That morning it was unseasonably warm for the beginning of October. There was no one outside walking the dog or running errands. No one watched me. I closed my eyes. It was the beginning of a bright day, and I felt the brightness burn through my eyelids. When I opened them, I looked across the street at a large modern house, a box of glass. Behind the house a relatively unmolested forest spread out, where I never liked to walk or think because when I was a child, there had been rumors of a child kidnapping taking place in the middle of the forest, or perhaps it was said that some kind of ogre-man lived there and kept a little boy as his sex slave, later as I grew older and came to understand those rumors as fairy tales designed to teach children a lesson (don’t go anywhere without your parents, don’t go off with strangers), I still avoided the forest for the simple reason that I thought the neighbors would see me, as there was a two-story glass wall the length of the house facing the forest. And as far as I knew, my adoptive brother never went into the forest, he came up with all of his ideas, probably even his suicide plans, by pacing back and forth in his childhood bedroom, the main place of rest for him. I stood at the end of the driveway looking out at the forest behind the neighbor’s house.
He was not a flexible person, I remembered, and therefore he was very uncomfortable when he visited me in Manhattan. To live in Manhattan one has to be extremely flexible. I turned toward my childhood home. In order to survive in New York City one has to be willing to bend to the city’s whims. Bend to the city’s whims! I thought. Bend or perish! Sometimes you had to be flexible enough to withstand being trapped underground on a train car in the Bronx at three in the morning after a night of dancing and doing drugs, so said my roommate Julie, or it might mean to take what you wanted when you saw it, wherever you happened to be. I saw that happen often enough, mostly when I observed my troubled young people take what they wanted and I will admit that I did not encourage them and I did not discourage them; I simply looked around and saw a great number of things, I saw the city as a horn of plenty, and after I looked at everything that everyone else had, I thought why shouldn’t my troubled young people have whatever it is they’ve taken, let it be theirs! When I considered all the things they had taken, I was always shocked at how small and inconsequential everything was. Cigarettes and candy and chips and sunglasses and toys from the hanging-claw arcade game and plastic trinkets made in China that didn’t mean anything to anyone.
A squirrel darted out from a bush with a piece of pizza crust in its mouth. The name Zachary Moon came into my brain. Zachary Moon from high school and beyond, what would he have to say? I decided to walk to his childhood house, a house I knew well since as soon as I passed my driver’s test, I was forced to drive there every weekend, dropping off and picking up, so my adoptive brother would have at least one male friend. Since I had been home, I thought he had no friends, but that wasn’t right.
Get it right, I said to no one. Organize yourself!
Perhaps he had more than two friends. Perhaps Zachary Moon’s parents would be home and I could question them. I went through the center of the suburb, and then in the direction of the city. People came out of their houses depressed and went into cars. The Moon house was on the edge of the suburb, right next to a small cemetery. On the way to the Moon residence, I stopped in at a gas station, and bought a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and a bottle of water. To get to the house I had to walk through the cemetery, which disoriented me in the bright sun. I smoked a cigarette as I went up and down large mounds of grass, and each time I descended one, the gravestones, grand and imposing, overwhelmed me. I smoked another cigarette. It took me over an hour to reach the Moon house, a mini-mansion that housed nine children plus the two parents. There was a rundown tennis court in the front lawn, the net in shreds. I walked up the gravel driveway. I remembered the exact sound the car wheels made when I put the car in reverse. I went to the door and rang the doorbell. I waited five minutes. No one answered. People were at work, I thought. The last time I dropped off my adoptive brother at this house, he and Zachary Moon were smoking cigarettes in the car, which at the time distressed and infuriated me. After ten minutes of meditative thinking and smoking my own cigarettes, I gave up and left.
On my way back toward the cemetery, I ran into what I could only assume were the parents. I startled them out of a leisurely walk through the neighborhood. They were older than I expected and I was shocked to see they were Asian, perhaps Korean. It came back to me that they were the two Asian parents in a mansion on the edge of the suburb. They had converted to Christianity and adopted nine children of various ethnicities and abilities. The friend was white, perhaps with a disability. I stubbed out my cigarette quickly and asked them if they remembered my adoptive brother.
Oh yes, said Mrs. Moon. He was quiet and well-behaved. I really was so thankful he became friends with Zachary.
I told them he recently committed suicide; I began to go over the six most common reasons, and once I got to the part about losing control I noticed Mr. Moon pulling on his wife’s arm.
It’s not good to talk like this, he said. You’re upsetting her. Look at yourself.
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