Matt Bell - How They Were Found

There were also eight cats, an emaciated dog, and countless numbers of vermin. By the time Langley was found, the rats had eaten most of his face and extremities and the cockroaches were beginning to carry off the rest.

It began with the newspapermen, their tales of the gold stashed in your halls, of stockpiled gems and expensive paintings and antique jewelry. None of it was true, but none of it surprised you either. The reporters have never worried about the truth before, not when it came to you and yours.

So the articles run, and then they come: not your true neighbors, but these new ones who replaced them. The first brick through the window is merely irritating, the second more so, but by the third and the fourth you’ve had enough and board up all the windows. You have to go out at night and scavenge more wood despite Homer’s protests, his pleas for you to use the piles of lumber already in the house. He doesn’t understand that what you have gathered already has purpose, is stock against future tragedies.

The bricks are only precursors, warnings: There is a break-in, and then another. The first time you fire a gun in the house, Homer screams for two days, refusing to calm down no matter what you say. You count yourself lucky that he’s gone blind, or else he might have come down himself, seen the blood soaked into the piles of newspapers bordering the basement door.

Afterward, you move even more bundles to the basement, stacking newspaper to the ceiling, layering it six feet deep. Heavy and damp and covered in mold and rot, you know that no burglar will be able to push his way through the newsprint. It is your family’s history that they are after, the city’s that will keep them out.

I came in through a history of accumulation, through a trail of documents that led to you, Langley, and to him, Homer. I came in through the inventory of your home, through the listing of objects written down as if they meant something, as if they were clues to who you are.

Obsessed, I filled one book and then another and then another.

What I learned was that even a book can be a door if you hold it right, and I held it right.

When I arrived at your home, I did not climb the steps or knock on your door. Instead, I waited and watched and when you came out I followed behind you.

I watched your flight through the dark night air, watched as you pretended skittishness in the streets. I followed you from backyard to alley to dumpster, lingered behind as you scavenged for food and pump-drawn water and shiny objects to line your halls. I watched you take each new prize and clutch it to your breast, and when you were ready to return, I followed you inside.

I want to tell you now that I am a night bird too, just another breed of crow.

Like the bird we each resemble, I am both a scavenger of what has happened and an omen of what is to come.

Despite your fears, I am not your death.

Despite this assurance, you will not be saved.

I promise you, I will be here with you when you fall, and when he fails.

After you are both gone, I am afraid that I will still be here.

Thirty Harlem phone books, one for each year from 1909 to 1939: Individually, they are just another pile of junk, but read as a collection they are something else. The names change from Roosevelt to Robeson, from Fitzgerald to Hughes, a process that doesn’t happen all at once but slowly, like the mixing after a blood infusion. By the 1920s, Miller and Audubon and Rockwell are gone, replaced by Armstrong and Ellington and DuBois. Read like this, they are yet another type of wall, one that is both harder to see and yet obvious enough once you know the color of the bricks.

When it rains, water comes in through the ceiling, creates trickling waterfalls that cascade downward from floor to floor, from pile to pile. The wood of every chair and table feels warped and cracked while nearby newspaper bundles grow heavy with mold and dampness that will never leave, their pages slippery with the ink leaking downward into the carpet. Things float in the water, or worse, swim, like the rats and cockroaches and whatever else lives in the high press of the stacks. Other floors are similarly obscured by the often ankle-deep torrents, hiding broken glass, sharp sticks, knives and scalpels, the dozens of light bulbs Langley broke in a fit when the electricity was shut off for nonpayment.

Once, Homer remembers, it snowed in his sitting room, the flakes settling on his face and tongue and clothes. He’d had only Langley’s word and the freeze of the air to tell him it was snow that fell that day. Reaching out his tongue, he feared he’d taste ash instead, but said nothing as his brother laughed and refilled their snifters.

Inside much of the house, the only navigation possible was through tunnels Langley had carved into the piles of garbage that filled each room. Supported with scraps of lumber and stacked newspaper or cardboard, these tunnels appeared to collapse frequently, forcing Langley to start over or to create alternate paths to the parts of the house he wished to access.

Some of the tunnels were wide enough that a person could crawl comfortably through them, and in places even walk in a crouch. Others, especially on the second floor, were much smaller. Langley might have been able to fit through them, but not the heavier Homer. The tunnels were the closest thing the house had to doors, and beyond them were secrets the older brother had most likely not shared in decades.

Langley once claimed to be saving the newspapers so that when his brother regained his sight he would be able to catch up on the news. It wasn’t a funny joke, but Langley wasn’t a funny man. The earliest newspapers in the house date from 1933, the year Homer went blind, and they continued to be delivered until weeks after the house began to be emptied and inventoried. Even allowing for twelve years of uninterrupted delivery, there were still far more newspapers in the house than anyone could have expected. They were stacked and bundled in every room, in every hall, covering the landings of staircases and filled closets and chests. Even if Homer had somehow learned to see again, this was never going to be the best way to rejoin the world.

After Homer lost his sight, his brother put him on a diet of nothing but oranges, convinced the fruit would restore his vision. Homer wasn’t so sure, but he couldn’t go out and get food himself—only Langley ever left the mansion, and even then only at night—and so Homer had no choice but to take what was offered. Every day, he ate a dozen oranges, until his breath stank of rind and pulp, until the undersides of his fingernails were crusted with the sticky leftovers of his meals. Langley told him that if he could eat one hundred oranges a week his sight would come back, but Homer couldn’t do it, no matter how hard he tried. It was too much of one thing, a deadening of his taste buds as complete as the deadening of his irises, his corneas, his optic nerves that still sent useless signals down the rotted pathways of his all too useless brain.

You started making the booby traps after the break-ins began, and never stopped revising and improving this new class of inventions. You rigged tripwires and deadfalls, hid walls of sharpened broomsticks behind the moist surface of your newspaper tunnels. Poured loose piles of broken glass beneath intentionally weakened floorboards. Made other traps and then forgot them, until you were unsure about even your own safety.