significant degree. Over the years, Bobby had seen the poems become
better, more satisfying, though he understood them so little that he
could not explain how he could discern the improvement; he just knew
that it was there.
Julie looked up from the two-page spread in the scrapbook and said,
“This is wonderful, Thomas. It makes me want to… run outside in the
grass… and stand under the sky and maybe even dance, just throw my
head back and laugh. It makes me glad to be alive.”
“Yes!” Thomas said, slurring the word, clapping his hands.
She passed the book to Bobby, and he sat on the edge of the bed to read
it.
The most intriguing thing about Thomas’s poems was the emotional
response they invariably evoked. None left a reader untouched, as an
array of randomly assembled images might have done. Sometimes, when
looking at Thomas’s work, Bobby laughed out loud, and sometimes he was
so moved that he had to blink back tears, and sometimes he felt fear or
sadness or regret or wonder. He did not know why he responded to any
particular piece as he did; the effect always defied analysis. Thomas’s
compositions functioned on some primal level, eliciting reaction from a
region of the mind far deeper than the subconscious.
The latest poem was no exception. Bobby felt what Julie had felt: that
life was good; that the world was beautiful; elation in the very fact of
existence.
He looked up from the scrapbook and saw that Thomas was awaiting his
reaction as eagerly as he had awaited Julie’s, perhaps a sign that
Bobby’s opinion was cherished as much as hers, even if he still didn’t
rate as long or as ardent a hug as Julie did.
“Wow,” he said softly. “Thomas, this one gives such a warm, tingly
feeling that… I think my toes are curling.” Thomas grinned.
Sometimes Bobby looked at his brother-in-law and felt two Thomases
shared that sadly deformed skull. Thomas and one was the moron, sweet
but feebleminded. Thomas and two was just as smart as anyone, but he
occupied one small part of the damaged brain that he shared with number
one, a chamber in the center, from which he had direct communication
with the outside world. Although number two’s thoughts had to be
filtered through number one’s part of the brain, so they ended up
sounding different from Thomas number one’s thoughts; therefore the
world could not know that number two was in there, thin and feeling and
fully alive-except through the evidence of picture poems, the essence of
which survived even after being filtered through Thomas number one.
“You’ve got such a talent,” Bobby said, and he meant it almost envied
it.
Thomas blushed and lowered his eyes. He rose and quickly shuffled to
the softly humming refrigerator that stood by the door to the bathroom.
Meals were served in the communal dining room, where snacks and drinks
were provided on request, but patients with sufficient mental capacity
to keep their rooms neat were allowed to have their own refrigerators
stocked with their favorite snacks and drinks, to encourage as much
independence as possible. He withdrew three cans of Coke. He gave one
to Bobby, one to Julie. With the third he returned to the chair at the
worktable, sat down, and asked, “You been catchin’ bad guys?”
“Yeah, we’re keeping the jails full,” Bobby said.
“Tell me.”
Julie leaned forward in the armchair, and Thomas scooted his
straight-backed chair closer to her, until their knees touched, and she
recounted the highlights of the events at Decodyne last night. She made
Bobby more heroic than he’d really been, and she played down her own
involvement a little not only out of modesty but in order not to
frighten Thomas with too clear a picture of the danger in which she had
gotten herself. Thomas was tough in his own way; if he hadn’t been he
would have curled up on his bed long ago, facing into the corner, and
never gotten up again. But he was not tough enough to endure the loss
of Julie. He would be devastated even to imagine that she was
vulnerable. So she made her daredevil driving and the shoot-out sound