“WHAT DO YOU THINK?” DAVID SAYS. I CAN’T TELL IF HE IS kidding. There’s no way he could really want my opinion about this new shithole apartment he shares with his girlfriend, this life he decided was worth throwing away Yale, worth throwing away our family.
“It’s okay,” I say.
“Don’t get distracted by the way it looks,” he says, stamping out his cigarette in the already overflowing ashtray. “That’s superficial shit. That’s the bullshit people like Dad want you to think is important. Money and power and position. That’s their world, Marcus, not ours.” He gets up off the ripped and saggy sofa, steps over a pile of clothes on the floor and into the tiny kitchen, and pulls two beers out of the fridge.
“This apartment means freedom,” he says, handing me a beer.
This apartment means he’s gone. It’s final proof of what I’ve known in my heart for months, as I’ve been missing my brother even when he’s standing right in front of me.
“Did Mom buy you this beer?” I say.
“Yeah.” He laughs. “She took me to Trader Joe’s and basically told me I could fill up the cart with anything I wanted. I cleared out the frozen pizzas.”
What am I supposed to say to that? Congratulations on using Mom’s weird codependent need for your devotion to get free groceries?
“It’s so funny,” David says, lighting another cigarette. “She’s the one who always talked about leaving, and I totally beat her to it.”
David’s girlfriend, Natalie, is lying on the couch next to him, her head resting in his lap. She was already tired after a long night of work at the strip club, then she had a joint and four shots of tequila as soon as she got home, and now she can barely keep her eyes open. “I made really good money tonight,” she murmurs. “And I didn’t even have to touch anyone.” She laughs to herself at the joke I cannot bring myself to understand.
“Don’t judge me,” she slurs in halfhearted outrage, at an imagined reaction she could not have seen through her closed eyelids.
I am barely more conscious than her. She is snoring now. I cannot open my eyes more than slits. Before I pass out, the last thing I see is David laughing, still completely awake despite having consumed more than twice as much as us. He is stacking things on top of Natalie’s prone body, as if she is a table, not a person, as if she is an unfeeling thing—the TV remote, junk mail, a dirty plate.
David’s lip is cracked and his eye is swollen and blue. He’s been gone for five days and won’t tell me where he’s been. I called him as soon as I read the letter Mom left in the kitchen, but apparently she had gotten to him first.
I want to talk about her. I want to know what she told him. I want to show him the letter she left for Dad and me, how it explains nothing. It weighs heavy in my pocket, the drunken, scribbled words burning a hole into my leg where they are scrawled across the page:
I can’t take this anymore. I’m leaving. I’m sorry, Marcus. I love you. Maybe someday I’ll figure out how to be a mother, but I am done being a wife.
I want to know if she told him more than she told me. I want to know how his heart is breaking, if it is in the same shattered pieces as mine.
But he refuses to talk about her. He won’t tell me where he’s been or how he got the black eye. “She’s gone,” is all he says. “It’s over.” He’s pacing around the apartment like a trapped animal.
“What’s over?” I say. I want to hurt him. I want to hurt somebody. I want to hurt myself. I want to dig into my skin until this pain stops. I need something to make me stop thinking about her, about her absence, about my being left alone in that house with no one on my side.
“Our family,” he says. “I’m gone and she’s gone.”
“I’m still here,” I say, but he doesn’t hear me.
“Fuck it,” he says. He sits down and pulls a small leather bag out of his pocket. I watch as he pulls out a wrinkled piece of burned black tinfoil. A glass pipe. A baggie of brown clumped powder.
Because I don’t see any needles, I tell myself David’s not a junkie. But, deep down, I know heroin is still heroin, even if you smoke it.
I pull the letter out of my pocket. I shove it in front of him. “Read it,” I say. He takes it without looking at me, pulls a lighter out of his pocket, and lights it on fire. I watch the flame climb up the paper and lick his fingers. “David,” I say.
His face is empty, blank. No pain, no feeling, nothing. For a split second, I wish I could be as numb as him.
“David!” I pull the letter out of his hand and throw it in the ashtray. It is black, charred, barely solid. The words are gone. It is halfway to ash.
David sits there, looking at his hand with no expression on his face. The tips of his fingers are burned red. They will blister for sure.
“Does it hurt?” I say. I suddenly feel strangely calm. His pain is so big it erases mine.
“No,” he says. “Nothing hurts.”
I say nothing as I watch him get loaded. I am removed somehow, watching a documentary about a promising kid’s life getting destroyed by drugs. It is someone else’s brother, someone else’s life. He smokes until he can’t keep his eyes open. Even after all we’ve drank together, all the pot we’ve smoked, the ecstasy, the mushrooms, the acid, he’s never been like this. Gone. Barely human. I know in this moment I am going to lose him too.
He sinks into the ratty couch and pulls an unzipped sleeping bag over himself. “I shouldn’t have left,” he mumbles. “I’m sorry, Marcus.”
“You can come back,” I say, but he’s already sleeping, and I know it isn’t true. When he left, there was nothing left for Mom to stay for. Now that she’s gone, I know he’s never coming home.
David sleeps his junkie sleep, the skin on his face slack, his mouth open and drooling, his mind emptied of its burdens. This deathlike sleep is the only way he knows to find peace. My brother has been replaced by a zombie.
I go home. The house is dark and silent. Dad is out with whatever bimbo he’s seeing at the moment. I could trash the place. I could destroy it beyond repair.
But instead, I walk up the grand staircase and down the hall to my bedroom. I don’t turn on the lights. I stand in the middle of my room and feel the darkness go on forever, in every direction. No matter what I do or where I go, it will be there. Waiting for me. Following me. I will never get away. Fate is fixed. There are only different shades of darkness.
I grab my left wrist with my right hand. I dig my fingernails into my flesh. The darkness contracts. But my nails are not long enough. I need something sharper to really carve the darkness away.
I am disgusted with myself the moment I think of it, but there is already so much to be disgusted by, what’s one more thing? I walk slowly, calmly to the bathroom. I lift my razor from the counter. I remember how proud I was the day I first shaved, how it was David, not Dad, who showed me how.
I pull the plastic away from the blade. The sharp edge reflects the ceiling light as I feel the metal sliver in my hand.
I try not to think. I focus on the steps down the hall. One two three. Back to my room. Back to the darkness of my cave, where I will huddle in the corner, tiny as a mouse, hiding from the beasts that are most hungry, making myself small and bitter tasting so they won’t want me.
I lock the door, not that Dad would ever come to this part of the house. I take off my shirt. I turn the lights off and light one candle. Everything else stops existing. My world is the dull circle illuminated by that weak flame. Reality flickers in and out.
This blade, this tiny, sharp thing. It has the power to shrink the world to the size of a narrow line. A centimeter, an inch. A moment of nothing. Just a finite location, so small there is no room for David, no room for Mom or Dad or anyone else whose absence demands so much space inside me. I press down and meet resistance. I press down, harder, and in a split second my pain funnels to this minuscule opening, this dot of light.
I cut myself to let them go. I open my skin to release them. I slice them away. I bleed them out. The pain makes me clean. And the blood speaks louder than I ever could. The blood is my voice. It tells me I’m alive.