How They Were Found Part 8

A CERTAIN NUMBER OF BEDROOMS, A CERTAIN NUMBER OF BATHS.

THE BOY CARRIES THE BLUEPRINT CATALOGS EVERYWHERE HE GOES. At school, he keeps them in his backpack, only occasionally looking inside to spy their colorful covers, comforted simply by their presence, their proximity. It is different at home. After school, he locks himself in the empty house and sits at the kitchen table, where he fans the catalogs out in front of him as he eats his snack. He compares the artist's renditions on the left page with the floor plans on the right, then moves to the living room floor, where he watches television and turns the thin catalog pages. He mutes his cartoons so he can hear himself enunciating the names of the homes he hopes his father will build.

Ranches: Crestwood, Echo Hills, Nova.

Split Levels: Timber Ridge, Elk Ridge.

The Capes: Cod, Vincent, and Chelsey.

Two-story houses, like the one they live in, in ascending order by size: Walden, Westgate, Somerset, Carbondale.

The boy has not been reading long and wants to be sure that when the time comes he can spell the new house's name, that he can say it. He p.r.o.nounces slowly, then more confidently. He wants the new home to be built from the ground up, so it will not have anyone else's history attached to it, so that he knows for sure that no one will have died in the garage. He often wonders if they would be better off without a garage at all.

Only after his father's obsession with the catalogs pa.s.sed did the boy take them to his own room. He thought he'd get in trouble for claiming them but never did, not even later when he started sneaking them to school in his backpack. The boy is years away from the time he steals his first p.o.r.no magazine from beneath his father's mattress, but when he does he will remember the catalogs, remember the feel of their crinkly, hand-worn pages. Once again, he will find himself too young to understand what he's looking at or why he wants it, the magazines reminding him only obliquely of this time in his life, when so much hope is invested in so little paper.

At dinner, the boy tells his father about the houses he likes best this week, about how he is having trouble deciding between the Crestwood and the Cape Cod. The father glances at the pages as the boy presents them. A month ago he smiled at the boy's enthusiasm, even joined in with comments of his own, but now he is less demonstrative with his opinions.

Dinner: A meal consisting of brand-name hot dogs and macaroni and cheese. The father is not frugal with his shopping as the mother was. He buys what he recognizes, a.s.sured by television that he is making a good choice.

The boy has been in so few other houses that actually picturing the interior of any other home means simply reconfiguring the rooms of their own house into his conception of the new one. The floor plans he likes best are ones he can most easily shoehorn his own into, using the homes of his grandmother and of the neighbor boy his mother once forced him to play with to fill in the bigger houses. The father does not say much in return, but the boy has become used to this. To make up for his father's reticence, the boy talks more and more, more than he is comfortable with, not because he wants to but because he does not like the silence at the table, the reminder that there is something missing, that without her they are alone even when they are with each other.

Suicide: Car running, windows closed, parked in the garage. No one would ever drive it again and two months after her death it would be sold at a loss. The boy was not supposed to find her. She did not know that school had become a half day, that everyone had been sent home early because of the impending snowfall. The note taped to the outside of the driver's window was addressed to his father, not to him. The boy could barely read then, but decided to try anyway. He pulled the note off the window, leaving the scotch tape behind.

Mother: Hidden underneath. Pressed against the window with her mouth open, the steam from her breath slowly disappearing from the cloudy gla.s.s. The last time he saw her.

9-1-1: The boy had learned the number in school, but he had not been taught that it was not failsafe, that it did not save everyone. For months he thought about raising his hand and telling his teacher about her error, but they had moved on from health and safety and would not speak of it again.

Extolling the virtues of the houses to the father, the boy lists the numbers of bedrooms and bathrooms. He wonders what half a bathroom is but does not ask. He explains that all the houses from American Homes have R-19 insulation, which he has been a.s.sured by the catalog is the very best kind. He shows his father the cross section of a wall and repeats from memory the phrase oriented strand board. The boy p.r.o.nounces many of the words wrong. He does not realize that learning words by sounding them out alone has left him with false p.r.o.nunciations, sounds that as an adult he will be constantly corrected for. No matter how hard he tries to hide it, he will not speak the same language others speak.

Father: Quiet. Sluggish. Often watches the news from his easy chair with his eyes closed. A tumbler of melting, browning ice dangles from his fingertips at all times. Has apparently forgotten how to play catch or even how to get to the park.

Father (previous): Fun. Loud. Told jokes the mother disapproved of but that the boy loved. Often rustled the boy's hair, which the boy pretended to hate but secretly didn't. Missing in action.

Father (future): Defined by the loss of his partner in a way he was never defined by her presence.

The boy reads the catalogs in the evening while his father naps in his recliner. His father rarely makes it to the bedroom anymore and so sometimes the boy sleeps on the couch to be near him. More often he goes to his own room, where he reads the catalogs until he is too tired to keep his eyes open. Each night, before he sleeps, he chooses the home he thinks they need, his decisions changing quickly, like moods or Michigan weather. Sometimes he falls asleep with the light on, and those nights are the ones he stays in his bed.

On other nights, the boy wakes up shaking, then walks into the living room where his father sleeps. Standing beside the recliner, the boy tries to will his father to wake up before starting to shake him. Neither tactic works. The father snores on, even when the boy begins at last to talk, begins to insist that his father talk back, that he take them away from this home which is no longer any such thing.

Eventually his teacher notices the black rings below his eyes and keeps him inside at recess. She asks him if there's anything he wants to talk about, if maybe something is happening at home. He knows she knows, but if she will not say so, then neither will he. The boy does not show her the catalogs, hides their meaning from anyone who might accidentally see and ask. Curiosity is not the same as caring.

The new house will end up being an apartment, a word the boy doesn't even know yet, and then later the new house will be his grandma's bas.e.m.e.nt. The boy will lose the catalogs on one moving day or another, but by then he won't need their physical presence. He will have memorized them completely. They will be part of who he is. As he grows, he will make friends and then lose friends, realizing a year or two later that he is unable to remember their names or faces but can still recount the number of bedrooms in their houses, how many bathrooms and a half they had. When he thinks of his old house, the one he had been born in and his mother had died in, he will picture it as a spread in one of his catalogs, imaginary fingers tracing the picture of the remembered home, the hard blue lines of the floor plans.

Home: Three bedrooms. One bath. Storm windows and a thirty-five-year guarantee on the shingles.

Family: Two parents. One child. One dead with two survivors.

This is a home. This is a family. This is what happens in a home when a family breaks down a fault line, when a foundation suddenly shifts because once it got wet when it should have stayed dry, because that wet spot was sealed beneath the floorboards, because it hid there for years and years before cracks began showing around doorways and windows, before one day whole chunks of plaster fell from the ceilings and walls as something fundamental within gave way to ruin.

THE COLLECTORS.

1A. HOMER STANDS, FALLS, STANDS AGAIN.

How long has Homer been sitting here in the dark? A decade, a year, a day, an hour, a minute, or at least this minute, the one where his eyes pop open and his ears perk up, listening to the voice howling in the dark. Somewhere in the house, Langley is yelling for Homer to help him, has, perhaps, been doing so for some time. Homer leans over the edge of his tattered leather chair-the chair that once belonged to his father and has been his home since he lost his sight-then sets down his snifter, the brandy long ago emptied into the hollows of his throat. He stands, legs shaky, and for a moment thinks he will fall back into the chair's ripped excess. He finds his balance, takes a step or two forward, then loses it, crashing forward onto the damp floor covered in orange peels and pipe ash, the remains of the only forms of nourishment he's allowed. Homer calls out for Langley, who calls out for him, and together their voices echo through the twisted pa.s.sageways and piled junk of their home. Homer's eyes long gone, everything has become touch, life a mere series of tactile experiences. He pushes himself upward, his hands sinking into the orange peels that litter the floor, their consistency like gums pulled away from teeth. He's disgusted, but has been for so many years that this newest indignity barely registers.

In a loud voice, he tells Langley that he is coming, but he doesn't know if that's true. There's so much between them, much of it dangerous, all of it theirs.

3A. INVENTORY.

Some of the items removed from the Collyer mansion include hundreds of feet of rope, three baby carriages, rakes and hoes and other gardening implements, several rusted bicycles, kitchen utensils (including at least four complete sets of china and several potato peelers), a heap of gla.s.s chandeliers that had been removed from the ceilings to make room for the piles and the tunnels, the folding top of a horse-drawn carriage, a sawhorse, a room full of dressmaking dummies, several portraits of both family members and early-century presidents such as Calvin Coolidge and Warren Harding, a plaster bust of Herman Melville, a kerosene stove placed precariously close to the stacks of newspapers in Homer's sitting room, a variety of children's furniture and clothing, the cha.s.sis of a Model T Ford that Langley had apparently been trying to turn into a generator, hundreds of yards of unused silk and other fabrics, several broken clocks and piles of clock parts, one British and six American flags, piles of tapestries and rugs, whole rooms filled with broken furniture and bundled lumber. There was also the matter of their inheritance from their father, which included all his medical equipment, plus his thousands of medical and anatomical reference texts, greatly expanding the already large, impenetrably stuffed Collyer family library. All in all, the acc.u.mulated possessions of the Collyer brothers added up to over one hundred fifty tons of junk, most of it unremarkable except for the advanced state of ruin and decay that infused everything.

There were also eight cats, an emaciated dog, and countless numbers of vermin. By the time Langley was found, the rats had eaten most of his face and extremities and the c.o.c.kroaches were beginning to carry off the rest.

2A. THOSE WHO CAME FOR YOU FIRST.

It began with the newspapermen, their tales of the gold stashed in your halls, of stockpiled gems and expensive paintings and antique jewelry. None of it was true, but none of it surprised you either. The reporters have never worried about the truth before, not when it came to you and yours.

So the articles run, and then they come: not your true neighbors, but these new ones who replaced them. The first brick through the window is merely irritating, the second more so, but by the third and the fourth you've had enough and board up all the windows. You have to go out at night and scavenge more wood despite Homer's protests, his pleas for you to use the piles of lumber already in the house. He doesn't understand that what you have gathered already has purpose, is stock against future tragedies.

The bricks are only precursors, warnings: There is a break-in, and then another. The first time you fire a gun in the house, Homer screams for two days, refusing to calm down no matter what you say. You count yourself lucky that he's gone blind, or else he might have come down himself, seen the blood soaked into the piles of newspapers bordering the bas.e.m.e.nt door.

Afterward, you move even more bundles to the bas.e.m.e.nt, stacking newspaper to the ceiling, layering it six feet deep. Heavy and damp and covered in mold and rot, you know that no burglar will be able to push his way through the newsprint. It is your family's history that they are after, the city's that will keep them out.

4A. HOW I CAME IN.

I came in through a history of acc.u.mulation, through a trail of doc.u.ments that led to you, Langley, and to him, Homer. I came in through the inventory of your home, through the listing of objects written down as if they meant something, as if they were clues to who you are.

Obsessed, I filled one book and then another and then another.

What I learned was that even a book can be a door if you hold it right, and I held it right.

When I arrived at your home, I did not climb the steps or knock on your door. Instead, I waited and watched and when you came out I followed behind you.

I watched your flight through the dark night air, watched as you pretended skittishness in the streets. I followed you from backyard to alley to dumpster, lingered behind as you scavenged for food and pump-drawn water and shiny objects to line your halls. I watched you take each new prize and clutch it to your breast, and when you were ready to return, I followed you inside.

I want to tell you now that I am a night bird too, just another breed of crow.

Like the bird we each resemble, I am both a scavenger of what has happened and an omen of what is to come.

Despite your fears, I am not your death.

Despite this a.s.surance, you will not be saved.

I promise you, I will be here with you when you fall, and when he fails.

After you are both gone, I am afraid that I will still be here.

3B. INVENTORY.

Thirty Harlem phone books, one for each year from 1909 to 1939: Individually, they are just another pile of junk, but read as a collection they are something else. The names change from Roosevelt to Robeson, from Fitzgerald to Hughes, a process that doesn't happen all at once but slowly, like the mixing after a blood infusion. By the 1920s, Miller and Audubon and Rockwell are gone, replaced by Armstrong and Ellington and DuBois. Read like this, they are yet another type of wall, one that is both harder to see and yet obvious enough once you know the color of the bricks.

1B. HOMER HATES THE WEATHER IN NEW YORK CITY.

When it rains, water comes in through the ceiling, creates trickling waterfalls that cascade downward from floor to floor, from pile to pile. The wood of every chair and table feels warped and cracked while nearby newspaper bundles grow heavy with mold and dampness that will never leave, their pages slippery with the ink leaking downward into the carpet. Things float in the water, or worse, swim, like the rats and c.o.c.kroaches and whatever else lives in the high press of the stacks. Other floors are similarly obscured by the often ankle-deep torrents, hiding broken gla.s.s, sharp sticks, knives and scalpels, the dozens of light bulbs Langley broke in a fit when the electricity was shut off for nonpayment.

Once, Homer remembers, it snowed in his sitting room, the flakes settling on his face and tongue and clothes. He'd had only Langley's word and the freeze of the air to tell him it was snow that fell that day. Reaching out his tongue, he feared he'd taste ash instead, but said nothing as his brother laughed and refilled their snifters.

3C. INVENTORY.

Inside much of the house, the only navigation possible was through tunnels Langley had carved into the piles of garbage that filled each room. Supported with sc.r.a.ps of lumber and stacked newspaper or cardboard, these tunnels appeared to collapse frequently, forcing Langley to start over or to create alternate paths to the parts of the house he wished to access.

Some of the tunnels were wide enough that a person could crawl comfortably through them, and in places even walk in a crouch. Others, especially on the second floor, were much smaller. Langley might have been able to fit through them, but not the heavier Homer. The tunnels were the closest thing the house had to doors, and beyond them were secrets the older brother had most likely not shared in decades.

Langley once claimed to be saving the newspapers so that when his brother regained his sight he would be able to catch up on the news. It wasn't a funny joke, but Langley wasn't a funny man. The earliest newspapers in the house date from 1933, the year Homer went blind, and they continued to be delivered until weeks after the house began to be emptied and inventoried. Even allowing for twelve years of uninterrupted delivery, there were still far more newspapers in the house than anyone could have expected. They were stacked and bundled in every room, in every hall, covering the landings of staircases and filled closets and chests. Even if Homer had somehow learned to see again, this was never going to be the best way to rejoin the world.

1C. HOMER TAKES HIS MEDICINE.

After Homer lost his sight, his brother put him on a diet of nothing but oranges, convinced the fruit would restore his vision. Homer wasn't so sure, but he couldn't go out and get food himself-only Langley ever left the mansion, and even then only at night-and so Homer had no choice but to take what was offered. Every day, he ate a dozen oranges, until his breath stank of rind and pulp, until the undersides of his fingernails were crusted with the sticky leftovers of his meals. Langley told him that if he could eat one hundred oranges a week his sight would come back, but Homer couldn't do it, no matter how hard he tried. It was too much of one thing, a deadening of his taste buds as complete as the deadening of his irises, his corneas, his optic nerves that still sent useless signals down the rotted pathways of his all too useless brain.

2B. THE ONLY THING YOU HAVE CAUGHT THUS FAR.

You started making the b.o.o.by traps after the break-ins began, and never stopped revising and improving this new cla.s.s of inventions. You rigged tripwires and deadfalls, hid walls of sharpened broomsticks behind the moist surface of your newspaper tunnels. Poured loose piles of broken gla.s.s beneath intentionally weakened floorboards. Made other traps and then forgot them, until you were unsure about even your own safety.

More and more, you had to tell Homer that maybe the best thing for him would be to stay in his chair.

The one that got you was a tripwire in the second-story hallway leading from the staircase to the master bedroom. You were hurrying, careless for one moment, just long enough to trip the wire that released the trap, burying you beneath a manmade boulder, a netted ma.s.s of typewriters and sewing machines and bowling b.a.l.l.s hung from the ceiling months before.

Even with all that coming toward you, you almost got away. Only your right leg is pinned and broken, but that is all it takes to doom you. You cannot see behind you well enough to know how bad the wound is, but even through the mold and must you smell the blood leeched from your body, soaking the already-ruined hallway carpet.

1D. HOMER IS MERCIFUL.

It doesn't take long for Homer to lose his bearings and get lost, turning randomly at each intersection in the tunnels. Without sight, there's no way to check the few clues that might yet remain, like the pattern on the ceiling or the moldings in the corners. He reaches out with his hands, stretches his fingers toward whatever awaits them, every inch a lifetime's worth of danger. The s.p.a.ce is filled with tree branches, a bramble slick with rot and sticky with sap. Homer recoils at the sound of movement nearby-insect or rodent or reptile, Homer can't know which-and with his next step he crushes something beneath his foot, the snap of a vertebrae or carapace m.u.f.fled by the sheer bulk of the room. He stops for a moment to stamp the thing out, to be sure it is dead. Somewhere his brother moans in the stacks, and there's no reason for whatever creature lies beneath his heel to suffer the same.

2C. JUSTIFYING YOUR GATHERING.

When your father left you and your brother and your mother, he took everything with him. He took his medical books and his anatomical drawings and his specimen jars. He took his suits and his shoes and his hats. He took his golf clubs and his pipes and his records, and when he was gone, your mother scrubbed the house from top to bottom in her grief, removing every last particle of dust that might once have been him. He left her, and in return she eradicated him so thoroughly that for twenty years he stayed out of the house.

And then he returned, bundled in the back of a truck and disguised as gynecological equipment and ornate furniture, as something that could be bound into chests and sacks and bundles of paper.

He took everything that might have been yours, and just because it eventually came back doesn't mean you didn't hurt during the years it was gone. Now you have him trapped, boarded behind the doors of the second floor, and he will never escape again. Every stray hair still clinging to a shirt collar, every sc.r.a.p of handwriting left in the margins of his texts, all of it is him, is who he was. It is all that's left, but if you keep it safe then it is all you'll ever need.

3D. INVENTORY.

The master bedroom was found full of correspondence, tied into bundles organized by month and year. The letters begin arriving in 1909, then increased in frequency during the following decade until a letter arrived almost every single day. After this peak, the correspondence slowly tapers off before stopping in 1923. The bulk of the unopened mail is from Herman Collyer, each letter a single entry in a series of entreaties dating from his abandonment of his family to the year of his own death. Whether Langley ever showed his brother these sealed envelopes is open to debate, but his own stance on his father's writings is more definitive: Each letter remained an apology unasked for, unwanted and unopened, from the day they were received until the day he died.

2D. THE FIRST h.o.a.rD.

Was inherited, not gathered. Your father died and suddenly all his possessions were yours, spilling out of your rooms and into your halls. As if you knew what to do with the evidence of a lifetime. As if you could throw away your father, or sell him off to strangers.

It wasn't long after that when you started adding to the piles yourself, was it?

If only you gathered enough, then maybe you could build a father. Gather a mother up in your arms, like all these piles of porcelain knick-knacks. Design a family from things best left behind. Replace birth with theft, life with h.o.a.rding, death with destruction. This house is a body, and you and Homer move within it. Rooms like cells, floors like organs, and you two-like what, exactly? Pulses of electricity, nervous messages, the tiny sparks that one day might bring this place to life?

Listen- Somewhere, Homer is crying again, isn't he?

4B. WHERE I AM IN RELATION TO WHERE YOU ARE.

The thin biography tells me nothing, doesn't help me penetrate past the birth and death dates, the one extant photograph, the mere facts of your father leaving you and of your mother dying and of the great divide opened between you and your brother by his blindness. I am divided from you too, by decades I could not cross in time. The only way I feel close to you is when I read the list of objects you left behind, because I know that in your needy acquisitions there is something of me.

Are you listening?

Breathe, Langley. Breathe.

1E. HOMER REMEMBERS HIS FACE.

Homer crawls on his hands and knees, searching for signs of his brother, whose voice is a cricket's, always out of reach, the sound coming from every direction at once. Homer is hungry and tired and wants to go back to his chair, but he perseveres. His brother would do it for him. His brother has been doing it for him. On each of the thousands of days since Homer went blind, Langley has fed him and clothed him and kept him company-has kept him safe from the intruders Homer isn't supposed to talk about-and now on the day when Langley needs his help, he is failing. Homer's face is wet but he doesn't know if the wetness is tears or sweat or something else, something dripping from the ceiling and the stacks. He doesn't think he's crying but feels he might start soon, might start and never stop. Whatever it is, he doesn't reach up to wipe it away. His hands are filthy, filthier than anything that might be there on his face.

His face: Once, before his blindness but after he stopped being able to look himself in the mirror, Homer dreamed he was a man made of mud, a pillar of dust, some delicate creation waiting to be dispersed or destroyed.

It was just a dream, he knows, not motivation or reason for staying in his chair as long as he has. Not the cause of his nothingman life. He wishes he could go back, forget he ever left the chair, ever left the sitting room, ever reentered the world of pain that had always been there waiting for him. His bathrobe is torn, his hands and feet bloodied and bruised, and his face- Over the years, he has forgotten his face, the shape of the thing, the angle of his nose and the thickness of his lips and the scars or lack of scars that might distinguish it from another. He has forgotten how it feels to see a brow furrow in pain, to see a mouth contort in frustration and anger.

He has forgotten, but he is trying to remember.

Whatever his face is, floating in the dark around his eyes, it is wet again.

3E. INVENTORY.

Fourteen pianos, both grand and upright. A clavichord, two organs, six banjos, a dozen violins (only two of which are strung), bugles, accordions, a gramophone and an exhaustive record collection (including well-worn works by Paul Whiteman, Fred Waring, Sophie Tucker, and Blossom Seeley), two trumpets, a trombone, and what appears to have once been an upright ba.s.s before it was smashed and broken. Both brothers were accomplished musicians, and it is easy to picture them sitting and playing music together, and later, after the lights went out and they began to fight, apart from each other, their only points of connection the accidental melodies they made in the dark.

1F. HOMER PLAYS THE PIANO.

After Homer trips over the bench in front of the parlor's piano, he sits down and rests his fingers on the keys. Wherever Langley is, he's quiet, resting too, or else something worse, something Homer doesn't want to think about. He feels bad enough, for not hurrying, for not being able to find his brother and save him. His lungs ache and his ankles throb, the arthritis in his leg joints a lightless fire. He centers himself in front of the piano and starts to play, then stops when the sound comes out wrong. He sighs, starts over with more realistic expectations.

The piano is almost completely buried by the mounds of trash that fill the room, the heaps of paper and metal and wood, the objects breaking down again into their const.i.tuent parts. Homer's fingers are gnarled ghosts, flickering over the keys in an approximation, the memory of music. The sound comes out of the piano m.u.f.fled and muted. It does not fill the room but goes into it instead, Homer's fingers driving each note through the piled garbage and into the rotting walls like a nail, like a crowbar, like something meant to hold a thing together, like something meant to tear it down.

4C. MOTIVATION.

I'm sifting through their possessions, crawling through the ruins of their lives searching for those lost, for remains, for the remains of a family: I am in the master bedroom, reading letters they never read. I am in the parlor, wiping the grime off a generation of portraits. I am in the hallway, setting thousands of mouse traps all in a row.

I am on my hands and knees, scrubbing the floor without success, as if there could ever be enough soap to remove this particular stain.