WHEN he was ten, Christopher Landes unlatched the baby gate at the top of the staircase. He saw his little brother toddling down the hall toward the stairs and he opened the latch and watched as the little boy, who was nineteen-months old at the time, put his weight on the gate and fell forward when it swung open. The stairs were carpeted and the little boy didn’t make a sound as he fell. Even when he hit the hardwood floor of the foyer he made only a dull thud that was barely noticeable. The carpet on the stairs and in the hallway was deep blue pile and soft and the little boy liked to walk on it in his bare feet and feel the coolness on his soft skin, just as Christopher, as an adult, still liked to do.
After the dull thud from the foyer, there was no sound in the house except for the muffled noise of the television in the bedroom where their father was watching a football game with the door closed. It was a Sunday afternoon and their mother was out shopping with their aunt. Christopher, after looking down at his brother’s body, and after realizing that the little boy wasn’t moving and wasn’t going to get up, went into his room and closed the door and began to play in the corner of his room—the corner farthest from the bedroom door and the hallway and the stairs—playing with his back to the door, creating a small triangle of floor between the corner and his legs folded Indian-style, his back bent over the few action figures he heaped up, still able to hear the distant voices giving play-by-play and color commentary though the wall that his bedroom shared with that of his parents, his shadow over the figures on the floor below his bent back, obviously in a posture of not having heard what happened and, therefore, not knowing what happened, being totally unaware of his brother’s body at the bottom of the steps, having nothing to do with that at all. For the time he sat there like that, all that existed of the universe was that small triangle where those action figures acted out their dramas at his whim, his spine an incomprehensible cosmic boundary beyond which those action figures dared not dream. Though the door to his parents bedroom was at the opposite end of hall from his bedroom, and thus in his mind far away, Christopher Landes was now actually much closer to his father, just a few feet away, two thin layers of drywall all that separated them, father and son absorbed in the choreography that unfolded before them.
During the half, their father got up and went to get another beer from the kitchen. Christopher did not hear their father get out of bed, the sound of springs, nor did he hear the door to their parents’ bedroom open and close, though he might have registered the momentary clarity in the commentary coming from the television, and he did not hear his father in the hall, until his father began to yell and nearly tumble down the stairs himself. Should I go out there, Christopher wondered, or should I stay here? While he could remember nearly everything about that afternoon perfectly, the striped shirt he was wearing, the feel of the blue carpet on his bare free, the warmth of the winter sun on his back as he sat on the floor, he could not remember what happened after he heard his father’s voice, louder and louder it grew. Did he run out to see what had happened? Did he sit still in his room, afraid? He didn’t remember the police or the paramedics, though he assumed they’d been called and had come. He didn’t remember their mother and aunt returning home from shopping to an empty house or to chaos. There was nothing there at the end of that memory, and though he could imagine any number of ways that the day might have ended, he rarely ran through the possibilities.
Christopher Landes never told his family what he’d done. It never occurred to him to do so, even after he realized that his father believed it was his own fault. Yes, the gate had been unlatched, but the gate had also been installed the wrong way, swinging toward the stairs, rather than away. Their parents had realized the mistake when they put it in, but had not yet gotten around to fixing it, despite both saying to each other, with regularity, We need to get this fixed. Christopher did not talk about the gate with anyone in his family at all. The memory of unlatching it existed only in him and he could believe that it happened or not believe that it happened.
When his mother tried to tell him that his brother was gone, the word stumbling in her mouth, caught on her clotted feelings, he still said nothing, not just about the gate, but about his brother as well. He understood well enough and quietly waited for his mother stop making those terrible sounds, struggling up out of her chest, so that he could go off to his room and play. Their father always though that he’d forgotten to latch it, or hadn’t latched it properly, as did their mother and their aunt and all three living grandparents, and though they loved him and felt sorrow for his grief, his obvious, terrible grief, his weight loss, his trouble at work, everything that came after, his wife and the family and everyone all knew that this was on him. Christopher Landes loved his father, but after the little boy fell, the man changed, as one can imagine would be the case. As an adult, Christopher had a hard time remembering what his father had been like before, the crumbled thing that came after blotting out the man that had once been.
Christopher became the sole source of his mother’s aggressive affection, a new level of attention and care that became a burden to him as he grew. It was a love that was like an omnipresent metal orb resting on the top of his head, not warm and soft and all enveloping like he imagined when he saw other children with their parents, but hard and cold and heavy. Hollow. Hollow with another boy’s shape at the center, he could feel it, hear the odd angled echoes that his body made as it beat against this love, echoes that sounded a shape that was not his own, but one that he’d had a hand in crafting. His mother’s hands on his head at night, brushing his hair from his forehead, every night on the edge of his bed, bending the mattress down with her weight, causing his whole body to lean uncomfortably toward her hips, or waking him early in the morning so that she could take him with her as she went to the store or to the doctor or on a long silent drive. Country roads, AM static, light rain on yellow-green pastures and nothing to talk about, her lungs full of something syrupy and rotten. She would pull over onto the dead grass shoulder by a crumbling rock wall, the boundary of what had once, perhaps, been a vast estate, and she would sob, her face getting redder and redder, mucous running from her nose uncontained, years after the boy fell, still crying in the car away from home because she did not want to let her husband see it, knowing that it would be read as a rebuke, as an accusation, as a pin in his pulled-back skin. He would interpret her sorrow as being about him, when in reality he was no part of it. There was no room in it for anyone else, so she only shared it with her son. Christopher watched his mother lose control in the car as the drizzle danced on the cooling hood of the car. She never explained or apologized and they did not talk about it, though once she was under control, she would wipe her face and then lean over and kiss her son on his face and head and they would drive again. With her long fingers, she would seek out a new station, but out in the county, there was never anything worth listening to.
It wasn’t something that Christopher thought about, or, he thought about it from time to time, but only the image of it—his brother walking down the hall, his finger lifting the latch, his brother falling forward, the boy at the bottom of the steps, the square of afternoon light on the hardwood, but then, after running through these images, remembering these collections of colors, his mind would move on to other things. He didn’t have strong feelings about it one way or the other. He would remember the images, the moment, but not what lead to it. He did not interrogate them. Perhaps it was because he considered these images of the moments surrounding his brother’s fall were not his at all, but belonged to his whole family and were not his to alter by digging and drilling into them with questions, curious as to motive and meaning, but, despite existing only in his memory and his memory alone, were to be trotted out only often enough to remain, to let the light revive the color and then to be closed up once more, safe and clean.
• • •
As an adult, when he visited their father in the nursing home, he was always impressed by how small the man had gotten in comparison with the image of the man Christopher carried in his mind. Their father was in his eighties now and suffered from dementia. Christopher stood beside the man’s bed and looked down at him and saw him as though from a great distance. Their mother died from breast cancer decades earlier, and their father lived alone in the house, retiring early from the poultry processing plant where he was plant manager and doing, as far as Christopher Landes could tell, not much of anything with himself. He had some VHS tapes he liked to watch, over and over. In the nursing home, Christopher Landes would take their father’s hand and hold it and their father would turn to him, slipping for a moment out of some involuntary reverie and would begin to cry and would try to say something to his son sitting there, this young boy who’d become this grown man, try to say something, the words stalled on his tongue, his tongue writhing and crying and Christopher, uncomfortable with having his father suddenly fully in the room, suddenly fully awake, suddenly focused on him with the last of his waning intensity, would let go of his father’s hand and quickly leave.
Their father lingered on for a few years like this and then died one spring and was buried next to their mother and next to the small grave of the little boy. His brother’s tombstone had an etching of a child and a lamb. Their father had wanted to buy a tombstone that had a place to put a picture of the boy, but their mother said it would fade in the sunlight and she did not want to watch the boy’s face fade. Their father suggested not buying plots that didn’t get so much direct sunlight. The three plots were in a nice part of the large cemetery, far from the front gate, but not so far back that they didn’t get cared for, not back in the corners where beer cans and bits of paper and plastic congregated, unnoticed by the city-employed caretaker, back with the old broken stones, stones that a boy in middle school once told Christopher were the graves of witches and suicides.
Christopher lived alone in a three-bedroom ranch house near the college. One of the bedrooms was the master and one was the guest bedroom and one he used as his office, where he kept his private papers and financial information and a box with his father’s papers that he had never gone through. Christopher was an orthodontist and in Rotary and a trustee of the West Walnut Mennonite Church. Children enjoyed going to his office, to the extent that a child can enjoy the orthodontist, because he was friendly and had small hands and had the best sugar-free lollipops of all of the town’s dentists and orthodontists. While he dated in college and in dental school, though not in graduate school, none of his relationships lasted long, and he never married. He’d once dated a girl in college who wanted a cat, so he bought her a kitten as a gift and, not long after that, she’d left him. After the relationship was over, he got rid of the kitten. The ranch house was at the back end of a 1970s development on the edge of the city. Behind his house ran train tracks. A single train passed each morning at 5:45. Sometimes after work, Christopher would walk along the tracks and look at the rocks that had fallen out of the boxcars. He was usually able to find something interesting in the ballast, always amazed at what strange colors were hidden in the rubble.
In dental school, he’d dated a young woman for several months and both felt certain that it would lead to marriage, though neither of them ever talked about it openly. One evening, after a party at a classmate’s apartment, Christopher and his girlfriend, a term he found childish for people in their mid-twenties, returned to his apartment, staggering up the stairs to the third floor and fumbling with the keys because they were both deeply drunk, too drunk to have driven home from the classmate’s apartment, a fact that will only occur to her later, which will occur to her unexpectedly from time to time with a sudden rush of adrenaline, as though it was still possible, through some mistake of time, for them to have been in an accident, to have died, to have killed someone, glass and bodies broken on a county road. Once inside Christopher Landes’ apartment, they staggered to the kitchen for one more drink and collapsed on the floor, laughing, squinting in the flickering pink light of the cheap apartment’s kitchen and they sipped cooking sherry from the bottle, because it was all he had, and they talked, her leaning against his chest, and for the first and only time in his life, he told someone the truth about his brother. Not just that his brother died, a fact that he often failed to disclose to acquaintances, but that he’d unlatched the gate, not just left the gate unlatched, but actively unlatched the gate as his brother came toddling and that his brother fell down the stairs and had died, all while their father was in his room, watching a football game, and she turned, looking up at his face, moved close, put her hand on his face, soft and cold on his flushed cheek, and she said that he shouldn’t blame himself, that he was just a little boy, that he couldn’t have known, that it had truly been his father’s fault for not watching the boys, for shutting himself in his room and drinking beer while a ten-year old and nineteen-month old were left free to roam the house alone. Christopher Landes pushed her off of him, leaving her to slump to the peeling tile floor. He hit her hard across the face, feeling the spit fly off of his lips as he yell something at her and standing, he grabbed her purse off of the counter, threw it at her and told her to get out.
The girlfriend didn’t call the police, but she did file a complaint with the school and Christopher Landes had to meet with the Dean. Rather than deny it or try and make excuses, he explained that he knew that what he did was wrong, even though he’d had too much to drink and even though they’d had a very emotional discussion, he knew that what he did was not just wrong, but beyond acceptable and that he would accept whatever disciplinary action the school felt appropriate. The Dean nodded, patted him on the shoulder, said that he knew that school was stressful and that if Christopher would go to six session of counseling, there would be no further action by the school and nothing would be noted in his record, a course of action that Christopher Landes complied with.
After graduate school, he joined an orthodontic practice in his hometown and years later, once his partner, who was several years older, retired, he bought the practice and remained the sole orthodontist in the office for the remainder of his career.
He went to work one morning and the receptionist and dental hygienist were looking at the local paper and talking about the latest sad story, saying things like “…poor thing…” and “…bless her heart…” and “…who would do such a thing…” He looked at the paper and concurred in their hushed murmuring and went into his office with his black coffee to read more about the story on the Internet. Later that morning, he printed a picture of the child out on the color printer in the back room and put it on an empty can from the kitchen and put the picture-covered can on the receptionist’s desk with a handwritten message soliciting donations for the child’s family. He sent a message to the Board of Trustees at West Walnut Mennonite and to the pastor about the family, suggesting a special prayer and offering and on Sunday, a special offering was taken and a woman who knew the family gave an update on how the family was handling it and that the police were working with a Federal agents, or so she’d heard.
That night, Christopher Landes stayed up later than usual reading a long comment thread on a website where people were confessing the worst things they’d ever done, signing in to comment not with their usual screen names, but with throwaway names that often incorporated the word “throwaway.” Christopher Landes did the same and then he wrote:
When I was in college, I was dating this girl. We’d been together for over a year and in our senior year, I started to worry that we’d break up. I was crazy about her, but I knew that she wanted to go to law school and was only applying to places in the northeast. I was going to med school and only applying to places near home (the south). I had an off campus apartment, and though she didn’t live with me, she stayed there most nights.
She really wanted a cat. She kept talking about how cute they were but she couldn’t have one when she was a kid because her sister or mother was real allergic. So one day, I go to a shelter and I get her a kitten. It was orange. Real cute. So I bring it home and she comes over and I give it to her and she gets really excited. But then, a week or so later, we get into a fight and she breaks up with me.
I don’t remember what we fought about. Nothing big. The end was coming one way or another. She left and I and I put the cat in a little box but she said she didn’t want it. I told her it was hers and she said she didn’t ask me to get it for her and she didn’t want it. And even if she did, she couldn’t take it home and she couldn’t have it in the dorm. So she left me with the cat.
It just sat in the box mewing for a long time. I tried to take care of it, but I was in college and it was tough keeping up with classes, applying to med schools and cleaning its litter and feeding it. I wasn’t very good at it. I probably forgot to feed it some days.
It was cute, but it also drove me crazy. It would jump on the bed at night and attack my toes. But if I put it out, it would cry and cry. I couldn’t sleep. The house smelled like cat piss and cat food. The wet food drew flies. Sometimes I would have friends over and they would give the kitten beer and we would laugh when it tried to walk. But I would feel bad later when I would see it sitting quietly, looking sick. Or it would puke in a corner. Everyone who came over wanted to pet it because it was cute but after a few minutes, they didn’t want to have anything to do with it. When they would leave, I still had to feed it and clean it and try and sleep.
When the school year ended, I packed my stuff up moved out. Behind the apartment building there was an undeveloped lot. I took the kitten out there and left it. I left it with its box and a little stuffed mouse that it would play with. I don’t know what happened to it. Maybe it turned into a mouser. Maybe it got hit by a car. Who knows. I still think about it and I still feel bad.
No one responded to his comment. He checked back every few minutes to see if there was a response, but it just sat there at the end of the thread. Perhaps no one even read it, he thought as he finally got into bed at some hour close to dawn, the ghost image of the computer screen shivering before his closed eyes.
The next morning, his telephone rang early. “Christopher Landes,” he said, leaning over in bed to reach the cordless phone on the bedside table. There was no one there. “Hello.” Silence. He waited for several seconds, waiting to see if the person would speak, or if there was the crackling sound of a bad connection, or to see if the person hung up, but they didn’t, and so he finally did. When he dialed *69, the number was unknown.
He went to work and after lunch, there was a young boy scheduled for the removal of an impacted molar. His assistant gave the boy three shots of Novocain before Christopher began the process of peeling back the gum and chipping out the molar which had grown its roots before it had risen to the surface. The plan was to remove the tooth and then harness a wisdom tooth which had already come in and, over time, pull it over to where the impacted molar once was, tying the boy’s teeth together with metal wires which he would tighten every few weeks until the wisdom tooth was in the right place. As Christopher Landes began to work, the boy groaned and clenched his fists and indicated that he could still feel it and Christopher Landes asked the assistant to give the boy a little more, but the boy could still feel it, his face flushed and eyes wide and fingers writhing, but there was nothing to be done, it wasn’t safe to keep giving the boy shots, so Christopher Landes nodded for his assistant to come and hold the boy’s shoulders and he returned with his tools, occasionally stopping to tell the boy that he was sorry.
As he worked, Christopher Landes could hear sirens rushing up the street. Several, all out of phase, their echoes seeming to bounce in from different directions. In the lobby, the receptionist looked at one of the hygienists with raised eyebrows that said, What is going on in this town? In the operation room, Christopher Landes was sitting still, listening to the sounds, the high wail, the falling and rising of the sine waves, the cresting and breaking, louder now, listening with the drill in his hand, poised in the air, louder now, the drowsing boy in chair before him, the child’s mouth gaping, the ring of red lips, the white stones stabbing through pink knolls and the vertigo-inducing pit before him, dark and glistening with sparks of light from the lamp overhead, louder now, he listened and it sounded as though the sirens were rising up out of the child’s face, louder, lifting upward in strange song, long past the point when the sound should have passed, should have faded, louder and louder, up out of the child’s mouth, the drill still trembling in Christopher Landes’ hand in a moment that would be preserved in the memory of the young dental hygienist sitting across from him, across the void of the child’s face, forever like some long forgotten insect slumbering in amber.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Connerley Nahm is the author of Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky (Two Dollar Radio, 2014). His work has appeared in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Wyvern Lit, Monkeybicycle, Pithead Chapel and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. He lives in Virginia.
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LF #066 © 2014 David Connerley Nahm. Published by Little Fiction | Big Truths, August 2014.
