After Eli Read online

  Dad: So when are you going to finish stacking that woodpile, Eli? It looks like Paul Bunyan threw up out there.

  Eli: I said I’d do it, Dad. I’ll do it this weekend.

  Me: Dad, did you see my dragon?

  Dad: That’s a dragon? What kind of dragon is pink? Where’s the mail? Did you kids forget to bring in the mail?

  You see how it was. You’d try to tell him something or show him something but he’d be thinking about something else, like why hadn’t you cut the grass or why hadn’t you taken your shoes off on the porch because they were all over mud and you were tracking up the floors.

  My mom always said that my dad didn’t mean it and he just had a lot of worries, and Eli said nobody could grow up with Aunt Wendy without having TSWS and DTMTA. TSWS was Terminal Social Withdrawal Syndrome and DTMTA was Desire to Move to Australia.

  But back when I was a kid, having a mostly absent dad didn’t bother me all that much because I always had Eli.

  I never thought about how I’d get along without Eli being there. In all those Education Days, that’s one bit I never learned.

  When I think about the terrorist attacks on 9/11, I don’t think just about the people who died. I also think about the lucky ones, the people who nearly died but didn’t. They missed the plane in Boston or were late to work that morning or had a stomachache and decided to stay home sick. They weren’t there when the planes hit and so they survived.

  Afterward, a lot of them were on the news saying how God must have been looking after them that day. But my question is: Why wasn’t God looking after all the passengers on those planes and all the people trapped in the tower on the 106th floor, with the I beams melting under them and the smoke crawling under the doors? Where was God then?

  Pastor Jay says there’s a pattern behind everything that’s just too big for us to understand. But I think he’s wrong there. I don’t think there’s any pattern at all. I think living or dying is just dumb luck. If Eli had taken a few minutes longer to lace up his boots that morning, or if he’d had three eggs for breakfast instead of two, maybe he’d have been in a different truck, one that didn’t run over the bomb.

  Walter says that every time we make a decision, no matter how small, the universe splits into parallel universes, so that there’s a universe where one thing happens and another universe for something else. There are universes where Columbus sank on his way across the Atlantic and where Hitler won World War II. A universe where Eli never went to war, and one where the terrorists never got on the 9/11 planes at all, but decided instead to settle down in Florida and open up a little restaurant on the beach selling crab cakes and French fries and souvenir T-shirts.

  “So how come I have to be in this universe?” I said. “How come I can’t be in some other one, with Eli still in it?”

  Walter said it had something complicated to do with quantum physics.

  I was in fourth grade the year the towers went down, and what I remember most about fourth grade is that I had a Hogwarts pencil box, with Harry Potter pencils that had wizards on them, and stars and owls. It’s weird after all that’s happened how well I can remember that stupid pencil box.

  Everything was all Harry Potter that year. Ms. Mellinger, the fourth-grade teacher, had us all divided up into Hogwarts houses for reading and discussion groups, and I was busy hating her because I was in Hufflepuff. Being pissed at Hufflepuff is what I was thinking about on 9/11.

  When we first heard about the attacks, I wasn’t scared. To tell the truth, I didn’t take it in what was going on, any more than all those little kids at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, understood right off why the president suddenly got that deer-in-the-headlights expression and stopped reading The Pet Goat.

  Also I was sort of used to things crashing and blowing up, due to growing up with Eli across the hall blasting virtual orcs on his computer screen all the time.

  That night, though, when my mom and dad and I watched the news, it got real. The news guys kept replaying those planes crashing into the towers, with people screaming and crying and running, and the buildings spewing out smoke and then just crumpling down like a house of cards. Crash and fall, over and over.

  We heard about the nineteen hijackers with their box cutters, and the staticky voices of people who were about to die making cell phone calls. “We’re all gonna die! We’re all gonna die!” one woman said. She was so damned scared.

  My mom cried and my dad drank Scotch and said a lot of the seven words that nobody is supposed to say. That I was even there shows how upset they were, because usually my mom didn’t let me watch stuff like that.

  Eli called home in the middle of the third replay of the president talking about evil.

  First he talked to Mom and Dad, and from the half I could hear, it didn’t sound like he was exactly defusing a traumatic situation.

  “No,” our mom kept saying. “No. You should be home. We should be together at a time like this.”

  At which point Dad took the phone because Mom had lost it and needed more Kleenex.

  He listened for about six seconds, and then he said, “That’s very idealistic of you, Eli, but don’t be a fool. You can’t do any good there. You want to do something, you go down to the Red Cross and give them a pint of blood or something.”

  Then he said, “Danny’s doing fine.”

  And then our mom started crying harder, and our dad said, “Now, Ellen, please,” and they put me on the phone.

  “You doing fine, Dan?” Eli said.

  “Are they going to blow us all up?” I said.

  “Hell, no,” Eli said. But his voice sounded funny.

  “Did they kill kids?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” Eli said.

  “So what’s happening?” I said. “With you and Mom and Dad?”

  Because they were talking and talking in the kitchen, and our mom was still crying and Dad sounded mad.

  “Listen,” Eli said. “Me and some friends here, we wanted to go to New York and help out, is all. Stuff like this happens, and you want to do something. You don’t want to be one of those guys that just sits back on his ass. You remember when it’s okay to say ass?”

  “When it’s a donkey or anything to do with Timmy Sperdle,” I said. “I wish you were home.”

  “Danny, look, you’re okay,” Eli said. “They’ll figure out what happened and they’ll take care of it. It’s gonna be okay.”

  Then he said, “So you still in Hufflepuff?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “That’s cool,” Eli said. “Hufflepuff sucks, but it doesn’t suck as much as Slytherin. Those Slytherin kids are totally screwed.”

  “Our emblem is a stupid fat badger,” I said. “Slytherin has a snake.”

  “Badgers are smarter than snakes,” said Eli. “Snakes suck. When is it okay to say suck?”

  “Vampires, vacuum cleaners, and anything to do with Timmy Sperdle,” I said.

  “Right,” Eli said. “So you just go to bed, okay? I’ve got a clock right here that says it’s past your pitiful eight-year-old bedtime. If you don’t get your sleep, you’ll grow up to be a midget. You’ll have to stand on a stool to pee.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I said.

  “Well, it’s true,” Eli said. “I swear and double-swear on a two-foot stack of Bibles. So get your short, skinny ass into bed. Now say ‘Good night, Eli.’”

  “Good night, Eli,” I said.

  “Good night, kid,” Eli said.

  Looking back, I think if my dad had just listened then, when Eli wanted to go help in New York, things would have turned out different. Maybe Eli wouldn’t have joined the army if he’d gone and helped in New York.

  I think if my dad had listened, we’d all be in a different parallel universe now, one with Eli still in it.

  This was one reason I hated my dad.

  Before I started keeping my Book of the Dead, all I knew about Archimedes was that thing about the bathtub, how
he jumped out of it, naked as a jaybird, and went running through the streets hollering “Eureka!” He’d discovered that when you sit down in the tub, the water around you goes up, which seems to me more of a “duh” moment than anything else, but Walter says that scientifically it was a big deal.

  Even so, you’d think he could have grabbed a towel.

  Actually Archimedes wasn’t as dumb as he sounds. When the Romans attacked his hometown on the island of Syracuse, Archimedes invented these great Roman-killing war machines. He built a giant iron claw that could yank Roman ships out of the water and a heat ray that used huge mirrors to make Roman ships burst into flames.

  Some Greek archaeologist built a copy of Archimedes’s heat ray a while back and burned up a rowboat with it, which I thought was pretty cool. For a while, Walter and I were thinking about trying to make one of our own to see if we could get Timmy Sperdle on his Jet Ski, but we never did.

  Anyway, when the Romans finally conquered Syracuse, Marcellus, the Roman general-in-chief, gave orders that Archimedes was to be captured but not harmed. Walter says that in war everybody tries to grab the other side’s brainpower, like after World War II when the Russians and the Americans scrambled to divvy up all the German rocket scientists, like Wernher von Braun.

  But unfortunately not everybody listened to Marcellus. Some crap-for-brains soldier found Archimedes sitting there in the middle of the battle, working on a math problem, scratching diagrams of circles in the dust. And, just like that, he stabbed him to death. Archimedes’s last words were supposed to have been “Don’t disturb my circles.”

  I could see Walter dying like that. Getting so obsessed with what’s going on inside his head that he doesn’t notice that there’s some thug the size of a refrigerator looming over him with a sword.

  “Don’t disturb my circles.”

  Walter would say that.

  I didn’t begin to know Walter until three years after Eli died, the summer after our freshman year, when we were both fourteen. That is, I knew who Walter was, because we’d been riding the same school bus back and forth twice a day since forever, but I didn’t really know him, if you see what I mean.

  Walter’s is the bus stop after mine, so he’s always gotten on after me on the way to school in the morning and gotten off before me on the way home in the afternoon. His is the stop at Cemetery Hill Road, which really isn’t much of a hill or much of a road, or for that matter much of a cemetery either, just a bunch of old graves from before the Civil War, a lot of weeds, and a rusty iron fence that’s falling down. The new cemetery, the one where Eli’s buried, sort of butts up against it, but it’s got a road of its own.

  Nobody gets on the bus there but Walter, because Walter’s is the only house on the road, which is a dead end. People used to tease Walter about that, and call him Zombie Boy and Wally the Living Dead, which was partly because of him living near the old cemetery and partly because of Walter himself.

  Walter is tall and skinny, and when he’s thinking, he has a habit of staring at nothing while his eyes flicker back and forth, back and forth, as if he’s picking up signals from outer space. Walter says that thinking is the cerebral manipulation of information, so from the outside it doesn’t look like anything much, but he’s wrong there. From the outside that staring thing he does looks weird as hell.

  Everybody always made fun of Walter, including me. I’m not proud of it, but that’s the way it was. I’ve seen the same thing in Jim Pilcher’s chickens, the way they’ll gang up and peck at any chicken that’s different. Jim keeps an eye out for that so that he can intervene before it goes too far and turns into a chicken bloodbath, but there wasn’t anybody around then to keep an eye out for Walter. He’d hunch up his shoulders and turn his head as if he hadn’t heard what we were saying, but we’d just keep pecking away.

  By the time Walter got on the bus, I was always already there and sitting on the backseat with Peter Reilly and the other guys who hung around with Peter, like Mickey Roberts and Ryan Baker. Peter’s friends are the popular kids, and the backseat is the best. For one thing, it’s got the most legroom, and for another, it’s the farthest from Earl Keever, the bus driver, who has a mean temper and chews Skoal Wintergreen tobacco, so he’s always getting off the bus to spit. Everybody knew that the backseat was reserved for Peter and his friends, and it was a big deal if you got to sit there. It meant you were in.

  Walter always sits in the very front seat, because Walter is about as far out as it’s possible to get.

  From where I sat, I could see the back of Walter’s head, which stuck up above everybody else’s because he’s so tall, with his big poked-out ears and his really short haircut that his mother gave him at home that made him look like he’d backed into a pair of lawn clippers. He always wears white shirts buttoned all the way up to the very top button, the one that nobody normal ever buttons, and instead of carrying a backpack like the rest of us, he lugs around this funky old leather briefcase with buckles that looks like something some professor might carry in one of those movies set in a British boarding school.

  Walter is terminally weird, but he’s smart weird. In fact, he’s the smartest person I’ve ever known, which explains why his only problem in the near future is going to be deciding whether he wants to go to Harvard or Stanford or MIT. When Walter was in third grade, he built a model of King Ludwig’s castle in Bavaria with 11,265 sugar cubes, and in fourth grade, he made a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton from chicken bones. It took three whole chickens, boiled.

  Also he’s read practically everything in the world, including stuff that nobody else would in a million years, like The Iliad by Homer and On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and Plato’s Republic.

  Peter Reilly wouldn’t leave Walter alone about reading Plato.

  “Hey, Wally, you reading any more Play-Doh?” he’d yell.

  And then we’d all chime in.

  Peter is the captain of the hockey and soccer teams, and by our freshman year he’d had five serious girlfriends already, which was probably some kind of record. Freshman year it was Amanda Turner, who has long blond hair and boobs the size of watermelons and is the hottest girl in our class.

  Peter’s hair is practically white and cut sort of spiky, and he swaggers when he walks, very cool and laid-back, like Clint Eastwood in that movie where he says, “Go ahead, make my day.” Peter has what they call leadership qualities, because people always somehow end up doing what he says. He was the person I always thought I’d want to be if I could be somebody other than me.

  Not that I would have said so.

  “In your dreams, Anderson,” Peter would have said, and he’d have punched me in the arm, the way he does with friends.

  Peter has a mean punch too. He works out on his brother Tony’s Bowflex machine.

  I’m on a couple of teams, but I’m not great at sports, not like Eli was. I don’t do so great academically either, but I get by. Teachers like me, and the guys in my class think I’m a good sport, and the girls think I have a cute smile, so they call me sometimes on the phone.

  To tell the truth, though, the year when I was fourteen, I could still take or leave girls. I liked girls all right, but not just one yet, like she was special.

  I hadn’t met Isabelle then.

  I didn’t meet Isabelle first though. First I met the twins.

  There aren’t any twins in my Book of the Dead. The closest I’ve got are the two little Princes in the Tower, who were smothered to death when they were just kids by order of their wicked uncle, King Richard III. Their skeletons were found two hundred years later, stuffed under a staircase in the Tower of London.

  On the other hand, after spending fifteen minutes or so with the twins, you start thinking maybe King Richard had a point. I saw a picture of those princes once in some book, looking pretty harmless, with long golden curls and these little black velvet outfits. But looks can be deceptive. Maybe the little princes were real pai
ns in the ass too.

  Isabelle’s family moved here just before school got out, sometime at the beginning of June. Her parents had taken a summer’s lease on the old Sowers house, because Isabelle’s father, who teaches history at some college, wanted a relaxing atmosphere in which to write a monograph about Oliver Cromwell and his pivotal role in the English Civil War, and Isabelle’s mother, who is an artist, wanted to experience the rural countryside and paint interpretive pictures of fields and cows.

  My dad said they’d been taken for a ride, and that if Harry Sowers weren’t as tight as a duck’s ass, he’d have bulldozed that damn place ten years ago and built some condos on top of the rubble and this time put in some insulation and modern plumbing. But I was just as glad he hadn’t, because I always thought the old Sowers place was cool.

  The Sowers house is the oldest house on our road. It’s big and gray, with a porch with pillars all across the front and a funny little cupola up on top and a lot of huge tall windows with little panes of thick old wavy glass and about a million rooms. At the end of the driveway, there’s a pair of stone gateposts where some past Sowers was thinking of putting something impressive in the way of statues, but whoever it was went broke before he did.

  The Sowerses used to be rich way back when, but they lost all their money in 1929, when the stock market crashed and started the Great Depression. So the lions or griffins or Greek goddesses or whatever never got put on the gateposts, and ever since then, the house has been going downhill. Grandma O’Brian, my mother’s mother, said that her mother remembered when there were dances and banquets at the Sowers house, and there used to be a French cook and maids in little ruffled aprons and caps and a chauffeur in a uniform with gold buttons and a cap with gold braid.

  By the time Isabelle and her family moved in, though, the yard was nothing but hay, and there were bats in the attic, and a lot of the wallpaper was brown with damp and peeling off the walls. But Isabelle didn’t care. She liked the crown molding in the old Sowers dining room, and the claw-foot bathtubs, and the parlor with the gold peacocks on the walls.