Island Page 10

  The most beautiful map I have ever seen may not be the most beautiful map to anyone else. It’s an undated and anonymous map of the eastern Mediterranean, like Buondelmonti’s, but a portolan, a kind of map used by captains and navigators to pilot their ships. A portolan has a hundred, two hundred fine straight lines crisscrossing the face of it, a web of wind roses. It’s like looking at a map through a net. The lines pass through all the islands and peninsulas painted in blue and yellow and red and green, through the distant author’s indecipherable writing, his names for the parts of the sea, the harbors, the bays and headlands.

  The lines lead you everywhere and nowhere. This is a map, really, of a human being, a human brain: beautiful, complicated, starting and ending over and over, and almost totally unknowable.

  EIGHT

  Time goes fast when you have to think about surviving. Years flew.

  Around the middle of ninth grade, a couple of years after his great violence at the dinner table, our father started to come out of his room, the room that had been his bedroom with our mother. He let himself be seen. Useless, vacant, he drifted between rooms, sometimes sitting for hours at a time, or standing here and there.

  He had long before stopped supplying us with money. My brother and I had worked for cash — yard work, odd jobs, babysitting — before we turned fourteen, when we could get real work. We worked fast food. We’re both managers now, the youngest in the chain. We’ve sometimes talked about opening up a restaurant of our own, or a food truck. But that would get in the way of Key’s Ivy League future and my monastic life.

  The house had slid backwards, decaying at a faster rate. Key and I used our salaries to repair the house a little. We used the same book of home repair my father had used to fix the roof. We bought windows and replaced the broken ones in the kitchen. We gave ourselves the gift of light.

  Key and I learned how to repair the walls my father had broken through. And, almost three years after our father lost his mind, we had a functional kitchen again. Not pretty, but functional.

  Our father wandered around. He would sometimes watch us work, putting up drywall, glazing the new windows, and from time to time he’d greet us when he saw us. But then he’d disappear again, travel over some body of water to his island, someplace separate. Whatever ailed him made him almost unreachable. That’s the truth. It made him an uncharted island.

  Every so often, our father would appear in some part of the house, almost ghostly, silent and stationary, just as he did when I wanted to kill myself after Jacqui slept with some guy at debate camp. Key and I didn’t need him for anything, but he was there, a presence.

  Sometimes he’d try and make small talk about the weather, or ask after us, how we slept, how school was going. The exchanges could get weird fast.

  “So, Rad, what’s happening?” His eyes would seem unfocused, almost as if he’d been staring for hours through a telescope at the stars a billion miles off and couldn’t see clearly anything within arm’s reach.

  “Not much. You?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I thought I was hungry, but I’m not. Are you hungry?”

  “No, I’m not hungry.”

  “I thought about catching eels. Have you ever eaten an eel?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I’m not sure I want to skin an eel, to be honest.”

  “No one will force you to skin an eel, Dad.”

  “I’m pretty sure you have to skin an eel before you eat it. The skin carries the electricity, and if you bite into an eel that hasn’t been skinned, that hasn’t had the electricity taken out of it, you’ll get the shock of your life. Your whole mouth full of lightning.”

  “I’m not sure that’s true, Dad.”

  “True or not, I think it’s better not to catch and skin eels.”

  The End.

  He simply slid away to some other room in the house.

  Our father never mentioned our mother, and he never mentioned what happened the night he attacked Key and me and bled a river.

  Then, one afternoon fourteen months ago, our father disappeared. Or so Key and I thought. There were times when he’d gone for a walk and called the home phone when he didn’t recognize where he’d ended up. One of us would have to bring him home.

  For some reason, though, on this afternoon, Key and I felt more afraid than usual when we didn’t find our father at home. We felt he had disappeared, that he hadn’t just gone to his interior island but had left for good.

  The garage was open — this was before my brother sealed it shut — but no sign of our father.

  “Oh, Rad,” Key said. He took off toward the basement.

  “Wait, what?”

  “The ravine.”

  We decided without saying anything that our father had fallen to his death.

  And I’ll confess right here, now, I couldn’t tell whether or not I wanted him to be lying at the bottom of the ravine. All the sudden horror, and all the sudden freedom, rushing at Key and me at the same time.

  Maybe it would be better if —

  We found our father out back. Wood, hammer, nails, a shovel, spade. He had cleared the ferns that once carpeted the ground past the stilts that held up our deck. He was lying on his stomach, working the dirt, digging, scraping.

  “Dad?” Key walked over to him. “Hello?”

  Our father looked over his shoulder, calm and alert. “Key, hi.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Good, yes.” He sat up. “How’re you doing, Rad?”

  I shrugged. I was still trying to calm myself.

  Question: Was I relieved or disappointed?

  Answer: Yes.

  Key said, “What are you doing there, Dad?”

  My father looked around, smiling. “I’m going to build a ladder down the wall of the ravine.”

  “All the way to the bottom?”

  “No, of course not. I’m going to build a platform. I want to sit among the trees and stones.”

  Key and I looked at each other.

  “By yourself?” Key said. “Dad, you could die.”

  “I won’t die,” he laughed. “I’ll do what I can by myself. You’ll help if I need it, I know you will. But I don’t think I’ll need the help.”

  Key and I more or less stood there staring at him.

  “I can do this,” our father said, smiling up at us.

  “How?” I said. “How can you do this without falling?”

  “My secret,” he said, the smile gone. “Now run along, you two. I’m fine.”

  Key and I said nothing, both of us wondering if by walking away we would be giving up on him.

  “Please,” our father said. “I can do this. Look, I’m checking the ground and the cliff, seeing how they’re made, checking the rock ledge. Then I’m going to build the ladder up here in the garage, a ladder of slats and steel cord. Something collapsible, but with a little structure. I’ll anchor it in the stone and tie it off to the house. Then I’ll anchor it here and there as I go down.”

  “Are you serious?” Me again.

  “And I’ll make the platform in pieces. Interlocking, you know?” My father ignored me, watching his vision instead, watching himself descend his ladder into the ravine. “Steel and wood, a big sturdy puzzle, cantilevered, and —. Well, I haven’t figured everything out yet. But I will.”

  “Dad,” Key began. “Can’t you just sit on the back porch? You’re not a carpenter, let alone —”

  “I know what I’m doing, boys. And now it’s time for you to leave me alone.”

  We stood there not quite sure what to do.

  “I said move along.” His voice had turned black. “Don’t make me stand up, okay?”

  I was bigger than my father by then, and I knew I could defend the two of us against him, but I tugged Key away by the sleeve.

  B
efore we went in through the basement door, we looked back at him, at our father of sorts, as he worked from his belly, chipping, digging, scraping.

  * * *

  ı

  My ghost mother had no idea what to do or say that night when I told her about my father’s project. Would she have me lock him out of the garage? Sell off his tools?

  “Promise me you’ll at least talk to him, Rad. For me.”

  I promised.

  And when I went to him, he said, lucid and strong, “I’ve already talked to your mom. I told her I won’t die. I’m focused. I know I can do this.” He tapped the side of his head and frowned. “I need this, understand?”

  “Yeah, I understand,” I said. “But do you understand it’s frightening? You understand we don’t want you to do this? Even if Mom —”

  “Yes.”

  And, for the first time, my dead mother appeared to my father without appearing to me. She must have, because my father said, “That’s not fair, Diane.”

  A moment when my mother must have been talking to him.

  My father sighed, half-growled. “I’m not me, Diane. Or fully me. I know that. I’ve got one ending ahead of me, and it’s not the ending I want.”

  Key appeared next to me, home from work.

  “What’s going on?” he whispered, but I shook my head.

  We watched my father talk with our mother.

  “I’m saying I want to leave the planet long before you or the boys have to see me or deal with me at my worst. I don’t want you or Key or Rad to deal with any of it. And I don’t want to go to a hospital.”

  “Any of what?” That’s what my mother must have said.

  “The dirty work of whatever this is. Losing what’s left of my mind. My long death.”

  “That’s not your decision.”

  “Yes, it is.” And with that, my father stood up. “You can let me stay here, Diane, let me build the ladder and platform, let me be alive here for as long as I can bear it, around you, around the boys, the people I love, or you can let me go right now. I’ll go this second. Step off that ledge into the great abyss.”

  My ghost mother might have been silent.

  “Do we have an understanding?”

  My father worked when he had his concentration and wits. It took him through the winter and into spring to put together his ladder of teak and steel cord and steel brackets. And he built his platform, eight interlocking pieces, just as he said. All of it, beginning to end, he did alone.

  May, a year ago, after the spring rain had stopped, my father tied off his ladder to the stilts holding up the back porch and fastened his ladder into the ground where the ferns used to grow, then into the stone ledge, and let it down the wall of the ravine. With only a length of rope knotted around his waist and to one of the stilts, he assembled his cantilevered platform piece by piece, fastening it to brackets he’d embedded in the stone. He anchored two steel cords to the face of ravine and hooked them into thick eyes he’d screwed into the front of the platform. Two taut cables, two brackets, so the whole shebang had support from above and below.

  Finally, the time came when Key and I had to watch our father carry a decrepit folding chair down to the platform. He went over the ledge on hands and knees, the chair hanging off his shoulder.

  “Do you want me to bring the chair down, Dad?” Key had to volunteer, his care shining through, while I waited to see what would happen.

  “No, thank you.” Our father getting his bearings, positioning his hands and feet on the slats, shrugging the chair up further onto his back. “I got it.”

  Key and I waited. We expected a great cracking as the platform failed, pitching our father to his death. We expected a long scream as he fell to the bottom of the ravine.

  Silence.

  “Dad?” Key got to his belly and inched his way to the ledge. “Dad?”

  A moment later, peering down over the edge, Key waved his hand for me to come forward.

  “Seriously?”

  I got down and crawled to the ledge.

  There, almost twenty-five feet down, my father, sitting on his chair.

  For the rest of his short life, he would go to his platform to sit. He’d gaze out from his island toward the horizon, across an ocean he’d invented.

  * * *

  ı

  Six months ago, I found my father lying on the floor of the kitchen. He was holding his head in his hands and writhing on the floor.

  “Dad?”

  “Help me.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Get Diane. Get my wife. She’ll know what I need.”

  I was helpless.

  “Mom.” I shouted it. If ever I wanted her to appear. “Mom.”

  Nothing, and my father started banging his head on the floor. “Make it stop. Make it stop.”

  I threw myself onto my father and held his head against my chest. I clamped him in my legs and arms, but he fought. He fought.

  “Please. Where’s Diane? She’ll know.”

  Then he passed out. Maybe the pain knocked him out.

  I sat there on the kitchen floor until I laid my father down on his side. I tried to make him as comfortable as possible, and I waited.

  Fifteen minutes he slept. And then he reached for his head. He seemed to check his jaw and cheek, as if his head had broken or burst into pieces.

  “Still hurting?”

  My father nodded.

  “A little better, though?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I get you anything?”

  “Water.”

  I poured my father a glass of water from the pitcher I would break months later. He drank it slowly.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “Headache.”

  I’d never known my father to have headaches, migraines. I get headaches, especially when I get upset, but —

  “Migraine?”

  My father lowered his glass and shook his head.

  “What would you call it then?”

  “Something else. It’s everything in my head trying to break out.”

  “Is this the first one?”

  “No.”

  “How long, then? When did they start?”

  “I don’t know. A year ago? They’ve gotten worse.”

  “You don’t think you should go to a doctor?”

  My father shook his head. “I can’t seem to get my wife to make the call, and I’m not sure she wants me to go at all. What can a doctor do anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” I started. “MRI? Painkillers?” I could hear my own sarcasm, and I didn’t much like it. I tried to soften my tone. “Maybe it’s something we should know about. A tumor or something?”

  My father looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “Can you turn off the light?”

  I turned it off.

  I said, “You want to stand up and go somewhere else to lie down?”

  “No. I’m fine here. I’m waiting for my wife.”

  I looked around for my mother.

  Mom? Nothing.

  My father closed his eyes, rubbed his head. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”

  “How much does it hurt now?”

  “Nothing like it did, but it still might knock down a horse.”

  “That’s bad. Can I take you to a doctor? Call an ambulance?”

  “That’s up to my wife. Do you know Diane?”

  I closed my own eyes and rubbed my temples.

  “I know her,” I said.

  “She’s something, right?”

  “Something else,” I agreed.

  My father looked at me from half-closed eyes. His eyes looked black and hollow.

  “If you don’t mind my asking,” he said, “who are you?”

  * * *

&nbs
p; ı

  You can ask, why didn’t I — why didn’t we — get my father help? He might have had a tumor or some terrible illness. Like Alzheimer’s. There were the headaches that tore him open. The forgetfulness, the hallucinations.

  This is how the conversation went between Key and me after that first time I witnessed my father’s pain.

  Key: He had no idea who you were?

  Me: No. But seeing his pain was worse.

  Key: I thought you had no pity for him.

  Me: This man isn’t our father anymore. He’s something, someone, else. His brain is punishing him.

  Key: Why haven’t we taken him to a doctor? Why didn’t you?

  Me: I’m trying to understand what matters.

  Key: Dad is sick.

  Me: So why not let him be sick here, with us, with the ghost of Mom?

  Key: We can’t leave him alone in the house anymore.

  Me: Let’s ask him what we should do.

  Key: He’s in no position —

  Me: But he has opinions.

  We called our father down to us, and we sat him at the kitchen table.

  Key: Comfortable? Want something to eat? A tuna sandwich?

  Dad: I’m fine, thanks. What’s going on?

  Key (pointing at himself): Do you know who I am?

  Dad: You both look familiar, I’ll say that.

  Key: I’m your son. And so is Rad. We’re twins.

  Dad (frowning): Where’s Diane?

  Me: Coming. Give her a minute.

  Key: Dad, we’re trying to figure out what to do.

  Dad: About what?

  Key: About you.

  Our father looked over at me, then back at Key.

  Dad: I’m not sure I understand. What about me?

  Me: You’re not well. You know that, don’t you?

  “He’s right, John.” My mother materialized next to me, across from my father.

  Dad: I’m not well. So what?

  “They want to know how to take care of you,” my mother said. I couldn’t be sure if this ghost of my mother belonged to me or to my father or to the both of us. “What’s next, John?”

  My father sighed and bent his head.