Andy Leanza
Minotaur
It was still dark when he came into the world.
He flopped onto the ground with a loud belch of steam and a gush of red muck, as still as a corpse, a thick film of placenta wrapped around his head like a plastic shopping bag. The dust started to settle on him, turning to mud. The next moment he was writhing blindly through the grime, while my father’s deft hands tore the gummy hood off his muzzle, the sheer broadness of it drawing a smile of appreciation from the crowd. Stubbornly, amid loud cheering, he tried to get up, failing again and again as if drunk on too much life already. His mother nudged him patiently, lapping the filth off his otherwise immaculate coat, and soon he was on his knees, dragging himself toward her teats like a cripple on stumps. Outside, the black walnuts were turning blue.
They named him Morning Star.
Nine months later he weighed 1,530 pounds, with a frame as square as a Greek temple and horns measuring four feet from tip to tip. His scrotal circumference was a monstrous fifty-seven centimeters. A godsend. It had taken Dad nearly twenty-five years, but finally his dream had come true. He had bred a champion who would sire sons and daughters by the thousands. His only regret was that his own father hadn’t had a chance to behold him. The old man had passed away a couple of weeks before the bull’s birth, quietly, in his sleep they said, although his eyes were in fact wide open when they found him, as if he had been staring at the black ceiling all night long.
My grandfather’s eyes had been the deepest blue—made not so much of the stuff of skies, I thought, as of booming oceans. A sea creature, born and raised on the coast, he had served as a gunner aboard the USS Missouri during the Korean War before moving inland to Texas Tech on an engineering scholarship. Here he met my grandmother. She came from Throckmorton County, where her family owned a forty-thousand-acre ranch that dated back to the Spanish-American war. Without thinking twice, Grandpa switched his major to Agricultural Sciences and eventually married into the business. He had found himself not only a wife, but a vocation, too.
Those were the late fifties. By 1967, the year my father was born, my grandfather had crossed a Hereford with a Brown Swiss. The calves had great hardiness and carcass quality, but the color was weird. A dull grayish brown marred by darker streaks and haphazard patches. They looked mangy, like a pack of stray dogs. Hell, you’re selling steaks, not hide, my grandfather would tell his customers, but they could not be persuaded. Strange how beauty in its most elemental form—color—turned out to be the determinant factor among those hardy, level-headed meat-packers. In the end Grandpa had to auction off the whole stock at half price. And then he began all over again. This time, instead of Brown Swiss, he used Simmental, getting rid of the color problem while improving weaning weight and percentage calf crop.
Weaning weight, percentage calf crop: these empty alliterations had reverberated inside me for years with a mysterious, almost liturgical quality. But gradually, as their meaning seeped in, they began to lose their ring. Calf crop. It sounded like corn production now. The weaning was our harvest.
My father inherited Grandpa’s passion for gene tinkering and after high school he studied genetics at Texas Tech. One of the old man’s main concerns had always been cattle heat tolerance, so over the years he’d added Brahman to his Simmental hybrid and eventually had a cargo of Senepol flown in directly from the Caribbean. By the time my father graduated, the ranch had its own registered heat-proof cattle breed. But once again the market was slow to respond. The family motto was: Fine Beef for God’s Fine People. They were creating premium beef, but for some reason they weren’t selling it as fast as they should.
It was Dad, fresh from graduation, who put his finger on the problem. A recurring pattern: his father was repeating the same mistake that had led him to the crisis in 1967. He was dealing with issues of carcass quality and heat tolerance, but was forgetting, once again, to address the question of beauty. I could almost see Grandpa’s face. His own son, speaking like a Fine Arts graduate? The hell were they teaching kids these days at TT? It’s called marketing, my dad would say. He had taken business classes on top of genetics. Whatever we’re selling, what we sell, first and foremost, is an idea. Fine Beef for God’s Fine People. So these calves we’re selling, they sure as hell better measure up. Gifts of God to the American people, from the very heart of Texas.
What my father had in mind was a simple yet powerful vision. A vision of purity and tradition. A white bull. But not just any ordinary white bull. A bull that had Texas all over it. A Longhorn top breeding bull as white and unblem- ished as freshly fallen snow.
* * *
Beauty and purity, they went hand in hand for my father. He was a tall shy man with a pencil-thin mustache that flashed like a copper wire when he smiled. Like most cowboys, he always carried a pocket knife with him for scraping the dry mud off his boots. And his iPhone of course, on which he would scroll through the herd’s latest EPDs: Expected Progeny Differences, an endless flow of genetic evaluation stats as cryptic as a list of stock quotes. He wore a clean blue shirt every day of the year, except at funerals, and a white hat with a flat brim to keep the sun out of his eyes, which unlike his father’s shone with the hard red luster of horse chestnuts. He was shy, but not withdrawn. Far from it. If he wasn’t out on the pastures with the guys or at the AI—the ranch’s artificial insemination center—he was looking at bulls somewhere or picking up cows. He ran the school board and coached the girl’s JV soccer team, on which I played too—not exactly a privilege: even though I was the top scorer, he unfailingly started me on the bench. Sunday mornings he sang in the choir. And he was never ashamed of bringing flowers home. He gathered them himself, using his pocketknife, sheaves of horsemint, goldenrod and blue vervain that he tied with strands of frayed hay string and dunked in the water pitcher at the center of our table.
On the rare occasions I had seen him naked, fewer and fewer as my own sharp edges rounded out, I gazed in wonder at the milky smoothness of his body, untouched as it was by the sun. It stood out in stark contrast with the baked crust of his face, hands and forearms, the pale moons of his buttocks rising from the springy turf of his thighs, followed by the clean double sheath of his back and the gleaming shoulder blades. Always a rawboned man, his bare torso seemed to me to be clad in a notched, snaggy armor, giving him the appearance of a battered knight riding bareback through the underbrush.
He always claimed that with Mom it was love at first sight—even after what happened later—in an attempt, perhaps, to sanction the fatefulness of their bond and expunge any margin for reexamination.
They had met quite late in life, at least according to our small-town standards. I believe it was my grandmother’s early demise that finally cleared the path for my father.
Mom was thirty-five, a year older than him and almost a spinster by then, an English teacher from Oklahoma whose sturdy German genes had somewhat softened after two generations in Kiowa land, allowing shades of rich caramel into the pure diamond of her hair and flecks of lilac in the steel of her irises. Shorter and less buxom than her ancestors, she retained their large feet and a certain heaviness around her ankles and jaw. Hardly a striking woman from a distance, she easily went unnoticed at social gatherings, but under closer scrutiny her features would acquire a sudden distinctiveness, falling into place all at once as it were, like the answer to a riddle or a long-forgotten rhyme. She never wore any makeup, nor made the slightest effort to enhance her figure. She spurned fa- cial creams and body lotions, even though her skin chapped easily and peeled in the sun. At times she seemed almost oblivious of her body and as the years went by she became more and more like those coarse, untended prairie wildflowers my father never failed to bring home.
It had been almost a year since Grandpa had left us. As the day of Morning Star’s first semen extraction drew nearer, a strange hush fell upon the ranch. Even Mom, who rarely spent much time around the pen, would stand there gazing at the yearling’s colossal white bulk for minutes on end, motionless, a pink flush spreading up from her neck, softening her weathered cheeks. When Morning Star swung round to face her his head loomed as large as a plinth, the lightning-shaped horns climbing up from each side like a first step to nowhere. His eyes seemed full of sorrow, deep wells of ageless grief. And yet, like all things moist, there was something soothing and nourishing about them. Mom would stare into them and a light tremor would surface to her lips.
That beast, she’d whisper to herself. It has a soul.
She spoke to her pastor about it. It troubled her: she thought animals weren’t supposed to have souls. The young minister tried to reassure her. She was confusing soul and spirit, a fairly common mistake. People often used them as synonyms, but their meanings were quite different. Soul, he said, refers to the living aspect of beings. Animals and men, the thing we have in common is that we are alive, that is, we have souls. But we possess something that animals don’t have, something we call spirit: a breath, or wind, infused into us by God. For we were made in His own image, and God is Spirit. When they die, animals must revert to the dust of the world, like our body. But the spirit of man returns to the Lord.
Mom shook her head. She claimed the white bull visited her at night, in her sleep.
The young man smiled. These days pastoral leaders were required to be well-versed in psychology, too. There was nothing to worry about, he assured her, the bull was just a father symbol evoked by her psyche to counterbalance her feelings of loss after the recent departure of her father-in-law, to whom he believed she was deeply attached. A textbook compensatory mechanism. But it’s been almost one year to the day, my mother protested. Exactly my point, said the pastor.
Mom kept quiet, then. The lack of sleep was beginning to make her leaner and she often complained of hunger pangs, but when she sat at the table she would hardly touch her food. She started taking cold showers in the middle of the night. Dad believed they were the first signs of menopause and told her so, giving her a supporting hug and planting a fond kiss on her burning brow. He said: You’re bound to feel a little depressed. She laughed in his face. I have never felt so alive in my whole life, she cried. It’s pure agony.
She sneaked into the church every day at dawn, but it was at the bull pen that she found some respite. She found herself wondering at the pastor’s words. Morning Star’s visits to her bed in the dead of the night were always announced by a breath of wind. The implication, of course, was blasphemous, but she seemed to have lost all power over her thoughts.
Meanwhile a different kind of excitement had taken hold of Dad’s mind. His head was a swelling bubble of acronyms and numbers, market projections, investment plans. He could hardly wait to get the ball rolling: their top dam, the one with the best calving ease and cow energy value stats, was getting her GnRH and prostaglandin shots for ovarian stimulation; after insemination the resulting embryos would be implanted in surrogate dams and, if the ensuing calves met their daddy’s standard, well, then the sky was the limit. A few months earlier a Hereford bull from Idaho had been sold to an Iowa syndicate for six hundred thousand dollars and his semen was now going for more than a thousand bucks per straw. Dad could sell Morning Star and still retain the rights to half of his semen, with the opportunity to use it in his own herd and collect a percentage of the sales at the same time.
Finally the big day arrived. Some ranchers availed themselves of a mounting frame covered in cowhide for collection, but my father preferred to use a teaser—a steer implanted with estrogens. Female teasers weren’t recommended because of the potential risk of penetration and the spreading of venereal disease. The smaller the chance of contact the better: yet another corollary in this venture of purity.
I still remember the first time I saw a bull’s penis. It flashed wet and pink from its sheath, slim, pointed, an abnormally long ice pop going all runny at the tip.
It usually took three people to get the job done: one to handle the teaser, one to control the bull, and one to collect the semen. The steer would be led around the pen with the bull behind and then stopped abruptly, simulating, this way, the behavior of a cow in heat. Also, to maximize sperm cell numbers, false mounting was employed. After the third false mount the bull’s penis was to be quickly inserted into a rubber tube, the artificial vagina, which was lubricated and temperature-controlled to stimulate ejaculation. A couple of seconds and the show would be over.
Now everything was set. Morning Star paced majestically around the pen, sniffing the steer, his shiny bulk almost translucent in the early morning light, rippling with each step like a stream over glistening stones. His half-formed horns lolled up and down in the still air, masts of a great white ship caught in a heavy swell. The first cowboy brought the teaser to a sudden stop, gave it a sharp tug and set it in motion again. He repeated the trick three times, leading the teaser progressively closer to the railing. Finally, with a quick bound, he landed on the other side and eased the steer’s head through a horizontal gap in the fence.
A surge of static swept through the corral. Morning Star rose slowly and steadily, as if from a vast sea, the hump on his neck cresting like the foam of a giant breaker. Zap! His blazing carrot was out, sniffing the air. The second cowboy pulled at the halter, bringing him down with a thunderous thump. Morning Star rose again. And again. Puffs of steam billowed from his nostrils, as a deep straining noise, like a grinding of hidden gears, spilled from his belly. He adjusted his stance, planting his hooves more firmly, and rose for the fourth time. As smooth as clockwork, Dad sneaked up on him from his blind side and with a practiced tweak diverted his flaming nuzzle into the warm welcoming tube.
Nothing happened. One, two, three more seconds went by. Dad glanced incredulously at his audience. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. Stunned silence descended over the pen. What in God’s name—? Dad looked up at the towering beast, who was still leaning casually on the steer. His heart sank. Later he would swear the bastard had actually been grinning.
A murmur ran through the crowd. They could always employ electro-ejaculation as a last resort, but the method—sticking an electric probe up his ass—wasn’t exactly one befitting a god. The magic had suddenly left the house.
Then Mom spoke. Let me try, she said. Everyone turned her way. What?— said my father. He was still standing there, with the bull’s raw stick in his hand. Let me try, she said again. She clambered over the fence in her sagging jeans and rubber clogs. Dad told her to stand back. This was no joke, one false step and she could get her feet crushed, if not worse. But she held her ground, this tough middle-aged broad with violet speckles in her eyes, silently proffering her rough upturned palm. Suddenly, to his own surprise, Dad shrugged his shoulders and unsheathed the bull’s undutiful dagger, which seemed to wag playfully in response, like a dog’s tail. Morning Star let out an appreciative moo. A chuckle rustled among the audience. Mom stepped forward and wrapped her fingers around the artificial vagina. With her free hand she stroked the beast’s shimmering coat, digging her fingertips in and dragging them all the way down from hump to rump, as if she were raking a strip of lawn, cooing softly to him. An expectant silence settled around the audience. Slowly, tenderly, she slid the honey-colored cone over his pink stalk.
Immediately a bolt shot through her fingers, as a fat load of semen was dumped into the collector. Mom gasped, faltering, trying to keep her grip on the tube. All of a sudden a thick pearly froth flowered on the rim, boiling over like milk from a pan. The bubbly mass dribbled down her hand and onto her wrist, where it dangled in fat, iridescent gobs. Oohs and aahs soared and shattered into jagged hoots all around her. Wadja know, deadpanned one of the guys, you gotta appreciate a woman’s touch. Bales of laughter rolled around the corral. Mom grinned, shaking the glistening charms off her wrist. She said: This shit is fucking hot. It was the first time anyone had ever heard her swear. Even Dad had to crack up.
After that, things started to get really weird. I would wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of shrill, muffled cries escaping from the crack under my parents’ door and at breakfast Dad would be wearing a handkerchief around his neck and a sly, creased expression on his face, like a tomcat’s. It went on like this night after night after night, until Dad’s appeased gaze began gradually to falter, as if under a great strain. He sat brooding, sifting his morning coffee through his teeth and pushing crumbly clots of egg around his plate, his eyes vague with fatigue and apprehension. Mom didn’t come down till half past nine, and often went straight back to bed and stayed there until noon. When she didn’t oversleep she spent half the morning in the bathroom and then, all dolled up, she made the two-hour drive to Fort Worth, where she cruised the malls. People began to talk.
I can’t take it anymore, Mom told me late one afternoon after returning from one of her day trips. I was sitting on the dusty boards of the back porch. It was that tipping point of the day when the winecups gently shut their chalices and the evening primroses burst open one after the other like a bunch of drunken cheerleaders. Mom’s skin looked gray under the makeup and her newly acquired UV tan. She said, I need to get away from him. I thought she was referring to my father, but she meant Morning Star. He’s too much for me. Tears started streaming down her cheeks. Do you know what his name stands for? I glanced up at the clear sky. Venus had appeared, the first star of the evening. She would rise again in the morning, a few hours before the sun. But it wasn’t a she that Mom had in mind. The son of dawn, she said. The bringer of light. I stared at her. She sighed—Oh, Ariadne! She looked at me as if I were dumbest girl on earth. Lucifer, she said. Who else?
A few weeks later she found out she was pregnant.
The thing was, she had been put on meds in the meantime. The heavy antipsychotic stuff. Plus there was her age, of course. I pulled up the stats from the internet. At twenty the chances of giving birth to a child with chromosomal abnormality were 1 in 526, at thirty 1 in 384, and at forty 1 in 63. At forty-seven the odds were 1 in 10. That was without considering the drugs. Let’s face it, as a dam she rated pretty low.
One morning, as I was sitting at breakfast, I heard Dad whisper distinctly to his sister, over the phone, the word monstrous. How ironic, after years of breeding, striving for perfection, that this should happen to him!
I was intrigued. As I dunked my buttered toast into my tea, I couldn’t help but picture my baby sibling’s enormous head lolling over the high chair in a couple of years’ time, the lumpy bruises on his temples—for somehow I knew it must be a boy—shifting from purple to green beneath the kitchen light, while his pudgy little fist pounded the bespattered tray like a hoof. With a sudden pang of dread, and excitement, I realized I would be the one to take care of him; Mom certainly didn’t seem capable of it and Dad had the ranch to run. As his elder sister, it would fall upon me to look after him. I would have to give up school, the soccer team, I would never go out on a date. Calmly, I surveyed my future. I found a grim satisfaction in the idea of embracing such a life of abnegation. My brother’s keeper. I would be his only companion, for people would shun him. Even Dad would look upon him with disgust. He would add a new wing to the house for us, with all commodities. I would potty-train him, I would cook his meals; I would teach him to read and write. He would be utterly dependent on me, and if one day I decided to leave he would become so violent he would have to be put down.
But if that was what was in store for me, I must be prepared. I had to be sure. I needed evidence. Mom was retreating further into herself every day, so I asked my father instead. But he shouted at me, a shrill note teetering on the edge of his voice, as if something had given way in his throat. All I wanted was an ultrasound picture of the fetus. I knew he had one, I’d seen him dig it out of his shirt pocket while he spoke on the phone to my aunt. I would have liked to pore over its ectoplasmic convolutions alone, with the aid of my magnifying glass if necessary. I was upset. It was not like Dad to lose his temper with me that way.
Soon his behavior became even more erratic. Next thing he fired the Mexican kid with the bottle-green eyes who cleaned the stables. And then, one day, Morning Star was gone too.
The news ran through the ranch like a tremor. At first people thought someone had made off with him—perhaps the Mexican kid himself. However, when it became clear that this was not the case, their surprise was even greater. Nobody could believe my father had finally made up his mind to part with his champion, only the other day he’d refused an offer for seven hundred thousand dollars. On one hand they were relieved that he had come to his senses, for such an attachment had been unnatural. Everything must have a price, nothing on this Earth should be valued for its own sake; not only was it folly to uphold such a belief, it was sinful. It was idolatrous. On the other hand, they too seemed to have come to rely on the great beast’s shining presence. His departure had left an almost palpable trail of dimness in its wake, as if indeed a star had gone out in our lives.
We didn’t celebrate the sale. Dad never even mentioned it to us. Later that same week, though, he treated us to a steak dinner, which was not exactly a big deal in our home. What struck me as odd was the feverish twinkle in my father’s eye as he stoked the grill, and the smell of whiskey wafting from him whenever he averted his face from the burning coals. He was singing under his breath. It sounded like one of the Sunday psalms, only it was too high for him, his voice kept breaking off in mid-verse.
The smoke rose from the barbecue, lightly, like a prayer. Hesitantly, I raised my eyes to the vast, darkening sky, which by some curious trick of perspective seemed to be resting entirely on my father’s shoulders. The moon was balanced on his head. It was waning; along the coast, four-hundred miles south, the tide would be starting to fall back, shortening its reach with quickening breaths.
Dad served the meat, thick slabs of it, but my mother wouldn’t touch it. She merely gazed at her plate in silence. They had just got back from her appointment at the Whole Woman’s Health Clinic. After he’d finished his, Dad reached over and began to cut her sirloin for her. He lifted a morsel to her lips. Red juice dribbled down her chin. Come on, he said, you need to get your red blood cells up. But her eyes were far away. She stood up and went inside. Well suit yourself, he called after her. It’s not every day you get to eat a million-dollar steak!
I should have been shocked, but a numbness had crept over me since their return from the clinic. Instead, I thought again about the pastor’s words. And I asked myself, what if animals did possess a spirit after all—where did it go? Would it live on in us after we partook of their flesh? It was what the Plains Indians believed, in any case. By eating the buffalo they entered into communion with the Great Spirit of their land.
Our land, now. And where did that leave us?
And what about my baby sibling? I knew that after their visit to the clinic he was no longer with us, Dad had told me as much. He would have been so malformed, he said, that he wouldn’t have been able to survive in this world. He’s in Heaven now. Still, I wondered. Perhaps his human spirit had indeed returned to our Lord, but what about the other half—the one that was, well, monstrous?
I kept pondering over these questions, idly, under the black walnuts that skirted our property. My grandfather had told me all about these majestic trees, of how nothing could ever grow beneath them. The curse resided in their far-reaching roots, which exuded a natural herbicide called juglone, but I preferred to attribute this lethal power to their shade, under whose dark wing I now sought shelter.
The house had become pretty much out of bounds these days. My mother hardly came downstairs anymore, she lay in bed all day with the shutters closed, complaining of head-splitting migraines. Her hearing had become so sensitive that the slightest footfall on the floor below drove a hot spike through her brain. She screamed at me, her muffled rebukes like an alarm clock going off at the bottom of a trunk. Just getting from the kitchen to the living area became an adventure, the crossing of a minefield.
Sometimes I tried to make an afternoon of it. The marble fireplace, the Persian rugs, the leather sofas and chaises, and the ottomans, and the hand-carved coffee tables, the crystal cabinets—all of which lay in a state of timeless, shrine-like suspension, for the kitchen and the rear terrace were where our family had always gathered, even when Grandpa was still alive—formed a series of doorways and interlocking chambers among which I mapped out my course. My senses were painfully alert. Darting stealthily from one recess to the other down the twisting mahogany floor, I braced myself against my mother’s cries. I shut my eyes tight. Guided only by touch and sound, I imagined I was tiptoeing through the very hallway of her mind, holding on to an invisible thread, following the dark, intricate weave of her thoughts.
But it was a dangerous game. As the day drew on I found it increasingly harder to find my way out. More and more often I would catch myself going around in circles, even after I’d left the house, searching blindly for an exit. If I happened to glance at my reflection in a window, I did not recognize myself. I’d forgotten who I was. Ariadne, Ariadne. Sometimes I thought I was nothing more than a voice inside someone else’s head.
Meanwhile my father had become his old self again, at least on the surface. He drove around the county looking at herds, he attended school board meetings, he came to soccer practice, he even brought flowers to the table. But the joy had leaked out of him. Singing in the choir on Sunday mornings, he reached unbidden for the highest notes, straining his voice. Nobody in the parish knew about the pregnancy, nor its termination; he carried the weight of his sin on his own shoulders, holding himself together by raw willpower. He brought Mom her meals, like a jailer, and slept on an army cot at the foot of the master bed, on which she lay day and night.
One night I dreamt of him. At first I saw him from a great distance—my father, a tiny speck against a swollen green ocean. Large ivory breakers galloped toward him under a platinum sky, but somehow they never seemed to catch up with him. He was crouching in the surf, one knee bent, his head thrown back as if in laughter. As I drew closer I realized he was not alone. Next to him was Morning Star, his huge gleaming body the same shade of the shoreline. Dad was wrestling with him. He had his arms locked around the lightning-shaped horns, biceps bulging, the cords in his neck standing out like frayed clotheslines, ready to snap. His face, I could now see, was a frozen mask not of mirth but of exhaustion. And yet he would not give in. Morning Star’s hind legs were buried in spume, while his upper half twisted and pulled, front hooves scrabbling for a foothold, like the day he was born. A prolonged, mournful bellow rose from the depths of his bowels, like a foghorn, soon drowned by the roar of the water. But no matter how hard I strained my eyes, I could not tell whether my father was trying to pin him down or deliver him from the pull of the ocean. On and on the struggle went, relentlessly, although no progress was made. Slowly, the breakers were closing in on them. The billowing surf had already reached Dad’s chest. And still he would not let go. The bull’s breath burst through the crashing waves in fierce white gusts. The tips of his horns flashed for a brief moment, and then they went out.
I woke up. It was still the middle of the night. There was a new moon outside, and my room was pitch dark. I shivered. Below my waist, my nightdress and bed sheets were soaked through, and now the chill was creeping slowly up my back. I was too old to be wetting my bed, but the pungent tang of ammonia was unmistakable. I assessed my situation, as calmly as I could. My parents’ bedroom was directly opposite mine, so it was best not to turn the light on, in case one of them was still awake.
Gingerly I got up, peeled my nightie off and tore the sheets from the mattress. My brow felt hot, I was sweating and shivering at the same time. I reached out toward the settee and grabbed the first thing I could lay hands on—my soccer uniform. I slipped it on. Then, gathering the sopping bundle in my arms, I groped my way across the room.
I peeked out. No light came from under my parents’ door, but the darkness and silence around me felt precarious, like the slumber of some giant beast. I strained my ears for the sound of breathing. Was that my father’s soft rasp? I pictured my mother’s eyes, wide open, vigilant, trained on me like X-ray sights. But I didn’t have much choice. Slinking against the wall, I slid down the hallway as quietly as I could. My fingers touched the wood of the banister, my toes the cold marble stairs. Down I went. Another hallway. I kept going, feeling my way through the black insides of the house as if it were something living. Finally I reached the basement door. Only then, once I had shut it tight behind me, did I turn on the light.
A fluorescent bulb flickered into life at the bottom of the concrete steps, followed by a string of others, a swift cool ripple trailing off into the far corners of the room. I made my way to the laundry area, past an ancient-looking exercise bike and a brand-new rowing machine nobody in the family had ever used.
Opposite me, running the whole length of the wall, was Grandpa’s workbench, which had since been cleared of all his extravagant clutter. He’d fancied himself an inventor at a certain point in his life. I remember him hunched over his tools, sparks flying around his head as he hammered and welded away at some complicated and dangerous-looking contraption involving obsolete agricultural machinery. In second grade he’d built me a model watermill with the reel of a Webb Whippet push mower, which Mom had immediately confiscated.
Way before that, around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he had built his own nuclear fallout shelter. It was still there, buried adjacent to the house, a long concrete bunker designed to comfortably accommodate eight people. The main entrance tunnel was right here, at the far end of the basement, behind a four-inch-thick lead door. I had never set foot in it—it had been kept locked for as long as I could remember, but recently, rummaging through Grandpa’s old stuff, I’d found a plan of the room.
Four bunk beds, a kitchenette, a chemical toilet, a collapsible table and chairs, plenty of shelves for batteries, canned goods and bottled water, and some- thing called a Kearney Air Pump. It was equipped with a water tank too, plus a Geiger counter, a radio and an electric generator hooked up to an exercise bike, probably the same one that was now gathering dust by the stairs. The diagonal air shafts, the oblong chamber below ground—they reminded me of a layout of the Great Pyramid of Giza we’d been shown once at school. The diagram of the shelter also indicated an emergency exit, a secondary tunnel leading out back somewhere; but where was it now? There were no trapdoors in our backyard, nor vents or tunnels of any sort. The lawn was smooth and level, with a built-in sprinkler system and a fish pond overrun by giant koi. Once the lead door was sealed, there was no escape. This locked room, built by my grandfather to stave off the end of the world, had in time become a storage place, though for what exactly my father had never said. All I knew was that I wasn’t allowed to play in it.
The laundry area seemed unnaturally bright. The washing machine, the dryer, the white porcelain utility sink etched themselves painfully on the back of my eyelids. I dumped my sodden bed sheets and nightie on the floor and studied the control panel. It didn’t look too complicated, despite the thumping inside my skull. I shot a glance at the door at the top of the stairs. Returning to the panel, my eyes lingered briefly on a caption that read: silent spin. I loaded the machine, filled the dosing ball with blue detergent and placed it inside the drum the way I’d seen it done on commercials. I pressed the quick wash button and waited, squatting on my heels.
Suddenly the machine sprang to life. A sound of rushing water, like a mountain stream, very close, filled my head. I jumped up in panic, it was so loud! Then the drum kicked in, a steady rumble like the inexorable drone of a cement mixer. I held my breath, expecting the basement door to fly open any moment soon. The humiliation! My heart pounded in my ears, hard, drowning out everything else.
Then I thought, wait. If I could hear my own heartbeat, it meant the noise wasn’t so loud after all. I told myself, it’s OK. I sat down heavily on the floor, leaning my head against the humming machine. I closed my eyes.
That’s when I heard it. A long, throbbing cry.
I thought it came from the washing machine at first—but no, there was nothing mechanical about the sound. It was vibrant, moist: it was alive. I got up and ventured out of the laundry area, to make sure. There. One moment faltering, distant, the next so close it made you turn your head, like a voice carried by the wind. It was strange, whenever I tried to tune in to it, it died; all I could hear was my own labored breathing. It resumed as soon as I let go, a garbled wail, unraveling slowly, like a skein. I tried to follow it as best as I could. Past my grandfather’s workbench, deeper into the basement.
And then I knew. It was coming from the shelter, the cry of a baby. I drew nearer. I could just make out the outline of the lead door. The light was not so strong here, one of the pillars cast a black shadow on the wall.
So they had brought him home! They had lied to me. They had brought him home and locked him in the shelter. Premature, deformed, a monster. My baby brother. They had shut him away in embarrassment and shame. In fear. A tightness gripped my chest, and throat, as if I’d swallowed a large lump of dough. I could hear him more distinctly now. His cries were deeper, rougher than a baby’s. More like raucous, strangled sobs. I’m coming, I thought. But how? What could I do?
I reached out a hand. My ear pressed against the cold metal, I ran my fingers hopelessly along the door frame.
I jerked them back. The door was open, just a crack, about half an inch wide. My small fingers slipped through it easily. The cries had stopped. Did he feel my presence? I was almost sure I could hear him breathe—short, hesitant rasps, not unlike my own. Slowly, I pried the door open. It was heavy, I had to use all my weight to make it budge.
Inside it was so dark, and stuffy, as if the air itself, like the light, like everything else, must stop at the threshold. I took a step forward. We would survive it together, the end of the world. All I had to do was shut the door behind me.
I said out loud, in the voice of a stranger: Don’t be afraid. It’s me.