28. Montara Beach, California, April 1999

As ever, Eddie’s room is knee-deep in mess. Every concave thing has become an ashtray. The clothes will now have to be thrown away.

The mattress has been shoved against one wall, slumped to an L as a makeshift sofa, and on the bared bedstead, empty Pepto-Bismol bottles are ranged like sentinels. Eddie needs one more to have one for each oak slat, and because I know my brother, I know he thinks of emptying that final Pepto-Bismol bottle as an achievement, which will mark a watershed in his life.

A lamp, set at a tilt on a bundle of towels, has burned a hole into its skewed shade, and sends a searchlight beam across the room at a battered audio cassette. It’s a 90-minute Woolworth’s brand, with orange stickers, labeled in felt-tip pen: Soul – various. It gives me a start because it’s mine.

I taped it from my friend Dina’s record collection, when I was fourteen. The selections are therefore slushy, and by no means all Soul. There are, for instance, three BeeGees tracks in a row, which made Side A unplayable, once I had matured in reason.

Eddie had borrowed it sixteen years ago, as a tool in his campaign to seduce his first girlfriend. He’d then refused to return it, because “You were stupid enough to lend me anything, in the first place.” I step forward instinctively to retrieve it.

“NO, behind you, Chrysa. You’re actually blind.”

I turn around: there are ten-odd cartons stacked against the wall. They’re pasted over with Federal Express stickers and stamped FRAGILE FRAGILE. For some reason I’d expected something like cartons, and nodded pompously as if it was old news.

“Ralph’s stuff,” Eddie said.

I balked: “Ralph’s what stuff?”

“From Colorado. Cause we put his possessions and shit in storage. Only I paid the storage people, so it’s my name on the account?”

“Oh, shit.”

“Oh, yes.”

“But, you mean, he doesn’t know?”

Eddie smiles. Then for a few minutes we both laugh gaily, unconvincingly, like a brother and sister horsing around in a dishonest ’50s movie.

Then I say, “Oh, God, I must be as sick as you.”

“You’re on my side now?”

I’m thinking about it when he suddenly ducks and grabs a whiskey bottle from his pile of laundry. He unscrews the cap and swigs, then gestures with it at the wall of cartons: “I’m just basically looking for an address of someone. So it’s address books and letters and shit. If you want to –?”

I suddenly feel wide awake.

We begin to manhandle cartons down and rip tape away. Since Eddie simply empties them onto the pre-existing mess, I follow suit. It’s mostly newspaper-clad ceramics, although there are appliances at random, books, and puzzling unRalphlike articles: a basketball, love beads, Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal. At first we hold these “finds” up and giggle, but we’re quickly jaded. The taboo recedes, and we’re just digging through someone’s crap. It becomes work. Then it becomes hard work. At last it is becoming “the kind of thing I really hate,” when Eddie says,

“Yeah, if this fucks up, I get to drink myself to death.”

He continues delving in his carton. Finding a baseball cap, he puts it on and looks at me. He shrugs at the expression on my face, says, “Chicago Cubs, why?” and goes back to digging.

“Don’t you hate,” I say, “how the people you love are the ones who oppose you in everything, and if they were dying of thirst and you gave them water, they wouldn’t drink the water because it was you?”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t know, I never loved anyone.”

“But that’s exactly the kind of thing I mean.”

“Ha! Paydirt! BOOKS never means fucking BOOKS.”

Reaching into his carton, he withdraws a wad of creased handwritten pages.

“Oh, God,” I say, sidetracked. “Do you think we really actually?”

He looks at me and time stops. It teeters and yields a brief peaceful Eddie who:

“You know what it is?” He puts his finger to his temple, serious. “It’s just weird someone as small as you being so intelligent.”

We are struck and exalted by this wonderful non sequitur. I say equally truly:

“I like talking to you.”

We grin at each other in congratulation. It’s so good. Then Eddie looks down and says,

“Wait. Shit. This is to Mom.”