My Brother and Me

I was a young boy.  It was just me and my mother and my little baby brother.  We had fallen on hard times.  We had taken to living in the hollow of a large boulder at the local park.  There were small holes to climb up into this hollow on either side of the boulder, and it was comfortably snug within.  Once ensconced, we were safe inside the boulder, but we had to be discreet in our comings and goings, so that the other patrons of the park wouldn't notice that we were living in there.  To that end, my mother took some of the sand that lay on the ground around the boulder and molded it in such a way that the openings were recessed into two pitted grooves.  That way the folks power walking in the parking-lot down the hill wouldn't see us slip in and out.  My mother demonstrated, wiggling in feet first.  Her smiling face slipped up under the boulder and she was inside.  The people down the hill went about their picnics and their brisk strides, never noticing a thing.

But then I just had to go and point out a problem with this idea.  I climbed in after her, and once inside the cool, damp hollow, I whispered that there was a winding stone walkway that passed right by the boulder.  Certainly these hidden entrances would be visible to anyone walking along this path.  My mother stuck her head out to see what I was talking about, and just then a cop happened to be coming down this walkway.  He spotted her before she could duck back in.  So she slipped out the rest of the way, and made like she was just resting against the boulder in its shade.  She assumed as casual an air as she could with a smear of subterranean dirt across her cheek.

I sat inside the boulder, trying to hold my breath, trying not to make a noise.  My baby brother rocked back and forth, shirtless, nibbling at his fingers.  I could hear the cop's muffled interrogation outside.  He seemed to be buying my mother's story.  He seemed like he was about to move on.  Unfortunately just then, I bumped into one of my brother's toys, a plastic phone for toddlers,  and it let out the briefest clipped ring. The noise echoed off the concave ceiling of the hollow.  This perked the cop's attention, but it wasn't until my baby brother suddenly started wailing from all the tension and confusion that the game was truly up.  I snatched up my brother and slipped out the hole on the other side of the boulder.  I took off running across the park with my brother tucked up under my arm, never looking back.

The two of us started making our way across town, somehow growing older as we cut along the back streets and crossed the busy intersections.  I figured that we could go stay with my grandmother.  I was nearly a teenager and my brother was just starting to walk and talk, coming out of stores marveling at everything he saw, fascinated by the bell that jingled whenever the door opened, the candy and chips and cans of soups that would sustain us smuggled under both our coats.  We sat at the curb eating, while I consulted the pieces of a weathered old map, figuring which routes we had to take.  My brother's little shoelaces were loose and dirty from being dragged along in the mud.  I tied them into bows and promised I'd show him how to do it himself some day, and then we got to our feet and kept moving.

I was a grown man by the time we reached my grandmother's house.  My brother was the teenager now, raised in the wild.  He tossed pebbles across the yard as we waited for my grandmother to appear at the screen door around the side of the house.  I told her that I would pay her rent for whatever rooms she could spare.  I insisted.  I wanted more than anything to settle into the comforts of working a steady job and living a daily life and paying my own way and finding myself in a chair in front of the TV at the end of the day in crusty old work shoes.  She told me that we could have two of the bedrooms in the back, upstairs.  They had been closed off for years, but we just needed to dust and take down the cobwebs and it would be just fine.  It would be so nice to live in a real house again, to sleep in real beds, to sit snugly under a roof on stormy nights.

The clouds were even gathering as we spoke and I could feel those first few drops of hard rain.  It seemed that we had arrived just in time.  My grandmother held the screen door open and my brother and I ducked inside.  Sitting on a cabinet across the room was a stack of letters that my mother had written from jail.  My grandmother had kept them for me, waiting for me to arrive.  The ones at the bottom of the stack were discolored with age.  I considered the weight of the stack in my hand.  The whole story of all those years in a handful of envelopes.                         

Wrong Beach

When I went back there, I found our local beach was worse than I remembered.  It had become a dumping ground for people's old junked appliances.  Industrial washing machines and dryers and electric stoves lay cock-eyed in the sand, littering the landscape, and there was always a chance of stepping on some broken piece of glass or rusted metal if one were unwise enough to venture out in bare feet.  The water had a thick red hue to it and the sky above was always dark, full of churning, turbulent clouds.  Determining day and night had become impossible, as even the sand itself was lighter than the sky, lit terrestrially as it was by a row of streetlamps planted along the edge of where the beach and the parking-lot met.  The sky's only illumination was the occasional flash of lighting rumbling in the cracks between the clouds.

No one ever swam out into the water, for fear of what it was, and whatever had given it its color, and whatever might have been lurking out there.  Instead, a large inflatable pool had been set up on the beach for whoever wanted to swim.  But the standing water in this pool was murky and foul, and it gave off a rank odor.  Swimming in this pool was almost certain to leave one bedridden with fever and chills the next day.  An air of sickness lingered about it.  It was rumored that there were drowned bodies that lay unretrieved at the bottom of this pool, and some claimed that you could feel the rotting flesh against the tips of your toes, while others insisted that these were merely spots where the pool's canvas liner bulged against the sand.  The water in the pool was so clouded that these debates remained unsettled.

And yet, despite all this, as I stood there, people still poured onto the beach as gamely as ever, with all the cheerfulness of the damned, carrying towels and coolers, all ready for a fun day at the shore, their smiles and laughter only occasionally punctuated by someone cursing as they stepped on a used syringe or a broken bottle.  They wandered right down to the water's edge and dumped their stuff and took their place, as though tempting fate itself to reach its great red hand from the waves and drag them out to oblivion.  They lay out, as if basking in a sun that wasn't there.  They set up chairs under umbrellas, as if enjoying the infernal view.  They left their children to make castles that would rot and stink and decompose rather than simply wash away.  And all the while I just stood there and shook my head.

A Roadside Portrait

An old man lived across the road from me.  In the spring he would come out every morning to sit there by the roadside, reading his newspaper and waiting for his grandson to come along and pick him up in a battered orange truck.  From my window I could see a kitchen chair set out there by the mailbox, weathered and worn and weak in one leg, and the old man was there to take his post at six o'clock every weekday morning, regular enough to set a pot of coffee brewing at five till and know that it was done by his arrival.  He was as dependable a part of the landscape as the thicket of trees behind him or the road that ran before him waiting to gather the heat of the day.  He just sat there with his paper, never glancing down the bend to see if the truck was coming or fretting impatiently over his watch.  He was the figure to which all the rest of it was ground.

And so I came out early one morning to set up an easel and canvas.  I had my paints and my brushes, and I started in on the grass and the trees and the morning light creeping into the scene from down the road.  I got most of it done, waiting for the old man to come take his place at the center of the composition.  But six o'clock rolled around and he never showed.  The orange truck never came along.  The crooked kitchen chair sat empty.  I was just one day late.    

Lifetimes Ago

Ever since I'd woken up from that dream, I'd felt like years and years had passed.  I dropped by to see people I knew, and it seemed like they were in completely different places in their lives.  My brother's ex-wife even greeted me warmly at her door, old grudges all forgotten.  She cooked breakfast for a houseful of guests.  They all sat around the kitchen laughing over eggs.  Who were these people?  It was the same with everyone else.  Old friends were all doing new things, working new jobs, telling unfamiliar jokes, stressed over different problems.  I felt adrift, disconnected, alienated from the people around me.  I blinked my sleepy eyes.  All of this overnight?

I chalked it all up to the epic span of the dream itself.  It was that sense that a whole lifetime had passed in my sleep.  I'd only dreamt that years had gone by, and that feeling had resonated upon waking.  I tried to explain all this to my family as they sat around on sunken couches in my grandmother's living room on Christmas afternoon, the garland wound around the bannister, the lights strung along the wood paneling.  My brother sat at a table and nodded over a glass of eggnog, but I could see that none of them really understood what I was saying or how strange it all felt.  It was just a dream.  How could a mere dream throw someone so out of sync?

I figured that if they could see it, maybe they'd understand.  I had sold the movie rights to the dream and I wheeled in the old silver TV with the rabbit ears and everyone gathered around on my grandmother's floor to watch.  The dream had told the story of a dog.  It had been a little puppy when we were all kids crouching there in the grass to pet it.  It was white with patches of black, and it grew as we all grew.  It was a frisky little critter.  There was a scene where it squeezed through a wooden fence and started paddling around in an alligator tank, and we stood outside the fence reaching our hands and yelling out the dog's name and hoping and praying that one of the alligators wouldn't bite it.  On the floor in front of the TV everyone laughed at that part and thought it was cute.  Then the dog got older, even as we all got older and we moved out of the house and went our separate ways, and there it was in the winter twilight all mangy and laying at the end of the driveway in the snow, whining, wondering where we'd all gone.  The credits rolled on this somber note.

After the movie, I went home with my wife.  But things were off there as well.  The place was a cramped basement apartment with high windows.  It wasn't the cozy country house out in Perry that I remembered.  I tried to tell my wife, but she wouldn't listen.  She just dragged me from room to room being playful.  "None of this is right," I told her as she pulled me along by my arm.  There were throw pillows and broken coffee makers and dirty dishes and junk everywhere.  I picked up a discarded towel with my free hand.  "I know that you used to keep the house a lot cleaner than this," I shouted over her laughter, showing her the towel.

She led me into the kitchen, which was just as cluttered as the rest of the place.  The cabinets were all crammed full of open cereal boxes.  The walls were bright yellow and there was an old icebox style refrigerator, the kind with the latch you pop out to open the door.  None of this looked right.  And then I noticed a small room off the kitchen.  "What's this?" I asked my wife.  She shook her head.  She didn't seem to know.  She suddenly grew serious.  I thought I had seen all the other bedrooms and rooms of the apartment on my dizzy guided tour.

I crept into the room.  It was actually more of a hallway, as it led to the laundry room down at the other end.  The light shined down from another basement window high on the wall above and my desk was beneath this window, piled with loose papers and folded laundry, leaving no space to work.  Even the chair was piled with laundry.  But as I got closer, I saw that it wasn't laundry.  There was a bundle of people in the chair, or maybe just their heads.  I brushed back the dark hair from one of the faces and the eyes stared back at me, and then I jumped and jolted and screamed and finally found myself back in my own bed.                       

Our Uncanny Valley

Somewhere in the wilderness out west, my daughter and I found the valley that the creator of the video game The Clones was said to have based the layout of his game on.  The story went that while on vacation, and while ruminating on different project deadlines that he was facing back at work, he had climbed to the peak of one of the mountains surrounding the valley.  When he had reached the summit, he turned back and looked out over the green fields below, and in that whipping wind and the panoramic curve of the Earth, the whole idea for a video game simulating people and life hit him just like that.

Staring out from that same summit, I had a similar inspiration.  I stretched my hand out over the land and explained it all to my daughter.  We would buy up the whole area, and we would create a real world community based on the game.  We'd cut some kind of deal with the company that held the license to the game.  We'd set up the roads just as they were in the neighborhoods of the game, and we'd sell off all the individual parcels of land.  People could come and build any kind of crazy houses they wanted to.  The streets would all be named after references to the game.  There could be shops and thoroughfares where people could buy themed merchandise and furnishings for their homes just like those featured in the game.

I stared out, nodding with satisfaction as if I could already see it all under construction below.  But my daughter was still confused about the whole idea.  She wasn't sure why anyone would go for it, why they would want to come live here.  I just shrugged as we turned to head back down the path that had led us to the summit and I told her, "There comes a point with any simulation, if you take it to one extreme or another, that it eventually coincides with reality."