In the Land of the Living (10 page)

“You know your father was one of the great men,” James said, plucking off another yellow leaf. “I always thought, he was
rough-hewn by life,
that’s how I always put it to myself. These other guys, they had money, they had family. But he didn’t. He had his character. He did it all purely by the force of his personality.” He stared at Leo again as if he were looking into Leo’s soul, and shook his head. “And he was as strong as a bear.” Ghost Boy grinned like a devil and concluded, “You look more like your mother.”

There be nine worthy and the best that ever were
.

Before bed, Leo looked at the picture of his father and then went to the mirror with it. Leo was thirteen now, but he felt he looked twelve, with no muscles. In the picture his father looked thick and powerful in the green-gray twilight, with arms like a steamfitter’s. Behind his father there was gray lake water, subtended by horizon and shore, and distant trees, August light fading as the picture itself was fading from too much sun. Leo thought he hadn’t cared well enough for it and now it was damaged beyond repair. You couldn’t see any bugs in the photo, but you could infer they were dangling there in the mystic twilight, dancing on skin still damp from a shower and tacky with new sweat, landing on your clean pressed shirt and then reconsidering and flying away and dithering still more and landing again in the exact same spot. There he was, his father, tobacco in his pocket, biting a pipe, relaxed, happy. What lake? Erie? Was it on South Bass Island somewhere? Leo had never been there. You couldn’t see much of the island in the picture, but it, too, was real, as his father had been, and the water was in fact real at the moment of the picture, even though Leo wasn’t there, real and wet to the touch, a real lake of water like a great dark mirror, ticked with midge rings. In the other picture: his father’s jaw, from below, slightly blurry—turning away, refusing to be paralyzed by the camera, turning away from Leo but back toward life and motion and time, an unshaven face blurry and dark as burnt bread. That picture was kept in a frame with chipped silver paint.

Leo put the badly faded picture of his father back on the shelf and took the birthday card with red balloons to the garbage can, a steel oval cylinder with a Mercator map of the world wrapped around it.
The world is my garbage can
. He let the card fall loudly to the bottom. Then he lined up the milk crates and boxes on the floor of his room in two rows. The row of blue plastic crates started at the base of his actual-size poster of Marilyn Monroe, with whom he’d recently become infatuated. She looked at him askance, standing up in high heels and a black maillot bathing suit. She held her down-turned hand under her chin like the
Thinker,
except only touching her chin lightly with the ends of her extended fingers and not supporting her head on them as the
Thinker
did. A centennial poster of Einstein had also recently gone up (1879–1979, it said on the bottom) in place of an old poster of Aquaman, the blond hero whom no one liked anyway because all he could do was swim, and not even swim all that fast, and breathe underwater, and talk to squids. Leo had only put him up there because of an idea he’d had while swimming in the Atlantic Ocean in a strong undertow, the kind of undertow that moves a hundred tons of seawater on a whim and then moves it all back to where it was before. The idea was that a hero doesn’t overcome what can’t be overcome, but sustains, survives, by endurance, by true grit and an instinct for the rhythms of the waves.

In the first crates went the
Star Wars
toys from his closet. The
Millennium Falcon,
the X-wing with trusty droid R2-D2 in the back (R2-D2 could be pushed down to open the spaceship’s wings into the X formation), and all the miniature
Star Wars
people that didn’t bend at elbow, waist, or knee: orphan hero Luke Skywalker, who came with a yellow light saber even though none of the light sabers in any of the
Star Wars
movies were yellow; old Obi-Wan Kenobi in an unrealistic chintzy plastic cape of a burnt sienna color; Darth Vader, whose light saber was an evil red; two Han Solos, one with a huge head, one with a normal head, now hard to find in the stores; a bunch of seldom-used Princess Leias in her various weird outfits.

The Legos, once dismantled, would have to go in the boxes. He broke apart the spaceships he had built, and the interconnected space stations where the Lego spacemen had made their home, bravely huddled in the heart of lonely crepuscular moonscapes and black empty space—they had but meager defenses in the bottomless abyss of the universe. When Leo was done, the shelves where the space installation had been were bare except for large balls and tangles of dust. The crates and boxes were loaded with a rubble of toys.

He opened up the mausoleum of his closet to inter the stethoscope, medical book, and pathology journal that James Helpern had given him. He hung his father’s old stethoscope in the closet next to the black belt and the rough red shirt. He took down the blue box from Higbee’s that had in it his father’s T-shirt (
HARVARD
in block letters like a crimson badge at the breast, armpits stained yellow with aluminum—he would go there someday, to Harvard or Yale), and he took down the jewelry box that held the hospital ID card and the merchant marine license. On top of those things he laid the pathology journal. James said his father’s pathology report was written up in it because the doctors had never seen that type of lymphoma before. Immunoblastic sarcoma. James said the doctors looked at the pathology and they didn’t know what the hell it was his father had.

Leo opened the dusty medical book and saw where his father had written
ISIDORE AUBERON, M.D.
He stepped out of the closet and put the book on the shelf that had just been vacated by his Lego spacemen.

What must I do?
Leo thought, giving a last look into the closet. What do you do? You make a black leather belt in the hospital playroom with a black lady with a pick in her hair, a stranger—fitting each soft leather piece into the next in a daisy chain; and you hang that belt in your closet like the shed skin of a black snake and let it hang there forever. Next to the dusty red shirt.

AT THREE, LEO
was of an average weight and height, and of the usual tender flesh, but his mother thought that something inside him was different from other children she knew. He’d spoken a bit early, true enough, but it wasn’t his aptitudes that struck her as unusual. She didn’t care that much for aptitudes anyway. His heart was heavier, she thought. His face sometimes had a kind of medieval stillness and sobriety to it—like a face, say, looking out on the centuries from a unicorn tapestry that’s itself unchanged and unchangeable. Any mention of his father would elicit the stillness, and so could many other unpredictable things. He seemed depressed. She sent him to a preschool that was run by psychoanalysts.

The child could not understand guilt, or grief, or defense mechanisms, or much of anything, really, besides life and death, and presence and absence, but he did understand and welcome one principle upheld for him by certain grown-ups: that he could call for help. The school seemed to be an island in a sea of helplessness and aloneness. He trusted the women there to answer him if he cried out. Elsewhere, among strangers, he could feel himself struggling and then actually drowning in a great, dangerous sea without anyone noticing or caring. He could feel a coldness about him like Atlantic water in December, all purple with the gelid blood of winter.

Very early, he developed radical, monastic convictions: he was a hero afloat in a storm sea strafed with winter winds. He was a poet at the mercy of the gods, looking in on the far revolving core of the universe. He had a destiny before him ruinous or triumphant, and everyone he knew belonged to this destiny, not least his younger brother, who he thought had been spared the tragic burden. It only remained to be seen whether Leo had within him ruin or glory.

As he passed into that period of life known to psychoanalysts as latency, his sense of destiny receded behind the normal affairs of childhood, but it would reassert itself at the most unexpected times and in the most unexpected ways.

By the summer of 1982, when all the bad things could no longer be clearly remembered, Mack followed his older brother, Leo, everywhere and in everything—and as far as Leo was concerned, that was as it should have been. If Leo took a pretzel from the ebony bowl at Grandma’s (Philip’s mother’s) house on a Friday night and bit the sides off the pretzel, so that it looked like a little man, and then had the little man leap into his mouth to a death by mastication, then Mack did that too. If Leo and their cousin Todd slid down the polished floorboards in Grandma’s front hall in their socks, then Mack did too. If Leo covered his door to their shared bathroom with Wacky Packages and
Star Wars
stickers, then so did his younger brother. If Leo trained himself to write in all caps like they did in comic books, then Mack trained himself to write in all caps so he could write like Leo.

And if at 5
A.M
. Leo sat down in front of
The P.T.L. Club
to watch Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker crying about their sins, Mack watched it too.
The P.T.L. Club
was better than
The 700 Club
even though neither show made much sense. And even
The 700 Club
was better than no TV, especially on a day when there was Sabbath school, which they grudgingly attended every week at Park Synagogue near Taylor Road. At the Sabbath school they’d been told they were Jews, and they figured it was just as well, since the Bakkers made them feel that Christians were perhaps a bit weird.

It was understood that whatever the show, Leo would occupy the more favorable couch position—that is, the end farther from the TV—and Mack would sit at the other end, where you had to crane your neck to see
P.T.L.
at a fifteen-degree angle and were so close up to Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker that you could see the red, blue, and yellow pixels of their tears wiggling on the inside of the curved glass. Leo had once or twice tried sitting there himself, and from Mack’s side, you could even reach out and brush the invisible, hairlike lines of static that stood up off the glass.

Did Leo call his dad Dad in the summer of 1982 or was he still calling him Philip? Such changes became mysteries. Dad or Philip, Philip or Dad—but not Daddy. That summer Philip flew them and their mother to Disneyland in California, where Philip took Leo on his first roller coaster: Space Mountain. Leo didn’t get a bloody nose as he had that other time with Philip, in the bumper cars, when his legs were too short and he’d left off his seat belt to reach the pedals.

He didn’t get mad at Philip when he got the bloody nose. Or when Philip dropped him into a pile of leaves and the hard frozen ground punched him in the lungs. When he crawled to his feet out of the warm, decaying, flattened underleaves, he tried not to let Philip see that he couldn’t breathe, and that he’d gotten the seat of his pants wet. He didn’t even pull the leaf out that was stuck inside the waist of his pants, so as not to embarrass his new father. Leo would not be mad, but he would also not let Philip throw him into any more leaves.

The past was not supposed to matter anymore, but it did.

From California, Philip took them into the desert of Arizona.

“Do you know how it is when your little brother’s in the lower bunk and he won’t stop talking?” Leo wrote in his diary while he lay on the top bunk in the sleeper car of the overnight train. And then: “We are having an adventure in the West. We are sleeping on the train. The bathroom is a shower with a sink and a toilet in it.” His diary had a puffy blue cover with cowboys, lassoes, and sheriff badges on it. His brother had been given one with a puffy red cover with cowboys, lassoes, and sheriff badges. They both wrote about their feelings in there, because their mother had trained them to pay attention to those as opposed to doing what most other people seemed to do with theirs, which was to stuff them down like gunpowder into an old musket. “I am trying to think,” Leo wrote, “but my little brother keeps interrupting me! Ugh! Little brothers!”

Yet he dared not write what he was thinking.

Leo had begun to think about things that were well beyond his younger brother’s comprehension. Shameful, exciting things, such as “naked ladies.” He wanted badly to see a grown woman’s vagina, or at least an up-close breast. (He had seen a topless woman on a beach once, but she was far away, and people seemed to notice him staring and thrust their faces back at him in a mocking way.) A naked lady was a very scarce commodity, evidently. He had recently cut out a little picture of a naked lady from the Showtime pay cable guide, but it was a drawing, not a photograph, and only about an inch high and you could not see anything that looked remotely like a vagina. That was how desperate the times were. His friend Ted said that his dream job was to be a
Playboy
photographer. Leo had not thought of that possibility. He had seen
Playboy
in the magazine racks at Campus Drug, and he knew what was inside the pages without ever having seen. The idea that someone was employed to look at naked ladies all day gave him and Ted great hopes for the future. Once, Ted had pulled a
Playboy
magazine from the drugstore rack, and they had seen the face, necklace, and bare shoulders of the centerfold, but then they’d been apprehended by the fat and fully clothed lady behind the cash register before they could see anything else. Naked ladies were fiercely guarded treasures, that much was clear; the universe legislated against their seeing one. They had to carry on with the certainty that naked ladies existed, even though they might never see one. They had to carry on with belief and hope.

When Leo awoke from his reverie about naked ladies, he saw that where his felt-tip brown marker had paused, the brown ink had leached into the page in a big wet dark spot. The train began to sway and caused his pen to record its movements. After a minute or two, the movements of the train had drawn a little supernova.

Mack did not understand about the larger world out there rushing past in the darkness, the wilderness of sagebrush and naked ladies. He only wanted to think about
Star Wars
. But there was more to life than
Star Wars
.

Philip took them to the Anasazi cliff dwellings, to the place where you could stand on one foot in four different states all at once, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado, to a dude ranch outside of Tucson where Leo looked for snakes at night and saw every star, and to the Grand Canyon, where people were making a movie. Chevy Chase came down the front steps of the lodge while Leo was climbing up them. Chevy Chase was very, very tall, especially when he was standing at the top of the steps. Leo recognized him from
Seems Like Old Times
and
Foul Play,
where a dwarf rolled down the street in a garbage can, just about the funniest thing Leo had ever seen. (After seeing
Foul Play
Leo began his own mystery in a spiral notebook. It was called “Murder in the Bathtub,” which he drew in creepy slanted bubble letters, and he planned for it to be four or even five hundred pages.) When Leo came back from the bathroom and out of the lodge and down the steps, he told his mom that he’d seen Chevy Chase, and then he saw Chevy Chase again, under a big umbrella, kissing and kissing a young woman with yellow hair and a yellow blouse, kissing to the point where Leo thought it must be boring, like when you chew gum for too long. Leo’s mother was looking another way and she said, “Harold Ramis? I love him!” and the man called Harold Ramis, who was not as big a star as Chevy Chase and seemed pleased to be noticed, turned and pointed to himself and mouthed the words “Who, me?” and Leo’s mom loved that. The movie people never seemed to do any acting. They just stood around and ate grapes. Leo and Mack sat on their suitcases. It was very sunny and very hot.

The joys of that trip seemed very natural. They were a family. Leo’s mother was happy. Leo and Mack were having their adventure, new phases of which seemed to unfold by the hour. One forgot, even, that it had ever been different.

“Alaska,” Leo said in the backseat of the rental car, and he threw his arms around Philip’s neck and pushed his face past the front seat and up against his dad’s rough face.

“I love you, boy,” Philip said, quietly, almost confidentially, and pressed his hand against Leo’s cheek. “And how is Fly back there?” he said, peering into the rearview mirror. “Hello, Fly!” Fly was what Philip called Mack when he wrestled or tickled him because, he said, Mack weighed as much as a fly.

“Hello,” Mack said sedately. He was filling out a Mad Libs.

“You have an ‘A,’ Dad,” Leo said.

“I have a what?”

“In Geography.”

“Oh yes, an ‘A,’” Philip said. “Hmm.” He was not really looking out the windshield but digging between the car seats for a morsel of blueberry muffin and steering the car with his knee. He seemed to be at the same time sifting distractedly inside his mind for a geographic rarity, a bauble of suitable glitter for a boy, as he generally did when they played Geography. Finally, he said, “Andalucía.” (Abidjan, Amman, Antananarivo, and Ankara, perhaps, dropped back carelessly to his heap of jewels.)

Philip’s mind possessed a thousand highways, the currencies and civil wars of foreign lands, their crops and ideologies, and all their history buried below. He was not afraid of plane crashes and didn’t notice when he cut himself, which he seemed to do with some regularity. He seemed in no danger of dying at all. Philip and Mack went hand in hand right up to the edge of the canyon, where you could fall down a thousand feet. They stood together on the edge of the chasm without fear with the man’s sure grasp on the boy’s shoulder while Leo lay down and hugged the dirt, more than twenty feet away from the edge. He gripped the weeds in his fists.

“You’ll fall in!” he said, and laughed, though it wasn’t funny.

Philip laughed.

Mack said nothing.

Leo’s brother and dad looked out over a chasm of blue sky.

Leo took a picture with his Kodak Disc. When they came away from the edge, he hugged Philip tight around the middle.

“Yes, boy, I know,” Philip said. “You’re shivering!” He pulled off his sweater and gave it to Leo.

He was shivering but he refused the sweater. “Listen to this, Dad,” he said, “I can imitate Gomer Pyle. ‘Well, goll-y, Sergeant!’”

“Very talented, that boy,” Philip said.

And the boys ran away laughing about the Irish Rovers song about the two brothers where the toy horse’s head falls off.

Months later, the brothers looked at the picture.

“Weren’t you afraid?” Leo said.

“No,” Mack said, and pulled at his lower eyelid, which he always did when he lied.

When they got back to Cleveland, the boys went to a new camp called Red Barn. It took an hour by school bus every single day to get to the camp in the woods and an hour to get home.

Neither boy had friends there, and they were not in the same group because Leo was ten and Mack was only seven. Still, they saw each other on free periods and at lunch, and Leo said he would protect Mack from the cicadas, and in fact he usually did have to pluck the cicadas off his brother’s red T-shirt or disentangle them from his brother’s hair while Mack closed his eyes and held perfectly still as though he were covered with a hundred tarantulas like Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom. Leo couldn’t remember ever having been irritated with his brother then. He hungered to be with his brother every second of the day, especially at the end of the morning bus ride, a moment that without fail harrowed in his stomach.

That was when the bus drove up the gravel road to the camp and the dust flew in their eyes, and the gravel clinked like shrapnel on the sides of the bus and clicked on its windows now and then with a sound like a lady’s fingernails. But the motor of the bus didn’t stop. When the gravel road protested, the engine roared louder, inexorable when Leo’s heart protested, and they got out and went as if to their deaths into the lonely, lonely woods that hissed and hushed, hissed and hushed on waves of high insect heat.