The Things a Brother Knows Read online

  “You know, the central system that makes your computer work properly.”

  “That’s bad, right?”

  “It’s not good.”

  “Shit.” He sits down in his chair and puts his face in his hands.

  Maybe I should comfort him. Say something encouraging. But instead I use this moment, with Boaz’s eyes in a web of his fingers, to take a closer look around the room.

  The papers on the floor. They’re maps. All of them.

  Some are printed from the computer. Some look like the kind you’d buy at your local gas station if you ever left the house. Above his bed is an old Rand McNally map of the United States that once hung in my room. Abba bought it for me when I first started trying to understand places in relationship to each other, pestering him with my endless questions: Where’s Boston? Where’s Israel? Where’s Gotham City?

  I wonder where Boaz found it. It’s been a lifetime since I saw it last.

  I squint at the pastel-colored states and baby-blue oceans and notice that the right side, the Atlantic, is covered in pencil scrawlings, but I’m too far away to make any sense out of them.

  Boaz lets out a deep, guttural groan. “Damn it,” he whispers. For a second, I think he might actually cry.

  Suddenly, I can see him at nine, running into the house with a wrist bent the wrong way. He’d taken a fall off his skateboard and was screaming and cursing, running around in circles, but his eyes were dry as the desert.

  I’ve never seen my brother in tears. Watching him cry over a dead computer is something I just don’t think I can handle.

  “It’s all right,” I whisper. I almost place my hand on his shoulder. “It’s probably time you get a new one anyway.”

  “Shitshitshitshitshitshit.”

  I picture a trip to the Apple Store. A swarm of tattooed hipsters in matching black T-shirts and headsets asking Boaz how they could help him. I know I can’t watch him go through that.

  “Look, I can get it for you if you want. Or you could just use my laptop. I’ve got finals to study for and I don’t need it all that much. As long as I can have it for a few hours in the afternoon to check my e-mail and visit my favorite porn sites, I’m all set.”

  This doesn’t earn even the hint of a grin.

  I decide to give it one more go. “Right now I’m all about Gigantic Jiggling Jugs dot com.”

  Nothing.

  Boaz clears his throat. “Can I print?”

  “Of course. I’ll configure it. No problem.”

  He lifts his head. Cloudy eyes and an unreadable face.

  “Thanks, little brother,” he says.

  Even though it might seem like I had this in mind when I offered my computer to him, I really didn’t. I promise. I’d swear on my grandmother’s grave if she hadn’t bucked tradition and insisted on a burial at sea.

  I didn’t plan this.

  But sometimes you’re handed an opportunity.

  And every day, when I get home from school, Boaz meets me at the threshold to his room, and he puts that opportunity right into my hands.

  My days of hunting for some trace of Boaz, running my fingertips over his possessions may be long gone, but there are other ways to retrieve information.

  I know I shouldn’t.

  I can’t tell what my brother is thinking or what is happening to him inside his messy room, but I can find out where he’s been.

  Virtualsoldier.com

  Memorialspace.net

  Inthelineofduty.com

  Desertcam.net

  And a long array of sites with detailed maps of the northeastern United States from Boston to the Chesapeake Bay.

  He has an e-mail account, and I know I could figure out how to log in as Boaz, but that, for the time being at least, is a line I can’t cross.

  Maybe I do believe in something after all.

  FOUR

  ABBA WAKES ME at eight-thirty.

  Eight-thirty on a Sunday? To make matters worse, I was having a dream about Christina Crowley. All oil-slick slippery with no shred of a plot. The butterfly on her shoulder. Things were just getting good when: “Levi! Kum! It’s time we get to that fence!”

  Now it’s nearly two in the afternoon, and I’m covered with sawdust, nowhere near done with the fence and out of things to talk about with Abba. The obvious topic for discussion is why I’m out here instead of Boaz, when we all know that he’s the one who knows how to fix things. He knows how to work with tools that rattle your limbs and blow out your eardrums. But I just let the electric sander eat up the silences.

  Zim stops by, hoping I’ll go shoot some baskets, which typically involves me sitting down watching him shoot baskets, because any other way is just downright humiliating.

  He beats a quick retreat before Abba enlists him in Project Fence.

  A big storm last winter knocked a branch off our neighbors’ tree, which knocked down our fence, which to my sense of order means the neighbors should be the ones out here fixing it, but Abba says their mess is our mess too.

  I hand him a freshly sanded board. He inspects it. Slides his big hands up and down the flat sides. He blows some dust off its edges and nods his approval. I hold it upright while Abba fills a hole in the ground with wet cement. I watch beads of sweat congregate around his bald spot.

  He sticks a post into the hole. He holds it there and I watch him count to thirty under his breath.

  Abba could have lived his life like this. Instead of running Reuben Katznelson Insurance with five branches in the greater Boston area, he could have stayed on the kibbutz and spent his days fixing fences. Picking oranges. Maybe milking cows.

  But he wanted to own his own house. He wanted to eat at his own dining table, line his own pockets with his own hard-earned money and raise his children in a melting pot. In the land of opportunity. In a country that wasn’t constantly defending its very right to exist.

  When we finish, Abba strips down and showers himself with the garden hose. I take in the stomach that’s now more flab than muscle. His pale and beefy back. The mole or two on his ass.

  I’m pretty sure there’s nothing in the world uglier than the sight of your own father’s pubic hair.

  “B’seder, Levi. Go inside and get me a towel.”

  For Abba, the immigrant, everything was turning out just fine for a while.

  He had the house and the dining table and the pockets. He had the American wife he’d met in Israel who would have stayed on happily but returned because it was what he wanted.

  He had the American sons.

  Then Boaz had to go and make his choice.

  And now I’m out here on a Sunday fixing fences.

  I dream of maps.

  Continents and oceans. States. Highways. Rivers. Places I’ve never been swarm beneath my closed eyelids.

  Maps. Maps. Everywhere maps.

  I’m desperate to understand his maps, but I don’t have the courage to ask, and anyway, Boaz doesn’t give me the chance.

  Why? I want to ask him. Why all those maps? What are you planning? Where are you going? Or are you just dreaming, like I am, of someplace else?

  We’re sitting at dinner with Dov when it strikes me.

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” I say. “And I think, maybe, I want to go to Oberlin.”

  Dov looks at Abba. “What’s this nice lady talking about?”

  “Oberlin. It’s a college, Dov. Hard to believe, but Levi’s almost a senior. He’s got to start looking at colleges.”

  Abba says this like it’s just occurred to him. By the time Boaz was taking final exams his junior year, Abba had a three-sheet list of schools on yellow legal paper.

  Mom wipes her mouth with her napkin. “That’s wonderful news, baby. It’s a great school. I have a friend who went there and she loved it.”

  “Where’s Oberlin?” Dov asks.

  Aha.

  See, Dov’s a smart man. He knows a ton. But everyone has a weakness, even Dov, and his is the geography of the United Sta
tes. It’s probably because when my grandmother died Dov moved from the kibbutz straight to Boston and has barely been anyplace since.

  I put down my fork. “It’s in Ohio.”

  “So that would be west of here.”

  Abba laughs. “It certainly isn’t east, Dov.”

  “Shut up, smart-ass.”

  “We have a map somewhere, right?” I say. “I’ll show him.”

  “We must. Somewhere.” Abba shrugs and goes back to frowning at his eggplant.

  “What about that Rand McNally map that used to be in my room?”

  At this Bo turns his gaze on me, laserlike. I can feel heat.

  Mom says, “Why don’t you show Dov on your computer. Find a map online. That way you can show him the school’s Web site too.”

  “Ohio.” Dov shakes his head. “Who ever heard of such a place?”

  Pearl broke up with Popcorn Guy. If he had another name, I never learned it.

  “He just wasn’t the kind of boy I could bring home to Mama Goldblatt.”

  “Your mom doesn’t even know you date.”

  We’re driving around without any place to go. Zim is stretched out across the backseat. It’s Saturday night.

  “And he misused the word penultimate. He told me that Asteroids of Doom was the penultimate popcorn movie.”

  “He is Popcorn Guy, after all,” Zim says. “This is his area of expertise.”

  I point to the left. Pearl turns.

  “So that’s why you broke up with him? Because he doesn’t know what penultimate means?” That sounds awfully shortsighted to me.

  “Tell me what penultimate means, Levi.” She throws a look over her shoulder at Zim. “I’m not asking you, Richard Zimmerman, because everyone knows you’re a moron.”

  “You won’t get any argument from me,” Zim replies.

  “Are you testing me?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  “Penultimate means second to last.”

  “See?” She slaps my thigh. “If you weren’t so homely I’d totally date you.”

  I point to the right. She turns again.

  “Where are we going, anyway?”

  “I don’t know. We could go get milk shakes?”

  “Screw you, Levi.” She shoves me hard.

  “Ow. What?”

  “Have you even looked at me lately? I’m so fucking fat! What normal Chinese girl gets fat like this? I’m supposed to be delicate. Diminutive. Demure.”

  “You’re insane.”

  “I blame the Jews. Mama Goldblatt and her goddamn brisket. It’s not natural. Biologically speaking, I should be on a totally different kind of diet.”

  Zim sits up and leans forward. “So let’s go get egg rolls.”

  “No.” She makes a turn onto Route 2 heading west. “Let’s go to the pond.”

  We park underneath a cluster of pines.

  The dried-out needles crunch beneath my flip-flops.

  “Let’s walk,” Pearl says.

  The loop around the pond is a little over a mile. She starts out ahead and Zim and I jog to catch up. The moon is full. Its reflection spiderwebs its way across the water. A warm wind rustles the leaves. Laughter rolls in from far off in the woods. I’m with my two best friends in the world and it’s a night so beautiful it’s like it sprang from the pages of a child’s picture book. It’s the kind of night that might fill another person with a sense of peace, but for me, all a night like this does is shine a light on the places where everything is going wrong.

  Pearl is panting.

  “You know,” I say, “you really should quit smoking.”

  “Stuff it, Saint Levi.”

  We walk without talking. Somehow Zim and Pearl sense that I’m not up for it.

  A boulder appears on the path in front of us. Pearl and Zim take to one side and I take to the other. I almost whisper Bread and butter, but only because I’ve heard Mom say it a thousand times, not because superstitions carry any weight with me at all.

  “It used to be only me he ignored,” I finally say, “but now he’s ignoring the world.”

  Pearl slows her pace so she’s walking by my side. “If it makes you feel any better, he used to ignore me too.”

  “Not me,” Zim says. “He was always really cool to me. And don’t hate me for saying this, Levi, but he was pretty cool to you too. He just had a lot of stuff going on at the end of high school, and he had to deal with your parents, and how everyone freaked out about his decision, and I’m not sure it’s fair to take all that so personally.”

  I stop in my tracks. I feel Pearl’s hand on my wrist.

  I don’t know if she’s trying to hold me back from punching Zim, or if she’s just trying to show me she’s on my side.

  Pearl lets go and it feels like she’s uncorked me, like all the blood drains right out of my body. I’m not going to punch Zim. Of course I’m not going to punch Zim. I’m not filled with fight.

  I’m filled with worry.

  “It’s just … I don’t know. I don’t know what’s happening with him. He doesn’t do anything. He just spends all his time on the Internet,” I say.

  “You’ve just described the entire American population under the age of forty-five,” Pearl says.

  “And he looks at maps. Lots and lots of maps. I guess this could be taken as a good sign, like he’s actually interested in something, but it sure doesn’t feel like it.”

  “What kind of Web sites does he go to?” Zim asks.

  “How would I know?”

  “Because you check his history when you take back your laptop.”

  “I do?”

  “Yeah, dude. You do.”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  “So?”

  I let out a big sigh. “It’s bleak.”

  We’ve arrived back at the parking lot.

  It’s almost midnight. I’d be worried about getting home if I had a curfew or if I thought anyone was waiting up for me.

  “How bleak?” Zim and Pearl ask in unison. They look at each other and, because they’re so rarely in synch, they can’t help but smile a little.

  I tell them how he spends his days looking at desert combat video shot by the shaky hands of soldiers with their pocket-sized cameras. How he visits Web pages that have outlived their subjects, turned from sites where cocky young guys with names like Spike once blogged about scratchy army toilet paper into online memorials. Virtual warehouses storing the grief of others.

  I tell them something they already know. That Boaz used to be one of those people who had everything. But still, there were things he wanted. Things to fight for. Even if that part of him cost us all so much.

  I tell them how he’s gone and disappeared.

  Pearl stops with the keys in her hand and looks at me over the roof of her car. Her face stone straight. Very un-Pearl-like.

  “He’s in there somewhere, Levi. Really, he is, and he’ll be back. Somehow he’ll be back.”

  Zim nods his head.

  I want to believe them. And I try.

  But the moon is gone now, vanished behind some clouds, taking the warm air with it, and this is no longer a night that might bring somebody peace.

  It’s a night full of worry.

  And for me that worry is this: maybe he is back. Maybe this is it.

  There’s a saying about the military that you go in a boy and come back a man. But I’m pretty sure Boaz went in a man and came back a ghost.

  FIVE

  WHEN I WAS LITTLE I USED TO SLEEP with my parents. I’d wake up, find my way down the darkened hallway and invent some sort of excuse for why I’d arrive at their bedside in the dead of night.

  My foot aches. There’s a noise outside my window. There’s something itchy in my sheets.

  I don’t sleep with my parents anymore because, well, that would be totally gross. But I’m still someone who wakes, for no real reason, in the middle of almost every single night.

  Now when I do, more often than not, I hear Boaz. Sometimes it’s
typing. Tonight, I hear him soft-screaming.

  I don’t get up. I don’t go to his door or go see if there’s anything I can do to help him through the dark hours.

  I reach for my radio alarm clock and I fill the room with music from my favorite station. A song I’ve never heard.

  Tonight I turn the dial. Just a touch. A fraction of a fraction too small to measure, until I can no longer hear my brother.

  All I can hear is static.

  I see Christina when I go with Pearl to a movie at a different theater from the one where Popcorn Guy works. She sits three rows ahead of us. Her date is tall, thin. Long, tanned arms. Blond goatee. A T-shirt from Boston College Law School.

  At some point during the first half of the movie he leans over and whispers into her hair. He kisses the arch of her neck. She lowers her head onto his shoulder.

  I grab Pearl and try rushing her out the door at the start of the final credits, before the houselights come up.

  “I gotta pee,” she says.

  “C’mon, Pearl. Can’t we just get out of here?”

  “Did you see the size of my soda? Sorry.” She shrugs, her hands comically covering her crotch. She darts into the bathroom.

  I step outside and study the posters for the movies coming soon to a theater near me. I wonder when the ticket-buying world will finally tire of movies spoofing fringe sports.

  “Levi!”

  I could pretend it’s not my name. Bill. Bill would work for me right about now. Bill, the guy who just can’t wait for the next movie about an Ultimate Frisbee team down on its luck.

  She comes and stands beside me.

  “Hi, Christina.”

  She holds out a packet of Twizzlers. “Want one?”

  I don’t, but I take one anyway. Her date seems to have disappeared. Maybe he has a girl’s bladder like Pearl.

  “How are things?”

  “By things do you mean Boaz?”

  It comes out sounding a lot pissier than I intend it to. She takes a step back and looks into the Twizzler packet as if she might find something valuable in there.

  “Yes. I do.”

  “Well, if you really want to know, he never leaves his room, and he barely talks, and he spends all his time online, and sometimes I wake up to the sound of him screaming.”