by Drew Ford
Shit, I can’t afford these digressions.
After Bobby died I covered him with a quilt, sat at the window of this cabin just north of North Conway, New Hampshire, for some three hours, looking out at the big nothing. Used to be you could see the orange glow of the high-intensity arc-sodiums from town, but no more. Now there’s just the White Mountains, looking like dark pieces of crepe paper cut out by a child, and the pointless stars.
I turned on the radio, dialed through four bands, found one crazy guy, and shut it off. I sat there thinking of ways to tell this story. My mind kept sliding away toward all that nothing. Finally I realized I needed to get myself off the dime and shoot myself up. Shit, I never could work without a deadline. Well, I got one now.
Our parents had no reason to expect anything other than what they got: bright children. Dad was a history major who had become a full professor at Hofstra at thirty. Ten years later he was one of six vice administrators of the National Archives in Washington, DC, and in line for the top spot. Good shit, too. Had a whole Chuck Berry collection, my dad. He filed by day and rocked by night. Mom graduated cum laude from Drew. Business administration. Got a Phi Beta Kappa key she sometimes wore on this funky fedora she had. She became a successful CPA in DC, met my dad, married him, and took in her shingle when she became pregnant with yours truly. I came along in 1980. By ’84 she was doing taxes for some of my dad’s associates as a “hobby.” By the time Bobby was born in 1987, she was handling taxes, investment portfolios, and estate planning for a dozen powerful men. I could name them, but who gives a fuck? They’re either dead or driveling idiots by now.
I think she probably made more out of her “hobby” each year than my dad made at his job, but that never mattered—they were happy with what they were to themselves and to each other. I saw them squabble lots of times, but I never saw them fight. When I was growing up, the only difference I saw between my mom and my playmates’ moms was that their moms used to read or iron or sew or talk on the phone while the soaps played on the tube, and my mom used to run a pocket calculator and write down numbers on big green sheets of paper while the soaps played.
I was no disappointment to a couple of people with Mensa cards in their wallets. I maintained A and B averages through my public-school career (the idea that either I or my brother might go to a private school was never even discussed, so far as I know). I also wrote well early, with no effort at all. I sold my first magazine piece when I was twenty—it was on how the Continental Army wintered at Valley Forge. I sold it to an airline magazine for four hundred fifty dollars. My dad, whom I loved and do love deeply, asked me if he could buy that check from me. He gave me his own personal check and had the check from the airline magazine framed and hung over his desk. Sweet guy. Of course he and my mother both died raving and pissing in their pants—like most of the human race—late last year, but I never stopped loving either of them.
I was the sort of child they had every reason to expect: a good boy who grew up in an atmosphere of love and confidence, a bright boy who found a considerable talent and put it to work.
Bobby was different. Bobby wasn’t just bright; he was a bona fide genius.
I potty trained two years earlier than Bob; that was the only thing in which I ever beat him. But I never felt jealous of him; that would have been like a fairly good high-school pitcher feeling jealous of Catfish Hunter or Ron Guidry. After a certain point the comparisons that cause feelings of jealousy simply cease to exist. I’ve been there, and I can tell you: You just stand back and shield your eyes from the flash burns. Bobby read at two and began writing at three. His printing was the straggling, struggling, galvanic constructions of a six-year-old. . . . startling enough in itself; but if transcribed so that the lagging motor control no longer became an evaluative factor, you would have thought you were reading the work of a bright, if extremely naive, junior high school student. Sometimes his syntax was garbled and his modifiers, misplaced; but he had such flaws—which plague most writers all their lives—pretty well under control by age five.
He developed headaches. My parents were afraid he had some sort of physical problem—a brain tumor, perhaps—and took him to a doctor who examined him carefully, listened to him even more carefully, and then told my parents there was nothing wrong with Bobby except stress: He was in a state of extreme frustration because his hand would not work as well as his brain. “You got a kid trying to pass a mental kidney stone,” the doctor said. “I could prescribe something for his headaches. but I think the drug he really needs is a typewriter.” So Mom and Dad gave Bobby an IBM. A year later they gave him a Commodore 64 with a WordStar program for Christmas, and Bobby’s headaches stopped . . . although he really believed for the next two or three years that it was Santa Claus who put that word cruncher under the tree.
Now that I think of it, that was maybe the only other place where I beat Bobby: I Santa trained earlier, too.
I could go on. and will have to, at least a little, but I’ll have to go fast. The deadline. Ah, the deadline. I once read a very funny piece called “The Essential Gone with the Wind” that went like this: “‘A war?’ laughed Scarlett. ‘Oh, fiddledeedee!’ Boom! Charleston was taken! Ashley died! Atlanta burned! Rhett walked in and then walked out! ‘Fiddledeedee,’ said Scarlett through her tears. ‘I will think about it tomorrow, for tomorrow is another day.’” I laughed heartily over that when I read it; now that I’m faced with doing it, it doesn’t seem quite so funny. But here goes.
“A child with an I.Q. immeasurable by any existing test?” smiled India Fornoy to her devoted husband, Richard. “Fiddledeedee! We’ll provide an atmosphere where his intellect—not to mention that of his something-less-than-moronic older brother—can grow. And we’ll raise them as the normal, all-American boys they by gosh are!” Boom! The Fornoy brothers grew up! Howard went to Rutgers, graduated cum laude, and settled down to a freelance-writing career! Made a comfortable living! Stepped out with a lot of women and went to bed with more than a few of them! Managed to avoid social diseases both sexual and pharmacological! Bought a Curtis-Mathis TV and a Mitsubishi stereo system! Wrote home at least once a week! Published two novels that did pretty well! “Fiddledeedee,” said Howard, “this is the life for me!” And so it was, at least until the day Bobby showed up with his two glass boxes, a bee’s nest in one and a wasp’s nest in the other, Bobby wearing a Mumford Phys. Ed. T-shirt inside out in the best mad-scientist tradition, on the verge of destroying human intellect and just as happy as a clam at high tide.
Guys like my brother Bobby only come along once every two or three generations, I think—guys like Newton, Einstein, Da Vinci, maybe Edison. They all seem to have one thing in common: They are like huge compasses that swing aimlessly for a long time, searching for some true north and then homing in on it with fearful force. Before that happens, such guys are apt to get up to some weird shit, and Bobby was no exception. When he was eight and I was fifteen, he came to me and said he had invented an airplane. By then I knew Bobby too well to just say “Bullshit” and kick him out of my room. I went out to the garage, where there was this weird plywood contraption sitting on his American Flyer red wagon. It looked a little like a fighter plane, but the wings were raked forward instead of back. He had mounted the saddle from his rocking horse on the middle of it with bolts. There was a lever on the side. There was no motor. He said it was a glider. He wanted me to push him down Carrigan’s Hill, which was the steepest grade in DC’s Grant Park—there was a cement path down the middle of it for old folks. That, Bobby said, would be his runway.
“Bobby,” I said, “you got this puppy’s wings on backward.”
“No,” he said. “This is the way they’re supposed to be. I saw something on Wild Kingdom about hawks. They dive down on their prey and then reverse their wings coming up. They’re double-jointed, see? You get better lift this way.”
“Then why isn’t the Air Force building them this way?” I asked, blissfully unaware that both America
and the Soviet Union had plans for such forward-wing fighter planes on their drawing boards.
Bobby just shrugged. We went over to Carrigan’s Hill, and he climbed into the rocking-horse saddle and gripped the lever. “Push me hard,” he said. His eyes were dancing with that crazed light I knew so well—Christ, his eyes used to light up that way in his cradle sometimes. But I swear to God, I never would have pushed him down the cement path as hard as I did if I thought the thing would actually work.
But I didn’t know, and I gave him one hell of a shove. He went freewheeling down the hill, whooping like a cowboy just off a trail drive and headed into town for a few cold beers. An old lady had to jump out of his way, and he just missed an old guy in a walker. Halfway down he pulled the handle, and I watched, wide-eyed and gape-jawed, as his splintery plywood plane separated from the wagon. At first it only hovered inches above it, and for a second it looked like it was going to settle back. Then there was a gust of wind, and Bobby’s plane took off like someone had it on an invisible cable. The American Flyer wagon ran off the concrete path and into some bushes. All of a sudden Bobby was ten feet in the air, then twenty, then fifty. He went gliding over Grant Park on a steepening, upward plane, whooping cheerily.
I went running after him, screaming for him to come down, visions of his body tumbling off that stupid rocking-horse saddle and impaling itself on a tree or one of the park’s many statues standing out with hideous clarity in my head. I did not just imagine my brother’s funeral; I attended it. “BOBBY!” I shrieked. “COME DOWN!”
“WHEEEEEEEE!” Bobby screamed back, his voice faint but clearly ecstatic. Startled chess players, Frisbee throwers, book readers. lovers, and joggers stopped whatever they were doing to watch.
“BOBBY, THERE’S NO SEAT BELT ON THAT FUCKING THING!” I screamed. It was the first time I ever used that particular word, so far as I can remember.
“I’ll be all right . . .” he was screaming at the top of his lungs, but I could barely hear him. I went running down Carrigan’s Hill, shrieking all the way. I don’t have the slightest memory of just what I was yelling, but the next day I could not speak above a whisper. I do remember passing a young fellow in a neat three-piece suit standing by the statue of Eleanor Roosevelt at the foot of the hill. He looked at me and said conversationally, “Tell you what, my friend, I’m having one hell of an acid flashback.”
I remember that odd, misshapen shadow gliding across the green floor of the park, rising and rippling as it crossed over park benches, litter baskets, and the upturned faces of the watching people. I remember chasing it. I remember how my mother’s face crumpled and how she started to cry when I told her that Bobby’s plane, which had no business flying in the first place, turned upside down in a sudden eddy of wind and that Bobby finished his short but brilliant career splattered all over D Street.
Way things turned out, it would have been better for everyone if it had turned out that way. Instead, Bobby banked back toward Carrigan’s Hill, holding nonchalantly on to the tail of his plane to keep from falling off the damned thing, and brought it down toward the pond at the center of Grant Park. He went air-sliding five feet over it, then four . . . and then he was dragging his sneakers in the water, sending back twin white wakes, scaring the usually complacent (and overfed) ducks into honking indignant flurries before him, laughing his cheerful laugh. He came down on the far side, exactly between two park benches that snapped off the wings of his plane. Bobby flew out of the saddle, thumped his head, and started to bawl.
That was life with Bobby.
Not that everything was that spectacular—in fact, I don’t think anything (at least until The Calmative) was quite that spectacular. But life with Bobby was a constant boggle. By age nine he was attending quantum-physics and advanced-algebra classes at Georgetown University. One day he blanked out every radio and TV on our street—and the surrounding four blocks—with his own voice; he had found an old portable TV in the attic and turned it into a wide-band radio broadcasting station. One old black-and-white Zenith, twelve feet of hi-fi flex, a coat hanger mounted on the roof peak of our house, and presto! For about two hours all four blocks of Georgetown could receive was WBOB . . . which happened to be my brother, reading some of my short stories, telling moron jokes, and explaining that the high sulfur content in baked beans was the reason our dad farted so much in church every Sunday morning. “But he gets most of ’em off pretty quiet,” Bobby told his audience of roughly three thousand, “or sometimes he holds the real bangers until it’s time for the hymns.”
My dad, who was less than happy about all this, ended up paying a seventy-five-dollar fine and taking it out of Bobby’s allowance for the next year. Life with Bobby, oh, yeah . . . and look here, I’m crying. Is it honest sentiment, I wonder, or the onset? The former, I think—Christ knows how much I loved him—but I think I better try to hurry up a little just the same.
Bobby had graduated high school, for all practical purposes, by the age of ten. But he never got a B.A. or B.S., let alone any advanced degree. It was that big, powerful compass in his head, swinging around and around, looking for some true north to point at. He went through a physics period and a shorter period when he was nutty for chemistry . . . but in the end, Bobby was too impatient with mathematics for either of those fields to hold him. He could do it, but it—and ultimately all so-called hard science—bored him. By the time he was fifteen, it was archaeology—he combed the rocky White Mountain foothills in the area around our summer place in North Conway, building a history of the Indians who had lived there.
But that passed, too: He began to read history and anthropology. When he was sixteen my folks gave their reluctant approval when Bobby requested that he be allowed to accompany a party of New England anthropologists on an expedition into South America. He came back five months later with the first real tan of his life; he was also an inch taller, fifteen pounds lighter, and much quieter. He was still cheerful enough, or could be, but his little-boy exuberance—sometimes infectious, sometimes wearisome, but always there—was gone. He had grown up. And for the first time I remember him talking about the news . . . how bad it was, I mean. That was 2003, the year a PLO splinter group called Sons of the Jihad set off a squirt bomb in London, polluting sixty percent of it for the next seventy years and making the rest of it extremely unhealthy for people who ever planned to have children (or to live past the age of fifty without developing some sort of cancer, for that matter). The year after, we tried to blockade the Philippines after the Cedeno administration accepted a “small group” of Red Chinese advisers (fifteen thousand of them, according to our spy satellites) and only backed down when it became clear that a) the Chinese weren’t kidding about emptying the holes if we didn’t pull back; and b) the American people weren’t all that crazy about committing mass suicide over the Philippine islands. That was the same year some other group of crazy motherfuckers—Albanians, I think—tried to air-spray the AIDS virus over West Berlin.
This sort of stuff depressed everybody, but it depressed the shit out of Bobby.
“Why are people so goddamn mean?” he asked me one day. We were in North Conway, it was late August, and most of our stuff was already in boxes and suitcases . . . the place had that sad, deserted look it got just before we all went our separate ways. For me it meant back to The Rut; for Bobby it meant Waco, Texas, of all places . . . he had spent the summer reading sociology and geology texts—how’s that for a crazy salad?—and said he wanted to run a couple of experiments down there. He said it in a casual way, but I saw my mother looking at him with a peculiar, thoughtful scrutiny in the last couple of weeks we were all together. Neither Dad nor I suspected, but I think my mom knew that Bobby’s compass needle had finally stopped swinging and started pointing.
“Why?” I asked. “I’m supposed to answer that?”
“Someone better. Pretty soon, too.”
“Because that’s the way people are built.”
“That’s bullshit. I don
’t believe it. Even that double-X-chromosome stuff turned out to be bullshit in the end.”
“Because of economic pressures.”
“Also bullshit. The only people who really want to fight are relatively well-off. And the people they want to fight are also relatively well-off. Poor folks are too busy looking for something to eat.”
“Original sin,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “maybe that’s it. I won’t say it isn’t. But what’s the instrument?”
“I’m not following you,” I said.
“It’s the water,” Bobby said moodily.
“Say what?”
“The water. Something in the water.”
He looked at me.
“Or something that isn’t.”
The next day Bobby went off to Waco. I didn’t see him again until he showed up at my apartment wearing the inside-out Mumford shirt and carrying the two glass boxes. That was three years later.
“Hi, Howie,” he said, stepping in and giving me a swat on the back as if it had been three days instead of three years.
“Bobby!” I yelled, and threw both arms around him in a bear hug. Hard angles bit into my chest, and I heard an angry hive hum.
“I’m glad to see you, too,” Bobby said, “but you better go easy. You’re upsetting the natives.”
I stepped back in a hurry. Bobby set down the big paper bag he was carrying and unslung his shoulder bag. Then he carefully brought the glass boxes out of the bag. There was a beehive in one, a wasps’ nest in the other. The bees were already settling down and going back to whatever business bees have, but the wasps were clearly unhappy about the whole thing.
“Okay, Bobby,” I said. I looked at him and grinned. I couldn’t seem to stop grinning. “What are you up to this time?”
He unzipped the tote bag and brought out a mayonnaise jar that was half filled with a clear liquid.