Gary A. Braunbeck - Cages and Those Who Hold the Keys

Alan laughed; it was breaking glass. “What a fucking bill of goods! You don’t do it because you love someone, you do it because your conscience won’t leave you alone if you don’t . It’s not so much that you love that senile, oatmeal-drooling caricature of a human being in the nursing home bed, you do it so you can clear your conscience . ‘Well, at least I came to see him. At least I did that.’ It’s all such shit . I’m not saying that love doesn’t have a small part in there, it’s just that we tend to ennoble our actions by saying they’re done out of love, when in reality they’re done because we’re scared to death of never being able to forgive ourselves if we don’t at least make the gesture!”

“God, Alan, that’s a horrible way to think.” Marian was so terrified she was on the verge tears, and the last thing she wanted to do now was give into it.

“Is it?” replied her brother. “Think about it. It’s what drove Grampa to us, isn’t it? His last-ditch attempt to clear the slate, to beautify his tapestry. There’s so much that gets buried under the weight of compiling years, so many memories that can find a dark, dusty little corner to hide in, so much unresolved guilt that builds up unnoticed that we can never be sure if we have really made our tapestries whole, beautiful, acceptable, cha-cha-cha. What if Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grampa, all of them, what if when they got to wherever it is we go they pulled out their tapestries and— voila! — right smack in the middle of it was all this shit they’d forgotten about, all these disfiguring little unremembered guilts that crept into to the artwork, huh? Easy—they get banished to ever-blessed Night. But what if there was a way to fix those tapestries? What if there was a way to remove the ugliness from them? They’d have to be accepted then, wouldn’t they? Wouldn’t they? ” He was almost right in her face now, and Marian, for the first time she could remember, was very much in fear of her brother.

“G-Given what you’ve s-s-said,” she whispered, “I s-s-suppose they would almost h-have to be. Yes.”

Alan’s body suddenly released all its tension. His eyes grew less intense, his shaking stopped, and he smiled his crooked grin. “Good,” he said, taking her hand. His touch was almost too gentle, and Marian noticed with a numb horror that the moist blood squishing between the flesh of their hands was not...was not at all that unpleasant. She closed her eyes and swallowed. “Marian?” “Yes?” “I’m going to tell you how we can do it. I’m going to tell you how we can make their tapestries beautiful once again.” “...all right.”

He leaned over and kissed her cheek. She stared at the faces he’d sketched on the wall, wondering why none of them were dripping because his blood was so fresh.

“Last night, around six or six-thirty— I wasn’t paying that much attention— I was sitting in the front room, just...just sitting, I guess. I kept thinking about all that had gone wrong between Laura and me, and try as I did I couldn’t find the reason for us breaking up like we did.

“You have to understand that the nights were terrible for me, have been for the last eight months since she left, and I...I can’t stand sleeping alone. The fact that everything in our house had her smell on it didn’t help matters any. The chairs, the curtains, our bed— God, especially our bed! She took everything with her when she left, except her smell. It’s the sweetest smell I ever knew. Everything about her was the sweetest I’d ever known.

“Anyhoo, I started going through the closet one day and I found her old black robe and a bra and panty set she’d left behind. They were covered with her scent. It was incredible. I’d hold them next to me and lie on the bed and just...just breathe it in.

“It was so overpowering that I could almost feel her there with me. So I tried laying all the things out like she’d be wearing them if she were still there, and I’d lay there and close my eyes and smell here, so near, so full and ready, and I could sense her body, every part of her body, there in the bed next to me. So one night I didn’t open my eyes, I let her scent carry me as far as it could, and when I reached out to touch her I could feel her skin, and it was so warm, so near, so ready ...it was like we’d never been apart. I made love to her that night like I’d never done it before.

“Afterward, I closed my eyes and let the scent cover me. And then I sensed him in the room with me. I looked up and he was just standing there, shaking his head at me.” Marian shuddered. “Wh-who?” “He said his name was Joseph-Something-or-Other, I don’t quite remember.” Marian swallowed. Once. Very loudly. “Comstock?” “What?” “Comstock. Was his last name ‘Comstock’?”

“How’d you know that?” Alan didn’t wait for an answer. “So Joseph says to me, ‘You should turn the gas off.’ So I did. I even opened all the doors and windows so nothing would go wrong. Then he told me what he’d come for, and asked me if I’d lead him to where he needed to go.

“I led him to the spot in the front room, under that hanging of The Last Supper , the spot where Grampa died. He stood there a long time, like he was searching for something, then he turned around and said there’d been a lot Grampa had forgotten about.

“I took him upstairs next, to the guest room where Grandma died. The first thing he did was ask me how she died, and I told him about how Grandma moved in with us after Grampa’s funeral because she felt so bad about things, and I told him about how I’d bring her an orange soda every night so she could read and take her pills, then about that last night when I brought her the soda and she hugged me so hard and kissed me and told me I didn’t have to sit with her if I didn’t want to, she’d understand. I told him about how I left her and how, the next morning, we found her dead because she’d taken all her pills. He just nodded at me and then sat on the bed and then found the things she’d forgotten about, as well. Then I brought him down here and he went right to the spot Dad died—I didn’t even have to show him where. He stumbled a little bit because of all the guilt and regret Dad had inside him when he died.

“The hardest part was finding Mom. I knew she had her stroke at the market and that she DOA at the hospital, but the hard part was going to be finding the exact spot where she died. We wandered through the store for a while— they’re open all night now, isn’t that nice?— until we hit the ‘Miscellaneous’ aisle. She’d gone into that aisle to get some more thread to use on her story quilt because she was almost finished with it. Joseph turned around and told me it started there, the first waves of dizziness and pain and breathing problems.

“Mom always checked-out through lane 7 because it was closest to the payphone so she could call a cab. And she had to call a cab— I’m sure we all know— because all my life I’ve been too chickenshit to drive. If I did drive then maybe— “—but that’s nothing. We walked outside and he found the spot where it really hit her. “Then he looked at me. “Took three steps. “And found her.

“Those fuckers at the hospital lied to us when they said she died on the way! She was dead before they even got there. He even told me what it was she whispered to some woman who was near.

“She was worried that no one would remember to feed the dog, Midnight. Our dog that’s been dead for six goddamn years!

“By then Joseph had everything that he came for, so we went back to the house and down to the basement. He found Dad’s old tool box and took out the hammer.