Brother's Keeper

by C. E. Smith

  He’s lucky these days to make it to more than one meeting a month. While he recognizes the benefits of the twelve steps, he isn’t sure he’d even be capable of making a list of those he’s harmed. It would have to include his brother, and perhaps his father as well. Perhaps Nick too, though he isn’t sure Nick himself would have agreed. Of those living, should he apol­ogize to Beth for that fleeting attempt at seduction? For the drugs he stole from her pharmacy? And what of all the women during medical school and residency – those he slept with and subsequently ignored, or those who assumed commitment only to discover that he’d been sleeping with others as well? Surely such cruelties are common enough to rank low in the hierarchy of sins. And is it not presumptuous to think those ten or twenty women did anything other than forget him in short order and move on with their lives?

  But of course Amanda Grey is a different matter altogether. In four years, more than three living together, he never managed to stay faithful for more than a few months. The problem, it seems to him now, was that their relationship began as an unforgivable betrayal. Would faithfulness to her not have been the equivalent of consecrating that original offense? Or is he compounding his betrayal by making it the basis for a litany of others? Whatever the case, he’s beginning to think he could redeem years of harm simply by making amends with Amanda. If she were willing, he could start with a clean slate – they could establish a friendship of sorts. He could befriend her husband and come to know her child as well. Her husband of course might not approve – he might see Burkett as a threat – and Burkett couldn’t blame him for that.

  He composes an email. He saves it as a draft and over the course of a week makes small changes to the wording.

  Hi Amanda,

  I thought I saw you other day at the Green Hills Mall, but didn’t get a chance to say hello.

  You might not be aware that I live in Nashville now and practice general surgery. The plastics fellowship didn’t work out.

  I’m sure you heard the bad news about Owen. I had an ordeal of my own, which you can read about here and here.

  Anyway, it would be great to catch up. We could grab a cup of coffee sometime. Just let me know what would work for you.

  Best,

  Ryan

  That very day she responds:

  Great to hear from you, would love to catch up. Any interest in stopping by the office?

  He sees in this the challenge of a married woman with a sexual history. If he put her in an awkward position, she at least found a reasonable com­promise in the idea of meeting at the office she shares with her husband, a morgue in fact, and perhaps there is nothing like the proximity of death to trivialize romantic tension.

  In the atrium, visitors are greeted by an engraved motto:

  Let conversation cease. Let laughter flee. This is the place where death delights to succor life.

  He gives the receptionist his name. He’s ten minutes early, so he takes a seat amid the fake plants and occupies himself with the out-of-date magazines.

  Through the plate glass he watches a hearse cross the parking lot – perhaps carrying the body of one of Amanda’s patients. Are the bodies she examines called patients? Perhaps the more accurate term would be subjects.

  The receptionist conducts him down a brightly lit hallway to the only open door. Amanda walks around her desk to meet him. On the pants of her blue scrubs he notices a dark stain – a spilt drink, he hopes, rather than seepage from an autopsy.

  ‘Good to see you,’ she says when they are alone.

  There is a moment of hesitation before they embrace. Of the two chairs for visitors, one is occupied by a pile of laundry. The other she must have cleared in the moments before his arrival. He sinks into the cushions, surprisingly deep. His view of her is partially blocked by the papers and journals heaped on her desk, and he has the sense that with the slight­est nudge she could bury him in an avalanche of medical literature. He wonders if this is intentional, the low-slung chair a means of demeaning visitors. More likely a result of poor planning: she was always disorgan­ized, most comfortable amid clutter.

  ‘I was so sorry to hear about Owen,’ she says.

  ‘I had to travel there to claim the body,’ he says, hoping to appeal to her forensic sympathies.

  She gives him a look of pity that borders on mockery, and he girds himself for the inevitable Poor baby.

  Instead she says, ‘The worst was yet to come.’

  With a smirk he holds up his left hand, displaying the amputation stump.

  ‘It is what it is,’ he says, though he’s not sure if this is the right cliché. He was trying for a kind of humorous fatalism but he somehow missed the mark. She is looking away, out the window toward the distant Nashville skyline.

  ‘Did they ever catch the people who killed him?’

  ‘Our kidnappers were the same ones who killed him.’

  ‘The Heroes of Jihad,’ she says with a frown. ‘Did you find out what happened, who did it?’

  He offers an account that for him has nearly hardened into truth: how Owen was baited by a stranded motorist, and shot when he resisted being taken. Burkett envisions three gunmen, Tarik as the leader. This time, but not always, the other two are Akbar and Sajiv. From day to day he sees variations in Owen’s fight – perhaps he disarmed one of them, perhaps there was some kind of standoff – but it is always Tarik he punches in the face, and always Tarik in the end who shoots him.

  ‘So this fellow Tarik,’ she says, ‘did they ever catch him?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘That’s disappointing.’

  Silence fills the office. He notices a human skull serving as a bookend. Small numbers are written on its dome, perhaps a vestige of some anatomy class.

  ‘So Ryan,’ she says, turning back to him, ‘what can I do for you?’

  It is abrupt, a bit off-putting, but he tries to see this from her perspec­tive. She probably has bodies waiting for autopsies – preferable company, no doubt, to the ex-boyfriend wanting to dissect the past. He has yet to give her any indication as to why he’s come.

  He clears his throat, a sound to punctuate the silence. ‘For years I had a problem with substance abuse,’ he says. ‘You saw the worst of it. I’m just here, you know . . .’ He shrugs, trying to give an impression of spontaneity. ‘I just want to say I’m sorry.’

  How artificial it sounds: a canned apology, the sort of thing he might have come across in a pamphlet.

  ‘All right,’ she says, her voice freighted with doubt.

  ‘I’m serious,’ he says. ‘I’ve been going to AA meetings, haven’t had a drink or pill in over three years.’

  ‘Good for you,’ she says, obliging him with a remote smile. ‘Congrat­ulations.’

  The coldness strikes him as rather juvenile. He’d almost prefer that she lash out, berate him for all the lies and betrayals to which he subjected her more than a decade ago. All the crimes she should have expected from a man who would steal his twin brother’s girlfriend.

  ‘I hate to break it you,’ she says, ‘but I don’t sit around brooding about the time I spent with the Burkett twins.’

  He shrugs to conceal his irritation. ‘I just wanted to make things right. If it’s meaningless to you—’

  ‘What my past experiences may or may not mean to me – frankly, it’s none of your business.’

  In silence she leads him to the foyer, where they shake hands, and all at once her expression softens. Saying nothing, she leans close and kisses his cheek. He detects a faint odor of putrefaction – from a body nearby, or more likely from Amanda herself, from her hair and clothes. It draws him back to the basement morgue in Khandaros, to the body of his brother. This modern facility stands in sharp contrast to that cramped space of linoleum and tile, and yet the common smell gives him a sense of repeti­tion, a segment of time between then and
now like a rope held in tension by two different versions of himself.

  She calls to him in the parking lot, ‘Wait,’ and he turns and walks back to where she stands at the curb.

  He resists an urge to apologize all over again. He already feels it was a mistake to come here. What more could she want from him?

  ‘Did you ever wonder why your brother went abroad?’

  ‘It’s what he felt called to do.’

  ‘I can’t help but feel partly responsible for his decision to leave.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ he says as a dead leaf wavers in the air between them and clings to the tie at the waist of her scrubs.

  ‘Do you remember the time he came to Atlanta?’

  ‘Which time?’

  ‘You were in your final year of surgery,’ she says. ‘The resident on call had a funeral at the last minute, which meant you had to cover the entire weekend.’

  He nods, remembering. ‘I hated having to work during one of his few visits.’

  ‘He called that Saturday,’ she says. ‘We met for a drink.’

  ‘Really,’ he says with a pointless twitch of jealousy.

  ‘We went to Neighbors.’

  Neighbors. An unwelcome memory comes to him: the moment they locked eyes in the mirror behind the bar, when he realized she’d seen him with another woman. Why so many years later would she choose that par­ticular bar to meet Owen? Was it coincidence? Did she use his twin for some masochistic revision of the earlier scene? Or perhaps they met somewhere else entirely: perhaps she has brought up Neighbors only out of spite – to spurn his all too vague apology by reminding him of a specific reason for it.

  ‘So what happened?’ he asks.

  ‘Things got – strange.’

  ‘You slept together?’

  ‘Not that kind of strange,’ she says. ‘Come on, this is Owen we’re talking about. We had a bottle of wine – or I did – and we sat there talking. We spent hours talking. It took me back to my sophomore year at Penn State.’

  He waits for her to continue but almost wishes she hadn’t brought it up at all. If Owen had kept a secret from his brother, would he have wanted it unsealed now?

  ‘I’d just gone through a divorce,’ she says, ‘which was likely part of the problem. Being with Owen that night I had this overwhelming sense that we’d been meant for each other all along. Next thing I knew I was crying and telling him I’d always loved him.’

  ‘That’s what you get for sharing a bottle with a teetotaler.’

  She gives a hint of a smile and goes on: ‘In the weeks afterward we talked just about every day. But of course something was wrong. It felt like I’d stumbled into someone else’s relationship.’

  ‘He wanted you to be someone you weren’t.’

  Burkett wonders what bothers him more – that Owen’s history with her went beyond his own, or that he knew nothing of it.

  ‘He came down to Atlanta the next time we both had a free weekend,’ she says. ‘I told him we needed to call it off.’

  ‘And that was around the time he decided to become a missionary.’

  She lowers her eyes. ‘It was only a few weeks later that he sent out the mass email asking for donations.’

  He can see how she would make the connection, but it strikes him as rather egocentric on her part to take responsibility for an outcome so far beyond her control. Does she actually think she could have saved Owen’s life by loving him? By pretending to love him? He knows what she wants to hear – that it wouldn’t have made any difference, that Owen would have gone to Khandaros no matter what. But he remains silent. He can give her no such comfort, not if it means yet again belittling her role in his brother’s life.

  26

  A package waits on his doorstep. A book, he can tell, though he doesn’t recall placing an order. It is late, past midnight, and he has to be back in the operating room at seven. He rips off the tape and pulls back the flaps. Gods of the Rock, by Véronique Six.

  It’s been almost four years since her visit to Atlanta. He has tried to follow her career, the meteoric rise after her coverage of the Khandar­ian secession. Now a foreign correspondent for CNN, she reports from Middle Eastern ‘trouble spots’ so dangerous that she rarely appears on camera without a helmet and Kevlar vest.

  He lies in bed with the book. Although they’ve exchanged emails, he has no idea how she might have portrayed him, but if it covers two decades of jihad in El-Khandar, as the jacket claims, he can’t imagine his own experience warranting more than a sentence or two. The cover shows a woman in a burqa against a background of ocean and palm trees. He flips to the glossy pages at the center of the book and scans the black­and-white photographs. There are politicians shaking hands: white men in suits, Arabs in thobes. Jihadists posing with guns. The Aljannah Hotel in its prime and then as a smoldering ruin.

  He catches his breath at the picture of himself and Owen. It is that same photograph from their wrestling days – the night Owen won the national championship. A moment passes before he realizes that the image is reversed – like a reflection of the original – such that Owen’s injury, the broken clavicle, is on the right rather than the left. The caption reads: ‘Brothers Ryan, left, and Owen Burkett.’ He finds no picture of Nick.

  His eye drifts to a face at the top of the next page. Five men in suits, all of them Arabs, but it is the youngest at whom he is staring. The face was bearded when he last saw it, but there is no mistaking the smug expres­sion, the eyes behind those wire-rimmed glasses. It is Tarik.

  The caption reads: Yousef Al Bihani, the minister of health, with advisors. The minister is undoubtedly the white-haired figure at the center. Tarik, one of four others, stands at the edge of the picture to the minister’s right.

  The index lists no one by the name of Tarik, but he finds several refer­ences to the minister of health, this Yousef Al Bihani. A physician trained in the United States, he served on Quadri’s counsel before becoming min­ister of health under President Djohar. He was responsible for negotiating a brief but well publicized ceasefire with the Heroes of Jihad, a ceasefire that came to an end when the president was killed by a suicide bomber. Burkett remembers the shaky footage from Tarik’s laptop, the suicide bomber strolling up to the line of traffic. Al Bihani now serves on the cabinet of the new Islamic Republic of South Khandaros, which in retrospect might cast doubt on his allegiance to Djohar. He was one of several conservative members of that regime to defect to the south in the wake of the secession.

  Véronique’s number is still in Burkett’s phone.

  ‘The book looks great,’ he tells her.

  ‘Sorry not to include more of your experience,’ she says.

  He hasn’t bothered yet to read the parts about himself. He drops out of bed and pads into the bathroom.

  ‘Do you remember the man I told you about?’ he asks. ‘The bolt cutters.’

  ‘The good Dr Tarik,’ she says. ‘We never figured out his real name.’

  Absently he opens the medicine cabinet. He checks under the sink. There are no vials of pills, not that he expected any – not that he’s ever had a stash of pills here at his new house – but the habit of checking drawers and cabinets somehow puts him at ease.

  ‘You have a picture of him in your book,’ he says. ‘Page 190.’

  ‘Which picture?’ she asks, clearly surprised.

  ‘The minister of health with his advisors.’

  ‘Djohar’s inaugural gala.’

  ‘Tarik is the one on the far left.’

  ‘Hold on, let me get the book,’ she says. He hears her turning pages. After a pause she says, ‘That is Hussein, Yousef’s son. He was a physician if I remember correctly.’

  ‘It fits,’ he says. ‘Tarik was educated, connected.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she says. ‘A lot of people are educated and connected.’
/>   ‘Weren’t we assuming all along that Tarik was a nom de guerre?’

  ‘It seems rather far-fetched, but let me look into it and see what comes up.’

  He lies in bed but hardly sleeps. Four hours later, when he rises for work, he finds an email from Véronique: Hussein Al Bihani is still alive. Having obtained a work visa and medical license, he is currently in the second year of an endocrinology fellowship at the University of Louisville.

  How does a terrorist obtain a visa, much less a Kentucky medical license? Is he planning some kind of attack? Or perhaps he was serious about the swords and plowshares.

  The internet doesn’t turn up anything useful. There is a photo from his medical school yearbook, but it is ten years old, and the face bears only a slight resemblance to the Tarik Burkett remembers. On the University of Louisville’s website, Hussein is listed as a fellow in endocrinology, no picture included, but it seems he’s taking the year to pursue research on diabetes. The lab where he works has a separate website of its own, but the staff photos haven’t been updated in years.

  Hussein recently co-authored a paper in the journal Psychoneuro­endocrinology: ‘Counterregulation of cortisol levels during extreme hypoglycemia’. Burkett scrolls through the text and charts, not sure what he’s looking for. Does he hope to recognize Tarik’s voice in the scientific language? The odds are slim that Tarik contributed to the actual writing of the paper. More likely he earned his place among the ten or so authors by drawing blood from rats or managing a centrifuge.

  Another message from Véronique: during the period of Burkett’s cap­tivity, Hussein Al Bihani held a position as a hospitalist in Saudi Arabia. Could he have traveled back and forth, managing his revolutionary activ­ities on top of a medical practice?

  Véronique sends the contact information for someone she knows in the FBI. ‘He’s an old friend,’ she writes, which makes Burkett think she probably slept with him. She also suggests that he ‘talk with someone, perhaps a counselor’. Maybe this is her way of asking if he’s started drink­ing again. He could tell her he’s been sober now for almost four years. And perhaps that is the problem: if he were drunk, would he see the truth of that picture? Is his deep-seated anxiety now expressing itself in the form of paranoia? Has he become the sort of man who finds connections where none exist?