How They Were Found (18 page)

2A. THOSE WHO CAME FOR YOU FIRST

It began with the newspapermen, their tales of the gold stashed in your halls, of stockpiled gems and expensive paintings and antique jewelry. None of it was true, but none of it surprised you either. The reporters have never worried about the truth before, not when it came to you and yours.

So the articles run, and then they come: not your true neighbors, but these new ones who replaced them. The first brick through the window is merely irritating, the second more so, but by the third and the fourth you've had enough and board up all the windows. You have to go out at night and scavenge more wood despite Homer's protests, his pleas for you to use the piles of lumber already in the house. He doesn't understand that what you have gathered already has purpose, is stock against future tragedies.

The bricks are only precursors, warnings: There is a break-in, and then another. The first time you fire a gun in the house, Homer screams for two days, refusing to calm down no matter what you say. You count yourself lucky that he's gone blind, or else he might have come down  himself, seen the blood soaked into the piles of newspapers bordering the basement door.

Afterward, you move even more bundles to the basement, stacking newspaper to the ceiling, layering it six feet deep. Heavy and damp and covered in mold and rot, you know that no burglar will be able to push his way through the newsprint. It is your family's history that they are after, the city's that will keep them out.

4A. HOW I CAME IN

I came in through a history of accumulation, through a trail of documents that led to you, Langley, and to him, Homer. I came in through the inventory of your home, through the listing of objects written down as if they meant something, as if they were clues to who you are.

Obsessed, I filled one book and then another and then another.

What I learned was that even a book can be a door if you hold it right, and I held it right.

When I arrived at your home, I did not climb the steps or knock on your door. Instead, I waited and watched and when you came out I followed behind you.

I watched your flight through the dark night air, watched as you pretended skittishness in the streets. I followed you from backyard to alley to dumpster, lingered behind as you scavenged for food and pump-drawn water and shiny objects to line your halls. I watched you take each new prize and clutch it to your breast, and when you were ready to return, I followed you inside.

I want to tell you now that I am a night bird too, just another breed of crow.

Like the bird we each resemble, I am both a scavenger of what has happened and an omen of what is to come.

Despite your fears, I am not your death.

Despite this assurance, you will not be saved.

I promise you, I will be here with you when you fall, and when he fails.

After you are both gone, I am afraid that I will still be here.

3B. INVENTORY

Thirty Harlem phone books, one for each year from 1909 to 1939: Individually, they are just another pile of junk, but read as a collection they are something else. The names change from Roosevelt to Robeson, from Fitzgerald to Hughes, a process that doesn't happen all at once but slowly, like the mixing after a blood infusion. By the 1920s, Miller and Audubon and Rockwell are gone, replaced by Armstrong and Ellington and DuBois. Read like this, they are yet another type of wall, one that is both harder to see and yet obvious enough once you know the color of the bricks.

1B. HOMER HATES THE WEATHER IN NEW YORK CITY

When it rains, water comes in through the ceiling, creates trickling waterfalls that cascade downward from floor to floor, from pile to pile. The wood of every chair and table feels warped and cracked while nearby newspaper bundles grow heavy with mold and dampness that will never leave, their pages slippery with the ink leaking downward into the carpet. Things float in the water, or worse, swim, like the rats and cockroaches and whatever else lives in the high press of the stacks. Other floors are similarly obscured by the often ankle-deep torrents, hiding broken glass, sharp sticks, knives and scalpels, the dozens of light bulbs Langley broke in a fit when the electricity was shut off for nonpayment.

Once, Homer remembers, it snowed in his sitting room, the flakes settling on his face and tongue and clothes. He'd had only Langley's word and the freeze of the air to tell him it was snow that fell that day. Reaching out his tongue, he feared he'd taste ash instead, but said nothing as his brother laughed and refilled their snifters.

3C. INVENTORY

Inside much of the house, the only navigation possible was through tunnels Langley had carved into the piles of garbage that filled each room. Supported with scraps of lumber and stacked newspaper or cardboard, these tunnels appeared to collapse frequently, forcing Langley to start over or to create alternate paths to the parts of the house he wished to access.

Some of the tunnels were wide enough that a person could crawl comfortably through them, and in places even walk in a crouch. Others, especially on the second floor, were much smaller. Langley might have been able to fit through them, but not the heavier Homer. The tunnels were the closest thing the house had to doors, and beyond them were secrets the older brother had most likely not shared in decades.

Langley once claimed to be saving the newspapers so that when his brother regained his sight he would be able to catch up on the news. It wasn't a funny joke, but Langley wasn't a funny man. The earliest newspapers in the house date from 1933, the year Homer went blind, and they continued to be delivered until weeks after the house began to be emptied and inventoried. Even allowing for twelve years of uninterrupted delivery, there were still far more newspapers in the house than anyone could have expected. They were stacked and bundled in every room, in every hall, covering the landings of staircases and filled closets and chests. Even if Homer had somehow learned to see again, this was never going to be the best way to rejoin the world.

1C. HOMER TAKES HIS MEDICINE

After Homer lost his sight, his brother put him on a diet of nothing but oranges, convinced the fruit would restore his vision. Homer wasn't so sure, but he couldn't go out and get food himself—only Langley ever left the mansion, and even then only at night—and so Homer had no choice but to take what was offered. Every day, he ate a dozen oranges, until his breath stank of rind and pulp, until the undersides of his fingernails were crusted with the sticky leftovers of his meals. Langley told him that if he could eat one hundred oranges a week his sight would come back, but Homer couldn't do it, no matter how hard he tried. It was too much of one thing, a deadening of his taste buds as complete as the deadening of his irises, his corneas, his optic nerves that still sent useless signals down the rotted pathways of his all too useless brain.

2B. THE ONLY THING YOU HAVE CAUGHT THUS FAR

You started making the booby traps after the break-ins began, and never stopped revising and improving this new class of inventions. You rigged tripwires and deadfalls, hid walls of sharpened broomsticks behind the moist surface of your newspaper tunnels. Poured loose piles of broken glass beneath intentionally weakened floorboards. Made other traps and then forgot them, until you were unsure about even your own safety.

More and more, you had to tell Homer that maybe the best thing for him would be to stay in his chair.

The one that got you was a tripwire in the second-story hallway leading from the staircase to the master bedroom. You were hurrying, careless for one moment, just long enough to trip the wire that released the trap, burying you beneath a manmade boulder, a netted mass of typewriters and sewing machines and bowling balls hung from the ceiling months before.

Even with all that coming toward you, you almost got away. Only your right leg is pinned and broken, but that is all it takes to doom you. You cannot see behind you well enough to know how bad the wound is, but even through the mold and must you smell the blood leeched from your body, soaking the already-ruined hallway carpet.

1D. HOMER IS MERCIFUL

It doesn't take long for Homer to lose his bearings and get lost, turning randomly at each intersection in the tunnels. Without sight, there's no way to check the few clues that might yet remain, like the pattern on the ceiling or the moldings in the corners. He reaches out with his hands, stretches his fingers toward whatever awaits them, every inch a lifetime's worth of danger. The space is filled with tree branches, a bramble slick with rot and sticky with sap. Homer recoils at the sound of movement nearby—insect or rodent or reptile, Homer can't know which—and with his next step he crushes something beneath his foot, the snap of a vertebrae or carapace muffled by the sheer bulk of the room. He stops for a moment to stamp the thing out, to be sure it is dead. Somewhere his brother moans in the stacks, and there's no reason for whatever creature lies beneath his heel to suffer the same.

2C. JUSTIFYING YOUR GATHERING

When your father left you and your brother and your mother, he took everything with him. He took his medical books and his anatomical drawings and his specimen jars. He took his suits and his shoes and his hats. He took his golf clubs and his pipes and his records, and when he was gone, your mother scrubbed the house from top to bottom in her grief, removing every last particle of dust that might once have been him. He left her, and in return she eradicated him so thoroughly that for twenty years he stayed out of the house.

And then he returned, bundled in the back of a truck and disguised as gynecological equipment and ornate furniture, as something that could be bound into chests and sacks and bundles of paper.

He took everything that might have been yours, and just because it eventually came back doesn't mean you didn't hurt during the years it was gone. Now you have him trapped, boarded behind the doors of the second floor, and he will never escape again. Every stray hair still clinging to a shirt collar, every scrap of handwriting left in the margins of his texts, all of it is him, is who he was. It is all that's left, but if you keep it safe then it is all you'll ever need.

3D. INVENTORY

The master bedroom was found full of correspondence, tied into bundles organized by month and year. The letters begin arriving in 1909, then increased in frequency during the following decade until a letter arrived almost every single day. After this peak, the correspondence slowly tapers off before stopping in 1923. The bulk of the unopened mail is from Herman Collyer, each letter a single entry in a series of entreaties dating from his abandonment of his family to the year of his own death. Whether Langley ever showed his brother these sealed envelopes is open to debate, but his own stance on his father's writings is more definitive: Each letter remained an apology unasked for, unwanted and unopened, from the day they were received until the day he died.

2D. THE FIRST HOARD

Was inherited, not gathered. Your father died and suddenly all his possessions were yours, spilling out of your rooms and into your halls. As if you knew what to do with the evidence of a lifetime. As if you could throw away your father, or sell him off to strangers.

It wasn't long after that when you started adding to the piles yourself, was it?

If only you gathered enough, then maybe you could build a father. Gather a mother up in your arms, like all these piles of porcelain knick-knacks. Design a family from things best left behind. Replace birth with theft, life with hoarding, death with destruction. This house is a body, and you and Homer move within it. Rooms like cells, floors like organs, and you two—like what, exactly? Pulses of electricity, nervous messages, the tiny sparks that one day might bring this place to life?

Listen—

Somewhere, Homer is crying again, isn't he?

4B. WHERE I AM IN RELATION TO WHERE YOU ARE

The thin biography tells me nothing, doesn't help me penetrate past the birth and death dates, the one extant photograph, the mere facts of your father leaving you and of your mother dying and of the great divide opened between you and your brother by his blindness. I am divided from you too, by decades I could not cross in time. The only way I feel close to you is when I read the list of objects you left behind, because I know that in your needy acquisitions there is something of me.

Are you listening?

Breathe, Langley.
Breathe
.

1E. HOMER REMEMBERS HIS FACE

Homer crawls on his hands and knees, searching for signs of his brother, whose voice is a cricket's, always out of reach, the sound coming from every direction at once. Homer is hungry and tired and wants to go back to his chair, but he perseveres. His brother would do it for him. His brother has been doing it for him. On each of the thousands of days since Homer went blind, Langley has fed him and clothed him and kept him company—has kept him safe from the intruders Homer isn't supposed to talk about—and now on the day when Langley needs his help, he is failing. Homer's face is wet but he doesn't know if the wetness is tears or sweat or something else, something dripping from the ceiling and the stacks. He doesn't think he's crying but feels he might start soon, might start and never stop. Whatever it is, he doesn't reach up to wipe it away. His hands are filthy, filthier than anything that might be there on his face.

His face: Once, before his blindness but after he stopped being able to look himself in the mirror, Homer dreamed he was a man made of mud, a pillar of dust, some delicate creation waiting to be dispersed or destroyed.