Almost Once

If you scanned someone’s brain while they were having a memory, all different sites would light up: the part of the brain that saw, the part that heard, smelt, touched, tasted. The lobes and sulci illuminated, the connections. From dendrites to axons. If the person remembered the same episode again, the brain activated in an alternate way: different illuminations, different cells. I used to think of the past as a storage vault: an apothecary filled with wooden shelves, floorboards to roof. On the sills were brown glass memory jars. We just had to walk down a musty row, pick up a vessel, unscrew the lid and let the remembrance float up and consume us, like smoke.

It isn’t like that: each memory is split into a thousand tiny pieces and stored disparately in the brain so that every time we are reminded of something we have to recollect. Remake it.

The deficiencies in the process were troubling. I tried to remember my brother but every time I replayed a memory it altered. I transformed it. The recollections I held the tightest inadvertently turned into fiction; they collapsed and rewrote themselves. How could I distinguish between my past, a thought and a dream? The boundaries were deceptive: the edges had become sticky and joined to each other. I ran towards things, the hope in them, a mirage.

The colours in my memories were never quite right. In some you were coloured in reverse, like a film negative, so that your eyes were red and your hair white. In others, everything was as it should have been except for one detail. I remembered one day after swimming club, we lay next to each other and looked up at the clouds. The green stripes of our towels had changed to yellow, or orange. The sky was cobalt, and then it was pastel. Your hair black and wet, and then it was chocolate and dry. Gaps. The recollections were laced together but weakly – crocheted. They could keep you warm for a time but they were full of holes.

My favourite memories were the ones that appeared from unconsciousness, brand new and experienced for the first time. But once I could evoke a recollection I ruined it with use; I overplayed it like analogue tape.

I attempted to hold on to what was certain by keeping lists of true things about you in my journal.

When I tried to visualise your face it eluded me. I couldn’t recreate you, I only saw your peripheries, the curls of your hair, the nape of your neck, the mole on the rise of your right cheek. I saw the side of your face bathed in red light and heard rain falling but the centre of your face had no form. I searched for your eyes, the centre of your face and mouth, but what was supposed to be there became a long tunnel.

Elijah’s disappearance severed my life. After it occurred, my timeline was forever divided into before and after. It was a crevice in the rock bed, the opening of a chasm. The moment I realised it was already too late. If I tried to jump across, back to where I was before, I wouldn’t have made it.

There was the moment I realised he was missing. There was the second just before, when I didn’t. The horrible instant between, the colour of mustard and tasting of bile when I discovered no one had heard from him in two weeks. That he was out of control and I had no way of contacting him. No emails came, no phone calls. No more postcards arrived.

I woke in the mornings with a strange unsettlement, my mind wandering through vague plans for the day. Then it would trip over the forgotten fact: he was gone. The realisation hurt me in the abdomen until I felt nauseated. I lay curled. Eventually I made it to the shower. From there the steps got easier. I went into autopilot. I remembered his face and laughter. I tried to focus on all the good things.

I recounted what I knew, what the police told us after we filed him as missing. Elijah stayed in a hostel in Geraldton in mid-September. That was two months ago. He went drinking with two Swedes and a Czech who said he acted erratically and was looking to buy amphetamines. He told people he was going overland into South Australia. A truck driver saw Elijah hitchhiking near Coober Pedy. In his statement, he described my brother wearing a faded red short-sleeved T-shirt.

There was CCTV footage of a man that might have been him at a petrol station in Broken Hill. Rebekah, Dad and I sat together and watched the grainy footage in greyscale. A person Elijah’s height and build with dark hair walked through the sliding doors, went out of view from the camera and returned to pay for something at the counter. We watched on a loop. Over and over. It could have been him. It could have been him. It could have been anyone.

No one knew what happened next. There were no more reported sightings. No one with his name was admitted to any hospital.

We waited for news. Any news. Even the worst – but his body did not emerge. I thought of Elijah less as a person and more as a spectre, as if his flesh had turned into pixels: the grainy tones of the low-res security camera.

So it went. Each day I came to terms with Elijah’s life and disappearance. Every night sleep erased my progress; my awareness covered its own tracks. In the mornings I lost him again, falling down the truth of it like a flight of stairs; the hollow notes of being unable to break my own fall. The pain didn’t augment but it didn’t recede either. I lost my brother over and over again, and each loss had the same blunt trauma as the first: the perpetual motion of grief.

~

Rebekah, Dad and I fell down the crevice into a parallel universe. It reminded me of a video game Zed and Elijah used to play. It started on grassy hills but after a few levels the player went underground and moved through pipes and tunnels. My parents and I were trapped in a subterranean world of unknowingness. We heard the regular world above us, distant voices that laughed, the sound of daily goings-on echoed. We saw people and sensed that life continued, but we couldn’t get back to it. We were stuck. Underneath.

On a Monday I missed my bus stop at Taylor Square and decided not to go into the lab. I stayed on until Martin Place, where I disembarked and walked to the Domain. Two ibises picked through rubbish around a bin, their dirty cream wings tucked against ovoid bodies; long, curved beaks sorted through the trash layers like surgical forceps. I walked away from the city and sat on a hill that overlooked the freeway.

I took an unexpected turn and found myself standing at the sculpture of two giant matchsticks. I halted at the sight of them: their shape against the sky and the roar of the traffic below. The matchstick on the right was pristine, unused. A perfect beam of dark, grainy blackwood. It stood exactly straight with a fluorescent red phosphorus head that reminded me of a grenadier. Next to it was a second match with the same square base, but this one had already been struck and its body was black, twisted and shrivelled, not as tall. The burnt body stooped at the hips and the shoulders, a weary head that looked upwards as if pleading. The burnt match was gnarled with a charred snakeskin torso. I was gripped by an urge to lean against the struck match, to listen to it creak and moan like an old tree until it snapped and fell. I would pick up the cinder in my hands, break it down from its shell. It would coat my hands and become airborne around me like black snow, ash, fallout.

~

I walked past an attorney, I walked past a medical student, I walked past a busker, I walked past lovers, their arms entwined around each other, I walked past someone high, I walked past someone drunk, I walked past the bus shelter and stopped. It took a few moments to register what was missing. Him. This time of the morning he was usually there, drinking a coffee, smoking a cigarette or sleeping with his back to the street. The bench where he sat was void. There was a smudgy grease stain on the timber, but the shelter was empty.

Professor Olsen instructed me to move quickly onto the confirmation experiments for my project; to repeat the work in different cell lines. He’d also ordered in mouse colonies so I could test the gene function in whole animals.

People at work had heard about Elijah’s disappearance. Without me saying anything, it had spread through the building like wildfire. It didn’t matter. Even though it appeared that I checked my email, tended to cell cultures and planned experiments, the truth was I was still in the subterranean world. I wasn’t really there; it was only my outline, drawn in chalk: shadows and stitches.

My colleagues tried to sympathise with me. I heard the faint sounds of their voices as they attempted to communicate, as if through double glass. They used strange combinations of words, strung together awkwardly like coloured pasta on wool.

‘I can only imagine what you are going through.’

‘I am holding you in my prayers.’

‘Everything happens for a reason.’

‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ It was Jonathan who said that, but it didn’t feel like it came from a place that he’d lived.

I listened to the placations without the courage to tell them I didn’t think they were true. Every time you talk to me it hurts. I felt like saying, When you say my brother’s name it’s like digging your fingers into a bruise.

I looked at them through cellophane, and realised we were in a situation in which all language fails.

That night I called Dad.

‘How are things?’ I asked, not really wanting to know the answer. Dad told me he had confronted Rebekah. She had admitted her affair and moved out shortly after.

‘You should be speaking to her too, you know,’ Dad said. ‘I don’t expect you to take sides here.’

‘I’ve got nothing to say to her right now.’

~

After Elijah disappeared I found myself spending less time in the laboratory and more time in Terrace Books. Paperbacks and hardcovers spilled out of the shelves and spaces. New stock was stacked in waist-high piles on the floor; their spines lay still, one on top of the other. People stood in corners, in the aisles, heads bowed into open pages, the words escaping into the readers. Novels were tucked under people’s arms, into their armpits, while they rummaged for more tomes.

I went in just to breathe in the smell of thumbed paper, of printing ink and glue.

I spent more than an hour every week in the bookstore. I tried to evade some of the regular staff on my way in; I didn’t want them to notice how often I was in the store. I read the first chapters of novels, biographies of artists, histories of music. I browsed through atlases and books about astronomy. I opened covers, ran my fingers down their backs, my eyes skimming over lines and lines of text.

I was looking through all those books, all those words, trying to find the right ones: the ones that showed me how to go on.

~

Cormac and Lillian organised a fundraiser down at the baths. They called it a Day of Healing and the idea was to raise awareness of and money for the continued search for Elijah. To pay for more missing posters and advertising. As I walked towards the clubhouse doors, I saw small foamy bubbles on the wet sand from where the tide had left its mark. Apart from family there were friends of Elijah’s from high school and swimming, people he’d played music with, Dad’s colleagues from the university and Rebekah’s from the orchestra.

Dad and Rebekah were not standing close to each other at the baths, but they didn’t seem to mind being at the same place. Their paths still crossed but they were in separate orbits now. Normally when a marriage broke apart it was a colossal thing, I guessed. My parents’ separation happened quietly, under the unfolded umbrella of Elijah’s disappearance. It made me think I had only walked in on the final act of a longer narrative, and that perhaps I’d missed the earlier signs of a gentle disassembly.

The day was an awkward mix of memorial and cry for help. Cormac invited the minister from their church. In his sermon he talked about having faith: in the future, in that Elijah would be found alive and well. I saw Rebekah standing at the edge of the crowd near the front as the minister spoke. I saw her bristle. There was a temper behind her eyes I didn’t think anyone else could see.

I could only think about what wasn’t said, like the fact Elijah could be dead. If we knew Elijah had perished we could have a funeral; if we had a body we could bury him. Or have him cremated and pour the lumpy grey dust of his ashes into the ocean. The day was a thoughtful gesture, but to me seemed ultimately pointless. All we could do was acknowledge we were living in purgatory.

~

Dad and I were sitting on the back veranda at night, drinking whisky. He’d spent that day like most of his weekends now, tracking birds in the bush, leaving before dawn and returning after dusk. If he wasn’t at home he didn’t have to see the kitchen chair where Elijah used to sit. Or hear the radiating absence of Rebekah.

I looked at Dad in the half-light and he looked aged. The pale blue of his eyes glistened behind a liquid film. When he spoke, a pain coloured his voice that stopped and started in bursts like hiccups.

‘I can’t – like this – go … on.’

Seeing my father in that state was a horrible truth I was perhaps never supposed to witness. Elijah’s absence hovered over us like a cloud front. It forced us to face up to each other and tore us apart at the same time. If there had been an obvious way to halt the destruction I would have done it.

‘I’m worried about us, our family,’ I said into the darkness, ‘and about you.’

I locked in on my father’s gaze. He was a small boy trapped inside the body of a man.

Dad looked out over the shadows of the bay, then back up to the veranda railing. His eyes surveyed the veranda’s length, as if expecting someone to arrive. He looked to where I was sitting.

I realised that before this moment I had never seen him cry.

‘It’s not that I want to die,’ he said finally. ‘I just don’t want to be here if he isn’t.’

~

Underwater, a blue-green haze between us. Light shone down from the surface of the ocean, metres above; it illuminated particulate matter in the water and made it look like snow. Down here swells blew, moving weed on the rocks and groups of blue tang fish.

You were ahead of me in your grey-black steamer and fin-like flippers. The oxygen tank was on your back and you were breathing through a regulator. When you turned around I saw your green eyes through the mask; the rubber face seal obscured your trademark mole. You were near the edge of a granite formation. A school of kingfish swam past us; white salmon. I looked at you again. You raised your right hand with the palm facing towards you and drew it into your chest repeatedly. Come here. I kicked my legs and propelled myself forwards using my own fins. I heard my breath in my ears as if I were on a ventilator. When I got close, you grabbed my upper arm and a giant sea turtle sailed towards us. Cranky old-man eyes and a hooked beak, like a parrot. The turtle beat with his two front flippers and soared through the water, flying. We explored around the rock crevice and found clams and starfish. We disturbed clownfish that were hiding there. On the other side, the sandy seafloor rose up and we realised it was a giant stingray rearing and then leaving with rippling edges, its long needle tail behind it.

Down here there was a peaceful beauty and the sensation of floating, swimming and falling all in one. You signalled to me again: pointing back and forth between us and then shaking your head side to side and then pointing your right hand straight down, indicating the ocean floor. You repeated this pattern over and over again: motioning back and forth, shaking your head side to side and then hand down to the seabed. My heart beat faster – I didn’t understand the signals – I was unable to decode you. I swam towards you but I got there too late and you started to remove your mask. Inexplicably you spoke to me underwater and I could hear you clearly.

‘We never got to do this,’ you said.

I woke in bed in a cold sweat, my eyes and mouth still filled with seawater.

~

‘Hey stranger.’ I’d taken a detour on the way to the lab for a coffee. I’d found a hole-in-the wall cafe on Cleveland Street that smelt of fresh roasted beans. It was Hyun. We’d spoken a few times at the bookshop, mainly at the register. He knew which days I was likely to swing by, which was most of them.

‘Hey, what are you doing here?’ I asked. It was disorienting seeing him out of context.

After we ordered we stood to the side of the counter to wait. Hyun turned both of his palms to the ceiling and shrugged. ‘This is my place,’ he said. ‘Best coffee in Sydney. How about you, what are you doing?’

‘I’m on my way to work, over at the Macquarie Institute.’

Hyun’s eyes widened. ‘Are you a doctor?’

‘It’s complicated. I did study medicine, but I’m working more in research now.’

‘Man … My parents would love me so much more if I was a doctor. I mean they would probably explode with pride, but they would love me more first – while they were exploding. I’m a big disappointment to them, you see.’ He said this in such a relaxed way, while he was smiling, that it was obvious that nothing he’d said about his parents was true.

‘I guess you yarn bombers have your eye on the Lachlan Macquarie statue in Hyde Park,’ I said.

‘Oh, he’s on the list,’ Hyun said.

‘Hi-yoon?’ the barista called out, and then, ‘He-un?’

‘I think that’s me,’ Hyun said, laughing. My coffee came out next and we made our way back onto the street. From behind Hyun I could see a long cardboard tube sticking out of his leather satchel.

‘What’s that?’ I asked when we were outside. He handed me his coffee so he could show me. From the tube he pulled an A3 transparency, unfurled it and held it up to the sky.

‘I’m taking a course in printmaking.’

I moved around holding our drinks until I was standing right next to Hyun. It reminded me briefly of my hospital days, looking at X-rays without a lightbox, just holding them up to the fluorescent overheads.

The transparency was printed in greyscale. I saw the outlines of gnarled branches and small buds of flowers. The background was filled in by Sydney sky.

‘Hey,’ I said, recognising the image, ‘isn’t that by van Gogh?’

‘It is,’ Hyun said, looking at me as he brought his arms down. ‘It’s his Almond blossom – he painted it for his brother Theo. I’m going to use it as part of a photopolymer plate.’

We were headed in different directions.

‘Hey, thanks for the loan of the CD by the way; I love it. I’ll have to drop it back to the shop after I get my own.’

‘No worries. Whenever is fine. Hey – is that your phone?’ Hyun asked. It was sticking out of my jeans pocket. ‘Can I see it for a second?’ I pulled it out. After I unlocked it Hyun asked if he could hold it, and he started typing into it.

‘I don’t want to ask for your number, because – you know – you might not want to give it to me. So, I’ll give you mine. That way if you want to chat it’s up to you. I’m quite a good person to know, though: I can let you know when we get good books in.’

He was wearing a scarf with tassels today, and the satchel slung over his chest and right shoulder. There was something else too: a camera strap holding an SLR. As he tapped I noticed the angle of his cheekbones, his particular masculine elegance.

Hyun handed me back the phone.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you back at the shop, I guess.’

On the walk to work I looked at Hyun’s number in my phone and wondered how he always knew just how to be. Talking to him made me feel light and warm over my skin, so I started typing my name into a message. It didn’t seem enough, so I added a smiling face emoji and then the one of the pile of books.

~

That night I dreamt that Elijah and I were standing on Jimmys Beach. Elijah had a red surfboard propped up in the sand.

The early morning sun made the water shine like metal. The waves rose in intervals: the sharp edge of their peaks formed from nothing, reared and reflected the light like mountains, before they fell forwards and spilled in a roaring sigh.

‘It’s breaking down there.’ He pointed down the beach. ‘Let’s paddle out through the rip.’

Elijah ran ahead of me into the water, set the board down on the surface and landed his chest on top. I ran behind, swimming through the water boardless; the waves broke over me. I lost Elijah in the whitewater. The rip pulled me out and I swam across it. I wished I had something to buoy me. I moved over to where I thought Elijah was but when I got closer I saw the face of another surfer.

All I could hear was the bellow of the water, the rhythmic sound of breakers crashing.

‘Grub!’ I heard my brother’s voice as it called behind me and soon he was next to me.

I held on to the side of his board and caught my breath.

‘I couldn’t find you.’ I looked up at him on the board. ‘I couldn’t find you,’ I said again.

‘Grub, don’t you know where I’d go?’

I woke up slippery with sweat and giddy with palpitations. It was nearly three am but I reached for my phone and called my dad.

When he finally answered, without introduction I said, ‘I know where he is.’

The drive to Hawks Nest was unlike any before: silent and joyless. Dad picked me up in the wagon. In the early hours of the morning the Pacific Highway wailed and hissed with road trains hauling cargo up the east coast. We didn’t speak. I counted off the towns as we passed them.

The scrub on the side of the road was charred from bushfires that passed though months ago. The eucalypts were shrouded in new growth, bright green sprouts that climbed over the scorched exteriors and made the trees look hairy.

At dawn we turned into Tea Gardens.

‘I’ll go,’ I said when we pulled into the driveway on The Anchorage. Dad looked uneasy as he reached into his trouser pocket to retrieve the key. The windows and doors of the house made an expressionless face. I slid the key into the lock. The building was dark and stale; the curtains were drawn. The rooms smelt of musty carpet. The loungeroom was calm. There was no one there, and no signs that anyone had been.

In the master bedroom, the bed was made and the room was empty. In the spare room was nothing. The bathroom was clean and quiet; a cake of faded Imperial Leather lay in the holder. The last room was the poky space down the end, past the kitchen: it was the room we used to share. I slowly pushed the door open.

‘Elijah?’ I whispered. The door creaked; the room was quiet.

I stood in the room and closed my eyes. I tried to sense if he was there. I listened for low vibrations, I could smell the lagoon and hear the neighbour’s dog bark. But he wasn’t. He wasn’t there.

~

Elijah’s absence had the same pain as a phantom limb. Something that used to be attached had been severed. In its place was empty space. It was the hurting of something that no longer had a physical presence; it didn’t come from the appendage at all, it was an illusion. The agony derived from the tract of nerves that used to connect the extremity to the sensory cortex.

The pain was inside the head.

~

The last time I’d felt so debilitated was after I’d quit my internship the year before. When I thought back to that time everything was in the same tone. White. My nights then were haunted by my own mistakes and inadequacies. I lay awake and thought about them, unable to sleep. Dawn broke and suddenly I was tired. I pulled the doona over my head and hid in the covers. I didn’t get up to eat or wash.

Dad tried to coax me out with love and encouragement. I would not be coaxed. My mother’s matzah ball soup didn’t work either. The unleavened flatbread broke off into pieces and got stuck in my throat. Under the blankets I was becoming something other than myself, all my worst parts held together by ligaments. What made it worse was I knew how fortunate I was, overall. My family was comfortable; I had open avenues to be educated and to work when girls born in other countries didn’t. I should’ve been grateful for the opportunity to be a doctor. What was the point of all my privilege if I couldn’t help other people? My despair became compounded by guilt. I spent hours curled up. I became less differentiated, parts of me melded into other parts. I was a ball of hair, skin, teeth, tissue and bone: a teratoma.

There was a knock at the door. I rolled away from it. The light under the covers changed from dark grey to cream as I heard the light switch flick. Someone moved inside the room.

‘Hey, Grub.’ Elijah pulled the doona from over my head. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Everything hurts.’

‘You have to get up; you have to eat something.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

‘I can’t do this anymore. I can’t watch people dying anymore.’

I was somewhat surprised that Elijah had come back to the house. Only two weeks before, he and my mother had a spat over family dinner. He was already behaving differently then, more irritable and reactive. Since moving out of home and enrolling in art school Elijah had found it challenging to make ends meet. My mother’s suggestion was always to restart cello tuition to high-school students, a job he’d ceased when he moved to the inner city. But Elijah didn’t want to go back to teaching music; he wanted only to work in the visual arts, to learn and make and derive enough income from that world: a solution that seemed impossible.

Of course, my brother was always welcome to move back home, to eat there, but my parents made a point of him needing to cultivate his independence too. I knew the costs of living in Sydney were high, that it was a difficult place to be a student; Elijah made those early years of adulthood seem hard.

Elijah stroked my hair back from my forehead until it lay across the pillow in greasy strands. It had been a long time since anyone had done that, or since my hair smelt of lemons, was brittle with seawater and streaked by the sun.

‘You don’t have to go back, but you do have to get up. Also, I found something I think you’d be good at.’

Elijah handed me a cut out: a square advertisement from the jobs section of the newspaper. He’d probably been scouring it for himself.

At the top of the newspaper was a blue figure made of brushstrokes that ran across the page, and behind it streamed a double helix of blue and purple flying out from the hand like a kite.

PhD Scholarships

The Macquarie Institute is seeking talented graduates of Science or Medicine to undertake research into the genetic basis of disease …

~

My phone rang with a number I didn’t recognise.

‘Hello?’ I answered.

‘Hey.’

I knew the voice but couldn’t place it.

‘It’s Zed.’

He sounded like the past.

‘Oh, hey. New number?’

‘Yeah, I burnt the other one. Fresh start.’

That prompted me to ask, ‘Hey, those people you were selling for, you and Elijah don’t, like, owe them at all do you?’

‘Nah.’ Zed said. ‘I squared away all my debts, your brother’s too. I told him that.’

‘It’s just that last time I spoke to Elijah, he seemed to think there were people following him.’

‘Nah,’ Zed said again, in a definite way. ‘Anyway, I need you to come and get his stuff.’

Not even saying Elijah’s name; Zed was good at burning things, it seemed.

‘Are you kidding me? Already?’

‘I need to rent out the room.’

‘But what if we find him? What if he comes back?’

‘Well as long as he’s not around, he’s not paying his board.’ Zed was talking faster and the pitch of his voice went up a notch; he was getting defensive. ‘And hey, I’m not like you all. I’m not made from money.’

I didn’t have a comeback for that. There was no advantage in fighting Zed over this.

‘Okay, I’ll come get it.’

Zed. What was it we called him? A survivalist.

I walked under the giant Coke sign and past the statue of meatballs on skewers, towards the apartments where Elijah used to live with Zed. It was early and people were accumulating in front of poker machines. The white ribbon lighting of the billboard flashed and the background panels lit up like floorboards in a sequence.

I rang the doorbell at the security door and a buzz let me in. The stairwell inside was filled with wet leaves and junk mail. After I knocked on the apartment door I heard Zed’s footsteps. He opened the door in a pair of old jeans and a hooded sweatshirt.

He was paler than when I’d last seen him. His skin was sallow as he let me across the threshold while barely looking at me. I wondered how that happened: how people who were part of your family could become complete strangers.

Some days when I thought about how Zed just left our relationship I wondered if it was in part related to his father abandoning him. If he’d somehow associated loving with leaving.

But then on other days I thought I might just be flattering myself.

Zed ran his fingers through the front of his hair. I looked at his ears, the lines around his eyes and his neck, for the person I used to know – but was unable to find him.

Zed nodded at the hallway. ‘His room’s down there on the right.’ His eyes darted around and evaded my face. ‘I gotta be somewhere: you can let yourself out.’

Then I was alone.

Elijah’s room was small and smelt of dust. It felt like he hadn’t been there for a long time. There was an old futon with a plaid doona cover on it and a pile of books and music score in the corner. Contents of the desk and bookshelf appeared to have been pillaged; the only things left had been deemed to hold no value.

I put my bag on the floor and decided what to take. I folded up the doona and sorted through the books, taking all the cello music for Rebekah. I put the rest in garbage bags and carried them downstairs, placing them near the front door.

In the built-in wardrobe, I took out some pants and a flannel shirt of Elijah’s and binned an umbrella and a baseball cap I’d never seen before. The cupboard looked empty and I was about to leave when something in the far corner caught my eye. I slid the door across. There in the back of the wardrobe was a crumpled black sack. For an instant I mistook it for a body bag. I lifted it out and things inside moved. I unzipped the soft case and inside I found the broken remains of Elijah’s cello.

The scrolled head dismembered from a battered body; wooden layers coming apart. Splintered wood stuck out like splayed ribs from the upper bout. There was no bridge and only two strings. It looked as though someone had picked it up by the neck and hit it over a hard object. This was shocking to me, as Elijah was not a destructive person – all he was ever really interested in was making things. Even if he didn’t want to be a professional musician anymore, the brother I knew would not have destroyed an object of such beauty, let alone one with which he’d shared so much. The damage could only have been the result of utter desperation or an act of deliberate self-harm.

When we were younger and Elijah played I used to think, when watching him from the side or behind, that the neck and scroll looked like a wizard’s staff. Larger and more imposing than a wand, it had to be leant on the ground and stood as tall as his head. All that power that it radiated: did it derive from Elijah or the instrument? It was impossible to know, like in that poem about the dancer and the dance.

I ran my fingers along the soft grain of the inside body, a part not meant to be visible to me. It reminded me of the first time I saw open heart surgery as a medical student: the sternum sawed through and the ribcage held open by retractors. This was where I had thought it hid: the literal wolf that Rebekah could hear. Not bestial at all, but just the sound of feuding energies.

Not caged, unless of course it had already been released.

I didn’t think the cello could be saved, but it felt wrong to leave it. I gently put all the parts back in the case and closed it. I tended to it carefully and with love, in the way I wanted to tend to my brother but wasn’t able to.

If Dad and Rebekah had intervened earlier and harder with Elijah, would I be here, doing this?

I carried it with the other things down the stairs. The apartment was quiet as I let the security door lock behind me and stepped back onto the street.

~

‘Is that a real cat?’ I asked. I was back in the sanctuary of the bookshop. It seemed to exist outside the rest of my life and whatever was real. Hyun was the only person there who knew me, and he was unaware of everything going on in my world.

That day I’d found a stack of books upstairs in the second-hand section – novels mostly. The tomes were an antidote to the scene at Zed’s; I found whenever something bad happened, finding new books helped. Second-hand ones were on-sold so cheaply that my measly research stipend could go a bit further in terms of dog-eared medicine.

Hyun was at the counter. Behind where he was standing was a table holding an impossible number of books, and on top of one tall stack was a soft oval cat bed with a sleeping tortoiseshell filling the space inside. The animal lay so still it was hard to tell if it was alive or not.

‘Yeah, this is Pyewacket.’ Hyun turned and gently scrubbed the cat between its ears in a way that made the animal turn its head upside-down.

‘Pyewacket,’ I repeated.

‘It’s a literary name,’ Hyun said. ‘This is a very literary cat.’

‘Well, they would have to be,’ I said with a small smile and handed over my purchases. Hyun was wearing suspenders again, this time with dropped-crotch trousers and a dark shirt with a thin tie. He always wore interesting combinations of garments that would look strange worn by other people but somehow made sense on him.

‘Have you seen the movie of this?’ Hyun held up the volume I’d found in the science fiction section, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? ‘It’s Blade Runner, the film I mean.’

‘Oh, right.’ I hadn’t been to see a movie or a band in a while; I’d just been suspended in time.

‘It’s playing at the Dendy,’ he continued. ‘I was going to go with a friend, but they can’t make it. Want to come with?’

I looked at Hyun then, trying to discern if he had some unstated motive, but the way he spoke was the way he always did: warm and light and as if he was just verbalising whatever was going through his head at the time. I suppose it would be easy to be like that, friendly and spontaneous, if you didn’t have a brother who was gone.

‘Sure,’ I said, but I wasn’t.

~

Dad made an appointment for me to see a counsellor. She smelt of dewberry and wore her brown ponytail in a scrunchie. I sat in the room with her for an hour not knowing what to say and not wanting someone I didn’t know to pry into my life.

‘Tell me about how you feel,’ she said, and I immediately became defensive.

The weekend before there was something nagging on my mind. When I realised what it was, I heard the sound of dropped plates and saw the diazepam in my brother’s hand. Those tablets prescribed for me that I told Elijah he could take, leaning towards me in their foil blister pack like an old friend with a bad idea. I couldn’t shake the thought that they had something to do with his disappearance.

I tried to tell her about Elijah. It was hard to talk about someone who had disappeared.

I kept slipping between present and past tense.

I said if I knew Elijah had died I could mourn. If we had his body we could bury him. If he was murdered we could blame someone. If he was maimed I could get angry. If he was unable to walk I could push him down the street in a wheelchair. His disappearance, his lack of existence, spread out in an oceanic unknowingness. A small part of me knew he was dead, and a small part of me knew he was alive. I oscillated between these two certainties to the point of exhaustion.

Or that’s what I was trying to say. I wasn’t sure how much of it came out in a way that was coherent. She asked me to make another appointment for the following week, but I didn’t go back.

Later that night I thought more about the counsellor’s questions. I tried to conceptualise more of what I was feeling. The closest explanation was I felt robbed of knowing what had happened to Elijah, even if he’d died and it was violent and horrible. If he suffered I would rather know, because it was a part of him, of his life. If as approaching his ruin, he was out of control and hurtled towards the inevitable; if he wasn’t quite himself, affected by drugs, and said things that didn’t make sense or were cruel.

I didn’t want Elijah to be – to have been – alone at his finish. If he splattered all over me at the end I could wear him through the rest of my life, carrying the mantle of my brother on me like the dark side of the moon.