Slide - Kyle Beachy [22]
And oh Jesus that noise. Even when the squirrels were at rest there was another sound, this awful like tap or pat from somewhere up there with the squirrels, in apparently the busiest goddamn attic this side of the Mississippi. Sex everywhere we could manage it, exploring campus nooks and crannies. Put your foot here. Hold this. The study lounge of her dormitory, carpeted. Later that week we lay naked in bed, fan blowing, Audrey pressing a finger against the twin rug burns on my knees. Pain and joy. Memories arrived with perfect lucidity and a fondness that worked like some inverse torture. Sharing a table in the library, studying, she reached across and pushed my copy of Franny and Zooey to the floor. I retaliated with her City of Quartz. One by one until all of our books stacked into a beautiful interdisciplinary pile. Our ridiculous laughter.
Like some kind of godshit squirrel carnival up there. I went to the hallway closet that accessed the attic. Tossed winter coats and slid boxes of Christmas decorations into the hall. I lowered the ladder and stared up into the black black black above. Scared. There was a light switch, but it was upstairs in the middle of that darkness, which now seemed absolutely idiotic. Squirrels, I thought, squirrels bite and carry disease. Everyone knows this. I was wearing boxer shorts and nothing else. I climbed the ladder and stood with my shoulders and head through the trapdoor, listening for signs of squirrels. Nothing. Minutes passed, and I climbed the last few rungs until I was fully and completely in the attic.
From the inside, darkness isn't as dark. My eyes adjusted quickly to the light from the only window. Boxes were stacked in awkward piles that looked like they might fall at any moment. Here was the only room in the house untouched by my mother's decoration, the structure in its raw state. Planks for floor, walls and ceiling of poofy insulation. This was my family's attic, an explosion of data. I wondered what could possibly be inside all the boxes. I inhaled and panned from one wall to the other and back again.
There was somebody sitting on a box. A person. He was shirtless and shoeless, wearing a bathing suit and water wings. He was sopping wet and dripping onto the floor. And he was feeding squirrels.
“If you're going to stare like that this isn't going to work do you understand.”
Low and steady, his voice sounded like someone translating words into English that had just recently been translated into some other language, from English. I nodded several times in succession.
“I'm worried about you,” he said. “You used to be so smart and composed and now look at you you're a mess. These furry guys will spend all night long with you if you're holding food look see how they're waiting for me they will wait all night.”
I moved a step toward him. The attic smelled like trapped breath. Freddy was in perfectly adequate shape, not fat and not skinny. He looked to have ten pounds on me, no more. But what distinguished him as a character was the authority with which he sat on that box and fed the squirrels. He had a motorcyclist's ease about him, a formal serenity that gave the impression of someone who knew precisely what was what. I took him seriously— this despite the bright orange water wings around his arms.
“I have advice to give you if you want it I don't know if it will help,” he said.
“You're Freddy,” I said idiotically
There was no doubt that this was my dead brother, grown. Age twenty-seven, a spitting image of my father. He sat on a box with his elbows pressed against his thighs, bent forward, holding what looked like a dinner roll. Five squirrels waited motionless