The Strange Fascinations of Noah Hypnotik Read online

  ALSO BY DAVID ARNOLD

  Mosquitoland

  Kids of Appetite

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2018

  Copyright © 2018 by David Arnold

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780425288887Z

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Arnold, David, 1981– author.

  Title: The strange fascinations of Noah Hypnotik / David Arnold.

  Description: New York : Viking Books for Young Readers, [2018] | Summary: “This is Noah Oakman, sixteen, Bowie believer, concise historian, disillusioned swimmer, son, brother, friend. Then Noah gets hypnotized. Now Noah sees changes—inexplicable scars, odd behaviors, rewritten histories—in all those around him. All except his Strange Fascinations” —Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017038030 | ISBN 9780425288863 (hardcover)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Best friends—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Brothers and sisters—Fiction. | Twins—Fiction. | Hypnotism—Fiction. | Family life—Illinois—Fiction. | Illinois—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.A7349 Str 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038030

  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  ALSO BY DAVID ARNOLD

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  THIS IS → PART ONE1 → that sadness feels heavier underwater

  2 → the delicate triangle

  3 → some thoughts on Iverton and home and walking while walking home through Iverton

  4 → a concise history of me, part nineteen

  5 → I am thinking about wolves again

  6 → the further away, the stronger the urge

  7 → I go to some dumb party

  8 → the sunlit narrative of Philip Parish

  9 → they are talking about Tweedy and college and things of that nature

  10 → exit the robot

  11 → Circuit, a conversation

  12 → unfortunate fates

  13 → a concise history of me, part twenty-two

  14 → my new sweater

  LOOK, IT’S → PART TWO15 → the fog

  16 → that night in a dream I am suspended from the ceiling

  17 → passage of time (I)

  18 → the colors and quirks of Penny Oakman

  19 → OMG

  20 → one school is like the other

  21 → joyous virgins

  22 → dinge beginnen für Norbert weirden zu bekommen

  23 → the pros and cons of Penny Oakman

  24 → the arpanet, the golden age, and an exclusive look inside the first celebrity canine wedding!

  25 → monsters

  26 → a concise history of me, part twenty-six

  27 → application

  NOW FOR → PART THREE28 → I think writing is less about the words and more about the silence between them

  29 → ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

  30 → between my sixth viewing and falling asleep

  31 → between the moon and LA

  32 → Sara, a regrettably brief conversation

  33 → Circuit, another conversation

  34 → the vase

  35 → that sadness feels heavier suspended in midair

  36 → harmjoy

  37 → action item number two

  38 → passage of time (II)

  39 → a concise history of me, part twenty-nine

  40 → senioritis

  41 → s’BOOk-tastic!

  42 → the tender arms of madness

  PRESENTING → PART FOUR43 → Mark Wahlberg has a very refined palate

  44 → to the Wormhole, through the Wormhole

  45 → two weeks a tide

  46 → a concise history of me, part thirty-two

  47 → just another yard

  48 → the life and times of Mr. Elam

  49 → productivity begets productivity

  YOU GUESSED IT → PART FIVE50 → omen

  51 → fifty shades of beige

  52 → hypnotik returns

  53 → over one billion served

  54 → masks

  55 → meanwhile, on my fun gay ballsack

  56 → revolution in their bones

  57 → Philip Parish, a conversation

  58 → and the bird sang

  59 → hey there, slugger

  60 → fabrics and flapjacks

  61 → the curious case of Len Kowalski

  62 → floods

  63 → a concise history of me, part thirty-seven

  64 → give thought, receive advice, take action

  HERE IS → PART SIX65 → this can only get better

  66 → moby dick sucks

  67 → alone or lonely

  68 → #blessed

  69 → attractions, coming and going

  70 → (no subject)

  71 → there are two kinds of plans

  72 → what I think when I look down on the clouds

  73 → planes, trains, and glockenspiels

  74 → Manhattan State University is not in Manhattan, nor is Manhattan a state

  75 → girl, faded

  76 → Ava Phoenix, a conversation

  77 → the advancing world

  YES, IT IS TIME FOR → PART SEVEN78 → but first, a drink

  79 → and the ice

  80 → facing the world as Penelope Oakman

  81 → the herculean curtain call

  82 → a concise history of me, part forty

  83 → the cursor blinks

  84 → Piedmont

  85 → the oracle

  86 → just pretend you live here

  87 → the closest word

  88 → mirrored lives

  89 → passage of time (III)

  90 → relive

  91 → the contingency of caring

  92 → peculiar way

  93 → the maze

  94 → affectionate roots

  AND FINALLY → PART EIGHT95 → my immortal tree

  96 → our best lives

  97 → animals

  98 → the sun will rise

  99 → and how perf
ect

  100 → a beautiful piece of land

  epilogue → and lo! the world emerges a strange and fascinating place

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To Mom and Dad, for helping me through the maze

  THIS IS → PART ONE

  “It’s not enough to put myself into my art—I have to die to it. And that’s how I know it’s something.”

  —Mila Henry,

  excerpt from the Portland Press Herald interview, 1959

  1 → that sadness feels heavier underwater

  I’ll hold my breath and tell you what I mean: I first discovered the Fading Girl two months and two days ago, soon after summer began dripping its smugly sunny smile all over the place. I was with Alan, per usual. We had fallen down the YouTube rabbit hole, which was a thing we did from time to time. Generally speaking, I hate YouTube, mostly because Alan is all, I just have to show you this one thing, yo, but inevitably one thing becomes seventeen things, and before I know it, I’m watching a sea otter operate a vending machine, thinking, Where the fuck did I go wrong? And look: I am not immune to the allure of the sea otter, but at a certain point a guy has to wonder about all the life decisions he’s made that have landed him on a couch, watching a glorified weasel press H9 for a bag of SunChips.

  Quiet, and a little sad, but in a real way, drifting through the Rosa-Haas pool—I fucking love it here.

  I would live here.

  For the sake of precision: the Fading Girl video is a rapid time-lapse compilation of photographs clocking in at just over twelve minutes. It’s entitled One Face, Forty Years: An Examination of the Aging Process, and underneath it a caption reads: “Daily self-portraits from 1977 to 2015. I got tired.” (I love that last part, as if the Fading Girl felt the need to explain why she hadn’t quite made it the full forty years.) In the beginning, she’s probably in her early twenties, with blonde hair, long and shimmery, and bright eyes like a sunrise through a waterfall. At about the halfway mark the room changes, which I can only assume means she moved, but in the background, her possessions remain the same: a framed watercolor of mountains, a porcelain Chewbacca figurine, and elephants everywhere. Statues, posters, T-shirts—the Fading Girl had an elephant obsession, safe to say. She’s always indoors, always alone, and—other than the move, and a variety of haircuts—she looks the same in every photo: no smile, staring straight into the camera, every day for forty years.

  Always the same, until: changes.

  Okay, I have to breathe now.

  * * *

  I love this moment: breaking the surface, inhale, wet hair in the hot sun.

  Alan is all, “Dude.”

  The moment would be better alone, to be honest.

  “That was like a record,” says Val. “You okay?”

  A few more deep breaths, a quick smile, and . . .

  I love this moment even more: dipping beneath the surface. Something about being underwater allows me to feel at a higher capacity—the silence and weightlessness, I think.

  It’s my favorite thing about swimming.

  * * *

  The earlier shots are scanned-in Polaroids, but as the time lapse progresses and the resolution of the photos increases, the brightness of the Fading Girl begins to diminish: little by little, the hair thins; little by little, the eyes dim; little by little, the face withers, the skin droops, the bright young waterfall becomes a darkened millpond, one more victim in the septic tank of aging. And it doesn’t make me sad so much as leave an impression of sadness, like watching a stone sink but never hit bottom.

  Every day for forty years.

  I’ve watched the video hundreds of times now: at night before bed, in the morning before school, in the library during lunch, on my phone during class, in my head during the in-betweens, I hum the Fading Girl like a song over and over again, and every time it ends I swear I’ll never watch it again. But like the saddest human boomerang, I always come back.

  Twelve minutes of staring at your screen and watching a person die. It’s not violent. It’s not immoral or shameful; nothing is done to her that isn’t done to all of us, in turn. It’s called An Examination of the Aging Process, but I call bullshit. That girl isn’t aging; she’s fading. And I can’t look away.

  There it is, the inevitable shoulder tap.

  Time to join the land of the breathing.

  2 → the delicate triangle

  “The fuck, Noah? You trying to drown yourself?” Val is on a float in the middle of the pool, wearing these giant sunglasses, sipping some kind of homemade daiquiri.

  “For real,” says Alan, popping a handful of caramel corn into his mouth. He’s been working on this giant tin can (the kind with forests and snow and frolicking deer painted on the side) most of the afternoon. “Ours is a delicate triangle, yo. You drowning fucks up the whole system.”

  Val and Alan Rosa-Haas are twins. The Rosa-Haas house is a quick walk from my own, plus it has this amazing in-ground pool and Mr. and Mrs. Rosa-Haas are rarely around, so you tell me.

  Alan was the first kid I met when my family moved to Iverton. We were twelve and he came over to my house and we read in my room, and he told me he thought he was gay, and I was like, “Uh, okay,” and he was all, “Um, uh,” and it was totally squirrely. And then he said not to tell anyone, and I said I wouldn’t. And he said, “If you do tell, I’ll whiz on your hamster.” Back then I had this arthritic hamster called Goliath, and I didn’t want some kid whizzing on him, so I assured Alan that my lips were pretty much sealed. Later I found out I was the first person Alan had come out to, and, at twelve, I had no idea how important a step this was. All I knew was my hamster was in dangerous proximity to a person threatening whiz. I asked Alan why he didn’t want me to say anything, and he told me I wouldn’t understand. A couple years later he came out publicly—and kids called him terrible names, and kids jumped a mile in the air when he bumped into them in the halls, and kids moved tables when he sat with them at lunch, not all kids, but so many kids—and I found out just how right he’d been. “I hadn’t planned to tell you,” he’d said in my room that day when we were twelve. And he told me how he felt like a shaken-up can of Coke, and how I just happened to be around when the lid blew off. I told him I was fine with that. So long as he didn’t whiz on Goliath.

  We made a pact.

  And then we whizzed out the window together.

  Truth is, from the moment I met Alan, I knew I loved him. He loves me a lot too. When we were younger, we talked about what it would be like if I were gay, to which he always said, “As if I’d even be into you, Oakman,” to which I usually flexed a budding bicep, raised a single eyebrow, and nodded in slo-mo, as if to say, How could anyone not be into this?, and we laughed and imagined it was so. We imagined how we’d get married and buy a cabin in the mountains somewhere and just spend our days weaving baskets and eating out of iron skillets and talking about deep things.

  But that was a long time ago.

  “Who gave us this, anyway?” asks Alan, perched out on the edge of the diving board, swinging his pruned feet over the water.

  “Who gave us what?” asks Val.

  “This piece of shit.” He holds the now-empty tin above his head.

  “Okay, you basically just made love to that caramel corn,” says Val. “Now you’re done with it, you’re calling it names?”

  “That’s not his point,” I say, treading water by the edge of the pool.

  “Exactly. No one buys these things for themselves,” says Alan. “It’s a blow-off gift, an afterthought. Should come with a card that says, You mean next to nothing to me.”

  Val is all, “Well, I think it’s a nice gesture, but I’ll be sure to express your displeasure with the Lovelocks next time I see them.”

  “Wait, like, the Lovelocks? Up on Piedmont?”

  “They were over for dinner the other night. You were at pr
actice.”

  Alan tosses the empty tin into the swimming pool, all, “A pox on the Lovelocks!” and dives in with a yell.

  Val rolls her eyes, lays her head back on the float. Unlike Alan—who is pale year-round, taking after his father in what he calls the “perpetual Haas hue”—Val is always the first of us to tan. When we were young, she was just my best friend’s annoying sister, a constant unwanted presence like a gnat buzzing our faces. Cut to the summer before high school, and one day she opens the door and I’m all, Uh, hey, Val, uh, um, like, uh. It’s a deafening finality, getting smacked in the face with that first notion that perhaps sex isn’t gross after all.

  Like a two-by-four, really.

  I don’t know if it happened slowly, right under my nose, or if it was an overnight thing, but I suddenly found Val’s presence far less annoying. That year I asked her to homecoming, and she said yes, and it was a little weird because we’d known each other so long, but it also felt like one of those things that needed trying. So we tried it. And here’s what that looked like: me holding Val’s hand in the hallway for all of two minutes before Alan sees us; thinking it’s a joke, Alan busts a gut laughing; realizing it’s not, he swings into complete and utter berserkery.

  That was the last time we held hands, and the first time Alan referred to us as “the delicate triangle.”

  Still, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t occasionally think about her like that. Val has this charm about her, smart without being arrogant, funny without taking over the room. She makes little comments under her breath as if annotating the situation, and you get the feeling she’d do this whether anyone was within earshot or not, which makes you feel lucky just being in her orbit.

  Also, she has perfect breasts.

  Alan backstrokes the length of the pool. He’s getting faster, which I almost say out loud, but I know where that will lead: The team misses you, Noah. We need you, No. How’s the back, No? You okay, No?