How They Were Found Part 9

There is so much to see here, but only in fragments, in peripheries. Every step across the floorboards brings this house of cards closer to collapse, and so I must move backward and forward in time, balancing the now and the then, until I have found what it is I am looking for.

I am a collector too, but it is not their possessions I have clutched close and h.o.a.rded.

I am holding Homer's face in my hands, staring into his milky eyes, whispering to him as he searches in starved sadness. I am kneeling beside Langley like a detective, my bent knee slick with his blood, looking through the rote clues to discover what happened to him.

I am conducting an investigation. I am holding a wake. I am doing some or all or none of these things.

2E. THE CRACK IN YOUR FOUNDATION.

You howl, hurling the curse of your brother's name down the corridor. For hours you have heard his b.u.mbling and still he is no closer to you, his blind search for you as failed as your own cursed attempt to reach the master bedroom. You picture him crawling forward on his hands and knees, unable to see through to the end of each tunnel, unable to know how much farther there is still to go.

For years, he has kept to his chair in the sitting room, leaving you to deal with the collapse of the house, the danger it poses to all of your possessions. The house is both protector and destroyer, both safety and threat, and it is you who tips the scales, not him. It was you who braved the streets night after night to bring back food and water, to gather all the supplies essential to your lives. Homer knows nothing of what you've had to do, how you've moved from one halo of lamp light to the next, avoiding the dark men who rule the streets. You see their eyes sometimes in the shadows, peering at you from front steps and street corners, hurrying you on your way through this ruined city that was once your home.

The pain is too much. This time when you scream, your brother answers, but from too far away. The slow sticky warmth emanating from your crushed thigh has reached your crotch, your belly. It's easy to reach down and feel the slippery copper heat of your blood. There's so much, more than you expected.

You close your eyes. Not much longer now.

Even surrounded by all your possessions, dying is so much lonelier than you expected.

Whisper your brother's name. Whisper the names of your father and your mother. Whisper my name, and pray that I might save you, but understand that even though I have already changed the truth merely by being here, I will still refuse to change it that much.

1G. HOMER LOSES FAITH.

The house bucks and shudders, settles or shifts. Homer stumbles but doesn't fall down, knows that if he does he might never get up. He stops and listens to the creaking of the floorboards, the scuttle of the rats. Says, Langley?

Homer wants to yell his brother's name again but doesn't. It's been a long time since his brother answered, and without sight there is no light and no marker of time. Homer doesn't know if it's morning or night, if a few hours have pa.s.sed or if it's already been days. He's so tired and so alone, lost inside his own house, remade in whatever crooked shape Langley has envisioned. He thinks about all Langley tells him when to do because he cannot tell himself.

Homer, go to sleep, it's midnight.

Homer, wake up, I've got your breakfast.

Homer, it's time to play your violin.

It's time for me to read to you.

It's time for a drink, time for a smoke, time to eat another orange.

Homer's so tired, and all he wants is to be back in his chair, but for once Langley needs his help and Homer doesn't want to let his brother down.

The thing is, he doesn't know if Langley is still there to be helped.

2F. YOUR WEIGHTY GHOSTS.

No father without medicine, without dictionaries, without reference texts full of once perfect answers slowly rotting themselves wrong.

No mother without silk, without satin, without wool and cotton. No mother without a closet full of shoes, a hundred high heels spilled out into a trapped nest of spikes.

No brother without a piano, without a bathrobe, without a chair, a pipe, a mouthful of oranges and black bread.

No self without these ghosts.

No ghosts, without- No. No ghosts, or rather: No ghosts except in things.

They surround you, press closer, waiting for the rapidly approaching moment when you too will be just a thing, an object, a static ent.i.ty slowly falling into decay. That moment is so close you can smell it, like the breath of rats, like the rot of oranges, like blood and dirt mushed into new mud.

4D. MARCH 21 (EARLY).

I know you were hurrying through the second floor hall because you knew what you needed to do to complete this place, to bring an end to the endless gathering and piling and sorting. You were hurrying because it had taken you so long already, and you didn't want to waste another second.

Even now, at the very end, you tell yourself that if only you could have completed your project then it would have been enough to stop all this. It could have been different. You could have taken Homer and left this house. You could have started over somewhere else, which is all you've ever wanted.

You were hurrying, and you were careless, and now it's too late.

Your lungs heave, trying unsuccessfully to clear their b.l.o.o.d.y fractures. When you are still again, I reach down to touch your face, to turn it toward my own.

With my fingers twisted around your jaw, I say, Homer isn't coming.

I say, Tell me what you would have told him.

I can see the sparks dancing in your eyes, obscuring the last sights you'll ever see, so I say, Close your eyes. You don't need them anymore. Not for how little is left.

For these last few moments, I will see for you as you saw for him.

In the last seconds of your life, I will tell you whatever you want to hear, as long as you first tell me what I need.

I say, Tell me how to finish the house.

I say, Tell me what I have to do to get out of here.

And then you will, and afterward I will lie to you, and despite my whispered a.s.surances you will know that I am not real enough to save you or him, and then it will be over.

1H. HOMER FINDS THE FARTHEST ROOM.

Homer experiences the lack of guideposts, of landmarks, of bread crumbs. He knows his brother is dead or dying and that finding him will change nothing, and even though he wants to turn around he's not sure how. He tries to remember if he climbed the stairs or if he crawled upward or if he is still on the first floor of the house, twisted and turned inside it. He tries to remember the right and the left, the up and the down, the falls and the getting back up, but when he does the memories come all at once or else as one static image of moving in the dark, like a claustrophobia of neurons. He wants to lie down upon on the floor, wants to stop this incessant, wasted movement.

He closes his eyes and leans against the piles. His breath comes long and ragged, whole rooms of air displaced by the straining bellows of his lungs. He smells the long dormant stench of his sweat and p.i.s.s and s.h.i.t, come shamefully back to life now that he's on the move again.

Somewhere beyond himself, he smells, if he sniffs hard enough, just a hint of his orange peels, the last of their crushed sweetness.

Homer opens his eyes, useless as they are, and points himself toward the wafting rot of his last thousand meals. He holds his robe closed with one hand, reaches out with the other toward the dark. He puts one foot in front of the other, then smiles when he feels the rinds and tapped ash begin to squish between his toes.

He slips, and falls, and crashes into the tortured leather of his favorite chair. He pulls himself up. He sits himself down. He puts his heavy head into his hands.

3F. INVENTORY.

In the lock box: Thirty-four bank books, all from different banks. Irving Trust Company. Fillmore-Leroy. Liberty National. Park Avenue. Seaboard. Albany City Savings. Temple Beth Israel. Alfred Mutual. ABN. Alliance. Amalgated. American Bond and Mortgage. Jefferson Savings. a.s.sociated Water Companies Credit Union. a.s.sumption Parish. Canaseraga State. Dry Dock. Eighth Avenue. Fallkill. Queens County. Glaser Mercantile. H&K. Village. Industrial Bank of Ithaca. Kings County. Manhattan Trust. State Dime Savings. Bank of Brooklyn. Oneida. Rockaway. Union National Bank of Friendship. Beacon Federal. Whitehall Trust. The Zurich Depository.

A total of three thousand dollars and eighteen cents. The very end of a fortune, kept in Langley's name, inherited by Homer, and then, after he died too, taken by the state.

1I. MARCH 21 (LATE).

Homer squirms on the high throne of his last decade, every pose the wrong one. His back aches and his legs jerk no matter how he adjusts himself. Everything is physical, every craving desire a need for his brother, for his abandoned Langley. Homer would give everything away for a gla.s.s of water, would go into equal debt for a snifter of brandy or a pipe or even one of Langley's G.o.dd.a.m.n oranges. Anything that might bring relief. Anything that might bring with it absolution or forgetfulness. He licks his lips and tastes mud. He puts his fingers to his mouth and sucks and there it is again. His face, his beard, his clothes, all are mud. Homer puts his hand back in his mouth, sucks and swallows until it is clean. He repeats the process with his other hand, and then he cleans himself like a rodent, using his hands to bring the dirt off of his face and neck and arms to his mouth, where he devours it. Homer's throat chokes shut. He closes his eyes to block out the last blurs of gauzy light his blindness still allows. He is inside the house and the house is inside him, like a nesting of labyrinths. Lacking the tools to solve himself, he gives up. The process starts in this one second but takes weeks to finish. He does not cry out again. He does not beg. He does not want, not for food or water or companionship. He could, but he does not. This life has been an abject lesson in the limits of wanting, and he has learned all he cares to learn.

5A. WILLIAM BAKER.

William Baker breaks a second-story window from atop a shaking ladder. William Baker peers into the darkness and then signals to the other officers that he's going in. William Baker uses his nightstick to clear all the gla.s.s out of his way. William Baker climbs through the window into the room beyond. William Baker gags but does not vomit. William Baker turns his flashlight from left to right, then back again, like a lighthouse in a sea of trash. William Baker thinks, Not a sea but a mountain rising from a sea, a new, unintended landscape. William Baker begins to take inventory in his mind, counting piles of newspapers, broken furnishings, books molded to floorboards. William Baker puts his hands to a wall of old newspapers and pushes until he sinks in to his wrists. William Baker finds the entrance to the tunnel that leads out of the room, then gets down on his hands and knees and crawls through. William Baker pa.s.ses folding chairs and sewing machines and a wine press. William Baker pa.s.ses the skeleton of a cat or else a rat as big as a cat. William Baker turns left at a baby carriage, crawls over a bundle of old umbrellas. William Baker crawls until he can't hear the other officers yelling to him from the window. William Baker is inside the house, inside its musty, rotted breath, inside its tissues of decaying paper and wood.

William Baker disappears from the living world and doesn't come back until two hours later, when he appears at the window with his face blanched so white it shines in the midnight gloom. William Baker knows where Homer Collyer's body is. William Baker has held the dead man, has lifted him from his death chair as if the skin and bones and tattered blue and white bathrobe still const.i.tuted a human person, someone worth saving. William Baker counts the seconds that pa.s.s, the minutes, the days and the years. William Baker thinks it took a long time for this man to die. William Baker has no idea.

5B. ARTIE MATTHEWS.

Artie Matthews doesn't understand how a house can smell so bad throughout every inch of its frame. Artie Matthews thinks the garbage should have blocked the smell at some point. Artie Matthews smells it on the sidewalk, smells it in the foyer, smells it in the rooms he and the other workers have cleared and he smells it in the rooms they haven't. Artie Matthews wears coveralls and boots and thick leather gloves and a handkerchief over his face and wonders if it's enough to protect him from what happened here. Artie Matthews has arms that ache and knees that tremble from yesterday's exertions as he climbs the stairs to the second floor. Artie Matthews throws cardboard and newspaper out a window. Artie Matthews throws out armfuls of books that reek of mold and wet ink. Artie Matthews pushes a dresser to the window and empties its contents onto the lawn below. Artie Matthews wonders who these clothes belong to, wonders if there is a wife or a mother or someone else still trapped in the house, or if this woman left long ago. Her bra.s.sieres and slips and skirts fall to the ground. Artie Matthews watches another worker trying to gather them up before the pressing crowds can see them. Artie Matthews wonders why the worker is bothering, why anyone would worry that the people who lived in this house have any dignity left to protect. Artie Matthews thinks that what they are really removing from the house is shame made tangible as wood and steel and fabric.

Artie Matthews will find Langley Collyer, but not for two more weeks. Artie Matthews will find him buried beneath a deadfall of trash ten feet from where his brother died and wonder why he didn't yell, why he didn't ask Homer for help. Artie Matthews will not realize that Langley did yell, did howl, did scream and cajole and beg and whimper. Artie Matthews will not be able to hear how sound moved in this house before all the walls and tunnels of trash came down. Artie Matthews will never understand how a man might cry out for help only to have his last words get lost in the deep labyrinth he's made of his life.

3G. INVENTORY.

Besides the letters, there was one final object found in the master bedroom, hidden beneath a canvas tarp. It is a model, a doll house, a scaled approximation of the brownstone home. Inside, the model's smooth wood floors are stained and then carpeted, the walls all papered or painted with care. There is an intricately carved staircase that winds to the second floor, its splendor shaming its murderous real-life counterpart. Tiny paintings hang on the walls, painstaking recreations of the smeared and slashed portraits found downstairs. Miniature chandeliers dangle from the ceilings in nearly every room.

There are tiny beds, tiny tables and chairs, tiny pianos. There are even tiny books with tiny pages and a violin so small that it would take a pair of tweezers to hold its bow.

In the downstairs sitting room, there is a tiny version of what Homer's chair must have looked like before the leather tore open, before its stuffing leaked onto the floor.

This is a house without traps, without tunnels and stacks and collections that never seem complete.

In the absence of photographs, this is perhaps the closest thing to the truth of who these people used to be.

The wood floor around the model gleams, its surface scrubbed and polished, contrasting with the filth and rot of the rest of the room, left unprotected by the tarp.

Outside this circle, there are dozens of prototypes for what would have been the model's finishing touches: Four figures, repeated over and over in different mediums. A man and a woman and two small boys, rendered from wood and clay and string and straw and hair and other, less identifiable materials. All discarded, cast aside, and no more a family than anything else we found lying upon the floors of the Collyer House.

4E. DECAY.

I wanted to leave after both of you were dead, or at least after your bodies were bagged and covered and taken out into the sunlight that awaited you, that had always been waiting. Instead, I remain here, walking these emptying halls. Without you to talk to, I become desperate for connection, for these workers tearing down your tunnels to see what you had become, what you might have been instead. I tap a new father on the shoulder so that he turns and sees the child's mobile hanging in a newly opened s.p.a.ce, its meaning slanted by your own childlessness. I open a medical reference text to the page on treatments for rheumatoid arthritis or diabetic blindness, then leave it on top of the stack for someone else to read, to note what is absent, to see that nowhere on the page is the cure of the hundred oranges you prescribed your brother. I whisper explanations into curious ears, explain that what you had planned to do with all these piles of lumber was to build a house inside the house, to build a structure capable of holding a family together, something the previous one had failed to do.

I try to explain to them how close you were, how close I am, how with a little more help I could solve this puzzle, but they don't understand. They are not trying to understand you.

They are trying to throw you away, and they are succeeding.

Before they finish, I go up to each nameless sanitation worker and offer him a facet of your lives, a single dusty jewel plucked from the thousands you had gathered.

To each person, I try to give the thing he has been looking for, to offer him a history of you that will clash with the official version, with the version of the facts already being a.s.sembled by the historians and newspapermen. I want them to see you as I wanted to see you when I first came to this place, before I started telling your story to my own ends.

I leave minutes ahead of the wrecking ball. All your possessions have been carted away to be burned, or else tied into garbage bags and discarded. What took you decades to acquire took other men mere weeks to throw away, and now all that you were is gone. Despite the many opportunities to take whatever I wanted, I have left all of your possessions behind, with only a few exceptions: I have taken one of Homer's orange peels, with hopes that it might help me see, and I have taken the makings of one of your traps, on the off-chance that it might protect me better than it did you. I have left everything else for the historians and garbage men to do with what they will. The workers want to throw you away, but the historians who follow will want something else altogether. They will gather you into inventories, into feature articles and well-researched biographies. They will annotate and organize. They will h.o.a.rd the facts, organizing them into timelines and tight paragraphs of pa.s.sive prose, then publish their theories in journals and books before reciting them on television shows and in packed lecture halls. They will collect more of you and Homer than anyone should need or want, and then they will collect some more, never satisfied with what they have, always greedy for more facts and more theories.

Once, I wanted to be just like them.

Once, I too built a trap for myself out of a few obsessed pages, and when I fell in, it crushed me too. Sometimes I am still there, calling out for help to anyone who will listen.

AN INDEX OF HOW OUR FAMILY WAS KILLED.

A BROTHER, A FATHER, A MOTHER, A SISTER.

A family, to begin with.

A family, whatever that is.

A list of evidence, compiled in alphabetical order rather than in order of importance, rather than in the order in which I gathered these clues.

A message, left on my answering machine and never deleted: My sister's voice, telling me she's okay, that she's still there.

Absence of loved ones, never diminishing no matter how much time has pa.s.sed.

Accidents happen, but what happened to us was not an accident.

Acquittal, but not for them, and not for us.

Alarms that failed to go off, that have never stopped ringing in my ears.

Alibis, as in, everyone's got one.

Ambulances that never arrive in time to save anyone.

An index, a collection of echoes, each one suggesting a whole only partially sensed.

Arrest, to bring into custody.

Arrest, to bring to a stop.

Autopsy, as a means of discovering the cause of death.

Axe, as possibility. Also, other sharp objects, other combinations of handles and blades.

Ballistics, as method of investigation.

Blood, scrubbed from the floor of bedrooms and barrooms and hospital beds, sometimes by myself, more often by others, by strangers, by men and women in white clothes, unaffected by the crime at hand.

Brother, memory of: Once, my brother and I built a fort in the woods behind our house by digging a pit and covering it with plywood. Once, we put the neighbor kid down in that pit and covered the hole. Once, we listened to him scream for hours from the back porch, where we ate cookies and milk and misunderstood what it was we were doing wrong.

Brother, murdered. Murdered by a woman, a wife, his wife, the wife he had left but not divorced. Who he had left for another woman, a woman who could not protect him even with a house clasped tight with locks. Murdered in his sleep, with a blade to the eye. Murdered beside his new woman, who woke up screaming and didn't stop for days.

Bruises so black I couldn't recognize her face, couldn't be sure when I told the coroner that yes, this is my mother.

Bullets, general, fear thereof.