Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [173]
The new man starts to walk down the aisle of the plane, his oblong, three-holed head turning from side to side. A second man walks behind him. Eerily, the taped music comes on over the intercom, saccharine, soporific. The man pauses; his oversized head moves ponderously left, like the head of some shortsighted, dull-witted monster. He extends an arm, gestures with the hand: Up. It’s my brother he points to.
Here I stop inventing. I’ve spoken with the witnesses, the survivors, so I know that my brother stands up, eases himself past the man in the aisle seat, saying, “Excuse me.” The expression on his face is one of bemused curiosity: these people are unfathomable, but then so are most. Perhaps they have mistaken him for someone else. Or they may want him to help negotiate, because they’re walking toward the front of the plane, where another pillowhead stands waiting.
It’s this one who swings open the door for him, like a polite hotel doorman, letting in the full glare of day. After the semidarkness it’s ferociously bright, and my brother stands blinking as the image clears to sand and sea, a happy vacation postcard. Then he is falling, faster than the speed of light.
This is how my brother enters the past.
I was on planes and in airports for fifteen hours, getting there. I saw the buildings after that, the sea, the stretch of runway; the plane itself was gone. All they got in the end was safe conduct.
I didn’t want to identify the body, or see it at all. If you don’t see the body, it’s easier to believe nobody’s dead. But I did want to know whether they shot him before throwing him out, or after. I wanted it to be after, so he could have had that brief moment of escape, of sunlight, of pretended flight.
I did not stay up at night, on that trip. I did not want to look at the stars.
The body has its own defenses, its way of blocking things out. The government people said I was wonderful, by which they meant not a nuisance. I didn’t collapse or make a spectacle of myself; I spoke with reporters, signed the forms, made the decisions. There was a great deal I didn’t see or think about until much later.
What I thought about then was the space twin, the one who went on an interplanetary journey and returned in a week to find his brother ten years older.
Now I will get older, I thought. And he will not.
69
My parents never understood Stephen’s death, because it had no reason; or no reason that had anything to do with him. Nor did they get over it. Before it, they were active, alert, vigorous; after it they faded.
“It doesn’t matter how old they are,” my mother said. “They’re always your children.” She tells me this as something I will need to know, later on.
My father became shorter and thinner, visibly shriveled; he sat for long periods, without doing anything. Unlike himself. This is what my mother told me, over the telephone, long distance.
Sons should not die before their fathers. It’s not natural, it’s the wrong order. Because who will carry on?
My parents themselves died in the usual way, of the things elderly people die of, that I myself will die of sooner than I think: my father instantly, my mother a year later, of a slower and more painful disease. “It’s a good thing your father went the way he did,” she said. “He would have hated this.” She didn’t say anything about hating it herself.
The girls came for a week, early on, at the end of summer, when my mother was still in her house in the Soo and we could all pretend this was just another visit. I stayed on after them, digging weeds out of the garden, helping with the dishes because my mother had never got a dishwasher, doing the laundry downstairs in the automatic washer but hanging it out on the line because she thought driers used up too much electricity. Greasing the muffin tins. Impersonating a child.
My mother is tired, but restless. She won’t take naps in the afternoon, insists on walking to the corner store. “I can manage,” she says. She doesn’t want me to cook