Beneath Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

  ONE: UP TOP

  A LITTLE FAMILY HISTORY

  WE ALL HAVE LITTLE QUIRKS

  HERE ARE SOME OF COOP’S FAVORITE THINGS

  THE GREAT TUNNEL DISASTER

  THE DAY COOP LEFT

  HI, COOP

  NOVEMBER IS COLD HERE, PATRICK

  BUT I AM WORRIED ABOUT COOP

  I’M NOT GOING TO FLORIDA

  TWO: BENEATH

  THE POST OFFICE

  BUT THE MAN DIDN’T WAIT

  THE DAY PACK

  I FOLLOWED HIM

  RATS

  UP EARLY

  THE SAME SKINNY WAITER

  I DID NOT CALL BACK

  THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

  MY GUIDE AWAITS TOO

  I HAD TO JOG

  HE HANDED ME THE EIGHTEEN-POUND TURKEY

  WE WENT TO TWO MORE DUMPSTERS

  THE LAST DUMPSTER

  IT STARTED TO SNOW

  I CHOSE THE BLINDFOLD

  SOMETHING HEAVY

  HERE

  I WASN’T HUNGRY

  ALL EYES

  COOP IS IN THE DEEP

  NEXT SUBJECT

  THE GIRL WITH THE SUNGLASSES

  COOP’S RECORDER WAS BROKEN

  THREE: THE DEEP

  THE DOG’S NAME

  KATE GAVE ME A LEG UP

  NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS

  …AND OVER

  MAYBE I SHOULDN’T HAVE LISTENED TO KATE

  A BARKLESS DOG

  IT WAS SOPPING

  YET SHE WAS SO KIND

  WE BOTH KNEW

  I HIT PLAY

  KATE STOPPED

  ON THE PATH

  THEY CAME

  I MUST HAVE FALLEN ASLEEP

  I YANKED THE EARBUDS OUT

  I MADE IT FORTY

  SUBTERRANEAN HOMESICK BLUES

  KATE HAD NO MEMORY OF HER PARENTS

  TWO DEAD IN DUMPSTER

  DUMPSTER DEATH

  THE ALLEY

  THE LIBRARIAN

  AND THAT’S WHEN HE APPEARED

  HE MIGHT BE A GHOST

  THE RIGHT PLACE

  I HIT RECORD

  KATE HAD A BIG SMILE ON HER FACE

  FOUR: THE POD

  WE TOOK THE RIGHT TUNNEL

  YOU DON’T NEED A WEATHERMAN TO KNOW

  CRACK

  HOURS

  KATE POINTED AT THE FAN

  A BEAM OF LIGHT

  WE TOOK OFF OUR SHOES

  1300

  THE CHRISTMAS BREAKFAST

  KATE SLIPPED HER SHADES OFF

  OVER THE BRIDGE

  LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT

  COOP LOOP

  KATE RETURNED

  WE REACHED THE RIVER STYX

  THE CANOE

  SHADOWS ON THE DOCK

  KATE STOPPED

  SOMETHING GROWLED

  THE LIBRARIAN

  HIS ROOM

  TIME TO GO

  ALEX DANE

  FIVE: DAYLIGHT

  DR. BERTRAND O’TOOLE

  DR. ARIEL O’TOOLE’S

  THIS CAN’T BE TRUE

  BEFORE I MARRIED

  OBVIOUSLY THAT’S NOT TRUE

  THEIR FIRST STOP

  ARIEL AND BERTRAND

  PLAY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  Exactly one year to the day after my brother, Coop, ditched me, I got a package in the mail.

  It came to the school, not our house.

  The secretary handed me the package with a warning that I was never to use the school as my personal address.

  I was going to tell her that I hadn’t when I saw my name: Pat Meatloaf O’Toole, scrawled in Coop’s familiar handwriting.

  Meatloaf is not my real middle name.

  I told her I would never do it again, grabbed the package, locked myself in a restroom stall, and tore the box open.

  Inside was a handheld digital voice recorder, a supply of memory sticks, and a note written on a greasy hamburger wrapper:

  Lil Bro, Pat, just turn the recorder to Play and I’ll explain what you’re supposed to do with this. DO NOT share with parents. This is just between you and me.

  Your Big Bro, Coop

  I made sure the restroom was empty and switched on the recorder.

  Hey, Meatloaf, I know you’re mad at me for splitting without so much as a good-bye, or a note, but opportunity knocked. I’m not sure what Mom and Dad told you, but while you were at school we had one of our discussions about my future. As usual, it was one-sided — a monologue, not a dialogue — and their plans for me did not include anything I was interested in doing … big surprise. So I packed my things and walked out the door while it was still open.

  I would have called and explained, but you know my take on the whole phone thing. Then I was going to write you a letter, but the longer I waited the longer the letter got in my head. Pretty soon it was too long to write. Know what I mean? So I bought a second digital voice recorder exactly like the one I’ve been using in my travels and figured you and I could stay in touch on the little memory sticks that store the recordings.

  And the truth is that I want to hear your voice, and I hope that you still want to hear mine. So consider this a slow-motion cell phone.

  You’ll be able to transcribe all this into one of those journals you’re always scribbling in.

  Epistolary. Remember that?

  Now, memorize this address: PO Box 1611, New York, New York. Zip: 10011. This is where you can send the memory sticks when you figure out how to use the recorder. And it would be nice if you would respond soon so I know you got the recorder and that you’re okay. Here’s another address you need to know: PO Box 912 at the post office on Elm Street. That’s your private mailing address in McLean. You pass the post office every day on your way to and from school, so it shouldn’t be a problem for you to pop in and check the mail. The PO box key is buried in the pot with the petunias Miss Flower planted in the backyard. I assume that Mom and Dad still haven’t hired anyone to do any landscaping since the Flowers were fired. And I’m certain you haven’t done any yard work, so the key should be there. Talk to you soon, Lil Bro.

  Only Coop would think of something like this. That’s how his mind works. But the recorder was a huge technological leap for him. I think this is the first electronic gadget he has ever owned.

  The little recorder has a lot of functions. There’s software with it too. I can edit the recordings, splice them together — like I’m doing now — then transcribe them in my journal.

  A hybrid journal.

  A collaboration with my brother.

  The thumb switch on the side has five positions:

  Play.

  Fast-forward.

  Rewind.

  Record.

  Erase.

  Down the rabbit hole we go.

  … for my eyes … I mean, for my ears only … in order to practice with this recorder.

  I don’t think I’ll send this to Coop, but I might change my mind if I don’t sound too stupid.

  My brother, John Cooper O’Toole, is five years older than me. And I’m not embarrassed to say that I have idolized Coop my entire life, from the day my baby blue eyes understood that the boy with curly brown hair, green eyes, and the idiotic grin always leaning over me was my brother.

  I’m definitely not sending this to Coop …

  Rewind …

  I can get rid of the last words or …

  Fast-forward …

  Insert …

  (I can insert things I forgot or want to clarify.)

  Or I can keep it even though it sounds stupid, which I think I’ll do …

  Rec
ord …

  Coop was not the child my parents expected.

  I wasn’t either.

  But you don’t get to pick your parents, and they don’t get to pick you.

  My parents did pick each other before Coop came along though, which is one of the unsolved mysteries of the universe.

  Mom is an astrophysicist and former astronaut.

  Dad is a molecular biologist and Nobel laureate.

  Mom is always looking up. Dad is always looking down.

  Neither of them looked at us much.

  Mom wanted girls.

  Dad didn’t want kids at all.

  Here’s how Coop put it: With their combined DNA they expected filet mignon. When they opened the oven they got two pans of meatloaf.

  Within months of Coop’s abrupt departure, by mutual consent, my parents split up.

  Mom is dating an old man with three young daughters.

  Dad is dating a young woman with an old parrot.

  but Coop has more than most.

  I think it’s because he was born during a lunar eclipse.

  December 24.

  Christmas Eve.

  Two weeks before he was supposed to pop out.

  Dad raced Mom to the hospital and got snagged by the worst traffic jam on the 495 Beltway in Virginia history.

  People simply stopped their cars in the middle of the highway to watch the sky.

  Mom was furious.

  But not at the motorists who decided to turn the highway into a parking lot.

  It was the timing.

  She wanted to see the eclipse just as badly as those who were blocking her.

  Instead, she was lying on the backseat of their brand-new SUV in agony, trying to squeeze out her first child.

  A boy.

  Coop has a different take on his quirks.

  Prior to his birth, Mom went on two space shuttle missions.

  Coop believed that during the second mission … something happened. (He always whispered those last two words.) What happened was never explained.

  From the day Coop was born he rarely slept at night.

  The pediatrician assured my parents that Coop would outgrow this behavior.

  The doctor was wrong.

  Mom and Dad both worked, so they hired a full-time nanny to take care of him at night. And a second full-time nanny to watch him sleep during the day.

  The nannies were sisters.

  Identical twins.

  Spinsters.

  Camilla and Cecelia Flores, who didn’t speak ten words of English between them. We called both of them Miss Flower because their last name was the Spanish word for flowers.

  We suspected they switched shifts, covering for each other when necessary, sometimes working twenty-four hours in a row. It didn’t matter to us because we couldn’t tell them apart anyway — they were identical down to the moles on their upper right lips with three black hairs growing out of them. They were the same person split in two.

  The Flowers taught Coop to flamenco dance when he was three years old.

  By the time I came along he had switched to tap and never looked back.

  Coop and I used to watch YouTube clips of the great tappers like the Nicholas Brothers, Leonard Reed, Honi Coles, Bojangles, Fred Astaire … Coop was as good if not better than all of them. He sometimes tapped for me and the Flowers, but mostly he tapped by himself for himself. Several nights a week he’d drape his tap shoes around his neck, sneak out of the house, find a tunnel or highway underpass, and tap until dawn.

  I asked him one time why he tapped.

  “To keep my feet moving, Lil Bro,” he answered. “You’re not going anywhere if you don’t keep ’em moving.”

  When I was nine and Coop was fourteen, Mom and Dad let the Flowers go. It was like losing two mothers at the same time. And it turned out to be a big mistake, because it left Coop and me on our own. But I’ll get to that later.

  Back to Coop’s quirks …

  He collects flashlights. (Hundreds of them from all over the world.)

  He loves people but doesn’t crave their company, sometimes staying in the house for weeks at a time. (I guess I better explain: Old people, young people, rich people, poor people, white, black, Hispanic, Muslim, Christian, whatever … he makes no distinctions. To him they are just people … none better, none worse than the other. I think people sense this in Coop, because they are attracted to him like moths are attracted to light. I don’t know why this is. Something in the way he moves? Pheromones? I’ve seen complete strangers cross a busy street to talk to him. But the conversations are a little one-sided. Coop will nod, shake his head, frown, smile, and say only enough to keep them talking. When they walk away Coop knows all about them, but they know virtually nothing about Coop.)

  He has never worn a watch. (A minute, hour, day, or month are all the same to him.)

  He has never sent or received an email.

  He does not know how to drive a car.

  He writes short letters to people he doesn’t know on purple stationery in beautiful script and doesn’t include a return address.

  He does not talk on the phone. (Ever.)

  He slept virtually all the way through school (and was late every day) but graduated with honors because he did his homework — at night — and turned in all of his assignments on time.

  He was accepted to every university my parents filled out the applications to. He rejected all of them.

  He has no close friends, yet everyone is his friend.

  I thought that I was his best friend until he took off without telling me. I know that sounds whiny, but it hurt. I was really ticked off at him. It was worse than losing the Flowers. I was tempted to send a recording back consisting of just two words with an exclamation point. But that idea lasted about two seconds. I was too happy to hear from him to stay mad.

  Favorite activity: Three-way toss-up … tapping, reading, writing.

  Favorite book: Another toss-up … Dracula by Bram Stoker, written in 1897, and A Journey to the Center of the Earth, written by Jules Verne in 1864.

  He must have read both of these books a dozen times. And he read them to me when I was eight, giving me nightmares for months. Especially Dracula. Coop assured me that there were no such things as vampires. He said that the reason the novel had so much effect on me was because Stoker had chosen to write it in a style so realistic the story appeared to be fact. The technique is called epistolary, from the Latin epistola, meaning letter. The author uses fictitious diaries, letters, and newspaper articles to tell the story. But the nightmares continued, and bats still creep me out. What does an eight-year-old know, or care, about epistolary novels?

  Just think what Stoker could have done with a digital voice recorder and email.

  This is what I’m doing here in this journal … stringing together bits and pieces of information to make a story, each bead in the necklace made from different material. Memory beads. Recorded beads. Newspaper beads. Letter beads …

  Coop got me hooked on keeping a journal. He gave me my first one and said I should keep a diary and never let anyone read it, including him. He said showing someone your diary was like offering someone a slice of your soul. “Too many slices, Meatloaf, and pretty soon the plate is empty. No soul food left, Lil Bro.”

  Which reminds me …

  Favorite food: Tuna fish sandwiches.

  Favorite drink: Water.

  Favorite quote: “Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!” (Count Dracula to Jonathan Harker when the wolves howl outside the castle on Jonathan’s first night there.)

  Favorite music: Anything with drums.

  Favorite smell: Freshly turned dirt.

  Which brings me to …

  as it became known, started the day after the Flowers were dismissed. (Or weeded, as Coop put it.)

  I’m not talking about a little hole in the ground or a small cave. I’m talking about a real full-blown tunnel that any mining engineer would have be
en proud of. Coop must have been planning it for months, or even years. He had drawn up elaborate schematics and complicated mathematical equations. He had collected shovels, sledgehammers, picks, wheelbarrows, wooden posts for beams, planks for the walls and ceiling, scuba gear in case he ran out of air … all stored in the shed in back of the house, which neither of my parents ever went into.

  I was recruited as his assistant engineer and coconspirator after I swore on his favorite possession (his tap shoes) that I would not tell a living soul about his plan. It was easy to keep that promise because there really wasn’t a plan. Plans have endings. Coop’s tunnel only had a beginning hidden behind the shed.

  Mom and Dad thought Coop was lazy and lacked drive. I guess they never took into account the time it took him to dig the tunnel, which authorities later determined was more than a mile long.

  Coop was inside that muddy tube every single night, week after week, for eight months. When he hit an obstacle he couldn’t break through he would go around it, over it, under it — the tunnel slithering beneath the neighborhood like a giant earthworm.

  His nightly routine was to wake up around eleven, eat a tuna fish sandwich, then walk across the backyard to the shed, where he would change into his digging clothes — my mom’s yellow rain slicker and pants. It was cold in the tunnel and wet. When he finished digging for the night he’d rinse off the mud with a garden hose, dry himself with an old towel, change into his jeans and T-shirt, and sneak back into the house.

  On school days I was Coop’s alarm clock. My job was to get him out of the tunnel before my parents woke up. On weekends I joined him in the tunnel. My job was hauling buckets of dirt and dumping them into the wheelbarrow.

  About four months into the project Coop broke through a wall of dirt and discovered a cavern.

  “I knew it!” he shouted. “I knew there was something down here.”

  What he had discovered was his own tunnel from a month earlier, evidenced by the molding tuna sandwich inside the Ziploc bag lying on the tunnel floor. Somehow he had gone in a complete circle and bumped into his old lunch.

  Coop kept digging.

  The longer the tunnel became, the slower the progress. Every scoop of dirt had to be wheelbarrowed back to the entrance and dumped into the stream that ran down the gully in back of our house. He started punching head-size holes in the surface every few nights to figure out where he was, hoping to find a closer dumping site.