With Sean in the Pacific Northwest I had the dorm to myself Friday night. I did nothing but veg out, watch TV, and fall asleep before ten. Woke up 12 hours later to another cryptic e-mail from my nephew, Prince William, so I decided it was time to go see him in person to find out what the hell’s going on.
I headed down to the parsonage with a belly full of frosted flakes & cantaloupe from the cafeteria—the fast way, 21st Avenue south to 440 (as in hertz) then 24 (as in hours) to the Old Hickory exit—and found Will by himself; Dad was still at Young Marines & Mom was running errands. He was upstairs in the bonus room watching the big screen, AC on full blast, in Dad’s blue recliner. I switched off the wall unit in order to have a chance at being heard over the din of The Weather Channel, and sat down on the musty couch.
“Thanks, was just beginning to get cold.”
“No problem, Willo.” A grimace at that nickname. Sixth grade is brutal.
“Sorry—Will,” I said. “’Sup? Why are you e-mailing me in the middle of the night. Can’t sleep?”
“No,” he said. “Not really. Too itchy.” Will claims the cotton in his clothes & linens is of a coarser quality than he’s accustomed to. No rash that I could see, yet he seemed very reluctant to move around, as if he had a bad sunburn. “Grandmother thinks it’s the detergent she uses in the laundry, so she’s gone to get the hypoallergenic kind—but I think it’s the strain of cotton the fabric is made with.” I hadn’t any clue how he got this idea in his head.
On television was the post-landfall coverage of Rita. I assume he was up all the previous night watching TWC, a channel he’s been obsest with ever since he was old enough to click the remote. “Jude. Is there anything wrong with that map, that you c’n see?” He pointed to the radar loop of the cyclone spinning out over northern Louisiana, as one of the daytime personalities (Bill Keneely, maybe) stood before it, green-screend & gesturing as he described its path. “What’s that blue? Next to Memphis.”
“Lake Arkansaw?” I said.
“I’ve never seen it before.” He said it in a weird, faraway voice that made me think he was joking at first, deadpan. Then I recald the e-mail he sent me two weeks ago (see 9/12) upon which I now suppose I should shed some more light: He declared, in a nutshell, that since his mom (my sister Suze) died in January he’s begun to notice his memories do not entirely match up with the apparent world of today, resulting in a kind of chronic, ever-waxing sense of jamais vu. He calls it “warpt memory.” Actually, he spells it warped—which he thought was the correct form of the past participle of all regular verbs, regardless of pronunciation—a spelling convention that has been out of style for at least a century. Tho he’s learning not to do this in his schoolwork, it was a homework assignment that prompted that first e-mail. Over the weekend of the fourth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks his English teacher had the class write a few sentences describing what they rememberd about that day & how they felt about it today. Everyone remembers exactly where they were & what they were doing that morning, right? Not Will. He doesn’t remember anything unordinary about any day in September that year (he was seven & living in Texas, going to a parochial school); after a while he said he could recall that his dad mentiond something about a plane crash in Pennsylvania, near Pittsburg, but nothing about a hijacking or the towers or the Pentagon. “I just made something up and turned it in,” he wrote me, “but I don’t know why I can’t remember like everybody else.”
Now he seemed beset with this new phantom, the oblong body of water between Memphis & Little Rock formed by the confluence of the Mississippi/Missouri and Ohio/Tennessee rivers, towards which a weakening Hurricane Rita (by now barely a Cat-1) was moseying on screen. “It shouldn’t be there. How did that get there?” I started to explain the 1811–12 earthquakes, he just shook his head & said “No, I know about that, but that’s not the real foot. Where’s the real foot?” at which point I figured he’d completely lost it. I felt a momentary flash of fear that my precocious nephew might be suffering from childhood-onset schizophrenia.
“Here,” he said, abruptly breaking his stoic countenance to reach under the chairside table & bring out a US road atlas from like, 1999 or 2000. He flipt thru till he found Tennessee, and pointing with both hands, scrutinized a corner of the state on the map. “It’s a… river. It’s suppost to be a lake. Look.” He handed me the old softcover atlas & I peerd close: Reel Foot R., a tiny trib not much bigger than Mill Creek here in town, located entirely within Obion County in northwestern Tennessee. It feeds directly into Lake Arkansaw on the border with Missouri, about ten miles south of Hickman, Kentucky.
“So you remember a ‘Lake Reel Foot’ instead of Lake Arkansaw,” I said.
“‘Reelfoot Lake.’ One word, ar-double-ee-el-ef-double-oh-tee.”
Again, I don’t know exactly what to make of this. He’s not panicking (so I’m trying not to) but he is poking the bear of delusion, seemingly. Jesus, at eleven years old, too.
The bear/elephant in the room/den: in January of this year, my sister Suzanne died of double pneumonia brung about by a particularly nasty case of the flu. She was 32. She’d struggled with an eating disorder most of her adult life—the proverbial jury is still out on what brang that about—which had weakend her to the point of exhaustion, and so under the virus’s siege her body simply gave up. At the time she & Will were on their way here from Texas; she was leaving her husband, Timothy, behind for good. Infidelity, Suzie said. We’ve no reason to doubt that, either, as Tim Roman has since vanished off the face of the fucking planet & has not come looking for his son or tried to contact him whatsoever—even went to the trouble of changing his phone number. Piece of shit. Anyway, after that bit of trauma, Will has understandably had a tough time adjusting to life in hazy, congested Middle Tennessee, having never gone to its schools or played its games before, all while grieving the loss of his mother & the abandonment of his father. I’m surprized he hasn’t crackt sooner, honestly.
A commercial came on, an ad for Lipton Brisk iced tea featuring bigheaded claymation homunculi of Elvis Presley, James Brown, Willie Nelson & Coolio, uncannily jiving in prison to a re-toold version of “Jailhouse Rock.” Will was transfixt. “Osceola Rock…” he mutterd. Thirty seconds passed & the next ad was playing. He repeated: “Osceola Rock.”
“Huh?” I still held the atlas & didn’t want to give it back to him. I was squinting close at the page, trying to see it the way my nephew does: the Mississippi River restored from Cairo to Natchez & an itty-bitty lake known as Reelfoot, instead of our so-cald Great Lake of the South which extends beyond this map’s limits.
“It’s ‘Osceola Rock’—the original lyrics, I think. Oh-ess-cee-ee-oh-el-ay.”
What is this, a spelling bee? Yet, as he speld it, in the bleed-thru symbols of the maps on the other side of the page & the previous page facing it, those dim, grayish squiggles underneath the pale blue behemoth lake became letters that appeard to form Osceola for a half-second—the name of a city, across the Old Channel of the Mississippi from the town of Fulton in West Tennessee, opposite the northernmost “Chickasaw” bluff—then squirmy ink-ghosts again.
Suddenly it hit me. I knew why the cotton in his clothes would irritate him. The parallel universe he lived in prior to his mother’s passing would have had thousands upon thousands more square miles of rich alluvial floodplain to grow cotton on, enough room to experiment and perhaps breed a finer cotton plant with superior quality fibers than what the antebellum planters in our timeline were able to cultivate—thus setting a higher global market standard than what we have, now, “here.”
Tho I considerd not telling him this, I knew he’d come up with something on his own anyway, eventually. He didn’t react like I expected him to, didn’t react much at all in fact. He just kept repeating that name, Osceola. “Do you hear that? There’s a ‘knock’ sound on the second O, like someone’s knocking on a door. Osee-Ola. Osee-OH-la.”
Of course I didn’t hear it, and was again weighing the pros & cons of informing Will when the motor for the garage door sprang to life beneath our feet, vibrating the bonus room floor and by extension our seats, startling us both. Mom or Dad was home; I didn’t know which yet. “Y’better not mention any of this to your grandparents,” is all I could think to say to him.
Now what does any of this mean? I don’t know, but it’s past my bedtime.