by Ford Collins
This threat, perhaps, could be the one that spurred his brother’s return to him, to serve as his savior and shepherd once again. And so he decided to conduct his first social experiment with him as a full participant, rather than simply a collector of data.
Lowell could feel the spinning of gears and hear the whirring of instrumentation clamping into place within his laboratory, preparing for his return.
[Twenty-Four]
Lowell intended to spend Monday evening alone in his apartment.
He ordered Chinese food by cell phone prior to returning to his desk from his p.m. run, in an effort to avoid spending any extra time where he might be forced into conversation or other sorts of annoyance. The food was ready and waiting for him when he stopped by the restaurant two blocks from his home.
Norman had passed by the eatery’s door and noticed Lowell while the latter was standing at the counter seconds before receiving his food. Norman nodded toward Lowell, but didn’t pause any longer than it took for the cursory greeting and continued down Monroe, presumably to round onto Oxford and then his apartment. Lowell was relieved, though Norman’s interactions at this point neither added to nor took from his working plan. There was a good chance, however, that he would need Norman to answer a few questions regarding secondary lines of research in the near future.
He stocked that away in the back of his mind, paid for his dinner, and finished his commute minutes later.
The food rested at Lowell’s feet as he disengaged the deadbolt on his door. He bent to lift the bag while the door swung open, and upon his return to an upright position he locked eyes with a small, sallow boy sitting in a chair to the left of Lowell’s table.
He was maybe twelve or thirteen years old, and wore a tan, puffy winter coat. His feet, clad in black boots with gray piping and Velcro straps, just touched the floor. His head was tucked into a dark blue ski hat with a light blue and gray yarn pompon erupting from its peak. Two puffy gray mittens rested on his lap below a familiar blood-stained envelope spinning between index fingers and thumbs.
“Hi, Lowell.”
Lowell set the bag of food on the table edge nearest to him, removed his coat and boots, and sat.
He watched the boy watch him.
Lowell cocked his head clockwise slightly, blinked hard, and looked back at the boy.
“You’re early.”
“Aw, you don’t need me anymore, Lowell. You don’t need anyone anymore.”
Lowell glanced at the envelope, now motionless in the small hands.
“I don’t. But I have some things I’d like to ask you, since you’ve come.”
“I’m not sure I have any answers you’ll want to hear, Lowell.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because you wanted me here. Do I need another reason?”
Lowell pointed to the letter resting under curled fingers on the boy’s lap. “Did you read it?”
“Nope. Didn’t have to.” The letter slid across the table toward Lowell. “What I did wasn’t noble, Lowell, and I didn’t work anything out. You told me you wouldn’t be there before they even said when the flight would be leaving. I didn’t know why you were late, I just knew that you would be. I knew what you wanted me to know, Lowell.”
“I would never ask you to do that for me. That’s…” He thought back hard to the details of the letter. He’d seen it only once, and for no more than thirty seconds. “Who were ‘we’?”
“I don’t know what you mean, Lowell.”
“We. They… The ‘we’ in your letter. ‘We have not always told you how we love you so, but we each and every one do. I can only hope you will forgive me, brother dear.’”
“Folks who cared about you, Lowell. That’s all I meant.”
“Cared? Why don’t they care anymore?”
“They’re all gone, Lowell. You sent them all away.”
Lowell’s heart raced. His breathing was shallow and strained in his chest.
“Don’t you remember, Lowell?”
“No. I… I didn’t send anyone…”
The boy sighed and turned his face toward his knees and his boots below. He shook his head slowly, with his eyelids clamped shut. “I knew I shouldn’t have come. This was a bad idea.” He leaned forward and shifted weight to his feet. “I should go.”
“No. You’re not leaving me here.” Lowell stood and clenched the sleeve of his brother’s coat, but he’d closed his eyes as well, and couldn’t bring himself to open them again or even square up to the boy’s small body. “You can’t leave until I’ve heard you say why.”
His brother set a now mittened hand on Lowell’s outstretched and quivering arm. He patted him, just as he’d patted Lowell’s back when he’d found him lying in the slush after the launch. “Look at me, Lowell.”
Lowell shook his head. His eyelids fluttered.
“Please, Lowell. Look at me.”
He did.
The boy smiled up at him and leaned in to wrap his arms around Lowell’s waist. As he poured himself into the embrace, he angled his neck back and found Lowell’s eyes with his own. “You wanted to know if I wished I hadn’t stayed for you?”
Lowell could barely see him through blurry eyes.
“Not once. Not even for a second, Lowell. Please believe me.” He pulled back from Lowell’s body, and Lowell released his grip on the boy’s sleeve.
Lowell swiped the cuff of his shirt over his face, and began to tell his brother that he could never forgive himself, even if the young boy had forgiven him.
He was standing in the middle of the apartment alone.
Lowell sat back down, slid the unopened envelope away, unpacked the brown paper bag, opened the cartons, and ate.
[Twenty-Five]
He hated to admit it, but once he’d been left behind by his brother, Lowell felt as though a yoke had cracked and slid from his shoulders.
In the resulting wave of relief his first thoughts turned to imagining Lauren sitting with him over the modest spread of Chinese food.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t sure whether his earlier decision to remove her from his life and return to his strict adherence to social chastity while in pursuit of academic clarity was authentic, or simply a ruse designed to work him up to force the return of his savior.
The fire that he’d built beneath himself had been choked back, if not extinguished for the time being.
Distinct senses of urgency and dread that he’d experienced over the previous eight to ten hours interested him, so Lowell packed them away for study at a later date. Those weren’t pangs he’d felt often, and he didn’t particularly like having to deal with them, but that’s precisely what made them so intriguing.
He’d never been close with anyone. His childhood was spent reading, thinking, and watching, with occasional ill-fated attempts to adapt to community-mindedness, such as the bloodletting during his single baseball practice and the season and a half of soccer. He’d ended up as the watcher off the pitch there, though, as well.
As a teen and young adult, he’d fine-tuned his methods for collection and synthesis, while developing his ability to hide in the open. It was almost as if his withdrawal from interactions with others made him hard to gauge not just in thought, but in a visual sense as well. He was blurry any way you looked at him.
Lowell didn’t regret his divergence from social streams. Although he was fully capable of handling himself in most situations, it was strictly a matter of choice. People, by and large, disgusted him. They fascinated him, it was true, but their lack of basic decency in their dealings with others, and willing disregard for their own development, welfare, and any sort of adherence to the tenets of moral and ethical living, was repulsive.
So what was it that stoked his curiosity now? Was it something as primal as Lauren’s appearance? Or could it be her willingness to engage him on some intellectual level in an attempt to… To what?
For her to show concern with his physical or emotional state would mark her assu
mptions that: A.) There was obviously something wrong with Lowell, something from which he needed to be saved; and B.) She could save him.
Both ideas were ridiculous and insulting to Lowell, but he could appreciate her desire to create change.
At that moment, it was enough to satisfy him.
Lowell snapped down the lids and folded the carton flaps shut, and put all of the remaining food back in the brown bag it came in. He tugged on his coat, tied up his boots, slipped his hat on carefully, grabbed the food, and headed out the door.
It dawned on him halfway to Meigs Street that he didn’t have a clue where Lauren’s apartment was, other than remembering seeing her turn onto Harvard Street the night before. He didn’t know what her car looked like, either, so he wouldn’t be able to narrow down her location by checking the streets and driveways. It was possible that she didn’t even own a car.
He turned right on Meigs and took another right on Harvard, then paced down each side of the street, searching for any hint of her location. A pickup truck with a broken muffler growled by, followed by a compact car, and, a few minutes later, another tiny two-door. Lowell hoped no one was taking him for a peeping tom or prowler.
Halfway through his fourth circuit, Lowell gave up and walked home to once again eat spring rolls and crispy eggplant in garlic sauce on his own.
[Twenty-Six]
Lowell wasn’t overly upset about not finding Lauren, and in retrospect he decided it was a poor idea to show up unannounced at her home when they had only really spent time together on two occasions outside of work. And one of those came only as a product of coincidence.
Add to that the likely lingering tail of what looked to be a nasty shade of hangover she’d been dealing with that morning, and it could have ended up a disaster.
By the time Lowell finished his dinner and cleared the table, it was nearing nine-thirty. He was restless and feeling uncharacteristically claustrophobic, so he put his outerwear back on and descended the stairs to the front entrance of the house.
Through glass warped by age and climate, he could see glowing windows in both directions on the opposite side of the street. Some rooms convulsed in white and blue from televisions bombing their audiences with pap. Others glimmered weakly from nightlights or warm beams escaping from deeper rooms.
A single, soundless car passed by with tinting too dark to reveal the driver’s face.
The doorknob radiated cold from outside into Lowell’s hand as he turned it. The temperature had dropped since he’d returned from his tour of the sidewalks of Harvard Street. He hunched his shoulders up and in, tucking his arms as close to his body as he could, and set out for Cobbs Hill Park, about a mile southeast down Monroe.
If he followed in that direction long enough, Lowell would have ended up in the more tony suburbs of the city. The transition from his home to the park was accordingly one of increasing cleanliness and order, rather than what met Lowell when he crossed from Monroe over I-490 down Goodman.
But as he’d seen in the garages of the business district after upscale happy hours on Friday nights, and in the law firms and business offices populated predominantly by the six-figure sheep who flocked in from small mansions each weekday, human waste is hardly confined to the scraps of food and plastic and rusted metal they leave behind.
It seemed that the longer men stewed in their wealth, the more rotten their innards became.
The urchins were filthy from top to bottom because they knew nothing else. They never hid what they were. Rather, they painted themselves in the colors of their belligerence and shortcomings, and paraded through the streets in open defiance.
The rich were different animals. They were filthy on the inside because they knew how to play the game. They kept their perversions behind locked and heavily barricaded doors. Wealth skews reality, but there is no escaping failure no matter how you looked at it. You can’t pay others to take your place in death.
That field of his studies remained the least developed, but he fully intended to revisit it once he solved the current batch of issues.
The park included a field that ran about five hundred feet from Monroe up a slope to a reservoir surrounded by a cast iron fence a little over ten feet high. A road ran around the fence, and a large, pillared, stone and concrete gatehouse sat at the point of the upper road closest to the field below. Lowell hiked the incline, including the series of three flights of stone steps, to the base of the gatehouse stairs.
Teenagers congregated throughout the park in the warmer months, finding space between iron posts of the fence to sneak through and swim in the reservoir, or getting high in groves of trees.
Lowell usually stayed away from the park until late fall and into the winter for that very reason. Tonight, he found the grounds free of everyone except him.
It was a still place to lie, watch the night skies, and think. Or to do nothing at all.
The moon was nearing, or just past, its third quarter, and held a strong, crisp light, but it was hidden behind an overcast ceiling. Occasionally a gap would allow a small cluster of stars to peek through before it was quickly patched over. The drab glow of the city mixed with the luminescence of the curtained heavenly bodies to coat the underside of the cotton clouds in silvery gray.
The hill was the high point in this part of the city, and it felt to Lowell that his was the closest face to the cosmos. There was no horizon in his periphery, only the titanic dome of embers left behind from an atmosphere scorched without reprieve for hours by the sun. All he needed to do was extend and punch through the shell, shatter the division between man and all beyond, and claim his rightful reward.
But that would have been too simple. Satisfaction comes mainly from struggle. If nothing is overcome, nothing is earned. And if nothing is earned, nothing is won. If you cannot say with conviction that you have won the right to hold the riches you cling to once the race is run, then you have nothing to say.
Lowell had worked for this. He had nearly divined the essence of man. The simplest ingredients were left for him to reduce and combine in their elemental forms.
He’d come so close in the past eighteen months. He could feel that the proposition that man was inconsequential wasn’t the solution on its own, but this was the most necessary component of the elixir. There were aspects of man’s legacy that eluded him. Was it an offshoot of man directly? If so, he needed to determine the point at which it was shed from the physical husk, as well as the level of significance of the trajectory. Or, was it possible that the legacies of men orbited them, ceaselessly collecting scraps from the lives of all—great and infamous—to pad its mass?
This night wasn’t the one for Lowell to solve the riddles that had outrun him to that point. He felt a shred of guilt for having set aside his quest for his greater answer, his masterpiece, to satisfy selfish urges. But his focus was waning. He suffered from frayed nerves and self-doubt creeping through fractures in his inner sanctum. He’d done his best to repair the damage before it was beyond his capacities, but he felt at times over the last few days that the fixes were very much temporary ones. Time had become a consideration.
Lowell looked away from the clouds only when his neck stiffened from the angle he’d held his head, from the cold, and from a mental exhaustion that he’d evaded by ignoring for days. His body was becoming stubborn, needing extra time to respond to simple commands. It didn’t concern him, but it was a nuisance.
If it hadn’t been so cold up on the stone platform of the gatehouse, Lowell would have considered sleeping out the night there. Beyond the chill, though, he did need to get to work on time Tuesday morning, or risk drawing unwanted attention.
All traces of the universe past earth’s atmosphere were cut off from his vantage point as the clouds thickened and stitched every breach. The ambient sound of that exact moment was rushing air, the white noise of a distant jet engine infused with the hiss of rolling tires from nearby roadways in all directions, and a wind through the spindly branches of a
frame of willow trees.
Lowell propped the door to his study open wide and let the frantic, frozen current run through every hallway, every corner of his consciousness. He could feel the clutter correct itself in the winding flow. Excess was discharged with each exhalation. Canvasses skipped around, rearranging themselves, offering new perspectives on tracks of thought worn and tattered. Spines of his volumes upon volumes of research were polished by the brush of passing detritus, returning lost luster and reigniting their appeal.
Once the cleansing was complete, Lowell saw the sky down to the tree line, and farther to the streets and houses, all with a renewed clarity. The edge of calm that he’d teetered along for the days prior rolled away and left him still and whole. But this wasn’t the first time he’d felt that way during that period. Nothing indicated the bottom would drop out from under him again in a week or an hour or a day. Nothing indicated it wouldn’t, though, either.
He could only take on disruptions as they presented themselves. Hunting them down would be worthless.
Now, to convince his disruptions of this, too.
[Twenty-Seven]
Lowell set aside an extra ten minutes in the mailroom Tuesday morning while loading, unloading, and reloading his messenger bag with the dozen morning deliveries assigned to him.
He was wrapping up the operation when, at ten minutes and thirty-four seconds, his stalling paid off.
Lauren stopped in the doorway behind him. He could smell a trace of her perfume before she spoke.
He closed his eyes and pictured himself in the center of a dusky, dense forest, buried to his chin in earth and fallen, decomposing leaves.
“And what are you smiling about, creepy guy?”
“Forgetting.”
“Huh. I was going to guess ‘Imagining a fat guy dropping a big cake all over himself while falling down stairs.’ I was waaayyyy off.”