Demonology (11 page)

My brother Jack refused to speak to me in the cinder-block halls of New Rochelle High, unless these halls were empty, unless
we were alone, and even then he would answer only
yes
or
no
to questions having to do with what time we were to be picked up, or the hour of a certain dentist appointment. My brother
carried a
golf club
everywhere he went, a seven iron, and swung at me with it. My brother swiped twenty dollars from my mother’s purse, to wager
on the ponies, brought back forty dollars from O.T.B., put the twenty back in her purse, left a ten in the offertory plates
at Mass on Sunday. My brother never liked me, as he never liked American cars, black jeans, health foods, girls without makeup.
My brother Jack never liked to talk about what didn’t go his way, or about our father, or about my
second sight.
He was handsome. He liked tailored suits. He liked his socks to match his shirt.

I am well pleased with my two sons,
my mom said wearily, when the two of us fought, like the time I chased him around the entire house with an ax, threatening,
cursing him/swinging the ax,
I’m going to bury this thing in your skull, and then I’m going to watch your brains run out and I’m going to eat your brains.
He locked himself in the bathroom, and I was banging on the door with the dull side of the ax, until I had managed to put
the ax
through
the door, and he was yelling,
Christ, he’s insane, Mom, can’t you get him to back off;
my mother waited patiently, until the hitch in my swing, the dormancy in me, when I turned to her,
Why has everything been so easy for him?

My brother and I fought the whole next ten years, my brother Jack and me, as I correctly predicted, threats shouted at holidays,
even after I met my wife, even after my marriage ceremony (my best man was Joey Kaye, the guy whose dad paralyzed Bobby Erlich
for life). My brother missed my wedding because he’d been at a club in the Village called Silver Screen, where he said whatever
he had to say in order that he might persuade one Elise, an alcoholic, to go to a motel in Yonkers with him, where he was
doing lines with her on a pocketbook mirror and watching motel pornography, the swooping arc of enhanced breasts, a nipple
coming in and out of focus, simulated yelps of longing. He had never seen a girl with such large tattoos, and in such unusual
spots. Was it her or was it the actress on the screen who was so vocal? Elise wanted to be an actress, and her uncle had
incested
her, but she made him phenomenally happy for two hours, and he her, at least until they ran out of their talc, and then when
she woke in the morning my brother was back at the car dealership, moving the
Beemers,
as he said, wearing an Armani double-breasted suit, totally forgetting that he was supposed to be at my wedding. I know all
these things.

One day some years later, who should come knocking at the back door but my brother Jack, wearing clothes that eerily resembled
the garb of detectives from a popular television show of the period: a designer suit in pale blue and a polyester T-shirt
of dusty rose. He was at the back door, see, while my wife and I were eating deviled eggs and sprigs of parsley; here he was
wearing pastel colors, smiling in a way that signaled
bad news ahead.

What’s he doing here?
my wife said, loud enough that he would not mistake the words. She’d never forgiven him for missing the wedding and for sending
us a set of plastic nesting bowls as a gift, and she rose up from the table on the porch, her green paper napkin still tucked
in her neckline, and hastened indoors, where she turned on some opera, loud.

He rapped on the aluminum siding, though I was two feet away. We were in plain sight of one another.

Who do you think it is?

Oh, hey. A long-lost relative. A good-looking guy with a flimsy pretext.

Thought I’d drop by.

So you did.

What the hell’s going on?
he attempted.
I
wanted to say that I feel bad about things, you know? I feel bad about things and I want to straighten it out. I thought I’d
come on over and we’d have a talk. We could set things right again and we could hoist a few beers together. Talk about it
all.

He was still out on the step, and he was shading his eyes, though wearing sunglasses. He had a scrape on his cheek. There
was an earnestness to his simulations.

That’d be great,
I said,
but Tanya and I have an engagement, if you want to know the truth, so I only have a couple of minutes.

What kind of engagement?

Precious Jewels and Stones show. At the Coliseum. Going to be a big rush on the first day.

It went on like that, each of us maneuvering for a purchase. One guy makes a slip, the other guy grabs for the
handhold, crowds in. Soon my brother Jack began to warm to his ulterior motive. He was always a guy who couldn’t sit still
for long.

Why don’t you come out front here,
Jack said.
I
got something I want to show you.

The screen door slapped at its frame. I figured I’d get it over with. We went around the alley, between Frattelli’s place
and ours. Fratelli’s garden hose coiled by the edge of his lawn. Frattelli’s excessively healthy floribunda, a spigot on the
side of our house still dripping, though I had put a washer in there only a week before. I wanted a life with a minimum of
fuss.
Woe to them that are wise in their eyes.

It was a gold Porsche.

Mergers in the automobile business will continue apace, and soon General Motors will be making Bentleys, and the same barely
functioning engines that are under the hoods of American cars will soon be under the hoods of fancy foreign models, and it
will be good for stock prices, and even good for the Gross National Product, but not good for cars themselves. That’s the
limit of my interest on the subject. What’s a car, my fellow-Americans, but a system for conveyance, as I was recently telling
Sasha Levin of Forest Hills, before she had time to complain about her under-performing account; I’ll buy any car, a Reliant
K, a Breeze, a Cavalier, I don’t care too much, and Tanya doesn’t either, and we tend to leave bottles rattling around in
the footwells in the back seat, to take up the space where the kids should have gone. A Porsche to me was just another car,
and mainly I saw behind it some Organized Crime Figure or Junk Bond Trader who rode your bumper and talked on a cellular phone
while
flipping you the bird. I didn’t want to have anything to do with Porsches, or Jaguars, or Corvettes. I looked back at my house.
I saw my wife, Tanya, in a window upstairs. A curtain fell across her face.

Isn’t she a beauty?
My brother said hurriedly. He meant the car.

What the hell are you doing showing me this Porsche? Let’s get this over with, okay?

What’s the rush?

It was dented up. In a way that, for me, exactly recalled an earlier car crash and an earlier victim, which is to say that
the passenger side was mashed, one headlight completely eliminated, and I’m pretty sure the axle was bent and the front fender
mangled up in there, rubbing against the oil pan. There was flourescent gunk running in my driveway.

I just hosed this driveway.

Hey, I’m sorry,
Jack said.
Listen, I just want to know if I can park this in your garage for a couple of days.

I looked at my Timex with imitation Cordovan strap and wondered
why eighteen minutes
for this request. He had his own car dealership where he worked, and his own auto mechanics who would bang out a few dents,
no questions asked, and he had always boasted that he could get an inspection sticker for me
easy.
It was not a good sign, his request, and I asked why I had to have this car in my garage, and he said that he’d busted it
up right nearby, out on the river road, and he had things to do, and some points on his license, and just wanted to leave
it for a couple of days, wouldn’t be any trouble, and he’d buy me a case of beer or something to make it worth my while.

And that was when I noticed the blood inside. The interior of the Porsche was leather, a ruddy leather interior, and there
was blood on the dash, on the molded foam, where the air bag would later have gone, there was a dried splotch of blood from
where some forehead had collided with the windshield, and I squinted at it discerningly, at the inevitability of another life
coming to an end, the failure of it, of life leaking out on the leather.

Is this blood in this car?

What the hell are you talking about?
My brother replied.

I asked if this was blood.

There’s no blood in the car. I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Why was a spillage of blood always an emblem of my troubled march in this world, why these pieces of bodies, these cascading
morsels of corporeal material, why this length of tibia broken jaggedly off at the knee, with tufts of muscle still clinging
to it, why, in my dreams, the stretcher bearers, why the dead boys, why the high-impact collisions, again and again, why the
spectacle of young men running into stationary objects, why the lamppost with the D.U.I. wrapped around it, a hand separated
from a wrist, by some fifty feet, vertebrae like popcorn scattered across the bucket seats?

I said,
Get your goddamn car out of here now, what do you mean by bringing this thing around here? Did you kill someone, in this car?
Am I accessory to all your blunders? Like I don’t have enough blunders of my own? What are you doing here? I’m not related
to you, I don’t have even one characteristic that you have.
I started loud, admittedly, but I got quieter, because I
knew,
in the middle of my tirade I knew,
this fragmentary bunch of people, this collection of lost souls, my family, they were rushing further off now, like some distant
hurtling margin of the negatively spherical universe, they were further off during this conversation, and when this conversation
was over, they would be
impossibly far away
—cousins, aunts, uncles, of old bipolar Eire, my father, there would be only my mother’s death left to survive, my mother
alone in her little house in New Rochelle one block over from a shuttered Main Street, and when my brother climbed into his
Porsche —which had a left front flat, I now saw —the last of my uncertain futures would be certain.

With a fluttering of his pinky-ringed hand, my brother tried to get me to play cool.
I’m gone before you know it Man, if I came here singing songs of love, even then you’d bounce me out on my ass.

Now the backing away of my brother Jack, blond dealer of exotic high-performance cars, future dealership owner. I waited for
the threatening language, but the silence of his departure was instantaneous.
I
will not punish your sons when they commit whoredom.
I knew, I knew. I knew where the police would find the body of poor Elise from the club called Silver Screen, out by the
woods at the edge of the golf course in Pelham. There’s always trouble at the edge of this golf course, you know, because
it’s the edge of New York City, it’s the beginning of the suburbs, and every threshold must have its darkness, and so Elise,
who was
incested
when young, got driven to the edge of this wood, where she drank wine with my brother, and they kissed, and they cavorted,
and they lived such lives as I have never lived, and then they
took a dirt road there, by the edge of the canal, where there were only torched hulks of cars, stripped of all but the smoking
exterior chassis, the steering column, muffler, disc brakes, upholstery all gone, my brother, at thirty-four miles per hour
in an avenue zoned for twenty-five, drove into a tree, knocked her unconscious, ditched her body, flung away its wedding band,
and then after the visit to me abandoned the stolen car, the car he brought into the city to impress her, or to impress someone
like her, and he waded down into the lifeless river just beyond the woods, and he dove in, in his Armani suit, drifted downstream,
in a narcissistic reverie. Leaving no trail.

Remember Melissa Abdow? The girl who saw Bobby Erlich’s crash? Amazing thing. She called last week, at work. (The surfaces
of my cubicle are appallingly clean. My rolodex is blank. Here’s a photograph of Tanya wearing a yellow dress.) Melissa wanted
a little advice on the inverted yield curve,
What’s going to be the effect on treasuries, as a conservative type of investment?
She and her husband were trying to salt away some funds for their kid’s college education. And she got my number from somebody
who got it from somebody. Research, that morning, had brought in some disappointing news from the markets. It was also scrolling
across my computer screen.
Full kingdom blessing
on traders of bonds, they
shall run like mighty men. The horseman lifteth up the bright sword.
That I.P.O. for the new web portal is going to sell out fast. Melissa asked about my brother.
How’s Jack anyway?
Something in my tone made her ask, I knew, and yet I couldn’t stop myself. If it’s possible for a voice to have worry lines,
Melissa’s voice had them,
when she was speaking to me.
My brother? My brother, Melissa?
I started and I couldn’t stop. I admitted that I hadn’t seen my brother in years, seven years, that he had married a lovely
girl, Elise, and I didn’t go to his wedding, you know,
I smote you with blasting and with mildew,
because I was ashamed; he had smashed up Elise’s brother’s Porsche not long before the ceremony, cut himself kind of badly,
and he came to me for aid and counsel, and I drove him out of the house,
and you know how it is with brothers, Melissa, you know how it is.

My wife keeps calling down the basement staircase to where I’m sitting here enveloped in darkness, tightening wood screws
on a small racing car that I have made for my nephew, Danny. I have made him many toys.
A day of darkness, a day of clouds and of thick darkness, as morning spreads upon the mountains,
the bugs are kind of bad down here,
Take me and cast me into the sea.
This basement with its cinder blocks and its exposed bulb, this suits me. Seven years now, a biblical interval, and it was
just a little thing. I was a jumpy, anxious person, hard to get along with, I suppose; amazing that I have kept my job this
long, when I cannot be comforted. It was just some car that I refused to have in my garage, you would think that would be
enough, that it could be forgotten. And I haven’t even set eyes upon my brother’s boy, except in that Christmas card that
came this last year (his hair like a crown of
goldenrod),
and there’s Elise, with the strawberry-highlights, I don’t get too many cards, it’s almost a week now here that I have been
worrying about the boy, waiting for my brother to call, our Chevy is gassed and ready. There was a time when everybody knew
the future, but a few wise types elected
to forget what was to come,
as we all elect, eventually, to forget the past. Forgetters raised up many children and made songs of praising,
I will lift mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.
Please let me be wrong again. About that sick boy. Let me be wrong.