johnny plebus
Years earlier, before he ever knew how to drive stick, Johnny Plebus liked touching sharp objects.
Years earlier, before he ever knew how to drive stick, Johnny Plebus liked touching sharp objects. He would sit with blades, transfixed, balancing them on his fingers, feeling out the fulcrum, occasionally dropping them into his lap.
Johnny wasn’t like the other kids: he seemed to know things inexplicably, things about you that you wouldn’t want your parents, or brothers, or friends to know. He was privy to the wildest desires and darkest concealments of men, and the children – his peers – could sense his intrusion.
‘And if you stare into the sun,’ Johnny would tell them, ‘You can see rainbows.’
The parents of the other children began to complain about Johnny. They called for his expulsion, blockading themselves from his damning intuition. But to the other children, Johnny offered truths at terrible prices; a seeing, a visibility that was at once terrifying and completely satisfying, revelation, exposure, all wrapped up in the piercing, intrusive gaze of the weird boy.
His messianic confidence inspired some and repulsed others. Slowly, Johnny built a following, lost disciples who hoped his incorruptible visions would help them understand the things about themselves that had been pushed deep down. But the band that opposed him worked with the animalistic drive of those who have much to lose, and their plot against Johnny reflected the severity of the tragedies that faced them.
They knew that to take him down, he who knew every spark of their wildest thoughts, an utmost spontaneity was required. So they dwelled in inertia, purposefully avoiding conspiracy as the supposed time drew near, striking only when Johnny couldn’t know it was coming, because neither did they.
Johnny Plebus was killed in the early hours of an overcast Thursday. Nobody saw it coming, including his attacker. His murder was in the paper for a few days, but beyond the initial shock only his widowed disciples grieved. The classroom felt paradoxically empty, voided, and at the same time returned to a purity and a completeness that the boy’s perceptions had stolen.
Now, Johnny Plebus lies in a sleep from which he will not wake. He looks peaceful. He can no longer balance blades on his fingers, and any attempt to do so topples the knife instantly. His mind, which had heard everything of its surroundings, without exception, now transmits only static. We all felt the interference go out, a lid whisked off its suffocating box. We think freely again.
We did not speak of this openly. There was an understanding, distributed among us without being passed from one to the other. We went back to our lives and our lives received us without comment, and if sometimes in the middle of an ordinary thing — eating, driving, standing in a queue — we felt the sudden, vertiginous sensation of being known, we told ourselves it was memory, and memory fades, and we were patient with ourselves about it.
The widowed disciples were less patient. They congregated for a while in the places Johnny had frequented — the corner of the playing field where he’d held court, the particular bench, the stairwell with the bad light — and you could see them from a distance, this loose and mournful assembly, talking with the purposeful intensity of people trying to reconstruct something. They compared notes. They pooled what he’d told them, what he’d seen, what he’d known without being told. They were trying to build him back from his outputs, like trying to rekindle fire from the shapes of its ash.
It didn’t work. Of course, it couldn’t. What Johnny had given each of them was specific, aimed, the particular truth of a particular person, and it didn’t formulise. What was revelatory to one was meaningless to another. They sat with each other’s secrets like men who had been handed maps of countries they’d never visited, and gradually the congregation thinned, and the bench went back to being just a bench.
There was a boy named Marcus who had been neither disciple nor conspirator. He had existed at the edge of both, drawn in by the pull of Johnny’s vision, repelled by the cost of it, and had finally settled into a watchful neutrality that he’d convinced himself was a kind of wisdom. After Johnny died Marcus found he could not sleep without the light on. He couldn’t have explained this if he were asked, and he didn’t try. He simply left the light on and told himself it was a habit he’d acquired and would presently lose.
He didn’t lose it.
I know Marcus well enough to say this: he was not a guilty man. He had done nothing. His hands were clean in every sense that the law would recognise and most that conscience did. But Johnny had looked at him once, really looked, in the way he looked at people, and Marcus had felt it — the full inventory of himself, filed somewhere he couldn’t access — and whatever Johnny had found in there, Marcus never learned, and now never would. He’d been left with the knowledge of his own contents, that they existed, without the contents themselves, a locked room in his own house.
Johnny’s mother had kept the blades. This was reported by someone who’d been to the house, a neighbour, not a gossip but a practical woman who’d gone to offer food and had found the mother at the kitchen table with them laid out in front of her, the various knives and letter-openers and penknives her son had collected, arranged without a visible system.
The neighbour had not known what to do with this information and had given it to someone else to carry, and it had passed around the town in this way, everyone handing it forward, nobody wanting to keep a hold of it for too long.
She was not a strange woman, the mother. She had been baffled by her son as most parents of extraordinary children are baffled —outpaced, constantly arriving somewhere he’d already left, just left. She had loved him in the straightforward way, which is perhaps the purest way, of loving something you didn’t understand. And now she sat with his blades and whatever she was doing with them she was doing privately, and the neighbour who’d seen it had felt, standing in the doorway of that kitchen, the same thing Marcus felt with the light on at night — the sense of something just beyond what she was permitted to know.
We think freely again. We said this to each other in the weeks after, and we meant it, and it was true, and yet.
There are thoughts I have now that I would not have had before Johnny, thoughts about what I want and what I’m afraid of and what I have done in rooms where I believed I was unobserved. I don’t know if Johnny gave me these thoughts or simply showed me that they were already there. I don’t know if the distinction matters. What I know is that the thoughts remain, having outlived their source, and I sit with them in the ordinary light of ordinary days and they are mine now, irrevocably, and there is no one left to tell me what they mean.