The ‘brother’ dreams. On Amtrak. Heading northeast. Outside: marshlands of Connecticut. A state noted both for its marshes, for the fractal subdivision of rivers as they empty into the Sound. Time: late afternoon. Day: Friday. Lighting effects are consistent with the light of late afternoon in Connecticut, which is the flickering light of things passing away, the light of things coming to an end. Eschatology. Amtrak riders know that the water side of the train is the side of flickering light. Ends of things. What else to do here but remember? Tyrone remembers, the better to avoid thinking about current events. Tyrone, with ski cap pulled down over his eyes. Tyrone, having shaved his head and chin that morning in the apartment, having sacrificed his dreadlocks. Tyrone, sporting chinos and some shirt his mother bought for him that had never before been free of its packaging. He looks like the “model person of color” here on the Northeast corridor. He counts seven people reading various daily newspapers. Seven readers who might have acquainted themselves with the headlines and who might have the kind of intelligence that assembles photos of suspects in newspapers and applies these pictures to passersby. Flickering light, bare trees. Light of Connecticut estuaries. Tyrone can’t, won’t think of the enormity of his predicament. He is a voracious eavesdropper, and overheard cell phone conversations contain portions of narratives, scraps of consciousness, grocery lists, birthday wishes, at least until the Old Saybrook stop, where the weekenders decamp. By then he’s satisfied that it’s okay to stroll the car. Tyrone heads for the snack bar, and he’s on his way there, in his chinos and his Italian dress shirt, when a stylish and elderly woman, having recently boarded in the village of Old Saybrook, she of the “excessive pastels” and translucent hair, asks him if he will loft up her rolling suitcase onto the luggage rack. He thinks about telling her to “fuck off,” but instead he puts his back into it, hoists up her seventeen-hundred-pound rolling casket. After which she presents him with her ticket. Of course, because he’s the well-groomed black man in the car. In truth, the only reason he doesn’t “scare” the lady with the translucent hair is because he’s clean shaven and “on the lam.” She should be scared of him, according to news reports. He is randomly felonious, according to at least one tabloid. Indeed, he’s just about to tell the “pastel lady” that “bidialectalism is a natural ability” while taking her ticket and shoving it in his mouth, or perhaps just hanging on to it so that he can cash it in somewhere, maybe the casinos. But instead he whispers, “I’m a passenger myself,” at which the woman blanches in recognition of her dangerous political mistake. Her rouged cheeks flush, and she is silenced, and he knows that she will never identify him to the interstate authorities because to identify him would be to admit that she believed he was a conductor or rail employee simply because he is a black man. She won’t say it in any venue. No prosecutor can make her say it. She is humbled, and he goes back to his seat. He sleeps. The train gathers its lateness into itself, as if it is the patron saint of lateness, it bisects the marshes and then it subdivides the pine barrens of the Bay State. Cell phone gabbers shout to their neighbors about the restaurant they are going to tonight. Up the Northeast corridor, on the lam, in the shuddering and occasionally silent interior of the Amtrak train.
“Hi, Mom,” the “brother” whispers, on Hillcrest Place, the interstate train having given way to the commuter train, the commuter train having given way to the taxi, the taxi having given way to the lawn of the Duffy home, which badly needs to be raked. An unused rake is balanced against a birch in the yard, at dusk.
Now that the door is opened, he feels how heavy his secrets are.
“Billy? What are you doing here?”
Awkwardly, Tyrone says, “Surprise! Just wanted to, uh, see the old neighborhood. . . .”
They’re in the condition of not knowing how to stand there, as if lessons in casual standing haven’t yet taken place. His mother calls upstairs. “Honey? Honey?” When there’s no response, she goes up, one step at a time, and Tyrone, standing with his overnight bag in the foyer, takes in the place. The living room, where the neglected furniture is, as always, barely presentable. The furniture is coffee stained, mildewed, neglected; the rugs are matted and sun bleached. The Duffy household is prepared for the leave-taking of the last child, the natural child, Max, who has just the one year left before college, probably at Yale, where the White Dwarf went. When Max, the natural child, is gone, the Dwarf and his wife will retire to their separate studies, but perhaps in a smaller house befitting a minister in his dotage. On cue, they clump downstairs, Indian file.
“Look at what the cat has dragged in!” the Dwarf observes. “Looking really good, Billy. Neat hairstyle, what there is of it. To what do we owe the pleasure?”
“I needed a break.”
They wouldn’t ask. They have given up asking. His answer, whatever it is, will entail bad news and irresponsibility. They no longer want to know, nor to feel that they caused it, whatever it is, nor to find themselves wound into the knots of his strange thinking. If a question is put to him in the wrong manner, he will go back to raving, blaming them somehow, asking weighty questions that should go unasked and doing it in an ugly, vindictive way featuring much simulated “ghetto” cursing.
“How long can you stay?”
A few days, he says, and then he tries to close out the subject. Anyway, his father is probably trying to get a sermon together. That’s what he’s usually doing. Do not distract the White Dwarf from the job of sermonizing. Do not distract his wife, who will be wanting her heaps of rancid cottage cheese and salad while she looks over her five-hundred-page textbook on adolescent depression. She’s been sifting through the topic for ten years, for a study that has, as part of its source material, her own experience with a pair of adopted black children. Who knows whether the black children were adopted for the study or whether the study was adopted for the benefit of the black children? It no longer matters.
His father, standing one carpeted step up, reaches out for a hug. Though Tyrone doesn’t budge, the White Dwarf clamps his arms around his lanky son and tells him how good it is to see him, and Tyrone almost believes him.
“Come on, get out of the doorway. Make yourself at home.”
In a brief attack of the dutiful variety, he follows them, his parents, as they scuttle into the kitchen. Inside, it’s the same mixture of leftover pieces of china from other people’s houses, glasses with the names of regional country clubs on them, church sale finds. They all sit down at the table. Clipped hydrangea blossoms dry in the centerpiece, blue and cream and gray. To forestall silences, Tyrone panics and rushes to tell them, yes, the job is going fine, really, yes, he is making some art, yes, he just talked to Annabel, yes, he is seeing someone, yes, an Asian curator, and he is feeling well, and, yes, he’s okay, he just wanted a short rest, yes, so he took some time off. They seem to be satisfied, or maybe they’ve just given up. Who knows? He would never be open to scrutiny, he has his notion of dignity, and his notion of dignity is about living beyond their scrutiny. They know. The agreement is for partial disclosure. Soon his parents edge out of the room.
A ragged spider plant on the pantry shelf needs watering. An article clipped from the Globe, dangers of herbal remedies, curls on a countertop. A distant cassette plays the cello suites, Pablo Casals sawing away. He’s been there a quarter hour, in the kitchen, a quarter hour of staring absently at a dish overflowing with aspartame packets. A quarter hour of turning objects over in his hands. Feeling the heft of a soup ladle left out to dry. A ceramic bowl. His mother crosses through the room several times, appearing, disappearing, carrying more papers. He mutters some more, why can’t he stop, about Annabel, oh yeah, about this story she’s developing, making up details as he goes along, embellishing, “Multigenerational thing, guys out in the desert with forked sticks, rattlesnakes, scorpions, dig here, the Mormons coming across the plains, the origins of Las Vegas, water wars, a story about dowsing.” His mother looks at him in that way, that I-am-still-your-mother way, that
way she always looks at him. Mothers, with their night vision goggles. He pretends fascination with the matter of spots of yellowing paint here on the wall by the back stairs. His mother, with her wrinkly face and her pile of unpaper-clipped monographs, all compassion, all exhaustion, looks at him, telegraphing, Go ahead, tell me.
Does he want food? Because there is food of some kind, leftovers. There are plastic containers, the food of northeastern intellectuals who disdain culinary flaunting, who prefer the legacy of their forebears, leftover food of minimal flavor, wine from jelly jars. There’s tuna casserole in a plastic container, which is similar in consistency and mouthfeel to chicken salad, also in a plastic container, which in turns resembles pasta salad, all from the same spot on the color wheel, yessir, jammed into the refrigerator every which way. Should he decide to eat, he will be well nourished by beige foods. There are many beige choices. He closes the refrigerator immediately, goes into the pantry, but here, too, the range of choices crushes him. How many kinds of cereal can one household have? There must be thirteen brands of cereal, and they are all varieties of flakes; there are bran flakes, oat bran flakes, corn flakes, oh wait, there are rice puffs. All the same color. The flakes are beige. It’s the same with the crackers. Maybe a hint of orange or ochre. He starts taking a cracker out of each box, setting them out on the counter in the pantry. From the wheat thin to the saltine to the old-fashioned digestive, it’s all in the same family of color tonalities. He needs to know. He is comparing the hue of these crackers to see if there are crackers that are different from the other crackers in any way, looking to discard anything wide of the beige family; he requires the consistency and perfection of beige.
“Max is late at school. Some kind of rehearsal. He should be back any time now.”
The proof is immediate. On his way upstairs, Tyrone overhears the garage door opener beneath him. It’s the Great White Hope. The “genetic copy.” The White Dwarf can be heard stirring in his cloister, as if the Dwarf has an uncanny sense of the movements of the “genetic copy.” The White Dwarf is saying something to his wife about All Saints’ Day, which appears to have been the theme of last week’s sermon, and then the “genetic copy” says something, for now he is on the scene. Soon there are footfalls on the stairs.
The first thing that must be said is that Max’s lower lip is pierced. It’s an innovation that Tyrone has somehow missed. Max’s head is also shaved. Of course, there are two, three, four earrings. Some Maori-style tattoos on the arms. Black jeans and a torn-up flannel shirt. Maximillian Rivers Duffy, public-access television host, advocate of assisted suicide and antiglobalization. Genetic copy. Radical teen.
Tyrone nods imperceptibly from his place on the bed in what is now the guest room. A potpourri dish only inches from him, on the side table, with its bed-and-breakfast olfactory redolences.
Max says, “Hey, Bro.”
Tyrone stares.
“Got someone I want you to meet.”
Tyrone stares.
“Have you talked to Sis?”
Tyrone says, “Diphthongization in certain regions is incrementally breaking away into triphthongization. If the trend continues, it will no longer be possible to understand certain regions, especially those that are marginalized along cultural or racial lines.”
The “genetic copy” stares back.
“I really do have someone I want you to meet.”
“In certain counties in North Carolina, the word dead has three syllables.”
Apparently, there is no choice but to stride past his brother, the “genetic copy.” Back in the living room, like the caged animal he always was at this address, Tyrone now feels an additional confinement anxiety, the possibility of future penal confinement. He’s flipping through the LPs collected on a shelf on the wall, looking at some jazz from the fifties, the cover of each LP summoning up a swinging time in his parents’ past. Pipe smoking was pandemic. Sideburns indicated a knowing acquaintance with the New Criticism, and that’s the moment, in this reverie of all things of which he’s contemptuous, when there is old-fashioned tolling of an American Telephone and Telegraph handset. Their rotary-dial phone.
He knows immediately.
He hears his mother call out his sister’s name, “Hi, sweetheart!” He’s already loping, in his rangy way, past his mother’s office, into the pantry, through the kitchen, up the back stairs again, the maid’s staircase, with all the political ramifications, never the front staircase, into the teenager’s bedroom, that bedroom which observes all the Congregationalist trappings, a homely bedroom, without decoration, no wall-to-wall, just a little Oriental area rug in the middle. Max is actually sweeping his homely bedroom, and Tyrone says, having changed his mind entirely, “Okay, let’s go.”
“Where are we going?”
“To see your friend.”
The sweeping is undeterred by the conversation. As if sweeping enables reasoning.
“The one you were mentioning before. Let’s go.”
“You changed your mind fast.”
“Don’t waste my time.”
Max reaches up to the window, opens it, the screen is nowhere in sight, a legacy of some youthful mischief, and Tyrone says, “Let me.” He means the arachnid that is fleeing ahead of the piles of dust. Like Jonathan Edwards’s pet arachnid. Tyrone knows about the perfection of the webs; this has all been covered in his own diaristic commentary on his childhood, which is near upon sixteen thousand pages in length. He takes the arachnid, reaches one loafer-clad foot out the window.