Floating Staircase(11)
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.