Authors: Douglas F. Warrick
I remember my mother’s room (formerly my parents’ room, before the great theatricizing of the basement) in the attic, and how it was always oppressively hot and stuffy, and how she left the lights off and played Solitaire on her computer. I remember her keyboard in the corner, and the stacks of yellowed sheet music on the carpet beside it. I remember the red leather suitcase full of old photographs she kept in her closet. My mother, who is dead. Who had the same look in her eyes that my father described in his autobiography when I said to her, “I’m moving out, Mom. I’m taking my college money and I’m moving to California.”
My mom, with her beautiful curly blonde hair, whose secret was out, who shot silent apologies to me with every stare, who always seemed afraid that the floor would open up and swallow her.
I sat on the piano bench and she sat at her computer and we didn’t say anything for a long time after that. The slope of the roof granted strange corners to the attic, odd alcoves where shadows gathered too thickly. You couldn’t sit up there and look at someone without your eyes wandering to those too–dark shadows, distracted by the strangeness and the movement of the little voids scattered across the room like rain puddles. Or maybe you could have. But I couldn’t.
“Oh, baby,” she said, which is what she always called me when I was making her sad, or reminding her of how sad she already was (so many people gave me so many names; they have attached themselves to me like ticks as I passed, and I have never been able to burn off a single one of them). “Oh, my baby. My baby boy. You can’t. You can’t go.”
“I can,” I said. “I have to.” I was eighteen then, and everything in my life had gone wrong. Fir was leaving, ripping a hole in the suburban Midwest and disappearing through it, going to some university in Vancouver, pre–med major, women’s studies minor. She never ended up going, opting instead for the same local community college I eventually attended, but back then we both felt she was already practically gone. My mother had convinced my father to take his own extramarital partner (I have to struggle for her name now, the poor psychotic, suicidal girl… Leanna… Leanna of the scarred arms and the pixie haircut and the darting, trustless eyes), and she skulked around the basement looking bored and manic while he ignored her in his relic–filled office. My sister had married (for the first time but not the last, as it turned out; we mirrored each other romantically, my sister and I, with our double–marriages and our double–divorces; she’s on her third now, having transformed herself again, this time into a woman of faith and modesty and silence) and disappeared, leaving me in the house with my parents and their lovers and their hauntedness. The house. Oh, the house. The house, which no longer felt to me like a collapsing lung, but like a tendon stretched on the rack and about to snap.
I could. I had to.
My mother shook her head and didn’t let go of the tears that I could hear in her throat. She said, “No, baby. No, you can’t.”
Norton stepped out of the shadows behind her, like a stagehand sneaking out from behind the curtain. He did this often, stepping out of corners like the house had just vomited him up out of its walls. He put a proprietary hand on my mom’s shoulder and used the other hand to straighten his paisley bowtie. He looked at me, and my mother looked away. Looking at his eyes was like looking at the painted sockets of a department store mannequin given animation, unaware and unconcerned with its actions or the consequences thereof. Poor, oblivious, passively evil Norton. Norton, the dream who stuck around after my mother’s eyes fluttered open one morning, who only knew how to look human, not how to be one. He smoothed down his horseshoe mustache and said, “Let me explain, Dean.”
My mother whispered, “No. It should be me.” But Norton’s eyes never left mine, and he did not pause to let her speak.
“There is no college money,” he said. “We needed it. Our family is… struggling, Dean, and sometimes when your family is struggling, you need to make sacrifices. All of us have made sacrifices. Your mother, your father, myself. We all give things up to keep our world turning. You understand, don’t you, tiger?”
“I have some money,” I said, stinging, numb. “I have some in my account. Enough to get there, at least.”
My mom shook her head and chewed on her knuckles.
Norton licked his lips and said, “You mean the joint account your mother opened for you?” He did a broad pantomime of regret, shrugging, rubbing his fingers together and then blowing on the tips. Gone.
I should have said something.
I ran down the stairs to the kitchen, and then through it to the basement, past Leanna, who sat on the bed in my father’s false apartment, running her fingernails over her naked knees and waiting for him to pay attention to her. She called, “Deany, can you tell your dad to come out? I just, I need, I mean, I need, I need, I guess I need to talk to him, and I need it really bad, so Deany, tell him to come? Deany? Deany, tell him, okay? Deany?” On and on like that, as I swung the secret wall aside and made my way down the dark corridor to my father’s office. Pleading for someone to look at her. For someone to save her.
My father tells me Leanna killed herself last year. Nearly fifteen years after my father said goodbye and sent her out into the world, she wrote his name on her bathroom mirror and taped a picture of him beneath it, and she swallowed a great deal of medication and went to sleep in her bathtub with a bag over her head. She could do that, because she was real. She was damaged and sad and toxic, but she wasn’t fiction. She had that going for her.
My father was playing with a doll when I stormed in and slammed the door. He glanced at me over the rims of his half–moon glasses. He said, “Hey, Lieutenant.”
“Goddamn it,” I said. I remember that I said it because I had heard him say it, and because when he said it, it sounded masculine and final. From his mouth, my intellectual father, it was both a sentence and its own punctuation. It was a magic word. From mine, it was lifeless and phony, and even more so when I tried again. “Goddamn it,” I said. “Goddamn it.”
He held up the doll for me to see it. It was a clown with a brown pork–pie hat, with white lips curled into an abysmal, accepting frown, with a painted–on five–o–clock–shadow, with a torn brown suit and a crumpled polka–dot tie and gigantic plastic shoes.
My father said, “Good old Emmett.”
I began to shout about mom and Norton and the crushing weight of this place, and how I had to leave, how if I didn’t I was sure this house would kill me, and my dad put a finger to his lips. He said, “Come on, Lieutenant, let’s not waste our precious time on that shit.” He glanced at the clown–doll, held its neck between his thumb and forefinger and wiggled its head at me. He said, “I found him. My god, I finally found him. My Emmett Kelly doll. Emmett used to sit on my dresser when I was a kid. He used to mortify me. Absolutely scared me shitless.” He looked at the doll with naked amazement, an open–mouthed awe. It made me hopeful and filled me with impotent anger. I stood before him with my arms out at my sides, fingers splayed. I wished I felt like he looked. He said, “Good old Emmett. Now he’s come back home.”
“Dad,” I said, “everything is so fucked up.”
“Come on,” he said, “Let me read you my new chapter.”
Here is what he read to me:
The Last Time I Saw Emmett Kelly
On the night my son was born, I stood outside of the hospital at the roundabout in front of the emergency room and watched the ambulances pull up to the door and wheel out the injured and the dying. Mostly, all I did was smoke cigarettes. I knew that the awful adventure of my life had caught up to me again, because so many of the injured were freaks. An incredibly gorgeous woman in a satin negligee with a beard down to her navel was wheeled in with third–degree burns crawling up her legs. A midget with the extra, vestigial mouth of an absorbed twin on his left cheek hobbled through the doors cradling the severed stumps of several fingers in a blood–soaked wad of toilet paper. The tattooed man was DOA. During all of this, I was visited by Emmett Kelly. The real Emmett Kelly, not the doll that haunted my bedroom in Tarzana as a child. He was in full “Weary Willie” regalia, and at least three feet taller than me, and nobody else could see him. I asked him how my children could escape this, how I could avoid infecting them with it, and he shook his head and said, “They can’t. You can’t.” We sang the song of the twenty–eight–knuckled hands together for a while, quietly so that nobody else would have to hear, and then I went inside and met my beautiful son, bloody and terrified from his arrival, for the first time.
I have moved back into the old house. My mother is dead (in the basement shower, although God knows what she was doing down there; she slipped, and she bashed her head on the edge of the tub, and therefore became my dead mom; no dramatic death hers, no scene from my father’s autobiography; stupid, empty, over in a moment). The house is paid for, and I can’t afford the rent in Boston anymore because my father made me a poet and, unless you’re selling psychic tongues or fighting secret wars, it doesn’t pay well.
Fir helped me move in two weeks ago. Then she left for Iran. She’s still beautiful, and she still smokes those Iranian cigarettes, although her nose ring is gone. She showed me the ghost of our tower, which is buried underneath a housing development called “Caribou Run.” I tried to kiss her before she left, and she pushed me away gently and said, “What are you doing?” and I retreated from her, into my father’s fake basement apartment. I have not left that place much since then.
I have found my father’s autobiography. And I have found good old Emmett. I don’t think my father knows I have either of them. Today, I sat in the basement and read the entire manuscript, and then I tied it back together with the red ribbon in which I found it. And I set Emmett Kelly on the dresser across from my bed. And now all that’s left here is me. And I don’t know any magic and all the secrets I ever had that mattered have been spilled or spoiled. This house is dreadfully unhaunted.
I went into my mother’s attic, and I left the lights off, and I shouted for Norton until my voice was gone. He never came out of the shadows, and I wonder if he’s still here at all or if the house has forgotten the poem it composed for my mother. I imagine him watching her die, down there in the basement, stroking his horseshoe mustache and licking his lips and waiting for the last of her brain activity to sputter out so he could fade back into the woodwork and become part of the house again.
What I’ve just done is this: I pulled out the red leather suitcase, and I stared at our photographs. There is one of my father in his bathing suit on their honeymoon, staring back at the camera through his sunglasses and smiling over his shoulder. He’s got a tattoo across his shoulder blades, a scrawl of cursive letters spelling out French words. It shouts at me, my father’s tattoo, from across decades, from a world before I, begging me to know it, to understand it, to translate it and inherit it. But I don’t know any French, and the handwriting is small and spidery, so all I can do is stare at my dad, smiling at my dead mother’s camera. At me. And breathe in whatever ghosts might be left over.
…SEE THIS THING… DANNY WANTS to call it a man, but that’s not really what it is anymore. He pokes it with the narrow end of the broken branch and when the gnarled stick breaks through his — its — purple skin, he has a real motherfucker of a time breathing.
“Jesus.”
He swallows, rubs at the barely–there baby–stubble on his jaw, forces himself to blink. He pushes a little harder on his end of the stick. Watches it bend, hears it creak like maybe it’s about to snap in two, and then watches the small patch of ruined skull crumble.
“Oh. Oh shit.”
The wind blows. The scrawny grey trees on either side of the culvert dance. Their shadows are so dark down here that they erase whatever is beneath them. Down here, shadows turn into black holes.
Adam isn’t far away. He’s standing there on the sloping concrete embankment rubbing his forearm. He’s got the joint pinched tight between his thumb and forefinger. His eyes dance in double–time, spotlighting each shadowy corner of the drainage ditch. He says, “Danny, we should go,” and his voice is high and fragile. He says, “We should call the cops.”
Danny leans a little closer. Works the stick deeper. He can feel his pulse in his ears. He pulls it out. Studies it. He smiles, and he thinks he shouldn’t be smiling, and that makes him smile wider.
“Oh, dude,” he says. “I think this is his brain.”
Adam looks up and Danny watches those dancing eyes of his lock on the dark scrap dangling from the stick’s end. He turns, bends at the waist, says, “I’m not going to throw up,” and then throws up anyway.
Danny hears himself mumble, “You all right?” but he doesn’t mean it. This is exactly what Danny has been waiting for. This is the gaping window into… what? Into the big UnWorld, the slippery space beneath. This right here, a bloated naked body, some guy drowned in the sewers and washed into a ditch. This is what Danny’s whole life has pointed toward.
Somewhere up above them, a car crosses over the asphalt above the drainage pipe. The pipe eats the sound of it and belches it back out into the culvert, louder now and with teeth it didn’t have before. Danny feels his scalp tingle. He can’t smile wide enough.
“I want to go home,” says Adam. “Somebody ought to call the cops.”
That dark little mess on the end of the stick. Man. Just — wow.
You remember that feeling? I do. I think we all do.
Adam says, “Danny?”
And then he says, “Jesus, Danny, please?”
So Danny rolls his eyes. He jabs the stick back into the dead man’s head. It sticks there like a lightning rod. He says, “Fine.” And they climb back up the slope.
His car is waiting, the ’86 Volvo with a backseat caked in fast food wrappers and Mountain Dew bottles, that old rubber skeleton left over from Halloween and hanging from the rearview. Somehow the skeleton embarrasses him now. Danny feels like he’s wasting his time on it. It’s like, you think you know what macabre means. You think EC Comics reprints and Texas Chainsaw action figures are pointing you in the right direction. Then you see the real thing and everything else seems stupid by comparison.