A Home at the End of the World

by Michael Cunningham

  “ No ,” I holler. I try to twist loose, but our mother has a grip that could crack walnuts.

  Carlton’s girl tosses her hair and says, “Good night, baby.” She smiles a victor’s smile. She smooths the stray hair off Carlton’s forehead.

  “ No ,” I scream again. Something about the way she touches his hair. Our mother calls our father, who comes and scoops me up and starts out of the room with me, holding me like the live bomb I am. Before I go I lock eyes with Carlton. He shrugs and says, “Night, man.” Our father hustles me out. I do not take it bravely. I leave flailing, too furious to cry, dribbling a slimy thread of horrible-child’s spittle.

  Later I lie alone on my narrow bed, feeling the music hum in the coiled springs. Life is cracking open right there in our house. People are changing. By tomorrow, no one will be quite the same. How can they let me miss it? I dream up revenge against our parents, and worse for Carlton. He is the one who could have saved me. He could have banded with me against them. What I can’t forgive is his shrug, his mild-eyed “Night, man.” He has joined the adults. He has made himself bigger, and taken size from me. As the Doors thump “Strange Days,” I hope something awful happens to him. I say so to myself.

  Around midnight, dim-witted Frank announces he has seen a flying saucer hovering over the back yard. I can hear his deep, excited voice all the way in my room. He says it’s like a blinking, luminous cloud. I hear half the party struggling out through the sliding glass door in a disorganized, whooping knot. By that time everyone is so delirious a flying saucer would be just what was expected. That much celebration would logically attract an answering happiness from across the stars.

  I get out of bed and sneak down the hall. I will not miss alien visitors for anyone, not even at the cost of our mother’s wrath or our father’s disappointment. I stop at the end of the hallway, though, embarrassed to be in pajamas. If there really are aliens, they will think I’m the lowest member of the house. While I hesitate over whether to go back to my room to change, people start coming back inside, talking about a trick of the mist and an airplane. People resume their dancing.

  Carlton must have jumped the back fence. He must have wanted to be there alone, singular, in case they decided to take somebody with them. A few nights later I will go out and stand where he would have been standing. On the far side of the gully, now a river swollen with melted snow, the cemetery will gleam like a lost city. The moon will be full. I will hang around just as Carlton must have, hypnotized by the silver light on the stones, the white angel raising her arms up across the river.

  According to our parents the mystery is why he ran back to the house full tilt. Something in the graveyard may have scared him, he may have needed to break its spell, but I think it’s more likely that when he came back to himself he just couldn’t wait to get back to the music and the people, the noisy disorder of continuing life.

  Somebody has shut the sliding glass door. Carlton’s girlfriend looks lazily out, touching base with her own reflection. I look, too. Carlton is running toward the house. I hesitate. Then I figure he can bump his nose. It will be a good joke on him. I let him keep coming. His girlfriend sees him through her own reflection, starts to scream a warning just as Carlton hits the glass.

  It is an explosion. Triangles of glass fly brightly through the room. I think for him it must be more surprising than painful, like hitting water from a great height. He stands blinking for a moment. The whole party stops, stares, getting its bearings. Bob Dylan sings “Just Like a Woman.” Carlton reaches up curiously to take out the shard of glass that is stuck in his neck, and that is when the blood starts. It shoots out of him. Our mother screams. Carlton steps forward into his girlfriend’s arms and the two of them fall together. Our mother throws herself down on top of him and the girl. People shout their accident wisdom. Don’t lift him. Call an ambulance. I watch from the hallway. Carlton’s blood spurts, soaking into the carpet, spattering people’s clothes. Our mother and father both try to plug the wound with their hands, but the blood just shoots between their fingers. Carlton looks more puzzled than anything, as if he can’t quite follow this turn of events. “It’s all right,” our father tells him, trying to stop the blood. “It’s all right, just don’t move, it’s all right.” Carlton nods, and holds our father’s hand. His eyes take on an astonished light. Our mother screams, “Is anybody doing anything?” What comes out of Carlton grows darker, almost black. I watch. Our father tries to get a hold on Carlton’s neck while Carlton keeps trying to take his hand. Our mother’s hair is matted with blood. It runs down her face. Carlton’s girl holds him to her breasts, touches his hair, whispers in his ear.

  He is gone by the time the ambulance gets there. You can see the life drain out of him. When his face goes slack our mother wails. A part of her flies wailing through the house, where it will wail and rage forever. I feel our mother pass through me on her way out. She covers Carlton’s body with her own.

  He is buried in the cemetery out back. Years have passed—we are living in the future, and it’s turned out differently from what we’d planned. Our mother has established her life of separateness behind the guest-room door. Our father mutters his greetings to the door as he passes.

  One April night, almost a year to the day after Carlton’s accident, I hear cautious footsteps shuffling across the living-room floor after midnight. I run out eagerly, thinking of ghosts, but find only our father in moth-colored pajamas. He looks unsteadily at the dark air in front of him.

  “Hi, Dad,” I say from the doorway.

  He looks in my direction. “Yes?”

  “It’s me. Bobby.”

  “Oh, Bobby,” he says. “What are you doing up, young man?”

  “Nothing,” I tell him. “Dad?”

  “Yes, son.”

  “Maybe you better come back to bed. Okay?”

  “Maybe I had,” he says. “I just came out here for a drink of water, but I seem to have gotten turned around in the darkness. Yes, maybe I better had.”

  I take his hand and lead him down the hall to his room. The grandfather clock chimes the quarter hour.

  “Sorry,” our father says.

  I get him into bed. “There,” I say. “Okay?”

  “Perfect. Could not be better.”

  “Okay. Good night.”

  “Good night. Bobby?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Why don’t you stay a minute?” he says. “We could have ourselves a talk, you and me. How would that be?”

  “Okay,” I say. I sit on the edge of his mattress. His bedside clock ticks off the minutes.

  I can hear the low rasp of his breathing. Around our house, the Ohio night chirps and buzzes. The small gray finger of Carlton’s stone pokes up among the others, within sight of the angel’s blank white eyes. Above us, airplanes and satellites sparkle. People are flying even now toward New York or California, to take up lives of risk and invention.

  I stay until our father has worked his way into a muttering sleep.

  Carlton’s girlfriend moved to Denver with her family a month before. I never learned what it was she’d whispered to him. Though she’d kept her head admirably during the accident, she lost her head afterward. She cried so hard at the funeral that she had to be taken away by her mother—an older, redder-haired version of her. She started seeing a psychiatrist three times a week. Everyone, including my parents, talked about how hard it was for her, to have held a dying boy in her arms at that age
. I’m grateful to her for holding my brother while he died, but I never once heard her mention the fact that though she had been through something terrible, at least she was still alive and going places. At least she had protected herself by trying to warn him. I can appreciate the intricacies of her pain. But as long as she was in Cleveland, I could never look her straight in the face. I couldn’t talk about the wounds she suffered. I can’t even write her name.

  JONATHAN

  O UR seventh-grade class had been moved that September from scattered elementary schools to a single centralized junior high, a colossal blond brick building with its name suspended over its main entrance in three-foot aluminum letters spare and stern as my own deepest misgivings about the life conducted within. I had heard the rumors: four hours of homework a night, certain classes held entirely in French, razor fights in the bathrooms. It was childhood’s end.

  The first day at lunch, a boy with dark hair hanging almost to his shoulders stood behind my friend Adam and me in the cafeteria line. The boy was ragged and wild-looking: an emanation from the dangerous heart of the school itself.

  “Hey,” he said.

  I could not be certain whether he was speaking to me, to Adam, or to someone else in the vicinity. His eyes, which were pink and watery, appeared to focus on something mildly surprising that hovered near our feet.

  I nodded. It seemed a decent balance between my fear of looking snobbish and my dread of seeming overeager. I had made certain resolutions regarding a new life. Adam, a businesslike barrel-shaped boy I had known since second grade, dabbed at an invisible spot on his starched plaid shirt. He was the son of a taxidermist, and possessed a precocious mistrust of the unfamiliar.

  We slowly advanced in the line, holding yellow plastic trays.

  “Some joint, huh?” the boy said. “I mean, like, how long you guys in for?”

  This was definitely addressed to us, though his gaze had not yet meandered up to address our eyes. Now I was justified in looking at him. He had a broad handsome face with a thin nose slightly cleft at the tip, and a jaw heavy enough to suggest Indian blood. There were aureoles of blond stubble at his lips and chin.

  “Life,” I said.

  He nodded contemplatively, as if I had said something ambiguous and thought-provoking.

  A moment passed. Adam would have gotten through the conversation by feigning well-mannered deafness. I struggled to be cool. The silence caught and held—one of those amicable, protracted silences that open up in casual conversations with strangers and allow all members to return, unharmed, to the familiarity of their own lives. Adam visibly turned his attention toward the front of the line, as if something delightful and unprecedented was taking place there.

  But then, forgetting my resolution, I fell into a habit from my old life, one of the personal deficiencies I had vowed to leave behind.

  I started talking.

  “I mean, this is it, don’t you think?” I said. “Up till now everything’s been sort of easy, I mean we were kids . I don’t know what school you came from, but at Fillmore we had recess, I mean we had snack periods, and now, well, there are guys here who could fit my head in the palm of their hand. I haven’t been to the bathroom yet, I hear there are eighth-graders waiting in there for seventh-graders to come in and if one does they pick him up by his feet and stick his head in the toilet. Did you hear that?”

  Adam impatiently plucked a speck of lint from his collar. My ears heated up.

  “Naw, man,” the stranger said after a moment. “I didn’t hear anything like that. I smoked a joint in the head before third period, and I didn’t have any problems.”

  His voice carried no mocking undertone. By then we had reached the steam table, where a red-faced woman parceled out macaroni casserole with an ice-cream scoop.

  “Well, maybe it’s not true,” I said. “But you know, this is a rough place. A kid was murdered here last year.”

  Adam looked at me impatiently, as if I were a new stain that had somehow appeared on his shirtfront. I had abandoned my second resolution. I was not only babbling, I was starting to tell lies.

  “Oh yeah?” the boy said. He appeared to find the assertion interesting but unexceptional. He wore a washed-out blue work shirt and a brown leather jacket that dribbled dirty fringe from its sleeves.

  “Yeah,” I said. “A new kid, a seventh-grader. It was in all the papers. He was, well, sort of fat. And a little retarded. He carried a briefcase, and he kept his glasses on with one of those black elastic bands. Anyway, he showed up here and a whole gang of eighth-graders started teasing him. At first it was just, you know, regular teasing, and they would probably have gotten tired of it and left him alone if he’d been smart enough to keep his mouth shut. But he had a bad temper, this kid. And the more they teased him, the madder he got.”

  We worked our way down the line, accumulating small bowls filled with corn kernels, waxed cartons of milk, and squares of pale yellow cake with yellow icing. We sat together without having formally decided to, simply because the story of the murdered boy wasn’t finished yet. I stretched it out over most of the lunch period. I omitted no detail of the gang’s escalating tortures—the stolen glasses, the cherry bomb dropped in the locker, the dead cat slipped into the victim’s briefcase—or of the hapless boy’s mounting, impotent rage. Adam alternated between listening to me and staring at the people sitting at other tables, with the unabashed directness of one who believes his own unimportance renders him invisible. We had finished our macaroni and corn and had started on our cake before the victim took his revenge, in the form of a wire stretched all but invisibly, at neck’s height, across the trail where the older boys rode their dirt bikes. We were through with our dessert by the time he botched the job—he had not secured the wire tightly enough to the tree trunks—and were on our way to our next classes before the police found him floating in the reservoir, his new glasses still held in place by their elastic band.

  We walked together, we three, to Adam’s and my math class. He and I had planned to share as many classes as possible. I finished the story at the door.

  “Hey, man,” the stranger said. He shook his head, and said nothing more.

  “My name is Jonathan Glover,” I said.

  “I’m, um, Bobby Morrow.”

  After a moment, Adam said, “Adam Bialo?” as if uncertain whether such a name would be believed. It was the first time he had spoken.

  “Well, see you later,” I said.

  “Yeah. Yeah, man, I’ll see you later.”

  It was not until he walked away that I saw the faded blue eye stitched to the back of his jacket.

  “Weird,” Adam said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I thought you weren’t going to tell any more lies,” he said. “I thought you took an oath.”

  In fact, we had traded oaths. I was to abandon my storytelling, and he to cease inspecting his clothes for imperfections.

  “That was a tall tale. It’s different from a lie.”

  “Weird,” he said. “You’re about as weird as he is.”

  “Well,” I answered, with a certain satisfaction. “I guess maybe I am.”

  “I believe it,” he said. “I have no doubt.”

  We stood for a moment, watching the stranger’s embroidered ey
e recede down the biscuit-colored hall. “ Weird ,” Adam said once again, and there was true indignation in his voice, a staunch insistence on the world’s continuing responsibility to observe the rules of cleanliness and modesty. One of Adam’s attractions had always been his exasperated—but ultimately willing—sidekick quality. His shuffling, uncurious ways made me look more exotic than I was; in his company I could be the daring one. As I chronicled our mild adventures in my own mind, I cast Adam as a hybrid of Becky Thatcher and Sancho Panza, while I was Huck, Tom, and Nancy Drew all mixed together. Adam considered a nude swim or a stolen candy bar to be broaching the limits, limits I was only too happy to exceed. He helped me realize my own romantic ideal, though lately I’d begun to suspect that our criminal escapades were pathetically small-time, and that Adam would not accompany me into waters much deeper than these.

  Bobby was waiting for us at lunch the following day. Or, rather, he managed to turn up next to us in line again. He had a particular talent for investing his actions with the quality of randomness—his life, viewed from a distance, would have appeared to be little more than a series of coincidences. He exerted no visible will. And yet, by some vague-eyed trick, he was there with us in line again.

  “Hey,” he said. Today his eyes were even redder, more rheumily unfocused.

  “Hey,” I said. Adam bent over to pull a loose thread from the cuff of his corduroys.

  “Day number two, man,” Bobby said. “Only a thousand five hundred to go. Yow.”

  “Have we really got one thousand five hundred days of school left?” I asked. “I mean, is that an actual count?”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “Like, give or take a few.”

  “They add up, don’t they? Two years here, four in high school, and four in college. Man. A thousand five hundred days.”

  “I wasn’t counting col lege, man.” He smiled, as if the idea of college was grandiose and slightly absurd—a colonial’s vision of silver tea sets gleaming in the jungle.