1. OUTSIDE IN

AT LAST I threw my tools in the van, drove back to Jud’s Mobil, and called the real estate agent. I told his answering machine that the house had front steps but don’t show it to anyone over two hundred pounds. On an impulse, I phoned the Red Roof Inn and canceled. Then I jumped in the van and drove home.

I’d get there between one and two A.M. It was stupid, I knew, driving home at night, exhausted. But I was desperate to get back. I pictured Hannah and our boys in upstate New York, where our house did not smell, nor had it been abandoned. Rather, it was filled with books and paintings, stuffed with boys’ things—bicycles, basketballs, climbing magazines, Clearasil—and in my mind’s eye it almost seemed to be breathing, set against its hill. Paul’s house was a shell, but ours had a heart and lungs, vital circuits, beds for dreaming . . . front stairs too.

I was fleeing Paul, I realized, yet doing it in his car. So as I fled him, in a sense he surrounded me. It suddenly felt like bathing in his water. Some things come full circle, I suppose. Paul had died of an aneurysm; how would I die?

My thumb continued to throb in its Band-Aid. Overhead, the empty sky was a huge white sponge, absorbing all the light. Trees and hills had darkened, and the headlights of cars in the opposite lane were perfect little aspirins. Air cool and dry. I might even need to put the heat on pretty soon, so I code-checked the dashboard, the van being new to me. I felt like a fighter pilot, in control, then imagined that Paul, driving this van, must have felt the same way when he’d traveled this route to visit us. There was still enough light to watch the road slowly open, watch the screen of appearances split down the middle and curl to either side like shavings from a plane. Yet something in that screen continued to withdraw, to shrink from my approach. As the world opened up, something inside it, buried deeply, withdrew.

Then night came all at once, as though a door had slammed. Driving in darkness was more dangerous, I knew, than driving in daylight, yet it felt agreeable. It felt crustacean. The other cars now rinsing through my vision out there in the night were fellow bottom feeders. Their drivers were mostly alone like me, as far as I could tell. By now I was on I-93, a road marked by blood. Several years after this highway first opened, in the 1960s, when I was a teen, my father and I, returning to Boston from New Hampshire after visiting his chiropractor—chiropractic then being outlawed in Massachusetts—passed a fresh wreck at a bridge abutment in Methuen, somewhere close to here. People had pulled off the road to take a look. The driver’s door was ripped off, and the body of a woman lay across the seat, her legs severed at the knees. Having just obtained my license, I was driving. “Just keep going,” my father said. The males in my family never said, “Oh, how horrible,” or “Are you okay?” Just keep going.

At home that night I wrote my first poem, “The Accident,” and showed it to Paul, who lived with us now, after Grandma’s death. Paul had been in the army; he’d seen the world. He lay back on his bed, lit up a cigarette, read my poem, and kicked me out of our room. You don’t know a damn thing about life, he said.

 

Driving Paul’s car, I listened to his music. His van had a CD player, a luxury my cars never had possessed. When the van became mine I inspected all its crannies and compartments, opened every receptacle. In a drawer beneath the passenger seat was a cache of classic jazz CDs, including one I’ve since played repeatedly, Early Duke. Somewhere on I-495 I slid it into the player and “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” came on, from 1926. Ellington describes it as a portrait of an old man walking home after a hard day of working in the fields, and he and his broken walk are coming up the road, but you know he’s strong in spite of being tired.

I followed my headlights flying down the road, listening to this number. Then I played it again, turned up the volume at the chorus of Steamboat Willy muted trumpets, and laughed out loud. When the ominous zoom-zoom line of the tuba and lower-register reeds returned, I thought of the proud gloom of the cellos and basses in the principal theme of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. Ellington was similar but less ponderous. Pure unfettered joy with a cartoon shadow. I slapped my hand on the steering wheel and started crying. What a lost bright world, I thought, it will never come again. So why am I so happy?

I knew why. I’d gotten everything done and now was going home. I’d fulfilled my duties as reluctant executor and now could forget my brother for a while.

But I couldn’t. I began to wonder about Paul’s love of jazz, another corner of his personality I’d never understood. When I was a senior in high school, he took me to see Dizzy Gillespie at Storyland in Boston. Having been raised by Grandma in a country village, he never seemed to feel comfortable living in the city after she died. He’d served in the army, then moved in with us, sharing my room, but still called himself a country boy. Yet jazz was big-city music, was it not?

At the time, he was working in a South End warehouse. We saw Dizzy on a weeknight, weeknights being cheaper. I nursed a single ginger ale all evening, because Paul, who was treating, had warned me to order only one drink. I could tell the music filled him with pleasure, since he kept his mouth shut and smirked, to seal it in. Each time Dizzy’s cheeks puffed larger than grapefruits, Paul wanted to laugh, just like me listening to “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” now.

But no one laughed or shouted for joy or wept at Storyland; jazz, which used to be hot, now was cool. Between sets, Paul became nervous and withdrawn. He leaned back in his chair and his eyes scanned the room. The people in that club were hard to read, I remember—tough guys and hoods who talked like Kennedys. And the audience was racially mixed, a rare thing then in Boston.

Riding home on the bus, Paul shrank into himself. If I was seventeen then, he was over thirty. We were alone until the bus stopped somewhere on Broadway and a punk stepped on with regulation hair—ducktail and sideburns. He wasn’t that much older than me, and on that empty bus he chose to hang on a strap directly over Paul, waving his knee back and forth, back and forth. My brother finally mumbled, “Let’s go,” and pulled the cord. We had to squeeze past the little hood, who wouldn’t move. It was three or four stops before ours. We walked home in single file down Broadway to Summer Street.

Past Lowell, I switched on the cruise control—the traffic had thinned. Chrysler’s little ghost in the machine held my speed constant at 63 miles per hour. One of Ellington’s signature tunes came on, “Black and Tan Fantasie,” 1927. After the bouncy intro, Bubber Miley’s high opening B-flat extends for four bars, then explodes into yacky rain forests. Somewhere in the middle of this “magnificently structured melodic creation” (Gunther Schuller), Tricky Sam Nanton’s plaintive trombone whinnies like a lovesick horse. The whole thing ends with a tag based on Chopin’s “Funeral March.”

The next cut was another version of the same, recorded two weeks later. Driving through the darkness, I floated on the music. My alpha rhythms seemed to have adjusted to the hum of the tires and the rise and fall of Duke Ellington’s music, and were hypnotizing me into feeling eternal.

Then I thought it wouldn’t last. I began worrying about auto accidents, about smashing up the car. The thought was phantasmic. It could happen, but probably wouldn’t. Still, it could happen. Earlier, in twilight, that was the thing that withdrew as I approached it, buried inside the opening world—that ghostly potential of a violent smash.

How slowly it seems to unfold, when it does. There’s always a skid, a wait lasting centuries. Once, with a friend who made an ill-advised left turn against traffic on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston, I calmly watched as a delivery truck skidded into the door beside me. Last year, driving at night outside Ithaca, I ran over a deer already dead in the road, and realized what a solid obstacle soft bodies can make. Part of the carcass got caught on the car’s frame, which drove our dog crazy. I parked outside for a few nights, and it quickly disappeared—we live in the country.

The only line I remember from Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange is the one about driving back to town, “running over odd squealing things on the way.”

What would movies be without hard cars and soft bodies? The movie screen shows what the windshield mustn’t, “images of the body in extreme circumstances” (Lennard Davis). Comforts of the movie house ape those of driving, but movies are safer—you’re not flying through space. The multiplex is our Roman coliseum. You suck on greasy popcorn while bodies splash across the screen like forbidden fruit torn open—eroticized or mutilated bodies, bodies aroused or bodies riddled with bullets, bodies crushed in cars, bodies exploded, bodies chopped up, bodies thrown off roofs.

Coming home from Storyland that night, Paul sat slumped on the bus, his usual posture. Perhaps his body language invited aggression. Yet he’d enlisted in the army—he’d been schooled in bravado. I remembered how he looked upon arriving home, having served his hitch, when he first came to live with us. He’d been stationed in Bakersfield, California, and, he later told us, once was shipped to Nevada, to witness from a bunker an above-ground nuclear test with dark glasses issued by the army.

I’d just become a high school sophomore. We expected him that weekend, but on Sunday, not Saturday, and no one had heard the car drop him off. He burst into the kitchen in full uniform, then stood there saluting, and my mother squealed, “Paul!” “Blood and Guts!” I shouted—the name his platoon had christened him with, as he’d informed us in a letter. Even then I sensed their sarcasm, but really, who knew? It could have been affectionate, could have followed from his buddies’ smiling acknowledgment of some unexpected pluck.

He looked sharp and smiled broadly and announced to Mom how he’d mop the kitchen floor once a week now, having learned to in the army. “You’ll do it twice, then forget it,” said Dad at the table. “How you doing?” he added.

It couldn’t have been very long after that that Paul bought his microbus and we’d just finished washing it. Pride of ownership, neighborhood safekeeping, surplus army spunk—God knows what the cause was—but when a car ran the Stop sign at the corner, Paul stepped into the street and shouted as it passed, “Hey fella, that sign says Stop, not Slow Down.”

Squeal of tires, slam of door. He stood above Paul, a tall boulder-bellied man with white hair and pale skin, crazed and cracked across his face, and thick black-rimmed glasses. He must have been twice my brother’s age, well over sixty, but he inquired about his balls—would Paul like to keep them? My brother, I saw, did not know what to say. There was a code in our neighborhood. I knew it well enough to avoid, when I could, occasions to practice it, but Paul didn’t have a clue. He was supposed to act puzzled and use words to this effect: How come your keeper released you, you crazy fuck? Then, for example, if he were Joe Pesci, he would have lunged for the carotid with his ballpoint pen. Instead, he wilted like a flower. “It didn’t look like you stopped,” he managed.

“That’s none of your fucking business, is it?”

“Well—it didn’t look like you stopped.”

Behind some parked cars, I hung my head—like Paul—hands in pockets, from shame as much as fear.

“Get the fuck off the street,” said the man. Paul did as he was told. “Mind your own fucking business after this, you little creep.”

Paul said nothing.

Invigorated, beet-faced by now, the man jumped in his car, slammed the door, and drove off.

 

Somewhere beyond Littleton, I pulled off for gas and found myself in a Texaco convenience store, a red and black hallucination. Every car here was a sport utility vehicle, and most of the customers wore athletic shoes to match, with high wraparound soles and little trapezoidal air vents. When I walked inside to pay—past green, blue, and red twelve-packs of soda stacked shoulder-high in the glass entry—the fluorescent wonderland seemed full of exotic produce. They were merely human beings, I knew, but what grotesque examples! It must have been my mood. The store also housed a Baskin-Robbins, a Blimpie, and an A & W, and perhaps for that reason everyone in it seemed well fed. In fact, most were eating—burgers or cones—as they milled among the snacks, sunglasses, Tampax, refill mugs, aspirin, hairbrushes in plastic bubbles, and shrink-wrapped firewood. One little girl with a dolly-mop head seemed not to have a body so much as a stick. The rest were hewn solids, some squat as bowling pins, some tall with high knees, and nearly everyone wore shorts. Did that account for their strangeness? I saw body types, not people, and wondered how they saw me, with my grass-stained jeans still brushed with sawdust. They didn’t seem to notice.

Two dolphin-shaped women with Red Sox caps and ponytails swinging from the caps’ rear vents studied the thousand varieties of chips. Round faces, yellow eyes, straw-colored hair, rhino folds above their knees. A middle-aged man, squat like a tree stump, wore shorts that came down below his knees and a grandpa undershirt, without sleeves. Ropes of muscles seemed to torture his upper body, and the Lenin mustache and beard so black on his face looked pleasingly at odds with the gray stubble on his head.

There were hourglass bodies whose hips and shoulders billowed, and pear-shaped bodies, and torsos like drainpipes. The Scandinavian look: large bony ears, prominent nose, high cheeks, long neck, skinny body, small breasts, and big flat hands. One boy had pulled his arms inside his T-shirt and folded them there; he looked like a kitchen sink. His gold hair matched a small gold cross hung on a chain around his neck. My Britannica describes “physiognomy” as the practice of reading moral character through bodily and facial characteristics, but to me these people were all blank slates. I had no idea who they were. They were red and yellow photos, they’d flown into their casings, they were outsides without insides, yet had colorful feathers.

It wasn’t that long ago that police and criminologists consulted charts of body types and head shapes in their work. So did eugenicists. The goal was not just weeding out degenerates, it was ensuring the tyranny of the normal, in Leslie Fiedler’s phrase. According to Fiedler, social groups achieve this goal by arranging for the ritual slaughter of freaks. It must not have worked. At the beginning of the twentieth century, cries for fitness and health, anti-immigration sentiments, the eugenics movement, and proposals for the sterilization of criminals and other defectives had apparently failed, if the sideshow before me was any measure. One splendid specimen with a thick tubular neck walked around with such authority you could draw a straight line from the back of his head all the way down his shoulders to the small of his back. It was as though, for a brace, he were wearing a tire iron. With his large bony head and tiny baseball cap, sucking on a Tootsie Roll Pop—wearing white socks and Teva sandals—he was hardly an exception to the general menagerie, but part of the show.

I’ve noticed it often in nineteenth-century novels—the recourse to physiognomy. In Mrs. Gaskell’s Mary Barton a man at a trial says of the accused, “I am no physiognomist, but I don’t think his face strikes me as bad.” And what signifies bad? According to Cesare Lombroso, in his L’Uomo delinquente (1876), the moral birthmarks, or stigmata, to look for in born criminals were receding foreheads, massive jaws, prognathous chins, heads lacking symmetry, long, large, and projecting ears, rectilinear noses, strongly marked wrinkles, thick hair on the head, scanty hair on cheeks and chin, feline eyes (cold, fixed, and glassy), a long span of extended arms, an ape-like agility, and superior eyesight, though the other senses generally lacked acuteness. What, then, was normalcy in such an economy? The neutral face, the average body? No such thing exists. Yet the urge to “read” bodies has proven irresistible, and may stem from a desire to find a “natural” language, both common and self-evident. Since we live in a fallen world, however, one sage’s self-evident lexicon of body types is another’s secret code. Robert Fludd, for example, in his History of the Microcosm (1620), said that large and fleshy feet mean foolishness in love, very hairy arms signify madness, a nose that reaches the mouth indicates a generous person, and baldness is a sign of perspicacity.

Where do such pronouncements come from? The roots of physiognomy lie in the ancient world, according to my Britannica. The earliest physiognomist was a man named Zopyrus, who analyzed Socrates’ face and body and pronounced him to be oversexed, dull, and stupid. When Socrates’ disciples laughed, the master stopped them. It was true, he said. That was his former character before he took up philosophy.

But my favorite is Aristotle. In his treatise on physiognomy (which may be spurious) he says that those with bulbous noses are piggish and insensitive, while sharp-tipped noses belong to the churlish—who are like dogs—and large, obtuse noses to the generous and leonine. Slender, hooked noses are signs of an eagle-like and noble character, retrousse noses of people who act like preening roosters, noses with notches of the crowish and impudent, and snub noses of the indolent and luxurious, whom Aristotle compares to deer.

I saw no notched noses in the Texaco convenience store, but did note a man with a crease across his head and a bulging brow, like a bufflehead duck’s. The code’s secret, then, was our link with the animals. From Aristotle’s litany of snouts and beaks to Lombroso’s apish and feline birthmarks, the common template describing human variety had been borrowed from the circus and zoo. What a key! Welcome to the monkey house. I saw octopal hips, avian eyes and chins, large thickets of hair, even sagittal crests. One overweight girl rounding an aisle flapped her hands like flippers, while a tall man behind her walked with delicate balance, flexing his body exactly like a giraffe’s.

Then something kicked me in the chest. I’d just handed my Visa card to the boy behind the counter, and we were waiting for the okay. A snatch of conversation drifted by—“maxed out my 401(k)”—and a woman asked the clerk where the copy machine was. I swiveled my head and noticed three men emerging from an arched doorway leading to the fast-food booths. Behind them at a table sat my brother, hunched over a burger. His large nose and ears, his horn-rimmed glasses, his small and mousy head, and the way his gray hair lapped down over his ears—his baggy trousers, his gynecoid body type—all stamped him as Paul. I felt myself sinking. I was breathing through a straw. He must have seen me frozen there, openly staring, because he looked up and by the grace of God the resemblance passed like a shadow racing up the face of a cliff. The man became someone else, a subaltern Mr. Potato Head, perhaps. I hurried out the door, shaken.

Half an hour later I was speeding through Worcester, passing church façades lit up by spotlights beside the elevated highway. Fifty years ago, what the future would look like was elevated highways threading through skyscrapers twenty stories up. The future is always more modest than its simulacra, but this city interstate still had a certain cachet. Branches of streetlights whipped past below the highway. I spotted the night, solid as a girder, beyond the cloudy glow suspended over the city. The downtown lights were pretty bright to the right, but the darkness to the left was more familiar to me, where I-290 crossed the old Route 9 cutoff. I knew what it looked like even if I couldn’t see it. Before this artery was built, when I was growing up, we’d taken that road every weekend of my life to visit Grandma and Paul, ten miles west in Wire Valley. It runs between railroad tracks and some raw-looking tenements stacked on a hill.

The song on the CD now was “The Mooche,” another of Ellington’s Cotton Club dance numbers. On this one, Miley uses a mute made from a bathroom plunger for his wah-wah trumpet. “I feel in this piece a conflict of two elemental forces,” said a Dutch critic after Ellington’s band played a concert in Utrecht—this is on the liner notes—“one the violence of Nature, which is an eternal struggle with the other, the force of Man, a more melancholy, restrained and mental force.” Well. It does brood, that’s true. It haunts you like a shadow straining to reach.

It was only nine o’clock and my back was getting sore. I had four or five more hours of driving to go.