The first time he drank, that you know of, you caught it on his jacket as he tripped in late, and looked at him so he’d know you knew, but you said nothing, holding it over him like a hammer, your first taste of authority [the power to make a person breathe shallow and jerk awake in dread], he was, what? fifteen? and you kept him like that for maybe weeks, him like a deer [never breathing deep, never sleeping deep, scared]. And then, when he irritated you —you can’t remember what he did, but it was right before supper— you swung the hammer down hard, right there at the table, sitting to his left, and, cornered, he denied it. No, I did not, he said, outraged. And your mother’s astonishment went straight to rage as it always did. And your father, as though stagelit, in slow motion, let’s say to swelling violins, sunk into his chair under the enormous weight of what we picture as a black cloak of disappointment [of making it about himself, you later learned over a year of weekly sessions at $120/hr]. And your little brother pushed back from the table, his chair and your mother shrieking, his face swelling like a baby’s, and out the door coatless, your mother screaming shame she would never admit to regretting, every word, you thought, designed to hurt, but which you now think [after all those weekly sessions] had more to do with her own personal shit than with any lack of love for him [though what’s the difference?] and not only did he slam out into the cold dark but you didn’t see him again for weeks, and then only disappearing around the corner of Stone and 4th Ave, or maybe it was someone else, he’ll never say and you’ll never know. There was before this, and after.
And then there was hearing news of him, that he was in Phoenix, working some teenage job and you actually went there to find him, the first time you’d driven out of Tucson, going 55 to save gas, and you found Phoenix bigger than you’d known, spread out for an hour north to south, endless patterned optimized layouts of beige haciendas between the chemlawn golf courses and elevated freeways with their precast walls printed with pink saguaros, and you were daunted, scared —you had imagined, dimly, a rescue mission, his gratitude, a heart-swelling reunion from which you would return the conquering hero, magnanimous but quietly humble, with him forever in your debt, in awe of you, [you having done what your father could not]— but instead you used your quarters calling the number you had and listened to someone, not your little brother, some stoned stranger’s mock-polite answering-machine greeting, [the druggy slack-tongued dip-shittiness of the message both threatening and comforting to you: you thought he was in danger, but at least you had reason to believe you’d found him, or people who might know him] and left a message after the beep. You drove back south in the dark with, for the first time, the sense that adulthood, starting in a week, would kill you.
This is where you tell me about his stupid job: he’s worked that same teenage job, and others like it, for months at a time, sharing rent on a series of thin-walled apartments. He’s on the bus at 7, clocked in at 8, and the warehouse is a quarter mile long and stacked with pallets of cardboard boxes of bleach to the sodium-lit ceiling, pigeons up there, and conduit bringing the light in from somewhere, and bar trusses, and the quilted underside of insulation, and all you have to do is fork a pallet off the top of a stack and lower it while backing beeping into the gray fumes, dash it to the waiting truck, bay after bay of trucks backed up to the docks, [every so often a truck pulls away and a triangle of Phoenix light wedges deep into the murk and another truck backs into its place, cutting off all but a narrow frame of light], and he bangs the forklift over the edge of the dock and into the snug-packed semi at jogging speed, aimed just right to place the pallet exactly in its place, two wide and three tall, 60 pallets per 53’ trailer [we owe it to him to do a little research, let the facts pile up like his days and weeks and months of this] and imagine maybe thinking back to that time we were stuck in the tunnel, the fumes, the exhaust that filled the space, you’d think OSHA would shut it down but then he’d be out of a job, wouldn’t he, and then back out of the truck, craning his neck, arm thrown over the seatback, and back down the long aisle, fork low, til at the last second he raises it to the level of the pallet while he swings perpendicular, and slows into it, just taps steel to wood, raises it a little, then forks it down, etc etc etc. Sometimes when you have a headache or some bullshit at the DMV or you’re on the elliptical you think of his hour in the bus, his 4 hours driving the forklift, the seasick back and forth, the intolerable air, and then his lunchbreak on the loading dock on the shady side of the building, then another 4 hours on the forklift, then an hour in the bus back to his thinwalled apartment, and you think It could be so much worse for me, that’s a guilt-thought, you know, and you wonder how could anyone do that for years. Years of 5, 6 days of week of that to pay the rent on the place where he rested to find the strength to do it again and again and again and this for months, then a break, then again and again, and the force of this repetition like a hammer, boring, this is a short story so I cannot convey the boredom because I can’t string enough words together, short stories are all condensed action, happening, one thing leading to another but this boy just woke up every day in his thinwalled room, ate his affordable breakfast, took the bus [and, later, his shit car] to the warehouse, drove pallets of cardboard boxes of bleach from racks to docks, raised the fork, lowered the fork, into the trucks, back onto the dock, over and over and over, I can’t say here what it is to be a boy with a thinwalled room and days full of exhaust fumes loading pallets of cardboard boxes of bleach into semis that go out and deliver it to supermarkets and thence to ten million dirty sinks. Do the numbers. Ok, I’ll stop. But, really: years of that.
And then there was the time you got the call from the social worker telling you he had asked her to call you, that he was in rehab, or had been, that he was paying his way in some home manning the reception desk, but she had a way of talking, circling but never arriving, every phrase inflected like a question? that somehow presumed too much, assumed that you knew more than you did, she used acronyms and shorthand and oblique references you couldn’t follow, and it was unclear why she was calling and what you should do and, anyway, you couldn’t think straight, your thoughts just running on and on stringing stuff together, one thing after another, you were in some kind of fog and you didn’t get all the info, and when you called a few days later —a few days you’d spent sort of immobilized by the enormity of contact after two, three years, an immobility you compensated for with a burst of productive long hours at the firm— you called her back and left a message and she called you back and left a message and it was to say, basically, that she no longer had his permission to speak with you about him. And then after some time you drove up to the home, which is what they called it, but it looked more like a suburban office park, pink stucco and aluminum storefront, we’ve all been there, behind a parking lot, a flag at the door, a wall of sad local art for sale, the plastic ficus, oak half-round and brass trim on mauve laminate, fluorescents, polycarbonate between you and the gray-faced resident working reception, who slid you the clip board which you signed and pushed back. The resident went through the door, where he paused, conferring with someone, and returned, and shrugged, and sat, and a nurse in teal scrubs, heavily made up, brisk [as I imagine her now as I write this; I wasn’t there] came out and read your name off the clipboard and referred to another clipboard, and said I’m sorry but he is not expecting any visitors but I will tell him you came by, and you wished you’d brought something to leave, and you left, and you spent the night with your friend and he didn’t call the next day so you drove back to Tucson.
A few years later, maybe, you don’t remember for certain now, you got promoted, and you used some of your raise to hire a law firm that had people, ex-cops, to track him down and you found him right here in Tucson. They gave you his address, condos near the University. You went and knocked, but nobody was home. You went several times, on your way places. You left notes and you were nervous every time you approached his door, but you didn’t see him.
Then one day a call, just like that, the phone ringing as you came in from the office, you almost didn’t pick up, but you did, and he was awkward, shy, he said your name and you said yes as to a telemarketer but in that same instant you knew his voice and you looked up at the refrigerator at his J. V. soccer picture, him grinning, kneeling on the ball, number 13, his out-of-date hair, his braces, and he said your name again and you said his like a question. He laughed a beat, maybe a laugh, almost maybe scoffing, a sound of shame perhaps, it is hard to say at this remove, but I imagine what it cost him to call you after all that time, how much pride he must have tamped down, how much need he must have felt, and you, of course, feeling too much to trust to the phone line, said Where are you? Where are you? I’ll pick you up now. And he said I’m on the street. This time I don’t think I can do this anymore. This was, what? fifteen years ago now and you said Where? and when you got there there he was, it was summer in Tucson, a hundred degrees at 9:00 at night, in a windbreaker and dress slacks and taped high-tops and a Cleveland Browns ballcap and a shopping bag and his face like yours but hard and worn and hollow where teeth belonged and his eyes flat as glass. What you said later, I wrote it down: A reunion most longed for. You didn’t sound like you when you said that. You stood half out your car door and he stood full-on. Just faced your defenses down, all shame and lost time. He looked like your father, your little brother. And your manners caught up to you, you stepped forward and you embraced and it was awkward but real, he was your brother gone so long, you prodigal and him wayward, fall upon his neck and slay the fatted calf, all that, and he got in your shit car you still drove despite your successes, your guilt car, your ride of shame, and he put his shopping bag snug between his feet and you drove to your house. You wanted a glass of wine, but you’d better not. He eyed the ranked bottles atop the fridge. He kept his windbreaker on. He smelled of let’s call it poverty, or of piss and buses, or humiliation, it reminds me of violence, he stunk of what befalls people, not what people choose, I think, I always confuse these things, conflate them without evidence, and you gave him water, it felt lame like bad hospitality, not celebratory, here’s your long-lost brother and your consciousness is 100% on the alcohol labels-out atop the fridge and you give him water. Then you remember food, how hungry he must be for good food, and you take steaks out and place them in water to thaw, and you fill a pan and cube potatoes into it, and strip kale from its stalks, and you ask, wishing all the time you could drink, to make this easier, How are you? Where are you working? What have you been up to? And his answers are evasive, and you feel a surge of anger, or irritation, the feeling of the last time you’d seen him, right before he slammed out the front door, but you remind yourself: How can he answer these stupid fucking questions? How are you is for someone three days gone. Our language does not have protocols for reunions of brothers long years gone. And you ask yourself: What would I say if I were drunk? What does my heart long to say? What does my sober, exhausted, shocked, bleary self most resist saying? And you say it: I love you brother. Your back is to him, you’re still dicing potatoes, you’re at the stove, and you know you’ve said what needed to be said and he’s silent and the silence is like a black pond: you can’t know what’s in there, but it’s deep. Maybe he’s incredulous, maybe embarrassed, maybe moved, you can’t know unless you turn around and face him, be more than your father was, own it as they say, stand the fuck up and be responsible for what just leapt from your heart and passed your lips and landed in his filthy ears, but you use your busyness as a foil, as armor, this you share with 10,000 generations of men back to the Rift Valley, you speak from within the impregnable fortress of the task at hand. And he hides, too, rustling his shopping bag, placing things on the table behind you, and when you finally run out of potatoes and kale to keep you busy at the stove, when you’ve wiped it down and finessed the heat and placed the knife in the sink, you turn to him and he has a two-liter bottle of Pepsi and a Bible in front of him. The light rakes his face.
That night he showered and fit your clothes, and ate. He stayed some time in your guest room. You stopped drinking and he went without. He did the dishes at first, then stopped. He did some yardwork, raked under the courtyard trees, hosed off the patio. After the first couple days he started talking, but it was mostly bad roommates, car trouble, bad jobs, glorious squalid benders, saving money, blowing money. You brought up Mom and Dad, but he looked down and smirked and changed the topic. He stopped doing dishes, slept half the day, went out at night God knows where, kept the guest room okay, then let it slide, borrowed money for a haircut and new shoes, was gone three days and two nights, did the dishes again for a while, and then he was gone, no note, just didn’t come home one night, and the next, and the next til you washed the sheets and made the bed. You left the back door unlocked. Then you came home and your CDs and stereo, your carbon-fiber bike, your Alessi lamp, and your miniature yellow Jeff Koons balloon dog were gone, and you punched a hole in your home-office door and called the cops.
I could go on, exhaust you with words. Make the language tally the days, workweeks, months, the punctuating benders, the years, the call when you turned 40, the time you heard from an old friend who’d seen him asleep on a bench in Flagstaff, but this is just a short story. Every phrase marks a time. Not enough words allowed me to tell it all. I know you miss him. I know your life has circled that supper table, a tight orbit, replay, replay, replay, replay. The tight circle of his life, as best we can imagine it, a feedback loop, the shame he ran from, the drink that dulled it and made it and dulled it and made it, the jobs no more than a desperate patch on the gushing wrecked hull of his losing, the endless circle of drudgery and loss and anesthesia, you said once, he’s on a tether, wearing a rut in the yard at its short radius, wearing it down, tired first, then hopeless, but dogged, then the pads worn off his feet, the bones, into the white.
