The Goldfinch

x.

MY SCHOOL STARTED THE second week of August. From a distance, the fenced complex of long, low, sand-colored buildings, co

The other section of Honors English was reading Great Expectations. Mine was reading Walden; and I hid myself in the coolness and silence of the book, a refuge from the sheet-metal glare of the desert. During the morning break (where we were rounded up and made to go outside, in a chain-fenced yard near the vending machines), I stood in the shadiest corner I could find with my mass-market paperback and, with a red pencil, went through and underlined a lot of particularly bracing sentences: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” “A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.” What would Thoreau have made of Las Vegas: its lights and rackets, its trash and daydreams, its projections and hollow façades?

At my school, the sense of transience was unsettling. There were a lot of army brats, a lot of foreigners—many of them the children of executives who had come to Las Vegas for big managerial and construction jobs. Some of them had lived in nine or ten different states in as many years, and many of them had lived abroad: in Sydney, Caracas, Beijing, Dubai, Taipei. There were also a good many shy, half-invisible boys and girls whose parents had fled rural hardship for jobs as hotel busboys and chambermaids. In this new ecosystem money, or even good looks, did not seem to determine popularity; what mattered most, as I came to realize, was who’d lived in Vegas the longest, which was why the knock-down Mexican beauties and itinerant construction heirs sat alone at lunch while the bland, middling children of local realtors and car dealers were the cheerleaders and class presidents, the unchallenged elite of the school.

The days were clear and beautiful; and, as September rolled around, the hateful glare gave way to a certain luminosity, a dusty, golden quality. Sometimes I ate lunch at the Spanish Table, to practice my Spanish; sometimes I ate lunch at the German Table even though I didn’t speak German because several of the German II kids—children of Deutsche Bank and Lufthansa executives—had grown up in New York. Of my classes, English was the only one I looked forward to, yet I was disturbed by how many of my classmates disliked Thoreau, railed against him even, as if he (who claimed never to have learned anything of value from an old person) was an enemy and not a friend. His scorn of commerce—invigorating to me—nettled a lot of the more vocal kids in Honors English. “Yeah, right,” shouted an obnoxious boy whose hair was gelled and combed stiff like a Dragon Ball Z character—“some kind of world it would be if everybody just dropped out and moped around in the woods—”

“Me, me, me,” whined a voice in the back.

“It’s antisocial,” a loudmouth girl interjected eagerly over the laughter that followed this—shifting in her seat, turning back to the teacher (a limp, long-boned woman named Mrs. Spear, who always wore brown sandals and earthtone colors, and looked as if she was suffering from major depression). “Thoreau is always just sitting around on his can telling us how good he has it—”

“—Because,” said the Dragon Ball Z boy—his voice rising gleefully, “if everybody dropped out, like he’s saying to do? What kind of community would we have, if it was just people like him? We wouldn’t have hospitals and stuff. We wouldn’t have roads.”

“Twat,” mumbled a welcome voice—just loud enough for everybody around to hear.

I turned to see who had said this: the burnout-looking boy across the aisle, slouched and drumming his desk with his fingers. When he saw me looking at him, he raised a surprisingly lively eyebrow, as if to say: can you believe these fucking idiots?

“Did someone have something to say back there?” said Mrs. Spear.

“Like Thoreau gave a toss about roads,” said the burnout boy. His accent took me by surprise: foreign, I couldn’t place it.

“Thoreau was the first environmentalist,” said Mrs. Spear.

“He was also the first vegetarian,” said a girl in back.

“Figures,” said someone else. “Mr. Crunchy-chewy.”

“You’re all totally missing my point,” the Dragon Ball Z boy said excitedly. “Somebody has to build roads and not just sit in the woods looking at ants and mosquitoes all day. It’s called civilization.”

My neighbor let out a sharp, contemptuous bark of a laugh. He was pale and thin, not very clean, with lank dark hair falling in his eyes and the unwholesome wa

“Well, to address some of these questions? I’d like for everybody to turn back to page fifteen,” Mrs. Spear said. “Where Thoreau is talking about his experiment in living.”

“Experiment how?” said Dragon Ball Z. “Why is living in the woods like he does any different from a caveman?”

The dark-haired boy scowled and sank deeper in his seat. He reminded me of the homeless-looking kids who stood around passing cigarettes back and forth on St. Mark’s Place, comparing scars, begging for change—same torn-up clothes and scrawny white arms; same black leather bracelets tangled at the wrists. Their multi-layered complexity was a sign I couldn’t read, though the general import was clear enough: different tribe, forget about it, I’m way too cool for you, don’t even try to talk to me. Such was my mistaken first impression of the only friend I made when I was in Vegas, and—as it turned out—one of the great friends of my life.

His name was Boris. Somehow we found ourselves standing together in the crowd that was waiting for the bus after school that day.

“Hah. Harry Potter,” he said, as he looked me over.

“Fuck you,” I said listlessly. It was not the first time, in Vegas, I’d heard the Harry Potter comment. My New York clothes—khakis, white oxford shirts, the tortoiseshell glasses which I unfortunately needed to see—made me look like a freak at a school where most people dressed in tank tops and flip flops.

“Where’s your broomstick?”

“Left it at Hogwarts,” I said. “What about you? Where’s your board?”

“Eh?” he said, leaning in to me and cupping his hand behind his ear with an old-ma

“Your shirt,” I said, with a curt nod. “Not much boarding in the desert.”

“Nyah,” said Boris, pushing the stringy dark hair out of his eyes. “I don’t know how to snowboard. I just hate the sun.”

We ended up together on the bus, in the seat closest to the door—clearly an unpopular place to sit, judging from the urgent way other kids muscled and pushed to the rear, but I hadn’t grown up riding a school bus and apparently neither had he, as he too seemed to think it only natural to fling himself down in the first empty seat up front. For a while we didn’t say much, but it was a long ride and eventually we got talking. It turned out that he lived in Canyon Shadows too—but farther out, the end that was getting reclaimed by the desert, where a lot of the houses weren’t finished and sand stood in the streets.