I Had a Brother Once
Page 4
forgive, if one of you insisted
on a course of action &
was wrong? if there is
more bad news, what then?
we agreed to err on the side
of knowing too much & were
rewarded, though rewarded is
the wrong word, we did not
earn a goddamn thing & it
would have turned out
the same had we done nothing.
we were lucky, that is all.
the clubfoot was just clubfoot.
the needle did not stab the fetus.
the only true fear i had left
remained inside its dungeon,
shackled to its post. all of this
happened much later. the baby
in question is my second child,
almost nine years younger
than my first. what i am
trying to get at is the way
we emerged from this brief
crucible & quickly realized
how unstrange it was,
that it fazed neither
family nor friends, that
everyone we knew knew
someone who’d had progressive
casting, worn the funny little
boots with the bar, that it
could be discussed beneath
blue skies & would not stain
rooms purple, & all this,
everything about this, is
the opposite of suicide.
no one knows anyone who
killed themselves, or if
they do they are not telling
me. this statistic is no more
plausible than six overpowering
ninety-four, i know, but
there are things we cannot
risk draping with language,
things we silo inside ourselves
or attempt to graft onto other
conversations only to learn
that they won’t take. nothing
reminds you of this story,
except as black reminds you
of white, or health of sickness.
even discussions of death,
of depression, provide not
a method of ingress but
a reminder that there are
no bridges to this island.
you must swim. the few
times i have done so
i have been a little
drunk & hours into a first
talk with someone i know
i want to keep. a sense
that i am being dishonest,
that everything is false
until i bare this wound,
takes hold of me. i grow
impatient to find a way,
bore open a point of entry,
my heart throwing off sparks
as if i were working up the
courage to declare
my love. once it is said,
i surprise myself no further.
the narrative slithers toward
me, tongue dancing, tasting
the boozy air as it makes
a caduceus of the barstool leg. the
embers go gray inside me
as i tell the story, deepening
the grooves of the track &
keeping my head down to
avoid seeing the vicious
unexplored terrain scream
past the windows. what
was meant to be a laying
down of armaments,
a call to intimacy, seems
like the opposite now,
calculated, mannered,
weaponized, as if the only
point had been to illustrate
that i, or i too, or i like you,
am seasoned by tragedy,
my flavor made complex.
or maybe it is that i can
feel the tremor of hooves,
see another horde of questions
cresting the hilltop, & i hate
all my answers.
i did know one person: mark,
who owned the nameless
philly record spot, a fourth
floor room in an unheated
steel building, more storage
space than store. he was
open on sundays & by
appointment, & his brother
had killed himself. i was
back in town to give a
talk at my old school, a few
months after david died.
douglas had tipped me off
& so i sought mark out.
my parents had attended
a meeting of suicide
survivors, that is the
tortured, oxymoronic
nomenclature for the
people left behind,
but only once. i had not
even considered it, could
not see any point, knew
or imagined i knew exactly
what it would be like,
everybody sitting in a
circle telling each other
it wasn’t their fault &
admitting that they were
angry, or weren’t angry
anymore. but mark was
weird & wise, smelled like
loose tobacco & the must
of ages, bought & sold rare
books, & when i had once
asked him what he liked
to read he said memoirs by
pre-twentieth-century
schizophrenics, written
before the existence
of the word, the diagnosis,
any understanding of the
affliction. books by people
who had no idea what
the fuck was happening
to them, whose terrors had
no names or the wrong
names, were blamed on demons
& treated with bloodletting,
who wrote out of desperation,
hoping it might save their lives.
so i told mark & he told me.
it turned out to be not one but
both his brothers. maybe
a parent too, i am ashamed
to say i can’t remember.
mark said he understood it,
that his brothers’ decisions held
no mystery for him. suicide,
to his way of thinking, seemed
almost an inevitability,
something you got around to
sooner or later, when you had
no fight left in you & the time
was right. i bought some
reggae forty-fives & left
thinking my god, the only thing
worse than not understanding
would be to understand,
to know it like the night
knows darkness.
i came to think of my grief as
bottomless, because nothing
i threw down it made a sound.
it could not be filled so instead
i found some plywood &
walled it off the way one might
a treacherous system of caverns,
scrawled a warning sign & nailed
that up as well. some days i pulled
everything down & peered
to feel the fear of falling that is
really a fear of jumping, &
others i walked by without
a wayward glance. i knew
better than to call this healing,
or disparage it as anything
short of tremendous progress.
the decision to look or
not look, feel or not feel,
took its place among
the rituals of my day,
the espresso & the gym, the
desk & chair, the escalating
fights & bitterness, the plotting
of escape routes, putting
the toddler down for her nap,
not calling my parents.
time is longer than rope but
both can strangle you or
knot themselves beneath
your feet & implore you
to climb.
when one puts on a mask,
as david did, as i did, one
does not become another.
one becomes two. the inner
peers through the outer.
the outer feels the blood
pulse from behind. the
dreidel game we play at
hanukkah is a gambling
game & also a lie, invented
at a time, one of many,
when we were forbidden
from study, from prayer,
the two have always been
synonymous to us, & so
we pretended to wager on
the spinning top made
out of clay & became two.
there is a joke about a jew
who buys the house next
door to rockefeller, drives
the same cadillac, hires
the same gardener to edge
the shrubbery, clearly this
jew has spun the dreidel well.
one morning rockefeller
glances across the hedgerow
as the two of them step into
their identical conveyances
& in disgust says you think
you’re as good as me, don’t
you? the jew says certainly not,
i think i’m better. rockefeller
demands to know why.
for one thing, the jew explains,
i don’t live next door to a jew.
we survive by learning how
the goyim see themselves
& us. this becomes as reflex,
breath, the head jerking toward
the twig snap. what comes less
easily is remembering how
to see ourselves, see as
ourselves, feel the blood pulse
from behind the mask as
we bear witness to that which
seeks to confound eyesight,
scrub itself right out of history,
that which cannot be judged,
not by the likes of us, mere
flies on walls, liminal beings,
necessary evils, middlemen,
landless, unrooted, circum-
scribed, scapegoated
but enough. these masks of ours
are not the heroic disguises
the ancestors wore. ours
do not double consciousness,
ours cut everything in half.
a mask you wear to bed
is no tool of survival,
no matter what task you must
perform when you wake up.
david died in his mask &
perhaps because of it. silence
did him in, & this in its
own way is just as hideously
ironic as the gas. he feared
being known more than he
feared death, refused to do
the thing that makes us human,
which is telling our stories,
claiming & declaiming them,
& so all i can do to grapple
my way back is write his, or
maybe i mean mine, make
ritual of being known as he
would not, build a bridge
to that island or become
one. but what a forced
& tidy resolution this
appears in certain light,
both true & false, profound
& glib, to speak of memory
as life & forgetting as death,
or death as forgetting, as if
memories cannot also
kill you, as if being known
cannot, has not. another
train station. & besides,
who can say that david
did not tell his story,
tell it in full?
me. i say that. on that,
if nothing else, i will
stand firm. but i could be
the paleontologist who
placed the head on the wrong
end of the elasmosaurus,
made the neck the tail.
every detail i imbue with
meaning could be wrong.
a novelist at a murder scene
sounds like the setup
of a joke. the very impulse
to duck underneath the
yellow caution tape
& flip the notebook open
seems violently right &
violently wrong. perhaps
the particles must float in
solution, unreconciled,
suspended like judgment,
& my only job is to stare
at them the way i would the
tank of undulating jellyfish
at the aquarium, which
i also cannot understand,
but do not seek to.
this year i have been writing
con movies, the kind with a
final twist that makes you
think back & reconsider
every scene beforehand,
realize nothing was as
you’d believed. the mark
is always unsympathetic,
between the confidence
man’s crosshairs because
he has no legal recourse, no
moral high ground upon
which to stand. he is
a cheater cheated, brought
low by his own duplicity,
his own bad faith.
there is no second act for
the mark. we never circle
back to see whether therapy
has helped him address
his nascent inability
to trust. the most we
grant him is a fleecing
so elegant that he never
realizes he’s been had,
a brush-off that leaves
him thanking god he is
alive. it is intended
only as a precaution
against revenge, but
to live out your days
believing that misfortune
brought you low &
not deception, that
things might have
turned out far worse,
is no small grace,
makes me wish my
brother had contrived
to make us think he’d
drowned or been
h
it by a bus & then
i am ashamed of
this thought, a plea for
erasure to multiply
itself.
we hardly speak of david
now. for years my mother
would erupt in tears if
anyone mentioned his
name, even her, so instead
he hovers in the periphery,
the space between words,
the rush to fill silences
however possible. when
we do talk about him it is
innocuous, incidental, my
dad recounting a museum
he took us to when we were
kids, never his death, never
the instructions he left us
about how to read his life.
for years i was my brother’s
translator, the only one who
understood a word he said.
he threw tantrums because
he could not make clear what
he wanted, usually a spider-man
chewable vitamin. my parents
saw some vulnerability in him,
or else created it. he learned
to speak late & was not a
jailhouse lawyer when he did.
his intelligence clustered in
an unfamiliar quadrant,
was not fierce & literary
but curious, methodical, &
this was foreign, hard
to see at first. our schtick
was words, puns, opinions
legal & otherwise, we
did not suspend judgment
or embrace the scientific
method. we were generations
deep in trying to figure out
what to make of the strange
new freedom to do something
besides study the talmud all
fucking day but had not really
ventured very far afield.
by the time the realization
hit that david was maybe
the smartest of us all,
the odds had been set.
he had been handicapped.
i am not saying any
of this is a reason for
anything, just wondering
what it must have felt like.
they say that if somebody is
going to kill himself he’ll
find a way. you can’t stop it
by cutting off the means.
there is so much received
wisdom on this topic, so
many books that all say
the same thing, so many
vectors of exoneration.
but what if you had started
trying to stop him years
before, what then? surely
there is some juncture,
some inflection point at
which it is still possible,