Jean was not mollified. “Are we going to get it?”
My father was even more stricken by this question than he had been by her last one, but Zuvicek was firm. “Absolutely not. You are already older than you would be if you were ever going to get it. As are you, Lawrence. This ailment only attacks very young children, most of them infants or toddlers; tragically, Ethan was himself almost old enough to be considered out of danger. It is next to certain that your own children, should either of you have children, will also never have to worry about such a thing. All you have to worry about now is your poor brother . . . and how much your poor mother and father will now depend on you, to help take care of him. It—”
Ethan screamed. The inhuman sounds from upstairs, which would never stop in the long years that followed, had been audible since long before Zuvicek came down. But most of them had been cracking and grinding noises, as well as sudden exhalations, that had not sounded like anything in particular and had been almost impossible to identify as product of any particular little boy’s voice.
This shriek was Ethan’s voice, returned to him: a cry of almost unimaginable pain that would not have been inappropriate coming from a boy set on fire, or one swarmed by hornets, or one simply locked in a cramped black place along with the sound of vicious things scrabbling in the dark. There was no sanity in it, or hope. But it was, for a second, recognizable as Ethan’s voice. I suddenly remembered that it was my little brother we were talking about, and half-stood, determined to race up the stairs to his side. But then the sound of his pain changed to something far worse, something with barbed wire and broken glass in it, and all my instinctive protectiveness fled, replaced by paralysis and shame as a stream of warm piss ran down my leg.
My father saw it. So did Jean, and so did Zuvicek. Not one of them blamed me. They had all heard the same thing I’d heard, and may have come close to the same involuntary release.
In the end, Zuvicek could only finish the sentence he had started before Ethan’s scream.
“—will not be easy for any of you, I’m afraid.”
Now I was an adult, home from the University my mother had insisted I leave home to attend, as inured to horror as only one who had lived his life steeped in horror could ever come to be.
I stood at the locked door of Ethan’s room, gripping the deadbolt, closing my eyes when one of the wet sounds from within reminded me of rending flesh.
As always, standing at this threshold felt like facing a long drop into formless darkness. Even if I’d taken the next step on more days than I could count, even I knew from long experience that I’d survive an encounter with my brother, there was no way of quantifying how much it was going to hurt. The only certainty was that it would.
As always, I waited for the first cry that sounded recognizably human before I peered through the spy hole.
Even allowing for the distortion of the panoramic lens, Ethan’s room no longer looked like the toy-strewn sanctuary decorated with spacemen and superheroes that it had been on the day of his sixth birthday. The colorful boy-sized bed frame and desk and toy chest had not long survived his illness unbroken; they had been removed, and replaced with padded walls and a steel trunk equipped with padlock and air holes, for those times when only absolute confinement would be enough. The padding covered walls that had been rebuilt to cover what had once been windows open to morning light, with a fine view of the trees at the edge of our backyard forest. Now the only light was a circular fluorescent ring within a reinforced cage. One of its segments flickered and one of the others gave off a dim glow brightest at the center, like the sun trying to break through a blanket of clouds. Stains of various colors, some recognizable as the things that come out of a human body, and some not, streaked from the ceiling and puddled on the knit seams between the padded places on the floor.
It was, I knew, impossible to keep the room looking or smelling like anything but an open sewer. By its very nature, Ethan’s disorder meant that he leaked. Sometimes, when he transformed into whatever he became next, he reabsorbed whatever he’d spilled last. Sometimes he didn’t. It was the only consistent way to tell the difference between what was part of Ethan and what was just his waste fluids.
It took me a second or two to find the twitching, half-melted form, like a man wrenched into a Moebius strip, that bubbled at the room’s farthest corner. Even as I watched, it tried to grow spikes, but they deflated with a hiss. The shape softened, becoming as close to the shape of a human boy as Ethan ever got anymore: a lot like a plastic army man that somebody had melted on a hot stove and then allowed to cool.
I threw the bolt and entered, wincing as always at the sheer stench of the place. My mother and father had installed a state-of-the-art air-filtration system early on, using what would have been Ethan’s college fund, but the atmosphere in here was always like a deep whiff of a sweaty sneaker that had been allowed to marinate in rotten bananas and then soaked in a puree made from the contents of a rancid diaper.
It was as impossible to get used to the stench as it was to get used to the things Ethan changed into, because fresher and more offensive perfumes were always being added to the soup. You can get used to living inside an open sewer, if you have to. Your sense of smell adapts, if only by turning off. But if shit is only the least offensive of all the possible things you have to wade through, and everything new that comes dribbling down the pipes attacks some remaining vulnerability in your gag reflex, then adaptation doesn’t work. There’s nothing to get used to.
I had lost one of my college girlfriends because our evening walk had taken us past a golden retriever who’d been split open by a passing car. It was still alive, and whining, even as its parts leaked from its flattened belly. The septic release of its split bowels made the site of its imminent death like the inside of a toilet. My girlfriend vomited out the General Tso’s Chicken I’d just paid for and later called me cold and inhuman because the sight of the poor pooch had left me unaffected. I hadn’t been able to explain to her that I’d long since grown used to obscene sights and smells like that, because my little brother spent most of his life as obscene sights and smells like that.
Now, fighting back the nausea I hadn’t been able to feel then, that Ethan could still wrench from me, I padded across the sodden canvas to the place where the throbbing shape lay, trying to grow a face. Dark patches that could have been embryonic eyes, a nose, and mouth, as captured in a drawing by an ungifted first-grade cartoonist, appeared just below the thing’s semi-liquid chest, and seemed about to congeal into something capable of speech . . . but then they faded, leaving only an oozing green patch, like a gasoline spill on a driveway.
Ethan quivered, that little failed attempt at coherence exhausting him utterly.
My vision blurred. “Hey, kid. I drove a long way to get here. Can you spare a little hello for me?”
He gurgled like an infant, and exploded.
There’s a certain sight popular in Hollywood comedies: the hapless character who gets drenched by something slimy and malodorous—shit or fertilizer or paint or, in gooier fantasies, alien bodily fluids that have never been included in the usual list of substances produced by the human body. The victim’s eyes always blink multiple times in the middle of a face otherwise obscured by muck, eloquently communicating an offended dignity that encourages the ticket holders in the audience to howl in disgust and delight.
Ever since Ethan turned six, my family no longer considers that kind of scene funny. We’ve all been through it too many times.
This time I was lucky; not only did none get inside me, but what got on me decided that it didn’t want to stick. The layers of little brother flowed off my skin like quicksilver, forming another queasy puddle at my feet before pieces of him became the snout of a rat, the leg of a dog, the cock of a stallion. Two beautiful cat’s eyes, with irises of green and gold, blinked on his surface, communicating a calm amazement that could have meant anything I wanted it to mean; then they disappeared and—in what I
could only think of as a little miracle—the vomitous ooze congealed, forming an oversized, bodiless portrait of a little boy’s face.
“Hello,” he said.
It was the first coherent word my little brother had spoken to me in three years.
He looked like he would stay this way for a while, so I touched him on his oversized cheek. My hand looked like an infant’s against that larger-than-life canvas.
A lump formed in my throat. “Hi, kid. How’s it going?”
He gulped, a gesture more about seeming to swallow than actually swallowing, as his big face fronted no throat and no gullet. “That’s a fucking . . . stupid question, Lawrence. You know . . . how I’m doing.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Fuck your sorry.” He coughed, struggled for voice, moaned with a supreme effort of will as his mouth tried to go away. Several seconds later he managed to bring it back, but by then his eyes had dropped several sizes and assumed normal human dimensions, which made them comical on that oversized face already beginning to run like wax at the edges. “Fuck you. Fuck Mom. Fuck Dad. Fuck Jean. Fuck all of those fucking vultures downstairs. Fuck your pity in your fucking ass. I hope your fucking kids get what I fucking have. I hope you have to fucking watch them live with this. I hope you have to fucking hope for them to die. I fucking wish it had been you all along. I fucking wish I could look down at you the way you’re looking down at me. I fucking wish I could piss on you. I fucking wish you’d get cancer. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.”
He tried to say more, but his moment of coherency was done. His body was too busy becoming a succession of specific things, all of them terrible. A bloody Jesus, writhing on the cross. A burned man, crawling across an expanse of broken glass, his trail marked by the pieces of himself he left behind. A little girl having her eyes gouged out by hooks. A dog trying to crawl on the bleeding stumps of amputated legs. A pregnant woman giving birth to a spiked asterisk of a thing, all bristling needles and barbs, that crawled from her bloody womb only to sink its claws into her flesh and drag itself up her body, so it could force itself down her throat and enjoy being born a second time. A little boy paddling around a favorite swimming hole on his birthday, and beaming with an innocent delight that was about to be ruined, forever, by the terrible fatal flaw that cruel nature had built into him.
None of them surprised me.
They were all things that I’d seen him become before.
I left Ethan’s cell after another half an hour, feeling as unclean as I always felt, whenever I visited my little brother. It never mattered whether I’d managed to avoid getting any of him on me. I was contaminated by the sight of him, sometimes the very idea of him.
I took a shower with the water hot just a sliver short of scalding. I let it burn. There was no stain of Ethan on me—that quicksilver retreat of his flesh from my skin a measure of insufficient kindness in a visit that had otherwise afforded a full measure of his condition’s cruelty—but I still stayed beneath the spray, enduring its punishment, until I was reddened and raw and able to feel scoured of every part of him.
I crawled into bed and slept, enduring the usual Ethan dreams of my bones twisting into razored shapes inside me.
When I woke, the afternoon light was fading. I got dressed and went downstairs, finding much the same assortment of cousins and aunts and uncles, their positions on the family couches unchanged. I endured the usual questions about anything but Ethan, questions that ranged from whether I was seeing anybody special to whether I’d decided what I was going to do after graduation but somehow never touched on how much I was suffocating. I asked where my mother was, and was informed that she and Dr. Zuvicek were both upstairs with Ethan, who had taken yet another in a long series of turns for the worse and was hardly changing at all, which an elderly aunt who had researched the condition told me was a sign that his remaining lifespan could now be measured in hours.
After that I endured the usual half hour of well-meaning family blather about everything but the crisis at hand; the cousin who had gotten married, the uncle who had moved to another state, the relative of uncertain provenance who had done something even more uninteresting that I was expected to note and file away as vital genetic intelligence. Somebody was doing well in business, somebody else was failing, a third had had fallen out of touch, and a fourth had committed sins that the aunt reporting them considered scandalous enough to impart in shocked whispers. I nodded and pretended to care and then watched as the subject inevitably circled back to Ethan, and how sweet a little boy he had been.
When I finally made my escape I stepped out into the afternoon’s fading light and found Jean on the porch swing, smoking a cigarette. I hadn’t suspected her of picking up the habit, but she didn’t know I had either, and as I sat down she just handed me the butt without making eye contact. I took a single drag deep enough to make the paper sizzle, then put it out and sat down beside her, watching the sun turn to bright red shrapnel behind the sheltering trees.
“So?” she said, without looking at me. “Ready to leave yet?”
I nudged the porch with my toe to make the seat rock. “Pretty much.”
“And you’ve only been back for a few hours. Try it when it’s just you and Mom sitting on opposite ends of the same couch, night after night, trying to find things to talk about in between Ethan noises.”
I held up my hands in a gesture of abject surrender. “You win.”
She glanced at me out of the corners of her eye, searching for signs of mockery. After a second or two she came to the reluctant decision that I wasn’t offering any, and looked away, her anger still burning but unsatisfied by any fit place to put it. “I’m sorry. You offered to stay, too.”
That I had; though I’d offered only token resistance when Mom insisted that I had a life to live, that I needed to see to my own future while my poor brother burned through what little was left of his. Give her credit, she hadn’t tried to inflict any guilt when I let her win that argument . . . or when I chose a faraway school that would keep me from having to come home and help out on evenings and weekends.
I just hadn’t considered the pressure my absence would put on Jean during her own last two years of high school. Two years of always having to rush straight home to help Mom with Ethan. Two years of never being able to spend time with friends, of never being able to go to parties, of never being able to fumble in back seats with boys. Two years until graduation and then two more years of putting her own future on hold, so Mom would not have to deal with our family nightmare alone.
And I had to admit to myself: that was bullshit, too. I mean, that I hadn’t considered it. Of course I’d considered it. I’d considered it, taken the offer of freedom from Ethan, and fled while there was still something left of me to flee with.
I wanted to say I was sorry, but that would have been an insult, so I said nothing.
She studied the fading light. “It’s not even you I’m mad at. It’s them. All those sanctimonious assholes in there. All those covered casseroles and cold cut platters; everybody bringing the same things, every day. Making a big show of being there for Mom, when for all these years it was hell getting any one of them to spare an afternoon or an hour to watch him so I could take her out of the house for a while. When Ethan was just this thing that was never going to end, they were all just fine with letting her live like somebody who had to be chained to one spot. They wanted nothing to do with us. But now that’s he’s almost gone, they’re back, wanting back into our lives. It’s like . . . Ethan was never anything but a stigma. And once he dies, we’ll all be clean again.”
“Maybe we will,” I said.
I expected anger, but got something worse, a pathetic little half-smile of the sort an adult offers to a child who has not yet learned the ways of the world and who has said something adorable and precocious and sad and naïve. “Will we? Is that even possible now? After everything we’ve seen?”
“Of course it is. I promise
you: when this is all over, we’ll all go somewhere for a while and figure out how.”
A terrible warbling sound erupted from the house. It was less a scream than a chorus of them, all erupting from a throat that now came equipped with a multitude of voices. They all cut off in mid-howl, replaced with something bubbling and liquid that invoked the image of a room of bound captives trying to breathe through slit throats.
One of the distant cousins, a stranger to me, burst from the house, fell to his knees, and vomited on our front lawn. It took him several minutes to empty, and even once he did, he remained on hands and knees, trembling, preferring that spot and the view of his own stomach’s contents to the prospect of returning to the house inhabited by the family obscenity.
Jean rested her head on my shoulder. “You better keep that promise, bro. I’ve never even been to Disney World.”
It was five hours later. We were back inside, drowning in more premature condolences, when the low hubbub of empty conversation went away all at once. At first I thought it was just one of those awkward conversational lulls endured by all families who have ever endured an extended death watch, but then I registered the gaze of an aunt frozen in the act of dipping a cracker into a bowl of salsa, the identical look on the face of her fat husband who’d been napping on and off between forced reminders of her own deep empathy, and the relief on the faces of almost everybody else, as they reacted to something over my shoulder. I turned around and saw Dr. Zuvicek, who had stopped midway down the stairs and now faced us all, looking grim and professorial and older than his years. He had washed up and changed into a new black suit, one unsullied by the various explosive effluents of time spent with Ethan; he had slicked back his hair and resculpted the flared lines of his beard and transformed himself back into the buttoned-down man of medicine, but the ordeal of the last few hours had still taken a lot out of him, and he wore the pain of it on his face and on the shoulders.
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