Zombie Spaceship Wasteland (8 page)

My uncle Pete was insane.

I know there was a proper medical term, a specific
diagnosis,
for what he had. A sort of schizophrenia or something. But that knowledge died with my grandfather, who took care of Pete for most of his sixty or so years.
^*
Pete died a few years before Grandfather, which was just as well. Grandpa Runfola was attuned to Pete’s moods and rhythms. He could fend off an angry spell, quell daylight demons, and guide Pete through foggy fugues instinctively. They lived together—a divorcée and his huge, shaggy, bachelor son, in College Park, Maryland. Their house was just blocks away from the house that Pete, his two brothers and one sister (my mom), and, at the time, my still-married grandfather and grandmother grew up in.

Well, no . . .
not
my grandfather and grandmother. They didn’t grow up in that house—or anywhere, really. My grandfather and grandmother grew up, separately, elsewhere. They collided in their youth, sent four kids flying into the world, and then continued on without each other. Except for Thanksgiving and Christmas, which were unspoken rally points in their solitary lives, when they’d get together with their four kids at either our house, one of the uncles’, or—best of all, in my opinion— at Grandpa Runfola’s. Other than that, it was a condo in Chevy Chase for Grandma and the little house in College Park for Grandpa and Uncle Pete.

Grandpa’s house in College Park was my favorite. So much better than Grandma’s sterile Chevy Chase condo. At the condo, after dinner had been consumed, the adults were drawn in two directions. The men coalesced around sports on a television and short, bumblebee bursts of travel to the wet bar. The women sat with them and gossiped about work, kids, and celebrities. It was the first musical mash-up I can remember hearing—the headlong pulse of a football game, with the driving drone of the announcer’s voice and the occasional whoop and bark of adults praising or condemning this or that godDAMN that or yyyyEEEEESSSS or AWWWWwwww (shit). And then, laid over this, like gulls over a noisy summer beach of dropped hot dog bits and popcorn kernels, the women, who can’t beLIEVE how STUpid this one at work is or HORRible this one kid on the block is or HOW she can stand to be photographed when she’s so FAAAAAAT? A high treble of lip-smacking snark over the drum and bass of sports.

My brother loved sports. I couldn’t believe anyone could follow any conflict that didn’t involve lasers, robots, or magic rings.

I’d go out on the balcony and swoop up the crusty snow on the railings and drop it far far far into the empty courtyard.

Uncle Pete would join me out there on the icy balcony. Not that he hated sports or even company. I assumed, at the time, he was the only other person who understood the inherent awesomeness of shattering ice sheets and
plaaaap
ing balls of soft snow on concrete, which looked, from that perspective, like spells or evil presences smashing against the gray wall of reality, not getting through.

What I didn’t know was that Pete already had a hundred songs and voices and movies and gods in his head, chattering and flirting and arguing in an eternal overlit salon. It probably seemed rude, to him, to subject a group of job-holding, tax-paying, child-raising adults to such a cosmic and otherworldly standard. You wouldn’t let Barney Fife go up against the Man with No Name or the Magnificent Seven, would you?

We stood on the balcony, Uncle Pete and I. My breath came out in a clean fog in the winter air and he exhaled an empty gray exhaust from the cigarettes he chain-smoked. Pete hadn’t started growing his mad-Russian-priest beard. He wore thick horn-rimmed glasses. He had a square, clean-shaven face that looked like any number of people you’d see in the background of an early-fifties group photo of a searching party.

“Think you could hit those ravens with your snow bombs?” he asked, pointing down to a huddle of black birds on a branch two stories beneath us.

“I could, but it’d be mean.”

“They’d bomb
you
if they could. That’s what they’re talking about now,” he said, going back inside for another handful of the endless peanuts he used to wash down his cigarettes. I looked back down at the ravens, and as if they felt my gaze, they huddled together closer.

I thought Pete was the coolest person in the world.

And he lived in the coolest house ever. A little suburban bungalow, perched on a corner off the highway, with this weird backyard that swooped and rose, abutting other backyards that swooped and rose. Standing on the back porch, you looked out onto a stormy ocean of grass, flash-frozen at its angriest moment. Whoever designed College Park, Maryland, must have been quietly terrified of the landscape and left it untouched, as if the confused, dark, and ancient forces that carved the surface had signed it with an exclamation point.
^*

* * *

“Nevermore,” said Pete, slamming himself down in the chair next to mine at the little kitchen table.

I was laughing. He said “nevermore” in this weird, TV-horror-movie-host voice, and he bugged his eyes out.

He had a thick book in front of him, and one of his thumbs was marking a page.

“Quoth the Raven . . . ,” said Pete. And then, fumbling the book open, he started from the beginning of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.”

That was my first encounter with Poe—being read “The Raven,” without preamble, introduction, or context, by my insane uncle in a tiny kitchen in College Park. And he read it like a little kid discovering it—making a poem about adult regret and loneliness seem like the greatest thing to a kid who thought coolness acted like the Fonz, sounded like Kiss, and rode a motorcycle like Evel Knievel.

My world was fun, but I always suspected there was more. Vampires in a room shuttered against California sunshine. A snow fort melted into the water that we swam in at the community pool in summer. Heroes and villains created at the flick of a pencil tip or in the tumblings of a handful of dice. My parents could drive us to Washington, DC, to get freeze-dried ice cream at the Air and Space Museum or ride the rides at Kings Dominion, or take us to movies. They could drop me off at an airport to take a plane to visit my other grandparents, out in the Arizona desert. Still, the world felt
bounded
. Uncle Pete was the first one ever to heave open the gates that sealed ancient pages and make me suspect there were worlds within and without the world I was in. That there were worlds outside of the
time
I was living in. All of this he carried against his will, in his head. But unlike the other adults, with their resentments and their anxiousness or anger, he seemed eternally, uncontrollably
entertained
. I really envied him.