Free Sweet Jesus by Christine Pountney Page A

tubes, when exactly are you planning to leave us? He pulled a small pad and pen out of his breast pocket and got ready to write it down.
    Before I grow up.
    Not if you decide what you want to be when you grow up, then you’ll have to grow up first. Do you know what you want to be when you grow up?
    I want to be an annie
-theezeegist
, Sam said. So I can put my doctors to sleep.
    Zeus had to swallow. How do you spell that?
    Sam shrugged and Zeus drew a picture of a doctor with a mask asleep on the floor under a squiggle of
zzz
’s beside a hospital bed in which a child sat upright, holding a squirting syringe. He gave the drawing to Sam and Sam studied it.
    Zeus crossed his ankles. Sam, Zeus said, do you believe in moments of consciousness?
    Moments of
cushy –
what’s it called?
    Zeus rescued him. They’re moments in life when you’re really alive, that nobody can take away from you and that never die.
    Like when my sister got into a fight with Anne Jansen because she said I was faking being sick so I wouldn’t have to go to school? Sam asked, panting a little.
    Yeah, Zeus said, like that. He waited until Sam’s breathing was restful again. He was so easily exhausted, even talking was an exertion that could wear him out.
    They’re like the pieces of a puzzle, Zeus said. You know, like if you put them all together, they’d show you a picture of who you are, and what’s important to you.
    Like my sister.
    Because she defended you, Zeus said, and Sam whispered, That’s right.
    Yep, that’s called a moment of
cushiness
, Zeus said and reached down and hauled his toolbox onto his lap. He clattered around until he’d extracted two spaghetti balloons and a small hand pump. He returned the toolbox to the floor and pumped up the first balloon until it shot past the end of the bed. He started to pinch and twist the balloon into a sword. The balloon squeaked like sneakers on a gym floor.
    I remember when I was very young, Zeus said, swimming in a big outdoor pool. There was a boy there, and the other kids were teasing him. They were pretending to play catch with him, but always throwing the ball too high, or right at his head. It was just a beach ball, but I’m sure it hurt a bit when he got hit in the face. It must have been embarrassing, but he wasn’t letting it get to him. He just kept playing, you know? He really wanted to be included, even though they were making fun of him. God, it made me so sad, and my sadness was like this physical sensation. It was like a crushing in my chest. I remember sinking to the bottom of the pool and watching the legs of all the other swimmers. I remember how peaceful it was down there, being able to watch without being seen. Because it had made me feel strange, you know? Why was I so sad, when all the other kids found it so funny?
    Zeus stabbed the air with his balloon sword and said, Ah-ha!
    He gave the sword to Sam, then inflated the other balloon and looped it around Sam’s wrist to gauge the size he would need to make the handle for a shield. When he slipped it off, Sam let his hand rest on Zeus’s leg. It was such a sweet feeling. The emotional terrain here was so perilous, he thought, but if he could force a gentle nonchalance, for the sake of thechildren, then it made him feel heroic. Because the children in palliative care were on the brink of an incomprehensible kind of vanishing, and Zeus knew a thing or two about vanishing.
    His real parents had been so young when they’d had him – young and crazy and way too into drugs. The small adobe house of his childhood had been full of laughter and screaming matches, but always outside the sun was bright and the sky that vivid New Mexican blue and the clouds obliterating in their whiteness. And often there was a car rally, or a festival with a bonfire crackling into the stars, and sometimes he would have to find his own way home because his parents had forgotten about him. Once, he slept on a hillside and woke frozen to the bone