The Boy He Couldn't Find

(Author note: This story references J.D. Salinger's unpublished short story "The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls" which was leaked in 2013 even though his estate did not want the story to see the light of day until at least 2060. The story is a prequel to "The Catcher in the Rye" and details the backstory of the character who would become Allie in the novel.)

The dead boy was easy.

That frightened him.

Jerry could place him anywhere: by the sea, in a summer room, near the terrible ordinary brightness of a family that had not yet learned what had happened to it. He could give the boy a fever, a laugh, a hand moving over a toy. He could make the loss clean enough to survive the page.

It was the living boy he could not find.

He had pages on the desk. More pages in a folder. Notes on yellow paper. Names crossed out and brought back again. A child dead too early. A brother damaged by knowing it. A family arranged around an absence the way chairs remain arranged after a party no one enjoyed.

Outside, New York moved through its appointed noises. Taxis. Pipes. Men delivering crates. A woman laughing too hard below his window, as if instructed by weather. The city had resumed itself after the war with the shameless competence of things not required to remember.

Jerry sat at his desk and reread the first sentence.

Then the second.

Then he turned the page and understood, as he had understood the night before, and the week before, that someone was missing.

Not the dead one.

The dead one was everywhere.

The missing one was the boy who would have to keep talking.

A letter from Harold Ober lay under the ashtray. Jerry had read it so often the paper had begun to look personally exhausted.

Dear Jerry,

Story has declined, with admiration. Collier’s finds the material affecting but perhaps difficult for its readership. The New Yorker remains interested in seeing more of the family, though they continue to express reservations regarding tone. I do think there is something here, and I urge you not to lose heart.

Yours,

Harold

Tone.

They always objected to tone when they did not want to admit they had been touched in the wrong place.

Jerry lit a cigarette and did not smoke it. He watched the smoke climb. It made a little Europe in the room, gray and administrative.

The trouble with editors was that they wanted pain to arrive well dressed. They wanted grief to remove its boots before entering. They wanted boys who spoke as boys had been authorized to speak by men who had forgotten everything useful about being boys.

He tried again.

The living boy stood somewhere near the edge of the story, hands in his pockets, unwilling to enter. Jerry could feel him there. Not see him. Not yet. A boy with a mouth full of judgment and damage. A boy old enough to be obscene and young enough to mean it. A boy who did not want consolation because consolation was usually just laziness dressed as kindness.

Jerry wrote:

He said—

Then stopped.

The boy said nothing.

From the street came the sound of a truck backing up, a blunt mechanical warning repeated into morning. For one moment it was not a truck. It was a signal. It was a convoy. It was a road in Europe with mud on both sides and a dead horse swollen near a ditch and a man asking for water in a language Jerry had learned too late to be useful in.

He stood quickly.

The room came back by increments. Desk. Window. Ashtray. Pages. The ridiculous American privilege of a clean shirt.

He went to the sink and ran water over his hands, though they were not dirty.

This had been happening more often. A sound would open, and the war would step through, not dramatically, not with music, but with the practical confidence of something that knew it had a right to the premises. A door closing. A child shouting. The smell of boiled cabbage from a lunch counter. Once, in the middle of a sentence about a boy at school, he had heard shelling so clearly he put his head down on the desk and waited for the room to decide whether to remain.

He had not told Harold. He had not told anyone that the trouble with the story began whenever the room became Europe.

The doctors had given it names. The Army had given it forms. Jerry distrusted both. Forms were what civilization used to pretend it had not made an animal of you and then objected to the noises.

He dried his hands.

On the desk, the pages waited with the patience of the condemned.

Another letter began forming in his head.

Dear Harold,

Please do not send the story out again. I have decided it is not for publication.

Not for publication.

A phrase with a lock on it.

He sat.

The dead boy could be protected by art. The living boy would not be so lucky. The living boy, if he ever found him, would run his mouth in public. He would make people uncomfortable. Worse, he would make them comfortable for the wrong reasons. They would admire the complaint and miss the wound. They would quote him. Jerry could almost see it: the boy turned into a posture, a permission slip for self-pity, a way for strangers to enjoy their own damage without having to answer for it.

No.

Better the drawer.

The drawer was honest. The drawer did not review.

But then the boy moved.

It happened so slightly Jerry almost missed it. Not on the page. Not in the room. Somewhere between the two, that untrustworthy country where writing either begins or becomes vanity.

A boy was standing in a field.

No. Not a field. That was too pastoral, too obedient.

Tall grass, maybe.

Children running.

A cliff.

An absurd job no one had asked him to perform, saving children from falling because all the adults had gone off to conferences about the proper management of children.

Jerry closed his eyes.

There.

For one second, the boy was almost visible.

Then Europe entered again.

Not the battlefield this time.

The camp.

He hated that the mind had rooms it could not keep locked. He hated the body’s little betrayals: the sweating, the jaw, the heart beginning its blunt argument against the ribs. He hated, most of all, how quickly language failed there. Language, which in New York strutted around in jackets, became thin near certain memories. It stood at the fence and looked down.

He saw a face behind wire.

No.

Several faces.

No.

Not faces.

The idea of faces after the face has been used up.

He opened his eyes.

The boy was gone.

On the page, he had written nothing except a long black line where the pen had dragged through He said— and ruined the rest of the sentence.

Jerry laughed once. It sounded false, which was not surprising. Most human noises did.

He took Ober’s letter and turned it over.

Dear Harold,

He stopped.

Harold Ober was a good agent, which meant he believed in persistence and postage. He believed stories were sent out, returned, improved, sent out again. He believed a rejection from Story did not mean what it appeared to mean, nor Collier’s, nor even The New Yorker with its tasteful little doubts. He believed there was a home for every good piece if one continued knocking on doors in the correct shoes.

Jerry admired this in him and found it unbearable.

There had been, briefly, interest elsewhere. Encouragement. A woman’s voice on the telephone saying phrases that sounded like a door opening. They liked the story. They saw something in it. They wanted to discuss.

He had hung up and felt not triumph, but exposure.

That was when he knew.

Acceptance was not rescue.

Acceptance was a new form of danger.

Publication began as a yes and ended as possession.

He wrote:

Dear Harold,

I am withdrawing the story from consideration. Please tell them my decision is final and not a reflection of their judgment, which has been generous. The story is not available elsewhere and should not be submitted again.

I know this will disappoint you. It disappoints me also, though not in the same direction.

Yours,

J.

He read it back and found it too polite.

He crumpled the page.

The second version was shorter.

Dear Harold,

Withdraw it. Do not send it out again.

J.

This had the advantage of cruelty, which often passed for clarity.

He placed it beside the envelope and did not seal it.

The room dimmed. Afternoon collected in the corners. On the street, boys were coming home from school, shouting at one another with magnificent stupidity. One of them called another one a lousy moron. The phrase rose cleanly through the window.

Jerry stood very still.

A lousy moron.

The living boy stirred.

Not enough.

The boy was there, somewhere below speech, pacing. He had survived a brother. He had survived schools. He had survived adult language, which was to say language used for evasion. He had survived being young in a world that kept insisting youth was a cheerful medical condition.

What he had not survived, not yet, was being written.

Jerry wanted him suddenly with such force he had to sit down.

“Come on,” he said.

The room did not answer.

“Come on, you little bastard.”

Nothing.

He tried the field again. The children. The cliff. The impossible vocation. He tried a museum where nothing changed. He tried a sister whose innocence would not be sentimental because she would be allowed to be intelligent. He tried a red hat and immediately disliked it, then liked it, then distrusted liking it. He tried a boy walking through New York after being expelled from another school, telling the truth badly because no one had taught him what else to do with it.

The voice approached.

It had a limp. It had smoke on it. It had nerve.

Then the telephone rang.

Jerry flinched so violently the pen rolled from the desk.

He let it ring.

Five times.

Six.

When it stopped, the silence that followed seemed theatrical and therefore false. He despised the room for arranging itself around him with such significance.

The voice had retreated.

He put his face in his hands.

There is, he thought, a merciless peace in not publishing.

The sentence arrived whole. He did not know whether he believed it. Belief was beside the point. Some sentences arrive with the pressure of weather.

Merciless peace.

Peace because the story stayed his. Peace because no one could misunderstand what they had not been given. Peace because the dead boy could remain unhandled by strangers in waiting rooms and on trains.

Merciless because silence did not preserve the living.

The living boy needed air, even if air meant ridicule, fashion, essays, classroom boredom, all the bright, stupid machinery of being read. The living boy needed to be mistaken for a hundred things in order to be one thing to one person who needed him.

Jerry understood this and hated understanding it.

He took the short letter to Ober, folded it, and placed it in the envelope.

Then he opened the drawer.

Inside were old drafts, envelopes, a fountain pen that leaked, a photograph he disliked but kept because dislike was still attachment. He placed the manuscript on top.

The pages looked harmless there. Almost domestic. A little stack of paper behaving itself.

He closed the drawer.

The click of the wood entering place was small and final and obscene.

For the rest of the evening, he did not work.

He walked.

He bought coffee and did not drink it. He watched couples pass under theater signs. He saw a boy in a cap standing outside a store window, staring at a display of skates with an expression of such complicated hunger that Jerry nearly stopped.

Instead he kept walking.

The city prepared itself for night. Lights came on one floor at a time. Women leaned from windows. Men in hats moved with the false urgency of men who would arrive nowhere improved. Somewhere a radio played too loudly. Somewhere a child was being told to finish supper. Somewhere, in a room Jerry would never enter, a lonely boy waited for someone to speak in the exact pitch of his injury.

At a mailbox on Lexington, Jerry stopped.

He took out the envelope addressed to Harold Ober.

For a moment, he imagined not mailing it. He imagined returning to the room, opening the drawer, uncapping the pen. He imagined finding the boy at last, not whole, never whole, but near enough. He imagined the first sentence arriving with the vulgar confidence of a taxi horn.

Then the war came up behind him without sound.

Not memory this time. Not image.

Just the old knowledge that anything living could be taken from a room before the room had finished being itself.

He mailed the letter.

The envelope dropped beyond reach.

There it was: peace.

It entered him like cold water.

When he returned to the apartment, the room was darker than he had left it. The desk waited. The ashtray waited. The drawer waited with its neat little mouth shut.

Jerry stood in the doorway for a long time before taking off his coat.

He did not turn on the lamp.

In the dark, he could almost hear the boy. Not speaking. Not yet. Just moving around inside the drawer with his hands in his pockets, refusing the grave, refusing the page, refusing to become useful.

Jerry sat at the desk.

He opened the drawer.

The manuscript was still there.

He touched the top page with two fingers, lightly, as if checking for fever.

The dead boy remained easy.

The living boy waited beside him, looking toward the place where a voice might have been.

Jerry picked up the pen.

Then he put it down.

The boy opened his mouth.

And for a moment, before silence came back and took the room, Jerry almost heard him.