“Not at all. How’s your back?”
“Crap! My shoulders feel like clamps. A town masseuse, that’s the kind of suggestion that would do some good,” Lionel said as he massaged his own shoulders with both hands.
Terry and I arrived outside the café. It was closed. It was always closed now; the boycott had won in the end. Caroline was lurking inside; the café was her private hideout until her father managed to sell it. We saw her through the window: she was lying on the bar smoking, trying to blow perfect smoke rings. It was adorable. The rings came out as whirling semicircles. I tapped on the glass and reached out to put my hand on Terry’s shoulder in brotherly support, but my hand met with nothing but air. I turned to see Terry’s back moving away from me fast, and by the time Caroline had unlocked the door and stepped out on the street, Terry was gone.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“Do you want to come in? I’m smoking.”
“Maybe later.”
As I walked away I noticed a bad smell in the air, like dead birds rotting in the sun.
I found Terry sitting beneath a tree, holding a pile of letters in his hands. I sat beside him and didn’t say anything. He stared down at the letters.
“They’re from her,” he said.
So, Caroline’s letters! Love letters, no doubt.
I stretched out on the grass and closed my eyes. There was no wind, and next to no sound. I had the impression of being inside a bank vault.
“Can I take a look?” I asked.
A masochistic streak in me was dying to get my hands on those stinking letters. I was frantic to see how she expressed her love, even if it wasn’t for me.
“They’re private.”
I could feel something crawling on my neck, maybe an ant, but I didn’t move- I didn’t want to give it the moral victory.
“Well, can you summarize?” I asked.
“She says she only wants to be with me if I can give up crime.”
“And are you going to?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
I felt myself shrink a little. Of course I was pleased that Terry would be saved by the woman he loved, but I couldn’t rejoice. One brother’s success is another brother’s failure. Dammit. I didn’t think he had it in him.
“Only, the thing is…” he said.
I sat up and looked at him. His eyes were heavy. Maybe the hospital had changed him after all. I wasn’t sure how, exactly; maybe inside him something fluid had hardened, or something solid had melted. Terry gazed out in the direction of the town center. “There’s one thing I need to do first,” he said. “Just one little illegal thing.”
One thing. They all say that. Just one and he’ll be on to the next, and before you know it he’ll be like a snowball rolling downhill gathering yellow snow.
“Well, you’ll do whatever you want,” I said, not strictly encouraging him, though not discouraging him either.
“Maybe I shouldn’t do it,” Terry said.
“Maybe.”
“But I really want to.”
“Well,” I said, choosing my words very carefully, “sometimes people need to do things, you know, to get the things that they need to do out of their system.”
What was I saying? Absolutely nothing. It was simply impossible to recommend to Terry a course of action; this was my defense for the unconscionable act of bad brothering I was doing.
“Yeah,” he said, lost in thought, and I stood there like a stop sign, even though I was saying, Go!
Terry picked himself up and brushed the grass off his jeans. “I’ll see you a bit later on,” he said, and walked off slowly in the opposite direction from Caroline’s café. He was really dawdling, I think because he wanted me to stop him. I didn’t.
Betrayal wears a lot of different hats. You don’t have to make a show of it like Brutus did, you don’t have to leave anything visible jutting from the base of your best friend’s spine, and afterward you can stand there straining your ears for hours, but you won’t hear a cock crow either. No, the most insidious betrayals are done merely by leaving the life jacket hanging in your closet while you lie to yourself that it’s probably not the drowning man’s size. That’s how we slide, and while we slide we blame the world’s problems on colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, corporatism, stupid white men, and America, but there’s no need to make a brand name of blame. Individual self-interest: that’s the source of our descent, and it doesn’t start in the boardrooms or the war rooms either. It starts in the home.
Hours later, I heard the explosion. Out my window I saw thick billows of smoke spiraling into the moon-drenched night. My stomach tightened as I ran into town. I wasn’t the only one. The entire populace had congregated in the main street outside the town hall. They all looked horrified, the preferred expression of a crowd of spectators who gather specifically for tragedies. My poisonous suggestion box was gone. There were bits of it all over the street.
An ambulance had arrived, though not for the broken box. A man was stretched out on the pavement, his face covered with a white cloth soaked in blood. At first I thought he was dead, but he removed the cloth to reveal a face of blood and powder burns. No, he wasn’t dead. He was blind. He’d been reaching into the box to place a suggestion when the whole thing exploded in his face.
“I can’t see! I can’t fucking see!” he was shouting, panicked.
It was Lionel Potts.
There were more than fifty men and women on the scene, and in their eyes was a sort of thrill, as if they had come to dance in the streets on an enchanted evening. Through the crowd I saw Terry sitting in the gutter with his head between his legs. The horror of his badly timed act of vandalism was too much for him. Lionel had been the one bright light in a world full of dim ones, and Terry had torn his eyes out. It felt strange to see shards of my suggestion box strewn all over the road, and the way my brother was slumped in the gutter, and Lionel sprawled on the pavement, and Caroline hunched over him; it seemed to me that my loved ones had all exploded too. Smoke still hung in the air, curling in the bluish light, and it smelled very much like firecracker night.
Only five days later our family was dressed in its Sunday best.
Juvenile courtrooms are just like regular courtrooms. The state tried a number of charges on Terry like a rich woman trying suits on her favorite gigolo: attempted murder, attempted manslaughter, malicious wounding- the prosecutors couldn’t decide. They should have arrested me too. I don’t know if egging on a crime for love is an offense punishable by law, but it should be.
In the end, Terry was sentenced to three years in a juvenile detention center. When they took him away, he gave me a little wink. Then he was gone, just like that. The rest of us stood hugging each other in the courtroom, totally bewildered. I tell you, the wheels of justice may turn slowly, but when the state wants you off the streets, the wheels that carry you away spin like comets.
Democracy
After Lionel’s blinding, I found myself haunted by questions, and after Terry’s incarceration, I felt those questions pressing down on me from all sides. I had to do something. But what? I had to be someone. But who? I didn’t want to imitate the stupidity of the people around me. But whose stupidity should I imitate? And why did I feel sick at night? Was I afraid? Was fear making me anxious? How could I think clearly if I was anxious? And how could I understand anything if I couldn’t think clearly? And how was I going to function in this world if I couldn’t understand anything?
It was in this besieged state that I arrived at school, but I couldn’t make my way through the gates. For a good hour I stood staring at the ugly brick buildings, the dim-witted students, the trees in the playground, the brown polyester pants of the teachers making a swishing sound on their fleshy thighs as they marched between classes, and I thought: If I study hard, I’ll pass my exams, but so what? What do I do between that moment and the moment of my death?