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  Stubborn. That was the word that best described him during those years—and every year more stubborn than the year before, more locked into himself, more unwilling to budge when someone or something pushed up against him. Ferguson had grown hard—hard in his contempt for his father, hard in the abnegations he continued to impose on himself years after Artie Federman’s death, hard in his opposition to the suburban society that had held him prisoner since the beginning of his conscious life. If Ferguson hadn’t yet turned into an insufferable scold who made people flee from him the moment he walked into a room, it was because he didn’t look for fights and generally kept his thoughts to himself. Most of his fellow high school students saw him as an okay sort of guy—a bit morose at times, a bit lost in his own head, but not someone with a chip on his shoulder, and definitely not a bore, since Ferguson wasn’t against all people, only some people, and the people he wasn’t against he tended to like, and the people he liked he treated with a reserved but thoughtful affection, and the people he loved he loved in the way a dog loves, with every part of himself, never judging, never condemning, never thinking an ill thought, simply worshipping them and exulting in their presence, for he knew he was utterly dependent on the small band of people who loved him and whom he loved back and that without them he would have been lost, another Hank or Frank tumbling down the shaft of the all-devouring incinerator, a flake of ash floating across the night sky.

  He was no longer the boy who had written Sole Mates as a fourteen-year-old nitwit nobody, but he still carried that boy inside him, and he sensed that the two of them would go on walking together for a long time to come. To combine the strange with the familiar: that was what Ferguson aspired to, to observe the world as closely as the most dedicated realist and yet to create a way of seeing the world through a different, slightly distorting lens, for reading books that dwelled only on the familiar inevitably taught you things you already knew, and reading books that dwelled only on the strange taught you things you didn’t need to know, and what Ferguson wanted above all else was to write stories that would make room not only for the visible world of sentient beings and inanimate things but also for the vast and mysterious unseen forces that were hidden within the seen. He wanted to disturb and disorient, to make people roar with laughter and tremble in their boots, to break hearts and damage minds and dance the loony dance of the dizzy-boys as they swung into their doppelgänger duet. Yes, Tolstoy was ever so moving, and yes, Flaubert wrote the best sentences in creation, but much as Ferguson enjoyed following the dramatic, increasingly drastic turns in the lives of Anna K. and Emma B., at that moment in his life the characters who spoke most forcefully to him were Kafka’s K., Swift’s Gulliver, Poe’s Pym, Shakespeare’s Prospero, Melville’s Bartleby, Gogol’s Kovalyov, and M. Shelley’s monster.

  Early efforts from his sophomore year: a story about a man who wakes up one morning to discover he has a different face; a story about a man who loses his wallet and passport in a foreign city and sells his blood in order to eat; a story about a little girl who changes her name on the first day of every month; a story about two friends who stop being friends because of a dispute in which both of their arguments are wrong; a story about a man who accidentally kills his wife and then decides to paint every house in his neighborhood a bright shade of red; a story about a woman who loses the power of speech and finds herself growing progressively happier as the years go on; a story about a teenage boy who runs away from home and then, when he decides to return, discovers that his parents have vanished; a story about a young man writing a story about a young man writing a story about a young man writing a story about a young man …

  Hemingway taught him to look at his sentences more carefully, how to measure the weight of each word and syllable that went into the building of a paragraph, but admirable as Hemingway’s writing could be when he was writing at his best, his work didn’t say much to Ferguson, all that manly bluster and tight-lipped stoicism seemed slightly ridiculous to him, so he left Hemingway behind for the deeper, more demanding Joyce, and then, when he turned sixteen, another bundle of paperbacks was given to him by Uncle Don, among them books by the heretofore unknown Isaac Babel, who quickly became Ferguson’s number one short-story writer in the world, and Heinrich von Kleist (the subject of Don’s first biography), who quickly became Ferguson’s number two short-story writer, but even more valuable to him, not to say precious and everlastingly fundamental, was the forty-five-cent Signet edition of Walden and Civil Disobedience that was wedged in among the books of fiction and poetry, for even if Thoreau wasn’t a writer of novels or short stories, he was a writer of sublime clarity and precision, a creator of such beautifully constructed sentences that Ferguson felt their beauty as one feels a blow to the chin or a fever in the brain. Perfect. Every word seemed to fall perfectly in place, and every sentence seemed to be a small work unto itself, an independent unit of breath and thought, and the thrill of reading such prose was never knowing how far Thoreau would leap from one sentence to the next—sometimes it was only a matter of inches, sometimes of several feet or yards, sometimes of whole country miles—and the destabilizing effect of those irregular distances taught Ferguson how to think about his own efforts in a new way, for what Thoreau did was to combine two opposing and mutually exclusive impulses in every paragraph he wrote, what Ferguson began to call the impulse to control and the impulse to take risks. That was the secret, he felt. All control would lead to an airless, suffocating result. All risk would lead to chaos and incomprehensibility. But put the two together, and then maybe you’d be onto something, then maybe the words singing in your head would start to sing on the page and bombs would go off and buildings would collapse and the world would begin to look like a different world.

  But there was more to Thoreau than just style. There was the savage need to be himself and no one but himself even at the cost of offending his neighbors, the stubbornness of soul that so appealed to the ever more stubborn Ferguson, the adolescent Ferguson, who saw in Thoreau a man who had managed to remain an adolescent for his entire life, which is to say, a man who had never abandoned his principles, who had never turned into a corrupt, sellout grown-up—a brave boy to the bitter end, which was precisely how Ferguson wanted to imagine his own future. But beyond the spiritual imperative to transform himself into a bold, self-reliant being, there was Thoreau’s critical examination of the American premise that money rules all, the rejection of the American government and his willingness to go to jail in order to protest that government’s actions, and then, of course, there was the idea that had changed the world, the idea that had helped make India an independent country five months after Ferguson was born, which was the same idea now spreading across the American South and perhaps would help change America as well, civil disobedience, nonviolent resistance to the violence of unjust laws, and how little had changed in the one hundred and twelve years since Walden, Ferguson told himself, the Mexican-American War now turned into the Vietnam War, black slavery now turned into Jim Crow oppression and Klan-run state governments, and just as Thoreau had written his book in the years leading up to the Civil War, Ferguson felt that he too was writing at a moment when the world was about to blow apart again, and three times in the weeks both before and after his mother married Jim and Amy’s father, as he watched the televised images and studied the newspaper photographs of Buddhist monks in South Vietnam burning themselves to death to protest the policies of the American-backed Diem regime, Ferguson understood that the quiet days of his boyhood were over, that the horror of those immolations proved that if men were willing to die for peace, then the steadily expanding war in their country would eventually become so big that it would obscure everything and end up making everyone go blind.

  * * *

  THE NEW HOUSE was in South Orange, not Maplewood, but since the two towns were governed by a single board of education, Ferguson and Amy stayed on as students at Columbia High School, which was the only public high school in the distric
t. They had already finished their sophomore year when their parents were married on August 2, 1963, and the dispiriting conversation that had taken place in the backyard of Ferguson’s old house eleven months earlier was all but forgotten. Amy had found herself a boyfriend, Ferguson had found himself a girlfriend, and their brother-sister friendship had forged on just as Amy had hoped it would, although now that they were actually brother and sister, perhaps the old metaphor had become a trifle redundant.

  Ferguson’s father was taking all the money from the sale of the old house, but Dan Schneiderman still owned the old-old house, the first Maplewood house, which young Ferguson had never wanted to leave, and by selling that house for twenty-nine thousand dollars, he had been able to buy the somewhat larger house in South Orange for thirty-six thousand dollars, for even though Ferguson’s mother was nearly penniless because the monthly checks from his father had stopped coming after she married Dan, Dan himself was no longer broke, since he and Liz had both taken out one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar life insurance policies early in their marriage, and now that he had collected that sum in the wake of Liz’s hideous, premature death, the newly formed family of Adlers, Fergusons, and Schneidermans was comfortably solvent for the time being. It was hard not to think about where the money had come from, the gruesome translation of terminal cancer into dollars, but Liz was dead, and life was moving on, and what choice did any of them have but to move along with it?

  They all loved the new house. Even Ferguson, who was strongly opposed to living in a small town, who would have given almost anything to move to New York or any other large city anywhere in the world, admitted that it was a fine choice and that the two-story white clapboard house built in 1903 and situated on an out-of-the-way cul-de-sac known as Woodhall Crescent was a far better place to park your bones than the chilly Castle of Silence he had been forced to live in for the past seven years. They probably could have used one more bedroom on top of the four they had, since the room that would have been Jim’s was converted into a studio for Dan, but no one saw it as a hardship, least of all the phlegmatic Jim, who visited only rarely and seemed content to sleep on the living room sofa, and if he didn’t mind, why should anyone else mind? The important thing was that they were all in it together, and because Ferguson approved of Dan, and Amy and Jim approved of Ferguson’s mother, and Dan approved of Ferguson, and Ferguson’s mother approved of Amy and Jim, they all settled in peacefully together and paid no attention to the gossips in the two towns who felt that with all the twists and commotions of the past year—death, divorce, remarriage, a new house, and two sexed-up teenagers living side by side on the same floor in that house—something strange or unnatural or not quite right must have been going on over there at 7 Woodhall Crescent. The man was nothing more than a struggling artist, for pity’s sake, meaning a slovenly, wisecracking luftmensch (according to the Jews) or a long-haired nonconformist with doubtful political leanings (according to the non-Jews), and how could Stanley Ferguson’s wife have walked out on her marriage and all the money that came with it to join forces with a character like that?

  The biggest change for Ferguson had nothing to do with his mother’s marriage to Dan Schneiderman. She had been married before, after all, and in that Dan was a better, more compatible husband for her than his father had been, Ferguson endorsed the union and didn’t think about it much because he didn’t have to. What he did think about, however, and what represented a far more significant upheaval in the basic conditions of his life, was that he was no longer an only child. As a young boy, he had prayed for a brother or a sister, again and again he had begged his mother to produce a baby for him so he wouldn’t be alone anymore, but then she had told him it wouldn’t be possible, that she had no more babies in her, which meant that he would be her one and only Archie until the end of time, and little by little Ferguson had come to terms with his solitary fate, evolving into the pensive, dreamy fellow who now wanted to spend his adulthood sequestered in a room writing books, missing out on the rough-and-tumble joys and high-spirited camaraderie that most children live through with their siblings, but also avoiding the conflicts and hatreds that can turn childhood into a hellish, unrelenting brawl that ends in lifelong bitterness and/or permanent psychosis, and now, at the age of sixteen, having eluded both the good and the bad of not being the only one for his entire life, Ferguson’s childhood wish had been granted in the form of a sixteen-year-old sister and a twenty-year-old brother—but too late, too long deferred to be of much use to him anymore, and even though Jim was mostly absent and Amy was his close friend again (after a long spell of resenting her for having turned him down the previous summer), there were days when he couldn’t help longing for his old life as an only child, even if that life had been much worse than this one.

  It would have been different if Amy had loved him in the way he had come to love her, if they had taken advantage of their new circumstances to indulge in various sorts of carnal mischief, impromptu hanky-panky sessions when their parents’ backs were turned, secret lust frolics and midnight assignations in either one of their adjacent bedrooms, culminating in the mutual sacrifice of their two virginities to the cause of love and greater mental health, but Amy wasn’t interested, she really and truly just wanted to be his sister, and the sex-mad Ferguson, whose primary goal in life was to stick his penis into a naked girl’s body and put his virginhood behind him forever, had to go along with it or else explode from the continual agitation of wanting what he couldn’t have, for thwarted desire was a poison that seeped into every part of you, and once your veins and inner organs were fully saturated with the stuff, it traveled upward toward your brain and burst right through the top of your skull.

  The early weeks in the new house were the most difficult for him. Not only did he have to suppress the urge to grab hold of Amy and smear her face with kisses every time they were alone together, and not only did he have to tamp down the nighttime erection reveries of slipping into bed with her in the room next door, but there were numerous practical adjustments that had to be made as well, which largely revolved around the question of how not to infringe on each other’s privacy, and until they established a set of hard-and-fast rules about how to coexist in the spaces they shared (knock first, tidy up the bathroom before leaving it, wash your own dishes, don’t crib the other’s homework unless the answer is freely given to you, and no snooping in the other’s room, which meant that Ferguson couldn’t peek at Amy’s diary and Amy couldn’t peek at Ferguson’s work notebooks and stories), there were several awkward moments and a couple of downright embarrassments, as when Amy opened the bathroom door and saw the freshly showered Ferguson sitting naked on the toilet jerking off—I didn’t see that! she yelped, as she slammed the door shut—or when Ferguson popped out of his room at the precise instant Amy was walking down the hall trying to adjust the towel that was wrapped around her body, and when the towel suddenly fell off, unveiling the whiteness of her bare skin to the startled Ferguson, who was looking at the small-nippled breasts and curly brown pubes of his stepsister for the first time, Amy let out a loud Fuck!, which Ferguson answered with an almost witty retort—I always suspected you had a body, he said. Now I’m sure of it—and Amy laughed, then raised her arms in a mock-cheesecake pose, and said, Now we’re even, Mr. Dick, which referred not only to the funny character in their beloved David Copperfield but to what she had seen in the bathroom several days earlier.

  It was true that Ferguson had a girlfriend, but it was also true that he would have dropped her in an instant if Amy’s Barkis had been willing, but it wasn’t, and now that Ferguson had seen the body that would never be given to him, he no longer had to torture himself with trying to imagine what it looked like, and that was a small step forward, he felt, a way to begin curing himself of an unhealthy obsession that would never take him anywhere except into the Bottomless Well of Eternal Sadness, and by way of recompense he tried to fix his thoughts on his girlfriend’s body, which he had seen naked onl
y from the waist up so far, but their explorations were becoming bolder and more reckless now that they had been reunited at the start of their junior year, which meant there was cause for hope, and after a rough summer of not knowing where he stood with Amy or how he should act with her, Ferguson decided to capitulate, to burn his arsenal of weapons and sign a mental treaty of absolute surrender, and from that moment on he began to settle into his new job of acting as a brother to Amy’s sister, knowing that was the only way he could go on loving her and still be loved in return.

  Sometimes they fought, sometimes Amy shouted and slammed doors and called him names, sometimes Ferguson hid in his room and refused to talk to her for entire evenings, entire blocks of ten or twelve uninterrupted hours, but mostly they made an effort to get along, and mostly they did get along. In effect, their friendship returned to what it had been before Ferguson got it into his head that they should be more than just friends, but there was an added intensity to the friendship now that they were living with their newly married parents in the house on Woodhall Crescent, with longer, more intimate conversations that sometimes lasted three or four hours and at some point always managed to come around to Amy’s mother’s death and Artie Federman’s death, with more hours of studying and preparing for tests together (which pushed Ferguson’s grades up from B+’s and occasional A−’s to Amy’s level of all A’s and A−’s), more cigarettes smoked together, more alcohol drunk together (almost all of it beer, cheap Rolling Rock in long green bottles or even cheaper Old Milwaukee in the stumpy brown ones), more old movies watched on TV together, more records listened to together, more games of gin rummy played together, more trips to New York together, more joking, more teasing, more arguing about politics, more laughing, and no more inhibitions about picking noses and farting in each other’s company.