Maybe it bespeaks something decent in me somewhere deep down, but my concern with possible blood splatter isn’t for me. It’s for Elliot. It’s for Nell. I don’t want them to see it. I don’t want them to see it first. For some reason I can’t and don’t want to understand, this man meant something to them. And even though he meant nothing at all to me, I don’t want them to see his mess. I don’t want to add that visual aid to whatever their brains are already doing on their own. But the truth is, it’s too late. The truth is, it’s well past midnight and the man is undeniably dead and here we are already, and whatever is behind that front door and then behind the back porch door is beyond my control. This, all of this, is beyond my control.
“Now or never,” says Nell, and the still life advances slowly forward, three against the world.
10
inside Dad’s place
I should take my time with this. I should go slowly with this next part. It’s important I get as many of the details correct as possible:
We approach the front door as a single unit.
At the top step, Nell pulls out a key.
Elliot and I hang back. We watch as she glides the key into place. If there are expectations, I’m not aware of them. If there are pre-images for what I think is waiting on the other side, I’m not privy to them.
Nell pushes the door in, but it opens only halfway. Elliot and I watch as she aligns herself with the doorframe, slips a hand inside the house, and flips a switch.
It is difficult to take it all in at once. That is, once we get the door fully open.
Inside, there are boxes. Boxes and more boxes. Piles. Hills. Mounds. Collections. Mountains. The room—presumably the living room—is completely filled with clutter. Filled shoulder-high with crap. Stan was always a pack rat. Moving to the high-rise with him was a disaster. The doormen said they’d never seen so many boxes. But once we unpacked, the boxes had been flattened. They’d gone to storage just like they were supposed to. The houses I lived in with him, even after Nell and Elliot moved away, were always clean. Crowded—babies, wives, knickknacks—but clean.
I look to Elliot, expecting an explanation. Expecting him to say, “Movers.” But I know already this is not from movers. This, right here in front of us, these stacks of starched button-downs and clusters of dying potted plants—this is the stuff of reality TV. My archenemy. This is a hoarder’s home. Perhaps merely an entry-level hoarder, but a hoarder all the same. There’s no doubt, and yet I had no idea. Oh Stan, you’d better not be trying to make me feel sorry for you.
“Wow,” says Nell, shooing away a fly. A fly! I couldn’t make that up if I tried. “I had no idea it was this bad.”
“This bad? How come I didn’t know about it at all?”
Nell pushes a stack of boxes from in front of her and weaves her way to the center of the room.
“Sasha told me about it,” says Nell. “But she didn’t say it was anything like this. I can’t believe she stayed as long as she did.”
“Maybe Sasha did the hoarding,” I say.
“Sasha did not do the hoarding.”
“How do you know?” I say. I mean it as a joke, though already I anticipate Nell’s unwillingness to see it as one.
“When did you become such an old man?” says Nell. “You’re perfect all of a sudden? You can’t give anyone else a chance?”
I have no idea what she’s talking about. But I do know that Sasha was number five. And that Nell and Elliot weren’t around for four years when I had to suffer alone through number three. It’s not a terrible thing, I think, for me to be dismissive, joking or not, of the fifth one. She could be a saint, and it would still take another saint—or an angel or something even more divine—to want to spend any time at all with her. Have I met her? Yes, I have. She’s my age. My age, minus a few months. When I was younger, I overheard stories about my father’s “endowment.” In fact, number two, Whitney, a botanist, used to tell me about their “lovemaking.” “An animal,” she’d say, if we ever crossed paths in the hallway in the middle of the night. “He’s an absolute animal.” Whitney got pregnant in, like, one week. There are plenty of reasons to hate Whitney, who—dear Lord! How many obvious realizations will I have tonight?—it just now occurs to me, I might be seeing in person again after so many years. Will she come to his funeral? She was the wife who dubbed me a “lying, lazy little brat.” Who packed my lunches with cans of artichoke hearts. What was he thinking? What was Stan thinking when he brought that woman home? Was he thinking about us at all? Was he thinking about me? It doesn’t matter. These questions are moot now. The point is, I’ve met Sasha and, sure, okay, she isn’t as bad as Whitney, but it’s insane to think Nell doesn’t understand this. It’s ludicrous for Nell to want me not to make jokes about this woman.
“Where did he even get this stuff?” says Elliot.
I pick up a seashell that’s sitting in an ashtray that’s sitting on top of a stack of New Yorker magazines.
“Beats me,” I say. “The better question is, are we really going to stay here tonight?”
Nell sighs. “You’re right.”
“I mean, where would we even sleep?” I sweep my hands around dramatically and, as I do, get an even better picture of the squalor and filth in the midst of which our father lived and died. It’s enough to make a person feel utterly blue.
“I don’t know,” says Elliot, who’s looking at his phone and not at us. “Let’s look around. I need to call Rita.”
He walks back outside and I look at Nell, who thankfully seems to be reading my mind. What she’s reading is this: Seriously? You want us to look around? And then you walk outside? What the aphid, dude? Aphid is the family’s stand-in for fuck. We adopted it as children in order to feel like we were speaking crassly in the company of adults without getting into trouble.
After Elliot closes the door, I say to Nell, who’s still standing sort of dumbstruck in the middle of the room, “You were going to say something before? When we were outside?”
“Things are weird in Colorado,” she says.
I push and pull my way through cardboard until I’m standing next to her. We both take seats on boxes near us.
“He said that? He said ‘weird’?”
“No,” she says. “Not really. But he’s different. And he’s queer with the phone. Not like he is when it’s business. Just watch.”
“You think tomatoes?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I really don’t. But on the plane he was upset in a way that made me think it’s about more than just Dad.” She pauses. “Not that this isn’t also a big deal.”
I look around. Overhead is the same chandelier that’s been following us from house to house to house. It seems obscene in this condo. Completely out of place. It needs a staircase. It needs a balcony and a foyer and a grand piano. It needs a nuclear family. Mom would have blushed. Or shaken her head. Or merely looked away until she’d found a better talking point. My imagination’s version of my mother.
Nell picks up a pair of fingernail clippers and stares at them like they’re a foreign object. I put my hand on her knee. “Are you okay?” I say.
She nods, then puts the clippers down and wipes the tips of her fingers on her pant leg. “I’m in shock, probably. I feel sad for him. Not sad for me, but sad for him. Does that make sense?”
“It does,” I say. “Yes.” I say this not because I necessarily agree, but because I know she needs to hear it.
“But then,” she says. “Feeling sad for him sort of makes me feel sad for me also, after all. God.”
A mosquito buzzes at my ear.
“This was his life,” she says.
I nod.
“This.” She gestures to the room around us.
I nod again. I feel faint. Or maybe it’s the booze wearing off.
It’s not normally so awkward with Nell, but sitting knee to knee with her in this room doesn’t feel carefree and easygoing. Instead it feels like a first date. A first dat
e that’s going badly.
“Are you okay?” she says.
Of course, I could tell her the truth. I could tell her right now while it’s just the two of us surrounded by the physical manifestations of our father’s mental failings. I could cut the tension with one admission or with every admission. I could tell her about the affair. I could tell her Peter wants a divorce. I could tell her that for the past many years I’ve been slowly whittling away at nearly fifty thousand dollars’ worth of early twenties credit card debt on top of mammoth school loans. But all this would be tantamount to saying, “P.S.: you think you know me, but you don’t.”
I can’t tell her the truth because the truth is that I lie to my sister. I’ve been lying to her this whole time. Every day. Every phone call. As much as and more than I lie to Peter, I lie to Nell. I feel like I might pass out.
“Don’t you think it’s strange that Sasha didn’t tell anyone?” I say.
“Tell anyone what?”
“About Stan,” I say. “About moving out.”
She looks down at her lap and picks at an imaginary fiber. “She told me.”
“You didn’t say anything,” I say.
Nell looks older than the last time I saw her, which was over Christmas. Six months and she’s already aged. Which is better? To see yourself so often you don’t notice the wrinkles? Or to go a year not looking in mirrors, only to be shocked that everything’s changed?
She shrugs. “I couldn’t have stopped what happened.”
I’m about to say something insincere, something like, It would have been nice to be looped in, but Nell’s right. Being looped in wouldn’t have altered anything.
Nell says, “Did Dad have a cat?”
“Why?”
“It smells,” she says.
I sit up straighter and sniff the air.
Big Daddy: Didn’t you notice it, Brick? Didn’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room?
Tennessee Williams is not on my side tonight.
“Maybe we’re on an episode of some awful show,” says Nell. “Maybe we’re being filmed. Maybe there’s a dead cat under these boxes.”
“Maybe,” I say. I can ignore the smell for now. “Maybe there’s even alcohol in the kitchen.”
She looks around at the stacks and mounds and piles of every tiny thing you could possibly think of. “We should probably find out,” she says.
11
the back porch
It’s a screened-in back porch, which I hadn’t been imagining. I’d been imagining an open porch, covered, but with a railing, maybe with some plants hung here and there. But this, screened in and closed off from the world, feels more an extension of the house and the clutter of the house than it does a gateway to the outside. If I were on set, I’d say as much to the location scout.
There are coffee cups and coffee cans. There are two small sofas forming an L against the back and side walls. And near the screen door, with ashtrays at its side, is the old white rocking chair that I know for a fact is the one from my bedroom when I was a baby. It was in my sister’s bedroom before that. And in my brother’s bedroom before that. I remember, as a kid, having a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that it didn’t belong to me, that I hadn’t been the first baby rocked to sleep in it.
On the screen above the rocker, there is a large, dark, circular stain, off center of which is a small circular tear, but that’s it. There is no other evidence of anything out here. There is no evidence of a suicide. No evidence of a gunshot.
I look at Nell. She’s staring at the stain.
“Here,” I say. I hand her the bourbon we found under the sink.
“You think it’s safe to drink?” she says.
“Like maybe he poisoned it?”
She smiles but doesn’t look at me. She does, though, take the bottle.
“No.” She pulls a long swallow. Long and slow enough to make me think there are things—maybe many things—I don’t know about my sister as the person she is now. “Safe, as in, I was thinking it might be swill,” she says. “But it’s good.”
“Tasty,” I say, which is a callback to a joke about Whitney. I don’t remember the specifics, only that it was a word she couldn’t stand to hear. Tasty. Moist. Brainstorming. There was a whole slew of words that, when used, would throw her into a frenzy.
“I talked to Elliot about this on the plane,” she says.
“Irmus,” I say.
“What?”
“Irmus,” I say. “When you reveal the meaning at the end.”
“What are you talking about?”
I take the bottle, steal a quick sip, then hand it back to her. I feel a keen desire to get Nell drunk. “You said, ‘I talked to Elliot about this on the plane,’ but you haven’t yet said what this is. Presumably you are now going to define ‘this.’”
“Do your students have any idea what you’re talking about?”
“No,” I say. “Nope. Not a word.”
“Are they any good?”
“You mean, can they write?”
“Yes,” she says.
I point at the bottom of the bottle and swing my finger upward, indicating that she should drink. She does as directed.
“Yeah,” I say. “They can.” And it’s true. They can. It gives me hope.
“Irmus,” she says.
I nod.
“Right, well, what I already talked to Elliot about is the funeral.”
“Okay.”
“Sasha would like—”
I take a deep breath. I am being deliberately dramatic and she knows it.
“Give me a chance.”
“Yes, yes.”
The crickets have started. I forgot about crickets. In Chicago there are no crickets. Not where I live. But here in Atlanta, even in the middle of the city, you can’t quiet the crickets. I should remember this. The next time someone asks what Atlanta is like, I should say, “It sounds like crickets.” It’s the kind of statement that wins a person friends. In Hollywood, it’s the kind of thing people remember you for. Or maybe I’m giving the sentence too much credit. Regardless. It’s true. It sounds like crickets.
“Sasha wants to have an open casket.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No.”
I watch her face for some hint that this is a joke, but she holds my gaze and doesn’t seem to mind waiting for my brain to wrap itself around this ridiculous idea.
“But his skull.” I make a circling figure with my finger at the side of my head.
“I talked to her while we were on the ground in Denver. She’s talked to the funeral director and he seems confident that their guy can put it back together.”
I don’t want to give in, but I feel the repetitions starting again.
“Put it back together?”
She nods slowly, then hands me the bottle. “They make a mold,” she says. “They fill in the gaps.”
This has happened before. All these things have happened to other people before us. The world has thought of everything. Funeral home directors are prepared for anything. They make a mold. They fill in the gaps. A husband buys his lunatic wife an airplane ticket because she can’t afford to buy one for herself and then forces her to get on a plane. My students should be following me around.
“Elliot is okay with this?”
She shrugs. “Listen, he thinks it’s unorthodox that Sasha is okay with an open casket, especially since most of Dad’s kids are pretty young. I mean, Mindy is six. And that’s definitely discomforting to Elliot. I think he’d be less cool with it if his girls were going to be here. But it’s what Sasha wants, and she was the last one really in his life, so I guess he wants to give it to her.” She pauses. “So do I.”
It’s probably indicative of a smallness—the fact that I’m so ardently resisting the rationality of this proposal. I wonder if it’s something as simple as not wanting to see his face again. But then, why? Do I not want to see him because he means so li
ttle to me? Or do I not want to see him because I don’t want to see what he’s become, to see what old age looks like on him?
“If you guys are okay with it,” I say, “then I guess I am, too.”
“Okay,” says Nell, her head bobbing like I’ve made a really grown-up decision and she’s therefore proud of me, which makes me want to take it back. “This will be good for Sasha. Okay.”
Elliot comes up behind us.
“Boo,” he says.
I jump a little.
“Bad taste,” says Nell. “Too soon.”
“You’re in a better mood,” I say. I hand him the bourbon. He smells it, scowls, then tries to hand it back. I wave it off and he hands it to Nell.
“I talked to Rita,” he says. “She sends her love.”
Nell and I have been leaning in the doorway, against either side of the doorframe. But Elliot pushes past us and walks over to the screen, to its stain, to its perfect little tear. He traces the outline of the stain with his finger and then, slowly, almost as if he’s dared himself, he pushes his finger through the hole.
“Unreal,” he says. “Completely unreal.”
And I think, Yes. I think, You have no idea. None of us has any idea. Fewer than twenty hours ago a man, our biological father, walked out onto this porch, sat down in that rocking chair for some unknowable amount of time, then put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Did he load the gun out here? Did he load it inside and bring it that way onto this porch? Did he give it a second thought? Did he know the night before? What about the night before that? Was there relief? Was there anything at all in that split second after the trigger had been pulled and the bullet released? Was there a dwarf lifting of sadness? A miniscule feeling of joy? These are things we will never know. All we’ll know for sure is that this man, this father, walked out here all alone and did what he did and now we are here. Now we are here.
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