20th Century Ghosts (40 page)

I didn't want to have anything to do with Eddie after that, but he couldn't be avoided. He sat next to me in classes and passed me notes. I had to pass notes back to him so he wouldn't think I was brushing him off. He showed up at my house after school, without warning, and we sat in front of the TV together. He brought his checkerboard and would set it up while we watched
Hogan's Heroes
. I see now—and maybe I saw then—that he was consciously sticking close to me, watching over me. He knew he couldn't allow me to put a distance between us, that if we weren't partners anymore, I might do anything, even confess. And he knew too that I didn't have the spine for ending a friendship, that I couldn't not open the door to him when he rang the bell. That it was in me to just go along with the situation, no matter how uncomfortable, rather than try and change things and risk an upsetting confrontation.

Then, one afternoon, about three weeks after the accident out on Route 111, I discovered Morris in my room, standing at my dresser. The top drawer was open. In one hand he had a box of X-acto knife blades; there was a whole pile of junk like that in there, twine, staples, a roll of duct tape, and sometimes if Morris needed something for his never-ending fort, he would raid my supplies. In his other hand was the Polaroid of Mindy Ackers's crotch. He held it almost to his nose, stared at it with round, uncomprehending eyes.

"Don't go through my stuff," I said.

"Isn't it sad you can't see her face?" he said.

I snapped the picture out of his hand and tossed it in the dresser. "Go through my stuff again and I'll kill you."

"You sound like Eddie," Morris said, and he turned his head and stared at me. I hadn't seen a lot of him the last few days. He had been in the basement even more than usual. His lean, delicate-boned face was thinner than I remembered, and I was uniquely conscious in that moment of how slight and fragile, how childlike his build was. He was almost twelve, but could've easily passed for eight. "Are you and him still friends?"

I was ragged from being worried all the time, spoke without thinking. "I don't know."

"Why don't you tell him to go? Why don't you make him go away?" He stood almost too close to me, staring up into my face with his unblinking saucer-plate eyes.

"I can't," I said, and turned away, because I couldn't bear to meet his worried, mystified gaze. I felt stretched to the limit of what I could take, my nerves worn raw. "I wish I could. But no one can make him go away." I leaned against the dresser, rested my forehead against the edge of it for a moment. In a rough whisper that I hardly heard myself, I said, "He can't let me get away."

"Because of what happened?"

I shot him a look then. He was hovering at my elbow, his hands curled against his chest, his fingertips fluttering nervously. So he understood ... maybe not all of it, but some. Enough. He knew we had done something terrible. He knew the strain of it was pulling me apart.

"You forget about what happened," I said, my voice stronger now, edged almost with threat. "You forget about what you heard. If anyone finds out—Morris, you can't tell anyone. Not ever."

"I want to help."

"I can't be helped," I said and the truth of this statement, said just in this way, hit me hard. In a lame, unhappy tone, I finally added, "Go away. Please."

Morris frowned slightly, and bowed his head, seemed briefly hurt. Then he said, "I'm almost finished with the new fort. I see it all now. How it will be." Then he fixed his arresting, wide-eyed stare on me once again. "I'm building it for you, Nolan. Because I want you to feel better."

I let out a soft breath that was almost a laugh. For a moment we had almost been talking like any pair of brothers who loved and worried about each other, talking like near-equals; for a few seconds I had forgotten Morris's delusions and fantasies. Had forgotten that reality, for him, was a thing he only glimpsed now and then through the drifting vapors of his waking daydreams. To Morris, the only sensible response to unhappiness was to build a skyscraper out of egg cartons.

"Thanks, Morris," I said. "You're a good kid. You just need to stay out of my room."

He nodded, but he was still frowning to himself when he slipped around me and went out into the hall. I watched him walk away from me down the stairs, his scarecrow's shadow lunging and swaying across the wall, growing larger with every step he took towards the light below and some future that would be built one box at a time.
 

Morris was in the basement until dinner—Mother had to yell for him three times before he came upstairs—and when he sat at the table his hands had a white, plaster-like powder on them. He returned to the basement as soon as our dinner plates were parked in the soapy water filling the sink. He stayed down there until it was almost nine in the evening, and only quit when my mother hollered that it was time for bed.

I went by the open door to the cellar once, not long before I went to bed myself, and paused there. I had caught a whiff of something that at first I couldn't identify—it was like glue, or fresh paint, or plaster, or some combination of the three.

My father came into the mudroom, stamping his feet. There had been a little dusting of snow, and he had been outside, sweeping it off the steps.

"What's that?" I asked, wrinkling my nose.

He came to the top of the basement stairs, and sniffed.

"Oh," my father said. "Morris mentioned he was going to do some work with papier-mache. There's no telling what that kid will play with to get his kicks, is there?"
 

My mother volunteered at an old folks' home every Thursday, where she read letters to people with bad eyes and played piano in the rec room, banging on the keys so the half-deaf could hear her, and on those afternoons, I was left in sole charge of the house and my little brother. When the next Thursday rolled around, she wasn't out of the house more than ten minutes when Eddie banged his fist on the side door.

"Hey, partner," Eddie said. "Guess what? Mindy Ackers just fed me my ass in five straight games. I have to give her back that picture. You have it, don't you? I hope you been taking good care of it for me."

"You're welcome to the nasty fucking thing," I said, a little relieved that he was obviously only stopping by for a minute. It was rare to be able to get rid of him so quickly. He kicked off his boots and followed me into the kitchen. "Let me go get it. It's in my room."

"Probably on your night-table, you sick fuck," Eddie said, and laughed.

"Are you talking about Eddie's photograph?" Morris asked, his voice floating up from the bottom of the basement stairs. "I've got it. I was looking at it. It's down here."

I was probably quite a bit more surprised by this statement than Eddie was. I had made it clear to Morris that I wanted him to leave it alone, and it was unlike him to disregard a direct order.

"Morris, I told you to stay out of my stuff," I yelled.

Eddie stood at the top of the steps, leering down into the basement.

"What are you doin with it, you little masturbator?" he called down to Morris.

Morris didn't reply and Eddie tromped down the staircase, with me right behind him.

Eddie stopped three steps from the bottom and put his fists on his hips, stared out across the expanse of the basement.

"Whoa," he said. "Cool."

The cellar was filled, from end to end, with a great labyrinth of cardboard boxes. Morris had repainted them,
all
of them. The boxes closest to the foot of the stairs were the creamy white of whole milk, but as the network of tunnels spread out into the rest of the room, the boxes darkened to a shade of pale blue, then to violet, then to cobalt. The boxes at the furthest edge of the room were entirely black, limning a horizon of artificial night.

I saw crate-size boxes with passageways leading from every side. I saw windows, cut in the shapes of stars and stylized suns. At first I thought these windows had sheets of weirdly shining orange plastic taped into them. But then I saw how they pulsed and flickered softly, and realized that they were actually sheets of clear plastic, lit from within by some unsteady source of orange light—Morris's lava lamp, no doubt. But most of the boxes didn't have windows at all, especially as you got out away from the bottom of the staircase and moved towards the far walls of the basement. It would be dark in there.

In the northwestern corner of the basement, rising above all the other boxes, was an enormous crescent moon, made out of papier-mache and painted a waxy, faintly luminescent white. The moon had thin pinched lips and a single sad, drooping eye that seemed to regard us with an expression of unfocused disappointment. I was so unprepared for the sight of it, so stunned—it was truly immense—that it took me a minute to realize I was looking at the giant box that had once been at the center of Morris's octopus. Back then, it had been encased in a mesh of chicken-wire, shaped into two points like lopsided horns. I remembered thinking that Morris's massive, misshapen chicken-wire sculpture was irrefutable proof that my brother's already soft brains were deteriorating. Now I saw that it had always been a moon; anyone with eyes could've seen it for what it was ... just not me. I think this was always one of my critical failings. If something didn't make sense to me right away, I could never manage to look past what confused me to see a larger design or pattern, either in a structure or in the shape of my own life.

At the very foot of the stairs was an entrance to Morris's cardboard catacombs. It was a tall box, about four feet high, stood on its side, with two flaps pulled open like a pair of double doors. A black sheet of muslin had been stapled up inside, blocking my view of the tunnel leading out of the box and into the maze. I heard distant, echoing music from somewhere, a low, reverberating, trance-inducing melody. A deep baritone sang,
"'The ants go marching one-by-one, hurrah! Hurrah!"
It took me a moment to realize that the music was coming from somewhere within the system of tunnels.

I was so astonished I couldn't stay angry with Morris for swiping the picture of Mindy Ackers. I was so astonished I couldn't even speak. It was Eddie who spoke first.
"I don't believe that moon," he said, to no one in particular. He sounded like I felt—a little winded by surprise. "Morris, you're a fucking genius."

Morris stood to the right, his face bland, his gaze directed out across the vast sprawl. "I stuck your picture up inside my new fort. I hung it in the gallery. I didn't know you'd want it back. You can go get it if you want."

Eddie flicked a sideways look at Morris, and his grin broadened. "You hid it in there and you want me to find it. Boy, you are a weird shit, you know that, Morrie?" He bounded down the last three steps, almost did a Gene Kelly dance down them. "Where's the gallery? Way out there, inside that moon?"

"No," Morris said. "Don't head that way."

"Yeah," Eddie said, and laughed. "
Right.
What other pictures do you have hanging up in there? Bunch of centerfolds? You got your own little private room in there for spankin it?"

"I don't want to say anything more. I don't want to ruin the surprise. You should just go in and see."

Eddie shot me a look. I didn't know what to say, but I was surprised to feel a tremulous kind of anticipation, with a white thread of unease stitched through it. I both wanted and dreaded to see him disappear into Morris's confused, brilliant fortress. Eddie shook his head—
Do you believe this shit?
—and got down on all fours. He started to crawl into the entrance, then glanced back at me once again. I was surprised to see a flush of almost childlike eagerness on his face. It was a look that unsettled me for some reason. I myself felt no eagerness whatsoever to squirm around in the dark, cramped interior of Morris's immense maze.

"You ought to come," Eddie said. "We ought to check this out together."

I nodded, feeling a little weak—there were no words in the language of our friendship for saying
no
—and started down the last few basement stairs. Eddie pushed aside the flap of black muslin, and the music echoed out from within a large circular tunnel, a cardboard pipe almost three feet in diameter.
"The ants go marching three-by-three, hurrah! Hurrah!"
I came down off the last step, started to duck down to climb in after Eddie—and Morris came up beside me and seized my arm, his grip unaccountably tight.

Eddie didn't glance back, didn't see us standing together that way. He said, "
Ke-rist.
Any hints?"

"Go towards the music," Morris said.

Eddie's head moved up and down in a slow nod, as if this should've been obvious. He stared into the long, dark, circular tunnel ahead of him.

In a perfectly normal tone of voice, Morris said to me, "Don't go. Don't follow him."

Eddie started worming his way into the tunnel.

"Eddie!" I said, feeling a sudden, inexplicable burst of alarm. "Eddie, wait a minute! Come back out."

"Holy shit, it's dark in here," Eddie said, as if he hadn't heard me. In fact, I'm sure he
didn't
hear me—had stopped being able to hear me almost as soon as he entered Morris's labyrinth.

"Eddie!" I shouted. "Don't go in there!"

"There better be some windows up ahead," Eddie murmured ... talking to himself. "If I start getting claustrophobic, I'll just stand up and tear this motherfucker apart." He inhaled deeply, let it out. "Okay. Let's go."

The curtain flapped down across his feet and Eddie disappeared.

Morris let go of my arm. I looked over at him, but his stare was directed towards his sprawling fortress, towards the cardboard tube into which Eddie had climbed. I could hear Eddie clunking through it, away from us; I heard him come out the other end, into a large box, about four feet tall and a couple feet across. He bumped into it—knocked one of the walls with a shoulder maybe—and it shifted slightly. A cardboard tunnel led to the right, another to the left. He picked the one that pointed in the general direction of the moon. From the bottom of the basement steps I could follow his progress, could see boxes shaking slightly as he passed through them, could hear the muffled thump of his body striking the walls now and then. Then I lost track of him for a moment or two, couldn't locate him until I heard his voice.