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“What, by going back and rolling the dice again? You said your consciousness wouldn’t go back. That’s like dying, what’s the point if you have to die?” I try the doorknob again. It’s unlocked but the door won’t budge.

“It won’t be the same.”

“I know it won’t be the same, but will it be better, you think next time you’ll even make it, that you’ll be an uncle? Open this fucking door!” I have to pound my fist on it, its uncontrollable, its instinct. I tell Adrian that it’s nothing and to go to bed but Anne is in the hallway now too and not getting my back on getting Adrian to bed. He asks what’s wrong with uncle mike. I tell him nothing. “When did he get a fucking deadbolt on this door? Did you know about it?” Anne says no without saying anything out loud. I try not to whisper in my own home.

“Ok, so it’s so bad that you are gonna risk what? Risk everything I worked for, make me earn it all again, risk your nephews good health? And what if you got it wrong, what if you drew it wrong and it doesn’t work right, you suck at drawing. Are you still in there?” I motion for Anne to look and see if he has gone out the window but she won’t leave. Julia has not cried once. Everyone’s right here at the door. Is this what he’s going back to find.

“And what’s gonna happen to us? Are we going to blink out? How far back are you going? You know we had Julia after you moved in! Is that gonna happen if you succeed yourself out of this bedroom? That’s your niece.” I can hear him move something inside. The bed creaks. My bed doesn’t creak. It hits me so hard. My brother is sleeping on a squeaky bed. A bed that is not good enough for me. A bed I wouldn’t sleep on. Anne and I have a great big bed. We dug blankets out we had put away after we bought our second set of new bedding. We still have the first set in one of the trunks upstairs. We put the apartment sheets and her old blanket from her mom’s house in his room when we made it up. I think about the mini fridge I bought for thirty dollars and the microwave we kept in the garage by the freezer, I think about what it felt like, what he might have taken it to mean. Stay in here. Don’t use the kitchen. Anne gave him some of my old cloths.

“Sometimes man, you have to go back to an early save. I hate it more than you. But you do it, you don’t start over.”

“I start over.”

Outside the moon growls at all of the pale and the tan faces, looking out or looking like it. You can’t see outside like that when it’s dark and you have a light on inside. Everyone knows, all you can see is yourself.

I think it has calmed down a bit. I slide down against the door like in the movies. I imagine him on the other side like I am, a similar gesture of defiance and love. “How far back are you going?”

“All the way Justin.”

“Can you take me?” I ask him. I can hear him crying. I see him sit with a pillow over his belly. I remember our Christmas. I thought the whole time, like he was a kid, another kid I was taking care of. It was no big deal, I made good money. It wasn’t easy, it wasn’t like we had a five bedroom or anything I mean for fucks sake I was renting and had two kids, but no one was eating macs and cheese. I remember that look, how I couldn’t place it. How some of our friends could say nothing but make that subtle expression that meant so much, like he was weird. I know what the face meant now. I know the shame he carried. I should know, I gave it to him.

You think you will do so many things when the time comes but you don’t. Mostly you acquiesce. I could have kicked the door open right? I mean I connected the dots, what else did I do? I think about it the next day. I am looking at a paper, accidently. There is a crossword puzzle. It’s a picture in my mind. Some one has answered the questions and come up with the right words and has written the words in with one of those cheap bic pens. 4 across, I. 17 across, am. 3 down, going. 7 down, to. 11 down, kill. 13 down, myself. Yeah, the puzzle has been done in this paper alright, I say, folding it up and putting my cup in the sink, driving to work, working.

I do not throw away the jeans I was wearing. I take it as a sign. I have to hide it from Anne. Twice I take them from the trash. I come home and I just know. I go to the trash and there they are. I lock them in a chest. It was a smile, it made a smile on my ass where it came under the door. I know you did the right thing. I know your there again, in the yard, running, laughing. I know I will not fuck up with you again. I just wish it could have happened in my universe.

Where's it gonna be

“Can you believe this shit? I’ve never driven a station wagon in my life.” We are in between spots for good radio. The cliché of off interstate radio, you know, all gospel and Spanish, the eerie lack of reflection of values or ideas or anything really that you tell yourself is you, in another person, you know, so you don’t feel so alone, it’s not a cliché. I bet if you listened to it long enough, like I have, you’d have no other choice but to think the world you knew just up and flew into the clouds, all of them together, without you.

Everything about this car is dirty but it’s the smell of smoke that’s the worst. I wanted to start smoking again, smelled a pack of Marlborough Reds before I took this wagon, had planned on getting a pack after some long and lonely deliberation and all this god damn radio. Now that shit smell of smoke in the bruised plush bench seat, well, I won’t be starting again today.

“I believe in the soul.” But he knows I do. The radio is off now and the abrupt noise of wind through the window I have lowered is like a flag in a gale. I fold the wing every which way until it takes some of the noise out of it and I leave it there. Through the rear view I can see the sheets moving like that flag in my mind, only much slower. I shouldn’t have broken the rear window. It was the right thing then but now, driving the interstate? “Yeah well don’t you worry, I do not give a fuck about what they think.”

The drive into the mountains came as a surprise even to me. It’s like this sometimes, sometimes I bet it’s like that for all of us. You don’t know where you were headed til ya got ther? Yeah, you know. He never believed in that shit. “Did ya? You never believed in any of that huh?” it was like waking up and swingin yer feet out and sittin there for a minute before getting up and then, well, and then you’re just not sick anymore. I was wearing boots. I looked at em in the dirt. They were made for it. I had a shovel and everything.

“It’s kind of stupid now. Bet I’ll tell the story different later. Yeah, you know.” It still haunts me how close I put him to the road. How you could do a thing like that, cars and what not everywhere as they are. Couple times I waved, not insidiously, I waved, I really cared. “I didn’t have time for a plan buddy. I just thought, shit, there has to be a place, someone, that can help. Well, probably there isn’t.” I laugh thinking about where we might have gone. Na, there isn’t a place.

I thought I was some big outlaw, you know, takin him, thought the cops would have followed me for miles like a funeral. Not pullin me over for it bein dangerous and all. Yeah, heds a laughed at that too. Wouldn’t a said nuthin though. Yeah, he was alright.

“Where you at? I know yer here.” but it’s just me. Still got the wagon, can you believe that? No one ever reported it. How’s it a car can not belong to someone? “I left the keys in it, gas too. Hasn’t run in a while, it’s not broke, I just haven’t been able to get out and start it. Anyways, should be easier for you. Look I wrapped myself all up too, ha! Nope, it should be real easy for you.”

13 - Alone

Do you think he is gone when I wake up?

Do you think he could leave without me knowing?

If you let someone live, isn’t that the same as saving their life? Isn’t it?

I have never tortured anyone before. It does not surprise me that I am good at it. It is easy to cause pain, I have spent my life avoiding it, avoiding giving it to others, it is like I am sitting in a chair, a lawn chair now, a broken lawn mower, out of gas, it doesn’t need to be, I will not use it again were it running. I have a drink in my hand because it has always meant 'easy' to me, having fun, relaxing, drinking. It meant I was with friends.

I did not take his eyes because I hated him or I didn’t want him looking at me or I wanted to hurt him. And there is no amount of gaging or removing of things that will stop a man from screaming and carrying on if that is what he wants to do, nothing short of death of course.

I tell him I am saving his life. Right now I am. I know he does not see it that way. I know he thinks that if I will kill him eventually then I am killing him right then, always, am capable of nothing else, like offering him a cake, water, a reprieve.

Hurting him is easy like resting is easy, in that chair with the drink, the friends, all that. I don’t expect to feel so alone when he is dead. Despite it I see him, glance at him and there is this quick idea or thought that he’s still alive, he’s alive. He is not, and it goes but not as quickly as it comes, its probability pushed away like unwanted attention, shoved out of a room and a door shut behind it until I turn and see him, the twist, the unlikely repose and he is in the room again, still, passed out maybe, but no, no he’s dead.

12 - Sleep

Some trick of gods has left us cool, hidden and alone, though the walls of this place, and its roof if we could reach it, are still too hot to touch, should be glowing like a filament in a light bulb or those many thin red fish bones of a toaster, things he does not remember well and never will. A conversation has just ended and that thing we left when we began speaking is returning, has returned.

I wonder how he will know who he is. He is the only child on a playground. He is the son of invisible parents. He is the brother of a thing departed, returning to a new thing, an older meaning and holding his hand, he returns with it. There are no thousand shades of black. No menagerie of ideas. No calm crowd, perfect & meaningless. He will be devoured by readiness. He will spend the night of the rest of his life at the bottom of and beneath a great death and though he call it god, it will not be.

“I could do it. I could keep us safe Michael.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“If I don’t do these things, If I don’t do what I know will make us safe, we won’t be.” He is fiddling with a part of his coat. I fixed it. There is something about its form, its reincarnation that is wrong to him because it is different, I think that is what he is doing, what he is working at with preoccupation, it works, it’s not the same.

I abide by a rule not to rant or explain without being asked to explain. It felt like I was giving clean water when I first did it. I even felt righteous when I was holding back these explanations, these rationalizations, whatever they are, they are the fire and they are the cross on the hill the fire illuminates. Now my silence eats me like acid.

I must ask a question now or be silent until he speaks again. I ask a question. He just turns and rolls over to his side, his back to the fire as he faces the sudden cold that has become of all of this. I hide in the coals of this fire, our life, it takes me, I would let it were it not for him. I say his name. He is sleeping now, whether he is or not.

11 - Rest

I can’t stop thinking about that asshole. The guy I did not kill. He becomes or I make him, a phantom, a spectral looming regret, large like a building, always there like the sun, or at least as often. I turn corners expecting his stupid fucking face, his wanton slack if there is such a thing, his stupidity, his sun burned laziness, his stupid fucking face and I dream of it, of killing him, I want to so bad. I don’t dream of him for real, like In a dream, I just wish I could kill him now or take it back, the NOT killing of him and trade it for his blood on my hands, it would be a skin softening lotion to me now. Not for real, not like washing my hands in blood, I’m not sick, I mean it figuratively. Fucking blood is disgusting. If it wasn’t hidden in our bodies we would have nothing to do with this life, any of us.
I think that my brother has forgotten him. He may not have. Do you forget the life you save? I do not think that he thinks of it that way. I do not think that he regrets sparring him, or suggesting with his silence that I not kill him.

He’s boiling water now and though I do not think he is avoiding me, it feels like it. I know or fear he may wish I was different and there are times that I want to be. Rice is another one of those foods there seems to be a lot of. I tell him that our life has dissolved into a cooking show. He never watched them. It’s a cooking show for days on end, then I kill someone and we move on.

It was easy to take the climbing legs off the tower as I climbed up for the last time until when we would leave. Its high enough but not too high, shady, no mess, holes for shitting, holes for shooting, flat spaces for sleeping and metal for a place for fire, holes enough for a breeze, for smoke to leave, holes for light.

We can see far enough that I am never without something to do. He reads aloud about Silk. The whole world has slipped from what once was not a cliff. It is now. We will never get back up there again, never.