One day my uncle appeared with an odd-looking object. It resembled a dog’s collar that had been attached to the end of a long, narrow metal plate. At the other end was a wide belt.
“This is a brace to make you grow,” he said. My parents looked skeptical but said nothing. “Let me show you how it works.”
I was chosen to be the guinea pig.
“Does it hurt?” I asked, somewhat alarmed, but my uncle just shook his head and started loosening the buckles.
“Not a bit,” he said. “You’d like to be taller, wouldn’t you? Short guys never get the girls—which is why men all over the world are going to be clamoring for these.”
The belt that looked like a collar turned out to be exactly that. My uncle buckled it tightly around my throat. The metal plate pressed against my spine, held in place by the belt around my waist.
“How does that feel?” He spread his arms and studied me with obvious satisfaction, but there was a concerned look on my mother’s face. And, indeed, I was finding it hard to breathe; my neck was being forced up, and I couldn’t turn my head to the side or bend at the waist. I was completely immobilized, with only my eyeballs free to move.
“Just thirty minutes a day for six months and you’ll be two inches taller. It stabilizes the neck and pelvis and stretches the muscles, which provides stimulation for the bones and encourages secretion of the growth hormone.”
“Thirty minutes?” I said, nearly in tears.
“And you’ll be taller. What more could you ask?”
“But it hurts,” I said. “I can’t breathe.”
“You can’t?” he said, fiddling with the buckle. “I guess I’ve got it too tight. This is just a prototype; I’m still working out the details. But I’ve decided to go into the mail-order business with these, I’m completely convinced they’ll sell. I’ve signed a contract with a factory to produce them, and I’m going to advertise in all the newspapers and men’s magazines. I’m even applying to have them licensed as a medical therapy.”
He pulled some papers out of his pocket and waved them in front of us.
“Is that so?” my father said, sounding even more skeptical than usual. My mother tapped her finger against the metal plate.
“Take it off, please! I can’t stand it anymore.” I was crying in earnest now.
Not long thereafter, true to his word, my uncle began selling the braces through the mail. I have no idea whether he ever fixed the collar, but I started seeing his advertisements in magazines: a shirtless man with well- oiled muscles in my uncle’s brace, striking a confident pose. When I’d worn it, the brace had been terribly uncomfortable, but it seemed to fit the model like a second skin, as though he had been born wearing it.
The prototype sat in the corner of my closet for some time after that, like the molted skin of some misshapen reptile, but I never put it on again. Eventually, the metal plate started to rust. When my mother went to throw it out, the screws in the plate came loose, the belt fell off, and the whole thing went to pieces.
My uncle apparently sold almost none of them at all. I’m not sure whether it was because they broke so easily or because they failed to live up to their advertising, but very soon my uncle was arrested for fraud. It seems the license he had obtained was a fake.
It was some four years later, when I was in middle school, that we next heard from him. Looking back, I suppose this was probably his most prosperous period. The clothes he wore—and the quality of his presents— improved considerably. He smoked cigars, wore French cologne, and he seemed always to arrive at our house by a hired car.
He said he had found work as the butler in a great house, though my mother said she couldn’t imagine he was anything more than a handyman. The house in question belonged to two elderly ladies, twins who had inherited a considerable sum from their father—a coal magnate of some sort. Since they spent most of their time traveling, my uncle’s duties consisted primarily of standing guard over the house.
I recall that one of my aunts spread the rumor that the two old ladies shared my uncle’s sexual services between them. At the time, I couldn’t conceive of what this might mean, but she seemed disgusted when she said it, so I knew it was nothing to be proud of.
“They’re absolutely identical,” my uncle said. “From the build and voice to their taste in clothes and makeup, even their wrinkles. Exactly the same.”
“Do you ever get them mixed up?” I asked.
“No, there’s really nothing to mix up. A or B, B or A—it makes no difference. They’re just one person.”
“But what does a butler do?”
“My job is a bit different from your average butler.” His tone was boastful as ever. “Mostly, I look after the Bengal tiger.”
“Tiger?” I blurted out.
“That’s what I said. He lives in the garden. They got him when they were traveling in India, while he was still young.”
“But he got big?”
“He got huge! So huge you can’t get your arms around him, and his legs are like iron poles. The claws could tear you apart, and the ground shakes when he walks across the yard.”
“Aren’t you scared?”
“Sure I am! That’s why I have to be on my guard all the time. He could charge at any moment, but that danger is what makes him so beautiful. His fur shines and the stripes on his back ripple, and there’s this deep rumble in his throat. He’s absolutely perfect, but it’s the kind of perfection you can’t touch, even when it’s right there in front of you.”
He closed his eyes, as though trying to remember every detail of the tiger.
“To tell the truth, the biggest problem with the tiger is the odor—it’s overpowering. It gets into your pores, right down the roots of your hair. That’s why I always wear my cologne. It was a present from one of the ladies. Not sure which one. Anyway, it cost plenty.” At this point, he moved closer until his chest was almost touching my face. “Nice, isn’t it?” he said. He had apparently acquired expensive tastes from living among the wealthy, though the experience had made him no richer himself.
“But the old ladies are really more interested in all different kinds of torture,” he went on without opening his eyes. “They go all over the world, buying anything that could be used to inflict pain, and my job is to take care of all the things they bring home.”
“That’s a pretty strange job,” I said.
“At first I thought it was torture enough being left alone with the tiger, but I have to admit that some of the devices they bring back are pretty interesting: a hatchet for breaking ankles, a stretcher to rip open your mouth, a knife for flaying human skin.”
He described these “devices” one after the other, and I found it difficult to picture what they looked like. Some of them, though, reminded me of that brace of his.
The image of my uncle that remains clearest in memory for me is of his back as he is leaving our house. No one ever knew where he was going, and no one asked. He left with little more than a “See you later.”
When he returned, he was carrying nothing. He never had a suitcase, and I wondered what he did for clean underwear and the like. Perhaps he kept these things tucked away somewhere in his pockets—like the gifts he brought me.
“I’ve had a wonderful time,” he would tell us when he was ready to go again, and he apparently meant it. And then he might tell me how important it was to study hard. “Even if something seems pointless at the time, you mustn’t take it lightly. You’ll see how useful it is later on. Nothing you study will ever turn out to be useless. That’s the way the world is.”
He would pick me up and rub his cheek against mine. Sometimes I would struggle to escape and muss his carefully combed hair in the process, but he never seemed to mind. Then he would bow and thank my parents, smoothing his hair with his hand.
“When will you be back?” I would ask. It still amazes me that I could have been so blunt as a child—but I
