We Contain Multitudes

by Sarah Henstra

  Yours truly,

  Jo

  Thursday, June 9

  Dear Little Jo,

  Mark says people are always asking him these questions. How was it? Did you kill anyone? Are you like one of those crazy Vietnam vets? Did you read about fill-in-the-blank that happened over there? What do you think about Abu Ghraib? How come you only did one tour? Aren’t you glad you didn’t end up in fill-in-the-blank?

  Mark says these are all the wrong questions, but he doesn’t think there are any right ones either. He said he knew these two marines who died in Bagram because the magic mushrooms that one of the guys’ girlfriends sent him accidentally had a poisonous mushroom mixed in.

  “Nobody wants to hear that story,” Mark said. “They never reported the cause of death either. Nobody wanted to know it was something like that.”

  In a lot of ways, he told me, it was worse than somebody getting bumped in the line of duty. “There we were in all this danger all the time,” he said, “and these losers go and die in this ordinary way, just like someone could have died back home.”

  Mark’s been talking to me a lot about PTSD. About how my trauma from being Uncle Viktor’s punching bag for so long likely triggered my blowup at Bron’s party, especially the part where I felt totally out of control and didn’t even know who I was hitting. But my brother says PTSD also likely contributed to the other blowups, like when I wrecked your bedroom or called you horrible names or attacked Dowell that time in the library. He says it’s probably what causes all my nightmares too. I mean I sleep on his sofa, so he hears it when I wake up yelling.

  Mark talked to his VA social worker and got me on a waiting list for some counseling. He says counseling really helped him figure out how to trust himself again.

  I told Mark about this old book I found in the library once called Nature’s Killers. It was from 1904. I’d memorized a bunch of the names in this book that people had given to various poisonous mushrooms: armed stinkhorn, jelly babies, bog beacon, scaly tooth, cramp balls, poison pax. There are lots of mushrooms in Minnesota you can die from. Even the smallest amount can paralyze you or give you severe liver damage.

  It made Mark laugh, hearing the names. “We should discover a new mushroom,” he said, “so we can call it something insane like that.”

  He got quiet for a minute. Then he said, “I’m serious. We should go on a canoe trip this summer, or something. Off in the woods.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Adam,” my brother said, “let’s not be the type of people who are afraid to live because we might die.”

  Sincerely,

  AK

  Thursday, June 9

  Dear Kurl,

  I’m glad it worked out with the Bridge to Education people. I’m glad you’re not angry with me for sending in your letters to the admissions committee.

  You referred to the sullen and suffering hours, so you must be reading Walt’s “Calamus” poems. I’ve been reading those same poems, actually, over these last few weeks.

  Did you know that Walt was in love for years with a man who didn’t love him back? After “Song of Myself” comes heartbreak. He feels it with his entire body, that yearning and loneliness, just like he feels everything with his entire body.

  In these later poems Walt is starting to figure out that his standards for love are way too high. His vision of it was too good to be true. He realizes that he doesn’t even want love, if love is going to be this watered-down thing, this ordinary thing full of compromises and lies. That’s why these poems are so bitter: He’s realizing that he’d rather be alone than paired up partway.

  So he says, Therefore release me now, before troubling yourself any further—let go your hand from my shoulders, Put me down and be on your way.

  I’m glad you got into U of M, Kurl, and I’m glad it’s all the way up in Duluth. It’s exactly the way forward from this, from us. It’s exactly right.

  It’s exactly as Walt says. Let go your hand from my shoulders. Put me down, Kurl, and be on your way.

  Yours truly,

  Jo

  Saturday, June 11

  Dear Little Jo,

  Please don’t send this back to me. Don’t give it to Bron to give back to me either. You can throw it out if you want, but don’t give it back. I saw it in the window of Mr. Ragman’s store on Lake Street and I couldn’t not buy it for you.

  I tried walking past. I mean I felt light-headed at the thought of buying it and you not wanting it. And I know it’s not like your old scarf either. It’s actually flashier. More fringe and shinier silk. Iridescent, Mr. Ragman called it. Grass green. Spring green. Like the flag of your disposition. I just couldn’t not buy it for you, Jo. Don’t send it back.

  And since I’m making requests I have no right to make, I also want you to stop throwing away your things now. Lyle’s paisley scarf in Bron’s garbage disposal at the party. Your mandolin splintered on the floor of the Texas Border. Your tent out at the curb, your turntable, your LITTLE WIZARD lantern, which Bron delivered back to me at your request.

  I mean you’ve even quit wearing a lot of your vintage clothes. I saw you sitting in English on Monday. Was that your last English class of the year? Probably. I looked in the window of Khang’s room just for a minute. You were wearing a T-shirt and those jeans again, and you’d cut your hair so short that I almost didn’t recognize you.

  So I read the “Calamus” poems again after I got your last letter. And I do see it, how you can read it as Put me down and be on your way. How Walt wants to live in the real world, not inside some beautiful fable that nobody else has read. I see it.

  But Walt doesn’t leave it there, does he? He doesn’t rip up Leaves of Grass, does he? He doesn’t go out and destroy everything he loves and stop writing and start wearing T-shirts and jeans to school. Does he? You know what I mean. He doesn’t stop writing.

  I’m not asking you to live in a bubble, Jo. But there has to be a way to live in the real world without giving up all the things you love. All the things that make you you. I mean I can’t stand to see you acting like you can’t have these things. It’s worse than missing you, worse than not being able to talk to you or touch you.

  You can tell me to let go of your shoulders, Jo. You can tell me to put you down and go on my way. But I can’t do it. I’m sorry; I know it doesn’t make it any easier for you. I just can’t.

  Sincerely,

  AK

  Sunday, June 12

  Dear Kurl,

  I’ve promised myself this is my last letter to you, Kurl, because I’m keenly aware of the hypocrisy of me saying, Let go your hand from my shoulders and then tapping you on the shoulder with another letter.

  Yesterday Lyle and I drove up to Moorhead to visit Shayna. I’m still finding it hard to know what to say to my father. In the car he played Tony Rice and I drowned it out with Prince turned up loud in my earbuds.

  Life in Moorhead seems, surprisingly, to agree with my sister. She looked older than I remembered her, even though it’s only been three weeks. Her hair looked shinier—she’d dyed it a brown-black shade instead of blue-black—and she was wearing new clothes.

  She wouldn’t come out of Gloria’s guest room to see Lyle, though. She let me in and then locked the door behind me. I sat next to her on the bed while Lyle conversed with her through the door for a few minutes—long paragraphs of apology and reconciliation from Lyle, eye rolls and monosyllabic responses from Shayna—until Gloria called to him that the coffee was ready, and he retreated to the kitchen.

  Shayna said she and Gloria get along pretty well. “Gloria makes me go with her every day to this place called the Harbor where she volunteers. All these down-and-out people, basically. After school all these kids come to get free snacks. Mostly I just play guitar for them. There’re a couple guitars the kids like to mess around on. This one kid is actually getting pretty good.”

  I showed her my picture of Raphael, the one Trudie had given me. Shayna didn’t look all that s
hocked or impressed, though. She told me that Gloria has some similar pictures. “She and Grandpa Hanssen went to LA a couple times to buy her dinner and stuff. Once they tried to check her into the hospital, but she jumped out of the car.”

  I’d assumed Shayna must still be furious with Bron, since she hasn’t been answering any of Bron’s correspondence. I told her about the Prince memorial and tried to portray Bron as humbled and contrite about her role in the Axel/Lyle blowout.

  But Shayna says it’s more that she needs to make a clean break. “Bron is separate from me,” she told me. “I barely knew that, I think. I need to have a life. Not the life he’d want for me—Lyle—but not Bron’s, either, you know?”

  We didn’t talk about you, Kurl. About what happened between you and my sister. I suppose I hoped Shayna would bring it up—deliver a formal apology for her part in it, report on the deep psychological analysis she’d been performing on herself to figure out her motivations, reassure me that she never meant to hurt me, her beloved brother. But she behaved as if nothing had happened, and I found it was actually a relief not to have to talk about you, not to hear your name spoken aloud. And anyway I would have had to tell Shayna that all was forgiven. I would have had to admit to her that I no longer have any claim over you, nor did I, technically, even at the time of Bron’s party.

  We said goodbye, my sister and me. We hugged in front of the guest-room door and then she unlocked it for me and swung it open, and we both froze where we stood. From the kitchen came Lyle’s sobbing, and his strangled words: “I can’t lose her. I just can’t. I don’t think I’d survive it.”

  And Gloria’s reply, loud and clear: “Listen, you need to understand something. Shayna is nothing like her mother. Nothing. Something was damaged in Raphael, her whole life. Some deep-down damage.”

  Gloria was weeping, too. We heard the sound of her blowing her nose. I started down the hall but Shayna held me back by the arm and put a finger over her lips.

  “I blame myself,” Gloria said. “Rapha’s daddy… well, Lyle, you know he was not a good man. He wasn’t good to her. I blame myself.”

  “Oh, no, come on,” Lyle said. “That’s not—”

  Gloria plowed on: “Shayna, though. Shayna’s different. She’s… fine, Lyle. She’s whole. She’s fierce as all hell.”

  Lyle gave a laugh-sob.

  “She’s angry at you right now because she wants her mama, that’s all,” Gloria said. “But she is going to be fine. Trust me on this one.”

  They were quiet a minute. I crept down the hall toward the kitchen while Shayna leaned in the guest-room doorway.

  Lyle took a shuddering breath. “I loved her so much,” he said.

  “I know you did,” Gloria said. “I did, too.”

  Another quiet minute. Then: “I know you’re there, Jonathan,” Lyle called. “I can hear you sniffling.”

  Behind me the guest-room door clicked shut.

  More bitter than I can bear. I was remembering, just now, those suffering words from Walt. You burn and sting me. Is that how Raphael feels to Lyle and Gloria as well as to me? The lost Raphael, the ghost of Raphael? Or is it different for those who remember her, who knew her before she was a ghost?

  Goodbye, Kurl,

  Jo

  Sunday, June 12

  Dear Little Jo,

  The summer before my father died there was a family picnic down at the river. Sylvan had his own car by then, and one of Sylvan’s friends was there with his truck, and Uncle Viktor in the company van. I remember that for some reason they parked all the vehicles in the gravel lot with the noses together, like bison.

  My dad cooked sausages and steaks on the barbecue. I remember swimming with the sun getting low and the green water sparkling in its shallows. Later the supper smells died under the woodsmoke. Sylvan’s friend played Zeppelin on his car stereo, and Dad and Uncle Vik stacked the fire against the cold.

  Mark rolled a cigarette and passed it to Sylvan. Dad reached for a puff, but Sylvan laughed and said, “It’s a joint, Dad.”

  Our towels dried on the bushes. Uncle Vik pinched a mosquito on his arm and licked the blood off his fingers. He was just Uncle Vik to me then, nothing but a shadow in the background of my father.

  Night, fire, music. The dirt cold under my butt, my face warm against Dad’s knee, my head joggling as he kept the beat with his toes. I remember his bare shins were crisp and hot under my hand from the close-by flames.

  And I was happy, so happy.

  I mean I was young—way younger than my brothers. All I knew was that there were these men around me—all these strong Kurlansky men surrounding me, who would always be there, I thought. Who would keep me safe. Who would show me the way.

  Sincerely,

  AK

  Wednesday, June 22

  Dear Kurl,

  All right, then: one last letter, as I feel your invitation deserves a considered response. Lyle was waiting for me when I got home from work, and he told me about your visit. Did he mention to you that I’ve been doing some work for the music school? I’m mostly helping organize the summer camp schedules, processing cancellations and late registrations from the wait list. Anyhow, Lyle said that you had come by with Mark and written him a check for the amount you thought it would cost to repair my bedroom door. The three of you talked for quite a while, apparently. You and your brother filled Lyle in about your uncle’s abusive behavior, your current living situation, and your plans for next year.

  And then you told him about U of M’s Summer Poetry Seminar. That you’d gotten the Bridge to Education people to agree to admit me even though I’m only sixteen, so long as I get Lyle’s consent.

  I guess I asked for it, by sending in your application. It’s ironic, isn’t it? The e-mail message you printed out for Lyle says, We have, of course, read about your friend Jonathan, and have great respect for his abiding and well-informed love for the poet Walt Whitman. We agree that he would make a valuable contribution.

  Of course they know about me. I’m all over your letters, Kurl. I knew that, and I cringed a bit when I reread them before sending them in on your behalf. Somehow I thought of myself as a character in your story, though—or I assumed that’s how the admissions committee would see me.

  And then you went ahead and asked them to consider me as an actual, flesh-and-blood person. Ironic, and now I have a very clear idea of how it must have felt for you. Shameful. Exposed. I apologize again, retrospectively, for the violation, even if the outcome was a happy one.

  Thank you for the offer, Kurl. Truly, it means a lot to me. I can see how you tried to do the same thing you thanked me for doing—for being generous, for considering your future despite everything.

  I do appreciate it, but I can’t say yes. I can’t ride out of my life on the tail of your life. It would be a fantasy, nothing more—two months of wandering around a sunny, idyllic college campus, letting myself swallow the illusion that my biggest problem in life is iambic pentameter.

  And then I’d have to let go of it and come home, and here would be high school and Maya and the butcherboys and not Shayna and not Bron and not you. To be honest, I’d rather skip the fantasy and stay in the reality than have to adjust to the reality all over again.

  I’m sorry you went to all that trouble, Kurl.

  Yours truly,

  Jo

  Monday, June 27

  Dear Little Jo,

  So I went directly over to your house last night, after I got your letter saying thanks but no thanks to my offer about the Summer Poetry Seminar.

  You opened the door and said, “Oh, hi, Kurl.” There was your crooked hair, your fine nose, your hand coming up to your throat.

  “You’ve grown,” I said. Of all the things to say. It brought heat into my face.

  There were tears already in your eyes. “Damn,” you said, wiping them away. “Ignore the crying, okay? I’m serious. Just edit it right out.”

  “Okay,” I said. I had thought maybe you’d slam th
e door in my face. But asking me to edit out your tears meant edit them out of something bigger, something that was still going to happen, like maybe a whole conversation. So I stepped forward and you stepped back and let me come in.

  You led me into the living room and we sat down. Lyle’s records in their crates, the monstrous stereo components, the 1970s orange lampshade with the fringe, the musical instruments hanging from their pegs, the purple glass bong. Everything looked different. I thought of your mother. I thought of Shayna, her daughter, living up in Moorhead now.

  You were wearing my scarf. Your scarf, the new green one I sent you. You saw me notice it and you unwound it from your neck, fast, and crammed it down between the sofa cushions like it was a dirty picture or a love letter.

  Jo, your flushed cheeks. Your raw eyes. Your chapped mouth. I remembered the roughness of your lips, the feel of them, and my blood rushed. Urging, urging. I had to look away to concentrate on what I wanted to say.

  “You’re ignoring the crying, right? It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “I know,” I said, and I remembered what I’d come over for: “I want you to do the seminar without me,” I said. “You can have my dorm room to yourself. I’m going to stay at Mark’s for a few extra weeks, and then I’ll get a room somewhere near campus when the football stuff starts in August.”

  “What football stuff?”

  A grin took over my face before I could stop it. “They want me to try out for the varsity team at U of M.”

  “No way,” you said. “Kurl, that’s incredible. That’s amazing.”

  “Yeah.”

  “College football star.” Your voice cracked a bit, and you made a half wave in front of your face to remind me to ignore the crying.