Page 76 of The Sign for Home

I typed in my own email address.Look at me, I thought,I’m being the Cyrano de Bergerac of the DeafBlind.

Before I went to bed I checked the board, but there were no responses.As I was about to shut down my computer, I heard thetingof a new message. I quickly opened an email in mygingerterp69in-box from someone named Larry Garcia:

Dear Arlo:

I am very surprised! I thought you was disappeared forever! Yes, I will like to meet and talk long time. I work Philadelphia School for Blind but will staying at Helen Keller Center in Long Island for workshop. I can take train to see you up in Poughkeepsie. I am free Tuesdays and Thursdays. Are you free to meet next week? Just write me email where to meet and I will come. Must talk to you. What for your email called gingerterp69?

Larry “Big Head Lawrence”

Garcia

I quickly forwarded Arlo the email, telling him to respond to Big Head Lawrence as soon as he could via the Gmail account I had set up for the purpose. I was beyond excited. I felt like I had done something truly good for the first time in such a long time. Intoxicated by the wine and the success of the plan, I hunted down Larry “Big Head Lawrence” Garcia’s profile in the DeafBlind group. His main photo was just the Guy Fawkes mask, that scary white-faced icon of anarchy that hacker groups tended to use. When I searched through Larry’s other photos, I noticed the majority appeared to be of other people, especially women. Then I found a group shot, from what looked like one of those DeafBlind camps Tabitha had told me about. The photo showed about a dozen DeafBlind folks with their white canes and two or three guide dogs. My eyes were suddenly drawn to a shorter person with a hoodie at the edge of the group wearing what I thought at first was a novelty rubber Halloween mask. When I clicked through more of the photos, I found even more of the same masked short boy.

I zoomed in, and quite literally gasped. I finally understood. What I mistook for a boy in a mask was actually a man’s face and head covered with small and large tumors. The condition, called NF1 (neurofibromatosis type 1), is often misidentified as the same condition the famous Elephant Man suffered from but is quite different—and more common. The tumors grow along the nerves of the skin. I learned about it years ago when I attended a workshop on medical interpreting. Larry was also much shorter than the other men in the group photo, with a typical-looking young man’s body. His huge head composed nearly a third of his entire height. Enlarging the photo further, I looked into Larry’s one unobfuscated eye. It was dark and innocent-looking, almost like an anime character’s in its openness. Above it was a well-shaped quizzical eyebrow that seemed to be in the midst of asking a question. This was Big Head Lawrence.

33REUNION

You will be meeting Big Head Lawrence at a specific bench on an inside walkway that goes over the tracks at the Poughkeepsie train station. Cyril met you at the Abilities Institute and secretly drove you to the station. You tell Cyril that Big Head Lawrence most certainly will be traveling with an SSP, or a friend. Even though his vision has always been better than yours, he surely could not get all the way from his home in Philadelphia to the Helen Keller National Center in Long Island and then all the way to Poughkeepsie on his own. Still, Cyril wrote Big Head Lawrence specific directions, pointing out that the bench is between two giant square trash cans.

You finally tell Cyril to leave, because you’d like some time to think before Big Head Lawrence gets there. Cyril keeps saying, “Are you sure you’ll be okay?” and doesn’t seem like he wants to leave. You tell him you will be fine and that you will meet him at 5 p.m.—right outside the front door like he showed you—so he can take you back to the Abilities Institute where you will catch the Able-Ride back home.

When you are alone on the bench, your heart beats very fast. The vibrations of trains, like thirty-second earthquakes, rock the floor beneath you. People are traveling to all sorts of places. Some are going all the way to Canada or down to Florida. Maybe they too are meeting old best friends. Your hands are sweaty, so you wipe them on Snap’s fur. Snap doesn’t mindsince she likes to be petted, and she knows how nervous you are because you’re breaking your promise to Molly, Brother Birch, and Jehovah God.

Red star.

Your intention for this meeting—at least the one you tell yourself and the one you will tell Brother Birch if he finds out—is to reconnect with Big Head Lawrence for the purpose of giving him some JW literature and to talk about Jehovah God. Your backpack is full of brochures,Watchtowers, and a large-print copy of the Bible.

Gold star.

If your old friend becomes a JW then maybe he can tell Martin and then he will convert to JW too and then you all can be friends again. Together the three of you can help many Deaf and DeafBlind people come to the light and spend eternity in God’s paradise.

Double gold star.

But this is mostly a lie.

Red star.

You really want to see your old friend because you miss him, because you’re lonely, because seeing him is like connecting a line from your present life to your past life—a past life you have worked so hard to forget.

Double red star.

Another train going somewhere passes beneath you.

Five and a half years ago, after what happened at the Rose Garden School, there was an investigation by police detectives and social workers. During that year, the brothers and sisters at the Kingdom Hall mostly avoided you. Brother Birch told you that you had gone down a dark road, and you needed to ask Jehovah God for help. But you didn’t. You mostly just wanted to disappear. Then, a year later, Brother Birch said that you (as well as the other boys at the Rose Garden School) werecleared of all charges.No one had been raped, they admitted. No one would be blamed for S jumping off the building. No one. You asked Brother Birch if you could visit your old friends Martin and Big Head Lawrence. But BrotherBirch said no.If you want to be happy, you need to let that part of your life go. Promise me you will not mention their names or the name of that school. You may not have committed a crime, but you have committed a grave sin in the eyes of Jehovah God. You need to read the Bible and pray to Jehovah God to heal your soul and help you forget the sinful people Satan brought into your life. The word of Jehovah will drown out the evil memories.And you tried. You prayed, you read, you tried to forget. But, instead, with every other breath, you thought about S and what happened. You still recalled the smell of S’s skin, the touch of S’s fingers writing love words on your body. Remembering the good things hurt worse than remembering the bad.

You couldn’t concentrate. You barely ate.

The bad dreams started.

In these dreams, you always have excellent vision like when you were small. You can see people’s faces clearly, and the bright light doesn’t bother your eyes. But with this magical clear vision you can also see S running from some evil unseen person. You chase S up steep stairs to the roof of the building. S stands far across the roof from you and looks over the edge. The wind blows in your hair and face. You too look over the edge and the ground is so far away that the fear causes your testicles to retreat inside you. S turns toward you, looking terrified, and begs:Please. Don’t let me fall. Please. Suddenly a pair of hands try to force S over the edge. You are desperate to stop the evil person from killing her. But that is when you recognize that the hands—the hands pushing S off the building—are yours. S looks at you with her beautiful, heartbroken eyes. You whisper to her:I sorry. I bad boy. I love you. Then you shove S’s body as hard as you can off the roof. Her body falls for a very long time, tumbling slowly through the air. Through her eyes, you can see the sky, and the birds, and the tops of the trees, and then the ground moving closer and closer. You see S’s beautiful, perfect hands reach out to stop the ground. But the ground won’t stop. Just before she hits, you are back outside S’s body, watching it all happen. Her bodycrashes onto the pavement and shatters into a hundred pieces. Body parts and blood are everywhere. You begin to drown in sadness, and you grab at your eyes with their perfect vision and scratch and dig, wanting to be blind again. But, as hard as you try, your eyesight stays strong, and you stare at S’s remains, seeing everything forever.

For a year you had dreams like this. You knew you would die if you didn’t stop thinking about S. You told yourself:FACT: S killed herself. FACT: S cannot be saved. FACT: You can save yourself. FACT: You are heartbroken over a person who did not even exist. Satan was trying to trick you into committing sin. That’s why you can’t forget. It was the ghost child that visited you in the middle of the night. It was the ghost child’s idea to commit the sin of sex. The ghost child bled and said nothing. But, worst of all, if Satan sent a doomed Hindu goat to persuade a poor DeafBlind boy to do sinful things and turn his back on the way of Jehovah God and Jesus Christ, Son of God, that means the ghost child just lied about loving you in order to send you to eternal death.

That means the ghost child never loved you.

You finally felt something toward S you had never felt before: hatred. You promised yourself that you would no longer think of that name unless it was attached to the wordsbetrayal, sin, andSatan. After you had these realizations you could finally breathe again. Jehovah God had saved you.

One afternoon, almost two years after the Day That Changed Everything, you walked into Brother Birch’s living room when Molly was there. You told Brother Birch:Long time ago I did bad things at school. I disobey Jehovah God and follow Satan. Sorry. Sorry. I wrong. I want Jesus save me! I want become preacher and spread word of Jehovah God and our Lord Jesus Christ our Savior. Please forgive me.

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