20th Century Ghosts (36 page)

She turned a sideways look upon me, and smiled sympathetically. Outside, the sky was a blue-almost-black, and the clouds were a scalding shade of crimson, but in the car it was already night. I turned in my seat, sat up on my knees, to watch the cottage disappear through the trees.

"Let's play a game," my mother said. "Let's pretend you never really knew your father. He went away before you were born. We can make up fun little stories about him. He has a Semper Fi tattoo from his days in the marines, and another one, a blue anchor, that's from—" Her voice faltered, as she came up suddenly short on inspiration.

"From when he worked on a deep-sea oil rig."

She laughed. "Right. And we'll pretend the road is magic. The Amnesia Highway. By the time we're home, we'll both believe the story is true, that he really did leave before you were born. Everything else will seem like a dream, those dreams as real as memories. The made-up story will probably be better than the real thing anyway. I mean, he loved your bones, and he wanted everything for you, but can you remember one interesting thing he ever did?"

I had to admit I couldn't.

"Can you even remember what he did for a living?"

I had to admit I didn't. Insurance?

"Isn't this a good game?" she asked. "Speaking of games. Do you still have your deal?"

"My deal?" I asked, then remembered, and touched the pocket of my jacket.

"You want to hold onto it. That's some winning hand. King of Pennyfarthings. Queen of Sheets. You got it all, boy. I'm telling you, when we get home, you give that Melinda a call." She laughed again, and then affectionately patted her tummy. "Good days ahead, kid. For both of us."

I shrugged.

"You can take the mask off, you know," my mother said. "Unless you like wearing it. Do you like wearing it?"

I reached up for the sun visor, turned it down, and opened the mirror. The lights around the mirror switched on. I studied my new face of ice, and the face beneath, a malformed, human blank.

"Sure," I said. "It's me."

I don't know who I'm writing this for, can't say who I expect to read it. Not the police, anyway. I don't know what happened to my brother, and I can't tell them where he is. Nothing I could put down here would help them find him.

And anyway, this isn't really about his disappearance ... although it
does
concern a missing person, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't think the two things had anything to do with each other. I have never told anyone what I know about Edward Prior, who left school one October day in 1977, and never arrived home for chili and baked potatoes with Mom. For a long time, the first year or two after he vanished, I didn't want to think about my friend Eddie. I would do anything not to think about him. If I passed some people talking about him in the halls of my high school—
I heard he stole his momma's weed and some money and ran away to fuckin California!
—I'd fix my eyes on some point in the distance and pretend I was deaf. And if someone actually approached and asked me straight out what I thought had happened to him—now and then someone would, since we were known
companeros
—I'd set my face into a rigid blank and shrug. "I almost think I care sometimes," I said.

Later, I didn't think about Eddie out of studiously formed habit. If anything happened by chance to remind me of him—if I saw a boy who looked like him, or read something in the news about a missing teen—I would instantly begin to think of something else, hardly aware I was even doing it.

In the last three weeks, though, ever since my little brother Morris went missing, I find myself thinking about Ed Prior more and more; can't seem, through any effort of will, to turn thoughts of him aside. The urge to talk to someone about what I know is really almost more than I can bear. But this isn't a story for the police. Believe me, it wouldn't do them any good, and it might do myself a fair amount of bad. I can't tell them where to look for Edward Prior any more than I can tell them where to look for Morris—can't tell what I don't know—but if I were to share this story with a detective, I think I might be asked some harsh questions, and some people (Eddie's mother, for example, still alive and on her third marriage) would be put through a lot of unnecessary emotional strain.

And it's just possible I could wind up with a one-way ticket to the same place where my brother spent the last two years of his life: the Wellbrook Progressive Mental Health Center. My brother was there voluntarily, but Wellbrook includes a wing just for people who had to be committed. Morris was part of the clinic's work program, pushed a mop for them four days out of the week, and on Friday mornings he went into the Governor's Wing, as it's known, to wash their shit off the walls. And their blood.

Was I just talking about Morris in the past tense? I guess I was. I don't hope anymore that the phone will ring, and it will be Betty Millhauser from Wellbrook, her voice rushed and winded, telling me they've found him in a homeless shelter somewhere, and they're bringing him back. I don't think anyone will be calling to tell me they found him floating in the Charles, either. I don't think anyone will be calling at all, except maybe to say nothing is known. Which could almost be the epitaph on Morris's grave. And maybe I have to admit that I'm writing this, not to show it to anyone, but because I can't help myself, and a blank page is the only safe audience for this story I can imagine.
 

My little brother didn't start to talk until he was four. A lot of people thought he was retarded. A lot of people around my old hometown, Fallow,
still
think he was mentally retarded, or autistic. For the record, when I was a kid I half-thought he was retarded myself, even though my parents told me he wasn't.

When he was eleven, he was diagnosed with juvenile schizophrenia. Later came other diagnoses: depression, obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, acute depressive schizophrenia. I don't know if any of those words really capture the sense of who he was, and what he struggled with. I know that even when he found his words, he didn't use them that much. That he was always too small for his age, a boy with delicate bones, slender long-fingered hands, and an elfin face. He was always curiously affectless, his feelings submerged too deeply to create a stir on his face. He never seemed to blink. At times, my brother made me think of one of those tapered, horned conch shells, with a glossy pink interior curving away and out of sight into some tightly wound inner mystery. You could hold your ear to such a shell and imagine you heard the depths of a vast roaring ocean—but it was really just a trick of acoustics. The sound you were hearing was the soft, rushing thunder of nothing there. The doctors had their diagnoses, and when I was fourteen years old, that was mine.

Because he was susceptible to agonizing ear infections, Morris wasn't let out in the winter ... which by my mother's definition began when the World Series ended and ended when the baseball season began. Anyone who has ever had small children themselves can tell you how hard it is to keep them happily occupied for any real length of time when you can't just send them outside. My own son is twelve now and lives with my ex in Boca Raton, but we all lived together as a family until he was seven, and I remember just how draining a cold and rainy day, all of us stuck inside, could be. For my little brother, every day was a cold and rainy day, but unlike with other children, it wasn't hard to keep him busy. He occupied
himself
, descending into the cellar as soon as he came home from school, to work with quiet industry, for the rest of the afternoon, on one of his immense, sprawling, technically complicated and fundamentally worthless construction projects.

His first fascination was the towers and elaborate temples he would build out of Dixie cups. I have a memory of what might have been the first time he ever made something out of them. It was evening, and all of us, my parents, Morris and I, were gathered in the television room for one of our rare family rituals, the nightly watching of M *A *S *H. By the time the show faded into its second commercial break, however, we had all pretty much quit paying attention to the antics of Alan Alda and company, and were staring at my brother.

My father sat on the floor beside him. I think initially he might've been helping him build. My father was a bit of an autistic person himself, a shy, clumsy man who didn't get out of his pajamas on weekends, and who had almost no social truck with the world whatsoever beyond my mother. He never showed any sign of disappointment in Morris, and he often seemed most content when he was stretched out beside my brother, painting sunshine-filled stick-figure worlds on construction paper with him. This time, though, he sat back and let Morris work alone, as curious as the rest of us to see how it would come out. Morris built and stacked and arranged, his long, slender fingers darting here and there, placing the cups so quickly it almost looked like a magic trick, or the work of a robot on an assembly line ... without hesitation, seemingly without thought, never accidentally knocking another cup down. Sometimes he wasn't even looking at what his hands were doing, was staring instead into the box of Dixie Cups, as if to see how many were left. The tower climbed higher and higher, cups flying onto it so quickly I found myself sometimes holding my breath in actual disbelief.

A second box of Dixie Cups was opened and used up. By the time he was finished—which happened when he had gone through all the wax cups my father could find for him—the tower was as tall as Morris himself, and surrounded by a defensive wall with an open gate. Because of the spaces between the cups, there seemed to be narrow archer's windows in the sides of the tower, and the top of both tower and wall appeared crenellated. It had startled us all a little, watching Morris build the thing with such speed and self-assurance, but it wasn't an inherently fabulous structure. Any other five-year-old might've built the same thing. It was only remarkable in that it suggested larger underlying ambitions. One sensed Morris easily could've gone on building, adding smaller watch towers, out-buildings, a whole rustic Dixie cup village. And when the cups were gone, Morris glanced around and
laughed
, a sound I think I had never heard before then—a high, almost piercing noise, unpracticed and more alarming than pleasant. He laughed, and he clapped for himself, just once, the way a maharajah might clap to send away a servant.

The other way the tower was obviously different from the work of some other child his age was that any normal five-year-old would've constructed such a thing for one purpose—to give it a swift kick and watch the cups come down in a dry, rattling collapse. I know that's what I wanted to do with his tower, and I was three years older: march along it, bashing with both feet, for the sheer joy of knocking down something big and carefully built, a Little League Godzilla.

Every emotionally normal child has a streak of that in them. I suppose, if I am honest, that streak was a little broader in myself than it was in others. My compulsion to knock things down continued into adulthood, and ultimately included my wife, who disliked the habit, and expressed her displeasure with divorce papers and a jaundiced-looking lawyer who possessed all the personal warmth of a wood-chipper, and who operated with just such grinding mechanical efficiency in the courtroom.

Morris, though, soon lost interest in his finished work, and wanted juice. My father led him away into the kitchen, murmuring that he would bring home a huge box of cups for Morris to play with tomorrow, so he could build an even bigger castle in the basement. I couldn't believe that Morris had left his tower just standing there. It was a tease I couldn't bear. I shoved myself up off the couch, took a crooked step towards it—and then my mother caught my arm and held it. Her gaze latched into mine, and it carried a dark warning:
Don't even think.
Neither of us spoke, and in another instant I pulled my arm out of her hand and drifted out of the room myself.

My mother did love me, but rarely said so, and often seemed to hold me at an emotional arm's length. She understood me in a way my father didn't. Once, horsing around in the shallows of Walden Pond, I skipped a stone at a smaller boy who had splashed me. It hit his upper arm with a meaty
thwack
and raised an ugly purple welt. My mother saw to it that I didn't swim the rest of the summer, although we continued to visit Walden every Saturday afternoon, so Morris could paddle clumsily around; someone had persuaded my parents that swimming was therapeutic for him, and so she was as firm that he should swim as she was that I shouldn't. I was required to sit on the sand with her, and was not allowed to stray out of sight of her beach towel. I could read, but was not allowed to play with, or even talk to, other children. Looking back, it's hard to resent her if she was overly severe with me then, and on other occasions. She saw, more plainly than others, a lot of what was worst in me, and it worried her. She had some sense of my potential, and instead of filling her with hope and excitement, it made her harsh with me.

What Morris had done in the living room, in the space of a half hour, was just a hint of what he would do with three times the area to work in, and as many Dixie cups as he wanted. In the next year he painstakingly built an elevated superhighway—it meandered all around our spacious, well-lit basement, but if stretched out straight it would've measured nearly a quarter mile—a giant Sphinx, and a great circular igloo, large enough for both of us to sit inside, with a low entrance I could just squirm through.

From there it was no great stretch to designing towering, if impersonal, LEGO metropolises, patterned after the skylines of actual cities. A year after that, he graduated to dominoes, building delicate cathedrals with dozens of perfectly balanced ivory spires, reaching halfway to the ceiling. When Morris was nine, he became briefly famous, at least in Fallow, when Boston's
Chronicle
ran a short feature on him. Morris had set up over eighteen thousand dominoes in the gym of his school for the developmentally challenged. He arranged them in the shape of a giant griffin battling a column of knights, and Channel Five shot him setting them off, filmed the whole great roaring tumble. His dominoes fell in such a way that arrows appeared to fly, and the griffin seemed to slash at one of the gasping chain-mailed knights; three lines of crimson dominoes fell over, looking for all the world like gashes. For a week I suffered fits of black, poisonous jealousy, left the room when he came into it, couldn't stand that there should be so much attention focused on him; but my resentment made as little impression on him as his own celebrity. Morris was equally indifferent to both. I gave up my anger when I saw it made as much sense as screaming into a well, and eventually the rest of the world forgot that for a moment, Morris had been someone interesting.