For Brad (6)

The answer is no, I do not want to dance.  Not with anyone.  I might have never wanted to dance in my entire life. 

But I do, maybe.  I maybe want to dance in another world I know might be real, where boys and girls are the same and my father isn’t showing up every five minutes to remind me to

“Sit like a lady,” he says, his voice stern, and I sit with my knees together in my white tights under my navy blue sailor’s dress with my red patent buckle shoes.  Maybe it was the 4th of July.

“I did,” I say, my voice petulant.  “See?  I did.”

Any memories I have of living with my father in the house were cultivated during a period of around 1000 days before I was four years old.  During that time, I remember being dressed mostly like a doll whenever I was taken into public, and I was a pretty enough baby to have been on the cover of some craft book to make lace. 

I was a pretty enough baby to admonish from anyone’s thoughts the notion that one day I would be plastered wet to the floor of my shower, my hair tangled into wet lumps, throwing up benzos while Brad held onto me, his fingers reaching far down my throat enough to make me wretch them all back up, while singing soft in the echoes of the bathroom I Want You to Want Me in a slow and melancholic way.

“Feelin’ all alone without a friend, you know you feel like dyin’,” he winces while thin bile washes down the drain, circling around his shoe, as he brought me to the shower fully clothed.  “Didn’t I, didn’t I, didn’t I see you cryin’?”

This moment must’ve existed in the heart of the girl I was long before it ever came to pass, like having all the eggs inside my ovaries I’ll ever have in my life at the moment of my creation.  So must I also possess all my talent for my own destruction, and all the violence in my heart.  I don’t know it, as a girl, when I’m told to sit and I sit, ankles crossed, pouting and pretty.

When asked to dance, I might always think of this moment.  I might consider it dancing, in a way, when dancing with me.  The boy who asks is always trying to make beautiful this moment in time, when I am pathetic and self-indulgent and clinging to the wet cotton of Brad.  But it’s Brad I’m dancing with. 

If Brad is a bomb, always exploding, well, so am I.

I want to sit Michael down and explain this to him.  I want to tell him that girls are dark and bloodless and desperate, and most importantly, they do not want to dance.  I want him to understand that life is short and violent, and that we are standing in the wreckage of a rapidly-dying world, and that people are sometimes cruel but always beautiful.  I want to explain to him that the girl he needs to marry is the one who will cut her palm open for him, to mix their blood together.

But those are all Brad's thoughts, 

For Brad (5)

On January 18th, 2013, I was in a car accident that stranded me in 17 degree weather for 5 hours without proper cold-weather clothing.  I was wearing one of Adam’s dress shirts, having taken it from the floor in a rush the morning before, without thinking too hard about where the day might take me. 

My phone died while I was waiting to be picked up.  I had been texting Bonnie thoughts and she’d been appropriately empathetic to my situation until the battery died, and all I could do was stay in one place and hope I was found.

I knew then that Adam watched me for voyeuristic if not ultimately scientific reasons, and this was the first night he sauntered into my head, a voice of reason trying to coax me into keeping a clear head while confronted with the bone-aching cold.

“The human body can withstand any amount of cold as long as the internal temperature stays above hmmm… let’s say 75 degrees.”

I shivered, and stamped my aching feet, and kept moving in small circles.

“Of course, some humans experience a kind of… spontaneous hibernation.”

His voice sounded dry and unconcerned.  I could feel he was reading facts, or simply repeating those he had rotely memorized. 

“The animal which you are,” he mused in my head, “is found in Northern climates that can reach temperatures as low as 15 or 16 degrees.  But you also den during those months when such temperatures might be reached.”

I kept walking and tried not to cry, snow falling into my hair, which was still long, and his voice dipped and softened.

“The coldest you’ve ever been,” he reminded me, “was a winter in Poland in 1343.  You used to talk about it all the time, although I was never sure if you were joking with me.”

“Well, fuck,” I said out loud to myself, and I could feel him chuckle.

“You’ll be alright, Eve,” he reassured me.  “I’ll stay with you until help arrives.”

Since then, it’s all been the same.  Adam wanders into my thoughts, loud and intrusive, when I am trying to understand something I can’t, when I’m afraid, or when his interest breaches the distance that keeps him unknown to me.  Panting on the glass, I suddenly am blind and notice his face pressed to the window of us.

Once I decided to examine how I was a boy, his intrusions became brotherly, in a way, or educational the way a hygiene video might be. 

Finding myself a boy in unexpected situations at work, Adam will clear his throat politely and enter the scene holding a pointer stick and demonstrating his thought with a diagram on the board. 

“THIS section of the brain,” he says, “is often thought to be responsible for the urge to act on aggressive behaviors.  It’s activation is dependent on the use of certain neurotransmitters such as epinephrine, of which you are experiencing a normal surge.”

I bite back swear words, and imagine putting my fist through the dual layers of treated glass magically without maiming my hand.

“What’s happening now is a reaction triggered by the frontal lobe, which recognizes higher moral function, and the more subtle forms of cause and effect.”

Because he’s Adam, I want him to explain every experience I have that I can’t account for otherwise, and so he watches me talk to Bonnie, his glasses perched on the end of his nose like a psychologist.  It’s something I’ve given him permission to be, which helps me feel allowed to be anything at all: that I might have a safety net in him wherever I dare to travel in myself. 

I know that Bonnie doesn’t have such a safety net when she travels the unknown corners of being a girl.  I don’t either, but I wonder sometimes if the water over there for her is as foreign and strangely depressing as I find it.  See, as a girl, I’m special and unique and sometimes even beautiful or valuable.  As a boy, I’m… not any particularly interesting kind of boy.  There’s very little about me which a girl might find redeeming or fascinating or even worth loving.  I’m moody and often angry and resentful of others.  In a girl, those things can sometimes have poetry, but not here.

Bonnie’s eye change when she’s a girl.  How I know she’s a duplicitous creature is by her eyes, which are sometimes a boy’s and sometimes a girl’s.  I’m not sure how I know, or what changes therein to make me think so, but it’s subtle enough I know the change is real, and happening on a small scale, through the tissues of her tiniest muscles in her cheeks.  When she changes, I always touch my own face more, because I know I’m not.  I fear, or I think I fear, being something slow enough and stupid enough that I could kill her in seconds through suffocation; through my inability to move; by never asking her to dance.

“The metaphor of the sleeping princess,” Adam begins when she walks into the room, and I try to ignore him.  She lays in bed next to me, and I kiss her and think of the ways her body comes to life when she’s kissing a boy like Clyde or Brad.  Under them she becomes moving flesh and fast breath and blinking tears. 

“... such as a sword or other weapon,” Adam continues, his voice quieting to something almost a whisper as she stills under me, and turns to stone.

“A tool,” he says, his voice cracking hoarse as if he’s telling me something he never meant to say out loud.  “The magic he might possess to make something work again is dependent on the mastery of the skills it takes to do so.  In other words, no matter how you slice it, it’s never the car’s fault it won’t turn over.”

I touch the soft skin of her cheek with mine, and listen to her slow and even breath.  I want to tell her that never being a boy, for my whole life long, means that I don’t know the way other boys do how to show her myself in such a way that she might fall in love with me.  Even if I did know, there might be nothing to show.  Not knowing how to build the invention of the two of us, I listen to her breath at the edge of the pile of junk it is, and ask Adam, inside, why he can’t just tell me how to do it, but he doesn’t explain.  When I lift my head to look her in the face, she has pity in her eyes which tell me she already knows I can’t.

The pity makes me angry but I’ve thought more than once that it might be better than nothing.

It’s not that I expect her to love me.  It’s that of anyone, I thought she might.  It’s not that I had an expectation of her reaction to me, but I did have one about the world into which I might be bringing this boy, where…

“Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war,” Adam mutters, and I know he means something about Brad, and playing with fire.

If she was going to find a girl and I was going to find a boy, then didn’t that mean… something?  I don’t know.  I’ve never known.  But I know what happened was my fault because I wasn’t given enough lessons with… something.

Maybe as a boy I had an expectation that the world would work a certain way which it did not.  It wouldn’t be the first time.  But the becoming of one for me meant subjecting myself to a world which I had never been a part of before.

When I had tried to talk to her about it before, carelessly perhaps, Bonnie had drawn the same conclusion that my high school friends had drawn when I tried to explain to them something I saw in the world.

“So you’re a woman-hater, basically.”

But I had just stared it down in the sexual politics of Jenna, and I didn’t see that.  I saw that there were girls, of which I had been one, and some of those girls saw the world a way which made me the enemy to them.   An enemy which required not vanquishing, but enslaving to some cause.  Which is not to say that men don’t do the same thing, but I would now be looking at the other side of the equation.

“You Justified,” Adam muses, “Is such that you desire a flat world.  One where relational politics are not non-existent, but rather as fair as possible.”

I slide away from Bonnie, and lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling.

“That’s interesting,” he continues, “Because for you it seems to mean that you wish to buy peace by arming the world with guns.”

Yes, maybe that’s true.  Yes, I like when things are fair, but I never thought of myself in the manner which a girl might see me.  I never thought about being the subject of all the punishments I learned as a girl, because I was born with the idea in place that everyone on earth believes in their own superiority. 

Maybe I read every situation wrong, or created strife where it didn’t need to be created by the elimination of what I saw to be power over me that didn’t ever exist.  Maybe I was misled by something, somewhere, which embedded social messages into me that I never shook loose. 

But I don’t want to live for a girl. 

That doesn’t make me a badguy, does it?

I curl into the smallest internal ball for Adam, who pokes me until I open again.  I mean… I mean it looks like because I don’t know how to love her, I hate her.  I mean… it looks like all this stuff I don’t feel and I want to explain it but I don’t know how.

“Res ipsa loquitur,” he replies with his eyebrows raised.  I wonder briefly what’s Latin for “if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck.”  I already made her think I hate her, and there’s nothing I can do to fix it, now.  He watched me get there with the same dry sensibility as ever; looking over his glasses and awaiting my reactions.  I wanted him to tell me how to be the kind of man he is, but he didn’t, the same way a father chooses to let his son become his own man. 

In more ways than one, Brad has suggested for the last year that I have much in common with our father, and when he says it, I know he means the particular father of sin which bred us into monsters; the kind of man who beats his family and enacts violence when denied sex.  They all start out life just like me, it seems, and all the men of the house seem to know it.  There is a kind of man I don’t want to become, and it seems I’ll become him simply because I don’t want to be manipulated by a woman; because that concern makes me paranoid; because my paranoia has made me cruel.

I think I was cruel as a girl, for the same reasons.  It didn’t make me dangerous or despicable in the same manner.  It didn’t make me a man-hater.  It didn’t make me a dyke.  It didn’t make me possibly abusive, and while I might’ve tendered those things for myself in my fears and thoughts, I wasn’t treated that way, and it made them safe to think, and the paranoia alright to explore.

I feel this all at Adam, and he clears his throat softly, as if taking notes.

If I spoke to her in this moment, it would be to say, “I should know better by now,” and finish it with some litany of things I know as a girl but for some reason can’t file or place as a boy.  If I spoke to her, it would be to say I was sorry, but I already know it would not be accepted. 

“Why?” I imagine her demanding, and, unable to say why, I would make something up, which she wouldn’t believe, or would misunderstand, and then we would fight.

I should know better by now that she is a person of a particular nature, but what I don’t know is how that nature might be applied to me as a boy, and all the chances I had to find out were done in a kind of haze of violence over a scar in me, or maybe it was in her.  If I knew how, I would ask, little by little, to explain every corner of the junk pile of our conversations, but they go by too fast, and I can’t undo a single thing.

She turns to me and tells me she’s going to make herself cum for me, and I think there’s no possible way I could ever get hard where I am, in this hole, and I hope she doesn’t notice.  Adam’s ears redden at the same time mine do, and she positions herself on top of me.  Inside I turn to look at him and wonder if he’ll tell me what to do.

“After everything,” he admits, as if he doesn’t want to, “It’s… the desire to understand that which is beautiful and unknown… that seems to prevail.”

I don’t tell her I’m a virgin and this is the farthest I’ve ever gone with a girl, but I want to.  I know then I can’t be any one of three boys I know I can be, but a different one I can’t remember ever being touched except by Brad, and those boys I have made a soup out of can coalesce into an idea of a single boy I want to be, once I figure out all the pieces, and maybe this is just the worst part of me, and I’m wading through boys and prophets and ballads and abandoned swords all made of wood down in a place where I can’t find love, but I want to get out, and I want to do it for her.

When her mouth meets mine, she comes to life like she knows all that, timid to open her mouth into mine; as if she knows I’m a person she’s never kissed and I might be a boy to her, like Clyde is.  I wonder briefly if she thinks I’m Clyde, as her breath picks up, and she winnows her hand between us, to touch herself.

“The first time I…” Adam begins ,and trails off as she moans, and I clutch the back of her neck with my fingers.

“Well, it was terrifying,” he assures me, humor thin in his voice which strains to break again.  I think he means to tell me it’s alright, and to remain calm.

Her eyes open, blank as two galaxies, and I grip a part of her thigh under her black skirt for reasons I try to memorize in case someone ever asks.  Because I wanted to touch her skin.  Because I wanted to feel her moving.  Because the earth is spinning too fast, and that could make it slow down.  Because if it can’t slow down then I want to die together.  Because I want her to think I’m stronger than I am.  Because I want to make her feel safer than I know I can. 

I watch her emotions pass over her face, brushing back with my free hand wisps of her hair.  I think it’s vulnerable of her to do this now, and show me this, and look at me, after everything. 

For Brad (4)

The sound of the violin coming from the bayou is distant and sweetly tossed by the wind.  In the trees, as the slim strip of moonlight drifts low, I’m dappled in blue and white by the leaves, and the darkness means I see John and Adam together in the clearing long before they see me.

John is shirtless, his thin body so pale it turns the same color as the bellies of fish.  He sits on a stone at  the edge of the small clearing, his knees thrust high enough to make him look like a pelican, perched on his rock.  His violin sways with his body, playing something sweet and fine.  They both have their eyes closed, John and Adam, and tilted to the side with the pull of the music as John reaches a note both high and heartbreaking. 

Adam is buried in the ground to his neck, his face serene and peaceful, leaning slightly to touch his ear to the dirt.  He looks peaceful, although the shadows under his eyes are dark.  The boys buried him as a part of their weird ritual, and left him only slightly above the ground, like he were drowning in water.

John stops playing when he sees me enter the clearing, and Adam raises his head at the interruption of his lullaby. 

“Oh, Evelyn,” he sighs.  “Hello.” 

The truth is, the sound of his voice raises chills along my arms and neck.  The truth is, over the last five years, Adam’s voice has merged in my imagination to match the voice in my head, which is admittedly a far cry from the one in my mouth.  When he speaks aloud, I’m as shocked by its difference as I am by the difference of my own.  I’m a girl, and he’s a boy, where inside we become something else.  The Story itself, maybe, told in a voice both ageless and genderless. 

Now, when he speaks, his voice is broken down into a near-croak from exhaustion and the wear of the shouting he’d done before as the boys had clapped and danced around him.  His hair is mussed and there’s a livid kiss-mark on his cheek.  He smiles at me, his eyes dreamy.

“I feel quite weightless,” he admits.

“The ground is loose around him,” John says, his voice a soft animal sound.  “They tried to pack him in, but he couldn’t breathe.”

Adam’s head blooms from the center of a circle of stakes, onto which I see the boys have written each of their names, and a flourish, here and there.  Brad’s is sealed with the same shade of lipstick kiss that rests on Adam’s cheek.  The ground around it is marked with scuffs of a struggle, deep markings from the heels of sturdy shoes.  Clyde’s boots, naturally.  Matthew’s stake is scrawled with careful calligraphy, and it looks like Joshua’s has been stuck with holographic stickers.  Nick’s has been filled out with a quote from the Bible; “It is not for you to know the times or the seasons.”

I read it 4 times, thinking about the fact that no one knows when or how these strange creatures might come into being, and John quietly excuses himself from the grove, murmuring his goodnights.

“Thank you, John,” I bid him, although I’m not sure what I’m thanking him for.  He dips his head in the way he does when he’s embarrassed, and shrugs his bony shoulders.

“I couldn’t leave him alone,” he explains, his tone sheepish, before ducking off into the darkness. 

Adam’s face is conspicuously absent of what abuses I expected to see on it; no black eyes or cuts from bottles.  I expected the boys to be more violent in their ritualizing of Adam, stuck into the ground from which he was made.  Instead, he seems basically untouched, except that his skin is sticky with some substance I’m unsure of when I touch his cheek.

“How should we get you out?” I ask him, laying on the loose ground, on my stomach, so I am face-to face with him.  I can tell when I get closer to his eyes that he’s either drunk or high or both. 

“Wellllll…” he thinks at me, his mouth cutting into a lazy and sarcastic smile.  “Who’s to say that’s what you ought to be doing?”

I pretend to be concerned, my head held up on my elbows. 

“Hm.  Maybe you should tell me about this pollination thing.”

Adam looks around furtive and surreptitious, like I’ve just asked him to talk to me about his cock.  He licks the lips of his smile, and his teeth show.

“Here?” he asks me, as if the idea is filthy in an exhibitionist way. 

“Yeah,” I tell him.  “Let’s hear it.” 

He clears his throat before beginning.

“Uh.  Well.  Pollen released from the anther of a male would be spread to the stigma of a female.”

“The question here being who has the anther and who has the stigma,” I conclude, beating him to the apex of the issue. 

“Yes,” he says.  “Right.”

I look around at the clearing, the ring of sleeping infants below the ground waiting to be grown. 

“I’m pretty sure you have the little stigmas,” I remind him, and he gazes into the dark, his eyes glassy with the recent memory.  I can see it scarring it’s way into his psyche, the trauma of it fresh in his mind.

“They… chanted,” he chokes.  “It’s a language I’m not familiar with.  Reminiscent of… Etruscan, maybe.  The kind of music you imagine in church services on other planets.”

“That sounds nice,” I try to reassure him, but tears well up in his eyes regardless, and he struggles for the first time against the earth which encases him. 

“Evelyn,” he pleads with me.  “I looked up at them, from here,” he whispers, his voice hoarse.  “And...“

I imagine what he must’ve seen, in the dark.  There would have been no fire, with him in the center, and I hadn’t considered that for some reason.  They would have brought only some light - maybe one of the flashlights from the treehouse - and passed it between them, shaking and swinging fast over their wild features, and vanishing again under the sliver moon.  The sound of them would have vibrated in the ground around him, and they would have bent close to kiss his face, their breath blowing like the release of steam from a train engine. 

It’s these kinds of experiences that I’m certain only Mark witnesses, really, inside Adam.  These kinds of experiences which shove him from the world of created lexicon and into the world of failed speech.  His threadbare expressions can only relate a purity of what is left when everything else ends in him, and he is looking out over a black chasm of something he has forced himself to believe doesn’t exist.  Surely he’d never be sacrificed in this way, never be witness to the sharks who devour his heart unfeeling, until it  happens.  It happens, and leaves him always alive, and looking for way to go on.

He doesn’t tell me any more of what happened, and I give him a weak smile. 

“Is there any magic left?” I ask him, and he tries to calm himself down. 

“I… probably not,” he laughs.  The smell of his breath is the same as the freshly-turned ground, and I think it’s the one thing we have in common; the minerals that collect on our tongues.  I lean in to kiss him, but he interrupts my approach by forcing out a thought along with his breath.

“You should dance,” he says, and we both stop, inches from one another.

“What?” I ask him, thinking he must be joking. 

“You should dance,” he repeats, the shadows on his face moving to show him breaking into a broader smile.  “That’s what they did.”

“I… no,” I protest, and he tries to persuade me. 

“Evelyn,” he starts, his tone at first admonishing.  “Please, it’s only me.”

The problem with magic is that it is so easily breathed into life.  As soon as he says it, there’s a kind of unfinished feeling to the air; almost like an obligation to God.  If I don’t dance, we’ll always be living in the world where I didn’t, and if I tell him I don’t want to, well, that’s where we’ll live, too. 

The night has swallowed us whole.  We are no longer strangers to the insects which buzz by our ears close, or the frogs which have entered the clearing on their way to other places.  Bats fly around over us, silent and flapping birds, picking their meals out of the air.  In the bayou from the distance, I hear one of the elephants trumpet.  The night folds us into itself until we’re forgotten by a civilized world and it suddenly seems more possible than ever to run into the forest and never see another person as long as we live.  

For Brad (3)

Michael stands with his hands on his hips, his brow twisted into a frown over his blue eyes.  His fists ball up against his ribcage, and his pale nostrils flare.  Next to him, Badham gets quiet and shadowy, slipping off to the corner to watch Michael’s tantrum. 

“I don’t go to the baby school,” he growls at me, and plants his two feet, in their small sneakers, onto the floor.  “I read better than the big kids.”

Badham picks around the attic of the school, looking at toys and picture books and cribs and twin beds.  Their belongings from the house are organized into a corner, spilling over a bunk-bed that is covered in sheets printed with a jungle pattern.  He slides into the bottom bunk, and picks his nose.

“There’s our walkie-talkies,” Badham observes, and Michael ignores him. 

Both of the boys are wearing white tank tops with blue piping along the sleeves and collar.  The front is printed with Transformers that match the print of their papery swimming trunks.  Michael is blonder and taller and thinner than Badham, who is chubby and has darker skin, but their resemblance is obvious.  Badham has a shorter nose, more often smeared with dirt.  Michael has longer legs with more scabs on the knees. 

“Me and Dig are not babies,” he insists, his cheeks reddening and his volume increasing.  Badham watches him, his head low.

“Michael,” I start to tell him, my voice quiet, and he yells over me, his voice high and almost squealing.

“This room is stupid!”

His face breaks into angry tears as he sits down on the floor and looses his rage onto a plastic dump truck.  He bashes it into the floor of the attic, and then beats the floor with his fists, his high voice wailing.  I watch him with my arms crossed, and stand still and amazed when Badham crosses the room and turns Michael over onto his back.

Badham sits on Michael’s thighs, and puts his arms around his chest.  Michael calms down, a little at a time, into whimpers, while Badham bear-hugs him into submission.  Michael fumes up to the ceiling, his brow still knit and his breath heavy, pushing up Badham’s head on his chest, until 10 minutes has gone by, and they are both asleep. 

When I turn around to leave, Brad is standing in the doorway, his baseball hat pushed back on his head, arms crossed and leaning on the door jamb.

“Isn’t that the most convenient shit you’ve ever seen?” he asks me, and I slip by him, and down the stairs of the new school, passing wide wood-paneled hallways with his hand in mine. 

“Some temper,” he remarks with pride, like Michael’s tantrum is something passed directly from father to son. 

*

“You think I’m fuckin’ stupid, Evie, you do!” Brad yells at me, his face the same red as Michael’s, tears welling up in his eyes.  “I see it when you fuckin’ look at me like I don’t know anything!”

“I don’t think that!” I protest at him.  “I never thought that!”

“Yes you fucking did.  You said the map I made was fuckin’ wrong and I’m a whiny pussy because of Donny,” he rants, pulling the sleeve of his shirt down over his knuckles by instinct.  The ground around us is muddy, but freezing cold, the sucking swamp eating the front tire of the van I was driving that I guess must’ve been Joshua’s.  The snow comes down in little flecks that melt and soak my hair quickly.  His breath puffs out of his mouth while he cries.

“I made that for you - for us,” he corrects himself.  He shivers without his jacket, left somewhere in the back, and I think I should offer him mine, or at least the chance to get back in the car, but I just stand there, getting wet in the snow. 

The thing about hell is that I never felt like I could ever leave for anyone or anything.  Not with any real permanence.  And I might’ve been able to make my inhabiting it romantic in some way, tragic even, if I had tried hard enough to do it.  I could have decided to embrace that as who I really was and maybe this would have all ended another way, with me standing next to Matthew and declaring everyone else to be fragments of distorted glass in a window, but it was always Brad that gave me the longest and most dire of pauses. 

At the end of the day…

At the end of the day, Evie, what is it you really want? 

And the answer to that was always something Brad gave me, something I wanted that he had, somewhere there was a chance to keep the idea of us alive.  To be close to him or even witnessed by him.  To fucking understand him. 

And it was always Brad because I had a responsibility built into me a long time ago, to see him through whatever I could.  Maybe it just comes down to blood being thicker than water, I don’t know.  I came home because of him, and it has always been him that was the reason I really stayed, at the very end of the longest days. 

But what would Brad do without me?

Oh fuck you, Evie.  I’ll move the fuck on is what I’ll do.  I’ll move on and cut you right out of my virgin.  Fucking.  Heart.

But what will I do without you?

Who would I even be? 

For Brad (2)

Brad waits with me in the hospital as our brother dies, and the light crystallizes to something translucent and ghostly through the filaments of the fluorescent bulbs.  We are there long enough to begin to see the dust bunnies in the corners, and the frayed edges of the curtains, and the circular mop patterns on the floor. 

We are there long enough to know the buttons on the remote that no longer work for the television, and we slide through the walls, to the bright blue sky of the pediatrics ward, where they have taken him again for being sick and not knowing why, although I know it’s because he is drinking mixtures of things under the bathroom sink to get Mr. and Mrs. Cartwright to remove him from school. 

We are there long enough for me to be wheeled down to obstetrics where I am forced to kill the baby we accidentally made together, and he holds my hand and gives me Saltines while everyone asks who the father is and I say I never knew his name but they all know I’m lying. 

We are there long enough it’s Mrs. Cartwright who is dying of cancer, and he waits for her to die coldly, picking his fingernails with his switchblade, and talking to me about nightmares. 

I grow up in the hospital as an outsider forced inward on an institutional world, where savvy is born of the comfort that all memories of this time will fade, given luck.  I grow up with Brad in the hospital, and when it’s time to leave, he tells me. 

I wake up in the hospital, and it’s bright outside, and there are magazines on the tables.  Brad’s eyes are clear and cruel.

“It’s time to go,” he tells me, and I snuggle against my purple sweater.

“Okay,” I tell him.  “Are you sure?”

He takes my hand, and squeezes it.

“Evie, look around.  There’s nothing left here.  This place has been closed for years.”

I look around the waiting room.  It’s bright white, the furniture covered in sheets, and a layer of white dust that floats in the air like snow.  We’re alone, and the sky is searing and gray-white like the ocean when the sun hits it. 

“You stayed here?” I ask him, suddenly confused, suddenly emotional, and suddenly understanding what’s happened.  I start to hyperventilate.  Not only has he stayed, into the decay of the hospital falling into disrepair, but he’s stayed until it became a ghost of itself, the rust stains and black mold turning into the shells and silt that wash up clean onto the beach.  He stayed through the hospital sinking green into the earth’s ecology, through the explosion of a nuclear bomb, and through the dusty wind blowing away all the possible life inside.

“Brad?” I ask the white room, and he clutches my knuckles hard in his. 

“I’m here, Evie.  I’m always fuckin’ here.”

For Brad (1)

Inside of Brad is a place which endures long after the bombs have gone off and the world has ended, full of clean rain and vicious and unending dust.  I can never tell if the bombs are always going off, or if they did only once, or if they never have at all. 

And maybe there’s no difference, between the world having ended or being about to end, except that it would have to exist in a single present moment to accomplish both.  Meaning that inside Brad, it is the constant terror of the ended world; the moment of the flash hitting the kitchen windows, just before they melt into dull-tipped bullets of exploded glass, scorching the lace curtains which made my wedding dress and burning my shadow into the wall. 

While I’ve never once met anyone here before, Grady approaches from behind me, his alligator shoes making a glassy crunch over the sand on the floor in Denton.  He has prism glasses on, and he’s blowing bubbles from a pink plastic bottle of solution, through a blue plastic wand, the handle of which is an ornate medieval crown, pressed flat and flexible.  His suit is the dark red velvet of a body’s insides, and the white flash quality of the sky frozen in time is what makes his movements into gloss and shadow. 

“Have you made love in every world yet?” he asks me, as if it was something we had bet one another we would do. 

“I can’t,” I argue with him, my arms crossing.  “If I even tried, I’d be creating just as many where I never did.”

I can see his eyes roll even behind his glasses, a slight gesture that means he wasn’t trying to argue with me, but is secretly glad I want to anyway.  He blows a string of bubbles, pink and blue and green in the radiance inside Denton. 

“Mija, you don’t get it,” he says to me, trying to catch them again on his wand.  “Reality splinters into all possible variations of all possible things.”

“I know that,” I Interrupt him, and he puts his bubbles on the floor to light a brown cigarillo that is usually some brand I don’t recognize, but I can tell today by its tip, is certainly a Black & Mild from the liquor store in the bayou.

“Si, si,” he agrees.  “But the reason we have this reality is just for that - so all is possible.”

“Well,”I tell him, waiting for a mushroom cloud to bloom in the prism of his glasses, “Yipee, I guess.”

He sits on the broken fireplace hearth, the bricks dusting his velvet with gray chalk. 

“It’s possible so we can choose!” he grins at me, raising his arms like I should have known better.  “We change worlds to inhabit the choice in them.  I have come here today so we move into the world possible where I have come here today, to tell you all we do is founded on the basis of choice.  In a moment, you’re going to choose how you react, and move us to a whole new world.”

I balk him easily, and automatically. 

“That’s bullshit,” I tell him.  “Do you think I chose to be in hell all that time?”

He drags long on his cigarillo, and exhales, his black eyes thoughtful.

“There’s no Hell, Bebe,” he dares me.  “There’s just a series of choices you made, which perpetuate the perception of it’s existence for you.”

“Tell that to Matthew,” I challenge him, and he rises, his voice getting louder to exclaim.

“But I did!” he laughs.  “Matthew already knows all that, and told you so.  He told you plain enough to write it on your walls!  He said Hell is other people!”

“That’s not what he meant,” I sigh.

“That’s what he said,” Grady corrects me, his eyes twinkling with the mischief of the broker of the Gods, which are all us.  He lets the smoke curl around him in the light spilling in from the window.

“If you wanted to leave Hell, Evelin, you just had to choose another world, where the shit that gets pushed around there isn’t true anymore.  To put…” he considers.  “To put your many-seeing eye on a prize you really want, and go there.”

“Like that everyone here is basically good and not trying to fuck with me,” I remember, and he nods.  “But then what about all these terrible places?  What about seeing a world where Adam doesn’t exist or Brad is dead or you kill yourself?”

He shrugs, and crosses his ankles in his new shoes.  I wonder briefly for a moment why I’m not having this conversation with the philosopher of him, and why he’s stayed the consummate professional, but he answers that question for me.

“You might react to this moment with fear.  With hesitation.  With distrust.  That’s true.  You might even react with hate.  We go to those worlds, sometimes.  But… you love me.  You move toward love.  I’m the gate to anywhere in the world.  Which way is your love, Evelin?”

He holds his arms out to his sides, so I can appraise him, and I point to him.

“Over there,” I say, my voice quiet. 

“Then come get your love,” he says, his tone serious.  “Give me the world you’re in.  Tell me what it’s like there.”

I hold my face against the velvet lapel of his jacket, thinking about what he’s said. 

“I hate when you just drop in to explain shit to me,” I tell him, and he doesn’t answer me.  We sway in the heat slowly, like we’re being rocked in a light breeze, and he smells my hair. 

“I go to fear places a lot,” I admit to him, and he nods into my shoulder. 

“Oui.  But no world is so bad when you’ve walked this far into love, just to find me.”