Donald Antrim: The Hundred Brothers

There were other, similar incidents, too, now that I come to dwell on it.

“Speak of the devil,” growled Virgil.

Sure enough, it was the black-haired tormentor himself. Here he came plowing through a crowd at the opposite end of the room. Shorter men’s heads bobbed around him. These heads got out of the way. Zachary’s brothers let him pass. God, what hands that man had.

Would Zack notice Virgil and me snug on our tiny love seat? Or might he — and let’s only hope! — overlook us and go after Max, whom he truly hated?

No such luck either way. Boys will be boys, even when they’re men with heart conditions. This party, Zachary included, was decidedly into the show at center stage. Catcalls could be heard. “Go nuts, Maxwell!” someone shouted — prophetically? — as Max bumped a chair and almost fell.

“We’re related to pigs,” decreed Virgil.

Yes and no. Pigs is harsh. Virgil was evidently slipping into one of his moods. It is hardly my intention to take issue with another person’s misery; nevertheless, I should say right now — at the outset of our evening together — that in this or any family certain moods and states of mind will be dominant and chronic to the extent that they are no longer perceivable as moods, but as routine personality traits, shared attributes — those supervening aspects of character that, because supervening, come to signify membership in the family circle. The collective persona of this family could reasonably be described as frantic, romantic, lethargic, sarcastic, fearful, frustrated, tipsy, pugnacious, unchaste, heartless, dog-eat-dog, borderline narcissistic, nervously narrow-minded, and more or less resigned to despair although occasionally festive when inebriated. This can be problematic. The fact that we all abide depression does not lessen the pain of the lonely sufferer lost among raucous celebrants. When dealing with Virgil, I always assume the worst. “Don’t make me ask Barry to give you a shot,” I told him, and he lowered his head in his hands and groaned. As usual, I had taken the wrong course.

“I’m sorry, Virgil. I didn’t mean that.”

“Yes, you did. You pretend you’re my ally, but you’re the same as all the rest.”

“No one is going to give you a shot.”

“Why do you have to say something like that? You know how that makes me feel.”

“I said I was sorry. I’ll say it again. I’m sorry. It was a stupid and insensitive thing to say. I shouldn’t’ve. Here”—putting my arm gently around his shoulders, giving a supportive, brotherly squeeze—“it’s okay, it’s okay. Calm down. Everything will be all right.”

“I don’t want to be that way anymore, Doug. I don’t want to be the way I was.”

“You won’t.”

“Promise?”

“Yes.”

He hunched over, head in hands. Virgil’s body shivered, and he sounded as if he might be crying. “I want to die,” he said.

“We’re all going to die soon enough, Virgil. There’s no reason to wish for death.”

At which point, and, as if on cue, Max did tumble to the floor. It was beautiful and balletic: Maxwell’s body arcing downward in face-forward descent with arms extended overhead, hands outstretched and still holding the pieces of the heirloom lamp he’d smashed at the outset of our gathering in this big red room — holding these pieces aloft and ablaze in the reflective incandescence of reading lamps constellated on tables everywhere: our homey little indoor Milky Way of 40-watt bulbs lighting up the library’s run-down leather furniture and desiccated animal heads and innumerable, dusty, unread books; and our faces, all our faces lit amber and watching Maxwell’s long body plunge belly flopping toward moth-eaten carpet bunched in folds set to snare and entangle the botanist’s drunken feet.

“The God is among us!” the falling man shouted out on his way down.

Then thump.

“Ouch!” someone nearby exclaimed, reflexively, as Max made contact. His thud accompanied by porcelain launched clattering across the floor. Porcelain bursting into smaller fragments. Skidding under chairs.

“Good Lord,” said a voice.

“Doctor!” called another.

And from far away in the rear of the mob blocking the door, the high voice of dear, sweet Milton, the channeler, asking anyone and everyone, “What happened?”

The bottleneck in the doorway broke up. A half dozen fellows cleared into the room. Curious others followed. More filed in to sit or stand gawking at Max.

“He freaked out,” Siegfried told Milton. In Siegfried’s callused hands were further remains of the busted lamp. Now the sculptor peered warily down at this glass he carried — as if it might somehow be hazardous, might hold the power to bring him harm. He explained to Milton, “Max tripped on a light cord and broke this light, no big deal, right, and Stephen and I were helping clear the mess. All of a sudden Max takes off chasing after people.”

“He tried to assassinate me!” wailed Hiram from over by the fireplace. Hiram heaved up an arm. He displayed his swollen hand. His face showed pain.

“Us, too!” chorused twins Winston and Charles in unison from their sanctuary behind a leather sofa.

By this time Barry’d made it to Max’s side and was kneeling in doctorly fashion, attending to the toppled man. Max lay flat on his stomach, not moving at all. Barry reached out to examine him; he pressed for heart’s cadence above Max’s collar. There was a hush. Shuffling of feet. A cough. A chair cushion sighed beneath somebody’s shifting. Silence, and in the silence that vaguely familiar, low whirring sound that had seemed to come, moments earlier, from the vicinity of the fireplace. What could it be. Oh, of course. It was Fielding with his eight-millimeter home-movie camera. He was zooming in, adjusting the focus, finding the light, getting everything on film.

“Give me a hand here, someone,” Barry said without looking up at anyone in particular.

Nobody moved. Eyes met eyes as the camera’s motor softly, metallically purred. The camera panned across floor and Max’s still back; its bluish lens pulled in tight over pair after pair of shoes nestled beneath cuffed and uncuffed trousers worn by men standing close. Fielding’s camera’s gaze passed right up those trouser fronts, up over the pleats and the plackets covering zippered or buttoned closures, up to check out the pockets stuffed with hands rammed down into them, playing absently with gum wrappers and balled-up money and keys and lint and change and receipts from purchases.

Playing, as well, with genitals. Our ninety-nine, not counting George’s, sets of underwear-enshrouded nuts.

“Put that goddamned thing down,” some brother or other told Fielding, who was at that instant raising his camera to take in, in steady lateral progression, our faces in sequence.

It was one of our everyday eternal moments of collective, mute indecision — in this instance over who would do what, if anything, to help Barry help Max.

A little clique in front seemed to wake up. Three came forward and positioned themselves around Maxwell. Following the doctor’s instructions—“It doesn’t appear that anything is broken. I want to try to get him turned over. Milton, put your hand under Max’s knees. Siegfried, watch his arms. Christopher, you hold his feet. I’ve got the head. Okay, we’re going to lift and roll, gently, on three. To the right. Careful. One, two, three ”—they grunted and shifted the prone man from his stomach to his back.

In other parts of the library, other things were taking place. It is easily possible, in a room such as this, for many activities to take place simultaneously, without significant disturbance to the informal reader or browser paging through baroque musical scores or the occasional dated literary, scientific, or heraldic tract pried from the heart of an uncataloged loose stack. I mention our vast heraldic holdings because they are of special interest, lately, to me. Genealogy — and by genealogy I mean more than mere sketching and labeling of “family tree” diagrams; rather, the deep investigation into bloodline and blood’s congenital inheritances, particularly in connection with insane monarchs — has become a primary avocation of mine. I’m not crazy. But I do have the blood of an insane monarch running through my veins. We all do. I wanted to know what, if anything, this might portend. So I’ve been spending nights doing layman research into intrafamilial sociobiological matters, spreading decomposing documents on the oak table beneath the rose window that would look down — if you could only see through those darkly stained indigo panes — onto cobbled footpaths and stone bridges here and there traversing grassy plots, onto the several interconnected, smelly, evaporating ponds encircled with old trees that were lush once though never tall, bowed lower still by their years and all but leafless on their way to dying, our former topiary garden. So much here suffers decline. The red library everywhere shows the years since anybody bothered picking up a putty knife. Browning paint and yellow plaster molts like a skin from the cross-vaulted ceiling. Of twenty chandeliers pendent from twenty golden ropes, only a few manage any real light. The effect, when looking up, late on a winter day as evening wanes to black, is unsettling: a Piranesian study of listless candelabra tethered beneath obscurely lit, cracked domes that, depending on illumination’s intensity and the various reaches of shadows flung every direction by the intersecting lattices of the vaults, appear alternately higher or lower, more ruinously beautiful or hideously spectral than they actually, probably, are — an entire grim structure in want of some kind of repair before it simply breaks apart and descends, faulty light fixtures and all raining down on our heads. Or so it would seem to the anxious reader obsessed with death. And on the subject of heads! From where I sat, squeezed into the love seat beside disconsolate Virgil, I was able to gaze more or less eye to eye at no fewer than one dozen lifeless mammals, wall-mounted, across the way, on plaques (the lone exception in this grouping, a reindeer that has had eyes gouged out, leaving wounds) — each among them wearing humiliation in one guise or another: lacerated ears poking through matted gray mane, chipped antlers or horns and the teeth either missing by the mouthful or cracked off blackly at their roots, general depilation under coatings of dust. Poor squandered animals. My heart goes out to them. Their faces seem to scream out final terror. What a crummy way to spend the afterlife, tacked up in a room full of men falling down or shouting obscenities at each other while getting their rocks off to eighteenth-century French and English pornographic works on paper — a main particular of interest among our special collections here, especially (Predictably? Understandably?) to the younger married fellows, who act as if the stuff doesn’t affect them in the least, yet who are invariably, whenever we gather socially, the first to make tracks to the mahogany and glass cabinet where it is stored. Whom did they think they were fooling anyway? There they were, those horny bastards over in their corner, Seth and Vidal and Gustavus and Clay, all the usual snickering crowd passing pages and quietly boasting, “I’d do her”—even while their brother the rainforest plant scientist lay semicataleptic, drooling, incontinent, out of his mind not more than twenty feet away. Don’t get me wrong. I do not intend prudery. I like a good erotic illustration, and these are very artfully made pictures, beautiful in the way Hogarth’s Gin Lane engravings are beautiful, which is to say flamboyantly grotesque and therefore fantastically curious to the furtive voyeur — well, I enjoy a good erotic image as much as the next person. But these dressing-room scenes of rickety-legged libertines putting lean penises into corpulent mistresses doubled over atop banister railings or the gilt backs of chairs (the women’s skirts parted behind to reveal poorly delineated genitals, a fleeting glimpse of thigh) — these dressing-room and scullery and opera-box tableaux are far more disturbing (in what they have to say about private life, public health, and the history of European sexual fashion and taste) than erotic. The Age of Enlightenment’s inattention to hygiene is well documented. A certain syphilitic degeneracy lurks in these bookplate etchings of rheumy aristocrats making doggy love with their hats on. Even the paper on which they are reproduced abides in a condition of yellowing decrepitude that only worsens the seeming pallor, the intrinsic sickliness of the figures. Seth, Vidal, Gustavus, and Clay do not appear to be bothered by this death imagery, maybe because they’re married and feel they’ll live forever through progeny. It’s that old bloodline problem. There’s no getting away from the drive to procreation. Celibacy would lead straight to boredom and the aimless waiting that is a precondition of renewed passion for life. What is this red library if not an oppressively furnished waiting room where grown men shift uneasily from foot to foot while launching small harangues about work or sex or their archaic interpersonal grievances, still viable, from our hundred overlapping childhoods? Indeed. Some manner of clamorousness was in progress over by the towering shelves where the National Geographic s are stacked — it was Foster getting heated up about his favorite topic, the imperiled cosmos. We’ve all had to sit through Foster’s impromptu rants about mankind’s fate. Andrew was his unlucky prey this evening.