The Phases of Harry Moon
Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize
"One is convinced that an outsize performer is trying his wings—a John Barth or a John Irving, with a touch of William Gaddis and maybe a dash of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr."—Chicago Tribune
"Once in a blue moon, modem American literature captures lightning in a bottle, producing a work that is both important and entertaining. The Phases of Harry Moon is just such a work. In the hands of Thomas Sullivan, it is a serious character study as seen in a funhouse mirror. The reader will look, laugh, and come away changed."—Loren D. Estleman
Thomas Sullivan has been a gambler, a Rube Goldberg- style innovator, a coach, a teacher, a city commissioner, and a born-again athlete. His short stories have been published in every magazine from Omni to Espionage. He lives in Minnesota.
For Norby Nation
My Magic Family
BORN BURNING
Thomas Sullivan
Born Burning
© 2011 Thomas Sullivan
Burton, MI 48509
Cover design by Patricia Lazarus
All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, stored in an electronic system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Thomas Sullivan. Brief quotations may be used in literary reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imaginations or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Printing History
Previously published by Signet, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. in 2002
Printed in United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sullivan, Thomas
Born Burning / Thomas Sullivan
ISBN 978-0-9837552-7-2
Copyright @ Thomas Sullivan, 1989
Tell-Tale Publishing Group, LLC
P. O. Box 90112
Burton, MI 48509
GENESIS
1
The teak from which the chair was cut was old when China was young. What kept it alive is a mystery of ecology or botany or God. Such trees generally live for two hundred years or so. This one endured for two thousand.
The soil from which it sprang was black and deep with the souls of fierce warriors. They had fought amid the dark forests of what is now Yunnan province and died in sunless depths, their blood black and thick on the forest floor. It may be that the protean caverns of some sanguinary subworld fed the thing or it may be that it had roots in hell, but it sprang lustily from its source at a time when China was six thousand feudal states in two river valleys. Christ was yet to be born—and then so far away. Far, too, to the northeast the Huang Ho and Yangtze life waters spawned dynasty after dynasty. The Shang and the Chou Sons of Heaven came and went,
and Shih Huang Ti built the Great Wall while China yet crept west.
Up soared the tree, taller, thicker, radiant with dense flesh, elbowing aside its rivals. Whatever touched it of the surrounding forest withered, even the bamboo, which always accompanies teak. The usual light soil yielded to an ever-widening circle of black loam. In the time of the Sung dynasty to the north, the local tyrant lord, Ati Chan, visited the tree and declared that here was a true Son of Heaven. He made it a symbol of his own feudal tyranny.
But the tree had not come from heaven, and its roots sank ever deeper into the underworld.
A hundred times lightning licked and blasted it, but always it healed. Twice, fire assaulted the forest in which it stood. The barren ring around it held, however, and the flames roared angrily as they starved themselves out. What there was of consciousness in the tree accumulated history and the portents of comets and novas. Revolution, invasion, new orders of ancient travesties teemed all around it, and of all the mighty warlords who ravaged the land, only Genghis Khan dared contemplate the tree's destruction. Six times he swung his sword against its trunk—until the blade shattered—and finding he could not conquer the mighty teak, he urinated on it. "You are mine now!" he cried. But Khan died. The tree lived on.
And on.
After the Sung dynasty came the Yuan and then the Ming, with all its elaboration in stone, ivory, bronze, jade, rock crystal . . . and wood. Wood and the idea of wood took on a reverence of its own. The reverence spread with travel, with commerce, even to the dark forests of southwest China where teak and tung grew in abundance. When the last Ming was overthrown in 1644, and the Manchus ruled eastern China, there arose in the forest of the teak a terrible despot named Khi-tan Zor. His dominions were limited, but his fierceness in ruling them was all the more cruel. His tortures were slow and exquisitely subtle. His enemies did not so much die as linger in eternal dying. And it is said that he ate his own male children at birth to forestall plots of succession. But what he is known for, what marked him in the ages of man and beast upon the earth, is that he carved his throne from the colossus in the heart of the forbidden forest.
What’s more, it came out of the living tree.
This may be important ... if understanding is important. For whatever realm the roots of that anomaly were vested in, whatever the concert of its living consciousness with the world around it, the teak was in total contact with both when the chair was torn out of its trunk. Whether it was the incredible strength of the surrounding wood or its sheer girth, the tree remained standing until it dried out and, in the middle of a moonless night some seven years later, came roaring to the ground.
It was another slow and exquisite murder for the Emperor Khi-tan Zor. But by the time it was fulfilled, the chair had long been crafted, polished, and employed in his palace. The original cover was silk embroidered with crescent teeth and a scarlet serpentine tongue entwined among the bloodied shoals of a half-savaged infant.
When the emperor died there was no successor, and a bloody revolt ensued. The palace was looted and burned, and the chair began its odyssey across the mountains from peasant to trader to merchant. Battered and scarred, its cover worn to transparency in spots, it was nevertheless a thing of obvious value. From Mandalay to Katmandu it was traded and bought and sometimes taken with loss of life, until an enterprising merchant fashioned a new silk cover for the damaged one and a new legend more palatable than the old. The chair, it now seemed, was commissioned for an Indian prince on the occasion of his seventh birthday and later became his throne. The legend of Khi-tan Zor and the truth of the chair's origins disappeared forever.
In 1856, the year before the Sepoy Rebellion against the British, a senior official of the British East India Company visited Calcutta. Chester Maynard Whitehall was a proud man, unbending, and with the wealth to make all his whims dictums. At home in England he had a wife and son. The son, Jacob Alexander, would be seven next month—the same age as the Indian prince of the false legend. The senior Whitehall saw the chair and learned the tale from a one-eyed Bihari who led him from his vat of boiling bones, where fat was being removed, to the gloom of some hellhole of contraband for the viewing. It was a magnificent piece of furniture, and Whitehall liked the pedigree of a prince become king in its embrace. There was no reason to doubt the tale; the chair had royalty in its grain. It was a thing of authority, an emblem of succession. Whether mandated by demonic forces and commissioned by an emperor who ate his male children or sanctified by fictitious Indian potentates, the chair was permanence and power. It invited occupation. Whitehall paid extravagantly and took it home to found his own dynasty.
"Jacob Alexander, you are my firstborn male and my heir," he said to his son when the boy turned seven. "Happy birthday."
Jacob sat in the chair and, though it was a bit lumpy, decided he liked it. "May I keep it upstairs?" he asked.
"It will stay in the drawing room. We will call it the patriarch chair. It is only the promise that it will be yours which I give you today. When I die, you
may keep it wherever you wish."
Jacob wished his father would die soon. He even thought about murdering him. He would sit in the patriarch chair and formulate ways of accomplishing this. But it wasn't to be. Two weeks after his seventh birthday, the boy disappeared.
The gardener, who had a criminal record and had never gotten on with young Jacob, was suspected from the start. But he fled as soon as he was accused, and the allegations were never proven. Neither ransom demand nor body ever turned up, and when his wife also died, Whitehall went to America, where he had a second son by a second marriage. The chair, of course, went with him, and in due course his last issue was initiated.
"Arthur Clement, you are my only son and heir," Whitehall said on the occasion of the seventh birthday.
Young Clement grew up uneventfully and married in 1890, the year after Chester Maynard died and the family fortune passed to him. Perpetuity was established in the will such that the patriarch chair and the fortune went together, and the creation of the next will had to echo the conditions of the first. It was almost biblical in its chauvinism. There were four daughters and three sons from Clement's marriage. The second male was Robert Chester. Little Bobby Bastard, the neighbors called him.
He strangled a kitten when he was eight and a year later set fire to a playmate's garage. The playmate's father hauled him into court, whereupon little Bobby Bastard looked up at the judge with elfin innocence and declared, "I love Jesus, and Jesus says to do unto others as you would have them do unto you." The judge looked down, saw a nine-year-old boy in velvet Fauntleroy clothes who could not possibly have committed what the accusations said he had committed, and dismissed the charges.
"Did you, Bobby? Did you do it?" his mother pressed him for the half-dozenth time after the trial.
"If you loved me, you'd quit asking," he said, and his amber eyes took on the shade of impenetrable teak.
Lovelessness is the guilt of every disappointed mother, and Bobby understood this. He used it. The role of victim suited him. He stole and lied and cheated, and the less remorse he expressed, the more his mother felt sorry for him. I am bad, and my mother is to blame because she didn't love me enough.
But when he was thirteen he did a very bad thing indeed.
He pushed his older brother down the basement stairs. The injury was severe but not immediately fatal. Moreover, his mother saw it happen. He had wanted her to see it. She was standing at the foot of the steps and he simply thrust forward, his face appearing briefly over the shoulder of his big brother. Bobby wasn't exactly smiling, but there was self-righteousness and triumph and challenge and absolute cold clarity in that fleeting look. Here is your choice of sons to love, Mother. Catch him. Save him. But it is I who am falling and whom you cannot catch! Thrust.
His mother saw it all, and though she was riveted upon her oldest son, the fleeting expression at the top of the stairs went deep into her soul for storing. Her voice cried out Bobby's name. It was that cry, echoing through the house and the chambers of his mind, which Bobby took with him to the study, turning it over and over for scrutiny of its elements: shock, fear, appeal, remorse. He took it apart while the house resonated with the frantic movements of others. Took it apart as he sat in the study.
In the patriarch chair.
When the aftermath subsided, they came looking for him, of course. Their footsteps broke the silence of shock, up and down, back and forth. But he was gone by then. He had gone without taking a blessed thing. His parents searched. The police searched. Finally, even the neighborhood searched. A man who sold newspapers thought he had seen him walking along the rail line through the town. But that was where the trail ended. No trace beyond that. A runaway. His distraught mother told the police she thought he might have been afraid he would be blamed for the "accident." It was an accident, she maintained. Bobby had been there when Kenneth tripped. So many times he had been blamed for things, he must have been afraid. Blame. A runaway.
She never told anyone the truth, and in her heart she knew that the rest of the neighborhood was glad Bobby Bastard was gone.
Arthur Clement grieved. One suffering brain damage, another fleeing, all on the same day. It recalled to him the dim tragedy of his own youth and a brother who had been kidnapped. As before, a portion of life suspended itself and the family did not move on. Bobby was not dead; he was somewhere. They waited. Grew but waited. Planned but waited. And when the plans and the growing could not be contingent anymore, they let Bobby go as surely as if they had buried him.
Peter Wilson Whitehall was the third son. He was not initiated into the chair until the age of twenty-three, after Kenneth's degenerative death and the family will was changed to reflect a new order of succession. After Arthur Clement died in 1923, Peter took over the declining family fortunes. Theirs was a ship-building enterprise on the Great Lakes, but the days of lumber barons and the ships to haul the trade were waning. When the opportunity came to invest in the budding automotive industry, Peter sold the last of the family's holdings in Midland, Michigan, and moved to Detroit. True to the family heritage, the patriarch chair accompanied him. Marriage came late, but not too late for a daughter and a son. By 1955, automotive investments had blossomed into a successful parts supply industry and an impressive house in Franklin Village. In due course, Peter initiated the chair's third generation—and fifth candidate—since Maynard Whitehall's journey to India.
"William Frank, you are my firstborn male and my heir," he said solemnly on the boy's seventh birthday.
Young Frank had already gained a sense of reverence for his ancestors. At this age, he knew nothing of the two previous generations' tragedies, but the family's resolve to survive its traumas intact reached into the past and future and this deeply affected the boy. The patriarch chair seemed to sum everything up, just as Maynard Whitehall had intended. Frank grew to manhood cherishing the heavy chair, so stable and permanent, its deep rich wood so soothing to his own little conflicts. It would be his someday. He would be the keeper of the dynasty. And nothing would flag under his stewardship. He would marry and have a son of his own—many sons and daughters—and present the chair at the proper time, and the family would never again lack for numbers to carry on the surname.
The second son born to Peter was Gerald Lucien. This was when Frank was ten. As a baby, Lucien cried little. As a child he was quiet, patient, clever. He smiled rarely. Everyone remarked on his good behavior. His mother and his brother loved him dearly. But Peter could not. He tried, but something in him always held back. He told himself how lucky he was to have another son, a boy who remembered virtually everything that was played in a card game, who could devise the cleverest ways to coax a cat from hiding, who could sit down and reason out where misplaced items were. The trouble was those rare smiles. It only took one to shatter all the reasoned love Peter felt for him. Because when Lucien smiled his face turned elfin, his eyes became as impenetrable as teak, and the corners of his mouth and the set of his teeth said something silently malevolent. Peter knew it was malevolent because he had lived with that smile and what went with it before. And every time it ate across Lucien's face, he saw again his long-vanished brother—Bobby Bastard.
If Lucien was aware of the uneasiness his father felt, he did not show it. It seemed likely he knew—as Bobby Bastard had instinctively known the emotional sub currents of others—but, of course, Lucien had nothing to compare it with. There had always been a gulf between him and his father. He never questioned the order of things. That his brother had been initiated into the patriarch chair before he himself was born and would inherit the family business and most of its assets was the way of it. Everything was happy in Franklin Village. They lived in a magnificent house, went to a picturesque church, attended modern schools, took lengthy vacations, and acquired the material goods they wished for. Lucien went on being quiet and patient and clever. And when his father died, he smiled a sad smile. And when he had to move out of the only home he had ever known, which was now his married bro
ther's, he smiled a philosophical smile. He would be comfortable living the quiet life of an artist on his share of the inheritance.
"You're welcome to work for the company," Frank told him. "I need a vice-president I can trust."
"Thank you, brother," Lucien said, "but not just yet." And Bobby Bastard smiled.
So the dynasty was established through its legitimate heirs and the sanction of the patriarch chair.
Maynard begat Clement.
Clement begat Peter.
Peter begat Frank.
Frank begat . . .
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