Everything Matters!

by Ron Currie Jr.

  Pete gets on his bike. I have to go Rod. I’ll see you later.

  He rides down the dirt path out of the trees and up toward the road. I watch him go. Then because I’m scared I just leave everything there, the shovels and the buckets and the pick, and I get on my bike and ride hard after him but he’s gone. I go by his house and see his bike out leaning against the front steps but I don’t dare go and knock on the door because his mother’s car is in the driveway.

  I go home and for a while I read a book about Carl Yastrzemski that I got at the school book fair. Then I get high again. Later I call Pete but his mom answers and asks who it is and I tell her and she says she doesn’t know why but Pete doesn’t want to talk to me did we have a fight? I say no and she says well I don’t know what’s wrong with him but maybe you shouldn’t call back for a while okay honey? I say okay and hang up and there’s nothing to do. Ma is in the bathroom with the baby and Dad’s at work at the warehouse. So I go outside and get on my bike and go to Uncle Rodney’s.

  Brother

  Here is what you need to know about Brother:

  Like you, your brother is a child, but older, more independent both in circumstance and spirit. His sovereignty and your lack thereof are inversely proportional; the more your mother dotes on you, the less time she has to care for, pay attention to, and police him. Your father, consumed by work, does not often figure into the equation except as a boogeyman—“Rodney, keep it up and I’m telling your father”—the threat of which your mother uses without much success. Rodney has therefore grown into a headstrong and willful boy whose headstrong, willful ways are likely to produce a life even more fraught with sorrow and regret than normal.

  This is not the only reason why you should resist the natural impulse to emulate and imitate your brother, an impulse you’ve already demonstrated through your growing tendency to disobey your mother simply for disobedience’s sake, and your proclivity for staging violent confrontations between stuffed animals, not to mention that one unfortunate incident with your brother’s homemade nunchakus, the loss of which, following the incident, served only to inflame his resentment of you.

  Your relationship with your brother will be, in many ways, the most complex and bewildering of all the interpersonal connections you will form. An older brother is both authority figure and peer, friend and bitter enemy, partner and rival, and will play these contradictory roles to varying degrees throughout your life. At this point the rivalry is most prominent, owing to the difference in age and the resentment your brother feels toward you monopolizing your mother’s attention. Try to remember, in the face of the poor treatment you receive at his hands, that more than a pure desire to cause you harm or pain, this is an effort on his part to win back some of that attention, even if it’s only through being scolded and punished.

  Of course your brother makes it difficult to bear this in mind. There’s the garden-variety mistreatment. The shoving and poking. The theft and withholding of toys, the gratified smirk at your subsequent howling. The sitting too close to and directly in front of the television, to obscure your view of Sesame Street. The one time when he holds you upside down over the gurgling vortex of a just-flushed toilet, repeatedly lowering you into the cacophony of the porcelain bowl, over and over, until your mother comes running and finds the two of you, he with your ankles in his fists, you with furious little veins pulsing at your temples and your eyes clenched shut and your hair dripping toilet water. No doubt Rodney would have subjected you to this torture again, delightful as he found it, except that several hours later the threat of your father became the actuality of your father, his bulk and fury and great swooping hand, an experience your brother has no desire to repeat any time soon.

  But these minor torments are merely a warm-up, because your brother is smart, and cunning, and patient, and mischievous, the sort of person who has the ability to wait for a weakness, recognize it when it appears, and exploit it when the time is right. And he discovers and plumbs your weakness, somewhat accidentally, through the miracle of cable television.

  The cable is installed at your mother’s request. Your father doubts that they can afford it, what with the mountain of unexpected medical bills from your birth that he’s still trying to scale, not to mention all the other expenses that arrive without end in thick off-white stacks, the accounts tabulated in Ohio and New Jersey even as he cuts rainbow squares at the bakery, the interest accruing as he tosses all manner of packages onto and off of trucks, the invoices printed and mailed while, in a stolen moment between shifts, he falls asleep in his ratty old easy chair with a coffee cup clenched in the fingers of his good hand. But your mother is full to bursting with compounded frustration from worrying about you—needlessly, your father believes—and dealing with your brother’s insurrection, and this cable thing has become so popular and widespread that the local CBS affiliate, sixty miles away in Bangor, has scaled back its broadcast signal to the point that she cannot get good reception of Guiding Light, her one afternoon solace. Thus your father concedes, and soon after a man in a hard white plastic hat and jangling tool belt comes to your apartment, and your mother gives him a cup of black coffee and directs him to the living room where, on top of the television, he places the Box. The Box is connected to the television by a thick black cable and has a row of buttons across its top which snap smartly when pressed. These buttons also control the image displayed on the screen, and since the TV is set on a low-slung coffee table, you can, standing precariously on your tiptoes with one hand gripping the back of the TV for balance, access the buttons. Make them snap. Control the image. The power is yours.

  Since your brother cannot permit you to have any power, no matter how trivial, he tries to wrest it from you. First by force—he will find you playing with the buttons, sometimes even when the TV is off, and he will shove you away from the Box, then gloat and grin in the squall of wailing that follows, withstanding with a laughable minimum of effort your attempts to get past him and at the buttons again. But his victory is short-lived, because your mother’s radar for even the faintest hint of distress from you is beyond acute, and she inevitably comes and scolds your brother and forces him to leave you be. Once, twice, three times, and on the third she tells him that this is it, do it again and she’s telling your father, and the memory of the last time your father intervened is fresh enough that he desists. Instead he sits, thin arms crossed over his chest, smoldering as he watches the rapid flash of shifting images: a snippet of Superfriends, a millisecond of the Creature Double Feature, a precious half-scrambled moment of Fat Albert.

  It goes on this way for weeks, and you notice that the more you play with the Box the less your brother is around. He retreats to the sanctuary of your Uncle Rodney’s apartment across town, where he can watch TV and even play Atari for hours, unmolested, uninterrupted. On weekdays you hardly see him at all. This is fortunate, because after more than a month you’re growing bored with the Box, and under the current arrangement you need only play with it for ten minutes or so when your brother comes home to change out of his one set of good school clothes, and after he leaves you’re free to fool around with your Matchbox cars, or even play with your brother’s Boba Fett action figure or Wiffle ball set, because he’s not around to keep them from you.

  This agreeable state of affairs comes to an end on a gray Saturday when your Uncle Rodney has left for the weekend on “business” and your brother cannot go outside to play because it’s rained hard for three days, transforming the town into a massive mud pit. So the two of you play on opposite ends of the living room. Your brother would go to the bedroom to get away from you and your endless snapping, except that to save money on the electrical bill your mother will allow only one light to be turned on, in the living room, and your brother cannot bear the gray gloom of a rainy day spent inside without at least the artificial cheer of indoor lighting. Especially a Saturday, when he should be in constant frenetic kid motion from dawn to dusk, enjoying as much fun and freedom as pos
sible in anticipation of Sunday morning and the somber proceedings of Mass and the sense that the world has been dipped in amber, not just suspended but suffocated, dead. For your brother there is only one escape from the dull hell that is Sunday: your Uncle Rodney’s apartment, where Sundays are treated pretty much like any other day of the week. But of course this weekend, with your uncle out of town, that is not an option. So the two of you share the living room with a peace as fragile and uneasy as that between the Israelis and Palestinians, you with the Box, he with a stack of Topps baseball cards. He sorts the cards into multiple piles on the sofa, arranging players by team and creating separate stacks for doubles and specialty cards. Each time he opens a pack he puts the powdery stick of gum in his mouth, and at this point he’s got a wad going that’s large enough to choke your favorite big lizard the brontosaurus, but he keeps adding to it, stick by stick, until he has to practically unhinge his jaw to chew. You, meantime, are snapping away. The epileptic frenzy of images on the TV is like a flip book without any sort of cohesive narrative: a girl spinning on a tire swing, snap! a giant cartoon robot grappling with a giant cartoon squid, snap! a ball of light so brilliant it turns the whole world to dust and silence.

  Suddenly transfixed, you stop snapping the buttons.

  This last is actually stock footage of nuclear weapons tests conducted in Nevada more than thirty years ago, incorporated into a feature on the French seer Nostradamus. Like most seers of any popularity, Nostradamus spent a lot of time predicting how the world would end, and though he was wrong, the images in the film are close enough to the truth as you know it that they frighten you almost literally to death. Still as stone except for your heart, which beats suddenly at a rate that is not at all sustainable, you watch. First, the ball of light, which expands quickly, then collapses upon itself. Houses, trees, and scary faceless people burst into flames. Languid fires lap at roofs and bodies indifferently, as tiny dust devils swirl in slow-motion on the ground. Suddenly a wall of air slams through, erasing the houses, snapping trees in half, and sending people and cars pinwheeling away into darkness. The world is gone, and in its place rises a great, fiery column of ash and smoke, and you recognize this as the Destroyer of Worlds, which until now you understood only in the abstract. Here It is made concrete, and you collapse on the ratty orange carpet before It, trembling, weeping silently, as your brother looks on with a mouth so jammed with bubble gum he can’t form the words to ask you what’s wrong.

  It appears to him quite possible that you have croaked, and though he hates you it is with the sort of benign hatred common among juvenile siblings, and he by no means wants you dead, especially with no witnesses around to testify that he had nothing to do with it. So he is concerned, both for you and for himself, as he crosses the living room with slow, cautious steps.

  “Junior,” he says, standing over you, his voice garbled by fear and the wad of gum. Now he can see your minute convulsions, the small muscles in your neck and arms seized and bulging, the tears streaming from your eyes. The relief he should feel at realizing you are not dead is displaced by blossoming panic, because even though you’re alive it’s clear there is something very, very wrong, something which his nine short years of existence have not prepared him to confront or understand. He reaches down with one hand. “Junior?” he says again, and when he touches you and feels the fever and tension of every hysterical cell in your body he recoils as if bitten, tears welling now in his own eyes.

  He then resorts to the default action of children everywhere when faced with a predicament beyond their scope of comprehension: “Maaaa!”

  Your mother responds somewhat more slowly than when you are the one crying out for help. A full minute passes before she appears in the doorway between the living room and kitchen, her face held in a pinch of mild exasperation. “What is it, Rodney?” she sighs, then answers her own question as she takes in the sight of you seized and foaming on the floor.

  Your mother sort of leaps to her knees beside you, giving herself second-degree rug burns. She gathers your head and supports it on her lap. “What did you do to him?” she screams at your brother. He stands mute with his hands at his sides and his eyes wide. “What did you do?” she asks again, grasping him by the front of his shirt and yanking him forward, a movement that causes the wad of gum to shoot back into his throat and lodge there.

  So here is the scene: your mother on the floor, just starting to register the pain in her knees and rapidly approaching hysteria; you, your head on her lap, curled tighter than an overcooked shrimp, every muscle in your body contracting as one; your brother, reeling around the living room, eyes bulging, alternately clutching his throat and grasping at the empty air in front of him, his struggle for breath so far going unnoticed. Meanwhile, on the TV, through the miracle of cut scene the world is remade, only to be swallowed again and again by the ball of terrible light. And you, eyes fixed, continue to watch.

  It’s not until your brother collapses half-conscious against your mother’s shoulder that she notices he’s choking. Still under the impression that he’s responsible for whatever is afflicting you, she spins him around and uses an open hand to pummel his back, much harder than is necessary. After a few sound whacks the gum hurtles from his mouth and lands, glistening and harmless, on the floor in front of the recliner. He sputters as your mother continues to pound and curse him. The blows are remarkably consistent, all landing centered on your brother’s spine between his shoulder blades, so that tomorrow he’ll bear a roughly hand-shaped bruise that will, over the course of the next week, turn every nauseous color of the contusion rainbow before fading away.

  Despite the fact that with each whack your mother knocks what little breath your brother has managed to catch from his lungs, he is able, in an act of pure self-preservation, to holler out: “The TV, Ma! Turn off the TV!”

  Her frenzy thus broken, your mother turns her attention to the TV, then back to you. Your brother pulls a deep, ragged breath and finds he has both the need and the energy to cry for a bit.

  Through her panic your mother recognizes, somehow, that she has to calm down and think clearly. With an effort of will that surprises her, she slows her breathing and wipes the scrim of tears away, then bends forward to look closely at your face. She notices how your eyes, though they appear empty and unseeing, follow the image on the screen as she lifts your head. Drawing a quick parallel between this and what your brother has said, she reaches up and slams the TV’s power button with the palm of her hand.

  The image blinks out, and your body goes limp as an empty pillowcase. Your eyes close. Foam runs from your mouth like an overflowing washing machine. Your mother reaches her fingers in to clear your mouth, drawing out gobs of stringy spit. She uses her other hand to gather in your brother, whose sobs have dwindled to blear-eyed sniffles.

  “Rodney, honey,” she says, “I need you to call your father at the warehouse. Can you do that for me, baby?” Your brother only stares at her, as if the choking spell has somehow left him deaf. “Rodney,” she says again. “Honey, Mommy’s sorry, she didn’t mean to hit you so hard, okay, she was just scared, but right now she needs you to call Dad at the warehouse. The number’s on the wall next to the phone. The third number down. Okay?”

  There are several reasons why your mother has decided to have your father come and bring you all to the hospital. First, he is her protector from the world, the rock against which she hurls all her problems and sees them smashed to bits, and even when a situation clearly requires someone with an expertise your father does not possess—a doctor, say, or a CPA—he is and always will be the person she calls. Second, the only vehicle they own, a 1973 Ford Country Squire wagon, mint green with woodgrain panels and a bad starter, is with him at work. Third, even if she had the wagon she couldn’t use it, because it almost always refuses to turn over, and so your father has to push it from behind to get the 5,000-pound vehicle moving, then run alongside, jump in through the open driver’s-side door, and pop the clutc
h.

  With a bit more verbal prodding and a gentle push in the direction of the kitchen, your brother does as he is told. Your mother, meantime, worries over you, smoothing your hair back with trembling hands, leaning down repeatedly to check your breathing, even though at this point there’s no evidence of anything more traumatic going on than a very deep sleep.

  Soon your father arrives from the warehouse. As always he appears calm and unfazed, though a careful observer would note some subtle signs of distress: his mustache twitching at the corner of his mouth, for example, and his carotid artery pumping furiously at the grizzled skin of his throat. He scoops you up and holds you against his chest with his bad hand, then herds your mother and brother out to the Country Squire and drives the whole sniffling, sodden-faced crew to the hospital.

  There the nurses put dressings on your mother’s knees and scope your brother’s nose and throat for any further blockage. One nurse notes a drying and crusting of your brother’s septum consistent with cocaine abuse. She has the doctor take a look, but given Rodney’s age he dis misses it as the somewhat strange remnants of a head cold. You, on the other hand, are the real mystery case, the enigma. The young intern examines you and listens to your mother’s account of what happened and tries to sort out the bafflement and skepticism he’s experiencing. It’s difficult for the young intern to sort anything out this afternoon, though, because his wife, a southern woman for whom marriage to a doctor has not so far been the mildly glamorous and moneyed shopping-fest she had imagined, hinted this morning around the possibility that she maybe was thinking about considering leaving him. After less than a year of marriage. And the intern is, as a result, somewhat distracted.