Staying Up All Night

One morning Artie is late waking up Paul. He lies in his bed at Distel House with his whole body spread out, the covers soft and heavy on top of him. He wants to stay still and not ever move, but finally he goes to Paul’s room and knocks and goes in. Millie is in there, handing Paul his shirt, and she says, “Artie, this was your job and you didn’t do it.” Artie opens his arms to hug Millie, but she’s moving around and he can’t hold on. “Go shave. Get dressed,” she says. She flipflaps her hand. “We don’t need you in here now.”

Paul makes a face with his eyes wrinkled up. He says, “It’s Artie’s fault, Millie. Isn’t it, Millie?”

At dinner that night, Paul tells in front of everybody that Artie made him late. It’s Artie’s best dinner, meat balls, and Paul is making them taste awful. The van came to take people to work, Paul says, but he wasn’t ready and he had to leave without eating his egg. He had to run to the van with his shoe laces flinging around, while everybody waited and laughed. And then he had to fix his shoes on the way to work, and the knots came out wrong because the van was bumping up and down. Artie stops eating his meat balls and yells at Paul, “Did not!” until Millie says to be quiet.

Later, under the covers, Artie rocks from side to side and holds his big belly. He has a squeezing feeling inside his eyes, like the beginning of crying. He has done a good job waking up Paul for a long time, maybe for fifty or a thousand years, so Millie and Paul shouldn’t be mad at him if he made a mistake. If he was lying in bed in the morning for once, accidentally.

The way to show them would be to stay awake the whole night. He has never done that. In the morning he would be ready to wake Paul up at the exact minute. He could even do it early if he wanted to, get Paul up early, and that would be better than good. Millie would say it was fantastic, that was her best word.

At first it’s an exciting plan. He can stay in his blankets and wait for morning, and maybe think about big, exciting things while he’s lying there. Maybe practice whistling. He knows you have to open your mouth just a little and then blow the air through. He tries it for a while. He rubs at the beard hairs in his cheeks and stares up to the ceiling, only there’s nothing to see, just black.

His eyelids start to close like they’re melting. The pillow feels warm and squashy. For a minute he is going to just start sleeping, pull the soft covers over his head the way he likes. But then he pushes up, waving his head around. He swings an arm through the dark, then the other arm.

The best idea is to get up, that’s how to stay awake. He can tell by the window that it’s nice outside. All he has to do is get dressed and he can go out there. He’s been out at night before, sometimes when they’ve had a fire with marshmallows, and once when a volunteer talked about the moon and the stars. The stars were supposed to make pictures in the sky, of people and animals. Artie couldn’t see the pictures, but everything looked different and silvery at night, and when you breathed there was a smell like leaves and water.

He has his clothes folded on a chair, even the socks—that’s what you do at Distel House, so in the morning you know exactly what to put on. He gets out of his pajamas, which is really a pajama bottom and a T-shirt, because the pajama top wore out and lost its buttons, and the bottoms are still all right.

Usually he’s good at putting on his shirt, but this time it chokes across his neck. Backwards. He has it backwards because of the dark. The pants are easier. To save time he decides to do flip-flop sandals instead of shoes. His mother used to help with his shoes, back a long time ago.

Getting out of Distel House is easy. He opens his door and walks through the living room. By the night light from the hall, he can see Furball the cat lying by the TV, curled up quiet and tight. He turns the knob of the front door, which pops out the button thing that makes it unlock.

He’s outside. Sharp leaves are all over the ground, they come down from the big oak trees. They prickle the edges of his feet. He can see the leaves because of the porch light, and then a dark edge where the light stops. He kicks some leaves into the black side, and they disappear.

His legs hurt, walking uphill to the road. At the top he sits down and rubs his knees. The tree branches squiggle over his head. Cricket sounds beep out of the dark, from little bugs that you could never see. Nobody comes. He puts his hands on the ground, on the sharp leaves, and pushes back up, even though it feels like needles. The road is on a hill, so he goes the downhill way.

The road is dark and empty. He goes down and down. There’s nothing along the road, except sometimes a house. Artie sits down to rest again. The air smells like cold rocks and dust.

Then lights are up in front of him when he walks again, from a big building. He holds his belly and marches faster down the hill to get to the bright place. It has tall walls and windows, and sidewalks with lights shining down. He walks, punching his hand against the tall walls, and sings: “O Susannah, o ho Susannannah, for I come from Alabama, o Susannah.”

The door opens when he pulls it. It has a square thing that you can just pull. There’s a big room full of benches, with wood boards across the ceiling. It’s like the church he went to one time with his mother.

She wore a grey dress that day with a belt and held Artie’s hand. She held his hand all the way, walking from Distel House. It was before she died. She sat with Artie on a bench in the church— there were benches everyplace and windows that had colors. The light came through the windows and Artie’s mother had green on her nose. He started to tell her—it was so funny, a green nose—and she pressed on his arm and said to behave. “Remember what I told you. We have to be quiet.”

Music played and all the people stood up from their benches and sang a song. Even though they were supposed to be quiet. Artie pulled at his mother’s dress. His mother looked at him with her frowning eyes and shook her head back and forth.

The music stopped. A man walked out in front wearing a long white dress, all the way to the ground. When Artie started to tell his mother about the dress, she put her finger against his mouth. “No,” she said. “No. For crying out loud.” The man talked and talked, getting louder and softer, up and down and up.

While the man in the dress was talking, Artie saw a book, a blue one, on a shelf to one side where nobody was sitting. He leaned far over to grab it. Books were fantastic. Millie would read them at Distel House, or sometimes volunteers did, and there would be pictures and voices and colors, and each page was a dizzy surprise. Only you could tear the paper if you didn’t watch out. Paul had torn a book. So had Artie. But that was a long, long time ago. He knew how to turn the pages at the corner now; he knew how to take care of books.

After more talking and more singing, his mother stood up to leave. The man in the white dress was at the door. He shook hands with Artie and noticed that Artie had the blue book under his arm. The man said it was okay to take the book back to Distel House, and after that it was Artie’s book, all his, all to himself, for a million years if he wanted. Until one day it got lost. He wanted it and it wasn’t there.

In this church now, tonight, the windows are black and he is alone. Artie looks at the ceiling and listens to the quietness. Nobody comes. Then he giant-steps up to the front where the man in the white dress would stand. He is going to be that man and do the talking.

Artie stands very straight and breathes air into his throat. He pretends that everyone from Distel House is sitting in the benches, listening. He starts to talk, about how he’s staying up all night, how he walked through the trees out in the night and came to this building. When he runs out of things to say, he sings some more of “O Susannah.” He circles his fingers around his eyes, trying to see everybody in his life making a crowd in the benches.

He walks in a line through the whole room, up and down. Finally he sits on a bench near the middle and nods his head down and holds his belly. The light is too bright now, the bench is hard, his flip-flops too tight. He closes his eyes and thinks about sitting on a bench like this with his mother. Her grey dress and the black belt around it. Her hand moving over to touch his mouth.

A long, long time ago, he used to live in a house with her. He can hardly remember it—a staircase and a white dog named Floppy, and hamburgers once, with cheese on top. His mother whistled when she combed his hair.

Then they found Distel House for him to live at. Because children have to move away. He has been there his whole life now, all the time, and his mother would visit. Before she died. She came on Christmas sometimes; one time she brought him a flashlight.

He opens his eyes again, and right that minute he sees a blue book, like the one he had before it got lost. He opens it in the middle—lots of lines and black dots, and also he finds an A like in Artie. He knows how to write his name and that’s how it starts, with A.

Holding the book makes Artie want to have it. He could take it with him to keep in his room. That would be okay, because the man said. Along the bench are more and more books, blue ones and red ones. He reaches way over and rubs one of them with his hand. It feels smooth and thick, with a little ribbon thing hanging down from the bottom.

He stands up, holding his blue book, and walks around the room again. Every bench has books on it. He picks up as many as he can hold. If it’s all right to take one, then that’s the rule: they are all right to take home. They don’t cost money that you have to pay, like in a store.

Artie has trouble opening the door, leaning with his body and still holding on to the books. He picks up the ones that fall down. It happens and happens, that they fall. Finally he gets outside, with books in his hands and under his arms. He has to squeeze them hard as he goes along walking, away from the building and out of the light. This time he has to go the uphill way on the road. His legs are very tired now. He drops another book, a red one.

He sits at the side of the road, puts down his books and stacks them into a high stack. It’s going to take a lot of work to get all the way to Distel House with the books, but he will do it, after he rests.

On the third time of resting—or fifth? —Artie spreads the books all around him. He rubs his legs and thinks to himself about Millie, how she didn’t let him hug her in the morning and he really wanted to. Also she has big nice teeth, and wrinkles that spread out from her eyes that he likes to look at.

He lets his body go backwards and down to the ground. The sharp leaves stick into his back and his head, and he ruffles away the ones he can reach. A smell of worms and dirt comes into his nose. He wants to lie there, one hand touching his big pile of books. Red and blue. He shuts his eyes.

The books stay on the ground next to him. He could come back lots of times and get more of them. They could fill up a drawer in his room at Distel House, and then all the drawers, and under his bed and the whole room.

Having his eyes closed makes the ground colder and the leaves sharper. He opens them up again, stares into the black sky. Stars are all over the place up there, some big and bright and some like dust. Artie wants to find those pictures the volunteer told about. He wants to see a cat like Furball, a leaf, a clock, a man in a white dress. A belt like his mother’s. Everything, everything should be up there. He looks for a long time, but the stars are too crowded. They shine down their light.