Revolution (3 page)

4

I
always take the long way home.

Up Willow from Pierrepont. Through the streets of old Brooklyn. What’s left of it. Then I turn right on my street, Cranberry. But tonight I’m hunched up against the cold, head down, fingering chords in the air, so lost in Suite no. 1 that I walk up Henry instead.

Nathan and I played for hours. Before we started, he took a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to me.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I fell.”

He gave me a look over the top of his glasses—his truth-serum look.

“Ms. Beezemeyer talked about Truman. And closure. It all went wrong from there,” I said.

Nathan nodded, then he said, “This word
closure
… it is a stupid word,
ja?
Bach did not believe in closure. Handel did not. Beethoven did not. Only Americans believe in closure because Americans are like little children—easily swindled. Bach believed in making music,
ja
?”

He kept looking at me, waiting for a reply.

“
Ja,
” I said softly.

We played then. He cut me no slack for my injuries and swore like a pirate when I bungled a trill or rushed a phrase. It was eight o’clock by the time I left.

The winter streets are cold and dark as I walk down them now. Lights blink all around me for the gods of the holidays. Green and red for Santa. Blue for Judah Maccabee. White for Martha Stewart. The cold air on my face feels good. I am drained. I am calm. And I am not paying attention.

Because suddenly, there it is, right in front of me—the Templeton.

It’s an apartment building, built from what used to be the old Hotel St. Charles. It’s eighty stories high, two blocks square, and it throws its ugly shadow over everything, even at night. The stores on the ground floor are always lit up, even when they’re closed. They sell basil sorbet and quince paste and lots of other things nobody wants. The upper floors are condos. They start at half a million.

It’s been nearly two years since I’ve come this close to it. I stand still, staring at it but not seeing it. I see the Charles instead. Jimmy Shoes told me it was swanky once. Back in the thirties. He said it had a saltwater pool on its roof, and spotlights, too. The Dodgers ate there, gangsters strolled in with chorus girls on their arms, and swing bands played until dawn.

It wasn’t swanky two years ago. It was crumbling. Part of it had burned. What was left housed welfare cases and winos. Drug dealers hung out in the front. Muggers prowled the hallways. Its doors were always open, like a leering mouth, and I could smell its rank breath whenever I walked by—a mixture of mildew, cat piss, and sadness. I heard it, too. I heard angry music blaring from boom boxes, heard Mrs. Ortega screaming at her kids, heard the Yankees game on Mrs. Flynn’s ancient radio, and Max. I hear him still. He’s in my head and I can’t get him out.

“Maximilien R. Peters! Incorruptible, ineluctable, and indestructible!” he’d yell. “It’s time to start the revolution, baby!”

I stop dead and stare at the sidewalk. I don’t want to but I can’t help it. It was there, right there, about five yards in front of me, by that long, jagged crack, where Max stepped into the street. And took Truman with him.

Rain washed away the blood long ago but I still see it. Unfurling beneath my brother’s small, broken body like the red petals of a rose. And suddenly the pain that’s always inside me, tightly coiled, swells into something so big and so fierce it feels like it will burst my heart, split my skull, tear me apart.

“Make it stop,” I whisper, squeezing my eyes shut.

When I open them again, I see my brother. He’s not dead. He’s standing in the street, watching me. It can’t be. But it is. My God, it is! I run into the street.

“Truman! I’m sorry, Tru! I’m so sorry!” I sob, reaching for him.

I want him to tell me that it’s okay, it was all just a dumb mistake and he’s fine. But instead of his voice, I hear tires screeching. I turn and see a car bearing down on me.

Everything inside me is screaming at me to run, but I don’t move. Because I want this. I want an end to the pain. The car swerves violently and screeches to a stop. I smell burned rubber. People are shouting.

The driver’s on me in an instant. She’s crying and trembling. She grabs the front of my jacket and shakes me. “You crazy bitch!” she screams. “I could have killed you!”

“Sorry,” I say.

“Sorry?” she shouts. “You don’t look sorry. You—”

“Sorry you missed,” I say.

She lets go of me then. Takes a step back.

There are cars stopped behind us. Somebody starts honking. I look for Truman, but he’s gone. Of course he is. He wasn’t real. It’s the pills playing tricks. Dr. Becker said I might start seeing things if I took too many.

I try to get moving, to get out of the street, but my legs are shaking so badly I can’t walk right. There’s a man on the sidewalk, gawking at me. I give him the finger and stumble home.

5

“M
om?” I shout as I open the door to my house. There’s no answer. That’s not good.

I kick my way through the heap of mail on the floor. Bills. More bills. Letters from realtors who want to sell our house for us. Postcards from art galleries. A copy of
Immolation
, St. Anselm’s student lit rag. Letters for my father from people who still haven’t heard that he moved to Boston over a year ago to chair the genetics department at Harvard. My father’s a genetics expert. World-famous. My mother’s out of her mind.

“Mom?
Mom!
” I shout.

Still no answer. Alarm bells go off in my head. I run into the parlor. She’s there. Not standing in the backyard in her bare feet, clutching handfuls of snow. Not breaking every dish in the house. Not curled up catatonic in Truman’s bed. Just sitting at her easel, painting. I kiss the top of her head, relieved.

“You okay?” I ask her.

She nods and smiles, presses her hand to my cheek, and never takes her eyes off her canvas.

I want her to ask me if I’m okay. I want to tell her what I almost did. Minutes ago on Henry Street. I want her to tell me never to do it again. To bitch me out. To put her arms around me and hold me. But she doesn’t.

She’s working on another picture of Truman. There are so many already. Hanging on the walls. Leaning against chairs. Propped up on the piano. Stacked in the doorway. He’s everywhere I look.

There are tools on the floor. Sawdust. Screws and nails. Scraps of canvas. She likes to build her own stretchers. There are crumpled rags and crushed silver tubes strewn about, splats of color on the floor. I can smell the oil paint. It’s my favorite smell in the whole world. For just a second, I stand there inhaling, and it’s like before. Before Truman died.

It’s a chilly fall evening and it’s raining and we’re all in the parlor, the three of us, Mom and me and Truman. There’s a fire in the fireplace and Mom’s painting. She’s making her still lifes. They’re so good. The critic for the
Times
said the one in the Met’s collection is “the world made small.” Once she painted a tiny nest with a blue egg in it, resting under the arch of an old black sewing machine. Another time it was a red sewing box, tipped over and spilling out its contents, next to a chipped coffee cup. And my favorite—one of a red amaryllis next to a music box. Truman’s like her and he draws while she paints. I play my guitar. The rain comes down harder, darkness falls. We don’t care. Together in our house, in the firelight, we are the world made small.

A few times, my father was there with us. Home late, as always, rumpled and bleary-eyed and smelling like the lab. He would walk in noiselessly and sit on the edge of the sofa as if he were only visiting. Distant. Apart from us. A shy admirer.

“Moo shu pork?” I ask my mother now.

She nods, then frowns. “The eyes aren’t right,” she says. “I need to get the eyes right.”

“You will, Mom,” I say.

But she won’t. Vermeer and Rembrandt and da Vinci put together couldn’t do it. Even if they got the shade right—a clear, startling Windex blue—they’d still fail because Truman’s eyes were totally transparent. That whole windows to the soul thing? That was him. When you looked into his eyes, you could see everything he thought and felt and loved. You could see Lyra and Pan. The Temple of Dendur. Bottle rockets. Garry Kasparov. Beck. Kyuma. Chili cheese dogs. Derek Jeter. And us.

I walk to the kitchen and call in our order: the moo shu, two egg rolls, sesame noodles. Willie Chen brings it. I’m on a first-name basis with all the delivery guys. I make two plates and leave Mom’s on a table by her easel. She pays no attention to it, but she’ll eat a bit in the middle of the night. I know because I usually wake up around two and go downstairs to check on her. Sometimes she’s still painting. Sometimes she’s staring out the window.

I eat my dinner alone tonight, like I do every night. In our big, empty dining room. It’s not so bad. I can study my music and no one asks me about the calculus test I failed; or reminds me of my curfew; or demands to know the name, address, and intentions of the delinquent du jour crashed out in my bed.

“Eat something,” I say half an hour later as I kiss my mother goodnight.

“Yes, yes. I will,” she says in French, still frowning at Truman’s eyes. She’s French, my mother. Her name is Marianne LaReine. Sometimes she speaks English, sometimes French. Most of the time, she doesn’t speak at all.

I head upstairs, iPod in hand. I plan to fall asleep with Pink Floyd. It’s homework.

I gave Nathan some stuff a few days ago. Demos of songs I’d written. I’d used a mix of time signatures and some cool effects. I’d layered in the different guitar parts and vocals with a loop pedal. I called the whole thing
Plaster Castle
. I thought the songs were pretty okay. Kind of Sonic Youth meets the Dirty Projectors. Nathan did not think they were okay.

“Abominable,” he’d told me. “A noisy mishmash. You must learn to do more with less.”

“Thanks, Nathan. Thanks a lot,” I said, really pissed off. “Care to tell me how?”

His great advice was to listen to the guitar phrase about four minutes in on the song “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” He says David Gilmour wrote it and it’s only four notes long, but it sounds exactly how sadness feels. I told him I didn’t need an old stoner to tell me how sadness feels. I knew.

“That’s not enough,” he said. “My schnauzer, too, knows how sadness feels. What matters is this: Can you express that knowing? That feeling? That is what separates you.”

“Separates who? Me from a schnauzer?”

“Separates an artist from a schmuck.”

“So I’m a schmuck now? That is the last time I give you anything of mine to listen to.”

Nathan’s reply was this: “One day in 1974, a man named David Gilmour was sad,
ja?
So what? Who cares? I do. Why? Because of that one incredible phrase. Because it endures. When you can write music that endures, bravo. Until then, keep quiet and study the work of those who can.”

Most of the teachers at St. Anselm’s tell me I’m a genius. That I can do anything, be anything. That my potential is limitless and I should reach for the stars. Nathan is the only one who calls me dummkopf and tells me to practice the Sarabande in Bach’s Lute Suite in E Minor five hundred times a night if that’s what it takes to get it through my thick skull. And it’s such a relief I could cry.

Up in my room, I drop my jeans and belt on the floor. I sleep in my underwear. As I cross the room, I catch sight of myself in my mirror. Skinny as a boy, pale and raccoon-eyed, straggly brown hair in short, ratty braids, and so much metal on me that I clank when I walk.

Arden Tode invented this game called Switched at Birth where she IMs the whole class someone’s name and says it’s just been discovered that this person was taken home from the hospital by the wrong parents. Then everyone has to IM her back the names of the person’s real parents. She picks the two best names and posts them, and her victim’s picture, on her Facebook page. My parents are Marilyn Manson and Captain Jack Sparrow. No wonder she’s failing biology.

As I pull off my T-shirt, the key—the one I wear around my neck—gets tangled up in my hair. I tease it out and it glints at me. It shines. Even in the dim light of my room, it shines. Just like Truman did.

I remember when he found this key. The night before—a Saturday night—our parents had had a big fight. There was crying and shouting. A lot of it. I’d gone upstairs to my room and turned up the television in an attempt to drown them out. I’d taken Truman up, hoping he’d watch a
Lost in Space
DVD with me but he didn’t. He stood in the doorway and listened. It was the same old thing. Mom was angry at Dad for never being around. Dad was angry at Mom for thinking he should be.

“Do you think money grows on trees?” he yelled. “I work hard to make a good living. For you. For the kids. To keep us in this house. To keep Andi and Truman at that school—”

“That’s bullshit. We have plenty of money. I know it, the bank knows it, St. Anselm’s knows it, and so do you.”

“Look, can we stop? It’s late. I’m tired. I worked all day.”

“And all night, too! That’s the problem!”

“Damn it, Marianne, what do you want from me?”

“No. What do
you
want, Lewis? I thought it was me. The kids. But I was wrong. So tell me. Say it. Come right out with it for once. What do you want?”

I’d given up on
Lost in Space
by this time. I was standing in the doorway, too. It was quiet for a few seconds and then I heard his reply. His voice was quiet. He wasn’t shouting anymore. He didn’t need to.

“I want the key,” he said. “The key to the universe. To life. To the future and the past. To love and hate. Truth. God. It’s there. Inside of us. In the genome. The answer to every question. If I can just find it. That’s what I want,” he finished, softly. “I want the key.”

I closed my bedroom door after that. Truman and I didn’t say a word to each other; we just sat on my bed and watched Dr. Smith camp it up in his velour space suit. What else could we do? How could we compete with the future and the past and God and truth? Mom with her paintings of birds’ eggs and coffee cups, me and Truman with our stupid, crappy kid stuff. It was laughable. My father didn’t give a rat’s about the bands I liked or Truman’s latest cartoon crush. Why would he? He had better options. I mean, who would you hang with if you could—Johnny Ramone, Magneto, or God?

The next morning Mom was up early. I don’t think she’d slept at all. Her eyes were red and the kitchen smelled of cigarettes when me and Truman came down for breakfast.

“Let’s go to the Flea. You want to?” she said.

She loves the Brooklyn Flea Market. She finds inspiration there. In all the sad and broken things. The frayed lace, the battered paintings and damaged toys. They all have past lives and she loves to imagine what they might be, then tell us their stories.

We jumped in the car and headed to Fort Greene. That day she found a gnarly three-legged planter she said was Elizabeth Tudor’s chamber pot, a magnifying glass Sherlock Holmes had used at Baskerville Hall, and a silver dragon ring Mata Hari had worn as she faced the firing squad. I found a vintage Clash T-shirt. And Truman, he’d dug in every box of junk—pawing through rusty locks, broken fountain pens, corkscrews, and bottle openers—until he’d found what he was looking for: a key, black with tarnish, about two inches long.

I was with him when he found it. He got it for a dollar. The dealer said she’d found it on the Bowery in some boxes of junk dumped on the sidewalk outside the Paradise, an old theater.

“Owner let the place go and the roof fell in,” she said. “Now the city’s going to tear the whole thing down to make way for a gym. Goddamned mayor. That theater was built in 1808. Who uses all these gyms anyway? Whole goddamned world’s fat as hell.”

“Do we have silver polish?” Truman asked as we walked back to our car.

“Under the sink,” Mom said. “Look, Tru, that’s a fleur-de-lis on the top. A sign of royalty. I bet it belonged to Louis XIV.”

She started to tell us a story about the key, but Truman made her stop. “It’s not a pretend thing, Mom. It’s real,” he said. When we got home, he polished it until it gleamed.

“It’s beautiful!” Mom said when it was all shiny. “Look, there’s an
L
engraved on it. I was right! It’s for Louis, don’t you think?”

Truman didn’t answer. He put it in his pocket and we didn’t see it again until two days later. It was a Tuesday night. We were all in the parlor—me and Truman doing our homework, Mom painting. And suddenly we heard the front door open. It was Dad. We looked up at each other, surprised.

He walked in carrying a bouquet of flowers. Awkwardly. As if he were a miller’s son courting a princess, expecting to get laughed out of the palace. The princess didn’t laugh, though. She smiled and went to the kitchen to find a vase. While she was gone, Dad looked over Truman’s fractions and my algorithms. For something to do. So he didn’t have to make conversation with us. Then he sat down on the sofa and rubbed his face with his hands.

“Tired, Dad?” Truman asked him.

Dad lowered his hands and nodded.

“Too much T and A?”

Dad laughed. When Truman was a baby, he heard Dad talking about DNA, but when Tru tried to pronounce it, it came out “T and A.” He called it that ever since.

“Way too much, Tru. But we’re close. So close.”

“To what?”

“To cracking the genome. To finding the answers. The key.”

“But you don’t have to anymore.”

“Don’t have to what?”

Truman reached into his pants pocket, pulled his little silver key out, and placed it in our father’s hand. Dad stared at it.

“It’s a key,” Truman said.

“I see that.”

“It’s a special key.”

“How so?”

“It has an
L
on it.
L
for
love
. See? It’s the key to the universe, Dad. You said you were looking for it. You told Mom you were. I found it for you so you won’t have to look anymore. So you can come home at night.”