by Robert Pobi
The brilliant Jacob Coleridge was losing the core reactor in his head was the hardest thing for Frank to fathom. Jacob had been a fixture in his life since the day their cell had divided, before he had become a husband or a father or a painter, and the one continuous fiber that ran through all the stages of their lives had been Jacob’s genius. Technically, Frank knew that cell for cell they possessed the same gray matter, but he had lived long enough to know that technicalities didn’t count for shit in the practical world; a show on the Discovery Channel had NASA engineers mathematically prove that technically speaking, bumblebees couldn’t fly. So in a genetic sleight of hand, Jacob had ended up with more than a fair share of that indefinable quality called talent. But Frank had never been jealous of his brother’s gifts in anything except Mia.
Mia.
Her name was still a dull ache in his chest. He had never told Jacob. Or Mia. He had, in fact, believed that it had been his only secret from his brother. But one night a few years after she had been murdered, Jacob, in one of his highball-fueled diatribes, had spat it out, like some poisonous tumor rotting in his stomach, and Frank had been forced to confront his brother. He had lied, shaken his head, denied, denied, denied. But Jacob had been relentless and had lost his temper, smashing his knuckles into the table, then into the wall, then into Frank’s face. That had been the end for them.
Frank looked down at his twin brother, strapped into the bed, medicated, small, asleep, and wondered why this opera was being carried out. “What do I tell them?” The only sound was the soft rasp of Jacob’s breathing and the hum of the fluorescent bulb.
His voice sounded serious in here, solemn, and he reached out and touched his brother’s foot through the blanket. For a brief second, he hoped that good wishes and the best of intentions could be transmitted through the waffled cloth. He squeezed Jacob’s foot, warm and stiff under the yellow shroud, then withdrew his touch. Jacob’s head moved on the pillow and he tried to lift one of his arms. The buckle clinked. And his eyes popped open, gleaming sickly in the yellow light that dropped down from the fixture hanging over the bed.
Jacob licked his lips and his eyes swung halfway across the room, from the window he had been facing, to his brother standing at the foot of the bed. Their eyes met and Frank realized that their lives had gone by, that most of the sand had dropped to the lower bout of the hourglass.
“Frank?” Jacob said tentatively, as if he didn’t trust his own judgment.
“Yes, Jacob, it’s me.”
Jacob looked around the room like a drunk waking up in an alley, not sure how he got there. “Frank,” he said again, and tried to move his arm. The belts and buckles holding him in tightened and he swiveled his head and glared at the straps. Then he looked at the spiderweb of nylon harnessing him in. “Frank, what the fuck is going on?”
Frank’s face split into a broad grin because he knew his brother was lucid. “Hospital, pal.”
“You here to spring me?” His eyes focused on the big clubs at the ends of his wrists. His face grew puzzled, then angry, like a character in a science fiction movie who wakes in a lab to find that his hands have been replaced with giant lobster claws. “And what the fu—” The sentence stopped short and he sucked in a long breath. “Oh, God. The fire. The window.” He tried to move his leg, his other arm. “Frank, can you undo some of these buckles?”
“The last time you were free you chewed off your bandages and painted a picture on the wall in your own blood. If I unleash you, you gotta stay put.”
Jacob’s face went red, only under the yellow light it came through as a sickly pink. “Jesus fucking goddamned Christ, Frank. Unbuckle me or cut these fucking straps or get the fuck out of here.”
Any other time, any other place, without having heard everything that Jake had laid out back at the house, he would have taken the old Ka-Bar out of its sheath and cut his brother free. But with everything he knew, everything he had been warned about, it took him a few seconds to make up his mind. “Fine. But keep it together.”
“Or?”
“Or the nurse is going to come back in here and shoot enough tranquilizers into your ass that they’ll be able to remove your brain with a vacuum cleaner and you won’t even notice. We clear?”
Jacob glared with the two pieces of flint he was using for eyes.
Frank undid the restraints at his brother’s feet and wrists, leaving the loop that shackled his waist fastened so that he wouldn’t be able to get out of the bed; the pineapple-sized knobs at the ends of his arms made undoing any buckles impossible.
Jacob stretched, brought one of his former hands up to his face, and rubbed his eyebrow and cheek like a bear scratching against a tree. The stitches sticking out of the antibiotic ointment made a soft rasping sound against the fabric. “How bad are my hands?” His voice was clear, but there was a slight slur to it, no doubt from the painkillers going into him one dull drop at a time.
“You want me to get the doctor?”
Jacob let out a long irritated sigh. “If I wanted you to get me a doctor, I’d have asked you to. What I want is for you to tell me how my fucking hands are.”
“Not good, Jacob. You burned most of the flesh away and the musculature and mechanics are gone. You’ll need prosthetics but chances are you won’t get them because you’re barely lucid and you’ve been violent.”
Jacob’s eyes drilled into Frank and his jaw clenched up, the cables under the skin tightening like a fist. “You’re certainly cheery.”
Frank thought about the bloody portrait and the screaming and panic and fear. “The doctor’s think that it’s Alzheimer’s,” he said flatly.
For a second there was flicker of black electricity in the dark behind Jacob’s eyes. “Yeah? Well, even the eggheads with the diplomas get it wrong, Little Brother.” The current hit the corners of his mouth and they twitched a few times, then went dead.
“Jacob, look, I don’t know how long you’re going to be—” he paused, searched his head for the right word, and settled on—“yourself. And we’ve got some problems. I need some answers.”
His eyes narrowed. “We? We, who?”
Frank knew the story of the two Jacobs from the beginning. He had been a spectator in the great Coleridge saga until he had packed up and left Montauk. He had gone missing, not letting anyone know where he was, and hadn’t heard from a soul until years later when his nephew had called and said he needed help kicking drugs. He was still having trouble equating the child he had known with the hard, armored man he had seen tonight. “Jakey’s back.”
Jacob’s face played around with various expressions of sadness before the life fell out of it. “He should have stayed away.”
“You’re his father. He couldn’t just leave you to the vultures.”
Jacob’s lips tightened up. “I don’t want him here. Make him leave. Make him go away. He can’t stay, Frank. He can’t stay in Montauk.” There was a tremor in his voice, a little flutter that was so subtle that it might have been imagined.
“Why not, Jacob?”
“Because it’ll come looking for him.”
Frank took a step toward his brother, put his hand on his leg. “Are you talking about the storm?”
Jacob’s voice came out a high-pitched screech, as if someone had taken a fishhook to his eardrums. “No, you idiot. I’m talking about him. If Jakey’s back, he’ll know.”
Frank tightened his grip on Jacob’s foot, trying to soothe him. “It’s okay, I’m here. I’ll look after Jakey.”
Jacob laughed—actually snorted with derision—and turned his face away. “You’re already dead. You’re just too stupid to know it.”
52
In a little over two hours they had captured nearly 1,800 more canvases. Jake held up a painting, Spencer snapped a photo, and Jake pitched it aside. The studio was piled up with a mountain of canvases that looked like preparations for an insurance fire. The building was not as solid as the house and the walls buffeted with the wind. Every now
and then some part of the flashing or roof would be torn away in an angry bark.
Spencer stepped back from the camera. “I need two minutes to take a piss and have a drink.” He had to yell to be heard over the wind.
Jake looked at Spencer’s sweat-soaked shirt and tired expression. “We’re out of Coke in here. Let’s go to the house. I need a smoke.”
They left the camera and ran for the house, hammered by the gauntlet of rain and wind tearing in from the ocean. They jumped in through the door to the deck.
Any other time, there would have been swearing. As things stood, Jake went to the fridge and Spencer stretched his shoulders.
The world was a deep gray that pulsed with white stabs of lightning, and the ocean was slobbering in on great rolling swells that were close to being the worst Jake had ever seen. He stopped on the way to the kitchen for a second and tried to see the dim outline of the beach through the rain. The pool shuddered and thrashed with the storm and the lily pads had bunched up against the wall closest to the house, many of them sloshed over the side and thrown up against the window. And this was just the beginning.
“Jake, can I ask you something?” Spencer leaned against the piano, below the Marilyn. Off to his left, blocking the big slate fireplace that stretched up into the rafters like a fossilized tree, was the Oedipal Chuck Close, eyes slashed. Spencer looked at the painting for a second, blinked like an owl, and tried to focus on the damaged canvas.
Jake opened the fridge and pulled out two glass bottles of Coke. The lending library was gone; all that was left was the cold pizza from last night’s dinner, half a loaf of Wonder Bread, and an untouched bowl of tuna salad.
Spencer turned away from the painting. “What happened to you out there?”
Jake popped the caps with a stag-handled bottle opener and held one out to Spencer. “Out where?”
“Wherever you were.”
Jake took a long swallow off the bottle, and for some reason, it tasted good and he was surprised.
“We hung out at the yacht club, smoking weed and chasing city girls on the weekend.” Spencer’s voice changed as he went back in time. “I mean, it all seemed okay to me. One day you’re my best friend, the next you’re gone. There were rumors in town that your dad murdered you and buried you out in that fucking garage, man. Thirty years later you come back some kind of paranormal expert on the John Wayne Gacys of the world looking like Rob Zombie’s stylist.”
Jake paused in the middle of a second swallow and pulled the bottle away from his lips. He felt a headache coming on and thought about a few Tylenol. “I was going for the Tom Ford look.” And then it hit him. Again. Riding in on an image of his wife and son came a jolt in his chest that signaled piston failure. He put his hands on the counter’s edge, wrists turned out, fingers clamped around the worn formica that at any other time he would have noted as cold. Now it vibrated with a low-frequency hum that rattled his teeth and throbbed through his bones. Buried in all of this was the sound of Kay’s voice, laughing. And just below that, Jeremy was making dinosaur roars. There was radio interference and then his antenna lost the signal and their voices stuttered into squelch. Then hissing. And finally silence.
He looked up to see Spencer staring at him with a good dose of What-the-fuck? in his eyes. “Jake, what?”
Jake shook his head with a finality that said he wasn’t going to talk about it; if he did, he’d come apart. He couldn’t even think of her, and up until now he had done a pretty good job of it. Sort of. The trick was not to reach out to her in any way. And that was the hardest part.
Jake turned back to the conversation. “Where were we? Oh, yeah. The big Why? If I could do it over, I would make different decisions, but leaving’s not one of them.” He rummaged around the kitchen and found the Tylenol in one of the bags from the pharmacy that held essentials. He opened the childproof top, poured three of the pills into his hand, and chased them down with a mouthful of Coke. “Coming home?” He just let the question hang in the air. What else could be said?
The rain outside came straight in off the ocean and hammered the windows, rattling the plywood that filled in for the broken thermo pane. Water leaked through invisible gaps and was gathering on the floor in a slowly expanding puddle.
Jake finished his Coke and walked down into the living room. He looked around for something to sop up the water—or at least put down on the floor to stop it from spreading. He kicked some of the bundled newspapers into the puddle, newsprint sandbags to hold back the flood. They quickly turned gray. On the way back to the kitchen he stopped in the middle of the spot he had just cleared of litter, and froze.
Spencer saw the switches flip in his head. “What?”
Jake stood still, his eyes locked on the floor, taking mental snapshots of the pattern he saw in the mess. “Sonofabitch,” he said, only the sound was lost in the noise of the storm. He began clearing the room.
He shoveled newspapers aside with his foot, swept chairs into corners, upended the coffee table and flung it aside. Jake grabbed the end of the steel-and-leather sofa, lifted it, and dragged it across the floor. The carpets didn’t bunch up because they had been nailed, screwed, and stapled down by his old man. “Come on,” he ordered Spencer.
Spencer, still stuck on confused, picked up the dragging end. “Where are we taking it?”
Jake nodded at the door and barked, “Outside,” like it was obvious.
Jake swung his end of the sofa around, balanced it on his knee, gripped the knob and pulled the door open. He hadn’t been prepared for the wind and it slammed the door in, nearly tearing it off its hinges. They squeezed the sofa through and Jake dropped his end onto the deck. Spencer lost his grip and the sofa banged down and fell over onto its back. They ran back into the house.
“Come on!” Jake threw a footstool into a bronze bust by Rodin, knocking it over. He dug like a dog, flinging things off the carpet. A vase exploded in sharp colored shards when it hit a bookcase. Paintings toppled.
Jake jammed the piano aside and it brayed like a wounded elephant. Within minutes they had cleared the center of the living room, exposing the dull, paint-splattered quilt-work of carpets.
Jake ran up the stairs and turned back to the living room to take it in. His eyes locked on the clear area excavated amid the garbage and furniture. He sat down.
Spencer stumbled up, turned around, and flopped down beside Jake. “Holy fuck,” he said.
Up close it was just a jumble of color, of overlapped carpets and splatters of paint. But from the staircase, with the benefit of distance and perspective, an unmistakable image was visible in the center of the room, like an X-ray of a coffin. It was a portrait of the same eyeless face Jacob Coleridge had painted on the wall of his hospital room.
“What the fuck is that?” Spencer asked.
Jake thought about Jeremy jumping up and down in the middle of the living room when asked to describe his friend Bud. “The man in the floor.”
53
Frank now understood what Jake had been talking about on the phone yesterday: Jacob was frightened. “What are you talking about?”
Jacob rubbed his face with one of the cocooned insect pincers that had been sewn on. The movement was unselfconscious, feral. “August 1969, Frank.”
Frank pulled a chair over from the window and the plastic on the bottom of its feet sounded like fingernails against the linoleum. He sat down, just beyond Jacob’s reach, and laced his fingers together behind his head. Not that his brother could do much damage with those soft clubs, but Frank was a cautious man, a quality that years of hunting big game had honed to a second-nature status in his library of life skills. “Jacob, whatever you are going to say, whatever has you scared, is not true. Okay? This is me you’re talking to. Whatever you want me to deal with, I will. Okay? I don’t know how much time you have—we have—and I don’t want to piss it away on stupidity. I have things I want to say to you and—”
“Shut up!” The buckles hanging against the bed f
rame rattled loudly.
Frank recoiled, looked into the fierce black holes of his brother’s eyes. Is this what Jake had been talking about? This background chatter of fear, some sort of subliminal message hidden in the signal of his voice? “Jacob, what are you talking about?”
Jacob was rocking side to side in his bed, something about it disturbing.
“You were there. You know what happened. Mia saw it first. And then she died. And then Jake…began sliding away. I lost him, too, Frank. I promised not to tell anyone. I promised and I kept my word. But I can’t keep a secret like this forever. Not forever. No matter how hard I want to.” His words spilled out like dirty motor oil, flecked with charred bits of his broken brain, and Frank wondered if Jacob had left the room.
“He’s here, Frank.” The black specks of Jacob’s pupils no longer looked focused, or even human; the planes of his eyes had dropped away and he was looking at images inside his head.
“Who is?”
“Him!”
“Jacob, this has nothing to do with the boat. Be rational. How could it?”
Jacob’s eyes came back on like someone had put new batteries into the compartment in the back of his head. “You never went aboard. You didn’t see what happened.” Old ghosts were coming out of the dark now, firing up the fear machine.
“Jacob, what are you talking about?”
The beams of his brother’s eyes crawled across the room and stopped on his face.
Frank wanted to believe that it was Alzheimer’s talking, not a rational human being, but his brother’s voice was calm and even. “Jacob, listen to me. You have to stop talking this shit. Okay? We both know what you’re talking about. We didn’t do anything wrong—you didn’t do anything wrong. There was nothing you could have done differently.”
“We could have left him there.”
