The God of War

by Marisa Silver

  THE JUDGE ORDERED ME TO complete my school year after I returned from the center. Those two weeks were a horror house of taunts and whispers, and a kind of isolation I had never experienced. On the last day of school, I burst out of the doors, eager to leave that place. Richard was waiting in the parking lot for me. Malcolm stood beside the Jeep with him, his bike lying on the ground by his feet. My pleasure at seeing Richard was punctured as I drew nearer. His duffel bags were piled on the backseat.

  “You’re leaving,” I said.

  “It’s not working out, Ares.”

  I fought to keep my voice steady. “What about the baby?”

  “She did alright with the two of you without a bunch of dumb-ass men around to mess things up,” he said, his mouth searching for a smile. But he gave up quickly, and his face and voice dropped. “It’s what she wants.”

  “Fuck you,” I said, but my voice broke over the words.

  “Hey, hey,” he said. “I know you’re upset.”

  “I’m not upset.”

  “I’m upset, too.”

  “You were never going to stay to begin with.”

  He started to contradict me, but stopped. “Maybe not,” he said.

  “Come on, Mal,” I said, reaching down to right his bike then heading toward the racks where my own stood. “We’re gonna ride. Fast, fast.”

  We rode to the sea and when we arrived, I threw my bike to the ground and ran down to the edge of the water. “I AM THE GOD OF WAR!” I yelled. “I AM THE GOD OF WAR!” I let out a roar that came from so deep a place inside me, it was as though my body were a vast cavern that defied physical reality and that held inside it all the space and energy in the universe. And then, like an echo, I heard a roar that mimicked my own so perfectly I thought I had made it. But Malcolm had made this second sound. It was his voice, full of his own feeling. I looked at him and my heart grew inside my chest because I was certain that my brother was not lost as I had feared he was. He had a voice, a pure, true voice that sang the world back to itself. It was the best thing a voice could be called upon to do.

  Our sounds frightened a clutch of birds from their hiding place inside a floating tangle of box thorn branches. They exploded just as the children had only an hour earlier, when the final bell of the year rang and they rushed outside, finally free. Malcolm shrieked and threw his hands up as if he wanted to embrace the birds. I watched his delight. It was impossible to believe there was no thought in that boy, that he did not have need or desire or the urge to reach out and touch a wider world in the same way I did. He wanted to connect to the birds even if it meant killing them and burying them, keeping them safe from the incessant harms that came of living. And it was impossible to believe that he did not have some personal language that expressed what was central to his being. Perhaps they were not words because maybe there were none that could say what needed to be said. There was only the heart expanding with its inability to contain all the joy and sorrow that it had to hold. It was an impossible task for any heart. Finally, there was nothing to do but hold up your arms and scream as loud as you could in order to let the air and the dirt, the ageless fossils and dried up fish skeletons know that you were there, trying over and over to say what could never be said. Malcolm twirled and fell to the ground laughing his inside-out laugh, and I laughed with him.

  TWENTY-ONE

  2007

  I hold my brother in a box by the shore of the Salton Sea. What I once took to be sand is simply a stretch of rocks and crushed shells and the detritus of the thousands of fish that have perished in the water over the years. The sea, once filled with the possibility of something whose farther shores could not be seen, is what it always was: an over-salinated and polluted mistake. The land around me is forsaken, a crossroads of the dispossessed. Economic improvements in the country at large must find this place last, when the coffers are empty, or nearly so. This desert outpost is like a child who has found himself such a good hiding spot that he unintentionally exiles himself from the game.

  The water, which looks like a blue oasis from a distance is, up close, a murky greenish brown. The gentle but insistent movement of it pushes algae and a disturbing, toxic-looking foam onto the beach. Trash is scattered around the shoreline—a crushed Coke can, a candy wrapper faded by the sun, indestructible Styrofoam food containers that are the clues some future anthropologist will use to determine who we were and what we cared about. But there’s not as much trash as you would think because there are still people living here who love this sea as much as we once did, who care about the place they live in even if it is overlooked by almost everyone, even if it exists only as a result of a colossal historic error. There will always be people like my mother who love a mistake, who will claim it, coddle it, and grow it until it has a purpose of its own, until they forget its erroneous beginnings and it becomes something necessary, something they can’t live without. This sea has its champions the way stray dogs have rescuers, people who turn up their noses at the breeding of purebreds when there are so many castoff, frightened mongrels lurking beneath underpasses and beside freeways.

  The judge in my case took the reporter’s view of my heroism, and in view of my youth, and of what was revealed to be a long history of violence on Kevin’s part dating from his earliest childhood, he only doled out the barest of punishments, as if it were not a life I had taken but a box of chocolates or a new pair of sneakers from the rack of a cut-rate store. The judge had words for my mother, though. He ordered her to watch Malcolm more closely and to provide him with more expert care. We moved away from Bombay Beach not long after Richard left. We settled into an apartment in San Diego, and my brother Angelo was born there. A new neighbor offered to watch Malcolm while my mother and I took a taxi to the unfamiliar hospital. The doctor gave her a shot and told her not to push until he returned, then left the room. The nurse attached a monitor to Laurel’s belly. I held up the long tongue of paper, and Laurel delighted in the peaks and valleys. We pretended our new baby was climbing a mountain on his way to us.

  “Don’t push,” the nurse warned. “The doctor said—”

  But Laurel’s scream drowned out any further instructions. The nurse pushed up the sheet covering Laurel, then ran to the door, calling, “It’s a flyer!” and suddenly I was holding a slippery, warm being in my arms. The baby was taken from me so quickly I hardly realized what had happened. My hands and arms were streaked with blood. I looked at Laurel because I needed her to tell me what to do, just as I had when I was four and had submerged my arms into a bucket of green paint she was using to reinvigorate a yard sale table. Back then she had laughed when I told her I wanted to become an alien. In the hospital room, her face opened in delight, and she laughed, and I laughed, just as we had those many years ago.

  “Good catch!” she said.

  She named him Angelo because he flew into the world. Richard’s last name was Pardee. Angelo Pardee.

  Richard came to stay for periods of time, but as the years passed the empty spaces between his visits grew longer until he hardly came at all. Malcolm moved to his first group home when he was twelve, after he had tried to smother Angelo with a plastic bag. The day Malcolm walked inside the doors of that first facility, Laurel looked as though all the bones in her face had been broken at once and her features were falling in on themselves. Everything I recognized about her disappeared in that moment of her defeat. I was eighteen then and had managed to win a scholarship to a state school up north. I was ready to leave my mother, but it frightened me to see her so adrift. Some still childish part of me relied on her obstinate assurance that Malcolm was fine, that we were fine, and that the life we led, and the place where we had lived, despite newspapermen’s deprecations and our life’s obvious privations, were worth defending as tenaciously as she had defended them for so many years.

  It was only when I moved away from my mother and met people who thought about the world in ways wholly different from the way she did, when I studied in earnest and bega
n to read the kinds of books that lined Mrs. Poole’s shelves, that I began to try to really understand what those psychiatrists at the center had told me: that my brother’s condition had nothing to do with that long-ago accident. There was a time when I was seeing a woman in Davis who was studying child development. I got drunk one night and told her how I had hurt Malcolm, and she brought out books and lecture notes. I read those books, and then others, and I learned all I could about the kind of child my brother was. Sometimes, even now, I run across a television program about children like Malcolm, and I watch obsessively, moving close to the screen as recognition washes over me in waves. I listen to experts explain about disrupted brain chemicals and damaged synapses, about the microscopic dings on a strand of DNA. I watch anguished, brave parents who dedicate themselves to treatments at the expense of financial security, jobs, and sometimes marriages. But what I focus on most are the children who people the backgrounds of the images. I look for the brothers and sisters of the affected child and study how they play and eat and occasionally demand attention, but mostly how they behave as any normal child would, happily ignorant of the evident strangeness around them because it is what they are used to. I wonder if they carry secret burdens in their young hearts. Watching those children, I am awed by the power of their natures to defend them, and I wonder why I was not so protected. Thirty years ago, there was just my brother Malcolm, and what I believed I had done to injure him, and there was my mother’s fierce and sometimes neglectful love for us.

  I left that decent woman in Davis as I have left many good women who wanted children, or homes, or more of me than I was willing to give them. My college money only took me through two years. The rest of my learning has come from libraries and the people I have traveled among and worked next to, all of whom have stories. I find that if I listen well, their tales, which appear to be about strangers and places I have never been, are about me, too. I have lived throughout the West, in Alaska, Washington, and Idaho, and now seem to have come to roost in Wyoming in the arms of a woman named Margaret who wants children, and a home, and all of me. I finally feel ready. I have chosen to live in a place where the winters are as cold as the desert summers are hot. On certain days of the year, I think that every cell in my brain will be numbed by the knifelike freeze that settles over the mountains. But there is no cold that can erase the heat and desolation of my desert childhood, and of what happened here.

  IT TOOK ME EIGHTEEN HOURS to drive from Wyoming to San Diego. I drove straight through, stopping once in St. George, Utah, and then again outside Barstow just to sleep for twenty minutes in my car. I left my home within a half hour of getting the news of Malcolm’s death. I don’t know why I hurried. Malcolm was gone, after all. There was nothing more I could do for him. But as the miles between us closed, I grew more anxious to arrive. I felt his need for me prickling my skin as I did when I was young and knew that I was responsible for him. When I saw the cityscape of San Diego, a giddy anticipation rocketed through my body as if I were going to greet a lover after a long separation.

  I arrived at the group home in the late morning. The director, a big, athletic man who looked as if he would come out on top of any number of situations, showed me to Malcolm’s room. I had been in this small, sparse room during my visits, which I tried to make every three or four months, although often the time between them was longer. The only decorations were two generic paintings of mountains and flowers that the staff had hung on the walls. My brother had become a fastidious man. His bed was neatly made. His two dress shirts hung side by side in the closet, swaying in the breeze created when I opened the door. His three pairs of shoes—a pair of sneakers, shower shoes, and a pair of dress shoes so seldom worn they reminded me of the shoes children wore to church—were lined up in a straight row on the closet floor.

  My earlier visits to my brother were usually unsatisfying. Whether it was the progress of his particular affliction or the dulling effects of his drug regimens, he turned more inward with age. He walked with his head bent, as though he were searching for something he’d lost, and he tended to drag his feet. His posture and shuffling gait became even more pronounced as he gained weight, so that in the last years he resembled a lumbering bear. I believed that he recognized me and that he remembered the childhood we shared, the games we played, but I had no proof except that he would let me lay a hand on his shoulder when we sat together and put my arms around his big back when I said good-bye. We took walks around the neighborhood and in a nearby park. Sometimes I helped him with the chores he was assigned at the home. He had been put in charge of the gardening, and as we walked around the outside of the house I exclaimed over the birds of paradise that were so plentiful and the twin Japanese maple trees that flourished despite the heat. I was always taken aback by the gentleness of his attentions toward the garden when he plucked dead leaves from the ground or straightened a stake. I could feel a familiar stab of hope as I foolishly allowed myself to believe these ministrations indicated a satisfying life. Often during my visits he would become agitated. I had no power to calm him any longer, and when he was in a particular state, his caregivers would suggest I leave. They said they worried for my safety.

  “Has my mother been here?” I asked the man.

  “She was at the hospital, of course,” he said. “She told us you would decide how to dispose of his remains.”

  “What?”

  “Whether you prefer a burial or cremation. He had no will.”

  I had no ready answer. I had not expected to be confronted so boldly with the physical reality of my brother’s death. My first reaction was anger at Laurel for not having dealt with this. It was typical of her careless and ultimately destructive optimism about my brother that she would not have thought ahead to a moment when this information would be necessary. It galled me that her idea of care did not extend to such an earthbound reality as death. But my anger was a futile and atavistic thing, and I realized, with a sadness even more dull than what I felt hearing the news of Malcolm’s death—for that is what I felt, really, not shock at the unexpected heart attack of an overweight and inactive thirty-eight-year-old man, but a leaden sense of inevitability—that I did not know what my brother would have preferred. Despite the fact that my mother and I invented thought and desire for him, despite the fact that I folded him into my elaborate games as though he were a willing participant and imbued him with initiative when he had none, despite the fact that, even now, he remained as inseparable from me as my own guilty heart, neither one of us could have honestly said we knew what he wanted.

  I slid open one of his dresser drawers and fingered a T-shirt. I was reminded of how huge his clothes had always been even when he was young and lank, how he preferred not to feel bound by cloth or touch. I imagined his bulk must have been an irritant for him, so much flesh defying his natural predilection for airiness. I wondered if he had continued to imagine flight.

  The director handed me a shoebox. “Some things were in his desk,” he said. “Not much. Nothing of value.”

  I had a strong reaction to this, as if the director were showing me Malcolm’s dead body and not an old box, and I didn’t immediately take it from his hands. After a moment, he put the box back on the desk. “Let me know what you decide about his remains,” he said and left the room. I felt foolish sitting alone and left soon after.

  Later, I checked into a motel and called Margaret. I felt grateful to hear the rough gravel of her voice. I imagined her hands, which she occasionally complained about, because her mother had been a hand model in Chicago and had made Margaret feel self-conscious about her body, which was powerful and athletic. Everything about Margaret’s physicality was blunt and present. She stood as comfortably rooted to herself and her home as the mountains she loved. The strength of her lovemaking, which attracted me, also overwhelmed me so that I was sometimes relieved when we parted in the mornings, she for her job guiding climbers in the summer and skiers in the winter, and I for whatever seasonal work I pick
ed up and the comforts of solitude. Still, Margaret was the first woman I had not fled from when the responsibilities of affection tightened around me and reminded me of the consequences of care. We had been together for a year and a half. I closed my eyes and saw her lake blue eyes, the smooth planes of her cheeks.

  “How are you?” she asked.

  “Hot. It’s dry here.”

  She laughed. “You’re ridiculous,” she said affectionately. Her easy familiarity with my reticent nature still surprised me, and I had to work to ignore the discomfort being known engendered in me. She was frank in all things. She had made it clear early on that she would have none of my obfuscation. She wanted all of me or none of me, and for some reason, I took her at her word. I could not account for our longevity except to say that I found myself wanting to become necessary to her.

  We were silent for a long time. I listened to her breath, remembered its natural sweetness, how it reminded me of the elusive scent of roses.

  “I went to his room,” I said, finally.

  “Mmm.”

  “I sent his things to Goodwill.”

  “Your mother called right after you left.”

  I didn’t respond.

  “Have you spoken to her yet?” Margaret said.

  “Not yet.” During the drive I had imagined calling Laurel, had even pulled over at a rest stop at one point determined to do just that. But what would we say? We saw each other infrequently, perhaps once a year, and when we did, we cut wide swaths around what mattered. How could I talk about what it meant for Malcolm to be dead without stepping into a conversation I had avoided for so many years? Was Laurel prepared to hear the truth about the shooting? Was I prepared to tell it? What would happen when I let go of a lie I had held so long that it had become inextricable from my character?

  “How did she sound?” I asked.

  “Like she lost a son. When are you going to call her?”