Angel sitting in the dark at his brother’s desk. Behind him the blinds were drawn, wood tabletop stone-smooth to the touch, a pile of papers in one corner and an Emeralite lamp in the other. The house, one of those thick-walled Garden District tombs, was quiet, and while Angel waited he’d been peopling it in his mind. Hard as it was to imagine Red with a family, he’d noticed the signs on his way in. Traces of a childhood as he’d once left in a house not unlike this one. Angel’s eyes had just begun to adjust when Red, or the sound of him, a rush of air, a voice, came into the room.
—Who’s there?
When a person asks questions of the dark, there is a part of the asking that is not totally sincere. The default state of our minds says that no one is there. But by the sound of Red’s voice, all his darknesses were densely peopled. This voice, years and octaves back, had begged him, Play with me. Angel’s fingers found the beaded cord of the Emeralite and pulled it. The bulb flashed on and they faced each other in a pale green pool of light.
It took Angel a moment to grasp what he was seeing, what surrounded him. The walls of the room and even the door Red shut were papered in a pattern of overlapping crescents colored green, and gold, and black. Bananas in their stages of ripeness, a massive downpour of fruit.
While Angel sat blinking, his brother’s eyes went first to Angel’s hands. What the hands were doing, what they held (at the moment, nothing) concerned him more than the face of the brother he’d believed dead for almost a decade. Angel didn’t know whether to be pleased or repulsed.
—When you were little, you used to steal my cleats. Wear them all over the house. Scratched the hell out of the parquet. Drove Mom and the maid crazy, but you’d clomp around all the same.
The light was like what happens in the aftermath of a storm, all milky emerald, a light that slows movement. The walls of fruit seemed to ripple and bulge.
—So, Red said.
—So I remember you, and before that, when I prayed for a little brother. When they brought you out, all wrapped up, I was proud of myself, like I was responsible. And when you scratched the floor or got blisters on your heels from shoes that were too big, I felt it too. I remember you, Red, and remembering you is the only thing that’s keeping me from doing what I should.
—Which is what, Angel? Kill me?
Angel was quiet.
—Then say it, man. Say it. Say, I’m going to kill you.
—No.
—Say I’m going to kill you, Red. I’m going to kill you because I can’t stand who I am, because I’m jealous—
—That’s what you want, isn’t it? A bloodbath. Fucking Greek tragedy. Prove to everyone just how important and grand the whole thing was.
As he spoke Angel thought of his brother’s family scattered throughout the house. What was the wife like? Did the children look like her or like their father? Did they love him, the children, or were they terrified of him, this father who, in death, if death were to find him tonight, would become forever barred from them and thus infinitely important.
A long silence then as he stared at his brother surrounded by the storm of fruit.
—Okay, Red said. Now what.
—Now you’re going to sit down, right there, and we’re going to talk, Angel said. And when we’re through, this’ll all be over.