You do not reply. This is always the way it is; I think I’m going to make it come out different this time, but that never works. When you open the basement door, a cold air breathes up. I follow you down the dusty unpainted stairs; you put the croquet set under the stairs where it belongs, then climb up again to your lonesome room, but I keep going all the way to the back of the basement, under the dirt, down through the black darkness to that place, whatever you call it. Where the little bones are.
2. All this
Matt Kolb, you’re sixteen now, a high-school sophomore in Dog River, Oregon, and I’m your twin, the dead one, following you around: invisible, impalpable, unthinkable, just a damp skin of nothing at all that sticks to you wherever you go. They have never told you about me, and you’ll never find out in this life, but you sense me out of the corner of your brain like a floater in your eyeball.
As Somerset Maugham said in another connection (or will say, I don’t care which), there are great advantages in being dead; I’m j-j-just trying to think what they are. Where I exist is outside your time, and I know things you don’t — for instance, I know we’re only three years and eight months from Pearl Harbor, a necessary event in the scheme of history, but you’re on a tangent now and may not get there.
Mother is in the locked ward in Salem and probably is not coming back. Father doesn’t go out to his lodge meetings anymore — he says he doesn’t want to leave you alone at night, but in fact he doesn’t want to leave you with anyone else either. After bedtime you hear the sounds of men’s voices in the living room, the mountain coming to Mohammed. What do the brothers do there? Mother used to pretend they took off all their clothes and danced around in their little aprons.
You make your own school lunches a day ahead of time (baloney sandwiches, an egg, sometimes a tomato). Father cooks dinner when he gets home (pork chops, hamburger, or macaroni and cheese). The kitchen knives are in the kitchen now, not locked up in the garage as they used to be.
Father leaves the house earlier than you do and gets home later; you have a house key, which you are forbidden to carry because you might lose it — you hide it under the doormat every morning. No one else comes to the house except the mailman and Mrs. Collier, who cleans once a week. And me, but I’m no company even when I’m out of the basement.
Now we’re walking up 13th Street in the damp cool of the morning, past silent houses and empty yards. The steep ascent is no problem, we’re used to that, but we’re late as usual and have to hustle. Students with cars zip past us. Father says he won’t buy a car till you’re a senior. Then it will be a family car, not your car, but he’ll teach you to drive. He wants to toughen you up, and has given you a ratty third-hand set of golf clubs, with which you dutifully trudge around the links by yourself on weekends.
Doesn’t it seem a long time ago when the whole neighborhood gathered for hide and seek under the lilacs? Or when the kids came to your lawn for the croquet? In their early teens they all grew in different directions, joined other groups, left you behind. You’re an outcaste now, a bug in the margin of the big happy class book. Against all evidence, you have faith that school will someday end. After that you will get out of Dog River, go to New York or Paris. Or Berlin, where the crazies live.
La la, la la, la. Here’s the high school, a crouching monster with two mouths like doorways, one open, one shut. Yellow buses are unloading students from the Valley, most of them Nisei. Your old classmate Roku is not among them; he lives in town now, where his father has a store. Anyhow, he hangs around with the lettermen.
Three juniors are huddled on the lawn near the entrance. One of them, Red Nichols, says “Hi, Brain,” then seizes his own pants-leg, pulls it tight, and farts. The others laugh.
You go inside to your locker. Right 17, left 31, right 10. The multiple slamming of lockers reminds you of the movie last Saturday at the Rialto, when the vast German dreadnought echoed to the tread of marching men. A sudden explosion. White-uniformed officers are racing past. “Spurlos versenkt!” Red Nichols fails in his sailor suit, punctured by flying shrapnel. Black blood pours from his nose and mouth. He holds his arms up in mute appeal, but you step over him and follow the crowd into American History.
Mr. Mueller is talking about England at the time of the American Revolution. “And a loaf of bread cost only two dee.”
You raise your hand. “The d is for denarius. It’s pronounced ‘pence.’”
Mueller smiles with pleasure. “Well, I never heard that before.”
Later somebody passes you a note. “Draconian meeting changed to eleven o’clock.” The Draconian is the school magazine; it comes out twice a year. At eleven you get an excuse and a dirty look from Mr. Phillips. You’re failing algebra, not doing the homework, which means to Phillips that you’re lazy, but those strings of symbols are Chinese to you. You made a cartoon about that for the school newspaper, The Guide; it did not amuse Phillips, to whom algebra is as clear as the alphabet.
The Draconian staff was hand-picked by Miss Fessenden, and that’s why you are on it, although Dick Mayfield wishes you weren’t. He looks annoyed when he sees you come in. Dick is a big square-headed blond in a letterman’s sweater that has three stripes and two pins. The reason he is the editor is that he likes to run things.
You sit down next to Margaret Hicks, across from Heather Boyd and Virginia Copeland, both well-groomed seniors in pastel sweater sets and pearls.
“Well, I see we’re all here,” says Dick, “so let’s get started. Heather, do we have any new stuff to read?”
“No.”
“Okay. That’s actually good, because where we stand now, we have to turn in the whole magazine by next Friday, or the printer can’t do it before graduation week. That right, Heather?’
“Yes.”
“And, we only have sixteen pages to fill, and, what, twenty-two pages of stuff that we already decided we more or less like, not counting the contents page and my introduction that I haven’t written yet.”
“How long will the introduction be?” Virginia asks.
“Well, it depends what else is in the magazine, doesn’t it? Probably a page and a half, but I could keep it down to one page, easy. So, what the heck, call it one page for the introduction and one for the contents page, that means there’s room for fourteen pages of other stuff. So we’re eight pages over. You got the stories, Heather?” “No, I thought you had them.”
“Oh, sorry.” Dick reaches behind him, stretches easily to the bookshelf and brings back a manila folder. He opens it on the table. “Okay, here,” he says, holding up a manuscript you recognize as your own. He dangles it from one comer. “This thing I never did like, and it’s seven pages long, so there’s the problem practically solved. Any objections?”
“What didn’t you like, Dick?” Margaret asks.
“It’s crazy. Little naked people walking around on a star?” You clear your throat. “Jupiter isn’t a star.”
He gives you a can’t-believe-this look. “It isn’t? What is it then?”
“It’s a planet.”
Dick looks at the ceiling. Virginia says, “I kind of liked the little Jupiterians. I thought they were cute.”
After a moment Dick tosses the typescript onto the middle of the table and folds his arms. “Okay, tell me what you want to do.” Looked at the right way, he’s wearing a hangman’s noose that pushes his head to one side; he is dangling from a gibbet, cross-eyed, and his tongue is out.