Big Brother

by Lionel Shriver

  Surely it’s obvious. I was letting myself off the hook. See? However extravagant, your intercession wouldn’t have worked anyway. It never works, does it? Had you put your time and even marriage on the line, and had he improbably cared enough to please you, Edison would still have lost weight for the wrong reasons, and what do you want to bet he’d have gained it all back? Of course, there are plenty of heroic exceptions to those gargantuas who lose hundreds of pounds and then on average gain back all but seven, and I never attempted to discover if my brother might be among them.

  A year ago, Edison Appaloosa died from the complications of congestive heart failure. It wasn’t clear-cut that his death was the direct result of his weight. Strictly speaking, what killed him was one of those hospital infections. But then, the overtaxing of a body weakens the immune system, and the heart failure itself was unquestionably occasioned by a circulatory system strangled by excess tissue.

  My brother had been in and out of the hospital several times by then, and his doctor at St. Luke’s hadn’t portrayed the situation as life threatening before Edison took a turn for the worse. I was rushing to arrange an immediate flight to New York when I received Slack Muncie’s call, assuring me sadly that I could now take my time. I gave St. Luke’s permission to proceed with cremation; renowned for work with obese patients, the facility possessed the large-capacity incinerator that Edison required. I didn’t urge them to wait until I could view the body because I wanted to preserve as best I could the image of my brother as I had known him for most of my life.

  I caught the flight anyway, and Slack insisted on meeting my plane, though he had to take the subway and then a bus. He invited me to stay at his apartment in Williamsburg. Once I got a look at the place, I was adamant about booking into a hotel in order not to crowd him, but I could finally appreciate the generosity of Edison’s most steadfast comrade. The lanky saxophonist had put my brother up for years in a cramped one-bedroom, where Edison had slept semireclining in the living room’s La-Z-Boy. Slack had laid out my brother’s tiny stash of chattel, in case I wanted keepsakes: that once-white, early-generation Mac now grayed by ashy fingerprints. The great shapeless black cardigan, scattered with hard holes from cigarette burns. A bottle of my brother’s favorite barbecue sauce. A box of CDs on which Edison had played that he’d never been able to sell. A fat rubber-banded stack of envelopes comprising correspondence with the IRS, which had been hounding him apparently, and a spiral notebook full of lists of income and expenses going back a decade: cash fees from door gigs of $22, $13.50; a debit of $42 for a taxi. I wept at the waste.

  It was Slack who filled me in about how Edison had grown desperate enough to go by “Caleb Fields” for a time. How his dabbling in heroin had made Sigrid walk out with his unborn son. How aping Travis by acting the prima donna had earned him a toxic reputation. How Edison was forced to sell the Schimmel only to subsequently “eat the piano.” How his band’s fee was docked because he’d gorged on the buffet at a wedding gig. How he lost nearly all his possessions when he fell behind on the rent for self-storage. How his friends got together and found him that little hideaway above Three Bars in Four-Four, only for Edison to blow it by pilfering from the kitchen after hours. I might have inferred something of the sort once my brother admitted that his tour of Spain and Portugal was fabricated, but I’d shied from construing from that one lie all the heartache that might lurk behind it, and I’d had no idea.

  Instead of driving Edison to the airport that afternoon in late November, should I have offered to shunt him off to an ad hoc rehab at Prague Porches, a real development a couple of miles from here? I’m never certain. In any event, this parallel universe has grown hauntingly alive to me since Edison’s death at the untimely age of forty-nine: dissecting tiny triangles of shrimp tail at the Last Supper. Dancing at our Ketosis Party. Railing and then relenting after uncovering the pizza box. Renting Edison a piano and hearing him adventure into West Side Story and Lyle Lovett. Seeing those cheekbones rise again into the sunlight for the first time. Biking and hiking and sandbagging together, reciting our fractured oaths, I pledge aversion to the flab of the derided waists of America, with all the attendant hilarity, until he steps onto a scale before a host of witnesses who’ve grown to love him and weighs in at a triumphant 161.

  Of course, I never arranged to fly Edison’s son to Iowa—although the boy did meet his father shortly before Travis’s stroke. On his own initiative, Carson located his dad at Three Bars in Four-Four, where Edison was known to still congregate with his friends. My brother called me that very night—waking us up, though I didn’t mind. He was exhilarated, sincerely for once, not generating the usual billows of optimism as a smokescreen, hoping to nurture a relationship with his only child at last. But Carson never got in touch again, and the contact details he’d provided his father in the club that night turned out to be bogus. I assumed the kid was shell-shocked. Edison in that expanded form wouldn’t have offered up the image of the ideal dad.

  To my surprise, Carson introduced himself at Edison’s impressively well-populated memorial at Three Bars. Tall, underfed, and sharing the bright knurl of his father’s hair at that age, he delivered condolences in great earnest. I had hopes the boy’s attendance was meant to help compensate for breaking his father’s heart—as, I reminded myself, Edison must have repeatedly broken his son’s. Effectively fatherless for most of his life, Carson had far more to forgive than his dad’s dimensions. Thanking the young man profusely for coming, I was prepared to enfold him into our family, until Cody—hardly a cynic—pulled me aside. “I talked to that little worm for twenty minutes,” she whispered. “All he wanted to know was what make of car you drive, do we have a swimming pool, and did your company ever make the Fortune 500. He gives me the creeps.”

  Smashingly handsome at twenty-two, yet having shed the narcissism that marred him in high school, Tanner sidled beside his sister. “You’re not going to believe this. That guy? My step-cousin? I watched him slip three bottles of wine into his backpack. I mean, let him have them. But really. Pretty low rent.”

  Sure enough, after a series of passionate, touchingly inarticulate testimonials by my brother’s fellow musicians, Carson impaired my enjoyment of the proceeding jam session with fulsome fawning over Baby Monotonous—the very yakking-over-the-music that Edison had often decried. By the time Fletcher rescued me, the boy was supposing that I might like to establish a “grant program” in his father’s honor, providing stipends for aspiring jazz musicians.

  I’d presumed that at nineteen the boy had tracked down his father for the usual reasons: to understand his origins, to fill the maw in his childhood. Now I had to wonder if the young man had merely been nosing around for resources, which Edison conspicuously lacked. To be fair, his father must have meant something to Carson, unless a penchant for jazz is genetic. And given Edison’s neglect, maybe a son’s callous opportunism was one more misfortune that my brother had actively courted.

  His paternal shortcomings aside, during this last year I’ve listened to Edison’s CDs with the concentration I might have applied when they were freshly recorded. I’ve come to believe that my brother was a fine musician. What a travesty, were he mostly remembered for being fat.

  Had you told me when I was younger that my brother would get that heavy I’d have been incredulous. Yet taking a step back, I wonder if the story isn’t pretty simple. Edison’s life started out exciting and ascendant, and then it went into a spiral and he got discouraged. He reached for the one gratification at ready hand, on an assumption he had nothing to lose that became self-fulfilling. That’s a sad story, but it isn’t mysterious. As for the larger social issue that my brother unintentionally embodied, in the end I can contribute only one small thought. I keep referring back to Baby Monotonous—the baffling lassitude of affluence, the sheer boredom of garnering a surfeit of the very worldly attention of which Edison felt so cheated. The word “disappointment” doesn’t begi
n to cover it. However gnawing a deficiency, satiety is worse. So here is the thought: We are meant to be hungry.

  It is impossible to gauge what you owe people. Anyone of course, but especially the blood relation, for as soon as you begin to calculate the amount you’re obliged to give—as soon as you begin to keep track, to parcel the benevolence out—you’re done for. In for a penny, in for a pound. I could not have said, “I will help you lose weight for three months, but not for four.” Once I assumed the role of my brother’s keeper there would have been no limit, don’t you see? And who’s to say whether such an escapade wouldn’t have ruined my marriage, leaving me as half of a sexless, barren sibling couple in an arid development owned by an overweight Czech? Even under the dubious assumption that my decadent big brother would have found the fortitude to diet to successful effect, who’s to say whether in the long run he wouldn’t have gained the weight right back? In preference to tackling the byzantine emotional mathematics of my exact responsibility for my brother, it was simpler to adjudge that I bore none. But nothing in this life is free. Having dodged paying the piper while Edison was still alive, I pay now instead. I pay every day.

  about the author

  LIONEL SHRIVER’s novels include The New Republic, the National Book Award finalist So Much for That, the New York Times bestseller The Post-Birthday World, and the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin, which won the 2005 Orange Prize and was adapted into a feature film starring Tilda Swinton. Earlier books include Double Fault, A Perfectly Good Family, and Checker and the Derailleurs. Her novels have been translated into twenty-eight different languages. Her journalism has appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. She lives in London and Brooklyn, New York.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  also by lionel shriver

  The New Republic

  So Much for That

  The Post-Birthday World

  We Need to Talk About Kevin

  Double Fault

  A Perfectly Good Family

  Game Control

  Ordinary Decent Criminals

  Checker and the Derailleurs

  The Female of the Species

  credits

  Cover design and photography by Milan Bozic

  Illustrations by Dana Mendelson

  copyright

  BIG BROTHER. Copyright © 2013 by Lionel Shriver. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  EPub Edition © JUNE 2013 ISBN: 9780062199263

  ISBN 978-0-06-145857-6

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