The Last Time I Saw My Brother
The rivers of America are spotted with small, uninhabited islands which are no different than forests, other than their accessibility. On one of these islands, shirtless and pacing in the low light, was my brother. Seeing him like this reminded me of years ago when he and Dad fought red skinned and drunk on the front lawn. On hot summer nights the argument would catch like wildfire and spill out from our house where the air conditioner cycled stale air. I remembered the crisp snap of the screen door opening and swinging shut. Dad and Mike circled each other like planets in slow orbit; Mom watched from the front window; I peeked behind her hip. Mike eventually took off down the street, teary eyed and muttering, and Dad would holler himself hoarse and then go back drinking in the garage, tools rippling as he settled atop the weight bench. I’d tell you how sad it made me feel if it was possible to describe. Sometimes the neighbors called the police. The cops wouldn’t put their sirens on but you could hear them from a few streets over because they’d haul ass, engines gunning and kicking up gravel along the worn street. My son has
anger problem, Dad would say in accented English, but the cops would ask him if he’d been drinking, and Dad would say something like is it a crime to have a beer in my own home? Mike was seventeen or eighteen around then. He’d disappear but then a few days later be right back in his room and he and Dad wouldn’t say word one about any of it.
It was about 15 years after that summer when I went to pick up my brother in a town in central Connecticut as a favor for my father. Dad called me just before Thanksgiving letting me know Mike was in trouble and needed a ride home. I hadn’t seen Mike in 12 years, not even at our mother’s funeral. I set out from Boston right away. The address was in a place called Collinsville, a village nestled in two opposing bends of a river that formed an S. It sprouted up in the 19th century around grist mills and an industry of axes, knives, and other edge tools. In the decades past it shed its industrial roots and settled in as pretty, lightly populated riverfront hamlet with a minor arts community. After driving across a bridge into town I passed by a bar, an antiques
store, a small industrial museum, and a barn on the river’s edge that rented out canoes, kayaks, and paddle boards. The address Dad gave me was for the second floor of a three-family that looked sunk into the cold muddy earth. Mike wasn’t there, instead only an odd young man named Robichard who said he was an essayist, though he wore a Dunkin' Donuts uniform and asked me to drive him to work. Robichard had a thin goatee and made intermittent eye contact while looking for something around the room. I drove him to work, and on the ride he told me that Mike was paranoid and had taken off earlier in the day, but would probably be back in the evening. I thanked Robichard and turned back down River Road, the way I came in, towards the interstate.
It was just after 5 PM on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, yet there was little traffic. The town center was empty except for an older couple being led by an inquisitive dog and someone turning off the barbershop's lights. Halfway over the bridge that bisected the river, I noticed a blur of movement out in
the water. Through the sepia dusk I saw a man standing on a small patch of land, pacing and shirtless in the November cold. I pulled over, put on my hazards, and got out of the car. “Mike!” I shouted from the bridge towards the island, maybe 100 feet away. He didn’t hear me. I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted again. “Mike!” He stopped pacing and looked up at me. “Mike, it’s me, Jack! What are you doing out there?” Mike patted his hands down towards the ground like he wanted me to be quiet. He gestured towards the west end of the bridge. He then shoved a kayak into the water and started paddling in that direction. I got back in the car and drove to the end of the bridge, turned right and parked just off the road as Mike pulled the boat ashore.
He was ghost white and trembled as he walked over to me. I took off my jacket and held it out to him. “Take this,” I said. Then, “Where is your shirt?” He didn’t answer but took the jacket. “Get into the car and warm up, for chrissake,” I said. He slipped on my jacket and sunk into the passenger’s seat like a block of ice. I returned to the driver’s seat and turned the heat up as high as it would go.
“Drive, please,” Mike grunted.
“What about your canoe? Are you okay?”
“It’s not my canoe. Just go ahead and drive along the road and I’ll tell you.”
I shrugged, put the car in drive, and started off down the road. It was not on the way to the interstate.
We drove for a few minutes in silence and I stole an occasional glance at my brother. He looked older than 32, his actual age. He wore spotty gray-brown facial hair, not enough to really be a beard, and had stray pockmarks on his cheek. A faded scar ran from his forehead down along his temple to the edge of his eye. He shifted uncomfortably, holding his hands to the heat vent, alternating his gaze between the passenger window and the rear view. He then told me the story of his recent life, which both began and ended a non-sequitur. He’d been in a relationship with a woman up in Barre, Vermont, but left because she wanted him to babysit her kids all the time and he’d had enough. A friend of his told him about a commune for men being run down by Great Barrington, where you could live and eat for free if you helped
around the farm and took some courses. The farm turned out to be just some shabby house on a half-acre of land, and the men living there worked retail or odd-jobs and spent a lot of the day drinking beer and reading the pamphlets that Don, the “leader”, wrote. Don was an advocate for the rights of Men,
Mike said, and was brilliant. He saw the threat more clearly than society did, and knew it was leading up to something serious. The “commune” was where he had met Robichard. Mike said another man in the house, Deveron, accused Robichard of being a homosexual. Mike said it was because of the way Robichard spoke and that he highlighted his hair, but that he wasn’t gay. One day, Don brought a woman back to the house that he’d met at some casino in upstate New York. Mike said she was a whore. There were ten men living in the house, and half were excited, tapping their feet and shifting chairs, and the other half were nervous as hell and looked on quietly. Don took the woman by the hand and walked her over to Robichard, and told him he could go first. Deveron was whistling and laughing but Robichard told Don he wasn’t interested. Don said it wasn’t optional and the house quieted down. Robichard stood up and
said “fuck this” but Don slapped him in the face and pushed him back down. Then Don just started laughing and the girl seemed confused as hell, and Don ended up taking the girl to his room and didn’t share her with anyone.
Mike didn’t like any of it, he wanted to make clear to me, so he and Robichard took sixty bucks from a drawer in the kitchen and ran out of there. They took a bus down to Connecticut and ended up in Collinsville. My brother and I hadn’t seen each other in ten years, and probably hadn’t had a serious conversation ever, and yet he recounted this slight episode of his life like it was a matter of life and death. At the very least, I expected some explanation for how Mike ended up on that baby island in the Farmington River, shirtless and freezing. Mike’s commune story was relevant to a narrative in Mike’s head that I wasn’t privy to.
Mike asked me to take him home so he could change.
Back at the three-family, Mike went into his room I saw it was a mess, covered in clothing and trash, and that his mattress sat on the floor. I waited in the kitchen. A few minutes later, he walked out wearing jeans and a t-shirt, looking normal enough,
and I asked him if we was ready to go.
“I have work tomorrow,” he said.
I scratched my neck and looked straight at Mike. “Then why did you ask Dad for someone to come get you today?”
“I never said today.”
Instead of engaging in conversation, Mike walked to the kitchen and started rooting through the cupboards in search of food. I heard slamming and huffing and a general pang of frustration. He came out of the kitchen gnawing on a roll that looked hard as a brick. The home reminded me of how young men lived in college - cheap frat rentals with mix-and-match furniture, overflowing trash cans, empty fridges, and unswept floors.
“Mike.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m driving back to Williamsport for Thanksgiving.” I looked at my watch. “I still have a ways to go. Dad said you wanted a ride home. What’s the deal?”
“Sorry, Jack. I have to work tomorrow.”
“You have to work on Thanksgiving? Where do you work?”
“Dunkin' Donuts.”
“Oh. With Robichard?”
Mike took the roll from his mouth and hurled it against the wall. He balled up his hands and stormed into his bedroom, slamming the door, and dust puffed up from the floorboards. Five seconds later, he opened the door and stomped out.
“Sorry,” he said.
“It’s OK, Mike,” I said. “But, tell me. What’s going on? Dad said you were in trouble.”
Mike started rubbing his fingers back and forth along his scalp. He repeatedly plunked his chest with his index finger. “I took the initiative to go find work. I found the job at Dunkin'. I interviewed, I got the offer, I started first. For 10.50 an hour.” Mike now jabbed his finger towards the front of that house. “That M O T H E R F U C K E R s t a r t s a n d t h e y o f f e r t h a t MOTHERFUCKER 11.25 an hour. He started AFTER me! He only knew about the job because of me! And I vouched for him.
STUPID MOTHERFUCKER.” While Mike spoke someone upstairs walked across the floor, causing minor creaks which would’ve gone unnoticed if not for Mike’s wincing at each footstep. Mike stood, neck craned towards the ceiling, seeming to take up more space in the room with each breath, his face red and his eyes bulging with sagging, leathery eyelids like some carnival grotesquerie.
Witnessing this, I felt a pang of regret for ever thinking my father a prude, just some confused immigrant schmuck, for claiming Mike had a pornography problem all those years ago. Of course the problem was my brother, not my father’s unfamiliarity with the norms of American youth.
Here, see my brother, raving lunatic.
Robichard just then came through the front door, red faced and shivering, like he had walked home from Dunkin' Donuts in the cold without a jacket.
“Fucker!” Mike said.
“Fuck you,” Robichard said. He disappeared into a hallway and then a door slammed.
I looked at my brother. He bit his nails, a habit he kept
from childhood, and looked at me. I couldn’t help but stare.
“What, what, what?” he said.
“Why did you call Dad?”
Throughout all this, Mike wouldn’t dare make eye contact with me. “I don’t even remember calling him. I was probably sick or something.”. He seemed to rock back and forth while standing. “You’d better go,” he said.
I stood up to leave. For a brief moment I considered hugging him, but it was a very brief moment, and instead a I said, “I have some extra cash on me. You want it?”
Mike accepted the money - 120 bucks - said thanks, and went back into his bedroom. I went out to my car and drove away.
When I got home to Williamsport and told Dad that Mike wouldn’t come, I couldn’t tell if he was sad or relieved. It was always hard to tell with him. We had pasta and meatballs because Dad couldn’t make a turkey or anything like that. The food was neither an American tradition nor a Polish one, not even a family tradition, it was just Dad working with what he had, but it was still hot and filling. We both drank a lot of red wine.“I know it’s
in a box but this stuff is actually pretty fancy,” Dad said. I went to sleep in my old room, feeling sluggish and thick. Lying on my bed I could see out to the front lawn, silver in the moonlight, but I was too tired to do more remembering and turned away to look at the blank wall. It was covered in dust. Sometimes there’s no making sense of something, and sometimes there’s no making sense of anything, I thought, and sometime after that I fell into a deep sleep.
Perhaps because of the red wine and the smells of childhood I had an odd, vivid dream. I dreamt of Gunter Liftin, a young German caught on the wrong side of the newly erected border in Berlin in August of 1961. I could see him walking, hands in his pocket and kicking pebbles, staring out at rolls of barbed wire and the Brandenburg gates just beyond. He’d spent the day just before the wall went up preparing his new apartment in West Berlin, but was caught on the wrong side of the city when the border practically appeared out of thin air - aided by thousands of loyal Stasi agents - in the nighttime hours on that historic Sunday morning. But the Brandenburg Gate was not where he would attempt his escape, but rather in the
Humboldthafen, a small canal in the middle of city, where if he completed a swim of 150 yards he would find himself on a shore of West Berlin, free once more. He made it 20 yards before being seen and ordered to stop. He kept swimming onward and was shot through the back of the neck. Gunter’s body was fished out of the harbour by the East German police a few hours later. In my dream I felt the sensation of a bullet entering my neck and exiting my throat, or my mouth, and of course it wasn’t painful because it was only a dream, but rather a surreal feeling of repeated shock and a fabricated sensation of death that is the best our imagination can do. I wondered if Gunter knew he would die, or knew it was likely, but I knew there was little chance of relating to chaotic, miserable times in history, where through a perverted confluence of events you may be shot at for swimming in the wrong canal. That’s the truth of history, or the trick. That Gunter jumped out into water not because he was stressed or frustrated but because he sought distinct freedom, an actual location, a considered risk of being shot that was worth it, as opposed to the present, where it seemed nothing could be explained except to lump it in some general malaise or ennui or dissatisfaction that was the
explanation for all things. There was darkness then that I didn’t remember. Sometime after that I dreamt of Robichard, and in this dream Robichard sat at a desk and wrote an essay in some leatherbound journal, using a quill pen or something equally esoteric, and in my dream I looked down at Robichard and laughed cruelly, thinking of him pouring coffee and microwaving circles of egg at Dunkin' Donuts, and that even if what he was writing in his essay was important and well written, it wouldn’t matter one bit.
I woke up in a daze in the middle of the night and heard my father standing at my bedroom door, looking in at me and breathing softly, like he used to when we were kids, and I knew his head must be filled with thoughts of something but what they were I had no more idea as a grown man than I did as a child.