Robert Wilson - Vortex

Kyle was five years older than Sandra. Before what the doctors called his “accident,” Sandra had always been able to share her troubles with him. He had taken his role as big brother seriously, though he joked about it. “I don’t have any advice for you, Sandy,” he used to say. He was the only person she would allow to call her Sandy. “All my advice is bad advice.” But he had always listened, carefully and thoughtfully, and that was the important thing.

She still liked talking to him, though he couldn’t understand even a syllable of what she said. His eyes followed her when she spoke, perhaps because he liked the sound of her voice, and she wondered, despite what the neurologists said, whether there was still some fragment of working memory inside him, an ember of awareness that might occasionally flicker with recognition.

“I’m in a little bit of trouble these days,” she began.

Ah, Kyle said, a sound as gentle and meaningless as the rustling of the leaves.

It was the Spin that had killed her father and ruined her brother.

Sandra had considered and reconsidered the event over many years, looking for an ultimate cause. She would have liked to pin her hatred on some particular thing or person. But in this case, blame was slippery. It glided over potential targets but refused to stick. And ultimately, behind all the trivial and quotidian facts, behind the million unfathomable contingencies, there was the Spin. The Spin had changed and mutilated many lives, not just her brother’s, not just her own.

In a perverse way, the Spin had been good for Sandra’s mother. Sandra’s mother was an electronics engineer whose career had stalled out, until the Spin rendered satellite communications obsolete and created a booming market for aerostatic signal-relay devices. She had been hired by a company owned by the aerostat tycoon E. D. Lawton, where she designed an airborne antenna stabilization system that became an industry standard. Her work was much in demand and she was often away from home.

The opposite was true of Sandra’s father. The initial chaos and confusion that followed the disappearance of the stars from the sky had triggered a global recession in which her father’s software business had wilted like a Christmas poinsettia after New Year’s Day. That—or the Spin itself, the blunt and simple fact of it—had thrown him into a state of depression that occasionally lifted but never entirely went away. “He just kind of forgot how to smile,” Sandra’s brother once explained; and Sandra, ten, had accepted this non-explanation somberly.

Easy for us, Sandra thought, the generation that followed: we’re so accustomed to these truths, that the Earth was encircled by nameless alien beings capable of manipulating even the passage of time; that to these godlike beings the human race was both trivial and somehow significant. You lived with it because you had always lived with it. Sandra herself had been born at the tag end of the Spin, about the time the stars (scattered and strange though they had become) reappeared in the sky. She may have owed her own existence to a last burst of optimism or desperation on the part of her parents, the affirmative act of creating new life in a world that had seemed to be crumbling into anarchy.

But the return of the stars had made no real difference to her father. It was as if some internal process of decay had taken root within him and could not be halted in its advance. No one ever said anything meaningful about this. Sandra’s mother, when she was home, labored to create an impression of normalcy. And because neither Sandra nor Kyle dared to contradict her, the illusion was surprisingly easy to sustain. Her father was often ill. He spent a lot of time upstairs, resting. That wasn’t difficult to understand, was it? Of course not. It was sad; it was inconvenient; but life went on. It did, at least, until the day Sandra came home from school and found her father and her brother in the garage.

Sandra was three weeks away from her eleventh birthday when it happened. She had been surprised to find the house empty. Kyle, home from school with a cold, had left his computer unfolded on the kitchen table. It was playing a movie, something noisy with airplanes and explosions, the sort of thing he liked. She switched it off. And that was when she heard the car motor growling. Not the car her mother drove to work but the family’s second car, the one parked in the garage, the one her father used to drive before he hid himself in the upstairs dimness.

She understood suicide, or at any rate the idea of it. She even knew that some people committed suicide by locking themselves in a closed space with an idling engine. Carbon monoxide poisoning. She supposed—it was a thought she harbored mainly in the bitter months that followed—that she even understood her father’s wish to die. People could get that way. It was like a sickness. No one should be blamed for it. But why had her father taken Kyle into the garage with him, and why had Kyle agreed to go?

She opened the door that connected the garage to the kitchen. The exhaust fumes made her dizzy, so she turned back and went outside and lifted up the big garage door to allow clean air to flow in to flush out the poison. The door slid open easily even though her father had stuffed rags into the gaps to keep the fumes from leaking away. It wasn’t even locked. Then she opened the car door on the driver’s side and managed to lean across her father’s lap and turn the engine off. Her father’s head had lolled onto his shoulders and his skin had turned a delicate, uncanny shade of blue. There was a crust of dried spittle on his lips. She tried unsuccessfully to wake him. Kyle was up front beside his father, wearing a seat belt. Had he been expecting to go somewhere? Neither of them stirred when she shook them, when she shouted.

She called 911 and waited in front of the house for the ambulance. Minutes passed like hours. She thought about calling her mother but her mother was at a trade show in Sri Lanka and Sandra didn’t know how to reach her. It was a sunny afternoon in May, beginning to feel like summer in the Boston suburb where Sandra lived. There was no one else on the street. It was as if the houses had gone to sleep. As if all the neighbors had been sealed indoors, like dreams the houses were dreaming.

The medics who arrived took Sandra to the hospital with them and found a place for her to sleep. Sandra’s mother arrived back from Colombo the following morning. Sandra’s father, it turned out, had been dead long before Sandra discovered him. There was nothing she could have done. Kyle’s young body had put up a fiercer resistance to the poison he was breathing, a doctor explained. He was alive, but his brain was irreversibly damaged and he would never recover his higher functions.

Sandra’s mother had died seven years after her father, of a pancreatic cancer that had been diagnosed too late for meaningful treatment. Her will had stipulated a sum of money to be held in trust for Sandra’s education and a far more substantial amount to pay for Kyle’s continuing needs. When Sandra moved to Houston she had asked the estate’s lawyers to find Kyle a residence nearby, if there was an acceptable one, where she could visit him regularly. The Live Oaks Polycare Residential Complex was what they had chosen. Live Oaks was devoted to caring for severely disabled patients and was rated as one of the best such facilities in the country. It was expensive, but no matter; the estate could afford it.

Kyle had been sedated for the flight west. Sandra had arranged to be present when he woke up. But if waking up in a strange bed in a strange room had caused him any distress or anxiety, Kyle had shown no sign of it.