Who are you in relation to him?
I’m a friend, said Thomas, I was his friend. Can I call you later? Now isn’t a good time to talk.
Of course. Leave a message if I’m not here.
He hung up before I was able to ask him if he had known anything about my adoptive brother’s struggles, because surely my adoptive brother had struggled, had Thomas known he was suffering? I wanted to ask Thomas if my adoptive brother had mentioned anything about a plan, a suicide plan. We hung up without making an arrangement to speak later. Thomas, who was this Thomas? I wondered. A long time ago I went home one weekend expecting to see my adoptive brother, expecting to have long conversations deep into the night with him, only to discover he had gone on a road trip with a friend. The idea of him doing something as pedestrian as going on a road trip had shocked me. Did they go to Mexico? Las Vegas? Was the friend Thomas? From where did he know this person?
My adoptive brother never had many friends, my poor little hermit. He had always preferred solitude to company. He isolated himself in his childhood bedroom even as an adult, whereas I left Milwaukee immediately. He must have devoted himself to something, everyone needs a cause; I didn’t know what it was yet, but I would find out, I assured myself. His trouble had always been attracting friends, whereas I had no trouble attracting them, my main trouble was keeping them. Our adoptive mother worried about it. Why don’t you each bring a friend home for dinner? she would ask us. Why don’t you invite friends over after school? The truth was neither of us cared to bring anyone into our adoptive parents’ house, the cheapest house on the block, cellar-dark. Bring them over for dinner? Bring them over for white chicken and rice and milk? When I was in seventh grade I once brought over a friend, whom I had attracted by giving some of my lunch money, and the next day this greedy little once-friend went on to give a report to everyone at the lunch table.
Helen’s Chinese and her brother’s Chinese, but they’re not all Chinese, she said laughing, the parents are white!
Everyone at the table laughed.
I’m Korean, I said to the once-friend, and you’re a stupid white cunt! I put my sandwich under her chin, as if I were threatening her with a knife.
Little white bitch, I whispered, do you know what a cunt is? Do you have a definition?
A nun stormed over to intervene, grabbed my forearm, and began to drag me to the principal’s office. The principal was a smaller, meaner nun. My adoptive brother watched the scene from his lunch table, sitting alone, picking at a piece of chicken with a plastic fork. I kept looking at him, but couldn’t catch his eye.
He was as predictable as the plains! White rice and white chicken sustained him. No dark meat! Who else found an entire day’s nourishment from a single glass of cold water? Who else paid money for a scoop of vanilla ice cream? It made sense to me that he stayed in Milwaukee even as a grown man, I thought, Milwaukee was the perfect place for a person like my adoptive brother. Not only a dreadful city like Milwaukee, but a dreadful house like my adoptive parents’, and in the dreadful house, his childhood bedroom, the only place he was ever truly comfortable. He was comfortable anywhere he was not forced to confront his own physical discomfort with being alive. And any time he went away from Milwaukee, he always wanted to go back immediately. That pattern of going away and coming back began with sleepovers in childhood, in the middle of the night, he would wake up and leave the friend’s house, frightening the people in the house, they would be left with no choice but to call my adoptive parents, and sometimes the police. Every time we took a family trip out of town, we had to assure him that everything in Milwaukee would be exactly the same when we came back. Look at all the houses, my adoptive father would say, and the people inside them. No one’s going anywhere. It never worked; his fears were limitless. And it only drew attention to the fact that he wanted to be back inside his own home. His entire life, he was afraid of the weather. Perhaps it was a cry of distress to be that plain and predictable. Of course I didn’t hear it, I thought. I didn’t hear anything.
15
My eyes traveled across the downstairs hallway near the back of the house. The hallway floor was wood, a dilapidated wood with deep crevices that collected dirt and dead skin cells. I had to wear shoes to walk its length or my soles would turn black. No one did a thing about it. Mice came out of the corners. The windows were filled with webs and carcasses. A vent whooshed on, spitting out dirty air particles. I didn’t cough. I covered my face. I went and filled another bucket with water and bleach. I started to mop. The mop head turned black. Long strands of someone’s hair and leaf-shaped clumps floated on the surface of the bleach water. For an hour or so I pushed the mop back and forth as helpfully as possible.
As I squeezed out the mop into the bucket, I remembered how I once helped him with his lines for the end-of-year show. He was ten years old, and decided out of the blue to participate. I was in the show already, every year another show, and when he announced it, I felt a palpable, creeping sense that he was going to steal my sunshine. A fucking vine crept up my legs and around my waist, and I thought at the dinner table in my twelve-year-old head: He’s going to steal my sunshine.
I’m doing it just this one time, he announced at the dinner table. Then he promptly forbade our adoptive family to attend.
They can’t come to see me? I said.