All This Life

Everybody calls him Balloon Boy. Started calling him that once he fell from the skies. Once he went thump-splat ouch. From that moment on, his real name Rodney was retired, and Balloon Boy was born. Or that’s how he thinks of it, there being two of him: In his head, all the words compose themselves like a hip-hop MC delighting audiences with a nimble tongue, wild rhyming schemes. Maybe a TV minister auctioning off salvation at mach speed. But when Rodney’s perfectly composed thoughts try to cross that threshold and make it out of his mouth, things malfunction. Reduced to speaking in monosyllables.

Reduced to being Balloon Boy.

Today is his eighteenth birthday, and he wakes up feeling ripe for adventure and for a few minutes it feels possible. Somebody like him can be summoned to greatness. Someone like Balloon Boy can do something extraordinary! Just because of his accident, just because he’s lost that connection between the life transpiring in his head — one crackling with consonants, one unctuous with chewy vowels — it doesn’t have to be a death sentence. It doesn’t have to be poor Balloon Boy being his condition. That’s not all he is. Because if in fact he’s poised, ready to be summoned to greatness, that won’t happen if he’s feeling sorry for himself, if he’s mired in a poor-me soup, swimming in it. No, this is a time to feel optimistic, to charge into his adulthood. There will always be a harsh disconnect between what people see — Balloon Boy, the name he detests — and the inner life of Rodney, the diatribes and monologues lobbed eloquently around his skull. It’s like a crowded theater in his head and he stands alone on stage, reciting Shakespeare, getting all the accents and rhythms right. He might not be able to articulate this, might falter trying to share with someone how he’s giving a topnotch soliloquy in the amphitheatre of his consciousness, so don’t go thinking that because his actual out-loud talking is garbled there’s only mud thrumming in his mind.

He’s eighteen now and can join the military, can go anywhere without needing any consent except his own. He is his destiny and nothing as silly as a broken mouth will stop him.

He stokes these calls to arms, these fantasies with his eyes closed, lounging in bed, imagining distant lands filled with beautiful women who actually like listening to him speak, who think it’s sexy how he takes his time delivering every sound. They don’t get frustrated with him. They don’t badger him.

All these possibilities disappear when a booming knock smacks through his plywood door, these declarations and illusions that had thrived in his solitude now scatter like bugs, once Uncle Felix shakes the meager door with his anger and enthusiasm, saying, “Hey, it’s fish o’clock.”

“No,” Balloon Boy says, and six seconds later adds, “thanks.”

With open eyes and a gruff uncle making too much noise, the reality of Traurig hits him like the heat outside.

Rodney sighs deeply, wipes his eyes. Each day always starts with the same action: looking at the picture on his bedside table, the shot of him and his mom on horseback, taken when he was ten years old, before the thump-splat ouch, before she ran away. The shot is taken head-on: Rodney sitting in front of his mother, all of their faces lined up in a row — horse, boy, mother.

The day she left for good, she tucked this picture under his pillow, and he’s come to think of it as a love letter, a last letter, an explanation, her way of saying she’s sorry and she still cares for him, even in her absence. Yes, sometimes letters don’t have words; sometimes the image tells you everything.

Yet some do have words: There is one other picture that Rodney has from his mom, a postcard. He keeps it tucked between his box spring and mattress. He had received it a few weeks after she left. It’s of the Golden Gate Bridge on a sunny day. On it, his mom has written, “Some day, I will tell you everything.” He likes reading the message, but what he adores examining is the return address, chiseled into his memory. He has no idea if she’s still there but at least it’s a way to start.

More knocking from Felix, the plywood barely standing up to his knuckles.

“You can’t skip, not even on your birthday. I let you sleep in,” says his uncle, “but fish wait for no man.”

“Five,” says Rodney, “more, min, utes.”

“No more minutes. Fish beckon us. They challenge us. There’s a fight to be had, and we will not lose.”

“Oh,” Rodney says, “kay.”