Later

69

Almost done now (and I remember when I thought thirty pages was a lot!), but not quite, so don’t give up before you check this out:

My grandparents—my only set of grandparents, as it turns out—died on their way to a Christmas party. A guy full of too much Christmas cheer swerved across three lanes of a four-lane highway and hit them head-on. The drunk survived, as they so often do. My uncle (also my father, as it turns out) was in New York when he got the news, making the rounds of several Christmas parties, schmoozing publishers, editors, and writers. His agency was brand-new then, and Uncle Harry (dear old dad!) was kind of like a guy in the deep woods, tending a tiny pile of burning twigs and hoping for a campfire.

He came home to Arcola—that’s a small town in Illinois—for the funeral. After it was over, there was a reception at the Conklins’. Lester and Norma had been well liked, so lots of people came. Some brought food. Some brought booze, which serves as godfather to a great many surprise babies. Tia Conklin, at that time not long out of college and working at her first job in an accounting firm, drank a good deal. So did her brother. Uh-oh, right?

After everybody goes home, Harry finds her in her room, lying on her bed in her slip, crying her heart out. Harry lies down beside her and takes her in his arms. Just for comfort, you understand, but one kind of comfort leads to another. Just that once, but once is enough, and six weeks later Harry—back in New York—gets a phone call. Not long after that, my pregnant mother joins the firm.

Would the Conklin Literary Agency have succeeded in that tough, competitive field without her, or would my father/uncle’s little pile of twigs and leaves have fizzled out in a little runner of white smoke before he could begin to add the first bigger pieces of wood? Hard to say. When things took off, I was lying around in a bassinet, peeing in my Pampers and going goo-goo. But she was good at the job, that I know. If she hadn’t been, the agency would have gone under later, when the bottom fell out of the financial markets.

Let me tell you, there are a lot of bullshit myths about babies born of incest, especially when it comes to father-daughter and sister-brother. Yes, there can be medical problems, and yes, the chances of those are a little higher when it comes to incest, but the idea that the majority of those babies are born with feeble minds, one eye, or club feet? Pure crap. I did find out that one of the most common defects in babies from incestuous relationships is fused fingers or toes. I have scars on the insides of my second and third fingers on my left hand, from a surgical procedure to separate them when I was an infant. The first time I asked about those scars—I couldn’t have been more than four or five—Mom told me the docs had done it before she brought me home from the hospital. “Easy-peasy,” she said.

And of course there’s that other thing I was born with, which might have something to do with the fact that once upon a time, while suffering from grief and alcohol, my parents got a little closer than a brother and sister should have done. Or maybe seeing dead people has nothing at all to do with that. Parents who can’t carry a tune in a tin pail can produce a singing prodigy; illiterates can produce a great writer. Sometimes talent comes from nowhere, or so it seems.

Except, hold it, wait one.

That whole story is fiction.

I don’t know how Tia and Harry became the parents of a bouncing baby boy named James Lee Conklin, because I never asked Uncle Harry for any of the details. He would have told me—the dead can’t lie, as I think we have established—but I didn’t want to know. After he said those two words—I am—I turned away and walked back into the care home to find my mother. He didn’t follow, and I never saw him again. I thought he might come to his funeral, or turn up at the graveside ceremony, but he didn’t.

On the way back to the city (on the bus, just like old times), Mom asked me if something was wrong. I said there wasn’t, that I was just trying to get used to the idea that Uncle Harry was really gone. “It feels like when I lost one of my baby teeth,” I said. “There’s a hole in me and I keep feeling it.”

“I know,” she said, hugging me. “I feel the same way. But I’m not sad. I didn’t expect to be, and I’m not. Because he’s really been gone for a long time.”

It was good to be hugged. I loved my mom and I love her still, but I lied to her that day, and not just by omission. It wasn’t like losing a tooth; what I’d found out was like growing another tooth, one there wasn’t room for in my mouth.

Certain things make the story I just told you seem more likely. Lester and Norma Conklin were killed by a drunk driver while on their way to a Christmas party. Harry did come back to Illinois for their funeral; I found an article in the Arcola Record Herald that says he gave the eulogy. Tia Conklin did quit her job and go to New York to help her brother in his new literary agency early the next year. And James Lee Conklin did make his debut nine months or so after the funeral, in Lenox Hill Hospital.

So yeah yeah yeah and right right right, it could all be just the way I told it. It has a fair amount of logic going for it. But it also could have been some other way, which I would like a lot less. The rape of a young woman who’d drunk herself unconscious, for instance, said act committed by her drunken, horny older brother. The reason I didn’t ask is simple: I didn’t want to know. Do I wonder if they discussed abortion? Sometimes. Am I worried that I have inherited more from my uncle/father than the dimples that show up when I smile, or the fact that I’m showing the first traces of white in my black hair at the tender age of twenty-two? To come right out and say it, am I worried that I may start to lose my mind at the still-tender age of thirty, or thirty-five, or forty? Yes. Of course I am. According to the Internet, my father-uncle suffered from EOFAD: early-onset familial Alzheimer’s disease. It bides its time on genes PSEN1 and PSEN2, and so there’s a test for it: spit in a test-tube and wait for your answer. I suppose I will take it.

Later.

Here’s a funny thing—looking back over these pages, I see that the writing got better as I went along. Not trying to say I’m up there with Faulkner or Updike; what I am saying is that I improved by doing, which I suppose is the case with most things in life. I’ll just have to hope I’ll be better and stronger in other ways when I again meet the thing that took over Therriault. Because I will. I’ve not glimpsed it since that night in Marsden’s house when whatever Liz saw in that mirror drove her insane, but it’s still waiting. I sense that. Know it, actually, although I don’t know what it is.

It doesn’t matter. I won’t live my life with the pending question of whether or not I’m going to lose my mind in middle age, and I won’t live it with the shadow of that thing hanging over me, either. It has drained the color from too many days. The fact that I am a child of incest seems laughably unimportant compared to the black husk of Therriault with the deadlight shining out from the cracks in its skin.

I have done a lot of reading in the years since that thing asked me for a do-over contest, another Ritual of Chüd, and I’ve come across a lot of strange superstitions and odd legends—stuff that never made it into Regis Thomas’s Roanoke books or Stoker’s Dracula—and while there are plenty concerning the possession of the living by demons, I have never yet found one about a creature able to possess the dead. The closest I’ve come are stories about malevolent ghosts, and that’s really not the same at all. So I have no idea what I’m dealing with. All I know is that I must deal with it. I’ll whistle for it, it will come, we will join in a mutual hug instead of the ritual tongue-biting thing, and then… well. Then we’ll see, won’t we?

Yes we will. We’ll see.

Later.