1.

My name is Joseph Stoyanovich. I write children’s books.

If not by my recent infamy, you may know me as the creator of Baxter Bear, Otto Octopus, and Wally Warthog, those characters of dark whimsy, both reviewed in popular magazines and featured in preschool libraries from Anchorage to Mobile. It is not a vocation one gives up easily. Paid well for work that is blessedly simple, I am admired in crowded classrooms. I am applauded in print.

And the letters.

Adult men and women, educated, successful … They write thanks for stories of evil dashed by honest struggle, tales that cast pastel life-ropes across the world awaiting their children. For myself, I can spend hours trying to convey, in the simplest words, the simplest moral precept. I will skip O’Neill and Ionesco to sit at the back of a gym watching six-year-olds forget lines to Jack and the Bean Stalk. I can wait through a green light, through honking horns and threats of violence, while first-graders chat to a crossing guard.

Yet such affection has cost me friends, career, even a beloved city.

I had certain ideas about myself.

Things happened. Those ideas changed.

Now I am ready to own up.

Though the fashion today is the nationally-televised, blame-wielding confession, I will start by securing alibis for friends and relatives. I will show how much anyone really knew of me at the time of my downfall. We will take a stroll through my wardrobe.

In the closet of my upstairs flat, in the house that I own in a recently gentrified section of Buffalo, New York, there hang pleated corduroy trousers, textured shirts in a Guatemalan motif, and black leather sneakers for a weekend of antiquing with Gordon and Greta—tenured renaissance scholars who haven’t actually reread a word of Shakespeare in nearly a decade, and double their double income dealing in east-side real estate. There are soft-weave jackets and pastel ties for an appearance at the Kiddie-Lit workshop in Yourtown, USA. One pair of faded levis, black T-shirt, and thin studded belt for the evening when Sylvia and Max (interior designer, visual artist) forgo Vivaldi for a bowling and beer session that inspires Max to a triptych based on groups of ten in triangles—complete with ominous black presence—which will win him the grant to pay off his two abortive years in law school, and the last five thousand on his vintage Porsche.

But at the other end of my closet, things are not so painfully with-it.

There you will find a brown button-down sweater, cotton and polyester two-pocket shirts, and in my drawer, an honorary University of Buffalo sweatshirt, white socks, and tight BVDs. These are the clothes I wear to visit my half brother William, whose taste is one with the child-bearing normalcy of his life.

I am a man, in short, who dresses not only for the social, but for the moral occasion; a man of the people among whom I find myself on any given occasion. That is why people like me. That is why, even in my private life, I am so loved.

I encourage. I provide confirmation.

With Gordon and Greta, Sylvia and Max, I snigger over the daily papers and sentimental movies. Yet the very next evening you can find me packed onto the couch with my half brother, half niece, half nephew, and half sister-in-law, eating popcorn and sipping non-diet soda to reruns of The Waltons, or breathlessly thrilling when handsome American pilots turn entire buildings, in some desert nation, into mere puffs of smoke. This in fact is why I live in Buffalo—to repose within the bosom of my brother’s family. For only as an uncle in cardigans can one take long walks with a blonde and freshly feminine seven-year-old without raising an eyebrow. Only as an uncle is one privy to the tender good nights, the prayers at bedside, the last kisses before lights out that an unattached bachelor never knows. In return, I am every child’s favorite baby-sitter. For I am as incapable of meaningful discipline as I am of not returning their funny faces or reading stories at their most casual whim.

In such a position, moreover, I know firsthand the joy I bring in my multichrome pages. Thus I can continue to live with myself in tolerable comfort even after a new Wally Warthog adventure arrives at my doorstep, and I rush inside, locking the front, hall, and study doors behind me, to scribble obscene dialogues above each character, filling every free space and margin with mockery of these platitudinous texts.

My pleasure in this defilement—even as the work is lisped and cooed across the nation—this pleasure is, I confess, onanistic. After two hours of minute scratching, I emerge from the room in a crust of dried sweat. I shower, shave, and take myself to dinner in a restaurant where, not infrequently, another copy of the same Wally Warthog will be thrust above my peas and steamed cabbage by a perky preschool teacher. And then I simply, discreetly, like the last thin puff from a postcoital cigarette, sign my name.

I am thanked.

Sometimes blessed.

And return to my corned beef.

How was it then that a girl barely pubescent brought this life to public crisis?

Was it that I carried the depressive mania of a father who once lay for six hours at the foot of our coat closet, in perfect blackness, then rushed us all to a truck-stop diner, and when the pork chop came cold to the table began screaming at my mother for selling him out to his enemies before kidnapping his two sons for a mad drive across three states, reciting whole chapters of Stalin despite our cries for food and water, stopping only for gas and candy and cigarettes, and to sing the “Marseillaise” in the lobbies of banks and loan companies from Philadelphia to Fort Wayne?

Or was it that she unearthed the bit of my dead younger brother, residing in a corner of my heart? At age eight, Dain had gone into the hospital with kidney trouble. In the waiting room, while my mother interrogated the surgeon wearing his sweaty mask like some ill-conceived necklace, my father lit a cigarette, quaking with the effort to avert his own tumble into mental darkness. His long hand caught my shoulder, the tips pressing the middle of my ten-year-old chest. “Things just don’t work out sometimes.” Then he dropped onto the couch, pressed his glasses to the blue pads at the top of his nose, opened a notepad, and started to write. I sat beside him. My hands on my knees, I watched Dain lie effortlessly in the air near the TV. His head was propped in one palm, smirking at an episode of Donna Reed.

Without warning, I would discover him floating in the sky or lounging in upper corners of the house. Sometimes he merely looked thin. At others his eyes were glassy and burning, with IV tubes leeching from his arms. Perhaps it was his fouled blood that I carried, the blood that had made him look like a shrunken old man.

The last time he spoke to me as a boy, we were supposed to visit the Kennebucks, a couple who appeared each summer beneath the oak tree that hovered over our gravel drive, their Lincoln’s trunk bearing homemade beer, jarred tomatoes, and the balsa ships Charlie Kennebuck had spent the year building, and he and I ritually shot to pieces with slingshots on a shallow of the Delaware.

I’d heard my mother and father through the bedroom wall, arguing about the trial of Dr. Spock, and whether we would stop to see her sister, my Aunt Grace, whose son had died in Vietnam. I was twelve, sitting up in bed and inspecting the morning paper through a magnifying glass. They would never fight in my presence. The doctor said it aggravated my eye trouble—a sudden and inexplicable jerking from side to side. (I’d perhaps inherited the condition from my father. While Dain was alive, after my father had mocked a speech by Kennedy or MacNamara or Johnson, he would pause and hold his hand out flat over the table. “Look. Just look at what they’re doing! Will you look at that!” And his thin hand vibrated like an autumn leaf. It was as though inside him were some seismic device for registering moral absurdities, and he wanted us to take readings of our own.)

Ten years earlier, in 1958, while my father was running for governor on the Progressive ticket, he had built a small shelter in the back of our Ford pickup by nailing a sheet of plywood across the side panels. We lived then on Party donations and my mother’s income writing for a shoe catalogue for men with extra wide feet. (There is a picture of my mother carrying me on one arm and pumping out mimeographed broadsides with the other beneath the Dutch-Uncle eyes of Karl Marx, who for years I confused, in both look and legend, with Santa Claus.) From Allentown to Pitcairn we were rousted and questioned by the police in every city and township, so he decided we could sleep in the truck.

Now, older and grayer behind glasses, he was tying the suitcases to the top of the plywood, despite my mother’s protests that they would blow off. It was a misty spring morning. I was lying on my usual perch, a low branch of the old oak tree, just feet above the pickup. My father was not particularly handy and worked with exaggerated concentration to make his lumpy web of rope appear planned. I had watched her put things inside the red suitcase to visit her sister. My eyes jerked once. Standing on the porch steps (I have a photograph of her standing just there, in sunlight, still pregnant with my brother), she was wearing jeans and a red blouse. He wore the sagging black sweater he always wrote in, its pockets stretched low as ancient teats with crumpled packs of Tareytons, wooden matches, pencil stubs, and the tiny notepads on which he occasionally stopped everything to scribble ideas. Like frightened kittens, his shaking hands took cover in his black pockets. “I want my suitcase down,” she insisted.

“It won’t go anywhere.”

“Not until you bring it down it won’t.”

I looked toward the Plymouth across the road, at George and Allen, the FBI men assigned to us for the past three years. (They never did watch us very closely. But by inventing suspicious behavior, they could ride out retirement without being shot in a burning ghetto in Detroit or Newark.) George was asleep with his mouth wide open, but Allen was staring. Then I saw my mother glance past the pickup. Allen became suddenly busy with the glove compartment.

Whatever the cost, after the times in the past, she would never again let my father expose her to ridicule. She descended the steps, walked around the side of the truck, climbed into the passenger seat and pulled the door shut.

My father glanced up at me through his watery glasses. I smiled as best I could. Then he looked away, into the orchard where he had always talked of building a greenhouse and once even sent away for a seed catalogue, from whose pages he copied the names of exotic flowers kept by the young widows who miraculously found romance in his books.

Once on the Turnpike, I occasionally sat up from reading about the Crimean war to wave at the dark blue Plymouth among midweek traffic. (I’d told George and Allen about our trip, so they could pack extra sandwiches.) George was awake and driving. Allen waved back.

Dain had been with us since reaching the highway. Up in the gray sky, he looked terribly thin as he peered down, judging the souls of people in cars and busses. He focussed on a woman alone in a new Mustang. She was chewing her nails. He shook his head, whooshing through the sky at forty-five miles per hour, like a stand-in for the burly St. Christopher our housekeeper, Angelica, had made me kiss before climbing into the truck’s bed.

He nodded down at the woman in the Mustang. “She’s thinking about someone she loves who doesn’t love her. She thinks it’s all her fault. People like blame sometimes. It makes them important.”

“What if it is her fault?” I asked, though I didn’t actually have to speak.

His head cocked back on his spindly neck: “You think you killed me the time we were wrestling.”

“When?”

“Don’t play dumb.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

He rolled his eyes and sighed. “You just didn’t know what death was. It’s not your fault mother and father are screwed up. That’s the way kids always think. It’s stupid.”

“I don’t think that.”

His arms still crossed, he stared west through the loping phone lines. The road jarred beneath my sleeping bag and I felt foolish for having to remain so close to the earth. “Angelica loves you and Charlie wishes you were his son. Parents are convenient but you can get all that stuff yourself—all the affection you need—so you don’t really have that much to complain about.”

My heart ached, looking up at angry clouds and gulls gliding miles and miles from the sea, but I made myself glare at him. I knew he knew about Angelica, about how she’d touched me that morning. I demanded, “That’s all?”

He uncrossed his arms, pulling on one sallow ear. There was a single pink band-aid on the inside of his elbow. He smiled. “Untie the suitcases.”

“No!”

“He’ll have to blame you anyway. And you know they’re going to come off in this wind no matter how slowly he drives.”

It was true. As my mother had predicted, the two bottom cases were bouncing steadily back over the edge of the plywood.

“I could warn him.”

“He won’t let anybody touch them. That would be admitting he was wrong. You can wait until there aren’t any cars behind. You could save a life. It’s going to be a mess one way or the other.” He glanced at the cases and shrugged. “Course, it always is.”

“I can’t.”

Realizing I was too afraid to give in, his eyes sharpened. “Just remember. I never got to fall in love or have sex or anything. Not even like Angelica touching you through your pajamas. Maybe it’s not that great but it would have been nice to find out for myself.” (I said nothing.) “Look. You want to be haunted, it’s your business. I’m dead, you know. I’ve got all the goddamn time in the world.”

Then he was gone. It wasn’t worth his trouble if you didn’t have the sense to see things his way.

And later, after that very afternoon, he would not reappear for twenty-five years. It required a quarter century to make clear, in the sadness, in the abject heart of a child, that my divided existence was intolerable.

But I digress.

Whatever the root cause, my life was suddenly unfounded—despite its coding into distinct personas and wardrobes, despite even a city that seemed conceived to protect me. For I lived in Buffalo not only for the comfort of my half brother’s family, but because it is a city incapable of bitterness. I lived there for the knee-jerk cheerfulness of a town that has been battered around the ears for decades, and still rolls over on its back to greet you, tongue and tail wagging, like an ugly dog. It is a city where a neighbor will invite you over with the wife and kids, armed with tuppered tuna casserole and the latest Schwarzenegger video, all upon the grand occasion of installing a new smoke alarm. It is a city that turned out twenty thousand people, on a sub-freezing weekday, carrying banners, flags, and yellow ribbons, stopping downtown traffic and business to welcome home a team that had lost the Super Bowl. It is a city where even during the longest, coldest, darkest night of Time and Being’s godless desolation, the value of a good snow shovel is beyond dispute.

And knowing that such people were my co-citoyens, I could go on for weeks working alone in my study. Content to sip weak tea as I look out on my backyard, where the white iron lawn chairs emerge through the snow only a few inches—thin crescents of lacy shadow on the white—imagining I am the benefactor of some ghostly Eskimo garden party, letting my prerecorded cheer answer the phone.

And when I do finally grow tired of my own childish voice on paper, I need not curl up in darkness, or invoke my dead brother. Here I simply call William. And in his house scattered with Legos and Lincoln Logs, scribbled coloring books and soda-stained math homework, I eat my fill of pork roast with sausages and sauerkraut, cornbread and pink lemonade from his wife Cindi’s native Buffalo cuisine. On these evenings, while Rachel and Isaac make faces between the French’s mustard and the corncob salt shaker, I am reaffirmed in my purpose. I touch, with avuncular affection, the downy heads of my constituents, feel drawn back from the arctic, and am rearmed to write the good write.

It is this easy escape from my life in the margins that allowed the trouble to begin. It was the little laugh I could not stop bubbling from my lips, weak with the Norman-Rockwellian charm of such scenes, that compromised the border between the empires of my heart. But to understand a word of this, you must understand my half brother.

William Jr. was my father’s new beginning. He is the boy in whom—after an overdose of aspirin, and then marrying the first face to greet his return to new life—he finally invested his name. Thus between Angelica da Vincini’s covert Catholicism, and my father’s best intentions, Will is saddled with a need to be everyone’s friend, to defend the weak and shelter the homeless, to be a buddy and an anchor in every storm.

My brother William lumbers six-two and a softening 230 pounds of ex-high school offensive guard (the position for all robust protectors) with an A.A. degree in accounting, and a closetful of white perma-press shirts and blue-striped ties. He is one of those men in a continual locker-room sweat, whose splay-footed walk always wears his heels to the outside, and who would give his wife and children everything if he were not already killing himself to give them enough. If love can indeed make you wealthy, my sister-in-law Cindi is a rich woman.

And I am happy for them. I begrudge them nothing.

The trouble started over dinner.

A new Baxter Bear adventure had arrived in the afternoon. I’d committed my literary sacrilege and had just stepped from the shower when Cindi called. She was running a mild fever and hoped I might help out with the children until Will arrived home.

Touched by her need, I convinced myself that my customary, day-long quarantine was mere superstition. After all, I was standing in my robe, hair scented with honey shampoo, scrubbed pink and clean to my fingernails. By the time I started to their house beneath the bracing autumn twilight, my dread had faded.

I helped Rachel make her father’s lunch for the next day and changed Isaac’s diapers twice before Will arrived home. Cindi and Rachel cooked while Will installed the new Maytag I’d bought for Cindi’s last birthday. Sitting on the basement steps with Isaac on my knees, I gummed his round tummy until he was nearly hysterical with laughter. Will smiled at us, finished the last attachments and ran a test wash of Rachel’s play clothes. I felt secure and happy in their household. Indeed, though my father had enjoyed the advantage of living one life, one wife and family, after another, I felt equally able to keep my two sides in their proper realms.

Giving Isaac’s belly a last nibble, I felt Will’s satisfaction as he watched the washer wash and rinse and spin. My own soul seemed as thoroughly purged of contaminants as the socks he plucked triumphantly from the silent machine.

Then, over dinner, Rachel paused with a triangle of calzone dripping from her fork.

“Does Baxter ever do sleep-overs with Otto Octopus?” (She was at that age when make-believe begins to clash with Newtonian reality.) Before I could answer, she wondered, “How could he stay under water that long if he goes to Otto’s house? Can bears even swim?”

We adults smiled among ourselves. I wiped my mouth, ready to offer an explanation. But when I tried to speak, no pictures came to mind: no bears in aqualungs, no octopus in a mobile aquarium. I saw only the pages I had defiled, enveloped in a glass sphere papered with manuscript. I could see Rachel and the dinner table, Cindi’s damp brow, the striped wallpaper and wagon-wheel chandelier—but only through a veil of my marginalia. There was some kind of static. Some perverse desire to cut suitcases loose.

While Will and Cindi and Rachel waited, and Isaac tattatted his tray with his spoon, I held my napkin before my mouth, trying to keep the bilge down. Without a word of excuse, I rushed to the bathroom.

The words leapt forth. A gut-heave of acid consonants and noxious vowels. Will came to the door. A gentle man, he did not so much knock as simply pat the wood.

“Joe? You okay?”

I exhaled. I inhaled.

“Joe?”

I wiped my brow with a hand towel—“Yes.”

“Uhm.” And then, as though this were all his fault because he’d forgotten to tell me: “Cindi made pie.”

I don’t say this was the beginning. I only know this was the first visible sign of breakdown.

Hands on knees, leaning over the toilet, I faced a prospect as appalling as the oval of vomit: Perhaps the bile in the margins of my books was not the moral decay of an epoch. Perhaps it was my very own presence that threatened the homely rapture of my brother’s modest life.

I turned suddenly, flinging a dollop of spittle into the air. A shadow, he was gone. He’d not even been there, and I was looking at the white buildup on the fringe of the shower curtain.

I escaped the bathroom. Apologetic, wooden, I left them standing, napkins in hand, their faces a still life of baffled concern.

It is the following evening and we are at Wegman’s, a twenty-four-hour grocery warehouse, at 7 P.M. Cindi is sick at home with a mature flu, so Will and I are doing the week’s shopping. We are accompanied by Rachel and Isaac. The latter is dead asleep on his father’s shoulder as Will pushes a basket mounded to the verge of avalanche with generic paper towels and toilet paper, a five-pound tub of Skippy, carrots, cherry and lemon Kool-Aid, frozen peas, hot dogs … Rachel has been sent on a mission for rye bread, missed on our way through the Bakery, and is now a good fifty yards behind us under tiny neon lights.

After last evening’s episode I am moody and nervous. I have managed to get even the costume wrong: stylish black Reeboks and blue polyester slacks. Though he will not admit it, Cindi told me Will’s feet are killing him. And the cart has a schizophrenic front left wheel that rides smoothly, then spins for no apparent reason, sending the cart’s nose veering dangerously left and right. We discovered this problem early on in the expedition. But when I pointed it out, Will said, “Someone’s going to get it, and I can handle the thing better than some old guy,” even while hundreds of other baskets stood waiting. As he names products, sizes, and quantities—“Tide, one family size. Comet, two of the fourteen-ounce cans, the ones on the coupons …”—and I pluck and pile, he takes the opportunity of Rachel’s absence to tell me an off-color joke he heard at work. A joke that undoubtedly will make him alone blush.

He is going to this length, playing man of the world and my brother, because he is vitally concerned for my spirits. First, because I have no wife and child and overweight mortgage to ballast my existence. Second, because he senses the distress I am feeling lest I repeat the scene of last night. In a charged whisper, he leans toward me, balancing his son’s diapered bottom on his forearm, pressing down painfully on his left foot, to deliver the punch line—“… and no wonder. Your gums are in terrible shape!”

His face reddens bottom to top like a thermometer plunged into boiling cocoa. I merely smile, though the joke is enormously funny. Indeed, I must suppress a round guffaw.

“Toilet bowl cleaner—Cling, the green kind, just one.” He pauses, watching me choose. Finally, he asks, “You okay?”

I hang onto the plastic bottle. “I’m stuck.”

“With your new book?”

I wedge the bowl cleaner into the basket between Cheez Doodles and frozen Cran-Apple juice (an extravagance for Cindi’s convalescence). Isaac sniffles in his sleep, drooling copiously upon his father’s collar.

“That too, yes.”

Will is happy the problem is so concrete. “So start another one. You said how that helps. Boy, you got nothing to worry about. My gosh, with your brains?”

In fact, I have been feeling much better since Cindi’s phone call. Nothing puts me back to rights like being called upon—kindly Uncle Joseph—to lend a brotherly hand.

That I maintain my aggressive funk is in truth an act of charity toward my brother. For it is my continual fear that there could just dawn a moment in which, finding no man, plant or animal upon whom to bestow his universal empathy, William Bartholomeo Stoyanovich Junior will gain the detachment to glimpse the sump of baby-puked, cat-hair-matted, overworked and underpaid mediocrity he himself endures.

The world will have stepped once too often on my brother’s good nature, and he will discover his human right to spite, perhaps to outrage; and in that moment, his own world will come flying apart. And I cling to my brother’s goodness with the abandon of my half nephew, slung wetly across his shoulder, grasping his offensive-guard mass in a world as tenuous as aspen leaves upon the wine-dark sea.

“Brillo pads. Just one pack. You need to meet somebody.” (This was before the real trouble started.) “Someone you can spend time with, you know, someone nice. It doesn’t have to be …” He leans and whispers, though the aisle is empty. Isaac’s head gently rolls. “—not a sex thing even. Just a friend.”

“I’ve tried.”

“You never really cared for any of ’em I don’t think. Cindi doesn’t think so either.”

I am spared responding by Rachel’s return. She is tired but triumphant with a loaf of Kaufman’s rye slung over her shoulder. Inside the plastic wrapper, the slices of glossy crust are as evenly rounded as the rings on a dead armadillo. I touch her shoulder. She heaves her catch atop the careening juggernaut and announces, “I saw a mouse. He was eating the sesame seeds under the bagel bins.”

“Maybe you should turn him in,” I suggest, with an Uncle Joe smile. (As she screws up her brow to ponder this option, I wonder what fix Baxter or Otto might get into to teach when to seek the help of higher authorities.) She twists a hank of hair the color of brushed flax.

“He was cute. He reminded me of Wally.”

Her father says to her, “Carina, sono sporchi dei topi. Fini, sì, ma sporchi; allora, sta’ attenta.”

I can understand only scattered words—a reminder, perhaps, of the sad state of rodent hygiene? Rachel looks unconvinced as she tells him, “Ma così fini. Come in un fumetto.”

This cabal of intimacy was Angelica’s gift to her only son. It is the code Will uses to express his deepest paternal love, and so in turn to cushion words of authority. So I am wounded already, wishing I could understand, when Will says to me, “Dishwashing liquid. Giant generic. Seriously, Joe. Cindi knows a woman in her sewing club.”

My knees go slightly weak—the ease with which my brother refers to his wife’s sewing club. As though it were 1955, and this some public service film.

But could this woman be my own cara Angelica? A virtual cloud of thighs and bosom into which I might—following my father’s example—forgetfully dive? Could it be I don’t really want the kinds of women I have fallen for all my life: Karmen, the Bronte scholar, or Margaret, the corporate tax consultant … modern variations on my mother with their graduate degrees and professional responsibilities, and the endless rules of engagement when boy meets girl? I glance at my brother’s open face, at lips that once suckled Roman breasts, and I feel a longing that approaches vertigo.

Am I afraid of saying something caustic? Or of hugging him recklessly?

“Who do I tell?” Rachel asks me, after some thought. There dangles in her mind a glimpse of a little police work, a brief grasp of adult responsibility, along with a healthy dose of skepticism: “I bet the manager doesn’t stay this late.”

“We can tell when we check out,” Will assures her.

And then, while looking down Isaac’s back at the shopping list scribbled on a used lunch bag, without the thinnest wedge of self-consciousness, my brother pronounces: “Don’t worry, honey. There’s always somebody in charge.”

I must grab the cart to keep my feet.

Will starts: “Hey.” The shopping list crumples in the hand grabbing my elbow. “Hey Joe.”

I search his soft eyes for any trace of irony. Finding none, I bite my lip because I want to say to him, Would that there were someone in charge, omniscient behind one-way glass, in trim green apron, watching over the great, sprawling mega-mart of our American continent. Would even that Big Brother were watching over us while we—through cable and satellite dish, like primitives around a camp fire—seek him.

Amid this slight commotion, little Isaac’s blue eyes suddenly pop open, head wobbling up to survey the waking world—left, right—before he plops back down into his own warm spit. Merely a complicated reflex. A reaction by ears and eyes and muscle to a phantasm of infant sensibility. Thus I tumble headlong from my soapbox as I wonder—as Wally, Otto, and Baxter themselves will argue—if children don’t actually see another world of people and animals and spirits; if they do not in fact enjoy channels of communication that wither by Rachel’s age, when the allure of an animal friend fades before the desire to wield the blunt stick of adult taboo. Could it actually be that for every word of adult English, French, Hunan or Arabic acquired, an entire lexicon of auras is extinguished?

How much do I miss Dain Stoyanovich?

How much do I need my half brother?

I need him, my anchor, that I might afford myself the long tether of such profitless speculation. I need him like the Scholastics needed the peasants whose aching toil, through plague, and infant mortality, freed them to keep count of angels on a pin. I need him like the mystic sea needs that submarine desert, the sea floor, to give it a home in the universe.

I gather all my strength. “Yes,” I tell him, and nod. “I’m fine.” I smile weakly. “Maybe I’m a little sick too.”

He lets my elbow free. While sincerely concerned, he is also happy there appears no danger of a sequel to last night, and pushes on.

“Cremora. The big one with the measuring scoop inside … Double-strength tea bags: generic, the hundred box. The woman Cindi knows, she’s not smart like you and dad and your mom but she’s a very nice person.”

While Rachel silently mouths the listed chemical contents of a dairy substitute, I am again nearly ready to agree to my brother’s proposal.

And then it happens.

As we round the end of the last aisle, once Rachel wanders off in search of the proper authorities, I notice that Will’s fly is open. Beneath the white Fruit-of-the-Loom bulge of his loins, there is a baggy-panted darkness, and sparse black hairs on thighs that once offered frightened quarterbacks time to pass.

I stop. He stops. Confused.

“What’s up?” he asks.

I cannot cease staring into his crotch. But after last night’s performance, he indulges me.

“What’s down may be more to the point.”

He leans over and sees. He smiles at the simplicity of the problem, lets go of the basket and faces a barricade of pink grapefruit Hi-C on sale for only eighty-nine cents. He tugs, the other arm still benching his sleepy son—“Thanks, buddy”—but the thing will not budge, and he has no more hands to hold his pants taut below the zipper. To spare him alarm, I beckon, “Psst, psst,” like a bad joke.

And while Rachel snitches on Mr. Mouse, and Isaac drools, between the herbal teas and Melitta coffee filters, I lean down, prepared, very gently—just between us three men—to rezip my brother’s pants.

Then I am on my knees.

“Hey.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, my hands clasped between my own legs.

He looks around. Pressing his son tight to his chest, he grabs my shoulder and tries to lift but I am dead weight.

“Hey Joe.”

“It’s okay,” I tell him. I raise my hands to the zipper. Then I do it. I zip him, and, with his help, regain my own two feet.

The checkout is blessedly short of staff. I begin bagging groceries, distracting hands that might otherwise reach out and hug my brother’s heavy shoulders, or wrap my niece too extravagantly in my arms. I force my voice steady and offer my regular shopping joke to Rachel:

“While primitive man brought down the wolf and cheetah with club and arrow, today you can bag all the trophies of western civilization with a laser-quick flash of MasterCharge. Are we not once again a hunter-gatherer society? Good hunting William, Rachel, Joe and Isaac. Your people eat heap-big Velveeta tummy thanks to you.”

She laughs, tittering, and then drunk with it. Both hands cover her mouth as her blond waves splash forward and back over her shoulders. It is my voice that touches her—a mix of Walter Cronkite, Lives of the Rich and Famous, and latent despair—meeting her own swelling melange of guilt and satisfaction after a thin assistant manager in red bow tie went running the moment she dropped the dime on Mr. Mouse. The girl punching the register (brush-cut and blasé, with a delicate gold ring in her left nostril), rolls her eyes as though I am only more boring than I am crazy.

Thankful for any sign of normalcy, Will splutters his grown-man’s giggle, though he seems to think he really shouldn’t be so touched.

“Jeez, Joe,” he says finally, shaking his head. He opens his wallet around Isaac’s bottom. “Jeez Louise.”

At my curb, under oblique streetlight—kids dropped and kissed and bedded—Will pats my leg and winks brother to brother.

“Thanks for the help back there.”

I should apologize, or offer thanks. Yet I balk. I cannot bring up the words to say, he owes me nothing. The night is wet and chilly, the sidewalks turned to runways of reflected living-room light. I stare at the green speedometer of his Wagoneer. We shake hands, and it is all I can do to resist kissing his weary brow.

How do you thank without hating a man for breathing, and in every selfless breath, saving your life?

I swing my feet to the curb. For a moment, before I shift my weight to stand, I balk again.

I am overcome with a sensation that seems to flow from the warmly lit houses up and down the block, from the graham-cracker-and-crayon smell of my brother and his family that fills every vinyled corner of the station wagon. It is only later that I understand what it was. A passing glimpse from a late-night train, through a window opening upon amber firelight. A world in which there are no margins. In which the woven text of life and love and a happy ending is as dense as thick canvas. For this moment, I am wrapped in it. Breathless.

Then Will drops the car into gear. The aged transmission jerks us forward with the heavy thunk of intention, ready to return to his warm brood and leave me to my aberrations.

Thus am I temporarily saved.

I see my old self returning, dropping out of the low sky like the outline of a homicide, sliced by the telephone wires into its distinct parts. And as these facets resume their separate residence within me, the sensation of wholeness rises, vanishing up into the night, through the wet black phone lines, like fingers of smoke.