It’s probably easier on him, being this guy. Tyler doesn’t, won’t, begrudge it.
And, really, their father was released from paternal duty years and years ago, wasn’t he? It may have occurred as early as those drinking sessions with Barrett, during the days after their mother’s service.
They were seventeen and twenty-two. They just hung around the house like stray dogs for a few days, in briefs and socks, drinking down the supply (the scotch and vodka led to the gin, which led to the off-brand tequila, which led eventually to a quarter-full bottle of Tia Maria, and an inch of Drambuie that had probably been there twenty years or more).
They languished for days in the suddenly famous living room, surrounded by all the ordinary things that had so abruptly become her things. Tyler and Barrett, sloppy and scared and shocked, getting hammered in their briefs and socks; it was (maybe it was) the night they turned a particular corner …
Do you ever think?
What?
They were lying together on the sofa that had always been there, the crappy beat-up biscuit-colored sofa that was managing, as best it could, its promotion from threadbare junk to holy artifact.
You know.
What if I don’t know?
You fucking do.
Okay, yeah. Yes. I, too, wonder if Dad worried so much about every single little goddamned thing …
That he summoned it.
Thanks. I couldn’t say it.
That some god or goddess heard him, one time too many, getting panicky about whether she’d been carjacked at the mall, or had, like, hair cancer …
That they delivered the thing even he couldn’t imagine worrying about.
It’s not true.
I know.
But we’re both thinking about it.
That may have been their betrothal. That may have been when they took their vows: We are no longer siblings, we are mates, starship survivors, a two-man crew wandering the crags and crevices of a planet that may not be inhabited by anyone but us. We no longer need, or want, a father.
Still, they really have to call him. It’s been way too long.
“I know,” Barrett says. “I know it’ll matter to you. But I think you should remember that it won’t, to her. Not in the same way.”
Barrett, bluff-chested, naked in graying water, is in particular possession of his pink-white, grandly mortified glow.
“I’m going to make some coffee,” Tyler says.
Barrett stands up in the tub, streaming bathwater, a hybrid of stocky robust manliness and plump little boy.
This peculiarity: Tyler is untroubled by the sight of Barrett emerging from his bathwater. It is, for mysterious reasons, only Barrett’s immersion that’s difficult for Tyler to witness.
Might that have to do with endangerment, and rescue? Duh.
Another peculiarity: Knowledge of one’s deeper motives, the sources of one’s peccadilloes and paranoias, doesn’t necessarily make much difference.
“I’m going to go to the shop,” Barrett says.
“Now?”
“I feel like being alone there.”
“It’s not like you don’t have your own room. I mean, am I crowding you?”
“Shut up. Okay?”
Tyler tosses Barrett a towel from the rack.
“It seems right, that the song is about snow,” Barrett says.
“It seemed right when I started it.”
“I know. I mean, it all seems right when you start it, it seems infinitely promising and inspired and great … I’m not trying to be profound, or anything.”
Tyler lingers for a final moment, to fully feel the charge. They do the eye thing, once more, for each other. It’s simple, it’s undramatic, there’s nothing moist or abashed, nothing actually ardent, going on, but they pass something back and forth. Call it recognition, though it’s more than that. It’s recognition, and it’s the mutual conjuring of their ghost brother, the third one who didn’t quite manage to be born, and so, being spectral—less than spectral, being never—is their medium, their twinship, their daemon; the boy (he’ll never grow past the pink-faced, holy gravitas of the cherubim) who is the two of them, combined.
Barrett dries off. The bathwater, now that he’s out of the tub, has turned from its initial, steaming clarity to a tepid murk, as it always does. Why does that happen? Is it soap residue, or Barrett residue—the sloughed-off outermost layer of city grime and deceased epidermis and (he can’t help thinking this) some measure of his essence, his little greeds and vanities, his self-admiration, his habit of sorrow, washed away, for now, with soap, left behind, to spiral down the drain.
He stares for a moment longer at his bathwater. It’s the usual water. It’s no different the morning after the night he’s seen something he can’t really have seen.
Why, exactly, would Tyler believe this was a good morning to return them to the story of their mother?
A time-snap: Their mother reclines on the sofa (which is here now, right here in their Bushwick living room), smoking, cheerfully bleary on a few old-fashioneds (Barrett likes her best when she drinks—it emphasizes her aspect of extravagant and knowing defeat; the wry, amused carelessness she lacks when sober, when she’s forced by too much clarity to remember that a life of regal disappointment, while painful, is also Chekhovian; grave, and rather grand). Barrett is nine. His mother looks at him with drink-sparked eyes, smiles knowingly, as if she’s got a pet leopard lying at her feet, and says, “You’re going to have to watch out for your older brother, you know.”
Barrett waits, mutely, sitting on the sofa’s edge, at the curve of his mother’s knees, for meaning to arrive. His mother takes a drag, a sip, a drag.
“Because, sweetheart,” she says, “let’s face it. Let’s be candid, can we be candid?”
Barrett acknowledges that they can. Wouldn’t anything other than total candor between a mother and her nine-year-old son be an aberration?
She says, “Your brother is a lovely boy. A lovely, lovely boy.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And you” (drag, sip) “are something else.”
Barrett blinks, damp-eyed with incipient dread. He is about to be told that he’s subservient to Tyler; that he’s the portly little quipster, the comic
