The Brother

by Joakim Zander

  2

  Brooklyn, New York—Thursday, August 13, 2015

  The feel of concrete through the thin mattress on the floor; the rattle of a truck on the street so loud it makes the dirty windowpane tremble; sporadic voices and clattering heels on the asphalt; sirens on Atlantic Avenue; heat pressing down; your pulse echoing between the brick walls; the key in the door.

  Yasmine sits up. She is immediately wide awake, eyes open, ready for anything, or almost anything. All those sounds, and the light from the streetlight falling over the floor. Darkness, reflections, and signals that she can’t identify immediately. Just a key in the door. She looks around, pulls yesterday’s black tank top over her head, steps into a pair of jeans, runs her hands through her thick dark hair, and stands up quietly. The rough floor is surprisingly cool against the soles of her feet.

  The lock jams and chickchackchackchick. The key is forced in and turned. The sound echoes through the empty apartment. Blue light from the street flickers in through the windows and over the half-finished canvases leaning against the walls.

  It’s the middle of the night. How long has she been sleeping? Has she even slept at all? The jet lag crackles inside her. It is as if all her senses were being filtered through a a weak radio frequency, making her slow and sluggish. She shakes her head again, trying to clear the noise, before she starts moving softly toward the sound at the door. Outside the sirens fade away down the cracked asphalt, leaving something that resembles calm in their wake. Now only the sound of the key in the lock.

  She moves closer to the door, so close that her lips touch the metal, and she whispers in Swedish: “David? Is that you?”

  She still has remnants of airplane air in her lungs and her voice is dry and hoarse. The key stops scratching in the lock.

  “Yasmine?” he says from the other side.

  The way he says her name. The flustered intonation and the aggressive, impatient tone. Everything they’ve built is destroyed in an instant. She turns the bolt and the door crashes open.

  David looks almost normal, almost like he did a week ago. The same gently curved lips, the same deep furrow in his brow. Same collarbone and the dimple on his left cheek, the shaved head, the same gray T-shirt with the same spots of spray paint and ink; the same jeans in thick, old denim that she bought him in Shibuya on her first trip to Tokyo. But there’s also the stubble and the dirty nails, the shifty gaze and the grinding jaw.

  “Yasmine, baby!”

  He throws his arms wide, steps over the threshold, his teeth bright yellow in the glow from the street. She backs up a step and turns away from his attempt to embrace her.

  “Baby, I didn’t realize… What time is it?” he says in English.

  He touches his wrist in search of a watch that isn’t there, pats his pockets, looking for a cell phone, finally finds it, takes it out, and pushes its buttons frantically, but gets no reaction.

  “What the fuck? I’m outta juice! What time is it, baby?”

  He drops the phone, which bounces on the floor. He moves toward her again, now with his hands cupped in front of him, as if to grab hold of her face. She backs up until she’s standing in the middle of the room or the loft as David calls it, though it’s no bigger than a dorm room, even if the ceiling is high and sometimes fills with light early in the morning.

  “Why are you speaking English?” she says.

  He stops and looks at her as if he hadn’t actually registered that she was there until now.

  “How’d you get in?” he says in Swedish, in an accusatory tone buzzing with paranoia and aggression.

  “David,” she says, her head cocked to the side now, like a child. “What happened?”

  She stands in the middle of the floor with her arms crossed over her chest. She feels anger penetrate the pain and confusion inside, feels it expand. There is a hole inside her, inside them, inside this room. Every time she thinks she’s grabbed onto the porous edge of this pit, she feels it expand, feels her fingers start to slide into the gravel. No matter how hard she fights, kicks, and bleeds, she fumbles, then falls forever downward.

  “Happened?” he says. “What do you mean happened?”

  He opens the refrigerator and pulls plastic containers in and out, rearranging leftovers on the shelves. A tub of butter falls on the floor, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

  “Timmy and Aisha had a party,” he says. “Then we went out with Rasheed and some other people.”

  He turns to her, surprised: “What are you doing here? You were supposed to come back on Thursday.”

  “It is Thursday,” she says, pressing her fingers against her temples. “Or maybe Friday now.”

  The noise wasn’t going away.

  “Timmy and Aisha had a party last Tuesday,” she says. “So you haven’t been home since then, I guess?”

  He shrugs, as if trying to think.

  “Thursday?” he says. “Rasheed and I got stuck in some beats he found. Then we went to a party in Bushwick. Lauren was there.”

  He looks as if he expects some type of credit for mentioning the name of a gallerist who they both know will never exhibit any of his paintings.

  “She seemed really interested in my new project, you know, the birds and the churches. Have I told you about it?”

  Yasmine sinks down to her knees.

  “A million times, David. But you haven’t painted shit, right? Not one fucking brushstroke!”

  She stands up again and goes over to the double mattress in the corner and picks up two sheets of paper. She puts them on the counter in front of David without saying a word.

  He leans forward and squints at them.

  “Oh,” he says. “Fuck it. It’ll take them forever to take us to court. We’re artists, baby! Evictions are just part of the story.”

  “We’re going to court in ten days, David. Then we’ll be on the street, OK? I’ve fucking been giving you money every week to pay the rent. What did you do with it? Drugs? Partying in Bushwick?”

  Deeper and deeper into the pit. She doesn’t even have the energy to fight it.

  “I need a drink,” he says, and opens the freezer door.

  He roots around inside the icy space until he grabs hold of a foggy bottle that he holds up in the gray night haze. He shakes it and turns it upside down before throwing it full force against the gray brick wall. The bottle misses the window by a couple of inches and shatters.

  “Why the hell did you drink the vodka?” he hisses and turns to her.

  Maybe it’s the eviction notice, maybe her trip, or the jet lag. Maybe it’s the last month, the ever-expanding sadness and confusion inside her. Maybe it’s because the pit just keeps getting wider. Maybe it’s the dirt under his nails. Maybe that’s what makes her see the dark and bloody bottom of the hole. Maybe it’s nothing. But suddenly she knows what needs to be done.

  “I haven’t touched your vodka, David,” she says.

  And not only that. Her voice doesn’t tremble, she doesn’t look away or back down or leave. Instead, she puts her arms across her chest and takes a step toward him. She can feel glass cutting deep into her left foot, feel how cold the shards are, how cold her blood feels in the heat.

  David looks surprised. What she’s saying isn’t consistent with their history, a history full of episodes where she ends up on her knees in the corner sweeping up the pieces. For a moment he looks puzzled. He grinds his jaw.

  “What the fuck did you say?” He takes a step toward her as the corner of his mouth twitches, either from speed or tension or lack of sleep.

  She knows she could end it now. She could back down and surrender. Grab some toilet paper and sweep up the bloody shards. She could run down to the bodega on Classon Avenue and buy him some beer. He could suck down a six-pack and scream for a while. She could turn his hatred outward, toward gallerists and agents, and all the other people who are to blame for the fact that he hasn’t made a decent painting since they came to Brooklyn. She might be able to borrow money from Brett
to stop the eviction? Take a couple of trips to Tokyo or Berlin. Continue saving up for her own apartment to disappear to under the cover of darkness. She can do exactly what she’s done a hundred times before, let herself fall slowly down into the pit again.

  But she doesn’t.

  “I told you I was in Tokyo for ten days,” she says instead. “And you know very well I didn’t touch your vodka.”

  He takes a step toward her and for a moment seems to be weighing what she said.

  “While you were here partying away the rent money for the thousandth time with your fucking loser club, I’ve been busting my ass for us to move forward, out of this shit,” she continues.

  She’s gone too far now. Further than ever before. But lack of sleep makes her light and volatile. For a moment it’s as if she’s no longer a part of this anymore, not fully. It’s as if the past month temporarily loosened its convulsive hold on her, as if what she and David had together was no longer real, just matter and myth and dream.

  It’s been a month now, a month since Fadi disappeared for good, a month since her phone buzzed in her pocket on the subway somewhere between West Fourth and Spring, and the world slowed down around her. It’s been a month since she started running from her grief and her past faster and further than she ever thought she could. And then, just when she thought she couldn’t get further away, just when she felt the terrible sorrow overtaking her, she received the second message four days ago. The blurry picture of someone who might be Fadi in Bergort. Fadi is dead. Fadi is alive. Nothing makes sense anymore. There is no pattern.

  “You bastard!” she screams now and feels how sharp and raw her voice is.

  “Shut up!” David roars, louder and deeper.

  He holds a hand in front of her face.

  “You should just shut your mouth! Who the fuck do you think you are? Huh? I don’t owe you shit. You know that.”

  He’s in her face now, and she can feel his chemical breath, smell in his clothes and skin the pungent sweat of two full days of partying. His voice is quieter now, more threatening.

  “Who the hell are you to come in here with this shit? If it weren’t for me you’d still be in the ghetto. If it weren’t for me you’d be working in that fucking nail salon your friend’s mom started, you ungrateful little cunt. Or you’d be dead like your retarded brother. You waltz in here with your fucking Tokyo trips… As if it wasn’t me who arranged all that for you. Fuck you!”

  She feels his saliva on her cheek, and she knows that what he’s saying is true. He’s said it many times before. She’s thought it so many times before. That her debt to him is so great that it justifies the pit, justifies everything.

  At that moment she almost lets go of the edge. Almost puts her arms around him instead. Almost puts his head on her shoulder, almost moves his arms around her waist.

  But something is different tonight. It’s as if there’s a rope ladder hanging down into the pit, nearly within reach. Fadi’s death and his resurrection. The world is spinning so fast it gives her vertigo. The journey between time zones makes everything seem easy and surreal. But she knows she can’t grab hold of the ladder by herself, she still needs him, even for this. Maybe especially for this. She needs his hands to get out of this bottomless pit and wrest free from their story. She needs him in order to save what can still be saved.

  So she hardens herself and pulls back, forcing that tenderness to become hatred with nothing more than her own will. She pushes him as hard as she can in the chest and yells.

  He stumbles a step backward, disoriented for a moment.

  “You’re such a fake,” she yells. “You’re a fucking clown, David! You think you’re an artist…”

  She laughs an empty, joyless laugh.

  “An artist! What a fucking joke! You haven’t done shit for a year! You’re a junkie, David. One step from the street. And you think you saved me? Don’t you get that I’m the only thing standing between you and a park bench?”

  She doesn’t get any further before David’s fist slams into her temple. It burns and her head buzzes—she feels weightless. The room spins around her as she falls backward onto the concrete floor. The taste of metal on her tongue. It tastes like sadness and emptiness. Like the end of the story.

  It tastes like a victory.

  3

  Bergort—Autumn 2000

  It’s called Bergort. Call it what you want, we don’t care. We can’t pronounce it anyway, and we’re still better at this than most. We know now that the ones who brought us here, our parents, will never make themselves understood here. They’ll be mute outside these walls, worse than dumb, because they’ll try. They’ll hem and haw and stutter and think that they’re rolling their consonants and curling their vowels well enough to get along, believe it’s enough to stumble your way to what you want. But it’s not enough, it will never be enough. Their old-fashioned, black dress pants, shawls, and jewelry. How could that be enough? We’ve known this from the first day. How could it escape them? We’re foreigners here. And we will never be more than the sum of our limitations. For people like us it’s never enough to do our best.

  So we decide right here on the scratched-up wooden floor of the living room in our new, old, shabby apartment with its toddler graffiti on the kitchen cabinets, with our stupid memories still in moving boxes next to the wall, still waiting for someone to grab hold of us. Someone to unpack us and connect us to all this newness. Here on the floor we decide we’re not like the things in the box. We can’t wait for anyone, and we can’t rely on the people in the kitchen, the ones who brought us here and then surrendered. They are nothing more than old clothes, old thoughts, and old languages.

  We sit in silence. We hear them chopping and mumbling in the kitchen, complaining about the tahini in the store on the square, about the acidic tomatoes, about the parsley, the olive oil, about how there are no vegetables worth the name. We look at each other, and you smile at me and stroke my cheek, push a lock of hair from my forehead. You’ve just learned a word that’s so funny. Kåldolmar. It’s something they served in the school cafeteria, something brown and gray that might contain meat. We’re not supposed to eat pork, but we don’t care. They serve it with potatoes—they serve everything with potatoes.

  We sit on the floor and listen to them nagging and whining in the kitchen, and it feels like we’re alone here, just you and me. Like there are oceans and worlds, galaxies and universes, between us and the kitchen. A cold wind streams in from the warped balcony door and you whisper to me: “Maybe we should eat kåldolmar instead.”

  And we laugh until we can’t breathe. This is where it begins. This is where we decide—it’s just us.

  *

  In the beginning, we never leave home except to go to school. I wait for you outside the barracks and hide behind bushes that lose their leaves in the fall, becoming just as bald and ugly as everything else. While counting the minutes on the big clock on the brick building on the other side of the schoolyard, I pick white berries from those bushes and feel them explode and drain through my fingers.

  It’s always gray, and it’s always raining—until it starts to snow. I can’t believe it at first, those flakes seem to come from nowhere, as easy as thoughts, as dreams, as wind. I’m freezing and jumping and shaking and waiting and waiting and waiting.

  And I wonder who goes to that big brick school, and why we have to go to these barracks, and I count the seconds that feel like minutes, like hours and days, until you finally come out the door, always first, always alone, always peering down toward the bushes until you catch sight of me. And then it’s not cold anymore, not hopeless, then the seconds don’t feel like hours, the afternoon is no longer empty and endless, completely beyond clocks and time.

  *

  This is autumn, this is winter—we exchange their Wayed Wayed for our “Razor Tongue” and “7 Days” and Britney. This fall, this winter we walk over the asphalt, between the sparse hedges and frozen grass, through a world that gets darker
and darker until I doubt I’ll ever see the sun again, that it’s disappeared and left me alone. Just like everything else left me. Everything except you, my sister.

  And we walk slowly back to them across the frozen asphalt, dragging our feet through fresh snow between the buildings, creating ditches and furrows, a trail to follow back. As if we’re Hansel and Gretel and don’t need to find a way home, but a way out.

  It gets cold so fast, and my feet are freezing in my old tennis shoes—the snow finds a way in under the tongue, through the hole in the sole, or up under my too short pants.

  “You grow too fast, little brother,” you say. “Soon we’re not gonna be able to afford those legs anymore.”

  The cold finds its way through my polyester jacket and my mustard-yellow thrift store sweater, through T-shirts and skin, and pierces bone and marrow.

  “We’re almost home, habibi,” you say. “Then we’ll run you a hot bath.”

  And we laugh because we have no bathtub, just a shower with a thin, weak stream of lukewarm water, but laughing warms me up.

  You say: “Cord, board, lord, afford.”

  New words you have learned. They sound like bird calls in your mouth, completely alien, inhuman. But we know that they are the key, they mean everything. We’re here now, we have no choice, can’t change our short pants, our crappy shoes, our cramped, depressing home. But we can practice this melody until we sing it more beautifully than anyone else. And when spring finally sheds its pale light over the yellow grass I chirp: “Row, hoe, mow, cow.”

  “That doesn’t rhyme,” you say.

  And we laugh again, helplessly, breathlessly, until we collapse into the melting snowdrifts—two scrawny, lonely kids in an alien world.

  *

  Sometimes when we get home the apartment is dark and empty, and we regret not hurrying more, running through the winter so we could have had more time alone in the almost warm darkness.

  Those afternoons by ourselves we put pillows on the floor so close to the TV we are almost inside it, and it is as close to happiness as I get in those early days. We learn the word flip, and we flip past the Arabic channels and straight to Ricki Lake or Oprah or reruns of Beverly Hills 90210. We dip dry bread in hummus or baba ghanoush or whatever we find pushed into the back of the refrigerator, behind the acidic tomatoes and tasteless, rotting peppers. Then we just lie there, still cold but drowsy, eyes half-open, and you read the subtitles aloud to me in a voice so heavy and tired and warm that I dream I can wrap it around me like the thickest, softest blanket, and sleep until the cold rolls away, and the sun streams in through the gaps in the broken blinds and gives us back our world again.