Donald Antrim: The Hundred Brothers

This was my undoing, really. The major section of ceiling that was the face came away from the rest of the ceiling. The dark brown water stain, eight or nine feet in diameter — this eight-or-nine-foot section of ceiling, the bulk of our father’s image — detached itself in one massive portion and, loosened by leaking water, broke free, plummeted to the floor.

My brothers’ voices called out. I leapt back. The plaster did not hit me. I think it might as well have hit me. The face dropped to the floor and its crash was the finale, as they say, of my little dance.

Water splashed. Chalky paste and particles like rocks flew. Dust clouds erupted into the air as Father broke apart before my feet. All the plaster shattered and a sickening compound, water and muck, covered my legs and my stomach. The muck was cold. The ceiling was ruined. I was amazed. The effect of Father’s thundering, bitter crash was like that of any harsh noise or bad surprise: shock accompanied by disorientation, lasting several seconds.

That was all the time it took for my beloved brothers to advance on me, to put their hands on me, to take me from all sides and hold me so that I could not move, and to hit me with their sticks and cut me with their knives.

I turned my head away and looked over at our windows. The windows’ panes were no longer black, exactly, but colored with gray, the beginnings of the morning’s light.

A voice beside my ear told me to stop struggling. I felt bereaved over the ceiling’s fall. My brothers ganged around me. A faraway voice shouted something and this was blind Albert alone in his chair, wanting something, rapping his cane against his horsehair chair.

Siegfried was the man in front of me and it was his knife, I believe, that made the initial cut across my stomach. Someone else was tugging at the mask, trying to wrench the mask off, because of course the mask’s elongated chin prevented the man behind me from cutting into my throat. The man behind me pressed his body against mine. I felt his legs against the backs of my legs, and I felt the man’s belt buckle digging into my back. The man’s arms were wrapped around me and the side of his rough face leaned against my shoulder.

“Who is that?” I asked.

“It’s me. Arthur,” the man answered as another brother poured a drink over the mask’s painted mouth, into the mask’s mouth and down over my lips. “Swallow,” a voice said, and I sank to my knees on the floor.

“Spooner, is that you?” I asked the man pouring cognac over my face and mouth.

“Yes.”

“Tell me what is happening,” I said to my brother. I lapped at the pouring drink and the blood ran from the cut Siegfried had made with his knife across my stomach.

“They’re taking off your mask,” Spooner said to me. “You’ve knotted the strings tightly, Doug.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“We’ll get it untied eventually,” a voice said; and this same voice, the voice, I suppose, of the man working to remove the mask, asked, “Would someone pass me a razor?”

The jabs to my ribs hurt more than deeper wounds to my stomach and my chest. This was true also of the sharpened table leg that I watched coming down in front of the mask, striking me on my arm.

There is an impression, held true in our society, that the father is surpassed, overtaken, outlived, and in these and other respects, killed by the son.

But this is, I think, actually not the case. In truth, I think, it is always the son who is killed by the father. Couldn’t it be argued that each man dies the death made for him by his father?

I felt so terribly weary. I felt so tired, and so sleepy. It was the end of our night. I felt blessed to be held by my brothers’ hands in our red library.

“I’m cold,” I whispered to a man holding my hand. I could smell the man’s alcoholic breath.

“Please, close the windows for Doug,” this man said to others. Sure enough, a brother of mine did trudge through puddles, ice, and snow to our tall windows. I could hear the windows, one then another sliding downward. The Doberman watched from beneath the dinner table. Bats circled overhead. What in the world had become of Chuck’s sheepdog? My brothers on the carpet, my brothers who had received their injections, stirred, began to move, lifted arms and legs, uttered sighs. They greeted the new day. I, on the other hand, had neither syringes nor medicines. All these things were gone.

My heart at least was beating in my chest. The mask came off and I was Doug again and a knife was cutting me somewhere.

Before closing my eyes I gazed in the direction of our fire. It pleased me to watch our fire.

It is true that there is nothing like a blaze in the hearth to soothe the nerves and restore order to a house.

The Verificationist

Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World

The Afterlife

“Elegant, outrageously imagined, comic … Antrim exaggerates his narrator into hilarious existence.”

— The New Yorker

“Antrim deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Pynchon, Heller, Vonnegut, and DeLillo. The Hundred Brothers is raucous and tender and suffused with intelligence of a most eclectic sort.”

— Detour magazine

“To read it is to enter a parallel universe somewhere between the worlds of myth and mammon.”

— Entertainment Weekly

“A fantasy that capers between atavistic ritual and inspired slapstick.”

— Time magazine

“Even as we laugh at the novel’s absurdity, at its brutal, skewering and amplified portrait of fraternity run amok, its madness rings both sad and disarmingly true.”

— Chicago Tribune

DONALD ANTRIMis a regular contributor to The New Yorker, and he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the New York Public Library. He lives in New York City.