are you special?
- Don't you think you're special?
- Yeah, - he said, and, standing on one pedal on one side of his bike, he rode
out onto his front lawn and stopped. - What about you?
I stopped, too, and held my pedals until the bike began to lose its
balance, then I jumped off and laid it on the grass.
- Of course I'm special, - I said. - We all are! Name me
one in our class, one in all of Mark Twain High School, who
plans to grow up and be a loser!
Zerb sat down on the grass, crossing his legs and leaning against the seat of his
bike.
- But that's how it all happens. Something happens between the time
when we're sure we're special and the time when we begin
to realize that we're not, that we're just ordinary losers.
- That won't happen to me, - I said. He laughed.
- How do you know? How can you be so sure? Maybe we're not really adults yet. Maybe you only become an adult when you stop thinking of yourself as someone special. Maybe only adults can be losers?
*** *** ***
- Sometimes in the mornings I wake up and walk out of the house and the air is so...
green, you know? The air tells you, "Something's going to happen today! Something big is going to
happen today." And even though, as far as I can remember, nothing like that has ever happened, but this feeling... It's like nothing is happening, but at the same time it is. Do you know what I mean?
- Maybe you just really want something to happen?
- I'm not making this up, Budge! Honestly, I'm not making this up. Something really is there, and it's like it's calling me. You can hear it, can't you? I mean, do you feel it sometimes?
He looked me straight in the eye.
"It's like a light inside me," he said, "like I've swallowed a
star."
"EXACTLY! And no matter what you do, you'll never find that star, even with a
microscope the size of a house!" My friend lay down next to his bicycle and watched the falling
twilight through the trees.
"You can't see stars in the daytime. You have to close your eyes, as if to
accommodate yourself to the darkness, and then you see that faint light in the distance. You see it, Dick?
"Only close friends talk like that, I thought.
"That light is a silvery anchor chain, stretching out of sight into deep
water."
"Deep water!" he said. "Oh, right! And we dive, we slide into
the depths, and there, deep, deep, the chain leads to the anchor - a sunken star.
I felt like a dolphin who had escaped from captivity into the open sea
and found a twin friend there. I was not the only one who felt Something influencing us,
Something that defies description in words.
*** *** ***
- So you know it, Budge! The glowing anchor! I'm swimming toward it, and even if
everything is bad, everything is fine. I'm sinking deeper and deeper, my boat is no longer visible on the surface, and the anchor glows brighter than the brightest light bulb and it is
inside me.
- Yes, - he said thoughtfully and no longer smiling. - It's really there.
- What are you going to do with it? You know that this... light...
is there, so what now?
- I think I'll wait.
- You'll wait? Damn it, Budge, how can you wait, knowing it's there?
I hope he realized that there was disappointment in my voice, not anger.
- What else can I do? Here you are. Dick, what do you do on your green
mornings ?
He plucked a blade of grass and chewed its clean, hard stem.
- I want to run. As if there were a spaceship hidden somewhere nearby, and if I knew which direction to run in, I would find it
standing with its hatch open, and in it are those who know me, who have come back for me
after a long absence. And then the door closes - shh ... - Is that why you asked if you were crazy?
- Partly.
- Well, - he said, - you really are crazy.
