20th Century Ghosts (37 page)

By the time I entered my freshman year in high school and started chumming around with Eddie Prior, Morris had moved on to building fortresses out of cardboard boxes that my father brought home for him from the warehouse where he worked as a shipping agent. Almost from the start, it was different with his cardboard hideouts than it had been with the things he built out of dominoes or Dixie cups. While his other construction projects had clear beginnings and endings, he never really seemed to finish any one particular design with his cardboard boxes. One scheme flowed into another, a shelter becoming a castle becoming a series of catacombs. He painted exteriors, decorated interiors, laid carpet, cut windows, doors that would flap open and shut. Then one day, without any warning or explanation, Morris would disassemble large sections of what he had built, and begin reorganizing the whole structure along completely different architectural lines.

Also, though, his work with Dixie cups or LEGOS had always calmed him, while the things he built with cardboard boxes left him restless and dissatisfied. The ultimate cardboard hang-out was always just a few boxes away from being done, and until he got it right, the great looming
thing
he was building in the basement had a curious and unhappy power over him.

I remember coming into the house late on a Sunday afternoon, clomping across the kitchen in my snow boots to get something out of the fridge, glancing through the open basement door and down the steps ... and then sticking in place, breath catching in my throat. Morris sat turned sideways on the bottom step, his shoulders hitched up to his ears, his face a pasty, unnatural white, twisted in a grimace. He held one palm pressed hard to his forehead, as if he had been struck there. But the thing that alarmed me the most, the thing I noticed as I came slowly down the steps towards him, was that while it was almost too cold in the basement to be comfortable, Morris's cheeks were slicked with sweat, the front of his plain white T-shirt soaked through in a V-shaped stain. When I was three steps above him, just as I was about to call his name, his eyes popped open. An instant later that expression of cringing pain began to fade away, his face relaxing, going slack.

"What's happening?" I asked. "You all right?"

"Yes," he said without inflection. "Just—got lost for a minute."

"Lost track of time?"

He seemed to need a moment to process this. His eyes narrowed; the look in them sharpened. He stared dimly at his fortress, which was, at that time, a series of twenty boxes arranged in a large square. About half of the boxes were painted a fluorescent yellow, with circular porthole windows cut in their sides. The portholes had sheets of Saran Wrap taped into them. Morris had gone over them with a hair dryer, so the plastic was stretched tight and smooth. This part of the fort was a holdover from a yellow submarine Morris had attempted to build. A periscope made out of a cardboard poster tube stuck out of the top of one very large box. The rest of the boxes, though, were painted in bold reds and blacks, with a flowing scrim of golden Arabian-style writing running along their sides. The windows of these boxes were cut in bell shapes that instantly brought to mind the palaces of Mideastern despots, harem girls, Aladdin.

Morris frowned and slowly shook his head. "I went in and I couldn't find my way out. Nothing looked right."

I glanced at the fort, which had an entrance at every corner and windows cut into every other box. Whatever my brother's handicaps, I couldn't imagine him getting so confused inside his fortress that he couldn't figure out where he was.

"Why didn't you just crawl to a window and see where you were ?"

"There weren't any windows where I got lost. I heard someone talking and tried to get out following his voice but it was a long way off and I couldn't figure out where it was coming from. It wasn't you, was it? It didn't sound like your voice, Nolan."

"No!" I said. "What voice?" Glancing around as I said this, wondering if we were alone in the basement. "What did it say?"

"I couldn't always hear. Sometimes my name. Sometimes he said to keep going. And once he said there was a window ahead. He said I'd see sunflowers on the other side." Morris paused, then let out a weak sigh. "I might've seen it at the end of a tunnel—the window and the sunflowers—but I was scared to go too close, so I turned around and that's when my head started to hurt. And pretty soon I found one of the doors out."

I thought there was a good chance, then, that Morris had suffered a minor break with reality while crawling around inside his fort, a not impossible circumstance. Only a year before, he had taken to painting his hands red, because he said it helped him to
feel
sounds. When he was in a room with music playing he would shut his eyes, hold his crimson hands above his head like antennae, and wiggle his whole body in a sort of spastic belly dance.

I was also unnerved by the much more unlikely possibility that there really
was
someone in the basement, a chanting psychopath who was perhaps at this very moment hunched in one of the tight spaces of Morris's fort. Either way, I was creeped out. I took Morris's hand and told him to come upstairs with me, so he could tell our mother what had happened.

When this story was repeated to her, she looked stricken. She put a hand on Morris's forehead. "You're all clammy! Let's go upstairs, Morris. Let's get you some aspirin. I want you to lie down. We can talk about this after you've had a minute to rest."

I was all for searching the basement right away, to see if anyone was down there, but my mother shooed me aside, making a face whenever I spoke. The two of them disappeared upstairs, and I sat at the kitchen counter, eyeing the basement door, in a state of fidgety unease, for most of the next hour. That door was the cellar's only exit. If I had heard the sound of feet climbing the steps, I would have leapt up screaming. But no one came up, and when my father arrived home, we went down to search the basement together. No one was hiding behind the boiler or the oil tank. In fact, our cellar was tidy and well lit, with few good hiding spots. The only place an intruder might conceal himself was Morris's fort. I walked around it, kicking it and peeking in through the windows. My dad said I ought to climb in for a look around, and then laughed at the expression on my face. When he went upstairs I ran after him. I didn't want to be anywhere near the bottom of the basement stairs when he clicked the lights off.
 

One morning, I was throwing my books into my gym bag before leaving for school and two folded sheets of paper fell out of
Visions of American History
. I picked them up and stared at them, at first without recognition—two mimeographed sheets, typewritten questions, large blocks of white space where a person could fill in answers. When I realized what I was staring at, I almost cursed the ugliest curse I knew, with my mother only a few feet away from me ... an error which would've got my ear bent the wrong way, and which would've led to an interrogation I was better off avoiding. It was a take-home exam, handed out last Friday, due back that morning.

I had been spacing out in history over the course of the last week. There was a girl, something of a punk, who wore tattery denim skirts and lurid red fishnet stockings, and who sat beside me. She would flap her legs open and shut in boredom, and I remember when I leaned forward I could sometimes catch a flash of her surprisingly plain white panties from out of my peripheral vision. If we had been reminded in class about the take-home test, I hadn't heard.

My mother dropped me at school. I stalked the frozen asphalt out back, stomach cramping. American history. Second period. I had no time. I hadn't even read the two most recently assigned chapters. I knew I should sit down somewhere, and try to get a little bit of it done, skim the reading, scribble out a few half-assed answers. I couldn't sit down, couldn't bear to look at my take-home again. I felt overcome with a paralyzing helplessness, the dreadful, sickening sensation of no way out, my fate settled.

At the border between the asphalt lot and the frozen, tramped-down fields beyond, there was a row of thick wooden posts that had once supported a fence, long since cleared away. A boy named Cameron Hodges from my American history class sat on one of these posts, a couple of his friends around him. Cameron was a pale-haired boy, who wore large glasses in round frames, behind which loomed inquisitive and perpetually moist blue eyes. He was on the honors list and a member of the student council, but in spite of these significant handicaps, he was almost popular, liked without really trying to be liked. This was in part because he didn't make a big show out of how much he knew, wasn't the sort to always be sticking his hand in the air whenever he knew the answer to a particularly hard problem. He had something else, though, too—a quality of reasonableness, a mixture of calm and an almost princely sense of fair play, that had the effect of making him seem more mature and experienced than the rest of us.

I liked him—had even cast my vote for him in the student elections—but we didn't ever have much to do with each other. I couldn't see myself with a friend like him ... by which I mean, I couldn't imagine someone like him being interested in someone like me. I was a hard boy to know, uncommunicative, suspicious of other people's intentions, hostile almost by reflex. In those days, if someone happened to laugh as they walked by me, I always glared at them, just in case what was amusing them was me.

As I wandered close to him, I saw that he had his exam out. His friends were checking their answers against his: "introduction of the cotton gin to the South, right, that's what I said too." I was passing directly behind Cameron. I didn't think. I leaned past him and jerked his take-home out of his hands.

"Hey," Cameron said, reached to get it back.

"I need to copy," I said, my voice hoarse. I turned my body away, so he couldn't grab his exam back. I was flushed, breathing hard, appalled to be doing what I was doing but doing it anyway. "I'll give it back at history."

Cameron slid off the post. He came towards me, his palms turned up, his eyes shocked and beseeching, magnified unnaturally by the lenses of his glasses. "Nolan. Don't." It surprised me—I don't know why—to hear him say my name. I wasn't sure until then that he knew it. "If your answers are just like mine, Mr. Sarducchi will know you copied. We'll both get Fs." There was an audible tremor in his voice.

"Don't cry," I said. It came out harsher than I wanted it to—I think I was really worried he might cry—so it sounded like a taunt. Other kids laughed.

"Yeah," said Eddie Prior, who suddenly appeared between Cameron and me. He planted his hand in the center of Cameron's forehead and shoved. Cameron went down on his ass, hard, with a yelp. His glasses fell off and skidded away across a puddle of ice. "Don't be a faggot. No one's going to know. You'll get it back."

Then Eddie threw an arm over my shoulders and we were walking away together. He spoke out of the side of his mouth, as if we were two convicts in a movie talking in a prison yard about the big breakout.

"Lerner," he said, referring to me by my last name. He called everyone by their last names. "Lemmie have that after you're done with it. Due to unforeseen circumstances beyond my control, namely my mom's boyfriend is a loudmouthed cunt, I had to get out of the house last night, and I wound up playing foosball with my cousin till all hours. Upshot: I didn't get past answering the first two questions of this friggin thing."

Although Eddie Prior pulled down Cs and Ds in everything except shop, and found his way to detention almost weekly, he was as charismatic in his own way as Cameron Hodges was in his. He seemed impossible to rattle, a trait which powerfully impressed others. Furthermore, he was so relentlessly good-humored, so game for fun, no one could stay mad at him. If a teacher told him to get out of class for making one ignorant remark or another, Eddie would raise his shoulders in a slow, who-can-figure-anything-in-this-crazy-old-world shrug, carefully collect his books, and slink out—shooting one last sly look at the other students in a way that always set off a chain-reaction of titters. The next morning, the same teacher who had kicked him out of class would be tossing a football around with him in the faculty parking lot, while the two bullshitted about the Celtics.

It seems to me the quality that separates the popular from the unpopular—the one and only quality that Eddie Prior and Cameron Hodges had in common—is a strong sense of self. Eddie knew who he was. He accepted himself. His failings had ceased to trouble him. Every word he spoke was a thoughtless, pure expression of his true personality. Whereas I had no clear picture of myself, and was always looking to others, watching them intently, both hoping and fearing that I would catch some clear sign of who they saw when they looked at me.

So in the next moment, as Eddie and I moved away from Cameron, I experienced the kind of abrupt, unlikely psychological shift that is the adolescent's stock-in-trade. I had only just ripped Cameron's test from his hands, desperate to find a way out of the trap I had made for myself, and more than a little horrified at what I was willing to do to save myself. Theoretically I was still desperate and horrified—but it delighted me to find myself reeling along with Ed Prior's arm over my shoulders, as if we were lifelong friends coming out of the White Barrel Tavern at two in the morning. It gave me a delightful shock of surprise to hear him casually refer to his mother's boyfriend as a loudmouthed cunt; it seemed as smooth a witticism as anything that had ever fallen out of the mouth of Steve Martin. What I did next, I would've thought impossible just five minutes before. I handed him Cameron's exam.

"You already got two questions done? Take it. Doesn't sound like you need it for long. I'll look at it when you're finished," I said.

He grinned at me, and two deep comma-shaped dimples appeared in the baby fat of his cheeks. "How'd you get yourself into this fix, Lerner?"

"I forgot we had a take-home. I can't pay attention in that class. Don't you know Gwen Frasier?"