After 25 years of faithful family service, all Harry had to his name was a red bouncy ball and a small black room.
Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.
As monotonous as the sound was, the bouncy ball was the sole aspect of his life that Harry could control. And every Saturday night he would take out the small toy, plop onto his bed and assault the floor boards.
Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.
Until:
“Hey kid, quit it with the God damn ball!”
“Yes Father.”
His parents came home. Their hobby was to blow their son's pay check.
When Harry’s mother and father came home, the rest of the night would be silent. The rest of the week was silent too. When they were home, silence reigned tyrannically within the house, without fail, without stop.
“You have any change from tonight Dad?”
“Why the hell should we? Ungrateful turd…”
“Frankie baby…” the mother slurred in, “leave the kid alone. No need to be mean or… or…” she started laughing hysterically and draped herself over her husband.
“You’re drunk—“ he said. Grabbing her rigorously by the waist, he joined in the laughter and hauled the quadragenarian in to their bed room.
Harry stood silently in the doorway and looked wistfully at the ball; had that ball since he was 9. He found it while he treaded home from school, the road scattered with painful shards of memories from school. Daily, Harry would suffer the slings and arrows of his peers with nothing but the silence his parents taught to shield him.
Harry walked from the door frame to where his parents had gallivanted off to. “Father, I’m sorry I asked for change.”
“Sure, just shut the hell up.”
“Yes.”
As he shuffled back to his room, Harry knew he was never included in his parents’ life plans; their plans included loud parties, booze and the occasional hangover. But they made due with the handicap that Harry was upon their lives by locking him up in his room nightly. No sound, no noises. Their time on the town was their time for loud, their time in their house was their time for quiet, and Harry’s role was to keep this equilibrium intact no matter what the cost.
Sitting on his bed, Harry took out a stubby pencil and wrote “I’m a mistake” on the wall. The wall was already pitch-black, rendering the writing invisible. Stretching out and gazing at the ceiling, he contemplated a recurring question of his. It made him depressed and gloomy, the question, but it wouldn’t leave him alone. Like a black tar stuck to his mental footing, the question would haunt him relentlessly. He rolled over and tried to put his mind on other things.
He returned to starring at the ceiling, and recalled a time when the room was white, the plainest, purest white. The days when the room was white were the days of innocence, happiness and bliss. Back in his youth he didn’t need friends. Harry had his own friends who visited him in his room whenever he so wished, and never left his side. Isaac, Raphaël and Celine were their names. His parents said he looked like a retard for talking to nobody, which eventually killed off the only friends Harry ever had.
With the fading of Harry’s old companions into the ether came a darker period of his life. On the threshold of adolescence, Harry thirsted for the love and interaction that his parents had never provided. But he was ill equipped for interacting with people, and gained no permanent relations with his peers. Wondering the asphalt black top, kids would laugh at the lonely Harry. When he sat at their tables, they would vacate. When he picked a rose for a girl on Valentine’s Day, the girls laughed at him. Harry was down and out.
But greater than the pain of social rejection was the pain of isolation. Harry had no one to talk to about his parents, about the death of his companions, or his failed interactions with women. In need of an emotionally cathartic medium, Harry began scratching his problems on the wall of his bedroom with a black pencil. Harry poured his soul onto the white wall which slowly became littered with Harry’s pains.
I’m lonely.
My parents hate me.
Zachary spit in my food.
Joshua called me queer.
Help me.
He continued to do so for years throughout his adolescence and the room slowly turned to a progressively darker and darker shade of grey. Harry spent hours at a time tearfully scribbling his mind and worked forests of pencils to the nub late into the night.
And eventually, the white room of his childhood became utterly black. Years of misery and neglect plagued his mind, and nobody but his walls knew.
Harry picked up the ball one last time, and pretended to throw the object against the wall. Discouraged and broken, Harry closed his eyes and thought long and hard.
He answered the question.
The next day Harry didn’t come home one his regular bus, but instead came home on a later bus due to a minor shift in the daily scheduling. He had to pick up some pills from an acquaintance of an acquaintance from work. He said it was for his mother who was having troubles sleeping lately, which was a lie. All five of the bottles were unmarked and in a small brown bag.
He sat down on the bus and quietly took out a book of sudokus from his small back pack and started working on his favorite puzzles. While he was occupied by the numbers and squares, a young girl in a white dress sat next to him. She was around the age of five and had messy tangled blonde hair. Once she was settled, she took out a Hershey’s bar, daftly tore away the wrapper, and devoured the chocolate with passion. Harry glanced as the girl hands, newly stained with brown chocolate residue, were wiped nonchalantly on the white dress. Being a tidy man, Harry was visually upset by the staining of the dress.
Squirming in his seat, Harry tried to ignore the little girl. He looked back at the Sudoku, tried to analyze the puzzle in front of him in vain but ended up looking back on the little girl’s dress. He finally broke character:
“Excuse me, what’s your name?”
“Celine,” the little girl responded in an accent unknown to Harry.
Harry was tickled, “I knew a Celine once”
“What happened to her?”
“Well… she left a while ago.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Can I ask a favor of you Celine?”
“Yes.”
“Can I clean the stains on your dress?”
Celine seemed confused at the suggestion. “You want to clean… my dress?”
“Yes!”
“With what?”
With a smile Harry dug into his small back pack and took out a packet of bleach pens. “These will make your shirt all bright and new again. I buy them weekly because I’m a bit of a klutz with foods.”
“What is a klutz?”
“A clumsy person”
“aaahhhhh”
“So… may I?”
“Yes.”
Harry went to work cleaning the brown stain off of the skirt as Celine observed with attentive, large eyes. Little by little, the brown stain faded, but when Harry brought his face closer to the dress he noticed a myriad of other blotches on the dress. Green ones, red ones, black ones were all screaming out to the already frantic Harry. “Hold on a second,” Harry said as he threw out the empty bleach pen and whipped out a new one. In roughly 5 minutes Harry had successfully rid Celine’s dress of imperfections, and Celine was beaming with an acute happiness similar to the glowing dress.
“It’s so beautiful! It’s so beautiful!” Celine laughed as she danced about the aisle of the bus. “Merci monsieur… tu t’appelles comment?”
“Excuse me?”
“What is your name?”
“Harry”
“’arry?”
“No no Harry… Harry with an H”
“That’s what I said! ‘arry!”
“Where did you come from anyway?”
“France, with my parents. Will you be here tomorrow?”
“Well I will be, but not at this time, on my normal work schedule I take the 4 PM bus.”
“Oh”
After a silence, Harry looked out the window. “My stop’s coming up soon.”
“Thank you for fixing my dress… it‘s so pretty now.”
“Oh it’s nothing it’s nothing. Hopefully we’ll meet again!”
“Yes please.”
The bus came to an abrupt stop. “Well, here’s where I get off. Bye!”
“Bye bye.”
Harry walked out of the bus smiling for the first time in a long time. After walking for a couple of blocks, Harry remembered his bag of pills. He looked at the bag and dug out a pill bottle. He analyzed the bottle, and he stared at the bottle.
He put the bottle back in the bag and threw the whole sack in a waste basket.
The following day Harry was quietly seated at the bus stop when he noticed something peculiar. A small mass of clothing with little legs came strolling down the street and sat next to Harry on the bench. Harry stared blankly at the creature for a good thirty seconds.
“’allo ‘arry.”
“Hello Celine.”
Celine popped her head out of the clothing with a business like expression and stared at Harry. “Can I ask a favor of you ‘arry?”
“I suppose so.”
The girl looked uncomfortable as she tried to squeeze the ideas out of her mental tube. “I looked magnificently beautiful in the white dress yesterday…” she stated, “and I wondered if you could fix more of my dresses.”
Harry’s chest couldn’t help letting fly a nervous giggle. “I’m going to need a whole lot of pens for this one,” he said to himself. “Doesn’t your mother or father wash your clothes?”
“No, they don’t have the time. They’ve explained it to me and I understand. Big girls do their own chores.”
Harry’s heart ached for the girl empathetically. “I’m sorry to hear that, my parents are like that too. My dad will say ‘go make the dinner you little turd,’ and I do it.”
“What’s a ‘turd?’”
Harry flushed. “It’s a rude way of saying poop.”
“Ahhhhh! Like merde! That’s how we French would say it.”
Harry nodded, stood up and walked around for a moment. He then turned back to the clothes. “Well, I suppose I could bring them to the Laundromat on the way home…”
Celine beamed with an unrivaled reverence for her new found laundry god. “Oh thank you so much ‘arry! Thank you, you are too kind.” And with that the small girl gave Harry’s upper thigh a tight embrace. Harry, completely out of his element awkwardly patted her head.
“It’s nothing really,” said Harry.
“It is to me,” she cooed.
“I’m glad I could make someone happy.”
“You’ve made me happy.”
Following this encounter Harry ventured into the Laundromat on the way home and cleaned the huge mass of clothing. The following days, weeks and months he washed every single skirt, dress, blouse, and pant that the little francophone possessed, and he enjoyed it immensely. He enjoyed the looks and squeals of joy that came from her mouth with every new load of laundry.
Eventually, once the majority of her clothes were clean and spotless, Harry began experimenting with new methods of pleasing Celine. He helped her with her homework, he baked her small treats, he even checked out a library book on how to do her hair. The two were close, and they fed off of their mutual desire for love and attention. Celine went as far as to call Harry “père ‘arry” each day on the bus.
The odd duo created their own microcosm on the bus, where loyalty, respect, and love guided the small planets of their solar system. The two for the first time in their lives looked forward to waking, and didn’t dread the empty dreams that formally haunted their slumbers. And under this regime, they grew strong.
One spring afternoon Harry was walking to the bus stop after work with a handful of heath that he picked from the side of the road. With a bounce in his step, Harry approached the station to find a large skinny man, around 6 feet in height waiting in the place that Celine usually stood. Harry sat down on the bench with flowers in hand, and assumed that his little friend was simply late. Suddenly the man’s eyes lit up, and he sprinted away towards a little girl about 20 feet away from us. It was Celine, and that was her father. Harry watched in horror as the man grabbed Celine by the shoulders and started to shake her violently while screaming.
“Est-ce que tu penses que tu peut sortir quand tu voudrais? Chez nous, est-t-il une hotel pour toi? Petite merde.”
Like he was raised to be, Harry was silent.
Though he understood nearly none of it, the tone of the man’s voice stung Harry’s ear’s and made him sick to his stomach. Celine was in tears, shouting and squirming as he began to slap her face. Harry gripped the Heath so tightly that the stems began to break in two.
The bus rolled up to the bus stop and Celine’s father stopped striking her. He grabbed her roughly by the hair like rag doll and started walking away.
Harry was silent as he watched the man drag away the best friend he had ever had by the hair.
Harry was silent as he walked onto the bus and sat down. Tears running down his face and hands trembling, he held himself tightly as the bus began to roll away.
Harry was silent.
Then the levy broke.
“Stop the bus, now!”
The bus driver didn’t have time to respond before Harry was upon him. “Stop the damn bus!”
The driver stop the bus and Harry scrambled out of the bus and began to run as fast as his legs could carry him. He felt strong, he felt empowered, he felt the love for Celine flowing through him. He finally caught sight of the two. He stopped, screamed.
“You!”
By the time the man wheeled around, Harry had punched the man right in the gut, then kneed him in the groin, and then struck him in the face knocking the man over.
“If you ever, ever come near my little girl again… you can’t even imagine what I’ll do to you.”
And with that, Harry took Celine’s hand, and calmly walked away from the shocked and injured man.
On coming home to his house, Harry walked to the wall phone and dialed the number for social services. “Hello, I’d like to make a complaint about a family, by the name of—“
“Shut the hell up, little turd! I’m trying to watch the tube!”
It was father. Harry immediately hung up the phone in midsentence and marched into the living room. His two parents were on the couch.
“I would like to say something. May I say something?”
“What the—“
“Alright thanks. You two, are lazy, miserable people. If you think that you can wring me out dry like some fat lemon, you’ve got another thing coming. I’m leaving, I’m taking my job with me.”
“But what will we do? You wouldn’t leave the parents who raised you and loved you throughout your life?” Mother begged.
“You’ve wanted silence all these years, now you can drown it in.”
And with that Harry strode out of the room and into the garage. He quickly snatched four cans of white paint his parents had intended for the living room. He ran up stairs and burst into his room. Opening a can of paint, Harry launched a pure stream of white paint flying through the air, and it penetrated the darkest parts of his mind. It shattered the black wall and left Harry laughing with tears running down his face. He emptied the cans until the room was all white, and until he was newly baptized as in white. He was free.
Harry looked around the small apartment. Two bedrooms, a bathroom and a kitchen. For the first time Harry had a place that was his own, and he painted it the most beautiful shades of colors. Vibrant yellows and vivacious reds splashed into Harry’s eyes and made him smile with each viewing. But he always kept the ceilings white.
Out of the bedroom, Celine ran out into the arms of her newly adopted father. After kissing her forehead, they set out into the hall, into the street and to the Laundromat, to wash their clothes.
