Brother in Ice

by Alicia Kopf

  When I get home I send him a message:

  “Did the scooter scare you off?” I jest, referring to his defeated air.

  “Haha, no … Lately I’ve been kinda tired. I really enjoyed our dinner, when can we do it again?”

  We make plans for that same week. Then come the kisses, the flowers, the dinners at restaurants, and the dinners at home.

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  ‌Northward

  R introduces me to his friend N. A thirty-four-year-old German woman living in Berlin. She represents indie music groups. She’s organized tours for bands like Arcade Fire and Death Cab for Cutie. She went through a breakup a year ago. The dinner conversation: What city should we live in? N travels a lot, works online and can live wherever she wants. Copenhagen, Oslo, Helsinki …

  “I’m looking for a place to live,” she tells me.

  Like all Germans, N isn’t afraid to get deep quickly; we have a long conversation ahead of us. I tell her that sometimes you have to stay, stay and fight, because leaving can be running away, full flight forward.

  A couple of days later I meet up with M, my roommate for over five years. First we lived in a tiny apartment on a very narrow street in the old city, later in Gràcia. M is back from a couple of years in Berlin. The company she worked for—a TV channel devoted to video art—has folded. She broke up with her long-term boyfriend in Germany. She takes refuge at her parent’s house. She thinks about leaving again. Maybe London. She has little savings. Thirty-five years old. The months pass. We talk about Brussels, London, Reykjavík … The answer is always further north.

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  ‌July

  Comparing the Amundsen and Scott expeditions on Wikipedia, it appears the main strategic difference is that Amundsen used sleds with dogs from Greenland for his transport, while Scott used Mongolian ponies. Amundsen decided to sacrifice several dogs before reaching the pole and store the meat for the return trip; this strategy allowed him to reduce the burden of dog food and ensure he could maintain the surviving animals on the way back. Scott’s ponies had to carry sacks of oats for their feed, which increased their burden and the chances of them sinking into the snow. Another disadvantage was that the ponies’ sweat froze on their coats, while the dogs regulated their temperature by panting.

  It seems that Amundsen’s expedition had better equipment, and clothing that was more resistant to the cold. All of Scott’s ponies died and the team had to go it alone. Scott added an extra team member at the last minute, which strained the food-rationing plan. While Amundsen’s voyage was efficient and suffered no serious setbacks, Scott reached the pole after great hardships, found Amundsen’s tent marking the Norwegian victory, and after documenting his defeat in the famous photograph, he and his entire team died on the return trip.

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  ‌October 21, 2014

  Letter from the Antarctic

  The ice rarely releases its grip on the polar explorers it captures—the frozen corpses of Captain Scott and his ill-fated team are still there somewhere flowing slowly along with the Antarctic continental drift—but sometimes it gives back some of their possessions, which is always thrilling. That is the case with a notebook, recently found in the old base at Cape Evans, which belonged to George Murray Levick (1876–1956), one of the sixty-five members of the 1910–1913 Terra Nova expedition. While Scott was attempting to reach the South Pole:

  Murray Levick was spending the austral summer of 1911–1912 in the midst of an Adélie penguin rookery. He is still the only person to have spent an entire breeding cycle there. His notes about the penguins’ sexual habits, which included sexual coercion, sex among males and sex with dead females, were deemed too indecent for publication at the time, so he wrote them in Greek, so that only an educated gentleman would be able to read them.12

  12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Murray_Levick.

  I recover my notebook, also frozen for a few months. The ice reminded me of my brother. I call my mother. She’s tired, as usual. I asked her about him. She told me that he’s been doing well since he found a girlfriend at the day center. At midday they give them some time alone, and they hold hands (she is in a wheelchair).

  I ask her about her boyfriend.

  “Good, I’m happy. The other day we were kissing and I asked your brother if it bothered him. He answered, ‘No, I’ve got my own now.’”

  When I visit them the weekend after that, my mother shows me a letter:

  Dear M,

  i love you all infinite eternity and i’ll never grow tired of you.

  Iloveyou Iwantyou

  [drawings of pink hearts and a red heart run through with an arrow]

  AB

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  ‌F

  When I found the apartment the first thing I did was get in touch with F. I knew she lived nearby. We had mutual friends and we often saw each other at concerts. Maybe because she was blond, intelligent, and not terribly lucky with guys, the concept femme fatale could come to mind as a first impression. It’s an expression I’ve always thought must have been invented by a scared man (or more precisely a scared Hollywood).

  F DJs on Fridays at a bar in the old city. That was where I met R who, since he was alone, also came by to visit her.

  F represents some local bands, which, as is often the case, doesn’t give her enough to live on, so she rents out her house on Airbnb. When someone was staying there she would come sleep at my place, and maybe because I’ve never had a sister, her company and familiarity, even though it was brought about by the necessity of circumstance, felt good. F is very talkative; she puts it all out there. Maybe it’s because she found her mother dead from a combination of pills and alcohol when she was sixteen years old. And since her father left home when she was a baby, she was left basically alone. Well, alone with her grandmother. F is one of those people who seem to have no trouble asking for help when they need it; it’s as if she expanded the function of one mother into various people; she has a wide network of friends she can go to when she needs advice or simply someone to listen. F is some sort of centrifugal hurricane. Otherwise, she told me, she would have jumped out a window. Maybe her mother’s death, looking on the bright side, was lucky in a way: her mother was perpetually trying to pass the exam to become a public prosecutor, and had the same plans for her daughter.

  Once I spent the night at her family house in a small town. I slept in a room that that seemed like it hadn’t been used in a long time, filled with furniture from the seventies and old portraits of girls. One of them was her mother as a child. The next morning her grandmother appeared in an elegant black robe, cinched around her thin eighty-six-year-old body. She had an angular face with big blue eyes and a slight tan. Her blond hair was perfectly coiffed and sprayed in place. In one hand she held a very thin cigarette. It almost looked like she was going to a party, except it was ten in the morning on a Saturday, and she was wearing a house robe, not a dress. She looked at me with the expression of a skittish cat. I mentioned that she resembled her granddaughter and it seemed she tried on a smile. Sometimes in families there are particularly strong, charismatic, or luminous characters. Those characters, if they are too focused on themselves, sometimes leave victims around them. Or perhaps it’s adverse climates that cause these extreme survival strategies and personalities.

  F spends those days when she’s rented out her apartment between her grandmother’s house and various friends’ places, including mine. That’s when F shows up with her little pink backpack. She’s never liked the idea of growing up. Because as a girl her mother would tell her that they couldn’t pay the bills, because she knew that her father drank, and she saw that her mother drank. So the idea of growing up—this came out over more than a decade of therapy—scares her. F shows up at my place with her “little backpack,” her headband, and her sparkly sneakers.

  “Can I use your shower? I like your shampoos better than D’s.”

  She goes into the bathroom, puts her favorite program on the radio. She does
n’t come out for a good long while.

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  ‌Searching for an Answer When the Uncertainty of it All Weighs Heavily

  My favorite virtual place is the I-Ching Online. Even though the horrible esoteric design of the site has none of the charm and ceremony of the book, you have the option of tossing the coins by hand, or virtually, which saves time and having to look for your change purse. I usually choose the virtual option because I have no time for ceremonies and no desire to scatter coins. I feel a little like a player addicted to Candy Crush, except I’ve never liked those sorts of games and I can’t stand getting those online invitations. The I-Ching’s answers are usually quite ambiguous and elusive because you can relate them at whim to whatever’s worrying you. Yesterday I went to the site at four in the afternoon. I found a blank page that read: “Server access blocked due to excessive traffic.”

  “So right now there must be a throng of people anxious about their future,” I said to myself. As the afternoon draws to a close, that throng—of which I am one—starts to experience a vertigo in which family, romantic, and work problems repeat in an eternal return. We consult the I-Ching so it will give us an answer, any answer, but above all:

  “If you do what’s right, everything will work out fine.”

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  ‌Advantages

  The advantages of having a brother with a high degree of dependency is that you can’t let yourself go. Unlike children with Down’s syndrome, who have a certain autonomy, lower life expectancy and a disability that is visibly appropriate for advertising campaigns and jobs in companies that want to make a display of their solidarity, autistic people can have a perfectly normal appearance and live as many years as anyone else. Some of my favorite artists have ended up committing suicide or dying young. That doesn’t enter into my plans: first of all, what would happen to my brother in the future if I weren’t around? That question, in my attempt to compensate for not being a neurosurgeon-genetic-engineer-discoverer-of-the-reasons-for-autism and therefore discoverer-also-of-his-cure, in addition to having a vocation as precarious as artist usually is, has aggravated things. I try to brace my clearly artistic résumé with multiple certified foreign languages, a second undergraduate degree—in Literature, what can you do—and a master’s. This feeling of added responsibility is something that also happens to those who’ve lost a brother or sister as children: somehow the awareness that you have an opportunity that someone close to you doesn’t have, means you are haunted by a feeling of not being able to let down your parents, who already have enough to deal with.

  All of that, plus the recession of 2008, ended up leading me from jobless desperation to teaching. Teaching secondary school is an activity that causes people to pity you; some hide it better than others. An activity that doesn’t enter into the plans of the samurai existence demanded of the artists’ collective, propelled across continents by grants, exchanges, artists’ residencies, etc. And if they do teach, it’s as a “guest artist” leading a workshop, usually funded by municipal cultural departments, because the administration assumes that there aren’t artists among the teachers but rather that they swoop in from the supposedly glamorous art world in order to empower the lumpen with Marxism, postcolonial thought and queer theory. I envy that life. Yes; for the explorations, places and people that I miss out on. I also imagine a reality in which before each teacher enters the classroom at the start of the year, a bigwig sent from the Department of Culture would introduce him or her to their future students with reverence:

  “Allow me to introduce X, whose teaching practice is situated between performance, conference, and activism. X has a long creative trajectory, having presented 875 variations on the same subject—Mathematics—in 75 different situations: first thing in the morning and at dusk, before students from urban centers, from small towns, and at risk of marginalization. Let’s welcome X with a warm round of applause!”

  Delusions aside, there is an important element necessary for any creative activity: a constraint. So many of us have to get up at seven. The best part is that there are a lot more people here and that staves off our spleen. Perhaps that’s counterproductive if you aspire to have an international career, but if what you aspire to is focus and being able to work without creating dependencies (my highest aspiration right now), it’s a great advantage. These are some of my current limits: I get up at 6:45 a.m., work until 2 p.m., and by 3 p.m. I’m home and can do whatever I want.

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  ‌After-Dinner Conversation

  “I would have children if, as I introduce them into the world, I could ask them if they want to be born,” I say.

  My mother’s boyfriend, JR, a sixty-year-old philosophy professor, answers:

  “I’ve already pondered this question. I came to the conclusion that, imagining infinite nothingness with suspended atoms, if any of those atoms had a moment of consciousness and could respond to the question of whether it wanted to exist, it would say yes, comparing the brevity of a human life with the long tedious eternity of a non-being. Existence, even if limited and filled with suffering, would seem like an adventure in the midst of that nothingness.”

  I’d always considered choosing to have children essentially an egotistical choice, based on earning emotional credits for old age and the biological necessity to continue our genes and relieve our loneliness. An option that is unnecessary for the planet, and inconsiderate toward the future being we bring into the world without asking for permission. In that sense, being born seems like signing a contract without having read its clauses. Growing up is gradually discovering them. Some of them are marvelous, others are terrible.

  JR, a newcomer to the family, also exposes me to the other side of the question, what he calls “the egotism of not having children.” In his own case, in which he didn’t have them out of convenience, because he, in part, shares my opinion, and above all because of his ex-wife’s wishes. A decision that JR now, sixty years old, regrets.

  The possibility of having children without sufficient resources, not only economic but also in terms of family, sometimes seems irresponsible to me. But where is the line of what is considered sufficient? Is it that below a certain income per capita, and without a partner or available family, you shouldn’t have kids? In other words, is the option to have children only for the fortunate and for normative families? And if not, how can parents be made aware of the dangers of transmitting behaviors that lead to poverty, illness, or unhappiness in an endless circle … ?

  None of the arguments in favor or against convinces me entirely; I once again arrive at my usual state of permanent doubt and suspension of judgment. Every case is different. For the moment, I am too fond of my small apartment, my freedom (despite the doses of loneliness it brings) and my dance classes to consider the question very seriously. Conquering those basic things took fourteen years of my adult life.

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  ‌Spoiled Children

  Indulgent love on the part of a father or mother can also be a form of negligence; parents without limits and rules, who turn a blind eye to their child’s defects, who idolize them so much that they are unaware of their real problems, are also responsible for a form of neglect.

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  ‌R’s Closet

  You often don’t tidy up until you invite guests over to your house. And no one but me has gone into your walk-in closet in the last few years. Spring, summer, autumn, winter, year after year the clothing from your childhood and teenage years just kept getting hidden toward the back. Season after season you just superficially folded the visible part, with the clothes you wear every day, the essentials that occupy the small illuminated part of the room. Because, after all, you are the only one who goes in there. Until someone, me for example, tries to enter with a torch after seeing that you have holes in your socks, and searching for pajamas finds bras in the underwear drawer. The bras have a hook that pulls out some stockings with a run, curled up inside a jumper your gran knitted for you. The jumper has
a button that you liked to touch, and it reminded you of the boy you used to play football with (wrinkled up, it’s a nest for dust bunnies). And from inside the sleeve comes a balled-up black sock that was your father’s—he was so obsessed with insisting you be punctual, and finish school—and further back, those pajamas, the Mickey Mouse ones they bought you when you all went to Disneyland together the summer right before the separation. All the way at the back, on the upper part of the last shelf, the bedspread with colorful edging that was always on your bed at your mother’s house takes up a lot of space.