20th Century Ghosts

by Joe Hill

  His first fascination was the towers and elaborate temples he would build out of Dixie cups. I have a memory of what might have been the first time he ever made something out of them. It was evening, and all of us, my parents, Morris and I, were gathered in the television room for one of our rare family rituals, the nightly watching of M*A*S*H. By the time the show faded into its second commercial break, however, we had all pretty much quit paying attention to the antics of Alan Alda and company, and were staring at my brother.

  My father sat on the floor beside him. I think initially he might’ve been helping him build. My father was a bit of an autistic person himself, a shy, clumsy man who didn’t get out of his pajamas on weekends, and who had almost no social truck with the world whatsoever beyond my mother. He never showed any sign of disappointment in Morris, and he often seemed most content when he was stretched out beside my brother, painting sunshine-filled stick-figure worlds on construction paper with him. This time, though, he sat back and let Morris work alone, as curious as the rest of us to see how it would come out. Morris built and stacked and arranged, his long, slender fingers darting here and there, placing the cups so quickly it almost looked like a magic trick, or the work of a robot on an assembly line…without hesitation, seemingly without thought, never accidentally knocking another cup down. Sometimes he wasn’t even looking at what his hands were doing, was staring instead into the box of Dixie Cups, as if to see how many were left. The tower climbed higher and higher, cups flying onto it so quickly I found myself sometimes holding my breath in actual disbelief.

  A second box of Dixie Cups was opened and used up. By the time he was finished—which happened when he had gone through all the wax cups my father could find for him—the tower was as tall as Morris himself, and surrounded by a defensive wall with an open gate. Because of the spaces between the cups, there seemed to be narrow archer’s windows in the sides of the tower, and the top of both tower and wall appeared crenellated. It had startled us all a little, watching Morris build the thing with such speed and self-assurance, but it wasn’t an inherently fabulous structure. Any other five-year-old might’ve built the same thing. It was only remarkable in that it suggested larger underlying ambitions. One sensed Morris easily could’ve gone on building, adding smaller watch towers, out-buildings, a whole rustic Dixie cup village. And when the cups were gone, Morris glanced around and laughed, a sound I think I had never heard before then—a high, almost piercing noise, unpracticed and more alarming than pleasant. He laughed, and he clapped for himself, just once, the way a maharajah might clap to send away a servant.

  The other way the tower was obviously different from the work of some other child his age was that any normal five-year-old would’ve constructed such a thing for one purpose—to give it a swift kick and watch the cups come down in a dry, rattling collapse. I know that’s what I wanted to do with his tower, and I was three years older: march along it, bashing with both feet, for the sheer joy of knocking down something big and carefully built, a Little League Godzilla.

  Every emotionally normal child has a streak of that in them. I suppose, if I am honest, that streak was a little broader in myself than it was in others. My compulsion to knock things down continued into adulthood, and ultimately included my wife, who disliked the habit, and expressed her displeasure with divorce papers and a jaundiced-looking lawyer who possessed all the personal warmth of a wood-chipper, and who operated with just such grinding mechanical efficiency in the courtroom.

  Morris, though, soon lost interest in his finished work, and wanted juice. My father led him away into the kitchen, murmuring that he would bring home a huge box of cups for Morris to play with tomorrow, so he could build an even bigger castle in the basement. I couldn’t believe that Morris had left his tower just standing there. It was a tease I couldn’t bear. I shoved myself up off the couch, took a crooked step towards it—and then my mother caught my arm and held it. Her gaze latched into mine, and it carried a dark warning: Don’t even think. Neither of us spoke, and in another instant I pulled my arm out of her hand and drifted out of the room myself.

  My mother did love me, but rarely said so, and often seemed to hold me at an emotional arm’s length. She understood me in a way my father didn’t. Once, horsing around in the shallows of Walden Pond, I skipped a stone at a smaller boy who had splashed me. It hit his upper arm with a meaty thwack and raised an ugly purple welt. My mother saw to it that I didn’t swim the rest of the summer, although we continued to visit Walden every Saturday afternoon, so Morris could paddle clumsily around; someone had persuaded my parents that swimming was therapeutic for him, and so she was as firm that he should swim as she was that I shouldn’t. I was required to sit on the sand with her, and was not allowed to stray out of sight of her beach towel. I could read, but was not allowed to play with, or even talk to, other children. Looking back, it’s hard to resent her if she was overly severe with me then, and on other occasions. She saw, more plainly than others, a lot of what was worst in me, and it worried her. She had some sense of my potential, and instead of filling her with hope and excitement, it made her harsh with me.

  What Morris had done in the living room, in the space of a half hour, was just a hint of what he would do with three times the area to work in, and as many Dixie cups as he wanted. In the next year he painstakingly built an elevated superhighway—it meandered all around our spacious, well-lit basement, but if stretched out straight it would’ve measured nearly a quarter mile—a giant Sphinx, and a great circular igloo, large enough for both of us to sit inside, with a low entrance I could just squirm through.

  From there it was no great stretch to designing towering, if impersonal, LEGO metropolises, patterned after the skylines of actual cities. A year after that, he graduated to dominoes, building delicate cathedrals with dozens of perfectly balanced ivory spires, reaching halfway to the ceiling. When Morris was nine, he became briefly famous, at least in Pallow, when Boston’s Chronicle ran a short feature on him. Morris had set up over eighteen thousand dominoes in the gym of his school for the developmentally challenged. He arranged them in the shape of a giant griffin battling a column of knights, and Channel Five shot him setting them off, filmed the whole great roaring tumble. His dominoes fell in such a way that arrows appeared to fly, and the griffin seemed to slash at one of the gasping chain-mailed knights; three lines of crimson dominoes fell over, looking for all the world like gashes. For a week I suffered fits of black, poisonous jealousy, left the room when he came into it, couldn’t stand that there should be so much attention focused on him; but my resentment made as little impression on him as his own celebrity. Morris was equally indifferent to both. I gave up my anger when I saw it made as much sense as screaming into a well, and eventually the rest of the world forgot that for a moment, Morris had been someone interesting.

  By the time I entered my freshman year in high school and started chumming around with Eddie Prior, Morris had moved on to building fortresses out of cardboard boxes that my father brought home for him from the warehouse where he worked as a shipping agent. Almost from the start, it was different with his cardboard hideouts than it had been with the things he built out of dominoes or Dixie cups. While his other construction projects had clear beginnings and endings, he never really seemed to finish any one particular design with his cardboard boxes. One scheme flowed into another, a shelter becoming a castle becoming a series of catacombs. He painted exteriors, decorated interiors, laid carpet, cut windows, doors that would flap open and shut. Then one day, without any warning or explanation, Morris would disassemble large sections of what he had built, and begin reorganizing the whole structure along completely different architectural lines.

  Also, though, his work with Dixie cups or LEGOS had always calmed him, while the things he built with cardboard boxes left him restless and dissatisfied. The ultimate cardboard hang-out was always just a few boxes away from being done, and until he got it right, the great looming thing he was building in the
basement had a curious and unhappy power over him.

  I remember coming into the house late on a Sunday afternoon, clomping across the kitchen in my snow boots to get something out of the fridge, glancing through the open basement door and down the steps…and then sticking in place, breath catching in my throat. Morris sat turned sideways on the bottom step, his shoulders hitched up to his ears, his face a pasty, unnatural white, twisted in a grimace. He held one palm pressed hard to his forehead, as if he had been struck there. But the thing that alarmed me the most, the thing I noticed as I came slowly down the steps towards him, was that while it was almost too cold in the basement to be comfortable, Morris’s cheeks were slicked with sweat, the front of his plain white T-shirt soaked through in a V-shaped stain. When I was three steps above him, just as I was about to call his name, his eyes popped open. An instant later that expression of cringing pain began to fade away, his face relaxing, going slack.

  “What’s happening?” I asked. “You all right?”

  “Yes,” he said without inflection. “Just—got lost for a minute.”

  “Lost track of time?”

  He seemed to need a moment to process this. His eyes narrowed; the look in them sharpened. He stared dimly at his fortress, which was, at that time, a series of twenty boxes arranged in a large square. About half of the boxes were painted a fluorescent yellow, with circular porthole windows cut in their sides. The portholes had sheets of Saran Wrap taped into them. Morris had gone over them with a hair dryer, so the plastic was stretched tight and smooth. This part of the fort was a holdover from a yellow submarine Morris had attempted to build. A periscope made out of a cardboard poster tube stuck out of the top of one very large box. The rest of the boxes, though, were painted in bold reds and blacks, with a flowing scrim of golden Arabian-style writing running along their sides. The windows of these boxes were cut in bell shapes that instantly brought to mind the palaces of Mideastern despots, harem girls, Aladdin.

  Morris frowned and slowly shook his head. “I went in and I couldn’t find my way out. Nothing looked right.”

  I glanced at the fort, which had an entrance at every corner and windows cut into every other box. Whatever my brother’s handicaps, I couldn’t imagine him getting so confused inside his fortress that he couldn’t figure out where he was.

  “Why didn’t you just crawl to a window and see where you were?”

  “There weren’t any windows where I got lost. I heard someone talking and tried to get out following his voice but it was a long way off and I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. It wasn’t you, was it? It didn’t sound like your voice, Nolan.”

  “No!” I said. “What voice?” Glancing around as I said this, wondering if we were alone in the basement. “What did it say?”

  “I couldn’t always hear. Sometimes my name. Sometimes he said to keep going. And once he said there was a window ahead. He said I’d see sunflowers on the other side.” Morris paused, then let out a weak sigh. “I might’ve seen it at the end of a tunnel—the window and the sunflowers—but I was scared to go too close, so I turned around and that’s when my head started to hurt. And pretty soon I found one of the doors out.”

  I thought there was a good chance, then, that Morris had suffered a minor break with reality while crawling around inside his fort, a not impossible circumstance. Only a year before, he had taken to painting his hands red, because he said it helped him to feel sounds. When he was in a room with music playing he would shut his eyes, hold his crimson hands above his head like antennae, and wiggle his whole body in a sort of spastic belly dance.

  I was also unnerved by the much more unlikely possibility that there really was someone in the basement, a chanting psychopath who was perhaps at this very moment hunched in one of the tight spaces of Morris’s fort. Either way, I was creeped out. I took Morris’s hand and told him to come upstairs with me, so he could tell our mother what had happened.

  When this story was repeated to her, she looked stricken. She put a hand on Morris’s forehead. “You’re all clammy! Let’s go upstairs, Morris. Let’s get you some aspirin. I want you to lie down. We can talk about this after you’ve had a minute to rest.”

  I was all for searching the basement right away, to see if anyone was down there, but my mother shooed me aside, making a face whenever I spoke. The two of them disappeared upstairs, and I sat at the kitchen counter, eyeing the basement door, in a state of fidgety unease, for most of the next hour. That door was the cellar’s only exit. If I had heard the sound of feet climbing the steps, I would have leapt up screaming. But no one came up, and when my father arrived home, we went down to search the basement together. No one was hiding behind the boiler or the oil tank. In fact, our cellar was tidy and well lit, with few good hiding spots. The only place an intruder might conceal himself was Morris’s fort. I walked around it, kicking it and peeking in through the windows. My dad said I ought to climb in for a look around, and then laughed at the expression on my face. When he went upstairs I ran after him. I didn’t want to be anywhere near the bottom of the basement stairs when he clicked the lights off.

  ONE MORNING, I was throwing my books into my gym bag before leaving for school and two folded sheets of paper fell out of Visions of American History. I picked them up and stared at them, at first without recognition—two mimeographed sheets, typewritten questions, large blocks of white space where a person could fill in answers. When I realized what I was staring at, I almost cursed the ugliest curse I knew, with my mother only a few feet away from me…an error which would’ve got my ear bent the wrong way, and which would’ve led to an interrogation I was better off avoiding. It was a take-home exam, handed out last Friday, due back that morning.

  I had been spacing out in history over the course of the last week. There was a girl, something of a punk, who wore tattery denim skirts and lurid red fishnet stockings, and who sat beside me. She would flap her legs open and shut in boredom, and I remember when I leaned forward I could sometimes catch a flash of her surprisingly plain white panties from out of my peripheral vision. If we had been reminded in class about the take-home test, I hadn’t heard.

  My mother dropped me at school. I stalked the frozen asphalt out back, stomach cramping. American history. Second period. I had no time. I hadn’t even read the two most recently assigned chapters. I knew I should sit down somewhere, and try to get a little bit of it done, skim the reading, scribble out a few half-assed answers. I couldn’t sit down, couldn’t bear to look at my take-home again. I felt overcome with a paralyzing helplessness, the dreadful, sickening sensation of no way out, my fate settled.

  At the border between the asphalt lot and the frozen, tramped-down fields beyond, there was a row of thick wooden posts that had once supported a fence, long since cleared away. A boy named Cameron Hodges from my American history class sat on one of these posts, a couple of his friends around him. Cameron was a pale-haired boy, who wore large glasses in round frames, behind which loomed inquisitive and perpetually moist blue eyes. He was on the honors list and a member of the student council, but in spite of these significant handicaps, he was almost popular, liked without really trying to be liked. This was in part because he didn’t make a big show out of how much he knew, wasn’t the sort to always be sticking his hand in the air whenever he knew the answer to a particularly hard problem. He had something else, though, too—a quality of reasonableness, a mixture of calm and an almost princely sense of fair play, that had the effect of making him seem more mature and experienced than the rest of us.

  I liked him—had even cast my vote for him in the student elections—but we didn’t ever have much to do with each other. I couldn’t see myself with a friend like him…by which I mean, I couldn’t imagine someone like him being interested in someone like me. I was a hard boy to know, uncommunicative, suspicious of other people’s intentions, hostile almost by reflex. In those days, if someone happened to laugh as they walked by me, I always glared at them, just in case w
hat was amusing them was me.

  As I wandered close to him, I saw that he had his exam out. His friends were checking their answers against his: “introduction of the cotton gin to the South, right, that’s what I said too.” I was passing directly behind Cameron. I didn’t think. I leaned past him and jerked his take-home out of his hands.

  “Hey,” Cameron said, reached to get it back.

  “I need to copy,” I said, my voice hoarse. I turned my body away, so he couldn’t grab his exam back. I was flushed, breathing hard, appalled to be doing what I was doing but doing it anyway. “I’ll give it back at history.”

  Cameron slid off the post. He came towards me, his palms turned up, his eyes shocked and beseeching, magnified unnaturally by the lenses of his glasses. “Nolan. Don’t.” It surprised me—I don’t know why—to hear him say my name. I wasn’t sure until then that he knew it. “If your answers are just like mine, Mr. Sarducchi will know you copied. We’ll both get Fs.” There was an audible tremor in his voice.

  “Don’t cry,” I said. It came out harsher than I wanted it to—I think I was really worried he might cry—so it sounded like a taunt. Other kids laughed.