Meeks (10 page)

Though I could sense the black shadow of the great bird of heartbreak gliding across open country toward me, I was still pretending that my brother's change of fortune was a game he and I were playing, and the next day, I followed him to the park, tracking him from the shadows, gleefully planning to tackle him against the bachelors’ hill—when I saw him run into the arms of his fiancee and spin her in a circle. I was stunned. He took her hand, and they started down the main path, airing out their good fortune, nodding slyly at the people who were like them. I followed. I am not a stealthy man to begin with, and I was making no special effort to move like a cat, and yet they seemed not to see me. Perhaps they were blinded by joy—
my brother! my sister!
—unable to recognize the deformed animal stumbling through the garbage-laced gloom as one of their own kind.

The broad-winged shadow glided into the park, darkening the treetops, and raced down the western slope of my brain and directly into my heart: I collapsed to the grass and rolled onto my back and tried to breathe. My brother was as good as gone, lost to some stranger, to a life of soft summer blankets, to weekend picnics, to roasted chickens, rounds of cheese, mild green pears, tins of roasted nuts, salads, dried fruit, pastries, cakes, cookies. Is that what my brother had really wanted? To be ordinary, to spend his days going soft, entombed in comfortable rooms, listening deadfaced to the endless narrations of the large and small creatures around him? To be a family man?

I had snuck a bottle from my mother's house. I pulled it from my inside pocket and took a long, discreet drink, which immediately brightened my view of things and, not for the first time, saved my mother's youngest son's brain from obliterating despair.

It wasn't long before the sun sank into the river and people packed up their things and left in droves, and I had drunk most of the bottle and the park lights were giving off their cold, dazzling drunken penumbras, and I was alone, in every sense of the word. I wanted to climb onto the stage, something that was strictly forbidden, but I knew it was the only place on earth I could be happy.
If it's what you really want. . . .
I hesitated, fond as I was of the Old Counselor. He lived in my brain, but then so did Mother—her dreams, her dread, her sense of shame, they all tripped over each other in the effort to make me afraid of everything I wanted to try in life. All of
her
thoughts somehow living in
my
head. I drank until they drowned, and I climbed onto the stage, where it was easy to look out at the world with love.
See the tree-lined infinitude of the park! See the pale gravel paths that disappear into the black silences between the trees, which is Death, yet I fear it not

I saw two men struggling to carry a third man deeper into the darkness of the park, and I laughed freely at the comedy that derives, inevitably, from men trying to capture and carry unwilling objects.

I looked overhead and could see the ghostly tendrils of old rope that still hung from the high branches. I studied the old proscenium: the fog-streaked trees, the slate-blue river, the ships huffing blandly across the black harbor. The ships that had carried the men and women who killed every bird, leaf, frog, bear, and snake they found by naming it. The smile (it was a stupid grin) faded from my jolly sweat-slicked face, and I sank into an oil-black melancholy that I must have loved . . . since I sought it out so often. “And, lo, the ships begot the people,” I declaimed, “and then more ships begot
more
people."

I hurled my empty bottle from the stage and heard it shatter against the hard brown fact of trees in the dark, and I saw the shadow of the park bum crouch and run. Always listening. I sighed, took comfort in the comfort that was there for the taking: I was a better man than some men, than at least one man. (Things could always be worse.) But an artist's job doesn't stop there, and just as I often tried to think of my oblivious, materialistic, self-absorbed fellow citizens as my brothers and sisters and to love them, I tried now to love and to find room in my heart for this foreign creature, and I reached an open hand toward the full darkness of the park, and I said, “My
brother
. . . remember me!"

Then I thought of the cold indifference of my real brother. If only I could obliterate once and for all the part of me that needed other people, I might become (through pain) an actor so great that I could lord over some part of the real world, even after death.

I turned back to the proscenium. I rocked back on my heels, I shoved my hands deep into the pockets, I leaned forward, and I charged it with all my strength, slamming my head clean through. I henched that ornamentation like a pro, busted it wide open, and my head, even in the swell of alcohol, burned with pain. I reeled backward, stunned, and put my hands instinctively to my head. I felt that it was slicked with blood, and to my surprise, vomit shot from my throat, and I fell facedown on the stage. I had struck the proscenium at the worst possible angle. My heart was beating frantically in my chest, and I detected—perhaps for the first time in my life—the eerie certainty of death living somewhere in my brain. In the excitement of what I had done (an extraordinary self-infliction), I saw very clearly just how far I had drifted from other people: no one would find me high up on the forbidden stage, and I would surely die, and die alone, a little tragedy that would be forever alloyed to my mother's joy over her other son, illuminating her pride with the shining gilt work of her grief.

The picture of the world was flickering in and out, and I crawled to the front of the stage, my hands wet and red, and I was full of alien feeling—it was terror, terror at the edge of my life. I wanted to be a different man, or at least remembered as a different man, and I cried out from the stage, from the full depth of my being:

'Tis true I hath head-punched the proscenium!

Forgive me, I was drunken when I hath done it.

I came to the next day, still prone on the boards, rough against my cheek, and my first thought, despite the severity of my condition, was of the beauty of the smell of the wood. My body had only pain in it (it seemed to be made of pain), and yet I was newly attached to it: I was clinging to this world again, a weak and fearful little man in a blood-flecked pale suit. I heard the taut ropes and metal grommets go tick, tick against the flagpoles as the wind picked up in gusts that smelled like the river, and I could hear the broad-winged seabirds calling out to one another.

Later, I woke again to the smell of the Brothers of Mercy, their telltale stink, their talcumy sweat, and I retched, convulsing and coughing up rotten air. I could hear my brother's voice—
No, no, no!
—and I managed to open my eyes, and I could see the silhouettes of four or five Brothers standing around me, and I moved my hand, which seemed to weigh a thousand pounds, to cover what I imagined to be a frightening wound. My eyes rolled stubbornly back into my head, into the blackness of my brain, and I strained to see, and I could see that one of the Brothers was holding a gray workman's smock—
No, no, no!
—and my eyes rolled back again, and I thought, I've got to think carefully about what's happening to me. I heard my brother arguing. I heard him try to take the gray smock from the Brother's hands, and then I lost him again beneath the piles of black powder accumulating in my head. Distantly, I could hear the shouts of children filling up the park, and I could hear the fountain filling, eternally.

I woke in a small, dim room, on a bed of old coats. It took me a moment to perceive the other shape. My brother was sitting nearby in a wooden chair, his beautiful pale suit replaced by the gray workman's smock. There was an empty bottle on the table beside him. Until that moment, I had lived a blameless, worthless life. Now I had made something happen—something terrible, of course.

"They took Mother to the Sheds this morning,” my brother said at last.

I covered my face with the coarse sleeve of my gray smock, in order to conceal from my brother any happiness that might appear, involuntarily, on my face. My brother and I were together again. Our mother was gone; my acting career was over; my brother's life was ruined, the love of his life probably weeping in the sun-streamed kitchen of her parents’ house . . . who cares.

Our little room, our heart of hearts.

Ben

Ben was back in the old armchair in the tailor's window . . . watching the butcher, gulping down cups of the tailor's weak tea. He was sweating in the hot window, in the dark suit, his brain still congested with stale alcohol, with the memories and effects of a bachelor night. The tailor shuffled back to his worktable.

"I went out with some of the bachelors last night,” said Ben, hoping to impress the tailor with news of his progress toward the norms.

"Are you planning to marry one of them?” asked the tailor. “Don't waste your time with other bachelors! Spend your evenings with
young women.
"

To think his fate was in this old man's hands, to think that an incapacitating grief over the loss of one man, the tailor's son, could so easily cause the death of another. And who would grieve for Ben? Albert? Finton? Ben folded a scrap of fabric thoughtfully and watched the butcher across the street pacing in his empty shop, the interior suffused with dim purplish light. Four or five grayish cuts of meat were stretched out under the bright bulbs of the display case. The butcher pulled a gristly plank of meat from the case and dropped it onto the chopping block to hack at it with a massive knife. Autumn was coming.

The tailor turned from his worktable and said, “Ill-gotten gain, if you believe the rumors. My neighbor saw the butcher in the park last night. He was cutting off the legs of a horse corpse with a hacksaw and then carrying the legs through the streets wrapped in a blanket. He's passing the meat off to customers as factory product, because the city has cut him off. He'd go back for the rest of the horse,” said the tailor full of contempt, “if the rest weren't so complicated."

"Are you going to report him?"

"No, no. Things seem to be taking care of themselves. Anyway, it's no surprise: look at his father. Consider his son. Things like this are passed on; they advance in the line, unless the line,” said the tailor, snipping his scissors at the air, “is cut.” The tailor glared through the window of his shop. Ben reminded himself of his natural feelings on the matter (that the butcher, like everyone else, deserved what he got), but he felt, too, that the tailor went too far, and he said, “Times are tough."

The tailor threw his heavy, black-handled scissors into the pile of fabric on his cutting table. He pointed at Ben. “If times are tough, why am I drowning in the best-milled cotton and wool? If times are so tough, Ben, how is it possible that you are free to enjoy drinking tea and eating cookies here all day? It's possible, in a just and orderly world, that times are tough only for the unjust. I've seen other young men struggling and weakening in idiosyncratic and homemade suits, and I've seen them stumbling in the street, and it doesn't move me. They will die of the failure they have permitted to bloom in themselves as certainly as the leaves of the flowering trees will die in the first hour of winter. ‘A man who will not change cannot keep his place in this world any more than a flower can resist being displaced by the fruit beneath it!'?

Ben stared at his knees; his black trousers were dusted in the powdered sugar and blond crumbs of the contents of the tailor's cookie tin. The old man was shouting the ancient words at him, killing him.

"I'm begging you to make me a suit. I'm begging you,” said Ben, overcome with panic.

"What?"

"Time is running out.” Ben met the tailor's look. “They're stockpiling lumber for Independence Day. The summer's winding down. I'm frightened. I'm getting very worried. You know, the feeling that time is slipping away from you, and then there will be none. I need a suit,” said Ben, “I need to find a wife . . ."

"Well, what's stopping you? Do you know anything about the way the world works? Have you not heard a word I've said these last few weeks?"

"But you said . . ."

"Listen, Ben. One says many things over a lifetime, and, while most of a man's words add up to a singular lifelong complaint, and others are merely echoes of the words of one's fellows, et cetera, there is, nonetheless, a great wasteland of surprising words behind a man at my age, and so, if things I said caused you to feel hopeful, we can't be shocked by it."

"But you told me to hold out hope, to keep a positive attitude."

"Did I tell you to hold out hope? Seems unlikely,” said the tailor, taking a seat in the wooden chair opposite Ben. “I've never known anything but difficulty myself. But you're quite like everyone else, as you've pointed out to me many times, and it's no surprise that you feel entitled to happiness."

"You know my family—you knew my mother and my father."

"But it's not up to them anymore, is it? It's up to you, and you appear as you are—someone refusing life, just like your father. Life is difficult, Ben, but as you've discovered, one is required only to pass through it. Departure is assured."

The tailor, shockingly strong for such an old man, had hauled Ben from the armchair and thrown him out into the street, threatening to call the police. The butcher had stood in the window of his shop and watched.

"Young man,” said the butcher in a low, warm voice (not at all what Ben expected) and opened the door to his shop: “You're welcome here.” But Ben wasn't about to accept pity from the lowest of the low, and he scrambled to his feet and ran, ran until he reached the water.

In the widest part of the river, scrubby islands parted the fast-moving currents, home to derelict, rusted boats, to the former cornerstones of gun towers, part of some long-defunct system of defense; the larger islands were the haphazardly planted graveyards of failed, forgotten men like Ben. How many bachelors had been ferried across by distracted civil servants and unceremoniously dumped? What happens when the boatmen push away from the dock and row out to the men with shovels, the ones who chain-smoke and make crude jokes and roll bachelors into pits, and come back hungry, sometimes laughing themselves into coughing fits. Do anything enough—even murder—and it loses its horrible strangeness.