“As far as I know,” Zuvicek said. “There are rumored to be other families who suffer something like it. But they may be obscure offshoots of our own. There are, as I say, few records. In the old country, these things were always kept private.”
Jean shivered and hugged herself, which was not just a fearful gesture, since she had donned her clothes while still wet and had caught a chill running back from the creek. “Why would anybody even want to be part of our family, then? Why would anybody in our family ever have children, if this could happen to us?”
I saw pain and anger flare in my father’s eyes, reactions he tried to hide by looking away. Years later, I still wonder if that was the moment when death first planted its terrible seed in him. Maybe. It still feels like the moment when it was first planted in me.
But Zuvicek was patient. “I understand that you are upset. I don’t expect you to take much comfort in this right away, but every family in the world has a history of increased susceptibility to one ailment or another. To compensate, they also all harbor areas of high congenital resistance. In our own family’s case, the childhood cancer rate is much lower than the norm, and the same can be said of our personal incidence of epilepsy, diabetes, and degenerative muscle disease. Nor is that all we have to be thankful for. There are many things we have to worry about less, that are much more important in the scheme of things, than this one ailment that almost never happens.”
Jean was not mollified. “Are we going to get it?”
My father was even more stricken by this question than he had been by her last one, but Zuvicek was firm. “Absolutely not. You are already older than you would be if you were ever going to get it. As are you, Lawrence. This ailment only attacks very young children, most of them infants or toddlers; tragically, Ethan was himself almost old enough to be considered out of danger. It is next to certain that your own children, should either of you have children, will also never have to worry about such a thing. All you have to worry about now is your poor brother… and how much your poor mother and father will now depend on you, to help take care of him. It—”
Ethan screamed. The inhuman sounds from upstairs, which would never stop in the long years that followed, had been audible since long before Zuvicek came down. But most of them had been cracking and grinding noises, as well as sudden exhalations, that had not sounded like anything in particular and had been almost impossible to identify as product of any particular little boy’s voice.
This shriek was Ethan’s voice, returned to him: a cry of almost unimaginable pain that would not have been inappropriate coming from a boy set on fire, or one swarmed by hornets, or one simply locked in a cramped black place along with the sound of vicious things scrabbling in the dark. There was no sanity in it, or hope. But it was, for a second, recognizable as Ethan’s voice. I suddenly remembered that it was my little brother we were talking about, and half-stood, determined to race up the stairs to his side. But then the sound of his pain changed to something far worse, something with barbed wire and broken glass in it, and all my instinctive protectiveness fled, replaced by paralysis and shame as a stream of warm piss ran down my leg.
My father saw it. So did Jean, and so did Zuvicek. Not one of them blamed me. They had all heard the same thing I’d heard, and may have come close to the same involuntary release.
In the end, Zuvicek could only finish the sentence he had started before Ethan’s scream.
“—will not be easy for any of you, I’m afraid.”
Now I was an adult, home from the University my mother had insisted I leave home to attend, as inured to horror as only one who had lived his life steeped in horror could ever come to be.
I stood at the locked door of Ethan’s room, gripping the deadbolt, closing my eyes when one of the wet sounds from within reminded me of rending flesh.
As always, standing at this threshold felt like facing a long drop into formless darkness. Even if I’d taken the next step on more days than I could count, even I knew from long experience that I’d survive an encounter with my brother, there was no way of quantifying how much it was going to hurt. The only certainty was that it would.
As always, I waited for the first cry that sounded recognizably human before I peered through the spy hole.
Even allowing for the distortion of the panoramic lens, Ethan’s room no longer looked like the toy-strewn sanctuary decorated with spacemen and superheroes that it had been on the day of his sixth birthday. The colorful boy-sized bed frame and desk and toy chest had not long survived his illness unbroken; they had been removed, and replaced with padded walls and a steel trunk equipped with padlock and air holes, for those times when only absolute confinement would be enough. The padding covered walls that had been rebuilt to cover what had once been windows open to morning light, with a fine view of the trees at the edge of our backyard forest. Now the only light was a circular fluorescent ring within a reinforced cage. One of its segments flickered and one of the others gave off a dim glow brightest at the center, like the sun trying to break through a blanket of clouds. Stains of various colors, some recognizable as the things that come out of a human body, and some not, streaked from the ceiling and puddled on the knit seams between the padded places on the floor.
It was, I knew, impossible to keep the room looking or smelling like anything but an open sewer. By its very nature, Ethan’s disorder meant that he leaked. Sometimes, when he transformed into whatever he became next, he reabsorbed whatever he’d spilled last. Sometimes he didn’t. It was the only consistent way to tell the difference between what was part of Ethan and what was just his waste fluids.
It took me a second or two to find the twitching, half-melted form, like a man wrenched into a Moebius strip, that bubbled at the room’s farthest corner. Even as I watched, it tried to grow spikes, but they deflated with a hiss. The shape softened, becoming as close to the shape of a human boy as Ethan ever got anymore: a lot like a plastic army man that somebody had melted on a hot stove and then allowed to cool.
I threw the bolt and entered, wincing as always at the sheer stench of the place. My mother and father had installed a state-of-the-art air-filtration system early on, using what would have been Ethan’s college fund, but the atmosphere in here was always like a deep whiff of a sweaty sneaker that had been allowed to marinate in rotten bananas and then soaked in a puree made from the contents of a rancid diaper.
It was as impossible to get used to the stench as it was to get used to the things Ethan changed into, because fresher and more offensive perfumes were always being added to the soup. You can get used to living inside an open sewer, if you have to. Your sense of smell adapts, if only by turning off. But if shit is only the least offensive of all the possible things you have to wade through, and everything new that comes dribbling down the pipes attacks some remaining vulnerability in your gag reflex, then adaptation doesn’t work. There’s nothing to get used to.
I had lost one of my college girlfriends because our evening walk had taken us past a golden retriever who’d been split open by a passing car. It was still alive, and whining, even as its parts leaked from its flattened belly. The septic release of its split bowels made the site of its imminent death like the inside of a toilet. My girlfriend vomited out the General Tso’s Chicken I’d just paid for and later called me cold and inhuman because the sight of the poor pooch had left me unaffected. I hadn’t been able to explain to her that I’d long since grown used to obscene sights and smells like that, because my little brother spent most of his life as obscene sights and smells like that.