Love and Hydrogen by Jim Shepard Page A

bring myself to keep talking to him, to tell him, No, I don’t have the whole set.
    Now I’m trying to remember: Did I ever have them all or not? Did they further separate me from my family, or allow me a place within it? Did I know then how much they affected what I could imagine? Do I know now? But that was how I learned to see, and that was what I saw.

GLUT YOUR SOUL ON MY ACCURSED UGLINESS
    Anson started signing his seventh grade worksheets The Fist because of his ugliness. Mrs. Ackley asked him what was up. She recognized his handwriting.
    â€œIs this a joke?” she asked from her desk. She graded the math worksheets while the class worked on social studies.
    â€œThe joke’s my face,” Anson answered.
    It got a laugh. Still, his classmates were wary.
    â€œWho’s ‘The Fist’?” she asked them. She was always complaining about never recognizing the newest trend. “A superhero?”
    The class looked at her.
    The kids who owned recess misunderstood. They thought she’d caught him bragging. One kid kicked him in the tailbone. “Hey, I’m ‘The Foot,’” the kid said.
    Anson walked around crying and holding his butt. The nicer kids seemed to think that what was going on was sad. A girl he liked looked mystified. Games went on around him.
    After recess Ackley announced that he was getting all zeros on his assignments. She said she was getting perfectly good assignments from someone named “The Fist,” but Anson had apparently stopped doing his work.
    The class looked to see how he was taking the news.
    â€œI suck,” Anson said. He meant it. There was a week’s detention, right there.
    On the way to the first detention, after school, he went to the nurse about his tailbone. She was sympathetic.
    She gave him a pillow for his chair. The pillow turned out to be a bad move, in terms of the other kids in detention.
    The next day Mrs. Ackley lost her patience. “Anson,” she said when she got to his worksheet.
    His butt was killing him. The hair on the side of his head over his ears looked like somebody’s armpit. His nose felt like the bill of a cap. “Feast your eyes,” he said, to whoever was looking. “Glut your soul on my accursed ugliness.”
    He’d seen Lon Chaney’s
The Phantom of the Opera
on video fourteen times.
    â€œBeware: the Strangler’s noose is quick,” he reminded Ackley. The class hooted.
    â€œWhat is your
dam
age?” Ackley asked. She seemed to really want to know.
    Part of his damage was that his dad was moving out. His dad was head over heels for one of the veterinarians at the animal hospital. The veterinarian’s name was Jeanne and she looked like a shorter Christina Ricci. He’d seen them making out at the movies. He’d lost his gloves and they’d had to go back and help him look. They never found them.
    His mom spent her time trying to figure out how to hook the DVD, the laser disc player, and the VCR into the back of the same monitor. The monitor had only two inputs. She sat at the kitchen table with the manuals spread out around her after dinner. “Nobody talk to me,” she said.
    His dad when he was home after dinner listened to gospel albums. He liked to fake a German accent and say things like, “
Listen
to zem. Zey are animals. But zey sing zo
beau
tifully . . .”
    They kept on him about his homework. The afternoon after the first detention he watched his man Lon on the old suitcase-sized VCR in the finished basement. That night he wandered around the house wanting to get out, nowhere to go. He toured the upstairs and ended up in the living room with his dad, in front of whatever movie was on. It was always something like a spoiled teenager having an affair with her plastic surgeon. Sometimes it wasn’t so clear because his dad liked to play with the mute.
    â€œI’m gonna throw this monitor right out the window,” his