Jasper loves his toys

My godson Jasper loves his toys. "Love" might not be a strong enough word. He obsesses over his toys. We all have one childhood keepsake that holds a special significance for us. My godson has a city, built painstakingly over a number of years. Cobbled together from Legos, tinker toys, and what looks like it could be a small Barbie dream house, it represents about 4 city blocks, and it would be impressive if it didn't absolutely terrify me.

My godson wound up living with me after the death of his parents. It was the kind of thing that makes people want to keep a gun in the house - burglary gone wrong, both parents shot. The strange thing was that after the break-in, the burglar shot himself. 3 bodies in there, and Jasper was the only one to come out alive.

The police said they’d never seen anything like it. I couldn’t explain it myself, and I had searched the bottom of just about every bottle of whiskey in my house trying. Truth be told, my drinking had become a bit of a problem. I couldn’t sleep knowing that my best friends were dead. Jasper was just a constant reminder of their absence.

His parents, Josh and Amanda, had been my best friends. I’d known Josh since college, and when we graduated and he and Amanda got married, we’d agreed to move into the same neighborhood so that our kids could grow up together. Unfortunately, I hadn’t found that special someone yet, and Jasper was almost 9 years old already.

Jasper passed into my custody after the incident. With no grandparents, aunts or uncles to speak of, responsibility for his care fell to me, after a home inspection, a great deal of paperwork, and some curious eyes at the county courthouse.

I remembered seeing the centerpiece of Jasper’s now-huge re-creation of our town, his version of his parents’ home, on the floor in their house when I was called to look through his parents’ belongings and see what needed keeping. I scooped it up in pieces without a second thought and brought it back to my house.

I kept on drinking.

Jasper kept on building. Expanding outward from his parents’ house, he built the two streets that took him to my house. From there, he built the 6-story office complex down the road, the strip mall a block over, and every single house in between. The little city grew and sprawled, taking up most of the floor in the living room. I ceded the space to him after a talk with the court-appointed psychologist. She said that building his city helped him keep control of his emotions. It was “a physical reference for the way he sees the world.” I used to think that it was remarkable, especially the detail. It never took anybody who came over to my house longer than a couple of seconds to realize that they were staring down at a miniaturized version of the street that they had just driven down. Now I wonder why I didn’t understand sooner.

Jasper didn’t speak much in his first few weeks at my house. I guess I understood - after what he had been through, I wasn’t sure that I’d be in much of a talking mood either. He just sat on the floor of the living room, tinkering with his latest creation - a convenience store, a warehouse, whatever he could call up from memory, always in its right place, always eerily accurate.

“Wanna play?” Jasper asked me one morning as I was trying to get my tie to the right length over my button-down.

I whipped my head around, no longer used to the sound of his voice but pleased that he seemed to be coming back out of his shell.

“I’m sorry buddy, I can’t play right now. I have to go to work. Maybe when I get home tonight?”

“Okay,” he said, looking crestfallen as only young children can. “I’ll find something to do.” He continued putting the finishing touches on a blue lego pool in a neighboring house’s back yard, stacking the pieces four-high in a square with an empty space in the middle. I went back to struggling with my windsor knot and my hangover.

When I came home from work the next day, I didn’t notice the ambulances that were blocking the next street over from mine, though now I know that they must have been there. The truth is, I failed to put anything together until it was too late. I was too busy thinking about having a drink and missing my best friends. As I watched the news that evening, and Jasper tinkered, a report came on about a young girl who had drowned in her family’s swimming pool. They didn’t give a name or where she lived, and I didn’t think anything of it. I turned off the TV so as not to give Jasper bad dreams, and told him to go to bed. He put down the plane that he was building out of tinker toys and silently walked up the stairs. I poured myself another drink and examined the toy city.

It was beautiful, really. Each building had its own kind of aesthetic. Some were built from just one kind of toy, others were a mixture. Some buildings were perfectly to scale, others were exaggerated to show off their most recognizable features. It was like a beautiful painting in three dimensions. And, as always, in the middle, was his parents’ house. Still unchanged from the day I brought it home.

“Wanna play?” Jasper asked as I pounded my second glass of cold water and two aspirin in the kitchen the next morning. He held up the plane he had been working on the night before.

“Sorry chief, no can do. This old man has to go to work,” I said, avoiding the reflection of the harsh morning light off of the shiny granite countertops. The usual dull roar of whiskey had found a nice home in my retinas. Not unusual, and not a nice feeling. “What do you say we play a little bit later?”

He didn’t say anything, just turned threw the plane into the ground off to the side of the toy city. The wings snapped off and caromed in different directions while the small plastic characters inside spilled all over, clicking along the tiles and sliding all over the room. He glared at me as I snapped at him, grabbing him by his arm.

“Hey! Don’t throw things in this house!” I intoned through gritted teeth, trying my hardest not to yell.

To my surprise, he looked me straight in the eyes without fear and deadpanned, “I just want to play.”

I stared him down for a second to see if he would flinch. Then I realized that he was almost 9, and I was an adult. A hung over adult who had just lost his temper. An adult who was about to be late for work.

I let his arm go and said “Please be more careful. I don’t want anybody to get hurt in here.” All he did was smile.

I pressed a palm to my forehead, willing my heart to stop hammering. He just kept staring at me, a little smirk on his face. “Is your backpack ready?” I asked. He just kept on smiling.

About an hour later, while I was pretending to work and sipping on a metallic-tasting can of seltzer, my desk phone rang, sounding like it was coming from inside my head rather than an arm’s reach away. I snatched up the handset, loosely tucked it between my cheek and shoulder, and asked, “Yes?”

A recorded voice answered.

This an automated alert from the Los Pesadas Elementary School District. There is currently a code red situation at Herman Elementary School. All parents and emergency contacts are requested to come collect their children from the premises. For any additional information, please dial…

I didn’t listen to the rest of the message. My worry for Jasper (and, admittedly, my lack of enthusiasm for being at work) jumped to the front of my brain and ushered me out the front door, coat under one arm and car keys in hand. I squealed the tires in the parking lot, dashed out to the freeway, and was clocking about 90 miles per hour when I saw the smoke.

Silky black clouds were rolling out of the block where Jasper’s school sat, held low to the ground by a southerly wind. I checked left and right at the freeway exit and shot through a red light, already sweating and preparing myself for the worst. As I approached, the sulfur and soot started to attack my sinuses and throat, and my eyes began to water. I saw a group of kids of various ages and sizes being corralled onto a small patch of grass about 200 yards from the school by a firefighter. I pulled up to the curb, hubcaps grinding along the concrete gutter, and hopped out, already screaming Jasper’s name.

“Jasper! Jasper!” I continued, not looking at faces but scanning for the feel of him, his thin frame and distinctive shoulders-forward hunch. It’s why I almost missed him in the crowd of hysterical children.

He was calm as could be, staring back across the street at the smoke, wearing the same smirk he had given me that morning. He was relaxed, shoulders held back and chin up. I grabbed him by the shoulders and dropped to one knee, checking him to see if he had any obvious wounds. “Jasper, Jasper, are you okay? Are you hurt?” I stammered out, trying to turn him around to check his back. He wouldn’t budge. He was rooted to the spot, looking back over my shoulder.

I chanced a look backwards to see what he was staring at and felt the bottom drop out of my stomach. There, in the corner of the school, was the wreckage of a small commuter plane buried in the roof of the building. Smoke shot along almost parallel to the ground, forced onward by the wind, and flames were still visible inside the fuselage and through the blown-out windows of the school itself. Bodies, some charred black, some still clothed and looking otherwise fine aside from their immobility, littered the site. Some were clearly children, others adults, though whether they were the plane’s passengers or teachers from the school I couldn’t tell.

Firefighters and paramedics were tending to the wounded and living. The screams and noise from the trucks melded together into a low hum and my vision swam. I swept Jasper up under my arm, stumbled back to where I had parked the car, and fairly tossed him into the back seat. Without even waiting for him to buckle his seatbelt, I peeled away from the curb and headed back towards our house. I kept checking the rearview mirror, looking at his face. He seemed almost placid, watching the houses pass his window as if nothing were wrong at all. I began to feel ill, and not from the smoke or the ravaged lining of my stomach.

I parked the car across both of the spaces in the driveway, leaned out the door, and retched onto the ground while still wearing my seatbelt. Wiping my hand with the back of my wrist, I looked over the seat to see Jasper sitting perfectly still again, my agony apparently not registering with him at all. He was staring out the window with no obvious intention of leaving the car. With some difficulty, I unclasped my belt and stepped out of the car, unable to avoid my pool of sick with my shoe in my dizziness. I opened the back door of the car, grabbed him by his arm, and half-leaned, half-marched him inside.

“Show me,” I said, as we stood before his little city, the pieces of the toy plane still scattered across the rug. “Show me what you do.”

He looked back up at me and, without saying a word, pointed to a female figurine in the blue lego pool he had been building earlier.

“Who is she?” I asked.

“She was mean. She said a burglar killed my parents,” he said softly, crossing his arms to hug himself.

“Jasper,” I replied, “A burglar did kill your parents.

He was silent for a moment, then he spoke, “That was just how.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“The burglar is how I did it,” he replied. “She said that it was his idea, that he did it himself. But he didn’t do it himself. I did it. She was mean, so I did it to her, too.”

“I don’t understand, Jasper,” I said, now fully leaning against the wall for support and beginning to think that, in fact, I did understand. No, not understand. Comprehend?

He walked over to his model city, stepping over smashed pieces of the toy plane, and settled down in a crouch in front of his parents’ house. Very carefully, he lifted up the roof, peered inside, then looked back to me. I straightened up, walked over, and looked inside.

On the floor of the house were 3 figurines, 2 of them classic toy dolls, one male and one female, and 1 male doll that had marker on his face resembling a mask.

“When did you do this?” I asked, knowing that I didn’t want to hear the answer.

“The day before they died,” he replied. “They kept fighting about me. They said they were going to take my toys.”

I bought a gun today. I know that it sounds crazy, but you have to understand - Jasper is dangerous. He has killed at least 10 people now, counting the carnage from the plane crash. Those are just the people that I know about. There could be more. I don’t know how it’s going to end tonight, but I know that it can’t go on like this.

I also know that I can’t look inside the model of my house. I’m afraid of what I will find.