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.”