The Excavation

The Excavation

Four months of writing the book came down to digging. In the dark, by hand, through the layers Kessler's program had poured over the top of me and left to set for 31 years.

Every day the house in Milton filled with the sound of the typewriter, tack... tack... tack..., from early morning until late at night.

I started at 5:40 every morning and worked until the light came off the kitchen window, then went back to it after dinner and stayed until eleven. Four pages was a bad day. Nine was the most I ever did, on a Tuesday in July when I typed the vent scene and didn't stand up for six hours. I ate both meals standing at the counter and washed the same plate twice a day.

The old oak floor in the living room took the shock up through it each time a key arm came down on my father's Underwood.

The ribbon I threaded on the first morning lasted all four months. Three spares sat in the desk drawer in their paper sleeves and I never opened one. By September the letters were coming out gray and I had to hold a page at an angle under the lamp to read what was on it.

Nothing in that sound belonged to a bestselling crime writer working a plot into shape for his readers or his editors. A pick going into rock, hour after hour.

No finished chapter came with relief in it, or with pride. Each one brought up another piece of my childhood from a long way down, pieces that had been tied off under the basement and smeared out with the bitter oil and Kessler's exercises.

I kept the finished pages face down in the bottom of the wooden bread box on the kitchen counter, weighted with a jar of pennies. Every night before I went up, I put a pencil line on the inside of the pantry doorframe, grouped in fives. There were 118 lines on the frame the night I typed the last page. Nobody came up the walk in those four months except the mail carrier, and she left everything in the box down at the road.

Digging up the dried blood was the easy part. The steel chair came up, and the rusted chain with the mud still dried on it, and none of that cost me much.

Then I hit the good memories.

When the last of the suggestion burned off, Ethan came back whole. Nothing missing, nothing blurred.

Seven years.

Seven years of it, the part we had under the same roof. They started on Ethan when he was five, and on me when I was five too, in a children's home upstate, three years before the Millers ever drove up there for me; I moved into Milton at eight and I was 15 the night it ended. Two brothers in one house, living it in exactly opposite ways.

There were stretches when Ethan was kept under the house for good, in the basement room they called Lab 2. In those stretches the two of us ran our whole world through one rectangular vent the width of a kid's hand, down at the floor line in the corner of the small first-floor bathroom.

Every afternoon around four thirty, once the typing and the tape recorder had settled into my parents' work room at the back of the house, I crawled across the cold tile of that bathroom and put my face and my ear flat against the rusted steel mesh.

"Ethan?" I kept my voice down at the grate. "Mom and Dad are in Lab 1. Are you still there?"

A short gap, then the old mattress moving under the vent. Ethan's eyes came up behind the rusted mesh, black and set deep.

"I'm here," Ethan whispered. His voice came out warped from how little he used it. "He gave me the yellow water again today, the bitter one. I wanted to throw it up but he stood there and watched until I got it down."

"Smell this." I pushed a finger through the gap and dropped a butterscotch candy in red cellophane down to him. "I've had it in my pocket since lunch. It's sweet. The bitter goes right away."

Ethan's fingers came up through the steel, thin and white and shaking a little, and took the candy. The cellophane came apart with a small crackle down there in the dark.

"Is it good?" I asked, my chin on the cold tile.

"It's good," Ethan whispered, working it around in his mouth. "It smells like that cake Mom made last year. She won't let me have cake now. She says sugar wrecks my brain waves."

I didn't say anything for a beat. I had no idea what brain waves were, only that my chest had gone tight.

"Hey, Ethan." I got a piece of cardboard and a stub of charcoal out of my pocket. "I finished the ship today. Want me to drop it down?"

"No more ships." His voice came up through the vent with a hitch in it. "Draw me... a house."

"A house?" I wrinkled my nose. "This is our house, right here."

"Not our house." I heard him shake his head down in the dark. "A house with a lot of windows. One really big window, and when you open it you can see the maple. I want to see the maple out by the gate. Down here it's all concrete."

I lay with my cheek on the tile, holding my breath, and drew a square house on the cardboard with the charcoal. I gave it one window that took up half the front, and outside it I put in a few dumb three-pointed maple leaves. Then I pushed the cardboard through the vent and let it go.

Ethan caught it and held it up close to his face in the dark.

"It's really good," Ethan whispered. Then his hand came back up through the steel and pushed something at me.

It was a small wooden matchbox. Inside it something went clack, clack, over and over, and didn't stop.

"What is it?" I took it from him.

"A cricket," Ethan said, and something close to pride got into it. "It came up the water pipe last night. I caught it. I've been keeping it for you."

I cracked the lid. A cricket, brown-black, worked its wings and put out a small reep... reep...

"It sounds good, doesn't it?" I smiled.

"Yeah," Ethan said. Under the vent his eyes took in what little light there was. "It sounds like a clock running at night. But it doesn't scare me. Dad's clock scares me. The cricket doesn't."

I closed my hand around the matchbox. "I'll take care of it. I'll feed it lettuce every day."

"Hey, James," Ethan said through the vent.

"What?"

"My name... how do you actually spell it?" His voice went thin on it.

"When he comes down here he calls me Sample 1. Mom calls me Subject A. Not one time down there has anybody used my real name the way you do."

I stopped for a second, then shook my head and got my ear back against the mesh.

"Who cares? A real name is the thing teachers make you write at the top of a test, or when you're about to get in trouble. You're Ethan and I'm James. We're brothers. That doesn't change."

Down in the dark he went quiet for a long beat, and then a small laugh came up through the vent, clear, the only laugh of a kid Kessler's world hadn't gotten to yet.

"Yeah," Ethan whispered. "I'm Ethan. You're James."

What happened in that house didn't stop at the vent.

The hardest pages to type were the ones about the normal stretches.

There were months when Walter and Miriam Miller decided to pause a trial. The oak door opened and Ethan was allowed up into the house.

Those were the stretches when the house in Milton actually had four people in it.

All four of us ate dinner at the long oak table in the dining room. Ethan wore the same clothes I wore and sat in the chair next to mine. My mother filled four bowls with soup. My father sat at the head of the table and ate and watched every move the two of us made, every time either of us picked up a fork.

On Saturday nights we even played Parcheesi. Four of us around the table: my father on red, my mother on green, me on blue, Ethan on yellow. Ethan called it out when he rolled a six, and I argued with my brother every time a yellow piece sent one of mine back to the start.

A complete family. Warm and ordinary and nothing missing from it.

And then the next trial period started.

After every one of those four-person stretches, my father called me into the study. He turned on the orange filament lamp, lit a dish of oil that put out a bitter smell, and had me look at a metal watch swinging on its chain.

"There's only you, James," my father said, and his voice went soft the way a lullaby goes soft. "There's you and your father and your mother in this house. There is no other child. You never had a brother. The one at the board with the yellow pieces is something your mind made up."

Every time the session ended, I forgot all of it.

Ethan went back under the house. The fourth chair went into storage. And my head held on to one habit the erasing never reached.

On the Saturday nights after that, I went out to the oak table by myself and set up all four corners of the Parcheesi board with my own hands.

Saturday nights I took the board out of the hall closet at seven and wiped the table first with a dish towel, because my mother didn't like a board set down on crumbs. Four wooden pieces to a corner. I put the yellow ones on the start squares last and squared them up with my thumbnail.

I sat there alone and played my blue turn, then got up, walked around to the far side of the table, and played the yellow turn for Ethan.

I split myself in two and argued out loud with an empty space, covering for a brother who had gone missing overnight and who my head had been forced to drop.

My mother stood at the left side of the doorway between the living room and the dining room with her hand flat on the frame. My father stood behind her shoulder. Neither of them came in. The kitchen clock behind them said 8:20, and when I looked up from a yellow roll a long while later it still said 8:20.

Every time my parents came through the living room and saw me alone at the board with the yellow chair empty, they wrote it in the notebook: Erasure trial successful. Subject B continues to maintain a phantom link to Subject A.

They didn't only keep Ethan under the ground. With the oil and the sessions they turned him into a ghost inside the house he was living in.