Imaginary

what a wonderful thing
is the end of a string
and will somebody tell me
why people let go
o by the by / e.e. cummings

Sam was three years old when I visited him for the first time. I remember his face when he spotted me, a freckle-swept squint-grin in the afternoon sun that radiated boyish joy. That’s my Sam. He wanted to be a pirate that day. He needed me to teach him the ropes.

Some of the others had been cast into more difficult challenges at the start of their friendships with children. They’d have to distract their two year-olds from hourly tantrums over inter-toddler Crayola theft, for instance, or prod the creatively sterile kids to play pretend with tiaras and trolls, some of the most familiar elements of our imaginary plane. But with Sam the magic was natural. What I’d been told in training seemed to be true: we were made for each other.

Sam needed an imaginary friend after his older brother started soccer. I would be his sidekick. A co-pilot. His babysitter was a fascinating older specimen who maintained such an impressive amount of facial paint I questioned, at first, whether she was an imaginary clown companion and that I’d gone to the wrong kid’s house, and she had a habit of talking on the phone to other humans her age and leaving the backyard to Sam and me for hours at a time. The dry grass there became our daily battlefield, our ocean, our desert, and the wooden-eyed fences that confined our playspace seemed miles away. The babysitter would catch us in the middle of great conquests, ghosting the back door every invasion or so to make sure Sam hadn’t poked himself in the eye with his stick-sword. She didn’t realize that I had it covered. Also, that she was interrupting what we were both so sure was the greatest performance of all heroes, ever, of all time.

“Get the starboard lines!” Sam boomed with a full belly and a furrow of eyebrows.

“Aye aye,” I replied.

I didn’t know much about humans then. The way they functioned, what life meant beyond the backyard. My focus was on Sam. More than that. He was my purpose.

“Cricket,” he called me. Cricket and Sam.

Imaginary beings do not exist, but they especially do not exist until they are needed. When young humans begin to need someone they can trust with their secrets, someone to whom they can voice ideas they don’t even know they have, it is the imaginary world that provides an ear, whether elvish or covered in fur. While the child is distracted by his or her immediate environment, its parents or its pacifier, a friend is cultivated on the Imaginary Plane to suit each of the child’s personal developmental needs. One shadow of a boy, reprimanded for his silence, needs someone to practice talking to, so a companion is created to delight him with questions until he sings the answers. A girl needs a scaly friend to defeat her fear of monsters, a dragon with a friendly face is conjured. The Imaginary Relations Council holds itself responsible for the world’s most personable and creative human characters, having done centuries of research on the species’ pleasures and developmental progress in order to produce the most fitting matches. Theirs is an invisible pride.

When my class was first called to consciousness, the Imaginary Relations Council welcomed us to an Orientation- Orientation being an understatement, but there were complimentary cookies. We were blank slates of beings, eager to learn our purpose, and a diverse party: balloonish clowns and beaming angels, squawking birds and snarling beasts, robots and aliens and mermaids. Some to listen, some to cheer, some to shapeshift, some just to be. All of us pulsed immediately with the desire to know our human counterparts.

We were quieted, however, by an older being, a crowned and withered Council member who used to play prince for a child in Eastern Europe.

“Be patient,” he said.

We would need the time to learn about the spectrum of earthly development before we were sent to meet our humans, he said. That was the day I realized that the energy flowing within me — so fresh then — yearned for more than a connection with my human. I had been built to better him.

The majority of us would be assigned to children between the ages of two and eight years- that swept out most of the animals and army men- but then there were imaginary companions that had been cultivated for the pubescent and adult humans, too, some of their responsibilities giving a whole new meaning to ‘playtime in the bedroom’ that I didn’t quite understand.

“Tramps,” muttered the garden fairy next to me as she eyed a set of Brazilian supermodels destined for some pimply thirteen year-old boy. Their designers must have forgotten their tops, I thought.

We memorized the breakdown of the human day and the significance, for all of our roles, of leisure time. We learned, to much dismay, that humans could not fly or breathe underwater. We were told that they loved food almost as much as they loved television, and that much of their understanding of the imaginary world had been based on concepts that had been recycled for thousands of years. The satyr next to me fidgeted.

“You, however, will bring a new spirit to their experience of the imaginary,” the Council commanded us with knowing smiles. “Tailored to your human.”

An army of us were drawn aside to be told that we had been designed for the most resilient of humans: the very young.

“You will be their comfort, their inspiration, their energy,” Silver announced. “You will grow them up.”

There were three rules:

1. Your time with your human is dedicated to their needs, not yours. You foster their natural growth. You provide a source of comfort. They trust you to be whatever they need you to be as they learn that the human world fails them. You come when they call.

“And only when they call,” growled the Council.

2. Your time with your human companion is secret. Humans wil recognize your presence if your companion introduces you. You do not impose yourself onto any of your human assignment’s other relations.

“Man,” exhaled a teenage bassist with body piercings. “I could’ve scared so many parents.”

And the most important of all: 3. Your time with your human companion is provisional. You wil serve your human as long as they need you, and when you are no longer needed you will learn to detach yourself.

“Humans are emotional beings,” the Council explained, “but you are not.” He looked to the group of us, who had nodded his every word into a soupy kind of law so far. “You serve — not attach. Do you understand?”

I thought I did.

Sam’s karate-themed fifth birthday party had already passed and I’d hardly thought about my training since we’d met. I’d been too preoccupied watching Sam climb our mast of a tree in the backyard, sailing the open seas in search of hidden treasure.

“Lookit!” His eyes brightened one day, shovel in hand. I’d hid the marbles under an X and everything.

We picked up an additional crew member that summer, a shy little human named Sophie who didn’t yet have an imaginary friend. She came over to play every afternoon while their adults were occupied with some other activity, penning out tax forms or driving siblings to youth sports practices.

“Why is he called Cricket?” she smiled, the first day we played together. Her teeth were so little.

“Iono,” said Sam. “Let’s be ninjas.”

Within a month Sophie was visited by an imaginary friend of her own, a nervous black cat with twitching green eyes and fur as smooth as silk. Malcolm, she called him. He cared for Sophie deeply, and we became a team of four. We explored every nook of the neighborhood together, hiding and going and seeking with a hunger for adventure that only settled when the kids were whisked away for dinner. There were certain flights to space or raids of the castle, certain mud puddles and well-deserved spankings, certain good night stories and see you tomorrows, that made me think our affection would never exhaust.

“Three years,” Malcolm said to me one day.

“Three years?”

“That’s our expiration date,” he said, his eyes flickering with concern. “No kid keeps an imaginary friend past the age of eight.”

“Flash’s kid does.”

“And he’s turning out fine...”

We fostered a certain degree of competition, all the imaginary companions working the child circuit. Whose kid shone? Whose kid fell behind? But the pressure to care for them correctly went beyond bragging rights and personal pride; we had rules to follow. I did everything I could to make sure I wasn’t misraising Sam, but not everyone was so lucky. The Council had been monitoring my old friend Flash for months now, whose superhero lessons had proven to be a little too inspirational for his human match and won him more than a few time-outs. There was Iris’s girl, too, who got so lost in her imagination she wouldn’t often register her own mother talking to her. A couple good pats on the cheek and usually she was back, but not always. The Council had hearings lined up.

The competition really set in fiercely when the children started school that fall. Sam wore light-up sneakers to his first day of class and told me he’d share some of his peanut butter and honey sandwich with me at recess. I’d never happier, watching him saunter off to his Kindergarten classroom like a cowboy with a bad haircut. Both Sam and Sophie performed excellently on class projects, which was important, but what mattered most to the imaginary friends watching from the chain link fence outside was how the children performed among the other kids on the playground. Kids who had been raised, we suddenly realized, without imaginary companions.

“There’s no way he’ll call me today,” a busty he-man named Hammer sobbed as recess approached that first day.

“They’re too distracted,” agreed a princess desperately. “Look at all the kids.”

“Look at all the handballs,” grunted a major leaguer through his bubblegum.

Malcolm and I remained silent as a whistle blared and the little humans streamed from the classroom, a chorus of commotion thrilling the blacktop. His eyes darted from child to child, hunting devotedly for Sophie’s dark braids, and I listened for Sam’s cry. Two of our imaginary friends were called to their children, kids that occupied the corners with tears in their eyes, not knowing what to make of the chaos. By the time they were all shuffled back to their miniature desks and safety scissors, I tried to tell myself I didn’t mind that Sam hadn’t called. That I didn’t like peanut butter and honey anyway.

It was the first day in three years Sam hadn’t needed me, and it scared me how much I needed him.

“They told us it’d be like this,” a giant cried.

We sat with the other companions back on the Imaginary Plane a lot during these years, comparing the various degrees to which our humans were letting us go. They’d found snot-nosed friends in their classes to pretend with. They’d started sleepovers. Some had even been replaced by cooler imaginary friends, pre-pubescent pop stars and steroidal action figures straight from the television.

At the same time, our kids needed us now more than ever before. They were beginning to see the realities of their environments with an almost threatening clarity, especially their parents. Sam’s mother, in particular, had a short temper, the reason I would come to discover he’d needed an imaginary friend in the first place.

“Mom’s being mean,” Sam complained to me one afternoon. He’d punched his brother at the kitchen table and she’d sent him to his room.

“Is she?” I asked.

He was frustrated that I didn’t agree. The next time he was punished he didn’t seek my company.

Malcolm caught me walking in circles on the Imaginary Plane, waiting for Sam to call.

“He’ll ask you to visit soon,” he told me. I wasn’t convinced. I’d misjudged him right when his own judgment had started to mature.

There were other imaginary companions who waited too, but no one waited as long as I did for their kid to call. Meanwhile, I snuck down to watch a seven year-old Sam cowering in the corner of an angry home, the cruel laughter of sitcoms backdropping kitchen sobs and screaming matches. When his parents fought, Sam ran. He ran to the park, or to Sophie’s. But he wouldn’t run to me.

An astronaut with thick eyeglasses introduced himself to me one day.

“Blue,” he introduced himself.

I asked him whose kid he was and he said Brittany, Sam’s old babysitter, who had just gotten her driver’s license this week. She used to call him in secretly for the occasional shoulder to cry on when her girl friends excluded her, he said, but that hadn’t happened in months.

“It’s amazing. They think they can do it all on their own,” he glanced down at the helmet in his gloved hands with a sad smile. “… and they really can.”

The other imaginary friends clung to the moments they had with their children that year:

Feb. 18: Maya blames Iris for the broken lamp in the living room. (Her parents send her to the psychiatrist.)

Apr. 4: Sophie gets braces and invites Malcolm to play. They pretend they are robots for two minutes and forty-three seconds before she goes to find the dog.

Jul. 23: Lucas gives a fifh grader a black eye. He tels the principal that Flash made him do it.

Oct. 2: Sam’s hides in his room and thinks about me. He doesn’t call.

The Council had strictly prohibited my attachment to him, but it wasn’t a simple matter of inter-species affection. We had created them, these packages of personality, opinion, creativity, and to deny them our everyday devotion was to deny our own purpose. To remind us that we didn’t exist.

Naturally, my kid couldn’t help but help me.

Dec. 13: Sam calls.

The beckon had charged me with a surprising rush of adoration. Almost eight years old and on his first beach trip with a friend, I’d been expecting to watch him trap himself under a pile of seaweed more than I’d anticipated being invited to play. But it all happened so suddenly.

“Let’s go to the cave,” his friend directed from the shoreline.

“We can be pirates!” Sam cheered. In a mental marathon, he pulled me out from the depths of his creativity. “Me and Cricket always play there.”

His friend’s eyes slimmed then. So bothered.

“My brother, I mean. My brother always takes me there.”

I don’t know if Sam willed me back to the Imaginary Plane or if I carried myself away. But I was flying.

Sam never apologized. None of the children did. But they didn’t need to — we didn’t exist.

The Imaginary Plane began to flood with the rejected. Some coped better than others, glad to be done marrying the same little girl for the hundredth time or letting the growth-spurting sixth grader win the boxing match again. Some really struggled. The Council took them away somewhere.

I yearned for Sam in silent torment, watching his first book report on Treasure Island and his first real sail with family friends. I watched his first home run, his first lost tooth, his first Valentine delivery. But I also watched him dissolve every time he went home, and I dissolved right with him. I tried to visit him uncalled, though Sam’s maturing mentality blocked me over and over again. I didn’t know what I feared more: Sam’s situation, or the fact that I could not change it. The less access I was given, the harder I tried. He hid in fear and I floated, purposeless, wondering how much time I had left to be there for him if he needed me. We were both shadows complementing each other on different planes of nonexistence.

“You feel his pain more than he does,” Malcolm warned softly, cat eyes catching me in my chaos. “Distance yourself.”

I was steps away from a hearing, I knew. The Council wouldn’t match my sympathy. Their years of experience trumped the void of a second grader locked in his bedroom, barricading the brokenness of his family with uninspired independence. But I needed Sam to survive. I feared what happened when our humans stopped calling us for good.

More, though, I feared for Sam. I watched him become less and less dependent on the imaginary, spotting so clearly the gaps I could’ve occupied for him.

Sam’s mother moved him and his brother to a new home, a smaller apartment with bottle caps in the ceiling and a man with dark eyes. I hated him.

Sophie came to visit, once.

“Do you remember Malcolm?” Sam had asked. I surged to his side.

“Yeah,” she laughed. “Malcolm and Cricket.”

Sam stared at the linoleum floor, long hair sweeping his forehead. “That was stupid,” he whispered.

Sam left childhood. He gained muscle, he put stuff in his hair, he got his first job at the docks. Sophie gave him a sense of where he came from, and he was occasionally joyful.

They’d soon both forget about Malcolm and me completely. Sam fought for himself alone, and Sophie got distracted by the wonderful things in reality. Malcolm spent so many nights circling that lawn in front of her apartment before he faded into blackness, his green eyes flickering with satisfaction for the final time. The others faded, too, Iris and Flash, but I kept floating, a distant whisp of something happy in the back of Sam’s stretching mind. For years I occupied a chilled gray space, watching Sam mature only through shadows of activity. I asked the Council to retire me but they told me my job was not yet finished. So I waited, watching.

Sam still had that squint. I saw it in his laughter with new friends, his smiles with the woman he came to love. His time with Sophie, too.

And then, years later, I saw it in a new face, on a clear day in a warm backyard with a great grass lawn just like we’d had so many years ago. Sam’s son was three years old, a freckled child grinning at his father in boyish glory, and though I knew when I saw him that he’d create an army of his own imaginary companions, he needed to learn how to be a pirate today. His dad had forgotten the ropes.

“But I used to know a pirate,” Sam took his son’s hand. “Cricket!” he called.