Determinant

Uncle Baby

19 U n C L e B a B y my father always told the stories—to anyone, even to people who’d been there—of how he and Paul had played with Uncle Baby. Baby was their only little brother. eleven years between, a long lacuna of miscarriages and things unnamed. Them back from college, and Baby writing sentences at the kitchen table: they couldn’t help it. Paul put lines of King’s black turds between Baby’s bedroom and the toilet. my daddy set Baby’s alarm ahead six hours, watched him pour and eat his alpha-Bits in the hot Florida dark. Their coup de grâce: the masks. my father was nixon, Paul a lime-green grimacing mummy. When they knocked on his window, Baby hid under the covers, so they kept knocking and saying, Baby, Baby, let us in. He recognized their voices. His brothers. So alike their gill-shaped stretch marks curled in the same places on their backs like a double helix. They couldn’t say how long he screamed when he came to the window—screamed as they screamed with laughter, screamed until mimi came screaming after them in her mushroom-colored bathrobe. i always wondered what Uncle Baby saw in the dark. a pair of monsters with his brothers’ voice? or a mask on a face that he knew, and underneath another face—one he didn’t know, a face he’d never seen. ...