In the lazy light cast by a naked red bulb , the walls of his bedroom become glistening flesh . Through all the moves in the past few years , in every dirty little bedroom , this red light has been the same . When he ’ d had the money , he would buy the colored bulbs from unchanging novelty stores in unchanging malls . Usually though , he would have to steal them . He needed the embryonic softness of the red light , the false safety of a room turned into a primal cave , to soften the jagged edges of a reality that was revealing itself to be colder and sharper than he ’ d ever known .
The boy was 11 . He was keenly intelligent , but it was an animal intelligence , a wolf ’ s intelligence . Matters of human interaction were a mystery to him . In the distant past , beneath the awareness of his awakened self , the child mind still wandered through foggy memories , oblivious to the hazards on all sides . Swaying arms and dancing laughter crawled through wrapping paper under tinsel and lightsas he watched them blaze and soften through squinted eyes . Friends were made , lost and quickly forgotten in the stream of schools . New hopes and bonds formed with no foresight to the hopelessness and betrayal they represented . There had been a time before he awoke to the patterns of his life , when each act of cruelty , each stranger in his house , each frightful escape in the night seemed like an anomaly . Before the awakening , there was no significance to his grandfather ’ s night games . Before the awakening , all people seemed human , and humans made sense .
The awakening had been a gradual thing , though its impact was brutal and sudden . It had started with the slow knowledge that he was somehow unlike other children in the schools he passed through . He didn ’ t understand them . Somehow , he couldn ’ t believe that they were all real people . They had to be some kind of simulation : a dream or a hoax . They all seemed so alien , so false . His teachers , he noticed , didn ’ t like him .
There were so many rules that he didn ’ t know or understand . He never really knew what he was supposed to be doing , and he just tried not to be noticed .
His mother was kind and vicious in turns . She was the only person who made sense to him . When she was happy , she made him happy . When she was sad , her sadness was profound and crippling , and she would lay on the couch unmoving for days . When she was angry , she stalked him through the halls of whichever new apartment they were in , kicking and pushing until he was cornered . There would be a deluge of curled fists pulsing a beat on his back like he was a broken drum that would make no noise other than sad , pleading whimpers . At least her emotions were real , emotions he understood . They were not the abstract , vague hostilities and ambiguous pretending of the people he met in schools . He started to understand that she , like he , was unlike other people in a way he could not comprehend .
They were isolated , the boy and his mother . It was more than the town-to-town moving every few months . There was a border between them and the rest of the world , and distance that she maintained . There was a secrecy that he ’ d always known without having been taught .
His Grandfather was the only person who ever knew where to find them . When they were in a familiar town , one close enough for him , he ’ d visit for days on end . The boy ’ s mother would drink beer and his grandfather would drink whiskey or rum and they would both smoke and argue at a dirty table in a dirty kitchen . Then , at night , his grandfather would drip into his room , bubble up into his bed , and tell him how special he was . His grandfather would whisper , a stinking , damp , close voice , about girls and bodies and games . The bristled chin would scrape his soft cheek , his tender