Thomas Pierce - Hall of Small Mammals - Stories

“Yes, maybe,” his wife said. “Or maybe it was the protesters.”

“What protesters?”

“The people against the mines. Surely there were protesters. I was reading recently the new blood diamond is computer parts. Our phones and televisions, everything needs these certain minerals, and it’s a very nasty business. It was a very upsetting article. Maybe someone read about it and spiked your brother’s drink. Maybe he was assassinated. For political reasons.”

Bert wasn’t sure what to say to that. In truth, he knew very little about his brother’s work. They’d never really discussed their careers. They’d never really discussed much of anything over the last few years beyond college football and what to do with their parents when the time came (hospice for their mother; and later, a nursing home for their father). Age was partially to blame for the distance between them. Rob was fifteen years younger, and sometimes Bert felt as though they’d been raised by entirely different families. Their father had already sold his insurance business and retired by the time Rob was out of diapers. Their mother had been forty-nine when she found out she was pregnant again. She’d always treated Rob like some kind of minor miracle. Like something out of the Old Testament. “Just call me Sarah,” she used to joke.

Rob had never married—“Too predictable,” he’d always said — but he’d cycled through plenty of girlfriends over the years, women he mentioned in passing but rarely brought along to family gatherings. Bert could remember meeting only one or two of them. His brother had dated a red-haired book critic named Monica (that one had really raised their mother’s hopes), and then there’d been that hippie girl with the big wire glasses, the one who made soaps — what was her name? Aspen? Bert wondered if there were people out there who wouldn’t have seen the obituary in the local paper three weeks ago, people who’d want to know Rob had died, suddenly, tragically, and far away.

Pending the investigation, everything that Rob had been carrying with him while abroad was being held in storage, but that still left his apartment in Atlanta, a place he’d used only two or three nights a month. Possibly he’d kept an address book or a computer with an email account Bert could crack.

“And just how will you crack it exactly?” his wife asked him as they drove down to Atlanta on a Saturday morning.

“I could know people who do that sort of thing,” he said.

Rob’s building was ten stories high, a red-brick behemoth, on a block full of newer stucco condominiums. They didn’t have a key to his apartment, so they knocked on the super’s door in the basement, hoping she might help. A skeletal woman emerged in a frayed red cardigan, gray wisps of hair like miniature storm systems over her head.

“Yeah?” she asked, and crossed her arms.

“My brother lives here,” Bert said. “In 8F. He died, and we’d like to—”

“You’re too late,” she said.

“Too late?” Delia asked.

“Some people came a few weeks ago. They took all his stuff and sealed up his apartment. Apparently I’m not even supposed to rent it out. They tell you what was wrong with him? They wouldn’t tell me. I figured it was pretty serious, for all the trouble it caused.”

Bert told her he knew very little. The woman gave them a disappointed look and retreated into her apartment. Outside again, standing next to the car, Bert counted up eight floors, shielding his eyes from the sun, guessing at his brother’s window.

“Well,” Delia said, “we tried.”

“Wait right here. I’ll be back.”

“Where are you going?”

He told his wife he had one more question for the super, but back inside the lobby, with its long wall of bronze mailboxes and marble floors that whistled under his loafers, Bert didn’t take the stairs down to her apartment. Instead he pushed the button for the elevator. It was a creaking box, barely big enough for two people. He imagined a network of frayed ropes and rusted pulleys on the other side of the ceiling. He’d never understood why his brother had picked such an ancient building. “You never did have any taste,” Rob told him once.

When Bert reached the eighth floor, the elevator doors dinged and opened to reveal a long, narrow hallway with beige carpet. Above each door were silver and shiny letters. Finding Rob’s apartment was easy. He tried to remember the last time he’d stood in front of this door. Summer before last? Rob had just returned from another trip, and they’d had dinner plans on the calendar for at least a month.

“Oh, that’s tonight, isn’t it?” his brother had asked coolly, before inviting them inside.

“You need to reschedule?” Bert had asked, not really trying to hide his irritation.

“I guess we should have called to confirm,” Delia said.

“No, please, come in. Sorry, I blame the jet lag. Drinks?”

His apartment had always been a museum of his travels, crammed with strange and potentially dangerous artifacts: shadowboxes that displayed shelled necklaces and stringy bracelets and charms of unknown origin, halfway sheathed swords, tribal spears with little notches carved and painted along the shafts; not to mention a surfeit of photographs — of viny temples and lazy brown rivers, of snowy peaks, of mosquito-thick jungles, of smiling strangers Rob never took the time to name or explain — and then of course his stone Ganesha, the knee-high sculpture of the elephantine Hindu deity that sat resplendent beside the sofa, its many waving arms and majestic trunk.

“So is it art?” Delia asked him once. “Or do you, like — what? Meditate in front of it?”

“He’s supposed to remove the obstacles from your life. Though he’s been known to add them too, in some cases… when needed.”

“How anyone could believe in something that looks like that, I have no idea,” Delia said.

“As opposed to what?” Rob asked. “Besides, he didn’t always look like that. His father chopped his head off and to bring him back from the dead his mother had to give him an elephant’s head. It’s a sweet story, sort of, if you think about it right.”

Bert had nothing against his brother’s travels, generally, and he tried not to let it bother him that the artifacts represented a part of his brother’s life that was, for better or worse, unknowable. But what could be so infuriating was the way Rob seemed to take it all for granted. “Oh, that?” he’d say about the little clay thousand-year-old whatever that Delia or Bert had happened to notice on the mantel, as if it were a trinket he’d picked up in the airport gift shop. It was condescending, wasn’t it? To feign such indifference?

The door to Rob’s apartment wasn’t locked today, but when Bert opened it, he discovered a thick piece of translucent plastic had been stretched across the frame and sealed on all sides with yellow duct tape. He pressed his palm to it. Warm, like skin. Probably the air-conditioning was shut off on the other side. Bert wasn’t sure what he wanted to do now. He jammed his index finger into the plastic, stretching it until the plastic hugged his knuckle like a condom. He had to claw at the plastic with both hands to actually rip a hole, and when he did, he discovered a second piece of plastic on the other side of the doorframe, small divots left there by his fingers.

He could see through the plastic, barely, the room bathed in milkiness. There was nothing on the walls. He thought of the various tapestries and wall hangings and lamps that had once made this white box of an apartment seem so intimate and homey. Everything was gone now: the furniture, the rugs, the curtains. Probably they’d taken the silverware, the cereal bowls. It was almost like his brother had never been there at all.