Winking

     Crouched on a rickety stool in great-grandpa’s barn where all the black widows lived, rain poured through the leaks in the roof, bouncing off the rim of your baseball cap. You were fine, content, so long as you could contemplate a thick book and work through a pack of Marlboro Reds with your dog at your side. What were you reading? I was too young to know. Maybe it was The World as Will and Representation. I’ve got it on my desk. It’s among the few volumes of yours your mama saved.

     I never went out there on my own. The debris and cobwebs were more than enough deterrence for me, being only five, maybe six. Hard to say. But I had the urge to follow you and the dog. I stood while you sat with the book—I could’ve taken a seat, too, if I weren’t so afraid of every surface in the barn—getting wet, your pages also getting wet. I don’t remember when you decided you had your fill of reading out in the storm. I know we went in sooner rather than later.

    Some things, she let go of easily. The books weren’t much of a struggle. Others were. A box of your old prescription bottles rested on our bathroom shelf for a couple years, nestled against a sack of hotel soaps and dusty Lysol cans. Part of it was she wasn’t certain what some of those medications were for, I think. She had the suspicion you hadn't been honest. She thought maybe you had cancer, or worse, and kept it from her. She meant to investigate it. Never did.

    She—your mama—gave me a copy of a graduate paper you wrote. I was fifteen. She thought it was within my realm of interest. Not quite. It is now. I’ve forgotten where I tucked it away. I would intersperse quotes from that paper here, if I had any. I would like to let you speak. I remember it was about Marx. And Nietzsche. And Orwell. A comparative analysis of their conceptions of the individual. Or something like that.

    Your mama, your brother, and his wife were crowding around a pile of paper junk. One of them—fuck if I can remember which—pulled out an old greeting card. A watercolor printed on the front showed a group of monkeys. One monkey strayed to the side. It displayed an apparent indifferent to the social rituals of the others.

    “Ha. That’s a bit like him, isn’t it?” said Dad.

    “Yes. That was my boy,” said Grandma.

     I lay stomach-down on the faded hardwood in great-grandma's bedroom, clicking together fragments of a puppy-dog puzzle.

    “We’re going to the hospital now,” said grandma, walking in.

     I’d just gotten the puzzle that day. Christmas 2011. Came in a cardboard tube. Dollar Tree, I think. You know, she was unphased. A sort of familial inside joke. Predictable, unavoidable. Wouldn’t be a holiday if you weren’t hospitalized, if you didn’t skip your medication for a day or two and get yourself carted off in a stretcher, or so she would say. I didn’t understand why back then. I do now. We were all there. It’d be nicer for you that way. Never panned out like you planned. Unfortunate. Knowing you were alone, left for hours, that pains me.

     A couple years ago, she gave me your old external drive to use as I pleased. Figured she needed to let go. Before formatting it, I looked at all your folders. Directory titled "Movies": Death Race 2000, Mean Streets. Damn. You had good taste.

     Your mama always said you were different before. She says the same about Dad getting his shit kicked in. Your mama is always telling me I'll never understand what either of you were really like. Doesn't change anything for me. I thought you were cool as you were.

     When it came down to it, everything failed you. We don't live in a world where we lament these as failures. Maybe we call them tragedies when we're privy to their unfolding. But a failure, no. No. Rare, that is. I'll call it as I see it, though. Someone has to grant you that. At least once. At least today.

     I ought to pour a couple out. Have some Seagram’s 7 with orange juice. I'll leave out some Marlboro Golds, too. That's all I've got. That's the best I can do for you.