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the pall of silence that surrounded the story for almost a year afterward had not been the result of an organized conspiracy, but a tacit and unspoken agreement that it was no outsider’s business. As “Dotty” Bernal, waitress at the Longview Diner, explained, “It wouldn’t be fair to force all that attention on Barry and Sue. I mean, it was their boy. Well, it was their boy’s bike, but it was their boy. You understand.” It was, indeed, their boy, the same soul inhabiting a different body. Sue Kleinman assured me that the bicycle behaved every bit as much like Jake as it was possible for a ten-speed to do. “It—he—followed around all his old friends and avoided the kids he didn’t get along with when he was—well, before. Took the same route to and from school every day, woke up at the same time. We tried experiments. We’d put on a TV show Jake liked and it’d sit there and watch. No eyes, but you could tell where it was looking from where the wheel was pointing. You know? So we’d change the channel and it’d honk its horn until we changed it back. So it was Jake.” To listen to Sue Kleinman attempt to describe life in the household with the new Jake constitutes an exercise in discomfort. She tries very hard to make it sound like they were able to get along for a time with relative normalcy. “Well, of course he didn’t eat, but he’d sit in the usual place at the dinner table. Well, I mean we had to move the chair out of the way, but he’d be right there at the right place where he belonged. I always set out a plate for him, so he’d feel welcomed. ‘Course the dog always ate it after dinner.” She was able to produce photograph after photograph of the bicycle posed with the rest of the family or frolicking in the yard. I watched hours of home video footage, in which it is painfully clear that an elaborate charade is being played, a game of pretending that everything is normal. His kid sister, Chrissy, kisses him on the handlebars; his father attempts to invent makeshift sports in which he can participate. But the dog will not even be in the same room as the new Jake. In one video, the father and Chrissy attempt to coax the dog out of the kitchen to join them and Jake in the living room. The dog growls and holds his ground. “Guess he’s just being a pain,” the father says to the camera, but not one photo or video clip shows the dog interacting with the new-bodied son. From the voluminous records, one would think that the Kleinmans
were one of those families that compulsively records everything, but in fact they have very little footage of life prior to what Sue Kleinman calls “the accident,” and about as many photos as would normally be expected. Recording was, I think, their attempt to form a narrative of how they wanted things to be. It was a way of telling themselves a story of how they loved and accepted their son for whoever he was. And of course, it was a fiction. When Barry Kleinman says to his son in one video about how “we gotta find you a girl,” the viewer simply cringes. The saddest part of all is how the bicycle appears to be playing along. “It was Barry who ruined everything,” Sue told me, but of course things had been falling apart long before. Jake’s teacher had finally asked them to stop sending Jake; his presence was too severe a disturbance. “That bitch. I told her straight out, the boy has a right to an education. And you know what she had the balls to tell me? ‘What, so he can get a job?’” While Sue was busy shopping around for a good home-schooling program, she admits that she noticed Jake’s world retracting. “He’d go out less, and stop seeing his friends. I think people were uncomfortable, and he could sense that. Always a sensitive boy. Finally just kept around the house all the time, moping. I knew we had to figure a solution, and finally one day it hit me. I said to Barry, ‘If he can honk that horn, he can communicate in Morse code!’ Barry said he thought it was a great idea, but there was something funny in his eyes. I should’ve known better than to trust him, but, Jesus, Barry was supposed to be his father.” She was wiping tears from her eyes as she showed me out the door. The last thing she said to me was, “Remember, when you write that article, it’s a ‘he’ and not an ‘it.’” This was important to her; she mentioned several times in our interview having to correct people on that point. I don’t think she realizes how often she herself uses ‘it’ in referring to him. She is still telling herself she was a good mother. Barry Kleinman no longer tells himself stories. He has taken up residence in a no-tell motel at the edge of town, where he waits for the divorce to finalize. His room smells of beer, and he was drunk when we spoke. “She tell you that old line about how to call him ‘he?’” he asked 7
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Page 4 and 5: Spring 2010 Awards The Berrier Poet
Page 6 and 7: A Cautionary Tale Eric Pencek Jake
Page 10 and 11: me. “Well, sure, he was a person,
Page 12 and 13: 10 Jenn Dice
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Page 16 and 17: The main feature reads “Gaga At T
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Page 22 and 23: Sailing, 1911 Edward Hopper (1882-1
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Page 36 and 37: And so on Patrick Morris the couche
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Page 44 and 45: with the girl. Maybe I’m too cons
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