Under-Heaven

by Tim Greaton

  As I looked down at my sister’s sleeping form one night, I realized how much she had grown, while I hadn’t changed in appearance at all. It’s true that I had gained a lot of knowledge during my five years in Under-Heaven, but my body remained that of a nine-year-old boy. Soon, Vicky would be physically larger than I was, and she would be moving on to experience her teen and ultimately her adult years.

  I envied her that.

  As I stared at her nighttime hair, mussed and tangled against her pillowcase, I sensed that one-day I would go back to Earth and experience all of the things I had missed. There is no way I could have known, however, the terrible price I would pay for that decision.

  18

  Realizations

  Jesse stood with the fingers of his yellow, SpongeBob SquarePants gloves entwined in the cyclone fence. The fence surrounded his kindergarten’s schoolyard. Out on the sidewalk, his father blew faint clouds of breath into his bare hands and rubbed them vigorously. He was dressed in the same stained, green jacket and black corduroys with a hole in one knee that Jesse had seen him in the last few times he’d stopped by the schoolyard. What had happened to the rest of his clothes, Jesse didn’t know.

  Glancing behind him, Jesse could see his best friend Heath playing with Storm and some of the other boys on the yellow, plastic slide in the center of the playground. Jesse wanted to run back and join them, but he knew his father would be mad. Besides, talking to his dad was important, too. He turned back to the fence.

  “Your mom and me are going to be getting back together again,” his father said. “You just wait and see.”

  Jesse nodded, but he no longer believed his father. Since the night the ‘speriment had ended, his mother hadn’t let his father come over or spend any time with Jesse. She said it was “too dangerous.” Jesse had even heard her threaten to call the police if his father tried to see Jesse at the laundromat after school.

  No, everything was different now, Jesse thought sadly.

  “I’m going to talk to her again,” his father said. “Okay, Jess?”

  Jesse remained silent as he stared at his father’s hands. Three dark scabs covered the knuckles on one hand, and both hands were splotched with grime. The ends of his fingernails were black. If Jesse had ever let his hands get that dirty, he knew his mother would have soaked him in the tub for hours, lecturing and scrubbing the entire time. It was a good thing she couldn’t see his father now.

  “Are you listening to me, Jess?”

  Jesse raised his head and looked into his father’s eyes. There was still love in those eyes, but Jesse sensed there was panic there, too. His father seemed scared that they would never be a family again. Jesse had the same fear. He wished his mother didn’t feel as strongly as she did. Though his father had let that man throw a brick through their window and burn his truck up, at least his father had never hit either his mother or him. Some of the kids in school got hit a lot by their parents.

  “Maybe we could go see a movie on Saturday, Jess. What do you think of that?”

  His father sniffled, and Jesse could see a small trail of blood running from his nose. A dirty hand wiped at it, leaving two smears of bright red on the back of his hand and blended with the dark stubble of his upper lip. He must have noticed the smudge on his hand, because he hid it behind his back. He casually brushed the other hand under his nostril, but the red stain had already frozen into his whiskers.

  Jesse’s mother said his father’s nose bled so much because of “nose candy,” and Jesse knew that was one of the original reasons she made him move out. Several times Jesse had tried to put candy up his own nose, but his nose wasn’t very good at tasting. After a while he always had to take it out and eat it the old-fashioned way. Jesse gave up on nose candy after a few tries. Maybe his father should have done the same.

  “I’m going to go now, Jess,” his father said, “but I’ll be back to see you soon, okay?”

  “Okay, Dad.”

  Jesse watched as his father crossed the street and walked rapidly down the sidewalk. He kept watching until his dingy, green jacket was no longer visible. Sadly, Jesse turned to look at Heath. His friend was at the top of the slide and shoving the other boys down as they climbed up the plastic chute. Joining them no longer seemed fun because Jesse realized that since his father no longer had his green, Toyota truck he might not have any place to sleep.

  Like the blood that had run from his father’s nose, tears began to seep from Jesse’s young eyes. He would talk to his mom again. He would beg. He would plead. She probably wouldn’t give in, but he had to try. With the temperatures freezing cold outside, Jesse was terrified for his father. He turned away from the King of the Mountain game and faced toward the street. He didn’t want the other kindergarten kids to see him cry.

  After all, he was a big boy now.

  “Why don’t you come down and see what I’ve done to the place, Nate?” Uncle Finneus said to me. In the four years we had lived together, it had never occurred to me to even look down into his basement. One reason, I suppose, is that I imagined it would look like a substation of Hell, someplace I never wanted to visit. But the more likely reason was that, no matter what time of day or night it was, whenever I needed my uncle and would knock on his basement door, he would step right out as though he had been coming up at that very moment anyway. We were just finishing up a game of chess late in the evening when he made the offer.

  Now, don’t ask me where my uncle got the chessboard or any of the other items he dragged into my home on a regular basis. I had spent my first year in Under-Heaven without so much as a baseball, and I had never thought of or wanted one either. It was true that my angels occasionally brought items to facilitate lessons, like the cards that Grandma Clara had used during my very first lesson, but Uncle Finneus was of a completely different mindset. He always seemed to need something and would say, “I’ll be right back.” Within seconds he would return with all manner of toys, appliances and tools. But I never let him leave anything upstairs. I couldn’t imagine the horrified look I would get from my Aunt Alice if she ever saw, for instance, a stamp collection. Coincidentally, Uncle Finneus had a pretty impressive one he’d shown me a few weeks before.

  You might have thought that my uncle was trying to turn me toward the underworld, but actually the opposite seemed to be true. Though Uncle Finneus wouldn’t have known how to keep me on the pure path, he always made sure someone did. The moment he saw color creep up any further than the cuff of my pant legs, he would call for Uncle Albert or Grandma Clara, who was now making daily visits to my Under-Heaven again, apparently having resolved any issues she had about cavorting with her underworld relative. Uncle Finneus had once said to my Uncle Albert that he was “…happy to be away from that unpleasantness down below, and by helping my boy up here I’m helping myself, as well.” The last part I found particularly believable, if Uncle Finneus was nothing else, he was definitely the king of self-interest.

  “So what do you say, young fellow?” Uncle Finneus asked again. “Are you ready to see what I’ve done with my meager space?”

  I smiled and nodded. “Sure, why not.”

  “By the way, that’s game one hundred and thirty-seven in my favor,” he said as he placed the last crystal knight in his ornate, folding wooden chess case. “You have yet to win your first.”

  He was so smug in his win that I had to smile. Though likeable, he was not modest. I also suspected he could be a bit of a sore loser, because we used to play checkers a lot until I started to win a few games. I hadn’t seen a checkers game in months.

  With his chess set tucked snuggly under his arm, Uncle Finneus strode down into his home. I followed. The basement stairs were brightly lit and covered with a plush, red carpet. I could smell an unusual spicy scent in the air which grew stronger as we went down and down. It felt like we had descended the equivalent of five flights before the narrow hall opened out into an immense, cavernous space.

  If an archangel had grabbed my fi
nger and spit in my face, I wouldn’t have been any more surprised than I was at the sight of my Uncle’s underground home, that is if anything that large could be called a home. Somehow larger than my entire Under-Heaven neighborhood, his space could only be described as palatial. The area immediately around us looked like a king’s ballroom. Crystal chandeliers hung from the forty-foot high ceilings. Elegant wood tables and chairs with ornate carved arms and legs were placed strategically throughout the seemingly endless, carpeted floor. There were stuffed couches and chairs with lavish pillows and ornate cloth coverings. Paintings twice my height hung from the walls and impressive statues were interspersed amid the exquisite furniture.

  We continued down the last dozen stairs to the carpeted floor. Several hundred feet from us, the furniture and carpet ended, turning instead into open space and grass. Judging from the half-dozen white flags I saw, it looked to be a golf course. Distantly, off to my left, I could also see a bowling alley and a large merry-go-round.

  “Modest but comfortable,” Uncle Finneus said.

  I looked up and expected to see a sarcastic grin on his face, but there was none. He had been serious.

  “You could at least have added a pool and a Ferris wheel,” I quipped.

  He nodded in earnest. “Both fine ideas, young Nathaniel. I will take them into consideration. Come, let me show you around.”

  If anything, my initial impression of the size and splendor fell far short of the reality of the world my uncle had somehow built directly beneath my feet. It was as though I was walking through one of the grand castles of the Russian Czars my Aunt Alice had described, though I suspected this was on an even larger scale. For an instant, I thought Aunt Alice would appreciate what I was seeing, but I dismissed the thought almost immediately. I couldn’t imagine there was anything about Uncle Finneus that she would find of interest. Other than having similar formal manners, they were as different as two souls could be.

  We ended the tour at the far side of my uncle’s lavish domain in an area covered with more toys than I had ever seen or imagined. There were toy cars, trucks and airplanes. Molded armies were lined up on half a dozen tables. Two electric trains circled each other on a large platform that was made with space in the middle for two people to stand and control them. One wall was lined with bats, and balls and baseball gloves. There were at least a dozen basketballs. I didn’t dare ask where one could use those balls, because I assumed I would be led directly to a basketball court. What my uncle had created down here defied explanation or belief.

  “You can come down here and enjoy these toys anytime you like,” my uncle announced proudly. He handed me a Flash Gordon doll, just like the one I’d seen in the comic ads and had wanted for so long. I accepted the doll and nodded, but my smile was insincere. Something seemed wrong about all of this, something that I couldn’t put my finger on but was, nonetheless, there. I looked over the toys for as long as seemed polite but then pled fatigue and the need for sleep. Together we made the long walk back to the stairway. My uncle led the way up.

  “I hope you’ll visit me down here often,” he said.

  Though we were to spend many more years together in my Under-Heaven, it was a visit that I never did repeat. I’m sure my uncle must have found the Flash Gordon doll where I left it on the bottommost stair.

  19

  Troubled souls

  Though Ricky had been gone from Under-Heaven for nearly seven years, I still remembered his grandmother from the Stone Age. So, it was with great surprise that I greeted her at my own door one day. My Uncle Albert, of course, accompanied her. I couldn’t imagine what Ricky’s grandmother Amber was doing with him.

  “I believe you’ve met,” my uncle said.

  “Hi,” I said, though I knew from Ricky’s previous experience that she wouldn’t understand me. “I extended my hand to shake hers and hoped she would com­prehend the gesture.

  She ignored my hand and moved closer to hug me. I returned the hug and was struck by how different it felt. My grandmother Clara embraced me on a regular basis, and I had been hugged by hundreds of aunts, uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers, but to be in the arms

  of Amber was like cuddling with a lioness. I felt an over­whelming affection coming from her, but more than that I felt totally safe. Her emotions seemed instinctive and pure, and in that regard, she reminded me of Whiskey. I savored the feeling.

  “I know you have met,” Uncle Albert said, “but I don’t believe you knew at the time that Amber is also your grandmother,” he paused, “…removed by tens of thousands of years, of course.”

  “How?” I asked. “Nobody told Ricky and me that we were related.”

  “You should know, Nate, from all of your lessons with Clara, that if you trace a family back far enough, everyone is related. It all goes back to that first couple.” He didn’t say Adam and Eve. One of the first things you learn in the heavens is that the discussion of religion is no longer relevant. It quickly becomes apparent that all Earthly religions are based on the same truths, and that mankind’s botched interpretations are what created most of the religious strife throughout history. For Uncle Albert to give names to the first couple would have been to dishonor the names that other sects might have used. And as far as God was concerned, all labels were true.

  “But we are related?”

  Uncle Albert shrugged. “Yes, but so distantly the point is moot. You’re just as related to nearly everyone else back on Earth.”

  Just then, I heard Uncle Finneus knock from inside his basement door.

  “Come on in,” I said, but the wide-eyed look of shock on Uncle Albert’s face made me immediately regret it. I didn’t know what the matter might be, because my two uncles had always gotten along quite well. Uncle Albert had even beaten Uncle Finneus at a game of chess a few months back.

  For better or for worse, Uncle Finneus stepped out into the room.

  Amber snarled, pushed me backward, and inserted herself between Uncle Finneus and me. Her knees were bent into a crouch and her fingers were extended like claws. Though I couldn’t see her eyes, the growl from deep in her throat told me everything I needed to know.

  “Uncle Finneus,” I said loudly. “Now is not a good time. Please go back downstairs!”

  I need not have bothered, however, because my voice was directed at the back of his black jacket. He was descending the first stair by the time I finished my sentence.

  “Civilized people would know enough to keep savage beasts caged,” I heard him quip just before his door slammed shut.

  And so it became normal that during the visits of yet another of my relatives, Uncle Finneus would make himself scarce. It seemed that less than a quarter of my family could tolerate him, which baffled me because, all his faults aside, I genuinely like the man.

  Aunt Amber turned out to be one of the more interesting of my relatives; and I, like my friend Ricky, found myself gravitating more and more toward returning to life because of her. There was something in Aunt Amber’s primitive psyche that seemed completely rooted in those things physical. When I was around her I wanted nothing more than to wrestle, to run, and to jump. With her, physical communication extended to physical activity. We would romp and play outside for hours whenever she visited. It wasn’t long before she became one of my favorite and regular visitors. I suppose that shouldn’t have been surprising, given that she was my only Aunt who knew how to give a decent headlock.

  Vicky had grown into a beautiful young girl. By the time she was ten, every boy in fifth grade would turn just to watch her walk by. For her part, she tended to ignore most of them, only tossing her hair and giggling for the benefit of the most troublesome boys. It seemed that the more often a boy was sent to the principal’s office, the happier she was to talk with him. I didn’t understand her attraction to the boys with darker characters, but it became increasingly obvious that with them is where her affections lay.

  Whether it was in mimicry of the boys she socialized with, I didn’t
know, but one day I viewed Vicky in what would soon become a common scene at my aunt’s house. She had just returned home from school and wore a beautiful white skirt with an embroidered poodle on the left side, its embroidered leash extending over toward the right. Her pale, yellow blouse was partly hidden by the turquoise sweater that was draped across her shoulders like a cape. A small chain with pink stones held the sweater in place. I’d once heard Vicky refer to the white suede shoes she wore as “White Bucks.” Her white anklet socks extended only an inch above the shoes. The outfit was adorable but the angry set of her face detracted from it.

  She hurried across the glossy, black- and red-checkered kitchen floor to stand behind my Aunt Donna. I could only see the back of my slender aunt’s blue dress because she was leaning into the refrigerator. In a moment, she came out with two green, glass dishes and sat them on the counter. She wore a frilly, white apron over her dress. As she closed the refrigerator door, I realized that sometime since I’d last seen the room, the refrigerator had gone from white to pink. A pink stove, too, had replaced the previous white one.

  Vicky said something to my aunt.

  I saw my aunt shake her head and mouth the words, “I’m sorry, but no.”

  Vicky stomped her White Bucks angrily and began yelling. I settled into her to find out what was going on.

  “I’m going roller-skating, Aunt Donna,” my sister said, “whether you like it or not!” She started to leave the room.

  “Please come back,” Aunt Donna said. Her voice seemed to be carefully modulated.

  Vicky spun to look at her again.

  “What’s gotten into you, Vicky? It seems that lately you just want to pick fights. Is something the matter?”

  “You don’t care about me. You and Uncle Bert just think I’m in the way!”

  “We love you, Vicky.” My Aunt Donna’s eyes were crinkled in concern. “What happened to your family was horrible, and your uncle and I are so very sorry for that. I miss your mother and the others, too, but it hurts our feelings when you say we don’t love you.”