Love and Hydrogen (27 page)

The first two years I worked eighteen-plus hours a day. I never got home, almost never talked to my family. Crises came and went; what did I care? I combed everything: the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Smithsonian Library, the British Museum, the Royal Society of London, the Royal Institute for the Tropics, the Volcanological Survey of Indonesia, the
Bulletin Volcanologique.
I needed more help than anyone else on earth. And I turned out to possess the height of scientific naïveté. I believed everyone I read. Everyone sounded so reasonable. Everyone's figures looked so unassailable. I was a straw in the wind. I labored through Verbeek's original monograph from 1885 as well as later papers by Wharton, Yokoyama, and Latter. At one point my adviser told me with exasperation, “Hey, know what? It's not likely that everyone's right.” I incorporated this into my text. I wrote, “Nevertheless, it is safe to assume that all of these contradictory theories cannot be accurate.”

I uncovered a few things. I turned up a few photographs of the devastation from as early as 1886. I tracked down some math errors in the computations of the airwaves. Then, in 1983, the centennial year of the eruption, everything I'd done was surpassed, the dugout canoe swamped by the
Queen Mary
: the Smithsonian published
Krakatau 1883: The Volcanic Eruption and Its Effects,
providing me with 456 phone-book-sized pages to pore over. It would have been my fantasy book, if I hadn't already sunk two years into a thesis.

EVERYTHING HAD TO BE RETOOLED. My new topic became this baggy, reactive thing that just got me through, something along the lines of This Big New Book: Is It Almost Completely the Last Word? The answer was yes.

I had a Career Crisis. My personal hygiene suffered. I stared openmouthed out windows. I sat around inert most mornings, working my way through tepid coffee and caramels for breakfast. I faced for the first time the stunning possibility that everything I touched was not going to turn to gold.

My mother called to see how I was doing. I put on a brave front. She called back the next day and said, “I told your brother you weren't doing so well.”

“What'd he say?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said.

“I'm worried I'm gonna end up like him,” I joked.

We heard a click on the line. “Uh-oh,” my mother said.

A WEEK LATER my brother sent me Krakatoa: East of Java. He'd taped it off a Disaster Film Festival and mailed it in a box wrapped in all directions with duct tape. Maximilian Schell, Rossano Brazzi, Brian Keith: that kind of movie. What my brother remembered was that the second half of the film—the eruption itself, and the tidal waves that followed—was the really unendurable part, and always had been for me, ever since I sat through its sorry cheesiness with him when I was thirteen years old.

He didn't include a note with it, and he didn't have to: it was exactly his sense of humor, with the aggression directed everywhere at once.

Even my brother, in other words, had seen through the schematic of my private metaphor and knew the answer to my adviser's question: Why is he obsessed with volcanoes? Because they go off, regardless of what anyone can do. And because, when they do go off, it's no one's fault. Volcanology: the science of standing around and cataloging the devastation.

MY FATHER DISCOURAGED my brother from visiting me, wherever I was. He did it for my benefit, and my brother's. He was the Peace-maker, he thought; if he wasn't around, anything could happen. My brother didn't particularly enjoy visiting me—anything new in my life seemed to cause him to take stock of his—but he had few places to go. Occasionally he'd call, with my father in the room, and drop a hint. My father would hear the hint and intervene in the background. The excuse he always came up with—I was too busy, I had all this work, this was a bad time for me to be receiving visitors— could not have helped my brother. But if he wanted to keep us apart, what else could he say? My brother was too busy?

“This isn't the greatest time anyway,” I'd say. “What about around Thanksgiving? What're you doing around Thanksgiving?”

Knowing full well that the tiniest lack of enthusiasm would destroy whatever chance there was that he'd work up the courage to visit.

DONNIE WAS SIXTEEN when we went through family counseling. He'd been out of high school two months, and had had three jobs: landscaping, freight handling for UPS, and working construction. The construction work was for an uncle who owned a company. We'd had our first incident involving the police. That was how my father referred to it. I was twelve. I had relatively little to do during the sessions. I conceived of the time as an opportunity to prove to this psychiatrist that it wasn't all my parents' fault, what had happened. I acted normal.

Donnie called my father the Mediator. The shrink asked what he meant by that. Donnie said, “Mediator. You know. Zookeeper. What the fuck.” It was the “What the fuck” that broke my heart.

EVEN THEN I had a mouth on me, as my mother would say. Christmas Eve we watched the Roddy McDowall/David Hartman version of
Miracle on 34th Street,
a version my brother hadn't seen but insisted was the best one. It was on for four minutes before it was clear to everyone in the room that it was terrible. Which made my brother all the more adamant in his position. The holidays were hard on him. We'd given up on the family counseling a few weeks before, as if to get ready for Christmas.

In the movie Sebastian Cabot did a lot of eye-twinkle stuff, whatever the situation. I made relentless fun of it. I mimicked Cabot's accent and asked if Santa came from England, stuff like that. I was rolling. Even my father was snickering. Roddy McDowall launched into something on the Spirit of Christmas and I said it sounded like he was more interested in getting to know some of the elves. Donnie took the footstool in front of him and smashed the TV tube. That was the second time we had to call the police.

They took him to the Bridgeport bus station, 8:30 at night on Christmas Eve. The two cops who came to the house wanted to leave him with us, but he wouldn't calm down. One cop told him, “If you don't lighten up we're gonna have to get you out of here and
keep
you out of here,” so Donnie started in on what he was going to do to each one of us as soon as the cop took off: “First I'm gonna break
his
fucking neck, and then
her
fucking neck, and then
his
fucking neck.” Stuff like that. It was raining, and when they led him out, he had on a New York Jets windbreaker and no hat.

My father drove down to the bus station a half hour later to see if he was still there. The roads were frozen and it took him an hour to get back. My mother vacuumed up the glass from the picture tube. Then she sat in her bedroom with the little TV, flipping back and forth from
A Christmas Carol
to the Mass at St. Peter's.

When my father got back he made some tea and wandered the house. I remembered the nuns talking about the capacities of Christ's love and thought, What kind of reptile
are
you? I was filled with wonder at myself.

I finally went to midnight Mass, alone. My mother just waved me off when I asked if she wanted to go. I found myself once I got there running through a fractured catechism, over and over:—Who loves us?—We love us.—Who does this to us?—We do this to ourselves.—Whose victims are we?—We are our own victims.

THE NEXT MORNING I was supposed to come downstairs and open presents.

Around noon we gathered in front of the tree with our coffee. I suppose we were hoping Donnie was going to come back. I opened the smallest present in my pile, a Minnesota Viking coffee mug, and said, “That's great, thanks,” and my parents' faces were so desolate that we quit right there.

He called from the bus station on the twenty-seventh. He opened one or two of his presents a week after that. The rest stayed where they were even after the tree came down. Some of them my mother gave, the next year, to our cousins. We never put tags on our presents; we just told each other who they belonged to.

THE THIRD TIME they had to call the police I was fourteen thousand miles away, fulfilling my dream, standing on what was left of Krakatau. I brought back pieces of pumice for everybody. Donnie had called my mother's sisters whores, and she'd slapped him, and he'd knocked her to the kitchen floor. When he was going full tilt he tried everything verbally until something clicked. He was thirty-four then and she was sixty. My father left his eggs frying at the stove and started wrestling with him. He was sixty-three. My brother let him wrestle.

FROM PAGE FIVE of my thesis: “Early theories explaining the size of the Krakatau explosion held that millions of tons of rock had unfortunately formed a kind of plug, so that pressure-relieving venting was not allowed, making the final detonations all the more cataclysmic. But in fact the opposite might also have been true: gas fluxing of the conduits and the release of pressure through massive cracks may have hastened the catastrophe, since once the vents were opened, the eruption might have grown, as deeper and hotter layers of magma were tapped, leading to the exhaustion of the reservoir, and following that, the collapse of its roof.”

My adviser had written in the margin: “Anything new here?”

I HAD THREE REASONS for my own passivity: selfishness, cowardice, and resentment.

AS DONNIE GOT OLDER the anger inside him was not decreasing but increasing. His rage was driven by humiliation, and year by year he felt his situation—forty-one and living at home, unemployed, forty-two and living at home, unemployed—to be more and more humiliating. The friends-and-family question, “So what are you up to?”—fraught when he was eighteen—was, when he was forty, suffused with subtextual insult. His violence was more serious. His threats were more pointed. He defined himself more and more as a misfit, and more and more he seemed to think that the gesture that was going to be necessary to redeem such a life, with each passing day, needed to be grander, more radical.

HE WAS FORTY-TWO. I was thirty-eight, two hours away, mostly out of contact, and all of my failures with him were focused in one weekend that summer, when, despite everything, he visited. We spent two days circling each other, watching sports and old movies and making fun of what we saw. His last night there he told me about some of his fantasies. One of them ended with, “They'd
think
they knew what happened, but how could they
prove
it? How could they
prove
anything?” My stomach dropped out.

It was late. I'd turned off the TV. I could see his eyes in the dark. “Listen,” I said. “You've gotta see somebody.”

“Don't you think I know that?” he said.

AFTER TWO LATE MOVIES he fell asleep facedown on the sofa. I went to my office and called Psychological Services at the university. The guy on call gave me a referral number.

“I don't think you understand,” I told him. “This isn't a kind of wait-and-see situation.”

“Are you saying he should be picked up, for his own good?” the guy said. There was a buzzing on the line while he waited for my answer.

“No,” I said.

THE NEXT MORNING my brother was leaving. I stood by my parents' car while he settled into the driver's seat. I told him I had the name of a guy he should talk to. “Thanks,” he said.

“You want the name?” I said.

“Sure,” he said. I could see his eyes, see a blowup coming on again. This was excruciating for him.

I fumbled around in my pockets. “I don't have a pencil,” I said. “You gonna remember?”

“Sure,” he said. I told him the name. He nodded, put the car in gear, said good-bye, and backed out of the driveway.

I WARNED MY PARENTS. Which, I thought to myself, would help my conscience later.

WHY DIDN'T I HELP? Why did I stand aside, peering down the rails toward the future site of the train wreck? Because even if he didn't know it, all along, he was the lucky one. Because he was the black sheep, he was the squeaky wheel, he was the engine that generated love from my parents.

I KEPT HOPING that my worst feelings had been left behind in childhood, and that only analysis, diagnosis, remained.

Volcanoes, volcanoes, volcanoes. In a crucial way he didn't resemble volcanoes at all. Most volcanoes look like oceans. Because they're
under
oceans. Nothing happening for hundreds of years. Something destructive surfacing only very very rarely: who did that
really
sound like?

The first record of explosions came months early, May 20 at 10:55 A.M., when the director of the Observatory at Batavia, now Jakarta, noticed vibrations and the banging of loose windows in his house. Explosions brought lighter articles down from the shelves at Anjer. There was this homey little description from the captain of the German warship
Elisabeth,
in the Sunda Strait: “We saw from the island a white cumulus cloud rising fast. After half an hour, it reached a height of 11,000 m. and started to spread, like an umbrella.” Or this, from the same ship's Marine chaplain, now seventeen nautical miles away: “It was convoluted like a giant coral stock, resembling a club or cauliflower head, except that everything was in imposing gigantic internal motion, driven by enormous pressure from beneath. Slowly it became clear that the top of the entire continuously growing phenomenon was beginning to lean towards us.”

OR THIS, from a telegraph master on the Java Coast: “I remained at the office the whole morning and then went for a meal, intending to return at two. I met another man near the beach, and we remained there for a few minutes. Krakatau was already in eruption, and we plainly heard the rumbling in the distance. I observed an alternate rising and falling of the sea, and asked my companion whether the tide was ebbing or flowing. He remarked that it seemed to be getting unusually dark.”