Herb and I flew out to San Jose to collect Seth, then flew back to Toledo on the same plane as the bodies. They store them in the cargo hold, did you know that? Me neither. Nor wanted to.
The funeral was one of the most horrible experiences of my life-probably the most horrible. Those four coffins-my brother, my sister-in-law, my niece and my nephew-lined up in a row, first in the church and then at the cemetery, where they sat over the holes on those awful chrome rails. Wanna hear something totally nuts? During the whole graveside service I kept thinking of my honeymoon in Jamaica. They have speed-bumps in the road that they call sleeping policemen. And for some reason that’s how I started thinking of the coffins, as sleeping policemen. Well, I told you I’ve been crazy, didn’t I? Ohio’s Valium Queen of 1994, that’s me.
The service at the church was packed-Bill and June had a lot of friends-and everyone was bawling. Except for poor little Seth, of course, who can’t. Or doesn’t. Or who knows? He just sat there between me and Herb with two of his toys on his lap-a pink van he calls “Dweem Fwoatah” and the action figure that goes with it, a sexy little redhead named Cassandra Styles. The toys are from a show called MotoKops 2200, and the names of the damned MotoKops vans (excuse me, the MotoKops Power Wagons, lah-di-dah) are among the few things Seth says which are actually understandable (“Doughnuts buy “em for me” is another one; also “Seth go potty”, which means you’re supposed to go in there with him-he’s trained but very weird about his bathroom habits).
I hope he didn’t understand the service meant the rest of his family is dead, gone from him forever. Herb is sure he doesn’t know (“The kid doesn’t even know where he is,” Herb says), but I wonder. That’s the hell of autism, isn’t it? You always wonder, you never really know, they’re broadcasting but God hooked them up with a scrambler-phone and nothing’s coming through at the receiving end but gibberish.
Tell you one thing-I’ve gained a new respect for Herb Wyler in the last couple of weeks. He arranged EVERYTHING, from the planes to the obituaries in both the Columbus Dispatch and Toledo Blade. And to take Seth in as he has, without a word of complaint-not just an orphan but an autistic orphan-well, I mean, is it amazing or is it just me? I vote for amazing. And he seems to really care for the poor kid. Sometimes, when he looks at the boy, a preoccupied expression comes into his face that could even be love. The beginnings of it, anyway.
This is even more remarkable, it seems to me, when you realize how little a child like Seth can give back. Mostly he just sits plonked down out there in the sandbox Herb put in as soon as we got back from Toledo, like a big boy-shaped raisin, wearing only his MotoKops 2200
Underoos (he has the lunchbox, too), mouthing his nonsense words, playing with his vans and the action figures that go with them, especially the sexy redhead in the blue shorts. These toys trouble me a bit, because-if you’re not entirely sure I’ve lost it, this should convince you-I’m not sure where they came from, Jan! Seth sure didn’t have any such expensive rig the last time I visited Bill and June in Toledo (I checked in Toys R Us, and the MotoKops stuff is VERY pricey), I can tell you that. They aren’t the sort of toys Bill and Junie would have approved of, anyhow-their toy-buying ideas ran more to Barney than Star Wars, much to their kids” disgust. Poor little Seth can’t tell me, that’s for sure, and it probably doesn’t matter, anyway. I only know the names of the vans and the figures that go with them because I watch the cartoon-show with him on Saturday mornings. The chief bad guy, No Face, is tres creepy.
He’s 50 strange, Jan (Seth, I mean, not No Face, har-har). I don’t know if Herb feels that as much as I do, but I know he feels some of it. Sometimes when I look up and catch Seth looking at me (he has eyes of such dark brown that sometimes they actually look black), I get the weirdest chill-like someone’s using my spine for a xylophone. And some odd things have happened since Seth came to live with us. Don’t laugh, but there’ve even been a couple of incidents like the poltergeist phenomena they sometimes dramatize on what Herb calls “the psycho-reality shows”. Glasses flying off shelves, a couple of windows that broke seemingly for no reason, and weird wiggly shapes that sometimes appear in Seth’s sandbox at night. They’re like strange, surreal sand-paintings. I’ll send you some Polaroids next time I write, if I think of it. I wouldn’t tell anybody this stuff besides you, Jan, believe me. Thank God I know and trust your wonder… your curiosity… and your DISCRETION!
Mostly Seth is no trouble. The most annoying thing about having him around is the way he breathes! He takes in air in these big, sloppy gusts, always through his mouth, which is always hung open and halfway down to his chest. It makes him look like the village idiot, which he really is not, regardless of the problems he does have. Mr Marinville from across the street was over the other day with a banana cake he baked (he’s quite a sweetie for a guy who once wrote a book about a man having a love-affair with his own daughter… and called the book Delight, of all things), and he spent some time with Seth, who was taking a sandbox-break to watch Bonanza. Remember that one? TNT shows the reruns every weekday afternoon (they call “em the Afternoon Ponderosa Party, ain’t that cute), and Seth just loves em. “Wessurn, Wessurn,” he says, when they come on. Mr Marinville, who likes to be called Johnny, watched with us for quite a while, the three of us eating banana cake and drinking chocolate milk like old pals, and when I apologized for Seth’s wet breathing (mostly because it drives me nuts, of course), Marinville just laughed and said that Seth couldn’t help his adenoids. I’m not even sure what adenoids are, but I suppose we’ll have to have Seth’s looked at. Thank God for the Blue twins-Cross and Shield.
One thing keeps nagging me, and that’s why I’ve enclosed a Xerox of the postcard my brother sent me from Carson City shortly before he died. He says on it that they’ve had a breakthrough-an amazing breakthrough is what he says, actually-with Seth. Capital letters, lots of exclamation points. See for yourself. I was curious, natch, so I asked him about it the next time we talked on the phone. That must have been on July 27th or 28th, and it was the last time I spoke to him. His reaction was very peculiar, very unlike Bill. A long silence, then this weird artificial laugh: “Ha-ha-ha!” the way it gets written out but the way real laughter hardly ever sounds, except at boring cocktail parties. I never heard my brother laugh like that in his life. “Well, Aud,” he sez, “I might have overreacted a little on that one.”
He didn’t want to say any more on the subject, but when I pressed him he said that Seth seemed brighter, more with them, once they got far enough into Colorado to see the Rockies. “You know how he’s always loved Western movies and TV shows,” he said, and although I didn’t then, I sure do now. Nuts for cowboys and posses and cuttin” “em off at the pass is young Seth Garin. Bill said Seth probably knew he wasn’t in the real Old West because of all the cars and campers, but “the scenery still turned him on”. That’s how Bill put it.
I might have let it go at that if he hadn’t sounded so funny and vague, so really unlike himself. You know your own kin, don’t you? Or you think you do. And Bill was always outgoing and bubbly or indrawn and pouty. There wasn’t much middle ground. Except during that phone call, it seemed to be all middle ground. So I kept after him about it, which I wouldn’t have done ordinarily. I said that AN AMAZING BREAKTHROUGH sounded like one specific event. So he said that well, yes, something had happened not too far from Ely, which is one of the few good-sized towns north of Las Vegas. Just after they went by a road sign pointing the way to a burg called Desperation (charming names they have out there, I must say, makes you just wild to visit), Seth “kinda freaked out”. That’s how Bill put it. They were on Route 50, the non-turnpike route, and there was this huge ridge of earth on their left, south of the highway.