The Brothers K (34 page)

I, for starters, was transformed within weeks into a feminist. The term hadn’t made it anywhere near Camas yet, so I didn’t know that was what I’d become. But I can think of no better word to describe a thirteen-year-old American male suddenly forced to discover that no working citizen of this bizarre country can hope to maintain a tenable existence without possessing (1) a car and (2) an unpaid, unthanked, faceless, sexless drudge—i.e., “Traditional Housewife.” Being too poor, young, ugly and honest to woo, purchase or steal either, I pedaled around town on a rattletrap Huffy bike that was as close as I could get to the car, and became the even more rattletrap drudge myself. It was a spectacularly rude awakening. To have ironing boards folding up on your fingers while the school bus is honking outside the window; to walk into department stores with eight or ten hard-earned bucks in your pocket and a two-hundred-dollar void in your wardrobe and be expected to consider this humiliation a self-indulgent “shopping adventure;” to have—before an arduous school day has even begun—to make a bed, prepare a breakfast, ride a crappy bike eleven miles to deliver 103 papers, take a shower, prepare a lunch, wash your dishes, and
then
be expected to know what to do with that disgusting wad of guck that’s left in the drain strainer after the water goes down … Suffice it to say that these were not the sort of experiences I expected Freedom to be paved with.

As might be expected, Everett underwent an even more radical transformation. He was so desperate to prove that he hadn’t been dependent
on Mama in any meaningful way that he refused to do anything for himself or his clothes or his room which he hadn’t been doing before. As a result, my most dapper and fastidious brother was transformed within weeks into an ersatz bohemian skuzzball who smelled like moldering gym socks and lived in half a bedroom that looked like a Winter of 76 campsite at Valley Forge. To add inanity to injury, he also began struggling—when friends and schoolmates sniffed out telltale odors of rebellion upon his person—to pass off his increasingly subfuscous wardrobe and squalorous digs as a matter of style by affecting the same beatnik lingo and mannerisms that had previously been the object of his most withering scorn. The transparency of this ploy set even Irwin to smirking. But Everett is nothing if not stubborn: he entrenched himself in this counter-feit beatnik personae for so long that even he eventually had no choice but to call it “real.” Fortunately for his social and sex lives (though not for his grip on honesty), he was soon able to feign having had a prophetic finger on the pulse of the nation all along—for our generation was about to spawn that peace-preaching sartorial and hygienic disaster, the American Hippie.

Peter attacked his domestic and economic difficulties in an equally extreme but far more honest way: he became, so far as I know, Camas, Washington’s first self-made Buddhist monk. Paring away possession after possession, he soon owned nothing in this world but three shirts, two pairs of pants, two pairs of black Converse high-tops, a perennially empty wallet, three or four hundred paperback books and a top-of-the-line Wilson outfielder’s mitt, which, in a pinch, could double as a begging bowl.

It was not that big a change for Peter (he still owned the same
sorts
of things, just fewer of them), but combined with Everett’s transmogrification it had a disturbing effect on their room. What had always been a fairly standard, ail-American boys’ bedroom—and for Irwin and me the most educational, or at least stimulating, room on earth—suddenly split in half. To the right of the window an anarchistic ragpicker seemed to be trying to start a revolution, or at least acquire squatter’s rights, while to the left an athletic bhikku sought a bookish enlightenment.

Far more troubling than this visual tension was the unseen tension between the inhabitants. Everett’s basic feeling was that we three were suffering an outrageous and punitive suspension of our rights as sons, and that some sort of equally punitive counterattack should be launched as soon as possible. But Peter wasn’t interested. In fact, Peter seemed, except for the friction with Everett, even more serene and satisfied in his ascetic circumstances than he’d been before. Knowing that his thinking
infuriated Everett, but wanting to explain his position to me, he began to give me the occasional surreptitious “dharma talk.” I remember one in which he told me that our family had never been far from poverty. But while there was abject poverty, he said, “the usual kind,” there was also something that contemplatives and monks talked about, called “voluntary poverty.” He said that both meant few possessions, simple food and clothes, maybe no car, and so on. But whereas abject poverty was like being thrown overboard in a storm, like Jonah, voluntary poverty was like diving into a calm, clear sea because you saw the beauty of it and wanted to take a swim. I still remember the intensity of his voice and the flash of his eyes as he added, “We’ve arrived at the ocean’s edge, Kade. So why fight it? Why not dive?” And I remember how hard I tried to appear moved by his pearls of wisdom.

But the truth was, I wasn’t ready to go swimming in any damned river, pool or sea whether I dove or got thrown in or was washed out of bed in my sleep. The truth was, both sides of Everett and Peter’s room looked alien and comfortless to me now, and it wasn’t the choice between rebellion and renunciation that generated that comfortlessness: it was an unnameable sadness that filled both halves—a loss of unity, or solidarity, or brotherhood. Something precious was being taken from us, or squandered by us. And neither Everett the Revolutionary nor Peter the Monk was taking even a moment to look back and mourn for it. But to me … To me it felt as though two old and intimate friends, after sixteen years spent hiking shoulder to shoulder, had come to a fork in the trail, and without even noticing had taken different paths. When they first looked up and saw what had happened, they were not at all far apart: they could still speak quietly to each other, could still see each other perfectly well. But they just kept going! All those years spent side by side, yet they didn’t hesitate, didn’t wave goodbye, didn’t even acknowledge that they’d parted! Somehow this chilled me to the heart. It seemed that only I understood that, blithe as their divergence had been, it was permanent. So as my big brothers hiked intrepidly on, I—the slow, over-round, over-adoring brother who’d spent his whole life traipsing happily along behind both of them—just stood back at the fork, watching them veer farther and farther apart, and grieving for us all.

“T
he Hump of Energy” was a Famous Science experiment as tedious to outside observers as “Centrifuging Flickers” was interesting, but it remained a great favorite on sultry summer afternoons. To work this meager wonder the two Scientists would simply take time out from running through the sprinkler, disconnect the garden hose, stretch it straight out across the lawn, then give one end of it a violent, four-handed snap. The Ω-shaped hump that proceeded to fly from their hands down the length of the hose gave the experiment its name. They would do this six or eight times, scrutinizing the Ω with a look of far greater interest than they possibly could have felt. Then they’d reconnect the sprinkler, sprawl belly-down in the grass beneath the spray, and while the sun baked them hot and the sprinkler bathed them cool they would proceed to speculate—at unbelievable length—upon the possible “meanings” of the hump.

The charm of the experiment completely eluded my brothers and me. All that talk about a wiggle in a hose seemed more like an affliction, an attack of logorrhea maybe, than a scientific experiment. What we didn’t know was that Grandawma, in a little lab journal she’d begun to help the twins keep, had written a description of the experiment that made quite a bit of sense. In a few flamingly uncharacteristic sentences she even attempted to gear her language down to the level of eight-year-olds. Here’s what she wrote:

The “Hump of Energy” is only superficially an experiment in physics. The undulation in the hose is of course a mild curiosity, but the more profound challenge here is to your imaginations—for which reason the very dullness of the hose becomes its chief value. Your aim should be to let the “Hump”—the little undulation—pass cleanly into your minds, and then to follow your thoughts wherever the undulation leads them. Don’t work too hard at this. Don’t judge or censor yourself, or each other. Just spin and bounce and juggle your ideas the way a circus seal juggles the ball on its nose; then, when you feel ready, start tossing your ideas back and forth, like two seals. Silly as it may seem at first (it sounds rather like
baseball,
doesn’t it!), this is very like what scientists do when developing an idea. To maintain a spirit of playful cooperation, to keep the thinking lively while showing
your partner’s daftest notions no disrespect—these are the aims of the experiment, and the only valid measures of its “success.”

When Grandawma had first taken up with our two Scientists I’d feared that one more feisty faction had just shouldered its way into the family ideological wars, and that some rabid new form of brainwashing had begun. It was a pleasure to discover how wrong I was. In a completely noncombative way, the grumpy old so-called Atheist was attempting to sew together some of the rips being torn in our family in the names of “Christ” and “salvation.” It’s amazing, sometimes, how far away the name of a thing lands from the thing itself.

O
ne scorching-hot day during Famous Science’s inaugural summer—long before my brothers and I learned of Grandawma’s congenial definition—the “Hump of Energy” caught no less a thinker than Peter by surprise. Having just mowed a humongous lawn a few blocks up the street, he’d returned home dripping with sweat. And since, in those days, Peter’s feelings about having sweat on his body were akin to most people’s feelings about having feces on theirs, when he saw the sprinkler whirring and my sisters lolling beneath it, he took a short sprint, did his patented headfirst base-thieving slide across the soft, sopped grass, and came to a tidy halt right between them just in time to hear Beatrice say, “If a hose could reach from here clear to Spokane, do you think there could be a man strong enough to jerk it hard enough to make the Hump travel all the way?”

The twins were fortunate: if Everett had been the one to overhear this sentence, he’d have taken the words “hump,” “hard,” “hose,” “jerk” and “all the way” and more or less robbed the twins’ ears of their virginity. But Peter was a gentleman: all he did was groan. And when the twins ignored him, this pleased him. He liked it that the Scientists, while engaged in speculation, paid no heed to the banal protestations of the laity.

“I don’t know about Spokane,” Freddy hesitantly replied. “I mean, I don’t know how far a hump of energy could travel down a hose, because if some muscleman or machine or something jerked it
really
hard, I guess the hose might just break.”

“I never thought of that,” said Bet.

I
didn’t either
, Peter thought.

“But I do think,” Freddy continued, “there might be all sorts of humps of all sorts of energy that go traveling all sorts of directions people can’t see. For instance when a person gets mad at somebody …” (Her words
came quicker now, and her breathing had become audible.) “Like when you get
really
mad and maybe slap somebody or jerk their arm or something, like Mama does to us sometimes, I think an invisible hump of energy might go flying all the way up their arm and right into their skeleton or insides or whatever—a hump of mean, witchy energy—and I think it might fly round and round in there like a witch on a broomstick flies round the sky, and go right on hurting invisible parts of the person you don’t even know you’re hurting, because you can’t see all the ways their insides are connected to the mean thing you did to their outside. And from then on, maybe that hump of mean energy sits inside the hurt person like a coiled-up hose or a rattlesnake, just
waiting
in there. And someday, when that person touches somebody else, maybe even
way
in the future, that rattlesnake energy might come humping up out of them by accident and hurt that next person too, even though they didn’t mean to, and even though the person didn’t deserve it.” She paused for a moment. Then, with feeling, concluded, “I think it happens. I really think it does.”

“I think it does too,” Peter said.

He felt Bet’s scowl, knew that he was trespassing on Scientific turf, but finished his thought anyway. “I think what you said can happen,
does
happen. But every witch who ever lived was once just a person like you or me, that’s what I think anyway, till somewhere, sometime, they got hit by a big, mean hump of nasty energy themselves, and it shot inside them just like Freddy said, and crashed and smashed around, wrecking things in there, so that a witch was created. The thing is, though, I don’t think that first big jolt is ever the poor witch’s fault.”

Bet thought about this, and finally nodded cautiously. Freddy said nothing. The sprinkler hissed like a Halloween cat. “Another thing,” Peter said, “is that
everybody
gets jolted. You, me, before we die we’ll
all
get nailed, lots of times. But that doesn’t mean we’ll all get turned into witches. You can’t avoid getting zapped, but you
can
avoid passing the mean energy on. That’s the interesting thing about witches, the challenge of them—learning not to hit back, or hit somebody else, when they zap you. You can just bury the zap, for instance, like the gods buried the Titans in the center of the earth. Or you can be like a river when a forest fire hits it—
phshhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Just drown it, drown all the heat and let it wash away …”

Bet was scowling again, but Freddy just lay still, watching his face. “And the great thing,” he said, “the reason you can lay a river in the path of any sort of wildfire is that there’s not just rivers inside us, there’s a
world
in there.” Seeing Bet’s scowl deepening, he added, “Not because I say so. Christ says so. And Krishna. But I feel it sometimes too. I’ve felt how there’s a world, and rivers, and high mountains, whole
ranges
of mountains, in there. And there are lakes in those mountains—beautiful, pure, deep blue lakes.
Thousands
of them. Enough to wash away all the dirt and trouble and witchiness on earth.”