by David Arnold
“Penguins and polar bears.”
“What now?”
“When I was a kid I went to Sunday school with a friend, and the lesson was Noah’s ark. Of course all the other kids think I’m some big expert because I’m Noah, so just to push back, I ask the Sunday school teacher if penguins and polar bears were on the ark too. She says, ‘Yes, all God’s animals were present and accounted for.’ So I ask, ‘How did they get there?’ And she’s all, ‘Get where?’ and I say, ‘Look, I can buy the old man single-handedly built a boat the size of a freighter, and I can buy the apocalyptic flood, and I can even buy God’s animals-first philosophy, but can you please explain how two representatives from every species, separated by continents, oceans, and ecosystems, all gathered in the same place at the same time?’”
“So what’d she say?”
“She looks me right in the eye and says, ‘He picked them up.’”
“She did not.”
“I was like, ‘Come again?’ And she’s all, ‘Whatever animals weren’t already in the vicinity were picked up by Noah later on.’ So then she tries to move on to the post-flood rainbow, but I’m like, ‘Hold up. Were they on rafts?’ And she’s like, ‘Who?’ And I’m like, ‘These animals that weren’t in Noah’s vicinity, did they build rafts?’ And she says, ‘Now you’re being ridiculous,’ so I’m like, ‘Tell that to those poor animals, just floating along on a wing and a prayer.’”
“The balls on you.”
“Anyway, my friend invited me back the following week, I said thanks, but I was busy fishing for hoary marmots.”
“What’re those?”
“They’re like—these giant squirrels that live in Alaska.”
“Get the fuck out. Giant Alaskan squirrels?”
“Hoary marmots, look ’em up.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Here’s something else weird. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—the country’s leading authority on all things oceanic—goes by the acronym NOAA, pronounced like my name.”
“Really?”
“Their entry on Wikipedia actually says, ‘NOAA warns of dangerous weather.’”
“How do you know all this?”
“I write these things—Concise Histories. It doesn’t matter. It’s a long story.”
“Which is it?”
“It’s a long story that doesn’t matter.”
“All right then, my turn for a story. Actually, first off . . . how old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
“Sixteen, shit. All right, let’s start here. When I was your age, I was high all the time. Weed mostly, then meth, and eventually heroin. I was a drop-dead junkie. Always high, always alone. And this didn’t fly with Abe. He was a year younger than me, a good kid. Only thing he loved more than going to church was bugging me to come with him. I was just like . . . what’s the point? But he kept asking, so I finally came up with a solution. Here I had this lonely brother, doing his thing all by himself. And here I was, doing my thing all by myself, both of us lonely as all get-out. Why not—”
“Shit.”
“Yeah. So I tell him about my idea to trade time with each other. He gets high with me, I go to church with him. Just the once, I told him. Fucking stupider than stupid.”
“That’s him in the photo?”
“Yeah.”
“So what happened?”
“I went to church with him, necktie and all. I remember like it was yesterday. Preacher talked about innocence. You know who Pontius Pilate was, right?”
“Know the name.”
“So Jesus is brought to trial, and Pilate, he’s basically the judge. But he’s conflicted, see, because he thinks Jesus is innocent, but this crowd of people wants him dead—and not just dead, but crucified. That’s a brutal death, all manner of ways crucifixion can kill you. Blood loss, shock, organ failure, exhaustion, starvation, even . . . but you know what most books list as the actual cause of death?”
“What?”
“Asphyxiation. You’re just hanging there, choking, flat-out unable to breathe, until phht—you’re dead, man. So here’s Pontius Pilate with a decision to make. Go with his gut? Or go with the crowd?”
“I think I know how this story ends.”
“Right. But get this. There’s this line in Matthew, says just before Pilate hands over Jesus to be crucified, he washes his hands, claiming to be ‘innocent of this man’s blood.’ But I think, deep down, Pilate knew. He didn’t kill Jesus with those freshly washed hands of his, but he may as well have.”
“You think?”
“Say you’re inside a room with a bunch of people. It’s dark and there’s only one door. Let’s say it’s your house, even, and you are intimately familiar with the surroundings. And you know that directly on the other side of that single door is a sheer drop off a cliff. But you open it anyway. First person steps through, phht, dead. Next person steps through, phht, dead. Now, you didn’t push them off the cliff, but you knew what would happen when you opened the door. So who do you think is to blame?”
“So, like—were these people blindfolded?”
“Come on.”
“Also, if that’s the only door, how did we get inside the room to begin with?”
“You get what I’m saying, though, right? You knew what was on the other side, and you opened the door anyway. That’s what Pontius Pilate did. That’s what I did with that trade. I opened a door, knowing the cliff was on the other side. And out my brother walked.”
“That why you picked the name?”
“Philip Parish. Pontius Pilate. Same initials, same fates. Sometimes a thing stares you in the face until you pick it up.”
“But you’re clean now?”
“Yeah.”
“When did that happen?”
“Few years after Abe got hooked. I saw what was happening, how he was changing. It’s like that cave, see. Everything dulls around the edges, turns to shadow, stays that way so long you start thinking the shadow is the real thing. I don’t know how I did it, but I climbed out of that cave right on up into the blazing sunlight. I tried bringing Abe with me. For years I tried. Figured I’d been there before, knew the way out. He tried a couple times, got clean once. But it didn’t last.”
“The sun is too bright.”
“I found this photo in his nightstand. I don’t know when he took it, and I don’t know what he planned on doing with it, but . . . anyway.”
“The sunlit narrative.”
“The what?”
“In my class, you talked about the shaded narrative. How in songwriting, you write the mood of a thing rather than the thing itself. Which seems a little like the ‘Allegory of the Cave,’ right? Those guys only saw the shadow of things on the wall, not the actual things.”
“Sure.”
“But that day, you talked about another type of writing.”
“Yeah.”
“Philip.”
“Yeah.”
“What happened to your brother?”
58 → and the bird sang
There was a bird in a tree outside the apartment in which Abraham Parish lived, and it would not quit singing, like birds do, says Philip, and it was on a Tuesday, he remembers, because Stacy at the Shell station gave him two-for-one jelly doughnuts, and Stacy only works Tuesdays (she’s a student, I think), and so Philip arrived at his brother’s house that morning, an extra jelly doughnut for Abe, and he walked past the tree with that singing bird, la-la-la, it sang and sang, and he walked up three flights of stairs, the shirt sticking to his back from the heat of the day, and, reaching the top floor, he knocked on the door of his brother’s apartment, Abe, it’s me, you better be up and at ’em, because Philip had just gotten his brother on with him at Sanders Drywall, and it was a shit job, but a shit job’s a job, and his brother was really
trying to dig himself out of this hole, see, he needed this job, but after a few minutes and no answer, Philip pulled a key out of his wallet, one he rarely used, but one that weighed a brick, and he opened the door and walked inside, Abe, where are you?, and it was a small apartment, not much ground to cover, and Philip was down the hall in no time, Abe?, and opened the bedroom door, Abe?, and I saw what I saw, man, I saw him, man, just lying there, my little brother on his bed, on his back, skin as blue as the fucking ocean, just staring at the fucking ceiling like he’s waiting on it to collapse on top of him, and there are all manner of ways drugs can kill you, but my brother, Abe—in death, just like in life, he followed Jesus, man, choked on his own damn spit, and Abe, and Abe, my God, don’t leave me here alone, and Abe, look what I did, and Philip Parish turned and ran from his brother’s room, from the tiny apartment, down three flights of stairs, and he felt blood on his hands, I’d squeezed the shit outta that doughnut, and he collapsed on the lawn, to his knees, praying, yelling, I really don’t know which, crying and crying, just crying so hard, I am all alone. . . .
And the bird sang.
59 → hey there, slugger
Penny: One of the French fry eaters has a staring problem
Penny: Strange brood, these fried potato people
Penny: That sounded weird
Penny: Okay wait a sec
Penny: The girl with the staring problem is approaching the car
Penny: Actually. I think it’s the car she’s staring at. Not me
Penny: Okay, um, Noah where are you?
Penny: This girl is literally climbing up on the hood
Penny: Mayday
Penny: Mayday
Penny: SOS
Penny: The French fry eater is ON TOP of the car. Repeat
Penny: ON TOP OF THE CAR
Penny: WHERE ARE YOU???
Penny: Look I know we’ve had our differences
Penny: But whatever you’re doing in there, COME OUTSIDE NOW
Penny: I’ve got my pepper spray, but I could use backup
Penny: OK there you are, thank God
Penny: Wait. Do you know this girl????
Penny: Until further notice, I am shunning you.
Penny: Consider yourself shunned. Starting now.
* * *
No one shuns like Penny when she puts her mind to it. Silent treatment the whole drive back to Iverton, and once we get home, I watch her storm through the yard and sneak inside the house. I sit in the car for a second, reread her texts, pull my phone out of the charger, and lean my head against the seat.
“Well, that was a night.”
The smell of Parish’s cigarettes linger. Listening to his story felt like holding a vessel and watching the poor guy empty himself into it, and by the time he’d finished, he could barely breathe, he was so exhausted. The way he talked about his brother, even the gentleness with which he spoke the name Abe—like if he wasn’t careful, it might run off his tongue never to return—reminds me of how I’ve recently started thinking of Penny:
From his roost in the backseat, Mark Wahlberg yawns audibly.
“Terribly sorry if we interrupted your beauty sleep.” I twist around to face him; he looks back at me with that head tilt like he understands every word. “What in the world happened to you, Fluff?”
He sits on those strangely youthful haunches, staring at me like ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
Outside, Mark Wahlberg follows me up the lawn, through the front door, and then scurries off to Penny’s room. I take the steps two at a time, extra cautious as I pass the guest bedroom. It’s after two a.m., so if Uncle Orville did in fact arrive around one, he’s probably asleep, but still—would suck to get caught this late in the game.
Safely in the confines of my own bedroom, it hits me how tired I am. I pull off my jacket, my boots, my Navy Bowie, and crawl into my warm bed.
Very warm. Like, really very warm.
“Hey there, slugger.”
Scream my lungs out, and Uncle Orville laughs, and Mark Wahlberg comes bounding into the room, barking for all the world like a Rottweiler, and my parents are in the room stat, wide-eyed and frizz-haired, and Orville climbs out of my bed in nothing but skintight leopard-print briefs, and Dad whispers, “God, Orville,” and my uncle stretches and yawns, all, “Should I put on a pot of coffee, then?”
Without dressing, Uncle Orville makes his way downstairs, presumably to start some coffee, while I have it out with my parents. Much as I hate lying to them, I could hardly tell the truth, that I’d taken their twelve-year-old daughter and the family dog to a bar in Chicago, where I’d left them in the car so I could use a fake ID to track down a local musician about the photograph he dropped in my class at the Magazine Mega Gala, oh, and also, I think I’m in love with this girl who climbed on top of my car.
So I say I couldn’t sleep. I say I went to the basement to watch a movie, and that Uncle O must have arrived while I was down there. I ask why he was even in my room to begin with, hadn’t Dad cleaned out the guest room for this exact purpose? “Yes, I cleaned out the guest room,” says Dad, and then he says Mom just forgot to notify Uncle Orville of the change of plans, to which Mom says she thought Dad was going to let him know. Scratching of heads, non-apology apologies, and we go downstairs to iron things out with Orville (who, gulping the coffee, is either immune to caffeine or in such a constant state of hype it’s impossible to tell). “Just a mix-up,” we say, “totally our bad,” et cetera, and Mom goes to bed, and Dad ushers Uncle Orville to the guest room.
Finally alone, staring down at my bed, all I can see is Uncle Orville in those leopard-print briefs. I strip the sheets, toss them in the hamper, plop down on the bare mattress, and in the darkness of my room I stare up at the ceiling: I think of caves and dogs and Abrahams and Noahs, of birds, of angels in songs and demons in deeds, of shaded and sunlit narratives, of all the doors I’ve opened for others in full knowledge of the cliff on the other side. And I think of canoes.
Penny must have heard the commotion—but she never left her room.
60 → fabrics and flapjacks
Hovering.
Look down at myself in Circuit’s bed, on my back, Abraham next to me, barking, total silence, the drenched figure in the corner who will not turn around, the swirling air, a tornado of brilliant colors, letters seeping from walls, floating in complete chaos until some invisible hand reorders them, shoves them across the room, and those two words are so close, I can feel their colors on my face: STRANGE FASCINATION. And I am in my body again, eyelids fluttering, and I breathe for the first time in years.
* * *
Waking up on a bare mattress is bad enough; waking up on a bare mattress in a cold sweat, having had the same stupid dream every night for months, is the absolute worst.
It’s Wednesday, first day of break, and by all accounts I should be enthusiastic about the next couple days. Unfor-tunately, my uncle’s presence in the house combined with the ticking clock of my college deadline makes enthusiasm tough.
I’m about to get up, when I rub my hand across the bare mattress, and it’s weird, but I have that sudden sensation like when your left arm falls asleep to the point of total numbness, and you touch it with your right hand, and even though your right hand feels the touch, your left arm feels nothing at all.
It’s like touching someone else’s arm.
I shake it off, shower, get dressed, head downstairs. “Hey there, slugger.” Uncle Orville, still in his robe and little else, is literally flipping pancakes on a griddle. “Saw your dad’s cereal options in the pantry, figured I’d take matters into my own hands. Making my world-famous flapjacks. You want some?”
“Thanks,” I say, grabbing an apple from a bowl on the counter. “But I have to eat and run.”
“School’s out, right?” Uncle Orville turns off the stove, pours maple syrup on a tall stack, and dig
s in.
“I have a chiropractor appointment.”
“Oh, right,” he says with a mouthful. “The back injury.”
On the drive to Dr. Kirby’s office, I replay the conversation with my uncle; he didn’t put air quotes around “back injury,” but it sure sounded like he wanted to.
61 → the curious case of Len Kowalski
The thought of returning home after my appointment, of going back to Uncle Orville’s half-naked flapjack parade, is downright crushing. Luckily, I hadn’t planned on returning home just yet.
“Yo,” says Alan, climbing into my car. He grabs my phone from the console, scrolls through my Bowie catalog to find “Space Oddity.”
“So how’d it go?” he asks.
I pull out of the Rosa-Haases’ driveway. “How’d what go?”
“The chiropractor, dude.”
“Oh. Fine.” Dr. Kirby did say he saw “a lot of progress,” which sort of calls into question the actual state of my back, but maybe also the actual state of his degree. “He says things are looking up.”
Alan sighs in that dramatic way he does and looks out the window.
“What,” I say.
“Nothing.”
“Come on, what.”
He shifts in his seat so he’s staring at me while I drive. “Just don’t treat me like I’m everyone else, okay? That’s all. Don’t treat me like I’m everyone else.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Look, I get it. You felt backed into a corner, all this pressure to be some big swimming stud, and you wanted out.”
Verbal denial, at this moment, would only sound like confirmation. So I say nothing.
“Fine,” says Alan; he turns back to the window for a second, but thinks twice. “One last thing, and then I’m done, and I’m only saying this now because I’ll regret it later if I don’t.”
