Floating Staircase

by Ronald Malfi

  Adam became no more than a stranger to me—another neighborhood kid whom I did not know except to glance at with a sense of vague recognition on the school playground. A stranger whose bedroom was across the hall from mine.

  For a short time, my dark, angry secrets were the baby birds I squeezed to death in the nest behind the shed and the ants I stuck to bits of Scotch tape, watching them squirm until they eventually stopped.

  There was a small brown frog, too, which hopped out of a mud puddle in the street after a brutally unforgiving rainstorm brought down a number of trees, as well as a telephone line in our neighborhood. I caught the frog and carried him in cupped hands behind the shed in our backyard. I sat on a cord of firewood while the little thing trampolined inside my hands for what must have been hours.

  By the time I opened my hands and released the frog, which bounded away through the underbrush, tears streaked my face. My reign of terror over the tiny creatures of my neighborhood was over . . . but left behind in its wake was the hollow ringing of culpability.

  Ultimately I became a jumpy, twitchy mess who not only made myself nervous but troubled those around me. Everyone expected me to eventually fall on some jail time, which at different points in my life I probably deserved, but it never came to that. I was in what one therapist termed “the indefinite present,” some sort of constant flux. Ever changing, ever evolving. I thought of silkworms metamorphosing into moths and those fat, greasy pods that burped up phosphorescent green ooze in the movie Gremlins.

  I feared Kyle’s vengeful return from the grave. On the eve of his first birthday following his death, I convinced myself he would come for me. Sleep was not to be found that night; I was too wired, sitting up in bed listening for the sounds of bare feet in the hallway and water dripping from his clothes. He would walk into my bedroom, his head smashed and broken, his skin a blasphemous blue green like the mold that grows on bread, and stare at me not with eyes but with black, soulless divots that leaked muddy water down his rotting face.

  He’d point one accusatory finger at me as he stood in my doorway in a spreading puddle of dark water. You did this to me, he’d say. You did this to me, Travis. You were my older brother, and it was your job to protect me, but you killed me instead. And now I’m here to take you back with me, take you back beneath the water where you’ll sink into the ground and break apart like broken glass.

  I thought, You did this to me. Because when you kill your brother, part of you dies with him.

  I began to lock my bedroom door at night. No one cared and no one said anything. On the occasion when my old man would lumber out of bed and stagger drunkenly to the bathroom, my heart would catch in my throat, and a fine film of perspiration would break out across my flesh. I was certain it was Kyle coming for me. Then I would hear the toilet flush, and I’d know I was safe for the time being. But soon . . . soon . . .

  My dreams came in a whooshing funnel of kaleidoscopic imagery—of ice-cold water as dark as infinite space; of being suspended indefinitely in the air, unable to fall yet afraid of falling; the dull whack of bone on some solid, invisible surface.

  One recurring nightmare had me chased through a maze of slatted wood boards, my freedom glimpsed occasionally through the slats and knotholes in the wood but unreachable just the same. Finally, overcome by fatigue, I would collapse to the ground only to learn that the ground was not solid beneath my feet but instead a miasma of cloud-like steam and quicksand. I struggled but knew it was futile: I was slowly pulled down to my suffocating death, though not by the quicksand but by what felt like tiny hands around my ankles.

  That deadness in the house was growing, too—suffocating, nerve-wracking, black as the basement of hell, and about as subtle as an avalanche.

  When I hit eighteen, knowing my parents had no legal authority to come after me, I split. What followed was a jigsaw assemblage of snapshot indiscretions better left in the dark. The acquaintances I made during this period of my life looked like something out of central casting for degenerates—leather jackets, vintage seventies shirts with wide collars, tattoos, partially shaved heads beaded with piercings, an overall distrust of anyone even slightly removed from their clique—and I got into a lot of bullshit no one should be proud of. Street fights resulted in black eyes, boxed ears, and a semiserious laceration along my left bicep from a hypersensitive stranger’s reflexive swipe of a butterfly knife.

  I spent nights sleeping on benches in metro stations, certain that every midnight footfall was my dead brother coming to claim me. You did this to me. But in the end none of that mattered because I was in the infinite present, a silkworm undergoing permanent transformation, a stream snaking down a mountain in search of a river. Find a river. Find an ocean.

  As it turned out, the ocean happened to be my childhood home, for I returned there visibly defeated after only a few months living in the streets on my own. My mother cried and hugged me, then hurried off to the kitchen to prepare me a warm meal. My father, his presence forever an imposing one even in the face of the weakness that had claimed him since Kyle’s death, examined me in thunderous silence, his expression one of complete and utter resignation. Adam, who’d been away at college when I took off, was there when I returned.

  It was over Christmas break, and my mother had strung up a few decorations in the front hall. Adam and I were both old enough and proud enough to maintain mutual distaste for each other. I kept telling myself he would say something to me—how disappointed he was in me for running away like a coward, how much he hated me for worrying our mother sick, anything—but he said nothing the entire break. He left with my father in the family Chrysler very early one morning to return to college.

  Through the front windows I watched him go, my face burning and red, my eyes welling with tears. Adam played football, got good grades, and wanted to be a police officer. I had murdered our younger brother, then saddled what remained of our crumbling family with my emotional baggage. What could we possibly say to each other?

  Sometimes we go in, the therapist once told me. Sometimes we go out. You’re in a state of constant flux, Travis. You need to cast an anchor and hold on to something before you can change direction. What is it you’re always writing in those notebooks?

  Sometimes we go in; sometimes we go out.

  Because homelessness was not something I desired, I completed two years at the community college where I wended through my classes with the enthusiasm of a zombie. Surprisingly, I got good grades. This earned me nonspecific commendation from my father, a zombie in his own right, and he paid my way through my two remaining years at Towson. My heart wasn’t in it, yet my grades were always good, and I graduated with honors.

  (My only memories of Towson are the nights of excessive drinking with my roommate, a flagrant homosexual with spiky blue hair and horrendous breath; vomiting in the bathroom for hours on end until I thought my esophagus was probably swirling around in the sewer pipes somewhere; and attending classes in bedroom slippers and the same stinking sweatshirt for much of the week—a stunt that earned me tortured-artist status among the liberals, making it possible for me to bed a few fairly attractive if not meticulously groomed girls from the liberal arts college. One of whom, I believe, eventually became a lesbian.)

  Somewhere down the line I’d settled into a state of semicomplacence. It turned out those notebooks were filled with dozens of stories I’d written, and once I’d left college and moved out of the Eastport duplex for good, I rewrote a number of them and began to get them published.

  What was it Fitzgerald had once written in a letter? Something about all good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath? Well, this was true. I’d written The Ocean Serene, the novel about Kyle, and it was published as well. That was when I was living in Georgetown and dating Jodie and, for the first time in a long time, felt a glimmer of hope for my future. My writing was not only therapeutic; it was absolution. I was finally putting old ghosts to rest. (Sleep, old spirit, though I know you st
ill hunger!)

  My relationship with Adam became tolerable, even civil, and we spoke regularly on the telephone. Kyle was an unspoken presence standing in the room with us each time we were together, which was not very often. When Adam married Beth, I was his best man. I visited when both his children were born. Together we laid our father to rest after a brief battle with prostate cancer, and Adam was my best man at my own wedding the following year. Yet all the while that damnable therapist’s voice resonated in my head—You need to cast an anchor and hold on to something before you can change direction—and because I’d never cast that proverbial anchor, I eventually struck an iceberg on the night of my mother’s funeral.

  Due to the amount of alcohol I’d consumed that evening, coupled with my own personal desire to wipe as much of the memory of the event out of my head, I am only able to recall bits and pieces of what transpired between Adam and me. What I do remember, I only wish I could forget.

  It happened at Adam’s house. We’d both been drinking, though I was the only one drunk. I opened my mouth and made a foolish comment about three-fifths of our family being dead and buried, then turned on Adam without provocation and accused him of blaming me for Kyle’s death. Speechless, Adam could only shake his head. I motored on, bawling while shouting at him. I’d killed our brother after all. I just wanted to hear Adam say he blamed me, needed to hear it. Instead, he reached out to embrace me. Yet my addled mind transposed his attempt to hug me as a threat, and I swung a clumsy fist at him, striking him in the eye.

  Jodie and Beth shouted simultaneously. Somewhere in another dimension, a dish fell to the floor and shattered. I swung again, much steadier this time, and even through my drunken stupor felt the solidity of my older brother’s jaw against my knuckles. Then I felt his fist against my face, the force of it knocking me to the floor, his hulking shape—our father’s?—looming before me, blurred by my tears.

  Jodie peeled me off the floor while Beth called me a piece of shit and told me to get the hell out of her house. I threw a drinking glass across the room and heard the children in their bedrooms start crying.

  Jodie ushered me out into the cold night, a firm hand against the small of my back. I staggered as if in a fever. She said things into my ear as we headed to the car, although I can recall none of them and I probably wasn’t even listening to her. Similarly, I remember nothing of the drive back to our apartment.

  I spent the next two weeks at the bottom of the world. Overcome by obsession, I thought about Kyle and trembled under the weight of my own guilt. With the dedication of someone newly possessed, I scribbled furious entries in my notebooks and smoked cigarettes like a longshoreman. I quit changing my clothes, which was no longer considered artistic as it had been in college.

  My guilt was a pool in which I was drowning . . . though to suggest I was drowning elicits visuals of flailing arms and shouts of help. That was not me. I drowned in my grief with grotesque acceptance, like the captain of a ship who sinks with obligation to the ocean floor, tethered through sacrifice and commitment to the ship that drags him down. Something suggestive of fever claimed me—I let it claim me—and I spent several days in bed, muddy-eyed and swaying back and forth, at least spiritually, like a cattail in the wind. I feared Jodie would leave me. She didn’t, but my depression seemed to weaken her, too. Two weeks later, by the time I returned to some semblance of normalcy, there was an unspoken fatigue that had run its course through both of us like some strain of illness undiagnosed.

  I would not speak with Adam again until much, much later, well after Jodie and I had moved across the Atlantic to North London.

  Sometimes we go in; sometimes we go out.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I was vaguely aware of a sudden sweeping sound followed by the sharp knife of bright daylight stabbing me through the eyelids. I groaned and rolled over onto Jodie’s side of the bed, which was cold in her absence.

  “Explain to me,” came Jodie’s voice from some ethereal vortex, “how this happened . . .”

  Some stupid, delinquent part of me was not in the bed in our new house but instead suspended in midair over a glistening lake, night having fallen all around me, the moonlight sparking like bursts of electric current on the black waters. Trapped in a freeze-frame, I held my breath while waiting for the icy plunge that would never come. Jodie’s voice was the disembodied voice of God, shocking me into consciousness.

  Weakly, I opened one eye and winced at the daylight pouring in through the part in the curtains. Jodie stood at the foot of the bed holding my pajama pants.

  “Morning,” I growled.

  “You must have some brilliant explanation for this, I’m sure.” She shook the pajama pants in both hands. “They’re soaking wet. The hallway carpet is wet, too. What gives?”

  “Must have been a wet dream.” I dropped my bare feet onto the floor, my naked flesh prickling at the chill in the air.

  “Hysterical. Your sneakers are half frozen by the front door, too,” she said, balling the pajama pants up and stuffing them into the laundry hamper. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you raced the Iditarod before coming to bed last night.”

  All at once I remembered creeping out of the house and going down to the frozen lake. Had it not been for the soaking wet pajama bottoms, I would have written it off as a vivid dream. Now, in the sobriety of daylight, I realized just how careless I’d been last night. “What time is it?” I said, rubbing my eyes.

  “Noon.”

  “Why’d you let me sleep so late?”

  “I tried waking you about an hour ago, but you wouldn’t have any of it.” She disappeared into the bedroom closet only to return a moment later, her arms laden in clothes that had yet to find a home. She dumped them on the edge of the bed. “I’d like you to move that desk into the spare room.” Unsure where to put the desk, the movers had left it in the hallway upstairs. “Also, go through some of the boxes in the basement, if you have time. I feel completely unsettled.”

  I sighed. “That’s because we are unsettled.”

  “Help me out here, will you?” She selected a blouse from the pile and carried it over to the bevel glass beside the bedroom door. I watched her peel away her shirt and slip into the blouse. Her dark hair was pulled back with a barrette, and she was wearing makeup.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To the college to see about transferring those outstanding credits.”

  This had been Jodie’s only hesitation about moving from North London back to the States. She’d been on course to receive her doctorate in psychology by the end of the upcoming spring semester and was on the verge of completing her doctoral thesis; the last thing she wanted to do was lose credits in the move.

  “There shouldn’t be a problem, but I wanted to make sure, just in case. I don’t think I have the patience to make up any course work. I’ll sooner quit the program.” She tucked her blouse into a pair of nice black slacks, then examined her reflection in the glass.

  “You’re not going to quit.”

  “Maybe I’ll take up bartending. Or stripping.”

  “Cut it out. You’ll be fine.”

  Adjusting the top button of her blouse, Jodie came over and planted a kiss squarely on my forehead. “Don’t forget those boxes. And the desk.”

  “I won’t.”

  “See you later, alligator,” she said and left.

  Somewhat awkwardly, I negotiated Jodie’s desk down the hall and into the spare room we’d decided to turn into an office. There were more boxes hoarded against the walls here, too, and the closet was already overflowing with Jodie’s clothes. I moved a few of the boxes out of the way, then dragged the desk along the carpet where I finally set it beneath the single window that looked out upon the side yard. Through the window I spotted the appliqué of black tamarack pines running down the slope of the property to the lake.

  Then I noticed a small, rectangular perforation in the Sheetrock at the base of one wall, only slightly bigger than a doggy do
or. I would have missed it completely had I not moved boxes out of the way to make room for the desk. I knelt down and realized it was actually a little door, no different than the cubbyholes we’d had in our North London flat, which we’d utilized for storage. The cubbyholes had been hinged on one side and stayed closed by a magnetic latch on the inside of the door.

  I pushed against the door and felt the magnetic latch give. A second later, a bracket of darkness appeared in the wall as the door opened. A breath of freezing air issued out of the opening, causing shivers to cascade down the length of my spine. Poor insulation.

  I opened the door all the way and looked inside. The squared-off compartment was no bigger than the inside of a washing machine, the flooring unfinished wood boards, the struts in the walls covered by opaque plastic through which tufts of pink insulation burst like stuffing in an old couch.

  I managed to make out a few items on the floor. One was undeniably a baseball. A tattered Scrooge McDuck comic book. Several Matchbox cars (and just seeing these jabbed me with a cold spear, for I was suddenly thinking of the Matchbox cars I’d found under Kyle’s bed after his funeral and how my father, in his grief, had beat me with his belt before going off to sob in his study). There was a cardboard shoe box back there, too, covered in a fine coat of dust.

  This had been some little kid’s secret hideout, I thought, reaching in and sliding the shoe box toward me. I picked it up, leaving a distinct handprint in the dust on the lid, and set it in my lap. The box felt very light, though not empty. I opened the lid and, with lightning quick reflexes, shoved the box off my lap while simultaneously scooting backward on the carpet.

  The box tumbled over on its side, and two of the things inside bounced out.