Redactor’s Preface

This is just for me.

This is

My name is Miriam Schoen, and I

These are the collected writings of Herschel Schoen, my brother.

My brother.

My

These are the collected writings of Herschel Schoen, my brother, who told me to keep them safe.

And maybe put them together into a book, sometime. In a real book, with a binding and a cover.

In a real binding, so the pages could sit all snug and nice, and not ever fall out while you were reading. Not like those things he used to make, with twigs, and string, and duct tape.

Maybe even get it published, somehow.

Although I told him, I don’t know the first thing about how a book comes to be published. And he didn’t know the first thing, either. Despite being the one of us who brought up the whole publishing idea. He hemmed and hawed but I knew.

You’d never hear him admit he didn’t know a thing. Never. Not about anything in this world, and not either when it came to his little world, my brother’s little world.

My little brother’s little world.

You’d never hear him admit he didn’t know a thing. Not even when it came to, oh, the whereabouts of the frying pan, gone missing in the kitchen.

He’d hem and he’d haw, instead of admitting. When it was just the frying pan, for goodness’ sake, Herschel, for goodness’ sake stop it, you’re making me laugh.

And what did he say to that? Why, his eyes lit up, and he said:

The frying pan IS for goodness’ sake, as all things are. For the sake of goodness created He the day and the night, the sky and the waters.

And I just laughed harder and harder.

There are things you wouldn’t know about Herschel, except if you were his sister, see. There are things.

So I guess that is what this is for. What I’m writing now.

Showing how he was human, and all.

How he put on his pants one leg at a time, or whatever they say

You think you know him, but you really don’t. You don’t know the first thing about him.

And you’re thinking, this is his sister, here to tell me how he put his pants on one leg at a time, and used the bathroom, and all.

Here is his sister, who remembers when he was still in diapers. No way to be dignified in diapers.

Here’s the sister, who can tell me how he wasn’t always dignified, not always. I already know, just by guessing, but I need her to tell me, somehow.

The other part of the picture. The human element. What he was like around the home. How he resisted chores, how he sulked and pouted.

Like he’s not real to you, until I tell you so. Until I give the signal for you to believe.

Until I say

He was real, he was a boy, I was his sister, we did live on earth, in a dusty little two-bedroom brownstone apartment in Flatbush, with too many drawers in the kitchen, we were always losing things in those drawers

We did live there, just like regular people, with a clutter of mail and magazines always on the short little table we had in the living room, yes, and dirty clothes always on the floor, always, despite all Ma’s scolding

He didn’t write all this up in heaven, he wrote it down in the dust

He wrote it sitting on our old sagging couch, in our living room, in our apartment where even the noises are dusty, the scraping static of the radio, the rude pops and snaps of Ma frying in the kitchen

You already know. But you need me to say it.

And if I say it, you’ll think you REALLY know him then

Even though you won’t be laughing

It was a laugh riot, being his sister. Every single day, it was. That’s the first thing about him, the very first thing, and you aren’t laughing.

Can’t you SEE that you don’t know a single thing-about

This is the Book of Miriam Schoen.

This, that I’m writing now, that you’re reading.

This is the Book of Miriam Schoen, which is a part of the Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen.

Come again? A part of what?

A part of the Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen. (There, got it now?)

And that—I’ve just now decided—will be the name for the collected writings of Herschel Schoen, my brother, taken together with the Book of Miriam Schoen, his sister.

I guess that probably isn’t its right name.

“The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen,” I mean. Herschel would tell me that that isn’t its right name, that it should be called something else. I don’t know. I’m doing my best.

I’m doing my best, Herschel.

Do your best, now, too.

Like your big sister. If she can do it, so can you.

He told me to keep them safe.

His papers.

That’s what he called them, “my papers.” Of course that’s what he called them. Anyone could have guessed that.

Spiral notebooks and yellow legal pads, cluttering up our room. Filling up our closet so full that they spill out all over the floor, when you open it.

And scattered all across the floor, too. Despite all Ma’s scolding.

And piled up under his bed.

And piled on the bed, too. Laid out around him on the bedspread every night, in a shape like a house. Stacks of paper made into a line down his left side, and another one just like it going down his right side, and a little steeple of pages arching over his head.

Like some kind of shrine, I’d think, sometimes.

He wouldn’t let me do it for him. Putting the papers in place around him, before bed, so he could sleep. Even when he was very, very sleepy, he insisted on doing that himself.

(He really couldn’t sleep, without them. Not a wink. Ma did learn that, eventually, though it took a lot of my pleading before her hard heart finally gave way, on this score.)

(See? Don’t say I’m not giving you what you expected, what you needed. I am the sister. Wasn’t it so homely, how we lived there, in the dust?)

There was a special arrangement to the papers on the bed. Which ones went where, and what order you set them down in, too. It had to be done exactly right, like a ritual.

Everything was that way, with him.

But you know that already.

Anyone could have guessed that.

I memorized the arrangement. And memorized it again when he changed it, which he did frequently. And still, he wouldn’t let me put the papers down for him, before bed.

He told me to keep his papers safe, and collect them into a whole.

I don’t think he said the word “collect.” It was more like, make them into a whole. Or make them whole, even.

You would have thought they were already whole, what with the way they spilled out all over your feet, from the closet.

I’m sure he said whole and I’m sure he meant whole.

Because he put everything into those “papers” of his. Chores and cockroaches, times tables, funnies he heard on the radio, our lost frying pan. It’s all in there, sitting real snug right next to G-d, as He looks out over all His angels, and over all the rest.

The frying pan is for goodness’ sake, as all things are. That was his way. Anyone knows that.

Anyone knows that, even if they don’t see the humor in it, the way he and I saw the humor in it.

You aren’t laughing and you won’t laugh, ever.

You mustn’t think it was all like this, between him and me. Bedspreads and magazines and messy rooms that have to be cleaned, now, Herschel, please, you know what Ma will be like if she sees.

You mustn’t think I was just the sister, instead of sometimes being Herschel Schoen’s sister, too.

He told me to make it whole. His little world with everything in it.

His little world that never would have been whole, never could have been.

It was a laugh riot, living with that every day.

Six things that never were and never could have been, before breakfast, every day. Six new ones, fresh out of the oven, not at all like yesterday’s. He knew how to surprise you, like no one else.

Did I cry, too? (Did the sister weep?) Of course, of COURSE. You have already guessed what anyone could guess but I am telling you the other part.

My point is, I think I know what he meant. When he told me to make it whole.

I didn’t when I started typing this out, but now I do. Funny how that works.

Paper, pencil, ink, typewriter: everyone talks as if these objects are just recording devices, for getting things down after they’re already fully figured out inside your own head. But there’s no clean split like that, with thought before and text after.

You only learn what you really intended to write in the moment just after writing it, when you stare down the fresh ink on the page, read over the words, and find yourself agreeing with them. The words write the thoughts, not the other way around.

Maybe that’s why he wrote so much. Maybe that’s why his papers would sometimes grow so enormously long, and I’d come home to see him writing away on the one hundred fiftieth page of some big stack that was not there at all, when I left in the morning.

Oh, but just look at me now! Talking like he had to figure things out, one pant leg at a time. I am the sister, the faithless sister, who giggles in the temple, and is not fit to change the diaper of that man who brought you all here, so that you might read his words.

His words which you understand, already.

I am making his papers into a book, and making them whole.

With everything in them. G-d, and the frying pan.

And me.

I was there, in December, in the dust. If anything is a part of that world, I am.

That world. His world.

You will have guessed that he grew away from me. You will have guessed that he fell back somewhat into silence, in December, leaving me behind among the dust.

You will have guessed that he shunned me, and was quiet. That he tended to his papers, and prepared himself for his last rite.

And maybe, yeah. I can’t deny that you’re right. Just like you were right about the crying.

But you mustn’t think we didn’t talk at all.

And you mustn’t think that he stopped caring about me.

If anything is a part of that world, his world, then my December surely meets the bar.

Our December. There, I said it.

(Such pride this sister has! Yes, I have been known to giggle in the temple—with Herschel Schoen, your Herschel Schoen, there snickering alongside me.)

This is the Book of Miriam Schoen, which is a part of the Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen.

Which tells of her December, in keeping with her brother’s wishes.

 

 

What was it like, to be his sister?

It’s a fair question. I don’t resent you for asking it. Even with all that I’ve written above.

It was the radio and the winds and the fields. It was that, first, before anything else.

We used to put the radio on, every night, to help us fall asleep. It was one of the many things we tried, to help us fall asleep in those days, and one of the few that worked. Ma kept strict bedtimes, and early ones, too.

We’d put the radio on, and Herschel would get settled into bed the way he liked, and I’d plop myself down next to him.

We would lie there, in the half-light of the late summer evening, which (pace Ma) was still evening and not night, and so not anyone’s proper bedtime. No, Ma, not even in the old country.

Herschel would stare at the ceiling, like he always did, whenever he was in bed. I’d stare with him, to give him company.

I would watch the rectangles of light, thrown onto the ceiling by the headlights of passing cars, as they came and went.

We would lie close by to one another, my arm almost touching his. This was long before Herschel’s system with the shrine of papers. All that separated us, besides a hair’s breadth of air or an intervening bedsheet, was my respect for my brother’s likes and dislikes.

He never did like being touched, not even by his own Ma. But you know that already, or have guessed.

This was when the war was still going on. It was in the time before Herschel started to talk.

He might have been five years old, I think, or six.

In which case I would have been ten, or eleven.

The war was still going on, and some nights the president would be on the radio, to tell us all about it. Out of all our nights with the radio, those are the ones I remember most clearly.

I watched the headlights play across the ceiling, and I listened to the president.

He did not sound like anyone I’d ever known. His voice was of the radio, not of flesh and blood. Every vowel sound was a tower plunging out of an abyss, a sudden and titanic apparition; his consonants felt ghostly, merely implied rather than voiced, but sufficient nonetheless. A dusty crackle of static murmured behind him, in attendance to his glory.

(Maybe I already knew then, on some intuitive level, the things that Vincent would later teach in words. About radios, and vacuum tubes, and magnetic tapes, and about the godly voices of men, that raise goosebumps on the skin of their women.)

(I am trying my best, Herschel. I’m trying to strike the kind of tone that’s fitting, for a Book, and a Book that’s part of your book no less. I don’t really know how to do it, lacking the tutors you had in your shell, and in our ceiling. But as tutors go, two years in English Literature at Barnard College is not nothing, I think!)

I felt the president’s radio voice shimmer over my body, like the waves made by the wind in a field of grass. I didn’t understand what he was saying, about the war, usually. But I didn’t need to. I was a carrier, only that.

I played with images in my mind. I made my body into the empty aether, in which the radio waves move.

I closed my eyes, and saw a moonlit field of grass, rippling in the wind. I was the grass, and the wind moved me. There was a message in the wind, being carried, but it was for someone else.

And that was all right.

That was perfect.

I thought of the feeling I would have, back then, when Herschel would tell me yes or no, without words. Without shaking his head, either. He did something with his body, something else, I don’t know what. If you have to ask, you’ll never know.

I could always tell, when my brother was saying yes, or no. It was always blindingly obvious. To me, if not to his schoolmates, or his teachers, or even his Ma.

Herschel did not talk, in those days, but he did hum, sometimes. With closed eyes and open ears, I heard the president speak, and heard my brother humming along with that great man, matching his cadence.

If you had asked me about my brother’s humming, then, I would have given you an earful of words, a whole big list of adjectives, and beautiful would be nowhere among them.

But it was beautiful, I think.

Maybe I am only being sentimental, now, but I do think so.

I closed my eyes and saw, very clearly, the wide field of grass and the wind roving over it.

It’s funny, that this image came so readily to my mind, and felt so much like home.

Seeing as there are no big fields like that in Brooklyn, or in the city, and there aren’t any in Portland, Oregon, either. And those are the only places I’ve ever been in.

I heard the president, and my brother’s humming, and I think I heard a third instrument, playing together with them.

A gentle, oceanic rustle. It was the chirping of cicadas, I believe.

I don’t know why I believe this. I’ve never heard a cicada, not in New York City and not in Portland, Oregon.

I do believe it, however.

I was the grass as it swayed, and I was the aether.

I thought: I am a carrier, and this frees me from having to be the voice that is carried.

I thought: Herschel, is this your secret? Are you a carrier, freed from having to be a voice?

I thought: I am a carrier for you, Herschel.

I thought: My screwed-up special-ed brother, let me carry you. Let my shoulders carry your body, and let my body carry your waves. Don’t worry, Herschel: there is no need to explain things to me in words. No need at all. I am tuned to your frequency. I am switched on. I am receiving.

I thought: I do not know what the message is, but I carry it.

I thought: I do not know what the question is, but my answer is Yes.