The Truth Commission (3 page)

A Word About My Sister

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I'm not that keen to get into it, but this story would be incomplete without one major piece of background. As many people already know, I have a sister. She's a famous graphic novelist and, to make a long story extremely short, she made me and my parents famous without our permission. The end.

Ha. Just kidding.

My sister, Keira Pale, is one of those people who seems to exist on a different plane. Maybe it's an artistic genius thing. G. P. Academy is full of people like Keira. People who go so deep inside themselves, especially when they're working, that they seem like sleepwalkers when they emerge. Traces of unconsciousness seem to cling to them, lending them an otherworldly sheen.

I can't tell you how many times I was sent to find Keira when it was time to eat/go to bed/graduate from high school only to find her deep in conversation with the neighborhood can collector, or out in the backyard staring intently at the moon at 3:30 in the morning, or watching some drama unfold between warring ants in the school parking lot twenty minutes after the bell rang. I believe the technical term is “space cadet.”

But she is the kind of space cadet many people aspire to be. My sister is fully alive to each moment and each observation.

When I was younger, living with Keira was like living with a fairy. It was never her intention to be hurtful or destructive. She was just doing what came naturally to her. Telling stories and turning the lives around her into fantastical creations. It wasn't personal. Or so I kept telling myself, even after my sister started publishing her books.

Backstory Alert!
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My sister's complicated, so I think the only way to help you understand her is through what we learned in class is called an infodump. Dear Reader: steel yourself for a taste of death by exposition.
17

My sister was part of the first group of kids who went through the Green Pastures Academy of Art and Applied Design. As a tenth grader, she'd already begun to write, illustrate, and self-publish installments of her graphic novel series, the Diana Chronicles.

The first volume is called
Diana: Queen of Two Worlds
. Diana, the protagonist, is a suburban girl who lives with her “painfully average” family, which includes her high-strung, easily overwhelmed mother, her ineffectual father, and her dull-witted, staring lump of a sister. Diana, who looks a lot like my sister, also happens to be the queen of Vermeer, a more beautiful or at least more melodramatic alternate universe named after my sister's favorite painter. Vermeer can only be accessed through a closet.
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In Vermeer, everything is the same as on Earth but amplified a hundredfold. In Vermeer, Diana's mother is politically and emotionally manipulative and
Game of Thrones
all over the place to keep the family in power. Diana's father is still unaccomplished, but he's also unscrupulous and has a passion for exotic foodstuffs and inappropriate relationships with half the household staff (male and female), as well as several of his first cousins. In Vermeer, as on Earth, Diana is burdened with a flaccid and enormous blob of a sister who is the target of every villain who passes through town. The sister (Flanders) is the especial favorite of cads and rakes who want to align themselves with the House of Vermeer.

In Vermeer, Diana has to keep her family from imploding due to their own stupidity, avarice, and laziness. It's a matter of multiverse importance. If the House of Vermeer falls, Vermeer will descend into war (always likely). Vermeer is Earth's twin, which means that as Vermeer goes, so does the Earth. Or something. I've always gotten a little tripped up on that part of the story.

The Diana Chronicles are funny and complicated and ironic. Diana's a bit of a bitch in both universes. She's rude to her family and half checked out, partly because she's so exhausted by the demands placed on her in Vermeer, where she spends half her time. She needs to be left alone to recuperate when she's in the Earth realm, but her mundane Earth family keeps interrupting. They sense her specialness and want a part of it.

The first chapters of the Diana Chronicles were photocopied and sold online and stocked in a few specialty stores. It gained an instant and devoted following. The combination of extremely personal stuff about Diana's life on Earth and the over-the-top violence and politicking in Vermeer made it hugely compelling to a lot of people. Her agent, Sylvia Kalfas, discovered her and got her a book deal with Viceroy, who put the chapters together into Volume 1. The money from that first book deal, which was serious, went into a trust administered by Sylvia and my parents until Keira turned twenty. The
Los Angeles Times
called the first Chronicle “groundbreaking and hilarious.” The
Globe and Mail
said the “combination of autobiography and fantasy make it an intoxicating entertainment.” The
Guardian
said it was “wildly inventive.” Readers couldn't get enough. People mentioned
Maus
, which is what people always talk about when they talk about massively popular graphic novels. (The Chronicles have less than nothing to do with
Maus
. Just to be clear.)

Keira had published three Chronicles by the time she left for college, which was the same year I entered Green Pastures. Each new Chronicle was more popular than the last.

This is probably the time to bring up the fact that Diana's family members look
a lot
like me and my mother and father. They are exaggerated versions, but identifiable. Of all of us, I'm the most deformed. The sister character is called Flanders (in a not-so-subtle reference to the fact that I was named after a famous World War battleground), and nicknamed the Flounder because she looks sort of like an obese, blank-faced flounder fish. I was a chubby kid, but I've lost most of my baby fat. I am not enormous and I am not dull-witted, not unless I'm really tired. In other words, we are ordinary people who have been made to look extraordinary, and not in a good way.

You cannot imagine how embarrassing it is to be in those books, especially when all the Earth plotlines are taken from minor and usually un-excellent incidents in our real life. The plots hit Vermeer and go so over the top, it's almost impossible to remember where they started.

Man, this chapter is getting long. And exhausting. Possibly also boring. But I'm not quite done.

Further background fact: I have never before spoken to anyone outside my family about how I feel about our depiction in my sister's books. To be honest, we've never really discussed it
inside
my family, either. Breaking that long-standing silence is really taking it out of me.

My parents have always treated Keira like a rare and delicate houseplant they aren't quite sure how to care for. There's a good reason for that. She's like a rare and delicate houseplant they aren't sure how to care for.

End of backstory! Finally!

xxxxx

At the time I'm writing about, things had gotten strange at home.
Strange
is the wrong word.
Bad
. That's better.

After she graduated from Green Pastures, Keira took a year and a half off to write and draw the third Chronicle and bask in her ever-growing success. Then she went off to the most prestigious art and animation school in North America, CIAD—the California Institute of Art and Design.

Meanwhile, I, Keira's younger sister, Normandy Pale, started grade ten at G. P. on a partial scholarship. Keira had said she wanted to help out our parents by paying off the mortgage and covering some of my tuition, but things hadn't worked out on that front so far.

When I first got to school, I was semi-famous thanks to my sister's books. Everyone assumed that I was the staring blob from the Chronicles, the hapless target of pervs and leeches, even though I wasn't particularly big and didn't stare much more than anyone else.

Soon people realized I was deadly average, and I settled in and met my two friends—who just happened to be my first friends, really. With Keira away, life at home got simpler. She had always required a lot of quiet when she was working, so my parents and I had to tiptoe around. Strangers threw her off, so we didn't invite anyone over. Now we could do potentially embarrassing things and not have them end up in a book. It was pretty much a halcyon time.

Then, without warning, Keira came home at the beginning of April, not long after she turned twenty. She arrived in her white 1987 Crown Victoria, which looks disconcertingly like an unmarked police car.

She wouldn't tell us what happened, and when my parents asked if everything was okay, Keira got mad and said she'd leave if they asked again. So they dropped it. We're not really discussers in my family. After all, who wants to rip open a bunch of scar tissue to expose the abscess beneath? Not that I mean to compare my sister to an abscess. She is more like an inheritance.

Imagine someone gives you an incredibly valuable and famous gem. You can't sell it. Your only job is to look after it. Now imagine your behavior can ruin the value of that gem. If you talk too loud or watch TV, you can tarnish it or crack it. Finally, take the next step and imagine that the gem you inherited likes to tell stories about what happens in the house where you are already trying to be extra careful so you won't wreck the gem. Okay. That's enough. The gem analogy has officially fallen apart.

Anyway, in September, at the time our story begins, my sister was even less right than usual. She rarely left her room or our closet. When she did leave, she stayed out for days and we had no idea where she went. My mother turned nearly catatonic with concern, and my dad fussed around trying to distract himself. I concentrated on not making things worse. In other words, I made myself an extra unobtrusive presence. Caused no waves. Went to school. Did my work. When Keira was home, we tried not to upset her.

We were all just waiting for her to tell us what was wrong and what had happened at school.

The afternoon of the first truth telling, I went home and found Keira in our closet. For those who follow her career, it's true: she actually does work in a closet that we share. We each have a door to it, but she's the only one who uses the space.

You probably want a visual of her, to help you digest all this dry, dusty exposition. So here goes:

Keira has wild, two-toned hair (dark brown and silvery blonde) and dark circles under her eyes. There are photos of her as a toddler that show that, even then, she had dark circles under her eyes. She is a wisp of a person, and after she started making money and visiting New York on publishing business, she started buying all of her clothes from a store in SoHo called 45 RPM. They specialize in handwoven fabrics cut into simple shapes that make anyone over a hundred pounds look frumpy and anyone under a hundred pounds look like she stepped out of a clamshell on an enchanted beach. Keira owns about fifteen garments in total. Her look is based on white cotton smocks and eleven-hundred-dollar jeans made from Zimbabwean cotton and hand-dyed by Japanese artisans. Her feet are almost always bare or encased in delicate ballet slippers.

These clothes are not very warm, so I often open my closet to find her wearing one of my sweaters. Sometimes two. It's funny that she sometimes borrows my clothes, since I'm not noted for the excellence of my wardrobe.

In another story, this closet dwelling would be a heavy-handed sign that my sister has repressed sexual urges. She does not.
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She says she likes to situate herself at the “portal.” She's turned that portal, AKA our shared closet, into a beautifully appointed art studio. She had excellent lighting installed, and she sits cross-legged on a special meditation seat, at a custom drafting lap desk she designed and built.

When she first started working in our closet, I asked if she wanted me to keep the door on my side locked, so she could have it all to herself. She said no. She said she found it comforting to have me close-by. I was ten, and my hero worship of my sister was at an all-time high. Now I'm stuck with no closet, which means that I have to keep my clothes in a cupboard in my room.

When I walked into my bedroom that afternoon, I could hear her humming as she worked. Having Keira at work in the closet meant I'd have to be very quiet all night, but having her at home meant my mom would be less worried. So that was good.

“Keira,” I said after I gently knocked, then opened the door. “How's it going?”

“I'm fine,” she said. “Working.”

So I quietly closed the door, picked up my needlework and schoolbag, and left. I would do homework for an hour or two, followed by a little writing, and then work on my embroidery until it was time for bed. There are few arts quieter than writing and stitching.

And that, folks, is a glimpse at life with my sister.

I would end this too-long chapter there, except I can't.

Because at midnight that same night, Keira left the closet and came into my room.