“Pilot?” Everything was blurry. What I had been able to make out in the woods was now rendered completely opaque after the harsh flash of his camera.
“Eric,” he said, “how will you explain this?”
“Pilot?” I said again. I wanted to stall him until I could see. I wanted to see him.
“If there was no evidence,” he said nervously, “why would you come looking for it? And how would you know exactly where to look? If I’m insane, why would you believe my story?” Pilot’s voice was quavering, excited. “Because I’m not crazy, am I? I’m sane, Eric, completely, totally fucking sane, and you know it.”
“The hell you are.” My eyes had adjusted enough at this point to know that Pilot was standing only a few feet in front of me. “Like fucking hell you are.” I held out the knife, my knife, the hunting knife I should have had all these years, and I took a step toward my brother in the dark.
But he jumped out of the way, more nimble than I expected. “Forget it, big brother,” he said. “You lose.”
“Pilot,” I said, “you don’t understand.” I stepped toward him again.
“No.”
“Pilot, Jesus Christ, it’s for your own good.”
“I don’t think so, Eric.”
“Pilot,” I said, and he took off running. I knew I would have to go after him. I knew I would have to catch him. I knew, in fact, that he wanted this—the chase. So I gave him a good head start, just as I had given him a head start millions of times when we were kids, knowing that I would catch him, knowing I had all the advantages. Then I started running, too, the knife in one hand, the Wonderbread bag with the sneaker in the other, my eyes finally readjusted to the starlight coming through the inky treetops. I knew exactly where he was going. I followed him, the tiny tree branches scratching and stinging at my face. The ground was frozen beneath me. But my shoes were office shoes, and I had trouble getting the traction I needed to overtake him. It didn’t matter, of course. I knew where we would end up. I knew exactly where this whole thing would end up. “Pilot!” I yelled after him. I could hear him ahead of me in the dark, thrashing through the trees. “Pilot!” I called loudly. But then I had a better idea.
“You’ll never catch me,” he said back. “You will never fucking catch me, you piece of shit.”
“Pilot,” I said, “you have to let me explain.” I knew he would be out of breath soon. I knew he hadn’t exercised a day in his life. “You don’t understand,” I said. “Let me tell you what happened.” We were nearing the path that led to the highway, toward the tunnel, exactly where I knew he would run. “Pilot,” I begged, “please. Let me tell you what happened to her.” Which is when I saw him disappear into the opening. And when I followed him in, I felt myself losing all reason, a numbness overtaking me, a physical absence, language itself leaving me, like it was escaping through the pores of my skin, the sentences leaving my body through my hair follicles. Pilot, I wanted to say, but it was like I couldn’t remember my own brother’s name.
He was in the tunnel, my brother, and the water beneath us was frozen, and there were bits and pieces of things—wood, trash, aluminum cans, cardboard boxes, an old packing blanket, what remained of the Tunnel Man’s effects—all caught in the ice. It was animal-dark in here, but we could see each other, each of us silhouetted against an opening of the tube, with the grayish starlight coming in from behind. I lost everything but my senses then, my eyesight sharpening. My hearing intensified. I could listen to his breathing, heavy from running. I could even smell his sweat. Was there fear mixed in? I could make out his eyes, and I could see that he could see mine. The instant froze like the water we stood on. One of us said the other’s name.
“Who do you think you are right now?” he said. But they were only sounds, meaningless noises erupting from his throat.
“Who do you think you are?” my brother asked. And I didn’t know what he meant.
“Right now. Who are you? Who the fuck—”
I’ll tear out your carotid artery, I wanted to say, with my bare hands.
Can you love someone so much that you can see through his eyes, that—just for a fraction of an instant—you become him?
Can love blur life at the edges?
I didn’t know the answer. I didn’t know who I was.
“You have to listen to me,” he said. “Brother, you have to listen. Please, please listen.”
I stood at the opening of the tunnel and saw his body easing, his muscles relaxing, his head drooping, his chest heaving, catching the cold air. I knew he was my brother, and I knew I was his. I knew only that.
“Do you remember pretending,” he said now, “pretending to be a wolf? Do you remember that?”
“It wasn’t pretending,” I said. I had found the words somewhere, like I had pulled them out of a well inside me.
“Do you remember being a wolf, then?”
“Yes,” I said. “I remember.” I closed my eyes. I remembered crawling through the fall leaves, baring my teeth, my knees in the mud, the traps, the animals’ traps—
“Do you remember when that started?”
“After Fiona. It was—”
“No, it was before.”
I shook my head, eyes still closed. I could smell my own skin beneath these clothes. There was fear.
“It was before Fiona,” he said. “It was right from the beginning, right from the time anyone could ever remember.”
“No,” I said, “it was after Fiona. It was a very common childhood response—”
“Brother, you have to—”
“—a response to trauma, very common.”
“—to listen, please. Please.”
“I’m listening.”
“Pilot, Jesus Christ, Pilot, it was you. Don’t you get it?” I opened my eyes, shaking my head—not to say no, but as if to get something off of me, as if I had been walking through the woods and felt a spider drop on my head. He was coming toward me, feeling his way across the ice. “That night you, you freaked out, Pilot, you went fucking crazy. You were just a little kid, I know, and that’s why you don’t remember, but that’s what—”
“That’s impossible.”
“—happened, you killed—”
“No,” I said.
“—her. You came and got the—”
“No.”
“—hunting knife and little brother—”
“There’s no way,” I said. “Because I—”
“—you cut her throat.”
“—remember.” I could hear my own breathing, loud. I could smell my own blood beneath my skin. I could feel my arteries pumping—
“You only think you’re sane, Pilot.”
—pumping my own blood. I could feel my bones wrapped inside my muscles. I leaned back against the curvature of the tunnel, and my body slid onto the ice. Eric stepped toward me, his hand touching the curved wall of concrete to guide him.
“I found her,” Eric said. “That night I came home late from the party and found her body in the backyard, just there by the trees, and, and, and I went and got Mom, I got Hannah, and we wanted to protect you, brother. We knew that if people found out what happened, if the police knew what you did, you’d be in institutions for the rest of your life, and Mom, and Hannah, she didn’t want that for you. I was just a kid, too, but, but neither did I, Pilot, neither did I.” He was near me now, standing over me. “You have to understand that I loved you, that it was because—”
“Where did you put her?”
“—I loved you.” He sighed. “We put her in the garage, for a while, for a few years, anyway, and then—”
“She didn’t—I mean, didn’t she—”
“We embalmed her. I did, anyway—with formaldehyde from school.”
“How did you—what about all the blood?”
“That night I had to work quickly, and Mom wasn’t any help, you know. It all went down the drain in the laundry sink. I put her body in there and did what I could to keep things clean, pouring
bleach down after it, and wrapping her in as many plastic trash bags as we had. I didn’t want there to be a smell.”
“And what about the knife,” I said, “and the sneakers?”
“I forgot them.” Eric slid down beside me. “I had left them by the patio that night, on the flagstones, and went out to get them later, and then I just stashed them under the desk. And, and I guess you saw them there, and you didn’t remember what happened, that’s all. You repressed it. You thought you were a dog.”
“The wolf boy.” It suddenly felt cold. I had been out in this weather all night, and only now did I feel the temperature. I looked up at Eric. “She helped you?”
“Hannah helped me.”
He was calling her Hannah. “Why don’t I remember?”
“Who would want to remember something like that? That was your defense mechanism.”
“And what about later, is she still, still in the house?”
“Pilot,” Eric told me, and now it was him shaking his head, “Fiona’s in the pool.”
I did remember. I remembered being the wolf boy. I remembered my fearful childhood as Pilot Airie—Airie the Fairy. I remembered sitting at the back of all my classes, avoiding eye contact with other kids, walking as close to the wall as possible. And college, and working in the bookstore, and writing sad screenplays, and all the rest. I also remembered looking out through Eric’s eyes and that the world was beautiful that way. How was this possible? Was it love? I remembered lying on the grass by the football field, arms wide open to the sky, thinking I was him.
Is that love?
“When I did it,” I told him now, “when I killed Fiona, I didn’t think I was the wolf boy.”
“No?”
“I thought I was you.”
This is the true nature of deception, to twist things around, persuade without persuasion—to complicate. It is too simple to create a lie, to say you were in one place and not another, to deny a series of events. Because the truth is a tangle, and you will get at it far more easily by raveling than by unraveling. So I sat slumped against the frozen wall of the tunnel with my brother and allowed him to convince me, the truths and untruths threading themselves around our bodies, binding us in such a complexity of yeses and nos and maybe-it-happened-that-ways that the actual truth seemed to become irrelevant, or at least impossible. And then we rose and walked out, and we separated like two brothers—me toward the house, Eric in the direction of his car—each without saying a word, each without saying anything or even gesturing his respective good-bye, knowing we would be together again, that we were never really apart. The sunlight came through the branches overhead in impossible shafts of dazzling yellow, and the air was so cold and clear there wasn’t a mote of dust between the earth and sky. My hands were growing light. My chest expanded to capture more oxygen than seemed reasonable. I stepped onto the lawn of my childhood home and noticed a light crust of frozen dew on the grass. It crackled slightly with each step. The flagstones were frosted over, the whorling patterns of fractured ice like the iridescent visions of my boyhood when I pressed my hands into my eyes.
“Pilot,” Katherine had said, “there’s a way out of this.”
I had remembered everything.
She had leaned toward me, using those green eyes—eyes like Fiona’s—to pull me in. “There’s a way.”
“What if I’m wrong?”
“Are you?”
In another lifetime I sat with my brother in the clearing of the woods and he showed me how to hold a joint between my finger and my thumb, how to pull the smoke into my mouth and then inhale, trapping it in my lungs. He sat close to me and put his hand on my back, tapping me there as I coughed. I didn’t want to stop coughing if it meant my brother was touching me.
“No,” I had said to Katherine, “I’m not.”
I stepped onto the frozen flagstones and looked at my mother’s garden, Fiona’s grave, the iced-over remains of the fall harvest broken and twisted on the hardened, cracked earth. The sun was fully up now. When I imagined her in there she wasn’t below six feet of earth, she was swimming, legs moving like a frog’s, sunlight flashing off the surface of the water. I saw the garden and pool at the same time, a double vision, and I knew with a single clarity what had happened to my sister.
“Pilot, there’s a way out of this.”
I knew I had not killed her.
“What if I’m wrong?”
“Are you?”
I knew it was him.
When my mother and I came home from the vet that day, Halley wasn’t a comet anymore. But I had already envisioned a special cat-size prosthesis for his missing leg, made of molded model airplane plastic and elastic straps, and now it was just a matter of waiting until the wound healed. Once it did, I took Halley and his new leg to the junior high science fair that year and then to the New York State Junior Scientist competition.
At the exhibition, I had to ask Dr. Herman for special kitty sedatives to keep Halley from running away. He was happy to oblige.
I won, naturally. The enormous cup is still in my old bedroom. My mother keeps it on the top shelf, above all my football and swimming trophies. It’s just a large bowl with my name and the year inscribed on it, nothing special. But it was winning that prize that made me realize my ambition in life. I’d already sensed it when I felt the hunting knife slicing through Halley’s leg or when I removed part of a shrew’s brain and watched its little gray body twitching on my father’s workbench. Dr. Herman had even come to the exhibition and explained that he had recommended putting Halley to sleep and that I had talked him out of it.
In the end, of course, it didn’t work very well. Truthfully, Halley tore the elastic off with his teeth and limped into a corner. He died a few years later of an enlarged heart—very common for cats.
When they announced that I had won, I walked up to the podium with Halley in my arms. The cat was so heavily sedated his eyes were barely open. There was applause unlike any I’d ever heard on the football field, unlike any applause I could imagine. There were even people who thanked me, actually hugging me, for saving Halley’s life. I realized I had to move up a notch, try something braver.
And then Fiona.
And then our parents in separate bedrooms, and eventually in separate states.
And then I just studied, my head inside one textbook after another, for years and years. When I got to college I had few friends, only one or two girlfriends. Mostly I studied, biology and pre-med, eventually to graduate summa cum laude. In medical school it was even more studying, cramming vast amounts of information into my brain. And there were the neurology program at Columbia, graduate work, starting my practice in East Meadow. What was it Katherine said?
Praised be the fall. I’d heard that expression once before in an English class. But I don’t know when the fall came for me. It wasn’t when Fiona disappeared. It was long before that. My fall came when I realized I could detach myself, could separate my sympathy into its component parts. Even now, I can walk into the operating room, saw off the back of a human being’s skull, and perform incredibly delicate operations on a person’s brain without feeling anything for them at all.
This is strength. This is what makes me more than just a good doctor. This is what allows me to perform.
To be a doctor is to continually test your resolve to suspend natural human sympathy. It is one thing to take apart a grasshopper and still another to remove and examine the organs of a baby squirrel. It is quite something else to cut the leg off the beloved family cat. Each notch up the great chain of being toward human requires greater and greater detachment. Unlike most doctors, I came to this realization early in life, and I asked myself, could I do it? Could I cut into a human body? Like my father had always encouraged me, I wanted to test myself early in life, so when eventually I encountered the real thing, I’d be prepared.
Like Pilot, I loved her, too. Who wouldn’t love a little girl with blond hair and green eyes in a red bathing suit and red s
neakers? Who wouldn’t love that smile? I remember when she was born. I remember standing over her crib and seeing her green, green eyes leap up at me in unmitigated delight. Of course I loved her. She was my sister.
That day—Christmas Day—I just kept driving, driving all the way to the beach house, stopping only once for gas. I felt better, much better, knowing I had all the evidence with me, that Pilot was finally convinced, that I had a clear day—a clear life—ahead of me. I only hoped that Pilot would forget about it again, let it slip behind him like the yellow lines on the road beneath my Jag.
Pilot had slumped down against the side of the concrete tunnel when I told him, his body limp. He’d put his face in his hands. He was remembering, I think. He was seeing it the way I described it. His fingers on the knife. The knife at her throat. He was remembering himself as the wolf boy. There were new pathways forming along the synapse routes in his brain. There were images coalescing, memories congealing. And even though I felt terrible telling him, it was the only way. He’d left me no choice. “But she was my sister,” he kept saying. “Fiona was my sister.”
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