Between beats of rain, there is the sound of his fingers tapping the steering wheel. It’s a sound like fear, drumming in your ears, the rhythm of blood rushing back and forth between the poles of your heart. I close my eyes to it and feel it in my temples, the little bones in my hands and toes. I ask myself: what can I give him? What can I do to make it right?
In the car, he takes off his shoes. It is the first thing he does, before even buckling his
seatbelt. Slowly, he peels off his socks, and runs his knuckles along the underside of his feet. He is a barefoot man, he is a running man. There are things that I will learn about him on this trip that might change everything. I think that he has brought me here to show them to me, that I might know for whom I have given up everything. He likes to drive barefoot, and taps his fingers when he is nervous.
Yesterday he said to me: it won’t be much of a vacation. You don’t have to come. Of course
this is meant to let me know that he wants me there, even though he hardly knows me at all. From the beginning he has feigned indifference, but badly. At times he is open wide, a yawning chasm of monsters and chimeras, and at others he is tight-lipped and tight-fisted, and closes himself to me.
When did you know you were in love with me, he asks softly. For a long time I do not reply. It seemed to me that I loved him from the beginning, though perhaps this is a romantic notion- one that doesn’t hold. When you fucked that girl and called me crying. I guess that’s when I knew. His jaw tightens and he closes his eyes for one moment too long. The car swerves. My breath catches in my throat. He doesn’t like me to talk about the past, but I have found that as I grow older, grudges are harder and harder to let go. He says to me then: I guess that’s when I knew too. So maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing after all. Besides, you were still with him. He reminds me of this often: the man with whom I shared a life before him, the man that has become to me a mere image, evaporating slowly, day by day. It is surprising: how quickly one forgets what once seemed so important and all-encompassing.
After that we are silent for awhile, watching the landscape change: the plants swelling with moisture and darkening green, the heavy palm fronds framing a pale blue sky. I told him that I hated Florida, mostly because of the stories he has told me about his time there. He wants me to see it once more with him, to see it anew. He believes that he can teach me to love the things that have hurt me- in this way, he is like a child. I want to give him this, but my faith is not as strong.
He tells me the story of his grandmother, who is nearly eighty years old and used to own a strip of crack motels along Airline Highway. She is the woman who raised him, the woman who taught him right from wrong. As a young woman in rural Taiwan, she had big dreams and big aspirations. It was only fitting that she would meet an Air Force captain and travel around the world just like she’d planned. In the mornings before school, they played a game of cards. She never let him win; she wasn’t like that. When he began to use drugs, he stole from her. At first it was only a little, and then it was a lot.
We have been on the road for six or seven hours when he begins to tell me about his brother.
It has been years since they have spoken, almost as long since they have seen one another. He says that his brother knows how to hold a grudge, that he lives alone with his resentments and his video games, and a little bare-skinned dog called Weenie. He says to expect some talk of politics- that I shouldn’t engage, or at least just keep it superficial. He shows me a picture. His brother does not look like him; he is flaxen blonde and blue-eyed, with a soft face bereft of angles and pale ashen skin. Later on his grandmother will tell me that they do not have the same father, though this is a family secret and I am not supposed to know. In the picture, his brother smiles and holds the arm of the girl who came between them both. She is small and stone-faced, and looks as though she is chewing on something hard and bitter. I want to know more about this girl, about her baby and the man she lives with now, but I dare not ask. He would prefer for it to live in his past, I know, though I tell him often that this is not his choice. I tuck the picture into the center console. He takes a deep breath and begins to tap again on the steering wheel, an uneven rhythm, a pained sound.
At first we can’t find the house. He doesn’t remember what it looks like, though he lived there for nearly a year. His brother, he says, would not have put up Christmas lights. We look for a circular driveway and a marble bird bath in the yard. Police cars pull onto the street and he flinches, trailing them with his eyes, but the house they stop in front of is green, and there are little Black children in the yard. The house that is his is small and looks as though it were drawn onto the landscape with chalk. Heavy curtains and towels hang before the windows, obscuring any light. The bird bath is dry, and leans heavily over the weed-choked grass. Perhaps no one is home.
He pulls over onto the curb and lights up a cigarette, looking at me through the blue smoke.
Perhaps he is wondering what I am thinking, how much I really know. I do not tell him that I have been here before, driving up to a dark house, empty-handed and full of remorse. This he must do for himself. He puts his cigarette out on the side of the rental car, and we watch the paint peel ever so slightly. Cicadas hum insistently from the darkness beyond the car windows. The air is thick with the wings of insects and the sweet smell of decay. We both look at the house: small and pale as a drawing on a loose piece of paper. Ribbons of light writhed beneath the door, around the cracks in the windows. We both knew that his brother was home, even though there wasn’t a car in the driveway. An occupied house has a certain heaviness to it, the weight of the soul inside, of everything it drags around and wraps around itself like so many scarves. You can always tell when someone is home.
He puts his second cigarette out on the curb, slowly making his way up the driveway. His steps are heavy, as though weighted with shackles, and his breath rises, mist blooming out from his nostrils into the damp autumn air. Water pools in various gullies around the yard, and a small pond has formed beneath the fallen bird bath. His boots stick in the mud and make a sucking sound as he walks across the wet underbrush. I do not move. I am leaning against the car, watching him walk away from me. Suddenly he is small and paper-thin, like a child’s cutout, unfolding into many iterations of itself, from the driveway to the door. When the door opens the light seems to flood through him and out the other side, his pale, diaphanous figure melting away at the edges.
What are you doing here, I hear his brother say. Showing up without a warning? Not cool.
I tried to call you, he responds. This I can attest to. He has been trying to call for a few weeks now, trying to find his brother to tell him he is going to come.
I saw your call, I see his features soften, the shape of him relaxing and expanding in the doorway. The two men stand before one another, hands balled into fists, bare arms rippling with tension. The brother is taller, his features brighter and blonder. A second figure appears in the doorway beside him. Who is it, it says. The voice is strained, piercing in the stillness of night. The frogs and insects pause mid-chant. The men stand as if locked in position, brimming with potential energy.
At last the second figure pushes past the first, holding the door open. Come in, he says, and the three enter quietly. He gestures towards me, beckoning me to follow them. I think that perhaps I am needed there, that perhaps there will be violence if I am not vigilant. I think that perhaps I am the only thing between them. I enter reluctantly.
Inside, there is a smell of dampness and ammonia. Papers and receipts litter the coffee table, the sole piece of furniture in an otherwise empty room. The two brothers circle one another once, like dogs preparing to fight. It is so quiet one can hear the rush of blood in the room, the urgent whisper of testosterone coursing through their veins. The other man, who introduces himself as Max, wrings his hands and paces back and forth until the brother says: sit down Max. Where’s Weenie? The man floats out the door once more.
He beckons us to sit on a set of cushions huddled around the coffee table, brushing the ash and dust with his long white hands. He has the hands of a woman, his brother, fingers pale and graceful. I cannot imagine him throwing a punch, though I know he would if I were not present. He asks us how long we have travelled, how far we have come. There is a long pause while we both try to remember; the journey was spent thinking of this moment and this moment only, we did not look at the time. The brother leans back in his chair, appraising us with eyes cool as marble.
So what did you come here for, he says with a drawling lisp. I wonder for a moment if he is drunk. His eyes sweep lazily over us and he fixes his gaze somewhere over Vincent’s shoulder. It’s not cool that you came here unannounced, he says again.
I came because I wanted to talk to you about everything that happened, Vincent begins slowly.
There is nothing to talk about, he huffs, you and I both know that there is nothing to talk about. He fishes in his pocket and pulls out a parcel of tobacco. The plastic sound crackles through the silence like sparks of fire.
Well I wanted to apologize.
I don’t need your apologies. Vincent looks at me then. He does not want to apologize, does not want to say “I’m sorry.” It’s meaningless, he has told me more than once, he’s heard it all before. But he knows that I think it is important: to speak a common language, to use a shared frame of reference for how he is feeling, for what he wants to say.
Do you remember the last time that we talked, his brother says. Vincent wrings his hands. His calf is warm and damp against mine.
I think it was right before I moved out, when the cops were here.
When you called the cops you mean, his eyes flash. When you called the cops on me because I was trying to get you to leave my house. You burned every bridge you had. Vincent nods and lowers his gaze. Do you remember that? I have an aggravated assault charge now. I mean I wasn’t ever convicted. But I have a charge on my record. The only two times I have ever been to jail were because of you, you know that? If it weren’t for you- He shakes his head and stops to lick the filmy paper of his cigarette. When he breaks eye contact for a moment, I know that he has softened somehow, that he has been waiting for this moment and will not refuse it.
I know, Vincent says, and I came here to talk to you about that and about other things. I have lots of regrets about the way that things happened. I stole from you- often- and I lied. I took things from you that I can’t give back, and I want to make amends for it. I want to know what I can do to make it right.
To make it right? Something is coming. His breath is quick and staggered like the panicked gait of an animal in flight. There’s nothing you can do to make it right. That ship has sailed. But I can see in his eyes that this is not so; he has let it go already, this terrible thing. His anger is born of something else, a Biblical conflict, old as time. It’s not about the girl, or her child, or the stolen items and relentless lies. It is a vestigial rage lay dormant for years, one passed down to them by their fathers and their fathers before them. It is the rage of brothers pitted against one another by the unforgiving conditions of a home as hostile as a Roman arena, the helpless rage of a man wanting to win, his hatred for the one he must vanquish. They cannot help but fear and thus resent one another, spurred on by their father’s reckless hands, their mother’s paranoia,the punishments they were made to inflict upon one another. There is no amends to be made for that sort of thing, no way to set right an imbalance so ingrained in them as to be invisible to them both.
Vincent looks down at his hands, his calloused fingers folded limply in his lap. I know that he wants to disagree- there must be something he can do. But he says nothing. The brother looks on, his eyes glowering. He is daring him to speak, daring him to question him. The other man paces in and out of the room nervously, whispering urgently to himself.
How you been Vincent? He stops in his tracks and begins tapping his feet, sparks flying off of him like he’s about to combust.
Good, you know. Eleven months now. How about you?
You know I’ve been sober too, he chimes in pathetically. This, I know, is a half-baked lie, an attempt to compete with the attention that Vincent is receiving for his efforts. Almost a year now too. Isn’t that a coincidence?
That’s great man, Vincent responds disinterestedly. He is beginning to get frustrated, anxious as he is to tie up loose ends, to reach some kind of resolution with his brother. He does not like to feel as though he is in trouble.
When he was thirteen years old, Vincent set fire to his brother’s leg. It was a dare, he said, they came up with the idea together. He recalls the acrid smell of burning hair, the metallic blue of a gasoline flame, blooming like a terrible flower. His brother did not scream, he said, or cry. They wanted to make a video. When they tried to put the fire out, it consumed the towel they were trying to use. When finally his brother made it to the hose outside, the skin had peeled clean from his leg like a strip of paint from an old house.
When Child Protective Services came, their mother kicked and screamed. She did not want her sons taken away; she could take care of it herself. Vincent remembers weighing his options; would elsewhere be better than here? Another family would want his brother, with his wide-set blue eyes and wheat-blonde hair, but no one would claim him, he knew, dark and wiry as he was- dangerous looking. The case worker came once or twice, to check the refrigerator and the bathrooms, though they knew not for what. Their mother was then on her best behavior, dressed to the nines and made up like a wedding cake, saccharine sweet and relentlessly polite. Eventually the woman stopped coming.
But things were not the same after that. His mother became suspicious, quiet as a cat. She looked at him with loathing in her eyes, the small, dark boy she had had too young, the one who had set it all off, had turned her into what she had become: a mother of children and litumore. He was told by his grandmother that he was the only one of his father’s children- look at them, she said, their blue eyes and yellow hair. They do not belong to us, she would whisper urgently, as though it were the first time she were imparting this secret to him, though she told him many times. And for this his mother must have resented him, because he was her anchor to a life that she had never wanted to begin with, a life in which she felt she had been trapped against her better judgment. He was a reminder of everything that she did not want that she had been given, and so she looked upon him with loathing. Perhaps it was the drugs; he was born quiet, still, frightfully so: addicted to opiates, the doctor said. He did not cry for the first year of his life, only held up his hands in little fists, as though cursing the god that had put him there, in this reluctant family.
Eventually he left of his own volition; his grandmother put him up in one of her motel rooms, alongside the crack addicts and soft-spoken prostitutes, who held him like he was their son, who danced with him to the crackling sounds of the poolside stereo, and ran their painted fingers through his hair. He was fourteen then, and this is the beginning he remembers. But his brother recalls it differently:
You always did get what you wanted: from Grandma, from Dad. Vincent shakes his head incredulously, but his brother continues, pretending not to notice. How many cars did you total in your twenties? Four? Five? You know I still ride my bike to work?
Vincent looks at his hands again, folded helplessly in his lap. He knows this, but it has made no difference in the end. His mother is the same woman she always was, and he is still her child.
But his brother does not know, nor does he understand, what it was like for those first few years, what it was like to be her only child. He wants only to be heard, for recognition of the injustices to which he has been subjected by a family that does not claim him. He is not ours, the grandmother whispers loud enough for him to hear, not with that yellow hair, he is not ours.
He goes on like this for awhile, listing out the things that were taken from him, the ways in which he has been deprived. And VIncent listens, or so it seems. He listens for the first time perhaps, to a different version altogether of the story that he has been telling himself all these years. Perhaps it is painful for him, though I cannot tell from the cool smoothness of his skin, the expression on his face blank as virgin snow. Perhaps he is dismissing it completely, in the way that people often do when something doesn’t fit their version of events.
I think of the first night we spent together: how I held his hand in my lap and rubbed my thumbs against his smooth temples. I think of the words that he used to describe his life, how carefully he seemed to have chosen them, to have picked them out from among the rest. His was a story that he first told himself, and then others: carefully curated. He had built an entire persona around disinhibition and nonchalance, and yet in him there was a dull, throbbing anxiety that threatened to consume him whole. That’s the thing about telling stories: you forget to whom you told what, and the whole thing falls apart.
The brother looks at me now, as though seeing me for the first time. He wants to know about my politics. We are on opposite sides of the spectrum it seems. He speaks in the raucous growl of right-wing commentators. He wants his brother to know that he watches the news and knows things about the world. I allow myself to listen. Often I have to remind myself that this is not for me.
My attention drugs for awhile and when I click back in they are exchanging phone numbers, talking about a video game. This becomes the right place to end things for the time being. There is a tacit agreement between us all that this is a good moment. They do not hug or shake hands, but we walk together out to the car.
In the darkness, the two brothers look like shadows of one another, paper cutouts of men unfolded from the same piece of paper. They pass the cigarette back and forth between each other, smoke seeping from their lips as the words tumble across the distance between them. This is where they settle: on a conversation about a new video game, the graphics, what it takes to win. The purring of the frogs and cicadas seems to weigh down the night, until our eyelids are heavy and we are all three nodding lazily in silence.
I guess we should go, Vincent says, long road ahead. His brother nods sharply, indifferently, though for a fleeting moment, his eyes glimmer with disappointment. So much has been left unsaid. Perhaps they will never find the words to say it. But something crooked has been righted. I see it as they walk side by side to the car, symmetrical figures floating through the darkness, two shadows of the same man, whom neither one will ever know.
