What was the evidence that I was on the cusp of meeting my brother?
Yes, I knew more about him than when I began. It’s also true I sometimes felt we were virtually one. That I was, in fact, Jeremiah, and soon the three of us would be united, with Westley commending me for having so rigorously pursued the quest when often even he might have given up.
But truthfully, I was no closer to connecting with him than I had been when we were absolute strangers.
It was all in my head.
I’d believed I would encounter geographical evidence in his stories that I could trace. Failing in that effort, I chased the seminary lead, following his various pastoral assignments with what I perceived to be some success. Except I was no closer to physically meeting him than would be a biographer of his long deceased subject.
In truth, I had been fooling myself.
Did I require more evidence that the acid-green lights on the bridge had illumined the pathway to this bilious-tasting self-awareness?
And that evening—concluding that even the initial visit to my father to bid him good-bye had been, at best, a naive one—I was still acting out the child, deceiving myself that it was the honorable gesture a son owed his father.
“Made in God’s image” had imploded, fallen in upon itself. I was nothing. Nobody. A ready-made self handed to me at birth that I had willed myself to grow into. Then one day it will breathe its final breath in me and I will deflate.
I lay in bed watching the car lights outside my window circle on my ceiling and thought about feeling my way, hand over hand, on the bridge’s parapet to its center. There would be no phoning my father this time. Enough of that. Let them recall me as they created me. Who was I anyway? My brother’s keeper?
And that brought a caustic grin to my face.
How about if this is where we reunite, I thought. At its center. One of us has to go first. Am I braver than you?
And then I recalled his story. But was it mine? I no longer knew for certain. For I had been at this very place before. I distinctly recall my father saying, “Hold on.”
“This is an emergency, lady. My number is 7-6208, Sharon exchange. Charge it to me.” I could hear him mutter, “My boy’s in some kind of distress.” She kept repeating, Five cents, please, deposit another five cents. “Christ, can’t you hear me, lady? Santa Muerte, festooned with green lights, is winging my kid across the dark Allegheny—and they’re about to merge with the fucking Ohio! It’ll be in all the papers in the morning if you don’t let us continue this conversation.”
Then nothing.
All we could hear was each other taking air. And for what seemed a whole minute, surely a dime’s worth, we breathed heavy, sucked wind, scrambling away from Mr. Taps.
Cajoling the operator not to cut us off.
For his boy was about to find his way to Huck and Jim’s proverbial raft.
It could be Westley’s and mine. Maybe that’s where we would converge: down at the mouth of the Mississippi. And start all over, this time creating ourselves, christening ourselves with our own names, abandoning the pasts that were never truly ours anyway.
And if fortune smiled upon us, one identity would suffice for navigating the rapids surely ahead of us.
It was at this moment that I sat up, faced my bedroom window, and saw him staring back at me.
“Westley,” I murmured, fearing I would cause him to vanish. But he continued to stare at me, unblinking.
“What is it?” I asked. “Please answer me.”
I slowly crawled out of bed and stepped to the window. He had not moved. As I got closer, I urged him to speak. “Call my name. Something. Identify yourself, for Christ’s sake and your unholy brother’s.”
I moved my face to the window and pleaded with him not to move his. Then, as if from some long-buried memory, I placed my lips to his and sang a lament. And the pane buzzed.
The window harp sang in my room that night.
I wept to his image.
As he surely did to mine, for the room wept in a harp’s despairing tone. A keening of sorts, an unholy song of separation. A longing for the selves to be reunited.
He warbling to me, I to him.
And somewhere in this hymn of lost brothers, I begged for him not to leave. And if he would stay . . . so would I.
For I could foresee in his eyes that dark night what he wished to say to me if he could have spoken.
But he couldn’t, for it was my voice, my tongue, my utterance.
He could only signal by his eyes that at the most intense moment of that brief encounter, they appeared as headlights on our family car, and I saw them stopping before me as I climbed the parapet, blinking on and off, as if in fright that I could go through with it.
The headlights nearly blinded me, letting me know I wasn’t alone. There was somebody inside that automobile, signaling me to stop.
And I did.
I did, understanding that if I left, he had no choice but to leave also.
An epiphany on the bridge of acid-green lights.
When daylight broke, I knew what I must do. It couldn’t have been more evident. I would join him in the very same way he’d joined other identities in “Going Dark.” I would become my brother as a means to reunite us.
This was the true pathway to discovering him.
His appearance in the window told me that.
I would become Westley Mueller.