When she returns to the living room, her dad says, “Should we be worried about your purchasing sex toys now that Alex is back in your life?”
Suddenly that joke isn’t funny anymore. “Alex isn’t in Nanette’s life. He’s going back to reform school tonight. Won’t see him again for six more months, if ever.”
“That’s an eternity in teenage years, correct?” Dad says.
“What’s in the bag?” Mom asks.
“Nothing,” Nanette says, and then retreats to her bedroom so that she can read Alex’s words, which she does without stopping until Christmas is officially over.
When her parents knock on the door and ask if she is okay, she requests to be left alone, and after several knocks and questions, her parents finally grant that request.
She does not sleep.
She rereads everything several times.
There are no straight-up letters, just poems that are sometimes dazzling or interesting but always cryptic.
Here are the central themes and repeated images found in Alex’s poetry: cages, keys, turtles, parents, youth, Jeeps, rebellion, Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the Liberty Bell, and “the pretty boys” who populate his reform school, which seems ironic, since all of them are there because they rebelled. You’d think that he would like everyone else who is “imprisoned” along with him, but it’s teachers and counselors who are the heroes of his poems. He refers to them as “freedom fighters” and recounts many of the lessons that they teach him as he progresses through a “self-selected curriculum,” which seems to revolve mostly around The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
It seems as if Alex is hiding behind metaphors and similes and symbolism, and she wishes he would have just written her simple letters explaining everything instead of giving her poems that stir up emotions in her chest, challenge her to think deeply, but ultimately explain nothing at all. She starts to fear that Alex is a coward and that poetry is sometimes a mask people wear when they do not wish to be seen or reveal what they are actually thinking. The more she reads, the more Nanette believes that Alex might be losing his mind, and yet there is an undeniable elegance woven throughout the words. She thinks of Hamlet and how Ophelia seemed to make her madness appear pretty. Nanette is afraid of Alex, and yet she finds him more attractive than anything else in her life.
There are no poems about Nanette, and while she is no narcissist, as June has officially determined, it is hard to “wait” for a poet to return when he writes about every emotion he has except his professed love. Nanette begins to feel as though he is punishing her, injecting his every thought into her brain with the needle of poetry but never offering the thoughts she’d most like him to have. And yet, he came on Christmas; he gave her his poetry, which seems weighty. He said he loved her.
Of the dozens of poems in the brown paper grocery bag, she keeps coming back to one, called “The Expendable Spider-Man Alex.” She experiences a vague premonition when she reads it, although she’s not exactly sure if the poem is based on real events. “There is no such thing as fiction,” Booker and Alex have often said. And so she wonders whether she should show the poem to Alex’s father or send it to the people who run Alex’s reform school. Is the poem a cry for help? Or is Alex trusting her with his most intimate secrets and therefore she has a responsibility to keep his confidence? There are almost a hundred poems in the bag, and this was only one of them. Alex surely didn’t expect her to read all the poems in one night.
Nanette lies awake in her bed thinking and then rereading and then thinking some more.
When she finally drifts off to sleep, Nanette dreams that she is falling and wakes up sweaty and terrified.
The novelty gifts she gave to her parents as a joke—the fuzzy pink handcuffs and the purple pleasure bondage kit. She starts to understand why people want to restrain their loved ones and why love is so often linked with pain, as if joy and suffering were two sides of the same coin.
Somehow she knows something bad is going to happen to Alex, and yet she worries that this thought makes her just as unbalanced as he seems in his poetry.
After all—it’s only a poem written by a teenage boy.
What power could there be in that?
24
There Is Always an Exit Window
THE EXPENDABLE SPIDER-MAN ALEX
By Alex Redmer
The windows of my cell are unlocked
Because I am on the seventh floor
And they don’t know I’m Spider-Man
They think I’m just a regular kid
Who cannot climb walls
They believe that gravity can kill me
And that a dead me is the same as
A locked-up me—problem solved
But the bricks of this building are
Old as the mortar, which has crumbled in
Between here and there making cracks
Deep enough for fingertips
Strong enough to cling, and dress shoe
Soles that stick out just a few centimeters
From the black leather upper
Find their way like hands into gloves
And so I climb in the middle of the night
When everyone else is resting
Up for running and push-ups
First thing in the morning
Before the sun rises over
The eastern horizon
And with arms and legs spread wide
Muscles quivering like
Strummed guitar strings
As a crab scuttles over sand
I rise up the side of the brick face
It’s slow going because I
Must rest from time to time
On the pretty boys’ windowsills
As the moonlight illuminates
Their sweet sleeping cheeks
I pity them for they know not