Maybe Incognito
By Titus Daniel Gee
Jimmy’s secret life began in the first house, not the rambling estate of his junior high and high school years. No, before that. At his first place, the little split-level tract home on a quarter acre that his dad referred to as “the postage stamp.” It started – perhaps he started – there. The place of his first memories. Of sandboxes and dirty faces, of spinach pinched raw from the garden and eaten seasoned by the sweat of unwashed hands. Of marveling at the summer heat and the miracle of rain and the fervent wish for snow.
Later those days would seem the prehistory of his life, an illiterate and barbaric age, though he learned to read halfway through it. That is, he learned the letters and put them together into words. He would not learn reading in earnest until several years later in another house when the blue-bound volumes of the Hardy Boys adventures – printed the year his father was born – would teach him that this secret life of his could travel into other places and other times, could involve strange dialects where older boys referred to one another as ‘chum’ and drove ‘jalopies’ and solved mysteries. No, in its pure beginning Jimmy’s secret life was his alone and limited by the circumferences of those things and people that orbited most near him.
At first this life consisted almost entirely of Watching – not simply seeing, but seeing and considering — and later of seeing, considering, and describing to himself the things he saw. Remembering. Trying to understand and to remember.
His hazel eyes took in the world with a gravity that made his teachers think of him as an ‘old soul.’ It made them fond of him in a rather uncertain way. That gaze of his could be unsettling in its directness.
And Jimmy didn’t seem to play with the other children. That worried them a bit. He did not fight with them either, but appeared content to watch their games from the sideline, a self-assigned bench warmer. A few of the more charismatic boys would draw him in from time to time, and for a while he had some standing on the playground as one of the Ghostbusters. But Jimmy had never seen the movie and so tended to improvise situations and equipment that didn’t quite fit the pop vocabulary of his ectoplasm-hunting compatriots. Or he might join in general games – a version of freeze tag, perhaps, where the boys chased the girls until someone arbitrarily called “Switch!” and then the girls turned around to chase the boys. In those games, the boy-girl games, he could merge into the collective edifice, become simply an appendage of the rowdy organism known as ‘the boys.’
In his secret life, his real life, Jimmy was invisible. He did not play the games of the other children because he could not see himself out there on the field. He Watched them. It needed to be done. It was something he did with an inner urgency and yet almost without awareness. Or maybe it was something that he was.
In the secret world, his classmates were like characters in a cartoon on Saturday morning. He paid attention to them, as he paid attention to everything, and so he knew them.
He knew Scott and Amy. They were boyfriend-girlfriend, the only ones in first grade to make such a commitment. They hid behind the tire wall and kissed or ‘humped’ their bodies against each other while other kids peeked from around the corner. When no kids were peeking they just sat and held hands and whispered.
He knew all of Jason’s favorite dirty jokes, though he was too embarrassed to laugh at them – at least not anywhere Jason could see him. He knew Jason’s dad drank beer and had a gun.
He knew Megan, even though she was a grade ahead of him. She was the smallest in her class, radiantly blonde and somehow softer than the other kids. One day he saw her standing in the bus line after school with tears in her eyes and he wondered why she had been crying. In the secret world, he looked back in time and saw someone pushing her down on the sidewalk and wished he had been there to shove the bully back and help her up. But he didn’t ask her what was wrong. He was invisible. And anyway he was Watching.
In class, when the other kids had their heads down quietly over their seatwork, Jimmy Watched the letters on his paper. His pencil made the motions over and over, methodically matching the example at the beginning of the line.
Aa Aa Aa Aa Aa
Bb Bb Bb Bb Bb
He Watched the letters form and wondered why the little b faced away from its mom, but seemed happier than the little d that glared up at its harsh D father.
On the playground, Mrs. Hampton noticed Jimmy every now and then, when none of the other children were howling from skinned knees or putting sand down one another’s shorts. He stood out somehow, among the others. She always had the vague impression that he moved like he was wearing new pants that were still a little stiff. In fact his clothes were rarely new, more likely to be sturdy hand-me-downs in a style the young teacher recognized from her own childhood, hardly more than a decade ago. His natural state seemed to be attentive stillness.
And yet from time to time, she noticed it was Jimmy who invented a game for the playground at large. Quietly, almost furtively, the boy would begin to do something and the tide of the group just turned in his direction.
For a while he reigned as king of the see-saw. No one had ridden that toy for months when he walked up to one of the girls (Was it Becky? She couldn’t remember. It must have been.) and quietly asked if she wanted to be on the other side for him. By the end of the day there was a line of kids waiting for a turn on Becky’s side of the see-saw. (Jimmy took them each in turn, but Mrs. Hampton noticed that Becky’s turns were the longest.) The toy enjoyed a renaissance for the next two weeks, but on the third day someone beat Jimmy in the mad dash at the beginning of recess and he had to cede his throne. The See-saw King dutifully waited in line for a turn, but after a few minutes of riding there was someone at his elbow demanding his spot. Jimmy did not get back in line.
And then there was the day he turned half the playground – from the once-again-idle see-saw to the slide and all the way over to the swing set – into a miniature city.
It started near the far back corner, up against the tire wall. Jimmy had lost interest in his classmates and turned his attention to the ground in front of him. He followed an ant for a while, but it eluded him. He started drawing idly in the sand. His name. A cockeyed stick figure.
He brushed them away with the side of his hand, smoothing out a long stripe in front of his knees. In the secret world, that patch of smooth sand suddenly became a courtyard at the base of a government building like the ones he had seen in Philadelphia when his parents took him across the Delaware Water Gap on the big “Fred J. Franklin bridge” (as he thought of it) to visit the Art Museum. The museum had a courtyard in front of it, with a parking lot that no one could park on because someone had painted a giant picture on it that you could only see from the top of the museum steps or maybe from an airplane.
Jimmy piled sand against the tire wall and fashioned the art museum with its hundreds and thousands of steps leading down to the courtyard. Then he started building roads, long boulevards that branched and curved gracefully around the see-saw and turned to cul de sacs — like the one across the street from his house — when they ran into the tire wall that hemmed in the schoolyard. Lost in his construction project, the boy hardly seemed to notice when Zach, one of the Ghostbusters trio, stopped silently to watch him and then, in the manner of young boys, squatted wordlessly to join his project.
Zach’s roads ran less straight than Jimmy’s and he tended to make a ktshhhhh-ing sound as he moved the dirt around. Zach knew a lot about trucks and fire engines, and his dad didn’t live with him but came on weekends to take him to something called a ‘tractor pull,’ only Zach said it “tracher pull” with his signature ktshhhh sound in the middle of the word. Zach also liked to make his hand into a car to drive down the streets they built and every so often he would stop building to test-drive in their city. In the secret world, the streets already had cars, scaled down to match the streets better than Zach’s hand could.
Jimmy went on building. He didn’t mind Zach’s less polished approach to civil engineering unless it came in the way of his own vision, in which case Jimmy just smoothed the sand over to make a more orderly connection between his straight, clean boulevards and Zach’s wandering truck paths with their ditches and ramps for stunt jumping. Zach always deferred to Jimmy as creator of the game. Sometimes he watched Jimmy building and just talked about the things that ‘they’ were making.
“We should make it go over here and then make like a lava pit with a big ramp.”
Jimmy never contradicted him or really said much at all. In the secret world this city already existed. It only needed to be built, here in the sand.
Eventually the city grew out into the main play area and the other children unconsciously made way for it, squishing their games toward the other end of the yard. Then suddenly the sand city reached a certain size and all at once ceased being Jimmy and Zach’s game. It became somehow a feature of the playground.
Becky and Kara, who knew Jimmy from staying late at school because their parents were teachers, climbed up on the tire wall over-looking the city and sat down to watch the construction. Soon other girls joined them.
The city spread out into the middle of the playground, cutting off access to the slide and some of the swings. The other children stood along the edges of it watching. One of the other boys, Jimmy didn’t notice who because he was trying to make the dry sand hold its shape for a tunnel, tried to join the building, but Zach bullied him away. Nearly everyone was watching now, circling around the edges of the growing sand city, careful not scuff the roads and house squares that lined them.
Then Lamont, the third Ghostbuster, produced a car from his pocket and knelt down over in the corner by the art museum. He tentatively set the plastic toy on the plaza below the stairs, not noticing the mural Jimmy had ‘painted’ on the space. Lamont glanced at Jimmy but the city builder didn’t seem to notice him. He drove the car around the plaza making Rrrrr-rrrrrr sounds with his mouth. Mike knelt beside him with a Matchbox car of his own and the two founded a drag racing club up the main boulevard in front of the art museum. Then a boy with a motorcycle started exploring Zach’s mountain trails and ramps over by the slide.
Then the road that Jimmy was building ended quite suddenly up against a wall of LA Gears and saddle shoes. He swept his hand in the now-familiar motion to create a cul-de-sac. He drew in the houses around the edge of the circle and looked up.
The spell broke a little then. The secret world receded.
His city had been besieged. A solid line of kids stood round it like a wall, watching half a dozen boys romping up and down his roads with their various vehicles. Zach and his hand car were loudly leading a road race over in front of the swings.
The city builder smiled.
Then he climbed up on the wall next to Becky. She smiled at him, but didn’t say anything. Jimmy didn’t seem to notice. He sat close to her, but not too close, and looked down on his handiwork and the other kids enjoying it. Another quiet smile.
Just then Lamont put his knee down on the art museum in his enthusiasm for winning the latest drag race against a Tonka truck that tended to smash down the houses on one side of Main Street.
The city builder’s smile faded a little.
The boulevards started looking pretty shabby before long. The cul de sacs over by the tire wall and under the slide were doing alright but any house within reach of the city limit had become a kneeling pad. Zach’s mountain trails morphed into a disconnected track with one giant jump in the middle. Zach didn’t seem to mind. He was kneeling on the Library of Congress, another Philly transplant, and leading a tracher pull across the remains of City Hall.
Then Matt and Billy got in a fight over who was next racing Lamont at the Main Street Drag Racer’s Association. Matt stepped on the Bronx and shoved Billy, who obliterated Downtown with one knee.
Then the bell rang.
The children turned automatically, mechanically, and bolted. Billy wiped out the rest of Downtown as he jumped up to run and get in line. Becky and the girls hopped down from the wall, finishing off the Museum of Art and the other government buildings.
In the secret world, Sand City faced the Apocalypse. Highways shattered, buildings crumbled. Tiny people cried out under the assault of giant sneakers falling from the sky to obliterate them. In seconds the streets were empty. Desolate. The shouts and squeals of the Titans faded into the distance.
Jimmy sat a minute longer on his wall, examining the destruction. Then he stood up and walked down the tire wall to the city limit, carefully hopped down near the mercifully preserved homes of suburban Underslide and turned away from the city.
The next day, in the secret world, a solo explorer scaled the Tire Cliffs and spent the recess hour hunting acorns and the tiny wild onions that grew in the sugar sand by the edge of the woods. He needed to store up food (like they did in the stories Mama read before bed) for a long winter, alone in the mountains.
