The Innisfree no. 9: Lemonworld

No one said goodbye to them when they left for the party. Their mom was asleep in her room, and their dad was three states away in the bed of a woman they still couldn’t bring themselves to call mom. They called her Maggie, now, which was her name. For a long time they’d just called her bitch. Their older brother, Bart, was gone. Behind them, the house looked tall and ancient, half dead, as they drove away.

Before they’d left, Matt had said he didn’t want to go, but Kate had simply shaken her head and said he had to. He didn’t know if he agreed with her, but he got in the car anyway and let her drive him away. It felt good to be swept up in something.

“It’s nice having you home, Matt,” she said, after fifteen minutes of silence, but he just offered a wan smile and continued looking out the window. The houses got bigger as the lanes got smaller, as they traveled toward the very tip of this long island. Eventually there were no street lights, just glittering constellations from upstairs bedrooms or offices, or rec rooms.

Matt turned on the radio. 

“Ess ess ess emm emm emm,” said the singer. “Sticks and stones may break my bones but whips and chains excite me.”

“Jesus,” he said, grimacing out the window.

“You remember Brian Jameson?” asked Kate, turning the music down, changing the subject. “He graduated with me. Lacrosse player?”

Matt shook his head, “No.”

“I dated him for a bit…?”

“I said I don’t remember him,” said Matt, more sharply than he meant. 

“Alright,” she hissed. “Well his dad got cleaned out by the stock market a few months ago. They don’t talk about it, but everyone knows they’re totally fucked.”

“Who gives a shit, Kate?”

“I just thought you'd like to know who's house you're going to," she said. “You don’t have to be such an asshole. Not to me.”

“I told you I didn’t wanna go.”

“I can drop you off here, then. You’re resourceful. I’m sure you could find a way home.”

Kate pretended to pull to the shoulder of the road and Matt held out his hand and smiled a little.

“Fuck it,” he said, and then after a long while, “Sorry.”

“Damn right. I’m the only sister you got, Matt. You can be a dick to everyone else, but at least be nice to me.”

The stars were dim, washed out from the noise and pollution of the city just a few miles away, but the moon was wide and grinning, a blind and gibbering fool.

“Over there,” he said. “The stars were so goddamn bright. I’ve never seen ‘em like that. Nowhere else.”

Kate didn’t know how to respond, so she didn’t. She just nodded and pounded her hands on the steering wheel to the beat of the song and looked for the gate to Brian Jameson’s dad’s beach house.

***

The house was exactly what Matt had expected: ostentatious, vain, marble and glass, with a cobblestone driveway and seven bedrooms. All the lights were on and they bathed the drive with yellow and gold and white. Music blasted from the opened front door. Cars were parked everywhere. There was a valet standing at the front door. He opened Kate’s door and she handed him the keys and he gave her a ticket, which she put in her purse. She and Matt stood outside the house, looking in. They couldn’t see anyone, but they could hear everyone, and they followed the sounds to the back of the house and the pool. There was an outdoor kitchenette and bottles of liquor and cans of beer were strewn everywhere.

Brian Jameson emerged from the house with his arms full of bottles, and he nodded at them and tossed the bottles recklessly on the counter. He turned and stuck out his hand. Matt slowly took it, offered a cursory shake and then put his hands deep in the pocket of his hoodie.

“We’ve met,” said Brian, though he could tell by Matt’s face he had no idea who he was. “But it was a while ago…”

He stopped but Matt just brushed away the awkward ending and lied, “I remember you, Brian. You played lacrosse. Dated Kate. I remember.”

“Alright, cool,” said Brian. “You want a drink?”

Matt shrugged. Brian pointed at Kate.

“Kate? Vodka cranberry?”

“Sure.”

“That good for you, Matt?”

“Do you have any beer?”

“Of course.”

Brian opened a small fridge and tossed a beer back to Matt without looking and Matt, surprised, dropped the beer on the ground. It clattered, but didn’t break. 

“Sorry, dude.”

“No problem,” said Matt, picking up the beer and twisting the top off, shooting the fizz-spray off in the bushes. 

Brian gave Kate a red drink that was too strong.

“Well, make yourselves at home. There’s a pool table and foosball upstairs, darts. Pool’s obviously right here. Beach’s that way. Gonna start a fire soon. DJ in the basement.”

“And your parents?” asked Kate.

“Fuck,” said Brian and didn’t say anything else. They were in their 20s; who gave a fuck where their parents were. “Come on, Matt. Let me introduce you to some people. They let you smoke weed in the Army?”

***

Brian led them to a ring of people sitting on the beach around an unlit fire pit. Logs and kindling were stacked, waiting. Out here, the stars and moon were brighter. It was a clear night and they shone onto the water and made it seem like small phosphorescent creatures swimming in the sea. Brian swept his arm around the circle. 

“Everyone, this is Matt. He just got back from Iraq,” he said. “He’s a fucking hero. Matt, this is everyone. Everyone who matters, at least.”

Matt didn’t wave, or move. He just stood there, looking out onto the water. There were some murmurs. He didn’t feel like correcting Brian, that it was Afghanistan that he’d just come back from. He imagined it wouldn’t matter to this group anyway. Brian introduced Kate too but most everyone already knew her. 

The three of them sat down on logs. Brian passed a joint to Matt, and Matt held it in his hands for a long moment. He hadn’t smoked pot since before he’d enlisted, hadn’t really done much of anything for years, other than a few pipes of opium. He was still in the reserves and he could get drug-tested, but he didn’t give a shit. If they threw every reservist who failed a drug test in jail they wouldn’t have anyone left. He took a long drag and held it in his lungs for as long as he could. He exhaled and the smoke passed into the air and was gone.

He looked around at the people with him but they were a lot of darkened shadows. He could see no faces. They were shapes, wraiths. It made him at once terrified and bitterly homesick, as though two separate nightmares were competing inside him. In the end, they drowned each other, and he was left with this unintelligible, gray feeling. He closed his eyes, knowing they couldn’t see him either.

They chatted in low tones for an amount of time that was impossible for Matt to know, until Brian decided it was time to light the bonfire and went back to the house to get the matches. When he came back it took him only three matches to get the kindling started. It’d been a hot, dry summer and there was plenty of driftwood languishing all day in the summer sun. The fire rose up and burned bright and Matt knew he looked like a creep sitting with his eyes closed, so he smoked some more pot and looked around at the now illuminated ghosts. They looked like he’d imagined they’d look. Benetton, Tommy, Louis, collars popped, cords in beige and white, tanned, the boys with hair long enough to be a little wild, the girls with ponytails or cropped short, angular, edgy, $250 haircuts from one-word Manhattan salons. The boys were slouched, confident in their daddy’s money, which would one day be theirs; the girls confident that it would actually be theirs, one way or another.

He put his hands deeper in the pocket of his hoodie, wishing he could stuff his whole body in there. He wasn’t uncomfortable because he was out of place; he was uncomfortable because he knew exactly what this felt like. It could’ve been his, if things had been different, if he’d been different. He drank the rest of his beer, and left the fire to find another drink. Kate started to follow him, but he waved her off and she stayed. She wasn’t sure what to do with him, so she didn’t do anything. He’d been moody and sharp before he’d left, but at least then he’d been predictably so. Now he was like a short in a wall plug, flickering, dead then not.

Matt got another beer from the fridge where Brian had gotten the first. There were more people now, and the pool was overflowing with kids in bathing suits and not in bathing suits and they screeched like owls. The thud of the DJ came through the walls and so he went in the house and followed the sound. The music would be loud, but at least it would be one sound, not a lot of sounds all together.

The house was even bigger than it looked from the outside; the music seemed ever out of reach, just one more bend away. He went down a long, winding set of stairs and there were pictures on the wall and Matt looked at the pictures. They were framed, each of them, some black and white, others color, following an upward social trajectory even as the pictures themselves went down into the basement.

There was a picture of a man in a suit. It was black and white, old, at least twenty years old. The man must have been Brian’s dad; he looked just like him, except beginning to lose his hair, except more generous in his features, as though there was more of him to give, or he was more willing to part with what he had. He stood in a semicircle with a group of men who all looked about the same age. The picture had been taken from somewhere above them, and the group of young men looked up at the camera and they all held up bottles of champagne to the camera. They were smiling with wide, world-eating grins. They were the inheritors of history and they had scarfed it down for dinner and now they were drinking champagne. Matt reached out and he touched the face of Brian’s dad. The man looked so young and so proud and so full of everything. The lines beginning to form around his eyes said that he’d seen things and he had defeated them and nothing would defeat him again.

Matt leaned back and chuffed, thinking of what Kate had told him earlier. No one could eat the world, he thought. There was always a bigger fish, always something bigger, always something with more teeth and less shame. He kept walking down into the basement until he found a door and the pulse of the DJ thudded against it and rocked everything. He pushed open the door and gave himself over to it.

***

When Matt was seven and Kate was five, they’d lived in a house just like the Jameson’s. It was big and spacious and had a lot of bedrooms and when they were young it had felt cozy and their dad and mom, and their brother, Bart, the five of them, their life had seemed like enough to fill the place, make it small, make it livable. It wasn’t a happy childhood but it was comfortable enough. Their mother was strict, hyper-aware of the generations of money that coursed through her veins, and hence, her children’s. She coddled them like precious vases traveling a long distance, always wrapped, always guarded. She saw her children as the vessels of something dear, priceless, and she made everything tense, spent holidays scolding their father about his scotch or his cigars or his football, scolding the children about their posture or their gum chewing. It was harmless, really, the scolding. Their father didn’t seem fazed and so they weren’t either; they took their cues from him. He was affable and confident, his eyes softening when he smiled as if to say none of this shit is serious, so don’t let it get you down. That he was a corporate lawyer who brought home eight figures after taxes must’ve helped ease some of the tension about his habits and the habits of his children. Nothing was serious, really. They were swimming in money, but their father had acquired all of his in his lifetime, and their mother never let him forget it, as if, at any moment, they could all tumble back to poverty-stricken obscurity, could take after his parents, who had been too poor to even pay for the rehearsal dinner at their wedding.

Bart was 13 years old, then. He was tall, and tan, and angry. He was five years older than Matt, and only seven months younger than their parents’ marriage, and these two things made him seem like the prow of some out of control ship, destined to hit the iceberg first. He played football and wrestled and ran track and he was good at all of these things in a chaotic, unfocused sort of way. He never won the State championship in wrestling, but he made Varsity as a freshman and he never got pinned and he won more matches than he lost by far. In football he was a linebacker because he told Matt he liked to be the hunter. He liked to hear the crunch of the pads in his ears, to feel the heat of the pain in his shoulders, liked to feel the ooof of the running back’s breath on his face as the two of them fell to the cold ground. 

Matt couldn’t relate to any of these things growing up. He was seven, which was old enough to have gotten in a fight, but he hadn’t. He was mild, prone to sharp left turns of personality that were rarely directed outwards, even at his family. He cried a lot. Timothy McVeigh had blown up that building in Oklahoma City that year and while Bart had told Matt that he wanted to watch the guy who did it fry like a motherfucker, Matt had just sobbed. He’d watched about five minutes of the news coverage and he’d seen the blood-covered stones in the street and his mother had sent him to his room until he could compose himself. She was embarrassed of the emotion, even from a seven year old. Bart had told him he was a piss-ant little fucker and Matt had believed it. Later, Kate had brought Matt some cookies and milk from the pantry.    

There was a pond on the property, and every winter it froze over. Sometimes they would ice skate in January, when it was good and thick and cold. Their mother never joined them, and it never occurred to Matt that it might be because she had no idea their father was letting them do it. Their ice skating sessions always coincided with a random Saturday afternoon their father had off of work and their mother was away shopping, or visiting her family. This never struck Matt as convenient, or interesting; he hated ice skating and only went because he didn’t want to be alone in the house. He brought books and sat next to his father watching Kate and Bart circle the pond in concentric turns. Kate was a natural, but Bart skated like he played linebacker, heavy and clunky and fierce.

***

The DJ was terrible, but his music was loud. Matt stood against the wall, his eyes closed, sipping his beer and feeling completely unmoored. There was a light show that was equally terrible, but Matt enjoyed it against the inside of his eyelids. He liked the thud of the bass and the flashing of the lights; it felt, if not comfortable, then normal to him. It felt as close to home as anything else he’d found since he’d come back. He pounded his free hand against the wall to the beat. His face would have been terrifying, if anyone had looked at it. There were only four other people in the basement. It was too beautiful of a summer night to be trapped in the basement of a disgraced businessman’s house, and so only the truly lost among them sought this place out.

He wanted to leave the party, but he knew he couldn’t, not yet. It would be cruel to Kate. She wanted to see these people. They were her friends, and it was the end of the summer, and in a few weeks she would be going back to Berkeley and wouldn’t be able to see them again until Christmas break.

And Christmas was always a tricky time.

He suddenly needed to be somewhere quiet, and lonely and dark, maybe somewhere with more pot, or something stronger. What was he gonna do with himself for the next few months? The question reverberated through him like the sound of ice breaking, an echo he had no answer for.

He went upstairs, past the picture of Brian’s dad smiling with his champagne, oblivious of the brick wall ahead of him just twenty or so years later. He grabbed another beer from the kitchenette and drank half of it immediately. What was he gonna do with himself? He would kill his mother if he had to spend more than three minutes with her, but she wasn’t gonna let him go, not again, not her only son?

“Matt,” said Kate, putting her hand lightly on his shoulder. She’d always been a gentle person. “Where the hell’ve you been?”

Her words were slurred a little and Matt was happy to see she had been drinking without him. He was keenly mindful of not ruining her time. He tried on a smile but it didn’t work, so he just stopped.

“I needed to be alone for a second,” he said.

She nodded her head and tried her own false grin.

Brian came up to them, “You two want some mushrooms?”

***

Matt suspected Brian wanted to fuck Kate which was why he was so interested in getting Matt as fucked up as possible. Only a small handful of people had been invited up to Brian’s room for the mushrooms and there was no good reason Matt should have been among them. But they took the mushrooms with peanut butter and bread and a couple of swigs of beer. It still tasted like shit, but not so much that they threw it up. Kate took less than an eighth because she had to drive them home at some point, but Matt took a full half. He was here, at this place, until he wasn’t, and there was no sense in fighting it. If Brian wanted to fuck Kate that was fine by him, or at least as fine as it could be for a brother. Kate was good looking, he knew that, and she was 21; she could do whatever she wanted.

It took thirty-two minutes for the mushrooms to kick in. Matt was in the bathroom taking a piss. There was paper on the walls with a repeating hunting motif and as he pissed he noticed that the hunters on horseback were starting to gallop. 

When he went back to the room, Kate had her legs flopped over Brian’s legs and his arm was around her. She didn’t see Matt, and he didn’t make himself known. He just turned and left, and went down to the pool. He sat at the edge of the water, on a lounge chair and watched the half-dressed kids jump in and out of the pool. There was one moron who insisted on flipping head first into the pool every time, and then whipping his wet hair and looking around to see if anyone noticed his acrobatics. No one ever did, save Matt, but Matt didn’t give him any compliments, and at any rate Matt wasn’t the one he was looking to impress.

After a while he grew bored of the pool and he looked up at the stars and he swore they were as bright as they’d been in Afghanistan and he swore for a minute he must’ve never left. But at the edges the city imposed and he knew he wasn’t there; he was here and here was here and not there. But, man, the stars were beautiful. He could see the Milky Way, the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, all these constellations he’d gotten to know over there.

Suddenly the sky was an empty pit to him and it vomited glittering sparks of forever on him and he groaned aloud and rolled off the lounge chair onto the cement and scraped his knees. He bent on hands and knees and panted. He knew he was going to throw up a moment before he did and then he was retching onto the patio and wishing he could just crawl into a hole and, if not die, then at least be alone.

But no one seemed to notice. There was a lot going on, and he was just one of those things. He wiped his mouth and he turned onto his butt and looked at the kids getting crazy in the pool and he wished that he could just be like them and forget any of this had happened, any of it.  He knew he couldn’t, but he wished it nonetheless. Couldn’t he just wear the Benetton once without feeling its endless weight? Why not?

He crawled back into the lounge chair and closed his eyes, and thought about what freedom really meant.

Next to him he heard someone ask, “You just got back from Iraq, right?”

***

“Iraq really fucked your brother up, didn’t it?” asked Brian quietly into Kate’s ear.

He held her close and she liked his warmth. She’d always liked him. He was slow and warm and easy. And now he was poor and she liked that even more. She placed the top of her head into the nook of his jaw.

“No,” she said, honestly.

The others left when the mushrooms were exhausted. No one wanted to be trapped in a room when they kicked in. Matt had left with the rest of them and then he’d come back. Kate had seen him, but she’d pretended she hadn’t. She didn’t want him to come back. She’d been responsible for him since she was five, even when he was away she was responsible, and she had a few drinks in her and she didn’t feel like it anymore. She wanted her brother to leave her alone. She wanted someone’s arms around her. She wanted someone comforting her.

“I don’t wanna talk about my brother,” she said and she kissed Brian to keep him from asking the obvious, painful questions and she grabbed hold of his hips and she rolled on top of him and she ground into him. She wanted to fuck him and then enjoy the party and not think about her hole of a brother or the emptiness he’d left behind for Kate to sweep up and tidy up and make pretty so her mother could function. She just wanted to be Kate for once in her damn life and not his sister, or his sister, both of them, supreme fuck-ups with long, neon sign trails that spread out all over this island. She’d chosen Cal precisely because it was so far away. 

Brian fumbled with his pants and he said something about a condom but she kissed away whatever he was gonna say and she helped him with his pants. She could feel the mushrooms grinding in her belly and she was grateful for the hollowness there and the feeling that she was above all of this. She kissed Brian’s neck and she ignored the sounds she heard from outside the window until it was too loud and she couldn’t ignore it any longer, raised voices and scraped chairs. Brian broke the kiss first.

“What the hell…?” He looked out the window and then back at Kate. “You’re brother…”

Kate leaned her chest into him but he set her gently aside, which felt as bad as a slap. She thought she could kill Matt. She was out the door before Brian could get his pants on, swearing under her breath the whole way down the stairs.

It was the question every asshole that remains safely behind wants to ask that did it, combined with the stars and the mushrooms and the discomfort, the unhealthy rawness of everything.

“Did you kill anyone?” the drunk asshole asked.

Matt thought he should give the question the sincerity it demanded, but then he looked over at the kid and the kid wasn’t even looking at him. He was asking the question like it was some rhetorical thing asked of the stars and that just made everything inside Matt boil and he rolled off his lounge chair and he grabbed the kid by his upturned collar and he dragged him from his lounge chair and he smacked the back of his head against the cement of the pool patio and he shouted a whole lot of unintelligible things at the kid. He didn’t know if he’d killed anyone, that was the horror of shooting blankly into empty buildings, but he’d watched someone die, many someone’s die, and that was close to the same thing. 

He hit the back of the kid’s head into the cement again and was going for a third time when his sister grabbed his arm and pulled him back and he let her pull him back though she was half his size. He went limp and he started to cry and he was immediately ashamed. Here she was, giving him fucking milk and cookies again.

“I’m sorry,” he said, but she led him away and patted his face and said everything was gonna be alright. This wasn’t right. He knew it and she knew it, and he knew she knew it, but it was the only way things could be. Forever and ever, amen.

***

Brian came later, but the kid who’d had his head smacked into the cement already had a wet cloth and he felt somehow like it was his fault this had happened and he actually had the balls to say he was sorry, which made Matt feel even more like a dickhead and stopped his crying cold. Brian didn’t say anything to Matt but he gave Kate a few strange looks and then led the bleeding kid to the bathroom.

“We should go,” Kate suggested, but Matt wanted to disappear and he thought he might have enough drugs in himself to do it.

“No, no,” he said, and shoved Kate’s hands aside. “I can take care of myself. Go on, get your fuck.”

And he knew it was cruel even as he said it. Kate stood straight and she pushed him and hit him in the face as hard as she could.

“You can go fuck yourself, Matt, really, you can,” she said, standing over him for a moment. Then she left, off to find Brian or another vodka cranberry or anything that might get her as far away from Matt as possible.

***

“You wanna see something cool?” asked Bart, sneaking up on Matt in their shared room. They didn’t need to share a room, but their parents thought it might toughen up Matt and give Bart a sense of responsibility. It did neither, really.

Matt looked up from his book and he knew he didn’t have a choice. He said, “Sure.”

On the way out of the house, they picked up Kate like magnets dragged across a metal filing. Bart led them across the snow-covered backyard to the frozen pond in the woods. He didn’t have his skates, and Kate didn’t have hers. The pond looked solid enough.

Bart took a step out on the ice, his tennis shoes slipping a little as he did. Matt heard a crack; if Bart did, he didn’t let on. 

“Bartie, we’re not supposed to be out here without daddy,” said Matt and he felt foolish even before it left his lips. He looked at Kate, wishing she’d said it, instead.

“Aww, babycakes, are you afraid?” asked Bart, smiling cruelly, and sliding farther onto the ice.

Kate took a step onto the ice, too. She was smaller and more sure-footed than Bart, but there was a loud crack and she immediately scrambled back onto the shore. Bart didn’t seem to notice. He slipped around on the ice, gaining his footing and then sliding awkwardly, trying to simulate having skates.

“Look at this, guys,” he said, straightening. “Look what Danny showed me. Look.”

Bart crouched low and looked about to do a flip or something but neither of them ever got to see what he was going to do, because his shifting weight broke the ice under him and he went cleanly, swiftly into the freezing water. It happened so suddenly and soundlessly that Matt was certain he’d imagined it, or was dreaming. Things didn’t happen like this. Bart had been there one moment and then he wasn’t. There was no sound, there was no splashing, no birds even chirping in the trees. There was only the sound of their breath against the frozen December air.

Matt’s thoughts were shocked, incoherent. He stood on the shore wondering what he should do. He looked over at Kate and she tried to step onto the ice again but it cracked and she lost her nerve and she looked back at Matt and she never really forgave him that original look, that he put this moment on her. He was the big brother. He was the one who should act. But he didn’t. He just stood on the edge of the ice and shouted Bart’s name until their father came sprinting to them almost ten minutes later, but by then it was too late.

***

He was certain Kate would come back, but when she didn’t he stripped to his boxers and jumped into the pool, hoping the chaos there would bury him somehow. He was stuck here now. He knew that. Kate wasn’t going anywhere for a long time. He looked around and didn’t recognize a single face, and they didn’t recognize him. They’d already forgotten him. The kid he’d fought was in the house, chugging beer with some of his friends. He’d moved on apparently, too.

Matt floated on his back and looked up at the stars. The constellations moved across the sky like bedazzled stick figures, scorpions and bears and heroes from a long gone age when men could fuck gods and be better than normal men. He listened to the voices of the other kids around him, his age, like him but not, splashing, shouting, swearing, playing at being adults, but free from any responsibility. None of this was serious; it was make believe, a giant Fisher-Price kitchen set for playing house. None of it was for him, though. He was too broken to play along, and at any rate he no longer understood the appeal.

***

He’d really liked opium the couple of times he’d tried it. It was everywhere over there. The big joke was that so much of their time was spent trying to convince farmers to stop growing it, but it was everywhere and it was the only thing anyone could get any money for. The place was a desolate wasteland, rolling hills of sand and metal and scrub brush. It was a place made for opium. Nothing else would grow. He liked it because it was the best of all possible worlds, mellow and psychedelic, without any of the lethargy or muddled head of pot. He could still think and function, but the buzz was so intense that he didn’t think about anything bad, just good stuff, just nice stuff, just warm and fuzzies.

The first time he smoked it was with one of those farmers he was supposed to be convincing to stop. His company was small and they traveled in groups of three, a Lieutenant, a Private, and an interpreter. Matt’s Lieutenant, Derrick, was only a year older than him but he’d been in Afghanistan since he was 19 and he looked like he was thirty and acted ageless. He was good with the Afghans, kind and compassionate, but he didn’t believe a word he was telling them. It had been two and a half years and nothing had really changed, or the change was so incremental that it was impossible to see. They knew it; he knew it.

The farmer had smiled at them and opened his arms and the interpreter said, “He’s asking if you want to share a pipe.”

“Will it help?” Derrick asked the interpreter, a question between the two of them, not meant for the farmer.

The interpreter had shrugged and Derrick had looked over at Matt, though he wasn’t looking for Matt’s approval or advice. He looked at Matt because Matt was the only one in the room he could trust.

“Fine,” Derrick said eventually.

It was a breach of protocol that would have gotten both of them courtmartialed if they’d been found out, but they weren’t. Matt was certain they were going to have their throats slit the entire time, or the hookah was laced with some poison, but nothing happened. They smiled and laughed and the farmer told them ghost stories with punch lines Matt didn’t understand.

When they left, the farmer grabbed Derrick’s arm and looked him right in the eye and said in perfect English, “I am not afraid to die.”

Derrick didn’t look away, and he didn’t pull his arm from the man’s hand. He replied, “No one’s gonna die.”

Slowly the farmer smiled and let go of Derrick’s arm and he laughed dryly and said something to the interpreter and went back to his pipe. They left. As they walked down the farmer’s dirt drive, Derrick asked the interpreter, “What’d he say? That last bit?”

The interpreter grinned hollowly in the waning sun, “He said, everyone dies.” 

***

Matt swam over to the edge of the pool where a group of girls in bikinis huddled and giggled and looked nice and knew they looked nice. They didn’t see him, or were so interested in their conversation that they didn’t notice him. He looked at their tits until he felt creepy and then he looked into the house and watched the people laughing and shouting and drinking. The mushrooms were really grinding on him and the windows elongated and stretched and were like perfect little frames for these vignettes of life unencumbered by pain or responsibility or fear. Like the pictures trailing into the Jameson’s basement, snapshots of all the good times before the great wall comes, before you realize you aren’t like those Greek heroes and that you’re really just very soft flesh and that the bigger fish always comes, with gnashing teeth and the rending of garments.

He didn’t notice Brian standing on the second floor balcony railing until Brian shouted, and then Matt looked up and the stars were so bright behind him, it was like Brian was a constellation, or an angel.

***

Kate made herself another drink and went upstairs to look for Brian. She wanted to finish what they’d started. She didn’t want to think about her brother’s brittle courage, or his crying. Brian wasn’t there. He’d finished patching up his friend and then he’d gone to the basement to listen to the DJ for a bit. He drank a couple of shots of Jack with one of his old friends from high school, who he hadn’t seen in years, and it was so awesome that he’d been able to make it and they asked the standard questions and they talked about the standard stuff. The friend had a kid now, with a chick he wanted to punch in the face most of the time. That sucks, man. That really sucks. They had a third shot and when Brian went back upstairs, Kate was in the bathroom and he walked right past the door, and then another old friend clapped him on the back and asked if he wanted to burn one, and then they went up to Brian’s room and did just that.   

Kate went out to the pool and her brother was there, floating on his back and staring off into somewhere as if nothing had happened. She wanted to throw a lounge chair at him, but she made another drink instead and went back upstairs. She found Brian, on his bed, his back against a poster of Bob Marley, wreathed in smoke, holding court with a few people Kate didn’t know.

“Kate,” he said. “Come in.”

His eyes burned red in his skull and his mouth was slack when he talked, but Kate didn’t care and she sat down next to him and she smoked with them until it was all gone. They listened to music that made her think of bare tree limbs and freshly fallen snow, which she didn’t want to think about, so she thought about the Beamer Brian used to drive and how much fun it had been to ride with him, top down, sunglasses on, hair blowing in the wind. She’d been in High School then and her brothers were gone and she was alone with her mother in this big house where there used to be a whole family. It had been nice to be with Brian and to not have to think about that stuff, to feel the wind and whatever worried her blowing away in it.

She put her hand on his leg and as though she were a fairy godmother and Brian a wooden puppet, he sprang to life and his eyes grew wide and he grinned. He stood up and looked around at everyone. 

“Fuck this, let’s go swimming,” he said. “Check this shit out.”

He opened the sliding door to the balcony and stripped off his shirt. He gripped the railing and looked back at them, his eyebrows raised, a magician about to perform an amazing trick. Kate didn’t have time to say anything before he was standing on the railing and looking down at the pool and shouting for everyone to look at him. Then he jumped, and his foot slipped and he hit his head on the railing and Kate heard him land on the patio below.

***

Matt looked at Brian lying crumpled on the ground. Some of the girls nearest to him started to scream and one of them threw up. No one moved. Matt didn’t either. He looked up at the balcony, wondering if Brian had been pushed. He saw his sister up there, her hand at her mouth, a group of surprised, stoned kids around her. He stared at her until eventually she looked up and she saw him too. She might as well have been five. He might as well have been seven.

Matt swam over to the other side of the pool and pushed himself up onto the patio and scrambled over to Brian. Blood came from his nose and from his eyes and he was shaking and panting in staccato bursts, his eyes looking around him wildly, unseeing. His arm lay under his body at an impossible angle.

“Just lay still,” said Matt. “It’s gonna be alright. Just keep still. It’s gonna be alright. Someone call 9-1-1! Jesus Christ! It’s gonna be alright, Brian. It’s gonna be alright.”

And he just kept saying that over and over, long after Brian stopped panting and lay as still as a December morning.

***

It was Kate who’d taken him to the airport when he’d left for basic training. Their mother had been hysterical the whole week at the thought of losing the only son she had left. She reminded him every chance she could. She told him he was going to die too, and that he was a selfish brat for doing this to her.

Their father was in DC on a business trip.

Kate pulled the car to the curb and she helped him with his bag, a solitary over-sized backpack. He slung it over his shoulder and they stood in front of each other, not sure of what to say in a moment like this. Kate broke the stalemate first and hugged him, tight, almost franticly. She kissed his cheek.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said.

“I do, actually,” he replied. “There’s a contract.”

“Break it.”

“I can’t.”

They separated and Kate held his arms and looked at him.

“Please don’t leave me here with her,” she said, looking scared for the first time Matt could recall.

“You’ll be fine, Kate.”

She didn’t answer him, but she looked off and a tear trailed down her cheek.

“Don’t cry. It’s gonna be fine. I’m gonna be fine.”

Neither of them believed it; things hadn’t been fine for a long time. They stood for a few more minutes, and then a car honked and she let go of his arm and he smiled at her. She smiled back and wiped the tears away.

“I’ll see you soon,” he said. “Tell mom I love her. I’ll write. I promise.”

He turned to leave, but Kate grabbed his arm again.

“It wasn’t your fault, Matt. There was nothing you could do, either of us.”

Matt didn’t respond. He took her hand off his, patted it and gave it back to her. He went into the airport. Kate waited a few more minutes until she knew he wasn’t coming back, then she got in her car and went back to their mother. Matt never did write.