The Dead Are More Visible

by Steven Heighton

  Laurel was not there, in school. She was hidden away in other, darker basements, doing things that made her parents and her principal and teachers “grey with worry.” Without a thought for her family. Unaware, it seemed, of the little brother who still worshipped her and whom she’d happily played with a few years before. (All the toys they had shared were buried in the crawl space under the basement stairs and sometimes during a “binge” in the rec room Merrick would make for that space, lurching and weaving with fierce concentration, and he would take out their old toys and sit playing with them by the light of a bare bulb—a freakish silhouette with his small shoulders dwarfed by his father’s fedora.)

  He did not get drunk, not very. He did go through the dark cabinets under the sink behind the bar and he shook into jade lacquer bowls the stale, exotic snacks abandoned there—peanuts mummified in mysterious coatings, soggy shrimp wafers, candied ginger. Then, playing bartender, he would set up on the bar a clique of bottles and pour doses of gin or white rum or vodka into shot glasses that gleamed icily in the underground light, as exotic and imposing in their way as the tubes and beakers in Mr. Leung’s spotless lab, or the implements and whole rite of Anglican Eucharist, which he had begun taking with his parents each Sunday. Laurel now spurned the sacrament, so he was caught between idols, the adult and the teen, not knowing which to follow, which to betray.

  On his first visits to the bar he did not use any mixes, because a man should always take his drink the way his parents did, straight up, but once he became a regular he began groping under the sink for the sticky old bottles of mix forgotten there. He dug out a few half-empty specimens of Pepsi and 7-Up and Canada Dry ginger ale, but they were too flat and anyway they were for kids. The piña colada mix, its gluey cap sporting a skirt of bark shavings, had gone off. But the lime cordial was still good, and dashed with water and a drop of Beefeater gin it made a drink that tasted like lemonade a few days too long in the fridge. Drinkable, barely. His Bloody Marys were better—a jigger of white rum and water diluted with enough grenadine to tint the flooded quarry, he imagined, a bloodshot pink. A spoonful of sugar. He could easily kill two, slumped and rumpled as Bogart at the bar, his father’s massive Ray-Bans held on with a pipe cleaner tied around the back.

  His parents would not be impressed, he knew. In his gut he knew it and he was always afraid, hearing them up in the family room as suppertime neared, the murmur and slur of their voices strained down through the ceiling—especially his mother’s voice, rising with that blurred, abruptly outraged inflection he had come to associate with her second hour of drink. His father’s footsteps growing louder, choppier, each time he rose to replenish their glasses. To Merrick it always seemed—especially after his second Bloody Mary, when his guts and small fists unclamped and his veins flooded with sluggish warmth and he thought of himself as “gloriously drunk”—that those footsteps splashed huge shadows across the ceiling, down the panelled walls, over the rec room’s fawn linoleum floor. Red shadows. He knew that was ridiculous. He knew that Mr. Leung, who liked and encouraged him in science class, would be disappointed he could think such childish things.

  The afternoon Laurel came down to the rec room, Merrick was slouching on the corner stool at the bar. He had on his father’s shades and red Shiner’s fez and was sucking on an unlit, desiccated cigar, drinking hard, he told himself, to forget. It had been a long day at school and he had picked a fight and lost it and then picked another and won but had not much cared and even Mr. Leung had been curt with him, impatient, it seemed, with his suave familiarities, the way he answered questions as if smoothly responding to the engaging, if imperfect, lecture of a colleague. Shouting now, a crashing of footsteps from close above and big shadows seeming to lunge over the dark walls and ceiling, as had happened before when Laurel came home after staying out all night without calling—but this time she had been gone two nights and the shouting was louder. Hearing feet on the basement stairway instead of the usual shootout of slammed doors, Merrick leapt off the stool and over the bar—the great fez sliding down over his brows—and groped for the bottles he’d lined up, shoving them under the sink with his rancid snacks. And his glass. A Bloody Mary. His third one, for the first time ever a third round, and it had made him awkward and dizzy and he knew he was making too much noise, like that time when another intruder had come down—his mother, her slippers spatting and weaving down the stairs and over the tiles by the crawl space and on into the rec room toward the bar. She hadn’t heard any noise Merrick made. With her clumsy movements and her weeping—standing in front of the bar, as if waiting to be served, then shuffling back toward the stairs—she was making too much of her own.

  Some day, Merrick hoped, she and Dad would join him at the bar for a round. It would be good to see more of them. But not now. These footfalls were lighter, faster. For a long time he had hoped this would happen, that Laurel would stray down and surprise him in the romantic, reckless, manly act of drinking alone. Hurting himself in private, hurting himself by the glass. And taking it. Laurel, he’d wanted to say, come down to the rec room and I’ll fix you a drink—you don’t need to stay out late with those friends of yours. But he’d been afraid she might laugh at him, or disbelieve him, or even turn him in to their parents. But if she just happened on him, how different things would seem. Merry, I had no idea you were so cool … shit, you don’t have to sit here all alone if you don’t want.

  But he’d hidden himself and the bottles and it was too late to present the unforgettable image he’d pictured. Time only for this: grip the last of his Bloody Mary and leap up behind the bar to toast her, let her see him as he was, a man. He caught a glimpse of her and froze. He ducked down. Like their mother she was crying but in a different way—with a terrifying, sobbing urgency, her red curls shaking over her freckled face, eyes bruised with smeared mascara.

  She turned and walked stiffly toward the crawl space and Merrick had to crane his head around the edge of the bar to watch her open the low door, kneel down, squeeze in. He couldn’t guess what she might want in there among the jumbled remnants of their childhood, dolls and stuffed animals and board games and science kits and hockey cards and Lego. He drained his drink. The pounding in his head seemed to come from elsewhere, as if his parents, drunk again, were stumbling around upstairs in search of the drinks they had set down somewhere and forgotten. Laurel crawled backward out of the dark space and punched the door shut, her old pink skipping rope clenched in her fist.

  She was no longer crying. Her face was grey. She stood on tiptoe and struggled to knot one end of the rope to the brass hook screwed into the ceiling for a spider plant that had died in the chilly dimness and been removed. Laurel moved toward the bar. Merrick pulled in his head. The grating of a stool being dragged away over the linoleum, then a faint wet sob, more a hiccup. He peered out again. Laurel was trying to balance her bare feet on the middle rung of the stool base as she stood wobbling, the seat’s edge crimping the backs of her bare thighs, her arms raised, hands fumbling with the rope. Merrick felt choked as if by the tie he liked to wear to church Sunday mornings but could never quite knot, so that his father, surly, eyes sunken small and red, had to be summoned to help.

  Summon him now, he thought. Both of them.

  But Laurel pulled back, settled on the stool, wept weakly, and Merrick let out his breath, yet he was still afraid of startling her, so he waited—a minute, two minutes—the time seeming to stretch into hours, the way a ten-foot drop will deepen to a hundred when you’re trying to do it—jump—and he saw himself back in the brutal sunlight up on the edge of the quarry where his sister and her gang always went. A month earlier he had followed them up to the edge, yet again, telling himself it was to watch over Laurel in secret, but really hoping they would notice him and ask him over for a drink. Hunched, sunglassed and sweating in the tall grass, he’d spied her and the others sprawling in the unseasonably warm sun on the clifftop, a transistor radio and a two-four of Red Cap in the gravel among them.
The Band was playing “Stage Fright.” Some of the stoners dozed and sunbathed. Laurel and her wiry boyfriend, who had a full tan although it was just May, sat face to face, legs pretzeled together on an open sleeping bag, sharing a smoke and a beer, Laurel gently reaching her hands along the boy’s sideburned face and inching up the bandana wreathed hippie-style around his long straight hair. Kissing his open lips. Merrick’s face scalding as the boy’s brown hand slipped into Laurel’s bikini top.

  One of the stoners, skinny chest tattooed, sat up in mock umbrage, tore off his mirrored John Lennon shades and in what Merrick knew to be a parody of their principal’s Scottish accent (Laurel often mocked him at home) told them to mind their deportment or they would be passing the whole night in detention. And another boy, working off a beer cap with the blade of his pocketknife, said, “They just need a cool dip.”

  They were all up now, ready to throw Laurel and her boyfriend over the edge, but the two of them raised their hands in genial surrender and got up, stretching like lean, limber animals and daring each other to go first. When the tattooed boy with the granny shades, his bangs so long they seemed to part around his sharp nose, bent and clinched the boyfriend around the waist as if to trundle him over, Laurel coolly stripped off her bikini and with a whoop sped away toward the edge. In motion that way—naked, running—she was a stranger to Merrick, without a face or a name. As she moved he was flushed and anxious and then, as she leapt out into space, he gasped Laurel. His last glimpse of her was a starburst of long red curls splayed out by the momentum of her jump.

  The boyfriend ran to the edge, looked down, waved. Merrick hadn’t heard the splash. Now the boyfriend turned from the cliff and peeled off his tight cut-offs, revealing dense black pubic hair and a long, half-swollen penis—larger, Merrick realized with a shock, than his father’s, glimpsed in the bath.

  After the boyfriend’s jump, Merrick stumbled out of the grass.

  “Who’s the kid with the monster shades?” a girl asked.

  “Where?” said the tattooed boy.

  Merrick couldn’t see the tattoo clearly. He took off his sunglasses.

  “Oh, fuck, it’s Laurel’s kid brother again.”

  “Tell him to beat it,” the girl said.

  “She can do it herself,” the tattooed boy said, gesturing with his bottle at the cliff, where Laurel was just appearing, head and shoulders and small high breasts seeming to levitate over the precipice. She must have been climbing a steep path. Her bare skin still dripped, glowed with the freezing water, the ice just a few weeks gone. The tattooed boy whistled and Laurel blushed from the breasts up and rolled her eyes and flitted over to her things and dressed with great speed, as if the bikini could warm her.

  “Your kid brother.”

  Laurel, fumbling behind her back, looked up with smudged, startled eyes and frowned hard, then blushed again. “What are you doing here, Merrick?”

  “Don’t know,” he mumbled. Then he lied: “Came to jump, I guess.”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” the other girl said.

  “We’d be in it deep,” the tattooed boy said, “if he got hurt.”

  Laurel stared at Merrick. She shook her head and looked skyward, long-sufferingly, the way she always did with their parents, then fastened her gaze on the clifftop. After a moment she shrugged, or maybe shuddered, and made a lopsided smile. “If he really wants to, he can try.”

  “We’d be in deep shit.”

  “Kid can hardly walk, Laur. He’s like hardly out of diapers.”

  “Shut up, Cathy,” Laurel said. “Just shut the fuck up, okay?”

  “Must be a hundred feet down,” the tattooed boy said and cocked an eyebrow over one mirrored lens, as if Merrick were an idiot incapable of decoding such grade-school irony.

  The boyfriend appeared on the lip of the cliff, wet headband high on his forehead, sinewy torso clenched up and shaking, his penis retracted now, puny as a child’s.

  “That your kid brother again, Laur?”

  “I can do it,” Merrick said, and spat dryly. “No shit. I can.”

  Someone gave a hoot of derision or excitement and the radio’s volume shot up: The Who, “I Can See for Miles.”

  Laurel, still knotting her brow, reached out her hand. “Okay, Merr, come on. Don’t listen to those guys. It’s fun, I’ll show you.”

  And she did. She led him to the precipice and she told him what to do and she told him again, then again, with dwindling patience, as he stood there for a full hour, stripped to his jockey shorts, sweating and trembling, eyes trained on his watch or on his lily feet or the scared, bloodless bump of his cock in the white jockey shorts, to avoid seeing the water far below as his big chance ticked away and the stoners sauntered up beside him and teased or encouraged him and one after another, with some hesitation, leapt. Laurel said it was just forty feet to the water, tops, all you had to do was tuck in your arms and go straight down, but to Merrick the drop seemed endless, sickening as that film he had seen at school: the camera in a jet fighter skimming low and fast over the desert toward the edge of the Grand Canyon, till the drop shudders into view and in a flash the earth’s floor shears away and the abyss explodes under you and your breath is gone, your guts, you’re plummeting till the life-cord jerks taut and your parachute hangs you in mid-air—a jolt like the slap on a newborn’s back—and you breathe. Even the toughest of Laurel’s gang were a bit scared. It took most of them a minute or two, and two or three chugs of beer, to muster the courage for each jump, and when they did jump they would gangle and windmill their arms like third graders on a trampoline—though once they surfaced they were themselves again, cured, aged, by the waters, the way liquor could age you, absolve you of childhood—the tattooed boy coolly tossing his head to flick the wet bangs from his eyes.

  After an hour they went back to their beer and left Merrick on the edge of the cliff, teeth rattling, loose limestone shards stabbing at his soles. In the distance past the city the river was a long, quivering blade carving up the sandbars, and beyond it the hills seemed to fold and crumple under waves of rising heat. Down on the water Merrick’s shadow looked scrawny. It seemed to move like an hour hand as the sun burning his neck and shoulders crossed the sky behind him and began to fall. But if Merrick couldn’t jump, he could not back away either, though Laurel, feet slung over the edge where she sat digging red fingernails into a beer label, was now trying to talk him out of it, telling him it was cool, the cliff was bigger for him than it was for them ’cause he was still so small, right? Shit, he was the brain on relativity.

  Her brow and mouth began to pucker, harden. She grabbed their father’s sunglasses—they were hooked over her bikini top between her breasts—and stuck them on. He choked back a welling in his throat. For a few years they had hardly exchanged a word and now she was making this overture, offering him this chance, and he knew he could not shame them both and let her down.

  But he could not jump.

  Laurel got up and tilted her beer back and drained it and hurled the bottle out across the quarry. It seemed to fall for a long time. “Maybe you should be heading home, kid.” And as he nodded gravely and half turned, realizing his last chance was squandered, a stone flipped, jabbing his heel, and he lost balance, lurched forward and knew he was falling and that knowledge braced him with a kind of helpless courage. Laurel reached out to help him but he launched with his feet, arms flapping, and he was airborne—motionless it seemed—then gravity was roaring up through his bowels and belly and throat and the dark circle of the water was surging up at him like a maw. He whipped his arms for balance and kicked at the air but at the last moment he wobbled off-kilter, yelled and smacked the water at an angle not quite belly flat but bad enough, and when the roaring, the wild kaleidoscope of ice-green fragments, had wound down to a stillness, the sun’s heat was on his face and eyelids and from high above came the mewing of a gull. Lips were being pressed to his, breath flowed into him in waves. He coughed wetly and heard Laurel close behind him
, panting, then something eclipsed the sun and he opened his eyes: the tattooed boy’s granny shades goggled down through the long, bracketing wings of hair, his sunken chest a few inches away as he tried to nurse Merrick with a bottle of beer. Drinking the warm beer, Merrick eyed his chest tattoo: a conventional pierced, bleeding-heart design, except the thin black arrow was tipped at both ends.

  “You all right? Fuck, kid, that was some belly flop. You cool?”

  He nodded. Because he’d done it. Even if Laurel, they told him, had had to dive in and fish him out because he was too shocked by the impact and the cold to swim. And later as she walked him home she’d actually let him know how proud she was—maybe in part, he guessed, so he wouldn’t tell their mother what had happened, how he’d wrenched his neck and ankle and lost his watch and nearly drowned. As if he would tell. “At first I thought you just slipped, then I realized you were really jumping. But it looked so strange. Like there was somebody behind you pushing you and you were trying not to go off the edge, but this invisible thing was pushing you. And the way your arms were flapping! Fuck, Merr, I’m sorry to be … I’m glad you’re all right.” As she draped a sunburned arm around his shoulders (maybe less in sibling solidarity than to help him walk), he felt a grin surge up inside him and burst into daylight like a man surfacing from far below after a perfect dive, arms raised, lungs inhaling the air in rapture and relief.

  But that hour turned out to be an interlude, a singularity, not a fresh start, and in the weeks that followed he saw Laurel less than ever before. As if that day had meant little to her. As if the ripples caused by his jump—which to him had seemed seismic, he being the first in his school to do it—were for her soon overwhelmed by the churnings of some greater storm.