Circling the Drain (4 page)

At twenty, he pulled out all his teeth, one by one with my father's pliers. I found him then. Sobbing. Kneeling on the pavement in the empty garage with a mouth full of blood, head bowed, hands between his knees. His teeth spread in a ring around him.

He tried to cut out his own tongue. But that was later, in the hospital, and the staff intervened. By then he was difficult to understand.

Haldol
, he whispered.
Please
.

It sounded like
Goliath
. People wrote these things down.

Goliath
, they whispered.
He said Goliath. He's talking about David, he's referring to a metaphorical slingshot
.

But I understood my brother. I slipped him the pills. I stroked his damp brown hair and kissed his forehead.

18.

When they unplugged his machines, the room grew so quiet. Without the beep and pulse of electronics the only thing that told me he was alive were his eyes. He looked through me and he held my hand.

I hate him
, he said.
All of the voices, but especially him
.

What other voices?
I asked, but he slipped from me, leaving words in my head.
I love you. I love you
.

I looked out at the moon hovering low over the hills and something jerked in between my ribs but I ignored it. I
adored my brother. Followed him around when I could and listened to what he told me to do. Always.

But then I was alone. And I was so angry.

19.

There was no reason to push that woman. It was violent and unnecessary, but she had come to mean everything to me in that moment. I knew she had the book. She knew I wanted more than the book. It was too much, swirling up and around me—dreamless as I was, I wanted something magical to happen. I don't know what. I didn't think about it—I just pushed.

She went over the edge of the dock and gulls screeched. Her arms windmilled in the air while off in the distance a barge shoved slowly through the water like a large, stupid bird. Maybe I wanted her to take off, to wind her arms and lift into the air. I was so tired of running that I wanted her to vanish. Which she did with a large, protracted splash and millions of ripples.

20.

There are clichés: when prophets come they bring light and love and wisdom. No one ever talks about when they go. About the darkness they leave behind, about us blinking in their absence waiting for our vision to adjust.

21.

I didn't mind asking Jack things. I was curious, after all, but the questions I asked were for me. I never accepted money to ask him anything. That's a cruel rumor. I had my own curiosity. I had some questions for God.

Which is it?
I asked:
The truth will paralyze you or the truth will set you free? Which is it, Jack?

Erin
, he whispered,
you don't want to know
.

22.

They tell me it's impossible to be dreamless, that the doctors couldn't possibly have concluded that and I must not remember it correctly. My parents could not be contacted. My father died a year after Jack, my mother is now an
Alzheimered resident of the Sunny Glen retirement community in Springfield, Arizona. I want her here, to clear this up. They say there's no record of Jack's birth or life or death but how can that be? What I want to know is whether I exist. Without him do I exist? If God won't talk to me is he real? Am I?

23.

She went under like a bag of sand, and the water churned over her, erased her with froth and ripple as I stood there, still panting. The sweat on my body and face began to freeze. There was an awful, absent silence for just a moment: a pause as if the world noticed what I'd done, took one gigantic, outraged suck of breath, and then the city exploded with life. People surrounded me. Two large policemen pulled me away from the water and handcuffed me, cursing and mumbling my rights. I saw people peeking from windows and streaming from buildings. Men and women trickled by us on the docks. The river lapped and lapped; a tugboat sounded its horn as it glided past. And in my head, the song she'd been humming in the store:

24.

In the hospital the last time, Jack pulled me to him and whispered an endless stream of vital things. I wrote page after page of his words and added them to the books of Jack, his testimony. But I am twenty-nine. Alone. In this city where I believed life would be easier. I underestimated my confusion. Memories crashed over my head here, collected in rivulets, trickled along my collarbone and down my back. Puddled. And I lost myself in them.

I burned many of Jack's books, but I saved one: The Book of Fear.

25.

Even at his craziest I trusted Jack with my future. He was ahead of me by eight years, so I felt certain he would get there first, would tell me how it all turned out. And then he left. And maybe he will still tell me how it all turns out. Maybe he will still lead me through what I don't know, through my ignorance to discovery and enlightenment. For now, I wait in the dismal evening and, with all the people in this city, I listen for one voice and hear nothing.

Do you know how it is to be truly alone? To look out into the night and realize that your voice echoes and calls back to you from a cavern? That you scale its walls alone?
Some people do not ever feel this, I am certain. In sleep they are connected to other people. Others are not. I am not. There are no secret strings that bind, no lines I cannot see. No more bookstore, no more words. I am alone here with my voice. It is quiet. Night falls.

26.

My psychologist says:
You were looking for someone to tell you what to do, to replace your brother
. But that's not quite it. I am looking for the words that flew from God's lips to his ears. Words he would not speak, couldn't speak. Words which stammered and cursed and spat. Words more powerful than the language that made them. I am looking for that voice, as if those words were him and more than him. And the thing is, I feel it out there, trickling through someone more generous than Jack. Someone who can save us all.

Lily was in love with a boy who chased freight trains. Rode his big blue horse like a big blue rocket shouting: Go Wonder, get 'em boy, and chased those trains and caught them.

The boy looped his mighty lasso above his head and tossed it over engines sputtering along, coughing black soot and faraway ideas all over the towns they roared past. When that lasso caught, he yelled: Here we go boy, and, holding on tight, got yanked on board to ride into the day ahead, with the whole open sky all around and the horizon unfolding like a clean new map. He rode until the land was chopped up by roads and he felt mankind spread in every direction like a crazy kind of kudzu. Then he whistled and Wonder, who'd been galloping faithfully along, was right there for him to leap back onto and off they went. He wiped his brow and said: That's it boy, that's the way to get 'em.

Wonder was faster than memory or scent, faster than hunger or illness or regret. But not as fast as love. No, Wonder was not a horse who could outrun love.

And Lily was in love with this boy who chased freight trains.

And the boy loved the horse. And the wind in his face. And the open earth.

Once she asked him: Why not passenger trains? Why not chase a train with people inside? and he said: Nothing doing, and his mouth became a jumpy line and furrows
erupted across the field of his face and she saw how tired he was and how afraid and she loved him even more.

Though she didn't know how to tell him so.

But then I could ride and you could leap aboard and carry me away on your big blue horse, she said. He sipped his beer and said: Nah, rope wouldn't hold and my balance'd be off and besides if you want to ride Wonder, he's out front so why go through all that?

And she saw he had no romantic imagination, but she just loved him more.

Ma, I'm in love with a boy who chases trains, she said, stirring potato soup and staring dreamily at the flat land spread from one end of her vision to the other like her feelings for him.

That's nice dear, her mother said and pushed a tiny needle in a tiny stitch through a tiny hole in her tiny flowered design. She held the fabric close enough so the flowers were huge dots of color and she could see only them, flowers waiting to be threaded, waiting to be brought to life by her hand, while off in the distance her daughter's heart was bruised and aching.

Ma, I'm in love with him and he rides a big blue horse and I don't know what to do.

That's nice, that's nice.

 

He thundered across the flat desert and up the greenest of green hills. He flew in the dust and held his arms out and laughed wildly. Sky filled his belly and tickled him and tousled his hair and he couldn't understand how there could be anything else. It seemed like all there was.

But he did like to drink beer in the bar with Lily.

They sat facing rows of colored bottles, butts on worn bar stools, in the one-room restaurant attached to the gas station
and motel along the dusty highway. She wore her most shapely dress and sucked in her stomach and told jokes. They spent time making faces at each other in the mirror above the bar. Lily stared at his eyes, wanting to own them, wanting to rein them in somehow, so they just saw her. But at the end of the evening he'd ride off on Wonder's back, leaving her alone with an empty beer and a starry view.

He ate at her house when she asked him. He even drank the very last drops of her potato soup, tossed twinkling glances her way, patted his stomach and stretched. And once, after a particularly fine bowl, he winked.

But he didn't seem to know what was brewing inside her and didn't seem to notice what more there was than trains and sky and food and Wonder. And as an afterthought: her. His pal Lily.

She couldn't bear the rhythm of it. Lily couldn't stand that he disappeared some days and she never knew when he'd be back with his windblown hair and his smile as big as the earth. So one day Lily concocted a plan to capture the boy.

At first she thought she should feed him her love, but that seemed wrong when she spun it around in her mind. She didn't want the boy to just taste her desire, she wanted to wrap him up in it. So she boiled all of her love in a soup pot and in it she soaked a hundred yards of blue thread. Then she stitched him a blue-threaded, love-soaked shirt and packed it carefully in tissue paper and waited.

That night was clear and the air was sharp. When the boy thundered to her, tied up Wonder outside and sauntered in, sheepish and ragged, Lily gave it to him.

He unfolded the paper and an ocean crossed his face and he held up the shirt and was blinded by her love. He stood frozen long enough for Lily to breathe in and out and to worry about him. Long enough for her to say: Hey?

As he turned toward her, his face was the mountains, the plains and the sea and she smiled at him: I made it for you.

He put it on and was so beautiful that she gasped. He walked around in a proud circle basking in the soft fabric of her love and then he said: I'm gonna go show Wonder, Lily, thanks.

As he strolled outside, her heart began to leak. She saw them through the window, the boy who chased trains, with Wonder nibbling his ear, and suddenly she knew what she was up against: his heart belonged to his horse.

Whoa, thought Lily. What am I, nuts? I'm in love with a boy who chases freight trains and now I think I have to get rid of his horse to capture his heart? That's crazy!

But love is a powerful thing when it's under your skin and pricking your pores. As she watched them head to head, she was swept away by the sour taste of it, so Lily plotted to kill the horse.

One night, while Wonder was tied up and the boy was chasing whiskeys with sodas, Lily crept outside and looked the big blue horse in its big brown eyes and said: I'm sorry about this, Wonder, it's nothing personal. And she placed a thick, poisonous soup made from simmered jealousy and swollen desire at Wonder's hoofs and went back inside to chase the boy who chased trains.

She asked loose questions about the night and the sound of the trains while she sat on the bar stool and saw the blue threads, the same color as Wonder, the blue bottles catching starlight in the windows. She thought of talking a blue streak and feeling blue, of blueberries and blue cheese, of bluebells and bluebonnets and blue jays and blue jeans, and when she looked into the boy's deep blue eyes she felt a sharp jab in her gut.

Wonder died quickly, not from Lilly's stewed ill will but
from the chemical reaction the ill will had with the aluminum pot. It doesn't really matter, what matters is that he died.

And the boy found him.

And when he did, his grief was huge. It snapped him open. It scooped him out and the weight of it flattened him like a cracker, dry and crumbling.

Wonder was dead and part of the boy was gone. Wind blew through the huge gaping hole in him. The world echoed unevenly and became dark.

Lily tried to comfort the boy but it was as though he had deflated and she didn't have air enough for both of them. She watched as he sat in the dirt of the plains, of the fields, by the road, motionless in the shirt she had made him, stitched so carefully with her love. The shirt grew tattered and its threads turned black.

Then it turned to rags. This was a quick process; soon the shirt was in rags and the boy was in rags and Lily watched him day and night and wondered at what she'd done, for she was invisible to him. Everything seemed invisible to him now. He even kept his back to the trains when they rolled through, held his hands over his ears and refused to hear their whistles.

Lily couldn't take it. Not only was he blind to her, but she didn't like the ragged boy nearly as much as she had before.

Ma, I tried to bewitch the boy who loved a horse more than me and now I think I've broken him.

Her mother looked up from her tiny stitches and saw her daughter all twisted into a knot and was filled with worry. That's no good, she said. You have to find him another horse. You can't rob someone to find love, honey. That never works.

A horse. A horse? Not another horse, but something. Lily had to do something, so she plucked the hollow boy from
the side of the road and slipped him into her battered Volvo and drove two days and two nights without sleeping, all the time silent, teeth gritted, hollow boy staring out the window where she'd propped him so he could see the land pass.

They came to a city where the boy had never been and Lily fed him in a loud and crowded restaurant and pushed him along a dirty crowded street but the boy seemed not to notice.

C'mon, she said: This is for your own good.

Then she toted him upstairs to a green platform and the boy stirred a little, surrounded by the very thing he'd never understood. He was wading knee-deep in the kudzu of man. When the subway roared in, the boy's eyes opened wide and his heart began to pound again and Lily saw color return to his cheeks.

Hey? she whispered: How about this?

She waited to see what would happen, but he didn't move while the people swarmed in, and then the silver boxes that contained them, one strung to another like an enormous caterpillar, crawled away, and then jogged, and then trotted and galloped and were gone. The boy stared wistfully after them and his shoulders drooped and Lily knew what to do.

Another train roared in.

Cowboy, she whispered: Climb aboard, and he hesitated but Lily gave him a firm shove and he stumbled through the open doors.

The car was full of people and she saw him look around and wander about and then, as though on fire, he came alive, yelling: No! yelling: Lily! and ran towards the doors but they closed and the train began to leave with the boy pressed hard to the window, his fear slapping at the glass like the flat of his palms. All around him passengers moved to sit down, moved away from the boy. But as the train
began to slip into the night, Lily hollered: Wait! reached deep inside and squeezed her hopes into a giant ball, then hurled it towards the front of the train.

Which stopped.

The doors opened and Lily ran for the petrified boy, yanking him down the platform and back to her car as it started to rain.

He was shaking by then, his eyes wild, and she wrapped him in a blanket and once again propped him by the window and began to drive.

I don't know, she murmured: I just don't know.

The city receded and the road unfurled and they drove for a long while, rain giving way to twilight, and the boy stayed put until Lily stopped the car.

She got out and pulled him into an open field, past grasses large enough to cover their heads, until they came to a clearing where Lily left the boy while she gathered the makings of a fire.

They sat cross-legged in its warm orange glow and Lily stared into the flames until it seemed her mind would melt, all the time thinking:
a horse, a horse
, but the boy lay with his arms behind his head and an emptiness in his eyes and Lily knew there had to be a way to bring him home in there.

Cowboy, she whispered: Let me tell you a tale. She handed him a weed to chew and lay herself back in the fine field dirt with the fire spitting and sparking nearby, and she closed her eyes and let the words tumble into stories and let the stories fly like pebbles in the air, each one landing near the boy, until they formed a ring around him, until he was safely walled in.

Wishes and dreams, she said: Before my father died he could make anything out of wishes and dreams. I'm sorry for what I've done to you, Cowboy. It was selfish, I know, but I didn't mean any harm. All I wanted was to love you the best
I could. All I wanted was to comfort you, to run my fingers through your shaggy hair, and roll over and around you late at night. To be as close as we could be. I didn't mean to untie the knot of you, Cowboy. How do I retie that?

The stars popped out one by one, and they lay in the darkness of the open-skied evening. Lily had almost drifted off when she felt a hand in her hair, then heard the scramble of a body and felt the warmth of the boy beside her. He pulled himself close, so his belly pressed her back, wrapped his arms around her and squeezed so tight she felt every outline of the buttons on his tattered love-soaked shirt.

The boy whispered: Lily, and his tears trickled down the curve of her neck and she also began to cry in that empty land, for the loss of her hopes and his horse, for the size of regret and the ache in her heart. When she turned around to face him it was almost enough.

I'm so sorry, she whispered as he kissed her face. I'll make it right somehow.

Her hands were in his, her weight under his, all around them her stories in a ring, and they cried and kissed by the light of the fire, making wishes and dreams, as they moved together under the absent moon.

But Lily slept soundly while the fire burned to embers in the cold gray dawn. She woke to the distant growl of an engine, to the zip of a car slicing the road, and then there was silence. There was the hush of wind moving through the tall grass. There were the scattered pebbles of her broken stories, crushed into dust by the heel of a boot. There was a ruined fire and the charred remains of a blue-threaded, love-soaked shirt.

And there was Lily all alone in the field.

No boy. No keys. Just an empty sky and the sound of her heart.