Excerpt from Brother: a forthcoming novel

Jambiani Beach no.1 Black and white photograph (digital). ©2008 Isaak Liptzin.

He was my brother. The one who told me about lightning and girls. The one who crouched beside me in hideouts when we were little. His shoulder thin and bare against mine, his body always just a skin away. That summer when we were only seven and eight and we climbed the sappy pine busting out of the asphalt behind the 7-Eleven. Days after reaching for each other’s hands to smell and name what clung there still. (‘It’s Mr. Clean,’ my brother finally said, nailing it.) That fall of the same year when he led me to the road-side ditch off Lawrence Avenue and piled the loose and blowing stuff of this land over our bodies like a blanket, hoping for cover. Leaves of orange and red, dried weeds and twigs. Also trash like paper and foil and the many shredded plastic bags blown here from fast food shops. Our hats camouflaged all guerilla style with twigs and mashed up drinking straws. Our faces already the color of earth.

One winter afternoon when we were still only eight and ten, when the bed-sheets on the balconies of the apartments facing us swayed stiff in the wind and the sky turned purple dark, we knew that nature itself was going to scheme with us. We woke the next morning to a beautiful, deafening white. Snow thick over everything, all the boundaries redrawn, the whole neighborhood made new. We were on our way to school when we noticed this huge pile that the snow ploughs had been making just outside of our building, and used one of mom’s thick metal spoons and also a garbage can lid and scrap wood to rabbit down yards but maybe miles beneath the surface. We made a den big enough for two at the bottom, and my brother pulled off his mittens to flick on this portable flashlight, and we just sat there, taking it all in. The cottoned warmth of the walls of snow. The quiet closeness of my brother’s voice, like it was coming from my own body.

“We’re wanted,” he said.

“Wanted?” I asked. “Who wants us?”

“Don’t be stupid,” he told me. “Wanted means you’ve done something.”

He let this sit for a bit, and a shiver crept slow upon me. He must have noticed the set of my mouth, and so he explained. It was something, he admitted. It wasn’t such a good thing to be wanted, but it wasn’t in any way the end of the story, he promised me. Just because you’re wanted doesn’t mean it’s all settled and done. Doesn’t mean you can’t dream and somehow find your way. Lots of heroes in old stories were wanted. Lots of scientists who broke what people thought they knew were wanted. And so why not us? We’d just have to be careful. And in the meantime, there were lots of places to hide. Lots of ways to just disappear. So don’t look so scared like that. Children just like us disappear all the time.

“But what’d we do?” I asked.

He might have told me, his eyes looked into that faraway place somewhere between remembering and making stuff up, but then we heard it. The sound of metal pushing heavily on asphalt, a scraping that grew quickly into an earthquake’s sound and force, the punishment that only God himself could deliver, and then it came, the crushing out of our light and air. I couldn’t move, couldn’t lift my stomach or chest to breathe. And there was screaming from somewhere. A voice that sounded lifetimes away, dulled as if it had to travel across an entire ocean, some language you couldn’t recognize, or maybe no language at all, hardly a voice like a brother’s or even a human’s anymore, some ghostly cry of pain.

Later we understood what had happened...