Floating Staircase

CHAPTER FIVE

It has been said that nature does not know extinction—that once you’ve existed, all parts of you, whether they’ve dispersed or remained together, will always be. Thick dust may hide the relics of human history, but it cannot erase the memory.

Picture a large, square conference room, with teal carpeting and alabaster acoustical tiles in the ceiling. Look around. You will notice that the mahogany benches are dull beneath the heated spotlights and crowded with suburban onlookers. At one end of the room are two large double doors with tapered brass levers, newly shined.

A cluster of people, solemn and reposed in what they so ignorantly consider their most formal attire, stands against the back wall, shuffling uncomfortably from right foot to left foot. The men with their hair awkwardly parted and grease matted to their scalps, the women with half-moon impressions on their palms where their nails have been digging in. Their hairstyles are outdated, and their inability to recognize this fact only reaffirms their small-town-ness. These are my mother’s people from small towns across America, unified in the big city, my father’s city, at last for this occasion.

At the other end of the room subsists a large podium-like assembly, modular and archipelagic in construct, cordovan-stained, teak, and recently shellacked. There are many people seated on the benches and standing at the back of the room, wedged together as if for warmth, but for the sake of this retelling, there exist only four individuals that we should concern ourselves with: the middle-aged father with the vacuous stare and wrinkles in his suit like the creases in a worry; the mother who cannot seem to focus on anything, anything at all, despite her constant stare. Then there are this duo’s two remaining adolescent sons, particularly the thirteen-year-old mope with the sticking-out-too-far ears and the restless hands.

The boy, this thirteen-year-old, stares at his father’s eyes. The boy’s mouth goes dry, and he is only vaguely aware that he has unraveled the thread binding the little black plastic button on his blazer and that he is now squeezing the button hard between his right thumb and forefinger. Just before he brings this button to his mouth, his hand spasms and the button drops to the carpeted floor.

It occurs to him that he is the only one at the entire funeral service who knows he has dropped this button. Something in that knowledge comforts the boy, as if he has found some safe and hidden haven far away from everyone else—even his father, his mother, his older brother, the cold body of his younger brother, the baby of the family, in the casket at the front of the room. And when he looks over the sea of stoic, hardened, country faces, he feels only slightly less afraid.

Sometimes we go in; sometimes we go out.

In the months following Kyle’s death, I grew sullen and withdrawn. At first there wasn’t anything special about my grief to separate me from Adam or my parents, and even if there had been, no one else in my family was in any frame of mind to notice. It wasn’t that my mother and father became more and more despondent or unavailable since Kyle’s death; it was simply that the both of them, always well-meaning and kind, could not regain the sense of energy and dedication that had defined them as parents prior to this horrible tragedy. There was something lost to them, and they knew not how to get it back.

The little duplex in Eastport closed in on itself like something dark and hibernating or like a corpse withdrawing into a grave. A troubled canyon had formed between the remaining members of the Glasgow family, the distance too great to fill by the time we became aware of its presence.

My mother, who’d been a generous and soulful woman with no further understanding of a life beyond matrimonial domestication than the generations before her, took up religion. She’d drag me to St. Nonnatus every Sunday where we’d sit in a pew that smelled of Pine-Sol and listen to the priest expatiate from the pulpit on the glory of God. This churchgoing lasted just over a year. If it did my mother any good, I couldn’t say. I know it didn’t do me any good, although I’m not quite sure if it was ever meant to. I took this to be some sort of penance for my role in Kyle’s death, but I never said anything about it to my mother.

My father, who’d always been an intimidating physical presence, seemed to grow smaller day by day, some vital bone or organ now broken within him. He reminded me more and more of those rusted old cars on concrete blocks, colorless weeds growing all around him. He became an alcoholic after Kyle’s death and maintained that ungodly and self-deprecating profession until prostate cancer punched his card many years later.

In those final years my memories of the man who had once been athletic, even-tempered, stern but compassionate, an overall good father and husband was even worse than the image of the old car on blocks. He was an indistinct and shapeless imitation of a man slouched in a recliner before the television set, a bottle of Dewar’s on the end table beside his chair, the medicated look of an asylum inmate on his face.

Adam became no more than a stranger to me—another neighborhood kid whom I did not know except to glance at with a sense of vague recognition on the school playground. A stranger whose bedroom was across the hall from mine.

For a short time, my dark, angry secrets were the baby birds I squeezed to death in the nest behind the shed and the ants I stuck to bits of Scotch tape, watching them squirm until they eventually stopped.

There was a small brown frog, too, which hopped out of a mud puddle in the street after a brutally unforgiving rainstorm brought down a number of trees, as well as a telephone line in our neighborhood. I caught the frog and carried him in cupped hands behind the shed in our backyard. I sat on a cord of firewood while the little thing trampolined inside my hands for what must have been hours.

By the time I opened my hands and released the frog, which bounded away through the underbrush, tears streaked my face. My reign of terror over the tiny creatures of my neighborhood was over . . . but left behind in its wake was the hollow ringing of culpability.

Ultimately I became a jumpy, twitchy mess who not only made myself nervous but troubled those around me. Everyone expected me to eventually fall on some jail time, which at different points in my life I probably deserved, but it never came to that. I was in what one therapist termed “the indefinite present,” some sort of constant flux. Ever changing, ever evolving. I thought of silkworms metamorphosing into moths and those fat, greasy pods that burped up phosphorescent green ooze in the movie Gremlins.

I feared Kyle’s vengeful return from the grave. On the eve of his first birthday following his death, I convinced myself he would come for me. Sleep was not to be found that night; I was too wired, sitting up in bed listening for the sounds of bare feet in the hallway and water dripping from his clothes. He would walk into my bedroom, his head smashed and broken, his skin a blasphemous blue green like the mold that grows on bread, and stare at me not with eyes but with black, soulless divots that leaked muddy water down his rotting face.

He’d point one accusatory finger at me as he stood in my doorway in a spreading puddle of dark water. You did this to me, he’d say. You did this to me, Travis. You were my older brother, and it was your job to protect me, but you killed me instead. And now I’m here to take you back with me, take you back beneath the water where you’ll sink into the ground and break apart like broken glass.

I thought, You did this to me. Because when you kill your brother, part of you dies with him.

I began to lock my bedroom door at night. No one cared and no one said anything. On the occasion when my old man would lumber out of bed and stagger drunkenly to the bathroom, my heart would catch in my throat, and a fine film of perspiration would break out across my flesh. I was certain it was Kyle coming for me. Then I would hear the toilet flush, and I’d know I was safe for the time being. But soon . . . soon . . .

My dreams came in a whooshing funnel of kaleidoscopic imagery—of ice-cold water as dark as infinite space; of being suspended indefinitely in the air, unable to fall yet afraid of falling; the dull whack of bone on some solid, invisible surface.

One recurring nightmare had me chased through a maze of slatted wood boards, my freedom glimpsed occasionally through the slats and knotholes in the wood but unreachable just the same. Finally, overcome by fatigue, I would collapse to the ground only to learn that the ground was not solid beneath my feet but instead a miasma of cloud-like steam and quicksand. I struggled but knew it was futile: I was slowly pulled down to my suffocating death, though not by the quicksand but by what felt like tiny hands around my ankles.

That deadness in the house was growing, too—suffocating, nerve-wracking, black as the basement of hell, and about as subtle as an avalanche.

When I hit eighteen, knowing my parents had no legal authority to come after me, I split. What followed was a jigsaw assemblage of snapshot indiscretions better left in the dark. The acquaintances I made during this period of my life looked like something out of central casting for degenerates—leather jackets, vintage seventies shirts with wide collars, tattoos, partially shaved heads beaded with piercings, an overall distrust of anyone even slightly removed from their clique—and I got into a lot of bullshit no one should be proud of. Street fights resulted in black eyes, boxed ears, and a semiserious laceration along my left bicep from a hypersensitive stranger’s reflexive swipe of a butterfly knife.

I spent nights sleeping on benches in metro stations, certain that every midnight footfall was my dead brother coming to claim me. You did this to me. But in the end none of that mattered because I was in the infinite present, a silkworm undergoing permanent transformation, a stream snaking down a mountain in search of a river. Find a river. Find an ocean.

As it turned out, the ocean happened to be my childhood home, for I returned there visibly defeated after only a few months living in the streets on my own. My mother cried and hugged me, then hurried off to the kitchen to prepare me a warm meal. My father, his presence forever an imposing one even in the face of the weakness that had claimed him since Kyle’s death, examined me in thunderous silence, his expression one of complete and utter resignation. Adam, who’d been away at college when I took off, was there when I returned.

It was over Christmas break, and my mother had strung up a few decorations in the front hall. Adam and I were both old enough and proud enough to maintain mutual distaste for each other. I kept telling myself he would say something to me—how disappointed he was in me for running away like a coward, how much he hated me for worrying our mother sick, anything—but he said nothing the entire break. He left with my father in the family Chrysler very early one morning to return to college.

Through the front windows I watched him go, my face burning and red, my eyes welling with tears. Adam played football, got good grades, and wanted to be a police officer. I had murdered our younger brother, then saddled what remained of our crumbling family with my emotional baggage. What could we possibly say to each other?

Sometimes we go in, the therapist once told me. Sometimes we go out. You’re in a state of constant flux, Travis. You need to cast an anchor and hold on to something before you can change direction. What is it you’re always writing in those notebooks?

Sometimes we go in; sometimes we go out.

Because homelessness was not something I desired, I completed two years at the community college where I wended through my classes with the enthusiasm of a zombie. Surprisingly, I got good grades. This earned me nonspecific commendation from my father, a zombie in his own right, and he paid my way through my two remaining years at Towson. My heart wasn’t in it, yet my grades were always good, and I graduated with honors.

(My only memories of Towson are the nights of excessive drinking with my roommate, a flagrant homosexual with spiky blue hair and horrendous breath; vomiting in the bathroom for hours on end until I thought my esophagus was probably swirling around in the sewer pipes somewhere; and attending classes in bedroom slippers and the same stinking sweatshirt for much of the week—a stunt that earned me tortured-artist status among the liberals, making it possible for me to bed a few fairly attractive if not meticulously groomed girls from the liberal arts college. One of whom, I believe, eventually became a lesbian.)

Somewhere down the line I’d settled into a state of semicomplacence. It turned out those notebooks were filled with dozens of stories I’d written, and once I’d left college and moved out of the Eastport duplex for good, I rewrote a number of them and began to get them published.

What was it Fitzgerald had once written in a letter? Something about all good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath? Well, this was true. I’d written The Ocean Serene, the novel about Kyle, and it was published as well. That was when I was living in Georgetown and dating Jodie and, for the first time in a long time, felt a glimmer of hope for my future. My writing was not only therapeutic; it was absolution. I was finally putting old ghosts to rest. (Sleep, old spirit, though I know you still hunger!)

My relationship with Adam became tolerable, even civil, and we spoke regularly on the telephone. Kyle was an unspoken presence standing in the room with us each time we were together, which was not very often. When Adam married Beth, I was his best man. I visited when both his children were born. Together we laid our father to rest after a brief battle with prostate cancer, and Adam was my best man at my own wedding the following year. Yet all the while that damnable therapist’s voice resonated in my head—You need to cast an anchor and hold on to something before you can change direction—and because I’d never cast that proverbial anchor, I eventually struck an iceberg on the night of my mother’s funeral.

Due to the amount of alcohol I’d consumed that evening, coupled with my own personal desire to wipe as much of the memory of the event out of my head, I am only able to recall bits and pieces of what transpired between Adam and me. What I do remember, I only wish I could forget.

It happened at Adam’s house. We’d both been drinking, though I was the only one drunk. I opened my mouth and made a foolish comment about three-fifths of our family being dead and buried, then turned on Adam without provocation and accused him of blaming me for Kyle’s death. Speechless, Adam could only shake his head. I motored on, bawling while shouting at him. I’d killed our brother after all. I just wanted to hear Adam say he blamed me, needed to hear it. Instead, he reached out to embrace me. Yet my addled mind transposed his attempt to hug me as a threat, and I swung a clumsy fist at him, striking him in the eye.

Jodie and Beth shouted simultaneously. Somewhere in another dimension, a dish fell to the floor and shattered. I swung again, much steadier this time, and even through my drunken stupor felt the solidity of my older brother’s jaw against my knuckles. Then I felt his fist against my face, the force of it knocking me to the floor, his hulking shape—our father’s?—looming before me, blurred by my tears.

Jodie peeled me off the floor while Beth called me a piece of shit and told me to get the hell out of her house. I threw a drinking glass across the room and heard the children in their bedrooms start crying.

Jodie ushered me out into the cold night, a firm hand against the small of my back. I staggered as if in a fever. She said things into my ear as we headed to the car, although I can recall none of them and I probably wasn’t even listening to her. Similarly, I remember nothing of the drive back to our apartment.

I spent the next two weeks at the bottom of the world. Overcome by obsession, I thought about Kyle and trembled under the weight of my own guilt. With the dedication of someone newly possessed, I scribbled furious entries in my notebooks and smoked cigarettes like a longshoreman. I quit changing my clothes, which was no longer considered artistic as it had been in college.

My guilt was a pool in which I was drowning . . . though to suggest I was drowning elicits visuals of flailing arms and shouts of help. That was not me. I drowned in my grief with grotesque acceptance, like the captain of a ship who sinks with obligation to the ocean floor, tethered through sacrifice and commitment to the ship that drags him down. Something suggestive of fever claimed me—I let it claim me—and I spent several days in bed, muddy-eyed and swaying back and forth, at least spiritually, like a cattail in the wind. I feared Jodie would leave me. She didn’t, but my depression seemed to weaken her, too. Two weeks later, by the time I returned to some semblance of normalcy, there was an unspoken fatigue that had run its course through both of us like some strain of illness undiagnosed.

I would not speak with Adam again until much, much later, well after Jodie and I had moved across the Atlantic to North London.

Sometimes we go in; sometimes we go out.