“We should have sex,” my brother tells his girlfriend. He makes a rambunctious expression and tries to look convincing.
She folds her arms. My brother wears his pleeeease-face and tells her she won’t get pregnant, that he will pull out before.
She tells him she’s not that horny. He says she doesn’t have to be, but he is. She pushes him out of the bed. She says the word abortion. He says he’ll wear three condoms. She says she thinks her breasts are small. He says they’re not. She asks him if he thinks she needs to lose weight. He says, “Don’t be silly.” She says she doesn’t know. He says he’s been thinking about this all day. She says, “Fine.”
Inside, my brother feels more confident and manlier, like he’s evolving into something greater. He is flying. Like Michael Jordan, he thinks. He feels freedom. He is fighting for freedom, for everyone. Like Nelson Mandela, he thinks, but manlier – like Che Guevara. She feels like a sales clerk at a checkout line. She feels like she’s scanning barcodes on cans of soup and dropping them into paper bags. She feels like saying, “Price check?”
They’re sweating. It’s getting harder and harder for both of them to breathe. A lamp on the nightstand falls over. It hits the ground. Sheets slide off the bed. They cover the lamp. The room goes dark.
There’s a knock on the door. My brother doesn’t stop. He can’t stop. She almost stops.
“Hello?” someone asks. It’s her father’s voice. When she hears it, she comes.
There’s another knock at the door. She pushes my brother off the bed. He falls on his back. He crushes the lampshade. The light bulb pops.
When door swings open, light pours into the room. She covers up. My brother goes blind.
He is still wearing three condoms. As he tries to stand, he’s shoved backwards. He falls onto the bed. Someone touches his face. He hears her father’s voice. My brother tries to answer but can only make a whining noise. He feels cornered. He reaches out his arms and sweeps them around. He feels nothing. He pulls up his pants. They fall down. He hears a woman’s voice. It’s his girlfriend’s mother.
My brother falls out of the room, down the hall toward the stairs. He thinks he’s being pushed but can’t be sure. He hears one of her parents speaking. He knows the voice. It does not sound happy. It says, OUT. My brother stumbles out the front door, retreating in a haze. The condoms rip on his zipper. The shredded pieces stick to his leg. He staggers across the front yard to his Jeep. He thinks, OUT. He falls behind the wheel. The ignition starts. The air is humid. He can’t get enough oxygen. His zipper scratches his dick. He thinks he is bleeding. He thinks he can feel skin peeling away.
He starts to drive but he doesn’t know where he’s going. He thinks about driving to McDonald’s – a safe place – but he thinks it’s too far. He tries to inhale.
He feels as if his body is tied up. His hands are tied to the steering wheel. His feet are tied to the pedals. His neck and throat are tethered to the headrest. He glances at himself in the rearview mirror. His face is intense and furious. He shakes his head. Slow and purposeful. He can see a line of streetlights behind him in the mirror. They glow toxic green.
His cell phone buzzes. It’s his girlfriend calling him. He answers but no words come out of his mouth. The word HELLO echoes on the other end. He hangs up and pulls over. He doesn’t know where he is. His heart punches his ribs. He remains silent. He can hear murmurs and coughs. He doesn’t know where the sounds are coming from. He looks at the backseat. Nothing. He closes his eyes.
“Hello?” he manages to say. There is no answer.
Sweat sticks to his face. His neck writhes. He bites the air. He takes in a lungful of oxygen, then sneezes. He sneezes again.
What happened? something makes him think. Where am I?
He tries to focus and, after a few moments, he is pretty certain of where he is. He is in his twenties, in Tennessee, where he grew up. He has never left. He sometimes feels there is another version of himself, somewhere in the future, that’s two minutes ahead, thriving in the cosmos, living life before he gets there, as if his very existence is a hand-me-down. Everyday he works out in his weight room and alternates different exercises to build different muscle groups. This is good, he thinks.
Then his thoughts turn into noise—they snap like teeth and balloon from his ears, growing like inflatable plastic phalluses, pointing out from his head like synthetic antlers dancing back and forth and popping above his head. Moment puddles in his ears. And his sense of awareness, for a split second, returns, a self-blanking type of reality and comfort that drags him into a lobotomized state of consciousness—heavy and muted, jam-packed, concussive, and pounding inside the skull. The engine is running. He is looking at the fuel gauge behind the wheel. He is distracted, he is young. He is dead from something that prevents him from living and keeps him from being killed.
Headlights appear in the rearview mirror. The lights are blue. They flash. My brother wipes his brow and puts the Jeep in park.
A minute passes. Eventually, a sheriff climbs out of the squad car. He holds a flashlight and aims the beam at my brother’s face. His pupils squeeze shut. He is hypnotized.
The sheriff asks my brother to step out of the vehicle. My brother becomes submissive and inaudible. He cooperates. The sheriff looks him over. He is shirtless. His belt is unbuckled. His hands are in his pockets, holding up his pants. When the sheriff tells him to remove his hands, his pants fall to his ankles. The sheriff moves the flashlight over my brother’s body. He sees three torn condoms hanging from my brother’s cock. He sees pieces of latex sticking to my brother’s leg. He sees streaks of blood smeared across my brother’s thighs. He points the beam back in my brother’s eyes. He thinks my brother is mentally ill. My brother feels mentally ill. Sweat pours from his pores. He shivers.
He tells my brother to pull up his pants. He tells him he has the right to remain silent.
My brother does not know what’s happening. He asks the sheriff, “Why?”
The sheriff says, “Suspicion to commit carnal acts.”
He handcuffs my brother and puts him in the back of the squad car. He has my brother’s Jeep impounded. My brother reclines in the backseat. There, he faints.
The sheriff assumes my brother is on illegal narcotics obtained from illegal immigrant terrorists. He writes this in his report. He calls my brother, “a shit.” My brother coughs and murmurs. He is still unconscious. Tears are in his eyes but he is not crying. The sheriff takes my brother to night court.
There, a judge declares him mentally handicapped. He charges him with heresy. He invalidates my brother’s driver license and seizes his cell phone.
“Why?” my brother asks again.
“Quiet!” the judge shouts. “Or I’ll charge you in contempt of court.”
The judge sentences my brother to eight years in a mental research facility, for “observation.”
_
Weeks pass. My brother is put in a cell. There is a bed, a toilet, and a sink.
He lies on his back. His eyes are too excited to sleep. They run up and down the wintry, grey walls of the cell. He climbs out of bed and runs cold water over his face. He massages his temples softly. He crawls back in bed and holds his arms.
Each day he is allowed out of his cell for one hour. He eats. He walks laps around the courtyard. There are prison guards. They carry nightsticks and cattle prods. They let my brother out, come back in an hour, and lock him up again. Afterwards, they spray water and Epsom salt at my brother with a power washer. The force breaks his skin. The water tastes like pennies. My brother’s mind grows weary. His eyes become dull and unfocused. He chews the inside of his lip.
_
He calls me on the phone. “Don’t worry,” I tell him.
But he doesn’t say a word.
My parents ask me where my brother is. I tell them he ran away with his girlfriend. I tell them he’s in Costa Rica surfing. My parents don’t speak to one another. My mother reads her bible and prays in private. My father hides in the basement and paints, diluted and sick, like watercolors with watercolors. They are angry with one another. They don’t talk anymore.
My brother is moved to another location. He grows more weak and incoherent.
He feels cornered. He wants to escape. He becomes angry. He closes his eyes and tries to sleep. He cannot rest. Every night he tries to sleep. He tries to stop his brain from thinking, from working, from feeling. He can only sleep from complete exhaustion.
He wonders what happened to his freedom. He wonders what he did to deserve this. He had seen every prison movie from the 90s, where protagonists manage to escape to international havens, like Canada. This usually happens right after being raped by the biggest greaseball in the jail. My brother wonders why he hasn’t been raped yet, or at least attacked. This makes him feel aesthetically inferior. He wants to fight for his freedom but is too weak. He imagines what Nelson Mandela would do in his situation. He wonders if our mom has thrown out his Che Guevara t-shirt. He plans on asking Santa for another one next Christmas.
_
He dreams. He’s in a supermarket. He wanders around with an empty cart. A clerk asks him if he would like any help. The clerk is young, puny, and has acne.
“No,” my brother says. He says he would rather walk around the aisles all day looking for what he wants than to ask for help. He says he wants to discover things on his own.
He lumbers down the aisles, like a monster, past the frozen food section, past the toiletries, past the sauces. He vacantly pushes the shopping cart. He is gathering things aimlessly from the shelves. He drops items into his shopping cart without looking. When his cart is full, he pushes it to the checkout lane. A saleswoman unloads the cart.
She asks him if he is having a nice day.
My brother does not respond.
He is thumbing through a People magazine. He is looking at pictures of celebrities dancing in nightclubs and surfing in Costa Rica. He reads about celebrity drug addiction and adoption. Celine Dion music is playing in the background.
The saleswoman scans my brother’s items. The scanner BEEPS-BEEPS: Frozen orange juice concentrate, high fiber cereal, organic soy milk, bleach, potato chips, whipped cream, yogurt, toilet paper, mustard, donuts, deodorant, charcoal, shaving cream, maple syrup, and more maple syrup. My brother can smell it. He thinks of Canada.
“Paper?” the saleswoman asks, “or plastic?”
My brother says, “Both.”
The saleswoman shrugs and shakes a bag open.
My brother’s heart begins to beat fast. He feels cornered. He wants to wake up. He stares at the saleswoman. She asks him if he has any coupons.
My brother says, “No.”
She says, “That’s fine.”
He says he has to escape.
She stares at my brother.
My brother stares somewhere else. He tries to keep his hands from tremoring. His neck grows stiff.
After a few minutes, the saleswoman asks him if he feels alright.
My brother says that she doesn’t care, that she never could, that it’s none of her business.
The saleswoman tells my brother the total, “$911.99.”
My brother says he needs to escape.
The saleswoman is quiet. My brother closes his eyes. He feels surrounded. He runs down one of the aisles and hides in a corner. Butchers are pounding and slicing deli meat. The slicer groans and cuts. He thinks, OUT. The blade drips liquid on the floor. It smells like Freon. My brother stares. His vision goes blank.
_
The prison guards come and get my brother to let him out of his cell for his daily hour. They are wearing surgical scrubs. They poke him with their nightsticks. They rub food coloring on his skin to keep him from looking pale.
My brother screams. He pulls his covers over his head and crawls into his mattress.
He can hear other prisoners scream. The prison guards scream.
“You motherfucking drug-addict!” they call my brother.
He feels himself being punched. He can hear other prisoners scream louder. The prison guards scream again.
He hears BEEP-BEEP. Items are being scanned. He thinks, Mercy.
One of the prison guards screams, “Get up!”
Another screams, “Leave him!”
My brother hears himself fall to the ground in his cell. He feels his chest groan. He feels like deli meat.
The cell door slams shut. He hears his heart beat.
_
Another week passes. The prison guards begin to leave my brother in his cell longer and longer. My brother doesn’t feel as ill anymore. This is because he has stopped feeling.
He sits in his cell and becomes very tense. His face wrinkles. When he sleeps he grinds his teeth. He hugs his body and feels how skinny he has become. His hair and beard have stopped growing. His bones begin to shrink and his wrists swell, making dented ukuleles out of his arms. He frowns.
He peeks between the bars on the door of his cell and tries to talk to another prisoner.
“Hello?” he says.
A voice responds, “Hello.”
My brother asks the voice, “How are you?”
“Good,” it says.
The voice asks my brother about himself.
My brother looks for the source of voice but cannot see anyone.
He says he doesn’t know.
My brother asks the voice where it’s from.
A voice says, “Costa Rica.”
The voice asks my brother where he is from.
He doesn’t respond.
The voice says, “Please?”
He tells the voice he doesn’t know what the world is like.
The voice does not answer. My brother closes his mouth and hugs himself.
He says he doesn’t know what’s wrong with him.
He says he feels worse every day.
He scratches his neck. He feels angry.
The voice says, “That’s only normal.”
He asks, “How do I have to grow?”
There is a moment of silence. Ventilators cough and murmur.
Sounding sarcastic, the voice finally says, “Sounds like you need another world.”
My brother’s face twitches. He drapes his blanket around his shoulders and goes to the window in his cell. He looks at his reflection in the glass. He tells himself he shouldn’t have said anything. He thinks, How did I get in here? He tells himself, Sorry. Through the window, he can see A Shining City on a Hill. The skyline is on fire, below it, a Beltway, along it, pedestrians.
More weeks pass. My brother doesn’t feel as angry anymore. His face is calm. When his eyes tear up, he wipes them. He imagines Michael Jordan, Nelson Mandela, and Che Guevara and gets them talking amongst themselves in his head. He hears the word abortion. He tries to smile, but he can’t. He feels strange, diluted and sick, like watercolors. He looks at the bed in his cell. He lies down. He goes to sleep.
_
Today he wakes up. He sits up. It’s afternoon. He is in his girlfriend’s bed. She is scratching his back softly. She says, “I remember the day with I met you.” She says, “You told me you weren’t feeling very good, that you needed to go home and sleep.” My brother is silent. She says, “I never asked you if you were tired, or why.” She says, “I fell in love with you immediately.” She says, “I remember everything about that day.” She kisses my brother. She tells him she loves him.
My brother thinks about his life. He looks at his girlfriend and doesn’t move. His eyes wander toward the ground. He thinks about sleeping. He thinks about other people sleeping in their homes. She starts to say something, then stops. She hugs him.
My brother’s chest rises and falls. She touches his face. He wonders how he got here. He keeps his eyes on the ground.
She says she’s happy she isn’t pregnant. She smells like maple syrup. She asks him if he’s happy with her breasts. “The shape,” she says. She says she’s thinking about getting breast implants. She says her father said he’d pay for them if she gets straight A’s. She asks my brother to help her study. My brother is motionless. He thinks, Mercy. There are footsteps downstairs. There are also voices. The sounds congeal together in the air and parade like shadows through his mind, keening in the upper register, somewhere between male and female, between childish innocence and jaded adulthood, at once ethereal and urgent, earthy and decayed.
My brother says, “I guess I’ll leave.” She says, “Stay for a while?” He says he needs another world. He closes his eyes.
She folds her arms. My brother wears his pleeeease-face and tells her she won’t get pregnant, that he will pull out before.
She tells him she’s not that horny. He says she doesn’t have to be, but he is. She pushes him out of the bed. She says the word abortion. He says he’ll wear three condoms. She says she thinks her breasts are small. He says they’re not. She asks him if he thinks she needs to lose weight. He says, “Don’t be silly.” She says she doesn’t know. He says he’s been thinking about this all day. She says, “Fine.”
Inside, my brother feels more confident and manlier, like he’s evolving into something greater. He is flying. Like Michael Jordan, he thinks. He feels freedom. He is fighting for freedom, for everyone. Like Nelson Mandela, he thinks, but manlier – like Che Guevara. She feels like a sales clerk at a checkout line. She feels like she’s scanning barcodes on cans of soup and dropping them into paper bags. She feels like saying, “Price check?”
They’re sweating. It’s getting harder and harder for both of them to breathe. A lamp on the nightstand falls over. It hits the ground. Sheets slide off the bed. They cover the lamp. The room goes dark.
There’s a knock on the door. My brother doesn’t stop. He can’t stop. She almost stops.
“Hello?” someone asks. It’s her father’s voice. When she hears it, she comes.
There’s another knock at the door. She pushes my brother off the bed. He falls on his back. He crushes the lampshade. The light bulb pops.
When door swings open, light pours into the room. She covers up. My brother goes blind.
He is still wearing three condoms. As he tries to stand, he’s shoved backwards. He falls onto the bed. Someone touches his face. He hears her father’s voice. My brother tries to answer but can only make a whining noise. He feels cornered. He reaches out his arms and sweeps them around. He feels nothing. He pulls up his pants. They fall down. He hears a woman’s voice. It’s his girlfriend’s mother.
My brother falls out of the room, down the hall toward the stairs. He thinks he’s being pushed but can’t be sure. He hears one of her parents speaking. He knows the voice. It does not sound happy. It says, OUT. My brother stumbles out the front door, retreating in a haze. The condoms rip on his zipper. The shredded pieces stick to his leg. He staggers across the front yard to his Jeep. He thinks, OUT. He falls behind the wheel. The ignition starts. The air is humid. He can’t get enough oxygen. His zipper scratches his dick. He thinks he is bleeding. He thinks he can feel skin peeling away.
He starts to drive but he doesn’t know where he’s going. He thinks about driving to McDonald’s – a safe place – but he thinks it’s too far. He tries to inhale.
He feels as if his body is tied up. His hands are tied to the steering wheel. His feet are tied to the pedals. His neck and throat are tethered to the headrest. He glances at himself in the rearview mirror. His face is intense and furious. He shakes his head. Slow and purposeful. He can see a line of streetlights behind him in the mirror. They glow toxic green.
His cell phone buzzes. It’s his girlfriend calling him. He answers but no words come out of his mouth. The word HELLO echoes on the other end. He hangs up and pulls over. He doesn’t know where he is. His heart punches his ribs. He remains silent. He can hear murmurs and coughs. He doesn’t know where the sounds are coming from. He looks at the backseat. Nothing. He closes his eyes.
“Hello?” he manages to say. There is no answer.
Sweat sticks to his face. His neck writhes. He bites the air. He takes in a lungful of oxygen, then sneezes. He sneezes again.
What happened? something makes him think. Where am I?
He tries to focus and, after a few moments, he is pretty certain of where he is. He is in his twenties, in Tennessee, where he grew up. He has never left. He sometimes feels there is another version of himself, somewhere in the future, that’s two minutes ahead, thriving in the cosmos, living life before he gets there, as if his very existence is a hand-me-down. Everyday he works out in his weight room and alternates different exercises to build different muscle groups. This is good, he thinks.
Then his thoughts turn into noise—they snap like teeth and balloon from his ears, growing like inflatable plastic phalluses, pointing out from his head like synthetic antlers dancing back and forth and popping above his head. Moment puddles in his ears. And his sense of awareness, for a split second, returns, a self-blanking type of reality and comfort that drags him into a lobotomized state of consciousness—heavy and muted, jam-packed, concussive, and pounding inside the skull. The engine is running. He is looking at the fuel gauge behind the wheel. He is distracted, he is young. He is dead from something that prevents him from living and keeps him from being killed.
Headlights appear in the rearview mirror. The lights are blue. They flash. My brother wipes his brow and puts the Jeep in park.
A minute passes. Eventually, a sheriff climbs out of the squad car. He holds a flashlight and aims the beam at my brother’s face. His pupils squeeze shut. He is hypnotized.
The sheriff asks my brother to step out of the vehicle. My brother becomes submissive and inaudible. He cooperates. The sheriff looks him over. He is shirtless. His belt is unbuckled. His hands are in his pockets, holding up his pants. When the sheriff tells him to remove his hands, his pants fall to his ankles. The sheriff moves the flashlight over my brother’s body. He sees three torn condoms hanging from my brother’s cock. He sees pieces of latex sticking to my brother’s leg. He sees streaks of blood smeared across my brother’s thighs. He points the beam back in my brother’s eyes. He thinks my brother is mentally ill. My brother feels mentally ill. Sweat pours from his pores. He shivers.
He tells my brother to pull up his pants. He tells him he has the right to remain silent.
My brother does not know what’s happening. He asks the sheriff, “Why?”
The sheriff says, “Suspicion to commit carnal acts.”
He handcuffs my brother and puts him in the back of the squad car. He has my brother’s Jeep impounded. My brother reclines in the backseat. There, he faints.
The sheriff assumes my brother is on illegal narcotics obtained from illegal immigrant terrorists. He writes this in his report. He calls my brother, “a shit.” My brother coughs and murmurs. He is still unconscious. Tears are in his eyes but he is not crying. The sheriff takes my brother to night court.
There, a judge declares him mentally handicapped. He charges him with heresy. He invalidates my brother’s driver license and seizes his cell phone.
“Why?” my brother asks again.
“Quiet!” the judge shouts. “Or I’ll charge you in contempt of court.”
The judge sentences my brother to eight years in a mental research facility, for “observation.”
_
Weeks pass. My brother is put in a cell. There is a bed, a toilet, and a sink.
He lies on his back. His eyes are too excited to sleep. They run up and down the wintry, grey walls of the cell. He climbs out of bed and runs cold water over his face. He massages his temples softly. He crawls back in bed and holds his arms.
Each day he is allowed out of his cell for one hour. He eats. He walks laps around the courtyard. There are prison guards. They carry nightsticks and cattle prods. They let my brother out, come back in an hour, and lock him up again. Afterwards, they spray water and Epsom salt at my brother with a power washer. The force breaks his skin. The water tastes like pennies. My brother’s mind grows weary. His eyes become dull and unfocused. He chews the inside of his lip.
_
He calls me on the phone. “Don’t worry,” I tell him.
But he doesn’t say a word.
My parents ask me where my brother is. I tell them he ran away with his girlfriend. I tell them he’s in Costa Rica surfing. My parents don’t speak to one another. My mother reads her bible and prays in private. My father hides in the basement and paints, diluted and sick, like watercolors with watercolors. They are angry with one another. They don’t talk anymore.
My brother is moved to another location. He grows more weak and incoherent.
He feels cornered. He wants to escape. He becomes angry. He closes his eyes and tries to sleep. He cannot rest. Every night he tries to sleep. He tries to stop his brain from thinking, from working, from feeling. He can only sleep from complete exhaustion.
He wonders what happened to his freedom. He wonders what he did to deserve this. He had seen every prison movie from the 90s, where protagonists manage to escape to international havens, like Canada. This usually happens right after being raped by the biggest greaseball in the jail. My brother wonders why he hasn’t been raped yet, or at least attacked. This makes him feel aesthetically inferior. He wants to fight for his freedom but is too weak. He imagines what Nelson Mandela would do in his situation. He wonders if our mom has thrown out his Che Guevara t-shirt. He plans on asking Santa for another one next Christmas.
_
He dreams. He’s in a supermarket. He wanders around with an empty cart. A clerk asks him if he would like any help. The clerk is young, puny, and has acne.
“No,” my brother says. He says he would rather walk around the aisles all day looking for what he wants than to ask for help. He says he wants to discover things on his own.
He lumbers down the aisles, like a monster, past the frozen food section, past the toiletries, past the sauces. He vacantly pushes the shopping cart. He is gathering things aimlessly from the shelves. He drops items into his shopping cart without looking. When his cart is full, he pushes it to the checkout lane. A saleswoman unloads the cart.
She asks him if he is having a nice day.
My brother does not respond.
He is thumbing through a People magazine. He is looking at pictures of celebrities dancing in nightclubs and surfing in Costa Rica. He reads about celebrity drug addiction and adoption. Celine Dion music is playing in the background.
The saleswoman scans my brother’s items. The scanner BEEPS-BEEPS: Frozen orange juice concentrate, high fiber cereal, organic soy milk, bleach, potato chips, whipped cream, yogurt, toilet paper, mustard, donuts, deodorant, charcoal, shaving cream, maple syrup, and more maple syrup. My brother can smell it. He thinks of Canada.
“Paper?” the saleswoman asks, “or plastic?”
My brother says, “Both.”
The saleswoman shrugs and shakes a bag open.
My brother’s heart begins to beat fast. He feels cornered. He wants to wake up. He stares at the saleswoman. She asks him if he has any coupons.
My brother says, “No.”
She says, “That’s fine.”
He says he has to escape.
She stares at my brother.
My brother stares somewhere else. He tries to keep his hands from tremoring. His neck grows stiff.
After a few minutes, the saleswoman asks him if he feels alright.
My brother says that she doesn’t care, that she never could, that it’s none of her business.
The saleswoman tells my brother the total, “$911.99.”
My brother says he needs to escape.
The saleswoman is quiet. My brother closes his eyes. He feels surrounded. He runs down one of the aisles and hides in a corner. Butchers are pounding and slicing deli meat. The slicer groans and cuts. He thinks, OUT. The blade drips liquid on the floor. It smells like Freon. My brother stares. His vision goes blank.
_
The prison guards come and get my brother to let him out of his cell for his daily hour. They are wearing surgical scrubs. They poke him with their nightsticks. They rub food coloring on his skin to keep him from looking pale.
My brother screams. He pulls his covers over his head and crawls into his mattress.
He can hear other prisoners scream. The prison guards scream.
“You motherfucking drug-addict!” they call my brother.
He feels himself being punched. He can hear other prisoners scream louder. The prison guards scream again.
He hears BEEP-BEEP. Items are being scanned. He thinks, Mercy.
One of the prison guards screams, “Get up!”
Another screams, “Leave him!”
My brother hears himself fall to the ground in his cell. He feels his chest groan. He feels like deli meat.
The cell door slams shut. He hears his heart beat.
_
Another week passes. The prison guards begin to leave my brother in his cell longer and longer. My brother doesn’t feel as ill anymore. This is because he has stopped feeling.
He sits in his cell and becomes very tense. His face wrinkles. When he sleeps he grinds his teeth. He hugs his body and feels how skinny he has become. His hair and beard have stopped growing. His bones begin to shrink and his wrists swell, making dented ukuleles out of his arms. He frowns.
He peeks between the bars on the door of his cell and tries to talk to another prisoner.
“Hello?” he says.
A voice responds, “Hello.”
My brother asks the voice, “How are you?”
“Good,” it says.
The voice asks my brother about himself.
My brother looks for the source of voice but cannot see anyone.
He says he doesn’t know.
My brother asks the voice where it’s from.
A voice says, “Costa Rica.”
The voice asks my brother where he is from.
He doesn’t respond.
The voice says, “Please?”
He tells the voice he doesn’t know what the world is like.
The voice does not answer. My brother closes his mouth and hugs himself.
He says he doesn’t know what’s wrong with him.
He says he feels worse every day.
He scratches his neck. He feels angry.
The voice says, “That’s only normal.”
He asks, “How do I have to grow?”
There is a moment of silence. Ventilators cough and murmur.
Sounding sarcastic, the voice finally says, “Sounds like you need another world.”
My brother’s face twitches. He drapes his blanket around his shoulders and goes to the window in his cell. He looks at his reflection in the glass. He tells himself he shouldn’t have said anything. He thinks, How did I get in here? He tells himself, Sorry. Through the window, he can see A Shining City on a Hill. The skyline is on fire, below it, a Beltway, along it, pedestrians.
More weeks pass. My brother doesn’t feel as angry anymore. His face is calm. When his eyes tear up, he wipes them. He imagines Michael Jordan, Nelson Mandela, and Che Guevara and gets them talking amongst themselves in his head. He hears the word abortion. He tries to smile, but he can’t. He feels strange, diluted and sick, like watercolors. He looks at the bed in his cell. He lies down. He goes to sleep.
_
Today he wakes up. He sits up. It’s afternoon. He is in his girlfriend’s bed. She is scratching his back softly. She says, “I remember the day with I met you.” She says, “You told me you weren’t feeling very good, that you needed to go home and sleep.” My brother is silent. She says, “I never asked you if you were tired, or why.” She says, “I fell in love with you immediately.” She says, “I remember everything about that day.” She kisses my brother. She tells him she loves him.
My brother thinks about his life. He looks at his girlfriend and doesn’t move. His eyes wander toward the ground. He thinks about sleeping. He thinks about other people sleeping in their homes. She starts to say something, then stops. She hugs him.
My brother’s chest rises and falls. She touches his face. He wonders how he got here. He keeps his eyes on the ground.
She says she’s happy she isn’t pregnant. She smells like maple syrup. She asks him if he’s happy with her breasts. “The shape,” she says. She says she’s thinking about getting breast implants. She says her father said he’d pay for them if she gets straight A’s. She asks my brother to help her study. My brother is motionless. He thinks, Mercy. There are footsteps downstairs. There are also voices. The sounds congeal together in the air and parade like shadows through his mind, keening in the upper register, somewhere between male and female, between childish innocence and jaded adulthood, at once ethereal and urgent, earthy and decayed.
My brother says, “I guess I’ll leave.” She says, “Stay for a while?” He says he needs another world. He closes his eyes.
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