“Shut up, Petey,” Toby says. His command scalds me into silence and I lower my head because I can’t look at him anymore. We’re silent for a time before he says, “Go on up to bed. I’ve got things to do.”
I do as I am told and I lay in bed, but my eyes are open, and I’m angry at Toby for dismissing me. Abandoning me. The house still stinks of the fish Mama fried for supper. My pillow is as hard as stone and the pillowcase feels scratchy and hot on my neck. My thoughts crackle and pop like damp kindling. I don’t understand how my family could crumble, just fall apart like a dirt wall in a hard wind. I don’t understand because no one has told me anything that sounds true. Toby will be okay. Daddy will be okay. But how can anyone know that? They can’t is the answer, but I’m supposed to accept the meaningless phrases as gospel?
Daddy is in the shadows staining my ceiling, and Toby is there, too. They are strangers to me.
I leave the bed and cross to the window and look down on the workshop, and I know Toby is there, and I decide I deserve to know what is happening. So, I walk out of the room, down the stairs, and out the front door, and I cross the walk to the dirt drive and I stare at the workshop door. Toby has done an excellent job and the windows are impenetrably black, but there is a narrow crack beneath the door and I see it is filled with gray light. The light remains for twenty seconds and then goes out, only to reignite after a single beat of my heart. I reach out for the doorknob and pause. The light goes out again; it returns.
Holding my breath, I turn the knob and push the door open. Initially a glaring disc beaming from across the room blinds me. The odors of the place — oil, sawdust, and sour sweat — burrow into my nostrils. A dull hum fills my ears. I lift my hand to shield my eyes from the light and it goes out, but a fog of green covers my vision the way it does after a camera’s flash. I close my eyes and the swirling murk remains. The lamp ignites again and before I open my eyes, I turn away.
I am aware of the shelves on the right side of the workshop and that something — One of Mama’s sheets? — hangs against the nearest wall. But my gaze lands on my brother and fills with the sight of him.
Toby lies on his cot. He has pushed his hands through leather straps affixed to the metal frame, and they are knotted into fists. His eyes are wide and he’s shaking his head frantically. There is something on his head. It is a small cap with metal arms that reach out to press against his temples. Rubber tubing hangs from these shiny appendages and drape the sides of his face where they connect to a wooden dowel wrapped in gauze. Toby clamps the dowel between his teeth like a horse bit. He struggles to get his hands free of the leather straps when the light goes out again.
It comes back on with a click, and the dull hum returns. Toby’s back arches and his body goes rigid. His eyes are rolled back and white, and lines of tendon and vein appear on his neck as if he’s swallowed a vine plant that is trying to push its way through his skin.
I scream. It does nothing to lessen my dread. I shout my brother’s name but he is paralyzed. I step forward and then back up and then forward again. The light dies, and the humming stops, and I turn toward the bench at the back of the room. When the light comes back on, the apparatus atop the wooden surface comes clear. A plug juts from the wall socket; a white cord runs to a junction box, topped by the black knob of the rheostat; two wires, one black and one blue, run like tentacles from the metal box to the cap on my brother’s head; another cord, this one yellow, snakes to the slide projector. I can only think of the display as a torture device, imagined and built by my father. But what was it meant to accomplish? I spin toward the image projected on the wall of the workshop and my breath lodges against the stone in my throat. A young woman stands naked in a field, holding a flower to her nose. Her hair, the color of corn silk, frames her beautiful face. She smiles softly. Sweetly. My gaze traces down her throat to her small round breasts and then over her belly to the mound of golden blonde hair between her legs, and then back up again. The room goes black. The picture of the young woman is replaced by that of a muscled man with a dense pelt of hair covering his chest. Beneath his thick mustache his mouth is twisted into a smirk. He is also naked and his hand grasps the shaft of his penis like the hilt of a knife.
The hum has returned to the workshop. Toby is again arched and rigid. And my confusion is momentarily erased as if I understand this perverse experiment, though I’m certain I do not. It seems that Toby is relaxed when pictures of women cover my mama’s bed sheet, but voltage and pain accompanies the images of men. I don’t know what this is meant to achieve, but I know it has to stop.
I reach across the workbench. Doing so, I lean over the rheostat and notice the switches and the dial on top. Dashes and numbers run in an arc to accommodate the round black knob. Someone, either Daddy or Toby, has run a strip of black electrical tape like a comic eyebrow, blocking out the lines and numbers on the downside of the arc, and above this, written in red ink, is the word Danger. I yank the plug from the wall. Despite the pitch darkness I find my way to the light switch on the other side of the shop and flick it on, and then I turn to my brother, who has managed to get one of his hands loose. He frees his other hand, reaches for the bit in his mouth and pulls it away all the while glaring at me.
“Y-you c-can’t be in here, Petey,” he says. His voice is dry, and he growls savagely to clear his throat.
Only when I try to answer do I realize that I’m crying, and I can’t find my voice. Toby removes the device from his head and I see the red marks at his temples, and I know they’re the reason he wears his baseball cap in the house, and the sight of them makes me cry harder.
“It’s okay,” he says. With a tremendous effort, he sits up on the cot and swings his legs off the side. “I’m okay.”
“No. No. No.” I blubber.
“You’re too young to understand,” Toby says, wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand. “I wasn’t right, Petey. I felt things and did things …” His voice trails away. A mask of confusion falls over his face like the darkness between the projector’s light. When it passes he says, “Daddy read all about it. He found books in Dallas. He found out what was wrong with me and how to fix it. He had to do something or else he’d have to send me away to an asylum and people would know about me, and they can’t know about me. They just can’t. Do you want me to go to an asylum, Petey?”
“It’s not right,” I say between sobs. “It’s hurting you.”
“It has to,” Toby says. His head dips and he observes the floor for a moment. When he looks back at me, the spark I’ve missed in his eyes has returned, except the light there is hard and cold. A hint of a smile touches the corners of his lips. His expression is hopeful but it’s also frightening, because, to me, Toby looks crazy. And when he speaks again, I feel certain his mind has come loose, because he says, “It’s working, Petey. I’m getting better. Really I am.”
I pulled into the drive of Toby’s house. My car’s headlights swept across the front of the shed like a lighthouse beacon. Black paint still covered the windows. A grey light showed beneath the door and then extinguished. Remaining in the parked car, I peered at the shed with trepidation. I’d thought the machine was gone, dismantled, torn apart, and thrown in the trash. That’s what Toby had told me; he’d said it was the first thing to go when he moved in after our mother’s death. His lie shouldn’t have come as a surprise.
Over the years, bits of information came my way. I learned that Toby had made a sexual advance toward his buddy, Duke, which had triggered the fight and the call from Richard Manheim. Of course I’d already figured that out, but Duke himself confirmed it years later. We ran into each other at a bar in Austin, and we got to talking about Toby. He felt bad for my brother. Such a shame, he’d said. Such a waste.