by Brad Listi
“Uncle Brian,” I said, “you think you can handle this?”
“HUH?”
“Are you all righty?”
“I’M ALL RIGHTY!”
“Okay,” I said to Stewart. “I think he’s doing fine.”
Stewart nodded, cleared his throat, and spit into the blackness.
I went in first. Uncle Brian followed me. Stewart brought up the rear. Propped up on my elbows, I shimmied my way forward. The air was dank inside the narrow passageway. I was in the guts of the earth, more than fifty feet underground. It was a world of utter darkness. Sunlight couldn’t reach me down there. My headlamp was my only salvation. Without it, I couldn’t see an inch in front of my face.
I shimmied my way forward.
Fifty feet into the tunnel, I heard a terrible noise behind me. It sounded like a goat giving birth.
“Uncle Brian?” I said. “You okay?”
“MMMEEWWWWOOOOOOOOOO!”
I couldn’t turn around. The width of the passage didn’t allow for it.
“Uncle Brian? You all righty?”
The bellowing petered out into a series of labored, husky breathing sounds.
“Sir!” Stewart called out behind me. “I think your friend here is having some kind of a reaction! I think we’re gonna have to get him out of here! He don’t seem to be liking this much! Whatcha say we back it on up?”
“What’s happening back there?”
“I don’t know, sir! He’s flippin’ out pretty good!”
“Uncle Brian,” I said. “You okay?”
“MMMEEWWWWOOOOOOOOOO!”
“Uncle Brian, we’re getting out of here right now, okay? You just listen to Stewart, and we’ll be out of here in two seconds.”
“Brian,” said Stewart, “I’m gonna need you to back it up here, partner. You feel my hand on your foot? You just follow me this direction, we’ll get you out.”
“I WANNA GET OUTTA HERE! I DON’T LIKE THIS, WAYNE!”
Uncle Brian made a series of strange barking noises. It appeared he was having trouble breathing.
“Let’s get him outta here, Stewart!” I said.
“You gotta get him to move! He ain’t movin’!”
“Then you’re gonna have to pull him!”
I backed up until I could feel my foot on Uncle Brian’s helmet. He grabbed on to my ankle and squeezed it for dear life. I felt for his shoulder with my boot and started to give him a light push. My heart was thundering in my chest.
“Come on now, Uncle Brian. You gotta help us out, buddy. You gotta back it up if you want to get outta here.”
“I WANNA GET OUT OF HERE!”
“I know you do. That’s what we’re gonna do. You just gotta help us move; otherwise, we can’t go anywhere.”
“WAYNE,” he said, “I WANT MY MOMMA!”
I felt like someone had just hit me in the chest with a red-hot sledgehammer.
claustrophobia n.
An abnormal fear of being in narrow or enclosed spaces.
separation anxiety n.
A form of anxiety originally caused by separation from a significant nurturing figure (as a mother) and duplicated later in life usually by sudden and involuntary exposure to novel and potentially threatening situations.
6.
Daylight. A late spring breeze. An ambulance . Three paramedics.
Uncle Brian was lying in the grass, wearing an oxygen mask. The paramedics were checking his vital signs.
It had taken Stewart and me more than two hours to coax him out of Marengo Cave.
The paramedics informed me that my uncle had suffered a mild anxiety attack brought on by an episode of acute claustrophobia. They suggested that perhaps it would be a good idea to take him to the emergency room for a full checkup.
Fear washed over me.
If my dad were to find out that I’d sent my uncle to the emergency room, I’d be a dead man.
I pulled two of the paramedics off to the side.
“Listen,” I told them. “It’s been a really rough month. He doesn’t do too well in hospital environments. His dad died a little while ago, and his mother just went into a nursing home with Alzheimer’s. She collapsed right in front of him, 911, the whole bit. I think if he was wheeled into an emergency room in an ambulance right now, it might really be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. We’re just a few hours from home. I’ve seen this kind of thing happen before. He usually bounces back if you let him find a comfort zone. If you don’t mind, I’d really just like to hit the road.”
The two paramedics nodded. The other one finished taking Uncle Brian’s blood pressure.
“It’s dropping,” he said. “He’s evening out pretty good.”
They talked among themselves and decided to let us go on our way. Mercy.
“You’re going to want to stop off and let him clean himself up,” one of them said to me. “I think he had himself an accident, if you know what I mean.”
I knew what he meant.
“And, for future reference, you might want to think twice before you take him into a cave or any kind of dark, physically restrictive space. I don’t think he’s really wired for it, if you know what I mean.”
I knew what he meant.
As a general rule, Uncle Brian didn’t take showers. He took only baths. He didn’t like standing under a showerhead. He didn’t like to get pelted with water. It made him nervous. I was well aware of this fact.
I pulled off the road and rented a room at a nearby budget motel. I drew Uncle Brian a hot bath and told him to clean himself up. While he was bathing, I threw his dirty clothes away and laid a clean outfit on the bed.
A few minutes later, I heard my uncle singing on the other side of the door. This was a great relief. I took this to mean he was returning to normalcy. He often sang while bathing.
I walked up to the bathroom door and knocked twice.
“Uncle Brian? You doing okay in there?”
“DOIN’ OKAY! DOIN’ ALL RIGHTY!”
Good, I said to myself. He sounded like himself. Sounded healthy. Stabilized. Normal. Perhaps his short-term memory was such that he wouldn’t even recall the cave. Maybe it was all behind him now. Maybe that was his gift, maybe that was the silver lining of his tragic condition: He was incapable of dwelling on things.
On the other hand, the events of the morning could have been the most searing memory of his entire lifetime. For all I knew, the experience had damaged the fundamental nature of his essential being. I could have been the man responsible for robbing him of his innocence, for introducing him to the deepest, most primal fear he’d ever known. If that were the case, it was reasonable to assume he’d spill the beans at some point, in which case he’d probably tell my dad. He tended to confide in my dad when something was seriously the matter.
If my dad were to find out that I had taken my uncle spelunking, I was a dead man.
With the benefit of hindsight, subjecting Uncle Brian to a two-hour tour of the subterranean darkness had been a monumentally poor decision on my part.
But my intentions had been good.
I sat on the bed and turned on the television.
Eminem was on MTV, rapping at the camera. He was furious about something.
Critics often referred to Eminem’s music as “incendiary.” His critically acclaimed new album, The Marshall Mathers LP, had vaulted him into the highest reaches of the cultural lexicon.
lexicon n., pl.lexicons or lexica
1.) A dictionary.
2.) A stock of terms used in a particular profession, subject, or style; a vocabulary: the lexicon of surrealist art.
3.) Linguistics: The morphemes of a language considered as a group.
Eminem sometimes referred to himself as Slim Shady. That was his other nickname, his other alter ego.
I didn’t have a nickname or an alter ego.
I’d never done anything critically acclaimed or incendiary in my whole life.
This made me furious.
Uncle Brian walked out of the bathroom stark naked. I handed him his clothes and told him to get dressed. He saw Eminem on the television. He sang a little bit, dancing along to MTV as he got dressed. Uncle Brian liked to sing along and dance. Didn’t matter what he was listening to. Didn’t matter if he was naked.
I didn’t like to dance.
On occasion, while driving in my car, I would sing along at the top of my lungs.
I studied Uncle Brian’s face, his body language, his demeanor. He looked normal. Movement was fluid. Posture was good. He appeared to be showing no visible signs of trauma.
Still, I figured it probably wouldn’t be such a bad idea to ask him to keep quiet about our adventures. I figured if I made my request in a circuitous manner, staying away from terms like “cave” and “paramedics,” I’d be able to avoid stirring up any unpleasant memories while at the same time doing whatever I could to get my point across.
As he dressed, I casually asked him if he remembered “the morning.”
“YEAH,” he replied. “I REMEMBER THE MORNING.”
I couldn’t tell if he really did.
I then asked him if he could keep a secret.
“I CAN KEEP A SECRET!” he replied.
I wasn’t sure if he really could.
I promised him that if he didn’t say a word about the cave trip to my parents, I would take him to Pizza Hut while we were in Indianapolis.
“If you do a good job of keeping this secret,” I told him, “I’ll take you to Pizza Hut as much as you want.”
“I WANT A PIZZA HUT!” he said.
“Uncle Brian,” I said, “listen to me now. I absolutely promise you that if you keep this secret—if you don’t tell my dad or my mom or Uncle Wally or Aunt Katherine or anyone else about what happened this morning—I will take you to Pizza Hut no fewer than three times next week. We’ll get pizza every day if you want. But you’ve got to keep a secret. You can’t talk about what happened this morning; otherwise, you won’t get any pizza.”
“YOU’LL TAKE ME TO THE PIZZA HUT?”
“Yes. But only if you keep the secret.”
“I WANNA KEEP THE SECRET!”
“Scout’s honor?” I said, raising the first two fingers of my right hand.
“ALL RIGHTY!” said Uncle Brian.
He raised his left hand and gave me the middle finger, kind of.
7.
We pulled into my parents’ driveway at dusk. The sky was purple and pink. The tulips in the garden were in bloom. Uncle Brian was out of his mind with excitement. I’d just informed him that his brother was inside waiting for him, with food. He jumped out of the car and raced in through the front door while I removed our bags from the trunk.
My mom was in the kitchen, stirring a pot, when I walked in. We hugged. It was good to see her. She told me I looked thin. I told her about the food in Cuba. She asked me about the road trip. I told her it went fine, that everything went fine. She asked me how Uncle Brian had done. I told her he’d done fine, that everything went fine.
“That’s good,” she said. “Your father and I were a little concerned.”
“He loves to ride in a car,” I said.
“Yes,” said my mother. “Yes, he certainly does.”
Here there was a silence. My mother looked at me for a moment before asking me how I was feeling. She wanted to know how things had been going all spring, how I’d been feeling about life, about work, about Amanda.
“We haven’t talked about it all that much,” she said. “I feel like I should be asking you about it, checking in on you, but you know that I don’t want to pry. That wasn’t an easy thing to go through, Wayne, and I’m just wondering…how you’re doing.”
I shrugged and told her that everything was fine, that I was feeling fine.
“There isn’t much to say about it,” I said. “It’s not that I’m avoiding anything, it’s just that the whole situation tends to defy any kind of analysis. It is what it is, and that’s it. There isn’t much else to discuss. So in light of that fact, I’m just trying to get on with things, trying not to think about it too much, trying not to obsess. That’s pretty much the extent of it.”
I shrugged my shoulders again and dug my hands inside my pockets, and then I glanced up to my left. I could see Uncle Brian through the window above the sink. He was out back on the deck with my dad and my little sister, standing by the grill, bouncing around on the balls of his feet, hollering at the top of his lungs, making wild, emphatic gestures with his hands. The window was closed, and I couldn’t make out what he was saying. To the best of my knowledge, neither could my dad. Judging by the look on his face, he was having a hard time deciphering. When Uncle Brian got excited like that, he tended to be incoherent.
This was good.
“My goodness,” my mom said. “The guy’s got a voice, doesn’t he?”
“I just spent twenty hours in a car with him.”
“I wonder what he’s talking about,” she said. “He looks like he’s about to burst a vessel.”
“God only knows,” I said.
Halfway through dinner, the other shoe dropped.
“So,” my dad said to me, “what’s this Brian keeps saying about an ambulance?”
“A what?” I said, setting my fork down.
“Well, I can’t be sure, but I think he was telling me about an ambulance and the two of you walking around in some cave.”
I looked over at Uncle Brian. He was locked into his plate of food, oblivious. I felt my face turning red.
“Oh,” I said. “We stopped off this morning at these caves in southern Indiana and went on a little tour. Nothing major. Just wanted to get out of the car and stretch our legs a little bit.”
I was a terrible liar. When confronted, I tended to falter. It wasn’t even worth the effort.
“You went into a cave?” my dad said.
I nodded, kind of.
“You mean underground?” my mom said.
“It was a short tour,” I said.
My dad looked at my mom. My mom looked at my dad.
“And what’s this about an ambulance?” my dad said.
I picked up my fork and took a bite of food, so as to appear casual. With my mouth full, I explained that Uncle Brian had “a slight panic attack.” I highlighted the fact that we had evacuated him immediately and called an ambulance “as a precautionary measure.”
“I didn’t want to take any chances,” I continued. “I felt it was the responsible thing to do.”
“You didn’t want to take any chances?” my dad said.
“What do you mean ‘a precautionary measure’?” my mom said. “What made you think he’d need an ambulance?”
“The responsible thing to do?” my dad said. “What’s so responsible about taking him into a goddamn cave?”
Anne giggled.
I explained that Uncle Brian had been hyperventilating slightly. My father tensed up on hearing the word “hyperventilating.” With this in mind, I quickly changed my rhetoric in an attempt to defuse a potentially combustible conversation.
“It was a slight oxygen issue,” I said. “I didn’t want to take any chances.”
“A slight oxygen issue?” my dad said. “What in the hell do you mean ‘a slight oxygen issue’?”
My choice of words wasn’t having the calming effect I had hoped it would.
“There’s no such thing as a slight oxygen issue,” my mother said.
“He was breathing a little funny,” I said. “Wheezing a little bit. I wanted to make sure he was okay. He got a little freaked out in the dark.”
“What in the hell were you doing taking him down into a cave, Wayne?” my dad said.
“I don’t know. I thought it’d be fun.”
“Jesus.”
“Who paid for this ambulance?” my mom said.
“Nobody.”
“What do you mean ‘nobody’?”
“I mean they never asked for anything. They gave him a
little oxygen and checked his blood pressure. That was it. They never asked me for anything. We were in a really small town.”
“Hundreds of miles from quality medical care,” my dad said. “You had no business being there.”
“Brian,” my mother said. “Brian, sweetheart. How are you feeling? You doin’ okay, honey?”
No response.
“Brian,” my dad said. “Listen up, pal. Listen to your brother. You doin’ all righty?”
“I’M DOIN’ ALL RIGHTY,” Uncle Brian said. His mouth was full of food. His eyes were glued to his plate.
“See?” I said. “He’s normal. Full appetite. It was really no big deal.”
“What about you?” my mother said. “What’s wrong with you? Why haven’t you touched your steak?”
“I told you, I’m not eating meat anymore.”
“What do you mean you’re not eating meat anymore?” my dad said.
“I mean I’ve lost interest.”
“What do you mean ‘lost interest’?”
“I mean I lost my taste for it.”
“Jesus.”
“It’s fine, Joe,” my mom said. “It’s his choice. If he doesn’t want to eat steak, that’s his business.”
“That’s a good piece of steak,” my dad said.
“Then you eat it,” I said.
My dad jabbed my steak with his fork and lifted it off of my plate.
My mom turned her attention to Uncle Brian.
“Brian,” she said, “what happened this morning? Tell us about the cave, honey.”
No response.
“Brian, honey. Listen to me for a second. What happened in the cave this morning?”
Uncle Brian stopped eating. He dropped his fork and grabbed the edge of the table.
“I DON’T WANNA GO IN A CAVE, ELAINE! NO WAY!”
“You might not want to use that word,” I said.
“We’re not taking you anywhere,” my dad said. “Calm down. We’re just asking what happened, buddy.”