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Authors: Thad Ziolkowsky

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“Absolutely,” Lewis promises. He picks up his cup of coffee from the ground and takes a sip.

Bishop looks to one side in a way Lewis now recognizes as indicative of taking a call. “I'll try that one. Later.” He sighs through his nose. “The study calls for closed-eye sessions but you'd be amazed at how hard it is to find
totally opaque
eye masks. Near impossible! Anyway, there's a CVS on Oliver that supposedly has the good ones, according to Jesse.”

He goes to the moped and slips the Army-surplus helmet from the handlebars and puts it on, looking like a character from a B movie comedy. “Could I have a hit of your coffee?”

Lewis passes the cup and Bishop takes two greedy gulps. “All she has to do is refresh the page and she'll see it.” He takes the Mac from Lewis, bends at the waist and kisses the top then hands it back. “What a woman!”

Bishop walks the moped along the pathway beaten into the weeds, through the gate, which is missing the door, and out to the street, where Bishop bounces it over the curb, kick starts it and turns to give a thumbs-up. He rides wobblingly at first then steadies up, a wisp of bluish smoke from the exhaust hanging in the air like a § symbol.

 

9

 

L
ewis walks around to the back of the house. The weeds are bowed in a rising wind. He sets the laptop down on the stoop and tugs on one of the tall tobacco-like plants. The roots release their hold on the soil with abrupt, satisfying ease. He pulls up another, cleaves his way out to the middle of yard and stands wondering whether he should start in clearing the rest.

He'd better ask Abby first. She may be letting the yard return to some pristine prairie-like state, out of an anti-lawn/pro-water-saving sentiment. If that's consistent with driving an Escalade. He can hear her quoting Whitman: “Do you I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.”

His dutiful-son impulse brings to mind Virgil and Uncle Bruno divvying up lawn work and minor house repairs during the annual summer visits to Cambridge, their competitive, theatrical sighs of exertion and sweat-flickings, the pallor of their chunky calf muscles flaring in the bright sunlight.

The grandchildren were exempt from these labors but expected to be pursuing high-minded hobbies. Lewis's project last summer was learning how to identify trees. Pretty banal. Sleek androgynous Izzy—like her brother, she inherited Bruno's dark hair but their mother's narrow, collie-like features—spent her time engrossed in an online whodunit game that involved literary maps of Beijing and Vienna. That was more like it. Meanwhile Eckhart offhandedly memorized Hungarian irregular verbs using a software program he'd helped design (occasionally sneaking off to porn sites when he thought no one was watching).

“Grandma” and “Grandpa,” the twins call Gerty and Cyrus. Because he barely saw them between the time of the divorce, when he was eight, and when he moved to New York to finish high school, Lewis has never been comfortable following suit, which the twins quickly noted and made a game of exposing: “Lewis, would you tell Grandpa dinner is ready?” Lewis padded down the hall and tapped on the door to Cyrus's study, the lair of the Genius. “Dinner's ready!” he called in a modulated voice.

“Very good, Lewis,” Cyrus said from within.

“Lewis, that's not right!” Izzy whispered. There was a twin, demon-like at each ear. Eckhart said, “You should say,”—calling it out over Lewis's shoulder—“‘
Grandpa
, dinner's ready!'”

There was a stir in the office and Cyrus said irritably, “I
heard
you, Lewis!”

He sought to be like them in the beginning, even thought–why not?–to surpass them. But there came a moment early on when he saw it was futile. It was in a café near the Goethe-Institut Berlin, where he'd been sent
at considerable expense
as part of a European tour-cum-language-acquisition catch-up in the summer before his freshman year at Columbia. He was reviewing the German second subjunctive with an American girl named Alissa. They had drunken, tension-relieving sex a few times, once in a park standing against a tree. She was a freshman at Haverford but hoping to transfer to Princeton or Dartmouth, hence the hasty, apple-polishing addition of German. She had a manner Lewis was familiar with by then, that of an average-looking but neither rich nor brilliant girl who reacted to her elite private school by adopting an expression of anticipatory affront. With Alissa periodically scanning the horizon for foes, they reviewed. For Lewis, this was a bit of a joke: the second subjunctive—along with the first—was a faint strand in a swirl of modal auxiliaries, separable and inseparable prefixes, compound tenses, vocabulary. He didn't have what it took to “pick up” a language in two or three months. He could philosophize, but his memory was average; he read Hegel but not in the original. There would be no catching up to the twins, not to speak of surpassing them. They were being groomed to accomplish rare feats of comparative-linguistic scholarship, while Lewis was mainly being worried over as a potential embarrassment, a threat to the family brand.

The one thing the grandchildren had to do, on these summer visits to Cambridge, was meet with Gerty for career counseling, ideally in the guise of helping tend her tomatoes. As with other family traditions, Lewis was expected to behave as though he'd always known it, because if he'd been callously excluded all those years from the annual visits to Cambridge and Christmas gatherings and edifying spring-break trips to Europe, then the Chopiks would be at fault, which would be a rude and ungrateful way for Lewis to make them feel.

In the tomato patch, Lewis always thought of the scene from
The Godfather
, with Gerty, stolid and gray and slow-moving, played by a cross-dressing Brando. It was the kind of thing he'd learned to keep to himself: far too irreverent, above all, and pop-culture references were considered outré: the grandparents might not get them and, well, it was vulgar. A straw basket over one arm, Gerty would draw out news about grades and honors and aspirations, most of which she already knew in detail, kick the tires of research topics, propose strategies for getting this or that fellowship. When it was Lewis's turn last summer, Gerty asked what he intended to write about for his senior thesis. Gray's “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard,” he told her and she frowned and worried aloud that the Elegy was banal, a high-school poem, like Frost's “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” What about John Clare and the textural variants? Lewis was bored with it. Boredom was no reason to abandon a project! Lewis said that part of what interested him about the Elegy was its “dual citizenship” (his advisor's phrase) in the high-school and university curricula, that the history of its uses within the school system was inseparable from its meaning. This seemed to placate or at least befuddle Gerty enough to silence objections. He told her about the “stone-cutter” and
Ignotus
theories that he was planning to dust off in order to demonstrate his mastery of the critical tradition but ultimately to make a larger deconstructive point that the “Thee” of the poem is unknowable, a cipher or blank standing for the disenfranchised political subject, the “mute, inglorious Milton” of the poem. Gerty found this to be an unsavory goal, smart-alecky and subversive. Would it add to the total sum of knowledge about the poem? That was the family tradition. There was no generation gap between the twins and their parents and the grandparents: an unbroken line of literary history and material philology and thematics. Lewis's interest in literary theory and dubious, show-offy types like Zizek were tolerated but viewed as worrisome.

She turned to fellowships. Both the Mellon Graduate Fellowships and the Rhodes had to be applied for during the fall of his senior year, she reminded him sternly; he would be
ineligible
thereafter. She had gotten wind of his then-tentative talk of taking time off after graduation. Time off from what—reading, study? And in order to do what,
work
? She sincerely hoped he came to his senses. Those who failed to go straight on into PhD programs, who “broke the daisy chain,” were never regarded in the same light as those who went straight through, whatever Lewis may have heard to the contrary. When the laggards eventually did apply, they were given
at best
mere university fellowships, tuition plus stipend, and burdened with a great deal of teaching when they would otherwise be free to do research. She was very keen on the Rhodes, a feather the family cap lacked. (The Twins were on Mellons.) A Rhodes seemed like quite a stretch to Lewis. His football would help, Gerty replied. Lewis hadn't played football since high school, he reminded her. He'd also heard athletics no longer mattered for a Rhodes. Well, they don't, Gerty said, but only by default, because no one smart played sports anymore. He shouldn't worry about it; he should just apply. Oxford is magnificent, she said. Had he visited Oxford? He hadn't. A Rhodes would open innumerable doors. She wanted him to call
Declan Lang
in the English Department at Columbia, not right away, in September, the second week. Declan Lang was himself a Rhodes Scholar; he would be expecting Lewis's call.

That seemed to be the end of the conference. Then, as they headed for the wicket gate, she caught him off guard by asking about Seth, whose existence had been assiduously ignored until then, not without Lewis's passive complicity. Lewis said something vague and neutral, to which Gerty's response was: “It's
terribly sad
.”

“What's sad about it?” Lewis heard himself say and felt her bristle.

She dropped a tomato into her basket and whispered impatiently, as if Lewis were needlessly embarrassing them both, “He's
mentally ill,
Lewis—Bipolar!”

Eckhart stood at the back door, visibly wondering what in Lewis's undistinguished life could possibly be taking up so much of Grandma's time.

“That's never really been established,” Lewis said.

Gerty pursed her lips and lowered her eyelids in a dismissive expression. “Well, it must be from the maternal side, since there's none on ours.”

“That you know of.”


Adversus solem ne loquitor
,” she said in reply to this impertinence, looking up at Lewis and shielding her eyes against the sunlight with a plump hand. “How's your Latin?”

Uh, compared to that of Izzy and Eckhart, who've been at it since they were six? Not so great.

“Adversus solem ne loquitor,” Gerty repeated more slowly. She taught Latin in high school once upon a time, before she married Cyrus.

“Don't talk against the sun?” Lewis tried, knowing as he said it that it was too literal and worried “solem” might mean “alone.”

Gerty gave a slight, disappointed shake of the head. What were they going to do about this one? “Don't
argue
against the sun—that is, what is obvious and self-evident.”

And that was that: Seth was clinically insane and, for the sake of everyone's peace of mind and concentration, should be forgotten about, disowned, disavowed, barred. And Lewis needed to work harder on his Latin.

On the other hand, Gerty urged him to apply for the Rhodes. She believed in him. It was also like she was intuiting the coming of Andrew Feeling. The world is a battlefield and this is the armor you must put on in order to prevail. But Lewis didn't listen. Lewis applied for no fellowships, went his own way, which has led him here, into the weeds.

10

 

T
hank you!” someone calls, startling him, though a split second later he recognizes the deep voice of Oren, the preacher neighbor. He stands resting his chin on the top of the fence so that his large jowly head seems to float there. “I've been hoping someone would give it a haircut,” Oren says, scanning the yard.

With the uprooted weeds held in his hand, Lewis must look like he's on the job. Oren wears his own hair in the fashion of a Born-Again football coach, parted on the side and lacquered into place. Or do the coaches mimic the ministers?

Oren nods back toward his lawn, where there's a birdbath that says along the rim,
His eye is on the sparrow and I know He watches me
. “We're catching your dandelions,” he says grimly.

“Good for salad,” Lewis points out.

“For
salad
?” Oren says, making a face. “That what they eat in New York City?”

“They do,” Lewis says.

Oren shakes his head in amazement or simple refusal. Dropping his voice into a quieter, confiding register, he says, “I want you to know your mother is just
overjoyed
you've come back home to live.”

Lewis is about to say he's just here for a visit then thinks better of it and stands smiling pleasantly while letting a silence build.

“Well,” Oren says, squinting up at the sky, “I'll let you get back to it.” Adding sagely, as he eases himself down from whatever he's standing on, a bucket, a stack of Bibles, “Be too hot for yard work before long.”

When Oren has slipped from view, Lewis drops the handful of weeds and goes moodily back to the stoop, where he sits down and resumes drinking his coffee. It's absurd—worse than absurd, it's primitive and superstitious—to hold Oren responsible for Seth's first episode. Though if it hadn't been for those packets of seeds left out in the open in Oren's garage, Seth might not have had his condition “kindled,” to use Harry's term: stirred, roused. Or not so soon, so young, at fourteen.

Abby found a strange residue in her coffee-bean grinder one morning. Lewis remembers her dipping in her pinkie and tasting it and making a face. Seth had started smoking pot, they knew. Now what? They were like parents together, Abby and Lewis, with a bond formed around handling Seth, their strange child. Things were about to get stranger.

They picked up his trail on the family computer. It led to a site called Erowid and a FAQs about morning-glory seeds that included a recipe. Lewis read it over Abby's shoulder and doubted aloud that Seth would have gone to the bother: there were too many steps, ethanol, petroleum ether, shaking it up, waiting, drying out the seed power. Then they came to this:

 

Q.
Why is this method of preparation superior to others?

 

A.
The virtue of this processing methodology will become clear if you sip a bit and hold it in your mouth before swallowing. VOILA: Instant Experience!

 

Q.
How long will the experience last?

 

A.
The morning glory voyage is clean, pure, intense and particularly enjoyable out of doors in the daytime (drink at dawn). It lasts the standard 8–10 hours.

 

Abby took the car and Lewis was sent off on foot. He tried Stacy's house, where Seth had been attending the Bible reading group led by her Born-Again hippie parents—no one home. Then he went down to the woods at the bottom of the neighborhood, calling Seth's name as he went, which embarrassed him but that's what being a parent entailed, overcoming embarrassment, panicking in public.

He walked a short distance into the grove and was turning to go when he spotted Seth resting his forehead against a tree. He went over and touched him on the thin shoulder. He was just a boy. “What the fuck did you take?”

“Shall not eat of it,” Seth said, his eyes closed. “Neither shall ye touch it.”

Lewis felt for his cell to call 911 but he hadn't remembered to bring it. Seth puked on the roots of the tree and said he was fine except when he moved. Lewis kicked dirt over the vomit and they sat on the ground beneath another tree. The trip lasted for hours; it may as well have been LSD. Seth was quiet for most of it, eyes closed, smiling, muttering things, but toward the end his eyes flew open and he sat up. “You're dead, kid.” It's what someone had told him as a threat before a recent showdown, Lewis knew. Seth was fighting a lot in school. “You are
so dead
.”

When he finally came down, he didn't come down: he was convinced he had died. Many people underwent a kind of ego-death on psychedelics, Abby explained. It was considered standard, something experienced users knew to anticipate. She read aloud pertinent passages from Timothy Leary and others. But what other people experienced and said meant nothing to Seth; what he had undergone was permanent and real: he was essentially and truly dead. And do you know the great thing about being dead? You're aren't
afraid
all the time, because that's what every fear is based on, the fear of death. Dead, he felt more alive than ever before. It was great to be dead!

It would clear up on its own, Abby hoped. Meanwhile it was summertime. Lewis drove out to a ranch to swim in the lake, ten dollars per car: an old man took the money and opened the cattle gate. They heard that the far end of the lake there were cliffs and a rope swing, but access to it was blocked by a gang of high-school skinheads who would appear arms folded on the footpath, their girlfriends swinging their white legs in the trees. It turned out the owner of the ranch was the grandfather of the leader and had raised the boy part-time—the mother was a meth addict, the father in Leavenworth. But being dead, Seth decided to demonstrate his fearlessness by challenging the bigger, vicious-looking skinhead leader. Which meant Lewis would have to fight too and Lewis didn't particularly enjoy fighting or give a damn about some rope swing. In addition to which this Skinhead was not just a kid with a shaved head and swastika tats; he was affiliated through his convict father with a regional white-supremacist group. Even if Seth and Lewis won the fight, they might find themselves being forced off the road on the way home by a car full of Hammerskins or Hammerheads (Lewis never got the name of the group straight or wanted to) and shanked in the bushes. But in the end they settled not on a fight but on a contest to see who would jump off the highest point on the cliff above the lake, the winner having the right to be gatekeeper to the pathetic fucking rope swing. Lewis watched Seth climb higher and higher up the cliff, until on the final, winning jump he struck the water on his side and briefly passed out from the pain and Lewis leapt in, afraid he might drown. Seth's first act as rope-swing gatekeeper was to welcome his biracial friend Marley, son of a WSU faculty couple, which touched off an endless, moronic debate about race, worse in its way than fighting would have been, Lewis often found himself thinking.

Then Seth flew to New York for his annual one-week visit to see Virgil. The night before he left, Seth came into Lewis's room. He wondered aloud about what it was going to be like,
flying on a plane when you're dead
. Lewis studied him. The kid still believed he was dead. It was the strangest thing. He referred to it in everyone's presence. Abby was out with Rennie, “lifetime companion” du jour, and when Seth lit a one-hit pipe, Lewis had a small social puff. But it was strong and he found himself thinking harder than he had about Seth's claim: he's dead, my little brother. Lewis had always lived in dread of Seth's dying—in a car crash, drowning at the beach, cancer. Now, in this strange, Alice-in-Wonderland fashion and under his nose it had happened anyway: Seth was dead. He turned to contemplating his own death, that beast of legend. Seth was dead, ergo Lewis too was going to die, one day the hour would actually come. The beast was real. He could make it out in the farthest distance, like a grainy photo of Bigfoot. But suddenly it turned and flew across that vast space and pressed itself against him and Lewis couldn't breathe, he broke down gasping out sobs of terror. “It's OK,” Seth said, soothing him. But Lewis knew he was gloating too: breaking Lewis the doubter was a victory. He would do the same with Virgil.

And the minute he got off the plane in New York he was pestering Virgil to acknowledge the astonishing and quite possibly unprecedented nature of what had occurred. Ask Lewis, Dad! Once in ten thousand lifetimes an event of this magnitude occurred! But what Abby saw as a worrisome but in the end legitimate instance of “spiritual drunkenness,” Virgil decided was a psychotic break triggered by the morning-glory trip, which Seth happily told him all about. Having lured him down to a clinic run by a colleague on the pretence of measuring his surely exceptional brainwave function, Virgil had Seth subjected to a battery of tests then kept there for observation for several days against Seth's will and without informing Abby. The test results were inconclusive but Seth was so furious at the betrayal and traumatized by the clinic discipline that he refused to speak to or visit Virgil afterward, with the estrangement lasting right up until Seth decided he wanted to become an actor and the Van Sant auditions were announced.

When he returned from New York, he spoke less and less about the morning-glory trip, less and less in general. When he did speak, it was to Abby alone. They spent a lot of time in her room, the door closed. And what he said frightened her: he wanted to finish the job; he wanted to die the rest of the way.

 

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