theMATEOlife
02/07/06, 02:48 PM
this one's a bit longer.
Picking up the pieces is a funny process. Lana has this habit of cutting out clippings and photographs from newspapers. Her bedroom wall is a collage of various events pasted from the floor to the ceiling. Every time you’re there it’s different; events written over. Columbine gets smothered by the World Trade Center attacks. Nightclub fires get smothered by triple homicides. She fills her closet with stacks of newspapers; the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post.
She wakes up in my bed, her head next to a newspaper clipping. In black and white ink dots, a girl covers her mouth, tears gushing through her fingers. You can’t tell in the photo, but she’s got red hair. “Please don’t cry,” I say, “you’ve been doing enough of that.” She looks up at me with the sleep tight around her eyes. A smirk makes itself apparent on her face, and (accidentally) on mine too. She’s disarming.
We reach three in the afternoon without my mom leaving David’s room. She sits at his keyboard, playing the same few notes over and over again. Occasionally, we can hear her trying to muffle a sob. For the most part, the house stays quiet.
The telephone rings. After what you can safely consider the worst day of your life, your motivation to do things like answering the phone, eating, and showering really withers away. So the telephone rings.
After you see and hear things that get branded onto your soul, your will to talk, to smile, to cook is seriously crippled. And the telephone rings. After experiencing loss that your brain can’t even begin to process, your desire to care, to interact, to want is practically nonexistent. And the telephone rings.
Click.
Lana and I both turn our heads toward the stairs, confused. No, Mom didn’t answer the phone.
“Hi, you’ve reached the Grady’s,” says David’s cheerful voice. Picture that sack of broken glass and cinderblocks. “We’re not here right now.” Lana bolts to her feet, rushing to the telephone cradle. “So please leave a message after the beep.” My fingers turn the volume up on the TV. “And we’ll get back to you as soon as--“
“Hello?” Lana says into the phone.
“You didn’t even ask me!” screams the television. New channel: “Welcome back. Today, we’re meeting girls with serious eating disorders--“
“Hello?” Lana repeats.
New channel: “He says Lorenzo doesn’t know jack.”
“Caleb.” The new channel is a black screen and bitter quiet. “It’s for you.” '
The phone unavoidably reaches my fingers. “Hello?”
“Caleb,” says my father’s voice, cracking on the second syllable.
“Dad.”
#
This side of 4am is harder to stomach. My bed is filled with me and my sweat. A glass of water just makes me thirstier, and lying down makes me more awake. Standing at the window, goose bumps raise the hairs on my arm. A spider spins a web in a nook up by the ceiling. Gliding through the quiet of the house, the floorboards squeal under my heels. One way or another, I find myself in David’s room.
My mother lies in bed, sleeping cautiously. Her body shifts and stirs repeatedly, occasionally letting out a troubled mutter. You can’t make out any of the words. Eying her carefully, I open the middle drawer of David’s bureau. Underneath a pile of clothes he never wore, still with the factory creases along the folds, is what I’m looking for. The rum lights my throat up as it slides into me, but I don’t wince. Within minutes, the entire bottle’s done, and I’m drunkenly standing in my dead brother’s bedroom with my sleep-talking mom muttering about standard transmissions. I’m still not in the mood to drive.
Caught with morbid fascination, my hands rummage through his drawers, his desk, his notebooks. Flipping through his math notes, I don’t find anything useful. A doodle in his English notebook reveals his passion for geometric shapes. After you’re dead, everything you wrote becomes profound. Your notes on the Orestes become gospel. Your pornographic drawings of Michelle Gilbury become modern art. Your mediocre recordings of original piano compositions become brilliant opuses. It’s a silly thing people do to numb the pain of premature death. I prefer the rum (at least it’s honest). But it’s in David’s history notebook that I find the gold.
“My Favorite Things,” reads the headline at the top of the page, followed by a list sketched out in David’s frenetic handwriting. Mice, garage rock, halter tops, David writes. The quiet of the city after it snows (not only ‘cause no one’s out but because the snow swallows sound). The taste of Coke after a good meal. Anthills.
Barefoot and topless, my legs carry me out into the snow. My hair dances in the wind, my toes curl on the walkway ice. Sing-alongs, colored contacts, earrings. My hand grabs the car door handle. It’s cold. I slip into the driver’s seat, and shut the door. Dancing with the music turned real loud, David writes.
Whispering things to people while they’re asleep. The keys click into the ignition and the engine sputters to life. The radio comes on, but quickly cuts out. It’s been fickle for months and we never got around to fixing it. Yelling things under water, David writes. Kissing. The car rolls out onto the street as my back spasms against the cold. My chattering teeth tell a story through clicks. The smell of the cold stings the insides of my nostrils. Taking accidental naps, writes David. Realizing you’ve got the house to yourself when you really need it.
Around the block we go, cutting through the elementary school parking lot, past the mall, driving by Acorn Boulevard and finally landing on the corner of Middleton and Rockwood where the yellow tape waltzes in the wind. Old black and white horror movies, David writes. Leaves blowing in the wind during autumn. My suspicion is accurate: concrete on Middleton is still stained (and will be for a while to come). Everybody is so desperate to leave their mark on earth. David’s mark isn’t his music. It isn’t his poetry. It isn’t the eloquence of his suicide note. After eighteen years, after two-hundred and sixteen months, after six thousand, five-hundred and seventy days of living, David’s legacy is reduced to a bloodstain on Middleton Ave and a leftover bottle of rum.
The car gets me home in one piece. The rum churns in my belly as my mom churns and turns in David’s bed. My wet, numb feet drip onto the carpet of my bedroom, soaking a track of footprints from the door to the desk. The last three things on David’s list of favorite things are,
“ACTION,
REDEMPTION,
PEACE.”
They are all capitalized and written in different color ink. On my desk, with a red pen, I cross out “My Favorite Things” and replace it with, “Reasons to Live.” After folding the scrap of spiral notebook paper up, I slip it under my pillow and pass out.
Picking up the pieces is a funny process. Lana has this habit of cutting out clippings and photographs from newspapers. Her bedroom wall is a collage of various events pasted from the floor to the ceiling. Every time you’re there it’s different; events written over. Columbine gets smothered by the World Trade Center attacks. Nightclub fires get smothered by triple homicides. She fills her closet with stacks of newspapers; the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post.
She wakes up in my bed, her head next to a newspaper clipping. In black and white ink dots, a girl covers her mouth, tears gushing through her fingers. You can’t tell in the photo, but she’s got red hair. “Please don’t cry,” I say, “you’ve been doing enough of that.” She looks up at me with the sleep tight around her eyes. A smirk makes itself apparent on her face, and (accidentally) on mine too. She’s disarming.
We reach three in the afternoon without my mom leaving David’s room. She sits at his keyboard, playing the same few notes over and over again. Occasionally, we can hear her trying to muffle a sob. For the most part, the house stays quiet.
The telephone rings. After what you can safely consider the worst day of your life, your motivation to do things like answering the phone, eating, and showering really withers away. So the telephone rings.
After you see and hear things that get branded onto your soul, your will to talk, to smile, to cook is seriously crippled. And the telephone rings. After experiencing loss that your brain can’t even begin to process, your desire to care, to interact, to want is practically nonexistent. And the telephone rings.
Click.
Lana and I both turn our heads toward the stairs, confused. No, Mom didn’t answer the phone.
“Hi, you’ve reached the Grady’s,” says David’s cheerful voice. Picture that sack of broken glass and cinderblocks. “We’re not here right now.” Lana bolts to her feet, rushing to the telephone cradle. “So please leave a message after the beep.” My fingers turn the volume up on the TV. “And we’ll get back to you as soon as--“
“Hello?” Lana says into the phone.
“You didn’t even ask me!” screams the television. New channel: “Welcome back. Today, we’re meeting girls with serious eating disorders--“
“Hello?” Lana repeats.
New channel: “He says Lorenzo doesn’t know jack.”
“Caleb.” The new channel is a black screen and bitter quiet. “It’s for you.” '
The phone unavoidably reaches my fingers. “Hello?”
“Caleb,” says my father’s voice, cracking on the second syllable.
“Dad.”
#
This side of 4am is harder to stomach. My bed is filled with me and my sweat. A glass of water just makes me thirstier, and lying down makes me more awake. Standing at the window, goose bumps raise the hairs on my arm. A spider spins a web in a nook up by the ceiling. Gliding through the quiet of the house, the floorboards squeal under my heels. One way or another, I find myself in David’s room.
My mother lies in bed, sleeping cautiously. Her body shifts and stirs repeatedly, occasionally letting out a troubled mutter. You can’t make out any of the words. Eying her carefully, I open the middle drawer of David’s bureau. Underneath a pile of clothes he never wore, still with the factory creases along the folds, is what I’m looking for. The rum lights my throat up as it slides into me, but I don’t wince. Within minutes, the entire bottle’s done, and I’m drunkenly standing in my dead brother’s bedroom with my sleep-talking mom muttering about standard transmissions. I’m still not in the mood to drive.
Caught with morbid fascination, my hands rummage through his drawers, his desk, his notebooks. Flipping through his math notes, I don’t find anything useful. A doodle in his English notebook reveals his passion for geometric shapes. After you’re dead, everything you wrote becomes profound. Your notes on the Orestes become gospel. Your pornographic drawings of Michelle Gilbury become modern art. Your mediocre recordings of original piano compositions become brilliant opuses. It’s a silly thing people do to numb the pain of premature death. I prefer the rum (at least it’s honest). But it’s in David’s history notebook that I find the gold.
“My Favorite Things,” reads the headline at the top of the page, followed by a list sketched out in David’s frenetic handwriting. Mice, garage rock, halter tops, David writes. The quiet of the city after it snows (not only ‘cause no one’s out but because the snow swallows sound). The taste of Coke after a good meal. Anthills.
Barefoot and topless, my legs carry me out into the snow. My hair dances in the wind, my toes curl on the walkway ice. Sing-alongs, colored contacts, earrings. My hand grabs the car door handle. It’s cold. I slip into the driver’s seat, and shut the door. Dancing with the music turned real loud, David writes.
Whispering things to people while they’re asleep. The keys click into the ignition and the engine sputters to life. The radio comes on, but quickly cuts out. It’s been fickle for months and we never got around to fixing it. Yelling things under water, David writes. Kissing. The car rolls out onto the street as my back spasms against the cold. My chattering teeth tell a story through clicks. The smell of the cold stings the insides of my nostrils. Taking accidental naps, writes David. Realizing you’ve got the house to yourself when you really need it.
Around the block we go, cutting through the elementary school parking lot, past the mall, driving by Acorn Boulevard and finally landing on the corner of Middleton and Rockwood where the yellow tape waltzes in the wind. Old black and white horror movies, David writes. Leaves blowing in the wind during autumn. My suspicion is accurate: concrete on Middleton is still stained (and will be for a while to come). Everybody is so desperate to leave their mark on earth. David’s mark isn’t his music. It isn’t his poetry. It isn’t the eloquence of his suicide note. After eighteen years, after two-hundred and sixteen months, after six thousand, five-hundred and seventy days of living, David’s legacy is reduced to a bloodstain on Middleton Ave and a leftover bottle of rum.
The car gets me home in one piece. The rum churns in my belly as my mom churns and turns in David’s bed. My wet, numb feet drip onto the carpet of my bedroom, soaking a track of footprints from the door to the desk. The last three things on David’s list of favorite things are,
“ACTION,
REDEMPTION,
PEACE.”
They are all capitalized and written in different color ink. On my desk, with a red pen, I cross out “My Favorite Things” and replace it with, “Reasons to Live.” After folding the scrap of spiral notebook paper up, I slip it under my pillow and pass out.