Strange how one careless wish could ruin everything. The day after I made it my brother shattered his elbow skateboarding. It wasn’t like I sacrificed a chicken at midnight. It was just a dumb half-mumbled wish that I’ll regret forever.
Hudson was twenty back then, still riding his stupid skateboard like an untouchable king. He’d fallen before, but this time was the worst. The doctor gave him oxy for the pain. He never came back from that.
That was also the day reality first splintered for me. In an alternate reality, I never wished anything and he never fell. Instead I sat on the front porch steps and watched him ride away from me like a golden angel chasing the faded light.
~
The air’s cold here. I can’t get comfortable on the railroad tie no matter how I contort my body. Hudson breathes next to me. “Nate, you still there?” he whispers. I say yes. “Can you hear it coming?” he asks. “Uh huh.” I don’t know if I can stay with him to the end, but I don’t tell him that.
~
Once when we were kids, our mother’s father inspected us with his rheumy eyes. “Chalk and cheese these two,” he proclaimed in his gravelly brogue like some angry Celtic god. Before that I never felt all that different from Hud. Afterwards, it was never the same.
Our father left us when I was seven and Hud was five. Left us alone with Hurricane Carole. We got good at tracking her moods. Category One meant she was placid. Not too many Cat Ones. Lots of Fours and Fives, though. The last Cat Five, Hudson was thirteen. He’d been sketching instead of washing the kitchen floor. She had him sprawled on that floor, yanking his head by his hair and smacking his face in a hot banshee frenzy. Usually she raged cold, making us get the belt and wait on the bed bare-assed where she’d beat us in controlled silence while we choked down our whimpers. Those beatings ended with puberty. Maybe instinct warned her that her stronger boys might lash back. We never did. Not Hud on the kitchen floor tossed around like a broken doll. Not me watching like marble. The next day Hudson shaved his head. He never let his hair grow long again.
Sometimes I still feel frozen in all those moments, and I wonder if it’s possible for a person to be smashed into pieces and scattered throughout the whole of their existence.
Reality splinters. Our father never left us with her like that. Instead we had a mother who was calm and even and never threatened to drown us in her emotional storms.
~
“I don’t think I can move off of here,” Hud says. The steel rail digs into my skull. It vibrates a sinister lullaby. I don’t ever want to move.
~
Sometimes I’d think we were supposed to be Cain and Abel, except neither of us had anything worth sacrificing and God never paid all that much attention to us anyway. In high school I had just a couple of friends, while Hud flowed like an easy river across all groups and years. As we grew into men, I stayed taller, but his body turned tighter and stronger with this angry energy. Everyone compared our looks and I got the short end, just like he got the short end from Hurricane Carole. “Why can’t you be good like Nate?” she’d tell him, such a damn stupid thing to say, and afterwards we couldn’t look at each other, with me feeling like I’d betrayed him somehow even though I never said a word.
Reality splinters. We’d hang out in high school. Go to the same concerts. Get drunk at the same parties. Chalk and chalk.
Now and then Hurricane Carole would force us to see our father. It never went good. Hud and I would argue about him. Did he leave because she was so angry, or was it his leaving that made her so angry? I always wished our father would rescue us but that wish never came true. He’d take us bowling. He’d buy us milkshakes. He’d take us fishing even though neither of us cared much for it. One day he brought us to a flea market to meet his fiancée, a woman with the face and hair of a parakeet. After slurred hellos that left a taint of alcohol in the air she kept hoisting hangers of clothes and dropping them onto the ground, mistaking the shadow of power lines for a clothes rack. Hud couldn’t believe our father settled for such a sloppy mess. We got invites to the wedding. We didn’t go.
~
It’s getting colder out here on these nighttime tracks. When I was a kid I’d hear the freight trains clatter across them every night, slicing through the night, grinding through the night, reminding me how alone I was, night after night. I stare at Hud’s profile in the thin moonlight. His nose is more prominent than mine but it’s one of those noses that fits the face and makes it all the better.
“I can’t do it,” he says. “I never could.”
~
After high school I enlisted in the army and found two years of peace a continent away. All of us were misfits in our own unique way; it didn’t matter where we came from or what we liked. One time I got jumped at the club on base on R&B night because I was white. Just before it happened, some guy grabbed my arm and warned me, “Ain’t no one here coming to save you.” They cracked my skull and a couple ribs. I spent three days in the hospital, but I coped like a king. The body knows, always. Mine was conditioned for violence, but not loneliness. I remember I saw an orderly who looked like Hud. I ached so bad for him to come to me, rest his hand on my bare arm, lean his head against mine and tell me that I could endure this world. That I was okay.
Reality splinters. I stayed in the army, made a career out of it, and spent years wandering far from home. Or I stayed in the army and got killed in someone else’s war, but I didn’t mind dying that way all that much. Or I went to college instead and became an engineer, with a wife and a daughter I’d never beat or abandon.
While I was away, Hurricane Carole’s anger broke into depression. But that was just another type of storm for us to suffer through. One evening, I caught her sitting in the darkened living room staring out the window and plucking out her eyelashes with her fingers one by one. It dragged this pity out of me, which got me so angry because I wanted to hate her for what she wove into our bones.
Me and Hud, walking through life flinching from the world, our bodies like mousetraps stretched unbearably tight. All we did was hurt those dumb enough to spring that trap. We were chalk and cheese when it came to girls. I drew in the dutiful ones, the sensible ones, but none of them could scale my fortress walls. Complicated girls would lose themselves inside Hud’s maze. It always ended in fury. I remember one girl stood outside his bedroom window screaming at him and setting on fire the sketches he made of her. When she surrendered in defeat, Hud moved on to the next. I kind of gave up.
Reality splinters. Me and Hud sit on a beach with our pregnant wives. We throw our laughter toward the surf. The sun hurts our eyes and burns our skin, but it’s a good hurt, and we endure.
~
The rail beneath my head vibrates with a nervous insistence. Hud lays curled with his back to me. He mumbles something I can’t make out. I’m close enough to feel the heat of his body but he’s a galaxy away from me. I don’t understand what I did to deserve to be so alone all the time.
~
Twenty-three was Hud’s first stint in rehab. He came out tanned and distracted. Tropical Depression Carole gushed over her beautiful boy. I clocked the resentment in his eyes. Therapy calmed her storms but did nothing for the wreckage she left in her wake. I caught the flinch in his body as she tried to pull him close. The body remembers.
“Sup bro,” he said to me that day as I hung back. Our eyes met and maybe we had a chance to see each other for real beyond the roles we’d taken: him the fuck-up, me the perfect one. I wanted to tell him how violently I despised that role, how perfection is a bitch goddess who sucks away your joy. He’d never understand that kind of curse. I forget who broke eye contact first.
Two years later, another rehab, this one he swore would take. He told me he’d finally evicted his demons. I didn’t believe him. The thing is, demons twist themselves around your veins and dig into your flesh. You can’t get rid of them without ripping out all the things that make you who you are. I said nothing.
Reality splinters. Hud did kick. Not just kick—he found his superpower: compassion and sympathy and connection with other broken people. He became a counselor.
Hud rented a studio apartment the next town over. I drove him to his storage unit to help him deposit his golf clubs and skateboards and boxes of clothes he stopped wearing but refused to get rid of. Afterwards we went to a truck stop diner and ate greasy burgers. He’d rest his hand on my bare arm, touch, then pull away. He’d murmur dreamily, and it felt like we were two boys saved, that somehow we’d managed to rescue ourselves, that he was finally there with me, for me. We didn’t say anything worth anything, but that didn’t matter.
~
Three stubborn stars poke through the midnight haze. Hud moans so softly it’s almost a whimper. I put an unsure hand on his bony shoulder. He flinches ever so slightly. I withdraw. This is it. This is my brother. Who he is. What he is. I’ve known it in my head all my life but I never could take it into my heart. He was always gone from me. I was always alone. The rail hammers my skull. It’s coming.
~
Six months ago, our father died. Tropical Depression Carole made Hud and me buy new suits and the two of us went to his wake. On the drive there Hud dangled a cigarette out of the open window. The air cooled the ember to ash. He stared at the overcast sky through sunglasses and sipped whiskey from a dented flask.
“He did it on purpose,” he said. “Died like this. Now of all times. Fucking heart attack my ass. He knows about my anxiety, how I get about things. You’re lucky, Nate. You don’t have to deal with anxiety like I do. It’s hell. He had to know. How could he not? I’m his flesh and blood for chrissake. I tell you, he did this on purpose because he knew it’ll fuck everything up for me.”
I waited for him to ask me how I felt. How I was doing. He never did. No one ever did. I waited for a light to turn green. A cold wind blew across my dried-out heart.
The funeral parlor was exactly like every other funeral parlor ever built, with its orange carpeting, tan wallpaper and cheap wood chairs with yellow cushions. Hud left me to go to the bathroom and I walked in alone. Some of our father’s family—cousins, I guess, a couple aunts maybe; we’d been exiled from them—inspected me from a distance, my face enough like our father’s to mark me as his. No one laid a consoling hand on my shoulder or said I’m sorry for your loss or even just hello. Not even that wet-eyed parakeet woman draped in black.
Hud gripped my neck tigerlike. He swayed in his new shoes and I caught something fierce and dark in his eyes, like two dormant volcanoes coming to life.
“This fucker,” he said low and sharp. “This…this…this…”
I grabbed his wrist. He shook free and stalked toward the casket. “This fucker,” he slurred. “Fucking shit. Shit shit shit. Goddamn shit.”
He crouched and swayed on the balls of his feet. Then he rammed his shoulder into the casket. It tilted on its base but held. Some man went to tackle Hud. Hud shouldered him away and tumbled onto the body of our father. He grabbed the lapel of his death suit and released it with a whimper. Then he spun around and looked in turn at each of the mourners and said, “This fucker.” He jabbed a finger at the corpse. “He couldn’t even give a fuck.” Hud punched the corpse’s neck. His fist left a cold thunk and skidded off it sideways.
I stood there in that funeral parlor with its hideous rug and depressing furniture staring at all these people, strangers and distant relations who discarded us like our father did, staring at the tilted casket, staring at the bawling parakeet woman, witnessing my brother’s spiral, knowing in my gut he’d never be okay, and I told myself one of those trite things people say to cope: you get the hand you’re dealt.
Thanks, asshole, but who the fuck’s the dealer?
My brother sat in a heap on the floor, covering his head, his shoulders shuddering.
Ain’t no one here coming to save you.
The next day we threw those suits out.
~
Crickets call out to me and Hud as we lay on these tracks. It feels like we’re deep in the ocean, two boys treading water, our legs so tired, our lungs so burdened. I stay on my back and hike my knees toward my chest as if I could curl into a ball and disappear. Save me save me save me I repeat in my head until my desperation dissolves into defeat. The rail screams against my skull.
~
Some mornings I’d wake up with the icy knowledge that I never had a brother, that I was an only child with an angry mother and a gone father, a lonely boy who invented another to siphon off the pain. I’d tiptoe to the closed bedroom door and slowly open it, almost crying with relief when I’d see Hud asleep, a bare foot poking out from his sheet.
Reality splinters. That bedroom was really an office. I sit among the dust balls beside the bookcase, the clock ticking a monotonous tune, and stare at my mother’s desk, wishing it was a bed that held someone who would understand, who could help me endure, but there’s nothing but a desk and dust and a ticking clock. No brother. No one.
No. I couldn’t bear that.
After the funeral, Hud seemed to pull himself together, but sometimes I’d catch him glaring at my face with its too-close resemblance to our father’s and it made me hate the face in the mirror. I know Hud didn’t mean it. I know in his soul he didn’t resent me, not really, not any more than I resented him. Still, it carved a chunk out of my heart and I didn’t have all that much left to spare.
He took me to the playground at night, the one we’d throw our exhausted bodies at so many years ago. We swayed on the swings, him puffing on a Marlboro, sipping from his flask, slurring his words in a way that made me know for sure he was using again.
“You’re my best friend,” he said to me.
I wanted to lash out at him, tell him if that was true why do you always make me feel like I’m a continent away? Why do I have to suffer alone on this island every day? Why can’t you save me?
Reality splinters. Me and Hud aren’t chalk and cheese. We’re two peas in a pod. A matching set. We can read each other’s minds and finish each other’s sentences. He catches me when I fall, and I…
…can’t catch him. I know that. One day I’m going to find him in his apartment cold and blue. He will leave me alone and I will hate him because his death will be proof that I’ve always been alone.
~
The rail beneath my skull vibrates in a frenzy. Hud stays curled beside me, three inches apart, three oceans apart, his mousetrap frame coiled and no doubt aching to snap free. The train’s coming. The wheels grind. A horn blares. It’ll bear down on us any minute. I can’t move. He can’t move. I can’t pull him off and I can’t leave him here alone.
Reality splinters. We stay on those tracks lost to our fates as the train crushes our bones to dust. Reality splinters. I pull myself free just before the train shudders past and leave him behind.
Ain’t no one here coming to save you.
I’m all out of wishes.
I don’t stay and I don’t leave Hud behind. Instead I do the one thing I always needed to do—I drag his body off those tracks, loop my arm around his shoulder, and together we walk deeper into the night and through the woods away from it all. We are splintered but we endure.
