20th Century Ghosts (42 page)

"Hey, Nolan," she said, with a look that was both hopeful and pleading. "What'd the cop say? Do they think they know where he went?"

I felt a flash then of something almost like anger, not for her, but for Eddie; a harsh contempt for the way he chortled about her and made fun behind her back.

"No," I said. "I wouldn't worry about him. I guarantee you that wherever he is, he isn't worrying about you."

I saw her eyes flicker with hurt, and then I pulled my gaze away and went on, without looking back, already wishing I hadn't said anything, because what did it matter if she missed him? I never had another conversation with her after that. I don't know what happened to Mindy Ackers after high school. You know someone for a while and then one day a hole opens underneath them, and they fall out of your world.
 

There is one other thing I remember, from the period that followed immediately after Eddie's disappearance. As I said, I tried not to think about what had happened to him, and I avoided conversations about him. It wasn't as hard to do as you'd think. I'm sure those who cared were trying to give me a little distance, conscious that a close friend had skipped out on me without a word. By the end of the month, it was almost as if I really
didn't
know anything about what had happened to Edward Prior ... or maybe even as if I hadn't known Eddie at all. I was already sealing up my memories of him—the overpass, checkers with Mindy, his stories about his older brother Wayne—behind a wall of carefully laid mental bricks. I was thinking about other things. I wanted a job, was considering putting in an application at the supermarket. I wanted spending money, I wanted to get out of the house more. AC/DC was coming to town in June and I wanted tickets. Brick after brick after brick.

Then, one Sunday afternoon at the very beginning of April, we were all of us, the whole family, on our way out to have roast and potatoes at my Aunt Neddy's house. I was upstairs, getting dressed for Sunday dinner, and my mother shouted to look in Morris's room for his good shoes. I slipped into his small room—bed neatly made, a clean sheet of paper clipped to his artist's easel, books on the shelf arranged in alphabetical order—and pulled open the closet door. At the very front of the closet was an ordered row of Morris's shoes, and at one end of them were Eddie's snow boots, the ones he had taken off in the mudroom, before going downstairs and disappearing forever into Morris's enormous fort. At the edges of my vision, the walls of the room seemed to swell and subside like a pair of hmgs. I felt faint, thought if I let go of the doorknob I might lose my balance and topple over.

Then my mother was standing in the hallway. "I've been yelling for you. Did you find them?"

I turned my head and looked at her for a moment. Then 1 looked back into the closet. I bent over and got Morris's good loafers, and then pushed the closet door shut.
"Yes," I said. "Here. Sorry. Spaced out for a minute."

She shook her head. "The men in this family are all exactly the same. Your dad is in outer space half the time, you shuffle around in a trance, and your brother—I swear to God one of these days your brother is going to climb into one of his little forts and never come out."
 

Morris passed a high school equivalency test shortly before he turned twenty, and for a few years after proceeded through a long string of menial jobs, living for a while in my parents' basement, then in an apartment in New Hampshire. He shoveled burgers at McDonald's, stacked crates in a bottling plant, and mopped the floor at a shopping mall, before finally settling into a steady gig pumping gas.

When he missed three consecutive days of work at the Citgo, his boss gave my parents a call, and they went to visit Morris in his apartment. He had rid himself of all his furniture, and hung white sheets from the ceiling in every room, making a network of passageways with gently billowing walls. They found him at the end of one of these slowly rippling corridors, sitting naked on a bare mattress. He told them if you followed the right path through the maze of hanging sheets, you would come to a window that looked out upon an overgrown vineyard, and distant cliffs of white stone, and a dark ocean. He said there were butterflies, and an old worn fence, and that he wanted to go there. He said he had tried to open the window but it was sealed shut.

But there was only one window in his apartment, and it looked onto the parking lot out back. Three days later he signed some papers my mother brought him, and accepted voluntary committal to the Wellbrook Progressive Mental Health Center.

My father and I helped him move in. It was early September then, and it felt as if we were settling Morris into a dorm at a private college somewhere. Morris's room was on the third floor, and my father insisted on carrying Morris's heavy, brass-hinged trunk up the stairs alone. By the time he slammed it down at the foot of Morris's bed, his soft, round face was unpleasantly ashen, and he was lathered in sweat. He sat there holding his wrist for a while. When I asked about it, he said he had bent it funny carrying the trunk.

One week later, to the day, he sat up in bed, abruptly enough to wake my mother. She forced her eyes open, stared up at him. He was holding that same wrist, and hissing as if pretending to be a snake, his eyes protruding from his head and the veins straining in his temples. He died a good ten minutes before the ambulance arrived, of a massive coronary. My mother followed him the year after that. Uterine cancer. She declined aggressive treatment. A diseased heart, a poisoned womb.

I live in Boston, almost an hour away from Wellbrook. I fell into the habit of visiting my little brother on the third Saturday of every month. Morris liked order, routines, habits. It pleased him to know just when I would be coming. We took walks together. He made a wallet for me out of duct tape, and a hat glued all over with rare, hard-to-fmd bottle caps. I don't know what happened to the wallet. The hat sits on my file cabinet, in my office, here at the university. I pick it up and stick my face into it sometimes. It smells like Morris, which is, to be exact, the dusty-dry odor of the basement in my parents' house.

Morris took a job in the custodial department at Wellbrook, and the last time I saw him he was working. I was in the area, and popped in during a weekday, stepping outside of our routine for once. I was sent to look for him in the loading area, out behind the cafeteria.

He was in an alley off the employee parking lot, around behind a Dumpster. The kitchen staff had been throwing empty cardboard boxes back there, and now there was an enormous drift of them against one wall. Morris had been asked to flatten them and bundle them in twine for the recycling truck.

It was early fall, a little rust just beginning to show in the crowns of the giant oaks behind the building. I stood at the corner of the Dumpster, watching him for a moment. He didn't know I was there. He was holding a large white box, open at either end, in both hands, turning it this way and that, staring blankly through it. His pale brown hair stood up in back in a curling cowlick. He was crooning to himself, in a low, slightly off-key voice. When I heard what he was singing, I swayed on my heels, the world lurching around me. I grabbed the edge of the Dumpster to hold myself steady.

"The ants go marching ... one-by-one..."
he sang. He turned the box around and around in his hands.
"Hurrah. Hurrah,"

"Stop that," I said.

He turned his head and stared at me—at first without recognition, I thought. Then something cleared from his eyes, and the corners of his mouth turned up in a smile. "Oh, hello, Nolan. Do you want to help me flatten some boxes?"

I came forward on unsteady legs. I had not thought of Eddie Prior in I-don't-know-how-long. There was a bad sweat on my face. I took a box, pressed it flat, added it to the small pile Morris was making.

We chatted for a while, but I don't remember about what. How it was going. How much money he had saved.

Then he said, "Do you remember those old forts I used to build? The ones in the basement?"

I felt an icy sense of pressure, a kind of weight, pushing out against the inside of my chest. "Sure. Why?"

He didn't reply for a time. Flattened another box. Then Morris said, "Do you think I killed him?"

It was hard to breathe. "Eddie Prior?" The simple act of saying his name made me dizzy; a terrible lightness spread out from my temples, and back into my head.

Morris stared at me, without comprehension, and pursed his lips. "No. Daddy." As if it should've been obvious. Then he turned back, lifted up another long box, stared into it thoughtfully. "Dad always brought home boxes like this for me from work. He knew. How exciting it is to hold a box and not be sure what's in it. What it might contain. A whole world might be closed in there. Who could tell from the outside? The featureless outside."

We had finished stacking most of the boxes into a single flat pile. I wanted to be done, wanted us to go inside, play some Ping-Pong in the rec room, put this place and this conversation behind us. I said, "Aren't you supposed to tie these up into a bundle?"

He glanced down at his stack of cardboard, said, "Forgot the twine. Don't worry. Just leave all this here. I'll take care of it later."
 

It was twilight when I left, the sky above Wellbrook a flat, cloudless surface colored a very pale violet. Morris stood in the bay windows of the recreation room and waved goodbye. I lifted my hand to him and drove away, and they called me three days later to say he was gone. The detective who visited me in Boston to see if I knew anything that might help the police to find him managed to get my brother's name right, but the long-term results of his investigation into my brother's disappearance have yielded no more success than Mr. Carnahan's search for Edward Prior.

Shortly after he was formally declared a missing person, Betty Millhauser, the care coordinator at the clinic in charge of Morris's case, called to say they were going to have to put his possessions into storage until "he came back"—a turn of phrase she delivered in a tone of shrill optimism that I found painful—and if I wanted to, I could come in and collect some of his things to take home with me. I said I'd stop in the first time I had a chance, which turned out to be Saturday, on the exact day I would've visited Morris had he still been there.

An orderly left me alone in Morris's small third-floor room. Whitewashed walls, a thin mattress on a metal frame. Four pairs of socks in the dresser; four pairs of sweat pants; two unopened plastic packages of Jockey underwear. A toothbrush. Magazines:
Popular Mechanics, Reader's Digest
, and a copy of
The High Plains Literary Review
, which had published an essay I had written about Edgar Allan Poe's comic verse. In his closet, I discovered a blue blazer Morris had modified, stringing it with the lights for a Christmas tree. An electrical cord was tucked into one pocket. He wore it at the annual Wellbrook Christmas party. It was the only thing in the room that wasn't completely anonymous, the only item that actually made me think of him. I put it in the laundry bag.

I stopped in the administration offices to thank Betty Millhauser for letting me go through Morris's room and to tell her I was leaving. She asked if I had looked in his locker down in the custodial department. I said I didn't even know he
had
a locker, and where was the custodial department located? The basement.

The basement was a large, high-ceilinged space, with a cement floor and beige brick walls. The single long room was divided in two by a wall of stiff chain-link, painted black. On one side was a small, tidy area for the custodial staff. A row of lockers, a card table, stools. A Coke machine buzzed against the wall. I couldn't see into the rest of the basement—the lights were switched off on the other side of the chain-link divider—but I heard a boiler roaring softly somewhere off in the darkness, heard water rushing in pipes. The sound reminded me of what you hear when you listen to a seashell.

At the foot of the stairs was a small cubicle. Windows looked in on a cluttered desk covered in drifts of paper. A stocky black man in green coveralls sat behind it, turning through the pages of the
Wall Street Journal
. He saw me standing by the lockers, and got up, came out, shook hands—his was callused and powerful. His name was George Prine, and he was the head custodian. He pointed me to Morris's locker, and stood a few steps behind me, arms crossed over his chest, watching me go through it.

"Your boy was an easy kid to get along with," Prine said, as if Morris had been my son instead of my brother. "He drifted off into his own private world now and then, but that's pretty much the order of things 'round this place. He was good about his work, though. Didn't clock in and then sit around tying his boots and yapping with the other guys like some do. When he punched his card he was ready to work."

There was next to nothing in Morris's locker. His jumpsuits, his boots, an umbrella, a slim creased paperback called
Flatland
.

" 'Course after he got off work, that was a different story. He'd hang around for hours. He'd get building something with his boxes and go so far away into himself, he'd forget dinner if I didn't tell him to get."

"What?" I asked.

Prine smiled, a little quizzically, as if I should've known what he was talking about. He walked past me to the wall of chain-link and flipped a switch. The lights came on in the other half of the basement. Beyond the chain-link divider was a bare expanse of floor under a ceiling crawling with ductwork and pipes. This wide, open area was filled with boxes, assembled into a sprawling, confused child's play fort, with at least four different entrances, tunnels and chutes and windows in strange deformed shapes. The outsides of the boxes had been painted with green ferns and waving flowers, with ladybugs the size of pie plates.

"I'd like to bring my kids here," Prine said. "Let them crawl around inside there for a while. They'd have a blast."

I turned and started walking for the stairs ... shaken, cold all over, breathing harshly. But then, as I brushed past George Prine, an impulse came over me, and I grabbed his upper arm and squeezed, maybe harder than I meant to.