“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I think I should be there.”
“For who?”
“Are you kidding? He called me Mom, John. We’ve known each other since middle school.”
I answer immediately, I go broad where I shouldn’t. “This isn’t something you want to be a part of,” I say.
“They’re my friends.”
“You’re not the grieving parent, Joey.”
“Fuck you—I don’t have to justify my relationships to you.”
You don’t, but nonetheless I’m moralizing before I know it, some stupid manifesto based on the train, an unrelated, arbitrary tragedy from those shared college years, which had already crystallized before we met my junior year. In the days immediately after that accident—equally fatal and conceptually the same, kids in the path of a speeding object—the tiny campus was reduced to fearful paralysis with the loss of two of its students. A girl told me how horrible she felt for “not crying enough”—one of the girls who’d died had lived in her co-op and been familiar to her, they had shared a kitchen. Eventually, this not-weeping girl would join the caravan of mourners to attend the funeral in the other girl’s hometown, three hundred miles away. I was skeptical of the instantly formed grief, of her commitment to its totality. I remember thinking at the time that I felt too young for my life to be defined by significant deaths, and at the same moment that I couldn’t have picked from a small crowd the faces of the two people killed.
“You can’t just suddenly care again,” I say now, equal in my resolve, deep in my moral hole, a code I’ve decided heedlessly to cling to, about consistency and friendship, like Casey’s death was a ploy to coax us back. “You don’t get reattached just because there’s a disaster or someone dies. We said we wouldn’t be those kinds of people. You don’t reappear at a fucking funeral.”
You motion at the empty vacant room around us, which for an indefinite amount of time before we arrived was explicitly ignored, condemned. “And that’s why it’s just the two of us?”
The silence through the empty doorway turns our domestic space into something else. There are times when I can’t remember how long I’ve been this way, this absolute. Occasionally it’s felt like we were locked in an unspoken battle for who could be more extreme, who could experience abjection most completely, but now I am the extreme one, the one pledging isolation—out of what, jealousy? spite?—and I answer, without really responding, “We left to get away from all that shit.”
Your phone vibrates again. “I’ve always cared. I didn’t leave because I stopped caring.”
“Then why did you leave?”
You flick your finger down the screen of your phone, shooting one of your text conversations back in time. I’m distracted by this gesture—maybe that we’re still grabbing internet from somewhere in this derelict building, that the technologies seem mismatched—and I only hear your answer, or think I hear your answer, quiet, a second after it clears the air: “For fucking you!”
It catches me, because I’m already losing track of how this argument began and the part I’m playing in it, the scope of our conversation escalating with every word, and because this idea, that I was the reason for our departure, that I instigated it, this is nothing that I’ve ever considered or conceptualized, such that I feel it’s been slipped into the discussion like venom to disorient me, a trick you’ve been saving, subtly deployed.
And so my next point is even more opaque, when I feel that I’ve absolutely lost control of what I’m saying, having swerved from a line of reasoning grounded in actual life into pure abstraction. “I thought we”—the phone vibrates again, on the table whose origins, too, are unclear (no, the floor, on the floor, vibrating beneath me), and my eyes flick toward it, the proof I seek—“I thought we agreed on these things.”
These things—by turns, everything becomes more and more vague. I feel myself, in my embodied half of the conversation, growing more horrible with every passing moment, becoming this monstrous, unanswerable thing. Your brother flickers back into my consciousness as an entity I should be aware of, that I should be cautious to remember when I speak.
“I’m still connected with the people there,” you say, “whether it’s against your fucking moral imperatives or not.”
“Still connected? Are you gonna stop by your parents’ too, then? Tell them where you’ve been since the last funeral you dropped in on?”
You let out a startled breath, as if from a blow. I feel evil. I knit my fingers together and flex them, struggling to find something to say next, to soften what I’ve said. My dry hands slide audibly in and out of each other, and I try to transmit the demonstrative angst of this sound over to your dark corner of the room while, to others, you re-solidify from afar. They poise for your reappearance.
Reading this memory after the fact, our bodies are difficult to orient—their relative positions, in what room of the apartment—because there’s no furniture to base them around, just walls at intervals. In my memory, I’m sitting on the couch and you’re in a chair by the window, though there wasn’t a couch or reasonable chair left in the whole building. The light, the tonal makeup of the room built into the memory—they’re all familiar elements, but not from the city. In the memory, it’s as if we’re in the apartment in Indiana, a different living space, as if we’ve made this decision already, to not engage, and this is a conversation we’ve had many times before.
The funeral comes and goes. We stay in the city, but I’m convinced that it has nothing to do with me—if you really wanted to go back, there’s nothing I could do to stop you. Neither of us says anything, but within the same night that we hear of Casey’s death, you stop texting people back, and once again, disappear. A while after that, we ditch our cellphones for good—it’s not directed, we just do it, the way you sometimes abandon a habit. We take the vase. A son is lowered into the ground.
*
Like Casey, your brother is dead. He’s been dead for over a year, but I often forget this, randomly, at terrible times. He died, or was killed, in the worst possible way, too, as a soldier in Iraq, years after combat ended, in a freak transport accident. The first time that I notably forgot—four months after the funeral, which I’d attended—when I asked if he was taking any leave to come back to the States for the holidays (feeling, at the time, vaguely proud that I’d remembered he was serving overseas, that you had a brother at all), you didn’t seem to mind, and told me that if it were my own brother who’d died I would probably care more, which seemed harsh but, ultimately, true. As an only child, the absence of a sibling in my development was passive, innate, while yours had happened upon you after growing into it the opposite way. The worst time, however, was at a house party six months after that, the semester we graduated and did death-drive things like go to house parties, when some kid I didn’t recognize saw your hair (spiked high at that point, like mine, or mine like yours—visually, it was more obvious than anything that we were partners) and tried to strike up an awkward conversation while I was standing nearby. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” he asked, as his fourth question.
“I had a brother,” you said.
“Had? What happened to him?”
“He died.”
There’s nothing I can say in my defense: he’d died during the time that we’d known each other, and I’d been sitting right there when your mother called to give you the news. Still, maybe there was something in your delivery, or maybe I was proximity-drunk or just too dissociated at that point to care about anything, but I actually laughed, as if it was a joke you used frequently to end conversations you didn’t want to have. The kid looked over at me because he obviously believed this to be the case, that this kind of dialogue happened often enough to be considered classic: this was how the lie spread.
You stormed out—difficult