Russell Banks - Affliction

Below him, LaRiviere’s silver head exited from the door, with his large body following, and behind him came the Merritts and the others. LaRiviere waited until they had passed and then he locked the door, and together the group strolled down the path, their breath coming from their mouths in small white clouds as they walked. Wade heard the car doors open and thunk shut, saw the headlights come on, watched the cold cars one by one leave the lot and drive away.

Then he was alone in the town hall, sitting in darkness upstairs by his office window. For the first time that day, he felt good, he told himself. All those plans; then the fears and worries and arguments and explanations that follow: it never seemed to change for him. He lit a cigarette and smoked it down and told himself again that he felt good. A few seconds passed, and the back of his bottom jaw began to throb with low-level pain; it was palpable but with very little heat, and it did not bother him much. He knew, though, that as the night wore on, it would get worse and then worse until the toothache would be the only thing he could think of, the only thing that could abide in his mind.

ONE MIGHT LEGITIMATELY ask how, from my considerable distance in place and time from the events I am describing, I can know all that I am claiming to be a part of my brother’s story. How can I know what Wade said to Jill and she to him when they were alone in his office? How can I know what Wade thought about Hettie and Jack out there in the parking lot by the town hall, or who won the costume contest? Who indeed?

And the answer, of course, is that I do not, in the conventional sense, know many of these things. I am not making them up, however. I am imagining them. Memory, intuition, interrogation and reflection have given me a vision, and it is this vision that I am telling here.

I grew up in the same family and town as Wade, side by side with him, practically, until I was eighteen years old, so that when I yanked myself away from both, I took huge chunks of them with me. Over the years, family and town have changed very little, and my memories of them, which are vivid, detailed, obsessive — as befits the mind of one who has extricated himself from his past with the difficulty that I have — are reliable and richly associative, exfoliating, detail upon detail, like a crystal compulsively elaborating its own structure.

And, too, I have been able to listen to my brother Wade during all the years of my adult life that preceded the events set down here and especially during the weeks when they were actually taking place, when I was able to hear Wade’s version of his story as it unfolded. I was able to listen to him, and once I started paying serious attention to him, which, as I said, occurred shortly after Halloween, I asked him questions. Interrogated him. Later, after his disappearance, when I pitched myself wholeheartedly into learning everything I could about the strange complex violent acts that led to his disappearance, I interrogated everyone even slightly involved, all the people mentioned in this account who survived those acts and even a few not mentioned here — police and legal officials, firearms experts, psychiatrists, journalists, teachers. I investigated land records, local histories, family traditions. I accumulated a roomful of documents and tape recordings, upsetting my domestic order, jeopardizing my job, curtailing my social contacts — in short, I allowed myself to become obsessed. Why I did this I cannot say, except to observe that when Wade began in early November to come undone, I understood it too well, too easily, as if I myself were coming undone in exactly the same way. Or, perhaps, as if I myself could have come undone, had I not left home when I did and the way I did, abruptly, utterly, blasting the ground with the force of my departure, with no goodbyes and never again returning — until after Wade, too, had left.

The third factor in the making of my vision — intuition— might be better understood as an uncanny ability to know fully how things must have been, how and what people must have said or felt at a moment when neither I nor Wade, my main witness, was present. There are kinds of information, sometimes bare scraps and bits, that instantly arrange themselves into coherent, easily perceived patterns, and one either acknowledges those patterns, or one does not. For most of my adult life, I chose not to recognize those patterns, although they were the patterns of my own life as much as Wade’s. Once I chose to acknowledge them, however, they came rushing toward me, one after the other, until at last the story I am telling here presented itself to me in its entirety.

For a time, it lived inside me, displacing all other stories, until finally I could stand the displacement no longer and determined to open my mouth and speak, to let the secrets emerge, regardless of the cost to me or anyone else. I have done this for no particular social good but simply to be free. Perhaps then, I thought, my own story and, at last, not Wade’s will start to fill me, and this time it will be different: this time I will truly have left that family and that town. Will I marry then? Will I make a family of my own? Will I become a member of a tribe? Oh, Lord, I pray that I will do those things and that I will be that man.

A half hour before dawn the wind drops, and the temperature rises quickly from fifteen degrees above zero to thirty. It is the first of November; the night is nearly over. Four miles south of Lawford Center, on the eastern shore of a small gravel-and-rock-bottomed lake puddled among a pile of wooded hills, there begins to emerge from the silken darkness the rough cluttered profile of a trailer park — ten or twelve dingy mobile homes set parallel to one another alongside the lake and perpendicular to a paved lane running at a right angle off Route 29.

From a distance, a half mile down the road, the trailer park in the dim new light looks like an abandoned migrant workers’ camp or a deserted military post. At half that distance, the trailers resemble metal coffins awaiting shipment. From the side of the road, where the mailboxes are posted, one distinguishes short driveways and squares of lawn bleached yellow by the autumn cold. And as one passes into the park itself, the trailers — pastel-colored iron boxes held above the hard dirt by stacked cinder blocks — seem to bristle in pale skins of frost. Rubbish, toys and old broken tools crowd the steps and driveways; piles of sand, stacks of bricks and blocks and odd-sized boards are left uncovered in the yards; rusting cars and pickups are parked in the driveways, and parts of cars and trucks lie randomly about. In front of many of the trailers there are spindly frost-burnt bushes, and in back, dead gardens looped by half-collapsed wire fences intended to keep the deer out.

In the history, in the development and even in the geology of the place, there is the appearance of disorder, clutter, abandonment. Despite this and despite the ramshackle neglected look of the trailers, the Mountain View Trailer Park and the entire town of Lawford and the valley as well are held in the grip of deep and necessary symmetries that, like death itself, order the casually disordered world that seems to surround it. In an ultimate sense, the place is enclosed by a fierce geometry of need, placement, materials and cold.

The lots and trailers were owned by Gordon LaRiviere and were laid out on a map three years earlier in a calculated and efficient way on a brush-covered rocky spit of land, an ancient meadow sown with glacial rubble that extended tentatively from the road down to the lake. In the gray half light of dawn one can look from the shore across the pale ice and see a black amoeba-shaped body of open water whose form bears no clear relation to the long narrow teardrop of the lake itself or to the north-south axis of the low hogback hills here on the near side and the higher moraine on the far.