They told me nothing. I hadn’t imagined anything, so it was nearly impossible to be disappointed, but still they told me nothing to help my investigation. I wandered through the cemetery, which put me in a philosophical mood, then took the bus, a foul-smelling vehicle, back to my childhood neighborhood. As I approached the house, I noticed the garage door was open. I smoked a cigarette, almost hoping my adoptive parents would come out and ask me what I was doing, what was wrong with me.
Inside the garage, I noticed something out of the ordinary. There was a car, my adoptive brother’s car, a cheap black Honda with the 666 license plate that my adoptive mother considered paying an exorbitant sum to have changed, the devil’s car, she shuddered, a Satan mobile. I looked at it for a while. What was so out of the ordinary was that it was parked in the garage at all, as the garage was for my adoptive parents’ cars, the children’s cars were always parked in the driveway, now his car was parked in the garage. The car’s exterior, freshly washed and gleaming like something out of THE BOOK OF CARS, reflected my disgusting appearance, my eyes looked wide and frightened. The car was unlocked, and as soon as I opened the passenger door, my nose was assaulted by the smell of cleaning disinfectant. For a few minutes, I sat in the front seat, dizzy from the fumes. There was a travel-sized pack of tissues on the floor and several quarters in the cup holder. Other than that, it was in immaculate condition. I got out and slammed shut the door. Looking at his car almost brought a tear to my eye. They’ll have to sell it, I said to no one. My adoptive father bought it for him when he graduated high school. There was a lot of tension over whether he would graduate on time. My adoptive father used the car as a way to motivate him to finish high school. It was always like that with my adoptive father. There were always bribes and rewards, even when we were little children, we would make deals with him to get things we wanted. With my adoptive mother we prayed for the things we wanted, and with my adoptive father we bartered. Before I left the garage, I found a spray can of insecticide.
I went into the house and brought the can up to my childhood bedroom, where I sprayed the flowerpot with the red dots. Before I sprayed them, the red dots moved very quickly. It was pleasant to see the spray turn into a white foam that froze the squiggling red dots. I pressed pause on their squiggling; then I ended their lives. It was so enjoyable to have an immediate and visible effect on something, I used up the entire can. All of the flowerpots on the sill were coated in a thick white foam like a man’s shaving cream.
Looking at the white foam covering the red dots, I felt something close to sexual desire, the first time in over a year. I went into the bathroom next to my adoptive brother’s bedroom, grabbed a towel, went back to my room, locked the door, took off my pants, and rolled the towel into a tube shape and rubbed myself against it as I stared at the clouds of beautiful white foam and thought of a scene from The Piano Teacher, when the woman gets out of her overbearing mother’s apartment, goes to an adult video store, rents a private booth, and sniffs a tissue. I kept looking at the foam and thinking of the tissue, foam, tissue, foam, tissue. I was on the floor with the towel for an hour. Satisfied, I brushed off the pubic hairs, then folded the towel and returned it to the bathroom. I put my pants on.
The house was as empty as I had left it. More flowers had been delivered and left on the front doorstep. It took me half an hour to bring in all the baskets, amongst three wreaths and five bouquets. The foyer was now full of wreaths and bouquets and cards. I collected all the flowers from their paper wrappers and baskets and placed them into the mop bucket from cleaning the hallway. It was my understanding that standing up in water helped the flowers stay fresh. I looked around for a box with my black sweater, but there were no boxes. The cards were addressed to my adoptive parents, and I noticed I wasn’t mentioned in them, it was as if I didn’t exist, perhaps because no one had seen me in years, even a few of my relatives forgot me.
To Mary and Paul, went the cards, and it was strange seeing my adoptive parents’ names like that, it jarred me into realizing that they were actual people in the world and not everyone had the special, troubled, and difficult relationality as I did with them. To some people, to most people in fact, they were just Mary and Paul. Simple Mary and Paul, Mary and Paul in the Catholic fortress, Mary and Paul with the coupons.
The more I said their names, the more I wondered if they were somehow at fault. It was impossible for me not to connect them to him and his suicide. He lived with them his entire life. Did living with them his entire life somehow drive him to suicide? Perhaps it forced him into depression, which led him to suicide. When someone commits suicide, we must look at the parents first in order to assess where to put the blame, then we can look at the siblings, and after we have examined those relations, we can look elsewhere, at girlfriends and boyfriends, and teachers and coaches, but first we must always begin with the nuclear family unit, we need to examine the intention and force of the members in relation to one another in order to assess the level of guilt and shame appropriate to each survivor-member. I stood in the foyer, paralyzed.
The two living rooms and dining room were brightly lit and if a stranger had walked by a couple hours ago and looked in and observed all the flowers and wreaths and warmth and brightness, he might have felt gladness in his heart, for it was indeed a very sentimental-looking tableau, it looked like something out of Currier and Ives.
Hello? I called out. Is anyone home?
No one answered.