The Brothers K

by David James Duncan

  after Chief Yulie and Corey finally trudged out to the phone booth, fetched him back to the Muskrat, fed him a burger ’n’ chips, stood him a pitcher of draft, then another, then another, then another, and Roon and Jeddy drove him back home and dumped him in bed, Everett, or what was left of him, awoke in the meaningless gray morning to find his mind, his possessions and half his heart still irretrievably gone. But for some reason his body still seemed to be hanging uselessly but noticeably down off his neck there. So meeting the body’s feeble demands, morning after morning, became his feeble new purpose in life.

  This A.M. bodily maintenance project was soon dubbed “the ABCDE.” His mind was so adrift that the acronym’s meaning would change now and then, but generally it stood for something like “Another Brainless Clone’s Diet Effort” or “Amorphous Blob Cooks Detritus for Everett.” What didn’t change much was the ritual itself: the ABCDE began with three boiled eggs, cooked sometimes too soft, sometimes too hard, almost never just right. Everett loathed overly soft eggs and he loathed overly hard ones, but since his A.M. mind couldn’t keep track of time without its morning coffee, and since coffee gave him heartburn on an empty stomach, he had to eat the eggs before he could drink the coffee. So every morning he mistimed, miscooked, and disliked them. He’d tried fried eggs for a while. But whenever he’d burnt them (which had been almost daily) he went through hell trying to clean his cast-iron skillet afterward. With boiled eggs, if the shells didn’t break (or what the heck, even if they did), the hot water for his coffee was ready just as soon as he spooned the eggs out, and the pan was as good as clean as soon as the coffee got poured out into his cup. Clever. For an Amorphous Blob.

  Everett drank drip coffee only. Percolated, cowboy or instant gave him even worse heartburn than drip, adding milk didn’t help, and Canadians hadn’t yet discovered cappuccino and the like, so black drip it was. He also tried fixing toast to accompany the eggs now and then. Since he had no toaster he had to use his gas oven, and since he used it in the midst of his pre-coffee stupor, he usually burnt the toast to cinders. Even if he didn’t burn it he seldom ate it, because he didn’t like toast unless it was hot and served with coffee and he couldn’t have it with coffee yet, because his eggs were still boiling in his coffee water, and by the time he got the eggs shelled and salted and peppered the toast was stone cold. But he liked to make toast anyway, if only because by operating the gas oven in the midst of his pre-coffee stupor he daily stood a very real chance of dying.

  Death. By all sorts of means. This was a topic Everett contemplated long, hard and none too carefully on these dank, gray-hued late-winter mornings. Stumbling round the kitchen, not comprehending time, he would fix and consume his preposterous breakfast till the eggy coffee did its work and his literacy kicked in. Then he’d start to read whatever printed words or numbers his eyes lit upon. Not Russian novels; not books; not even magazines or newspapers. Thought, literature, informative writing of all kinds—these were for suckers. Because they all tried to give life meaning. But once your life had acquired meaning, all it really meant was that you’d doomed yourself to hurt like a twice-hammered thumb once Unmeaning came along, as it always does, and knocked the teeth, brains and stuffing out of your puny meaning. All Everett required each morning, thank you, were some random household objects with a few meaningless words printed on them to add a little fuel to his contemplations of death …

  The 1943 tide table Scotch-taped to the side of the rusty, perennially empty napkin dispenser, for instance. “Sept. 10, 1943,” it warned. “High Water: 11:34 & 11:16; Feet: 7.4 and 8.4; Low Water: 5:00 & 5:13; Feet: −0.8 and 0.8.” Or the side of the corroded half-full can of Ronsonol lighter fluid under the kitchen sink. “DO NOT USE NEAR FIRE OR FLAME,” it threatened. “N.Y.F.D.C. of A. No 731. ALWAYS CLOSE SPOUT AFTER USE. Wipe lighter and hands dry before igniting. If swallowed do not induce vomiting. Call physician immediately.” Then he’d sip more coffee, and more, till he could picture himself floating facedown in an 8.4 high tide, or slipping on kelp, cracking his skull and drowning in a tide puddle on a −0.8 low, or immolating or poisoning or exploding himself due to some failure to “dry” or “CLOSE” or “induce” or “call” someone or something or other. And then of course up would stroll Natasha, just in time to toss the unseeable flower, or the now unreadable note that explained everything, or just the other half of his heart into the puddle or fire or gutter where he lay, and just in time to say, “I’m sorry, I really did love you” or “I’m sorry, I never did,” what’s the difference, really? Then out of the cottage he’d stroll, and up to the alder woodlot to weep or cut firewood, what’s the difference, really?, or down the driveway to fix the flood-ruts with a shovel, or all the way to town for supplies and mail and, when it was raining, a good camouflaged cry over the beautiful letter of apology she had once again not written. Then back to his home or his homelessness, to sleep or not sleep till morning, when he’d open his eyes to the sight of the same old body, hanging sad and silly as a turkey wattle from his neck. So out would come the saucepan, in would go the water, up would leap the blue flame. And he’d boil another three eggs.

  5. Herod

  letter from Irwin/Mekong Delta/February/1971

  Dear Mama,

  Sorry to worry you with a thing like this, but this letter’s for Nash when he’s old enough to wonder who I was, in case I don’t come back. I’d of sent it to Linda, but didn’t want to scare her. And if I don’t come back I figure her life could get crazy enough she might lose this before Nash ever saw it. Whereas knowing you, you’ll read it and hate it, but still take good care of it. So I thank you in advance. Okay? XOOX.

  Dear Nash.

  It’s weird to write somebody you love but have never met a big long letter you hope they’ll never read. But if you are reading this it means you won’t be seeing me, and I’d rather write a weird letter than leave you wondering your whole life whether I ever thought about you. I’m writing to say that I think about you and your mother every day and night, and that I love you both so much that one of the hardest things in my life now is trying not to hate myself for being fool enough to come here. How I did come, what forced me to leave, is not easy to explain. But for you I want to try. And if it just sounds dumb when I’m finished, maybe your uncles and aunts can fill in some of the holes.

  Once upon a time then, as far as I can understand it, there was this place, Vietnam, where a bunch of farmers, mostly Buddhists I guess, were happily and unhappily living and farming and marrying and making babies who grew up to be unhappy and happy farmers like themselves, when politicians from their cities, then from whole other countries, started fighting over whose flag should fly over their farms. The fighting became a war, and there was money and power and beliefs and revenge involved, and though I’ll never understand it, one thing led to another till several different nations including the most powerful one in the world, our nation, Nash, had sent men and tanks and jets and bombers into this quiet place, and they roared and poured out over the farmers’ farmland, and they blew each other and the farms and the crops and the animals and farmers, women and children included, Nash, kids no bigger than you, and just as sweet, into a million burnt and bloody pieces. Can you believe it? I hate to even tell you such a horrible story. I’m only doing it because, as I write this, it’s still happening. What’s worse, I’m one of that most powerful nation’s men.

  So why in hell’s name am I here, you must wonder. Because your granddad and uncles warned me, Nash. They told me exactly what was happening here and said go to jail or Canada instead. What I thought about their warnings may sound strange to you, but it’s the truth: what I thought was how much Jesus loved me. I had so much faith I just knew He’d protect me here, and help me help and maybe even save others, till He brought me back home safely to Linda and you. And this wasn’t wrong of me, Nash, it’s good to trust Jesus. But when it came to a subject like ’Nam it wasn’t very imaginative of me either. The thing was, I grew up hearing over and
over how Jesus loved the little children of the world, and to me the word “love” meant He must take care of them, He must watch out for them. So I simply couldn’t imagine an actual place on earth, not even when I saw it in black and white in the magazine pictures Everett sent me, where the broiling bodies of Christ’s little loved ones really were lying in pools of fire in their own backyards and playgrounds and gardens, and that my country was the one dropping the fire. I looked right at those pictures, but couldn’t see them. To me they were trick photography or something, and by coming here I figured I’d be able to straighten out the tricks and maybe keep Mama and Everett from going at each other’s throats.

  Well, I was wrong, Nash. Though now that I’m here I see two very good reasons why I couldn’t imagine ’Nam from back home. One reason was that a ’Nam could only mean that the leaders of my country were as crazy and cruel as King Herod. Maybe not that cruel as individuals, but running in a pack they sure were. And the other reason was that ’Nam means that I, who always felt so loved by Jesus, didn’t have the slightest idea what Christ’s love really is. It was this second part that scared me most, Nash. In fact it scared my mind shut. It slammed shut like a door whenever anyone warned me not to come here. Everett’s warnings especially confused me, because I knew he wouldn’t lie, but he was so full of anger and hate that his truths just didn’t feel true. So he with his good imagination and bad temper ran away to Canada. And I with my bad imagination and good temper came here, where I have seen and smelled and touched the things I found impossible to imagine. And now, too late, I understand Everett’s hate. Now I know that sure enough, Herod is alive and well and more powerful than ever, living in Moscow and Peking and Washington D.C. And what’s worse, at least for me: I no longer know what Christ’s love is. He’s lost me. I don’t know what He could possibly mean by this place, though I’m still struggling with all my heart to find out.

  That pretty much says it, strange and sad as it must sound. One thing I’m sure of, Nash, and don’t ever forget this. No matter how nuts this war would of made me, I’d of loved you all my life, with all my heart, when I came home.

  XOOX,

  Irwin (your dad)

  6. The Blue Turban

  One of Holy Mother India’s best-kept secrets—so Peter decided several months into his Fulbright year—was the thousand and one ways she had of making Westerners look like fools. Including even Westerners determined to live like Easterners.

  During Peter’s three-week stay in an embarrassingly luxurious guesthouse at the University of New Delhi, a servant had literally come with the house—that is, the fellow could be found round the clock, perched like some sort of home appliance in a tiny, doorless nook near the bungalow’s back entrance. Embarrassed by the man’s minuscule quarters, by his servility, and by the concept of servants in general, Peter told his faculty hosts that the man’s services were not needed. To Peter’s surprise, his faculty friends politely but firmly insisted that he stay. So into my brother’s life came an obsequious, incomprehensible little Tamil, Lakshman by name, who chose, despite Peter’s repeated attempts to send him home, to remain on call twenty-four hours a day.

  Lakshman’s complete services, Peter soon learned, would have cost him two rupees—about 360—a day, and no one but Allah would have known had he allowed himself to be waited upon hand and foot. But Peter felt his relationship with Lakshman was, like all human relationships, a spiritual test, and his strategy in taking this test was to treat his servant as a perfect equal. Peter therefore insisted, to the man’s obvious consternation, on picking up after himself, making his bed, hand-washing his own clothes, buying and preparing his own food, making and serving his own tea, heating his own bath water, and so on. He also visited Lakshman in his little- appliance closet at every meal or teatime, to offer him a portion of whatever food or beverage he’d made for himself. This unstinting show of equality seemed to alternately agitate and depress the servant, but Peter kept at it. There were still two annoyances in their relationship, however: the first was that Lakshman insisted, no matter how many times he was corrected, upon addressing Peter as “Sahib;” the second was that whenever Peter was not asleep (and perhaps even when he was) Lakshman would emerge from his nook every half hour like a cuckoo from a clock, to come stand in the doorway of whatever room Peter occupied, and to politely inquire, in the one English sentence he had mastered, whether Sahib yet required his assistance. The latter annoyance was especially disturbing to Peter’s scholarly work, both because it broke his concentration and because he’d begun to detect a veiled air of hostility: for all his apparent servility, Lakshman’s relentless interruptions seemed silently to say that Peter’s fandangled attempts at “brotherhood” meant nothing to him, and that on the day Peter took himself off to whatever Western hellhole he’d come from, Lakshman would go back to serving a real Sahib with pleasure. After two weeks of this torment Peter ran out of patience, described the situation to his faculty hosts, and for the second time requested that the servant be sent away—

  and that’s when he learned that Lakshman was assigned year round to the occupant of Peter’s bungalow and no other, that only by serving that occupant could he earn tips, that these tips were the sole source of income for the six kids, wife and mother-in-law with whom he shared an unplumbed one-room concrete apartment, and that, thanks to Peter’s fine notions of equality, Lakshman’s family had been begging their meals, or going hungry, ever since he’d arrived. Of course Peter was appalled—and he deliberately lived, and tipped, like a pasha for the rest of his stay.

  Another one of Mother India’s little practical jokes began one day, in Hyderabad, when Peter decided the time had come to purchase a piece of cloth suitable for a turban, both to protect himself from sunstroke and to conceal his crowd-attracting blond braid. What happened this time was that he did find a suitable piece of pale blue cloth, learned to wrap it in several traditional styles, and for the better part of a month wore it constantly, gradually growing numb to the hundreds, if not thousands of incredulous stares he continued to receive anyhow. He then learned, from a blushing female Rhodes scholar at the University of Madras, that his fine blue turban was of a color and cut of cloth which Hindu women use only as underwear. Peter managed to laugh as he ripped it off his head and presented it, with a bow and a strangled thank-you, to the woman. But he also proceeded to spend more time than ever shut up in hotel rooms and libraries, immersed in his work.

  The longer Peter stayed in India the more necessary he found it to shelter himself from the crowds and the heat, the overspiced food and black marketeers, the chaotic bazaars and abused landscape, the prying children, countless beggars, overabundance of life, overabundance of death. Yet the more skilled he became at sheltering himself, the more he felt as though something inside him, some kind of inner circuitry, had ceased to function. Emotionally, and at times physically, he felt disconnected from himself. Unplugged. When he’d try to look inside himself he’d see nothing particularly frightening; things were just a little fuzzy, a little vague in there. His mind was still sharp, his scholarly work was going well, and he had made several Indian friends in academic circles. What his life sometimes reminded him of, actually, were the nights he’d spent as a boy back in Camas reading forbidden books under the blankets by flashlight—except that this time it was Mama India he was hiding from.

  He did finally write to a favorite adviser at Harvard and described his “unplugged” sensation—albeit in somewhat fuzzy terms. And the adviser—one Dr. Ramchandra Majumdar, a British-born Indian, but an experienced traveler in East and West—wrote back promptly, showing a touching but necessarily fuzzy concern as he ventured to guess that Peter’s uneasiness might stem not from his struggles with the difficult culture but from “a temporary state of spiritual aridity.” Peter was most grateful for this diagnosis. Spiritual aridity is an impressive-sounding thing by which to be made fuzzy. Before receiving Majumdar’s letter he’d feared his true pathology might be something more
along the lines of “scared of running around like an imbecile with women’s underclothes on my head again” or “scared of catching the screaming shits again.” But those were Camas thoughts, puppy thoughts, sloppy thoughts, weren’t they? Dr. Majumdar knew more than he about these matters, didn’t he? So, yes, Pete would think. Spiritual aridity. That’s what I’ve got. And when, at times, he would recognize his complete lack of conviction in this diagnosis, he would immediately calm himself by thinking: But of course. Because lack of conviction is exactly what aridity is …

  There are kinds of human problems which really do seem, as our tidy expressions would have it, to “come to a head” and “demand to be dealt with.” But there are also problems, often just as serious, which come to nothing that we can recognize or openly deal with. Some long-lived, insidious problems simply slip us off to one side of ourselves. Some gently rob us of just enough energy or faith so that days which once took place on a horizontal plane become an endless series of uphill slogs. And some—like high water working year after year at the roots of a riverside tree—quietly undercut our trust or our hope, our sense of place, or of humor, our ability to empathize, or to feel enthused, and we don’t sense impending danger, we don’t feel the damage at all,