was three when he was born and my mother would say I spent a couple of years just waiting for him to get up and play. I’d try giving him my newest Hot Wheel, my best Transformer, even tucked a pillowcase into the back of his collar so we could make like superheroes and fly. But he never had a want for any of that. Sure enough he got up and learned some words but his eyes, they just didn’t move like ours. It was like we were nothing more than stagehands to him and he was waiting for the show to start.
By noon the stairwell would get too hot to bear and we’d escape to the basement, where walls of exposed brick escaped the sun’s reach and remained cool to the touch. Except for a few empty trunks and a lone chair there was nothing much else in the space. Sometimes our mothers would let us carry down a couple of fans and we’d set them up near opposing walls and position Ralph in the center. Then we’d veer and tilt around him like jet planes, spreading our arms and letting the breeze make its way through our thin t-shirts, drying our underarms and sending shivers down our spines.
Spent, we’d collapse onto the floor and talk about our dwindling summer in captivity and the approaching start of another nine months spent in classrooms that smelled like mildew and vinegar. ‘Is he ever gonna go to school?’ Tommy asked once about Ralph. I didn’t answer. My father had wanted Ralph to go to school, even tried enrolling him in special classes for a few weeks the year before. Then some kid scratched him up pretty bad, pressed a pencil with a broken tip into the soft flesh of his wrist and dragged it up and down his forearm until the skin broke. All that afternoon Ralph said nothing about it. Sat through the rest of his classes and dinner, even watched some Tom and Jerry with me. It wasn’t until she undressed him for a bath that my mother saw the carved skin, the dried blood flaking off like red ash. That’s when she put her foot down and said No more. She got approval to home-school him then, but not before she clomped down the stairs and the three blocks to the school and made every official cower or cry.
Without fail our basement conversations would soon turn to Poor Etan. Whole afternoons we spent imagining what happened to him. Six years old, same as Ralph, and he goes missing the first time he walks alone to the bus stop. How’s that for luck? We imagined him holed in a basement like ours, tied up and invisible to the world. Sometimes we’d really get into it and invent entire scenarios. We imagined him stoned to death and buried alive. Burned in a fire as an offering to some cult god, his screams growing in pitch as the flames surged upward. We imagined him skinned and hanging in one of the meat shops in Chinatown, like a rabbit waiting to be fried or baked for dinner. I could always picture it so perfectly. His photo was on the news each night and on the cover of my father’s paper each morning. I knew his face better than I knew anyone else’s, maybe even my own. Hair blond and long like a girl’s. Eyes wide-set and blue. A smile that cut into his cheeks and spread past his lips, a smirk to maybe say it was all a joke, that at any moment he’d reappear.
Sometimes we’d bring down some twine and take turns tying each other to the chair and pretend that one of us was Etan and the other the kidnapper. Ralph’d just drool and watch. Our weapons of combat would transform into torture devices and we’d pretend to slit each other’s throats and ply fingers off one by one while yelling things like, ‘Gimme all your dough,’ and, ‘Where’s the cash stash, punk?’ We knew a kidnapper wasn’t gonna ask for money – but we couldn’t quite figure what it was he would ask for, what it would be he was after, so we carried on like that. My mother found us once, after I’d tied Tommy good and tight to the chair and was threatening to zap him from here to Jupiter with my plastic gun if he didn’t tell me where he’d hidden the goods. She nearly tore us to crumbs but my father, who was just getting home and in no mood for a fight, said, ‘Salwa, they’re like caged ferrets. You gotta let them have a tumble every now and again.’ Still, she told Tommy’s mother and made me carry the fan upstairs. But by the end of that week we were back down there and at it again.
When we were feeling really daring we’d creep down to the ground floor, a small open space that housed abandoned bicycles and the door to the outside. I’d drag Ralph along so he couldn’t tell on us and Tommy would twist the metal latch and pull the door, thick and hulking, and we would stick our heads out one by one into the humid air. Soon enough we began daring each other to step out onto the pavement, to walk to the corner where the Guatemalan man sold fresh fruit and cigarettes, and eventually, to sprint full speed around the entire block once if not twice. Even now, more than thirty years later, I can remember the way the warm air filled me as I ran, how it surged and swirled in my lungs. I must have passed the fruit stand then and taken a right, ran past Earl’s Drugs and Stuff and the video store, turned right again and rushed past Didi’s Donuts, the hotdog cart and the laundromat. That must have happened but I couldn’t tell you at the time what I was passing, the streets feeling new and foreign even though I’d walked them all the years of my life, had known nothing but their shapes and colors. Instead, I glimpsed the curves of lips and angles of noses, the arches of brows and lines of grimaces. A bald man with a diamond ear stud leaned on a shuttered shop, a suit in a fedora brushed my arm as he passed, another wearing nothing but shorts and sneakers bounced a basketball as he went. I ran fast enough so I didn’t look at any one of them directly, couldn’t tell you the colors of their eyes, but knew that they could look toward me, could see me if they wanted. As I rounded the final corner, I’d erupt into something of a frenzy, a current coursing through my veins, leaving me feeling at once fearless, like I could do anything, and relieved that I wouldn’t because someone was expecting me to return.
I can’t say exactly when it was that Ralph went missing. I just know it was the week before we started school and the sun was low enough to turn everything orange.
Tommy’s parents had gone to visit a relative in Queens and my mother had offered to watch him until after dinner. I never invited my school friends home in those days and a sleepover was unthinkable. The one time I did have someone over, this kid Joey, Ralph drooled all over the Chinese checkers Joey’d brought with him and during dinner, kept his mouth clamped tight while my mother tried to feed him steamed carrots and rice. By the end of the meal, his face was covered in orange pulp and Joey was staring at him like he was a zoo exhibit. The next day the entire class was talking about it.
Sure, Tommy wasn’t especially keen on Ralph always hanging around, but he knew Ralph, knew what being his brother meant and didn’t mean, what it said and didn’t say. When I found out Tommy would be eating with us, I begged my mother to cook something normal. It was 1979 and exotic-sounding dishes with names like South Sea Beef and Chicken Tahitian were all the rage – culinary experiments that ended with my father sweating just trying to keep them down and Ralph spitting half-chewed chunks onto his plate until she caved and made him a hotdog.
That night though, she’d agreed to Spaghetti Bolognese and the smell of crushed garlic and simmering tomato sauce wafted down to Tommy and me as we stood on the ground level of the building, bent over with hands on knees, panting. We’d already run around the block three times each while Ralph sat and played with his plastic trucks.
‘Come on, Ben. Just let him go once,’ Tommy said, still gasping for air.
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m bored just doing the same old thing.’
I shrugged. ‘We could play Legos.’
‘Oh, come on. He wants to go, don’t you, Ralph?’ Tommy looked to Ralph who had picked up a truck that was down to its last wheel, was flicking the wheel with his finger to make it spin.
‘It’s almost dinnertime,’ I said. ‘Anyway, he won’t do it.’
‘Sure he will, he’ll do anything you say if you’re the one to say it.’
Ralph glanced up to me just then and I remember searching for something in that look, for a twitch or a well-timed blink. Anything. But on it went, that endless gaping stare.
‘See?’
