Мэтью Квик - Forgive me, Leonard Peacock

• Название: Forgive me, Leonard Peacock
• Автор: Мэтью Квик
• Жанр: Современная проза
• Год: 2013

How would you spend your birthday if you knew it would be your last?

Eighteen-year-old Leonard Peacock knows exactly what he’ll do. He’ll say goodbye.

Not to his mum – who he calls Linda because it annoys her – who’s moved out and left him to fend for himself. Nor to his former best friend, whose torments have driven him to consider committing the unthinkable. But to his four friends: a Humphrey-Bogart-obsessed neighbour, a teenage violin virtuoso, a pastor’s daughter and a teacher.

Most of the time, Leonard believes he’s weird and sad but these friends have made him think that maybe he’s not. He wants to thank them, and say goodbye.

In this riveting and heart-breaking book, acclaimed author Matthew Quick introduces Leonard Peacock, a hero as warm and endearing as he is troubled. And he shows how just a glimmer of hope can make the world of difference.

---

I look into Mrs. Giavotella’s eyes and her lids are quivering, which is when I realize that she’s going to cry just as soon as I leave the room. And this is going to be her last memory of me. I’m not really sure why, but I feel terrible all of a sudden. Like I want to pull out the P-38 and off myself in the bathroom stall. If I didn’t have to deliver the other three presents and shoot Asher Beal in the face, I probably would just get it over with and be done with everything.

I have the pass in my hand and now Mrs. Giavotella’s looking at the almost completely bare Japanese maple outside her classroom window.

What makes sad people want to look at that tree?

Her back fat is hanging over her bra strap and it makes me wonder if she was picked on a lot in high school for being so short, overweight, and squishy. She probably was, which makes me feel even worse.

“You’re a good teacher,” I say. “I knocked my own hat off too. I’m an asshole, okay? A HUGE asshole. I don’t deserve to have such a fine teacher as yourself. Okay? Don’t worry about the stupid things I said. I’m sorry I interrupted your class today. My head’s not right. I’ll answer multiple-choice questions in the future if it will make you happy. I know you work hard on your lesson plans and—”

Without facing me she says, “Just go, Leonard. Please.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’d like you to leave now,” she says in a shaky voice.

So I do.

THIRTEEN LETTER FROM THE FUTURE NUMBER 2

My Dearest Hamlet,

I’m five foot five with short brown hair (think pixie cut), a cute ass (or so you say, and I believe you because you can’t keep your hands off it!), and I wear a full (perky) B-cup. You find me irresistible and we make love at least once a day, but usually manage to do it multiple times employing all sorts of creative positions too. That ought to get your horny little teenage mind reeling.

Can you even imagine sex every day with another human being?

You told me that when you were a teenager you believed you wouldn’t ever have consensual sex with anyone—that you would die a consensual virgin, which would have been a shame, because let me tell you something, you LOVE sex.

Sometimes I make you beg, and beg you do.

And if you would just ask a girl on a date, Mr. King of Masturbation, you would definitely be surprised, and maybe we’d have fewer issues to work through when we first get together. Not that I want you fooling around with little chicken-assed high school girls before we meet! Ha!

You get to make love to me in the future hundreds (thousands?) of times!

Doesn’t that make you want to live on into adulthood?

Aren’t I enough?

All joking aside—for a couple that lives with a small child and an old man in a lighthouse, our sex life is mind-blowing.

We work all day outside, doing routine rounds, excavating buildings, checking our flotation devices, testing the radioactive levels of the water, and then we swim for hours and hours, so our bodies are firm and tan and beautiful, unlike the fat mush they would have turned into had we gone to the enclosed cities and worked desk jobs where no one ever sees the sun.

We are very, very lucky.

In many ways, we avoided adulthood.

Outpost 37 is our own private utopia.

You call it “second childhood.”

Do you want to know how we meet?

Should I ruin the surprise?

I feel like I better entice you. It would be a shame if you never made it this far—to the best part of your life.

After the war, when things settled and the North American Land Collective was formed, thousands of nomads were forced to repatriate through camps set up along the new controlled borders, which began in the state you now call Ohio, but have since been forced much farther west due to rising water, earthquakes, and general instability. Those who repatriated were absorbed by one of the many enclosed cities that were built and continue to be built upward. Those who refused to repatriate were considered a threat to the new order and therefore were hunted and, once captured, given the choice between death and forced labor in outdoor prison camps.

From what you’ve told me, the bounty hunters employed by the Repatriate Act of 2023 caught you asleep in a cave. You were surviving off wild berries and the small rodents you could kill, mostly rats. It was not a good life for you, I’m afraid, and you were not very well mentally. Actually, you were certifiably insane.

You did a tour overseas, during the Great War of 2018. You won’t talk about your time in the military, but sometimes you have nightmares when you scream about killing. Again, you won’t talk about it so I don’t know more.

You say, “That was the before life. Let’s live in the now life.”

And since you are generally happy when you are awake and are such a good husband, I don’t push it with the questions about the past and the night terrors.

But back to the story of how we met. You were brought into an outdoor labor camp, and you refused to work or talk, even when they withheld food and water and finally tortured you, almost to death.

When they decided that you were expendable and that it had been a mistake to bring you in alive, you were saved by a request from the heartland for test subjects and shipped to a government testing facility. I just so happened to be an administrative operator back then, and you were assigned to me.

I was a scientist working on a drug that made it easier for adults to conform to the new enclosed world. The idea was to rid the planet of rebellious people and to make sure we curbed the human tendency to disagree and argue, which has led us to nuclear war and all that followed.

Mother Earth was angry with us, and so we had to “teach ourselves to be better children,” which was the tagline the new North American Land Collective government preached.

At first you wouldn’t speak to me either. I had you in a padded cell and I would talk to you via speakers. But you just sat in the corner with your head between your knees, getting skinnier and skinnier.

At night we’d gas you, and then my aides would give you shots full of vitamins, nutrients, and the experimental chemicals.

I don’t remember why I decided to read to you, but we started with Shakespeare—Hamlet—which was damn lucky for us. Made me believe in fate again, if you’ll allow me to be mystical.

I read, saying, “Act I. Scene I. Elsinore. A platform before the Castle. Francisco at his post. Enter to him Bernardo. Who’s there?”

That’s when you lifted your head and said, “Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.”

I was shocked. You hadn’t spoken once and here you were reciting the next line in Hamlet. It was like I found the key to your mouth. So I read on, saying, “Long live the king!”

“Bernardo?” you said.

“He,” I replied.

“You come most carefully upon your hour,” you said, and then we traded lines from Hamlet all day long.

A few times I tried to break and ask you questions, but you would only say, “More words! Words, words, words!”

And for a week or so we played this game—putting on the play, just the two of us through speakers.

You were so passionate about it, such a good actor, actually—reciting Hamlet’s soliloquies with such zeal and conviction that I began to think you were perhaps once a budding movie star.

Eventually, I broke protocol and entered the padded cell so that we might read the play together in person. That’s how taken I was with your ability to breathe life into Shakespeare’s lines.

We acted out Hamlet for weeks, and the drugs we gave you started to work—you lost the wild look in your eyes and eventually began to speak to me like a regular human being. Only you weren’t regular at all—you were full of magic.

I remember the first thing you said too, when you finally broke character. You said, “Can I take you to dinner sometime?”

It was a ridiculous thing to say, since you were locked up.

But I laughed, and you smiled.

You began to tell me the story of your life, and I broke protocol again by telling you mine.

I began to take you out into the world—partly to show my superiors how I had tamed the wild man with my science, reclaimed his mind for the good of society, but mostly because I was in love with you.

As you will learn, my father was a high-ranking military man during the Great War and many of the North American Land Collective leaders owe him favors. It wasn’t really all that hard to get both of us transferred to Outpost 37 under his command.

Once the paperwork was complete, after I had finished my drug study and vitamin Z was introduced successfully into the controlled population, we were flown by helicopter to Outpost 37.

My father threw open his arms and said, “Welcome home.”

You and Dad took to each other right away, and he presided over our wedding a few weeks later when we discovered that I was pregnant.

That’s right, Leonard. You’ll be hearing from our daughter next. You love S even more than you love me, and I don’t mind that one bit, because I love you both to death.

You are a fantastic dad.

Fantastic!

And I know that your childhood wasn’t all that great—that you felt a lot of pain, and that you are in a lot of pain right now. But maybe you have to go through all that so you’ll learn just how important having a happy childhood can be, so you will provide one for our daughter.

I wish I could send you a video or a picture of you and S playing in the water with Horatio the dolphin. If you could see that, you’d know that all of the pain you have to endure to get here, where you are happy in the future, is most definitely worth it.

Even though she’s getting too old to be sleeping with us, she still falls asleep with her head on your chest every night. You kiss the top of her hair before you man the lighthouse with Dad and me.

We send out the beam for twenty minutes, and then conserve energy for twenty minutes, repeating the forty-minute cycle all night long. Three or so minutes before we switch the light back on, after our eyes have just begun to adjust to the dark, you and I always go out onto the observation deck to search for shooting stars. There are a lot these days and we’ve been keeping track of who spots the most. This year I’m beating you 934 to 812. We’re hoping to get to 1,000 each before the year ends, and it’s looking good.

And we kiss every time we spot a shooting star too.

So we’ve kissed 1,746 times on the observation deck this year alone, and many more times have we kissed elsewhere.

I like that you are so affectionate with me. You always say you’re making up for lost time and that you wished we could have met earlier in life, so that we would have been able to spend more time together.

It’s a good life, Leonard.

Hold on.

The future is better.

We have so much sex!

Your daughter is beautiful.

And my dad becomes a dad to you too—just like you always wanted.

Just hold on, okay?

Please.

Love,

Don’t-You-Dare-Call-Me-Ophelia,

A

FOURTEEN

My friend Baback is of Iranian descent, but when I first met him, he used to tell everyone he was Persian, because most American teenagers don’t know that Iran used to be Persia, and most American teens have watched enough news to hate Iran.

Back when he was a freshman, if you gave Baback some wrinkles and a salt-and-pepper beard he’d look exactly like the current Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which could cause him problems, especially during patriotic times like 9/11 anniversaries, and whenever Ahmadinejad made anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and anti-American comments, which was all the time.

At the very least you would have thought that Baback definitely could be related to Ahmadinejad, that’s how much he used to look like the Iranian president.

I met Baback during freshmen orientation, right after he came to America and ended up in our school. For a year I saw him around the halls looking tiny and terrified, dressed in really formal clothes—like if you gave him a tie, he’d be a prep school kid in a uniform. He had a backpack that was bigger than him, and he was always carrying this violin case—like everywhere he went. He wouldn’t leave it in a locker, except during gym class, when he was forced to—I know because we had gym together as sophomores.

There was this one gym class where we were playing floor hockey and our teacher Mr. Austin got called away on some sort of business for ten minutes. Baback and I were on the same team and not really participating all that much. We were sort of just standing in the middle of the gym holding sticks, watching everyone else chase and slap at a little orange ball.

Asher Beal was on the other team, and just as soon as he saw that Mr. Austin was no longer in the gym, he slap-shot the ball at Baback. It hit him right between the eyes. Baback blinked a few times in this really comical way, which made everyone else laugh, but I could tell that Baback was actually hurt so I didn’t laugh. I remember feeling hot, like my face was on fire, because I already wanted to kill Asher Beal back then, but I still thought I might want a future so I wasn’t really actively planning his execution, well not consciously anyway.

I saw all of the stupid übermorons with whom Asher now hangs exchange glances and then they all started to smile in this really creepy way. It was almost like they were a flock of evil birds or a school of evil fish, because they all instinctively reacted in unison without even talking.

Do übermorons excrete pheromones?

Everyone started to pass to Baback, and just as soon as his stick touched the ball, Asher or one of his übermoron cronies cross-checked Baback so hard he became airborne. Baback tried to flick away the orange ball really quickly, as if that could protect him, but they kept checking him whether he had the ball or not. He was getting killed, and I wanted to tell him to stay down or run up into the stands, but it was like he didn’t want to believe that he was being targeted for violence. It’s like he had to believe we were all better than that here in America. Maybe because that’s what his parents told him when he left Iran—America is better.

Several people checked Baback before Asher lined up a shot that sent the little Iranian kid flying into the stands. His feet went up above his head and I heard his skull thump the wooden bleacher slat.

Almost everyone[26] was laughing really hard, because Baback’s body spun around like a windmill and now his feet were in the air, his torso stuck in the bleachers.

But Baback didn’t get up this time.

“Come on,” Asher said to Baback, like they were friends. “You’re okay.”