The Boy and His Family

         In the basement of the house in Fallston the half-naked Boy watches Moby Dick sleep. The room is dark and narrow and the Boy has his fortress in the gap under the staircase. Five thick, tall pillows in a tight ring and over-top a patchwork canopy of blankets and throw cushions. A miniature faded-orange pylon placed on top like a turret or flag. Inside, the Boy is very still. The carpet itches at his bare chest. The shifting creak of footsteps above is the roll of thunder over his kingdom. The thunder of high, foul THINGS threatening descent. His eye is pressed to the gap between pillows, watching carefully. He knows he must not blink. Moby Dick lies on his side about nine feet away, up against the base of the fireplace. His tail is still. A loud snore from under the compressed layers of fat. The Boy shifts, excited. He wriggles a hand out from under and brings it to his eye, holds the lids open. The treacherous landscape of the split-level basement. The sharp places jutting out. The highness, the high windows just there, the curves of furniture, the wide spaces like oasis valleys tied down by early mountains. On the ground a layer of tiles and the shape of Moby Dick. The Boy pulls the geography together with an open eye and makes it his. He lets out a breath.

                   I am watching you Moby Dick, he says very small. You can’t run away because I am watching you and I will see you if you try. I can see everything.

The Boy blinks against his fingers. A drip of sweat off the eyebrow. Moby Dick is still. The Boy holds his breath until he is lightheaded. His mouth opens wide as it will go - the stretch of the lips and the jaw.

                   Moby Dick! Moby Dick! You are my enemy! he shouts, mouth wedged quickly in between pillows. I am always watching!

Moby Dick doesn’t respond. He is used to noise. The Boy roars and bursts through the fort. He dashes forward and with a dive grabs Moby Dick by the curve of the chest and pulls the dog into a fall, a chaotic barrel-roll. The Boy is a monster now. A high, foul THING storming in the deepness of a July afternoon. He yelps and howls and the fur is rough and warm against his skin and there is a comfortable happiness.
         Those summer days when his father and mother were out and Paul and Kat and Mary and even Little Josephine were gone the Boy would be sent to the house two doors down where Marianne McDougal would watch him. She was a stout dark-haired Scottish housewife with a thirteen-year-old daughter and a passion for soap operas and fifties’ romances. Men in black-and-white and beautiful women plastered up in long mandarin gowns would exchange whispers with a summer sunset. She couldn’t accept his love. She had dignity, a job, a life to be carved out with her own tools. The birth pangs of the heroine. As The World Turns.
         Marianne McDougal would sit on the tight flowered armchair in the dim, dim basement with the ironing board set out before her like a musical instrument. The sewing kit at the base of the chair. Shirts laid out like tapestries of gray and white and navy and pink and a soft blue all in line to be steamed and flattened. A tear in the man’s shirt could be fixed with a small puncture wound and a length of string. The television was in the corner and it was always on. The light of it, gray and white on her face. She knew all the lines and would parrot every word. She could iron without looking. Long afternoons. Air bubbles in the striped wallpaper. Nat King Cole on the television. A woman in Asiatic dress and the man kissing her.

                   Christopher, Chris, look at this. Aren’t they lovely? Aren’t they just lovely together?

And on the television Dr. Han Suyin says:

                   I will make no mistakes in the name of loneliness. I have my work and an uncomplicated life. I don’t want to feel anything again... ever.

         Each day of those summers was its own discrete universe. A hundred billion miles squeezed into a single row of houses. A supernova from inside. The warmth of his mother. A solar system in the front lawn. The Boy and his friends could leap from planet to planet without fear, pursuing the many-sided bodies of the galaxy, unaware that stars had died and burst and collided so that they could, in this small moment, be gods. A comet would shoot by. They would duck and run for cover.

                    You can’t catch me! I can see everything!

         It is July 1967 and the eight o’clock light is blue and it comes in through the open front door and through the windows of the kitchen and the small living room. The Boy lies tired on the couch, watching television. Kat and Mary and Little Josephine laid out on the carpet, sharing whispers as if passing slips of paper. Here are my secrets, they are precious. Keep them close. Kat is thirteen, the oldest of the girls. Little Josephine the youngest by four years. She is slipped in small among the others. An irregular triangle. Paul across the room reading a book. He is the oldest of the five, and he shares a room with the Boy. (Pencil drawings and glow-in-the-dark stars on the walls.) His hair is cropped short, his eyes are sharp - he affects himself a Romantic purist. He looks up from his book and for a narrow second meets eyes with the Boy. They are seven years apart. Paul smiles lightly. Neither of them remember this moment.
         The Mother and Father come from the kitchen. A small smile from her as she sits. A summer dress light on her body and from top to bottom a flow of color. As a result of a childhood illness, one of her legs is shorter than the other, producing a little limp on every second step. A softness permeates. In the hands, in the slight ends of the lips, in the hair drawn dark and back. The eyes. A lantern held up in a dim room. A person to come to at night with a sadness.
         The Father is forty, tall and he walks now with long steps across the room. A prosaic bending, and then the television bleeds out. The boy collects these images in the waiting space before sleep. The Father sits.

                   Everybody. Kat. Paul. Chris, Chris come on now. Sit up now.

A rearrangement of bodies.

                   Something has happened, something has changed.

                   ...

                   Something has changed. Your mother and I don’t love each other anymore.

         He raises a hand and expresses it forward into the air. Do you understand? He lets it fall. There is a silence. A few sparse details. The tears follow soon after. A shaking in the bodies. A madness quivering across a thread. From the couch the Boy can see everything and he begins to cry. He doesn’t understand, but he cries anyway. His voice is small and tired but it rides on the shoulders of the rest. It stretches upward, reaching into the chorus of confusion.
         Long before the music started, the Father and Mother had met at the University of Saskatchewan. He was studying engineering. She was pursuing social work. A Catholic girl’s residence. A tryst at the center of a century. They married when she was twenty-three. An ark with all its animals. A man in the belly of a whale. The wind-bit streets of Chicago. A giant crab tossed by the leg to join the constellations. The mythology from which a family grows.
         The Father was good to his children, his wife. Paul admired him. Here was a man to be admired. In 1967 he fell in love with his secretary and left the family. He worked odd jobs, he was remarried, he had children. He would come to visit, he would pull up out front the house and the Boy would sit in the back of the car with the others and they would speak for some time. The Boy would later remember these moments as shadows. Did they go somewhere during these shadow conferences, did they drive? Or did they just sit there in park? The love songs from the radio run like veins through memory, over memory, across memory, carrying the fire that today burns at the base of the heart. The radio might never have been on.
         In the years that followed the landscape changed. On Fridays: Donuts and Kentucky Fried Chicken from Edith on her way home from teacher’s college. Paul in retreat. In eleventh grade, Kat left school and went to work. A human being set foot on the moon. Rivers tore through the grassy valleys. Noah came later. The Boy would watch the road shoot by through the holes in the bottom of the car and imagine that it was his legs, not the wheels, that pushed so fast over the world. The warm ghosts of the seventies.

         A late August night in the basement. 1968. The stock of a BB gun pressed to his cheek and down the line an old Dracula doll. Click. Pop. A silver bullet through the head. Ha! He would fire with a rhythm. That night, like most others, the boy would slip into his mother’s bed. He would start in the proper place, he would start there in the room with Paul, but he would always end with her. She would console him in the dark, in his nighttime blindness.
         He meets Little Josephine on his way, in the darkness of the hall. She has her pillow to her chest. She is not much younger than him. They pause for a moment as they pass, the smallest voices in this new, single-parent hymn. Many years later she too would sleep-over with their mother. Daughter and mother would come together to eat and drink and listen to music and fall into old photo albums. Memories of the future in this dark hall in the house in Fallston.
         The boy pushes open the bedroom door.

                   Christopher, is that you? she says with a softness (an arm out into the dark). Come here.

                   Okay.

                   Is that better?

                   Yeah.