A Key to Treehouse Living

by Elliot Reed

  ISABELLA

  The daughter of my uncle, six years my senior, avid equestrian, weekly visitor to the mansion, one time took me to the movies. She was my first true love. Isabella was also among my uncle’s greatest loves, though I loved her more than he did. Or maybe he loved her as much as I did but he just didn’t know how to show it. He loved his bugle. He showed that by playing it so beautifully. I showed Isabella I loved her by hanging up her parka on the hall tree when she visited in winter, by bringing her popsicles when she visited in the summer, and by tidying things up in the kitchen when I heard she was coming over. I’d mow the lawn for her, clean the mold off of her purple folding chair and place it in her favorite spot so when she came she could just lie out and relax. Things took a turn for the worse when she left for France and met the astronaut. The time I knew Isabella the least, when we were light-years apart, was on the day of her wedding. I will never forget it. My aunt had been dead for years, but my uncle had commissioned a bust of her and had placed it at the head of one of the long tables that had been set up in the yard. Dinner came, then cake. Isabella and the astronaut kissed. My uncle gave a bugle solo, lit off a huge firework, and then five gypsies in white tuxedos tore the linen coverings from a new wing of the mansion: a huge bedroom with a private entrance, a blue-painted nursery for the grandchildren, and a bathroom with a hot tub. I was in the highest limb of the sycamore tree in the yard of the double-wide trailer, spying with binoculars through the clouds of smoke that rose from tires in the campfire. A little girl at one of the long tables let go of a red balloon she was holding and shrieked as it flew away. I wished, on the balloon, that the marriage would not last, and it didn’t. A month later, Isabella left the astronaut to explore her inner self in Mexico City, and he showed up at my uncle’s house in a car filled with vacuum-packed clothing and gear, sat down at the kitchen table, and revealed the fact that he’d been sterilized by a NASA experiment gone wrong. He went on to say that Isabella wasn’t interested in kids anyway, nor in fact was she interested in him.

  INDEX

  Not THE index, just AN index, unalphabetized, of entries I am still researching:

  Light, Lit, Aflame, Amok, Kindle, Air Show, Instinct, Attack, Sugar Rots Teeth, Jelly-Bean Alchemy, Mezzo-soprano, Kale, The Sharpening of Spears, Caring for Your Rattlesnake, False Bite, Mysterious Charges, Phony, Dent Repair Tool Kit, Hail Ice Cream, El Hondero’s Big Balloon Repair, Divine Intervention, Papal Hallucinations, Gold Nipple Piercings, Cabbage, Dental Emergencies, Going Shoeless, Depression, The Use of Fish as Bait, Pigs, Pig-Hair Coat, Triangulation, Disorientation at Sea, REM Sleep to Waking Transitions, Ball Pit, Nudity and Cake, Escalators, Scarecrows.

  ICING OF CAKE

  Most arousing part of a cake. Inexplicably most arousing in white. Also known as frosting. Eating of the icing is forbidden before the cake has been revealed. A week following her marriage, in the middle of the night, Isabella ate icing from the leftover cake, standing by the fridge, in the yellow light, alone, sucking it from her finger. I saw it all from the top of the stairs.

  JELLY FLYTRAP

  Jelly is a gelatinous substance resulting from the super-heating of ripe fruit and sugar. Jelly is stored in glass jars in pantries. Pantries are a great place to hide if you’re trying to eavesdrop on important conversations held in kitchens, especially if there are a bunch of aprons for you to hide behind. You can get jelly to hang off the edge of a piece of bread if you put enough on. Tilt the bread and watch the jelly defy gravity. Put more and more jelly on the bread until you have a jelly mountain. Put the jelly mountain outside your window, then bring it in after a while and it will have flies stuck on it. Pick the flies off and feed them to your Betta Fish as a treat.

  JOURNEY INTO DEEP SPACE

  Start on Earth, go up. You’re in the clouds, and up: thinner clouds, freezing air, the upper edge of the atmosphere. Now you’re seeing ice crystals and other, more mysterious forms of water hanging suspended above the land. Go up a little more and you enter the vacuum of space. Earth curves away from you, blue and egg-like. Keep going up (though the idea of UP is, by the time you’re here, nonsense) until Earth is a pinprick in the distance, the sun a glowing marble, and stop—you’re on the cusp of deep space. Deep space doesn’t have depth like a pool does. Deep space has neither surface nor bottom. It is at this moment, when the sun is a marble reflecting in his visor and Earth is a tiny blue point, that the astronaut is on the cusp of deep space. On the cusp of deep space he feels more alone than ever, more alone than he did the day Isabella left, more alone than he will ever feel again. When he looks into deep space he sees an endless swarm of amoebas and whirlpools, huge orbs of light pulled like melted cheese from the lips of black holes, endless mysteries of which he could become a part, and that’s when the loneliness really hits him, when his loneliness is the loneliness of the dead. He must only adopt the identity of memory itself, must understand that he will exist as memory while existing, still, as a flesh-and-blood human, to let the bow of his ship pass silently across the threshold.

  JUTE AND ALABASTER

  Alabaster is a white, bone-like material whose origins are unknown. Some say it just washes up onshore one day and that you find it among the stones on the beach. Others say alabaster is expelled once every four years, on a full moon in spring, from the beak of a falcon. Alabaster was what El Hondero used to prove his identity the day he showed up at the door of the parachute house, after the hail came through the material, the first time I met him. Tucking a wad of dense black curls above his ear, he revealed what hung from its lobe: whittled in alabaster, hanging on a brown string of tightly wound plant fiber known as jute, there was a rendition of lightning striking an arrow in flight.

  KERNELS OF THE PAST

  Memories are stories like little chunks of jute with two fraying ends. The more you handle the jute, the more it falls apart. A bit of frayed rope: your parents on a bus that’s overgrown with weeds, little piles of dirt in the aisle inside the bus, your mother sweeping, telling you not to step in the piles. Nothing more before or after that memory. No ropes leading anywhere from there. Just more frayed bits you catch the same way you catch tiny things that stick to your feet after you’ve walked barefoot across a carpet. Why do you remember, all of a sudden, licking your mother’s neck as she carried you, and that her skin tasted like bananas? How could you have known what a banana tasted like? And, most bizarrely: How can you miss something you can’t remember losing? Another lost memory: the sound of a cry somewhere above my head, I look up, then the sight of a moving black shape, the black shape of a boy falling from the limb of a tree, the black shape taking up more and more of my vision—then the impact. Why do I only remember it now: the trauma, the breathless panting in the grass, the grass in my mouth, blades of it on my tongue, the feeling of suffocation . . . Another chunk of frayed rope with no use. There was a month of my life during which I was sure that I’d been struck by lightning as a child and that I’d only just remembered it, but then I realized there was no way of knowing for sure and there was nothing I could do about it, anyway.

  KINETICS

  Kinetics is the physics of moving. The science of kinetics is what you have to explain to everyone when they ask why it is that they launch farther off the trampoline when they’re jumping alongside heavy-set children. I don’t think it was a boy falling from the limb of a tree. It was a boy launched high into the air by the force of a trampoline, and the boy was Ned. It must have been Ned’s house I was at because Ned was the one person I knew who owned a trampoline. I remember I lay there in the grass beside the trampoline with the wind knocked out of me, thinking I was dying. Ned’s mom called my uncle’s mansion and then Isabella came to pick me up. My wind came back quickly, and I was better by the time Isabella came, and I could have stayed, but I left with her anyway. I told her I thought I’d been struck by lightning and she said, “When, now?” “Back when I was little,” I said. She said that might explain some things about me. Then she said I pr
obably shouldn’t go to the doctor because what would he be able to do about it, un-strike me? Plus I was alright the way I was. She pulled on my hair and said that if I’d been struck by lightning my hair would come out very easily and that it didn’t so that proved I hadn’t been struck. I told her to let go and she let go, but then I wanted her hand back on my head. She dropped me off at my uncle’s, then drove off without saying goodbye. The next day I saw Ned walking around with some boys from the Crushers. Things had gone kinetic.

  KNEE-HIGH SOCKS

  Physical education, or P.E., holds all the fun of Little League, but lost in a sea of social politics, terrible body-consciousness, and constantly shifting, ambiguous rules. With few exceptions, a schoolboy will find himself forced to attend P.E. most frequently during the series of months when his body is most severely in flux. At the height of puberty, schoolchildren are forced to strip down to loose shorts and knee-high socks and then to lift weights before an audience of their peers. A boy in knee-high socks might be assigned to spot you while you lift weights, but his spotting will involve talking about taking showers with girls and will have nothing to do with making sure you don’t drop the weights. If you get tired of his story, drop one on purpose.

  KEEPING SCORE

  Gambling is staking one thing on another thing, the first thing being a for-sure thing, and the second thing being theoretical. The idea behind gambling is best illustrated with an example. Let’s say you and your uncle are in the unfinished basement, kneeling on the concrete floor eating popsicles while watching a cockroach and praying mantis battle to the death in a tank. It’s dim down in the basement, but comfortable. Outside it’s flaming hot. You broke a sweat trying to collect the roach and the mantis and you weren’t about to watch the battle outside in the brutal sunlight. Beside the fish tank is a pile of one-dollar bills—some that are yours, some that came from your uncle. If the cockroach wins, the pile is yours. You gambled on the roach because he’s bigger and he’s faster but you know, in the back of your mind, that the serrated arms of the mantis are deadly to roaches. When you’re older you keep gambling, only your odds get worse and the stakes get higher. You’re getting in a car with strangers, spending whole weekends in abandoned Victorians in the park when you used to just run in, tag the attic window, and rush out. What once seemed like a bad idea might now seem like a good one. You will see no consequences where consequences clearly exist, and you will take on the debts that make you a true gambler.

  LIFE OF GAMBLING

  You use half-rotten timbers to build the floor of your treehouse: that’s gambling with your life. You see a list of horse names and you bet the last of your money that one of those horses will pass the finish line before all the others: that’s gambling with your finances. If a girl’s parents don’t want you going over to her house but you go over there anyway, and you go right around the time her parents are supposed to be getting home from work: that’s gambling on the unlikely event that her parents will come home late or else get home on time but when they find you they will experience a sudden change of heart toward you. If the weather radar shows several big red blobs spinning toward Springfield and you and all the other gypsies pack your things and start driving there: that’s gambling on hail. If you run out of money because you bet on the wrong horse and then you take out a loan against your house so that you can gamble some more: that’s gambling with your shelter. If, later, after you’ve lost all the loan money and the creditors come knocking at your door, you set fire to that shelter on purpose so that you can collect the insurance money and leave town before the creditors find out about it: that’s gambling with your freedom. The authority on high-stakes gambling is my uncle. To gamble is to lose, and he is an authority on loss, though he is far from the only authority on that subject.

  LAWBREAKERS

  People who are caught breaking the rules set forth by the authorities. The authorities believe that when you detain a man who has broken the law and you hold him in jail for some duration of time he will avoid engaging in the kinds of activities in the future that would give them a reason to detain him again. If you impale someone on a spear, you’ll probably go to jail for good. If you take three large balloons out for an unplanned flight and you lose control of them in gusty weather and they wind up causing a major traffic hazard (see BALLOONS) you’re going to go to county jail for a month (see CALIBRATING THE BALLOONS). If you burn down your own house and the authorities find out about it, you go to federal prison and stay there for a lot longer than a month.

  LIBRARY

  A good place to go if you need to sit in peace and calmly think about what to do next, although it can also be a very difficult place to remain calm. If you’re curious about something that happened in the past, say you’re curious about why people lost interest in traveling by blimp and you don’t know anyone you’d trust to provide facts about the decline of blimp travel, then you would go to the library, find a book about blimps, flip to the index and find POPULARITY, DECLINE OF, and you would go to the corresponding page. If you decided to read the whole book as a result of reading about the decline of the blimp, you’d take the book to the librarian, she’d check it out in your name, and you’d leave the library with it. The librarian’s job is not just to check out books. It is also to make sure that nobody does anything crazy in the library, that everyone stays quiet so that people reading can think, and that everybody gets a turn on the computer. The library is supposed to be a place of peace and quiet, but it can very quickly become very exciting. I once saw El Hondero run full-tilt through the library doors with a book he hadn’t checked out. That was back before I knew who he was. Another time, after I’d met him, El Hondero tore up a library book that had reproductions of photographs in it. I know this because he gave me a photograph he’d torn from a book. The paper was glossy with one ragged edge, and in the picture an old man stood on the deck of a houseboat that was tied up on the banks of a wide, muddy river. The river was light brown and the man in the picture was just lighter than the river—he looked like he came out of that river as a baby and had lived on it since. Beneath the photograph was a caption that read JIM ‘RIVER’ SWIFT BESIDE HIS BOAT—PHOTO BY HOWARD TYCE, and beneath the caption were words that El Hondero had written in red ink: YOUR LAST NAME? PHOTOGRAPHER YOUR RELATIVE? THIS TAKEN DOWNSTREAM 100 MILES—SEE BRIDGE. In the corner of the photo was a unique-looking bridge suspended by wires that stretched from two towers, one on each bank. That’s how I came to suspect that my dad was alive, down the river somewhere, and that his real name was Howard. HOWARD, at the time, sounded something like an Indian name, and I thought that would make some sense. The one time my uncle said his name, the name he said was RAY. There were times I cared and times I didn’t care what my dad’s real name was, or that my dad could have been alive somewhere. Around the time El Hondero gave me the torn-out picture by Howard Tyce I was frying other fish: I was figuring out a routine that did not involve my uncle.

  LIBRARY LISTS

  The library is full of lists. There’s a list for who goes next on the computer, a list of people who aren’t allowed back, a list of books that are good for people mourning the loss of a loved one, and a list of numbers you can call if you suspect bad things are happening to somebody you know. Then there’s the genealogy section. A librarian named Denise introduced me to the genealogy section—her favorite place in the library—and for a day, the section kept me interested. The genealogy section was really just a thousand books of lists. Denise showed me how to find my mother’s name in the huge genealogy books. It turns out that my mother was called Suzy Paciano before she was called Suzy Tyce, which made perfect sense. PACIANO sounded to me like a type of bean, and TYCE I had always thought of as a botanical concept—a shoot, maybe. Suzy Paciano became Suzy Tyce a year before the day I was born, and Suzy Tyce was listed as deceased a few years later. I had no memory of this, so I must still have been a baby. According to the genealogy book, Suzy Tyce had died at an Institution for the Insane
. Denise put her hand on my shoulder when we read that part together, but I wasn’t exactly sad. I’d seen my mother’s headstone. The name of the place where she lived when she died, PARTING WATERS, was what I was most interested in. PARTING WATERS sounded like a place that was floating, and living on the water sounded good. PARTING WATERS made me picture an enormous ark but for the insane instead of animals. When we looked for Howard Tyce, we found only my dad’s dad’s name, Ebenezer Tyce, and we found neither my uncle nor my father, but Paciano could not have become Tyce by itself, and so I realized that the genealogy books were flawed, fallacious, and boring.

  No matter how badly you want to do it, you must not give in to the burning need to rearrange books the way you think they should go. Do not rearrange the books. Do not rearrange the books. There is no better system than the alphabetical one, although it is not a good system. There is no better system than the Dewey Decimal, although that is an even worse system.

  My father took photographs of people who lived on a river near a hanging bridge somewhere, and that’s all I knew.

  LIVING IN BUNKHOUSES FOR GIRLS AND BOYS WHO ARE WARDS OF THE STATE

  If you’re left with no place to stay because, for instance, the place where you were staying was burned down, your uncle is in jail, you’re left with no money, and you’re still technically a minor, the state is obliged to deal with you. This is a situation you do not want to end up in. How the state deals with you is they put you in a bunkhouse. A bunkhouse is a place where you live in a huge room with lots of other people in the same situation as you, a place where you spend your days waiting around for meals, the occasional math class, or one of the many TRAINING OPPORTUNITIES provided by businesses in the area who want cheap, unskilled workers. Most of these bunkhouses provide easy opportunities for escape and reentry, so the industrious orphan is able to adopt side projects and build himself an alternative plan. Most of the nights you spend in a bunkhouse are very uncomfortable. There are bugs, people snore, people sleepwalk or just regular walk, people touch you, there are fights, if you’re thirsty you have to wait until the morning to get water, the bedding is itchy, you overhear strange things, you see ghosts, it’s always steaming hot or freezing cold, the beds are hard, and someone named Fred won’t leave you alone until you look at his magazines. The only time a bunkhouse is bearable, when it’s actually borderline enjoyable, is when it storms hard outside. The roof of a bunkhouse is tin, and so when it storms you close your eyes, listen to the sheets of rain on the tin, feel stray drops hit your face, and sleep the whole night through.