The Things a Brother Knows Read online

  “We need equipment,” Pearl shouts over the noise of the radio. “Spyglasses and infrared detectors and maybe we should have a whole new lingo to boot.”

  The sun is just beginning to break its way into the sky.

  “We should have new names for each other. Code names. Double agent names. Names nobody would ever know us by. And speaking of names, what the hell kind of name is Loren for someone so downright scary?”

  She’s on her third cappuccino.

  “He has a chick’s name! And he’s gotta be the least chicklike guy I’ve ever met! Loren! That’s the name of someone you’d want to have over for tea!”

  I rub the sleep from my eyes. I’ll never catch up to the heights the morning’s caffeine has taken her to.

  “What about Suge Knight?” Zim asks. “He’s about as unchicklike as you can get, and his real name is Marion.”

  “Excellent point, Richard.”

  “I aim to please.”

  I put my feet up on the dashboard and tilt back my seat.

  “Don’t even think about sleeping,” she shouts at me. “That would be so totally unfair.”

  “I would never.”

  “Hey, I know. Let’s talk about what you packed.”

  “Why?”

  “For one, it’ll keep you awake. For another, it’s kind of like porn for girls.”

  So I tell her the contents of my backpack:

  5 T-shirts. One from Pearl’s convent. Two plain. Two with slogans on them. (WHAT IF THE HOKEY POKEY REALLY IS WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT? and MEET MY PEEPS, under a picture of the marshmallow Easter candies.)

  1 pair of running shoes.

  1 fleece jacket.

  1 lightweight rain poncho.

  6 pairs of underwear, all boxers.

  5 pairs of socks, brand-new.

  1 pair of shorts.

  1 pair of cargo pants Pearl tells me I look like a hobbit in but are nonetheless practical, not to mention comfortable.

  1 ziplock bag assembled while deep in the throes of a hypochondriac’s fantasy, filled with an assortment of pills, capsules, sprays, ointments, lotions and Band-Aids.

  4 granola bars.

  My cell phone and charger.

  A folder stuffed with papers that Zim holds in his lap.

  My wallet with $1,000 in cash slipped to me by Dov.

  2 decks of cards.

  “Nice work,” Pearl says. “Except, of course, for the hobbit pants. But at least now maybe you can put those stupid pockets to some use.”

  “You lost me at the T-shirts,” Zim says.

  I’ve barely slept. I spent most of the night online, looking at maps. Taking the addresses Boaz had scrawled into the Atlantic and plugging them into search engines. My head is awash in satellite pictures—it’s crazy the way everything looks the same from somewhere high up in the atmosphere. I can hardly tell Boston from Poughkeepsie from Edison from Baltimore from Washington, DC.

  I know nothing much matters beyond the address Loren gave me—this friend of a friend. That’s where I’ll find Boaz tomorrow if I can’t find him today. Once I find him, I won’t need any maps, I’ll be with him. But still, I couldn’t help myself.

  I wanted those addresses, those maps, those places seen from high above to tell me something. To whisper my brother’s secrets. I beckoned to them: Please. But all I got in return was a lousy night’s sleep.

  TWELVE

  BY THE TIME WE REACH RIDGEWOOD, it’s nearly eleven in the morning. We drive directly to the Motel 9, even though it’s the one place we can be certain we won’t find Boaz. He’ll be long gone by now, but it somehow feels like the right place to start. Or maybe it’s because it’s the only place to start.

  I walk into the lobby. I breathe in the scent of the cheap disinfectant. Over the years I’ve developed a nose for these sorts of things. I can tell the cheap stuff from the overpriced organic stuff Mom uses. I hear the sound of a vacuum from far down one of the long, dark hallways—a rumble barely masked by a Muzak version of “Yellow Submarine” pouring from the overhead speakers.

  Poor John Lennon must be rolling in his grave.

  I wander the perimeter of the small lobby. I finger the leaf of a potted plastic fern. I pick up a brochure for a local hot-air balloon company. I haven’t seen much of the area yet, but can’t imagine why anyone would want to pay $350 for the pleasure of observing this particular patch of New Jersey from the basket of a hot-air balloon.

  I walk over to the front desk.

  The guy behind the counter stands up. He doesn’t look much older than me, although he has a thick mustache. Not that I’d ever grow a mustache, but I wouldn’t mind the option.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for someone.”

  “Name?” he asks, hands poised at the computer keys.

  “Katznelson.”

  He taps quickly and then squints at the screen. “Checked out this morning.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  He gives me a puzzled look and then seems to decide it isn’t worth his time. He shrugs and sits back down in his seat.

  I continue my path around the lobby’s perimeter. From a small table next to an armchair I pick up a copy of Women’s Health and then Forbes. I can’t imagine Boaz reading either, so I put them both back down.

  Pearl and Zim are sitting in the car. I can see them through the motel’s glass doors. Zim is taking a nap. Pearl is on her cell phone. She looks up and sees me watching her. She tucks the phone into the crook of her neck and makes a gesture. SO?

  I put my hands up in the air. I don’t even know what it is I’m looking for, so how will I know when I find it? All I know is, I want to be somewhere my brother has been. To see something, hear something, touch something my brother might have touched.

  It all feels so sad. So depressing. The few times I’ve stayed in hotels in my life, excitement crashed its way through me—I was going somewhere. I was on a journey. Some sort of special circumstance had taken me there, had led me to walk the unfamiliar halls, ride the carpeted elevators and sleep in the crisply sheeted beds.

  But there’s nothing special about this Motel 9 in Ridgewood. This is not a place that makes you feel like you’re going someplace. There is nothing in here, not in the plastic fern, not in the stack of brochures, not in the three-week-old magazines, that brings me any closer to my brother.

  The doors jingle as they close behind me.

  “I gotta roll,” Pearl says. Then she laughs. “I know.” Pause. “I know!” Pause. More laughter. “Okay, later.” She snaps her phone closed.

  “Who was that?” I know it isn’t Mama Goldblatt. She demands impeccable grammar. Despises slang. Prohibits the dropping of g’s.

  “Nobody.”

  “Nobody?”

  “It wasn’t nobody,” Zim grumbles from the backseat. “Trust me.”

  “Okay. Fine. It was Il Duce.”

  “What!”

  “Just get in the car, will you? Stop interrogating me.”

  I grab the folder of maps from Zim and climb in.

  There are variables. Of course there are variables. Life is nothing but a whole mess of variables. But with all these printed maps on my lap, even though they only amount to a thickness of a few inches of paper, the variables suddenly feel one hundred stories tall.

  The address Boaz is headed to, a house in Edison, is almost thirty-six miles from where we’re sitting in Pearl’s car outside the Motel 9.

  So how to break down a thirty-six-mile stretch?

  From all my earlier snooping, I know that Boaz looks at the road in twenty-mile segments, but now he has thirty-six to go in two days. Would he walk twenty miles today and sixteen tomorrow? Sixteen today and twenty tomorrow? Eighteen each day? Would the ratio look something more like a 22–14 split or any of the other ways you could break down those numbers?

  Variables. Too many variables.

  I pull a few sheets from the bottom of the pile.

  These are maps of the ten-mi
le stretch that makes up the middle of this thirty-six-mile journey. Somewhere in here we’ll have to go looking.

  I’ve got a decent idea of the roads he’ll take. I know he won’t sweep far to the east or bend a western arc. I used a site I found in Boaz’s browsing history that maps out the most direct route between any two points for someone who chooses to walk.

  The way of the foot, as I’ve come to think of it.

  “Where to?” Pearl asks.

  I look at my maps. “The Oranges.”

  “Huh?”

  “I don’t know. Somewhere near West or South or just plain Orange.”

  “Okay. The Oranges it is.”

  We travel the driving route, not the walking route. It doesn’t take very long. Twenty miles by car never does, and when we reach Orange I have Pearl drive another five miles south and we park in the lot of a CVS.

  I figure it makes more sense to walk his route backward. That way we’ll be walking toward him rather than behind him and maybe, with some crazy luck, we’ll meet him face to face.

  “So what time did he check out this morning?” Zim asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t you think that might help us figure out where he’d be by this time in the afternoon?”

  Shit. I hate it when Zim is right. And Zim is right more often than he’s wrong.

  “I guess you need Pearl’s spyglasses and code names and whatever because on your own, you’re kind of a crappy detective.”

  Forty minutes into the walk and Pearl starts complaining. She holds her side and winces.

  “You know, this isn’t exactly a smoker’s holiday.”

  We haven’t made it very far. In part because I stop to look inside most of the businesses we pass along the way. Convenience stores, diners, sporting goods outlets.

  I squint into the stuffy darkness of various bars. I search all the places Boaz might have stopped. I walk right by the hairdressers and nail salons and storefronts with names like Scrapbooker’s Paradise.

  Zim is really laying into Pearl about Il Duce.

  “I mean, really! Are you totally incapable of having a platonic relationship with a member of the opposite sex? Even some pizza-faced yogurt guy? Does it always have to turn into a thing with you?”

  “What about Levi? He’s platonic.”

  “He doesn’t count. He’s Levi. He’s like your brother. No, he’s like my brother. He’s more like your stepbrother. Anyway, he doesn’t count.”

  “Right. And you don’t count, Richard, because you’re unattractive and dim-witted.”

  The afternoon is unseasonably cool. I’m wearing long sleeves for the first time in weeks. We’ve just come out the other end of an oppressive heat wave and I’m glad for Boaz, glad he’s been given this break, because I can’t imagine it’s too pleasant to walk twenty miles or more in the kind of weather we’ve been having lately.

  Then again, Boaz is no stranger to heat.

  After walking a little over an hour it becomes clear it’s time to turn back. I’m not quite ready to give up, but I don’t want to drag Pearl beyond the point of no return. She’s still keeping pace and bickering with Zim, but she’s sweating and she’s out of breath and I know her. Once she’s had it she’ll just sit down and refuse to move another inch, and I’m not up to the task of carrying her back to the car.

  Also, I’m becoming convinced we’ve missed him. That our two points on the map have crossed. Maybe I underestimated him. Maybe he’s already left South Orange in the dust. Maybe he’s able to walk thirty-six miles or more on any given day.

  We return to the parking lot of the CVS.

  Pearl goes inside to buy something to drink and I sit with Zim on the hood of her car, looking through my folder. I’m scouring the list of campgrounds. It’ll start getting dark soon and I figure we should settle in someplace for the night. Tomorrow we’ll drive to Edison, to the address Loren gave me, and I’ll … what?

  Knock on the door?

  Sit on the curb and wait?

  Stand in the street and scream his name?

  Tonight. All I can do is focus on tonight.

  Pearl returns with an oversized bottle of some sort of water drink claiming healthy properties that can’t possibly exist in a substance that shade of purple. She takes a gigantic swig, wipes her face on the sleeve of Zim’s T-shirt and looks over my shoulder.

  “I am so not camping.”

  “Why not?”

  “The relevant question is: Why? Why sleep in the dirt? Out in the elements? I escaped a life of poverty in rural China by the skin of my teeth, okay? I will not go backward. I will not make my bed outside on the ground like a hobo when there’s a hotel room someplace where a little hard-earned cash could buy us clean sheets and a moderately hot shower.”

  “I only have, like, a thousand bucks. I don’t know how long it has to last and I don’t want to spend it if I don’t have to.”

  “I said hard-earned cash, Levi, so obviously, I meant mine.” She reaches for her wallet. “Let’s throw down some of my frozen yogurt fortune.”

  We find a motel with a lobby that looks exactly like the one I searched earlier that day near Ridgewood, although with a different name, and a dramatically superior sound track.

  We check into a room with two double beds.

  “This should be interesting,” Zim says.

  “Boys on one side, girl on the other.” Pearl kicks off her flip-flops and starts jumping up and down on the bed to the left.

  I feel tired. Defeated. Anxious. I feel all sorts of things that lead me into my backpack in search of my running shoes.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Nope.” I tie double knots and do a half-assed round of stretches.

  “Do you want me to go with?”

  Zim is in pretty good shape. He’s fast and agile, but I’m not sure he’s much for distance. Not that it really matters anyway, because what I want right now is to be alone.

  “No thanks, man.”

  He seems relieved.

  Pearl flops onto one of the beds and turns on the TV. “At least have the courtesy to bring back some takeout.”

  I planned on running by the reservoir. Water is a place for me like the slope of my roof. Rivers. Oceans. Lakes. The pond where I walked with Pearl and Zim. Cheesy as it sounds, water is another safe place for me. I’m a decent enough swimmer, but really, what I like best is looking at water. Standing beside it. Gazing across its horizon.

  I read someplace that the human body is sixty percent water. It makes perfect sense. Going to the water is like going home.

  But despite all that, I turn away from the reservoir and begin running north. I don’t have my folder with all the printed-out maps. I don’t need it. By now I know the walking route by heart, and I start to run it in reverse.

  It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

  Sometimes when I run, I hit this point, two or three miles in, where the act of running suddenly becomes effortless. “Runner’s high,” people call it. It has something to do with endorphins—which are, like, the same chemicals released during orgasm or something, though I can’t say I see much of a parallel there.

  Tonight I’m on this runner’s high from the moment my shoes strike the pavement. My body is like this machine and I’m a bystander along for the ride. This body propels me forward.

  It propels me north, away from the reservoir.

  I’ve got four miles under my belt in no time.

  I keep telling myself that I’m not looking. I’m only running. But I study each flash of a face, each blurry window. I glance in the bus stop shelters, even though I know full well that someone who won’t ride in a car isn’t likely to hop on a bus.

  I forgot to pack my iPod. I’m not used to running without music. I’m not used to the sound of my own breath.

  I decide to turn back when I reach the CVS, and when I do, just as mysteriously as it came on, my runner’s high disappears.

  I slow my pace.

&n
bsp; That does no good.

  I slow it some more. My lungs feel hopelessly small. My legs turn to dead wood.

  Finally, I resort to walking.

  It’s night now. Full darkness. A stretch of quiet road unfurls itself in front of me. I miss my music. If I hadn’t been raised on horror tales of the fate that befalls the hitchhiker, I might stick out my thumb.

  I want to be in one of those two double beds. A pillow over my head to shut out the world.

  Eventually I come upon a strip mall. I passed it on the way out, on the other side of the road. This time I notice, tucked in between a Hallmark store and an aquarium supply shop, a narrow and brightly lit Chinese restaurant.

  It smells familiar. Where I am exactly I can’t be sure, but this restaurant is this whatever-town’s version of the Hungry Lion. Every town has one. That’s why Dov loves the Hungry Lion so much. It reminds him of a place he used to go in Tel Aviv.

  I’ve got nothing on me. No cash. No wallet. No cell phone.

  But still, I walk toward it. Toward the upside-down duck carcasses hanging from the windows and the smell of fryer grease in need of a change. Toward the steam-warmed windows.

  The place is half full, mostly with large Chinese families—the true sign, I know, of a restaurant’s quality. There are other people too. A couple of college-age guys. A white-haired woman and an even whiter-haired man.

  And in the back, alone at a table with two empty bottles of Chinese beer, a head shaved close to the scalp.

  THIRTEEN

  I’M LIKE A JEDI MIND MASTER. I stand behind him using nothing but the force of my thoughts, willing him to turn around and see me.

  Of course, he doesn’t move.

  And this I don’t understand.