Imagine Me Gone (9 page)

To be honest, Aunt Penny, I’m not sure what will become of us now. We thought it was bad when Dad got shackled to Jim Pottes two days ago, making sleeping awkward for everyone, and then Dad woke up with Jim’s corpse locked to his ankle and wrist, dead with the Marburg that Mom presumably gave him. We lost half the morning cleaning up all that blood and mucus (except that little fidget-creature, Alec, who said he had a headache). I’d planned to do so much reading on this trip, and have got to practically none of it. In any case, at the rate the crew’s expiring I guess they’ll need someone to sail this puppy north again, so maybe I’ll have a chance to catch up then.

In the meantime, be well, and know that while this move of ours has turned into a major bore, the five of us have our eyes fixed on one another like cement. Someday soon you’ll come visit us in England at our new house and we’ll all have a good laugh about the crazy turns life can take.

Yours,

Michael

Alec

The downstairs bathroom had a cork floor and one of those strange electric towel racks. There was a bathtub but no shower. To flush you had to pull a chain hanging from a water tank up the wall. The sink was high and tiny. But no one could see you in the bathroom, it had no window, which made it safe. And it was warm, too, unlike every other room in the house, and brightly lit.

I sat on the toilet until my legs went numb, but still nothing came out. Being there that long, my legs tingling, it was as if I had the power to see through the door, out into the front hall, and onto the driveway and the little lane that Michael called twee-to-beat-the-band, and beyond that through the other houses to the center of the village we’d been living in almost two school years already, into the weird English food stores, the butcher and the greengrocer, and the newsagent. Sundays were the only times I got to wear long pants here, because it was the only day I didn’t have to go to school, and long pants were for the upper-form boys, the ones with pubic hair.

The lined gray wool of my trousers lay crumpled around my ankles. When the numbness started to hurt, I got up from the toilet and stepped out of them. All I had on now was Michael’s silky white shirt, which felt like someone touching me. I unbuttoned it and let that slink to the floor, too. I put the footstool in front of the sink and climbed up to look at my bare self in the mirror, and then I leaned forward and flapped my penis up against the glass.

Have a good look then, you little wanker,
Linsbourne had said in the showers after games. I’d been staring at his without knowing it. Everyone looked at me, and I looked down at the gray soapy water puddling by the drain.

But here with the door locked no one could see me bobbing my penis up and down with the handle of my toothbrush, or running naked in circles around the bath mat. I touched my bare legs to the curves of the towel rack, and the radiator, which burned, and my stomach to the knob of the linen closet. Then I got bored and went over to the door.

I took the knob of the sliding-bolt lock between my thumb and finger. The lock was stiff and hard to use. Mom kept saying that. You had to press it until your fingers hurt. She kept telling Dad to fix it. I pressed hard enough to feel the little pain on the pad of my thumb. But not enough to shift it open. Which excited me again. One hard push and they could open this up and discover I was naked.

I knocked on the door. Then I stood very still, and listened, not breathing. Nothing happened. I knocked again, more loudly. I heard footsteps. Mom coming into the front hall.

“Who’s in there?”

“It’s me. The lock’s stuck. I can’t get it open.”

“Just push it a little harder.”

I pressed the knob again, enough to feel the prick of the little pain.

“It’s too tight,” I said. “It won’t move.”

“Well, then find something to push it with. The handle of the plunger or something.”

I did as I was told, crossing the room, naked, getting the plunger, and scraping the wood of it against the metal loud enough for her to hear.

“It won’t go,” I said.

“What’s the matter?” Celia asked, coming down the stairs.

“He can’t get the lock open.”

“Why, because he’s too weak?”

“No,”
I called through the door. “Because it’s stuck.”

“Well, push it harder.”

“He’s tried. I knew this would happen. I told your father.”

Kelsey bashed her tail against the bottom of the door, excited by our voices. I heard Michael passing through from the living room.

“Alec’s trapped himself in the toilet,” Celia told him.

“I keep saying he’s the fortunate one,” Michael said. “But no one believes me.”

“That’s not helpful,” Mom said. “I have to check the meat. Could you two help your brother, please?”

“Just open it,” Celia said. “I need my barrette.”

“I can’t,” I said, my cheeks burning, a strange light-headedness lifting my body until I almost floated there just a few inches from them, the door the only thing covering me.

“What are the conditions like in there?” Michael asked. “Are you well provisioned?”

“You’re just encouraging him,” Celia said, walking off toward the living room. “Leave him there and he’ll come out.”

But Michael stayed. He sat in the creaking wicker side chair by the hall table. I heard the drawer open, and a moment later the end of a black shoelace appeared under the door.

“What’s this?”

“You could tie it to the bolt and pull.”

I pressed my bare back to the wall and slid down it until I was sitting cross-legged.

Michael had hated his school as much as I hated mine, at least in the beginning. He’d cried about it, even though he seemed too old to. I listened at night from my bedroom, to Mom telling him it would be okay, that he would meet people and it would get better. That was when the two of us had still played together with Kelsey on Sundays, steering her into the same room as the white Persian cat that had come with the house, so we could watch them fight. But now Michael usually went into Oxford to go record shopping instead. And during the week he didn’t get home until suppertime, and always studied afterwards.

“Where’s Dad?” I asked, fiddling with the shoelace.

“In bed,” Michael said. “Where, of late, he is wont to be.”

“Why does he sleep so much?”

“I guess because he’s tired,” Michael said. “Very tired. Apparently unemployment will do that to you.”

“What do you mean?”

“He picks you up from school, doesn’t he? Did he ever do that before?”

Dad had started coming to get me from school in the last month, in the blue Skoda wagon. On the way home, on the straightaway of the country road, he’d speed up to eighty or ninety miles an hour, and then shift the car into neutral and turn the engine off. We’d swoop into the valley, freewheeling through the open fields, seeing how far we could get, if we could make it all the way to the pub at the bridge, until we were going only a few miles an hour and cars behind us were honking and passing.

“He’s not still
in
there, is he?” Mom said, agitated now. “This is ridiculous. Where’s your father? Michael, get your father.”

I leaped to the sink and put my clothes on. And then went to the door, and was about to slide the lock open but I didn’t. I waited. For Dad’s footsteps on the ceiling above me. For the sound of him moving in their bedroom. He would have to get up now. He’d have no choice. And then I heard him on the stairs, and heard his voice just on the other side of the door.

“Alec?”

“Yeah?”

“What’s the trouble, then?”

“The lock. It’s jammed.”

He walked out of the hall without saying anything and came back a moment later, and I heard a scraping at the base of the door, and saw the tips of a pair of pliers. But they wouldn’t fit through the crack. He got up again and returned with a smaller pair, which he slid through to me.

I clasped them to the knob and scraped them along the metal.

“You have to squeeze,” he said.

I stopped the scraping and made a little grunt. “It doesn’t work,” I said. “It’s still stuck.”

“For God’s sake,” Mom said, charging back in. “The food’s on the table.”

“Open the fucking door,” Celia said.

“You will
not
use that language,” Mom said.

All four of them were there now, and Kelsey, too. Dad didn’t say anything.

The blood was pumping in my ears.

“That’s it, then?” Mom said to Dad. “You’ve got nothing else to offer?”

“Alec,” he said. “Step back, step away from the door.”

“What are you doing, John?”

“I’m going to break it down,” he said.

“No!” I said. “Wait, let me try again.” And I grabbed the pliers, biting the steel with them and yanking the bolt across.

John

From the clearing in the woods, I can see down through the spruce trees to the river, where a long slab of rock parts the slow-moving waters covered now in morning shade. The rock is mute and still in the encroaching summer heat. It has the inhuman patience of objects. A reminder that mineral time does not care for sentiment, or life. Every human thing, a ruin in waiting. On a planet that is a ruin in waiting. Which says nothing about divinity, one way or the other. I only know that this trial is what has become of my sliver of time.

My great return to Britain was a great failure. There was a recession. Purposeful risk was a hard enough sell to my complacent countrymen. The declining market made them more cautious still. I did what I had told all the entrepreneurs I ever trained not to do: moved my family before I had sufficient commitments. These, at least, are some of the excuses Margaret encourages me to give myself for what happened. That is, when she is not eaten up by fear and rage at the fact that she and the children have been uprooted twice now: first to go over there, to retrieve our furniture from where it had remained in storage, to settle the children in English schools, and then less than three years later to retreat back here to America. Because of me. Because I was fired by my own partners, told they couldn’t afford my debilitation any longer—at the firm I had started. Back here to a different town and different schools, everything new again. Walcott, west of Boston. Because at least here, a man whose business I had helped to start pitied me sufficiently to offer me a job. Which itself couldn’t possibly last, and didn’t. Eighteen months of work, and then the suggestion that I go part-time, and then, a few months ago, the end to that, too.

Against the monster, I’ve always wanted meaning. Not for its own sake, because in the usual course of things, who needs the self-consciousness of it? Let meaning be immanent, noted in passing, if at all. But that won’t do when the monster has its funnel driven into the back of your head and is sucking the light coming through your eyes straight out of you into the mouth of oblivion. So like a cripple I long for what others don’t notice they have: ordinary meaning.

Instead, I have words. The monster doesn’t take words. It may take speech, but not words in the head, which are its minions. The army of the tiny, invisible dead wielding their tiny, spinning scythes, cutting at the flesh of the mind. Unlike ordinary blades, they sharpen with use. They’re keenest in repetition. Self-accusation being nothing if not repetitive. There is nothing deep about this. It is merely endless.

I taught my children how to handle themselves on the water, how to step in and out of a boat, how to row, how to steer an outboard and tie knots, and when I had the chance I showed them how to sail. I taught them how to ride their bicycles, and in the country, in Samoset, I cut paths in the field for them to ride on, and built them a tree fort. And back in Britain, for the two and a half years we lasted there, I showed them castles and Roman walls, and taught them what history I remembered from school. You could say that I fathered them as I was never fathered, but that sounds awfully American and psychological. My father did what his time expected of him without complaint, and I have no bitterness toward him. We weren’t meant to know each other and we didn’t. He didn’t plant the monster in me. It’s older than him, and far savvier. He worked for his family’s shipping business in Belfast, and when he turned thirty he became their agent in Southampton, where he met my mother. He saw his family through the Depression and the war, and ensured that his children were properly educated, and throughout it all he spoke very little, which was no deprivation given that I’d never known him to behave otherwise. It’s easy to make too much of fathers, I want to say.

A few months ago, a fog blinded me, thicker than ever before. I slept in the monster’s arms. I felt its breath on my neck, its scaled stomach rising and falling against my back, its head and face invisible as always. I couldn’t pretend anymore to Margaret that I was working. The children receded into noises grating on my ears. I stopped moving. Weeks went by indistinguishable one from another. I could smell the rot of myself, my armpits, my breath, my groin, as though the living part of death had already commenced, the preliminary decomposing, as the will fades. In Dante and Milton hell is vivid. Sin organizes the dead into struggle. The darkness bristles with life. There is story upon story to tell. But in the fog there is nothing to see. The monster you lie with is your own. The struggle is endlessly private. I thought it was over. That one night the beast at my back would squeeze more tightly and I would cease breathing. What remained of me hoped for it.