by Joe Hill
I stared at him. He stared back, waiting, his head tilted to that curious, listening angle, like a chickadee on a branch considering the sound of raindrops falling through the trees. I imagined him carefully putting back together what we had pulled apart in the last ten minutes…then imagined the music blaring to life from somewhere inside the boxes, roaring this time: “DOWN! IN THE GROUND! TO GET OUT! OF THE RAIN!” If that music started up again, without any warning, I thought I would scream; I wouldn’t be able to help myself.
I shook my head. Morris turned away and went back to disassembling his creation.
I sat at the bottom of the stairs for most of an hour, watching Morris carefully tear down his cardboard fortress. Eddie never came out of it. No other sound ever issued from within. I heard the back door open and my mother troop in, crossing the floorboards overhead. She shouted for me to come and help with the groceries. I went up, lugged in bags, put food in the fridge. Morris came up for supper, went down again. Taking a thing apart is always faster than putting something together. This is true of everything except marriage. When I glanced down the steps into the basement, at a quarter to eight, I could see three stacks of neatly flattened boxes, each about four feet high, and a vast expanse of bare concrete floor. Morris was at the bottom of the steps, sweeping. He stopped, and glanced up at me—giving me an impenetrable, alien stare—and I shivered. He went back to his work, moving the broom in short compact strokes across the floor, brush, brush, brush.
I lived in the house four more years, but never visited Morris in the basement after that, avoided the place entirely, as best I could. By the time I left for college, Morris’s bed was down there, and he rarely came up. He slept in a low hut he had made himself out of empty Coke bottles and carefully cut pieces of ice blue foam.
The moon was the only part of the fortress Morris didn’t dismantle. A few weeks after Eddie vanished, my father drove the moon to Morris’s school for the developmentally challenged, where it won third prize—fifty dollars and a medal—in an art show. I couldn’t tell you what happened to it after that. Like Eddie Prior, it never returned.
I RECALL THREE things about the few weeks that followed Eddie’s disappearance.
I remember my mother opening the door of my bedroom, just after twelve, on the night he went missing. I was curled on my side in bed, the sheet pulled over me. I wasn’t sleeping. My mother wore a pink chenille robe, loosely belted at the waist. I squinted at her, framed against the light from the hallway.
“Nolan, Ed Prior’s mother just called. She’s been calling Eddie’s friends. She doesn’t know where he is. She hasn’t seen him since he left for school. I said I’d ask if you knew anything about it. Did he come by here today?”
“I saw him at school,” I said, and then went mute, didn’t know where to go from there, what would be safe to admit.
My mother probably assumed she had just woken me from a full sleep, and I was too groggy to think. She said, “Did the two of you talk?”
“I don’t know. I guess we said hello. I can’t remember what else.” I sat up in bed, blinking at the light. “Actually, we haven’t been hanging out as much lately.”
She nodded. “Well. Maybe that’s for the best. Eddie is a good kid, but he’s a little bit of a boss, don’t you think? He doesn’t give you much space to just be yourself.”
When I spoke again, there was the slightest note of strain in my voice. “Did his mother call the police?”
“Don’t you worry,” my mother said, misunderstanding my tone, imagining I was anxious about Eddie’s welfare, when in fact I was anxious about my own. “She just thinks he’s laying low with one of his buds. I guess he’s done it before. He’s been fighting a lot with her boyfriend. Once, Eddie took off for a whole weekend, she said.” She yawned, covered her mouth with the back of her hand. “It’s just natural for her to be nervous, though, after what happened to her older boy. Him disappearing from the Juvie and just dropping off the face of the earth like that.”
“Maybe it runs in the family,” I said, my voice choked.
“Hm? What?”
“Disappearing,” I said.
“Disappearing,” she said, and then, after a moment, nodded once more. “I suppose anything can run in families. Even that. Good night, Nolan.”
“Good night, Mom.”
She was easing the door shut, and then paused, and leaned back into my room, and said, “I love you, kid,” which she always said only when I least expected it and was least prepared for it. The backs of my eyeballs prickled painfully. I tried to reply, but when I opened my mouth, I found my throat too constricted to force any air up it. By the time I cleared my throat she was gone.
A FEW DAYS later I was called out of study hall and sent to the vice-principal’s office. A detective named Carnahan had planted himself behind the vice-principal’s desk. I can’t recall much of what he asked me, or how I answered. I remember Carnahan’s eyes were the color of thick ice—a whitish-blue—and that he didn’t look at me once in the course of our five-minute discussion. I recall also that he got Eddie’s last name wrong, twice, referring to him as Edward Peers instead of Edward Prior. I corrected him the first time, let it pass the second. During the entire interview, I was in a state of high, dizzying tension; my face felt numbed, as if by novocaine, and when I spoke I could hardly seem to move my lips. I was sure Carnahan would notice and find this peculiar, but he never did. Finally he told me to stay off drugs, and then looked down at some papers in front of him and went completely silent. For almost a whole minute I continued to sit across from him, not knowing what to do with myself. Then he glanced up, surprised to find me still hanging around. He made a shooing gesture with one hand, said I could go, and would I ask the next person to come in.
As I stood up, I said, “Do you have any idea what happened to him?”
“I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Mr. Peers’s older brother broke out of Juvenile Detention last summer and hasn’t been seen since. I understand the two were close.” Carnahan turned his gaze back upon his papers, began shuffling them around. “Or maybe your friend just decided to hit the road on his own. He’s disappeared a couple times before. You know what they say. Practice makes perfect.”
When I went out, Mindy Ackers was sitting on the bench against the wall in the receptionist’s area. When she saw me, she sprang lightly to her feet, smiled, bit her lower lip. With her braces and bad complexion, Mindy didn’t have many friends, and no doubt felt Eddie’s absence keenly. I didn’t know much about her, but I knew she always wanted more than anything for Eddie to like her, and was happy to be the butt of his jokes, if only because it gave her a chance to hear him laugh. I liked and pitied her. We had a lot in common.
“Hey, Nolan,” she said, with a look that was both hopeful and pleading. “What’d the cop say? Do they think they know where he went?”
I felt a flash then of something almost like anger, not for her, but for Eddie; a harsh contempt for the way he chortled about her and made fun behind her back.
“No,” I said. “I wouldn’t worry about him. I guarantee you that wherever he is, he isn’t worrying about you.”
I saw her eyes flicker with hurt, and then I pulled my gaze away and went on, without looking back, already wishing I hadn’t said anything, because what did it matter if she missed him? I never had another conversation with her after that. I don’t know what happened to Mindy Ackers after high school. You know someone for a while and then one day a hole opens underneath them, and they fall out of your world.
THERE IS ONE other thing I remember, from the period that followed immediately after Eddie’s disappearance. As I said, I tried not to think about what had happened to him, and I avoided conversations about him. It wasn’t as hard to do as you’d think. I’m sure those who cared were trying to give me a little distance, conscious that a close friend had skipped out on me without a word. By the end of the month, it was almost as if I really didn’t know anything about what had happene
d to Edward Prior…or maybe even as if I hadn’t known Eddie at all. I was already sealing up my memories of him—the overpass, checkers with Mindy, his stories about his older brother Wayne—behind a wall of carefully laid mental bricks. I was thinking about other things. I wanted a job, was considering putting in an application at the supermarket. I wanted spending money, I wanted to get out of the house more. AC/DC was coming to town in June and I wanted tickets. Brick after brick after brick.
Then, one Sunday afternoon at the very beginning of April, we were all of us, the whole family, on our way out to have roast and potatoes at my Aunt Neddy’s house. I was upstairs, getting dressed for Sunday dinner, and my mother shouted to look in Morris’s room for his good shoes. I slipped into his small room—bed neatly made, a clean sheet of paper clipped to his artist’s easel, books on the shelf arranged in alphabetical order—and pulled open the closet door. At the very front of the closet was an ordered row of Morris’s shoes, and at one end of them were Eddie’s snow boots, the ones he had taken off in the mudroom, before going downstairs and disappearing forever into Morris’s enormous fort. At the edges of my vision, the walls of the room seemed to swell and subside like a pair of lungs. I felt faint, thought if I let go of the doorknob I might lose my balance and topple over.
Then my mother was standing in the hallway. “I’ve been yelling for you. Did you find them?”
I turned my head and looked at her for a moment. Then I looked back into the closet. I bent over and got Morris’s good loafers, and then pushed the closet door shut.
“Yes,” I said. “Here. Sorry. Spaced out for a minute.”
She shook her head. “The men in this family are all exactly the same. Your dad is in outer space half the time, you shuffle around in a trance, and your brother—I swear to God one of these days your brother is going to climb into one of his little forts and never come out.”
MORRIS PASSED A high school equivalency test shortly before he turned twenty, and for a few years after proceeded through a long string of menial jobs, living for a while in my parents’ basement, then in an apartment in New Hampshire. He shoveled burgers at McDonald’s, stacked crates in a bottling plant, and mopped the floor at a shopping mall, before finally settling into a steady gig pumping gas.
When he missed three consecutive days of work at the Citgo, his boss gave my parents a call, and they went to visit Morris in his apartment. He had rid himself of all his furniture, and hung white sheets from the ceiling in every room, making a network of passageways with gently billowing walls. They found him at the end of one of these slowly rippling corridors, sitting naked on a bare mattress. He told them if you followed the right path through the maze of hanging sheets, you would come to a window that looked out upon an overgrown vineyard, and distant cliffs of white stone, and a dark ocean. He said there were butterflies, and an old worn fence, and that he wanted to go there. He said he had tried to open the window but it was sealed shut.
But there was only one window in his apartment, and it looked onto the parking lot out back. Three days later he signed some papers my mother brought him, and accepted voluntary committal to the Wellbrook Progressive Mental Health Center.
My father and I helped him move in. It was early September then, and it felt as if we were settling Morris into a dorm at a private college somewhere. Morris’s room was on the third floor, and my father insisted on carrying Morris’s heavy, brass-hinged trunk up the stairs alone. By the time he slammed it down at the foot of Morris’s bed, his soft, round face was unpleasantly ashen, and he was lathered in sweat. He sat there holding his wrist for a while. When I asked about it, he said he had bent it funny carrying the trunk.
One week later, to the day, he sat up in bed, abruptly enough to wake my mother. She forced her eyes open, stared up at him. He was holding that same wrist, and hissing as if pretending to be a snake, his eyes protruding from his head and the veins straining in his temples. He died a good ten minutes before the ambulance arrived, of a massive coronary. My mother followed him the year after that. Uterine cancer. She declined aggressive treatment. A diseased heart, a poisoned womb.
I live in Boston, almost an hour away from Wellbrook. I fell into the habit of visiting my little brother on the third Saturday of every month. Morris liked order, routines, habits. It pleased him to know just when I would be coming. We took walks together. He made a wallet for me out of duct tape, and a hat glued all over with rare, hard-to-find bottle caps. I don’t know what happened to the wallet. The hat sits on my file cabinet, in my office, here at the university. I pick it up and stick my face into it sometimes. It smells like Morris, which is, to be exact, the dusty-dry odor of the basement in my parents’ house.
Morris took a job in the custodial department at Wellbrook, and the last time I saw him he was working. I was in the area, and popped in during a weekday, stepping outside of our routine for once. I was sent to look for him in the loading area, out behind the cafeteria.
He was in an alley off the employee parking lot, around behind a Dumpster. The kitchen staff had been throwing empty cardboard boxes back there, and now there was an enormous drift of them against one wall. Morris had been asked to flatten them and bundle them in twine for the recycling truck.
It was early fall, a little rust just beginning to show in the crowns of the giant oaks behind the building. I stood at the corner of the Dumpster, watching him for a moment. He didn’t know I was there. He was holding a large white box, open at either end, in both hands, turning it this way and that, staring blankly through it. His pale brown hair stood up in back in a curling cowlick. He was crooning to himself, in a low, slightly off-key voice. When I heard what he was singing, I swayed on my heels, the world lurching around me. I grabbed the edge of the Dumpster to hold myself steady.
“The ants go marching…one-by-one…” he sang. He turned the box around and around in his hands. “Hurrah. Hurrah.”
“Stop that,” I said.
He turned his head and stared at me—at first without recognition, I thought. Then something cleared from his eyes, and the corners of his mouth turned up in a smile. “Oh, hello, Nolan. Do you want to help me flatten some boxes?”
I came forward on unsteady legs. I had not thought of Eddie Prior in I-don’t-know-how-long. There was a bad sweat on my face. I took a box, pressed it flat, added it to the small pile Morris was making.
We chatted for a while, but I don’t remember about what. How it was going. How much money he had saved.
Then he said, “Do you remember those old forts I used to build? The ones in the basement?”
I felt an icy sense of pressure, a kind of weight, pushing out against the inside of my chest. “Sure. Why?”
He didn’t reply for a time. Flattened another box. Then Morris said, “Do you think I killed him?”
It was hard to breathe. “Eddie Prior?” The simple act of saying his name made me dizzy; a terrible lightness spread out from my temples, and back into my head.
Morris stared at me, without comprehension, and pursed his lips. “No. Daddy.” As if it should’ve been obvious. Then he turned back, lifted up another long box, stared into it thoughtfully. “Dad always brought home boxes like this for me from work. He knew. How exciting it is to hold a box and not be sure what’s in it. What it might contain. A whole world might be closed in there. Who could tell from the outside? The featureless outside.”
We had finished stacking most of the boxes into a single flat pile. I wanted to be done, wanted us to go inside, play some Ping-Pong in the rec room, put this place and this conversation behind us. I said, “Aren’t you supposed to tie these up into a bundle?”
He glanced down at his stack of cardboard, said, “Forgot the twine. Don’t worry. Just leave all this here. I’ll take care of it later.”
It was twilight when I left, the sky above Wellbrook a flat, cloudless surface colored a very pale violet. Morris stood in the bay windows of the recreation room and waved goodbye. I lifted my hand to him and dr
ove away, and they called me three days later to say he was gone. The detective who visited me in Boston to see if I knew anything that might help the police to find him managed to get my brother’s name right, but the long-term results of his investigation into my brother’s disappearance have yielded no more success than Mr. Carnahan’s search for Edward Prior.
Shortly after he was formally declared a missing person, Betty Millhauser, the care coordinator at the clinic in charge of Morris’s case, called to say they were going to have to put his possessions into storage until “he came back”—a turn of phrase she delivered in a tone of shrill optimism that I found painful—and if I wanted to, I could come in and collect some of his things to take home with me. I said I’d stop in the first time I had a chance, which turned out to be Saturday, on the exact day I would’ve visited Morris had he still been there.
An orderly left me alone in Morris’s small third-floor room. Whitewashed walls, a thin mattress on a metal frame. Four pairs of socks in the dresser; four pairs of sweat pants; two unopened plastic packages of Jockey underwear. A toothbrush. Magazines: Popular Mechanics, Reader’s Digest, and a copy of The High Plains Literary Review, which had published an essay I had written about Edgar Allan Poe’s comic verse. In his closet, I discovered a blue blazer Morris had modified, stringing it with the lights for a Christmas tree. An electrical cord was tucked into one pocket. He wore it at the annual Wellbrook Christmas party. It was the only thing in the room that wasn’t completely anonymous, the only item that actually made me think of him. I put it in the laundry bag.
I stopped in the administration offices to thank Betty Millhauser for letting me go through Morris’s room and to tell her I was leaving. She asked if I had looked in his locker down in the custodial department. I said I didn’t even know he had a locker, and where was the custodial department located? The basement.