Free Tumbledown by Robert Boswell Page B

molesting spider boxes. The job was different without Crews around. Everyone in the room felt it, Maura especially. A thrumming vibration rattled her bones, demanding she take advantage of his absence. It was stupid to waste opportunity, wasn’t it?
    “My mom’s car,” Cecil said, dropping the spider box in his hands. He picked it up. “My mom’s driving car is so big it can hold one mile of people.”
    “No car is that big,” Rhine said, “except maybe an army car.” His hands slowed as he pictured an impossibly long, light-green army truck, like the plastic toys he had played with as a boy; it had a square cab and a tent like covering for the enormous bed, with rows of benches along either side. It wouldn’t be called a truck bed if there were benches in it, he reasoned. “Is it a bed if there are benches?” he asked. The others looked at him as if he were nuts. He began explaining, which forced him to stop working. He couldn’t talk and work at the same time. A ringing phone in the empty office had ruined his last hour. He could not block out the sound, and with each ring he flinched with the desire to drop everything and answer it. He had tried twice, but the office was locked.
    Cecil picked up his elliptical, nonsensical monologue. “I was even born in California,” he announced.
    “You find out who was playing the Sinatra?” Mick asked.
    Maura nodded. “The house attendant or whatever they call him—the fucking guard. He’s trying to learn the words with his daughter. She’s in a talent contest. Though why any normal kid would choose to sing F. Sinatra is beyond me.”
    “ ’Tectives follow people,” Cecil continued, “and look for clues, like if you have any fingerprints in those boxes.”
    “It’s de tective, moron,” Maura said softly, almost to herself.
    “And they have cars with special powers.” His arms spread like wings, and he made a whooshing noise.
    “You’re an idiot,” Maura said as she dropped completed cartons into the transport box. Cecil kept flying, calling now for mission control. “You mean the control tower. ”
    “You said the I-word.” Rhine pointed at her.
    That Rhine could not talk and work was one of the saving graces of the assembly line, but today he had done almost no work and a lot of talking. “Idiot, idiot, idiot,” Maura said. “Get back to work.”
    Rhine counted with his fingers. “That’s four I-words, total, Maura.” She did not reply but casually reached inside her purse, which was open on the assembly table. Her cell phone lay on top of the jumble.
    It took only a second to hit redial. The phone in the office rang again. Rhine set his carton down. “Can’t anyone hear the phone ringing?”
    “I don’t hear a thing,” Maura said. “Karly, you hear anything?” Karly was studying the carton in her hands with what looked like fascination, folding it so slowly you might think she had never seen a spider carton. When she got like this, she didn’t hear anybody.
    “Do you ever wonder,” Mick asked Maura, “what people like that hear in their heads? What it’s like to have thoughts and feelings that don’t make you . . . like us?”
    “People like what? Like Rhine or like Sinatra?”
    “The dorm attendant who’s got a daughter.”
    Maura quite literally didn’t know how to think about the question. She didn’t believe her thoughts were different from anyone else’s, except the nimrods and dimwits for whom thoughts were like baths and a new one every few days seemed sufficient.
    Mick Coury had been seventeen when schizophrenia unaccountably descended upon him, and he was only twenty-one now, but he didn’t remember much about the fabric of his thoughts before his illness. It seemed to him it was something like the difference between color television and black-and-white. The basic environment of thought was recognizably the same, and yet some element was drained from it. He tried to explain this while he was whipping together