fiction

by Andrew F. Sullivan

A man wakes up before anyone else in the halfway house. He makes his way slowly down the hall and grabs a standard fire extinguisher, one mandated by local government to be installed on every floor in the facility. He enters another man’s room on this floor and proceeds to beat the younger man to death with the fire extinguisher, this younger man lying prone and asleep on a twin bed he routinely pisses in his sleep, according to staff interviewed later that day by police. Usually, this room would be shared with another man, but the smell of urine makes this living situation untenable for the other residents and so the young man dies alone on his plastic wrapped mattress, his skull beaten into dull shards of bone. The man then abandons the dented fire extinguisher in the recently renovated kitchen that features three microwaves and no oven. He disappears into the frozen streets outside without his shoes or socks, leaving a dead body and bloody handprints behind him like a taunt trailing off into unintelligible murmuring.

My mother says my brother didn’t mean to do any of this. My mother is an idiot.

You can be born bad. No one wants to hear that, but maybe they never tried baking a loaf of bread from scratch. Sometimes you add too much water. Sometimes the yeast causes it to rise in a lopsided fashion. Sometimes it doesn’t even rise at all. Sometimes it dies right there in the oven in front of you but you still take it out anyway and pretend its fine. You eat it out of spite.

Spite has always been a powerful motivator in our family, an engine that drove my father to eventually buy up a number of rowhouses on the southside of town and turn himself into a landlord, the very creature he loathed every day of his life until that fateful day arrived. To own a thing is one thing, to own a place is something far worse. It’s almost too easy to become the thing you hate. You learn to truly loathe something only through knowing it deeply. Spite can make you bigger than what you were before, but it cannot make you whole. It cannot satisfy you.

I stand in the middle of a parking lot, waiting for the snow to stop. It melts when it hits my skin, makes me think about all the times men told me about the things they wanted to do to my face, like there’s a deep secret inside them they just have to share with me. It’s never disgust about what they want to do that drives me away so much as it is the lack of originality, the utter despair that courses through me when yet another man asks me if this thing, this thing they want to do, would it, could it, might it be okay to do such a thing to me, like I’ve never heard of such things before, like I am just some lost and delicate creature they were lucky to come across in the pasta aisle at FreshCo, trying to choose between bowties and rigatoni. My pasta needs to hold sauce. It needs to be sturdy if it’s going to survive the boil. It needs to prove itself to me.

The figure staggering toward me, wearing bright white running shoes and a billowing lack coat is my brother. I didn’t ask him where he got the phone when he texted me, didn’t ask him about fire extinguishers or if he knew what he was doing. He wouldn’t have any truth for me, just different ways of telling me he was sorry, pathetic twitches meant to provoke my sympathy, meant to make me tell him its alright, its okay, he really is just misunderstood, misplaced, maybe even maladjusted, whatever words my mother might use in this situation. He didn’t text her because she doesn’t have a cell phone and the nurses at the home say a landline usually only causes her sorrow. Sorrow was the word they used, I think they know its weight more than most.

The shoes are stolen, maybe from a store, maybe off somebody’s feet. The jacket might just be something he found blowing in the wind, something he caught because he was in the right place at the right time. My brother is a man of extremes—he has witnessed beautiful things, woke to birds singing on his chest, rabbits copulating outside his window, the sun throwing their thudding bodies into bright white relief. He once saved a small child from a city bus, swept the girl up in his arms like she was his own flesh and blood, set her down so gently she barely knew what happened. He once made an entire box of Kraft Dinner and let me eat until I was full, my belly distended over my pajama bottoms, before he finished off the rest. This is how he would say he loved me, say it with a box of noodles that can hold no sauce, a little bit of margarine, a spot of milk, and a powdered cheese product that never tastes very good if you eat it solo—it only works when it is a part of the whole, only reaches that small, shitty nirvana in kitchens that drip and fester around the edges of the sink, linoleum kitchens with floors never truly cleaned.

“You came,” he says, the rot in his mouth carrying in the cold air. “You came.”

His brain pivots. For every child he spared, there was another he slathered up with honey and fed to the ants. He actually did do that once, tied a boy to a tree and left him covered in honey, the kind that comes in a plastic bear with a nozzle on its head. The kid’s parents found him before the bugs did much damage, and the police found us in the ragged backyard, laughing and singing and pretending we never did anything like that before, like we couldn’t dream of it, and sometimes I wonder if he did dream of it, if that was where he found these little horrible things, these shattered bits of what it meant to be a person, little filaments flickering in his head, barely coherent images of how to treat a person. He could say I love you while he cut you open, say you were his world while he robbed you blind, packing everything you own into a uHaul and disappearing for five years before calling from a jail cell out in Nova Scotia, babbling and bleating for you to save him again, and again, and again. No ones going to love you like I do.

“I came,” I say, taking his gnarled hand in mine. “I’m here. What do you wanna do?”

“I need to get away from here, I can’t stay here.” The words climb over each other.

“Okay.”

“What does okay mean?” he sputters, blue eyes turning cold, searching me for wires, for weak points he can pry at until my heart or something worse pops loose. “Okay?”

“Whatever you want to do, that’s what we’ll do. That’s all it means.”

“I want to get away from here.”

“Okay,” I say, trying to slow him down, trying to buy myself a few more seconds out here in the cold, the snow gone now, the air getting drier and drier. My nose crackles when I breathe deep. I am trying to pretend we are just two people in a parking lot, one of us wearing shoes so white they make my eyes hurt, the other doing her best to say this is fine, this is alright, okay.

“Okay,” he says, a smirk slashing through his face. “I can do it too. Okay.”

“Okay,” I say. “We will go for a drive. Do you want that?”

“I want whatever you want, babe.”

I don’t correct him, don’t ask him to call me something else. I leave the knife where he stuck it in and turn back to the car. I won’t let him twist it further. I won’t pull it out in front of him. No one calls me babe here. No one else has ever called me babe. No man has been dumb enough to do that. My face does not read babe. I’ve always been more of a honey, if I think about it.

“Okay,” I say again. “Get in the car.”

My dad said there was a hole in the boy. He said this after one of the tenants found my brother in her closet masturbating, his breathing so heavy it woke her up in the middle of the night. He let her live rent free for a year if she didn’t tell the police and she didn’t and I don’t blame her, that was a lot of money for anyone in that neighbourhood, a lot of money to pretend you never had a twelve year old in your closet yanking on himself. My dad said there was a hole inside my brother, one that was there before he was even born. An absence that made him so likeable, so easy to talk to, so hard to know once you realized there was nothing behind the curtain.

Sometimes I wonder if there is a hole inside me too, if it’s like a congenital heart defect, if there is a space in our genetic code that never really appeared. If his lack is my lack and I just don’t know it yet, I don’t know anything, don’t know enough to know what I do know and what I think I know and all the things that exist just out of reach. One of the other girls at the salon, one of the girls they have washing hair, she says when she took a DNA test she found out her father wasn’t really her father, but her uncle, and how that changed everything. I wanted to tell her it didn’t change anything, what is done is done, what happened happened, but I could tell she wasn’t ready for those words. She wanted to start over. She wanted to say this is someone new, staring into the mirror at her bad split ends and the gap in her teeth and the one freckle on her nose. She wanted to say, make me someone new. Make me over again and tell me I am you.

The hole in me might be why my brother is in this car with me, his hands the hands that ended another man’s life, his weight in the passenger seat a reminder that he is real and not just a figment of my imagination, the hand at my throat when I wake up in the middle of the night in darkness, choking on my own spit, screaming for someone to pull me out of the waves. The hole in me might be why when he gets out of the car while I’m pumping gas, I don’t try to stop him, even though I can see the look in his eyes, dull with intent for something, anything that will make him feel big again, that will right the word, that will undo all the slights he has suffered.

“Start the car, start the fucking car.”

He runs back out of the gas station, arms loaded with snacks he didn’t pay for and there is a woman chasing him, her face bright red, the spittle flying from her mouth, and she trips and I hear her head bounce twice off the concrete and then we are on the road again, driving further north, further and further toward a cabin we went to once when we were kids, a cabin my grandfather built himself, a place he could own, if only because no one else wanted the mossy rocks he built it on back then. We drive and my brother eats beef jerky and pretzels and long strands of licorice that he spins around his fingers until they stain his hands pink.

“What if she died?”

“Who, mom? She won’t die. She loves me too much to die. She’ll just live forever in that fucking facility you’ve got her planted in like a fucking potted fern.”

Every few minutes, a car passes us, always headed south. No one appears in my rearview mirror, but I just keep driving.

When my father died, he did so in his sleep. A small dignity, my mother called it. She was tired of changing his shit-encrusted sheets, tired of asking people to come and watch him while she showered or took a bath, too afraid to leave him alone for longer than a few minutes at a time, less his tongue slip back down his throat, or he decide to make a run for the picture window in their bedroom, attempting to throw his entire body through it like a freshly plucked turkey.

“You still making bread?”

“I like to try.”

“Seems like you could save a lot of time and money not doing that.”

“Okay.”

My brother wasn’t there for that. He told me he was working on a fishing boat, learning to tie knots and meet women in bars where everyone was there for only one thing. He was actually in a ward in a hospital that refused to give him a day pass. He was actually trying to scam more pills off of the nurse on duty when he overreacted and knocked her head directly into the bed frame three times, just enough to give her a concussion. He didn’t mean it of course. He never did. My father died without knowing that, with all his buildings falling into disrepair just as he did. We sold them off, sold them to pay off the lawsuits and the lawyers bleeding us all dry.

“I think I’m just going to live in the cabin up here. I think I can do that.”

“Okay.”

“I want you to pull over. I want to show the world I can survive out here. I want you to see I’m not lying. I could survive. I’ve survived worse.”

I pull over on the side of this two-lane road, the frozen gravel barely protesting. He climbs out and walks out toward the trees, stripping off his clothes in the frozen air, his back covered in small hatch marks, places where he pried and pulled at himself when no one else was available.

The snow up here is crueler, it nips at you, asks for pieces of your flesh where it finds purchase on your skin. I am not dressed for this and yet I am here because there are times I think I will follow him anywhere, times where I will tie a boy to a tree because it seems like that is what he wants me to do, that is what will make him happy, and we want to be happy, well, I want to be happy, and that is the piece he holds above me. He doesn’t need to be happy. He can’t be, he can only take. He can take and all I do is offer. Offer again and again. This time I take.

I take his coat, walking backward toward the car. I take his shoes, his pants, whatever I can grab. I take all the pieces he has shed to make himself a spectacle once again, even out here without an audience. I take these things back to the car and I throw them in the trunk. I climb behind the wheel, let the engine encourage my decision before pulling out onto the road and away from this barren space, this landscape I don’t want to know. I watch him chase me in the mirror, watch him scream and scream, watch him become a speck and then a nothing and then whatever he was before he was my brother—a hole, an absence, a space where two cells connected, withered, and then died together. But I am still here. I can see it in the mirror.