Raveling (57 page)

I saw it
.

It was like something had come unlocked, a synapse had connected in just the right way, or disconnected, the right combination
of serotonin and dopamine had been released. I could practically feel the pulsing of blood in my temples. I could almost hear
the nerves crackling with electricity, the play of information along chemical routes through the ganglia of my nervous system.
I found my feet on the hardwood floor. I found my hands reaching for the reading lamp. For some reason, I slipped into the
clothes I had been planning to wear the next day—dress shoes, a gray suit, pinstriped, a pink shirt, monogrammed. But it didn’t
matter. Tomorrow didn’t matter at all, I told myself. Tomorrow was canceled. I touched my face on the way out to the car and
felt stubble, rough and sharp. I looked at my Philippe Patek in the yellow glow of the driveway light and saw that it was
nearly three in the morning. I didn’t remember putting this watch on, a watch that suddenly seemed alien. As I got in the
car I realized that I had forgotten my jacket and overcoat. But I didn’t care. I’d get this over with quickly. Now that I
knew.
Now that I knew where it was, exactly, precisely where it was.

How did I know where it was? Because I saw—for a fraction of an instant, I
saw
—through my brother’s eyes.

For a fraction of an instant, everything had become clear.

Inside the Jag, it was like a freezer, and I held my hands to my mouth and blew, trying to warm the skin. I put my key in
the ignition, turned the engine, and waited a moment while the car thawed in the below-freezing temperature. Automatically,
a compact disc came on in the stereo, one of the Brandenburg concertos, sweet and measured. But this was a night that didn’t
need a soundtrack. This was the part of my life story I didn’t need in the documentary. I turned it off. I had an image of
Fiona in my head, the way she had looked the night of the party through the trees, the people that had been standing all around
the pool, cocktails and cigarettes in their hands, the mustachioed, blond Bryce Telliman standing alone off to the side, shirt
open to his chest, eyes unfocused but flickering everywhere. I could see her tiny little-girl body in her red bathing suit
with the white flower sewn between her two nonexistent breasts. I remembered the sneakers on her feet, red high-tops, one
of them tied, the other flopping around unlaced.

I pulled out of the long driveway and, without thinking, found myself on Sky Highway, the familiar whir of the tar road beneath
the wheels, the yellow lines blurring by like lasers in a science-fiction movie. I understood like no one in my family how
the human eye apprehends the physical world. I knew more than anyone how an image distorts when it is converted from light
and dark to discrete particles of information and then converted into a picture of something recognizable. I knew what could
happen when this ordinary process breaks down. I knew the blurring that could occur,
and the rest of it: the panic, the sensations of fear, the psychological vertigo. I had been seeing double all my life. Through
my own eyes, and through my brother’s.

I knew what our mother was experiencing.

I passed only three cars during the entire drive to the Thomas Edison Junior High School parking lot. And once there, I saw
the same old orange BMW 2002, the same burgundy-mist Buick Skylark, the same white early eighties Mustang, the same few poachers
who parked back along the edge of these woods knowing that no one else used this part of the lot, so far from the school,
way beyond the football field. Warmer now, even perspiring, I turned the engine off and cut the headlights. I knew that my
brother would never find the evidence, that he had, in fact, never even remembered where he’d put it. Memory doesn’t work
that way. Details become cloudy, they switch around, become confused with so many other details that it is impossible to sort
them all out. His brain was a blur, I thought. It takes someone else to decipher the memories, to find the shoelace of truth
inside the snake pit of recollection. I got out of my car into the fierce cold and closed the door without locking it. I stepped
off the pavement and walked across the grass into the woods of my boyhood, where my life’s experiment had begun.

When I was just a boy I found my father’s old animal traps in the attic. Originally, they had been used for catching mink
and muskrat, from the days—when our father was a kid—ordinary people sold animal pelts to Sears and Roebuck. When I was around
twelve or thirteen I took three of these traps into these woods, setting them with bits and pieces of meat, carrots, cheese.
Mostly, I caught squirrels and rabbits. In the mornings, I’d find the animals, their legs twisted and mangled from trying
to get away, insane from the rage and pain of the rusty metal teeth. Sometimes, however, I’d
find them catatonic, their undersides exposed, eyes all filmy and open, their bodies slack, wanting to die, I guess, or,
often enough, already dead. Sometimes another animal would have come along, probably our cat, Halley the Comet, and they’d
be gutted, their insides torn out, entrails exposed. I took these animals into the garage, usually, and experimented. I used
a set of my mother’s kitchen utensils to dissect their organs, categorizing each system with my old copy of
Gray’s Anatomy
, trying to compare the animal equivalents to the organs of the human body. I have to say I became surprisingly knowledgeable
about the structure of small mammals. But if one of them was still alive, I’d tack its body down by the fur and limbs to my
father’s workbench. Then I’d carefully remove the back of its skull with a serrated bread knife. If I was successful, the
animal’s brain would be exposed, but its body still quivering, and I would touch different parts of its squirrel or rabbit
or woodchuck nervous system just to see which parts of its body twitched. Bit by bit, I’d cut pieces away, seeing how long
it took them to stop breathing.

Right now I took a few quiet steps into the woods, looking for the path I had taken home every day from school for so many
years. Once I found it, I walked along confidently, more certain of my direction with every step.

The animals didn’t last long without their brains, of course. But every now and then I found a squirrel or a rabbit who surprised
me, who could live for quite a while—minutes, it seemed—without a central nervous system.

My father had given me the hunting knife when I was around ten, in secrecy. It was the knife I used to sever the legs off
the little animals I had caught in his traps. It had a curved, steel blade, an ebony handle with a silver inlay of a rhinoceros.
It came with a black leather sheath that attached
to my belt and a small sharpening stone. Dad made me promise, when he gave it to me, never to tell my mother I had it, it
was just between us guys. I carried this knife into the woods every day, checking the traps. And as the summers went by, I
became more and more proficient at cutting the legs off the animals I caught, finding the right way to sever a clean line
through the bone, slicing, and not tearing, through the surrounding flesh.

No one cared about that fucking cat, anyway.

I found him in the basement one day, sleeping on a pile of old blankets. I picked him up, petting his tangerine head and stroking
the fur of his neck so he wouldn’t be afraid. Halley the Comet loved everyone insanely, a glutton for affection. I could feel
the sinewy cat muscles beneath his soft orange-and-white-striped fur. His eyes were slits. He even seemed to smile at me,
and I could feel the little enginelike rumble inside him, his soft purr. I carried Halley the Comet into the garage and placed
him on the workbench. He wanted to get down, suddenly panicked. I had to fight him now, and Halley tore long, deep scratches
into my arms. He even got my face, his rear foot claws digging into the skin of my cheek as he tried to push off. I touched
my cheek and saw the blood on my hands, more brown than red. The next thing I had to do was to find a way to keep him down,
and the only way was to hold him, pinning the cat’s body with one hand and my chest against the workbench and reaching to
my belt for the knife with my other. This was easier than it sounds. He was just a cat, after all. I could hear a strangling,
gurgling sound coming from Halley’s throat. It was like a baby screaming underwater. But when I did it, when I took the knife,
which I had sharpened to a microscopic razor-thinness, and brought it down on his left rear leg, just below the joint, and
cut, pushing down and through it like
a carrot on the kitchen counter, Halley the Comet stopped making any noise at all. Like so many of the animals I had trapped,
his body went catatonic, his muscles loosening beneath my grip. He even lost control of his bowels and bladder, shitting and
pissing all over the workbench. There was also more blood than I thought there would be. It spurted onto my shirt and the
floor. So I cauterized the wound with my father’s soldering iron. Then I carefully cleaned the area and wrapped it around
and around with gauze and white tape. Halley was making a soft whining sound deep in his throat, not loud, so I stroked his
neck again. He just started mewling then, one weak little cry after another, his eyes all filmy and despairing. I had been
so absorbed in cutting off Halley’s leg I hadn’t been paying attention when the door to the kitchen opened. I looked up and
saw my sister standing there, her jaw slack, her head shaking.

“It’s all right,” I told her. “Everything’s fine.”

But she turned and ran back into the house, leaving the door to the kitchen ajar.

In the woods, more than twenty years later, the ground was hard beneath my feet, the mud frozen, and the air was dry and brittle.
It felt like my lungs were filling with ice crystals. There was no wind, thankfully, and the sky was clear, with a bright
half moon and pinpoint stars flickering like candlelight. It was a beautiful night, cold as it was. I could have walked through
these woods with my eyes closed.

So I closed my eyes for a moment and just stood there, breathing in.

Everything had become so clear.

Later, my mother came home and took me and Halley to see Dr. Herman, the veterinarian, a man with large, clean, hairless hands,
doctor’s hands. I told him I had found the cat in the woods, caught in one of my animal traps, that the lower
half of his leg was gone, I had dropped it in a panic. But I was congratulated. Dr. Herman said that if I hadn’t cut Halley’s
leg so cleanly and cauterized the wound so expertly, Halley probably would have died of blood loss. He said I had a great
future as a doctor. He also said he wasn’t sure how a cat could enjoy life without one of his rear legs. Dr. Herman looked
at our mother. He recommended putting Halley to sleep.

I remember that she sighed heavily.

But that’s what this had all been about, I said, saving Halley, and I had an idea.

I opened my eyes and walked straight to the clearing, to where the evidence was hidden.

I had an idea
.

A little girl’s red sneaker, a hunting knife.

It was there, just as I knew it had to be. In my very own hiding place. I remembered reaching into the old broken concrete
pipe so many times when I was a teenager to find the grass or speed I kept stashed inside a container. There was just enough
room in the small space for a piece of Tupperware, one I had taken from my mother’s kitchen. I used to come here every morning
to pick up a couple of speed tablets, and then I’d return again in the afternoon, after football practice, to smoke a joint
or two before going home so I’d have an appetite for dinner. Right now I felt around for the Wonderbread bag.

There it was.

Inside it, even in the darkness of these woods, I could see the red shoe. It was small—much, much smaller than I had remembered.
No bigger than my palm. Also, still in its leather sheath, was the hunting knife my father had given me, the one I carried
in these woods, looking for animals, for experiments, learning opportunities. For a moment, I didn’t know what to do with
these things. They had worried me all my life, the only objects that had ever escaped me, and now
they were in my possession. I stood in the clearing and removed the knife from the bag, holding its ebony handle. It felt
smooth, fitting my grasp like a finely made surgical tool. I slipped it out of the sheath and ran my finger along the blade.
There was no blood encrusted here, no dried matter, nothing to link anyone to anything. It was as clean as if it had been
sterilized, the blade still sharp, the point unbroken. I may have even laughed to myself at this moment. I may even have been
smiling when the flash of the camera went off and I heard my brother say, “I thought these things weren’t real, Eric. I thought
you said there was no evidence.”

“Pilot?” Everything was blurry. What I had been able to make out in the woods was now rendered completely opaque after the
harsh flash of his camera.

“Eric,” he said, “how will you explain this?”

“Pilot?” I said again. I wanted to stall him until I could see. I wanted to see him.

“If there was no evidence,” he said nervously, “why would you come looking for it? And how would you know exactly where to
look? If I’m insane, why would you believe my story?” Pilot’s voice was quavering, excited. “Because I’m not crazy, am I?
I’m sane, Eric, completely, totally fucking sane, and you know it.”

“The hell you are.” My eyes had adjusted enough at this point to know that Pilot was standing only a few feet in front of
me. “Like fucking hell you are.” I held out the knife,
my
knife, the hunting knife I should have had all these years, and I took a step toward my brother in the dark.

But he jumped out of the way, more nimble than I expected. “Forget it, big brother,” he said. “You lose.”

“Pilot,” I said, “you don’t understand.” I stepped toward him again.

“No.”

“Pilot, Jesus Christ, it’s for your own good.”

“I don’t think so, Eric.”

“Pilot,” I said, and he took off running. I knew I would have to go after him. I knew I would have to catch him. I knew, in
fact, that he wanted this—the chase. So I gave him a good head start, just as I had given him a head start millions of times
when we were kids, knowing that I would catch him, knowing I had all the advantages. Then I started running, too, the knife
in one hand, the Wonderbread bag with the sneaker in the other, my eyes finally readjusted to the starlight coming through
the inky treetops. I knew exactly where he was going. I followed him, the tiny tree branches scratching and stinging at my
face. The ground was frozen beneath me. But my shoes were office shoes, and I had trouble getting the traction I needed to
overtake him. It didn’t matter, of course. I knew where we would end up. I knew exactly where this whole thing would end up.
“Pilot!” I yelled after him. I could hear him ahead of me in the dark, thrashing through the trees. “Pilot!” I called loudly.
But then I had a better idea.