by Jim Shepard
KRAKATAU
I was twelve years old when I figured out that the look my brother would get around his eyes probably meant that there was a physiological basis for what was wrong with him. Six years later as a college freshman I was flipping through Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, fifth edition, and was shocked to come across that same look, Donnie’s eyes, peering out at me from Géricault’s Madwoman. The madwoman in question was elderly, wrapped in some kind of cloak. She wore a white bonnet. Her eyes looked away from the painter as if just piecing together the outlines of another conspiracy. She’d outsmarted the world, and was going to outsmart this painter. I recognized the hatred, the sheer animosity for everything, unconcealed. Red lines rimmed her eyelids in a way that did not resemble eyestrain or fatigue. It was as if the mind behind the eyes was soaking in anguish. The next morning my Intro to Art History professor flashed a slide of the painting, ten feet wide, on the screen in front of us. A gum-chewing class went silent. “How’d you like to wake up to that in the morning?” the professor joked.
That night I called my father. He and my mother and Donnie still lived in the house Donnie and I grew up in, two hours away. I was in the little public phone booth in the dorm. It was lined with cork, and the cork was scribbled over with phone numbers and ballpoint drawings of dicks.
Donnie answered. “How ya doin’,” he said.
“I’m all right,” I said. “How about you?”
He snorted.
Some kid opened the door to the booth like I wasn’t in there and poked his head in. “Who you talkin’ to?” he said.
“No one,” I said. “Get outta here.”
The kid made a face and shut me back in.
“Who was that?” Donnie asked.
“Some asshole,” I said. I didn’t say anything else. Donnie sniffed in like he was doing a line of something.
“You wanna talk to Daddy?” he said. He was four years older but he still used words like that.
“Yeah, put him on,” I said. You couldn’t talk to him for five minutes? I thought to myself.
He put his hand over the receiver. Things went on on the other end, muffled. “Hey there,” my father finally said.
“Hey,” I said back. There was some dead air.
“What’s up?” my father said.
“Not much,” I said. I’d planned on my father being alone. I don’t know why. My brother never went out. “Just callin’.”
I was rubbing my knuckles hard over the cork next to the phone’s coin box. Pieces were scrolling off as if from an eraser. “How’s the money holding out?” my father said. Donnie made a comment behind him.
“Is he standing right next to you?” I asked.
“Yeah. Why?” my father said, instantly more alert. When I was little and I wanted his attention, I just mentioned a problem with Donnie. By college it had gotten to the point that hashing over worries about my brother was pretty much it in terms of contact with my parents.
“I wanted to ask you something,” I said.
“Is there something I should know about?” he said. Donnie was always doing things that we kept from him because he got so upset.
“Nothin’ big. Maybe I should call back,” I said.
“Awright. I’ll see you,” he said. It was a code we’d worked before.
“Short call,” I heard Donnie say before my father hung up.
WHEN MY FATHER called back, we went over the physiological thing again. I’d run this by him before. We thought drug therapy might be a possible way out.
I could see the blowups coming in Donnie’s eyes. I could see the redness. And I usually didn’t stop whatever I was doing to help them come on.
THE PROBLEM was that Donnie had had drug therapy, back in the Dawn of Time, in 1969. Who knew anything? Various combinations of doctors tried various combinations of drugs. Most of the drugs had humiliating side effects. My brother became a master at lying to the doctors about what he’d taken and what he’d squirreled away, further confusing the issue. He came out eight months later as one of the Yale–New Haven Institute’s complete failures—“We throw up our hands with him,” the resident told my parents—and with a loathing even for Bufferin.
“IN GÉRICAULT’S PAINTINGS, suffering and death, battle frenzy, and madness amount to nature itself, for nature in the end is formless and destructive.”
But really: how helpful are we going to find art history prose as an interpretive model?
WE CALLED THE POLICE six times on him. After high school I was home only a few weeks a year—the World Traveler, my father called me, caustically—yet I’d been home four of the six times we had to call the police. My father mentioned the coincidence.
WHILE MY BROTHER was in a holding pen in New Orleans I received my B.S. from Swarthmore in geological engineering. While he was touring youth hostels on the East Coast on my father’s dole, keeping to himself, a dour man in his late twenties surrounded by happy groups of much younger Europeans, I was getting my Ph.D. in geology from Johns Hopkins. He had a scramble of fine black hair that he almost never combed. He wore pastel polyester tank tops long after even Kmart shoppers had abandoned them. He had a little gut which he accentuated by tucking in his shirts and wearing too-tight pants without belts. While he was giving night school a shot in Florida I was mapping the geology of Mount Rainier. The fall he spent going through his old things at my parents’ house and getting his baseball card collection sorted out, I spent crawling around ancient volcanoes in equatorial East Africa. The third time my parents had to call the police on him, I was in a little boat in the Sunda Strait, getting my first look at Krakatau.
WHAT WERE MY PARENTS supposed to do? They never went to college, and just wanted their sons comfortable and reasonably happy. A steady job in a stable business would have been nice. Instead, one son disappeared into the academic ionosphere: I had to literally write down postdoctoral fellow so my mother could pull it out of her wallet and say it for people. She asked me to. They had a copy of Volcanoes of the World around the house, with my name listed among the fourteen junior authors contributing. My mother would say, “Here’s his book.” And their older son dropped out of high school because, as he put it, he was “being stared at.” If I was hard to explain, my brother was impossible to explain. For relatives, the etiquette was to ask about the younger one and then move on to the older one. I was never around and always doing well. He was always around and never doing well. Yes, doctors had seen him, and yes, he was clearly disturbed, but no one had a diagnosis, and as far as their ability to present him as a coherent story went, he operated in that maddening middle ground: too disturbed to function and not disturbed enough to be put away.
THE FIRST TIME we called the police because he threw me down the stairs. I was twelve, and he’d dropped out of high school the month before. We’d been arguing about sports, matching feats of memory by reciting NFL championship scores (“1963, 14–10; 1964, 27–0; 1965, 23–13”), and he’d heard the contempt in my voice. He’d been livid, and my father’s mediation attempts had consisted of stepping between us and shouting for my brother to go upstairs. He had, finally, shouting abuse the whole time about my privileged and protected status, and for once I thought I wasn’t going to back down and went up after him, as homicidal as he was. At the top of the stairs I jabbed a finger in his chest. Shouting was going on. I watched his face move into some new area of energy. He lifted me up. My feet kicked above the risers like a toddler’s, and then he threw me. I caught the banister with my hands and landed on my elbow and side. The stairs were carpeted. I got up, unhurt. “Play with pain,” he shouted down the stairs at me. “Play with pain.”
“You’re gonna kill them both,” I screamed up at him, pulling out the ultimate weapon, his guilt. I said it so they could hear. “They’re gonna kill me,” he screamed back.
MY MOTHER, FATHER, AND I sat around the kitchen table after the police had taken him away. The policeman had been awkward and embarrassed and stood around Donnie�
��s room while Donnie packed a little blue duffel in silence. We could hear the creaks in the floor-boards above us as the policeman shifted his weight from foot to foot. The routine was that the police would drive him to the bus station and tell him he couldn’t come back for a while. Then the police would come back and talk to us. While we waited for that, my mother would outline the fatal mistakes my father had made raising my brother.
We were three coconspirators each operating with a different plan. My mother’s theory was that special treatment was his undoing. My father’s theory was that explosions could be avoided if everyone did their utmost to work around him. My theory was that something cyclical and inexorable was going on, and that one way or another, sooner or later, he had to go off.
THAT NIGHT my father had taken as much abuse as he was able to. He shouted at both of us, “You can’t treat him like a normal human being; you can’t keep baiting him.” He said, “It’s like having a dog on a chain. You don’t keep sticking fingers in his mouth.” Then he said to me, “And your situation doesn’t help.”
WHAT MY FATHER MEANT was that just by being alive I made my brother’s life harder. In Donnie’s eyes I was proof that whatever had happened to him—genetically, environmentally, whatever— hadn’t been inevitable. One of his consolations had always been that something in the alchemy of the parenting he’d received had been so lethal that he had had to turn out the way he did. But I was the problem with that theory, because if that was true, then why wasn’t the kid (he called me the kid) affected?
Whatever I achieved threw the mess he’d made of his life into sharper relief. He went to Catholic school and it ruined him; I went to Catholic school and got good grades. He was always shy and turned out to need hospitalization; I was always shy and turned out to be bookish.
At one point in Pompano Beach, he took a job as a dishwasher at a Bob’s Big Boy. My mother’s first response when she heard was to congratulate him. Her second was to remark that she thought they had machines for that now. That same day he went into work and the day manager was chatting him up. The day manager asked if he had any brothers or sisters. The day manager asked what his brother did. “He’s a rocket scientist,” Donnie said, up to his elbows in suds, thirty-eight years old.
MY THESIS ADVISER at Johns Hopkins always ate Fudgsicles while he looked over my work. All the charts and text he handled turned up with chocolate thumbprints. Slurping away, flipping through the data, he liked to ask, “What is it with you and Krakatoa, anyway?” He meant why was I so driven. He intentionally pronounced it the wrong way. He liked to think of himself as puckish.
The founder of the Smithsonian, James Smithson, explained his institute’s interest in the subject this way: “A high interest attaches itself to volcanoes, and their ejections. They cease to be local phenomena; they become principal elements in the history of our globe; they connect its present with its former condition; and we have good grounds for supposing that in their flames are to be read its future destinies.”
I quoted Smithson to my adviser as an answer. He shrugged and took out his Fudgsicle and said, “You can talk to someone like me now or talk to a shrink later.”
PICTURES CAME INTO MY HEAD periodically of what my brother must have gone through, on the road. He told me, occasionally, as well. When he traveled the country, he stayed at youth hostels because they were so much cheaper, but he paid a price for it: he was pathological about his privacy, and there he had none. In Maine an older woman asked him about his hair. It was falling out. At Gettysburg some teenaged Germans took him out, got him drunk, and asked if he was attracted to one of the prettier girls in the group. Assuming that some sort of positive sexual fantasy was finally about to happen to him, he said yes, at which point they all laughed. He said he woke up the next morning near the site of Pickett’s charge. A middle-aged couple with a video camera stood nearby, filming him alongside the stone wall.
THE LAST TIME I was home he was on the road. We’d timed it that way. I spent one late night going through a family album that my mother was putting together in a spasm of masochism and love. Looking back over pictures of my brother developing year by year, his expressions progressively more closed off and miserable, brought back to me powerfully the first time I saw the sequence of photos tracking the birth of Paricutin, the Mexican volcano that grew from a tiny vent cone in a farmer’s field.
THE POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP involved part-time work for SEAN, the Scientific Event Alert Network, which was designed to keep the geological and geophysical communities in touch about active volcanoes throughout the world. I compiled and cross-referenced known data about older eruptions so that it could be manipulated for studies of recent and expected volcanism. Which was where all my work on Krakatau came in.
My thesis adviser had been the first to point out that I’d developed what people in the field call a bias. I had a heightened appreciation for the value of eyewitness accounts. I always leaned toward the catastrophists’ viewpoint, that while the ordinary eruptions needed to be documented, the complete cataclysms had the real answers; they were the ones that had to be milked for all they could yield. “What do we have here?” my adviser would say wearily as he picked up another new batch of text. “More screamers?” “Screamer” was his term for Krakatau eyewitnesses. He called their rough calculations, made under what geologists would laconically call stressful situations, “Fay Wray calculations.”
AND YET, OFTEN enough for me, working backward from a dispassionate scientific measurement—the tidal gauges at Jakarta, say— I’d be able to corroborate one more eyewitness account.
I N MY DUMPY carrel at the Grad Library I had narrowed the actual subject of my thesis down to the precise causes of the Krakatau tsunamis that swamped Java and Sumatra. This was a reasonably controversial topic. There were all sorts of wave-forming mechanisms, all of which could have operated to some extent at Krakatau. The problem was to understand which mechanism was the dominant one. The expectation was not so much that I would find a solution to the problem as add something intelligent to the debate.
The first two years I worked eighteen-plus hours a day. I never got home, almost never talked to my family. Crises came and went; what did I care? I combed everything: the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Smithsonian Library, the British Museum, the Royal Society of London, the Royal Institute for the Tropics, the Volcanological Survey of Indonesia, the Bulletin Volcanologique. I needed more help than anyone else on earth. And I turned out to possess the height of scientific naïveté. I believed everyone I read. Everyone sounded so reasonable. Everyone’s figures looked so unassailable. I was a straw in the wind. I labored through Verbeek’s original monograph from 1885 as well as later papers by Wharton, Yokoyama, and Latter. At one point my adviser told me with exasperation, “Hey, know what? It’s not likely that everyone’s right.” I incorporated this into my text. I wrote, “Nevertheless, it is safe to assume that all of these contradictory theories cannot be accurate.”
I uncovered a few things. I turned up a few photographs of the devastation from as early as 1886. I tracked down some math errors in the computations of the airwaves. Then, in 1983, the centennial year of the eruption, everything I’d done was surpassed, the dugout canoe swamped by the Queen Mary: the Smithsonian published Krakatau 1883: The Volcanic Eruption and Its Effects, providing me with 456 phone-book-sized pages to pore over. It would have been my fantasy book, if I hadn’t already sunk two years into a thesis.
EVERYTHING HAD TO BE RETOOLED. My new topic became this baggy, reactive thing that just got me through, something along the lines of This Big New Book: Is It Almost Completely the Last Word? The answer was yes.
I had a Career Crisis. My personal hygiene suffered. I stared openmouthed out windows. I sat around inert most mornings, working my way through tepid coffee and caramels for breakfast. I faced for the first time the stunning possibility that everything I touched was not going to turn to gold.
My mother called to see how I was doing. I put on a brave front. She called back the next day and said, “I told your brother you weren’t doing so well.”
“What’d he say?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said.
“I’m worried I’m gonna end up like him,” I joked.
We heard a click on the line. “Uh-oh,” my mother said.
A WEEK LATER my brother sent me Krakatoa: East of Java. He’d taped it off a Disaster Film Festival and mailed it in a box wrapped in all directions with duct tape. Maximilian Schell, Rossano Brazzi, Brian Keith: that kind of movie. What my brother remembered was that the second half of the film—the eruption itself, and the tidal waves that followed—was the really unendurable part, and always had been for me, ever since I sat through its sorry cheesiness with him when I was thirteen years old.
He didn’t include a note with it, and he didn’t have to: it was exactly his sense of humor, with the aggression directed everywhere at once.
Even my brother, in other words, had seen through the schematic of my private metaphor and knew the answer to my adviser’s question: Why is he obsessed with volcanoes? Because they go off, regardless of what anyone can do. And because, when they do go off, it’s no one’s fault. Volcanology: the science of standing around and cataloging the devastation.
MY FATHER DISCOURAGED my brother from visiting me, wherever I was. He did it for my benefit, and my brother’s. He was the Peace-maker, he thought; if he wasn’t around, anything could happen. My brother didn’t particularly enjoy visiting me—anything new in my life seemed to cause him to take stock of his—but he had few places to go. Occasionally he’d call, with my father in the room, and drop a hint. My father would hear the hint and intervene in the background. The excuse he always came up with—I was too busy, I had all this work, this was a bad time for me to be receiving visitors— could not have helped my brother. But if he wanted to keep us apart, what else could he say? My brother was too busy?
