Trust Your Eyes (5 page)

“You know what I like,” Thomas said.

“But I won’t be here.”

“You can come back,” he said. “Once a week, and get my food and pay the bills and see if the furnace is okay and then you can go back to Burlington.” He paused. “Vermont.”

“What about each day? Let’s say you’ve got some food in the house. Are you going to be okay making your own meals?”

Thomas looked away.

I leaned in a little closer to him, reached out, and touched his arm. “Look at me,” I said. He turned his head back reluctantly.

“Maybe,” I said, “if you made some changes in your routine, maybe you could take on some of these responsibilities yourself.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Well, maybe you need to manage your time better.”

He adopted a puzzled expression. “I manage my time very well.”

I took my hand away and placed both palms down on the table. “Tell me about that.”

“I do. I make very good use of my time.”

“Describe your day for me.”

“Which day? Like, a weekday, or the weekend?” He was stalling.

“Would you say your Monday-to-Friday routine is very different from your weekend routine?”

He thought on that. “I suppose not.”

“Then any day would be fine. You pick.”

Now he eyed me with suspicion. “Are you trying to make fun of me? Are you picking on me?”

“You said you use your time wisely, so tell me.”

“Well,” he said, “I get up around nine o’clock, and I have a shower, and then Dad makes me breakfast around nine thirty, and then I get to work.”

“Work,” I said. “Tell me about that.”

“You know,” he said.

“I just don’t think I’ve heard you call it work before. Tell me about that.”

“I go to work after breakfast, and I take a break for lunch, and then I go back to work until it’s dinnertime, and then I do some more work before I go to bed.”

“And that’s around, what, one, two, three in the morning?”

He nodded.

“Tell me about the work.”

“Why are you doing this, Ray?”

“I guess I’m thinking if you spent a little less time on this work, as you call it, you’d be in a better position to look after yourself. Thomas, it’s no secret you’ve got issues you’ve been dealing with for a very long time, and that they’re ongoing, and I
get that. Just like Dad and Mom did. And, compared to plenty of other people who have the same thing as you, who aren’t able to shut out the voices or deal with other symptoms, you manage very well. You get up, you dress yourself, you and I can sit here and have a rational conversation about things.”

“I know,” Thomas said, somewhat indignantly. “I’m perfectly normal.”

“But the amount of time you spend on your…work stands to interfere with your ability to look after this house on your own, or live here by yourself, and if you’re not able to do that, then we’re going to have to look at some other arrangement.”

“What do you mean, another arrangement?”

I hesitated. “Living somewhere else. Maybe an apartment, in town. Or, and this is something I’ve only just started looking into, some sort of housing where you’d live with other people with similar issues, where there are staff who look after things you can’t look after yourself.”

“Why do you keep saying ‘issues’? I don’t have issues, Ray. I’ve had mental problems, which are very much under control. If you had arthritis, would you want me to say you had an issue with your bones?”

“I’m sorry. I was just…” I didn’t know what to say.

“Is this place where I would live a hospital? For crazy people?”

“I never said you were crazy, Thomas.”

“I don’t want to live in a hospital. The food’s terrible.” He looked at my unfinished meatloaf. “Even worse than that. And I don’t think a hospital room would have an Internet connection.”

“Nobody’s talking about a hospital. But maybe some kind of, I don’t know, a kind of supervised house. You could probably do your own cooking. I could teach you how to do that.”

“I can’t leave,” Thomas said matter-of-factly. “All my stuff is here. My work is here.”

“Thomas, you spend all but an hour of your waking day on
the computer, wandering all over the world. Day after day, month after month. It’s not healthy.”

“It’s only a more recent development,” he said. “A few years ago, all I had was my maps and my atlases and my globe. There was no Whirl360. It’s so much better now. I’ve been waiting my whole life for something like this.”

“You’ve always been obsessed with maps, but—”

“
Interested.
I’ve always been
interested
in maps. I don’t say you’re obsessed with drawing silly pictures of people. I saw that one you did, of Obama, in the white coat with the stethoscope like he was a doctor, that ran in that magazine. I thought it made him look silly.”

“That was the point,” I said. “That was what the magazine wanted.”

“Well, would you call that an obsession? I think it’s just your job.”

This wasn’t supposed to be about me. “This new technology,” I continued, “this Whirl360, has not been healthy for your
interest
in maps. You’re wandering down the streets of cities all over the world, which I grant you can be an interesting thing to do, but, Thomas,
you’re not doing anything else
.”

He looked down at the floor again.

“Are you hearing me? You don’t go out. You don’t see people. You don’t read books or magazines. You don’t even watch television. You never come down and watch a movie.”

“There’s nothing good on,” he said. “The movies are very poor. And they have so many mistakes in them. They’ll say they’re in New York, but you can tell from the background that it’s Toronto or Vancouver or some other place.”

“All you do is sit at the computer and click your way down street after street after street. Listen, you want to see the world? Pick a city. I’ll take you to Tokyo. I’ll take you to Mumbai. You want to see Rome? We’ll go. We’ll sit in some restaurant by the
Trevi Fountain and you can order some pizza or pasta and finish it off with some gelato and it’ll be the most fun you’ve ever had. You’ll be able to see the actual city instead of some static image of it on a computer screen. You’ll be able to touch these places, feel the bricks of Notre Dame under your fingertips, smell the Temple Street Night Market in Hong Kong, listen to karaoke in Tokyo. Pick a place and I’ll take you.”

Thomas looked blankly at me. “No, I wouldn’t want to do that. I like it here just fine. I won’t catch any diseases, or lose my luggage, or end up in a hotel with bedbugs, or get mugged or get sick in a place where I can’t speak the language. And there’s not time.”

“What do you mean, not time?”

“There’s not time to get every place in person. I can get it done here faster, get the work done.”

“Thomas, what
work
?”

“I can’t tell you,” he said. “I’ll have to check and see if it’s okay to tell you.”

I let out a long sigh, ran my hand over the top of my head. I was exhausted. I decided to change the subject.

“You remember Julie McGill? From school?”

“Yes,” Thomas said. “What about her?”

“She came to the funeral. She asked about you. Asked me to say hi.”

Thomas looked at me, expectantly. “Are you going to say it?”

“What?” Then I got it. “
Hi
. If you’d come to the service, she could have said it to you herself.” He didn’t react to that. His refusal to attend was still a sore point with me. “Was she in your class?”

“No,” he said. “She was a year ahead of me, and a year behind you.” Thomas paused. “She lived at 34 Arbor Street, which is a two-story house with the door in the middle and windows on each side and three windows on the second floor and the
house is painted green and there’s a chimney on the right side and the mailbox has flowers stenciled on it. She was always nice to me. Is she still pretty?”

I nodded. “Yeah. Her hair’s still black but it’s short now.”

“Does she still have a bod?” He asked this without a hint of lasciviousness, like he wanted to know whether she was still driving a Subaru.

“I would say yes,” I said. “Did you guys…did you have a thing?”

“A thing?” He really didn’t know.

“Did you go out?”

“No,” he said. I could have guessed. Thomas had never had a steady girlfriend, and had only gone on dates a handful of times that I could remember. His odd, inward nature didn’t help, but I was never all that sure he cared about girls to begin with. Back when I was hiding skin mags under the mattress, Thomas was already amassing his huge map collection.

“But I liked her,” Thomas said. “She rescued me.”

I cocked my head, trying to recall. “That time, with the Landry twins?”

Thomas nodded. He’d been walking home from school when Skyler and Stan Landry, a couple of bullies with the combined IQ of a bucket of primer, had blocked his path and taunted him about how he talked to himself in class. They were starting to push him around when Julie McGill showed up.

“What’d she do?”

“She yelled at them to leave me alone. Stood between them and me. Called them cowards. And something else.”

“What else?”

“Fuckheads.”

I nodded. “Yeah, I remember.”

“It was kind of embarrassing, a girl standing up for you,”
Thomas said. “But they’d have beat me up good if she hadn’t come by. Is there going to be any dessert?”

“Huh? Uh, I don’t know. I think I saw the end of a container of ice cream in the freezer there.”

“Could you bring it up to me? I’ve been down here longer than I planned and I need to get back.” He was already on his feet.

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

“I saw something,” Thomas said.

“What?”

“I saw something. On the computer. I think it would be okay for you to have a look at it. I don’t think it would violate any security clearance or anything.”

“What is it?”

“You should just take a look at it. It would take too long to explain.”

“Can you give me a hint?” I asked.

And he said again, “You should take a look at it.” He paused. “When you bring up the ice cream.”

FIVE

I
went up to Thomas’s room five minutes later. There was a tub of vanilla in the freezer and I was just barely able to scrape out enough for one small serving, which was fine, because I didn’t have much of an appetite.

I should have known better than to think I could reason things out with Thomas about how he spent his days. My parents had tried for years without success. I was a fool to think I could accomplish anything different. My brother was who he was. He’d always been this way and there was every reason to believe he always would.

The signs came early. At least some of them. The fascination with maps revealed itself when he was around six. At the time, my parents thought it was pretty cool. When guests came over they’d show off Thomas the way parents of a child piano prodigy would make him play something by Brahms. “Pick a country,” Dad would say to visitors. “Any country.”

My parents’ friends, not really sure what it was Thomas did, would finally come up with one. “Argentina,” they might say.
And then Thomas, a pencil and notepad in hand, would sketch out the country. Add some dots for cities and label them. Write in the names of neighboring nations. Then he’d hand it over for perusal.

The thing was, our visitors generally didn’t know Argentina from Arkansas, and didn’t have a clue whether the map they’d been handed was accurate, so Dad would pull an atlas off the shelf, open it to Argentina, and say, “Look at that! Will ya look at that? Can you believe it? He even got the city of Mendoza in just the right spot. Kid’s going to be a cartographer or something, I guarantee it.”

If Thomas minded being offered up as a parlor trick, he never voiced an objection. At the time, he just seemed like a very gifted baby brother. Somewhat withdrawn, shy, but no indication that he was troubled in any serious way.

That would come soon enough.

My parents were proud as could be of him. Me, not so much. At least not on family vacations, when Mom would pack everyone’s bag and Dad would load them into the trunk and we’d hit the road for Atlantic City or Florida or Boston. Mom had no sense of direction and had a terrible time reading the road maps the gas stations gave out, although she was a genius at folding them back up perfectly.

So Dad would read the map. When people today talk about the dangers of sending text messages while driving, I want to laugh. My father, had there been smartphones back then, could have tapped out Moby Dick while navigating the Buffalo bypass. He’d have Mom fold the map to a manageable size, drape it over the top of the steering wheel, and glance down every couple of seconds as we roamed across America.

Until Thomas got to be seven.

“I’ll read the map, Dad,” he offered.

Dad ignored him at first, but Thomas persisted. Finally Dad
figured, what the hell, let the kid think he was being useful. But Thomas wasn’t playing some game. He wasn’t pretending to navigate, the way some children, long before they know how to read, will rhyme off words when they open the pages of a book.

Thomas only had to glance at it for a few seconds before he said something like, “Just stay on 90 for another ten miles, then get off and go east on 22.”

“Let me have a look at that,” Dad said, taking the map back and studying it over the steering wheel.

“I’ll be damned,” he said. “The kid’s right.”

Thomas was always right when it came to reading maps.

I’d try to snatch them from him, figuring that, as the elder sibling, I should be the navigator. It tore me apart to see my father consulting my baby brother for assistance.

“Raymond!” my father would shout at me. “Leave your damn brother alone and let him do his job! He knows what he’s doing.”

I’d look at Mom, hoping for some sort of support. “You have things you’re good at,
too
,” she’d say to me. “But Thomas is really good at
this
.”

“What am I good at?” I asked.

She had to think. “You’re a really good drawer. Maybe you could draw some pictures of the places we visit on our trip. That would be fun.”