Date: 2007-10-16 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Short Stories (Single Author); Thrillers; Fantasy; Horror; Supernatural; Ghost; General; Paranormal; Fiction
Description: From the New York Times bestselling author of NOS4A2 and Horns comes this e-short story—from Joe Hill’s award-winning collection 20th Century Ghosts. Imogene is young and beautiful. She kisses like a movie star and knows everything about every film ever made. She's also dead and waiting in the Rosebud Theater for Alec Sheldon one afternoon in 1945. . . . Arthur Roth is a lonely kid with big ideas and a gift for attracting abuse. It isn't easy to make friends when you're the only inflatable boy in town. . . . Francis is unhappy. Francis was human once, but that was then. Now he's an eight-foot-
Publisher: HarperCollins

VOLUNTARY COMMITTAL

A Story from the Collection

20TH CENTURY

GHOSTS

JOE HILL

To Leanora:

WE Are My Favorite Story

CONTENTS

Begin Reading Voluntary Committal

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Other Books by Joe Hill

Credits

Cover

Copyright

About the Publisher

VOLUNTARY COMMITTAL

Idon’t know who I’m writing this for, can’t say who I expect to read it. Not the police, anyway. I don’t know what happened to my brother, and I can’t tell them where he is. Nothing I could put down here would help them find him.

And anyway, this isn’t really about his disappearance . . .

although it does concern a missing person, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think the two things had anything to do with each other. I have never told anyone what I know about Edward Prior, who left school one October day in 1977, and never arrived home for chili and baked potatoes with Mom. For a long time, the first year or two after he vanished, I didn’t want to think about my friend Eddie. I would do anything not to think about him. If I passed some people talking about him in the halls of my high school— I heard he stole his momma’s weed and some money and ran away to fuckin California! —I’d fix my eyes on some point in the distance and pretend I was deaf.

And if someone actually approached and asked me straight out what I thought had happened to him—now and then someone would, since we were known compañeros—I’d set my face into a rigid blank and shrug. “I almost think I care sometimes,” I said.

Later, I didn’t think about Eddie out of studiously formed habit. If anything happened by chance to remind me of him—if I saw a boy who looked like him, or read something in the 1

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news about a missing teen—I would instantly begin to think of something else, hardly aware I was even doing it.

In the last three weeks, though, ever since my little brother Morris went missing, I find myself thinking about Ed Prior more and more; can’t seem, through any effort of will, to turn thoughts of him aside. The urge to talk to someone about what I know is really almost more than I can bear. But this isn’t a story for the police. Believe me, it wouldn’t do them any good, and it might do myself a fair amount of bad. I can’t tell them where to look for Edward Prior any more than I can tell them where to look for Morris—can’t tell what I don’t know—but if I were to share this story with a detective, I think I might be asked some harsh questions, and some people (Eddie’s mother, for example, still alive and on her third marriage) would be put through a lot of unnecessary emotional strain.

And it’s just possible I could wind up with a one-way ticket to the same place where my brother spent the last two years of his life: the Wellbrook Progressive Mental Health Center.

My brother was there voluntarily, but Wellbrook includes a wing just for people who had to be committed. Morris was part of the clinic’s work program, pushed a mop for them four days out of the week, and on Friday mornings he went into the Governor’s Wing, as it’s known, to wash their shit off the walls.

And their blood.

Was I just talking about Morris in the past tense? I guess I was. I don’t hope anymore that the phone will ring, and it will be Betty Millhauser from Wellbrook, her voice rushed and winded, telling me they’ve found him in a homeless shelter somewhere, and they’re bringing him back. I don’t think anyone will be calling to tell me they found him floating in the Charles, either. I don’t think anyone will be calling at all, except maybe to say nothing is known. Which could almost be the epitaph on Morris’s grave. And maybe I have to admit that I’m writing this, not to show it to anyone, but because I can’t help myself, and a blank page is the only safe audience for this story I can imagine.

My little brother didn’t start to talk until he was four. A lot of people thought he was retarded. A lot of people around 2

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my old hometown, Pallow, still think he was mentally retarded, or autistic. For the record, when I was a kid I half-thought he was retarded myself, even though my parents told me he wasn’t.

When he was eleven, he was diagnosed with juvenile schizophrenia. Later came other diagnoses: depression, obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, acute depressive schizophrenia. I don’t know if any of those words really capture the sense of who he was, and what he struggled with. I know that even when he found his words, he didn’t use them that much. That he was always too small for his age, a boy with delicate bones, slender long-fingered hands, and an elfin face. He was always curiously affectless, his feelings submerged too deeply to create a stir on his face. He never seemed to blink. At times, my brother made me think of one of those tapered, horned conch shells, with a glossy pink interior curving away and out of sight into some tightly wound inner mystery. You could hold your ear to such a shell and imagine you heard the depths of a vast roaring ocean—but it was really just a trick of acoustics. The sound you were hearing was the soft, rushing thunder of nothing there. The doctors had their diagnoses, and when I was fourteen years old, that was mine.

Because he was susceptible to agonizing ear infections, Morris wasn’t let out in the winter . . . which by my mother’s defini-tion began when the World Series ended and ended when the baseball season began. Anyone who has ever had small children themselves can tell you how hard it is to keep them happily occupied for any real length of time when you can’t just send them outside. My own son is twelve now and lives with my ex in Boca Raton, but we all lived together as a family until he was seven, and I remember just how draining a cold and rainy day, all of us stuck inside, could be. For my little brother, every day was a cold and rainy day, but unlike with other children, it wasn’t hard to keep him busy. He occupied himself, descending into the cellar as soon as he came home from school, to work with quiet industry, for the rest of the afternoon, on one of his immense, sprawling, technically complicated and fundamen-tally worthless construction projects.

His first fascination was the towers and elaborate temples he 3

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would build out of Dixie cups. I have a memory of what might have been the first time he ever made something out of them.

It was evening, and all of us, my parents, Morris and I, were gathered in the television room for one of our rare family ritu-als, the nightly watching of M*A*S*H. By the time the show faded into its second commercial break, however, we had all pretty much quit paying attention to the antics of Alan Alda and company, and were staring at my brother.

My father sat on the floor beside him. I think initially he might’ve been helping him build. My father was a bit of an autistic person himself, a shy, clumsy man who didn’t get out of his pajamas on weekends, and who had almost no social truck with the world whatsoever beyond my mother. He never showed any sign of disappointment in Morris, and he often seemed most content when he was stretched out beside my brother, painting sunshine-filled stick-figure worlds on construction paper with him. This time, though, he sat back and let Morris work alone, as curious as the rest of us to see how it would come out. Morris built and stacked and arranged, his long, slender fingers darting here and there, placing the cups so quickly it almost looked like a magic trick, or the work of a ro-bot on an assembly line . . . without hesitation, seemingly without thought, never accidentally knocking another cup down.

Sometimes he wasn’t even looking at what his hands were doing, was staring instead into the box of Dixie Cups, as if to see how many were left. The tower climbed higher and higher, cups flying onto it so quickly I found myself sometimes holding my breath in actual disbelief.

A second box of Dixie Cups was opened and used up. By the time he was finished—which happened when he had gone through all the wax cups my father could find for him—the tower was as tall as Morris himself, and surrounded by a de-fensive wall with an open gate. Because of the spaces between the cups, there seemed to be narrow archer’s windows in the sides of the tower, and the top of both tower and wall appeared crenellated. It had startled us all a little, watching Morris build the thing with such speed and self-assurance, but it wasn’t an inherently fabulous structure. Any other five-year-old might’ve built the same thing. It was only remarkable in that it suggested 4

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larger underlying ambitions. One sensed Morris easily could’ve gone on building, adding smaller watch towers, out-buildings, a whole rustic Dixie cup village. And when the cups were gone, Morris glanced around and laughed, a sound I think I had never heard before then—a high, almost piercing noise, unpracticed and more alarming than pleasant. He laughed, and he clapped for himself, just once, the way a maharajah might clap to send away a servant.

The other way the tower was obviously different from the work of some other child his age was that any normal five-year-old would’ve constructed such a thing for one purpose—to give it a swift kick and watch the cups come down in a dry, rattling collapse. I know that’s what I wanted to do with his tower, and I was three years older: march along it, bashing with both feet, for the sheer joy of knocking down something big and carefully built, a Little League Godzilla.

Every emotionally normal child has a streak of that in them.

I suppose, if I am honest, that streak was a little broader in myself than it was in others. My compulsion to knock things down continued into adulthood, and ultimately included my wife, who disliked the habit, and expressed her displeasure with divorce papers and a jaundiced-looking lawyer who possessed all the personal warmth of a wood-chipper, and who operated with just such grinding mechanical efficiency in the courtroom.

Morris, though, soon lost interest in his finished work, and wanted juice. My father led him away into the kitchen, mur-muring that he would bring home a huge box of cups for Morris to play with tomorrow, so he could build an even bigger castle in the basement. I couldn’t believe that Morris had left his tower just standing there. It was a tease I couldn’t bear. I shoved myself up off the couch, took a crooked step towards it—and then my mother caught my arm and held it. Her gaze latched into mine, and it carried a dark warning: Don’t even think. Neither of us spoke, and in another instant I pulled my arm out of her hand and drifted out of the room myself.

My mother did love me, but rarely said so, and often seemed to hold me at an emotional arm’s length. She understood me in a way my father didn’t. Once, horsing around in the shal-5

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lows of Walden Pond, I skipped a stone at a smaller boy who had splashed me. It hit his upper arm with a meaty thwack and raised an ugly purple welt. My mother saw to it that I didn’t swim the rest of the summer, although we continued to visit Walden every Saturday afternoon, so Morris could pad-dle clumsily around; someone had persuaded my parents that swimming was therapeutic for him, and so she was as firm that he should swim as she was that I shouldn’t. I was required to sit on the sand with her, and was not allowed to stray out of sight of her beach towel. I could read, but was not allowed to play with, or even talk to, other children. Looking back, it’s hard to resent her if she was overly severe with me then, and on other occasions. She saw, more plainly than others, a lot of what was worst in me, and it worried her. She had some sense of my po-tential, and instead of filling her with hope and excitement, it made her harsh with me.

What Morris had done in the living room, in the space of a half hour, was just a hint of what he would do with three times the area to work in, and as many Dixie cups as he wanted.

In the next year he painstakingly built an elevated superhigh-way—it meandered all around our spacious, well-lit basement, but if stretched out straight it would’ve measured nearly a quarter mile—a giant Sphinx, and a great circular igloo, large enough for both of us to sit inside, with a low entrance I could just squirm through.

From there it was no great stretch to designing towering, if impersonal, LEGO metropolises, patterned after the skylines of actual cities. A year after that, he graduated to dominoes, building delicate cathedrals with dozens of perfectly balanced ivory spires, reaching halfway to the ceiling. When Morris was nine, he became briefly famous, at least in Pallow, when Boston’s Chronicle ran a short feature on him. Morris had set up over eighteen thousand dominoes in the gym of his school for the developmentally challenged. He arranged them in the shape of a giant griffin battling a column of knights, and Channel Five shot him setting them off, filmed the whole great roaring tumble. His dominoes fell in such a way that arrows appeared to fly, and the griffin seemed to slash at one of the gasping chain-mailed knights; three lines of crimson dominoes fell over, look-6

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ing for all the world like gashes. For a week I suffered fits of black, poisonous jealousy, left the room when he came into it, couldn’t stand that there should be so much attention focused on him; but my resentment made as little impression on him as his own celebrity. Morris was equally indifferent to both. I gave up my anger when I saw it made as much sense as screaming into a well, and eventually the rest of the world forgot that for a moment, Morris had been someone interesting.

By the time I entered my freshman year in high school and started chumming around with Eddie Prior, Morris had moved on to building fortresses out of cardboard boxes that my father brought home for him from the warehouse where he worked as a shipping agent. Almost from the start, it was different with his cardboard hideouts than it had been with the things he built out of dominoes or Dixie cups. While his other construction projects had clear beginnings and endings, he never really seemed to finish any one particular design with his cardboard boxes. One scheme flowed into another, a shelter becoming a castle becoming a series of catacombs. He painted exteriors, decorated interiors, laid carpet, cut windows, doors that would flap open and shut. Then one day, without any warning or ex-planation, Morris would disassemble large sections of what he had built, and begin reorganizing the whole structure along completely different architectural lines.

Also, though, his work with Dixie cups or LEGOS had always calmed him, while the things he built with cardboard boxes left him restless and dissatisfied. The ultimate cardboard hang-out was always just a few boxes away from being done, and until he got it right, the great looming thing he was building in the basement had a curious and unhappy power over him.

I remember coming into the house late on a Sunday afternoon, clomping across the kitchen in my snow boots to get something out of the fridge, glancing through the open basement door and down the steps . . . and then sticking in place, breath catching in my throat. Morris sat turned sideways on the bottom step, his shoulders hitched up to his ears, his face a pasty, unnatural white, twisted in a grimace. He held one palm pressed hard to his forehead, as if he had been struck there.

But the thing that alarmed me the most, the thing I noticed as I 7

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came slowly down the steps towards him, was that while it was almost too cold in the basement to be comfortable, Morris’s cheeks were slicked with sweat, the front of his plain white T-shirt soaked through in a V-shaped stain. When I was three steps above him, just as I was about to call his name, his eyes popped open. An instant later that expression of cringing pain began to fade away, his face relaxing, going slack.

“What’s happening?” I asked. “You all right?”

“Yes,” he said without inflection. “Just—got lost for a minute.”

“Lost track of time?”

He seemed to need a moment to process this. His eyes narrowed; the look in them sharpened. He stared dimly at his fortress, which was, at that time, a series of twenty boxes arranged in a large square. About half of the boxes were painted a fluorescent yellow, with circular porthole windows cut in their sides. The portholes had sheets of Saran Wrap taped into them.

Morris had gone over them with a hair dryer, so the plastic was stretched tight and smooth. This part of the fort was a holdover from a yellow submarine Morris had attempted to build. A periscope made out of a cardboard poster tube stuck out of the top of one very large box. The rest of the boxes, though, were painted in bold reds and blacks, with a flowing scrim of golden Arabian-style writing running along their sides. The windows of these boxes were cut in bell shapes that instantly brought to mind the palaces of Mideastern despots, harem girls, Aladdin.

Morris frowned and slowly shook his head. “I went in and I couldn’t find my way out. Nothing looked right.”

I glanced at the fort, which had an entrance at every corner and windows cut into every other box. Whatever my brother’s handicaps, I couldn’t imagine him getting so confused inside his fortress that he couldn’t figure out where he was.

“Why didn’t you just crawl to a window and see where you were?”

“There weren’t any windows where I got lost. I heard someone talking and tried to get out following his voice but it was a long way off and I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. It wasn’t you, was it? It didn’t sound like your voice, Nolan.”

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“No!” I said. “What voice?” Glancing around as I said this, wondering if we were alone in the basement. “What did it say?”

“I couldn’t always hear. Sometimes my name. Sometimes he said to keep going. And once he said there was a window ahead. He said I’d see sunflowers on the other side.” Morris paused, then let out a weak sigh. “I might’ve seen it at the end of a tunnel—the window and the sunflowers—but I was scared to go too close, so I turned around and that’s when my head started to hurt. And pretty soon I found one of the doors out.”

I thought there was a good chance, then, that Morris had suffered a minor break with reality while crawling around inside his fort, a not impossible circumstance. Only a year before, he had taken to painting his hands red, because he said it helped him to feel sounds. When he was in a room with music playing he would shut his eyes, hold his crimson hands above his head like antennae, and wiggle his whole body in a sort of spastic belly dance.

I was also unnerved by the much more unlikely possibility that there really was someone in the basement, a chanting psy-chopath who was perhaps at this very moment hunched in one of the tight spaces of Morris’s fort. Either way, I was creeped out. I took Morris’s hand and told him to come upstairs with me, so he could tell our mother what had happened.

When this story was repeated to her, she looked stricken.

She put a hand on Morris’s forehead. “You’re all clammy! Let’s go upstairs, Morris. Let’s get you some aspirin. I want you to lie down. We can talk about this after you’ve had a minute to rest.”

I was all for searching the basement right away, to see if anyone was down there, but my mother shooed me aside, making a face whenever I spoke. The two of them disappeared upstairs, and I sat at the kitchen counter, eyeing the basement door, in a state of fidgety unease, for most of the next hour. That door was the cellar’s only exit. If I had heard the sound of feet climbing the steps, I would have leapt up screaming. But no one came up, and when my father arrived home, we went down to search the basement together. No one was hiding behind the boiler or the oil tank. In fact, our cellar was tidy and well lit, 9

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with few good hiding spots. The only place an intruder might conceal himself was Morris’s fort. I walked around it, kicking it and peeking in through the windows. My dad said I ought to climb in for a look around, and then laughed at the expression on my face. When he went upstairs I ran after him. I didn’t want to be anywhere near the bottom of the basement stairs when he clicked the lights off.

One morning, I was throwing my books into my gym bag before leaving for school and two folded sheets of paper fell out of Visions of American History. I picked them up and stared at them, at first without recognition—two mimeographed sheets, typewritten questions, large blocks of white space where a person could fill in answers. When I realized what I was staring at, I almost cursed the ugliest curse I knew, with my mother only a few feet away from me . . . an error which would’ve got my ear bent the wrong way, and which would’ve led to an interrogation I was better off avoiding. It was a take-home exam, handed out last Friday, due back that morning.

I had been spacing out in history over the course of the last week. There was a girl, something of a punk, who wore tattery denim skirts and lurid red fishnet stockings, and who sat beside me. She would flap her legs open and shut in boredom, and I remember when I leaned forward I could sometimes catch a flash of her surprisingly plain white panties from out of my peripheral vision. If we had been reminded in class about the take-home test, I hadn’t heard.

My mother dropped me at school. I stalked the frozen asphalt out back, stomach cramping. American history. Second period. I had no time. I hadn’t even read the two most recently assigned chapters. I knew I should sit down somewhere, and try to get a little bit of it done, skim the reading, scribble out a few half-assed answers. I couldn’t sit down, couldn’t bear to look at my take-home again. I felt overcome with a paralyzing helplessness, the dreadful, sickening sensation of no way out, my fate settled.

At the border between the asphalt lot and the frozen, tramped-down fields beyond, there was a row of thick wooden 10

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posts that had once supported a fence, long since cleared away.

A boy named Cameron Hodges from my American history class sat on one of these posts, a couple of his friends around him. Cameron was a pale-haired boy, who wore large glasses in round frames, behind which loomed inquisitive and perpetu-ally moist blue eyes. He was on the honors list and a member of the student council, but in spite of these significant handicaps, he was almost popular, liked without really trying to be liked.

This was in part because he didn’t make a big show out of how much he knew, wasn’t the sort to always be sticking his hand in the air whenever he knew the answer to a particularly hard problem. He had something else, though, too—a quality of rea-sonableness, a mixture of calm and an almost princely sense of fair play, that had the effect of making him seem more mature and experienced than the rest of us.

I liked him—had even cast my vote for him in the student elections—but we didn’t ever have much to do with each other. I couldn’t see myself with a friend like him . . . by which I mean, I couldn’t imagine someone like him being interested in someone like me. I was a hard boy to know, uncommunicative, sus-picious of other people’s intentions, hostile almost by reflex.

In those days, if someone happened to laugh as they walked by me, I always glared at them, just in case what was amusing them was me.

As I wandered close to him, I saw that he had his exam out.

His friends were checking their answers against his: “introduction of the cotton gin to the South, right, that’s what I said too.” I was passing directly behind Cameron. I didn’t think. I leaned past him and jerked his take-home out of his hands.

“Hey,” Cameron said, reached to get it back.

“I need to copy,” I said, my voice hoarse. I turned my body away, so he couldn’t grab his exam back. I was flushed, breathing hard, appalled to be doing what I was doing but doing it anyway. “I’ll give it back at history.”

Cameron slid off the post. He came towards me, his palms turned up, his eyes shocked and beseeching, magnified unnaturally by the lenses of his glasses. “Nolan. Don’t.” It surprised me—I don’t know why—to hear him say my name. I wasn’t sure until then that he knew it. “If your answers are just like 11

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mine, Mr. Sarducchi will know you copied. We’ll both get Fs.”

There was an audible tremor in his voice.

“Don’t cry,” I said. It came out harsher than I wanted it to—I think I was really worried he might cry—so it sounded like a taunt. Other kids laughed.

“Yeah,” said Eddie Prior, who suddenly appeared between Cameron and me. He planted his hand in the center of Cameron’s forehead and shoved. Cameron went down on his ass, hard, with a yelp. His glasses fell off and skidded away across a puddle of ice. “Don’t be a faggot. No one’s going to know.

You’ll get it back.”

Then Eddie threw an arm over my shoulders and we were walking away together. He spoke out of the side of his mouth, as if we were two convicts in a movie talking in a prison yard about the big breakout.

“Lerner,” he said, referring to me by my last name. He called everyone by their last names. “Lemmie have that after you’re done with it. Due to unforeseen circumstances beyond my control, namely my mom’s boyfriend is a loudmouthed cunt, I had to get out of the house last night, and I wound up playing foosball with my cousin till all hours. Upshot: I didn’t get past answering the first two questions of this friggin thing.”

Although Eddie Prior pulled down Cs and Ds in everything except shop, and found his way to detention almost weekly, he was as charismatic in his own way as Cameron Hodges was in his. He seemed impossible to rattle, a trait which powerfully impressed others. Furthermore, he was so relentlessly good-humored, so game for fun, no one could stay mad at him. If a teacher told him to get out of class for making one ignorant remark or another, Eddie would raise his shoulders in a slow, who-can-figure-anything-in-this-crazy-old-world shrug, carefully collect his books, and slink out—shooting one last sly look at the other students in a way that always set off a chain-reaction of titters. The next morning, the same teacher who had kicked him out of class would be tossing a football around with him in the faculty parking lot, while the two bullshitted about the Celtics.

It seems to me the quality that separates the popular from the unpopular—the one and only quality that Eddie Prior and 12

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Cameron Hodges had in common—is a strong sense of self.

Eddie knew who he was. He accepted himself. His failings had ceased to trouble him. Every word he spoke was a thoughtless, pure expression of his true personality. Whereas I had no clear picture of myself, and was always looking to others, watching them intently, both hoping and fearing that I would catch some clear sign of who they saw when they looked at me.

So in the next moment, as Eddie and I moved away from Cameron, I experienced the kind of abrupt, unlikely psycho-logical shift that is the adolescent’s stock-in-trade. I had only just ripped Cameron’s test from his hands, desperate to find a way out of the trap I had made for myself, and more than a little horrified at what I was willing to do to save myself. Theo-retically I was still desperate and horrified—but it delighted me to find myself reeling along with Ed Prior’s arm over my shoulders, as if we were lifelong friends coming out of the White Bar-rel Tavern at two in the morning. It gave me a delightful shock of surprise to hear him casually refer to his mother’s boyfriend as a loudmouthed cunt; it seemed as smooth a witticism as anything that had ever fallen out of the mouth of Steve Martin.

What I did next, I would’ve thought impossible just five minutes before. I handed him Cameron’s exam.

“You already got two questions done? Take it. Doesn’t sound like you need it for long. I’ll look at it when you’re finished,” I said.

He grinned at me, and two deep comma-shaped dimples appeared in the baby fat of his cheeks. “How’d you get yourself into this fix, Lerner?”

“I forgot we had a take-home. I can’t pay attention in that class. Don’t you know Gwen Frasier?”

“Yeah. She’s a fuckin skag. What about her?”

“She’s a fuckin skag who doesn’t wear any panties,” I said.

“She sits right next to me and she’s always opening and closing her legs. I got her one-eyed beaver staring me in the face half of class, how am I supposed to think about history?”

He boomed with laughter, in a voice so loud, people all over the lot stared. “She’s probably givin it some air to dry out her herpes sores. You want to watch out for her, partner.” And then he laughed some more, laughed until he was wiping at the 13

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water brimming in his eyes. I laughed too, something I never did easily, and I felt a shiver in the nerve endings. He had called me partner.

I seem to remember he never did get Cameron’s take-home back to me, and I wound up handing in my test completely blank anyway—on this point my memory is a little hazy. After that morning, though, I followed him around a lot. He liked to talk about his older brother, Wayne, who had spent four weeks of a three-month sentence in the juvenile detention hall, for the crime of firebombing someone’s Oldsmobile, and who had then busted out and was now living on the road. Eddie said Wayne called sometimes to brag on all the barhouse gash he was getting, and all the heads he was busting. He was vague about what his older brother was doing to get by, though. Helping on farms out in Illinois, Eddie said once. Boosting cars for Detroit niggers, he said another time.

We hung out a lot with a fifteen-year-old named Mindy Ackers, who babysat an infant in a basement apartment across the street from Eddie’s duplex. The place smelled of mold and urine, but we’d blow whole afternoons there, smoking cigarettes with her, and gambling on games of checkers, while the baby crawled around bare-assed under our feet. Other days, Eddie and I took the footpath through the woods behind Christobel Park, out to the concrete pedestrian overpass that ran above Route 111. Eddie always brought a brown paper bag full of garbage with him, heisted from the apartment where Mindy did her babysitting, a sack containing shit-filled diapers and sopping cartons of rancid Chinese. He dropped bombs of garbage at trucks passing below. Once, he aimed a diaper at an enormous semi with red flames airbrushed across the hood and steer horns fixed in the spot where the hood ornament belonged. The diaper burst on the passenger side of the windshield, and a splash of dill yellow diarrhea sprayed across the glass. The air brakes shrieked, smoke boiling off the tires. The driver yanked his air horn at us, a tremendous yelp of sound that caused my heart to surge in alarm. We grabbed each other, and ran laughing.

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“Book it, fat ass, I think he’s coming after us!” Eddie shrieked, and I ran for the sheer excitement of running. I didn’t really think anyone would go to the trouble to get out of their truck and gallop after us, but it was a thrill to pretend.

Later, when we had slowed down, and were walking through Christobel Park, both of us gasping for breath, Eddie said,

“There isn’t any form of human life more foul than truckers. I never met one that didn’t smell like a bucket of piss after a long haul.” I wasn’t completely surprised to learn later that Eddie’s mother’s boyfriend—the loudmouthed cunt—was himself a long-haul trucker.

Sometimes Ed came to my house, mostly to watch TV. We had good reception. He was curious about my brother, wanted to know all about whatever was wrong with him, was interested to see what he was working on in the basement. Eddie remembered seeing Morris knock over his griffin domino chain on TV, even though that had happened a couple years before.

This was never said, but I think he was enraptured by the idea of knowing an idiot-savant. He would’ve been just as excited to meet my brother if he was a double-amputee, or a dwarf. Eddie wanted a little Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not in his life. In the end, people usually get a bit more of what they want than they can really handle, don’t they?

On one of his first visits to my house, we went down for a look at the latest incarnation of Morris’s fort. Morris had about forty boxes strapped together to make a network of tunnels laid out in the shape of a monstrous octopus, with eight long passageways winding back to an enormous central box that had once held a projection-screen television. It would’ve made sense to paint it so it looked like an octopus—a leering kraken—and indeed, several of the thick trunk-like “arms” had been painted a lime green, with red discs on them to indicate suction cups.

But other arms were leftovers from older forts—one arm was built out of the remnants of the yellow submarine, another had been part of a rocketship design, and was white, with fins and lots of American flag decals. And the huge box at the center of the octopus was completely unpainted, but encased in a shell of chicken-wire mesh, which was shaped to look like a pair of lopsided horns. All the rest of the fortress had the appearance of 15

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a child’s homemade playset . . . spectacular looking, but just a playset nonetheless, something maybe Dad had helped to build.

It was this last detail, the unexplained, unexplainable chicken-wire horns, that marked it out as the work of someone who was seriously bullshit crazy.

“Awesome,” Eddie said, standing at the bottom of the stairs and looking out upon it, but I could see by a certain dimming in his eyes that he wasn’t all that impressed, had been hoping for more.

I hated to see him let down, for any reason. If he wanted my brother to be a savant, so did I. I dropped to all fours, at one of the entrances. “You got to crawl in to get the full effect. They’re always cooler inside than they are outside.”

And without looking to see if he’d follow, I climbed in.

I was a big fourteen-year-old, clumsy, broad-shouldered, maybe a hundred and twenty pounds . . . but still a kid, not an adult, with a kid’s proportions and a kid’s flexibility, able to squeeze my way through even the narrowest tunnel. But I didn’t usually make a habit out of climbing through Morris’s forts. I had discovered early on, scrambling through one of his first designs, that I didn’t like being in them much, had a touch of claustrophobia inside me. Now, though, with Eddie following behind me, I heaved myself in, as if worming around inside one of Morris’s cardboard hideouts was my idea of high good times.

I climbed through one linked snaking tunnel after another.

In one of the boxes there was a cardboard shelf with a jelly jar on it; flies buzzed inside of it, bumping softly and a little franti-cally against the glass. The close acoustics of the box amplified and distorted the sound of them, so at times the buzzing almost seemed to be inside my own head. I studied them for a moment, frowning, a little disturbed by the sight of them—was Morris going to let them die in there?—then crawled on. I wormed through a wide passageway in which the walls had been covered with glow-in-the-dark stars and moons and Cheshire cats—a whole neon galaxy swarmed around me. The walls themselves had been painted black, and at first I couldn’t see them. For one brief, sickening instant, I had an impression that there weren’t any walls at all, as if I were crawling through empty space on 16

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some narrow invisible ramp, nothing above me or below me for who knew how far; and if I went off the ramp there would be nothing to stop my fall. I could still hear the flies buzzing in their jelly jar, although I had left them somewhere far behind me. I was dizzy, I reached out with one hand, and my fingertips pressed against the side of the box. Like that, the impression of crawling through gaping empty space passed, although I still felt a little swimmy in the head. The next box was the smallest and darkest of them all, and as I was squeezing through it, my back brushed a series of small tin bells hanging from the ceiling. The sound of their soft, tinny clashing startled me so badly I almost shrieked.

But I could see a circular opening ahead, looking into a space lit by drifting pastel lights. I pulled myself into it.

The box at the center of Morris’s cardboard kraken was roomy enough to provide shelter for a family of five and their dog. A battery-operated lava lamp bubbled in one corner, red globs of plasma rising and sinking through viscous amber fluid.

Morris had papered the inside of the enormous box with silver foil Christmas wrap. Sparks and filaments of light raced here and there in trembling waves, sheets of gold and raspberry and lime, crashing into each other and vanishing. It was as if in the course of my long crawl to the center of the fort, I had gradually been shrinking, until at last I was no larger than a field mouse, and had arrived in a little room suspended inside a disco ball. The sight gave me a weak shiver of wonder. My temples throbbed dully, the strange, wandering lights beginning to bother my eyes.

I hadn’t seen Morris since getting home, had assumed he was out with our mother on an errand. But he was waiting there in the large central box, sitting on his knees with his back to me. To one side of him was a comic book and a pair of scis-sors. He had cut the back cover off and inserted it into a white cardboard frame, and now he was sticking it to the wall with pieces of Scotch tape. He heard me enter, and glanced back at me, but didn’t say hello, and returned straightaway to hanging his picture.

I heard scuffling noises in the passageway behind me, and slid to one side to make room. An instant later Eddie poked 17

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his head through the circular hatch and peered up into the foil-lined box. His face was flushed and he was grinning in that way that made dimples in his cheeks.

“Holy shit,” Eddie said. “Look at this place. I want to bang a chick in here.”

He pulled himself the rest of the way out of the tunnel, and sat on his knees.

“Bitchin fort,” Eddie said to Morris’s back. “I would’ve killed to have a fort like this when I was your age.” Ignoring the fact that at eleven, Morris was actually too old to be playing in cardboard forts himself.

Morris didn’t reply. Eddie shot me a sideways look and I shrugged. Eddie cast his gaze around, taking it all in, mouth hanging open in an expression of obvious pleasure, while a storm of brilliant lights, gold and silver, billowed silently around us.

“Crawling in here was wild,” Eddie went on. “What’d you think of the tunnel that was lined with black fur? I felt like when I got to the end I was going to pop out of a gorilla’s snatch.”

I laughed, but gave him a questioning, puzzled look. I didn’t remember a fur-lined tunnel—and he had, after all, been right behind me, had followed the same path I followed.

“Also the wind-chimes,” Eddie said.

“They were bells,” I corrected.

“Oh, were they?”

Morris finished hanging his picture and, without speaking to us, crawled to a triangular exit. Before he went through, though, he looked back at us one last time. When he spoke, he spoke to me: “Don’t follow me this way. Go back the way you came.” Then: “This way won’t do what it’s supposed to. I need to work on it some more. It isn’t right yet.”

With that, he ducked through the hatch and disappeared.

I looked at Eddie, to offer an apology, was preparing a statement along the lines of, Sorry my brother’s such an absolute fruitcake. But Eddie had crawled around me and was studying the picture Morris had hung on the wall. It showed a family of Sea Monkeys, standing together in a close group—nude, pot-bellied creatures with waving flesh-colored antennae and human faces.

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“Look,” Eddie said. “He hung up a picture of his real family.”

I laughed. Eddie wasn’t much in the personal ethics department, but it was never any trouble for him to make me laugh.

I was on my way out of the house—it was a Friday, in the first couple weeks of February—when Eddie called and said not to come to his place, but to meet me on the footbridge over 111. Something in his tone, a hoarseness, a strained quality, caught my attention. Nothing he said was out of the ordinary, but sometimes his voice seemed about to crack, and I had an impression of him struggling to clamp down on a surge of unhappiness.

The footbridge was a twenty-minute hike from my house, down Christobel Avenue, through the park, and then up the nature trail into the woods. The nature trail was a groomed path of crushed blue stones, which climbed the rising hills under bare stands of birch and moose maple. In about a third of a mile the path came out onto the footbridge. Eddie was leaning over the railing, watching the cars in the eastbound lane rush by below.

He didn’t look at me as I came towards him. Lined on the belly-high wall in front of him were three crumbly bricks, and just as I came up beside him, he nudged one off. I felt an instant of nervous shock, but the brick fell onto the back end of an eighteen-wheeler rolling by below, without damaging anything.

The truck was hauling a trailer loaded with steel pipes. The brick hit the top pipe with a clash and a bang, then tumbled down the side of the pile, setting off a series of tuneful clangs and ringing gongs, a hammer thrown at the metal tubes of some enormous pipe organ. Eddie opened his mouth in his broad, homely, impossibly likable grin, showing the gaps in his teeth.

He glanced at me, to see if I appreciated the unexpected musi-cality produced by his latest truck bombing. That was when I saw his left eye. It was surrounded by a ring of bruised flesh, ugly purple, with faint highlights of yellow.

When I spoke, I barely recognized my voice as my own. My tone was winded and faint. “What happened?”

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“Lookit,” he said, and dug a Polaroid out of the pocket of his jacket. He was grinning still, but when he passed the picture to me he wouldn’t meet my gaze. “Feast your eyes.” It was as if I hadn’t said anything.

The picture showed two fingers, belonging to a girl, her fingernails painted a creamy silver. They were pressing into a triangle of red-and-black striped fabric, caught in the cleft of skin between her legs. I could see her thighs at the edges of the photo, blurred, too-pale flesh.

“I beat Ackers ten games in a row,” he said. “We bet if she lost the tenth game she had to take a picture of herself fingerin her clit. She went in the bedroom so I didn’t actually see her take the picture. But she wants to go again sometime and try and win the photo back. If I beat her another ten games in a row I’m going to make her finger herself right in front of me.”

I turned, so that we were standing side-by-side, leaning against the railing, facing oncoming traffic. I gazed blankly at the photo for another moment, not thinking much of anything, unsure how to act, what to say. Mindy Ackers was a plain girl with frizzy red hair, devastating acne and a throbbing crush on Eddie. If she lost the next ten games of checkers to him, it would be on purpose.

At the moment, though, what she had or hadn’t done to entertain him was a lot less interesting than how Eddie had wound up with that freshly minted shiner on his left eye . . . a thing, apparently, he didn’t want to discuss.

“Fuckin wild,” I said, finally, and set the photo on the ce-ment wall below the railing. Without thinking, I put my hand down on one of the bricks.

A tractor-trailer thundered past below us, engine barking as the driver shifted into a lower, noisier gear. Black diesel-smelling smoke swirled up through the snow, which was falling in big, curling flakes. When had it started to snow? I wasn’t sure.

“How’d you do that to your eye?” I tried again, surprised at my own nerve.

He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. He was still grinning. “Fuckin bag of shit my mom is going out with caught me lookin in his wallet. Like I was going to steal his food stamps or something. He’s going to bed early, he’s got to leave 20

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for Kentucky before sunup, so I’m just staying out of the house until—oh wait. Look. Oil tanker comin.”

I glanced down and saw another big semi booming towards us, pulling a long steel tank behind it.

“We got one chance to blow it up,” Eddie said. “Four ounces of C-4. We hit this motherfucker just right we’ll take out the whole road.”

There was a brick on the wall, right in front of him, and I waited for him to put his hand on it and shove it off onto the oil tanker as it passed below. Instead, though, he put his hand on top of mine, which was still resting on the other brick. I felt a little pulse of alarm, but made no effort to pull my hand free.

That’s probably a fact worth underlining. What happened next I let happen.

“Wait for it,” he said. “Steady. Don’t miss. Now.”

Just as the oil truck started in under the footbridge, he gave my hand a shove. The brick struck the side of the oil tank below with a ringing ke-rang! It took a hard bounce and flipped sideways, away from the truck and out across the passing lane, where at that moment, a red Volvo was just pulling abreast of the rolling tanker. The brick crunched into the windshield—I had time to see a pattern of spiderweb fracture lines shooting out across the glass—and then the car disappeared under the footbridge.

We both spun around and jumped to the opposite railing.

My lungs seized up, for a moment I couldn’t force any air up out of my chest. When the Volvo came out from under the footbridge, it was already veering to the left, across the shoulder of the road. It left the highway a moment later and went down the snowy embankment at around thirty miles an hour. In the shallow valley at the bottom of the embankment were a few whippy maple saplings. The Volvo hit one with a brittle crack.

The whole shattered windshield fell out in one glittering piece and slid across the hood, then dropped into the snow.

I was still struggling to inhale when the passenger side front door sprang open. A blond, matronly woman in a red overcoat, belted at the waist, clambered out. She was holding a mittened hand over one eye. She was screaming, yanking at the back door.

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“Amy!” she screamed. “Oh God, Amy!”

Then Eddie had me by the elbow. He turned me around, shoved me at the path. He yelled, “Fuck outta here!”

He shoved me again as we came off the footbridge and onto the trail into the park, shoved me so hard I fell to one knee on the crushed blue stones—sharp darts of pain shot into my kneecap—but then he was wrenching me up by the elbow again and rushing me on. I didn’t think. I ran. With blood thudding in my temples, and my face burning in the cold air, I ran.

I didn’t start to think until we reached the park, and slowed to a walk. We were moving, without discussing it, in the direction of my house. My lungs hurt from the effort of running in snow boots, and from hauling in chestfuls of frozen air.

She went around to the back door, shouting Oh God, Amy!

Someone in the backseat, then, a little girl. The tall, heavyset blonde was holding a mitten over her eye. Did she get a shard of glass in it? Had we blinded her? Also: the blonde spilled out of the passenger seat. Why didn’t the driver get out? Was he conscious? Was he dead? My legs wouldn’t stop shaking. I remembered Eddie pushing my hand, remembered the brick slipping out from under my palm, tumbling end over end, and then the way it banged off the side of the oil tanker and flipped into the windshield of the Volvo. I couldn’t take it back. I saw that then, the thought struck me like a revelation. I looked down at the hand that had shoved the brick, and saw a photo in it, Mindy Ackers probing the triangle of cotton between her legs. I didn’t remember picking it up. I showed it to Eddie, wordlessly. He looked at it, his eyes foggy, baffled.

“Keep it,” he said. It was the first either of us had spoken since he yelled Fuck outta here.

We passed my mother on the way into my house. She was standing next to the mailbox, making small talk with our next-door neighbor, and she absentmindedly touched the back of my neck as I went by her, a flitting, intimate brush of the fingers that caused me to shudder.

I didn’t say anything until we were inside, taking our boots 22

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and coats off in the mudroom. My father was at work, I didn’t know where Morris was and didn’t care. The house was darkened and silent, had about it the stillness of an empty place.

As I unbuttoned my corduroy jacket, I said, “We should call someone.” My voice seemed to come from somewhere else, not from in my chest and throat, but from the corner of the room, under the pile of hats that were laying there.

“Call who?”

“The police. To see if they’re all right.”

He stopped pulling off his denim jacket and stared at me. In the poor light, his black eye looked like a tragic accident with mascara.

I went on talking for some reason. “We could just say we were standing on the footbridge and we saw the accident. We don’t need to say we were the ones who caused it.”

“We didn’t cause it.”

“Well—” I started, and then didn’t know what to say next.

It was such a baldly false statement, I couldn’t think of any way to respond that wouldn’t come off like a provocation.

“The brick took a bad spin,” he said. “How could that be our fault?”

“I just want to make sure everyone is all right,” I said. “There was a little kid in the back—”

“Fuck there was.”

“Well—” I faltered again, then forced myself to continue.

“There was, Eddie. Her mom was calling for her.”

He stopped moving for an instant, studying me carefully, a look of unhappy, truculent calculation on his face. Then he lifted his shoulders in a stiff shrug, and went back to kicking off his boots.

“If you call the police I’ll kill myself,” he said. “Then you can have that on your head, too.”

It felt as if there was a great pressure weighing down on my chest, compressing my lungs. I tried to speak. My voice came out in a whistling whisper. “Come on.”

“I mean it,” he said. “I would.” He paused again, then said,

“You know how I said my brother called me that time about all the money he was making ripping off cars in Detroit?”

I nodded.

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“That was bullshit. Remember how I said he called to tell me about fucking redheaded twins while he was out in Minnesota?”

After a moment I nodded again.

“That was bullshit too. It was always bullshit. He never called.” Eddie took a long breath, which shuddered just slightly on the inhale. “I don’t know where he’s at, or what he’s doing. He only called me once, while he was still in the Juvie.

Two days before he broke out. He didn’t sound right. He was trying not to cry. He said never do anything that will get you in here. He made me promise. He said they try and make you faggot in there. There’s all these Boston niggers who act faggot, and they gang up on you. And then he disappeared and no one knows what happened to him. But I think if he was okay somewhere he would’ve called by now. Me and him were tight.

He wouldn’t just make me wonder. And I know my brother, and he wouldn’t want to be someone’s faggot.” He was crying by now, soundlessly. He swiped at his cheeks with the sleeve of his sweatshirt, and then fixed his fierce, watery stare on me. He said, “And I’m not going to Juvie over some stupid accident that wasn’t even my fault. No one’s going to turn me homo. I already had something like that happen to me once. That fucking smelly shit, my mother’s fucking Tennessee shithead—” He broke off, tore his gaze away, gasping slightly.

I didn’t say anything. The sight of Eddie Prior with tears soaking his face took away any arguments I might’ve made for going to the police, silenced me completely.

In a low, shaky voice, he went on, “We can’t undo it. It happened. It was a stupid accident. A bad ricochet. It’s no one’s fault. Whoever got hurt we just have to live with it now. We just have to sit tight. No one’s ever going to figure out we had anything to do with it. I got the bricks from under the footbridge. There’s a bunch of them coming loose. Unless someone saw us, no one will ever know it didn’t just fall. But if you really got to call someone, just let me know first, because I won’t let them do to me what they did to my brother.”

It was several moments before I could collect the air to speak.

“Forget it,” I said. “Let’s just watch some TV and cool out.”

We finished pulling off our winter clothes, and stepped into 24

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the kitchen . . . and I almost walked into Morris, who was standing at the open door to the basement, with a reel of brown packing tape in one hand. His head was tilted to the side, in a listening-to-the-spheres pose, his eyes wide with their usual empty-headed curiosity.

Eddie bumped me aside with his elbow, grabbed the front of Morris’s black cord turtleneck, and slammed him into the wall. Morris’s already wide eyes flew open even wider. He stared with blank, dumb confusion into Eddie’s flushed face.

I grabbed Eddie’s wrist, tried to pry his fingers free, couldn’t break his grip.

“Were you eavesdropping on us you little retard?” Eddie asked.

“Eddie—Eddie—it doesn’t matter what he heard. Forget it.

He won’t tell. Let him go,” I said.

And just like that Eddie released him. Morris gazed into his face, blinking, mouth hanging open and slack. He took a brief sideways peek at me—what was that all about?—then moved his shoulders in a little shrug.

“I had to pull apart the octopus,” Morris said. “I liked all those arms streaming to the center. How they were like spokes on a wheel. But no matter where you climb in, you always know where you’re going and not-knowing is better. Not so easy to do but better. I have new ideas now. This time I’m going to start from the center and work out, same as spiders do.”

“Wicked,” I said. “Go for it.”

“My new design will use the most boxes ever. Wait’ll you see.”

“We’ll be counting the minutes, won’t we, Eddie?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“I’ll be downstairs working on it if anyone needs me,” Morris said, and he slipped through the narrow gap between Eddie and myself, clunked off down the basement steps.

We made our way into the living room. I put on the TV, but I couldn’t focus on what we were watching. I felt removed from myself, felt as if I were standing at the end of a long corridor, and at the far end I could see Eddie and me sitting together on the couch, only it wasn’t me, it was a hollow wax figure cast in my image.

Eddie said, “Sorry I freaked out on your brother.”

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I wanted Eddie to go away, wanted to be by myself, curled up on my bed in the quiet, restful dark of my bedroom. I didn’t know how to ask him to go.

Instead, I said, through just slightly numb lips, “If Morris did tell—and he won’t, I swear—even if he heard us, he wouldn’t understand what we were talking about—but if he did tell someone—you wouldn’t—you—”

“Kill myself?” Eddie asked. He made a rough, derisive sound in his throat. “Fuck no. I’d kill him. But he won’t tell, right?”

“No,” I said. My stomach hurt.

“And you won’t tell,” he said, a few minutes later. The day was growing late, the light draining away all around us.

“No,” I said.

He pushed himself to his feet, swatted my leg on the way out of the room. “Got to go. I’m eating dinner with my cousin. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I waited until I heard the door close in the mudroom as he went out. Then I came to my feet myself, light-headed and woozy. I reeled into the front hall and started upstairs. I almost fell over Morris. He was sitting six steps up from the bottom, his hands on his knees, his face a tranquilized blank. In his dark clothes, only his waxy pale face was visible in the dim of the front hall. My heart lurched when I saw him there. For a moment I stood over him, staring down at him. He stared back, his expression as alien and unreadable as ever.

So he had heard the rest of it, including what Eddie said about killing him if he told. But I really didn’t think he could’ve understood us.

I stepped around him, and went up to my room. I shut the door behind me and crawled under the blankets, still dressed in my clothes, just as I had imagined doing. The room tilted and swayed around me until I was almost overcome with seasick-ness, and had to pull the covers over my head to block out the senseless, disorientating motion of the world.

I looked in the paper the next morning for some information about the accident— little girl left in coma after overpass ambush—but there was nothing.

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* * *

I called a hospital that afternoon, and said I was wondering about the accident on 111 the other day, the car that went off the road, the windshield fell out and some people were hurt. My voice was unsteady and nervous, and the receptionist on the other end began to interrogate me—why did I need to know? who was I?—and I hung up.

I was in my room a few days later, feeling through the pockets of my winter coat for a pack of gum, when I came across a sharp-edged square of some slippery, plastic-like material. I pulled it out and stared at the Polaroid of Mindy Ackers finger-ing her crotch. The sight turned my stomach. I pulled open the top drawer, flung it in, and slammed the drawer behind it. It made me feel short of breath, just to look at it; remembering the Volvo crashed into the tree, the woman spilling out, mitten over her eye, Oh God, Amy! My memories of the accident were growing uncertain by then. Sometimes I imagined there had been blood on the side of the blonde’s face. Sometimes I imagined there had been blood dappling the broken glass of the windshield in the snow. And sometimes I imagined I had heard the teakettle shrieking of a child crying out in pain. This was an especially hard conviction to shake; someone had been screaming, I was sure of it, someone besides the woman. Maybe me.

I didn’t want to have anything to do with Eddie after that, but he couldn’t be avoided. He sat next to me in classes and passed me notes. I had to pass notes back to him so he wouldn’t think I was brushing him off. He showed up at my house after school, without warning, and we sat in front of the TV together. He brought his checkerboard and would set it up while we watched Hogan’s Heroes. I see now—and maybe I saw then—
that he was consciously sticking close to me, watching over me.

He knew he couldn’t allow me to put a distance between us, that if we weren’t partners anymore, I might do anything, even confess. And he knew too that I didn’t have the spine for ending 27

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a friendship, that I couldn’t not open the door to him when he rang the bell. That it was in me to just go along with the situa-tion, no matter how uncomfortable, rather than try and change things and risk an upsetting confrontation.

Then, one afternoon, about three weeks after the accident out on Route 111, I discovered Morris in my room, standing at my dresser. The top drawer was open. In one hand he had a box of X-acto knife blades; there was a whole pile of junk like that in there, twine, staples, a roll of duct tape, and sometimes if Morris needed something for his never-ending fort, he would raid my supplies. In his other hand was the Polaroid of Mindy Ackers’s crotch. He held it almost to his nose, stared at it with round, uncomprehending eyes.

“Don’t go through my stuff,” I said.

“Isn’t it sad you can’t see her face?” he said.

I snapped the picture out of his hand and tossed it in the dresser. “Go through my stuff again and I’ll kill you.”

“You sound like Eddie,” Morris said, and he turned his head and stared at me. I hadn’t seen a lot of him the last few days.

He had been in the basement even more than usual. His lean, delicate-boned face was thinner than I remembered, and I was uniquely conscious in that moment of how slight and fragile, how childlike his build was. He was almost twelve, but could’ve easily passed for eight. “Are you and him still friends?”

I was ragged from being worried all the time, spoke without thinking. “I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you tell him to go? Why don’t you make him go away?” He stood almost too close to me, staring up into my face with his unblinking saucer-plate eyes.

“I can’t,” I said, and turned away, because I couldn’t bear to meet his worried, mystified gaze. I felt stretched to the limit of what I could take, my nerves worn raw. “I wish I could. But no one can make him go away.” I leaned against the dresser, rested my forehead against the edge of it for a moment. In a rough whisper that I hardly heard myself, I said, “He can’t let me get away.”

“Because of what happened?”

I shot him a look then. He was hovering at my elbow, his hands curled against his chest, his fingertips fluttering nervously.

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So he understood . . . maybe not all of it, but some. Enough.

He knew we had done something terrible. He knew the strain of it was pulling me apart.

“You forget about what happened,” I said, my voice stronger now, edged almost with threat. “You forget about what you heard. If anyone finds out—Morris, you can’t tell anyone. Not ever.”

“I want to help.”

“I can’t be helped,” I said and the truth of this statement, said just in this way, hit me hard. In a lame, unhappy tone, I finally added, “Go away. Please.”

Morris frowned slightly, and bowed his head, seemed briefly hurt. Then he said, “I’m almost finished with the new fort. I see it all now. How it will be.” Then he fixed his arresting, wide-eyed stare on me once again. “I’m building it for you, Nolan.

Because I want you to feel better.”

I let out a soft breath that was almost a laugh. For a moment we had almost been talking like any pair of brothers who loved and worried about each other, talking like near-equals; for a few seconds I had forgotten Morris’s delusions and fan-tasies. Had forgotten that reality, for him, was a thing he only glimpsed now and then through the drifting vapors of his wak-ing daydreams. To Morris, the only sensible response to unhappiness was to build a skyscraper out of egg cartons.

“Thanks, Morris,” I said. “You’re a good kid. You just need to stay out of my room.”

He nodded, but he was still frowning to himself when he slipped around me and went out into the hall. I watched him walk away from me down the stairs, his scarecrow’s shadow lunging and swaying across the wall, growing larger with every step he took towards the light below and some future that would be built one box at a time.

Morris was in the basement until dinner—mother had to yell for him three times before he came upstairs—and when he sat at the table his hands had a white, plaster-like powder on them. He returned to the basement as soon as our dinner plates were parked in the soapy water filling the sink. He stayed down 29

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there until it was almost nine in the evening, and only quit when my mother hollered that it was time for bed.

I went by the open door to the cellar once, not long before I went to bed myself, and paused there. I had caught a whiff of something that at first I couldn’t identify—it was like glue, or fresh paint, or plaster, or some combination of the three.

My father came into the mudroom, stamping his feet. There had been a little dusting of snow, and he had been outside, sweeping it off the steps.

“What’s that?” I asked, wrinkling my nose.

He came to the top of the basement stairs, and sniffed.

“Oh,” my father said. “Morris mentioned he was going to do some work with papier-mâché. There’s no telling what that kid will play with to get his kicks, is there?”

My mother volunteered at an old folks’ home every Thursday, where she read letters to people with bad eyes and played piano in the rec room, banging on the keys so the half-deaf could hear her, and on those afternoons, I was left in sole charge of the house and my little brother. When the next Thursday rolled around, she wasn’t out of the house more than ten minutes when Eddie banged his fist on the side door.

“Hey, partner,” Eddie said. “Guess what? Mindy Ackers just fed me my ass in five straight games. I have to give her back that picture. You have it, don’t you? I hope you been taking good care of it for me.”

“You’re welcome to the nasty fucking thing,” I said, a little relieved that he was obviously only stopping by for a minute. It was rare to be able to get rid of him so quickly. He kicked off his boots and followed me into the kitchen. “Let me go get it.

It’s in my room.”

“Probably on your night-table, you sick fuck,” Eddie said, and laughed.

“Are you talking about Eddie’s photograph?” Morris asked, his voice floating up from the bottom of the basement stairs.

“I’ve got it. I was looking at it. It’s down here.”

I was probably quite a bit more surprised by this statement than Eddie was. I had made it clear to Morris that I wanted 30

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him to leave it alone, and it was unlike him to disregard a direct order.

“Morris, I told you to stay out of my stuff,” I yelled.

Eddie stood at the top of the steps, leering down into the basement.

“What are you doin with it, you little masturbator?” he called down to Morris.

Morris didn’t reply and Eddie tromped down the staircase, with me right behind him.

Eddie stopped three steps from the bottom and put his fists on his hips, stared out across the expanse of the basement.

“Whoa,” he said. “Cool.”

The cellar was filled, from end to end, with a great labyrinth of cardboard boxes. Morris had repainted them, all of them.

The boxes closest to the foot of the stairs were the creamy white of whole milk, but as the network of tunnels spread out into the rest of the room, the boxes darkened to a shade of pale blue, then to violet, then to cobalt. The boxes at the furthest edge of the room were entirely black, limning a horizon of ar-tificial night.

I saw crate-size boxes with passageways leading from every side. I saw windows, cut in the shapes of stars and stylized suns. At first I thought these windows had sheets of weirdly shining orange plastic taped into them. But then I saw how they pulsed and flickered softly, and realized that they were actually sheets of clear plastic, lit from within by some unsteady source of orange light—Morris’s lava lamp, no doubt. But most of the boxes didn’t have windows at all, especially as you got out away from the bottom of the staircase and moved towards the far walls of the basement. It would be dark in there.

In the northwestern corner of the basement, rising above all the other boxes, was an enormous crescent moon, made out of papier-mâché and painted a waxy, faintly luminescent white.

The moon had thin pinched lips and a single sad, drooping eye that seemed to regard us with an expression of unfocused disappointment. I was so unprepared for the sight of it, so stunned—it was truly immense—that it took me a minute to realize I was looking at the giant box that had once been at the center of Morris’s octopus. Back then, it had been encased in 31

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a mesh of chicken-wire, shaped into two points like lopsided horns. I remembered thinking that Morris’s massive, misshapen chicken-wire sculpture was irrefutable proof that my brother’s already soft brains were deteriorating. Now I saw that it had always been a moon; anyone with eyes could’ve seen it for what it was . . . just not me. I think this was always one of my critical failings. If something didn’t make sense to me right away, I could never manage to look past what confused me to see a larger design or pattern, either in a structure or in the shape of my own life.

At the very foot of the stairs was an entrance to Morris’s cardboard catacombs. It was a tall box, about four feet high, stood on its side, with two flaps pulled open like a pair of double doors. A black sheet of muslin had been stapled up inside, blocking my view of the tunnel leading out of the box and into the maze. I heard distant, echoing music from somewhere, a low, reverberating, trance-inducing melody. A deep baritone sang, “The ants go marching one-by-one, hurrah! Hurrah!” It took me a moment to realize that the music was coming from somewhere within the system of tunnels.

I was so astonished I couldn’t stay angry with Morris for swiping the picture of Mindy Ackers. I was so astonished I couldn’t even speak. It was Eddie who spoke first.

“I don’t believe that moon,” he said, to no one in particular.

He sounded like I felt—a little winded by surprise. “Morris, you’re a fucking genius.”

Morris stood to the right, his face bland, his gaze directed out across the vast sprawl. “I stuck your picture up inside my new fort. I hung it in the gallery. I didn’t know you’d want it back. You can go get it if you want.”

Eddie flicked a sideways look at Morris, and his grin broad-ened. “You hid it in there and you want me to find it. Boy, you are a weird shit, you know that, Morrie?” He bounded down the last three steps, almost did a Gene Kelly dance down them.

“Where’s the gallery? Way out there, inside that moon?”

“No,” Morris said. “Don’t head that way.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said, and laughed. “Right. What other pictures do you have hanging up in there? Bunch of centerfolds?

You got your own little private room in there for spankin it?”

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“I don’t want to say anything more. I don’t want to ruin the surprise. You should just go in and see.”

Eddie shot me a look. I didn’t know what to say, but I was surprised to feel a tremulous kind of anticipation, with a white thread of unease stitched through it. I both wanted and dreaded to see him disappear into Morris’s confused, brilliant fortress.

Eddie shook his head— Do you believe this shit? —and got down on all fours. He started to crawl into the entrance, then glanced back at me once again. I was surprised to see a flush of almost childlike eagerness on his face. It was a look that unsettled me for some reason. I myself felt no eagerness whatsoever to squirm around in the dark, cramped interior of Morris’s immense maze.

“You ought to come,” Eddie said. “We ought to check this out together.”

I nodded, feeling a little weak—there were no words in the language of our friendship for saying no—and started down the last few basement stairs. Eddie pushed aside the flap of black muslin, and the music echoed out from within a large circular tunnel, a cardboard pipe almost three feet in diam-eter. “The ants go marching three-by-three, hurrah! Hurrah!”

I came down off the last step, started to duck down to climb in after Eddie—and Morris came up beside me and seized my arm, his grip unaccountably tight.

Eddie didn’t glance back, didn’t see us standing together that way. He said, “Ke-rist. Any hints?”

“Go towards the music,” Morris said.

Eddie’s head moved up and down in a slow nod, as if this should’ve been obvious. He stared into the long, dark, circular tunnel ahead of him.

In a perfectly normal tone of voice, Morris said to me,

“Don’t go. Don’t follow him.”

Eddie started worming his way into the tunnel.

“Eddie!” I said, feeling a sudden, inexplicable burst of alarm.

“Eddie, wait a minute! Come back out.”

“Holy shit, it’s dark in here,” Eddie said, as if he hadn’t heard me. In fact, I’m sure he didn’t hear me—had stopped being able to hear me almost as soon as he entered Morris’s labyrinth.

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“Eddie!” I shouted. “Don’t go in there!”

“There better be some windows up ahead,” Eddie mur-mured . . . talking to himself. “If I start getting claustrophobic, I’ll just stand up and tear this motherfucker apart.” He inhaled deeply, let it out. “Okay. Let’s go.”

The curtain flapped down across his feet and Eddie disappeared.

Morris let go of my arm. I looked over at him, but his stare was directed towards his sprawling fortress, towards the cardboard tube into which Eddie had climbed. I could hear Eddie clunking through it, away from us; I heard him come out the other end, into a large box, about four feet tall and a couple feet across. He bumped into it—knocked one of the walls with a shoulder maybe—and it shifted slightly. A cardboard tunnel led to the right, another to the left. He picked the one that pointed in the general direction of the moon. From the bottom of the basement steps I could follow his progress, could see boxes shaking slightly as he passed through them, could hear the muffled thump of his body striking the walls now and then.

Then I lost track of him for a moment or two, couldn’t locate him until I heard his voice.

“I see you guys,” he crooned, and I heard him tapping against thick plastic.

I looked around and saw his face behind a star-shaped window. He was grinning in a way that showed the David Letter-man gap between his front teeth. He gave me the finger. The red furnace light of Morris’s lava lamp surged and faded around him. Then he crawled on. I never saw him again.

But I heard him. For a while longer I could hear him making his way along, moving in the rough direction of the moon, away into the far reaches of our basement. Over the muffled warble of the music—“down, in the ground, to get out of the rain” —I could still hear him bumping into the walls of the maze. I saw a box tremble. Once I heard him pass over a strip of bubble wrap that must’ve been stapled to the floor in one of the tunnels. A cluster of plastic blisters popped with sharp, flat reports, like a string of penny firecrackers going off, and I heard him say, “Fuck!”

After that I lost track of him again. Then his voice came once 34

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more—off to my right, all the way across the room from where I had heard him last.

“Shit,” was all he said. For the first time I thought I heard in his tone an undercurrent of irritation, a shortness of breath.

An instant later, he spoke again, and a flash of light-headed disorientation passed over me, left me weak in the knees. Now his voice seemed to come impossibly from the left, as if he had traveled a hundred feet in the space of a breath.

“Dead fucking end,” he said, and a tunnel off to the left shook as he scrambled through it.

Then I wasn’t sure where he was. Most of a minute ticked by, and I noticed that my hands were clenched in sweaty fists, and that I was almost holding my breath.

“Hey,” Eddie said from somewhere, and I thought I heard a warble of unease in his voice. “Is someone else crawling around in here?” He was a good distance off from me. I thought the sound of his voice seemed to come from one of the boxes close to the moon.

A long silence followed. By now the music had wrapped all the way around and the song was playing again from the beginning. For the first time I found myself listening to it, really listening. The lyrics weren’t like I remembered them from summer camp sing-a-longs. At one point, the low singing voice cried:

“The ants go marching two-by-two, Hurrah! Hurrah!

The ants go marching two-by-two, Hurrah! Hurrah!

The ants go marching two-by-two,

They walked across the Leng plateau

And they all went marching down!”

Whereas in the version I remembered, it seemed to me there had been something about a little one stopping to pick a rock out of his shoe. Also it made me antsy, the way the song just kept looping around and around.

“What’s up with this tape?” I said to Morris. “How come it only plays this one song?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “The music started playing this morning. It hasn’t stopped since. It’s been playing all day.”

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I turned my head and stared, a feeling of cool, tingling fright prickling through my chest.

“What do you mean, it hasn’t stopped? ”

“I don’t even know where it’s coming from,” Morris said.

“It isn’t anything I did.”

“Isn’t there a tape deck?”

Morris shook his head, and for the first time I felt panic.

“Eddie!” I shouted.

There was no response.

“Eddie!” I called again, and started walking across the room, stepping over and around boxes, moving towards the moon and where I had last heard Eddie’s voice. “Eddie, answer me!”

From an impossibly long distance off, I heard something, part of a sentence: “Trail of bread crumbs.” It didn’t even sound like Eddie’s voice—the words were spoken in a clipped, super-cilious tone, sounded almost like one of the overlapping voices you hear in that crazy nonsense song by the Beatles, Revolution

#9—and I couldn’t pinpoint where it came from, wasn’t sure if its origin was ahead of or behind me. I turned around and around, trying to figure where the voice had come from, when the music abruptly switched off, with the ants marching nine. I cried out in surprise, and looked to Morris.

He held his X-acto knife—loaded with a blade swiped from my dresser, no doubt—and was on his knees, cutting the tape that attached the first box in the maze to the second.

“There. He’s gone,” Morris said. “All done.” He pulled the entrance to the maze free, neatly flattened the box and set it aside.

“What are you talking about?”

He wasn’t looking at me. He was methodically beginning to take it all apart, severing tape, pressing boxes flat, piling them next to the stairs. He went on, “I wanted to help. You said he wouldn’t go away, so I made him go away.” He lifted his gaze for a moment, and stared at me with those eyes that always seemed to look right through me. “He had to go away. He wasn’t ever going to leave you alone.”

“Jesus,” I breathed. “I knew you were crazy, but I didn’t know you were a total shithouse rat. What do you mean, he’s gone? He’s right here. He’s got to be right here. He’s still in the 36

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boxes. Eddie!” Shouting his name, my voice a little hysterical.

“Eddie!”

But he was gone, and I knew it. Knew that he had gone into Morris’s boxes and crawled right through them into someplace else, someplace not our basement. I started moving across the fort, looking into windows, kicking boxes. I began pulling the catacombs apart, ripping tape away with my hands, flipping boxes over to look inside them. I stumbled this way and that, tripping once, half-crushing a tunnel.

Inside one box, the walls were covered with a photo collage, pictures of the blind: old people with milky white eyes staring out of their carved-from-wood faces, a black man with a slide guitar across his knees and round black sunglasses pushed up the bridge of his nose, Cambodian children with scarves wrapped over their eyes. Since there were no windows cut into the box, the collage would’ve been invisible to anyone crawling through it. In another box, pink strips of flypaper—they looked like dusty strings of salt-water taffy—hung from the ceiling, but there weren’t any flies stuck to them. Instead there were several lightning bugs, still alive, blinking yellow-green for an instant and then fading out. I did not think, at the time, that it was March, and lightning bugs impossible to come by. The interior of a third box had been painted a pale sky blue, with flocks of childish blackbirds drawn against it. In the corner of the box was what I at first took to be a cat’s toy, a mass of faded dark feathers with dust bunnies clinging to it. When I tipped the box on its side, though, a dead bird slid out. The body was dried out and desiccated, and its eyes had fallen back into its head, leaving little black sockets that looked like cigarette burns. I almost screamed at the sight of it. My stomach rioted; I tasted bile in the back of my throat.

Then Morris had me by the elbow, and was steering me towards the steps.

“You won’t find him like that,” he said. “Please sit down, Nolan.”

I sat on the bottom step. By then I was fighting not to cry. I kept waiting for Eddie to jump out laughing from somewhere—

Oh man, I fooled you—and at the same time some part of me knew he never would.

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It was a while before I realized Morris had lowered himself to his knees in front of me, like a man preparing to propose to his bride. He regarded me steadily.

“Maybe if I put it back together the music will start again.

And you can go in and look for him,” he said. “But I don’t think you can come back out. There’s doors in there that only swing one way. Do you understand, Nolan? It’s bigger inside than it looks.” He stared at me steadily, with his oddly bright, saucer eyes, and then said, in a tone of quiet force, “I don’t want you to go in, but I’ll put it back together if you tell me to.”

I stared at him. He stared back, waiting, his head tilted to that curious, listening angle, like a chickadee on a branch considering the sound of raindrops falling through the trees. I imagined him carefully putting back together what we had pulled apart in the last ten minutes . . . then imagined the music blaring to life from somewhere inside the boxes, roaring this time: “DOWN!

IN THE GROUND! TO GET OUT! OF THE RAIN!” If that music started up again, without any warning, I thought I would scream; I wouldn’t be able to help myself.

I shook my head. Morris turned away and went back to disassembling his creation.

I sat at the bottom of the stairs for most of an hour, watching Morris carefully tear down his cardboard fortress. Eddie never came out of it. No other sound ever issued from within. I heard the back door open and my mother troop in, crossing the floor-boards overhead. She shouted for me to come and help with the groceries. I went up, lugged in bags, put food in the fridge.

Morris came up for supper, went down again. Taking a thing apart is always faster than putting something together. This is true of everything except marriage. When I glanced down the steps into the basement, at a quarter to eight, I could see three stacks of neatly flattened boxes, each about four feet high, and a vast expanse of bare concrete floor. Morris was at the bottom of the steps, sweeping. He stopped, and glanced up at me—giving me an impenetrable, alien stare—and I shivered.

He went back to his work, moving the broom in short compact strokes across the floor, brush, brush, brush.

I lived in the house four more years, but never visited Morris in the basement after that, avoided the place entirely, as best 38

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I could. By the time I left for college, Morris’s bed was down there, and he rarely came up. He slept in a low hut he had made himself out of empty Coke bottles and carefully cut pieces of ice blue foam.

The moon was the only part of the fortress Morris didn’t dis-mantle. A few weeks after Eddie vanished, my father drove the moon to Morris’s school for the developmentally challenged, where it won third prize—fifty dollars and a medal—in an art show. I couldn’t tell you what happened to it after that. Like Eddie Prior, it never returned.

I recall three things about the few weeks that followed Eddie’s disappearance.

I remember my mother opening the door of my bedroom, just after twelve, on the night he went missing. I was curled on my side in bed, the sheet pulled over me. I wasn’t sleeping. My mother wore a pink chenille robe, loosely belted at the waist. I squinted at her, framed against the light from the hallway.

“Nolan, Ed Prior’s mother just called. She’s been calling Eddie’s friends. She doesn’t know where he is. She hasn’t seen him since he left for school. I said I’d ask if you knew anything about it. Did he come by here today?”

“I saw him at school,” I said, and then went mute, didn’t know where to go from there, what would be safe to admit.

My mother probably assumed she had just woken me from a full sleep, and I was too groggy to think. She said, “Did the two of you talk?”

“I don’t know. I guess we said hello. I can’t remember what else.” I sat up in bed, blinking at the light. “Actually, we haven’t been hanging out as much lately.”

She nodded. “Well. Maybe that’s for the best. Eddie is a good kid, but he’s a little bit of a boss, don’t you think? He doesn’t give you much space to just be yourself.”

When I spoke again, there was the slightest note of strain in my voice. “Did his mother call the police?”

“Don’t you worry,” my mother said, misunderstanding my tone, imagining I was anxious about Eddie’s welfare, when in fact I was anxious about my own. “She just thinks he’s laying low with 39

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one of his buds. I guess he’s done it before. He’s been fighting a lot with her boyfriend. Once, Eddie took off for a whole weekend, she said.” She yawned, covered her mouth with the back of her hand. “It’s just natural for her to be nervous, though, after what happened to her older boy. Him disappearing from the Juvie and just dropping off the face of the earth like that.”

“Maybe it runs in the family,” I said, my voice choked.

“Hm? What?”

“Disappearing,” I said.

“Disappearing,” she said, and then, after a moment, nodded once more. “I suppose anything can run in families. Even that.

Good night, Nolan.”

“Good night, Mom.”

She was easing the door shut, and then paused, and leaned back into my room, and said, “I love you, kid,” which she always said only when I least expected it and was least prepared for it. The backs of my eyeballs prickled painfully. I tried to reply, but when I opened my mouth, I found my throat too constricted to force any air up it. By the time I cleared my throat she was gone.

A few days later I was called out of study hall and sent to the vice-principal’s office. A detective named Carnahan had planted himself behind the vice-principal’s desk. I can’t recall much of what he asked me, or how I answered. I remember Carnahan’s eyes were the color of thick ice—a whitish-blue—and that he didn’t look at me once in the course of our five-minute discussion. I recall also that he got Eddie’s last name wrong, twice, referring to him as Edward Peers instead of Edward Prior. I corrected him the first time, let it pass the second. During the entire interview, I was in a state of high, dizzying tension; my face felt numbed, as if by novocaine, and when I spoke I could hardly seem to move my lips. I was sure Carnahan would notice and find this peculiar, but he never did. Finally he told me to stay off drugs, and then looked down at some papers in front of him and went completely silent. For almost a whole minute I continued to sit across from him, not knowing what to do with myself. Then he glanced up, surprised to find me still hanging around. He 40

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made a shooing gesture with one hand, said I could go, and would I ask the next person to come in.

As I stood up, I said, “Do you have any idea what happened to him?”

“I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Mr. Peers’s older brother broke out of Juvenile Detention last summer and hasn’t been seen since. I understand the two were close.” Carnahan turned his gaze back upon his papers, began shuffling them around. “Or maybe your friend just decided to hit the road on his own. He’s disappeared a couple times before. You know what they say. Practice makes perfect.”

When I went out, Mindy Ackers was sitting on the bench against the wall in the receptionist’s area. When she saw me, she sprang lightly to her feet, smiled, bit her lower lip. With her braces and bad complexion, Mindy didn’t have many friends, and no doubt felt Eddie’s absence keenly. I didn’t know much about her, but I knew she always wanted more than anything for Eddie to like her, and was happy to be the butt of his jokes, if only because it gave her a chance to hear him laugh. I liked and pitied her. We had a lot in common.

“Hey, Nolan,” she said, with a look that was both hopeful and pleading. “What’d the cop say? Do they think they know where he went?”

I felt a flash then of something almost like anger, not for her, but for Eddie; a harsh contempt for the way he chortled about her and made fun behind her back.

“No,” I said. “I wouldn’t worry about him. I guarantee you that wherever he is, he isn’t worrying about you.”

I saw her eyes flicker with hurt, and then I pulled my gaze away and went on, without looking back, already wishing I hadn’t said anything, because what did it matter if she missed him? I never had another conversation with her after that. I don’t know what happened to Mindy Ackers after high school.

You know someone for a while and then one day a hole opens underneath them, and they fall out of your world.

There is one other thing I remember, from the period that followed immediately after Eddie’s disappearance. As I said, 41

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I tried not to think about what had happened to him, and I avoided conversations about him. It wasn’t as hard to do as you’d think. I’m sure those who cared were trying to give me a little distance, conscious that a close friend had skipped out on me without a word. By the end of the month, it was almost as if I really didn’t know anything about what had happened to Edward Prior . . . or maybe even as if I hadn’t known Eddie at all. I was already sealing up my memories of him—the overpass, checkers with Mindy, his stories about his older brother Wayne—behind a wall of carefully laid mental bricks. I was thinking about other things. I wanted a job, was considering putting in an application at the supermarket. I wanted spend-ing money, I wanted to get out of the house more. AC/DC was coming to town in June and I wanted tickets. Brick after brick after brick.

Then, one Sunday afternoon at the very beginning of April, we were all of us, the whole family, on our way out to have roast and potatoes at my Aunt Neddy’s house. I was upstairs, getting dressed for Sunday dinner, and my mother shouted to look in Morris’s room for his good shoes. I slipped into his small room—bed neatly made, a clean sheet of paper clipped to his artist’s easel, books on the shelf arranged in alphabeti-cal order—and pulled open the closet door. At the very front of the closet was an ordered row of Morris’s shoes, and at one end of them were Eddie’s snow boots, the ones he had taken off in the mudroom, before going downstairs and disappearing forever into Morris’s enormous fort. At the edges of my vision, the walls of the room seemed to swell and subside like a pair of lungs. I felt faint, thought if I let go of the doorknob I might lose my balance and topple over.

Then my mother was standing in the hallway. “I’ve been yelling for you. Did you find them?”

I turned my head and looked at her for a moment. Then I looked back into the closet. I bent over and got Morris’s good loafers, and then pushed the closet door shut.

“Yes,” I said. “Here. Sorry. Spaced out for a minute.”

She shook her head. “The men in this family are all exactly the same. Your dad is in outer space half the time, you shuffle around in a trance, and your brother—I swear to God one of 42

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these days your brother is going to climb into one of his little forts and never come out.”

Morris passed a high school equivalency test shortly before he turned twenty, and for a few years after proceeded through a long string of menial jobs, living for a while in my parents’

basement, then in an apartment in New Hampshire. He shov-eled burgers at McDonald’s, stacked crates in a bottling plant, and mopped the floor at a shopping mall, before finally settling into a steady gig pumping gas.

When he missed three consecutive days of work at the Citgo, his boss gave my parents a call, and they went to visit Morris in his apartment. He had rid himself of all his furniture, and hung white sheets from the ceiling in every room, making a network of passageways with gently billowing walls. They found him at the end of one of these slowly rippling corridors, sitting naked on a bare mattress. He told them if you followed the right path through the maze of hanging sheets, you would come to a window that looked out upon an overgrown vineyard, and distant cliffs of white stone, and a dark ocean. He said there were butterflies, and an old worn fence, and that he wanted to go there. He said he had tried to open the window but it was sealed shut.

But there was only one window in his apartment, and it looked onto the parking lot out back. Three days later he signed some papers my mother brought him, and accepted vol-untary committal to the Wellbrook Progressive Mental Health Center.

My father and I helped him move in. It was early September then, and it felt as if we were settling Morris into a dorm at a private college somewhere. Morris’s room was on the third floor, and my father insisted on carrying Morris’s heavy, brass-hinged trunk up the stairs alone. By the time he slammed it down at the foot of Morris’s bed, his soft, round face was un-pleasantly ashen, and he was lathered in sweat. He sat there holding his wrist for a while. When I asked about it, he said he had bent it funny carrying the trunk.

One week later, to the day, he sat up in bed, abruptly enough 43

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to wake my mother. She forced her eyes open, stared up at him.

He was holding that same wrist, and hissing as if pretending to be a snake, his eyes protruding from his head and the veins straining in his temples. He died a good ten minutes before the ambulance arrived, of a massive coronary. My mother followed him the year after that. Uterine cancer. She declined aggressive treatment. A diseased heart, a poisoned womb.

I live in Boston, almost an hour away from Wellbrook. I fell into the habit of visiting my little brother on the third Saturday of every month. Morris liked order, routines, habits. It pleased him to know just when I would be coming. We took walks together. He made a wallet for me out of duct tape, and a hat glued all over with rare, hard-to-find bottle caps. I don’t know what happened to the wallet. The hat sits on my file cabinet, in my office, here at the university. I pick it up and stick my face into it sometimes. It smells like Morris, which is, to be exact, the dusty-dry odor of the basement in my parents’ house.

Morris took a job in the custodial department at Wellbrook, and the last time I saw him he was working. I was in the area, and popped in during a weekday, stepping outside of our routine for once. I was sent to look for him in the loading area, out behind the cafeteria.

He was in an alley off the employee parking lot, around behind a Dumpster. The kitchen staff had been throwing empty cardboard boxes back there, and now there was an enormous drift of them against one wall. Morris had been asked to flatten them and bundle them in twine for the recycling truck.

It was early fall, a little rust just beginning to show in the crowns of the giant oaks behind the building. I stood at the corner of the Dumpster, watching him for a moment. He didn’t know I was there. He was holding a large white box, open at either end, in both hands, turning it this way and that, staring blankly through it. His pale brown hair stood up in back in a curling cowlick. He was crooning to himself, in a low, slightly off-key voice. When I heard what he was singing, I swayed on my heels, the world lurching around me. I grabbed the edge of the Dumpster to hold myself steady.

“The ants go marching . . . one-by-one . . . ” he sang. He 44

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turned the box around and around in his hands. “Hurrah.

Hurrah. ”

“Stop that,” I said.

He turned his head and stared at me—at first without recognition, I thought. Then something cleared from his eyes, and the corners of his mouth turned up in a smile. “Oh, hello, Nolan. Do you want to help me flatten some boxes?”

I came forward on unsteady legs. I had not thought of Eddie Prior in I-don’t-know-how-long. There was a bad sweat on my face. I took a box, pressed it flat, added it to the small pile Morris was making.

We chatted for a while, but I don’t remember about what.

How it was going. How much money he had saved.

Then he said, “Do you remember those old forts I used to build? The ones in the basement?”

I felt an icy sense of pressure, a kind of weight, pushing out against the inside of my chest. “Sure. Why?”

He didn’t reply for a time. Flattened another box. Then Morris said, “Do you think I killed him?”

It was hard to breathe. “Eddie Prior?” The simple act of saying his name made me dizzy; a terrible lightness spread out from my temples, and back into my head.

Morris stared at me, without comprehension, and pursed his lips. “No. Daddy.” As if it should’ve been obvious. Then he turned back, lifted up another long box, stared into it thought-fully. “Dad always brought home boxes like this for me from work. He knew. How exciting it is to hold a box and not be sure what’s in it. What it might contain. A whole world might be closed in there. Who could tell from the outside? The fea-tureless outside.”

We had finished stacking most of the boxes into a single flat pile. I wanted to be done, wanted us to go inside, play some Ping-Pong in the rec room, put this place and this conversation behind us. I said, “Aren’t you supposed to tie these up into a bundle?”

He glanced down at his stack of cardboard, said, “Forgot the twine. Don’t worry. Just leave all this here. I’ll take care of it later.”

45

20TH CENTURY GHOSTS

It was twilight when I left, the sky above Wellbrook a flat, cloudless surface colored a very pale violet. Morris stood in the bay windows of the recreation room and waved goodbye. I lifted my hand to him and drove away, and they called me three days later to say he was gone. The detective who visited me in Boston to see if I knew anything that might help the police to find him managed to get my brother’s name right, but the long-term results of his investigation into my brother’s disappearance have yielded no more success than Mr. Carnahan’s search for Edward Prior.

Shortly after he was formally declared a missing person, Betty Millhauser, the care coordinator at the clinic in charge of Morris’s case, called to say they were going to have to put his possessions into storage until “he came back”—a turn of phrase she delivered in a tone of shrill optimism that I found painful—and if I wanted to, I could come in and collect some of his things to take home with me. I said I’d stop in the first time I had a chance, which turned out to be Saturday, on the exact day I would’ve visited Morris had he still been there.

An orderly left me alone in Morris’s small third-floor room.

Whitewashed walls, a thin mattress on a metal frame. Four pairs of socks in the dresser; four pairs of sweat pants; two unopened plastic packages of Jockey underwear. A toothbrush.

Magazines: Popular Mechanics, Reader’s Digest, and a copy of The High Plains Literary Review, which had published an essay I had written about Edgar Allan Poe’s comic verse. In his closet, I discovered a blue blazer Morris had modified, stringing it with the lights for a Christmas tree. An electrical cord was tucked into one pocket. He wore it at the annual Wellbrook Christmas party. It was the only thing in the room that wasn’t completely anonymous, the only item that actually made me think of him. I put it in the laundry bag.

I stopped in the administration offices to thank Betty Millhauser for letting me go through Morris’s room and to tell her I was leaving. She asked if I had looked in his locker down in the custodial department. I said I didn’t even know he had a locker, and where was the custodial department located? The basement.

The basement was a large, high-ceilinged space, with a ce-46

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ment floor and beige brick walls. The single long room was divided in two by a wall of stiff chain-link, painted black. On one side was a small, tidy area for the custodial staff. A row of lockers, a card table, stools. A Coke machine buzzed against the wall. I couldn’t see into the rest of the basement—the lights were switched off on the other side of the chain-link divider—
but I heard a boiler roaring softly somewhere off in the darkness, heard water rushing in pipes. The sound reminded me of what you hear when you listen to a seashell.

At the foot of the stairs was a small cubicle. Windows looked in on a cluttered desk covered in drifts of paper. A stocky black man in green coveralls sat behind it, turning through the pages of the Wall Street Journal. He saw me standing by the lockers, and got up, came out, shook hands—his was callused and powerful. His name was George Prine, and he was the head custodian. He pointed me to Morris’s locker, and stood a few steps behind me, arms crossed over his chest, watching me go through it.

“Your boy was an easy kid to get along with,” Prine said, as if Morris had been my son instead of my brother. “He drifted off into his own private world now and then, but that’s pretty much the order of things ’round this place. He was good about his work, though. Didn’t clock in and then sit around tying his boots and yapping with the other guys like some do. When he punched his card he was ready to work.”

There was next to nothing in Morris’s locker. His jumpsuits, his boots, an umbrella, a slim creased paperback called Flat-land.

“ ’Course after he got off work, that was a different story.

He’d hang around for hours. He’d get building something with his boxes and go so far away into himself, he’d forget dinner if I didn’t tell him to get.”

“What?” I asked.

Prine smiled, a little quizzically, as if I should’ve known what he was talking about. He walked past me to the wall of chain-link and flipped a switch. The lights came on in the other half of the basement. Beyond the chain-link divider was a bare expanse of floor under a ceiling crawling with ductwork and pipes. This wide, open area was filled with boxes, assembled 47

20TH CENTURY GHOSTS
into a sprawling, confused child’s play fort, with at least four different entrances, tunnels and chutes and windows in strange deformed shapes. The outsides of the boxes had been painted with green ferns and waving flowers, with ladybugs the size of pie plates.

“I’d like to bring my kids here,” Prine said. “Let them crawl around inside there for a while. They’d have a blast.”

I turned and started walking for the stairs . . . shaken, cold all over, breathing harshly. But then, as I brushed past George Prine, an impulse came over me, and I grabbed his upper arm and squeezed, maybe harder than I meant to.

“Keep your children away from it,” I said, my voice a stran-gled whisper.

He put his hand on my wrist and gently, but firmly, pulled my hand off his arm. His eyes held me at a distance; he regarded me with an air of calm, wary consideration, the way a man might look at a snake he’s snatched out of the weeds, holding it just behind the head so it won’t bite.

“You’re as crazy as he was,” he said. “You ever think of moving in?”

I have told this story as completely as I can, and now I will wait and see if, with this act of confession behind me, I can drive Eddie Prior back into my unconscious. I will learn if I can settle once more into my days of safe habit and thoughtless repetition: classes, papers, readings, English Department func-tions. Building the wall back up again, brick by brick.

But I am not sure what has been pulled down can be repaired. The mortar is too old, the wall too poorly constructed.

I was never the builder my brother was. I have been visiting the library in my old hometown of Pallow a lot lately, reading over old newspapers in microfiche. I’ve been searching for an article, some small report, of an accident on Route 111, a brick dropped into a windshield, a Volvo off the road. I’ve been trying to find out if anyone was badly hurt. If anyone was killed.

Not-knowing was once my refuge. Now I find it impossible to bear.

And so maybe it will turn out I have been writing this for 48

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someone else after all. The thought has crossed my mind that maybe George Prine was right. Maybe the person I should show this story to is Betty Millhauser, Morris’s ex–care coordinator.

At least if I was living at Wellbrook, I’d be in a place where I might feel some connection to Morris. I’d like to feel a connection to someone or something. I could have his old room. I could have his old job—his old locker.

And if that isn’t enough—if their drugs and their therapy sessions and their isolation can’t save me from myself—there is always one other possibility. If George Prine hasn’t demol-ished Morris’s final cardboard maze, if it’s still standing there in the basement, I could always climb in someday, and pull the flaps shut behind me. There is always that. Anything can run in families. Even disappearing.

But I’m not going to do anything with this story yet. I’m going to slide it into a manila envelope and stick it in the bottom right-hand drawer of my desk. Put it aside and try to resume my life, where I left off, just before Morris disappeared. Won’t show it to anyone. Won’t do anything foolish. I can go on for a while longer, pulling myself through the dark, through the tight spaces of my own memories. Who knows what may lie just around the next corner? There may be a window somewhere ahead. It may look out on a field of sunflowers.

49

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was originally released by PS Publishing in England, two years ago. Thanks are owed to those who gave so much of themselves to make that first edition happen: Christo-pher Golden, Vincent Chong, and Nicholas Gevers. Most of all, though, I want to express my gratitude and love to publisher Peter Crowther, who took a chance on 20th Century Ghosts without knowing anything about me except that he liked my stories.

I’m grateful to all the editors who have supported my work over the years, including but not limited to Richard Chiz-mar, Bill Schafer, Andy Cox, Stephen Jones, Dan Jaffe, Jeanne Cavelos, Tim Schell, Mark Apelman, Robert O. Greer Jr., Adrienne Brodeur, Wayne Edwards, Frank Smith, and Teresa Focarile. Apologies to those I might have left out. And here’s a special holler of thanks to Jennifer Brehl and Jo Fletcher, my editors at William Morrow and Gollancz, respectively; two better editors a guy could not wish for.

Thanks also to my Webmaster, Shane Leonard. I appreciate, too, all the work my agent, Mickey Choate, has performed on my behalf. My thanks to my parents, my brother and sister, and of course my tribe, whom I love dearly: Leanora and the boys.

And how about a little thanks for you, the reader, for picking up this book and giving me the chance to whisper in your ear for a few hours?

Gene Wolfe and Neil Gaiman have both hidden stories in introductions, but I don’t think anyone has ever buried one in ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
their acknowledgments page. I could be the first. The only way I can think to repay you for your interest is with the offer of one more story:

SCHEHERAZADE’S TYPEWRITER

Elena’s father had gone into the basement every night, after work, for as far back as she could remember, and did not come up until he had written three pages on the humming IBM electric typewriter he had bought in college, when he still believed he would someday be a famous novelist. He had been dead for three days before his daughter heard the typewriter in the basement, at the usual time: a burst of rapid bang-bang-banging, followed by a waiting silence, filled out only by the idiot hum of the machine.

Elena descended the steps, into darkness, her legs weak. The drone of his IBM filled the musty-smelling dark, so the gloom itself seemed to vibrate with electrical current, as before a thun-derstorm. She reached the lamp beside her father’s typewriter, and flipped it on just as the Selectric burst into another bang-bang flurry of noise. She screamed, and then screamed again when she saw the keys moving on their own, the chrome typeball lunging against the bare black platen.

That first time Elena saw the typewriter working on its own, she thought she might faint from the shock of it. Her mother almost did faint when Elena showed her, the very next night.

When the typewriter jumped to life and began to write, Elena’s mother threw her hands up and shrieked and her legs wobbled under her, and Elena had to grab her by the arm to keep her from going down.

But in a few days they got used to it, and then it was exciting. Her mother had the idea to roll a sheet of paper in, just before the typewriter switched itself on at 8 p.m. Elena’s mother wanted to see what it was writing, if it was a message for them from beyond. My grave is cold. I love you and I miss you.

But it was only another of his short stories. It didn’t even start at the beginning. The page began midway, right in the middle of a sentence.

It was Elena’s mother who thought to call the local news.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A producer from channel five came to see the typewriter. The producer stayed until the machine turned itself on and wrote a few sentences, then she got up and briskly climbed the stairs.

Elena’s mother hurried after her, full of anxious questions.

“Remote control,” the producer said, her tone curt. She looked back over her shoulder with an expression of distate.

“When did you bury your husband, ma’am? A week ago?

What’s wrong with you?”

None of the other television stations were interested. The man at the newspaper said it didn’t sound like their kind of thing. Even some of their relatives suspected it was a prank in bad taste. Elena’s mother went to bed and stayed there for several weeks, flattened by a terrific migraine, despondent and confused. And in the basement, every night, the typewriter worked on, flinging words onto paper in noisy chattering bursts.

The dead man’s daughter attended to the Selectric. She learned just when to roll a fresh sheet of paper in, so that each night the machine produced three new pages of story, just as it had when her father was alive. In fact, the machine seemed to wait for her, humming in a jovial sort of way, until it had a fresh sheet to stain with ink.

Long after no one else wanted to think about the typewriter anymore, Elena continued to go into the basement at night, to listen to the radio, and fold laundry, and roll a new sheet of paper into the IBM when it was necessary. It was a simple enough way to pass the time, mindless and sweet, rather like visiting her father’s grave each day to leave fresh flowers.

Also, she had come to like reading the stories when they were finished. Stories about masks and baseball and fathers and their children . . . and ghosts. Some of them were ghost stories. She liked those the best. Wasn’t that the first thing you learned in every fiction course everywhere? Write what you know? The ghost in the machine wrote about the dead with great authority.

After a while, the ribbons for the typewriter were only avail-able by special order. Then even IBM stopped making them.

The typeball wore down. She replaced it, but then the car-riage started sticking. One night, it locked up, wouldn’t move forward, and oily smoke began to trickle from under the iron ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
hood of the machine. The typewriter hammered letter after letter, one right on top of the other, with a kind of mad fury, until Elena managed to scramble over and shut it off.

She brought it to a man who repaired old typewriters and other appilances. He returned it in perfect operating condition, but it never wrote on its own again. In the three weeks it was at the shop, it lost the habit.

As a little girl, Elena had asked her father why he went into the basement each night to make things up, and he had said it was because he couldn’t sleep until he had written. Writing things warmed his imagination up for the work of creating an evening full of sweet dreams. Now she was unsettled by the idea that his death might be a restless, sleepless thing. But there was no help for it.

She was by then in her twenties and when her mother died—
an unhappy old woman, estranged not just from her family but the entire world—she decided to move out, which meant sell-ing the house and all that was in it. She had hardly started to sort the clutter in the basement, when she found herself sitting on the steps, rereading the stories her father had written after he died. In his life, he had given up the practice of submitting his work to publishers, had wearied of rejection. But his post-mortem work seemed to the girl to be much—livelier—than his earlier work, and his stories of hauntings and the unnatural seemed especially arresting. Over the next few weeks, she collected his best into a single book, and began to send it to publishers. Most said there was no market in collections by writers of no reputation, but in time she heard from an editor at a small press who said he liked it, that her father had a fine feel for the supernatural.

“Didn’t he?” she said.

Now this is the story as I first heard it myself from a friend in the publishing business. He was maddeningly ignorant of the all-important details, so I can’t tell you where the book was finally published or when or, really, anything more regarding this curious collection. I wish I knew more. As a man who is fascinated with the occult, I would like to obtain a copy.

Unfortunately, the title and author of the unlikely book are not common knowledge.

About the Author

Joe Hill is the author of the critically acclaimed New York
Times bestseller Heart-Shaped Box, a two-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award, and a past recipient of the World Fantasy Award. His stories have appeared in a variety of journals and Year’s Best collections. He calls New England home.

www.joehillfiction.com

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

A L S O B Y J O E H I L L

Heart-Shaped Box

Credits

Designed by Renato Stanisic

Cover design by Ervin Serrano

Cover photographs: theater by Mike Powell/Getty Images; woman by Vincent Chong; man by Kristin Gerbert/age
fotostock/Superstock

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

VOLUNTARY COMMITTAL. Copyright © 2005, 2007 by Joe Hill.

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Document Outline

- Title Page

- Dedication Page

- Contents

- Begin Reading
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Also by Joe Hill
- Credits
- Copyright Notice
- About the Publisher

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Other Books by Joe Hill

Credits

Cover

Copyright

About the Publisher

VOLUNTARY COMMITTAL

Title Page

Dedication Page

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Other Books by Joe Hill

Credits

Cover

Copyright

About the Publisher

VOLUNTARY COMMITTAL

Title Page

Dedication Page