Stevie: An Excerpt

“Stevie”

Speaking of introverts, which they both self-identified as, his other older brother, Steven, “Stevie” to almost all, be it friends and family or rivals and bullies, one group intending it as an affectionate diminutive with only a small, mithridatic dose of condescension, the other using it to minimize and to confer ridiculousness—especially in the way it was enunciated, nasally and top-heavy with exaggerated scorn, reclaiming it from whatever clement associations it had within the sanctuary of his home down into the muck of malefic intentions, effectively giving them a license to tease, harass, break down mentally by displacing the bricks of his psychic stronghold and using them as ammunition to hurl back at him, endeavoring to tear down the person inside with the essence of his own self-identification (a skill with which most schoolkids arrive on the playground already in a frightening state of mastery)—neither group bothering to consult the recipient on how he regarded the cognomen, which feelings he had on the issue could be summed up as “Just fine,” ultimately, also got along with Mina as well as the eldest brother did, though there were impediments to be sure of a different stripe, only the most astute bothering to notice that their (i.e. the impediments’) nature was internal, a struggle against quiddity, the end result being that it was a conflict that went largely unseen by the incurious. Stevie Cardaman—sussurate, punctilious, cogitative—was four years older than his younger brother, two years younger than the older one. The intercalary sibling, he had the insubstantial newborn face of a meerkat, which displayed less of naive innocence than skittish uncertainty, a coppery tarnish adulterated by the sheen underneath, and his eyes, of an isolated penetrative loveliness, shrouded and bursting with perceptions unvoiced, could, at a moment’s notice, brighten like a dog freed from leash when coming across things that fit his worldview and shine in happy confirmation as if to say “Belissimo!” He daydreamed, like a Djerban, with his head in the clouds. His mind was like one of those medieval castles of which he was so fond, inscrutable on the outside but whose pentralia was filled with intricacies, a complexity at once impenetrable and generous to those who would fain to unlock it, standing comparably, on occasion, with the insightful prolix disquisitions of which he was capable and yet all too aware, in polite consideration, of what in the presence of company he felt should be held in reserve. He was tall like his brothers. His hair he wore short but shaggily, like a dashing brigand with his poniard (or so he fancied), and it matched in color his treasured desk of russet which was of an obsolete construction and as deeply brown as the soil from the gardens of Tartessos where the Greeks would worship immortality (or so he liked to think).

The facts of one’s childhood are usually important when touching on an enthusiast. Stevie was a thoroughly committed boy, much attracted to solitude. At seven, he won a school prize for a sculpture of the Eiffel Tower—it resembled a tepee—and illustrated a comic book of his own melodramatic making which ended: “And so the radioactive wildebeests went into hibernation, from whence to return one day. . . .” There were maladies, and chickenpox in childhood following the development of asthma left his constitution unhardy.

 High school life in his developmental years led to unusual and inexplicable affinities. It wasn’t that he felt particularly shunned, but if individual moments went well—in everything, save, perhaps, for the periodic youthful folly he suffered in personam while trying to spike a volleyball during physical education—general acceptance proved elusive. He designed maps of nonexistent lands during interminable study halls, claimed he could decoct potions, and put it about that he believed the fluctuation of the stock market, because of an unseen interconnectedness from which mankind in its ignorance was not exempt, was influenced by everyone’s trips to the bathroom. He bemused his fellow students, furthermore, with several untempered lurid plans few were willing to countenance: to plant redwoods on the football field; to make the science lab water-tight and turn it into a perpetual swimming pool; and to construct—he actually had the design on draft paper and had started making inquiries to the local landscapers—a hedge maze on the roof of the school. Throughout his four years he showed a fantastic but genuine sense of delight.

Such was his seclusion from regular clamorous comingling with his peers, the severity of which brought into sharper relief by way of contrast with the daily roistering of his nearly coeval older brother, that his parents feared autism, or worse. A trip to their family doctor, followed by a casual recommendation—becoming a hasty and immediate scheduling in the face of the mom’s choleric urging—for a psych consult, revealed nothing more than adolescent spaceyness. It was recommended that Stevie be given the freedom to explore the effervescent side of himself, the dream-bound creativity that constantly threatened to evect him away up among the same cumuli that most often triggered the boring, insipid imaginations of those rooted to the ground (“Oh look, that one looks like Stevie”). There should of course be limits to his freedom, set by family and law, but beyond that the psychologist recommended he should be left to those same devices that had so troubled his parents and others. And so, like all figureheads ever-willing to cede authority when another’s expertise is not so much demonstrated but assumed, his parents did as they were bade.

It was with this newly sanctioned freedom, which Stevie took advantage of enthusiastically, if not floridly, with none of the compunction felt by those apt to question their own worthiness of such generous bestowal, that his interests bloomed into something resembling not so much the garden out back full of peonies, stargazer lilies, and phlox curated so assiduously by his green-thumbed mother as an unmanageable conflagration with its searing licks of flame scorching that which would venture close to its base in which lied the heart of Stevie’s multifarious passions, leaving all nearby things, not to say people, unburned but marked indelibly all the same. Thank the heavens, thought Stevie (never stopping long enough to consider whether he believed in such things), who quite readily, if somewhat inappropriately, couldn’t quite believe that the removal of strictures in his own life didn’t perhaps have the same manumitive force as the Emancipation Proclamation.

The first thing he tried his hand at under the restriction-free ukase was kite-building. There was, he supposed, a certain rationale behind this, as he had often found to much in his life thus far, and yet he harbored the supposition that the activity that makes sense at the beginning is often revealed to be unpropitious. His heart was corybantic at the hobby store, not with trepidation however, but anticipation: a feeling of surety that neither ablated nor suspended in the time it took to get the materials—of which there were not a few, from sails made from paper, plastic, or nylon, to flying line of cotton or polyester, to dowels, bamboo, and carbon fiber frames: so many decisions to be made on the spot without benefit of research, his noumenal sense carrying the day—get home—during which time he spent in the backseat flipping through the book of knots the salesperson had insisted complement his purchase, familiarizing himself with bowlines, figure eights, and clove hitches, as well as knots of the lark, angler, and dacoit—and start his new project, nor in the many days afterward that, after much monastic work, resulted in the parturition of his nascent kite with all its heraldry on display, and points tight and sharp, and beams upright and crisp. A glyph, the finishing touch whose resemblance to its intended representation—a screech owl—was not the most perspicuous despite much involved and loving labor, adorned the nylon, his material of choice at least for this initial effort, near the topmost vertex of the sky-destined diamond as an homage, possibly inadvertent, to the etymological origins of its namesake. And with its completion, he was ready to pursue whatever pleasures, as had been taken by so many other votaries of this curious and mercurial hobby, it could afford him.

His father drove him out on a picture-perfect day the father would, in all honesty, have preferred to spend at the ballpark shagging flyballs arcing against the lapis sky with one’s glove and hand framing not only the ball but the heavens above or at least its instantiation and so perfect representation, as men since time immemorial have tended to idealize the intangible, to a popular gathering place for new and experienced kiters, though the latter dominated, both in number and presumption. It was a lea nestled between rolling hills with an old barn nearby serving as the standard meeting place for kiters as well as the unofficial check-in. They approached the barn, a faded red affair (has anyone conclusively found the reasoning for that predilection?) with the usual cross-beamed doors flung open, and visible inside were, palliative to the restive soul, the lofts and attendant hay along with the various implements of husbandry even though, as one so often bore witness, the structure was absent livestock.

A congregation was already gathered nearby, all brandishing various geometrical shapes of fabric shields. They took notice of Stevie and his dad with the oppressive suspicion of those whose persecution feeds their elitism, distrustful of any and all, especially those who seek to join their ranks. One in particular seemed especially glueyed to the newly arrived interlopers. He was a pointy-nosed exemplar of arrogance, adorned with a flamboyantly filigreed yarmulke, who was less there for an afternoon of aerial gamboling than an open display of haughty indifference if the carefully maintained distance he kept from his fellow hobbyists meant anything. He sauntered over to Stevie and stood there without saying a word, considering him in silence. Stevie openly looked right back at him, more out of curiosity than a rise to any perceived challenge. He was an older, fusty-looking man with a gyhll-shaped marcel in his hair sharply—almost reproachfully—terminating when it met the yarmulke. His face was bosky with dundreary whiskers, a cicatrix, of origins unknown and not dared asked about, snaking out of it and down to his nuque. There was a conspicuous and inflamed furuncle on his nose whose head seemed to grow whiter as the surrounding dermis grew redder the longer he regarded Stevie. The man narrowed his lyncean eyes at the boy and his father, then opened the placket of the breast pocket of his formal coat out of which spilled a cupreous fob, pulling out the timepiece attached to the end. He cocked an eyebrow at Stevie. “Shall we begin?” he asserted, adding, before turning away and placing himself more in the others’ ambit, “Aquila non capit muscas.” Stevie loped after him as they all moved out into the open.

To say it was a motley group was to risk impoverishing the language by ascribing words to that which they fail to adequately delineate. Agnate outnumbered the distaff two-to-one in this omnium gatherum, and though they appeared at first glance to have enough dissimilarities to retain a natural immiscibility, upon closer inspection they all seemed temperamentally, if not taxonomically, related. There was a man draped in tartan, wearing a tam-o’-shanter and a coprophagous grin spread luridly across his rubicund face, wet borborygmic sounds issuing from his torso; a woman wearing a voile scarf, her bodice framed with fancifully ruched jabots, topped off with a toque; an exophthalmic tub of adipose with a pinguid complexion whose blusters were interrupted only by the occasional eructation; a frowsy bindlestiff whose patchwork habiliments gave him the appearance of a skewbald; a gracile sylph wearing a marquisette blouse, the limpidity of which, coupled with a skirt whose cut went above an imaginary Plimsoll line on her thigh, indurated not a few nearby inguinal areas; a hydrocephalic who suffered from acromegaly in all his extremities, his hand wrapped multiple times with kite string taking on the aspect of a sausage tied with rope; a man wearing a sheared, and therefore conspicuous, postiche, sucking on a cheroot; a senescent whose face was stippled with lentigo; a hoydenish gammer bedizened in a dirndl pluming around her zaftig figure, a bejeweled reticle hanging off one shoulder, an opopanax-scented sachet off the other, sabots on her bloated feet; an orgulous scaramouch who with a supercilious air kept brushing away the forelock dangling down onto his phiz, revealing his withering gaze; and many others equally outré.

As if not to be outdone, the kites challenged their owners in the breadth of their variation, and were borne as escutcheons are, with the pride and confidence felt in things thought to contain an incontrovertible connection with the more venerable epochs of the world’s history. They were of all different shapes, sizes, and construction. Ones made of georgette and tulle, poplin and shantung. The grosgrain ones had a corrugated appearance. Some were made from gossamery fabric, a lisle-like material, perhaps even organdy, giving one a transpicuous glimpse at what lay beyond, soon to be sky. One was viridescent with streamers blooming out in a verdant effusion. Another was made of an olivaceous percale that rippled in the wind, recalling the turbulent sea. Stevie saw villous ones that resembled the ciliated microorganisms he studied in his biology classes, as well as those with more fimbriate protrusions, thin acerose ones ready to pierce whatever airborne objects it encountered. A prasine kite reminded him of his mom’s creamy potato soup. There was a xanthic kite designed as a tribute to Sol, one emblazoned with St. Andrew’s Cross, another heavily ocellated as if constructed to be a better watchman of Io than Argus himself.

With slow, languid movements that belied their purposefulness—everybody was clearly present to partake in the activity they had all gathered for, with an absence of gongoozlers excepting Stevie’s dad—the group fanned out and hied down private runways to Bernoulli their kites into the air. The sky was soon full of birds of prey, gliding in the Favonian wind, seeking to conventrate the terra firma below. They swirled around expertly, scudding this way and that, volplaning in graceful, controlled dives, circling each other as if diffident future lovers, swooping asymptotically close as if to collide only to osculate at the last instant, a stolen intimacy before fluttering back to their respective solitudes. Their kaleidoscopic colors created an impasto hovering above them all, with glimpses of nature’s pentimento beyond—a supernal airscape.

Stevie, on the other hand, was having problems that prevented him from joining the fray. His kite, dissembling heretofore as airworthy, was being exposed as the unaerodynamic gewgaw it was, constructed with an ultracrepidarian’s verve. Every mortise and tenon, every adhesive, every angular protrusion was inimical to flight. No amount of enticement could beseech it into the air—this despite his father sprinting as fast as he could, even attempting, as Stevie observed, to lift it through the hot air generated from bellowed imprecations. Eventually they had to accept that they had on their hands an apterous monstrosity, possibly terricolous—at best a pathetic, moribund hoatzin hatchling, unable even to clamber up the rungs of wind currents. Despite these setbacks, Stevie remained beamish throughout. Professor Pangloss could not have had a better pupil.

The other kiters observed Stevie out of the corner of their eyes, turning smirkingly back to their own successful endeavors. Once they saw his skills were, as they assumed, banausic at best—incompetent, really—they experienced the calm that accompanies the knowledge that one’s superiority can continue unchallenged. In the face of outsiders, they closed ranks instead of extending a welcoming hand. The tight-knit group strengthened, by the same principle that occasioned it, the ravelins they put between themselves and others, obviating any dissension within the conclave. Their group-think made any potential quisling tamp any inclination to assist others, the threat of the likely banishment that would follow proving to be an adequate deterrent. They were a non-fissiparous unit that would brook no fomenter or dissident, leaving outsiders with little chance of signing with them an Entente Cordiale, taking on the qualities of a phalanstery no longer accepting members, their common property being the sky above.

 Stevie, to his credit, watched the other kites with the open appreciation of a tyro. As beheld the forsaken traveler in the Blue Desert a dove-white oasis that resembled nothing less than a Zerzuran paradise Stevie beheld the kites.

The scene grew uncomfortable when the wind that empowered the kites’ fanciful flights delivered invective—whispered at first, then getting louder and louder to the point where it was impossible to ignore—to the ears of both Stevie and his dad. The cadre was growing increasingly scornful of their presence and tossing fulminations back and forth among one another and also over their shoulders, in a regardant pose as if to preempt being accused of tergiversating as to whom their atrabilious words were directed toward. Even Stevie, who was used to such open displays of antipathy toward him, could not help noticing the others whickering away. When their criticisms started to be couched in a form resembling threats, he turned to his dad and said they should leave. Persiflage he could handle; philippics were a different matter altogether.

Stevie and his dad left the field it was still unclear whether the group was using with the property owner’s permission or simply indulging a usufructuary presumption, leaving the kiters to their pavonine strutting and lebensraum they had carved out of the world, the sound of cruel fleers giving chase and fading the farther they got from its source. His father gallantly offered to say something to the others on Stevie’s behalf, but Stevie demurred, not wanting his dad to be constrained by an incorrect perception of either of their characters. For now, they were harmless, somewhat pusillanimous specimens, but if his dad confronted them, they might be taken as unruly troublemakers, ones to be neutralized lest others’ fun be interrupted. And seeing his reflection in their eyes, there was always the danger of adopting their judgment in his own self-identification and being forced into undesirable action. For are we not all forced into service by our labels, despite who affixed them? Does not something hold us accountable by how closely we fit the bill no matter if remembrance of its due eludes us? Must a rantipole rantipole rantipole? (Or does it simply buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo?) Stevie did not want to find out. His dad urged him to forget about it. Stevie appreciated the sentiment behind the solicitude if not the actual advice, too polite was he to point out its superfluousness. It was intended to be an adjuration of the abjuration of their treatment that would allow the abrogation of their arrogation of his self-abnegation, but his dad wanted him to reclaim something that was never stolen. It was already old hat for Stevie to not even acknowledge such picayune matters, which enabled him to bypass the act of forgetting entirely and spend on it exactly the amount of time and thought one gives to nonexistent things. Theirs was the unknown—and therefore unconsidered—Weltanschauung.

Stevie moved on to other pursuits with dogged optimism. There was no doubt he would find something that would augment his interests into something more exalted, for is there not a frisbee tossed by the uninterested hand of a nihilist, thought Stevie, that may not be caught with flair by the hand of passion? It was, he felt, as if his capacity to explore were a large, turbulent wave, no, not a wave even, an overwhelming tsunami smothering a design of regimented interests, prescriptions, and regulations that were so organized as to usher people inexorably down one designated path. He seemed to believe that to keep the fires of his enthusiasm aflame, he must start another endeavor before the abandoned embers, through lack of use or general hopelessness, went out in an approach that other people who didn’t know the depth of Stevie’s commitment and wholehearted nature mistook as a flighty, epitrochastic disposition. His “ideal” passion for this thing called hope he aligned, with increasing surety, to the “real” attenuations of reality, antipodal and, for that, curiously related extreme points of universality, both, with each a defensiveness that failed to understand that the most vital thing for dreamers, as for realists, was to know how dreaming, how living, can be kept vital, not what must exist without it. A revelation.

And so he did many, many things. He trained briefly to be a masseur, concentrating on petrissage but also seeking competency in effleurage and tapotement; dabbled in belomancy; baked crackers in myriad shapes, favoring the infundibuliform and cuneate; invented many new curse words and obscenities (he wanted to make the vulgar vulgate); became a minor authority on cinquecentists; practiced a variety of multicultural couvades, which caused problems when he went to the local maternity ward and offered his services, amusing neither the prima- nor nullipara alike; constructed a rudimentary apiary in the backyard; sought to hierophantically elucidate the abstruse, recondite, and opaque, in the style of a mystagogue (he wanted to make the esoteric exoteric); started a monograph on the polysemy of the word “tierce”; made quaint wall-hangings announcing the bromides of the homestead in repoussé; wrote alexandrines about various flora and fauna (he wanted to write ghazals about gazelles and poesies about posies); took an interest in palpebral manipulation, focusing on complex folding and ptotic elongation useful only for Hallowe’en or when grotesquerie was called for; got really into faro for a while; practiced something he took to calling “intentional philology” (he wanted to literally do things literarily); occupied himself with cruciverbalism; researched a wilderness of stemma, not only that of his own family but others’ as well; helped young kids with their science fair projects, counseling them to include more displays of interdiction (he wanted to see in exhibitions adhibitions of inhibitions and prohibitions); tried his hand at grisaille; explored the contradictions and paradoxes inherent in the maquillage of the Orient (he wanted to find antinomy in antimony); meticulously crafted not very successful trompe l’oeils; joined an email group whose members sent one another risible diatribes of intransigent eristics mired in sophism and casuistry (he wanted to forward the faux words of the froward); looked into balneotherapy; developed temporarily grape-flavored spansules providing but a momentary respite from any acidulous medication contained within (he wanted to make incipient excipients); took a layman’s interest in pomology (strangely focusing on durians at some point), campanology (forced to stop after his mom, who had no problem with his pet bees’ bombination (more worried was she about the everpresent threat of urtication), couldn’t stand the tintinnabulation), psephology, and ichthyology; vociferously defended the prandial rights of university students (he wanted to battle for their battels, fustigate for their being able to masticate, fight for their right to bite, be a pestilence on those who would deny them esculents, belittle those who would withhold from them victuals, etc.); etc.

Lacking an aptitude that could not be made up for, despite his best efforts, with unrestrained enthusiasm, he reached the pons asinorum of all these activities fairly quickly. And if not for a last minute, hardly noticed addition in the codicil of the will of a mostly forgotten family member that passed soon after, Stevie might never have found that which has remained his calling to the present day.

The bequest was the result of the sole tête-à-tête Stevie ever had with his maternal grandfather, which took place during a visit most of the family made to the old man’s estate in Petaluma about ten years ago. It was yet another in a series of trips the Cardaman clan neither made all that often nor relished much due to the patriarch’s well-deserved reputation for being ornery and cantankerous when confronted with his progeny, his disappointment in whom was perhaps matched only by his disgust with their spouses and offspring. He was a perpetually dissatisfied man, one for whom the sun rising in the east was as much an inevitability as the fresh grievances each new day would bring. There would always be something to get worked up about: an insoluble problem the universe had conspired to drop in his lap, an uncorrectable wrong perpetrated against him despite his every attempt to live in a constant state of minding his own business. His acceptance that the remainder of his days—hoped to be few in number by those closest to him—would provide no variation to this pattern and that his only reprieve would be the final one granted to all mortal souls did not assuage his daily nastiness. Acquaintances unfortunate enough to be forced into some contact with the man came to envy his wife, now passed on four years ago at that point. For the most part people learned to stay away. Growing ever more reclusive in his twilight years, he saved his pent-up acerbity for those people he saw most often, which in cruel irony turned out to be family members, especially ones that were helplessly tied to an obligation drafted by their own consciences to visit the fading man and provide for him at least some human connection to a world that was swiftly trying to discard him now that he was alone and served no real purpose. And with one of his daughters living in the Midwest and his son in Florida, it fell to his only other child—Stevie’s mom—to make the semi-annual trips down the coastline to pay him the visits that everyone else in the family, with minimum guilt, could think of as vicarious sojourns and thus free themselves from making actual trips themselves. It was an unfair arrangement, although the fulsome number of packages sent by their uncles and aunts to the Cardaman household at Christmastime—both an acknowledgement of Pam’s sacrifice and expiation of their negligence—was more than a fair trade-off in the eyes of the boys.

This particular visit—which, unbeknownst to them, would be their last—was going typically badly. The old man’s mood was as caustic as they had ever seen, finding its only point of comparison with unadulterated lye. Their mom had brought a customary spread of homemade dishes for an in-home luncheon—food her dad picked at, wrinkling his nose and narrowing his eyes with a suspicion one normally reserved for the unexpected offerings of strangers. He couldn’t even bring himself to converse with them, grunts and long stares having to suffice for his contribution to the palaver with no indication that he would add his own branches of further inquiry to the discussion, which after a while ground all talk to a standstill. It was an afternoon of awkwardness and strain, a mismatched group harboring, with varying degrees of success, time-honed resentments, all of them checking and rechecking their internal clocks, awaiting that uncertain time when by tacit plebiscite they had all agreed that enough was enough and were allowed to disperse with minimal insult and unconcealed rancor intact. Even if families were indeed composed of relationships non-commercial in nature, they had, regardless, no business being in the same room. The reasons for their visit were atavistic, primal, remanded permanently to an ur-life no one, let alone the Cardamans, followed in a practical sense. They were thrown together for reasons known but not understood. It was the way things were.

Just before the moment when their dad was about to clear his throat and mercy kill this latest tip of the hat to pointless tradition, the old man rapped his knuckles on the table, signaling for a level of attention that was reluctantly given.

“I wish to speak to my grandson,” he gravelly intoned.

Their surprise was expressed with a shocked silence as they all slowly turned to RJ, who had unfortunately picked that exact time to lift a chicken leg to his mouth and found everyone suddenly staring at him mid-gnaw. With a reluctance only one person at the table found disproportionate to the severity of the act that decorum and common curtesy demanded (his mom understanding the dread involved in any sort of discourse with the old man, his father knowing the pain of being denied sustenance, especially when it is so tantalizingly close, Stevie sympathizing with what he knew to be his brother’s hatred of being put on the spot with no foreknowledge of the phrase that would best appease), RJ slowly let the meat-adhered bone fall back to his plate.

“Uh,” he managed to utter.

“Not you, you prattling fool,” the grandfather said. He pointed to Stevie, though otherwise his attention remained on RJ, flames in his eyes, his antipathy corkscrewing through the layers of the young man’s flesh which was now revealed to be scant protection for his soul. “Him.”

A new silence took over, the kind that descends when something not even understood enough to be considered a possibility impinges on what is commonly regarded as reality. A true blankness of thought or volition, with no idea of how to proceed since what was being presented was not understood as a precursor to anything, and though it aped the form of pure telos, something intrinsically autotelic, the “point” was understood even less than any of the possibilities that could follow from it. Only Stevie remained tethered to some idea of how he was supposed to act (paradoxically, some might say, by not considering at all what was expected of him), and he greeted the news with a spirited, “Sure thing!”

Only after they had left the rest of the family in the dining room, to finish their meal and contemplate what things meant, and retired to his study did he turn to Stevie and regard him with something resembling interest. Stevie looked around the room, a space he had never before been but immediately understood as some sort of sanctuary for his grandfather, gazing at the books lining the shelves, the giant floor globe on its own intricately woven mat, the light streaming in wispily through the mullioned windows, dreamy dregs of cobwebs in the corner—in other words, directing his attention at anything but his grandfather, which was his idea of demonstrating respect for the venerable old man.

“Sit, stand, whatever,” the elder muttered with a dismissive wave. “Just listen.”

Stevie obediently tried to follow his grandfather’s orders exactly, which pulled his limbs in different directions, his arms looking to stand, his legs aiming to sit, and his head swiveling around in search of “whatever.” The herky-jerky movement that resulted from these actions where assumed by the grandfather to be a retard’s version of pacing the room. The grandfather nodded and started doing his own pacing.

“There are things I want to tell each individual in your entire family, but for reasons of propriety I simply cannot.” He paused and stared hard at the far wall. “Actually, propriety has very little to do with it. I simply know that it will strike them in the most basic way, and the insult they would feel would cloud their judgment of what I was saying and thereby mitigate the instructive force of my affirmations. So why bother? But know that whatever seeming indictments I’m about to unleash are meant to be, above all else, just that: Instructive.”

Stevie pursed his lips in either effort or contemplation, it was hard to know.

“Your mother, for instance,” the old man said. “My daughter. She has turned into a fat cow.” He waited to see if Stevie would protest, and when no objection was forthcoming, he continued. “She can’t help it, or so she would have you believe. Or rather, she can help it, as long as she does these certain things she can’t bring herself to do . . . which are completely wrong!

“You know she still sends me mail?” he said ruminatively. “Letters in the mail, which I pay her the courtesy of reading. It’s a vestige of the old-fashioned manners the current heathen world has remanded to antiquity. It may be my only weakness. You send a letter and I will, against my better judgment, read it. It’s only right. I may even respond to it; almost certainly the first time, anyway. Maybe I truly am afraid to offend . . . and maybe this accounts for my feelings of isolation.” He brought his hand up to his mouth, then shook his head decisively. “She sends me these letters, exultantly recounting her success in following some ‘21-day plan’ or ‘fix’ or ‘cleanse’ or whatever. ‘Eight and half pounds and nine inches lost!’ she squeals, dare I say like a pig. I can hear it through the letter. Squee, squee, squee!”

Stevie smiled. He used to have an electronic device as a kid that made distorted, almost robotic sounds of barnyard animals. The memory to him was like a warm blanket.

“Never mind that the more weight you have, the more weight you can lose.” He picked a book off the shelf, flipped through its pages, and put it back. “But as I’m sure you noticed, this plan her pea-sized brain decided was unimpeachable? Hardly sustainable. Those eight-and-a-half came back with a vengeance, didn’t they? She didn’t wish those pounds bon voyage so much as merely bid them a simple bonne nuit, isn’t that right?” His nostrils flared. “Next time try a ‘60-year fix’ you cow. But she can feel good, espousing a view shared by the masses, never taking into account that the world is full of fat cows who all think they’re doing well. Cows, everywhere I look, cows! Even her spawn are bringing them home. Your mom includes pictures of those your brothers are bumping uglies with . . . heifers all. Makes you just want to weep for humanity.” He eyed Stevie across the room. “I’ve noticed that you, however, through will or circumstance, have not succumbed to societal pressure to be a cattleman. Good for you . . . just as long as you don’t bring home a bull, eh?”

He raised an eyebrow at Stevie, which Stevie tried to emulate, resulting in a sneeze instead.

The grandfather narrowed his eyes and resumed his pacing. “But the dull-witted cow finds its own, yes? Your father—a poor pathetic excuse for a paterfamilias. Fat, fat, fat, and not even the least of his many failings. I won’t get into his obsessions with watching grown men playing with balls, or the utter banality of every single thought he has ever expressed . . . never mind the insipidness of the ideas he expresses, imagine the horrific emptiness of the ideas he considers unworthy of articulating to others and that he instead squirrels away in that musty and desolate warehouse he calls a brain? And about those notions he considers novel or correct or just . . . pure pablum. So he was against both Iraq wars? Congratulations, dimbulb. A thing mentioned once, if at all. And yet, he’s repeated it so much that it has become one of the things his sons recount to others as evidence of their father’s rectitude. You all end up looking like dolts in the end! He’s done you boys no favors.”

Stevie heard his grandfather’s concluding words as “Nofay Verrs.” He did not know what that was, but thought immediately of vanilla wafers. A bit of drool involuntarily escaped the side of his mouth.

“Your older brother . . . I see this political leaning manifesting itself in wasted effort. Just running on a treadmill, or better yet, a hamster wheel. A bunch of running round and round and round, with no forward progress. You have to continue to grow, or you might as well be dead. Sometimes . . . sometimes I see news reports of those parents that snap and kill their whole families in a big ole murder-suicide deal. And I experience an envy that has scarcely been matched at any time in my life.” His gaze fell on Stevie. “Man, you are some funny-looking kids. That was not a felicitous match, your parents, aesthetically speaking. To go through all that sweating and grunting just to produce such aesthetic failures. It sickens the soul.”

He let out a heavy sigh, which Stevie attempted to copy. “All out of politeness,” he said querulously to his grandson. “So much failure is associated with being polite. A causal relationship between the two, I’m convinced. I’ve come to believe this at my advanced age. My only regrets are all the times I was needlessly polite. But I can’t do it anymore . . . I’ve run out of time.”

Running his hands through his hair, the old man stopped at the window and stared into the distance. “I’m not long for this world. And even if I had anything to offer it, I wouldn’t. Out of spite? Yeah, sure. I won’t even give them my vituperation. I conceal that from them, from everyone. Spitefully.”

He turned to Stevie. “But those I allow to enter into my confidence get the unadulterated contents of my brain.” He ticked off the points on his fingers: “Your mom is a fat cow. Your dad is a fat cow, and dull. Your brother is an untalented sycophant. I know nothing of the sports, but even I could tell at a glance he would amount to nothing in the arena of professional sportsball. He couldn’t hack it in any sort of professional world at all. A feckless nothing is all he will ever be. Dim eyes. But preferable to that other brother of yours. Arrogant eyes in that one. Know-it-all twerp. Currently going to college 3,000 miles away just so he can overpay for a non-education. He’ll come out of it having learned nothing, mark my words. Had my first and only real conversation with him before he left and I will rue that wasted time until the day I die. He’s a know-nothing and be-nothing. Wants to have opinions on everything and be paid for it. And when he’s stuck out in the middle of nowhere with no compensatory offers for those jewels of insight he comes up with which he mistakes for diamonds but are really flecks of mica . . . I wonder who will eventually end up taking care of his debts? And make no mistake: if that fat cow chips in, it drains my coffers, too. All these kids today complaining how poor they are. Shut up. One is only as poor as their parents.”

The grandfather ran his tongue over his lips and bared his teeth for a second. There was a baleful glint in his eyes. “And you’re probably wondering when my arrow of recrimination will be aimed at you, piercing deft and true. At this point you know there’d be no pussyfooting around. I’d go for the coup d’grâce immediately, no delighting in watching you stumble around, maimed. You can’t cripple a cripple anyway. But can you kill something without a soul, is the question. No, assuredly not.”

His face drained of emotion and assumed a neutral aspect. “Retards have no souls. This is what I believe.” He shrugged his shoulders and walked back across the room.

“So you, Steve-ie.” The name came out sluggishly, as if he were chewing an especially thick piece of nougat. Stevie’s ears pricked up and he almost leaped in the air upon hearing his grandfather enunciate his name for the first time ever. “I lately find myself having thoughts a trifle more magnanimous than usual,” he continued. “It is a condition that will soon pass, but it is a smallest window of opportunity for a select few around me. ‘Few’ is of course overstating it, for what I mean is ‘one.’ Do you get what I’m saying to you boy? Does the abyssal darkness shrouding everything inside that lopsided head of yours admit the barest sliver of light when proffered? Do you comprehend things, at least enough to respond in ways intelligible to others? Do you understand what I’m saying when I explain that you, being the least offensive of all these people I have the misfortune to call family, have been granted some kind of favor from me, provided it doesn’t cost me anything in money or time or thought? Are you cognizant enough to take advantage of this opportunity? Well, are you?”

Stevie gasped in awe, or confusion; it was unclear which. He knew from his grandfather’s mien that some sort of response was expected of him, if not in actual words issuing from his mouth than at least a clear indication of how to proceed. Stevie did not appear cowed by the situation, though it was left in serious doubt whether he understood the full implications of what he was just told. His grandfather, due to prejudices and antipathies developed long ago and allowed to metastasize throughout his being to such a degree that they did not fail to inform every thought that passed through his mind, could not think of a simpler way to put his proposal to his grandson, and nothing came more naturally to him than interpreting the silence that ensued as evidence of the boy’s complete idiocy and ineptitude. It also reinforced the idea he’d already had that attempts at communication was futile, that no one would ever understand him and so why bother even talking to anyone? This recognition brought some degree of satisfaction to the old man, and his spirits lifted, briefly.

Meanwhile, Stevie took the pause in his grandfather’s speech as an occasion for delight, the same kind one experiences when they are passed the dice while playing a board game. It was clearly his “turn” and even if he didn’t know the rules or how best to capitalize on the attention now directed his way, he would be sure to make some sort of move, no matter how random. His gaze wandered aimlessly and settled on the desk across the room. “Nice desk,” he told his grandfather.

“Yes yes,” the old man said impatiently. “It’s an 18th-century Joseph Schmitz, solid oak, black leather writing surface, three graduated drawers with ormolu handles, brass galleried back, boxwood banding, kingwood crossband, legs carved with tools that don’t even exist anymore . . .”

He abruptly stopped speaking and gave Stevie a curious look. The expression on his face, frozen in impatiently pedantic contours, morphed into one of surprised understanding, if not appreciation. “Ah,” he said softly. “Aren’t you the sly one?”

He waved his hand in the air with a flourish, moving Stevie to clap his hands exactly once with excitement, and he nodded at the boy in wordless affirmation. “Consider it done. Say no more. I insist, in fact. Any more words would corrupt whatever compact we have reached here. A gap has been bridged and it’s best not to take stock and look over the edge halfway across lest we be jolted by the vertiginous heights from which it is still possible to fall and, losing our balance, have grim possibility—probability, even—reified into all too bracing existence.”

Stevie stood there, uncertain, his head spinning. His grandfather looked at him. “Leave,” he said.

It was many months later that the old man died, and many months after that when a very large wooden box was delivered to the Cardaman’s house. There had been no advance notice, so receiving a package from the recently-deceased family member (a passing they had all gotten over fairly quickly) was something of a surprise. Even more surprising was that it was addressed to Stevie. The box was too big to fit through the front door and had to be wheeled around back and eased into the house through the slider doors in the kitchen. After a crowbar was tracked down and the box’s panels pried open, the family found themselves staring at an awe-inspiring antique writing desk. It was as big as a small car, impressively solid, and weighed a ton. It came with no note, no further instructions. The family’s reaction was muted. There was a lot of head scratching. Finally, Keith said they had better think of a way to get it up to Stevie’s room. The rest of them started as if jostled from a vivid dream. They all gathered around the gargantuan desk and dutifully, if not mechanically, began lugging it up the stairs. (Stevie was out of the house at the time, attending a meeting of enthusiasts of yet another in a series of bizarre hobbies the family had ceased even pretending to show polite interest in.) After narrowly averting tragedy on the stairwell when RJ suddenly lost his grip and the desk almost crushed his mom’s foot, they managed to negotiate the onerous bequest through the door to Stevie’s room only after mangling one of the doorjambs and scuffing up one of the edges of the desk pretty badly, a defacement they all agreed would go unnoticed by Stevie as long as no one said anything. It was then that they realized that there was no clearly felicitous spot in the somewhat cramped room to put the desk. They finally agreed to set it against one of the walls and help Stevie rearrange the furnishings when he came home, if he decided it was necessary (with each of them telling themselves that they would do everything they could to convince him the current arrangement was satisfactory).

When Stevie came home to find that an ostentatious desk had materialized in his room—the provenance of which he had entirely forgotten—he laughed as one does the moment after witnessing a particularly virtuosic illusion by a master magician. If he was initially taken aback by its presence, he quickly got over any befuddlement and set about straight away making use of it. His holed up in his room and his family didn’t see him for the rest of the evening. He emerged the next morning only to consume a bowl of Life cereal (garnished with many generous spoonfuls of sugar), after which he returned to his room and remained there until late afternoon. The next time his mother saw him was when he wandered into the kitchen as she was preparing dinner. Before any pleasantries could be exchanged, he requested of her a few pads of lined paper, or, if there weren’t any available, a trip to the store so they could pick some up. Some pens too, he added as an afterthought. As the days progressed with Stevie spending most of each and every one of them in his room, alone and out of sight, it became clear to the rest of them that he was diligently working on a manuscript of some kind. He didn’t tell them about it, and they didn’t ask. But if the constant supply of paper his mother kept him stocked with was any indication, the size of it was substantial. The family, as was their habit, let him go along unimpeded, secure in the knowledge that he was propitiated. What exactly it was that effected serenity in a soul they had long suspected was more tortured than he would ever let on was not their concern, so much. As a result, the content of Stevie’s writing would not be made clear for many years, until the day he finally shared it—for the first time, by all indications—with someone outside the family.

“Stevie” is an excerpt from Don Hough's upcoming novel The Youthless Young.