Landscape at L’Estaque (1906), Georges Braque
They Can Touch, They Can Name
I play a game with my children. They sit in the grass with anything they like at their disposal—markers, scissors, glue, glitter. Into their elfin hands I place two sheets of paper, one for each boy. The game is this: transmogrify the paper into anything they want it to be. The paper could be a bunny or a bat or a hamburger or a sword. It could be soaring birds or a watermelon or a hat. There is just one thing the paper cannot be, and that is still paper. They must make it something else.
The first time we played, my older boy went for a tennis racket and the younger a boot. Their hands nibbled at the pages and implements, folding, snipping, adhering, adorning.
“What do we get when we do it?” my older asked, ever on the make.
“Get?”
“I’m not just giving out free tennis rackets.”
That seemed fair, so I said if the boys turned the paper into anything not paper, they could have my car. I tossed my keys in the grass. One of them could have my car, I said, and the other could have their mom’s.
Four hands stopped nibbling. Four big eyes eyed me.
“I mean it,” I said. And I did.
They worked feverishly then, until a tennis racket soggy with glue and boot psychotic with glitter lay in my hands. The boys started wrestling over the keys.
“Paper,” I said.
They halted. They blinked.
“This sort of looks like some stuff.” I tried a forehand, the racket flopping over my knuckles. I held the boot near my foot. “This is still paper, though.”
“It’s a racket. I made a tennis racket.”
“That’s a boot!” the younger screamed.
“That’s what it looks like,” I agreed.
I retrieved my keys.
§
The next time we played, they tried a bicycle and city bus, respectively. The third time, both of them tried zebras. I agreed their pages looked like zebras. But more than that, they looked like paper cut in the shape of zebras.
When I tried the game a fourth time, the boys forsook making altogether. They became unmakers. Destructionists. The younger tore his sheet into long strips, then tore the strips into shorter strips, then wadded the short strips into pellets and scattered them in the grass. He showed me his empty hands.
“Gone,” he said. “There’s no paper.”
His brother snipped madly at his sheet, gnawing his tongue, until nothing but some grainy white powder lay at his feet.
It was paper powder, though. And a crow landed in the grass and stabbed its beak at the pellets.
“What’s that bird eating?” I asked the younger.
He didn’t want to say. But then he said, “Paper.”
I dropped the car keys in my pocket and went inside.
§
Arriving home from work some days later, I saw the front door fling open and two children dash out carrying scraps of paper and a box of matches each. We don’t play with matches at our house, but that day the boys struck up fire in their elfin hands and touched off the paper, and released it whooshing and smoking onto the breeze, ashen scraps of it dervishing down the street.
“Give us your car!” they hooted. “The car! The car! We win!”
But the smoke from their demonstration hung over the sidewalk and a charry stench filled our noses. “You smell that?” I asked. And I pointed at the smoke. “You see that?”
“It’s blowing away,” the older said. “Look, it’s gone. It’s gone.”
“Blowing away to where? Where’d it go?”
“The sky,” he said.
“So you made it paper,” I said, “in the sky. It’s paper in the sky now.”
The younger kicked at a sprinkler head. “I hate this game.”
§
They’re going to get our cars anyway, when they’re older. So none of this is cruel in the end. Plus, they did almost catch me out one time. One early morning, predawn, the older screamed “Trees!” from the boys’ bedroom, “Trees!” and pounded heels to their door, pounded heels up the hall, flung open our door and smacked on the light.
“Um,” my drowsy wife said.
“Paper,” the boy said, “is made from trees. Trees! So it was never paper anyway.”
More heels pounded up the hall. “Trees!” the younger shrieked, barreling into the doorway.
“I hate this game,” my wife said.
The older pointed at me. “It’s already not paper. It’s trees. We want our cars.”
My eyes were just adjusting. A dream fog drifted away. “Paper,” I yawned, “is trees. It’s part trees. You’re right about that.”
“See?!”
“So, to make the paper something else, you have to make the trees something else, too. The part of the paper that’s trees.”
The boys stared at me.
“It’s still trees right now.”
They wandered off toward their bedroom. The younger kicked a baseboard.
“It’s just trees,” I said to nobody, “mushed up as paper.” I reached a toe out from bed and flicked off the light.
“Let’s just give them our cars,” my wife suggested.
§
And we will. Soon enough, we’ll give the boys our cars, our house, our all of it. We’ll have made our speeches, and a night will come when our sons, venturing up hallways, will find nobody to awaken with a light switch.
But by the time that happens, I’d like our kids to know some things. The feeling of grass against their skin is one thing I’d like them to know. Another is how to win a rigged game, not by winning the game but by knowing it’s rigged and enjoying it anyway, by relishing the plot. Also, they should know why you never play with matches—especially when it’s windy—even if sometimes you do.
Most of all, I’d like our boys to know that the world at their fingertips, the physical world, might be a thing they can touch, even a thing they can name, but it was never a thing anybody made, and won’t ever be a thing somebody remakes, or unmakes.
Plenty of static will assure them otherwise. Voices will insist that a world made of trees—and of air and stone and flesh—actually is a world made of decisions. And to make a more wonderful world, those voices will say, we need only make more wonderful decisions.
That is not what the world is. That’s what I want my sons to know.
This morning, they wore pajamas onto the patio and drank apple juice in the sun. Their hair smelled like sleep and sun. Their nostrils flared as they gulped. Do not, little children, let them tell you it’s all decisions. All ideas, all paradigms, merely truths by consent or else truths by compulsion. What despair, to believe there’s nothing for us to see besides filters through which we see it.
When we are animals on this earth, our paws tread mud. The juice from our boxes weighs cool in our bellies, and our words—even our brightest words—float away as steam.
BEN NICKOL is the author of several books, including, most recently, The Sea Lanterns: A Novel and Sun River: Stories. After teaching for several years in the MFA program at Wichita State University, Ben returned to the Inland Northwest where he works as an attorney and adjunct law professor.