Slightly Far East

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2005 by Moyer, Kermit

At the second or third stop, the pneumatic doors hiss open and close, the bus starts forward with a slight lurch, and I look up from the paperback I'm reading (a novelization of the sciencefiction movie Forbidden Planet) to see this really tall kid making his gangly way down the aisle toward where I'm sitting. He's behind a group of other kids, but you notice him anyway, not only because he's so tall, but also because there's something not exactly mincing but sort of bird-like about him, a kind of Erector Set angularity in the way he moves. There are other empty seats available, but I'm somehow not surprised when he stops at mine and carefully folds himself into the seat beside me, pressing his knees together and bracing them against the quilted-metal back of the seat in front of us. When our eyes meet in passing, I nod and then quickly duck back into the book I'm reading.

"How do you like it?"

"What?"-and seeing him nod at my book-"This?" I turn it over to reveal a picture of a robot standing on some cratered moonscape holding a terrified girl in his lobster-like arms. "It's all right, I guess-I've only read a few chapters-"

'Yeah? I thought it was pretty neat myself-very Freudian-an invisible monster that's like the Id of this gargantuan IQ-"

"I don't think I've gotten that far yet," I say. "I just started it." I feel a little stunned. All I've been able to take in of what he's said is its authoritative tone and the way it threatens to overwhelm my own experience of the book. There's nothing more personal than reading, and I'm not sure I want anyone trespassing on my own private territory. But at the same time, the idea of having someone to talk to about what I'm reading is tremendously appealing. "But it's pretty good so far," I say, and then, encouragingly, "So you liked it?"

"Slightly!" he says, which is the first time I've heard the word used to mean a lot instead of a little. I pick it up like a password to the Age of Irony-"Slightly.1"-and it immediately becomes my favorite word of sarcastic emphasis. "I'm Gregory Sampson, by the way," he says, and he has to bend his elbow and thrust his arm back like a wing to offer me his hand.

I start to say, My name is Chester, but then, just in time, I say, "Chet. Chet Patterson," trying out the nickname I'm hoping to adopt in my new school, although my teachers will undoubtedly have me down as Chester in their roll books.

"That's Sampson with a 'p,'" Gregory says. "Samp-son. Not like Samson in the Bible, which has no 'p.' Gregory as in Gregory Peck-don't ask me why-my mother's bright idea-" His eyes keep darting around, rarely looking directly at me, and he says this last out of the corner of his mouth. "I noticed you were reading an actual book," he says, "and I couldn't help wondering whether, by any slight snowball's chance in hell, you played chess, too. But you probably don't, do you?"

'Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do," I say, glad both to please him and to contradict his expectations. "Or at least I know how the different pieces move."