A Gate at the Stairs (38 page)

Every night I lay in my bed, staying up past ten, reading. The light from my lamp attracted insects through the holes in one of the screens, and by eleven I would look up at the ceiling and it would be crawling with bugs, small, medium, and large, light and dark, all collecting up there in ominous flocks as if awaiting Tippi Hedren. Once, a leggy winged albino thing landed on my book, and its oddness fascinated me, though I soon slammed it between the pages. Once I awoke in the middle of the night and could see that through the crack between my door and the badly settled frame there was a long sliver of light from the hallway, and fireflies could enter the room; they sparkled in and out like fairies, as if the door were nothing at all, as if there were no separating this room from any other space. They were like visions, really, but ones I’d not had as a child, when I’d slept through the night with a depth and stillness that was no longer possible.

Whenever I put my bird costume on I felt once again like Icarus—take that, Professor Keyser-Lowe of Classics 251!—though I realized this wasn’t, mythically speaking, either lucky or apt. But it was becoming the most fun I’d had all year. Sometimes in the evening, the summer moon a tangerine shard—an orange peel stuck up there like the lunch garbage of God!—I’d get all set to go out and my father would say, “Oh, I’m sorry, not tonight, we’re not harvesting tonight,” and I would say, “Oh, OK,” but then I’d just go out anyway. Perhaps I was becoming addicted to being a hawk or a falcon or whatever it was I was. Perhaps I just needed the evening run. Often Blot would come with me, trotting along behind. Lucy would look longingly from her rope. The thrushes whistled their flutey country song:
Run to your home hear me / why don’t you come to me?
They sounded insincere and happy.

Waning light rouged and bronzed the clouds so they looked like a mountain range. As the dusk washed over, I galloped up and down the rows of three-season spring mix, and my dreams of flying would return. As ever, in my flying dreams, I never got very far off the ground, and now here if I took a leap I felt my wings supporting me, kitelike, just a split second above the field. I would hover, buoyed, my wings finding a little air, and so when I landed I would instantly leap up again, the ball of one foot pushing off—that split-second feeling of almost being able to set sail was enough of a thrill. Actual sustained flight would have been beside the point, and too scary to boot. This was my modest dream come true: unambitious flight. The kind that never even got high enough for a view.

Alone at dusk I was quiet; I sang nothing. At the field’s edges and near the barn and the root cellar, light still held in the yellow razzmatazz of the goldenrod. With the first full drop of the sun the swallows swooped out from their mud nests to feed. Then the barn bats followed—the small ones darting, then the larger ones, like cougars with wings, crawling their way through the air, ignoring the mosquitoes, heading for the fireflies. I sometimes studied their flight, which would never be mine, and neither did I really want it to be, but nonetheless, the balletic motions, both searching and swift, were things to be admired.

I was perfecting my soar and leap every evening as the sky deepened into night. All the daytime machinery of the nearby construction lay still, and the sawing scherzo legs of crickets began their summer repetitions—like the feisty strings in a piece by Philip Glass. The cicadas throbbed and shook with the rattle of tambourines, the peepers trilled—they all came together in a choral way. Sometimes there was the braying of a lone and distant goose. I would head toward the far woodlot, toward a spot where there was bluegrass with an overlay of rye, something that would have made a perfect soccer field. I would run toward that grass and back, feeling the slight takeoff of my wings, a sudden if momentary weightlessness. The reddening sumacs on the other side of the woodlot were fruiting early this year, and I would sometimes run in their direction as well. If Blot barked too excitedly or nipped at my heels or jumped at my wings, I ran him back to the house and would then return to the fields on my own, keeping to the narrow dirt rows between the baby greens and the kale. I ran and banked the turns and ran again, feeling myself float just lightly above the earth.

And then one evening, the air velvety and vibrating with tree frogs, the occasional bass of a courting bull in the pond thickening the song, the sturdy sky an infinitude of summer stars—what wishing! if one wanted to wish; what guiding of ships! if one were steering one!—there they both were: Reynaldo and Robert. I stopped, my skin hot from running. They were standing side by side at the end of the field, Robert with his yoga mat, Reynaldo with his prayer mat. Each had a cell phone and a volume of poems by Rumi. Their stillness, the fact that as apparitions they seemed to recede and keep the same distance from me always no matter how I tried to close it, and that they didn’t say a word before they turned and walked away, melting into the dark, though the sky remained mapped and spangled with constellations, was an omen. Plus they came again the next night in the exact same way, neither vaporous nor cadaverous, but wordless and turning and walking away, this time with a little bruised-up boy who I realized instantly in the way of visions was Gabriel Thornwood-Brink: this made me understand that they were unfindably dead, all of them, and that now the really useful things of life, like stars, would become incomprehensible decoration.

I was not there when the two military officers drove up in their military van to my parents’ door to announce my brother’s death, though years later I met someone who had done that kind of work for a living. “It’s very hard and very weird,” he said. “It was the strangest job I ever had. Although completely draped in duty, it was an exercise of total cluelessness, which, for someone who has spent any time in the military, is saying a lot.”

It was unclear how and why Robert’s death had occurred so suddenly, so soon, so instantaneously—eight weeks of boot camp had been hurried along and they had been shipped quickly overseas, as the all-volunteer army was at the beginning of its being spread too thin. They had only just landed someplace near Helmand Province; they had been there for less than three weeks; there was a BBIED but no QRD, which were all in TK or J-bad along with all the MREs; they were equipped with AKs but even a routine land-mine sweep can go awry. The letter said something different than the person on the phone. In appreciation of our loss a check for twelve thousand dollars came right away, express mail, with
Keltjin
spelled wrong.

The wailing of my mother is not to be recounted. A summer of having taken to her bed had not strengthened her for his death at all but seemed instead to have cut a groove for the mourning of it. One night she came downstairs simply to shout at my father. “We never should have named him after you! Jews understand that. It’s bad luck! Why did you want that so much?”

“I thought you meant it was bad luck for me!” my father shouted back. “And I didn’t mind that. I didn’t care about some old world hocus-pocus.”

“Well, look at that old world hocus-pocus now!” she cried, then rushed back upstairs. My father hadn’t been there when the officers had come, and he, too, had gone into a state of stunned silence, though he did say heatedly, “I’m going to make some phone calls.” Though I’m not sure he ever made enough to satisfy himself. A demining expedition. An ambushed foot patrol. How about a whack on the head with a backhoe? Fractured by a forklift? The boys stayed too long in the nighttime mountains even as the monkeys screeched their warnings. According to the PL or the CO. A BBIED. There was apparently a brand-new way to die: by cell phone. And there was supposed to have been a quick-recovery deployment by an OEF convoy. But the DU didn’t have the ECDs up and running. No one actually proposed the possibility of Robert’s own fright and ineptitude or of “friendly fire,” but the jumble of alternative explanations raised suspicions. My father, the NOK, was spoken to incessantly in acronyms and gruesome euphemism. “KIA by Talib RPGs,” they said.

“Well, I want a real explanation—ASAP!” my father cried in a voice of heat and ice. “What you mean is that his leg is in a tree somewhere?” Another officer had come to sit in our living room to explain things further.

“Actually,” said this uniformed man, “his leg was obliterated. His hand was in a tree. It was very high up. We had to leave it.”

My father did not lie in bed in the mornings the way my mother did, but busied himself in the fields without me. “You should rest,” I said to him.

But he said, “I can’t lie there and just think. It’s too scary to lie there and just think.” Sometimes he spent the days just chopping wood.

My mother covered all the mirrors in the house with pillowcases and scarves. The mirrors in the flowerbeds she covered with sheets.

Robert’s body was flown home to Chicago and from there two men drove it the five hours north to the funeral home in a Hummer, as if here in Dellacrosse even the dead might need the protection of such a vehicle, though the body did require a refrigeration unit and so perhaps this was why. The driver, on greeting my father, gave him my brother’s dog tags, which my father took like they were a fistful of change, in one hand, not looking.

The funeral, at a former Lutheran church Robert himself had never been to—one that was now Unitarian, for people who felt that God should be elected democratically and after a long campaign—seemed dominated by his friends. Chuck Buzlocki. Ken Kornblach. Cooper Dunka. They stood up, gearhead after gearhead, and you had to hand it to them: they had one boring story after another about Gunny, which moved them all to both laughter and tears. We his family sat startled and mute as if we did not know any of them, including the person they were talking about. Yet hadn’t we just seen all these boys at graduation? Listening to them, I realized why Robert’s grades had been so bad.

The minister made only the vaguest mention of God, in terms that made God seem a design and a force but a little indifferent to our fates and therefore unworshippable. Like a railway system. It could get you where you were going, wherever that was. A transit authority! But it wouldn’t counter your own devotion with love. Here and there in the church sanctuary there seemed to be a prayer, but each sat in my ears nonsensically.

Our father who art a heathen
Hollow be thigh name.
Thigh king is dumb
Thigh will is dun
on earth as it is
at birth.

I had nothing against prayer. Those who felt it was wishful muttering perhaps had less to wish for. Religion, I could now see, without a single college course helping me out, was designed for those enduring the death of their sweet children. And when children grew stronger and died less, and were in fact less sweet, religion faded away. When children began to sweeten and die again, it returned.

But sitting there, I began to realize that part of me didn’t believe Robert was dead. Part of me thought perhaps the whole thing was a prank. Like everyone, Robert would have loved to have attended his own funeral. Of course, one did always attend one’s own funeral. But usually one was so deep in the role of the dead person that one didn’t get to pay attention to the nice things people were standing up and saying about you.

The minister continued calling for others to come forth, to step up and speak, and a few more did: one teary girl and a geometry teacher. “I loved Gunny,” they both said. The girl read a poem called “Gunny Finally Got His Gun,” which was unbearable.

At the end my father stood up and shambled to the front. He clutched the lectern and looked out at all the gathered and just stared. It was not an especially uncomfortable silence as the whole occasion was so uncomfortable that his silent staring didn’t really add anything additional. Yet he did bear a look that to me seemed to say,
How have your own repellent and ridiculous sons remained alive when mine has not?

He began with a story. “When Robert was little he liked secretly to swing on the ropes in the haymow. Both my kids seemed always to love the feeling of flying, and so sometimes I looked the other way. Perhaps this was bad of me. Knowing when to look the other way and when to jump in has never been my strong suit. Once when he was about six he fell from the rope, down off the mow, and hit his chin against a rusty old bucket. He came to me holding the metal pail and said, ‘Daddy, don’t yell: I know I’ll need stitches and a shot, but it was awesome.’”