Some Hell Read online

  The third-strongest earthquake, Colin’s father had written, occurred forty years later, in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Waves approached a hundred feet and killed more than 230,000 people in fourteen countries. Colin was in kindergarten at the time, but he remembered it. It was the first thing he encountered, in all of his father’s notebooks thus far, that wasn’t like a note from a history text. He could point to it and say Yes, I remember, and nobody could argue it was fake. It made it easier to believe the world his father described was the world left in Colin’s custody.

  In no time at all, Colin had become an expert at picking locks—or at least one particular lock. He’d also mastered the open loops and uncrossed t’s of his father’s handwriting. It still felt like spying, but Colin convinced himself of the task’s necessity. Even now, he was looking for the future, or at least a way to prove his father would have loaded that gun, one way or another.

  He had spent the rest of fall and half of winter haunting Heather’s room when she was out with her boyfriend. Or boyfriends. There was no point in telling them apart. Each would pull up in his rusted sedan with plastic over one rear window, and each was sitting inside without a coat—only a T-shirt and a black stocking cap. Colin felt hypnotized by their arms: bicep wider than his calf muscle, forearm with its vein like a vine climbing a tree. They stared at Colin until he backed into the house. When he could no longer see them, down the street, it was safe to let himself into her room.

  It’d been months since he sat on her bed and listened to her wisdom. The batteries in the jewelry box had finally died and now there was nothing to hear through the wall, no way for her to translate his future. Instead, he began to go through her things. Aside from candy wrappers and shoes there was nothing under the bed. He rummaged through her dresser until he found a box of tampons and immediately closed it. On most afternoons he found nothing, and soon gave up pretense and only went in there to jerk off. His rule was that he could look at the men in her magazines, but only if there were women in the picture with them. If it was an ad with only men, he was supposed to turn the page. Like most of his rules, he couldn’t follow it.

  Colin blamed his brother for his failure as a human being. Even now, as he tried to finish his homework, his brother was distracting. It wasn’t like when they were kids, when Paul would rearrange the Lego men on his headboard, their plastic feet click-clicking against the wood. Colin had learned to ignore that years ago. The new distraction was the heap of clothes on the floor, as if his body had vanished in that spot. Paul had been sleeping naked for months, Colin had discovered. Without their father to select Paul’s clothes and convince him to get out of bed, Colin was left in charge. His strategy that first new morning, back in October, was to throw back the covers and yell, “Time to get up!” Instead of pajamas or underwear, Paul wore nothing but a dark red erection that reached past his navel. He screamed as Colin ran out of the room. Colin still thought about it every night when his brother slid under the covers.

  It didn’t seem fair. Paul’s side of the room remained cluttered with toys and books for children. Back in November, Colin had boxed up his model starfreighters and battle stations. When he peeled his film posters off the walls, they left behind bright matte rectangles. That was his childhood—Colin’s Stuff, in his neatest hand, written on a stack of boxes. He felt proud to see it on the basement floor next to Heather’s Stuff. How long until Paul’s Stuff would join them, if ever? He listened to his brother’s breath, thinking maybe he’d go right to sleep. He’ll never have a girlfriend, Colin thought, and—as if the word girlfriend were on a flash card with a translation on the back—He’ll never have sex. Colin switched off the lamp. He gathered his pajamas from the floor and brought them to the bathroom to change.

  One of the few things left on Colin’s side of the room was an angel—a drawing in colored pencil on a stiff sheet of card stock. When he returned to school the Monday after the funeral he felt like an exchange student. Some came up and hugged him, some said they were sorry this happened, but most avoided him. Nobody mentioned his birthday or asked him how it felt to be a teenager. No one could look him in the eye—not even Andy. But his friend Chelsea was different. She stayed with Colin as often as possible, smiling next to his desk until the bell rang and she was late for class. She told him she was sorry, he shouldn’t be angry, there was nothing to be afraid of. “I’ve been praying for you every night.” Chelsea’s parents took her to church every Sunday and Colin thought this made her wiser than the rest of his friends, as though she might know more about death. If she told him his father wasn’t in hell and that he needn’t worry about things like revenge or punishment, he would believe her. She touched his hand in a way that made him smile, even when he tried to keep himself from smiling. At the end of that first day back she met him at his locker and slid the angel out of her backpack, unpeeling it from two sheets of waxed paper. “I drew it last period. She’ll watch over you.”

  Colin remembered her eyes, how they darted away and came back to him like fish hovering around a hook.

  He’d tried praying. It wasn’t my fault, he told God, kneeling on the bathroom rug because that’s how people prayed. Dad would’ve done it anyway, he whispered at the ceiling. His prayers sounded like questions, lilting up at the end as though God might simply pat him on the head. There was too much to worry about, his worry itself a growing thing—an infected organ inflamed and toxic. Please take it away, he whispered to where he thought God hovered. When he asked God to rewrite history, it was only so he hadn’t loaded the gun or even discovered it. It never occurred to him to ask for his father’s life. I had nothing to do with it, he said to himself, or to God, or to whoever was listening.

  The prayers didn’t work. God was ignoring him. God was furious. God was planning his punishment. Colin thought about this more than he didn’t, and it made life a hard thing to live.

  When he came back from the bathroom, Paul hadn’t moved, his breath still steady. Colin shook his head and crawled under the covers, glancing once at the angel. She glowed there in the oval of lamplight as though really in heaven. His grandmother once tried to explain angels in her way of using words like celestial and hierarchical. But had they been people—those who’d died and gone on to be graceful—or something else, something more secret? When he pictured his father, clad in light and floating on two white wings, he closed his eyes as if to stop the image there. But his father’s wings burned up. His robes shredded themselves to rags, and those shadows of hands wrapped around his soul and pulled it down through the earth’s fissures. Colin had thought of this enough, and dreamt of it enough, to know this was real. This had happened. There were always hands waiting, and they waited for him, too. All he wanted was someone to see this, to watch it play in his head, and call it fake, call it made-up. You still believe in this shit? he wanted to hear. He wanted to be laughed at and ridiculed. He wanted someone to tell him how it was, to take away every last shred of authority and order him to feel better. Think this, he wanted someone to say, and to lay out his new life.

  Then he noticed it, the change in Paul’s breathing, the bedsprings creaking beneath him. It didn’t take Colin long to figure out what he’d discovered on his last night as a twelve-year-old, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, and as soon as he researched masturbation he heard Paul do it every night. At school, boys talked about their pervert brothers or cousins who jerked off all the time, and Colin laughed at their depravity while he watched the snow outside the cafeteria windows. They talked about going blind and he began to worry for his health. I have to stop, he told himself, but he only had to hear his brother pant like an overworked dog to break his own promise. Over a long weekend, back in January, he stopped for three days. Then, on Monday afternoon, his mother still at work, he couldn’t keep his hands away. They turned against him, his hands. He rubbed up against the couch cushions while he watched the stretch of cartoons after school, and for an entire hour he listened to his heart scream for h
elp. In the end he cursed himself and went to the bathroom. I can stop tomorrow, he’d thought.

  Colin listened to Paul breathe. He moved his erection so it was flush against his belly. He tried to think about something else—about school or Heather or Andy—but again his hands rebelled. When he heard Paul’s breath hang on a familiar note he crept out of bed and headed for the bathroom. This is the last time.

  As he was cleaning up, his mother knocked. “Are you okay? You’ve been in there a while.”

  “Uh.” With a handful of toilet paper he dabbed at his penis, wilting in his hands like a plucked dandelion. He thought she’d fallen asleep. “I’m fine?” The paper landed with a smack in the water and glided there like a wet swan. When he flushed and opened the door she was leaning against the opposite wall. “Goodnight,” he said, about to brush past her.

  She stopped him with her arm. “Colin. Hang on a minute.”

  He motioned to put his hands in his pockets but realized his pajamas had none. Instead he crossed his arms and looked down at the carpet.

  “Sometimes I feel like”—a noise came from her throat that could have been a growl, her lip curled in though—“like there’s too much going on at once. Too many things that need me?” She covered her face with her hands and her voice came out muted and airy. “I don’t know.”

  Colin frowned as he looked at her feet—bare, too white, the carpet coming up between her toes. He saw the real color of her toenails, like pale lavender, when for years they’d only ever been red or pink. He knew she’d been to therapy that afternoon. Just to see what it’s all about, she said. All night, he’d thought about what Shannon had told her, over coffee—what he’d overheard as he’d hidden in the dining room, pressed against the wall.

  She sighed. “It’s like I’m being pulled in all directions by mules or horses or whatever they used to do to people. Do you know what I mean?”

  Colin thought of his father, coming to his room all over again to ask for help. His heart beat hard, just once, as though struck by the little hammer doctors use to test your reflexes.

  “I don’t know,” she was saying. “There’s just so much to deal with. What I mean is I’m sorry I’ve been weird lately.”

  “It’ll be okay,” he said quickly. “We’ll be okay.” He hugged her and clasped his arms together on the other side, squeezing until she had to tell him to let go.

  “You’re too quick to forgive,” she said. Her hand landed in his hair. “But I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t.” She kissed him on the forehead, and he knew she was smelling his hair. “If you want to see your grandfather, that’s fine with me.”

  He looked up at her.

  She let go and stood up straight. “If you want me to help you contact him, I can do that.”

  In the morning, she stood behind him as he wrote at the kitchen table. “It has to be a letter,” she said. She pulled stationery and a fancy pen from the desk by the refrigerator. “He’ll like that.” Colin felt like he was being tested or trained as she watched him put together his sentences. “You don’t want to make any mistakes.” She put her finger on the paper. “There’s no apostrophe when its is possessive. Only use an apostrophe when it’s a contraction, when you mean ‘it is.’” She took up the letter and began to read. Colin played with the pen, thinking how stupid she was for believing someone would actually care if you forgot some dumb little mark on the page. “Don’t forget to sign it,” she said. He tried to impress her with his cursive but it looked like something he’d written in a moving car. He felt her lean forward, felt her lips touch the back of his head. He wondered what made her want to be near him all the time. Then he wondered if one day she’d smell it on him, the perverted leftover semen scent of a boy who’d lost all self-control. Rats, he had read in his father’s notebooks, can sense things like cancer and disease, even several generations back, in their mates. Sometimes he wondered if his father had passed something down, some genetic defect that would switch on and ruin his life. He squirmed until she let go and reached for her cigarettes, and he pulled his father’s lighter from his pocket, like a lock of hair cut from a victim.

  His grandfather’s reply was short—single paragraph short—and said little but I’d love to have you over for lunch this Sunday. The letter came on a Thursday in July, so long afterward that Colin was briefly confused when he saw his name on the envelope. From then on he couldn’t stop thinking of the funeral, how he’d used the word retarded. He felt like he had to make it up to him. While watching television or mowing the lawn, Colin talked out loud as if his grandfather were there with him, and his grandfather said things like, You sure are smart for your age. He said, I’ve never heard a young person say that. As he wiped sweat and grass blades from his forehead, Colin went over it until it felt real and he liked who he was in his grandfather’s eyes.

  What he would discover, he hoped, was that his grandfather and his father had been close. There had to be some clue, some keyword, to unlock his father’s second, secret history. I didn’t know you were so grown up, his grandfather would tell him, cleaning his glasses with his shirt. You don’t know this, but your father and I—we knew each other quite well. In the car ride over, Colin couldn’t stop fidgeting. He still hadn’t figured out that keyword, that smart thing to say.

  “I hope you have a good time,” his mother said as they pulled up in front of the house. She smacked her cigarettes against her palm and he offered the lighter. They hadn’t tired of it yet, this game, he the gentleman and she the lady. But she didn’t thank him now. She didn’t change her voice to sound how they thought was rich. Instead she looked over at the house. It was older than their own and nestled closer to the neighbors’ houses. Colin grabbed his backpack from the floor. His mother’s eyebrows were raised as if she’d asked a question, but Colin only nodded and gave his good-bye. He waved from the sidewalk but she was messing with the radio. By the time he reached the front steps she was halfway down the street, and that’s when he panicked. Was it the wrong address, the wrong house, the wrong part of town? The neighborhood no longer seemed like a nice place. He rang the bell and tried to look through the window in the door, but he wasn’t tall enough.

  Quentin looked younger, no longer in mourning, in a pale-yellow dress shirt with grey slacks. Colin, in his T-shirt and jeans torn at the knee, felt underdressed. Before they left, his mother had pulled a button-up from his closet but he put it back: “Doesn’t fit.” Now he wished he hadn’t lied.

  “Good afternoon,” Quentin said. He looked at his watch. “Actually, it’s still morning for a few more minutes. Good morning.”

  “Morning.” Colin tried to meet his eye but the door was using the sun to blind him. He put his hands in his pockets and looked down at the welcome mat, already out of things to say.

  The whole thing seemed suddenly stupid. All those times he’d asked his mother to please call Grandpa Patterson, to invite Grandpa Patterson to Christmas, to come with them to church on Easter Sunday because it felt strange without a man completing the parenthesis of two adults, three kids in the middle—and what for? During their ride to the cemetery, they’d only spoken one word between the two of them. Approaching the gates, Quentin had switched off the symphony playing on the stereo. “Respect,” he said. Yet in the last several months, this man had, in Colin’s head, come to know his father better than anyone else alive. In reality, his grandfather was one more person from whom he’d have to keep his secrets. Even thinking the word, secret, made Colin feel looked at and lit up, like one arrowed sign should say Pervert! and another Fag! and another Murderer! The sight of his grandfather’s smile only filled him with shame.

  “Well,” Quentin said. “Why don’t you come in?”

  Colin swallowed and stepped into the house. Through a large doorway you could see the living room, where everything matched and belonged. Even the books on the coffee table were stacked in pyramids, the largest on the bottom and the smallest on top. In the foyer, afraid to touch anythi
ng, he looked down at his grandfather’s pale-yellow socks. “Shoes?” Colin asked.

  “If you don’t mind.” Quentin opened a small door to his right while Colin pulled off his shoes without untying them. “I just had the floors refinished two years ago.”

  Colin followed him into the living room, glancing at the floor as though he was impressed. He sat down on the couch and brushed his fingers over the eggshell fabric. “You have a nice place.”

  “You should have seen it when I bought it. It was almost a lost cause.” He sat down in the chair opposite the couch and immediately stood up again. “Anything to drink? Iced tea? Juice?”

  “Do you have any pop?”

  “No. I don’t drink it. All that corn syrup is terrible for you.”

  Colin looked down at his lap. He crossed one leg over the other and touched the top of his sock, where the elastic had lost its stretchiness. “What kind of juice do you have?”

  “Cranberry.”

  “I guess I’ll have water.”

  “Water.” Quentin nodded and left the room. Colin listened to his grandfather in the kitchen, a cupboard door opening, a glass meeting the countertop, the refrigerator door’s condiments shaking against each other. He tried to lean back into the couch but it was too deep for his thighs. He perched on the edge of the cushion and sat erect, then sighed and slouched into himself. He was reading the spines of a book pyramid when Quentin returned with two glasses of water.

  “When I bought the place it was practically condemned. It was a duplex at the time and the landlord had done nothing to take care of it.”

  Colin tried to be interested.

  “It’s taken years to get it to look this way. I almost have it the way I want it now.” He looked around the room as if something might have changed without his knowing. “When I’m done I don’t know what I’ll do.”