Gram won’t let Alex sleep at her house. She says it’s because he smokes. Even if he smokes outside, he still stinks up the house. His dad lives there too, but ‘s Gram’s house and she calls the shots.
Alex remembers that there was a time he stayed in Gram’s house for almost a year. His dreams were loud in that house. Maybe because the house was so quiet. Except when he did something that pissed Gram off. Like the time he shaved his head and left hair all over the bathroom. He really believed he’d cleaned it up. Gram was so mad that after she cleaned it up, she dumped the whole trashcan full over his laptop. All those little bits of hair stuck between the keys.
And the time he lost his key to the front door. He came in through the basement window. Gram heard him thumping onto the floor. She almost called the police. Alex remembers how he looked up from the cold cement floor and saw Gram framed in the lit doorway. She was pointing her .22 right at him.
Alex smiles. He’s pretzeled up on a short sofa in a guy’s apartment. Alex can’t remember the guy’s name. They met earlier at the coffee bar. After a bit of friendly talk, Alex asked him if he knew a place where Alex could crash. So here he is. The apartment is pretty sleazy, but Alex has seen worse. And it’s warm, considering that outside it’s below freezing.
Alex thinks maybe he should try to stop smoking. Maybe he’ll tell Gram that he’s gonna quit and she’ll let him stay at the house. It’s nice there. The bathroom is always clean and Gram makes big pots of lentil soup.
The last time Alex asked to stay there, Gram said that the smoking was just one problem. She said she didn’t feel comfortable or even safe with Alex in the house. That he was unpredictable and he had a history of being violent.
Alex shifts his long legs and hangs them over the back of the sofa. Gram was talking about the time in the car, after he was released from the hospital. Dad was driving him down the Thruway to the City. But Alex didn’t want to go to his mom’s in the City. He wanted to get back on the street in town with his friends. He wanted to get back to the way things were before they got him picked up. So he grabbed the steering wheel.
Gram said Alex almost killed himself and his father. Alex doesn’t remember doing any of that. He was in the car and then he was back on the ward.
You belong to the universe in which you live, you are one with the Creative Genius back of this vast array of ceaseless motion, this original flow of life. You are as much a part of it as the sun, the earth and the air. There is something in you telling you this—like a voice echoing from some mountain top of inward vision, like a light whose origin no man has seen, like an impulse from an invisible source.
Your soul belongs to the universe. Your mind is an outlet through which the Creative Intelligence of the universe seeks fulfillment.
Tangled Magic 