this is just where we go
excerpt from the forthcoming memoir
‘The Cherry Burn’
Mark takes a long drag off his cigarette. He is sitting on the floor next to my old desk, back hunched like a question mark as he thumbs the edges of color-coordinated book spines tucked nearby on an old shelf. At the end of a row of neatly aligned black hard bounds, Mark pulls out a bible, an heirloom kept for posterity. We are not religious; we just come from a long line of histrionics.
How many other books on this shelf have you not read? he asks.
It is part question, part punch-line. I smirk and lean back in my chair until it tilts and plant my bare feet on the wall. I close my eyes and recall his 1990 funeral; I was 15 and shy, he was 17 and popular, which left me at an awkward disadvantage.
Disadvantage? I was friends with the cream of the crop of high school and left you holding the reigns of popularity. Don’t tell me you effed that up. When he says this, his voice climbs in octaves. I roll my eyes in the way that only family members get away with.
I tell him that conversations with a dead brother tend to be a very solitary activity. Not that my voice went far on a normal day, but on the day of his funeral, even my eyes remained painfully hidden behind lids that refused to raise up under the surprise spectacle of it all. We sat, my family and I, in a side grieving room adjacent to the front of the audience of several hundred attendees. My bones still; my chair, silenced. I kept thinking to myself, I wonder if they know my stepdad’s pockets are full of pills? I wonder if anyone knows how we got here? Do we even know?
Was I there? Mark asks in between smoke rings.
Don’t be stupid. It was your funeral, of course you were there, I tell him.
No, I mean, was I there?
I know what he means. I tell him that he didn’t show up until almost 6 months later, a sort of coping mechanism that I attributed to being a teenager with no ability to express. By the time I turned 16, I was hardly engaging my voice outside myself, entrapped instead in a stream of subconscious banter with a conjured brother who sometimes showed up unannounced, and often times unnoticeably, as if he’d been there all along. I had copious amounts of muscle relaxers at my disposal and this became my coping mechanism?
Little flecks of dust float in my old bedroom, permeated with stale air, visible in a beam of morning sunlight cast through a nearby window. As a child, I would pretend for hours that little dust particles were trying to communicate with me; they would beg me to exhale, causing them to swirl about. Each breath visible in those swirls, every linty fleck sent sparkling through sunbeams. Hey, over here! Breathe this way! I would sit really still until I could see pieces land atop my eyelashes, reaching like outstretched fingers in falling snow. After a while, I’d fall asleep, seemingly covered in dust. I slept a lot throughout my childhood, often 12–14 hours at a stretch. I slept through dinners and TV shows and dessert. I slept through rain storms and snow storms and power outages. I slept through arguments with voices raised and sobbing and glass breaking. Sleep was one door closing and another opening.
Outside, the horizon is close enough to be considered a threat; I imagine a line of soldiers bobbing in cadence, rising up and up, breaking across the tops of hillside weeds blowing choppily as a sea. There is a sliding glass door separating me from it, but I love anticipating the rushing wind over the summit, watching it climb down and then up the gully to rustle the old oak tree leaves on branches that reach up like flames licking at the second floor of our old home; all of this movement coming just so far, only to be broken against a single pane of glass. My breath leaves hot, smokey circles on the inside, noiselessly blowing back.
We haven’t really been back here in years, Mark and I, this is just where we go, inside my mind.
Mark flicks his cigarette, his face glowing amber in the almost-summer sun. The waxing sun glistens through the forest of blonde hair on his legs, as he leans his back against the mirrored door of my old closet. Over his shoulder, I see myself reflected. I shut my right eye and the image disappears, my face hidden somewhere behind his head. Shut the left, and I am there, just above his shoulder — we become one, two-headed, siamese. I like how the eyes can fool you like this. I lean my forehead against the window, feel the coldness of it penetrate through the layers of skin, willing the sensation to reach my fingertips, reach my memories. Mark looks to me, his eyes are not one color, but flecked with shades of olive and a rim of gold. In them I see the bits of who we have been, swirling atop the watery surface of the cornea.
I peek through a circle I draw with the tip of my finger, my breath the medium upon the window. Down below I see rows and rows of firewood stacked alongside this old farm house at the bottom of a sloping driveway, with a wayward pile waiting for the muscle to move it. Just beyond, a round rests mid-split, with the head of a chopping maul wedged inside like a thorn. The piece of wood is a shell partly cracked, its insides almost revealed. I think how easy and simple it looks there, just now, like I could take my thumb and forefinger and snap it open.
Do you remember the sound of the metal striking? Mark takes a drag and exhales his answer. How could I forget? he says.