“Spooner, is that you?” I asked the man pouring cognac over my face and mouth.
“Yes.”
“Tell me what is happening,” I said to my brother. I lapped at the pouring drink and the blood ran from the cut Siegfried had made with his knife across my stomach.
“They’re taking off your mask,” Spooner said to me. “You’ve knotted the strings tightly, Doug.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“We’ll get it untied eventually,” a voice said; and this same voice, the voice, I suppose, of the man working to remove the mask, asked, “Would someone pass me a razor?”
The jabs to my ribs hurt more than deeper wounds to my stomach and my chest. This was true also of the sharpened table leg that I watched coming down in front of the mask, striking me on my arm.
There is an impression, held true in our society, that the father is surpassed, overtaken, outlived, and in these and other respects, killed by the son.
But this is, I think, actually not the case. In truth, I think, it is always the son who is killed by the father. Couldn’t it be argued that each man dies the death made for him by his father?
I felt so terribly weary. I felt so tired, and so sleepy. It was the end of our night. I felt blessed to be held by my brothers’ hands in our red library.
“I’m cold,” I whispered to a man holding my hand. I could smell the man’s alcoholic breath.
“Please, close the windows for Doug,” this man said to others. Sure enough, a brother of mine did trudge through puddles, ice, and snow to our tall windows. I could hear the windows, one then another sliding downward. The Doberman watched from beneath the dinner table. Bats circled overhead. What in the world had become of Chuck’s sheepdog? My brothers on the carpet, my brothers who had received their injections, stirred, began to move, lifted arms and legs, uttered sighs. They greeted the new day. I, on the other hand, had neither syringes nor medicines. All these things were gone.
My heart at least was beating in my chest. The mask came off and I was Doug again and a knife was cutting me somewhere.
Before closing my eyes I gazed in the direction of our fire. It pleased me to watch our fire.
It is true that there is nothing like a blaze in the hearth to soothe the nerves and restore order to a house.
ALSO BY DONALD ANTRIM
The Verificationist
Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World
The Afterlife
ACCLAIM FOR DONALD ANTRIM’S THE HUNDRED BROTHERS
“Elegant, outrageously imagined, comic … Antrim exaggerates his narrator into hilarious existence.”
— The New Yorker
“Antrim deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Pynchon, Heller, Vonnegut, and DeLillo. The Hundred Brothers is raucous and tender and suffused with intelligence of a most eclectic sort.”
— Detour magazine
“To read it is to enter a parallel universe somewhere between the worlds of myth and mammon.”
— Entertainment Weekly
“A fantasy that capers between atavistic ritual and inspired slapstick.”
— Time magazine
“Even as we laugh at the novel’s absurdity, at its brutal, skewering and amplified portrait of fraternity run amok, its madness rings both sad and disarmingly true.”
— Chicago Tribune
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DONALD ANTRIM is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, and he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the New York Public Library. He lives in New York City.