3 A.M.
By Chloe Spencer
Published by JMS Books LLC
Visit jms-books.com for more information.
Copyright 2019 Chloe Spencer
ISBN 9781634869737
Cover Design: Written Ink Designs | written-ink.com
Image(s) used under a Standard Royalty-Free License.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published in the United States of America.
* * * *
To Robin Harper.
* * * *
3 A.M.
By Chloe Spencer
A blue betta fish named Slurpy. That was what finally convinced Phillip to dump my older brother Mizu. Not the countless times they cheated on each other, or the surprising number of holes they had punched through the drywall of their rent house. Nope. It took my brother coming home one night to find that the dishes from the night before still hadn’t been washed, and as payback, he flushed Phillip’s fish down the toilet.
My volatile brother was immensely proud of his actions. When Phillip came home that night, Mizu marched him into the bathroom, pointed to the empty fishbowl on the counter, and unceremoniously announced, “I flushed your fish, fucker.” Only Phillip didn’t react this time. He didn’t scream, punch holes in the wall, or find a pretty girl to fuck on Tinder. He just stared at the toilet, his hands hanging limply at his sides. He told me that he knew in that moment that it was over, because he couldn’t find the motivation to engage with Mizu.
“When you can’t fight, Kuro,” Phillip explained, “that’s when you know that it’s over.”
They didn’t always used to fight, Mizu and Phillip. During our childhood, the three of us played together harmoniously. We spent hours playing pretend outside. In the land of make believe, we were Power Rangers and Jedi Knights, always fighting against evil. On the days the cold was too bitter to bear, we’d spend hours watching Cartoon Network and doodling in coloring books we got from the Dollar Store.
Phillip lived next door with his bougie parents, who were professors at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Shortly after I was born, my mother struggled with postpartum depression, and thought that moving closer to her family would help. My father, although resentful that he would have to give up his life in New York, agreed to make the move when he secured a job at a consulting firm in downtown Minneapolis.
Since I was a baby, I have no memories of the day we moved into our house on 43rd Avenue. But the scrapbooks full of pictures make me think I was actually there that day. My favorite is one of Mizu and Phillip, their arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders, grinning but squinting at the flash. Phillip’s been a part of my life since before I can even remember. Still, it came as a shock to my mother when we decided to move in together.
You would think that moving in with your brother’s ex-boyfriend so shortly after they separated was a bad idea. And you would be right. But Phillip isn’t just my brother’s ex, he’s also a longtime friend…and crush. When Mizu kicked his ass to the curb, I was getting ready to move into my new apartment. After Phillip called me up and told me what happened, sobbing about his dead betta fish, I felt like my dreams of being with him became that much more attainable. Mizu had his chance to make Phillip happy. Here was mine.
Our Minneapolis apartment sat on the intersection of 15th Street and LaSalle Avenue, close to my community college. It was a nice area, populated with small businesses and trendy cafes, but the building was anything but nice. The wallpaper was peeling, the sink was leaking, and some of the lightbulbs were shattered. When we moved in, Phillip saw the glass littering the floor of our bathroom and he shook his head.
“We’re paying over a grand a month for this?” he asked, placing his hands on his hips.
“I have spare light bulbs in one of these boxes. I could go dig around for them.”
He shook his head again. “Get me a dustpan first.”
I fetched it from the closet by the front door and gave it to him. As I watched him sweep up the scraps with the pathetically tiny broom, I couldn’t help but feel wracked with anxiety, like somehow this was my fault.
“I’m sorry.”
He looked up at me, surprised. “What, did you smash all the lightbulbs before we moved in?”
“No, I just…do you want me to clean it?” I reached for the broom, but he removed it from my grasp.
He smiled at me. “It’s fine, Kuro.” Sweep, sweep, sweep. “Did we get all the boxes from the car?”
“Yeah, I think I got everything.” Phillip and I didn’t have many belongings, so in total, we moved in about fifteen boxes, three suitcases, and one Gibson guitar—mine. Everything was piled up in our living room beneath the ceiling fan.
“Cool,” he said. “When does your mom want us to swing by with the moving truck?”
“Not until tomorrow morning. She wants us to meet her at the house at ten A.M.”
Phillip dumped the scraps in the trash can. “Okay. Do we have sleeping bags?”
“Yeah, it’s in one of the boxes.”
But of course, when I went to look for them later, they were missing. I stared into boxes full of packing peanuts as if they were a bottomless abyss. I remembered to pack my extra toilet bowl cleaner and Ajax, but essentials like sleeping gear? Nowhere to be found. My chest constricted with panic, wondering where they could have gone. Phillip tapped my shoulder.
“You can’t find them, can you?”
“No,” I said, my throat tightening.
He squeezed my shoulders, his thumbs kneading the center of my spine. “Take a deep breath. We’ve got blankets, don’t we? Let’s just sleep on the floor.”
We found the blankets, stretched them out, and laid them on the floor. We piled them high, one on top of the other, each one fluffier than the last. Phillip laughed, flopping down on top of them. He propped himself up on his side and looked at me.
“Do you remember,” he said, “when we were little, and we’d used to have sleepovers in your basement? We’d lay out the blankets just like this. And throw all of our toys and books on top, and not get up?”
I smiled, sitting down next to him. “I remember.”
“You were terrified of the furnace,” he said. “One winter, it came on in the middle of the night with this massive roar and clanking. Like a jet engine taking off. You immediately woke up and started bawling. You cried so much that your tears soaked through my shirt.”
“I don’t remember that, but it sounds accurate. I was a crybaby.”
“You weren’t. That damn thing was creepy. When it was on, you could see the red glowing light through the slits and it looked like a Terminator. If I was just a little younger, I would have been crying, too.”
“Where was Mizu?”
“Sound asleep.”
* * * *
That night we ordered a pizza and salty barbecu
e wings from Rocco’s Pizza Parlour. We laid on the floor, watching Vine compilations on YouTube. Exhausted from hauling boxes all day, we decided to call it a night around eight P.M.
I reviewed my schedule for fall semester on my phone. Phillip exited the bathroom in a cloud of steam, rubbing a towel behind his neck and wincing. He flopped face first onto our bed, laughing.
“Everything hurts,” he groaned. “And we have even more to move tomorrow.”
Tomorrow was the harder stuff: the bed frames, mattresses, tables, and chairs. It was all stashed away in my mother’s garage, ready to be moved into the truck the next morning. Originally it was in the basement, but I spent last Saturday hauling everything up. Phillip had back problems, so the smaller the distances he had to move a heavy object, the better.
Seeing him writhe in pain, my worries returned. I reached across and stroked my fingers through his fine brown hair. Its texture was like damp straw. He rolled over onto his back, out of my reach, and stared at me. By looking into his eyes, I could tell that he knew, and I felt ashamed.
Over the years, I vividly imagined the ways I would tell Phillip about my feelings. Taking him out to a romantic restaurant. Penning him a thoughtful letter. Giving him a mixtape, which was old fashioned, but still a goody. It certainly wasn’t through some affectionate, wordless touching. I think I would have preferred the mixtape. I wouldn’t have to be present when he listened to it and inevitably rejected me.
Phillip didn’t acknowledge my feelings, or slap my hand away. Instead he blinked away his surprise. Then he rolled onto his side, turning his back to me. He yawned loudly, almost like he was overemphasizing his exhaustion.
“I’ll be fine,” he told me. “Just need to sleep it off. Night, Kuro.”
I laid awake in the darkness for several minutes. I could tell by the way that he was fidgeting around that he wasn’t asleep.
“Phillip, I…are…are we okay?”
“We’re okay. I’m just surprised, is all.”
Surprised by what? That I liked him? Or maybe he was surprised by the fact that I was queer. Mizu had always been obviously, flamboyantly gay. When we were five, he dressed as Britney Spears for Halloween and now he enjoys performing in drag shows as Karisma Kaneda. I hadn’t come to terms with my queerness until my dad got sick, when I was fourteen. Shortly after his sixty-second birthday, he was diagnosed with stage two prostate cancer. While my mother spent nights watching over him in the hospital or shuffling him to his chemotherapy appointments, I spent mine seeking comfort in random strangers. At first, I’d find them on Craigslist ads or outside bars within walking distance of my house. When people were scarce, I swiped through dating apps like Grindr or Tinder. These people invited me into their beds with promises of affection and drugs. I got the drugs, which was great, but the affection didn’t meet my expectations.
On the other hand, Mizu thrived. He rose to the top of his class, became the president of the Graduate Student Association, and won a full scholarship to the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Hell, Mizu finally worked up the courage to ask Phillip out—they started dating three months into Dad’s treatment. It was as if our father wasn’t sick. Worse, it was like his being sick helped Mizu. One night, after fleeing a date gone wrong, I found Mizu yukking it up with his friends on our living room floor, designing posters for an upcoming school dance. Seeing him so happy when Mom and I were suffering enraged me. Later that night, I demanded to know why he was enjoying himself so much. He was profoundly confused.
“Am I supposed to feel bad?” Mizu asked, tilting his head to the side like a curious puppy. “Our father is a piece of shit.”
I couldn’t argue with him there. Hiroto was a grade-A asshole, who only paid attention to his family when he was interested in inflicting emotional abuse. Case in point? My name. In Japanese, Kuro means “black,” and it also means “ninth son.” I can’t think of a name more fucked up than that, honestly. Only my father would name a child that purposefully calls attention to the fact that my mother had seven miscarriages between Mizu and me. Not to mention when I was finally born, Dad couldn’t even be happy about it. He could’ve named me “Jirou,” or second son. Hell, he could’ve named me something nice like “Takashi.” Nope. Instead I was “black.” Black, like the space where his heart should’ve been.
The more time my father spent on his deathbed, the worse his attitude became. One afternoon after school, we stopped by his hospital room to find him angrily typing away on his computer, klak klak KLAK, like a ricochet of bullets. By this point we knew he was terminal, so it was weird to see him working on something with so much energy. Mom meekly sat in the corner, distracting herself with Candy Crush. That day my brother was wearing his rainbow flag pin. When Dad looked up and saw him, he scowled, his face tightly contorting.
“What are you doing, Dad?” Mizu asked.
“I’m writing, baka,” Hiroto sneered. “Both My Sons Are Faggots: A Memoir.”
He turned his attention back to typing, and when he made a mistake, he let out a frustrated roar and threw the laptop on the floor. It shattered with a cacophony of sound, but we didn’t even flinch. The nurses scolded him, but he just waved them away in anger.
My dad knew that I liked men before I really did.
* * * *
I woke up at 3:00 A.M. I had fallen asleep without talking to Phillip about my feelings. The warmth had receded from the bed, and I knew that he had left. At first, I thought he had left the apartment, but then I saw the light shining from underneath the bathroom door. I heard him grunting, muttering curse words underneath his breath.
“Phillip?” I called out hoarsely, walking over to the door.
He sat, sweating profusely, his eyes in deep pain. He was struggling with the lid of an orange prescription bottle, not because it was difficult to open, but because he knew he shouldn’t be taking it. His hands were shaking badly, like he was afraid of it. He tossed the bottle to me as if it was hot lava searing his hands. I immediately recognized the pills inside. Oxy. After last year’s car accident, he was prescribed OxyContin, a full thirty milligrams of it. The first time he took the pills, he left his body. I remembered the way that he drooled and lifelessly stared at the TV set while Mizu cooked dinner.
“Where’d you get these?” I asked.
“The street.”
“What are you, a 1980s drug self-advisor? Seriously, where did you get these?”
He sighed. “I paid off a pharmacist for them. Look at the label on the side. It’s supposed to be for a Carl Junior.”
“If I was named after a fast food chain, I’d take Oxy, too.”
“No Kuro, he actually needs it. I just…” Phillip looked down at his empty hands. “I just think I do.”
I unscrewed the lid and pushed him out of the way, dumping all the pills into the toilet. Phillip watched, anguished, as I pulled down the handle. The rushing water filled the toilet and he squeezed his eyes shut as if trying to block out the sound. I sat down on the floor next to him. When the last pill flushed down the drain, his shoulders finally relaxed.
“How about some ibuprofen and a glass of water?” I suggested. “With ibuprofen you’re hurting your kidneys, but at least you won’t risk stopping your heart.”
“I guess that is better. You can live with one kidney. You can’t live without a heart.”
“Yeah, that’s what they told me in sixth grade bio.” I filled up a paper cup with water and passed it to him along with the off-brand pills in the cabinet. “You should have let me help you today. When you took three boxes at once, I knew that you were hurting yourself. Stop trying to be so tough.”
He sipped from the water and took two pills. “I just miss being able to do things like that. I used to bench press 180 pounds easy. I was a kicker on the football team, for Christ sakes. Now I’m lucky if I can lift a plastic chair above my head. I don’t even know my body anymore.”
His voice was so quiet, heavy with a sadness I couldn’t relate to. I’v
e lost control of my body before, but never in a way I didn’t want. To not know your own body and have to readjust your expectations for it was painful. It took time, and Phillip was not patient with himself. He was ambitious and task oriented, wanting to move as fast as he could to the next project. I wondered how long he had felt this way.
Even though I knew I was testing my boundaries at this point, I put my arm around him. His side melted against mine, and he leaned so much against me, I thought he’d knock me over. But I sat stiff and strong. I would be his rock.
“How long?” Immediately I knew what he was asking.
“I think a part of me always has.”
“And you just put up with it? With me dating your brother?”
“What other choice did I have?”
“You could’ve said something,” he said, his voice tense. “All these years, and then all of a sudden, you spring this on me?”
“Are you mad at me?” Now was my turn to be quiet.
He sighed. “No. I just…I mean like I said earlier, I had no idea you liked men. You only ever dated girls.”
I get it. Even in the times I had serious relationships, they were always with women. My relationships with men were almost entirely limited to one-night stands and weekend endeavors. I mean, I had occasional long-term relationships. There was Franklin, a married man who lived in Oakdale, whom I saw for about four months. He ended up deleting his Grindr profile four months later. I’m assuming his wife found out; he always grumbled about how snoopy she was. Chaz was a guy I dated for longer; he was twenty-three and worked at a textbook publishing company. He was a lot of fun, except when he was having fun at your expense. His sense of humor was grounded in the idea that you were a fucking idiot, and he was a genius.
I explained this to Phillip. He asked when I first slept with men and why, and I launched into that explanation, too. He didn’t take it very well.
“You did drugs?” he cried out, horrified.
“You are literally addicted to oxy, and you’re judging me for doing drugs?” I smirked. “I’m surprised you didn’t realize until now. I spent months stoned out of my mind.”
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