Island Read online

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  I’m trying to get us to a moment, a very small fragment in a whole lifetime, the time it took for my father to punch out every window he could find, destroy furniture and cabinets and walls, a one-man wrecker, and nearly bleed to death, all of it taking less than ten minutes start to finish.

  Like so much else, it’s difficult to get the circumstances right. Honestly, I don’t think any of us can have a pure memory of anything terrible or wonderful. The terribleness or wonderfulness itself warps us, twists around thought, perceptions, sensations. The whole experience, bad or good, has doubt sewn right through it. Was that thunderstorm really as scary as we thought? Was that movie really so funny?

  As for the violence that came a couple nights after my father revealed his plan to sell the house and whatever else to sail around the world, I can only tell you the truth as I understand it.

  My father made a dinner, a big and beautiful dinner. A slab of baked salmon with sprigs of dill and sliced lemon. Asparagus spears. Rice with herbs. I didn’t even know he could cook like that, more than hot dogs.

  Eleven days had gone by with him back in our lives. He was celebrating. And he came to the table without a hint of anything rough going on inside of him, only what seemed his good humor. This resembled, I thought later, the good humor he had for a little while years earlier when I wet myself at the dining-room table, when he came home drunk from the office and a fist fight, when he abdicated.

  At this dinner with just Key and me, he smiled and hummed, he passed this bowl and that dish. All was peaceful. Until again, just like a few years before, with the model for me and the Barbie for my brother, he presented a gift.

  Before ice cream and apple pie, after Key and I cleared the dishes, my father asked us to sit. He took two flat packages wrapped in brown paper from beside his chair and set them on the table.

  “I have an announcement,” my father said. “First, though, these gifts for my wife.”

  Wait.

  Key looked over at me, unsure.

  I understood. Not even I had noticed my ghost mother sitting with us.

  “What’s this, John?” If my dead mother felt at all nervous, she hid it well.

  “Open the small one first.”

  My mother slid off the baker’s string, red and white, binding the smaller of the two packages, and before she unfolded the butcher paper, she paused.

  “Thank you,” she said and smiled at my father.

  “Don’t thank me yet,” my father said.

  “I’m excited, that’s all.” And she uncovered the gift.

  Drawings. My father’s art.

  The drawings.

  Thirteen portraits, each one uglier and more grotesque than the last, variations on a single theme: my mother asleep.

  Sleeping: my mother’s face like an ancient corpse, a mummy unwrapped, or a woman lifted out of a bog after forty centuries.

  Sleeping: my mother’s mouth distorted by a dream, her eyes partially open, rolled up under the half-closed lids, eerie, the whites of her eyes and two slender arcs of her irises revealed.

  Sleeping: my mother’s hand under her chin, blunt fingernails, prominent veins, sharp knuckles, the ugly hands of a hairless monkey.

  Sleeping: my mother’s impossibly long throat exposed, her jaw, her long chin, her nostrils like a baboon’s, her short eyelashes, the deep ridge of her brow.

  Sleeping: my mother’s uneven mouth, and her lips, the full lower lip and the thin upper lip, and a tooth exposed, a fang.

  Sleeping: strands of my mother’s hair covering her face, resembling a woman drowned, bloated, tangled in seaweed.

  On and on. Thirteen times my mother asleep.

  “You like them, darling?” My father and his voice had gone dangerously soft.

  My mother sifted through the thirteen portraits. Her mouth a thin line.

  “Nothing to say?” My father drilled into my mother with an expression of — I don’t know what. Not hatred or anger. Maybe curiosity. As if he were showing his art to a critic he wanted to win over. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know what to think.” My mother stared at the drawing that looked as if she had drowned in her sleep. “I don’t want to know what you were thinking.”

  All the drawings had been done in sepia, a sickly brown closer to red. For some reason I thought it might have been my father’s blood and not ink. The blood, the ink, had long dried, but each of the portraits was a fresh and open wound.

  “Go ahead,” my father said, his voice black and brittle like charcoal. “Open the painting.”

  My mother shook her head.

  “Open the package and then we can move on to more important things. My plans for all of us. I have plans, you know.”

  My mother shook her head. “No, John. I don’t know what’s happening, but —”

  “Not another word, darling.” The word darling was not an endearment but a curse. My father took back the second package. “I’ll untie it for you.”

  And that’s when my mother cracked wide open.

  No.

  That’s when I cracked wide open.

  At that moment, with my father’s effort, a full dinner on top of everything else he’d done over the past eleven days, to insult my mother, my dead mother, to make her look ugly, to use these portraits for hate —

  I dropped the portraits onto the table, and I threw myself at my father. I had a butter knife. I meant only to destroy the second package, the painting, with the knife. I didn’t want to see it, didn’t want it unwrapped by anyone. I was all elbows and fists, armed with an almost harmless knife, but I managed to knock the package out of my father’s hand and somehow landed my fists on his face and cut open his ear. Blood enough for a drawing, maybe, a small drawing of a kiwi or the head of a squirrel.

  My father shot up out of his chair and grabbed my hands. He pulled me right across the end of the table and forced me down onto the floor in front of him.

  The knife clattered out of reach. I cried out.

  My father growled, raised his fist. “I will absolutely —”

  He might have finished his thought, but Key had moved. Twelve, not especially big, not especially strong, not especially fast, more clumsy than nimble, but my brother had moved.

  He shoved my father hard, forcing him to let go of me.

  My father punched wildly and connected once, somewhere soft. My father swung again. He swung, and I felt my head break, my jaw come unhinged, my cheek split.

  “Stop, please.” Key began his screaming. My calm, peaceful brother came apart. “Stop. Daddy, stop.”

  I was lying on the floor, my head filled with a hundred trains, and my brother scrambled toward me.

  My father turned away from me, roaring, and in his fury he found a purpose: to destroy the house.

  My father became a cannon, blowing out the windows one after another with five-pound fists, kicking in cabinets and breaking walls with ten-pound boots, like round shot. He shouted and grunted and cursed, punched and punched and punched, kicked and kicked. Shattering cabinet doors, glass, drywall, wood.

  My mother covered me with her body. She lay on top of me as if to protect me against a tornado and its spiraling debris, or a bomb blast, splinters of glass, wood, plaster, bone, flying nails, all of it sharp enough to slice anyone to threads.

  “I know you’re hurt,” my mother whispered into my ear, “but keep your face to the floor.”

  I wanted to ask her a question, but I couldn’t move my mouth properly. The trains, speeding and tumbling along their steel tracks.

  “We’ll get through this. Your father won’t kill you and Key.”

  I wasn’t so sure.

  Everything stopped. Silence.

  A few moments, questioning the quiet.

  My brother was crying,
sitting in a ball, his hands over his ears. But my father?

  My mother crawled off me. “Wait here. Don’t move.”

  I couldn’t move even if I had wanted to. I passed out.

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  As Key explained later, he crawled toward the doorway between the dining room and living room, altogether unsure where my father had gone. The front door was open. My father had left. He’d left bleeding. He trailed blood out into the yard, enough blood for a thousand drawings of my mother asleep, a path of blood across the grass to the already ancient Subaru, the car my father bought after selling the SUV and sports car from his family and lawyering days. He drove off, out of the cul-de-sac.

  My brother, his face a wreck with grief and fear and a little egg forming over his eye — From what? My father’s fist? — came back and sat by me. He was trembling. I was sitting up, bruised and concussed, my head lolling against Key’s shoulder.

  My jaw was painful, but I could speak. “Where’d he go?”

  “The hospital, I hope.”

  “Do you see her?”

  “Who?”

  “Mom.”

  “Mom?”

  My mother headed toward the kitchen. Glass, wood, rubble crunching under her feet.

  “No,” Key said. “I don’t ever see her.”

  I can tell you, this was one of the few times in my life when I felt nothing at all. No fear, no anger, no sadness. All my emotion had dried up. I was calm. My jaw and my head were exploding, but my heart? Numb.

  SIX

  We’re surrounded by maps. Maps everywhere, in everything. In the faces of everyone around us. All people wear a map of one kind or another.

  Some maps can’t be trusted. You set out, and without warning you’re lost. You think you’re in one place only to find out you’re nowhere at all, nowhere recognizable.

  My father’s face had a map like this. You might have thought you could know the man from his map. He had a dimple in his chin, dimples in his cheeks, a dimple just left of center in his forehead, a scar from chicken pox. These four little dents made a skewed diamond if you connected them, which now makes sense. He looked friendly, even goofy. He looked trustworthy. He had a map of good nature in his face, but his face was, instead, a map of the far side of the moon.

  Maps change as we get to know the world. The smarter we get, the more we learn. Maps go from rough to refined, from inaccurate to accurate. Look at early, early maps of the world, of the whole planet, its continents and oceans and seas as people imagined them. Early maps of India or Africa or Asia. Or the Americas, especially Canada and the North, before these places were known and charted. The continents in ancient maps belong to a planet other than earth. They are unrecognizable and almost laughable.

  The map of Jacqui’s face was this kind of map. I saw her first at twelve, and she was so totally new and unexplored, nothing like anyone else, something more fantastic and frightening and exciting and good. And when I got to know her, she lost her mysterious frontier. She became a map redrawn. I could navigate her, and I could chart her. Her map changed. It became more accurate. It was accurate until the land between us changed, until she chose someone else over me, until our world broke apart. And then I had to abandon everything I knew. I ended up for a long while without a map.

  Maps change. Some islands may be lost to the ocean. Weather and tides eat up the shoreline, gobbling land, changing geometry and geography. Volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, meteorites. Blazing missiles from space. Cataclysms change the shape of land, can kill the land. My mother’s face was a map of youth until it became a map of heartache and tiredness, a map of pain. Then she became a map of death.

  You can trust some maps to tell you everything you need to know. You know me when you see me. I’m a map of the Sahara, impassable and inhospitable and uninhabitable. You can visit, but you can’t stay.

  Some maps are maps of the imagination. Maps of places that exist only in the mind of the mapmaker. What’s the map of Atlantis? Or the island of Robinson Crusoe or Azkaban? What’s the true and accepted map of my brother, Key?

  Nothing about Key seems beyond doubt or argument. Not even his eyes. I say they’re green, but? Or his hair, brown or black? We’re twins, but some people question whether we’re related at all. We’re more complementary than alike. His expression seems to belong to a girl, a boy, and sometimes to a peaceful and rare animal or a sprite. Barely human. In a good way.

  I don’t know. People see what they want or need in Key’s face. He’s real enough, he has a voice and a body and a mind. He walks around, gets good grades. But there’s nothing to say for sure he isn’t also made up.

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  A few months ago, Key told me he’d mastered circular breathing. When he wants, he can inhale as he exhales. It’s not that exactly. There are subtleties.

  Since ancient days, circular breathing has been practiced in meditation, crafts, and music. Yogis, glassblowers, swordsmiths, and players of the trumpet, bagpipes, and didgeridoo. A man using circular breathing, my brother told me, once held the same note on a saxophone for the better part of an hour. That was good enough for the world record.

  Key isn’t always circular breathing, but he practices it, meditates with it three or four times a day. He told me it brings him peace. He told me he can recite a prayer or a question or a koan without stopping so that the spirit of what he says takes him over from the inside.

  “Is this to get over Harrison?”

  “It’s more than that.”

  “What kind of questions or prayers? Like, What’s the sound of one hand clapping?”

  “I don’t think you understand. I want to repeat something simple as often as I can without stopping, repeat it no matter what I’m doing, where I am. Doing this can build my confidence and my faith and my heart.”

  “What is the sound of one hand clapping, though?”

  Key looked at me and reached out his hand.

  What was I supposed to do? Take it? Not take it?

  “The sound of one hand clapping could be silence,” Key said. “Or it could be a hand in midair waiting for another hand, or a hand in midair waiting to do something meaningful.”

  I realize now, Key knew more about being a monk than I ever will. He knows more about prayer and God and patience.

  “You mentioned prayers, Key. You said you want to say these things over and over to build your faith and heart. Faith in what?”

  “I want to be love.”

  Wow, I thought, everything we’ve been through has come to this. My brother is the one who’s crazy.

  “I can see what you’re thinking, Rad. I’m not crazy. If I want to, I can become love.”

  “No one can be love,” I said.

  “I can. I can say to myself over and over, I am love, and saying it enough will make it true. It might take a long time, but —”

  “So, if I say enough times that I’m a walrus —”

  “Hilarious,” Key said, unimpressed. “I think you could be walrus-like if you convince yourself of it. If you say it enough times. But what’s a walrus anyway?”

  I stared at him, wondering for the millionth time in our lives what he could possibly be saying to me.

  “Do you believe me, Rad, that I could be love?”

  “Yes.” I knew he could be love, if being love was anything like being a lawyer or a heart surgeon or a painter. “Yes, Key. You want to be love? Sure, go ahead. But what does that mean any more than being a walrus?”

  “I don’t know, actually. I’m not saying I could be love right now. I don’t think I’m old enough. I don’t think I have the discipline. I get hurt too easily. I get sad, and I get happy, and I worry. Love doesn’t own any of these things for itself.”

  “So you’re practicing to be love?” Did I ask this, for real? Yes, I asked it, and I was serious
. “You can use the circular breathing to say I am love over and over, all day, waking to sleeping, 24/7?”

  “Yes. At some point I’ll be able to say I am love with every breath, in and out, and this will make it true.”

  “How old will you have to be to be love?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “At least twenty.”

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  An hour after I found my brother on the platform and my father dead, an hour after I carried him into the house, twenty minutes after I broke a pitcher of water in my rage while we sat in the kitchen among the ghosts of our father, I remembered this conversation with Key about becoming love.

  Key and I had been talking about what happened with my father. He’d told me a dream had descended on them, come down over them, and then my father had fallen away.

  “You once told me about becoming love,” I said. “Remember?”

  “Yes. It wasn’t that long ago. So?”

  “Were you practicing becoming love while you were on the platform with Dad?”

  Key made no sound or move.

  “Key? Were you standing there with our father, breathing circularly, meditating in a dream with him, becoming love or something?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “What do you mean by love, anyway?”

  “It’s about compassion and sympathy and kindness. Not romance or sex.”

  “Okay, Key. I’m trying to understand what you were doing with Dad. You were there with compassion and sympathy, right?”

  Key started rocking again, shaking.

  “I just want to know what happened. I mean, the other night was weird. More than weird. The night Dad attacked you.”

  “He hugged me at first on the platform, like I said.”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything, Key.” My fists, stones, heavy in my lap. “That’s not what I’m doing.”

  “Dad loved me,” Key said. “He loved you. But he really loved Mom.”

  “I know. I’m just trying to understand your dream and how Dad came to fall.”