This was my undoing, really. The major section of ceiling that was the face came away from the rest of the ceiling. The dark brown water stain, eight or nine feet in diameter — this eight-or-nine-foot section of ceiling, the bulk of our father’s image — detached itself in one massive portion and, loosened by leaking water, broke free, plummeted to the floor.
My brothers’ voices called out. I leapt back. The plaster did not hit me. I think it might as well have hit me. The face dropped to the floor and its crash was the finale, as they say, of my little dance.
Water splashed. Chalky paste and particles like rocks flew. Dust clouds erupted into the air as Father broke apart before my feet. All the plaster shattered and a sickening compound, water and muck, covered my legs and my stomach. The muck was cold. The ceiling was ruined. I was amazed. The effect of Father’s thundering, bitter crash was like that of any harsh noise or bad surprise: shock accompanied by disorientation, lasting several seconds.
That was all the time it took for my beloved brothers to advance on me, to put their hands on me, to take me from all sides and hold me so that I could not move, and to hit me with their sticks and cut me with their knives.
I turned my head away and looked over at our windows. The windows’ panes were no longer black, exactly, but colored with gray, the beginnings of the morning’s light.
A voice beside my ear told me to stop struggling. I felt bereaved over the ceiling’s fall. My brothers ganged around me. A faraway voice shouted something and this was blind Albert alone in his chair, wanting something, rapping his cane against his horsehair chair.
Siegfried was the man in front of me and it was his knife, I believe, that made the initial cut across my stomach. Someone else was tugging at the mask, trying to wrench the mask off, because of course the mask’s elongated chin prevented the man behind me from cutting into my throat. The man behind me pressed his body against mine. I felt his legs against the backs of my legs, and I felt the man’s belt buckle digging into my back. The man’s arms were wrapped around me and the side of his rough face leaned against my shoulder.
“Who is that?” I asked.
“It’s me. Arthur,” the man answered as another brother poured a drink over the mask’s painted mouth, into the mask’s mouth and down over my lips. “Swallow,” a voice said, and I sank to my knees on the floor.