When I Was Five I Killed Myself (5 page)

Jessica looked at him for a long time.

“Shut up, Mr Stolmatsky,” she said.

(I got I haven't the vaguest idea from my mother. She always says it when I ask her riddles from
My Weekly Reader
. My favorite is, “Why did the moron throw a clock out the window?”)

I
DIDN
'
T WRITE THIS
.

I have been at The Children's Trust Residence Center for a week now. I hate it. I would like to kill it. What I hate worst is breakfast. It is in a big noisy room with long tables where we eat with other youngsters who are sickening to look at.

Mrs Cochrane and the children from my wing sit at one table. There is Phil and Robert and Manny and Howie. Robert is only seven. Howie is nine and the rest are eight like me. Robert cries all the time which makes me nervous, to be candid, and he wets his bed at night and it smells quite pungent. He sleeps across the aisle from me. Next to me sleeps Howie, the boy with the scars. Phil never talks, he is silence and just smiles all the time and I don't know why, but maybe he is happy happy or maybe his face is froze that way. (My mom
says when I frown my face will freeze that way and I say “I'm glad so then I won't have to frown anymore, my face will do it all by itself.”) Manny is my age, he is also Jewish like me, he has black curly hair and says oy all the time.

At breakfast today I made a hippopotamus out of my oatmeal, which was all dried up. I made a bed for him out of cinnamon toast and I took my napkin and made a blanket. Then I took my spoon and beat him to death. I smashed his head open and broke him in half and smeared him on the plate. Mrs Cochrane got cross, she asked me why I did it. I said because he was a bad hippopotamus because he killed Jessica. He dragged her into the river and killed her. Robert said, What river? I poured my orange juice over his head and said, “This river.”

I got marched right down to see Dr Nevele.

He still had his coat on, which surprised me because I thought he lived at The Children's Trust Residence Center but he doesn't. I think he lives in a shopping center.

“Good morning, sir,” he said to me, smiling. “Won't you step into my chambers?”

I wouldn't. It was what he said. I wouldn't. I tried to run away but Mrs Cochrane grabbed me.

“What is this all about?” said Dr Nevele.

Mrs Cochrane told him about breakfast.

“No,” I said. “That's not it.”

“Then what is it?”

“You know,” I said.

“No I don't,” said Dr Nevele. “I haven't a clue. Now please come in here.”

“I won't go to your chambers,” I said.

“Burton.”

“Don't,” I said. “I'll be good from now on. Don't kill me. Don't kill me, Dr Nevele!”

“What? Why Burt, what makes you, please, Son.”

And I was screaming. I tried to run but he held me and I kicked at him and bit him to get away. I had to get away.

“Mrs Cochrane, take him to the Quiet Room where he'll feel safe.”

I ran there. All by myself. Because Dr Nevele said chambers. Because when I was five I saw a movie, it gave me bad dreams which I still have them. It was a movie about a room where they torture you and have a thing that goes over your stomach and squeezes you till your stomach squeezes out through holes like spaghetti, and you bleed to death, and there is a man in a black hood who is a doctor, like Dr Nevele. It was called
The Torture Chamber of Dr Night
.

There were legs in the Quiet Room. Imagine my surprise. It was the man with the red hair from the Playroom. He is like a doctor too. He was surprised when I walked in. I started to leave.

“Don't,” he said. “Don't go. I was just leaving. I was about to leave. Take over here, will you, stout fellow?”

He had on a tie this time, like dressed up. I stayed in the Quiet Room but he didn't leave. He just sat there.

“I'm going,” he said. “Any minute.” Then he did something funny. He put his fingers up to his eyes and wiggled them, and he like hummed, only it was noise, not music.

“You shouldn't sit on the floor in your good clothes,” I said. “You'll get punished.”

He looked up at me. His eyes were green with brown pieces, like Jessica's.

“So true,” he said. “And yet so far.”

Then he stood up and left.

Then I went to write this on the Quiet Room wall and I saw somebody had wrote

And it wasn't me.

So I followed him because he shouldn't have wrote on my wall. He went down to the Playroom. The door was open. I watched him through the little window, he was in there with the little colored negro boy I saw before, the one who is a spaz. The red-haired man was crawling on the floor with him, and the little boy was crying and crying. Then the red-haired man saw me. He stood up and told me to come in. I went in.

“This is Carl,” he said to me. “He bites.” And he walked out of the room and closed the door. And I was alone with Carl. Who bites.

He got up and suddenly started running all over the Playroom as fast as he could and smashed into the door and bounced off and walked away without crying or anything. Then he sat down. Then he got up. Then
he made a circle and walked on some toys and sat down again. I didn't say anything to him, I thought he didn't know I was there even. He picked up a bean bag and ate it. His eyes went funny. One over here and one over here. He blinked and jerked his head. He started to crush the toys in the toy box.

“You shouldn't,” I said.

But all he did was whistle. Then he stood up and walked into the wall and then he sat down against the wall and put his hands up to his eyes and wiggled his fingers. It was the same thing that the red-haired man from the Quiet Room did.

Carl fell over and rolled on the floor and smashed into the jungle jim and it almost crashed on him but it didn't, so he sat with his back against the wall again and started rocking and pounding the back of his head against the wall. I could see there was a little bald spot on the back of his hair from pounding. Suddenly he sat up straight and put his hands in his lap and sat like a little gentleman.

I said, “You are sitting very nice, Carl, with good citizenship.”

He hummed, only noise, not music, like the red-haired man did, and then he stood up and walked over to a little red wagon they had in the Playroom and climbed inside it and sat down with good citizenship.

“You aren't supposed to,” I said. “It's for carrying stuff in.”

But he stayed. He was like a statue in the little red wagon. (It had “Little Red Wagon” painted on the side
of it.) I picked up a bean bag and threw it to him, but he didn't move and it hit his head.

“You're supposed to catch it and throw it back,” I said. “You better get out before the red-haired man comes back or you'll get punished.”

Then the door opened up and an attendant walked in. He took Carl's hand and tried to pull him out of the little red wagon, but he wouldn't go.

“Come on, stop giving me such a hard time,” said the attendant, who was large and hairy. Carl bit him on the hand. I could see it started bleeding, and the attendant yelled, “You little bastard,” and grabbed Carl around the shoulders so he couldn't move and twisted his arms around him. Carl screamed and kicked and bit his teeth in the air, and the attendant could hardly hold him. He let go.

“I'll be back,” he said.

Carl stopped. He just stopped like a cartoon. Then he made a noise.

“Puss.”

I went up to him. He sort of looked at me and I reached out my hand and he didn't even bite. I touched him. He said, “Puss.” Then he grabbed my hand and pulled me but I got away. Then he screamed real high like a siren and then I got real mad and yelled at him, “Shut up, Carl, don't you know they are coming back with seatbelts and they are going to punish you and slap you across the face and show you who's boss and for your own good! God damn you. I can't understand you.”

And I cried too and I don't even know why, because it was Carl. He grabbed my hand and put it on the little red wagon.

“Puss.”

The attendant came back in a few minutes with another man, only Carl wasn't in the little red wagon. He was sitting very good citizenship in a little chair by the window of the Playroom.

They looked at me.

I said, “All he wanted was for somebody to push him.”

They took Carl away and I went back to the Quiet Room. I was thinking about the red-haired man who wiggled his fingers in front of his eyes and hummed noise like Carl. He was a doctor but he didn't act like a doctor. He acted like a little boy. Like me.

This was on a paper. I stole it from Dr Nevele, from his desk when I was there.

W
HILE
I
WAS SITTING IN THE
Q
UIET
R
OOM
M
RS
C
OCHRANE
came and told me that I had to go to the dentist tomorrow, that it is the rules at The Children's Trust Residence Center. I grabbed her arm and bit her like Carl and she slapped me across the face so I started to scream as loud as I could, “I'm going to kill somebody I'm going to kill somebody!”

She left me in the Quiet Room alone. But when I go to the dentist I am going to kill him. I hate the dentist. At home I have to go. Mom takes me.

The first thing when you walk in is the smell. I get sick at my stomach and it makes me afraid. When you open the inside door a bell rings. There is a window in the wall that you can't see through and it has a nurse behind it and she slides it open and asks me my name. Then I sit down. Everything is silence except for the aquarium with bubbles in it. Music comes out of the ceiling. On the walls are pictures of children winking at me all happy happy.

The door opens and the nurse says my name all smiley. I have to go in. I go in the room, it has water gurgling, and she sits me in the lay-down chair and pulls it backwards and puts a bib on me and a thing behind my neck.

The drill hangs over me, it has wires and wheels and hoses on it. It bends. There are different tips he puts in it. Each one is to hurt me.

Then I sit there and nothing happens but I hear a child next door screaming. Then the nurse comes in and says “Open.” She talks very quiet. Everyone at the dentist talks very quiet, and it scares me to death. Then she sticks knives in my gums and scrapes my teeth.

Then Dr Stahl walks in very fast, he is in a big hurry and he pretends to be happy happy only I know he isn't because I kicked him in the balls once. That was when I was five. But I know you have to have good citizenship at the dentist. He has the drill and I don't. Dr Stahl looks at my paper then looks in my mouth then looks at my paper then looks in my mouth. He has a mirror on a stick and he looks in my mouth (I sometimes pretend I am him with a spoon but it makes you upside down) and I ask him if I have any cavities but all he says is “Open.”

Then he takes out all his tools and makes noise on my teeth and says “Clickity clack on the railroad track.” He is trying to be funny, but it isn't fun. He says “Let me know if I poke you,” but I can't because his fist is in my mouth. Then he takes a sharp thing and jams it in my tooth and wiggles it and I have like electricity going
through me and I spin it hurts so bad. Then he says “Now let's look at the downstairs.”

He looks at my paper and makes some marks. I ask him “Please, do I have any cavities, do I have to be drilled?” And Dr Stahl says “Open.”

He screws a metal thing on my mouth with cotton in it and he puts the sucker under my tongue and it sucks up my whole mouth and my tongue and he takes the drill and puts it in my mouth and the noise starts like jet planes taking off inside me and it gets very hot and my head spins and it hurts so bad I think I am going into the ground and he leans way over me and I look in his face and he isn't smiling anymore. It hurts so bad. I try and ask him to stop for only a second but I can't because he is still drilling and if I move it will cut open my tongue. I almost stand up it hurts so much, and he holds me with his elbow. Then I hear a siren inside my head, on an ambulance coming for me. The drill goes through my mouth into my head and up to my eyes and my blood inside me is hurting. No one will help me. No one will help me.