Perhaps, said Chad, we would be more comfortable sitting in a different room.
The three of us moved into the living room. I seated myself in the wicker-basket chair opposite Chad and my adoptive mother on the wicker-basket couch. Someone had lit three white candles. I was looking at Chad through the candlelight. Something about his sitting posture, too straight and upright, reminded me of someone. Suddenly, an image of a broad, muscular young man who wore sleeveless Champion t-shirts took root in my brain. Homeroom sophomore year was set up in a U shape, perfect for observing and critiquing. I sat across from a young man in a sleeveless shirt, and I would stare at his patches of shoulder acne, red and irritated. From far away he looked sunburned. He was a starting power forward on the basketball team, and, unlike a lot of his friends, he had a long-term girlfriend, a brunette girl, everyone thought they were the perfect couple until one day he got into a terrible car accident. He was in a coma for a weekend, phone calls were made, a prayer chain was activated, and when he woke up, he couldn’t remember his girlfriend or how to dribble a basketball. It was one of the great tragedies of our high school. This person from my high school was named Chad Lambo. After the car accident, he became much friendlier. He even tried to befriend me in homeroom, which at the time I thought was disgusting. Presently Chad Lambo had invaded my childhood house and offered his support and guidance to my adoptive parents. I was the one that was supposed to offer them my supportive beam of light! Perhaps he would take the place of the adoptive son they once had, and lost. As soon as I thought that, I gagged with force.
It’s the water I drank, I said apologetically to everyone.
No one cared. I heard my adoptive mother tell Chad Lambo a couple of stories about my adoptive brother; at the moment, they were too depressing for me to digest. He must have said something very moving in response because she began to cry. Suddenly, for no reason at all, I remembered that one of my favorite troubled young people once described his girlfriend as a short woman with a uterus that felt like a bundle of dried-up twigs.
It hurts my dick, he said to me when I had him over for dinner at my shared studio apartment.
A bundle of dried-up twigs! No uterus of mine, I said or I thought. I folded my hands in my lap pleasantly, because I had made a lifetime of studying elegant mannerisms. I folded my hands immaculately in my lap and said that I thought the religious apparatus was a bunch of dried-up twigs; I left out the part about the uterus hurting the dick.
No one heard me. Chad Lambo asked us if we knew why our family was special and unique. No one said anything. My adoptive mother cried and blew her nose into the tissue. He said something about the adoption of Moses, how he had been discovered in a basket hidden behind the reeds along the Nile during the time of the Egyptians and their slaves, then, changing the topic abruptly, he began a terrible story about undiscovered tumors of the mind. I thought it was tasteless, the way he was bringing religion and the Bible into the conversation. He didn’t even get to the part about Moses and the burning bush. I might have heard him say cancerous brain tumors, how they can take root invisibly, bulbous tumors the size of grapes, how not even trained medical professionals are able to detect the invisible grapes, how people with these cancerous grapes go about their days like everyone else and no one can tell that the cancer is slowly eating up all the brain cells until one day, after the person kills himself, we can then, and only then, look upon the person after death and say, perhaps the grapes took root in his brain.
I stood up and went to the bookshelf and stared at the spines. There were encyclopedias, a whole shelf of obsolescence. There was one book in particular I kept staring at. It was as if someone were shining a spotlight on it. It appeared to be a book about cars. I took it off the shelf, a hardcover doorstopper with bright glossy photographs, and I began to flip through the pages, and Chad Lambo continued speaking about the location of my adoptive brother’s soul, about the possibility of a soul being in extreme distress shortly after dying in a violent manner, as if he were a priest, and the cars on the pages flipped past my eyes so quickly, it was like one multicolored, shimmering, flashing psychedelic car. I felt like I was on drugs.
Whose book is this? I interrupted.
My adoptive mother took the tissue from her face.
It was your brother’s.
Then her face retreated into the tissue.
The living room began to spin a little. It was your brother’s, she had said. She employed the word was not because it was no longer a book, but because my adoptive brother no longer owned it, because it could be said my adoptive brother no longer possessed anything. I collapsed onto the wicker-basket chair.
Was not is, I said.
Was not is!
When a person dies, it is the end of a human life, I announced.
Then I said or I thought, What a difficult time it is! What a toll it has taken! My adoptive mother and Chad Lambo continued to look at me in amazement and disgust, a disgust reserved for cockroaches.