Floating Staircase(2)

Over the phone, I tried to sound as casual as possible. “Wanted to see if Mr. Sharpe would have better luck in the publishing department than I’ve had. I guess he does.”

But that wasn’t the truth.

I couldn’t tell him that I needed to distance myself from it while at the same time I also needed to embrace it. It would make no sense. To me, it seemed a stranger was better prepared to introduce my dead brother’s story to the world than I was. A nonexistent stranger at that. Because I was biased. Because I could not detach myself from it, and to not detach myself from it would be to corrupt the story’s honesty into loathsome self-pity. And I would not allow that to happen.

Because all good books are honest books.

I celebrated with friends, who bought me shots of gasohol and tried to get me laid despite my recent (though undisclosed) intention to finally propose to my longtime girlfriend, Jodie Morgan, and then I celebrated alone with a full pack of cigarettes, a flask of Wild Turkey, and a stroll around Georgetown. Perhaps out of a need for affirmation, I found myself outside one of the neighborhood bars in D.C., punching numbers on a pay phone. It rang several times before my older brother, Adam, picked up.

“I think I just wrote a book about Kyle,” I said, drunk, into the receiver.

“Well, it’s about goddamn time, bud,” Adam said, and I felt myself grow wings and lift off the pavement.

On occasion I found my mind sliding back to that late autumn when I sat and smoked and wrote about my younger brother’s death. I remembered the change of seasons predicated by the changes of the leaves in the trees; the windswept, rain-soaked nights that smelled swampy and full of promise; the retinal fatigue suffered from hours of staring at the throbbing glow of my monitor. It was the only thing I’d ever written that caused me to suffer from sleepless exhaustion. I roved with the flair of a zombie through the streets late at night and subsisted in a state of near catatonia while at my day job as a copy editor for The Washington Post (making just enough money to stave off my landlord while maintaining a sufficient stockpile of ramen noodles and National Bohemian).

One evening found me dodging traffic on the corner of 14th and Constitution in downtown D.C., the solitary pedestrian caught in a freezing downpour, until I wound up drunk and with my teeth rattling like maracas in my skull at the foot of the Washington Monument. I proclaimed to the phallic structure, “I will eat you,” a phrase that to this day still boggles the mind, whether spoken to a stone monument or otherwise. Then I saluted it and, pivoting on my heels, turned across the lawn toward 14th Street. The series of events that eventually returned me to my apartment that evening remain a question for the ages.

The book was my gift to Kyle, but the writing of it was my punishment; the hours spent curled over that word processor hammering out the story were my penance. Having never been a religious person—having no belief in God or any variation thereof—it was all I had. And in thinking back on that time, I was reminded of the exhaustion that accompanied every moment.

I was thirteen when Kyle died.

And it was my fault.





CHAPTER TWO

We hit flurries coming out of New York, but by the time we crossed into Maryland, the world had vanished beneath a blanket of white. Baltimore was a muddy blur. Industrial ramparts and graffiti-laden billboards seemed overcome by a deathly gray fatigue. Bone-colored smokestacks rose like medieval prison towers, the tops of which were eradicated by the blizzard, and cars began pulling off onto the shoulder in a flare of hesitant red taillights and emergency flashers.

“We should stop, Travis,” Jodie said. She was hugging herself in the passenger seat and peering through the icy soup that sluiced across the windshield.

“The shoulder’s too narrow. I don’t want to risk someone running into us.”

“Can you even see anything?”

The windshield wipers were clacking to a steady beat, but the temperature had dropped low enough for ice to bloom in stubborn patches on the windshield. I cranked the defroster, and the old Honda coughed and groaned, then belched fetid hot breath up from the dashboard. With it came the vague aroma of burning gym socks, which caused Jodie to rock back in her seat and moan.

“I hope this isn’t an omen,” she said. “A bad sign.”

“I don’t believe in omens.”

“That’s because you have no sense of irony.”

“Turn the radio on,” I told her.

The snowstorm didn’t let up until Charm City was a cold sodium smear in the rearview mirror. Two hours after that, as the car chugged west along an increasingly depopulated highway, the sky opened up and radiated with the clear silver of midday. We motored on through an undulating countryside of snow-covered fields. Houses began to vanish, and telephone poles surrendered to shaggy firs overburdened with fresh snow. The alternative rock station Jodie had found back in Baltimore crackled with the lethargic twang of country music.

Jodie switched off the radio and examined the road map that was splayed out in her lap. “What mountains are those up ahead?”

“Allegheny.”

With only the faint colorless summits rising out of the mist, they resembled the arched backs of brontosauruses.

“Lord. Westlake’s not even on the map.” She glanced out the window. “I’ll bet there’s not another living soul out there for the next twenty, thirty miles.”