No, I said. I will rip open the door immediately. I’m certain the door is made of paper. I will shred it into pieces, then step calmly through the frame.
Helen, I’m so glad you’re talking with Chad, said my adoptive mother. Do you remember him from high school?
She approached me from behind in a white bathrobe. The reflection of the white bathrobe grew until it swallowed up the entire window. It looked like a ghost! She seemed pleased with herself for remembering the connection.
He has been extremely helpful to us, she whispered, he has been like a beacon of light.
I helped myself to a glass of refreshing water.
I don’t remember him. What is he doing here?
I’m here to offer my support and guidance to you and your family, said Chad. I’m always available during a familial crisis.
No one told me this would happen, I said. I wasn’t given any kind of warning!
Helen, did you get good sleep last night? interrupted my adoptive mother. You look a little tired.
It occurred to me that I had never been healthier, physically, in my life. Since coming to Milwaukee, a persistent and annoying day cough had gone away. My knees no longer ached from standing. My eyes were clear instead of fogged with mucous. The swelling of my ankles went down. My stomach settled. My hands stopped shaking. Pieces of earwax fell out.
I’m fine, I said. It just took me all night to unpack my suitcase.
My adoptive mother looked at me worriedly, while Chad smiled.
She says she’s fine, he said, and she’s probably right.
A few months ago I went to a free therapy clinic. It was free, I found out later, because they were conducting a study for a medical journal article. I only went because I wanted to know if there was a way to tamp down my anger, to stop disrupting the peace, my own included. You need a plan, said the therapist, who was actually a therapist-in-training. He prescribed a plan of thirty minutes of cardio a day, yoga twice a week, and one career aptitude test. I never went back.
Helen, said Chad, when was the last time you went to church?
I didn’t say anything.
Don’t be rude, said my adoptive mother. Helen, say something!
The reason we’re gathered here like this, I said, is because someone killed himself.
My adoptive mother took out a tissue from her robe and began dabbing her eyes.
A lot of people kill themselves, I said, but it seems like most of them do it when they’re older, like after they’ve reached middle age. We try everything we can to preserve ourselves and yet eventually something catches up with us, something dreadful creeps up, and we just can’t do it anymore. Then we throw our lives away, into the trash heap of suicides.
Perhaps, said Chad, we would be more comfortable sitting in a different room.
The three of us moved into the living room. I seated myself in the wicker-basket chair opposite Chad and my adoptive mother on the wicker-basket couch. Someone had lit three white candles. I was looking at Chad through the candlelight. Something about his sitting posture, too straight and upright, reminded me of someone. Suddenly, an image of a broad, muscular young man who wore sleeveless Champion t-shirts took root in my brain. Homeroom sophomore year was set up in a U shape, perfect for observing and critiquing. I sat across from a young man in a sleeveless shirt, and I would stare at his patches of shoulder acne, red and irritated. From far away he looked sunburned. He was a starting power forward on the basketball team, and, unlike a lot of his friends, he had a long-term girlfriend, a brunette girl, everyone thought they were the perfect couple until one day he got into a terrible car accident. He was in a coma for a weekend, phone calls were made, a prayer chain was activated, and when he woke up, he couldn’t remember his girlfriend or how to dribble a basketball. It was one of the great tragedies of our high school. This person from my high school was named Chad Lambo. After the car accident, he became much friendlier. He even tried to befriend me in homeroom, which at the time I thought was disgusting. Presently Chad Lambo had invaded my childhood house and offered his support and guidance to my adoptive parents. I was the one that was supposed to offer them my supportive beam of light! Perhaps he would take the place of the adoptive son they once had, and lost. As soon as I thought that, I gagged with force.
It’s the water I drank, I said apologetically to everyone.
No one cared. I heard my adoptive mother tell Chad Lambo a couple of stories about my adoptive brother; at the moment, they were too depressing for me to digest. He must have said something very moving in response because she began to cry. Suddenly, for no reason at all, I remembered that one of my favorite troubled young people once described his girlfriend as a short woman with a uterus that felt like a bundle of dried-up twigs.
It hurts my dick, he said to me when I had him over for dinner at my shared studio apartment.
A bundle of dried-up twigs! No uterus of mine, I said or I thought. I folded my hands in my lap pleasantly, because I had made a lifetime of studying elegant mannerisms. I folded my hands immaculately in my lap and said that I thought the religious apparatus was a bunch of dried-up twigs; I left out the part about the uterus hurting the dick.
No one heard me. Chad Lambo asked us if we knew why our family was special and unique. No one said anything. My adoptive mother cried and blew her nose into the tissue. He said something about the adoption of Moses, how he had been discovered in a basket hidden behind the reeds along the Nile during the time of the Egyptians and their slaves, then, changing the topic abruptly, he began a terrible story about undiscovered tumors of the mind. I thought it was tasteless, the way he was bringing religion and the Bible into the conversation. He didn’t even get to the part about Moses and the burning bush. I might have heard him say cancerous brain tumors, how they can take root invisibly, bulbous tumors the size of grapes, how not even trained medical professionals are able to detect the invisible grapes, how people with these cancerous grapes go about their days like everyone else and no one can tell that the cancer is slowly eating up all the brain cells until one day, after the person kills himself, we can then, and only then, look upon the person after death and say, perhaps the grapes took root in his brain.
I stood up and went to the bookshelf and stared at the spines. There were encyclopedias, a whole shelf of obsolescence. There was one book in particular I kept staring at. It was as if someone were shining a spotlight on it. It appeared to be a book about cars. I took it off the shelf, a hardcover doorstopper with bright glossy photographs, and I began to flip through the pages, and Chad Lambo continued speaking about the location of my adoptive brother’s soul, about the possibility of a soul being in extreme distress shortly after dying in a violent manner, as if he were a priest, and the cars on the pages flipped past my eyes so quickly, it was like one multicolored, shimmering, flashing psychedelic car. I felt like I was on drugs.
Whose book is this? I interrupted.
My adoptive mother took the tissue from her face.
It was your brother’s.
Then her face retreated into the tissue.
The living room began to spin a little. It was your brother’s, she had said. She employed the word was not because it was no longer a book, but because my adoptive brother no longer owned it, because it could be said my adoptive brother no longer possessed anything. I collapsed onto the wicker-basket chair.
Was not is, I said.
Was not is!
When a person dies, it is the end of a human life, I announced.
Then I said or I thought, What a difficult time it is! What a toll it has taken! My adoptive mother and Chad Lambo continued to look at me in amazement and disgust, a disgust reserved for cockroaches.
Insulted, I stood up from the wicker-basket chair, and remembered how my roommate Julie once described her previous apartment in Chinatown. A couple years ago, her brother, a home renovator, opened up her kitchen countertop for some kind of do-it-yourself weekend project only to discover her entire
kitchen counter, approximately fifty-five cubic feet, had been filled to the brim with live cockroaches, enough to fill four black garbage bags full of hissing wings and shells that were tossed promptly to the curb, and how even after the bags were tossed to the curb and collected, my roommate Julie vomited for five days straight, because she pictured the cockroaches’ legs locked together and their hard shells clicking against one another in one giant cockroach-ball-mass underneath the counter where she prepared all her favorite meals. She used to love to cook.
It’s enough to sicken you to death, I said as I turned around to face Chad Lambo and my adoptive mother, that such disgusting things can take place beneath the sterile surface, all the while you go about your daily life, eating and talking and gossiping and sanitizing and wiping things down and shitting.
The most we can do, I said, is to organize ourselves. Organization is good for morale. Make your bed.
I looked at my adoptive mother. Don’t you remember you used to say that to us back when we had all the time in the world? It’s one of the few things you said that turned out to be true. Organization has always been good, if not necessary, for the human spirit, even for those humans of the lowest common denominator, even for the most impoverished of souls. That’s why the homeless bums and beggars in Manhattan situated themselves on pieces of cardboard with their few cherished belongings surrounding them like a moat: organization.
I turned away from them both, disgusted at life as described by the sciences, disgusted at all biological life, trillions of cells and nuclei and mitochondria and membranes and bacteria multiplying and squirming and trembling and teeming invisibly underneath our noses.
We’re too dumb to see it, we’re too brainless to see how disgusting it is, I said.
Here’s what we’ll do, I heard Chad Lambo say to my adoptive mother, we’ll pray for her. We’ll just keep praying for her.
12
They didn’t try to stop me from leaving the living room when I told them Sister Reliability had important work to attend to.
You call yourself Sister Reliability? said my adoptive mother.
They call me Sister Reliability, I said as I reminded her of my position as overseer of troubled young people.
Before I excused myself, I asked them where my adoptive father was.
He’s at work, too, said my adoptive mother.
He went back to work? I said, appalled. Why isn’t he here grieving with us?
We all work on grief in our own ways, said Chad Lambo.
Thank you, I said with elegance.
I took the book about cars with me. I went back up into my bedroom, like a bug scuttling back into its crevice, furious with my adoptive father for abandoning us during this traumatic and difficult time. I managed somehow to find a patch of light for myself in the darkness of my childhood bedroom by looking at the book of cars, pictures of brightly colored, expensive-looking plastic and metal vehicles of death. When I set the book down, I noticed there was a sticker on the cover, a red circle that said HALF-OFF and then it was crossed out with a black marker and it said 75% OFF. It must have been one of those remaindered books on the clearance table, I thought. The cheapest book on the table, I bet, the cheapest book in the store! Everything in this house is so cheap, I laughed, even the most expensive things become cheap by merely existing inside this very house! Every item in the house that wasn’t a piece of furniture functioned as a knickknack or decorative bric-a-brac purchased in bulk quantities as cheaply as possible from places like Costco and Pier One Imports. Look behind one knickknack and see ten in a row, all waiting patiently for their turn to be displayed. Then it dawned on me: I had finally come up with a formula that made sense of everything.
An alert went off on my cellphone, a loud and brash alarm that sounded like a madman hammering on a piece of tin. CALL SUPERVISOR TO CHECK IN it said. I attempted to leave a message on my supervisor’s voicemail, to let him know I had safely arrived in Milwaukee.
Dear Supervisor, I said, I’ve finally formulated a theory of the house. I can’t wait to tell my troubled young people about it. Everything is extremely cheap here, even life itself! I laughed.
I called him three times, aborting each message because of my laughter.
Also in case you’ve forgotten, I’ve lost my only adoptive brother, I finally managed to say on my fourth attempt at a voicemail, HE KILLED HIMSELF and I need to find out HOW. Then I hung up. My laughter died and I felt a shock of despair race through me. Tone is difficult to control, I thought unhappily, we say things in our heads and we hear them and they sound right and when we speak them, they sound completely different to others. My voice has always been deep, almost like a man’s, and my laughter has always been the laughter of a monster, I despaired, and it only became more monstrous in proportion to the seriousness and finality of my adoptive brother’s death. They locked people up for laughing too much. Out of the corner of my eye, the book about cars sparkled and flashed, troubling me. Perhaps it had been a gift from my adoptive parents to my adoptive brother, perhaps it was given to him for his birthday. It made sense to me, it followed my theory of the house that my adoptive parents would buy the cheapest book on the clearance table, forget to take the sticker off, and then give the book to their adoptive son for his birthday. They purchased for him a book about a subject he didn’t care about, the cheapest book on the table, and they gave it to him for his birthday; they never understood one thing about either of us!
I realized I had created an entirely fictional narrative in my mind about the book of cars and its origins. Perhaps my adoptive brother bought it himself, perhaps he developed an interest in cars before he killed himself.
Of course he never bought himself anything. He never drank anything but plain water. He lived on white chicken and white rice. He left once, and then he came back. Then he left permanently. His exit was traumatic for everyone who knew him. Was it traumatic for him? He took tennis lessons one summer, then quit. He was forced to take an acting class for a summer, then quit. He worked for a week at a video-rental store, then quit. He wore the same clothes every day, the same light blue polo shirt and dark pants, and he talked to the same small circle of people. He never expressed an interest in dating, marriage, or having children. He didn’t make mistakes. He had no credit. He stole things, then returned them and asked for cash refunds. For exercise he walked the family dog, now dead, too. He walked the same route around the block, never into the forest, then up the hill to the pharmacy, along the train tracks to the church parking lot and back. Sometimes, if he was in a particularly good mood, he would tie the dog to a bench and go into the ice cream place, where he ordered vanilla ice cream. No one orders vanilla ice cream, except depressed people! He stayed the same his entire life. He never changed. If he were a character in a Russian novel, he was flat not round. He lived like a starving peasant. If he had indeed bought something for himself, it would have been precisely the cheapest thing on the table. Did he even have an interest in cars?
I retraced my thoughts. No one in our adoptive family cared about cars, except inexpensive ones, cars on sale, used cars. Everyone in my adoptive family had a passion for sales. What was this book about expensive, colorful cars doing in the house? According to my adoptive mother, it belonged to my adoptive brother, but she was unreliable as a source; she was consistently confusing things, names, places, and people. Since I had been at home she called me my adoptive brother’s name a few times.
Yoo-hoo! I heard a voice call out. Helen!
It was muffled, but it sounded like, Helen, we’re leaving! And what was I supposed to say to that?
I opened the door.
Wonderful, I yelled back, I’m very glad for you!
It dawned upon me that the book was a gift from a stranger, a friend, a lover. Did he have lovers? I wondered. Did he have sex? No, it wasn’t possible that my adoptive brother, who lived in his childhood bedroom for most of his life, had ever had sex. He was short, chubby in a not-unappealing way,
and very self-conscious. He must have been asexual.
The garage door opened and closed. I looked out my bedroom window: the security light beamed down upon my adoptive mother and Chad Lambo in his sedan and the wind poured some more rain down upon the house. I spent the morning sprawled out on my childhood bedroom floor as I attempted over and over to formulate a plan for my investigation, but all I did was speculate. All of this speculation will lead you to nothing, I thought. You might speculate yourself to death.
13
It has always been a dark house set at the bottom of a small and quiet hill surrounded by tall trees as leafy as the month of June.6 The tops of the trees bristled like brushes against the sky, even in the middle of autumn. The house did not get good light, not during the day, not during the summer, and especially not in the afternoon. On rain-dark days the entire house had the ambience of a medieval cellar.
I noticed some houseplants had died since I arrived; there were two on one of my childhood bedroom’s windowsills, and the plants were covered in patches of bright red dots. Upon closer inspection I noticed that the dots were moving, the dots were crawling all over the brown stalks and leaves. Disgusted, I made a note to myself to take care of the dots, to find an insecticide in the garage. I had the entire house to myself. I set the book about cars aside and went into the hallway. My adoptive brother’s bedroom door was closed. There was a strip of yellow light underneath the door because someone (perhaps my adoptive brother?) had left the lights on.
Staring at the strip, I became frightened of the room. I hadn’t expected to have such a visceral reaction to his door, only a few hours ago I thought I would rip it open. I surprised myself; I shuddered as I walked past, and went downstairs and into the living room and kitchen, where I looked around. I noted that some knickknacks from my memory were missing, and that they had been replaced with new knickknacks, but the overall arrangement of the house had stayed the same. Old knickknacks had not been removed without being replaced with fresh, new knickknacks. The wicker replaced the leather, I said to no one.
Sorry to Disrupt the Peace Page 5