Now, fighting back the nausea I hadn’t been able to feel then, that Ethan could still wrench from me, I padded across the sodden canvas to the place where the throbbing shape lay, trying to grow a face. Dark patches that could have been embryonic eyes, a nose, and mouth, as captured in a drawing by an ungifted first-grade cartoonist, appeared just below the thing’s semi-liquid chest, and seemed about to congeal into something capable of speech… but then they faded, leaving only an oozing green patch, like a gasoline spill on a driveway.
Ethan quivered, that little failed attempt at coherence exhausting him utterly.
My vision blurred. “Hey, kid. I drove a long way to get here. Can you spare a little hello for me?”
He gurgled like an infant, and exploded.
There’s a certain sight popular in Hollywood comedies: the hapless character who gets drenched by something slimy and malodorous—shit or fertilizer or paint or, in gooier fantasies, alien bodily fluids that have never been included in the usual list of substances produced by the human body. The victim’s eyes always blink multiple times in the middle of a face otherwise obscured by muck, eloquently communicating an offended dignity that encourages the ticket holders in the audience to howl in disgust and delight.
Ever since Ethan turned six, my family no longer considers that kind of scene funny. We’ve all been through it too many times.
This time I was lucky; not only did none get inside me, but what got on me decided that it didn’t want to stick. The layers of little brother flowed off my skin like quicksilver, forming another queasy puddle at my feet before pieces of him became the snout of a rat, the leg of a dog, the cock of a stallion. Two beautiful cat’s eyes, with irises of green and gold, blinked on his surface, communicating a calm amazement that could have meant anything I wanted it to mean; then they disappeared and—in what I could only think of as a little miracle—the vomitous ooze congealed, forming an oversized, bodiless portrait of a little boy’s face.
“Hello,” he said.
It was the first coherent word my little brother had spoken to me in three years.
He looked like he would stay this way for a while, so I touched him on his oversized cheek. My hand looked like an infant’s against that larger-than-life canvas.
A lump formed in my throat. “Hi, kid. How’s it going?”
He gulped, a gesture more about seeming to swallow than actually swallowing, as his big face fronted no throat and no gullet. “That’s a fucking… stupid question, Lawrence. You know… how I’m doing.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Fuck your sorry.” He coughed, struggled for voice, moaned with a supreme effort of will as his mouth tried to go away. Several seconds later he managed to bring it back, but by then his eyes had dropped several sizes and assumed normal human dimensions, which made them comical on that oversized face already beginning to run like wax at the edges. “Fuck you. Fuck Mom. Fuck Dad. Fuck Jean. Fuck all of those fucking vultures downstairs. Fuck your pity in your fucking ass. I hope your fucking kids get what I fucking have. I hope you have to fucking watch them live with this. I hope you have to fucking hope for them to die. I fucking wish it had been you all along. I fucking wish I could look down at you the way you’re looking down at me. I fucking wish I could piss on you. I fucking wish you’d get cancer. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.”
He tried to say more, but his moment of coherency was done. His body was too busy becoming a succession of specific things, all of them terrible. A bloody Jesus, writhing on the cross. A burned man, crawling across an expanse of broken glass, his trail marked by the pieces of himself he left behind. A little girl having her eyes gouged out by hooks. A dog trying to crawl on the bleeding stumps of amputated legs. A pregnant woman giving birth to a spiked asterisk of a thing, all bristling needles and barbs, that crawled from her bloody womb only to sink its claws into her flesh and drag itself up her body, so it could force itself down her throat and enjoy being born a second time. A little boy paddling around a favorite swimming hole on his birthday, and beaming with an innocent delight that was about to be ruined, forever, by the terrible fatal flaw that cruel nature had built into him.
None of them surprised me.
They were all things that I’d seen him become before.
I left Ethan’s cell after another half an hour, feeling as unclean as I always felt, whenever I visited my little brother. It never mattered whether I’d managed to avoid getting any of him on me. I was contaminated by the sight of him, sometimes the very idea of him.
I took a shower with the water hot just a sliver short of scalding. I let it burn. There was no stain of Ethan on me—that quicksilver retreat of his flesh from my skin a measure of insufficient kindness in a visit that had otherwise afforded a full measure of his condition’s cruelty—but I still stayed beneath the spray, enduring its punishment, until I was reddened and raw and able to feel scoured of every part of him.
I crawled into bed and slept, enduring the usual Ethan dreams of my bones twisting into razored shapes inside me.
When I woke, the afternoon light was fading. I got dressed and went downstairs, finding much the same assortment of cousins and aunts and uncles, their positions on the family couches unchanged. I endured the usual questions about anything but Ethan, questions that ranged from whether I was seeing anybody special to whether I’d decided what I was going to do after graduation but somehow never touched on how much I was suffocating. I asked where my mother was, and was informed that she and Dr. Zuvicek were both upstairs with Ethan, who had taken yet another in a long series of turns for the worse and was hardly changing at all, which an elderly aunt who had researched the condition told me was a sign that his remaining lifespan could now be measured in hours.
After that I endured the usual half hour of well-meaning family blather about everything but the crisis at hand; the cousin who had gotten married, the uncle who had moved to another state, the relative of uncertain provenance who had done something even more uninteresting that I was expected to note and file away as vital genetic intelligence. Somebody was doing well in business, somebody else was failing, a third had had fallen out of touch, and a fourth had committed sins that the aunt reporting them considered scandalous enough to impart in shocked whispers. I nodded and pretended to care and then watched as the subject inevitably circled back to Ethan, and how sweet a little boy he had been.
When I finally made my escape I stepped out into the afternoon’s fading light and found Jean on the porch swing, smoking a cigarette. I hadn’t suspected her of picking up the habit, but she didn’t know I had either, and as I sat down she just handed me the butt without making eye contact. I took a single drag deep enough to make the paper sizzle, then put it out and sat down beside her, watching the sun turn to bright red shrapnel behind the sheltering trees.
“So?” she said, without looking at me. “Ready to leave yet?”
I nudged the porch with my toe to make the seat rock. “Pretty much.”
“And you’ve only been back for a few hours. Try it when it’s just you and Mom sitting on opposite ends of the same couch, night after night, trying to find things to talk about in between Ethan noises.”
I held up my hands in a gesture of abject surrender. “You win.”
She glanced at me out of the corners of her eye, searching for signs of mockery. After a second or two she came to the reluctant decision that I wasn’t offering any, and looked away, her anger still burning but unsatisfied by any fit place to put it. “I’m sorry. You offered to stay, too.”
That I had; though I’d offered only token resistance when Mom insisted that I had a life to live, that I needed to see to my own future while my poor brother burned through what little was left of his. Give her credit, she hadn’t tried to inflict any guilt when I let her win that argument… or when I chose a faraway school that would keep me from having to come home and help out on evenings and weekends.