“Look,” he said. “It’s just an assignment. I didn’t even want to do it. I said in there he wasn’t my hero. I didn’t choose my topic, my topic chose me.”
“Don’t,” she said. “Please. No need to get upset.”
“I’m not upset,” he said. “Or yes, I am, but it’s just … I’m going to be late for Rotkin’s class.”
“Under the circumstances,” she said. “You being from a troubled home and all—”
—A troubled home? he wondered. What did she mean, a troubled home? He and his mother were both smack dab in the common sector, no different from anyone else—
“—I think it would be better for you to choose another topic. One with a hero.”
He shook his head.
“At least think it over,” she said. “I’m not going to force you to change. I just want what’s best for you. Just think it over.”
“I’ll think about it,” he said.
She reached out and touched his shoulder. It made him flinch. He found himself out in the near-deserted hall, halfway to Rotkin’s shop, before he realized he had forgotten to ask her for a late note.
He would give it up. He knew he would choose another topic, even before he made it to Rotkin’s door and went in to be confronted with the greasy-haired, ovoid teacher standing in a blue smock and wearing horn-rimmed safety goggles, greeting Rudd with his perennial “About time you showed up, Mr. Tardy.” He would choose something that was thoroughly grounded in the common sector, something that wouldn’t allow him to be singled out, at least not in that way. He hated to be defined as worthy of pity. He wanted to be above the crowd, not below it, or if being above were not possible, just part of it, nameless and mixed in. By the next day he had a new summary, a benign topic, Reed Smoot, an early Mormon U.S. Senator, and it was all Mrs. Madison could do not to embrace him.
“I knew you could do it, Rudd,” she said. “I just knew you could!”
When he told Lael about it the next Saturday, he just smirked.
“What did you think would happen?” Lael asked. “People don’t want to face things.”
“What things?”
“Things,” said Lael. “It doesn’t matter what.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Teaching’s not about truth. It’s about comfort.”
“You don’t even know her. How can you say that?” He was talking too loud, he knew.
“I was right about her before. I’m right now.”
“Leave her alone,” said Rudd.
“You’re the same way,” said Lael. “The truth’s all around you yet you want no part of it. Why?”
Rudd got up from the grass and started pacing. “What the Hell do you know?” he said. “Motherfuck.” The word came out singsongy and ridiculous, hardly a curse.
“Motherfuck yourself,” said Lael calmly. “You want stability. You want to fit in. You don’t want to see yourself as you really are.”
“What’s truth anyway?”
“Don’t be clever.”
“But—”
“Cut it out,” said Lael. “Listen for once.”
Rudd closed his mouth, opened it again. He walked over and stood by the scooter. He stared at it, one hand in his jacket pocket, then thumped the seat loudly with his other half-closed fist.
Maybe Lael was right, he told himself, then told himself no, not right at all. It was like that on the silent ride back home, then that evening, then as he lay in bed. He hated Lael and then a minute later loved him, no transition between the two emotions. A strange two-fold vibration between extremes, a leap between one extreme and another, no middle ground between.
It had been a stupid thing to argue about, he knew that, but he was angry. He resented Lael. His brother did not care about him, he told himself, that was something he had not wanted to face, but he would face it now. And how did he know Lael was his brother anyway? Nothing was certain. He had never spoken directly about it to Lael’s mother, except for the first time he called. Then, while stuttering and confused he had tried to piece together the story, she had interrupted brightly and almost airily: “You’re a boy, right? You must want to speak to my son,” and then hung up. That was all she had said, and it was clear from the little he had seen of her since that she wasn’t exactly sane. She had never said, “Your father is Lael’s father.” True, Lael hadn’t denied it after listening to Rudd’s story. But Lael was the type to go along with things just to see where they would lead.
Yet if Lael wasn’t his brother, who did he have?
No one, he told himself, and then, My mother.
That was not much. He stood and went to the window, pushed the curtains apart with his hand. There was no moon. The streetlight had nearly gone out. It gave off only a pale orange glow that lit the top of its pole and little more. He could see through the streaked pane the Milky Way above, unless it was just streaks, and pale clumps of stars. Closing the curtains, he returned to bed.
What had Hooper Young wanted? he asked himself. Certainly not the truth.
I don’t need anyone, he told himself. Truth is overrated. He lay in the dark, fingers softly rubbing the wool blanket. He could feel himself starting to fall asleep, his legs and face numbing until it seemed as if the sole thing that existed, suspended in a void, were his fingertips, and, around each, a few square inches of wool, his soul crowded into what little was left of him, then that fading too until it was gone.
He thought of nothing but Lael through the whole course of the week, but when Saturday arrived, he couldn’t bring himself to call. He uncradled the telephone and held it in his hand, rubbed the earpiece against his scraggly chin, then replaced it.
He spent Saturday lolling around the house. He lay in bed until late, past noon, and when his mother called him lazybones—it indicated a good mood, for her—he said nothing and still didn’t get up. He didn’t wash and when he ran his hand through his hair felt the skin between his fingers go greasy.
He decided to look through his father’s old books. He thumbed through them without reading them. In the rafters of the attic, there was a stack of gnawed newspapers bound in twine. He took them down, bringing down a slow sift of torn scraps and dust with them. Untying them, he discovered five tiny, eyeless, pink baby mice in a chewed-out space in the middle, their only movement a near-convulsive shuddering. He dropped them one by one through the dormer window, watched each roll down the black shingles into the gutter.
He spent the better part of the afternoon looking at his hands, nails flecked with white streaks, knuckles large probably from his having cracked them ever since he was a child. His mother caught him staring, asked if everything was O.K.
“Fine,” he said.
“At church tomorrow—” she started.
“—I’m not going to church tomorrow,” he said.
He could not look at her while he said it. He heard her wheeze. “Excuse me?” she said, her voice severe. His heart was beating terrifically, though he told himself that there was no reason to worry, that he was long past caring about what she thought, though he knew he did care, fuck all.
“Excuse me?” she said.
“You heard me,” he said.
“I swear, your father would roll over in his grave.”
“Let him roll.”
For the rest of the day that phrase was stuck in his head, Let him roll, sliding around with a kind of mute doom that was hard to evade. His mother had stomped out. When, near evening, she came back, he made no attempt to reconcile with her. Let him roll, he thought from the doorway, watching her core and slice a head of lettuce at the sink, the dull knife bruising the edges of each leaf. She turned and looked at him and he fled.
She did not call him to dinner, and he told himself he wouldn’t come if she did call. Before she went to bed, he heard her walking around the house turning off the lights. He thought she might stop outside his door, but she didn’t. I don’t need anyone, he thought, and snuck into the kitchen to find his
plate cellophaned in the fridge. He ate it, he tried to believe, not for himself but for her benefit, to keep her from worrying. It was an act of kindness to her, though he had enough spite left to eat the food cold.
He spent the night wandering the darkened house, dragging his hand along the walls, imagining that he was establishing a tactile knowledge of the house that would come in handy if he went blind. Then she would be sorry. He awoke on the floor of the half-attic, dust drifting in the sunlight coming through the window. He couldn’t remember falling asleep there. He went into the bathroom and splashed his face with water, then called for his mother. She didn’t answer.
The car was gone, his mother already at church. She had left his black leatherbound scriptures on the kitchen table. Next to them was a crudely drawn map to the church, with just two squares indicated, one marked “House,” the other marked “Church.” An arrow pointed from the first to the second. “In case you forgot the way,” was written on the bottom. On the table she had also spelled out the word HELL in white grains that he took for salt but which, tasting, he found to be sugar.
He took a paring knife from the counter, scraped the sugar into a pile, and began, carefully, to shape it into a series of concentric circles. As he worked, he imagined himself putting on his tie and button-down oxford and going to church, walking through the crowded pews and straight to the pulpit and from there publicly washing his hands of his religion for good. His mother would be in the audience, shocked, her mouth open. He would renounce Mormonism and then, baring his chest, would invite the devil to take his soul. Not that he believed in the devil, or God either, he told himself.
When he was done shaping the sugar, he had a target. He thrust the knife’s tip down hard in the center, so it stuck.
On Monday it was as if nothing had happened. She woke him happily, served him breakfast, chattered at him as he ate. She fussed and preened as he was about to leave for school and he hoped for a moment she would say something conciliatory, but knew she wouldn’t. If he brought it up she would say, What fight? And, if he insisted, I don’t recall a fight, dear, you must have been fighting with yourself.
He went through the week. At school somebody pried his locker open. He returned from English to find his books scattered down the hall, his notebooks reduced to rumpled scraps of paper. Humiliated, he picked up what was salvageable, other passing students kicking his books farther away.
The next day he feigned illness until noon, staying home until his mother’s attempts to baby him became too derisive. When he arrived at school his locker was fine, untouched. By the end of the week it hadn’t been broken into again, and he began to suspect that he had left it ajar himself.
It wasn’t until the next Saturday that he thought of Lael, and then only to marvel that he didn’t miss seeing him. He didn’t call, instead spent the rest of the weekend moving pieces about on a chessboard, reading, and watching TV.
The Hooper Young murder stuck with him. Even though he was no longer writing his paper on it, it continued to rustle about in his head. At night, he found aspects of the case wound into his dreams. He dreamed that he had a gold tooth that, if he were to escape the police, had to be removed. He tried knocking it out with a hammer. He awoke slightly nauseous, sticky and damp, his heart beating rapidly.
Saturday night he dreamed that it was 1903 and he himself was heading the investigation of the Young case and that they had somehow cornered Young’s accomplice, Charles Elling, in an alley that resembled something from a Universal Studios back lot. Elling had turned and had covered his face with his hands and did not move when Rudd reached out to touch him. Indeed, Rudd had to put his hands on Elling’s shoulder and physically force him to turn. He pried Elling’s hands away from his face, which when uncovered proved not to be Elling’s face at all, but a smooth, blank surface.
Suddenly he was awake, with no memory of having screamed, but someone was shaking him and asking him if he was all right, and he realized it was his mother.
“I’m fine,” he said. He started to reach for the lamp to turn it on, but his hand was shaking so badly that he thought better of it.
“You’re sure?” she said. “Who’s Ellen?”
“There’s no Ellen,” he said. “Just a bad dream.”
“If you’re dating someone named Ellen, I demand to be introduced.”
He moved to the far side of the bed, turning his face to the wall. His mother sat down, the springs of the bed squealing. Her hand brushed his ear, fell to his shoulder, slowly settling. She began to rub his back, rocking her body slightly forward as she did. He wriggled uncomfortably.
“Don’t you like that?”
“I’m not five years old,” he said.
“You’ll always be my baby,” she said.
“God, no.”
She stopped rubbing, drew her hand away. He felt her weight leave the bed, her slippers brushing across the carpet. When she spoke again, it was from the doorway, her voice rampant with bitterness. “It’s because you stopped going to church,” she said shrilly. “God is punishing you.” And then she was gone.
Early Sunday she was in his room, shaking his wadded shirt and tie in his face, telling him to get dressed and visit God, that it was for his own good, the only way to be free of bad dreams. He didn’t say anything, just put the pillow over his head. She kept talking, her voice getting higher and higher until all she was saying was “Answer me! Answer me!” over and over, then she slammed the door. I hate my life, he thought, though he knew it wasn’t as simple as that. And before he knew it, despite his anxiety, he drifted off to sleep.
He was awakened by the doorbell. He lay in bed, considering who it could be. Jehovah’s Witnesses probably, but did they come on Sundays? He was already on his way back to sleep when it rang again. Maybe it was a friend of his mother’s. It was certainly nobody he knew. He pulled the covers over his head.
It rang a third time. A moment later he heard the knob rattle. Maybe a thief, he thought, someone who knew his mother was at church and thought he would be too.
He sat up in bed and peeked out through the window. If he leaned just right, he could see the front porch. Nobody was there. He stood and pulled his shirt off the chair, found a pair of pants among the twist and curl of clothing on the floor. He was pulling them on when he heard the back door open.
Cursing softly he opened the closet as quietly as he could, looking for a weapon. All he could find was a wooden shoe tree, which he took and held in one hand like a prototype blackjack. He made his careful way out of the room and down the stairs. The back door was open slightly. He closed it, locked it.
“Mother?” he called, then regretted having said anything.
Going into the kitchen, he slid a long, thin boning knife out of the block, leaving the shoe tree on the counter. He went into the living room. Empty. He stood at the edge of the den.
“Anybody there?” he asked.
No answer. Probably, he thought, they had come in and gone back out again. Or maybe they had not come in at all, but only opened the door and then gone off, leaving the door ajar. He opened the door to the garage, flicked the light on and off. He searched the laundry room, the downstairs bathroom, then went up the stairs and into his mother’s room, her bathroom, and out again. Last of all his own bedroom, his closet. Nobody, no one at all.
He had finished his report, now on politics and Mormonism. Mrs. Madison was pleased, told him he was making real progress. Yet he couldn’t put Hooper Young out of his head, and finally went back to the university library to sort through other newspapers, to see if there was more about the case, if it had ever been mentioned in the Utah papers.
He had affixed the reel of the Church-owned Deseret News to the machine when he realized someone was standing behind him. Turning, he saw Lael.
He did not know exactly what he felt. Guilt was involved, and anger at feeling guilt, as well as resentment. But mixed in with it was a weird burst of ecstasy, and immediate awareness of the power La
el still seemed to have over him.
“You stopped seeing me,” said Lael.
“I can’t explain,” said Rudd.
“Try.”
“It was all too much for me.”
“What?”
“It,” said Rudd. “Everything.”
“Me, you mean.”
Rudd shrugged. “I mean you didn’t even …” he said, then stopped. “What are you doing here?”
“What do you think?” Lael said, and held up a microfilm spool. “Same as you. But don’t try to change the subject.”
“I wasn’t,” said Rudd, and then found he could not, somehow, meet Lael’s eyes.
“So tell me,” said Lael. “Go ahead. Tell me what’s wrong with me.”
“Nothing’s wrong with you,” said Rudd. “It’s just—”
“Do you want to know what your problem is?”
“Not really,” said Rudd.
“No? If you can’t take advice from your brother, then who?”
“Half-brother,” said Rudd. “And I’m not entirely sure you’re that.”
“Of course I am,” said Lael. “You contacted me, remember? You’d figured it all out before we ever spoke.”
“I was wrong, and you were a liar.”
Then they were both pushing at each other, buttons popping off Lael’s shirt. The heel of Lael’s hand flashed past Rudd’s head, clipped his ear, distracting him while the other hand struck him in the temple. Rudd fell, still grasping Lael’s shirt.
“So we’re brothers only when it’s convenient?” asked Lael, crouching over him and trying to pry Rudd’s hands loose.
“No, I—”
“Let go,” said Lael. He slapped the back of Rudd’s hand hard. “Let go!” he said, louder.
Rudd let go and scrambled up, stood breathing hard. He waited until Lael was playing with the buttonholes and the remaining buttons on his shirt, then punched him in the face.
Lael stumbled, woozy, steadying himself against the wall with one hand. He shook his head, his nose flicking blood across his cheekbones and onto the wall. Rudd watched him, his fists clumsily up. Lael looked at him and smiled slowly. Spreading his arms, he stepped forward and toward Rudd to embrace him. And this, to Rudd, was somehow more terrifying than if he had leaped forward swinging.
The Open Curtain Page 7
