Time of the Locust (7 page)

But Manden, standing with his brother and the caseworker, shivering in the cold of their spectacular loss, could not have known about any of this on that first day in front of his uncle's house. After the caseworker shook Uncle Randy's hand, told him how the Lord would bless him, and left, Randy installed Manden and Horus in the basement, where there was no heat in the winter and no air-­conditioning in the summer. A thin metal stair rail, which wobbled in its concrete pegs if pushed or pulled too much, lined the narrow steps. Entering the basement had reminded Manden of when his father once took him and Horus to the caverns in Virginia, and from the top of the basement steps he almost expected to see an expanse of luminescent stalagmites and mirrored pools of water at the bottom.

But it had not been so. His eyes, blinking in the dark as his uncle told him to take the first step down, had been unbelieving at first. Then, slowly, he began to understand. In the gloom, on the third step down, with Horus close behind him, Manden heard the creaking noise of the dry, rotting wood, which would be forever imprinted on his mind. The sound of the third step would stay with him always. It marked Uncle Randy's daily approach to bark an order, to remind them not to be like their misguided father and their fragile mother, to say that he was making men of them. The creaking third step was perceptible from every other sound in the world. It was the signal of descent into a long and uncomfortable night. The sound, too, was the trumpet of their daytime escape from their uncle's manhood-training tyranny, for its sound meant two steps to the unlocked door, to the outside, to school, however demoralizing or boring it had sometimes been.

There was a separate entrance in the basement, now bricked over. Two slender windows near the ceiling were frosted and fitted with iron bars. He and Horus spent the rest of their childhood there, sleeping on a worn mattress piled high with blankets or stripped to the bone. Every meal (whether breakfast, lunch, or dinner) was a sandwich: baloney and a thick slab of cheese with a glass of water, or tuna fish and a glass of milk. To pass the time when they were not in school, he and Horus would look through the tiny windows and watch the shadowed feet go by outside and the squirrels that stopped in front of the glass. At night, the door at the top of the steps was locked. In secret, they kept an empty milk bottle to relieve themselves if they couldn't wait until morning. From below, they listened to Uncle Randy's television upstairs, blaring a sports game or the news. Some nights, when they couldn't sleep for the cold or the heat, he and Horus lay on the floor along the wall, listening to the rats living behind the crumbling plaster crawl in and out of the tunnels they had made. They could feel the air moving through the cracks of their tiny halls, hear the freedom they were living.

Manden was fireside to a burning rage back then, when he wished their father would rise from the grave and choke Uncle Randy for his cruelty, when he tried to conjure their mother and have her take wing from Utica to rescue them. “Mama is coming back,” he would say over and over, like a chant. Like a prayer. “Soon,” he'd say. After a while. One day. Had Horus wished for her too? Had he cried himself to sleep? He did not know, and in his own basement torments in their uncle's house, a world away on the other side of the mattress, he did not cross the icy divide between them to ask. In the slow drip of helplessness, Manden came to view the world as an old house with many rooms, with many happenings behind closed doors. There were events in the common areas for all to see. And there was just as much wonder and spectacle in the time-stilled attic as in the decaying basement. God and the devil dwelled under the same roof, feet apart. Each listening to the other pad the hallways and creep up the steps.

Manden walked on. The Autism Center wasn't very far now. At that hour, store managers were still rolling back awnings, hosing down sidewalks, and putting out signs announcing the lunch special of the day. Walking the last block, Manden could see Brenda clearly on his approach, the center behind her, a box of mystery filled with children like Sephiri, yet all of them different in infinite, unfathomable ways. Without being conscious of it, he slowed his gait as he crossed the street and neared the entrance.

“Hello, Brenda,” he said when he got to the curb.

Brenda nodded without speaking, distracted, Manden assumed, by Sephiri spinning nearby. He looked at her in the awkward pause. She was even bigger and heavier than she was when he saw her six months ago. A shiny brown wig sat atop her head like a mop. When she offered a thin smile, he could see her full cheeks push against the deep circles under her eyes. He was newly amazed at how different she was from the vibrant young woman he remembered. She was once a shapely thing, with a glorious smile and an air of vitality. Manden sometimes thought that had he been a different man, he might have reached out to Brenda now. But he was unreachable even to himself, and he felt incapable of helping her in spite of bearing witness to her self-destruction.

Not that any of it mattered now. They had let the past be what it was. He and Brenda did not speak much, although they lived in the same city. They knew very little about each other's adult life, other than the surface of things. Maybe because they knew too much of what lay beneath. Out of a vague sense of familial obligation, perhaps out of some subconscious desire to cobble together some closeness between brothers, Manden once took Horus and Brenda out to dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant as a gesture of goodwill after the sudden news of the engagement, as a gesture to celebrate something he had no plans of ever experiencing. Ethiopian was her favorite, Brenda had said, pulling pieces of injera bread apart and dipping it into heaps of spiced peas and tomatoes.

Manden remembered how she talked incessantly at the awkward engagement dinner like a bird tweeting in the trees—about her new job at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, about all the wonderful things Horus had done for her since they met, about the rowhouse they were buying together and how it had exposed brick with the original molding, about all the money they would be saving for the honeymoon by going to the justice of the peace. It had been a long time since he and Horus had sat together with a woman who was smiling. Her skin glowed in the candlelit room. They were both speechless in its presence, gathered around her like a warm fire.

And Manden had wanted Brenda then, although he would never have touched her. He wanted his brother's woman. But it was not because of her pretty legs or the soft halo that framed her beautiful face. Or how well versed she seemed to be in literature and politics. It was her regal ways. Her sweet charm. It was a loveliness that reminded him of their mother, before her voyage. Before their father's blood had seeped down under Manden's fingernails. The redness that stayed long after he locked himself in the bathroom and washed his hands with bleach, long after he scrubbed them with steel wool, so that he could no longer tell whose blood was running down the sink.

Horus was only seven when their father was murdered. Did he remember Mama the way she was before all of that? Before what came after it, the staring out the window and the house visitors and the white robes and the institution she died in? He wondered if Horus remembered the big, fluffy pancakes she made for them on Saturday mornings. The steel-drum sound of her voice that filled the house. The way she laughed at his tenth birthday party that January. How she sang when she was cooking dinner and set the dishes on the table as if each one was a crystal chalice.

Manden remembered watching Brenda pick up the restaurant goblet at their little engagement dinner party and how he thought of venetian glass and sterling silver. In the presence of her svelte skin, all butterscotch and creamed caramel, he thought of neat plates of chocolates arranged on a coffee table. Of steaming coffee and gingerbread. Of the comfort and order that used to be. These feelings had always made Manden uncomfortable in Brenda's presence. He couldn't stand the sense that he was trying to hold on to something pure under dirty circumstances. And for years, it was this feeling that kept him distant from Brenda when she could have used his sympathy and understanding the most, even when she called him with a secret too heavy to carry alone.

She called a few weeks after the verdict to say that she was pregnant. In the silence, they listened to each other breathe through the phone. “Remains,” she'd said at first. That was how she first described the unborn child. Like a fossil of some ­fantastic creature known only in mythical lore. Manden had wanted to contest ­Brenda's choice of silence, but he could not think of any reason telling Horus about his child would be better than keeping it from him. And he was plagued by a new kind of guilt atop the burden of knowing his brother had taken revenge for their father's death and he had not. It lodged itself in his heart like botfly larvae, growing ever larger through the nine months of Brenda's pregnancy, ­bursting through him when she called to say that it was a boy.

“Hello, Manden,” Brenda said now, with a thin smile, a fruitless gesture born from the beast of habit. Then, looking at the boy, she said, “Look who is here, Sephiri.”

The child did not respond.

Manden looked at Sephiri. He had stopped spinning and was on his knees, staring intently, as if his life depended on it, at the grooves in the sidewalk. He let out a screech.

“Hello, Sephiri,” said Manden, knowing there would be no response. Looking at the deep expression on the boy's face, he was reminded of how Horus looked when they shot marbles together as children.

Sephiri did not respond.

Manden reached into his pocket and pulled out a small velvet sack of glass balls. It was an impulsive buy. He had walked past a little novelty shop on Wisconsin Avenue and saw the marbles shimmering in the window display on a bed of black velvet. He did not think of the possibility that Brenda would object to such a gift, that Sephiri might swallow them, that he could launch them through window panes once he had them in his hands. He had thought only of Sephiri's innocent look of concentration. So much like his brother's face all those years ago when they played the game.

Manden knelt down to Sephiri and sat the marbles on the ground next to him.

“Good to see you again, little man,” he said.

The boy did not react.

It seemed to Manden that each of Sephiri's birthdays marked the completion of a deeper, more complicated chamber. The boy sat silently for long stretches of time, pondering a spoon or the buttons on the telephone. Static flickers in the television seemed to mesmerize him. Manden wondered what Horus would have done had he known all of this, had he known of Sephiri's existence. Manden had felt it when his mother died, even before he got word from the psychiatric facility hundreds of miles away. He woke up in a cold sweat, clutching his chest, and saw her waxen doll face. He wondered if Horus felt her go, too, and if he felt Sephiri come into the world.

Later, Manden learned that Sephiri was born with both his eyes and his mind tightly shut, which filled him with a peculiar relief. Sephiri was blocked from it all, as far as he knew. And because the mysterious wall behind which the boy lived was soundproof, the reasons for his father's absence would never have to be explained to him, and he would never pierce the barrier to ask why his father was not there, why he was in a cage beneath the mountains. The ghosts haunting his family would never have to be discussed with him.

Manden watched Sephiri finger the bag of marbles as he sat on the sidewalk. He was fascinated by the velvet sack, not its contents.

Brenda looked at her watch. “I guess we'd better head into the center now,” she said. “The appointment is at nine.”

“I guess we should,” said Manden.

Manden watched Brenda lift Sephiri from the ground like a suitcase. The boy whimpered and kicked, clutching the bag of marbles. The last discussion about Sephiri's state still loomed in Manden's mind. There was always the summary of his condition: behavior mimicking deafness, little or no eye contact, sustained odd play, obsessions with sameness, refusal to accept changes in routine, extreme distress for unexplained reasons, tantrums, bouts of overactivity or lethargy, nonresponsiveness to verbal cues. It was true that all of these things applied to Sephiri. But Manden had only ever wanted to know what was wrong with him—or what was right with him that made him able to sweep a tiring world away.

Apprehension tightened Manden's throat. He would go inside the facility with them as he had done before, and he would remain silent, invisible, during the meeting as he had done before. His support of Sephiri was obtuse, and he was ashamed to admit that he had been reluctant about it from the beginning, never understanding his place, his role. And even in situations such as this, when he was asked to come forward, when he was needed to step in as the man in a certain circumstance, he knew that he would not be able to speak. For what could he say in defense of his brother's absence, in defense of his own paternal impotence? He could not bring himself to cast such shame at Brenda's feet in front of others and heighten the burden she had been carrying alone.

Manden watched Brenda hold Sephiri, cooing to him to come along, her great arms trembling under the child's weight. Her forehead was thick with perspiration. Manden waited for her to ask him to help carry Sephiri, but she did not. She held him like a heavy basket in her arms and carted him into the Autism Center.

Manden shoved his chilled hands into his pockets and followed behind them.

Observations

T
he Autism Center was filled with pictures of smiling children that hung along both sides of a long hallway. Skylights above shed a cheerful light on the yellow walls and the gleaming parquet floors. An enormous sculpture of children hugging the earth stood at the end of the hallway near the office entrance. Dr. Robert Peterson, the facility director, was a short, bubbly man with glasses. He was waiting for Sephiri, Brenda, and Manden with a big smile. “Greetings,” he said. “I'm glad you could make it today. Shall we go in?”

A redheaded attendant appeared from another door behind the sculpture to lead Sephiri to the playroom. The boy balked, and the attendant produced a bright green ball from her apron pocket. “I brought your favorite, Sephiri,” she said. “Remember?”

Sephiri began to flail his arms, ignoring her.

A pleasant chime announced the morning snack somewhere in the facility. Three cheerful-looking assistants came out of another hallway door with trays, chatting among themselves.

The attendant in the apron smiled at Sephiri, put the green ball back into her pocket, and produced a red crayon. “Look, Sephiri,” she said, holding it out to him.

Sephiri began to spin around as the attendant drew closer. He let out a high-pitched squeal when she attempted to take his hand in hers.

“Are you upset about something, Sephiri?” the attendant asked. Her soothing voice had not changed. “I'm sorry it is not the color you may have wanted.” She put the crayon on the floor in front of him.

Sephiri picked it up and began breaking it into little pieces.

“That's not how we express our feelings, Sephiri,” said the attendant.

Sephiri continued on in silence, staring at the crayon intently as he shredded it. While he was engrossed in this activity, the attendant picked him up and carried him away.

Brenda tried to numb herself to all of this, as she had tried on a thousand other such occasions. She always had the unnerving feeling of watching a wind-up figurine when she looked at Sephiri, hypnotized by his strange movements. Each time, her trance was arrested by an overpowering sense of helplessness, a feeling that the hand of God had wound up Sephiri and she could do nothing to control his curious dance, his spine-chilling sounds from the great beyond.

“Thank you for coming today,” said Dr. Peterson, gesturing for Brenda and Manden to go into the office and sit down at a large conference table. He had learned to be careful in the way he addressed them as Sephiri's parents, even though Sephiri's file had a letter stating that Manden Thompson was the boy's uncle and had Brenda's permission to attend meetings and discuss all matters related to Sephiri and the center and that on the line next to “Father,” his name was typed. A letter from the State of Colorado noting the incarceration of Horus Thompson was at the bottom of the file. Dr. Watson, Sephiri's speech pathologist, had come to him with the delicate matter of Horus Thompson shortly after Sephiri was first enrolled. She told him that Brenda Thompson seemed very uncomfortable discussing anything regarding the boy's father and that she did not make a correction when she was addressed as Mrs. instead of Ms.

Dr. Peterson had seen such things before in his years in social work. Even under the most difficult of circumstances, he always thought it better that children had some semblance of a father as part of the household, or at least their lives. It was a Band-Aid, but it was better than nothing. Because of Sephiri's autism, the doctor was uncertain about the degree to which Sephiri was aware of how Manden Thompson figured into his life or the impact his father's absence had on him. But he thought it best never to bring the subject up for discussion. Sephiri was in good hands at the Takoma Park Autism Center. That was the most important thing.

The table was covered with bottled water, notepads, and folders. A man and a woman were seated at the table.

“You already know Dr. Susan Watson, our lead speech pathologist working with Sephiri,” said the facility director. “This is Dr. Edward Smith. He's going to share some interesting things with you today. Please have a seat. Water?”

“No, thank you,” said Brenda. Manden sat down without a word. The formality of the meeting made Brenda nervous. It wasn't like the one-on-one conferences she had with the young Dr. Watson periodically, when it was just the two of them in the playroom with a cup of coffee. This looked like a panel discussion.

Dr. Peterson sat down and took a deep breath, a half-smile smeared across his face. “Mr. Thompson, Mrs. Thompson,” he began, pushing the rims of his glasses back up the slope of his nose. “Again, thank you for joining us today. I'll come straight to the point. Sephiri has exhibited some remarkable things lately, things I've never seen in my thirty years in this profession.”

The others at the table nodded in agreement. Dr. Watson looked at Brenda and smiled.

“Let me first say,” Dr. Peterson continued, “that I've discussed Sephiri with some individuals at the National Institutes of Health at great length. They are very excited, and with your permission, we would like to study him.”

At the word
study
, Brenda was sickened. She looked at Manden. His face was pained, but he did not speak. A violent cough took hold of her, and she drank some water to calm her throat. “Study?” she asked.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Thompson,” said Dr. Peterson. “Perhaps
study
is too strong a word. What I mean is, we would like to take a closer look at Sephiri and the extraordinary shift in what he is exhibiting.”

Brenda looked from Dr. Peterson to the other doctors. Sephiri was all she had left of Horus, as painful as it still was, all that remained of him since he had been put away. She didn't want her boy's peculiarities, however profound they were, under a microscope. Although Sephiri had been living bottled in a world of his own making, it was a safe world as far as she knew. His autism had allowed him that, at least. “I'm not sure I understand.”

“It's all very special, Mrs. Thompson,” said Dr. Watson. Her face was flushed with excitement, and her blond curls bounced as she spoke. “It's an observation of savants, extraordinarily talented autistic individuals. We think Sephiri is phenomenal. There are only a small number of these individuals identified in the world. They're unexpected. They appear like rainbows. I can assure you that Sephiri would not be subjected to anything intrusive, you understand, only close observation. We could arrange for a special room here just for him, with all of his favorite things. Even a bathtub. In fact, this new style of observation allows minimal contact for the levels of sensitivity that we know Sephiri is prone to exhibit. The observation is pure. It is aimed only to enlighten us about the unknown, about the full spectrum of this condition, of the human mind. It could be groundbreaking.”

Brenda looked at the animated young doctor. She did not want to say that as far as she could tell, what was amazing about Sephiri was the tremendously thick walls that seemed to shield him from everything and the mysterious mazes he seemed to wander alone. She did not want to say that her boy seemed as trapped as his father, that Sephiri might only be a riddle to them all. “Doctor, what do you mean by an extraordinary shift?” she asked.

The director's eyebrows rose. “Have you seen Sephiri's drawings, Mrs. Thompson?” He reached for a folder and opened it. He took out some papers and spread them around the table. There were enormous illustrations of insects, as if under a microscope. Some were drawn in pencil. Incredibly, others were sketched in multiple shades of brown, amber, or gold crayon. The outlines of things were drawn in the most delicate lines of black. There were fantastical renderings of abdomens, antennae, and wings. The veins across the wings were elaborate webs, with patterns drawn within patterns. From the head of each insect, a bold, piercing eye seemed to rise from the page. “Dr. Smith here can explain it better than I can,” said the facility director. He nodded to the other man sitting at the table.

Dr. Smith, a short and stout man with a balding head, pointed to the drawings with his pencil. “These insect renderings are anatomically correct. I've had them checked.” He picked up one of the drawings and shook his head. There was a bulbous thorax and abdomen, from which six mechanically drawn legs dangled; joints and musculature were visible, every femur and tibia shown, with finely drawn barbs lining the edges. “We discovered many such drawings stuffed behind the bookcase in the playroom after Dr. Watson retrieved this one from Sephiri.” He took another sketch from a different folder and held it up. “But this is the only one that seems to depict something different.”

The sketch showed a valley surrounded by enormous mountains. A great wall of dark rock was etched across a pallid-looking sky, and the charcoal-colored jagged heads of the mountains were capped with a smattering of white. Their hulking forms corralled an ominous structure in the foreground. Two towers flanked the extremities of a huge building in the middle. There were shadows of figures standing on the ledges of the tower. Thin rods extending from the frames of their bodies could have been long sticks. Or rifles.

“This really is rather extraordinary, even imposing,” said Dr. Smith. “Could it be somewhere Sephiri has been before?” He placed the drawing in front of Brenda. “Do you recognize it?” He looked at Manden. “Anything familiar at all, Mr. Thompson?”

Brenda looked at Manden, who remained silent.

Brenda was stunned by the drawings. She looked back again at the towers and the mountains in amazement, telling herself there couldn't possibly be a connection to what was creeping into her mind. It looked like a prison, with the silhouettes of men standing atop the towers and the ominous-looking walls. It looked like Black Plains. She had never been able to bring herself to go near there, and after the verdict, she was only able to look at photographs of it on occasion in those darkest of times, when she tried to fathom the place her husband was condemned to. The prosecutor called Horus a domestic terrorist. The judge said that he would be going where terrorists go. And she had looked at the images of the perimeter of the compound, wondering how something so sinister and terrible could be placed among such spectacular mountain majesty. In those first months, she had many nightmares of the dreadful place. And whenever she thought of Horus, it rose in her mind like a mirage of Hades.

But Sephiri had never been to Black Plains, and he knew nothing of Horus. His autism had cloaked him, hadn't it? And it was then that Brenda thought of the tapestry she'd spent so many days in front of at the museum, for which she had named her son. Sephiri, the hidden place of the heart. Was this the same boy who threw plates of food on the floor and banged his head on walls? Who would not let her touch him sometimes, who screamed when she tried to get him out of the bathtub? She was never sure if he even recognized his own name, since he was often indifferent to whether she used it to try to get his attention or not. How could he know about insects in this way or Black Plains? Brenda's stomach knotted, and she ­swallowed hard, staring at the drawings to glean some meaning from them, trying to balance an impossible equation.

“Mrs. Thompson?” asked Dr. Smith, louder.

“No,” she said. “This is not somewhere Sephiri's been before. I would never take him to a place like this.” She did not look at Manden. They did not discuss such things. What she would never know was that Manden had never gone out to the prison, that he had written a letter to Horus on the anniversary of their father's death every year since he was sent away. Some of the letters were one sentence. Some were pages and pages. Things had a way of coming out on the page, even when he hadn't wanted them to. But he had folded each letter up, sealed it, and thrown it in the trash. He had convinced himself that it was better this way, with the blood dried on the concrete of their lives and certain things left blank.

“Well, it doesn't particularly matter,” said the facility director. “The point here is the extraordinary show of mastery. We think Sephiri may be a savant. Such sudden displays of amazing ability have been documented before. There are still so many things we don't know about autism, so much of the brain that has yet to be unlocked. You have to understand that through careful observation, we might be able to learn more of the crucial elements of his condition. It may help you to understand him more.”

Brenda looked at the beautiful sketches and was amazed. If there was anything she wanted in the world, it was to understand Sephiri more. He had been unreachable since his toddler years. He had started to speak, first in baby gibberish, then with a few intelligible words. But when he turned three, it was as if language fell away from him altogether, and he descended into a world without words and the feelings associated with them, without facial expression or interaction. He looked at her arm or her hair as if from a distant place, somewhere too far away to hear her calling to him. He had turned to stone before her eyes.

“What kind of insects are these?” Brenda asked.

“Locusts. That's what the entomologist I had examine the drawings tells us,” said Dr. Smith. “An extinct variety of locust, distinguishable only by a few specific characteristics. From what I understand, it's a kind of mountain locust that was once native to the western United States. They used to lie dormant for years underground before hatching and emerging. They've been extinct since the eighteen hundreds.” The director shook his head. “All the more amazing that Sephiri would draw such a thing and all the more reason to watch him closely. He might teach us something.”

The facility director clasped his hands together and smiled. “We will keep you informed every step of the way. As you know, Sephiri will be challenged by a change to a different room, and this is the only initial concern we have. But a room of his own without the possible distraction of other children would be ideal, we think. It is a lovely space, with clear glass walls. We know of Sephiri's fondness for baths, and we have even equipped the room with a tub. Think of it like his own warmed pool, where he can relax. He would ­really like that, we're sure. Of course, we will have to allow time for him to adjust before we could actually begin noting anything in his behavior. We will have to help him to understand the new environment as being a friendly one, which may be a little difficult for him to realize at first. But we think this arrangement would be for the best. May we have your permission?”