Page 29 of The Sign for Home

“Yes!” I told Arlo. “Exactly! You got it! Perfect! Brilliant, in fact! That is the sublime!”

A pink flush of pleasure ran across Arlo’s face as he started to joyously rock his body backward and forward. I asked him if he could think of a better sign for the concept of the sublime rather than our fingerspelling it each time. Arlo suggested combining several signs. He used one gesture that could be best described as “seeing stars,” one that indicated goose bumps or hair standing up on your arm, and finally the sign that meant “a touched heart.”

“Hmmm,” I signed. “That’s a bit long. Could you condense that to just the touch of the heart and the sign forchills?”

Arlo shook his head.

“Not enough. I need to think. Just fingerspell word for now.”

“Okay. Do you need anything else?” I asked as I stood up, ready to leave. Arlo, like some DeafBlind ninja, grabbed my wrist, stopping me.

“Wait!” he demanded. “I think Walt Whitman didn’t need see big mountain, big ocean to feel the S-U-B-L-I-M-E. Not everybody rich and can travel to ocean and mountain. Not everybody sees good or hears good. Maybe Walt Whitman writes the poem for those people. Poem means: Look! Look everywhere! See, down on ground! Grass! Little. Not important. Even grass can cause you feel the S-U-B-L-I-M-E. You just need look for a long time and then understand and… chills… wow… beautiful. Connected… connected to grass… to grave… to dead soldier… to old dead people. See grass… think S-U-B-L-I-M-E… think dead people not gone. Wow! Walt Whitman very expert poet!”

Suddenly, it was I who was feeling awe—for Arlo. I considered just tossing it all and letting myself cry, but instead, I drummed my hands on the table and stomped my feet, letting Arlo feel the vibration of my excitement.

“That!” I shouted in both voice and sign. “Yes! That! I’m not supposed to tell you what to write your response paper about, but what you just said sounds great to me! You should write that down!”

Arlo opened up his laptop to make notes. Then I said I’d see him Monday and gathered my things to leave. He stopped me again.

“Cyril, ask you other question. You know stairway have banister?”

“Yes, I know.”

“At the end of old banisters, sometime have…”

Arlo mimed the shape of a large knoblike ornamentation at the bottom of an old staircase railing.

“That thing… that have word? Name what?”

“That’s a funny question,” I signed, chuckling to myself. “Yeah. Pretty much everything has a name. The post itself is called a N-E-W-E-L P-O-S-T. As for that thing on top… Wait a minute, let me think. I once interpreted an architecture class over at Marist College. Oh right. I remember. That little decorative bit at the top is called a F-I-N-I-A-L or newel cap. Either of those will work. But don’t worry, almost nobody knows what they’re called. Thank goodness for the internet.”

Arlo removed his hands from mine and placed them back on the keyboard. I saw him type the wordsfinialandnewel cap. I waited a second to see if he had any other questions about obscure architectural decoration, but he had disappeared inside his head again. It was a look I was starting to recognize. Maybe he was thinking about that sad-happy person he loved, or maybe he was lost amid the vast, secret mountain range of his mind. Somewhere sublime.

12GHOST CHILD

You have been sitting at your bedroom desk writing your assignment for Professor Lavinia Bahr’s class. The words and ideas about the sublime and how you think and feel about Walt Whitman’s poemLeaves of Grass(section 6) have made your mind tired but excited. You wrote about your mama, and that sunny day you were small, when you could still see well, and Mama let you lie down inside a pile of scratchy-but-soft leaves. Then she raked more leaves on top of you until you were buried, which made you laugh. You lay there for a long time, smelling twigs, moist ground, grass, a fire burning somewhere. You looked up and saw the sun shining through all the leaves, like a stained glass window of yellow, gold, orange, and red.The sublime.

You lift your fingers from the keyboard and your mind attaches to something else. A forbidden thought. You fall inside the memory.

You were sixteen and a half years old.

It was near the beginning of September. Yet already so chilly. Smell of cold. Smell of damp wood. Smell of blankets and someone’s breath. Three years already at the Rose Garden School. Alone in your bed. Your dorm room was pitch black. You were supposed to be asleep.

“Hello? Martin? I know you stand there!”

It was the second time it happened that week. Awakened in the middle of the night by the presence of someone standing over your bed. Youthought it might be one of your roommates, Martin or Big Head Lawrence, who liked to play such games. But each time it happened, you got up and found your best friends asleep in their beds, both breathing slowly.Could it have been the dorm boss?They did random bed checks at night, but this mysterious body that had just hovered over you, breathing on you, seemed smaller and slight. You knew the dorm boss’s breath, and you had memorized her heavy stomp coming down the hallway. No. This was someone you didn’t know.

During the summer break your body changed. Last year your head was just above your mama’s shoulder. By August, just before you went back to school, you could rest your chin on her head. Wiry hair had grown in your armpits, and on your legs and around your groin. There were even little soft hairs that had grown in the valley between your chest muscles and on your cheeks and chin.

Brother Birch spoke of the sin of masturbation during one Public Talk, and you knew he must be speaking about you. That first semester of school Big Head Lawrence taught you how to jack off with your pillow. You knew it was a sin, but it felt so good you couldn’t stop yourself. Had your mama seen you doing it over the summer? Did she find that you had made sticky pee every morning and night and stained your pillowcase? Did she tell Brother Birch? Was that why your face felt hot with embarrassment when the congregation prayed for the sinners?

The day you returned to school, you informed Martin and Big Head Lawrence they must stop jacking off and making sticky pee or they would face the Lake of Fire and forgo any opportunity to join the Great Crowd on Judgment Day. Big Head Lawrence said he didn’t believe in the Lake of Fire, so you told him he had to be careful, because not believing made it even worse. You told him that if he became spiritually strong and stopped jacking off, in heaven he would have a normal-sized head. You then told Martin that if he too accepted Christ and followed the narrow path, he would have real eyes instead of the glass ones his mother promised him.Excited by the prospect, both your friends promised they would stop jacking off and pray to God. But, after that, none of you talked about it again, and none of you stopped jacking off. And each time you finished the sinful act you grew sad and guilty and you imagined your body burning in the Lake of Fire.

Had the nighttime intruder watched you?

If the nighttime intruder wasn’t Martin, Big Head Lawrence, or the dorm boss, then who was it? You knew it must have been around two in the morning because you felt the radiator still rattling and the room temperature was not yet popsicle-cold like it was between three and five. The body stood over you, breathing, moving their face closer. So close you could feel the warmth of their face and smell their spicy-sweet breath.

“Why watch me?” you signed into the blackness. “Tell me who? Why not tell?”

---