The Boy in the Park: A gripping psychological thriller with a shocking twist

I set the caramel latte on the bench beside me, bid hello and a pleasant afternoon to the memory of Margaret, and pull out my notebook. Its home in my back pocket has left an indelible imprint on my khakis, every pair of them; and the shape of my ass has left the notebooks slightly bent. Every one of them. There are stacks, piled up at home. A lifetime of poetry, thus far read only by me.

I am not alone this afternoon. Free access and not-too-miserable weather have brought others into what is normally a rather secluded area. A group of children plays with stones off to my left, down at the water’s edge, their parents chatting idly behind them, visibly relieved that for the moment their offspring don’t require active observation. Further in the distance, a clutch of tourists with enormous cameras stops and starts along the beds by the water. I’ve never understood the fascination with taking pictures of plants, but these kinds of visitors are the standard, not the exception. The kind that take photos of flowers rather than actually see them – smell them, feel the way they reflect the light into your eyes, standing before their simple, unadorned magnificence. Surely this is a far greater thing than converting them to pixels. But I suppose there’s a whole generation, now, who simply do not know how to encounter anything directly. Human experience is mediated by a small screen held up between face and reality. Only what it captures is truly real. The memories of life have become confined to a span of 2.5 x 5 in (3.5 x 6 if you’ve got the latest model). On the periphery, nothing truly exists.

There has to be something tragic in this, there just has to be. I know we’re more connected than we’ve ever been, that it’s become the norm for the anonymous ‘us’ of the world to tweet and post and link to a degree that wouldn’t have been imaginable a generation ago. And I’m not against occasionally stepping into the public library and accessing the Internet with a swipe of my ID, to visit an online story or revel in the latest news of the day. But I cannot be the only one who feels more detached there than anywhere else. When I’m sitting beneath my trees and the water ripples beneath me, I feel more connected to the world than in any other spot. Even when there’s not another dot of humanity around me. But when I ‘connect’, when wires and satellites link my data stream to that of everyone else in creation, it’s then that I feel the most lost. The most alone.

And they make you pay for the experience.

Still, today is not about being alone. The tourists with their eyes pressed to their cameras may not notice the wide beauty of the periphery they’re avoiding, but for me the periphery is what’s interesting. Because there, at the edge of my vision, the branches wiggle again at the water’s edge.

In the usual spot.

I sit forward, unsurprised but eager. I’ve been looking forward to seeing him, to seeing the scrape that had upset me yesterday bandaged and a boy back to being a boy. Sure, the injury may have been unpleasant, but there are times when unpleasantness brings rewards. Now the boy will have war wounds to prove his courage and offer bragging rights before his peers. Every boy needs to have those: stories connected to little scabs, scars, offering fleshy proof that ‘I was brave, guys, and all grown up.’ Men seem to need them, too, though their scars tend to be deeper, their falls more brutal, and the evidence of maturity even more fleeting.

He dutifully emerges, as if on cue, and promptly takes his customary three steps down to the edge of the pond. Then, as always, he stands like a statue, his stick in hand, its tip just piercing the water. The familiar scene. My own comforting reassurance of normalcy. My heart loosens with gentle satisfaction.

But my breath chokes in my throat. The blood, I immediately realize, is still on his arm, just as fresh as yesterday. It glistens in the grey light seeping down from the overcast sky: moist, liquid, fresh. Even at the distance, I can see a stream of it flow along the path of his dirty skin towards his hand, trailing brown edges where the red blood meets dust and grime.

There is no bandage. His wound hasn’t been cleaned. Hasn’t been tended to at all.

But it’s not just the blood that stops my breath and keeps it halted. The blood’s not even the worst of it. There’s more, today. I’m glued at first on the injury I remember – poor child, still all scraped up – but finally my glance wanders a few inches to my left. Initially, I think it’s the shadows, a trick of the light; but then a sunbeam pierces the clouds and I see directly. The boy’s other arm is overwhelmed by something oval, black. I think at first it’s a patch of some kind, maybe a dark bandage over a different scrape. But it’s not fabric. Almost mirroring the wound on his left arm, I can see now that the large mark on his right is a bruise, deep and discoloured. The kind so dense it looks like it digs down to the bone. It extends over the whole of his forearm, from his elbow to the hand that clutches his favourite stick. Blues and purples and almost-greens that should never be the colours defining the skin of a boy.

I can’t fully focus. This isn’t right. A child so small should not be walking around with such wounds. I try to look into his face, into his eyes, to see if they’re watering, filled with pain. They ought to be filled with pain. But I can’t make out his features through the shadows and distance. Only the basic outline of his face, a few details – the bumps of his ears beneath his hair, the shadow that barely defines his nose. If only I could see him a little better; but the sunbeam is interrupted by tree branches high above, restricting its light to his shoulders and below.

I really have to approach him. Someone must take him to get cleaned up somewhere, at the very least. Get that scraped arm washed off.

But the boy senses my thoughts – his motions are almost that synchronized – and turns. Three steps and he is gone, the bristly green leaves of the Cryptomeria japonica brushing closed behind him.

EVENING

I cannot sleep. Not tonight. It’s not my usual insomnia, either. My normal night-time torture is more gentle: a sustained, unwavering, yet calm refusal to let sleep come, with no specific cause and no specific cure. I’ve grown accustomed to the ruthless consistency of its long-game attack. I know what it’s like to have no thoughts fill my head but still find sleep a foreigner, and to start counting sheep at number one, knowing I’ll easily make it to a thousand without my eyelids growing the slightest bit heavier. One sheep after another, waiting their turn without drama or protest, each mocking the sleep I crave.

But tonight’s insomnia is different, a punctuated sort of thing. Pokes and prods that bolt me to alertness every time I start to fade. And my body is actually fading, that’s the strangest part. I’m genuinely tired tonight. Exhausted. But each time my body starts to give way, to give in, my mind pounces and shoves sleep off.

I am thinking of the boy. He’s all I’m thinking about. Those arms, bloodied and bruised. The fact that I did nothing. I don’t understand his silence and I can’t fathom his threshold for what must be tremendous pain, but mostly I feel guilty that I saw a child with wounds he shouldn’t have had, whom no one had tended to since the day before, and now I’m here comfortably in bed – awake or otherwise – and I didn’t so much as say a word to console him. I feel ashamed, and embarrassed with myself.

This all must change, I resolve, and the change must begin with my behaviour. It’s not socially responsible just to sit on one’s own in such circumstances. I must take my courage in my hands and get my posterior off my bench.

Tomorrow, I’m going to say something.

7 (#ulink_ee44836e-a061-5092-bfcb-6a408171d69d)

Friday (#ulink_ee44836e-a061-5092-bfcb-6a408171d69d)

The new day hasn’t begun well, and that’s not entirely a surprise. The organic Vitamin-C-and-Zinc tablets in the yellow jars are selling themselves, but my mind is otherwise occupied. The sun is brighter today – none of the half fog / half overcast sky that sullied yesterday – so I ought to be in brighter spirits. My mood so often follows the weather outside the window: bright when it’s bright, grey when it’s grey. But I’ve spent the morning grey when it’s orange, troubled, as I knew I would be, from the moment I awoke, by the memory of the boy.

Memory allows the space for analysis, and in the scope of such analysis I recognize that there are a few features about this child that should, just possibly, not have me in quite such a state over his present circumstances. He’s never looked entirely in top form, not on all the many occasions I’ve seen him. That’s the first reality that sinks in. He’s never been one of those made-up children that urban parents produce as if from a factory or mail-order supply. The kind sculpted out of name-brand ‘playwear’ that’s stain-, wrinkle- and pleasure-resistant, trained to hold their autographed football rather than throw it, ‘because the grass is so dirty, Junior, and leaves marks.’ The boy is rougher than that. A little out of place for the middle of San Francisco, as if the Midwestern prairies had lost one of their member in this peninsular metropolis; and this child, who would have looked at home on an Oklahoma farmstead, had found himself wandering through the cultured greenery a stone’s throw from Silicon Valley. Out of his environment, caught askance out of time, with a body and a posture not quite sure what to make of this different jungle. The kind of boy who inserts himself into a tyre swing and kicks until his feet are above his head and the arcs so high the rope goes slack when it crests. Who sits in the muddiest patch of the field, just to sense what it’s like to feel the liquid sludge seep over his ankles. Who’s never owned a ball, because balls cost money; but has also never wanted one, because he’s always had access to sticks, and sticks are so easily horses, and rocket ships, and swords and sceptres.

But children don’t wander alone from Little House on the Prairie to the Inner Sunset, I know this full well. The fact that he’s not an Abercrombie Child doesn’t mean he’s not from around here. Not everyone in the City on the Bay is rolling in start-up fortunes and Union Square attire, and it’s possible to be poor and haggard in the city. Perhaps more normal than I generally appreciate. It’s the glitter that catches the eye, they say. Beneath it there’s usually a lot more glue and bare cardboard than we care to notice.

I’m stuck in these memories, such as they are. Second day running he’s done that to me. And in the mix of them, I find myself calling back to the most unlikely of things; the one feature that really nags at my attention. To my puzzlement it’s not the blood, not even the bruise. Instead, what troubles me is the fact that he’s never looked me squarely in the face. I’ve often thought this peculiar, even penned it into one of the poems in my notebook. Kids normally look at everything. From the moment their eyes first open children are absorbing the universe, striving to interpret it. Relishing every sight – which to young eyes are usually new sights, never before seen – and adding them to the canvas of their experience of life. What sort of child doesn’t fit this bill?

But this child, this one unique, odd child, has never so much as lifted his eyes up to mine, though I’ve always sat in what is quite clearly his field of vision. Day after day, and not so much as a passing glance or a corner of his eye caught out of a corner of mine. But he’s never had a bloodied arm before, either, or black marks.

My thoughts drift, and I wonder who takes care of him when he leaves the water’s edge, when he makes his way home. Who touches his face and speaks soothing words to him? And why haven’t they bandaged the broken skin?

Every boy deserves soothing words when he’s done himself harm. Soothing words, a bandage, and the love that makes blood a little less terrifying.

LUNCHTIME

With thoughts like these occupying my internal attention, work before lunch sits in my mind like a kind of haze. I’m fairly certain I sold a good stock of pills to several people, at least enough to keep my manager smiling. But I did it all while staring out the glass storefront at the bright sunshine of this new day, only physically present in the little shop. The higher part of me was somewhere else. I was anxious. Anxious to get back to the park and settle my internal bets about the boy’s welfare. I wanted to see if he would be there again. If he was, I wanted to survey his condition; and assuming that it still contained any troubling elements, I was resolved to speak. I had even prepped my remarks in advance so as to be fully prepared for the encounter.

Hi kid. My name is Dylan. I usually sit over there around lunchtime. I would point back towards my bench. I saw you hurt your arms. Are your parents around? Can we get them to take a look at it?

During the night I’d determined this was probably a good approach. Casual, not too confrontational. Caring, I hoped, without being creepy.

But they’re only plans. Burns once wrote a poem about plans – something to do with mice and men. One every poet has to learn. I forget it now, but the gist sticks with me. Plan and plan and plan, and eventually something will come along to best your intentions. So lunchtime has come, and I’m resolved to put my own into immediate action before Burns’s mice have the chance.

I walk towards the park with unusual haste, each foot planted before the next with a few extra inches in my stride. I don’t have the full hour today that I had yesterday – apparently Michael’s new hire has become proficient enough on the till that more extended training isn’t required, so it’s to be my usual forty-five minutes and I want to make the most of it. Today, unlike most days, I actually have things to do.

My ID is already in my hand as I approach the ticket window and hold it up for Anna. She’s the one who works Fridays, whose hair is dyed a hazard-cone orange with roots that are almost black, gelled into little spikes that give her head the overall appearance of a badly spray-painted cactus. There are three slashes boldly shaved at angles through her left eyebrow, which I’m vaguely certain is a signal of something, but I have no idea what (perhaps she’s in a gang? though this seems unlikely. I’m not sure how many gang members have day jobs taking tickets in botanical gardens). Her grey T-shirt says BACK OFF in enormous lettering, and she’s affixed her Welcome to the Botanical Gardens, MyName is Anna and I’m Happy To Help You badge just above the final F of OFF.

Anna glances at my ID with relative detachment. She’s not so much interested in the name, Dylan Aaronsen, or the photograph that is obviously me. Her real interest is in the zip code provided at the end of my address – proof I’m a resident, which she then notes down on a sheet of paper that for some reason charts the number of daily visitors from each zip code in the region. I’ve often tried to imagine why this could be of interest to anyone; but I’ve also taken an oddly irrational pleasure in seeing more tick-marks by my own suburban zip code (94131) than by many others. On other days, I’ve entertained the idea that this says something rare and telling about what kind of people we are in Diamond Heights. The kind of people who like plants more than the Union Square elitists of 94108 and the Mission hippies of 94110. I’ve never seen a single mark next to the zip codes that lie along the beaches. That’s telling, too. Let them have their sand. We 94131’ers like our nature, and enough to travel a good hike to get it.

But today my mind is on other things. I at last step into the gardens, my ID returned to my wallet, and start to walk with purpose. These grounds normally cause me such delight, but today they are simply an avenue towards a destination.

Five minutes later. I’m at my bench. I don’t sit down in a usual way: today isn’t about a gentle relaxing into place and breathing a little more deeply for the peace of it. I sit today with purpose, as if my butt plopping onto the wood will trigger the events I want to happen next.

The sun is bright and the water is dead still. There are no throngs of visitors this afternoon. Not every day draws the crowds, and it’s an unpredictable game, guessing what factors pull them in and what fend them off. It’s not always an exact correlation of sunshine-to-crowds or fog-to-emptiness. I’d have thought it would have been, that’s the sort of formula that makes sense; but today is a case in point against.

It takes a few seconds, given my swirl of thoughts, but I eventually calm myself down and shake off the various annoyances of the walk: the noise of the traffic along the road, the seemingly unnecessary ritual at the gate. I’m able to take in a few, deep, wonderful breaths of the fresh park air, scented with a touch of the must that comes off the still water. I’m refreshed. And in that relaxed state I realize that my stillness here is a little unusual.

I am, in fact, not only absent a crowd today. I’m entirely alone. Entirely. And the reality of that strikes out at me all at once.

The boy isn’t here. It’s past time for him to be here, and he isn’t here.

This isn’t right.This isn’t how these days go, I tell myself, agitated. My mind is immediately analytical. I come, I sit, and he appears. That’s the pattern. I’m used to the pattern.

My pulse is quickening. I can sense my heart thumping in my chest – and for an instant I feel absurd. Why this fuss? It’s just a kid with a scraped arm and a bit of a bruise. God’s sakes. You’re obsessing.

Yet I’m infinitely relieved when a second later I hear a rustle in the trees. I glance across the pond to the boy’s usual spot, expecting my consolation – but there is nothing there. A strange tingling starts to build up in my spine. Then, two college-aged students emerge from a different spot, giggling at each other with heavy book bags over their shoulders. They are the sources of my noise.

I have to calm myself down. I’ve become entirely too worked up over this whole thing. I don’t know this boy from Adam. His life is none of my business. I focus on the college students instead. They’re amused by whatever stories they’re telling themselves. They’re that age, so it’s probably something to do with alcohol, workloads, or sexual escapades – the only three categories of mental focus for the 18- to 22-year-old college crowd. For an instant, I desperately wish I was in college.

Then, to my relief, the longed-for moment comes. Branches rustle again, and from his spot the boy finally emerges onto the landscape of the pond.

I can feel the breath ease within me, like a great release from an over-inflated tyre. He’s here. And I can sense my curiosity pique as I squint in the sunlight to examine him from afar.

And then the colour starts to drain from my face – I can feel it disappearing – as I gaze upon what, despite everything, I was not prepared to see.