Circling the Drain Read online

  You here? I asked, trying not to sound afraid.

  Erin, he said.

  What? I stood at the foot of his bed. Above his head a poster of the Beatles curled at one corner.

  Erin, he said again, softer this time and I went over and sat by his feet.

  You’re sick, I said. I love you, but you’re sick.

  I know, he whispered. I know.

  4.

  The only earthquake or storm will occur in our hearts when we become our true selves. That will mean we are going to be heard, understood and alive the way GOD wants us to be.

  Los Angeles, CA USA

  What did I want from her, that bedraggled lumpy customer? I wanted to find that she was a prophetic dreamer, connected to time in an intimate way. I wanted to ask about my brother, about myself. I wasn’t a Christian lunatic afraid of the world ending, either. I just wanted context. Why else would I scroll through other people’s dreams? Maybe because I had none of my own.

  I didn’t mind, really. It’s hard to miss what you’ve never had. I’d always felt different, being dreamless was just more evidence that I was. My mother, alarmed that I never woke on my own, slept on demand, and seemed rested and refreshed whenever she roused me, took me to doctors. I lay on a glass table. Wires attached me to monstrous humming and beeping machines, lights blipped and flickered. I was terrified of them. Dr. Lathere came into the room and tugged at his gray beard. Erin, he said in his gravelly voice, I want you to go to sleep. I was a good kid, accustomed to oddity, and accustomed to Dr. Lathere, who had been treating my family as long as I could remember. I complied.

  I woke when my mother smoothed my hair back from my head. The wires were plucked from my skin and I was free to return home. No REM cycle, was what Lathere told my folks. Highly unusual, the subject of studies, etc., etc. And dreamless. I didn’t understand, really. But even at that early age I knew that Jack had all my dreams.

  5.

  Later I came to believe that God talked to my brother Jack. Whispered things he didn’t want to hear and asked him to do things he found difficult or horrible. No one talked to me. I lay awake nights, waiting, but heard only the murmur of distant crickets, the whisper of air. My head was empty of voices except for Jack’s.

  No prophecy. No secrets. No holy words. Unfair, I thought, since I wanted them so much, yearned to be a vessel for truth and mystery. Jack wanted none of it. I guess you could say we were different that way.

  And that wasn’t the only way, but most essentially: Jack was chosen. I was not. I loved Jack, believed in him, but could never live up to him.

  My brother was a brilliant man. A brilliant boy first, and then a gifted, unbelievable teenager and then a man who people turned to, followed without a question, worshipped instinctively.

  How can I tell the story of a velvet voice if mine is one of burlap? I am eight years younger than Jack. I was eight years younger. Now I am twenty-nine and Jack is still twenty-seven.

  6.

  Strange things happened all along—way before Jack’s night fits. There was the time, twelve and very much asleep, Jack walked three miles through snow in his pajamas to the train tracks outside of town where witnesses saw him lift a thousand-pound cow, near to the act of giving birth, from the path of a southbound passenger train to a nearby barn as though she were made of paper. Two hundred people were on that train and the storm had shoved an old oak through power lines up ahead—the train would have rounded the curve, hit the cow and derailed, slipped into an electrified bank of snow. The passengers would have sizzled and died.

  My brother woke in the barn, in damp pajamas, petting the new calf. He insisted he was not cold, but the Janeks gave him a blanket anyway, and drove him home. His picture was in the paper. I remember that.

  And there was Avery Gulton in the Waldbaum’s. That was before the train, when I was very young. We were shopping for groceries: my mother pushed me in a cart. I dangled my legs and swiped at cereal boxes and cookies while my brother chattered alongside. Suddenly Jack stopped talking and stood still. My mother turned to him and reached out a hand: What is it, honey?

  Jack bolted. We heard people shouting and then a loud, sudden sound: a shot.

  No one was hurt. Jack tackled Gulton from behind and the gun in his pocket went spinning along the gray and white linoleum, shot a bag of sugar and the plastic fruit display case. The cops got Gulton and in his pocket they found a list of explosive devices, in his house an arsenal and plans to destroy the state capital.

  Surrounded by police cars in the parking lot, my mom asked him: Jack, sweetie, how did you know? Why did you go tackle that man?

  My brother closed his eyes—I was a toddler, but I remember this clearly: the sky was gray and stormy, it was cold and I didn’t have mittens, my brother’s eyes stayed closed and then he looked at me and then our mom. God told me, he said. He tells me things. I’m supposed to listen. And then his face crumpled and he began to sob. My mother pulled him to her chest and held him and murmured something, rocking him back and forth. In the ring of blue and red lights, I stood alone.

  7.

  An historic event bringing prosperity and glory to this country. A peace process or alignment with other positive force to benefit directly a large number of middle and upper middle class people.

  Rahad Samthahandhan Smithtown, NY USA

  In the front of the bookstore, the woman began humming. What was the song? It was suddenly urgent that I know. It felt somehow like a message. What could it be? What was she trying to tell me? Just as I almost had it, as the name of the song formed in smoky letters and floated ahead of me, she stopped humming. No, I cried out, then cringed and fled to Shakespeare & The Masters. I crouched low, in a corner, protected on two sides by safe, heavy volumes.

  My boss, Marianne, walked by, the crisp lines of her white pants making a whrip whrip sound as her thighs met. She stopped and backed up. I stayed where I was and stared at her legs. The lines of her pants had little puckers: dents where her knees belonged. Suddenly Marianne’s face floated near mine as she popped down to a crouch. Erin, she said, you okay? I nodded. Marianne made me nervous. She worked for the Corporation and thought I was a loon. When this place was still owned by Mr. and Mrs. Tyndall, I wasn’t afraid of anyone, but since they sold it, I’d watched a lot of people disappear and was always afraid I’d say the wrong thing to Marianne and she’d explode.

  She bobbed like that for a minute, then popped back up and began to walk away. Her shoes were shiny and blue, they squeaked faintly. Erin, she called back over her shoulder. This your break?

  I scrambled up after her: No, I mumbled, and made my way back up front. I was supposed to Meet and Greet. Everyone knew I hated that job the most. They could put me in inventory for days at a time and I was utterly content, but Meet and Greet was excruciating; talking to each stranger who walked in the door, welcoming them in the middle of open space where they could stare at me, when I just wanted to weave through the books where I felt comfortable—it was punishment. People traded me their inventory station for whatever I was assigned. But Marianne noticed I hadn’t been on the floor in a while, so she made me Meet and Greet. Where I can watch you, she said. Like I was a child of ten.

  8.

  I was a tearful, unhappy baby.

  When I was young, and my mother told me this, I wished it was a sign: that I cried because I knew what was coming. But I was probably just colicky and unable to be comforted. Except by Jack. Family lore has it that at their most sleepless and impatient, my parents turned to Jack to hold me, and that in Jack’s arms I almost immediately went to sleep.

  9.

  Once we lived in a small northeastern university town where both our parents were professors of religion, and atheists. Here is my theory: two people who were fascinated by belief so much that they could not believe with their hearts, placed the object of their fascination in a glass case—the glass case of the academy, here—where they could stu
dy it carefully without touching it. Without it touching them. But then where did that passion go? The lust of initial belief? It didn’t wither and drop off like the dead limb of a tree. It didn’t harden and become scaly. I cannot believe something so warm solidified like that. Rather, I think it flew out into another place. All that belief tucked itself somewhere within reach of the believer denying herself, so that she might stumble on it. In its new form, like a certain lover, the belief waited patiently to be discovered.

  But all things affect each other. Everything changes. These laws of the world twist us in their palm. My parents’ passionate beliefs thundered through them and into the embryo of my brother, waiting to blossom. The belief, which drew them close to begin with, loved my parents back. This belief escaped the glass case of the university and lay in wait for my brother to be born. That’s what I think.

  10.

  A combination of dream and visions. A murder investigation was going on…. The woman…said, “The clue is in the Bush over. It is a handful of blue and white snot.” I…heard [the] President say, “He’s in the first year.” I believe this dream/vision is about [the president].

  Andrea Page Provo, UT USA

  The woman had left New Age/Self Help when I wandered up front. She headed to the register with a copy of Zolar’s Dream Encyclopedia under her arm and fished around in her huge black bag for something, money I assumed. But then, in a flash the book was gone. I didn’t see her duck it into her bag but I also didn’t see her put it down. She started to thumb through the road map display and I tried to think what to say.

  Hey! I called out, before I was even ready. Hey!

  She looked right at me. I saw her eyes were black and pupil-less. She looked right into me and then she smiled and her saggy face was suddenly beautiful. I couldn’t say anything. The transformation lasted only a moment. Her smile was abrupt and its completion collapsed her face back into its original slide. She bolted past the free newspapers and out into the street.

  I followed.

  11.

  The things he whispered were beautiful. Jack’s words always came like water, in one stream of images after the next.

  My own words fell to the earth with a thud. I was clumsy and easily flustered. Late at night I wished that I could wake up smooth and graceful, like Jack, but in the morning I always greeted my familiar bumbling self.

  Growing up he told me what to do. I don’t mean in a bullying sense or a bossy way—I mean they were his words I passed off as my own, it was his voice I heard in my head when I was alone with a situation.

  Ideas didn’t come easily for me. I was slow and thick in my thinking, so Jack did my homework. Jack took my exams for me. A’s in Civilization and the Americas, in Algebra, Trigonometry, Chemistry, Physics, Calculus. In European History, in American Literature. None of them were earned by me alone. When I had to write a paper, things I didn’t even know flowed from Jack and into me. I sat with my pen and my paper and I passed his sentences off as my own.

  Thanks, I said, when I felt Jack’s voice in my head at a particularly important moment.

  For what? he replied, like I mystified him, but I saw the playfulness, the wink in his smile.

  12.

  I keep having this recurring dream about how the world will enter the third world war…. In my dream…all of the technology will be worthless and invalid. No one, anywhere, will be able to use any types of technology, including microwaves, televisions, computers, light, nothing.

  Dolores Nelson Iowa City, IA USA

  Outside, the street was loud—crazy with movement and people. I lost the woman from the store for a moment, but then her lumpy form bobbed up ahead and I took off running as hard as I could, gulping down the cold gray air, feeling the wind beat my green apron. My blood thumped and pounded. I was unquestionably alive, moving through the world with one purpose: to catch up to the woman who’d fled with her song. Everything else faded. The street blurred. The grind and crank of the city united in one distant hum. I could see only a tunnel of her: the prophetic dreamer running from me as fast as she could.

  13.

  The book was what was left: Jack’s whisperings and my book of him. He wrote all the time, in tiny, precise letters. Scraps of paper collected in shoeboxes and notebooks. My Books, he called the boxes, and labeled them carefully: The Book of Loneliness; The Book of Sorrow; The Book of Astonishment. There were many. Some days I found him in his room surrounded by these boxes. Scraps arranged in careful circles or spirals around their box. Jack froze when I opened the door.

  Shhhh, he whispered. We’re busy, and I quietly closed the door and retreated into the hall.

  That was near the end, when Jack lived with my parents and I’d dropped out of college. I was working at a gallery and trying to figure things out. I wanted to be near my big brother, too, and this was clear enough to my parents that they tried to talk me out of it. We were all resigned to his illness by then. We’d stopped pretending it would melt away, that things would return to the cheerful slide of life before God’s whispers.

  Still, my parents reassured me, Jack was fine. Undergoing treatment, seeing doctors. Condition not improving, no, but neither had it worsened and wasn’t that good news.

  He’s with us all the time, Erin, my mother said, her voice warbling across the crackle of long distance. Don’t you let Jack pull you out of school, honey. We’re doing just fine. Just push through it.

  Her voice was so warm that I wanted to cry. Truth was, I had already withdrawn from classes. I’d slipped so far beneath the gloomy blanket of homesickness that school seemed like punishment and I knew that wasn’t right. What I wanted was to go home.

  I packed my few belongings into three duffel bags and hopped a bus. It was a long ride—bus to train to bus—and I’d planned it as a surprise, figuring my actual presence less arguable than the theory of my leaving school.

  I took a cab from the station, and let myself into the house and everything was the same: hall table with fresh flowers below the big oval mirror. Kitchen smelling faintly of garlic and coffee. And then I entered a hastily abandoned living room: an explosion of couches and chairs and blankets, as though a crowd of sleeping people had been surprised into action.

  Immediately I headed for Jack’s bedroom. He had left the clues I needed, my father filled in the rest later.

  While both my parents napped in front of the television, an old Hitchcock playing on the late Sunday afternoon lineup, Jack had shaved his head with an electric razor. By then sharp things were locked away—no straight razors for our boy Jack—but my father heard a thump, and it was enough to lurch from the blanketed chair and race up the stairs where he found Jack passed out on the floor of his room, blood leaking from his crumpled body. Jack had shaved his head, wrapped a belt around his neck and pulled it as tightly as he could, then begun to shave his tongue.

  My father yanked the belt open and Jack gasped air. Blood covered his chin and puddled on the floor. My father carried all six feet of his boy down the stairs, hollering for my mother the whole time.

  Ellen, he yelled, the car! Jack, Ellen!

  And my mother was, by now, trained to whir into motion at the sound of that tone, at yet another terrifying act of this boy of hers, this creature who had come whole out of her womb but was coming apart here, in the world. She had the car running and ready to go in no time at all.

  When I arrived at the interrupted house, lined up neatly against the bedroom wall were his boxes. In front of them an unmanicured pile of Jack’s ginger-colored curls moved in the breeze from the door, his blood pooled and dried a path to the hall and I knew I was home.

  14.

  I had a lover who was jealous of Jack. Of course you are jealous, I whispered late in the night, a cacophony of crickets and june bugs keeping us company under trees and a fat, shiny moon. Who wouldn’t want to be touched like that?

  That’s not what I meant, you understand, what I meant was co
nnection. Connection inspires jealousy. But my poor lover was unconvinced. He’s with me all the time, I whispered, even here with you, under this moon. But that’s no reason to be jealous. Yes, Jack is everything to me but I love you too.

  It was the wrong thing to say.

  15.

  In the beginning there was Jack and then Erin. God spoke to Jack and Jack spoke to Erin and to the world. When the things became too much, Jack tried to blot them out but eventually he couldn’t and they destroyed him. The things. The voices. God.

  And I was the first disciple of Jack. The truth he harbored, the light in him—I followed it.

  In the hospital, Jack was observed. They monitored my brother and consulted each other about his voices. It’s the voice of God, I told them. Jack says. But I stood by myself and the doctors clustered, and Jack, in traction, was with the voices in a glassed-in room.

  Apparently God had wanted Jack to tell us something and he refused. Jack had stood on the top of the cathedral roof. It was a chilly day, clear-skied and vibrant and from up there he could see the Connecticut River, the hospital and homes on the hill beyond. He could see the Portland bridge and the cars along the highway. He was surrounded by air on three sides, the spire of the church behind him. God wanted to chat and Jack had had enough. He was crying. He stood with his arms outstretched and his head back.

  No! he shouted. I don’t want anymore. He waved his fist in the air and yelled: I don’t want anymore! I am not your servant! I’m not!

  He was loud and fierce up there on the church. Below, people gathered in the street to see what the noise was about. It was about an argument between my speck of a brother and the Great Almighty who’d been plaguing him for so many years.

  Leave me alone! Jack bellowed. One more thing and I go! He was sobbing, you could hear him from the street. Leave me alone or I fly! No more!

  That was the last thing: No more! Then Jack howled and crouched and the crowd, who’d been too captivated by the noise to act, suddenly moved like a great wakening beast, murmured and scattered, sirens howling in the distance. But Jack was quiet. Just crouched and flung himself in an airy and graceful swan dive off the roof.