Welcome to the Modern World, Charlie

Charlie swung his door closed. A rattling crash reverberated through the house. Having made his point, he dragged his feet across his stained carpet to plop onto his bed. Lying there, rigidly still, he tightened his already taut features a little bit more. He almost screamed, but instead, biting his lip, he slammed his fist into the mattress.

The room was still for a moment. Charlie closed his eyes. A breezeless warmth burned through the open window above his bed. The sticky, Southern air pasted itself onto everything in the room. The disheveled dresser was sweating against the wall opposite him. Littering the floor, crisp socks and shorts and tee shirts grew moist again. Even around Charlie, the damp air thickened. A busy fly buzzed past his ear. Charlie opened his eyes to gaze up at the crack in the ceiling above him.

For a moment, he thought that if he looked hard enough, the one crack might splinter into a thousand cracks that would expand into a million cracks. Then, letting him gaze at both a topaz sky that he could escape into and a golden sun that he could fly to, the entire ceiling would disappear. But when reality reduced the limitless heavens back to a single, dark imperfection in the white paint, Charlie sat up.

Dangling his spindly legs over the side of the bed, he hung his head. Tiny mounds of dirty clothes rose up from the landscape as if they had sprouted from the frayed carpet itself and had remained intertwined with those dismal strands. Charlie followed the fly’s path over a precarious road of stained socks to the largest mountain of worn clothing.

The fly settled onto a flat, white, square corner of something peeking out from beneath a pair of grass-stained shorts at the bottom of the pile. Like a miner proud of the gold he has discovered, the insect paced back and forth, rubbing its forelimbs together in anticipation of the unearthed jewel.

Wiping away uncried tears, Charlie stood up. He walked over to see what was hidden beneath his clothing. Dropping to his knees and brushing away the fly, he removed the flat square that was as big as his chest.

On the back of the white album sleeve was a black and white cross of four faces. Recognizing them, Charlie smiled. He turned the album over in his hands. The band’s name swirled above a splotchy sparse collage of bright colors and other worldly things (a disembodied smile, a butterfly, a dragonfly, a hummingbird…). Beneath the letters’ puffy outline was the solid shape of the Roman numeral three. Charlie hugged the album to his chest.

When his dad had still lived with them, this album had been his. Charlie could barely picture being in a nicer house, and he kind of remembered an old, wooden turntable in the den, and he could almost see his dad sliding the black vinyl out of the sleeve, and he thought of the hiss and the crackle of the needle, and he saw himself setting up his action figures on a table, and he remembered his dad sitting in an over-stuffed armchair, and he pictured the music crying at him from the speakers.

And when both his dad and everything his dad owned had disappeared, somehow the record had been left behind. Charlie had taken it into his room. He had spent his days and nights playing with his black lab, Theo, and listening to the sounds hidden inside the record’s grooves. It was during one of those nights, long after his mom had gone to sleep, that he decided his dad must have died. If he hadn’t, he would have come back for the music he had loved so much.

When the man, Frank, started spending time at the house, the record stayed on Charlie’s plastic turntable while he hid in his room. Theo hid from the man as well. One night, with the dog barking and the music playing, Frank came in to ask Charlie if he could keep things a little quieter because he was doing work.

Charlie got angry. With a scratch of the needle, he took the record off. He put it back in its sleeve, and he dropped the sleeve on the floor. In the aftermath of summer, as Charlie and Theo spent their days outside in the grass and the heat and the mosquitoes, he forgot about the record his dad had left behind.

So today, in the midst of the late afternoon heat, when the crack in the ceiling would remain only a crack, Charlie wiped his eyes again. He got off his knees, and he walked over to the little, single component stereo with a turntable on top. Holding the record with one hand, he pressed the power button. A soft “pop” sounded through his messy room. In the speakers beside his dresser, a static noise buzzed.

He slipped the vinyl out of the sleeve, and he twirled it between his fingers. The record caught the light in its grooves, and it shined. Charlie put the record on the turntable, but just when he was ready to press play, his door creaked open.

Charlie spun around.

His mom was in the doorway. She was young and thin with long, blonde hair stringing around her face and dangling across her tee shirt. She quietly clicked the door closed. She walked across the carpet to settle onto the bed. Exhaling, she glanced around the cramped dirty room that she had given Charlie and that Charlie wouldn’t have to live in much longer. “I know why you’re angry,” she said while studying the crack in his ceiling. Then, she turned back to him. “But you’re not being fair.”

Turning off his stereo, Charlie sat down, Indian style, on his floor. His mom wiped a strand of hair off her face. “We already talked about it,” she said. Charlie shrugged. “You know Theo can’t come with us,” her voice trickled away. “We talked about that…”

Charlie gave another melancholy shrug.

“What do you want us to do?”

“Not move to New Haven.”

His mom looked back at the ceiling. “Frank’s job is there,” she said.

“But why do I have to go? My last name isn’t Hammond.”

His mom was stunned. She whispered, so that if Frank was walking down the hall he couldn’t hear, “It doesn’t matter whether or not your last name is Hammond. You’re coming too.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re my son, and I’m not going anywhere without you.”

“But why do we have to go anywhere?”

“Because we can’t stay here.”

“Why can’t we stay here?”

His mom laughed sadly. “Look around you, Charlie. Look at this house and this street, and you tell me why we can’t stay here.”

Charlie didn’t answer. Even at his age, he wasn’t blind to the dilapidation of the chipped paint both inside and outside their home. Even he understood the degradation of the faded façade of their Southern neighborhood. He picked at the worn carpet. His lower lip began trembling. Trying so hard not to cry, he raised his chin. His mom slid off the bed to join him, cross-legged on the floor.

For a moment, she was on the verge of crying as well. She creased her forehead, and she explained, “Frank really cares about us, Charlie, and he has a better opportunity there than here. We’re just lucky that he asked us to come too. This sort of stuff doesn’t just happen…”

“But how do you know New Haven will be any better than Athens, Mom?”

“We have to believe it will be.”

“Without Theo, it can’t.”

“Charlie,” his mom pleaded, “I wish Theo could come too. Frank wishes Theo could come…”

“Then why’d he give him away?”

“Because we’ll be in an apartment, and it’s not going to be big enough for a dog the size of Theo. You can’t expect him to stay cooped up all day without a yard and without a neighborhood to roam around in.”

Charlie didn’t answer.

“Maybe, once we get settled there, and we get a house, we can get another dog.”

“I don’t want another dog.”

“Charlie, we don’t have a choice…”

But Charlie wasn’t listening. Not caring whether or not Frank was close enough to hear, he cried to his mom, “But why’d he get to give him away. Theo was my dog. I should have taken him out there. Not him.”

“But you said you didn’t want to be there…”

“That’s because I didn’t think you’d do it.” He choked on a wad of tears. “I didn’t think you’d do that to me.”

His mom whispered something. She crawled across the floor to give Charlie a hug and let him cry into her shoulder. She spoke quiet, kind words. She smoothed his hair, and she told him that, soon, everything would be okay.

Charlie sniffled a few times. He whispered, “If Dad was still alive, he never would have gotten rid of Theo.”

His mom froze. “What did you say?”

“I said that if Dad was still alive…”

His mom pulled away from him. She said, “Charlie, your dad’s not dead.”

A slight spasm dried Charlie’s eyes. He’d been on his knees when his mom had hugged him, but now he retreated into a more guarded pose. He had never told her about his dad. He figured that she already knew and that, for some reason, she was hiding the truth from him.

“Who told you your dad was dead?”

Charlie tightened his jaw. He squeezed out the name, “Nobody.”

“Then why’d you…” His mom brought her fingers up to her mouth. “Charlie,” she began, nervously fidgeting with her lips over every carefully chosen word, “Your dad left. He didn’t die.”

“Then why hasn’t he come back?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know why he left.” His mom knew that was the wrong answer, but she didn’t know what else to say right then. She shook her head, and she stood up. “I’ll come check on you later,” she whispered, and she left Charlie alone in his room.

Charlie sat still in the silence. The humidity had sucked the air from his room to leave him drowning in its moisture. A tear dripped down his cheek, but he didn’t sob. He didn’t even wipe the single tear away. He just sat there, wishing he could hear Theo bark.

He wished that if he closed his eyes, when he opened them, the black lab would be shining like the record had in the sunlight. Theo would open his dark, droopy jowls for one deep, friendly sound, and Charlie could crawl on his knees to be smothered from hair to chin in the wet laps of the dog’s droopy tongue.

But Theo was gone now, too. Frank had given him away that morning. The man had put Theo in the backseat of a car, and he had driven the dog, who, the whole way, had whined and scratched at the window, to a farm. Frank said that Theo would be able to play there when the rest of the family left Athens next week. Charlie had stayed in his room until Frank had come back. When Theo hadn’t come back with him, he’d yelled. With a rattling crash, he’d slammed his bedroom door.

But when that had happened, he’d thought his dad was dead. He’d thought that it had to be that his mom was crying and that there was some man named Frank to care for them. But his dad wasn’t dead. That meant none of this made any sense.

Another fly, or maybe the same fly, buzzed past Charlie. The slight noise startled him back into his bedroom’s filthy heat. Taking a moment to wipe the sticky tears from his cheeks and chin, he watched the fly zoom lazy circles around his room. Once again reminding him of what he had forgotten, it landed on the stereo.

Charlie walked over to the turntable. He pressed power again. With another quiet “pop”, the speakers buzzed into life. The fly rubbed its hands. The little arm swung its half arc to land on the record’s grooves. Being written by the needle’s bobs, the album hiss climbed to a song. Charlie walked back to his bed.

The music struck the jarring, violent melody that his dad had loved so much. Charlie landed on his mattress. Looking at the single, thin crack above him, his eyes filled with tears. Now, even more than before, he needed that crack to engulf the entire ceiling. He needed the walls to cave down without a ceiling to support them, but when a voice’s high-pitched cry wailed above the music, everything beyond the moment of sound disappeared. The fly flew silently. Thoughts of Theo disappeared into the rhythm. Trapped inside the record, the voice wailed in another dimension. It cried to Charlie from that otherworld where the inhabitants were his overlords, and Charlie thought that, maybe, he might have been there, once, a long time ago.

By Michael Anthony Adams, Jr.
From his short story collection Welcome to the Modern World, Charlie.