Clean Again 4

[starphotographs]

Name: starphotographs
Story: Universe B
Characters: Satchel, Frankie, assorted others.
Colors: Clean Again 4 (Repair and Protect)
Supplies and Styles: Mural (It's also a 5+1, but that style isn't one of ours. :P)
Word Count: 16,475
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Choose not to warn.
Summary: Five times Satchel couldn’t be there for his brother. And one he could.
Note: As usual, whatever kind of questions/comments are fine with me!


Handlebars

Back when we were small, I remember you had some weird heart flutter or something, but going on what little I heard of what was actually going on, it wasn’t any big deal. Not the way you think of heart things being. I guess it was kind of like what people would call a “cosmetic issue,” only on the inside, so not even that. A “sounds funny up close” issue, I guess it was. But mom always blew things out of proportion, and I think I had that at least partway figured out even back then. So you were unjustly barred from even the medium-dangerous things that most kids do, like gym class and stepping into the world beyond our lawn. Flashlight tag. Falling off something fast with squeaky wheels. Now, that first thing, you actually appreciated. The grade-school gym teacher yelled at you in the hall and made you cry that one time, and you thought the gym really stank. The other stuff wasn’t even on your radar, just because you weren‘t allowed to do it, I guess. That alone made me pity you, so when school let out for the summer, our adventures began. Mom and dad were at work. Baxter was supposed to be watching us, because he was thirteen and thus apparently qualified, but he was always huddled in the living room or the basement with those two friends of his, doing things that looked like homework even though there were no teachers to make him. I remember one of the friends had a hissing cockroach in a plastic cage, which he wouldn’t let us touch because, according to him, you had to write down everything it did and us petting it would wreck the experiment. So yeah, Baxter was otherwise occupied, only seemed to realize we were alive if we were making noise, and only came up to our room to yell at us if we didn’t stop.

Since you can’t get any quieter than when you aren’t there in the first place, we were free to leave without notice at any time. So I’d tell you that you’d be safe, and that I really knew best, toss you my old helmet with the big crack in it that didn’t fit right anymore, sit you on my handlebars, and cart the two of us off into the blistering summer day. So I could take you around to all my places. Looking back, I’m honestly surprised that we didn’t get in more trouble. I remember a few adults threatened to call the cops, like the time we were hunched over someone’s garden pond and ripping up your peanut butter sandwich, so the koi could fight over the squishy middles and soggy bread. Or the time we climbed halfway up someone’s tree, and you attracted their attention when you started whining that you didn’t know how to get down. But, we always bugged out before they could make good on the threat. I remember riding away laughing, imagining the cops roaring over with their hectic lights and not finding any kids around. Maybe they’d decide the person who called them was crazy and take him to jail. Between that mental image and the rush of the escape, getting busted could almost make your day.

Still, it was scary enough that we usually stuck to non-trespassing activities. Like using the big pet store as an aquarium. I remember us both being really wowed at the fact that someone could theoretically buy a shark, as a pet, no matter how small it was. I decided I would get a shark when I grew up. I also remember that you got bitten by a parakeet, I told mom it was a scissor accident, mom told Baxter to keep an eye on us, and Baxter sat there nodding and pushing his peas around and did no such thing. Even after the bird/scissor incident, we were unsupervised and free. We’d go downtown and splash around in the fountain, gathering enough coins to hit up the diner for soda with free refills and all the jam packets we could eat. Sometimes, we even had enough to go to this dilapidated stand that sold tiny, disgusting cheeseburgers, where I’d plop my fistful of wet money on the counter and politely ask how many burgers it was worth. And then, soda or nasty meat, we’d head down to the little park with the particularly loose old merry-go-round and gleefully throw it all up. Why we kept doing any of this, I’m not sure. I guess it just beat the hell out of staying in the house all day.

We only got in real trouble once. It didn’t involve a fish pond or cops. It involved me, wobbling around on a bike with the weight of a small human on the handlebars, trying hard to steer and even harder to see where I was going. We were about a block or two from our house, over by the gas station. I remember I suggested that we take our wet, ill-gotten money and split a giant slushie on the way home. You were excited, because you’d never gotten to have the big one before, shared or otherwise, and were looking forward to drinking out of that giant cup with the handle. But, that just wasn’t our day, was it? I wobbled my way straight in to a curb. My bike tipped so it was only on the front tire for a few seconds, and both the initial impact and the wheel underneath me coming back down left me feeling a little jarred, but I was fine. You were thrown five feet onto the pavement. For about ten seconds, I was terrified that someone would need gas and run you over. But then you stood up crying, with your arm bent in the wrong direction, and I was suddenly unable to worry about anything. Or think at all, period. I went completely numb, and since I didn’t know what else to do, I also started crying. All I’d wanted was for you to get to have fun like everyone else. I was almost two years older, almost twice your size. So it was my job to keep things like this from happening to you, and I’d failed.

Not only that, but we were probably in huge trouble. Mom would find out that I’d been taking you around with me and find some way to lock us both in the house when they were out, making sure that you’d never do anything fun again. And I didn’t even know what she was going to do to me. I considered just riding us both off into the sunset, but I didn’t know how to fix your arm, or even where the heck we would go besides “not home.” We were screwed. I decided that, for this, I deserved to be screwed, so I made peace with it. I walked you and the bike home. The bike creaking and bobbing around on its busted rim, you whining and sniffling and dragging your busted arm. By the time we were back at the house, I felt suddenly bashful. I’d never been in charge of an “emergency” before, and I wasn’t sure how to go about barging into the living room and interrupting the very important Cockroach Science going on in there. So I just kind of shuffled in and delivered my line as flatly as possible and got it over with.
“…Frankie got hurt.”
You were Frankie, and thus provided a visual aid. Baxter and I stared blankly at each other for a while, completely unseeing. In my mind, both our eyes were pointing in two different directions, like how they draw vacant or confused people in cartoons. After about a minute of us looking stupid as shit, and Baxter’s friends just kind of sitting there and awkwardly looking back and forth at each other, Baxter stood up, and, because there was no one around to stop him, started swearing. He told his friends that they’d better leave, and they grabbed up their papers and binders and roaches and backed the hell out of there. Then Baxter called 911.

All things considered, what followed was actually pretty uneventful. I kept bugging the ambulance driver to put on the sirens, but the guy in the back with us said they’d all get in trouble for wasting the batteries. I knew he was full of shit, but I dropped the matter anyway. We went to the E.R., and you got fixed up, whining so loudly that Baxter and I could hear you all the way in the waiting room, while he texted his friends with minute-by-minute updates of how annoying the emergency room was, and I read a computer magazine I couldn’t understand yet. Then they dragged you out and told us our parents had been notified. We waited for whichever one was coming, you trying to change the TV channel and dropping the remote like a million times because you’re left-handed and the cast was on your left arm, Baxter playing some kind of airplane shooting game on his phone, and me reading a nature magazine that I could pretty much understand. When Mom got there, she must have just been glad we were all in one piece, because no one got yelled at, and she decided to placate her three poor, traumatized sons by stopping on the way home to pick up five cheap pizzas for dinner. I had worked up an appetite, what with all the bike riding, crying, harassing ambulance guys, et cetera, so I ate so many slices I lost count, but I think you had about half of one because you kept picking it up with your left hand and dropping it in your lap until you got frustrated and gave up. Baxter ate the rest of your slice and told the story of his dashing telephone heroism at least three times over.

Everyone got off pretty easy. We, even the one who crashed the bike and the one who was supposed to be watching the other two, were all interpreted as victims of circumstance, so we got Pity-Pizza. You didn’t get in trouble because Mom was just glad your heart didn’t explode or whatever. Baxter didn’t get in trouble, and even won our parents’ favor, because he’d taken charge and handled the situation like a mature, reasonable teenager. And I told everyone you fell down the stairs, so I didn’t get in trouble until about a week later, when Dad wandered into the garage to sit in the boat and drink beer, and accidentally walked in on me spray-painting your cast (and your shirt, and your hair) silver. I told you that you’d look cool, like a cyborg in some old movie I‘d watched on TV that afternoon. And I took you out on my bike the next day, you clinging one-handed to my shoulders this time. I was the older brother. It was my job to show you the world.

*****

Two Halloweens after the Bike Incident, I did something the both of us still haven’t forgiven to this day. Baxter was fifteen, and come to think of it, he might not even have been Baxter anymore, because it was around then that he started insisting on going by his middle name. I remember there was a huge family controversy over it when he won the science fair, gave the shitty local newspaper his name when our parents weren’t around, and ended up named in the article as “Preston Lennox,” which pissed dad off to no end. I watched the whole thing go down, and honestly couldn’t understand what either of them were trying to accomplish. Dad was probably just trying to exert the last bit of control he had over the first-born son, for some kind of quasi-Freudian reason I still can‘t quite wrap my head around. Baxter’s entire issue was that he thought he had “a dog name,” which is uncomplicated enough, but I didn’t get why the big fuss. As far as I was concerned, I had the stupidest name in the whole family (who the hell names a kid “Satchel?”), but it never occurred to me to go to the bother of doing something about it. Having a name that made me think of an old worn-out brown backpack with a hole in the ass-end was just my lot in life, and I accepted it gracefully, out of pure laziness if nothing else.

Well, anyway, the point isn’t whether or not Baxter was still Baxter to himself at the time. The point is, he was fifteen, and was going through that year when some kids have a really weird relationship with Halloween. I watched all my middle school friends go through it in high school, which is why I am no longer friends with a single one of them. (That, and I turned into a giant douche for a while there.) You know, the year where they want to go out, but are old enough that going out would be uncool and childish, and they actually genuinely don’t want to wander around with two annoying little brothers for three hours, but they still want some fucking candy, dammit, and it’s not like they’d ever admit it. This was also, in retrospect, when vaguely resenting us as obnoxious younger siblings was starting to segue into just plain disliking us as people. You were too easy to fool, and I was too hard to fool, which rendered us both incapable of functioning in normal society. He has your lack of self-awareness, but it manifests differently. Namely, in him being the only person on Earth who has ever actually thought “I love being normal because everyone else is.” I don’t know, that sounds like something he would think, anyway. Aside from what I‘m trying to articulate here, which is really just a theory, neither of us were anything like him, then or ever. As far as he was concerned, he was the One True Son of Lennox, and we were obviously irregular factory seconds. I think he wanted to go back to that lost first third of his life, back when we didn’t exist. Back when he could not only go out on Halloween without worrying about making an ass of himself, but could do so without lugging us around with him. A golden era of sorts. And now here he was, forced to be the precursor of weirdos, old enough to start feeling stupid in a costume, and pissed as hell that he’d been saddled with a fucking dog name. So he refused to take us trick-or-treating out of pure spite.

Not like we missed him at all. In the past few years, he’d been getting bored with us earlier and earlier in the evening, and since we were completely at his mercy, he could put a kibosh on the whole “Halloween” thing any time he wanted, a privilege he liked to abuse. So without him like a yoke around our necks, we were free to roam as we pleased. All the way out to where we started to see unlit country roads and had to turn back. All the way out to when we stopped seeing other kids in costumes and had to dash to every glowing porchlight out of fear that it would be shut off before we could get there, us weaving back and forth across the street without looking both ways. I think we would have been happy to run around like that all night, and we only went home, reluctantly, when things were starting to get borderline-scary. Most of the adults we were seeing on porches were smoking and didn’t have candy. People started asking where our parents were. Loud kids a little older than Baxter/Preston (who, I might add, didn’t seem to share his angst about Halloween participation) were throwing eggs out of car windows, which, admittedly, looked like a pretty good time. Potentially getting hit by an egg, not so much. So we decided to turn around. And it was just as well, because we’d been out so long by then that our bags were full and we were collecting candy in our wizard hats. Actually, I think it was less that we’d gotten enough candy, and more that being a wizard is considerably less fun when you can’t wear the hat. Hatless, we made our way home through the cold night air, crunching on leaves, shivering in cheap robes printed with stars that sparkled under the streetlights, young and free and overexcited. I made ghost noises at the top of my lungs, even though I was supposed to be a wizard, not a ghost. You ate a peppermint you found in the gutter.

Of course, when we got home, Mom had been worried, and was a little angry. Fortunately, she was mostly angry at Baxter/Preston for not going along and wrangling us home before the unholy hour of ten PM. We were just kids and didn’t know any better, after all. Just kids, young enough to wander around town begging for free candy like street people without anyone questioning it. As he slouched on the basement rec-room sofa, getting chewed out by Mom and watching us digging through our towering dragon hoard of candy, I think the wheels in his head had already started turning. We neither noticed nor cared. Not only were we still a little too young to always register when adults and teenagers had sinister motives, but we weren’t even looking his way. No, we were glued to some old movie that we’d watched every Halloween since we became conscious but still couldn’t go a year without. Even that was taking a back seat to snarfing down ungodly amounts of sugar, the dialog, which we’d mostly memorized anyway by now, drowned out by the sound of rattling wrappers.

The next day was a Saturday, and I remember that I was still nauseated from all the candy and decided to pass on breakfast. Instead, I ambled down to the basement, eager to play some video game. Baxter/Preston was down there, but he was sitting at the old drafting table and doing some kind of spreadsheet on his computer, on a Saturday, so I could count on neither of us getting antagonistic, at least for a while. And we did mostly ignore each other, him doing Unnecessary Saturday Homework, me curled around a controller and exploring endless dungeons, for about an hour. I think I was mostly after these masks that you could get from some of the monsters, but I’m not sure why, since I don’t remember them being good for much. Eventually, I ripped my eyes away from the screen, and I noticed something: Baxter/Preston was eating a small candy bar. At first, I only vaguely registered this in the halfhearted way you notice anyone doing anything visible but uninteresting. People eat candy bars all the time, after all. It was only when I heard him open another one that I noticed he had about four of them sitting in a little pile next to his computer. Suspicions aroused. Even though I knew full well it wouldn’t do me any good, I decided to ask him about it.
“Baxter?”
“Busy.”
Well, I knew that. And it wasn’t like that knowledge had deterred me, so I didn’t know why he bothered.
“Where’d you get all that candy?”
He spun around on the creaky old desk chair that we’d moved down here after getting the new one a few months ago.
“…If you have to ask, you little jerk, you’ll never know.”
That was his favorite catchphrase, because it was short enough to memorize and so meaningless that he could spit it out in response to just about anything. Having spat it out at me for the millionth time, he spun back around and got back to whatever boring thing he was doing with his day. Like I said, I knew asking him wouldn’t do any good. So I decided to take matters into my own hands. I made a run for the stairs, snatching two of the remaining candy bars off the desk as I went. Baxter/Preston called up after me:
“…Hey, you little shit!”
All that did was give me more ammunition. As soon as I got upstairs, I saw Mom standing in the kitchen, talking on the phone. I was in too much of a hurry to stop, but I figured I could at least toss an information grenade her way.
“Mom, Baxter swore at me!”
I knew “at me” would be more of an issue than “swore,” at this point in our lives. It would be years before our parents got just as fed-up with us as he was, so “be nice to your brothers” was very much a bone of contention at the time. As expected, my tactic worked. Mom stormed down to the basement, phone still in hand, her friend on the other end silently listening to her shouting at her son. Satisfied that I’d made his day just that much harder, I booked it up to our room.

When I got there, you were still sitting under the blankets on the bottom bunk, but I guess you must have gone downstairs for at least a little while, because you were reading some book I remembered you leaving down there and eating a bowl of rainbow-colored cereal. That cereal was usually our mutual favorite, but today, it looked completely unappealing, and I wasn’t sure if you could stomach it because you hadn’t eaten quite so much candy the night before, or were just eating it anyway because you were too dumb to know you felt sick. Ignoring you and your stupid nauseating cereal, I flung the closet door open and proved myself correct: one bag and one wizard hat were missing. My bag was an old pillowcase printed with line drawings of lizards, my wizard hat was blue, and there they were. Your bag was a faded canvas tote with a giant pair of cartoon flip-flops on it that did double-duty as a beach bag, your wizard hat was purple, and hell if I knew where either one had gotten to.
“…Frankie, I think Baxter took your candy.”
You let out a sick-of-this-shit groan far beyond your years, and flopped back on the bed. I decided it was my job to fix things for you, and padded down the hall to Fort Baxter. Or Fort Preston, whatever. After peering around the door to make sure that he hadn’t come up here to get away from Mom, I stepped inside and closed the door behind me. Baxter/Preston’s room was neat as a pin and always had been, the polar opposite of our disaster area of books, toys, stray beverage cans, and, one year, scattered acorns that turned out to be full of worms. Normally, this was something I took as further proof that he was a joyless dipwad. But, it would probably be easier to spot any out-of-place candy, so good job, “Preston!”. I glanced around the room a few times. Seeing no candy, I grabbed a page out of the middle of some paper he was working on, crumpled it into a ball, and made plans to flush it down the toilet. Then I got down on the floor and looked under the bed. Nothing but a pair of old shoes. The closet was full of nothing but clothes and a few science fair boards that were shedding gold glitter on the carpet. After a little more poking around, and a few more acts of minor sabotage, I found the candy, or most of it, in a desk drawer. I did not find the tote bag (which had been returned to its rightful place in the hall closet), or the wizard hat (which I never saw again). But, I wasn’t really looking for those things. I was looking for the candy, and I found it, so as far as I was concerned, I had won.

Now, what I did next, I can neither explain nor excuse, beyond making a general statement about how kids do awful things for no reason sometimes: I pocketed the candy for personal use. I think I rationalized the first few things I ate as a sort of finder’s fee. The rest, I have no idea. All I know is that I told you that Baxter/Preston was the one who ate all the good candy and left you with all the crappy shit that drifts to the bottom of the bag. But, for the first and last time in your life, you caught on, and you wouldn’t even talk to me for about a week. You never did end up forgiving me for that. We made up, yes, and our relationship didn’t suffer in the long run, but that doesn’t mean you forgave me. Not even after I gave you every single non-candy item I’d collected that long Halloween night. Stickers and erasers, pencils and spider rings, keychains and finger puppets, little notepads, annoying noisemakers, cheap yo-yos, bouncy balls painted to look like loose eyeballs, scary Christian literature, all that tacky worthless crap we both loved. You accepted it, and I know you actually enjoyed it, because I saw the pencils sharpened in your pencil case, and the keychains dangled from your backpack for years to come. But, again, that doesn’t mean I was forgiven. I don’t blame you. Someone you’d counted on your entire life betrayed you, revealing himself as a horrible little sticky-fingered Judas. And I don’t forgive me, either, because I know for that one week way back when, you thought of yourself having two terrible older brothers, and I still can’t believe I did that to you. All I can say is that, at ten years old, I was stupid and selfish. Not to mention, very hungry. And everyone does bad things.

*****

I don’t really know what happened over the next few years, but one day I woke up and the world was suddenly hostile. Full of half-truths and sinister plots. Some great hand trying to keep our heads down without us even feeling it. Well, I started feeling it, alright. And I guess it was just me that was different, not the world itself. I’d noticed too many veiled cruelties and dangerous inconsistencies, and there’s no getting that genie back in the bottle. I don’t think I could have stayed in line if I tried. My body rejected everything. I guess you could say I had a problem with authority, but that implies a certain cool, ostentatious confidence that I was too exuberant and highly-strung to quite carry off. I didn’t brood, or smolder, or spout cryptic phrases that made girls like me and adults hate me. I did end up owning a leather jacket, but only because I liked the idea of the inside pockets, and it never quite lost its church-and-fungicide thrift store smell, which was somehow only amplified by the teenage armpit smell that I bestowed on it. I didn’t fit the archetype at all. No, I had a problem with authority the way some people have a problem with their hips or their sinuses. Or with deep water or small spaces. Being touched. A problem as in, “I have a few problems with what you’re saying here.” A pain and terror I couldn’t ignore, a breech of my personal boundaries, a statement of ownership I couldn’t let go unchallenged.

So I challenged it, in the only way I knew how to challenge anything: by being simultaneously aggressively stupid and an insufferable know-it-all. It was how I’d been raising allowances and pushing back curfews for as long as I’d known parents could be argued with like everyone else (not to brag, but I might have been something of a prodigy in that area), so I decided to put it to good use in a wider arena. And thus began my reign of terror. As far as I was concerned, there was little difference between pedantically contradicting teachers, plugging up all the toilets in the men’s room, doing well-researched papers on uncomfortable subjects for extra credit, derailing the discussion in civics class, drawing dicks everywhere the second any faculty member took their eyes off me, and just fucking off and wandering out of the building in the middle of the day. All of it, just my way of trying to jump out of my own skin. I might have had some kind of distant, unformed goal of speaking my mind, spreading the truth, and all that real noble bullshit, but honestly, my only immediate aim was becoming so obnoxious and unpredictable that controlling me became impossible.

And I can’t exactly knock the approach, because it mostly worked. If I got detention, the only command I had to obey was “sit,” which I opposed on principle but could mostly live with. If I got suspended, well, they’d just worked against their own interests, hadn’t they? I’d get some extra time to screw around, or to focus on everything I’d been teaching myself. I read extensively on a few narrow topics. Who in this world was lying, how to better argue with people who tried to shut me down, what the problems really were, what I could do to live on my own terms. When I wasn’t studying, essentially doing homework on a Saturday like I’d mocked Preston for all those years ago, I devoted my time to being equally insufferable at home. I made statements I wasn’t even sure I believed just because they were the opposite of what someone else just said. I adopted a “no excuses” mindset, which was really nothing but a homophone for the so-positive-it’s-fucking-hokey buzzword you hear more often. In my case, it meant neglecting chores and snottily responding with “yeah, well, I didn’t do it!” if anyone asked me why something didn’t get done. This was a wonderful hobby, because it both pissed people off and made them aware of the futility of telling me what to do, which was very much in line with my goals at the time. Hell, I might have been the only teenager in history who actually took up smoking just to be rebellious. I liked having something mindless that people would yell at me for so I could watch myself go and do it anyway. A free agent in this world.

Looking back, I have no idea how you put up with me. To say I wasn’t easy to get along with was an understatement for the ages. And despite your being one of about five people I didn’t have much of a problem with, I know you caught at least a micron of my unfocused wrath. But you still followed me everywhere. Maybe it was that you didn’t really have a bullshit filter, so my bullshit just whistled through your head and went out the other side, leaving you free to start rambling about whatever nonsense you’d been wanting to tell me. Maybe you liked this confrontational streak because you had someone bigger and louder and blood-related to protect you when you started high school. Or maybe it was that, when it was just us, still sleeping in bunk beds and screwing around in diners, but traveling on two bikes now, I wasn’t really any different than I’d ever been. Hell, you might not have even noticed in the first place. It’s not like I wasn’t argumentative and a bit too convinced of my own cleverness from the day I first started talking, and there wasn‘t any reason to expect that this tendency wouldn‘t grow up right along with me. What happened probably was, you were the only person who wasn’t surprised.

After all, I’d been there all along, blustering around and keeping back everything in this wild world that might threaten us. The only big, noisy thing that had ever been on your side. As I got bigger, I got noisier in equal measure, and as far as you were concerned, that made me all the more sturdy and reliable, no matter how erratic I looked on the outside. My potential was being realized. All that changed was that I saw more dangers, coming from all sides, more tangible now. Turns out, there was only one real monster, with a thousand heads; a society that forces you to work yourself to death and then steals big chunks out of whatever money it throws your way. Then it wastes everyone’s money keeping the two of us locked up in school all day. So, everyone gets screwed in the end. I tried to explain this to you. And weirdly enough, you always seemed to understand where I was coming from with that. And you hardly ever understand anything. Or at least that’s what I thought.

No, the one who really didn’t understand anything was Baxter-Oops-I-Mean-Preston. He did what he was told like he got off on that shit, and didn’t seem to realize he was being had. Everything he did was just preparation for the day he’d be passed along to his next master, and that would have been kind of sad to watch, if not for the little thing where it made him the embodiment of everything I was learning to hate. Maybe I should have had the compassion to see him as just another victim, but he got under my skin so much that I couldn’t have managed if even if I’d taken the time to think about it. I remember he’d come home from college and we’d have spectacular shouting matches. Not always, or even most often, over ideological differences, or who was wasting whose life, or politics or crap like that. It could have been anything, no matter how petty or nonsensical. Case in point, the first big fight I remember us having after he left home, I was around thirteen and hogging the remote because some cartoon I liked was having a marathon. And I don’t know if he wanted to watch something else or if he was just sick of what I was watching, but we had a huge blowout that ended with him throwing the remote at my head, then getting in his car and driving off. A few years later, we shouted across the dinner table at each other because I’d been rubbing the fact that I was working as a zombie in a scary corn maze, and thus had not lost interest in Halloween, like some people my age, in his face. He sarcastically implied that this was nothing to brag about, and any hope of peace was lost. We were still sniping at each other while Mom cleared the table around us and you sat drinking a can of soda, just watching the fireworks.

The semester break after that was when we had our last confrontation that counted more as a fight than a passive-aggressive semantics battle, and it was the kind of fight that you can’t snap back from. We spent about an hour tearing into each other over childhood incidents, perceived failures, personality traits that could probably be more generously interpreted as neutral or mildly annoying, rhetorical weaknesses, god only knows what. If either of us had an attribute, the other would rip it out and throw it at him. In the end, I had the last word. Well, actually two full sentences: “…Jesus, Baxter, you’re like a non-entity! Doesn’t that even bother you!?” I used his first name on purpose. He probably had something to say in return, but I slammed out of the house before he had a chance. Not having a car of my own to screech away in, I just stomped my way down the sidewalk, pretty much on a warpath. I think I actually kicked someone’s recycling bin over. By the time I was about three blocks away from the house, I realized you were following me.

And god, I remember thinking that I couldn’t even believe we were related. I wasn’t as tall as I would be, but I was already tall. I had dark hair and my face glowered without me telling it to because I was pissed off all the time. You were short and skinny and blonde and young for your age, trying to keep your hair out of your eyes, old Halloween keychains rattling on your backpack. I had to stop and wait for you because you tripped on that piece of sidewalk with the big root growing under it. And god damn it, I was so fucking happy to see you. I waited, again, for you to catch your breath.
“…Hey.”
“Heya, Frankenstein.”
“So…”
“…Yeah. I dunno.”
This meant that we were going for a walk, but hell if we knew exactly where to. We ended up sitting at a metal table outside a coffee shop, and I unloaded everything on you, which was actually kind of a dick move on my part, so I’m sorry. You didn’t really say much. Actually, I think you had a cold or something, because you kept sniffing and wiping your nose on your sweater sleeve. But, you listened. Hell, you actually seemed to agree with me. You lived with him almost as long as I did, after all. And really, that was just what I needed. To remember I still had a brother I could talk to without everything falling apart. To know I wasn’t just imagining things. You even ducked inside and bought us coffee so we could keep talking without someone coming out and shooing us away.

Of course, a little over half a year later, even with you still right there, things did fall apart. People had finally given up and started to see me as a hopeless troublemaker. Coincidentally, I’d also shot up several inches and was now nearly a full head taller than anyone else in the family, which made me feel like even more of a misfit than I already was. A nail sticking up, ready to be hammered down. I dodged the hammer every time, of course, but it was starting to feel like the whole world had turned in to a giant game of whack-a-mole, me lurching up and down on a peg and gear, thrust again and again into a world that wanted to crush me. Unable to see any other exit, I up and dropped out of school. It wasn’t like I really attended anymore, anyway. I’d actually played truant enough times to get in trouble with the law about it, and I had to do community service where I ran friendly dogs back and forth from the animal shelter to the old folks’ home. Which was pretty much useless as a punishment, because I liked dogs and old people a lot more than my own teachers and classmates and was happy that people were telling me to hang out with them. I cheerfully served out my sentence. Then I packed my things, not exactly sure if I was running away or being kicked out.

And then you were the last of us, alone in our old room. I know I did the right thing for myself, but I wasn’t the only one in the equation. I knew this, and I knew you were having problems of your own. School confounded you. Kids your age screwed with you. Our parents just wanted to know what the fuck was wrong with you. You just wanted to know what the fuck everyone wanted from you. And now, you were alone. I, again, was stupid and selfish. And hungry, too, if in another sense. This time, you forgave me, and I thought I did, too, but looking back, I’m not so sure. I only knew you when you were with me, and I might have overestimated your ability to muddle through on your own. Maybe everyone did, and that was the source of all your troubles. No one knew how much you needed someone to guide you, and they probably would have screwed you up worse if they tried. Only I knew how. But, I probably no longer believed in guiding you at all, and probably thought spending some time on your own would do you good. Heck, for all I know, it did. With nearly half of our lives between then and now, I can’t really say exactly how either of us felt about anything at the time. I can only guess that you must have felt alone, and if that was too hard, I’m genuinely sorry.

We did still see each other. You’d come visit me in whatever car or hotel or sketchy old guy’s garden shed I was bumming around in at the time, and we’d do the same kind of things we always did. Aside from the month I spent shut up in that creepy commune before I realized they were Jesus freaks and flew the coup (literally, I had to sleep with the fucking chickens), you came by every few days, just to fart around and talk about stupid crap. Still, I got the idea you were having a rough time. Towards the end of this era, in particular, you seemed downright depressed, and all I could do for you was my best, which was honestly shitty. I’d drive you around until you fell asleep, listening to you rambling on. God, you were such a little kid. We weren’t so far apart in age, but I was already starting to think of myself as an adult, while you sat, unchanging, on the bottom bunk in our childhood bedroom. In suspended animation, waiting. Waiting for it to be legal for someone to rent me an apartment. Waiting until you were old enough to follow in my footsteps and finally escape from school. Waiting until we could go back to figuring our shit out together, because you were doing kind of a crap job by yourself.

And god, you really were. Left to your own devices, you were falling in to some really weird beliefs. You did always kind of believe weird things about the world, but now you were talking to people who would confirm them and then give you yet more magical-realist bullshit to mull over. I thought you sounded stupid as hell, but I didn’t say anything because it was against my ethics to tell people what and how to think. You had to figure things out on your own. To think for yourself. And now I just want to smack seventeen year old me, because that wasn’t even what you were doing. You were just letting a bunch of fucked-up people think on your behalf, which was exactly the kind of thing I hated most. I should have seen that the ones I’d be attacking would be them and not you. But I was too new to freedom, and too borderline-traumatized by the threats to my autonomy I’d experienced in school to think clearly about these things. I thought the important thing was just letting people do what they wanted, with no regard to what others might be telling them to do, unless the orders came from what I saw as mainstream society. I was wrong. I didn’t think things all the way through. I was a fucking disgusting hypocrite. And now, whenever you do something stupid, I can only think one thing: I could have stopped this.

*****

For a while, this was the score: I was a surly black sheep living in self-imposed exile, only rejoining either side of the family for major holidays and that big dumb summer picnic. You were a harmless fuckup who almost everyone tolerated to greater or lesser degrees but didn’t pay much mind to. Kind of a lost cause, but a lost cause who still turns up for smaller gatherings and family vacations. Now, I imagine I could have gone right along with you. No one was stopping me. But I probably would have had to act all “prodigal son” about it, promise to come back into the sheepfold, and swear to never be obnoxious again. And while being out on my own for a few years had mostly cured me of my intentional, malignant obnoxiousness, it turned out that my adult self was pretty obnoxious by nature. Not that I wasn’t an obnoxious little snot of a kid right out of the gate, but living as I was on the fringes of society, I had become something of an unbent spring snake of a person. There was just no getting me back in the can. You were more like a cigarette butt that got dropped in by an incompetent line worker at the spring snake factory, but since you’d been in there from the beginning, no one really questioned you, even if they probably wouldn’t have wanted you in there if they’d had the choice.

I wanted you around, though. And you must have wanted me around, too, because we shared apartments for half a decade after you moved out of the house. Well, for most of the fifth year, we shared a single room in that godawful experimental community, but as of what I‘m thinking about, we didn’t know that yet, as it was still in the future at the time. This was when we were living in the place where we spent the middle three years, the one that comes to mind when I think “Our Apartment.” We lived above a porn store, a dimly-lit mom-and-pop pharmacy, and a pizza shop that looked like a scene from a health inspector’s fever dream. But, we ate a lot of pizza anyway. I also bought a giant rubber ass that I mounted on a board and hung on the wall like a fish, and a giant rubber schlong that I outfitted with a construction paper rooster comb, making it look like a right and proper cock. I sat it on the windowsill, and a bunch of guys who shared the house across the street saw it. They got such a kick out of it that they came and knocked on the door to invite me over for beer and movies.

There weren’t many other non-business tenants in our building, but I eventually figured out that we shared a floor with a rarely-seen ancient couple, and their son who did things for them and slept on their couch. On the third floor, there were more women than you’d expect in a typical roommate-type situation, and I always suspected they were running a brothel up there, but I wasn’t rich enough to pay my way in, or cool enough to get up there on my own merits, so I never found out. The basement, in particular, was horrifying. A raging alcoholic, an overly friendly lapsed Hare Krishna, and our landlord all lived down there. They all hated it when the people upstairs shopping for pizza and dirty magazines made noise, and not a week went by when one of them didn‘t storm up the concrete stairs to pick a fight with some poor sap who walked too hard or something. I don’t know what the heck we were when everyone else thought about their neighbors. The Brothers with the Amusing Height Difference Who Lean Against the Pizza Shop Glass and Have Weird Conversations and Smoke. The Guy Who Keys Cars when He’s Angry and the Guy Who Keeps Locking Himself Out. Something like that. Or something else. Who knows?

I was the nighttime delivery slave for the gross pizza shop, in addition to a series of dodgy under-the-table day jobs that I did more for entertainment than anything else. And I can’t even remember what all you did, because it seemed like you had a different job every other month, like one of those minor cartoon characters that somehow get shoehorned into episode after episode. Not that I was much better, but you’re easier to imagine in the role. I think you spent a while as the sole employee of some old hag’s failing yarn shop. You stocked shelves at a small-time hardware store, until you dropped a box of lightbulbs and your mentally unstable boss flew into a violent rage that scared you out of the place for good. Then you worked from home as a telemarketer for a while, but you ended up getting fired, because you didn’t speak loudly enough, and no one wanted to hear you what you had to say about aliens and the dangers of cell phone towers, anyway. Also, you got sick a lot for whatever reason while we were living there, so all your coughing and sniffing was offputting. I remember that was the exact wording used, too. “Offputting.”

I can’t imagine that felt too great to hear. Worse, probably, was going back to visit the family and getting a bunch of passive-aggressive crap about not holding a steady job. I was becoming aware that no one thought much more highly of you than they did of me, and I wished they would just come out and say it so I’d feel justified in telling them off. I’d even started, in the shower and on long drives, to absent-mindedly think of all the scenarios that could potentially lead me to giving one of them the what-for, collecting you in my car, and telling you not to listen to them, and that everything was going to be okay. So I guess I did still hold on to a hard little chunk of my teenage resentment. As far as I’m concerned, I was pretty justified. Even if I wasn’t, my resentments are my own and holding onto them like an ambitious contestant in the world’s stupidest game of tug-of-war is my goddamn prerogative. So, I resented. When I wasn’t resenting, I was fantasizing about telling everyone just how I felt about the way they treated you. When I wasn‘t doing those things, and even while I did, I was watching you get up and go back for more, just because it hadn’t occurred to you that you could stop at any time. It was honestly hard to watch.

But hey, you liked going on vacation, and we were poor, so going on the big family trips must have been worth it to you. Me, I thought it sounded like hell on Earth. Two solid weeks of Mom speaking hushed tones about the latest tainted food scare even though we’d all heard her the first twenty fucking times. Dad wandering away from the group and making everyone think he’s dead until he comes back with a big rambling story about where he was. “Preston” rattling on and on about office politics. That one unrelated person that everyone insisted was an old friend of the family even though no one was quite sure who she was. The aunt who tries to get everyone to join her scented candle pyramid scheme, and the matched set of cousins who asked me what college I was going to every time I saw them even though I’d told them a million times that I didn’t even finish high school. To say nothing of that one horrible uncle who hated the sound of children speaking in his presence so much that we pretty much grew up being told that hay is for horses, offered cheese with our whine, and implored to wish in one hand and shit in the other. Nope, I wasn’t going. No damn way. Not even to the beach, even though I love the beach. Yes, really, you have a good time. Et cetera.

Lucky for me, I had my own arrangements this time. I was going to a huge conference set up by and for anarchists. Now, I wasn’t an anarchist (unless you count those two weeks before I turned fourteen, but I don’t because I didn’t really know what I was talking about), but the enemy of the enemy is my friend and all that shit. Also, there were going to be panels on all kinds of rad stuff. Like how to live off the grid and vandalize anything without getting caught. So, you know, overlapping wheelhouses and all that. You thought it sounded fun, and you probably would have tagged along if it was being held on any other weekend. But you wanted a real vacation, not just a few nights of us sharing a hotel bed and trying not to kick each other, and a few days of you wandering around a convention hall alone and letting untrustworthy people talk to you about chemtrails. So, I bid you farewell, spent the rest of the week bored out of my mind in an empty apartment, then took off. Eager for all I was going to learn, and all the quality time I’d get to spend with my fellow malcontents.

The first half of the intended long weekend went great, and I did indeed learn all sorts of wonderful and practical things. I mean, I doubted I was ever going to get tear gassed, but I shook too much red pepper into hot pans on the regular, so some of their strategies would probably come in handy. (So long as I’m okay with my annoying kid brother laughing his ass off at me while I dump milk on my face.) And hey, who doesn’t want to be a self-sustaining farm? Well, live on a self-sustaining farm. No one can actually become a farm, though some of the guys at this conference sure smelled like they were on their way. But they were knowledgeable and liked to yell at each other, so being around them was entertaining. I also like yelling, and hell, I admit that I’m not the cleanest person ever, and especially not when I was twenty, so for once, I fit right in. All I had to do was sit back, watch, and learn. These loud, smelly, contentious people were the model for a new and improved me. They accepted me among them, and I threw everything I had into walking their walk. I also chipped in for a huge case of beer when someone invited me and a bunch of other guys back to his hotel room, because I figured it wouldn’t hurt. So basically, things were awesome. Until they weren’t.

When I got the call, it was Saturday night, and I was sitting on the floor at the convention hall with my friend Otto, us having just left a panel about do-it-yourself wind farming. I had my notes out and was kind of letting half my brain review them, but we were honestly just shooting the shit. Otto was, and is, mostly an internet friend, but we go to a lot of the same events, and sometimes even go out of our way to attend things that we know the other will also be attending, provided they sound interesting enough. Honestly, I’ve never met another human being who even vaguely resembles him. Otto sits on the floor with his legs crossed and his hands on his knees even when chairs are available. He keeps his hair at about “yeah, I’m trying to grow it out” length without ever actually growing it out, and wears round glasses with no rims, which don‘t do shit for him, because they slide down his nose so he‘s looking clear over them about half the time. And he must be a genius or something, because there isn’t much the guy doesn’t know. Not just about sneaky anti-government shit, but about marine life, cooking, esoteric table-top games, and a zillion other weird specialties.

…Keep in mind, he’s a few years older than me, and has a voice made for announcing golf games or selling loose faceted stones on late-night television, so back then, I saw him as something of a schlubby, disheveled little guru, and hung on his every word. Which is actually pretty ridiculous in retrospect, because he was younger then than I am now, had been washing and re-washing the same pair of corduroys twice a week for years because he didn’t feel like buying more than one pair of pants for his entire life, makes coffee by putting grounds and water in an old juice bottle and sitting it out in the sun for days, can’t hold his liquor for shit, and has some kind of inner ear problem that makes him sway around like a bop clown every time he stands up. But, he was freakishly smart, and he had that voice, and I was young and stupid and excitable, so he seemed like the most together person on the planet by comparison, and I put a little too much stock in his judgment. I remember being relieved that he seemed to approve of homemade wind farms, leaving me free to get as nakedly enthusiastic as I wanted.

I also remember the way he went quiet and tilted his head to the side when I answered my phone. It was Mom, who liked picking a day out of her vacations to tell everyone she knew what she’d been doing. And even as something of an opt-out from our family situation, I guess I still counted as someone she knew, so I uh-huhed into the receiver until she gave me a chance to get a word in edgewise. I cleared my throat.
“…Okay. What’s Frankie been up to?”
She hissed something that sounded like “shit” under her breath, then went so long without saying anything that I thought something had gone wrong with her phone. Finally, with a cringe I swore the speakers had somehow picked up and broadcasted straight into my brain, she confessed that, all of a sudden, you kind of needed to get your appendix yanked, and had spent the last few days in your hotel room. To this day, I swear the only time I’d ever seen Otto startled was when I blurted out “…What!?” at the top of my lungs. Then I muttered that I’d call her back, jammed my phone back in my pocket, and sat with my head in my hands, having a miniature nervous breakdown. Otto tried to wait until I got my shit together, but since it wasn’t happening, he started talking at me anyway.
“So…”
I struggled back into a normal sitting position.
“My brother apparently had surgery a few days ago, but nobody told me fuckall about it because they’re on vacation. Remember how my mom’s a fucking flake? Because, yeah.”
“…Shit. Wow. I mean, there‘s flaky, and then there‘s…”
“…Yeah, we’re talking Lennox Flaky. And Jesus, my mom didn’t even start as a Lennox! What the hell even happened there?”
“Like attracts like, I guess.”
Just listening to him usually put me at ease, but for some reason, the calmness in his voice made me want to burst into tears. I gathered up my papers and dragged myself to my feet.
“Listen, I gotta go…”
“So you’re like, gonna drive over there?”
“Well, I don’t know what else to do!”
“It’s just… Maybe you should hold off until tomorrow morning? I mean, if they’re in our same time zone, he’s either asleep or is going to be when you get there, and it’s probably not such a good idea to just, like, hop in your car when you’re all hysterical and shit.”
I considered that he might be right. Like I said, his word was law. I could trust him.
“…You think?”
“Yeah, man, just go and sleep on it for a while, alright?”
God help me, I was trying not to cry.
“…Okay. Okay. Sure. See you later, I guess.”
“Later, Satch.”

I did go back to the hotel, but I didn’t really sleep. I kept jerking awake, then I’d lie staring at the ceiling, thinking about you in another hotel room, worrying that you were staring up right along with me, at another dark ceiling, in another dark room. I hoped Otto was right, and you really were asleep, or at least resting okay. I thought about calling, but I didn’t want to risk disturbing you. And I didn’t know if you’d be up to talking. I couldn’t even know how much pain you were in, and that just about drove me insane. Here I was, miles and miles away, when you needed me. Or at least needed someone who didn’t shrug this off as your problem and continue with business as usual. I thought about how it was indeed true that no one was stopping me from participating in anything. How I’d just backed off on my own accord because I was so sick of everyone’s shit. Forgetting, or just not caring, that you were probably sick of it, too, and then leaving you to deal with that on your own. I don’t think it even crossed my mind until then that you might have missed me when I stayed behind. I should have just sucked it up and gone with you. Especially now, with you sick, in pain, and alone, and me not knowing if you were, relatively speaking, alright. Groggy, anxious, wearing down tracks with my thoughts, I drifted in and out of consciousness. And as soon as the sun hit the horizon, I was gone.

And you were okay. Bored, tired, sporting an impressive bruise where the IV needle went in, and not bending so well at the waist yet, but okay. You were wearing one of those bathrobes that hotels let people wear and watching some shitty Public Access show. I didn’t know if I was more relieved you seemed to be doing well considering the situation, or angry with myself that you had to go through the worst of it alone. I couldn’t make that up to you. But, I could at least be there now. I got in bed next to you and asked you how everything went. You told a whole rambling story that started with you doubling over and throwing up on the tiles at some tourist trap, in front of a tank holding a huge dead shark, and ended with you crawling under the covers and watching TV until a commercial for a local car wash scared the shit out of you and you had to turn it off. Apparently, you were pretty looped on painkillers. And I wasn’t there to tell you not to worry, because it was just a big wheel of felt flaps, and couldn’t come out of the TV and get you anyway. If it “getting” you was even the issue. As usual, you weren’t so clear, and since you were still pretty medicated, you were making even less sense than usual. I didn’t mind.

I asked you if you wanted me to take you home. You declined, on the grounds that the hotels were one of your favorite parts of these trips, anyway. So, what ended up happening was I stayed, and we had our Great Hotel Vacation together, watching endless free movies and ordering off of every delivery menu in that little spiral-bound booklet. On one of the last nights, when you felt well enough, we took a midnight walk down the block and ate at one of those slightly-off diners that only seem to exist around the beach and nowhere else. I sat in the booth and stared out the window, thinking about how much I’d always loved doing normal things in different places. I don’t remember everything we talked about, but I remember how glad we both seemed that I was there. And god, all I wanted you to know is that even when I‘m not, it’s never by choice. For all the good that would even do. Intent without action means nothing in the world outside of your own fucking head. Especially when you’re not even there.

*****

Years later, after we’d gone out and found our own places to live, after you became just as unwelcome in the family as I was, after your body gave out bit by bit in a series of improbable situations, and we’d both done just a bit of what passed for growing up, you were rushed into surgery again. And again, I wasn’t there. I was up in the mountains on a survival retreat, which was really just an excuse for a bunch of disgruntled tax protestors to get drunk in the woods with no one bothering us. No modern technology. Leave your phone in your car, where it’ll ring until the battery runs out, filling up with unread messages. Get the fuck out of the woods, they tell you. Your brother was in respiratory failure while you were getting crocked by the fire and sleeping under the stars. Well, that’s just me paraphrasing the general theme of the whole set. The messages were from your friend Scissors, who normally communicates fairly well, sparklingly friendly if a bit garbled in person and articulate if a bit terse in text, but can’t operate a touch screen for shit under even the smallest amount of stress. Capitalization completely falls by the wayside, and whole words disappear while unwanted letters start infesting everything. One time, he had a flat tire and texted me (why me, I’m not entirely sure) to tell me to come get him, and I was left to figure out what the heck “cvat bnrok need hlrp” meant. And that was just a “car broke” situation. A “friend broke” situation meant that, when I finally crawled back into my vehicle, unsure if I remembered how to drive, smelling of rancid B.O., stale beer, wood smoke, and piney freshness, I had to put together what the hell was going on based on the following:

“frankie hospigal not srue whats wropng”

(Blurry picture of the inside of an ambulance.)

“u hv phone??”

“on vntillator shits bad”

“ddint tell whats wrong yet”

“fukced up insied needs srugry”

“reprting diaphrgm now not sure whats gonna happen get over here!!”

“tge hell u at??”

“satch u asshloe”

“no phne in woods?”

“don’t kno if gonna be okay answr fuckin phone!!”

Fuck. Once I unscrambled that mess, there still wasn’t much information, but there was enough to know that something horrible was happening to you. Or rather, had already happened to you, four days ago. He’d tried to contact me many times over the next three, but the gradual increase in coherency was reassuring.

“tlkd 2 doc”

“bnrok diaphragm coghting but fixd now”

“seriously answer damn phone”

“hes ok.”

“waking up now.”

“Answer the phone!! Frankie says hi.”

Okay, so now I knew that you, I assumed, ruptured your diaphragm somehow, but it was fixable, and you’d been awake since yesterday, so you were probably going to be alright. Probably. I was just about to peel out of the gravel lot at the mouth of the trail when my phone started ringing. Of course, I already knew who it was.
“…Hello?”
“Jesus Christ, the hell were you!? I’ve been trying to talk to you for days!”
“Yeah, I saw. Is everything…”
“…Your brother almost died!”
“I… I mean… That bad?”
“No shit, that bad! Didn’t you read anything I sent you!?”
“I did, you just… Weren’t super clear, alright? I figured things were looking pretty bad, but…”
“Well, that’s one fucking way to put it!”
“Look, I’m sorry. We just weren’t allowed to have phones on the retreat, and… You know what, it doesn’t matter. You got a hold of me, and you should tell me what the fuck is going on.”
“Just… Get the fuck out here, okay? I’ll explain in person.”
Scissors, you dick.

The two-hour drive into town was a blur. Mostly because I was worried, but admittedly, I was also pretty pissed off at your stupid little friend implicitly chewing me out for my irresponsibility. It bothered me because I knew full well that I had been irresponsible. By now, you were not only precariously ill, but had only two people you could contact in an emergency. I was one of them. Going out into bumfuck nowhere without a way for someone to reach me wasn’t an option anymore. What’s worse, I hadn’t even thought of that. I’d just gone and assumed I could leave for however long, you’d sit in your house trying to hack up a lung as usual, and I’d find you still in one piece when I got back. The way I imagined you frozen in time on the bottom bunk after I left home. You‘re sick, but hey, we‘re still pretty young. So the danger you were in, all the horrible realities of your situation, weren’t quite so real to me until that day. I’d been wrong. While I was away, you didn’t stay in one piece. You practically tore yourself in half, and I hadn’t even known about it. I knew you were alive, and awake, but beyond that, I wasn’t sure how I’d find you.

Of course, I found Scissors first, and he had some choice words for me. Or not, because angry people don’t really tend to choose words. They just kind of hurl them around, so that expression never made much sense. I tried to explain, as calmly as possible, that he knew full well I was in the woods and wasn’t allowed to have my phone. I mean, for god’s sake, he should remember me telling him, especially since he got all excited and wanted to tag along and then pulled a one-eighty when I told him that he’d have to go more than an hour without modern technology. I wasn’t sure why he was yelling at me. I tried to keep from yelling at him. And then he somehow let slip that he’d only been with you for about one hour per day and spent the whole time staring at the TV. So, I started yelling after all. How could he be such a half-assed little shit? Didn’t he know this was serious, like I obviously did, because I am perfect and totally didn’t flake out like a fucking douche? A whole inner monologue, coming out in a half-translated wall of Loud. Scissors had been yelling to begin with, so he tried to match me by yelling faster. Unable to keep up, I just started spewing obscenities. For a good minute, I was half expecting us to come to blows right there in the hallway.

I recognized, somewhere in the back of my brain, that I was really only shouting at, and vaguely wanting to punch, myself. If I hated that I hadn’t been able to be there, scapgoating someone who I’d decided hadn’t been there enough, or didn’t even do it right when he was, made a passable amount of sense to me, considering that I was pretty much temporarily insane. We went on like this until I saw a rather purposeful-looking doctor heading down the hall behind him, probably wondering what the fuck was going on. I held both palms in the air, silencing us both. Then I cleared my throat.
“…Okay, shut up, both of us. Where’s my brother.”
Scissors gestured the door behind him.
“Right in there.”
Well, that was embarrassing. I hadn’t been there ten minutes, and I’d probably already managed to stress you out. Reprimanding myself lightly (small noises, Satchel), and bracing myself for however you were going to look, I stepped into your room.

Really, you looked more normal than I expected. Kind of tired and grimy, and certainly worse than you had when I went to meet you in the hotel all those years ago, but still pretty normal, even if you had so much crap taped to you that you were starting to look like a failed arts and crafts project. You also looked like you just woke up, so I figured I should apologize, just in case it was my racket that did it.
“Hey, sorry about that out there. We’re just some hotheaded guys, y’know?”
“…Yeah.”
You only looked okay. How you sounded was another matter. It was like you couldn’t get enough air to blow through your vocal cords, so you had to time your single-syllable replies to ride out on what little natural exhalation you could manage. Even then, your voice could hardly out-compete the HVAC system, to say nothing of all that beeping crap they had you plugged into, so I had to listen really closely. But, I still managed to talk to both you and Scissors until I had a better understanding of what was going on.

What happened was, a cast sealed off most of your entire lung and refused to unstick itself. You had an intense coughing fit that went on longer than an hour and only ended because your diaphragm gave out. You freaked out and called Scissors. Scissors freaked out and called 911. You were already in shock and half dead by the time the EMTs scraped you off the floor. This is where I sidetracked the story for a little bit so I could grill you about why the heck you didn’t just call an ambulance in the first place. You didn’t know. Fair enough. Then you joked about how, yes, they did put on the sirens this time, and I should have been there to finally hear them. I’m sure you were very funny, but I kind of wanted to cry. Anyway, your guts slipped up under your ribs, your left lung got all crushed and mangled, and your intestines were a little bit bruised, but they opened you up and managed to put everything back in the right compartments, and remove the cast that started the whole thing in the first place, so you were okay for now. Provided you didn’t cough too hard and pop one of your inside stitches. All three of us were probably thinking the same thing: if that’s the case, you were as good as dead.

You might have been as good as dead, but you got better. For a certain value of better. At very least, you could go home. Where you immediately started to decline. Scissors lived closer, so he was the one who usually drove you to appointments, and he kept me updated on what was happening. Apparently, for the first time in more than a year, you weren’t coughing. This was not good news. It didn’t mean you were suddenly okay. It meant that coughing hard enough to even be productive was disallowed, coughing at all was painful, and none of that even mattered, because your chest wall muscles were too atrophied to cough, anyway. Or to do any of the other things you were supposed to do every day to stay cleared out. Or let you breathe and sleep at the same time, so you needed to use some kind of funky machine that forced air into your lungs when you couldn’t draw it in yourself. Then you got a bronchial infection that wouldn’t dry out and started having trouble getting around in your own house. So I stepped in. I told you that you could come and live with me until you were better. Admittedly, I was still feeling guilty, and I told myself that this would make up for me being isolated in the woods while you were dying on the floor. This time, nothing would stop me from being there. But, I’d also seen you, and I think I was genuinely worried that you were about to kick it in the near future. Thankfully for both of us, you accepted.

When I came to pick you up, you were sitting on your front steps, with one bag of personal crap and one bag of all your medical shit that I’d have to learn to understand. And my god, it had only been half a week since I last saw you, but you already looked worse than I remembered. Even on oxygen, you seemed like you could hardly breathe. Your collarbones were suspending your shirt like a coathanger. And you obviously hadn’t been showering, which always meant that you were having trouble getting up the stairs. I loaded your bags into my truck, then wondered how to go about loading you. I asked if you needed help. You said that you probably only needed help with standing up and getting in the car, so I complied. And seeing you in motion, I realized that you were even worse than I thought, but in a way I couldn’t quite place. It was like everything about you was muffled, and slowed down to half its normal speed. Now, you’d seemed kind of sleepy and lethargic your whole adult life, but this was different. You looked like your body was spending so much energy on just existing that it couldn’t waste even a little bit on superfluous movements. Or movements that only seemed superfluous.

Until then, I’d taken for granted how much people tend to move around. Sitting in the passenger seat that morning, you never once looked at me when you spoke or changed positions. I found this very alarming, and, along with having noticed that I could see pretty much all the cords and tendons in your neck, it gave me the idea that you probably needed to be fed, sooner rather than later, and it probably shouldn’t wait until we got to my place. So I took you to a diner, one of the ones where we used to hang out all the time. Even though you were so groggy you hardly knew what was going on, wearing the bathrobe you ended up stealing from the hotel back when you got your appendix out, and generally looking unfit to be in public. You got a nosebleed from having dry air blown up your face tubes all day and asked for extra napkins. Then you drank two cups of coffee, which didn’t stop you from lying your head on your crossed arms and falling asleep on the table after managing about three bites of hash browns. Okay, so we could tackle the “eating” thing later. I let you rest, finished my breakfast, and flagged down a waiter.
“…He needs a box.”

We arrived, and I put you up in my little fortress. Which might have been even littler then. I know I had my singlewide and the shipping container that I’d converted into a studio, but I’m pretty sure it was before either the RV I used as a guest room or the metal garage-looking thing that I used as a rec room. Maybe both. Well, I’m not sure off the top of my head, but either way, you were there. You slept in my bed, and yeah, I guess I must have had the RV by then, because I considered sleeping out there but decided to blow up the air mattress instead. And you complained about the woods not having any lawns or people that mow them, because you liked falling asleep to the noise on Saturday afternoons. Which struck me as kind of hilarious and bizarre, even though I remembered this about you from when you were little. Well, when we were little, but the small gap between us had started widening when you got sick, and without even realizing it, I tended to superimpose it on the rest of our lives. You were small and lost and needed me, so I got out a couple extension cords and hauled the generator to right outside the bedroom window, where it could vibrate loudly at you twenty-four-seven.

And at first, that’s about how much you slept, passed-out around the clock in your roaring room. I worried, but I figured this was just something you had to pass through before you could start getting better. You were making up for the rest you couldn’t get when you had to be in charge of yourself. But now you were here, and I could take over for you. I could be there. The way I couldn’t be when I was out in the middle of nowhere while you rattled yourself apart. I’d be there, and you’d snap out of this, and that would make up for all the times I left you alone. All my ineptitude and selfishness, my short-sightedness, my lack of awareness. I could prove to myself that I wasn’t the shitty brother I knew I was. This was my chance to finally make all of it right, and maybe it would even be easy. All I had to do was stay with you and wait. Cook food that you may or may not actually eat, put on movies that I’d end up watching by myself because you fell asleep halfway through, sort out pills that didn’t seem to do anything, supervise breathing treatments that didn’t seem to do anything. Let the dull roar of the generator and your weird face mask keep me awake, staring at a dormant light fixture, on a bed that felt like a fucking raft. So, waiting wasn’t easy. But, you were always there. Neither of us had to go through it alone. And I would fix things this time.

So in the end, I guess I still fucked up. This time, the mistake was assuming this was something I could fix. Or, really, something I had any influence over at all. And when you started forming casts again before you were allowed or even able to cough properly, I took it almost personally. But, by the time I drove you to the hospital, and they cleaned you out manually by making you inhale some kind of harsh vapor that made your lungs bleed and then sticking a metal pipe down your throat and vacuuming out your insides, I’d reached a horrifying conclusion: it wasn’t personal. At all. I didn’t have the least bit to do with anything here. And I had run out of chances to make things up to you. Every test that came my way, I’d failed. I pitched you off my handlebars. I tried to get something back for you and took it myself. I made a conscious decision not to teach you how to spot bullshit and then left you to try and navigate the world. I, admittedly through no fault of my own or anyone else’s, fucked off to some conference while you recovered from surgery alone. Took off into the wilderness for no goddamn reason when I knew you were sick. All this and more, I fucked up completely. And now you’d gotten to a point where, if you were going to deteriorate, you would deteriorate no matter what I said or did, and whether or not I was there. The time when I could fix things for you was over. All I could do was be there. And that I could do.

They decided to keep you for a day or two. I only went home to sleep. The rest of the time, I sat in a hard-backed chair and watched TV with you. I made a crack about how it beat the hell out of watching TV at my place, because the hospital had cable and I only had about three bottom-of-the-barrel local channels to pick from. You didn’t laugh. You didn’t even answer anything I said because your throat was too torn up from you getting flushed out or whatever, but I didn’t worry much about it. I figured it was less important to have a conversation than it was for you to hear me. Especially when I worked up the nerve to say something important. I remember the last night you were in, practically dusk, you not exactly falling asleep but obviously winding down for the night. My ass numb from sitting in that little chair all day. After staring at the television in silence for hours, I cleared my throat, mostly to get your attention, and spoke.
“Listen… No matter how sick you are, or what stupid stunts you pull, I’m not going anywhere.”
This was actually a recycled line. Salvaged from what felt like ages ago, when I couldn’t get myself to say it, couldn’t get myself to say anything of much significance at all. This was when you first got your diagnosis, something weird and scary neither of us had heard of before. You’d already been mostly out of commission for a while because of your back, and I think what was happening was that you were feeling more and more like a zero. Not exactly in the slangy sense of being a loser, really, but in the sense that it’s the only word that comes to mind when I think of how you felt. Like you were an empty space, not even really there, removed from the world. A blank. And not just a blank, but a blank that was passively forcing others to sustain it. More of a negative.

You said that you felt like shit and wished you’d hurry up and die. I had been driving you around, the way I did when you were fifteen and got upset. We were stalled in a parking lot, me giving my gas foot a rest, me wishing like hell that we didn’t need to have this conversation. I remember we were under one of those too-white streetlights that turns everything all shadowy and garish. Then you slumped over on the dash and cried like I hadn’t seen you cry since we were kids. I had no idea what I could do or say. I reached over and started running my hand over the back of your hair, which was something I did about once every other year. It was always really weird for me, because I’ve never been very good with the touchy-feely shit, but it calmed you down, so I did it anyway. This time, it only kind of worked. At a loss for anything else to do, I asked if you maybe wanted half a cigarette. Which I knew full well was a bad idea, because you’d already quit years ago (whereas I was playing some kind of demented “I only smoke in my car” game), and the whole reason we were in this mess in the first place was because your lungs didn’t work right anymore. But, like I said, I was stumped. I just didn’t want to watch you suffer. You accepted, took a long drag, coughed slightly, and stared out the window. I wanted to tell you that I didn’t mind that you were sick. You were kind of my job on this Earth. That was really how I thought of it, for as long as I could remember. And I guess all older siblings kind of think like that, but by the time I left home, it had turned into something different.

It took me a long time to articulate how, but I think I finally got it: I realized what I had. Working from the same limited set of genes, nature could have assembled fucking Baxter all over again. If things hadn’t been just right, I might have felt like more of a sore thumb than I already was. Me big and loud and hungry as ever for freedom, bookended on both sides by my cog-and-gear brothers, both of them pointing fingers, telling me to get my act together without realizing that this was my act. That I’d just chosen a different script to read from because the one they hand you sucks. All of this, just spitting distance from my life. But it wasn’t what happened. The world gave me you. The world gave me one fucking person in the family who actually seemed to understand me. Someone I could talk to who actually wanted to talk back. Someone who, at times, even seemed to admire me. And I know I’m nothing to admire. I’ve failed you at every turn, even if you didn’t notice. But you made me feel like, no matter how damaged or rebellious or foolhardy I was, there were things in me worth admiring in the first place. Things that might even be worth striving towards. I decided that I would strive for them, too. I wanted to be who you thought I was, because it was honestly the least I could do. You gave me company. You gave me a two-man group where I fit in perfectly. You made me think differently about myself than I might have otherwise. I don’t try to protect you because you’re my little brother and that‘s just how it goes or something. I try because I know, when it comes down to it, you’re all I really have in this world. So even when I fuck up, even when I can’t do shit, I keep trying. Because I can’t ever, ever, let you go.

*****

And over the years, I guess I did a few things right. You might have gotten thrown off my bike, but at least I got to show you everything and everywhere, in my little world, that was important to me. I might have been out to fucking lunch for your appendix and your diaphragm, but I was there when you got your intercostals repaired, and when we were living in the experimental community and your gallbladder went screwy, I was the one that drove you to the hospital in the first place. There were times when, in the best possible way, we were living in our own little world. We cohabitated and co-conspired. Hell, when I actually pore over everything, I was there for you more times than not. I slept right above you for over a decade. I marched us both, stumbling, into young adulthood. I’ve been dragging you around behind me for most of our lives. And I always did everything I could. Even if what that usually really meant was “shit all.” I’m trying to be nicer to myself. I’m trying to remember that, even if I wasn’t always perfect, I managed to do at least a few good things. I even did something for you that I could never do for anyone. And it still inspires me to keep trying, for you and everyone else. You probably already know what I’m talking about.

It’s kind of my life’s work. Well, one of multiple life’s works, actually. I have a bunch of those. They change with my passions, with the years, with what pressing need I’ve only just noticed. But, anyway, this is one of the big ones: I’m an advocate of sorts. I help people scam the system and get on public assistance. At least in theory. This has caused no small measure of friction in the circles I run in, even though I think it makes perfect sense. Every penny wrested out of the government’s hands is a victory for the rest of us. And if you can get them to pay you, long-term, well, then you’re free. You’ve moved up to the top of the pyramid and no one’s any the wiser. Joke’s on the Big Guy, right? I think it’s as noble as it is crafty. Problem is, it never worked. Everyone I tried to elevate was a little too able-bodied, or had more money than the people in charge really liked, or individual pencil-pushers had just gotten wise to me and wanted me to get the hell out of their office. Whatever. I was blocked at every turn. And then that’s where you came in. This was maybe a week after you cried on my dashboard. You had no job and a huge stack of medical bills. The money you got when you hurt your back had run out long ago, and the money you got from the lung damage that your last job thought was their fault, but was really from you screwing around with pool chemicals because you thought you had some kind of lint parasite, wasn’t going to last forever. You were perfect. And you seemed pretty keen on the idea. Trusting as ever. You let me call and set up the appointment. I kept convincing you it was a good idea. We waited.

Then all I had left to do was coaching you a little bit when the day finally arrived.
“…Can’t they just send the forms?”
We were sitting together on that loony couch you made yourself out of coffee cans and porch swing cushions, eating a fast-food breakfast I’d brought with me.
“Not much point in that now, little bro.”
“I realize that. But, like… Can they?”
I propped my feet up on your coffee table. Personally, I thought a coffee-can-coffee-table would have been more clever than a coffee-can-couch, but your table was just a normal table. Mostly. Actually, I always suspected, in another lifetime, it was someone’s craft table. That, or the former owner just really liked drinking paint.
“…Technically, yes. But I really think we should apply at the office. So they can see you. And you‘re gonna want me in the process. I know how to talk to these people. Plus, it‘ll look like you need an attendant. And you‘re pretty shit at forms. Remember that time you paid for a magazine subscription and you fucked the form so bad they actually had to call and ask you about it?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, see? No forms for you, dude. Just trust me.”
You pulled your legs up onto the couch with you, which I somehow interpreted as a kind of shrug.
“Okay.”
“Great! Now, you’re going to want to wear your oxygen.”
“I’m actually breathing pretty alright today, though. See, I just got something up, it’s in the jar on top of the TV…”
“…Already saw it. Very… Nice. But, anyway, they don’t know that.”
“Ah. Gotcha.”
You stuck the cannula up your nose and made sure it was in there real good. I gathered up all the papers we had spread out on the table. A thick stack of all your troubles.
“See? You look like you can, like, hardly breathe. I’m concerned just looking at you. Oh, and don’t bother to shower.”
“Whatever you say.”
I launched myself off the couch, grabbing my coat.
“Perfect! And remember, if you have to cough, don’t hold back. You’re not at the movies, Frankwich.”
“Sure.”
“Alright! Ready to motor?”
You nodded, and off we went.

We sat in the little office, while I explained your situation, and you occasionally confirmed something I said, but mostly just sat there, dizzy from the extra oxygen and looking properly sick. The woman behind the desk, looking properly alarmed. Me, looking properly compassionate and shit. You coughed, and I gently reminded you to take your time vocalizing. It was actually quite the spectacular performance. One method acting, the other with full understanding of his motivation. Neither really acting at all. And when all was said and done, my catastrophic language choices, your efforts to look as half-dead as possible, and the dismal career burnout of the poor caseworker they’d slapped you with, had secured you a hefty monthly check and additional help with paying for food and medical shit. For the foreseeable future. Because, obviously, you were chronically fucked and would never work again. Which was probably true, but I had to make sure that they could see that. And they did. I’d carried off my plans at last, and was trying really hard not to act shocked. It might have been the least convincing part of the whole act.

Shock gave way to exhilaration. I had shown you the farm, and you left it. Easy as that. We stood out on the blacktop in front of the office for a while. The day so cold and bright that it left an impression that still hasn’t faded. I took a deep breath, wanting to bring it all inside of me.
“Well, Franks’n’Beans, it looks like we did it!”
“…Did what? I didn’t do anything.”
“Well, hey, you were there! And you’re the only one who really got any benefit out of it.”
Like I said, I’ve always been kind of a failure at the touchy-feely game. But in that moment, it didn’t matter. I threw my arms around you. You, physically awkward as always, and not sure what to make of any of this, hugged me back for about half a second. Then we immediately let go. I guess we’d communicated what we needed to. No need to linger, or say or do anything else.

And really, I guess it did benefit me. At least, it gave me closure. I’d been trying to do this, or something like it, for years. And it never worked, not for me, not for anyone else. But somehow, I did it for you. And really, if I had to pick only one day to succeed, this would have been it. You, more than anyone, needed an exit. Even before you got all decrepit, even before it reached the conscious part of my brain, I knew this world didn’t have a place ready for you. I could tell, because it didn’t really have one for me, and I guess people can always make a decent guess at who might end up stuck in their own predicaments. You were never any good at much else that was supposed to be universal, but I always got the idea that you‘d noticed it in the other direction. Maybe you always stuck by me so I’d know that I would always belong somewhere, even if it was just side-by-side with another complete weirdo.

At least, that would be my guess, because it’s all I ever wanted to do for you. And I’m starting to think that this, the most important thing of all, might just be my one area of uncomplicated, flying-colors success. I taught you to have fun in a way that was, before you, uniquely mine. I gave you a place to go when you left school early. Above everything else, I’d secured some space for you outside of it all. That is one thing that I’ll always be able to say for myself. One time I really did right by you. And there’s nothing else I can really say. I can’t say you’ll be safe, even after I pulled that off. Even now. The dangers hovering over you today are the kind that strike without regard to me. I can’t even promise that, when I can act, my actions will be in your best interest. But I can say that I’m always trying. I‘m trying my hardest. I don‘t think I could stop trying even if I wanted to.

And I’m not going anywhere.

Comments

Re: And I finished it

[starphotographs]

90s high five XD

Thanks a lot! I'm especially glad you found it honest, because that's what I go for in fiction, and I never know if I actually pull it off or not.

As of both this and probably anything I'll be posting here in the future, Frankie is indeed alive! But, yeah, I don't know how Satchel would react if he wasn't, and I'm honestly not sure of his life expectancy myself, so there is potential for a lot of future sadness. I mostly just have a hard time thinking about that for any character, because it's like, the ultimate form of writing yourself into a corner.

Glad you liked it, and thanks for reading! :D