Souls At Zero
*CN: one (rather slight) slur, some general foul language*
“You could call them joined at the hip”
That’s what they said of him and his brother before the split. The slats of the blinds were at a quarter tilt in the office, casting scooped panels of light and dark bars across the face of little Janick in the frame.
Who has a picture of themselves when they were younger on their desk? It just struck Per as odd. Typical of little brother, though. He was never totally weird about any one thing in particular, instead he was almost imperceptibly off-centre about every little thing. And it had definitely been getting worse.
Per felt the heat of a familiar irritation rising within him. He was tired of feeling the polarity between his chest’s flutter and the swelling sickness pulling at his gut.
When did the changes begin?
No single point could be called a beginning. Jan walking along by the dockyard, passing the fish and chip shop and the old confectionists of their youth. The grotesque allure of oil, toothaches, and disrepute. Ragged mock-Victorian buildings flaked black paint in shards of wooden blisters around crumpled door frames.
On Jan wandered, not catching his brother’s eyes just yet, with his wispy rust-coloured beard, flat cap and slacks like a Dickensian peasant. Fulfilling a duty to the scene he set. The sun hit his pale, freckled face, shone upon his plump lips. A vibrant, animating red, as feisty as the frizz around his chin. He even had a copy of the manifesto in his stained shirt pocket. What a ridiculous image, Per thought. A caricature. A self-conscious provocation. Mischief along the constellations of abject weirdness. Surprisingly boring.
He’d left for Paris to study economics, dressed in a suit procured via the last of Mother’s money. Four years later he crawled out of a commune in Bordeaux, on dwindling credit, stinking of cheap supermarket Merlot. Online evidence of a lad’s hand on his body where he lay — lithe, white and topless. That was when Per finally understood what had happened. Jan wouldn’t have the guts to tell him directly.
“…so many things are in flux, Per. This one is special, I just know it. It’s like he aids and represents the wider changes happening inside me. It’s like the old bonds are breaking within; those that held together who I thought I was. Now I am atomised, but also energised. I feel this righteous fury, like an exothermic yield pouring off me, searing down the buffeting winds of the cold world outside. I’m ready to dance, to sing, to fuck. To burst and light the world up. Oh but please don’t ask me who they are, Per. It’s irrelevant and you wouldn’t understand right now anyway”
“You were right Janick, I wouldn’t understand. You were wrong Janick, it is highly relevant, regardless…” Per slowly tilted the frame of the picture back with his finger, until it collapsed over its stand and hit the desk flat. “I should’ve known immediately. You were talking like a woman.” Per tested his foot against the creak of a loose floorboard.
“Sending me letters from the commune, eh Janick? Mother is pissed off. I know she says she isn’t but she definitely is. Her mouth forms that little crease when I tell her about your dysfunctions. Your betrayals. You sound like you’ve been ‘acted-on’, rather than arriving at some marvellous epiphany. Dare I say it: ‘brainwashed’.
I am not like this, Jan. I am ionic. A cool, crystalline structure. I have to be because you aren’t here and Mother refuses to take her medication. Last week I discovered why she’s been growing her nails so long; she filed them down into sharp points in the bathroom and started clawing at her wrists.
She had her fingers in her arm when I found her, Jan. Don’t think you had anything to do with that?
You were supposed to make something of yourself, get a placement with a successful company. But now you’re a fucking Marxist, and the bathroom’s red. Call it Ironic if you want. You’re too ‘atomised’, as you put it.
I should have had your opportunity. Always and forever, I will be a fixed state, and for the sake of those who love me, no-one will ever change me. I am disappointed that you do not the same.”
Per followed the creak of the floorboards. The loose plank went up against another that gave less travel under his weight. He followed the line to the next board, and then another, until he’d left the office and was back out in the hall. When one bond weakens another gives way.
It’s the responsibility of a man to maintain his composure against the rub of time, his wider self remaining steadfast in the face of today’s frivolity and solipsism. This philosophy had served Per adequately, in spite of life’s inadequacy, but now inadequacy had infected his beloved brother, and stirred in the spirits of his Mother’s spilling veins, propagating through the cells of her infirmity. Surely it was his infirmity. Gaps between boards, tension in the bonds.
To Per’s left in the dark hall he passed another picture — Mother. Smiling with her arms around him at a buffet restaurant, celebrating his 12th birthday, above and beyond her nomination as a potential Nobel laureate. He only knew after she had fully explained her research to him little by little, night by night when she tucked him in for sleep. This was her favourite picture. Per in the charm and ignorance of his birthday; effervescent.
She could set that picture on her desk at the university with pride. She didn’t though.
“We don’t want a fucking queer here, Jan.” That’s all he’d needed to have said. The threat would have been implicit. His brother would have known his place, and Mother would still be here. He just knew it.
Out on the veranda, the warmth of the air was stifling, even as the sun ripened into gentle dusk upon the golden reeds lining the ashen saltmarsh. If he couldn’t pin down the exact time when Janick changed, he could at least remember when things were different.
They’d taken a biscuit tin out with them to catch frogs. Darkened their feet in the swampy mud and carefully parted the thick tufts of brown grass with a grace otherwise beyond their childish years. They’d entered the thickets like a gentle breeze; and there the cool demeanour of Love. Quiet. Detached. Souls at zero.
