Chapter 16: Gordon's Asthma Attack, and What He Says During It

The call came at eleven-seventeen by the clock on Gordon's grandmother's mantel, which ran four minutes fast and had done so for as long as Gordon could remember, meaning it was actually eleven-thirteen, meaning he had been sitting on the floor of his bedroom for approximately three hours and forty minutes since Mara had sent him home with the sixth tape and a look that said she wasn't ready to hear it with anyone else in the room.

He hadn't argued. He'd put the tape in his jacket pocket and walked the mile and a half home in the dark, and when his grandmother called from her bedroom to ask if that was him, he said yes ma'am, and when she asked if he'd eaten, he said yes ma'am again, and the second one was a lie but a tactical one, because if he admitted he hadn't eaten she would get up and he would have to sit at the kitchen table and be a twelve-year-old boy and right now he needed to sit on his bedroom floor and be something else.

His grandmother's portable tape player was smaller than Mara's father's Marantz. It was a red General Electric model that she used for church sermon recordings, and it had a speaker the size of a silver dollar, and Gordon set it in the center of the floor and sat cross-legged in front of it the way he had once sat in front of the television when he was six and space shuttle coverage came on and he couldn't get close enough to the information.