Donald Antrim - The Hundred Brothers

“What’s wrong with him, do you think?” Virgil whispered barely audibly in my ear.

Together we watched Max kneel unsteadily down among the lamp shards. Siegfried and Stephen, both standing in Max’s vicinity when the accident happened, came over and crouched beside their brother, helped him collect fragments, which they all painstakingly swept — their six outstretched, middle-aged hands raking and pawing the carpet for nuggets of porcelain and indiscernible, translucent bulb splinters — into a tidy pile. I was astounded by how fat Stephen had become. Just looking at him made me want a whiskey and soda. He scooped a quantity of particles into his soft hands and trotted off toward the fireplace, where, despite the fact that it was sufficiently warm in the room — and would become, what with the steady infiltration of more and more of our bodies, suffocatingly so — old Hiram was leaning on his walker, performing his customary patriarchal act of rudely supervising construction of yet another of his stupendous, raging fires.

“Ball those tight!” Hiram screeched at Donovan crumpling Sunday newspaper sections, lobbing these into the grate.

Hiram is ninety-three and universally despised for his many humiliating cruelties.

“Examine the flue!” he commanded Donovan, loudly enough for everyone in the family to overhear. And now Stephen quickly approached, head lowered and arms fully extended before him with hands cupped as if bearing something disagreeable, which, on arriving at the red-brick fireside, he flung away — a scatter of powder and detritus that clouded the hearth and the air around it with granular smog.

Immediately Hiram seized his walker by the handles and clattered backward, fleeing grime.

“Oh, my shoes, look at my shoes,” he cried as a second cargo of glass and dust and, also, several large, knife-edged porcelain fragments, carried by Maxwell, made uneasy passage toward that end of the room. We all watched in horror as Max tacked around furniture and the extended legs of semireclining men. Everything was an obstacle, and Max seemed, with each wavering, anxious footfall, on the verge of keeling over. He vaulted an ottoman that appeared suddenly in his path. He kicked up rug corners. The rugs were ancient and valuable, tattered to a point near disintegration — but never mind, the real worry was that Max would do something grievous with that serrated porcelain he was brandishing in every direction. “Oh! Oh!” Hiram hollered as Max cleared the big Persian carpet, hit the hardwood, lost his balance completely, and flew into a run/slide/stagger across the floorboards toward him, toward Hiram clutching the walker with fists speckled brown by age. Max’s arms thrashed, and it appeared he would crash into our eldest brother and cut off his head. But Hiram cowered down and used the waist-high, wraparound frame of the walker as a protective metal barricade. He lowered his head between bent elbows, thrust the walker before him, braced for collision — he’d once played sports! Now he showed admirable form, letting the walker absorb the initial impact, before recoiling from the main force of Max’s oncoming midsection with a sideways feint-and-parry maneuver that would’ve been nice to watch on instant replay, it looked so effortless.

Max veered away. Hiram shook his fist — in anger it seemed, actually pain. He’d suffered an injury to the wrist, so easy to do at his advanced age. Now he clasped this brittle hand and crumpled over — automatically, self-protectively, in the manner of a man who’s hammered his thumb. He shook out the hand and he made a face. Of course Barry came from wherever he was sitting to have a look. Barry’s a caring physician and a loyal brother. He gives us all plenty of complimentary medical counseling, as well as phoned-in prescriptions for tetracycline or a refill of antidepressants. If the complaint requires a specialist’s care, he’ll offer a referral.

Barry flexed Hiram’s wrist, massaged, tenderly, the hand and bony forearm. He swiveled the joint. “How’s this? This? How about here? Okay? No? Hurt? Sorry.” And so forth, as the old man grimaced.

Max in the meantime continued to weave. He still held that porcelain. What was he doing? Warding off an invisible enemy? No one dared approach him. It looked as if he might do serious damage after all.

“I wouldn’t mind a hit of whatever he’s on,” whispered Virgil as the whirling botanist sheered back onto the Persian rug and into a crowd of twins. I couldn’t help feeling, at that moment, a modest thrill. The twins invariably bunch together in a pack during social functions, refusing to mix with the rest of us, preferring to assert their own little club; and it’s obnoxious. Suddenly, in rushed Max, a berserker in their midst, scattering three out of four identical twosomes. It was like something choreographed, Max dervishing armed and dangerous between Lawrence and Peter, on his left, and Scott and Samuel, to his right; and these two pairs at once deftly sidestepping — a shuffle of debonair panic followed by Max pirouetting to make straight for Winston and Charles tumbling backward onto chairs, raising hands to shield their matching terrorized faces crying, “Leave us alone! Leave us alone!”

That was when I noticed Max was wearing one of my favorite Italian ties. Isn’t that the way in families. Someone’s always rifling your closet.

“My tie!” I called across the room. The tie whipped and fluttered, as if blown in a wind.

But there was no actual breeze in here, only fear and turmoil, as guys of all ages got hastily up from their seats and retreated to form disorderly ranks before bookshelves and the recessed window casements between the shelves — a ring of brothers gazing in at Max with the same pitying, blankly frightened expressions worn by the taxidermized wildebeests and elk that loomed so dolefully overhead.

The library was about filled at this point. Only the last stragglers ranged up or down the lengthy hallways and stairwells that led to and from this or that distant household wing. One by one we arrived. We were all present except George. Near the end of the line was Milton. I saw him coming through the library’s main doorway.

Or not coming through. This entrance was clogged deep with Clinton, Rod, Bennet, Christopher, Leon, and many, many others, all intent on the spectacle at room’s center: our brother stalking aimlessly, dangerously after nothing, pottery in his trembling hands.

Whispering Virgil told me, “I don’t think he heard you. Look at him. This is very distressing. He needs help.”

Maybe the thing to do would be for someone young and agile to storm out there and risk his body and just be a gladiator and tackle Max. Rush high, spear low, drive him hard to the carpet. Wham.

Quietly I said to Virgil, “Where’s Zachary when you need him?”

“Fuck Zachary.”

“Yeah, no shit. Fuck that guy.”

“You know what I mean?”

“Yeah. Absolutely.”

What did Virgil mean, exactly? And why was I agreeing with him? And what, by the way, was that low, whirring, humming sound coming from over by the fireplace?

The truth is, I like Zack a lot. Of course there were those times when we were kids, when he used stature and strength to gain advantage over smaller brothers. I’m thinking of the famous sickening instance when Zachary — who reached an imposing six feet seven and weighed in at two hundred and sixty virtually fat-free pounds before his seventeenth birthday, and who continued to grow, vertically and in girth, even after that — decided it’d be a gas to kneel on Virgil’s chest, vigorously scour Virgil’s naked stomach with a hairbrush, and yell out, in his ecstatic, hormone-enriched voice, “Red belly! Red belly!”