He nodded at the stack of papers, envelopes, and bills on his desk. “The Amex bill. Some accounting things for Ira that I was supposed to send him last week, just a lot of paperwork.”
Because the word accounting makes me want to shoot heroin, I nodded blankly and smiled, turned right, and began down the stairs to my own office.
Halfway down, I became aware of the difference in temperature; it had been comfortable upstairs but already it was chilly down there.
Winter in New England, I thought. Heat rises.
And then I saw the dazzling display of lights. Dennis had been the last one to bed; I hadn’t known he’d kept the tree lit.
The blinking lights were reflected across the glossy finish of our dark wood floors. Red, green, blue, yellow, purple—the colors seemed to be spreading from the shadows beneath the sofa, magically swirling, glistening and glittering throughout the main downstairs living area.
Kitchen, dining room, living room—all one space—shimmered with this wondrous Christmas ether. Even the wet-gloss baseboards and walls were splattered with twinkling lights.
I was momentarily stunned, locked in place at the bottom of the stairs, my right hand still on the banister, my body turned in witness. There was so much blinking, sliding, sparkling color; jewels flowing into jewels, the room awash in luminosity, hazy rings of glow floating everywhere.
It was beautiful in a way that made me hold my breath; the body’s response was to choose seeing over breathing. My eyes understood that what I was seeing was rare, significant.
Yet somehow, also, incorrect.
Like looking up at the night sky and seeing, there beside the moon, a nebula of silvery, blue lights; a nursery of baby stars where there had always been only shadow.
It was magnificent.
Then I understood, and it was appalling.
The lights were bleeding out from beneath the sofa and the table and all the legs of every chair. They were liquefied. The shadows had melted, their dark tails dissolved into a rippling, expanding lake of saturated color.
The floor, impossibly, was beneath inches of shimmering water.
Our new house, the home we had built together over two years and just finished, was flooded.
I watched waves glide beneath the dining table and soak into the carpet, ocean into sand. I remained motionless at the bottom of the stairs in a kind of paralysis of disbelief.
Two of the things Dennis hated most in the world—water and Christmas—had joined forces to ruin his new home.
I had always had the oddest feeling—consider it knowledge—that if I were ever to find myself inside the cockpit of a 767 with two dead pilots and a few hundred passengers in the cabin behind me, I would absolutely be able to land the ninety-thousand-pound jet.
And I would do it without deploying those ridiculous yellow rubber chutes.
I could see the landing in my mind: the sickening seesaw of the wings as I made my approach in a heavy crosswind, the thought-pulverizing speed of the geography’s approach and then at the last possible moment, the bending of probability itself, the crack of logic’s irrefutable spine, and the instantaneous elimination of all potential outcomes except for one: mine. The moment crowned and I delivered it—the perfect, elegant lift of the magnificent nose just so.
Almost arrogant.
The settling of the wings, instantaneous and in unison; like twin sisters suddenly deciding to behave perfectly and in flawless cooperation.
The coiled spring every passenger felt at their very center, held in place by the weight of breath, before the rear tires hit the tarmac, bouncing once.
The wheels slamming down once more, this time with permanence; they will not bounce again. The nose gently settling and the plane screaming defiantly down the runway, a gleaming triumph of flashing sun streaks.
Failure, destruction, ruination—the statistically probable outcome—was a mere vapor trail, mist consumed by the roiling air left in the plane’s wake.
I would land that 767.
But frozen at the bottom of the stairs in my own home, transfixed by the ruin, I couldn’t do a thing.
I snapped the hell out of it.
My hand left the smooth, polished curve of the banister’s volute at the bottom of the stairs and I ran past the old hutch where we kept cookbooks and plates. It had an ancient mouse hole on the side. You certainly couldn’t call it fancy. But many people before me had owned it and kept it safe. And it was standing in water.
As I ran, my feet kicked up dual arches of water so tall they nearly touched the ceiling. It was as though I was running through the surf. It was automatically joyous, and then horrifying.
I reached the kitchen sink. Water was escaping from beneath the under-sink cabinet doors. More water than could ever flow out the faucet. A sheet of water; it cascaded. How could there possibly be so much of it?
I experienced a moment of doubt.
It was like an infection, a germ received in an unwanted touch. This is too much for me. I spoke the words in my mind.
And because I did, suddenly it was.
I called for Dennis. “You have to get down here right now, hurry. It’s an emergency. But leave the dogs upstairs, lock them in the bedroom.”
Alarm in his voice: “What did you say?”
My eyes fixed on the torrent of water spilling over the kitchen floor. The floor itself was now warped: the center of each wide floorboard swollen into a peak, then cupped into a valley. I shouted, “Lock the dogs in the bedroom and come down here. Hurry. Right now, do it.”
I was barking orders like a fireman. But my sense had left me and so had my courage.
The plane was beginning to lose altitude, the nose dipping.
I backed out of the kitchen and turned around. Dennis was at the bottom of the stairs, heaving, unable to catch his breath, as his eyes surveyed the room.
He stood where I had stood, he absorbed what I could not.
He ran to the head of the table, stopped.
He could go no farther.
He brought both of his hands to his mouth, his fingers touching the bottom lip.
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,” his voice warbled, and what began as a whisper was almost instantly a howl; a sound that resonated with loss and terrible ache. And then it broke and he gasped for air and the wail came back, “Aw, no, why? Why? Why-hy-hy?” There was no mistaking the shock, horror, disbelief, pain, agony, failure—the abrupt removal of what we had formed with our own hands: home.
His knees buckled and I watched as he collapsed, doubled over as though shot in the stomach. But he raised his head so that he could see—he could not look away.
His hands now covered his face but his eyes were wide open, peering through the spaces between his fingers. He was trembling.
He screamed and he wailed and he moaned and he wept.
Nobody had died. It was only a house. We were not injured. The dogs were okay. Yet none of that seemed to matter. It should have mattered. All of those facts ought to have figured into the final accounting. But the math was immediate and the sum was irreversible.
Worse things had happened to me. But this was the worst moment of my life—seeing him like this was exactly the most I could take. Not one more thing could happen or I would break.
I had no idea what to do next.
Layered over this awareness, overlapping this recognition was a wave, a sensation that something was gathering. There was an alignment, a condensation, and it expanded until it was the only thing: the pilot had regained consciousness.
The pilot lunged toward the center panel, his right hand gripping the throttle, sliding it forward. The sound of the engines filled the world.
He pulled back on the wheel, which lifted the nose abruptly. The steel springs deep inside the cushion dug into his back.
I gripped Dennis by his arms and pulled him to a standing position.
He seemed unaware of me, his hands again covering his mouth, his eyes, wide and horrified and u
nblinking, fixed on the water at his feet, water in the act of destruction, water slaying us.
I wedged my body between him and what he was seeing; I gripped his wrists, pulled his hands from his face and replaced them with my own hands, one on each cheek. I angled his head so he had to look at me.
He blinked, and suddenly he was there.
I spoke in a low, firm voice. “Come with me. Do exactly what I say.”
He nodded.
I nudged him forward, through the deep water and then up the stairs. I clung to him, lightly pushing, like a border collie.
The thick wool carpeting on the treads was an instant relief, which was when I realized my bare feet were so cold they were numb.
When we reached the landing, I opened the bedroom door and steered him through. I directed him to the bed, angled him around so that the mattress was against the backs of his knees, then I pushed him down to a seated position. He stared blankly ahead. Like he was broken and didn’t work anymore. But I could not think about that.
I climbed onto the bed and pulled him up after me. His body was rigid with resistance. I shoved him flat. Then I turned onto my right side, pressed up hard against him and whispered in his ear. “Listen to me. It’s going to be okay. We will rebuild. We will rebuild the house. And we will make it better than it is. This is okay. It’s just a house. It’s just stuff. It’s only wood. I promise you, we’re going to be okay. Have I ever been wrong? Even once?”
I was betting that in his current state, he wouldn’t think too long about this one.
And I could feel the shock settle. I could physically feel that terrible, mindless fear and palsy of the soul depart. It was as if I had given him an injection, a sedative.
He took a deep breath and when he let it out, I recognized his eyes again.
And then I knew we were past that awful place, the Fear Capsule, and would not return.
I waited another long moment. And then I said, “Okay, get the fuck up now, we have to turn that water off.”
Originally, we were just going to let the basement be a basement. But then: There are French doors that open onto the backyard—let’s build a stone patio! And we could put a bathroom next to the hot water heater, and a media room—get a large flat-screen for the wall, surround sound.
So we’d finished half the basement and left the rest for storage.
Dennis had the stairway leading down lined with beadboard, which spread onto one wall and covered the entire ceiling. It took the contractor months because every line had to flow perfectly into every other. There was a wall of bookcases, made by hand, with roomy cabinets below.
We’d installed the speakers for the surround sound, but not yet the television.
It was also the only room in the house with wall-to-wall carpeting; a thick New Zealand wool in a spectacularly cool green and red plaid. I had been terrified of plaid wall-to-wall carpeting. “It won’t look like a rec room,” he had promised.
But as I walked down the soggy stairway into the basement, I heard disturbing sounds—fluids in motion, weaponized water. Once I reached the bottom I saw that it was, in fact, raining.
Water was dripping through all the spaces between the beadboard, every joint, each section where one piece of hand-planed wood met another. So much water was raining down that is was officially a storm. I couldn’t see all the way to the other side of the room.
The thick wool carpet had not absorbed the water—it was beneath it like some kind of bog moss.
Whole sheets of paint had welted and were peeling away from the plaster walls, hanging limply. It was like a third-degree burn. The plaster itself was curdling, dissolving. There was so much water, the windows and French doors overlooking the backyard were coated with condensation.
Yet I noted these details with only remote interest and complete detachment. The part of me that would have made a superb serial killer was now activated. I walked straight ahead, right through the rain. I felt no sadness. I felt nothing.
I was the pilot peeling the copilot’s violently severed face off the instrument panel, slinging it into the corner like a wet leather rag, then nonchalantly wiping the blood from the altimeter.
I located the valve in the far corner of the basement and twisted the knob counterclockwise as far as it would go. This provided me with an unexpected jolt—was it revenge? No, not revenge, not nearly. But I had clenched my teeth all the same and felt that primal biting-into-a-steak satisfaction.
It was control.
The valve restored my sense that all was right in the universe; turning it stopped sanity, order, and familiarity from draining out of my life altogether.
I jogged back through the sloshy Tollund Man basement and up the mushy steps onto the main floor. Dennis was feebly struggling with the mop—nothing more than a lengthy sponge on a stick. There was a flatness to his face, like it had been sculpted from clay and only half finished, abandoned before the finer details were added. He clearly hadn’t realized that we were long past the sponge mop stage. We were now at drainage, and we could well reach wrecking ball by nightfall.
I lunged toward him. “Fuck the mop,” I said, snatching it from his hands and tossing it on the floor, behind me. “We have to get this water out of here and we have to get it out now.”
It was as if I had a plan, knew what I was doing. Mine was the voice of Command, the voice of Action. I listened to it myself, curious and obedient, having no idea what it would say next.
I dropped to the floor at the base of the Christmas tree in front of the French doors leading out to the deck. I yanked hard on the green cord for the lights, jerking it from the wall outlet. Then I wrapped my arms around the trunk of the tree and carefully slid it away from the doors. Dennis asked, “What are you doing with that?”
“Open the doors,” I told him.
The deck was covered with deep snow and it was freezing outside. He couldn’t understand why I wanted the doors open so he was stuck, immobile.
I leaped up and unlocked the doors myself, then pried them open. I was immune to the blast of icy morning air. All that mattered was: now, we had an exit for the water.
I needed something large and flat. Like a dustpan. Exactly like one, in fact. So I ran down the mudroom hallway to the garage, plucked the dustpan from its hanger on the wall and returned to the kitchen. I squatted and began to shovel water onto the deck. It worked, but it did not work well enough. Better than the twenty rolls of paper towels we’d thrown down whole, but not good enough.
I dropped the dustpan and grabbed the phone to call my brother. Dennis picked up the dustpan and continued to flap water out to the deck. When my brother answered I yelled into the phone, “The house flooded. Get up here with stuff.”
My brother replied, “Okay, I’ll be right there.”
I hung up.
My brother was exactly the brother you wanted to have in the event of a flat tire or the complete collapse of society. Whether you needed automatic weapons, advanced knowledge of nuclear systems, or just an industrial sump pump, he was the one to call. His Asperger’s syndrome endowed him with certain mechanical qualities—a detached monotone, either no empathy or no way to express it, an obsessive, software-loop kind of pursuit of ever-changing interests. He also shared a special kinship with all things engineered.
While he’d never seen Friends and would probably tear pages from Anna Karenina to wipe oil off a dipstick, ask him about that “Length Fractionation of Carbon Nanotubes Using Centrifugation” article in Advanced Materials magazine and he’d never shut up.
Though we lived only two houses apart, it would take him a good fifteen minutes. He would have equipment to locate and transport. Possibly, he would have to zip into an encapsulating chemical or biohazard suit.
Watching Dennis continue to dustpan water out of the house, I worried we may have already entered the wrecking ball stage. All this water had been sitting on the floors for hours—who knew how many?
I couldn’t wait even fifteen minu
tes for my brother. I was going to have to do something I never, not even in my most terrifying nightmares, imagined: I was going to have to ask one of our neighbors for help. Carleen.
She was a professor. At the very least, she would be able to think of a better tool than a dustpan to get rid of the water.
I stumbled out of the garage wearing clumsy winter boots and no socks. My feet were sliding around inside them and I kept tripping. It felt like weeks had passed since I’d been outside, which is how I must have looked: pale, unshaven, wild-eyed, out of breath.
I was lumbering down my driveway when I saw Carleen sitting on the steps of her front porch, despite the cold. She was wearing a thick bathrobe and held a mug of coffee in her hand.
She resembled everything I had tried to create that was now destroyed.
As I walked, then jogged, across our yard to hers, I thought, I made Dennis leave New York City and build a house with me in Massachusetts. And then I destroyed it all because that is what I do—attract disaster.
As I neared Carleen, I could no longer see her. I could see only Dennis, doubled over on the floor and sobbing, “No, no, no.” Some part of him would be warped now, like the floors. The part that believed in me and thought we could build a life. The part that made it unscathed through forty-four years.
Then I was standing in front of Carleen, ragged and panting. My past had hunted me down and it had found me.
It turned out, in my new There’s meatloaf in the freezer! life, the meatloaf was actually just a dead cat wrapped in aluminum foil.
The furniture that had outlasted three centuries was right now splitting apart in my living room as it soaked up my water. Soon, it all would crash through the floor into the basement, with Dennis on top, impaled by my colonial fireplace poker.
What did I say to Carleen? I don’t remember. All that remains is this: she rose from the steps and moved to her front door, all at once. She was a blur, in motion. She held the coffee out, away from her. And her robe was airborne around the edges.
You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas Page 12