Anansi Boys

Impossible things happen. When they do happen, most people just deal with it. Today, like every day, roughly five thousand people on the face of the planet will experience one-chance-in-a-million things, and not one of them will refuse to believe the evidence of their senses. Most of them will say the equivalent, in their own language, of “Funny old world, isn’t it?” and just keep going. So while part of Fat Charlie was trying to come up with logical, sensible, sane explanations for what was going on, most of him was simply getting used to the idea that a brother he hadn’t known he had was walking up the staircase behind him.

They got to the kitchen and stood there.

“Would you like a cup of tea?”

“Got any coffee?”

“Only instant, I’m afraid.”

“That’s fine.”

Fat Charlie turned on the kettle. “You come far, then?” he asked.

“Los Angeles.”

“How was the flight?”

The man sat down at the kitchen table. Now he shrugged. It was the kind of shrug that could have meant anything.

“Um. You planning on staying long?”

“I haven’t really given it much thought.” The man—Spider—looked around Fat Charlie’s kitchen as if he had never been in a kitchen before.

“How do you take your coffee?”

“Dark as night, sweet as sin.”

Fat Charlie put the mug down in front of him, and passed him a sugar bowl. “Help yourself.”

While Spider spooned teaspoon after teaspoon of sugar into his coffee, Fat Charlie sat opposite him, and stared.

There was a family resemblance between the two men. That was unarguable, although that alone did not explain the intense feeling of familiarity that Fat Charlie felt on seeing Spider. His brother looked like Fat Charlie wished he looked in his mind, unconstrained by the faintly disappointing fellow that he saw, with monotonous regularity, in the bathroom mirror. Spider was taller, and leaner, and cooler. He was wearing a black-and-scarlet leather jacket, and black leather leggings, and he looked at home in them. Fat Charlie tried to remember if this was what the fly guy had been wearing in his dream. There was something larger-than-life about him: simply being on the other side of the table to this man made Fat Charlie feel awkward and badly constructed, and slightly foolish. It wasn’t the clothes Spider wore, but the knowledge that if Fat Charlie put them on he would look as if he were wearing some kind of unconvincing drag. It wasn’t the way Spider smiled—casually, delightedly—but Fat Charlie’s cold, incontrovertible certainty that he himself could practice smiling in front of a mirror from now until the end of time and never manage a single smile one half so charming, so cocky, or so twinklingly debonair.

“You were at Mum’s cremation,” said Fat Charlie.

“I thought about coming over to talk to you after the service,” said Spider. “I just wasn’t certain that it would be a good idea.”

“I wish you had.” Fat Charlie thought of something. He said, “I would have thought you’d have been at Dad’s funeral.”

Spider said, “What?”

“His funeral. It was in Florida. Couple of days ago.”

Spider shook his head. “He’s not dead,” he said. “I’m pretty sure I’d know if he were dead.”

“He’s dead. I buried him. Well, I filled the grave. Ask Mrs. Higgler.”

Spider said, “How’d he die?”

“Heart failure.”

“That doesn’t mean anything. That just means he died.”

“Well, yes. He did.”

Spider had stopped smiling. Now he was staring down into his coffee as if he suspected he was going to be able to find an answer in there. “I ought to check this out,” said Spider. “It’s not that I don’t believe you. But when it’s your old man. Even when your old man is my old man.” And he made a face. Fat Charlie knew what that face meant. He had made it himself, from the inside, enough times, when the subject of his father came up. “Is she still living in the same place? Next door to where we grew up?”

“Mrs. Higgler? Yes. Still there.”

“You don’t have anything from there, do you? A picture? Maybe a photograph?”

“I brought home a box of them.” Fat Charlie had not opened the large cardboard box yet. It was still sitting in the hall. He carried the box into the kitchen and put it down on the table. He took a kitchen knife and cut the packing tape that surrounded it; Spider reached into the box with his thin fingers, riffling through the photographs like playing cards, until he pulled out one of their mother and Mrs. Higgler, sitting on Mrs. Higgler’s porch, twenty-five years earlier.

“Is that porch still there?”

Fat Charlie tried to remember. “I think so,” he said.

Later, he was unable to remember whether the picture grew very big, or Spider grew very small. He could have sworn that neither of those things had actually happened; nevertheless, it was unarguable that Spider had walked into the photograph, and it had shimmered and rippled and swallowed him up.