A Home at the End of the World

by Michael Cunningham

  I stood in the doorway for a while, contemplating my position. I had expected him to hear me, to look up and commence worrying over the fact that I had been disturbed. When he maintained his posture on the bed I stepped quietly into the room. It was time for me to speak but I could not think of what to say. I had thought my simple presence would cause a next thing to happen. I looked around the room. There were the twin bureaus, with my mother’s makeup and perfumes arranged on a mother-of-pearl tray. There was the oak-framed mirror, displaying a rectangle of flowered wallpaper from the opposite wall. Empty-handed, without an offering, I crept to the bed and cautiously touched my father’s elbow.

  He lifted his head and looked at me as if he didn’t recognize me; as if we had met once, long ago, and now he was trying to summon up my name. His face nearly stopped my heart. For a moment it seemed he had left us after all; his fatherly aspect had withdrawn and in its place was only a man, big as a car but blank and unscrupled as an infant, capable of anything. I stood in the sudden glare of his new strangeness, shyly smiling in yellow pajamas.

  Then he brought himself back. He reoccupied his face and laid a gentle hand on my shoulder. “Hey,” he whispered. “What are you doing up?”

  I shrugged. Even today, as an adult, I can’t remember a time when I did not pause and consider before telling the truth.

  He could have picked me up and taken me onto the bed with him. That gesture might have rescued us both, at least for the time being. I ached for it. I’d have given everything I imagined owning, in my greediest fantasies, to have been pulled into bed with him and held, as he’d held me while the sky exploded over our heads on the Fourth of July. But he must have been embarrassed at having been caught fighting. Now he was a man who had awakened his child by yelling at his wife, and had then flung himself across the bed like a heartbroken teenage girl. He could become other things, but he would always be that as well.

  “Go back to sleep,” he said, in a voice gruffer than he may have intended it to be. I believe he hoped the situation could still be undone. If he acted forcefully enough, we could jump back in time and restitch the fabric of my sleep. I would wake in the morning with nothing more than dimly recollected dreams.

  I refused. I would settle for nothing less than consoling him. My father ordered me back to bed and I grew balky and petulant. I hovered at the edge of tears, which strained his patience. I wanted him to require my presence. I needed to know that by my kindness and perseverance I was victorious in the long contest for his love.

  “Jonathan,” he said. “Jonathan, come on.”

  I let myself be taken back to my room. I had no options. He picked me up and for the first time I did not exult in his touch or his spicy smell, the broad curving shine of his forehead. At that moment I came to know my mother’s reticence, her delicate-boned sense of remove. I had practiced imitating her and now, in a rush, I could do nothing else. If my father rubbed my weary shoulders I would tense up; if he stomped in from the snow I would think nervously of the collapse of my spinach soufflé.

  He put me into bed tenderly enough. He pulled the covers over me, told me to get some shut-eye. He did not act badly. Still, in a fury, I slipped out of bed and ran across the room to my toy chest. Unfamiliar feelings racketed in my ears, made me light-headed. “Jonathan,” my father said sharply. He started after me, but I was too quick for him. I dug to the bottom of the chest, knowing just where to reach. I pulled the doll out by her slick rubber leg and held her roughly in my arms.

  He hesitated, half standing over my miniature bed. On my headboard, a cartoon rabbit danced ecstatically on a field of four-petaled pink flowers.

  “This is mine,” I said, in a nearly hysterical tone of insistence. The floor of my bedroom felt unsteady beneath my feet, and I clung to the doll as if it alone could keep me from losing my balance and slipping away.

  My father shook his head. For the single time in my recollection, his kindness failed. He had wanted so much, and the world was shrinking. His wife shunned him, his business was not a success, and his only son—there would be no others—loved dolls and quiet indoor games.

  “Jesus Christ, Jonathan,” he hollered. “Jesus H. Christ. What in the hell is the matter with you? What ?”

  I stood dumb. I had no answer to that question, although I knew one was expected.

  “This is mine” was all I could offer by way of an answer. I held the doll so close to my chest her stiff eyelashes gouged me through my pajamas.

  “Fine,” he said more quietly, in a defeated tone. “Fine. It’s yours.” And he left.

  I heard him go downstairs, get his jacket from the hall closet. I heard my mother fail to speak from the kitchen. I heard him close the front door, with a caution and deliberateness that implied finality.

  He would return in the morning, having slept on the couch in his office at the theater. After an awkward period we would resume our normal family life, find our cheerfulness again. My father and mother would invent a cordial, joking relationship that involved neither kisses nor fights. They would commence living together with the easy, chaste familiarity of grown siblings. He would ask me no more unanswerable questions, though his singular question would continue crackling in the back of my head like a faulty electrical connection. My mother’s cooking would become renowned. In 1968, our family would be photographed for the Sunday supplement of the Cleveland Post: my mother cutting into a shrimp casserole while my father and I looked on, proud, expectant, and perfectly dressed.

  BOBBY

  W E LIVED then in Cleveland, in the middle of everything. It was the sixties—our radios sang out love all day long. This of course is history. It happened before the city of Cleveland went broke, before its river caught fire. We were four. My mother and father, Carlton, and me. Carlton turned sixteen the year I turned nine. Between us were several brothers and sisters, weak flames quenched in our mother’s womb. We are not a fruitful or many-branched line. Our family name is Morrow.

  Our father was a high school music teacher. Our mother taught children called “exceptional,” which meant that some could name the day Christmas would fall in the year 2000 but couldn’t remember to drop their pants when they peed. We lived in a tract called Woodlawn—neat one- and two-story houses painted optimistic colors. Our tract bordered a cemetery. Behind our back yard was a gully choked with brush, and beyond that, the field of smooth, polished stones. I grew up with the cemetery, and didn’t mind it. It could be beautiful. A single stone angel, small-breasted and determined, rose amid the more conservative markers close to our house. Farther away, in a richer section, miniature mosques and Parthenons spoke silently to Cleveland of man’s enduring accomplishments. Carlton and I played in the cemetery as children and, with a little more age, smoked joints and drank Southern Comfort there. I was, thanks to Carlton, the most criminally advanced nine-year-old in my fourth-grade class. I was going places. I made no move without his counsel.

  Here is Carlton several months before his death, in an hour so alive with snow that earth and sky are identically white. He labors among the markers and I run after, stung by snow, following the light of his red knitted cap. Carlton’s hair is pulled back into a ponytail, neat and economical, a perfect pinecone of hair. He is thrifty, in his way.

  We have taken hits of acid with our breakfast juice. Or rather, Carlton has taken a hit and I, considering my youth, have been allowed half. This acid is called windowpane. It is for clarity of vision, as Vicks is for decongestion of the nose. Our parents are at w
ork, earning the daily bread. We have come out into the cold so that the house, when we reenter it, will shock us with its warmth and righteousness. Carlton believes in shocks.

  “I think I’m coming on to it,” I call out. Carlton has on his buckskin jacket, which is worn down to the shine. On the back, across his shoulder blades, his girlfriend has stitched an electric-blue eye. As we walk I speak into the eye. “I think I feel something,” I say.

  “Too soon,” Carlton calls back. “Stay loose, Frisco. You’ll know when the time comes.”

  I am excited and terrified. We are into serious stuff. Carlton has done acid half a dozen times before, but I am new at it. We slipped the tabs into our mouths at breakfast, while our mother paused over the bacon. Carlton likes taking risks.

  Snow collects in the engraved letters on the headstones. I lean into the wind, trying to decide whether everything around me seems strange because of the drug, or just because everything truly is strange. Three weeks earlier, a family across town had been sitting at home, watching television, when a single-engine plane fell on them. Snow swirls around us, seeming to fall up as well as down.

  Carlton leads the way to our spot, the pillared entrance to a society tomb. This tomb is a palace. Stone cupids cluster on the peaked roof, with stunted, frozen wings and matrons’ faces. Under the roof is a veranda, backed by cast-iron doors that lead to the house of the dead proper. In summer this veranda is cool. In winter it blocks the wind. We keep a bottle of Southern Comfort there.

  Carlton finds the bottle, unscrews the cap, and takes a good, long draw. He is studded with snowflakes. He hands me the bottle and I take a more conservative drink. Even in winter, the tomb smells mossy as a well. Dead leaves and a yellow M & M’s wrapper, worried by the wind, scrape on the marble floor.

  “Are you scared?” Carlton asks me.

  I nod. I never think of lying to him.

  “Don’t be, man,” he says. “Fear will screw you right up. Drugs can’t hurt you if you feel no fear.”

  I nod. We stand sheltered, passing the bottle. I lean into Carlton’s certainty as if it gave off heat.

  “We can do acid all the time at Woodstock,” I say.

  “Right on. Woodstock Nation. Yow.”

  “Do people really live there?” I ask.

  “Man, you’ve got to stop asking that. The concert’s over, but people are still there. It’s the new nation. Have faith.”

  I nod again, satisfied. There is a different country for us to live in. I am already a new person, renamed Frisco. My old name was Robert.

  “We’ll do acid all the time,” I say.

  “You better believe we will.” Carlton’s face, surrounded by snow and marble, is lit. His eyes are bright as neon. Something in them tells me he can see the future, a ghost that hovers over everybody’s head. In Carlton’s future we all get released from our jobs and schooling. Awaiting us all, and soon, is a bright, perfect simplicity. A life among the trees by the river.

  “How are you feeling, man?” he asks me.

  “Great,” I tell him, and it is purely the truth. Doves clatter up out of a bare tree and turn at the same instant, transforming themselves from steel to silver in the snow-blown light. I know at that moment that the drug is working. Everything before me has become suddenly, radiantly itself. How could Carlton have known this was about to happen? “Oh,” I whisper. His hand settles on my shoulder.

  “Stay loose, Frisco,” he says. “There’s not a thing in this pretty world to be afraid of. I’m here.”

  I am not afraid. I am astonished. I had not realized until this moment how real everything is. A twig lies on the marble at my feet, bearing a cluster of hard brown berries. The broken-off end is raw, white, fleshly. Trees are alive.

  “I’m here,” Carlton says again, and he is.

  Hours later, we are sprawled on the sofa in front of the television, ordinary as Wally and the Beav. Our mother makes dinner in the kitchen. A pot lid clangs. We are undercover agents. I am trying to conceal my amazement.

  Our father is building a grandfather clock from a kit. He wants to have something to leave us, something for us to pass along. We can hear him in the basement, sawing and pounding. I know what is laid out on his sawhorses—a long raw wooden box, onto which he glues fancy moldings. A single pearl of sweat meanders down his forehead as he works. Tonight I have discovered my ability to see every room of the house at once, to know every single thing that goes on. A mouse nibbles inside the wall. Electrical wires curl behind the plaster, hidden and patient as snakes.

  “Shhh,” I say to Carlton, who has not said anything. He is watching television through his splayed fingers. Gunshots ping. Bullets raise chalk dust on a concrete wall. I have no idea what we are watching.

  “Boys?” our mother calls from the kitchen. I can, with my new ears, hear her slap hamburger into patties. “Set the table like good citizens,” she calls.

  “Okay, Ma,” Carlton replies, in a gorgeous imitation of normality. Our father hammers in the basement. I can feel Carlton’s heart ticking. He pats my hand, to assure me that everything’s perfect.

  We set the table, spoon fork knife, paper napkins triangled to one side. We know the moves cold. After we are done I pause to notice the dining-room wallpaper: a golden farm, backed by mountains. Cows graze, autumn trees cast golden shade. This scene repeats itself three times, on three walls.

  “Zap,” Carlton whispers. “Zzzzzoom.”

  “Did we do it right?” I ask him.

  “We did everything perfect, little son. How are you doing in there, anyway?” He raps lightly on my head.

  “Perfect, I guess.” I am staring at the wallpaper as if I were thinking of stepping into it.

  “You guess. You guess? You and I are going to other planets, man. Come over here.”

  “Where?”

  “Here. Come here.” He leads me to the window. Outside the snow skitters, nervous and silver, under streetlamps. Ranch-style houses hoard their warmth, bleed light into the gathering snow. It is a street in Cleveland. It is our street.

  “You and I are going to fly, man,” Carlton whispers, close to my ear. He opens the window. Snow blows in, sparking on the carpet. “Fly,” he says, and we do. For a moment we strain up and out, the black night wind blowing in our faces—we raise ourselves up off the cocoa-colored deep-pile wool-and-polyester carpet by a sliver of an inch. Sweet glory. The secret of flight is this—you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws. I swear it to this day.

  We both know we have taken momentary leave of the earth. It does not strike either of us as remarkable, any more than does the fact that airplanes sometimes fall from the sky, or that we have always lived in these rooms and will soon leave them. We settle back down. Carlton touches my shoulder.

  “You wait, Frisco,” he says. “Miracles are happening. Fucking miracles.”

  I nod. He pulls down the window, which reseals itself with a sucking sound. Our own faces look back at us from the cold, dark glass. Behind us, our mother drops the hamburgers sizzling into the skillet. Our father bends to his work under a hooded lightbulb, preparing the long box into which he will lay clockworks, pendulum, a face. A plane drones by overhead, invisible in the clouds. I glance nervously at Carlton. He smiles his assurance and squeezes the back of my neck.

  March. After the thaw. I am walking through the cemetery, thinking about my endl
ess life. One of the beauties of living in Cleveland is that any direction feels like progress. I’ve memorized the map. We are by my calculations three hundred and fifty miles shy of Woodstock, New York. On this raw new day I am walking east, to the place where Carlton and I keep our bottle. I am going to have an early nip, to celebrate my bright future.

  When I get to our spot I hear low moans coming from behind the tomb. I freeze, considering my choices. The sound is a long-drawn-out agony with a whip at the end, a final high C, something like “ooooooOw.” A wolf’s cry run backward. What decides me on investigation rather than flight is the need to make a story. In the stories my brother likes best, people always do the foolish, risky thing. I find I can reach decisions this way, by thinking of myself as a character in a story told by Carlton.

  I creep around the side of the monument, cautious as a badger, pressed up close to the marble. I peer over a cherub’s girlish shoulder. What I find is Carlton on the ground with his girlfriend, in an uncertain jumble of clothes and bare flesh. Carlton’s jacket, the one with the embroidered eye, is draped over the stone, keeping watch.

  I hunch behind the statue. I can see the girl’s naked arms, and the familiar bones of Carlton’s spine. The two of them moan together in the dry winter grass. Though I can’t make out the girl’s expression, Carlton’s face is twisted and grimacing, the cords of his neck pulled tight. I had never thought the experience might be painful. I watch, trying to learn. I hold on to the cherub’s cold wings.

  It isn’t long before Carlton catches sight of me. His eyes rove briefly, ecstatically skyward, and what do they light on but his brother’s small head, sticking up next to a cherub’s. We lock eyes and spend a moment in mutual decision. The girl keeps on clutching at Carlton’s skinny back. He decides to smile at me. He decides to wink.

  I am out of there so fast I tear up divots. I dodge among the stones, jump the gully, clear the fence into the swing-set-and-picnic-table sanctity of the back yard. Something about that wink. My heart beats fast as a sparrow’s.