Listen—
Somewhere, Homer is crying again, isn’t he?
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.
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.
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 bass 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.
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 constituent 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 muffled 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.
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.
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 hoarded.
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.
You howl, hurling the curse of your brother’s name down the corridor. For hours you have heard his bumbling 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.
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?