Matt Bell - How They Were Found

After Homer trips over the bench in front of the parlor’s piano, he sits down and rests his fingers on the keys. Wherever Langley is, he’s quiet, resting too, or else something worse, something Homer doesn’t want to think about. He feels bad enough, for not hurrying, for not being able to find his brother and save him. His lungs ache and his ankles throb, the arthritis in his leg joints a lightless fire. He centers himself in front of the piano and starts to play, then stops when the sound comes out wrong. He sighs, starts over with more realistic expectations.

The piano is almost completely buried by the mounds of trash that fill the room, the heaps of paper and metal and wood, the objects breaking down again into their constituent parts. Homer’s fingers are gnarled ghosts, flickering over the keys in an approximation, the memory of music. The sound comes out of the piano muffled and muted. It does not fill the room but goes into it instead, Homer’s fingers driving each note through the piled garbage and into the rotting walls like a nail, like a crowbar, like something meant to hold a thing together, like something meant to tear it down.

I’m sifting through their possessions, crawling through the ruins of their lives searching for those lost, for remains, for the remains of a family: I am in the master bedroom, reading letters they never read. I am in the parlor, wiping the grime off a generation of portraits. I am in the hallway, setting thousands of mouse traps all in a row.

I am on my hands and knees, scrubbing the floor without success, as if there could ever be enough soap to remove this particular stain.

There is so much to see here, but only in fragments, in peripheries. Every step across the floorboards brings this house of cards closer to collapse, and so I must move backward and forward in time, balancing the now and the then, until I have found what it is I am looking for.

I am a collector too, but it is not their possessions I have clutched close and hoarded.

I am holding Homer’s face in my hands, staring into his milky eyes, whispering to him as he searches in starved sadness. I am kneeling beside Langley like a detective, my bent knee slick with his blood, looking through the rote clues to discover what happened to him.

I am conducting an investigation. I am holding a wake. I am doing some or all or none of these things.

You howl, hurling the curse of your brother’s name down the corridor. For hours you have heard his bumbling and still he is no closer to you, his blind search for you as failed as your own cursed attempt to reach the master bedroom. You picture him crawling forward on his hands and knees, unable to see through to the end of each tunnel, unable to know how much farther there is still to go.

For years, he has kept to his chair in the sitting room, leaving you to deal with the collapse of the house, the danger it poses to all of your possessions. The house is both protector and destroyer, both safety and threat, and it is you who tips the scales, not him. It was you who braved the streets night after night to bring back food and water, to gather all the supplies essential to your lives. Homer knows nothing of what you’ve had to do, how you’ve moved from one halo of lamp light to the next, avoiding the dark men who rule the streets. You see their eyes sometimes in the shadows, peering at you from front steps and street corners, hurrying you on your way through this ruined city that was once your home.

The pain is too much. This time when you scream, your brother answers, but from too far away. The slow sticky warmth emanating from your crushed thigh has reached your crotch, your belly. It’s easy to reach down and feel the slippery copper heat of your blood. There’s so much, more than you expected.

You close your eyes. Not much longer now.

Even surrounded by all your possessions, dying is so much lonelier than you expected.

Whisper your brother’s name. Whisper the names of your father and your mother. Whisper my name, and pray that I might save you, but understand that even though I have already changed the truth merely by being here, I will still refuse to change it that much.

The house bucks and shudders, settles or shifts. Homer stumbles but doesn’t fall down, knows that if he does he might never get up. He stops and listens to the creaking of the floorboards, the scuttle of the rats. Says, Langley?

Homer wants to yell his brother’s name again but doesn’t. It’s been a long time since his brother answered, and without sight there is no light and no marker of time. Homer doesn’t know if it’s morning or night, if a few hours have passed or if it’s already been days. He’s so tired and so alone, lost inside his own house, remade in whatever crooked shape Langley has envisioned. He thinks about all Langley tells him when to do because he cannot tell himself.

Homer, go to sleep, it’s midnight.

Homer, wake up, I’ve got your breakfast.

Homer, it’s time to play your violin.

It’s time for me to read to you.

It’s time for a drink, time for a smoke, time to eat another orange.

Homer’s so tired, and all he wants is to be back in his chair, but for once Langley needs his help and Homer doesn’t want to let his brother down.

The thing is, he doesn’t know if Langley is still there to be helped.

No father without medicine, without dictionaries, without reference texts full of once perfect answers slowly rotting themselves wrong.

No mother without silk, without satin, without wool and cotton. No mother without a closet full of shoes, a hundred high heels spilled out into a trapped nest of spikes.

No brother without a piano, without a bathrobe, without a chair, a pipe, a mouthful of oranges and black bread.

No self without these ghosts.

No ghosts, without—

No. No ghosts, or rather:

No ghosts except in things.

They surround you, press closer, waiting for the rapidly approaching moment when you too will be just a thing, an object, a static entity slowly falling into decay. That moment is so close you can smell it, like the breath of rats, like the rot of oranges, like blood and dirt mushed into new mud.

I know you were hurrying through the second floor hall because you knew what you needed to do to complete this place, to bring an end to the endless gathering and piling and sorting. You were hurrying because it had taken you so long already, and you didn’t want to waste another second.

Even now, at the very end, you tell yourself that if only you could have completed your project then it would have been enough to stop all this. It could have been different. You could have taken Homer and left this house. You could have started over somewhere else, which is all you’ve ever wanted.

You were hurrying, and you were careless, and now it’s too late.

Your lungs heave, trying unsuccessfully to clear their bloody fractures. When you are still again, I reach down to touch your face, to turn it toward my own.

With my fingers twisted around your jaw, I say, Homer isn’t coming.

I say, Tell me what you would have told him.

I can see the sparks dancing in your eyes, obscuring the last sights you’ll ever see, so I say, Close your eyes. You don’t need them anymore. Not for how little is left.

For these last few moments, I will see for you as you saw for him.

In the last seconds of your life, I will tell you whatever you want to hear, as long as you first tell me what I need.