Donald Antrim - The Hundred Brothers

Luckily Tom came over to help. Tom seized Virgil’s arm and hauled him off me. Shame at this gathered in Virgil, who mumbled, “What do you know, couldn’t stand up, must be getting old or something, thanks, Tom.”

“No problem.”

“Yes, thank you,” I said to Tom, who, perhaps for Virgil’s benefit, said, “These antique chairs were built for smaller people, weren’t they?”

“Sure were,” I agreed.

“If you ask me, I think we ought to clear this place out and refurnish. Fix up these floors, knock out a few skylights,” said Tom.

“Hmn,” I said.

“I mean, the colors in here. What’s so great about red? You know, studies have shown that colors have significant effects on mood. Did you know that?”

“I think I did.”

“And red is, I’m not sure what exactly it is red supposedly does.”

“Violence and aggression,” I said.

“Is that right?”

“Of course in heraldic symbolism red is frequently associated with the monarchy.”

“Interesting.”

“As is purple. Here we see the three-way connection between secular power, the impassioned genitals, and the spilled blood of the Lord drunk by the faithful as Communion wine.”

“I guess that’s true,” said Tom in the bright light from Fielding’s camera. Fielding was becoming impatient; he peeked from behind the viewfinder and mouthed the words Come on. Max on his back heaved in oxygen. A short distance away Barry sat on the floor and clutched his head. Virgil beside me shivered and said, “Doug, I don’t feel so good. Will you check my temperature?”

“Okay,” touching my palm to his wet forehead. He was hot. “You’re fine,” I told him. But in the light he looked horribly unwell with his blue-white skin the color of a shaved puppy. Moisture emitting from him beaded up on his head where his hair was thinning at the crown. Openmouthed he looked about.

I understood then that he was growing sicker and might not live much longer.

The light beckoned. Fielding’s hand kept waving. I got a supporting hold on Virgil’s arm and off we went toward the wide center of the room, toward our Max. Brothers stood in a file on Virgil’s left, and in another line on my right; behind were more with necks craned. Several along our way acknowledged us. Vaughan nodded and Eric motioned with his hand, a barely perceptible greeting. Phil, standing in line beside Gregory, whispered, as we passed, “Hey, Doug. Hey, Virgil.”

“Hello, Phil,” I said.

“Philip,” whispered Virgil.

“Gregory,” I then said.

“Doug, Virgil, hello,” replied Gregory, and Virgil also nodded. Frank said:

“Boys.”

“Frank,” we said, going by.

Angus leaned in close as we walked past. “Doug, I need my belt sander back.”

“Right. I keep forgetting. Sorry.”

“Whenever you get a chance,” Angus said as Walter, next in line after Angus, remarked obnoxiously, “Hey, Doug, are you still trying to figure out where we all come from?”

“Genealogy is the indigenous history of the Self,” I told that jerk in passing.

To Virgil, though I know he has no particular interest in ancient heraldic artworks, I confided in a whisper, “Remind me to show you an amazing picture I found of a fourteenth-century boar couchant with wattled neck and the hind legs of a goat. It’s Walter exactly.”

“At least you don’t have to sit next to the guy at dinner,” said Virgil, huffy.

Fielding, meanwhile, crept backward as he filmed, establishing an enlarged perspective — the cinematic space dramatically unfolding, and so forth — squeezing more Max in the frame. Back Fielding went, three feet, five feet, ten, fifteen, steadily across the frayed carpet and onto hardwood floor, as if riding a dolly. I suppose it is inevitable that some youthful humorist would be unable to forgo crouching on all fours in Fielding’s unwitting path.

The prankster this time was Jeremy. I could see it coming because of course I was squinting directly at Fielding retreating across the room and could make out, behind him, the small figure tiptoeing the long way around the ratty wicker chaise and the drop-leaf table holding the cannon glass paperweight collection. Virgil saw, too. It happened fast. Jeremy knelt on the cold floor. Snickering arose from various corners but no one said a word.

Fielding was absorbed in cinematography and wouldn’t have heard anyway.

He panned onto Max. He raised a hand to calibrate focus. Max’s eyes were shut but his mouth was open and his hands by his sides were clenched. Fielding focused on him. He stepped back. Stepped back again. Suddenly Fielding was going down over Jeremy and the camera’s blinding light was zooming upward and away to spray whiteness across ceiling, a wall, the floor.

Equipment crashed and the camera light died. The room seemed to fall momentarily dark. From the darkness came a sound of wrestling and the ominous shouts of the night’s first of three fights.

“You fucker!”

“Take it easy, man!”

“I’m going to strangle you!”

“It was a joke!”

“Are you mindless? Do you have any idea what you have done? Do you?”

“Don’t push me.”

“I’ll push you. I’ll push you if I want to push you, you unimportant fuck.”

“Don’t get mad!” Jeremy cried in a voice that sounded strangled. Then there was a noise: cloth ripping. Something weighty fell and the Doberman commenced barking insanely as Fielding harangued:

“How often do you think a shot like that comes along? How often?”

“I don’t know! I’m sorry. Let go!”

“Never! That’s how often a shot like that comes along. Never!”

Other brothers converged in a circle ringing the fighters. No one was butting in, yet; experience has proved that it is best to let physical disputes resolve themselves on the spot, rather than interrupt and create additional frustration and the lasting grudges that accompany smoldering tensions — unless there is peril of injury.

Fielding held Jeremy in a classic under-the-arm headlock. Close by the two men’s feet lay that camera, irritant to all of us and a heap of parts now. Fielding, seeing it busted, went red in the brain. “You shit!” he yelled while dancing up and down with Jeremy’s smothered head bobbing.

This was inauspicious. Fielding is hardly large, but he is utterly self-centered and therefore disliked, therefore intimidating, and no one wished to challenge him. Who can predict what a narcissist will do in anger?

“Aaaaghhh,” Jeremy managed to say; and Fielding, squeezing him, made this speech: “What do you think? What do you think ? I filmed you riding your bicycle and I filmed your sixteenth birthday and you can be damned sure I filmed it when you got back from the hospital and you were in remission and we were all here to celebrate your health and that was no joke, was it? Was it? Maybe you don’t want anyone to care about that. Is that what you prefer? No troubling evidence that you are alive and have feelings and people who love you in spite of the fact that you are an immature child who doesn’t know how to comprehend love? A little kindness would go a long way around here, but I suppose I can’t expect you to have much regard for congeniality because obviously you’re lost in an arrested world of lame jokes and sick tortures. And that goes for everybody!”—peering around the room at the amazed faces, raising his voice to cry above Gunner the attack dog’s savage, intermittent barking—“In my mind there’s a difference between friendly clowning and this kind of malicious assault on a person!” Bark. Bark. Bark. “Mature men ought to know this difference!” Bark. Bark. Bark. “Show some courtesy!”