How They Were Found (19 page)

It was just a dream, he knows, not motivation or reason for staying in his chair as long as he has. Not the cause of his nothingman life. He wishes he could go back, forget he ever left the chair, ever left the sitting room, ever reentered the world of pain that had always been there waiting for him. His bathrobe is torn, his hands and feet bloodied and bruised, and his face—

Over the years, he has forgotten his face, the shape of the thing, the angle of his nose and the thickness of his lips and the scars or lack of scars that might distinguish it from another. He has forgotten how it feels to see a brow furrow in pain, to see a mouth contort in frustration and anger.

He has forgotten, but he is trying to remember.

Whatever his face is, floating in the dark around his eyes, it is wet again.

3E. INVENTORY

Fourteen pianos, both grand and upright. A clavichord, two organs, six banjos, a dozen violins (only two of which are strung), bugles, accordions, a gramophone and an exhaustive record collection (including well-worn works by Paul Whiteman, Fred Waring, Sophie Tucker, and Blossom Seeley), two trumpets, a trombone, and what appears to have once been an upright bass before it was smashed and broken. Both brothers were accomplished musicians, and it is easy to picture them sitting and playing music together, and later, after the lights went out and they began to fight, apart from each other, their only points of connection the accidental melodies they made in the dark.

1F. HOMER PLAYS THE PIANO

After Homer trips over the bench in front of the parlor's piano, he sits down and rests his fingers on the keys. Wherever Langley is, he's quiet, resting too, or else something worse, something Homer doesn't want to think about. He feels bad enough, for not hurrying, for not being able to find his brother and save him. His lungs ache and his ankles throb, the arthritis in his leg joints a lightless fire. He centers himself in front of the piano and starts to play, then stops when the sound comes out wrong. He sighs, starts over with more realistic expectations.

The piano is almost completely buried by the mounds of trash that fill the room, the heaps of paper and metal and wood, the objects breaking down again into their constituent parts. Homer's fingers are gnarled ghosts, flickering over the keys in an approximation, the memory of music. The sound comes out of the piano muffled and muted. It does not fill the room but goes into it instead, Homer's fingers driving each note through the piled garbage and into the rotting walls like a nail, like a crowbar, like something meant to hold a thing together, like something meant to tear it down.

4C. MOTIVATION

I'm sifting through their possessions, crawling through the ruins of their lives searching for those lost, for remains, for the remains of a family: I am in the master bedroom, reading letters they never read. I am in the parlor, wiping the grime off a generation of portraits. I am in the hallway, setting thousands of mouse traps all in a row.

I am on my hands and knees, scrubbing the floor without success, as if there could ever be enough soap to remove this particular stain.

There is so much to see here, but only in fragments, in peripheries. Every step across the floorboards brings this house of cards closer to collapse, and so I must move backward and forward in time, balancing the now and the then, until I have found what it is I am looking for.

I am a collector too, but it is not their possessions I have clutched close and hoarded.

I am holding Homer's face in my hands, staring into his milky eyes, whispering to him as he searches in starved sadness. I am kneeling beside Langley like a detective, my bent knee slick with his blood, looking through the rote clues to discover what happened to him.

I am conducting an investigation. I am holding a wake. I am doing some or all or none of these things.

2E. THE CRACK IN YOUR FOUNDATION

You howl, hurling the curse of your brother's name down the corridor. For hours you have heard his bumbling and still he is no closer to you, his blind search for you as failed as your own cursed attempt to reach the master bedroom. You picture him crawling forward on his hands and knees, unable to see through to the end of each tunnel, unable to know how much farther there is still to go.

For years, he has kept to his chair in the sitting room, leaving you to deal with the collapse of the house, the danger it poses to all of your possessions. The house is both protector and destroyer, both safety and threat, and it is you who tips the scales, not him. It was you who braved the streets night after night to bring back food and water, to gather all the supplies essential to your lives. Homer knows nothing of what you've had to do, how you've moved from one halo of lamp light to the next, avoiding the dark men who rule the streets. You see their eyes sometimes in the shadows, peering at you from front steps and street corners, hurrying you on your way through this ruined city that was once your home.

The pain is too much. This time when you scream, your brother answers, but from too far away. The slow sticky warmth emanating from your crushed thigh has reached your crotch, your belly. It's easy to reach down and feel the slippery copper heat of your blood. There's so much, more than you expected.

You close your eyes. Not much longer now.

Even surrounded by all your possessions, dying is so much lonelier than you expected.

Whisper your brother's name. Whisper the names of your father and your mother. Whisper my name, and pray that I might save you, but understand that even though I have already changed the truth merely by being here, I will still refuse to change it that much.

1G. HOMER LOSES FAITH

The house bucks and shudders, settles or shifts. Homer stumbles but doesn't fall down, knows that if he does he might never get up. He stops and listens to the creaking of the floorboards, the scuttle of the rats. Says, Langley?

Homer wants to yell his brother's name again but doesn't. It's been a long time since his brother answered, and without sight there is no light and no marker of time. Homer doesn't know if it's morning or night, if a few hours have passed or if it's already been days. He's so tired and so alone, lost inside his own house, remade in whatever crooked shape Langley has envisioned. He thinks about all Langley tells him when to do because he cannot tell himself.

Homer, go to sleep, it's midnight.

Homer, wake up, I've got your breakfast.

Homer, it's time to play your violin.

It's time for me to read to you.

It's time for a drink, time for a smoke, time to eat another orange.

Homer's so tired, and all he wants is to be back in his chair, but for once Langley needs his help and Homer doesn't want to let his brother down.

The thing is, he doesn't know if Langley is still there to be helped.

2F. YOUR WEIGHTY GHOSTS

No father without medicine, without dictionaries, without reference texts full of once perfect answers slowly rotting themselves wrong.

No mother without silk, without satin, without wool and cotton. No mother without a closet full of shoes, a hundred high heels spilled out into a trapped nest of spikes.

No brother without a piano, without a bathrobe, without a chair, a pipe, a mouthful of oranges and black bread.

No self without these ghosts.

No ghosts, without—

No. No ghosts, or rather:

No ghosts except in things.

They surround you, press closer, waiting for the rapidly approaching moment when you too will be just a thing, an object, a static entity slowly falling into decay. That moment is so close you can smell it, like the breath of rats, like the rot of oranges, like blood and dirt mushed into new mud.

4D. MARCH 21 (EARLY)

I know you were hurrying through the second floor hall because you knew what you needed to do to complete this place, to bring an end to the endless gathering and piling and sorting. You were hurrying because it had taken you so long already, and you didn't want to waste another second.

Even now, at the very end, you tell yourself that if only you could have completed your project then it would have been enough to stop all this. It could have been different. You could have taken Homer and left this house. You could have started over somewhere else, which is all you've ever wanted.

You were hurrying, and you were careless, and now it's too late.

Your lungs heave, trying unsuccessfully to clear their bloody fractures. When you are still again, I reach down to touch your face, to turn it toward my own.

With my fingers twisted around your jaw, I say, Homer isn't coming.

I say, Tell me what you would have told him.

I can see the sparks dancing in your eyes, obscuring the last sights you'll ever see, so I say, Close your eyes. You don't need them anymore. Not for how little is left.

For these last few moments, I will see for you as you saw for him.

In the last seconds of your life, I will tell you whatever you want to hear, as long as you first tell me what I need.

I say, Tell me how to finish the house.

I say, Tell me what I have to do to get out of here.

And then you will, and afterward I will lie to you, and despite my whispered assurances you will know that I am not real enough to save you or him, and then it will be over.

1H. HOMER FINDS THE FARTHEST ROOM

Homer experiences the lack of guideposts, of landmarks, of bread crumbs. He knows his brother is dead or dying and that finding him will change nothing, and even though he wants to turn around he's not sure how. He tries to remember if he climbed the stairs or if he crawled upward or if he is still on the first floor of the house, twisted and turned inside it. He tries to remember the right and the left, the up and the down, the falls and the getting back up, but when he does the memories come all at once or else as one static image of moving in the dark, like a claustrophobia of neurons. He wants to lie down upon on the floor, wants to stop this incessant, wasted movement.

He closes his eyes and leans against the piles. His breath comes long and ragged, whole rooms of air displaced by the straining bellows of his lungs. He smells the long dormant stench of his sweat and piss and shit, come shamefully back to life now that he's on the move again.

Somewhere beyond himself, he smells, if he sniffs hard enough, just a hint of his orange peels, the last of their crushed sweetness.

Homer opens his eyes, useless as they are, and points himself toward the wafting rot of his last thousand meals. He holds his robe closed with one hand, reaches out with the other toward the dark. He puts one foot in front of the other, then smiles when he feels the rinds and tapped ash begin to squish between his toes.

He slips, and falls, and crashes into the tortured leather of his favorite chair. He pulls himself up. He sits himself down. He puts his heavy head into his hands.

3F. INVENTORY

In the lock box: Thirty-four bank books, all from different banks. Irving Trust Company. Fillmore-Leroy. Liberty National. Park Avenue. Seaboard. Albany City Savings. Temple Beth Israel. Alfred Mutual. ABN. Alliance. Amalgated. American Bond and Mortgage. Jefferson Savings. Associated Water Companies Credit Union. Assumption Parish. Canaseraga State. Dry Dock. Eighth Avenue. Fallkill. Queens County. Glaser Mercantile. H&K. Village. Industrial Bank of Ithaca. Kings County. Manhattan Trust. State Dime Savings. Bank of Brooklyn. Oneida. Rockaway. Union National Bank of Friendship. Beacon Federal. Whitehall Trust. The Zurich Depository.

A total of three thousand dollars and eighteen cents. The very end of a fortune, kept in Langley's name, inherited by Homer, and then, after he died too, taken by the state.

1I. MARCH 21 (LATE)

Homer squirms on the high throne of his last decade, every pose the wrong one. His back aches and his legs jerk no matter how he adjusts himself. Everything is physical, every craving desire a need for his brother, for his abandoned Langley. Homer would give everything away for a glass of water, would go into equal debt for a snifter of brandy or a pipe or even one of Langley's goddamn oranges. Anything that might bring relief. Anything that might bring with it absolution or forgetfulness. He licks his lips and tastes mud. He puts his fingers to his mouth and sucks and there it is again. His face, his beard, his clothes, all are mud. Homer puts his hand back in his mouth, sucks and swallows until it is clean. He repeats the process with his other hand, and then he cleans himself like a rodent, using his hands to bring the dirt off of his face and neck and arms to his mouth, where he devours it. Homer's throat chokes shut. He closes his eyes to block out the last blurs of gauzy light his blindness still allows. He is inside the house and the house is inside him, like a nesting of labyrinths. Lacking the tools to solve himself, he gives up. The process starts in this one second but takes weeks to finish. He does not cry out again. He does not beg. He does not want, not for food or water or companionship. He could, but he does not. This life has been an abject lesson in the limits of wanting, and he has learned all he cares to learn.

5A. WILLIAM BAKER

William Baker breaks a second-story window from atop a shaking ladder. William Baker peers into the darkness and then signals to the other officers that he's going in. William Baker uses his nightstick to clear all the glass out of his way. William Baker climbs through the window into the room beyond. William Baker gags but does not vomit. William Baker turns his flashlight from left to right, then back again, like a lighthouse in a sea of trash. William Baker thinks, Not a sea but a mountain rising from a sea, a new, unintended landscape. William Baker begins to take inventory in his mind, counting piles of newspapers, broken furnishings, books molded to floorboards. William Baker puts his hands to a wall of old newspapers and pushes until he sinks in to his wrists. William Baker finds the entrance to the tunnel that leads out of the room, then gets down on his hands and knees and crawls through. William Baker passes folding chairs and sewing machines and a wine press. William Baker passes the skeleton of a cat or else a rat as big as a cat. William Baker turns left at a baby carriage, crawls over a bundle of old umbrellas. William Baker crawls until he can't hear the other officers yelling to him from the window. William Baker is inside the house, inside its musty, rotted breath, inside its tissues of decaying paper and wood.