"WHY DO YOU gotta ask this shit?" my brother says across a table of empty wine bottles. We have just finished an expensive dinner for my father's 60th birthday. I had asked my father if he was satisfied with his life. He shrugged. The question ricocheted off him and landed in front of my mother. She didn't answer.
My brother once told me that he respected my "quest for truth" but sometimes it was a bit much. My quest had been going on for years, as if my interviews would never end. It didn't matter that I didn't have my recorder; I asked questions all the time, whenever they popped into my head. I wanted to know everything. Mom, what was your first car? Dad, where did you and Mom go on your first date? How old were you guys when you lost your virginity? Was it to each other? What was your wedding song? What was the first movie you saw together? I didn't know what I planned to do with this information, but I thought: I lived with these people for almost twenty years and there is so much I still don't know.
Perhaps I felt comfortable asking these questions because I had listened to so many conversations between Vanessa and her family-how instead of talking about traffic or re-runs, they grilled each other, in a light-hearted way. With the television on mute, Vanessa asked her Mom about sex and drugs, what her life was like before Vanessa was born, what she wanted to do with her life, and if she felt satisfied with the way things turned out. Sometimes these conversations moved from laughter to tears in seconds, and I'd suddenly become very interested in the food on my plate. But after they cried together, they seemed closer.
I didn't understand why my question at dinner derailed the conversation. Vanessa and I asked each other questions like that all the time. "Checking in," we called it. It was our way of making sure we were living the lives we wanted, that we weren't coasting through year after year. But my question seems too direct for my family, as if I've thrown them on stage and watched them burn in the spotlight. My father looks away. My mother stirs the melting ice in her glass. Don shakes his head.
"Just let it go, man." Don says. "Move on."
I used to think all I had to do was let go. So you were a shy kid, let it go. So you spent most of your life listening, let it go. So you never felt connected with yourself, with others, let it go.
My brother moved on at a hundred miles per hour. He seemed to not only have the ability to let go, but crumple the past into a ball and toss it over his shoulder. Sometimes our phone conversations sound as if I'm tapping into his audio diary. The fast-forward button is stuck and his tape is racing, racing, racing, telling me about all the "justs" standing in his way: If he could just leave his job, just find a new apartment just get his brain out of this damn fog. Once he said to me, "I sometimes wish I'd die before I'm thirty, just so I wouldn't have to think anymore." He just turned thirty-four.
I wanted to shout: I feel the same way! All I do is listen and think. This should have been a moment for us to connect. But we didn't. I wasn't there. I was on the phone and I was listening, but I was in a bar years earlier, trying to find the words to express my disconnection from everything in my life, my own fog that descended on me or that I put myself in, obscuring my vision, muffling my heartbeat. I had spent months searching for the words but found nothing. In the corner of the bar, I turned my empty palms up as if they were the only place I hadn't looked. Don sipped his beer and stared at me.
"You know, your depression is really starting to bring me down, dude."
I want to play this tape in reverse, scratch the needle back across the record and hear a secret message. There must be another sound, a faint instrument I haven't heard. There must be.
I had planned to interview my brother. Drive down from Boston to his apartment, set the digital recorder on his coffee table, and start asking questions. Did you consider yourself a rebellious kid? Do you live more in the past or present? List from earliest to latest the cars you've crashed. I was set to do it, even told him why I was coming, but I chickened out. I was almost twenty-six, but I felt like the chubby little kid sitting on the hood of Don's Volare, watching him and the other characters in his world. I wanted to ask him about his life in California. Sometimes I'd bring it up and he'd sigh and ask me why I wanted to know about that. I'd shrug and say, "I don't know. Just curious."
As I dug through my backpack in his living room, preparing to change into shorts and go to sleep, I felt my recorder rubber-banded to my black notebook full of questions. My brother was in his room, opening and closing dresser drawers. He came out into the living room, to the kitchen, then back to his room. He forgot something, returned to the kitchen, then back to his room once more. He came back out and stood in the doorway.
"Goodnight, bro," I said, rolling over.
I felt him linger in the room. The floor creaked beneath his feet. "Okay."
Instead of talking to him, I sent him an e-mail. It felt like when I used to write him letters in high school, especially since I still had many of the same questions. But I could articulate them better now, and my email wasn't bogged down with my, and my friends', orders for Hustler.
He wrote back a long e-mail that I read over and over. He told me he did consider himself a rebellious kid: "Ever notice how many 'troubled teen' books Mom has around the house?" But he also thought that in order to rebel, one had to spit in the face of a controlling element, and he didn't have that. It was my parents' "hands-off" approach that allowed him to run wild. Only when the conflict was unavoidable, when my parents could not ignore the damage my brother did to himself or his cars did they respond—my father's once-a-year blowouts, an Old Faithful of fucks letting my brother and anyone else in the room know what was going on inside him.
At the end of Don's e-mail, he wrote about his cars:
'78 Plymouth Volare. Cherry red with a white soft top. Slant 6 engine that wouldn't die. I think I changed the oil once in two years. Slammed that one into a cement divider on the Expressway when it hydroplaned out of control. I stepped on the brakes too hard at the last minute. Car had a habit of sliding a lot anyways and I still get nervous taking sharp turns or hitting the brakes too hard, especially in the rain.
'79 Buick. Regal. Matte black with red velvet interior and faux-wood dash. So sweet. Had a Buzz Lightyear super-glued to the hood as an ornament. Coming off the Expressway, a woman in a Volvo station wagon ran a light at a three-way stop (she had no license, and no insurance) and I slammed into her on the driver's side. No stopping time. Almost broke my nose. Blood gushed out like a fountain. Totaled.
'98 Jeep Wrangler. White. Sweet. Crashed across a few lawns one night. I was pretty messed up and no sleep, and should not have been driving. Just a few minutes before I had been pulled over by a cop for swerving on the road. I did the sobriety/walk the line/touch your nose test and told him I was just tired. Got out of the car and walked home. Mom and Dad were asleep. Came back the next morning and saw the path of destruction across a Japanese garden and the cars and trees I scraped but just barely missed smacking into and either destroying or being destroyed by.
Yup, crashed 'em all. Can't wait to own a motorcycle.
When my father and Don fought in the living room, the backyard, the driveway, I listened. Fuck you and fuck, you, too, and get out of my house, and I am, and good, start walking. And when it was over, the house hummed with silence and the air around my face felt close and thick. Don would be gone for a few days and then he'd return and the house became calm. Eventually, Don quit or got fired from the gas station or department store, and the weather within our home would begin to change again. A shift in temperature. Each morning my father woke up, each morning my brother went to sleep, they crossed paths like jet streams flowing in opposite directions.
Most fights rumbled like dormant volcanoes. No explosions, no fire. No clear winner or loser. A latent heat spread across our landscape, and I searched for clues within the ripples steaming at the surface.
When I think about my brother, I see a boy holding his breath. In the summers, when I was in elementary school and Don was in high school, we spent afternoons in the pool. He dove to the bottom, air bubbling from his lungs, and sank like an egg in a pot of boiling water. I followed him down, forcing air out of my body, but I couldn't quite sit on the bottom. I didn't realize that if I remained still, if I tucked in my arms and feet like Don, I would sink quicker. I struggled to get my knees down. I felt the roots beneath the pool pushing up through the blue liner.
Don sat across from me, eyes wide. I stared back at him, slowly flapping my arms, trying to keep my body submerged. Our voices sounded like the adults in Charlie Brown. We pretended we were at a fancy Hollywood party. Don pressed his hand to his ear and I repeated my question; he raised his pointer finger, complimenting my astute observations of his latest script. When he spoke, I rubbed my chin and nodded, as if yes, I agree, he would be perfect for my next film. I wanted to stay down there forever, but my eyes burned and the water felt heavy against my chest. I tapped the top of my wrist as if I were late for an appointment, then pushed myself to the top. Before I reached the air, I looked back at Don on the floor. He gazed from left to right as if chatting with other guests at the party. Each word bubbled from his mouth—small, clear balloons on a turbulent path to the surface.
Don never wanted to live a stalled life: Suburbs, mortgage, kids, television. So he moved on. Moved on to high school graduation and gas stations and community college. Moved on to art school. Moved from class to class, party to party, drug to drug. Moving and moving and moving. Moving at the speed of sound: waves crashing beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. The speed of light: neon throbbing in the window as he rang up films of people feigning pleasure. Moved back home, then back out. Plowed through college a second time, won awards for his paintings and photographs, steady job, steady girlfriend, but there was always something. Something pulling him. Something else.
I feel like my brother and I have been sitting on opposite ends of the same see-saw. We listen to the same music, watch the same movies, but often at different times: He'll be in his Rolling Stones and Scorsese phase, while I'm headlong into The Coen Brothers and Bob Dylan. We read nonfiction, but he'll loan me books about larger-than-life explorers navigating through the Amazon or high-profile serial killers at the turn of the century. I'll offer memoirs about domestic issues or father-son relationships, books by Tobias and Geoffrey Wolff—two brothers writing about the same man.
Don tries to introduce me to new music, bands that are still making the rounds at small bars and clubs in Brooklyn. He makes me mixes of this unfamiliar music and FedEx's them to Boston. I open the CDs and check the playlists for bands I recognize, songs I know by heart. I put the CD in my desk drawer where it will remain, for days, months, sometimes years, unheard.
Until one day I decide to clean. I pop in one of Don's CDs for background music, songs that won't distract me. As I scrub around the bathroom floor, sponging up renegade bobby pins and strands of my hair and Vanessa's, I pause. I hear a song I recognize. Not a tune I know by heart, but it's familiar. I walk over to the computer and check the artist, the title, and try to place the song. But it can't be placed. It's new. Something I've never heard before.