Carlo wasn’t in his bedroom. But I had promised myself I would never follow anyone again.
The night Fabio died it wasn’t my mother who told me to follow him. I was already asleep: I had fallen asleep in front of the little black-and-white TV at the foot of my bed; on its yellowish screen, I occasionally watched the strip shows and old R-rated movies that the local stations ran after midnight. I woke with a start to see my father bending over me, touching my shoulder and whispering my name. He told me that a neighbor on his way home had stopped to knock on our door and let us know that Fabio was in the parking lot behind the town hall, sitting on the ground between two cars. “Go get him, bring him home.”
I got dressed again, in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, and my Adidas without socks, and I went down to the street and I took the R4 and drove without haste through the narrow streets of the village (you couldn’t do that now, the whole thing has become a pedestrian zone), obeying all the lights and stop signs even though there was no one around: it was 1:00 a.m. It was a warm, peaceful September night; some driveways and courtyards held camper vans or trailers carrying fiberglass boats (which were the big new thing, at the time, for people who got to the seaside only in summer), and dangling from the balconies were freshly washed sleeping bags hung out to dry — symbols that summer was over and that people were slowly, reluctantly winding up their vacations. How had we spent the summer? As usual, my parents hadn’t left home. I had spent two weeks camping with four old classmates, under the pine trees near some beach. Was it the year I went to Tuscany? Or the year I went to Corsica? One or the other.
Fabio had roamed around the local countryside, sleeping with friends here and there (“Did you sleep in the fields?” I asked, and he nodded). He was very direct. He counted someone as his friend if he had met the guy just that morning and spent the day hanging out and chatting with him. What did I see him do, when I followed him secretly? Nothing. I spied on him. I didn’t like the people he hung out with; it only made me angry to think about why he hung out with them. But actually I hardly looked at those people. I watched only him. He had the same serene, absent look he’d had when we were kids. He had nothing in common with those people. He didn’t share their frenzy, their gluttonous energy. As I spied on him, I couldn’t help thinking that he was happy. The idea was unbearable to me, but I kept turning it over in my mind; I held it close, like an ugly gift from someone I loved — something I couldn’t shake.
When he got back home that summer, we saw that he’d had a “total relapse” (that was my mother’s only comment on it, one evening after he came home; my father and I said nothing). Before the summer she had said, “He’s having a relapse” (though it wasn’t clear at the time that she was talking about Fabio: she was looking out the window when she said it). Summer wasn’t good for him. Summertime usually brings relapses, I thought as I drove languidly through the village: there’s something in the air. In February he had come home from his second stint in detox, and he had persuaded us that working in the factory wasn’t a good fit for him, that he wanted to finish high school. We believed him. He had turned cagey.
The windows of the houses facing the piazza behind the town hall were all dark and shuttered. Four flickering streetlamps shone down on the parking lot, which didn’t have even one empty parking spot left, and I thought how much I disliked empty or half-empty parking lots: a full lot is like a completed crossword puzzle, with every word in its place. It took me a while to find him, sitting with his back against some car’s left front wheel; he had arranged all his tools on the right front wheel of the neighboring car, in the small gap between the tire and the fender, as if he didn’t want to lay them on the ground: the lighter, the spoon, even the needle’s tiny green protective tip. The needle was still in his vein, the belt still tight on his arm. After shooting up he would always fall into a blissful sleep. To wake him you just had to give him a shake, or grab his shoulder, or squeeze his hand. It had worked for me twice before, and I was sure it would work again. It didn’t work.
There wasn’t much room, and I didn’t want to risk kicking him in the head if I stepped over him; I was on the side where he had the needle in his arm, the left side, and I wanted to talk to him on the healthy side, the clean, intact side; talk to him without raising my voice, maybe give him a little slap on the cheek. So I walked all the way around the car and kneeled down next to him. He was wearing a Shell Oil T-shirt with a big yellow shell on the back and a little shell on the front, above his heart. He had the same jeans I did, and Adidas with three red stripes (mine were blue). I said his name twice. I stroked his face with the back of my hand. I said his name again. I pushed his bangs back off his forehead. A strand of drool dripped from his mouth onto his T-shirt. I wiped it away with my own shirt.
I slapped him twice, without putting any muscle into it. He didn’t wake up; he was breathing noisily, with a little groan, barely audible, on the exhale. I decided to lift him up, thinking that I would lean him against the car to see if he could stand. But first I had to get the needle out of his arm. I went back around to the other side. I pulled out the needle with a sharp tug and laid it down on Fabio’s little night table (the tire) just as he would have done. I undid the belt from his arm and laid it on the hood of the other car. The metal buckle made a slight click against the hood. I looked up, but the lot was deserted, the night was still warm and calm. A tiny drop of blood blossomed from the hole in his arm.
Fabio was shorter and slimmer than Carlo and I. He had straight, almost black hair, dark brown eyes, fair skin. Carlo and I, at the time, had wavy but not quite curly light brown hair, hazel eyes, and darker skin. Every time I thought about that, I recalled my old idea that he wasn’t really our brother. But that night, as I tried to get him up on his feet, by hugging him beneath his arms, pushing with my legs and my back, I felt his jawbone against my cheek, and I fit my cheekbone in under his cheekbone, pressing my face against his, and I understood that we were made from the same mold, that we fit together exactly. Lifting a body up from the ground is one of the most difficult tasks there is, and I had only a few feet of space between the two cars to work in.
I leaned him against the fender, but he didn’t wake up, and I was afraid he would slide back down again to the pavement; I made another enormous effort and somehow dragged him to the R4. It took me about twenty minutes, but I finally loaded him in, sitting down with his head thrown back. I returned to his spot and tidied it up, throwing away the needle and its protective tip and the lighter and the spoon in a trash can. I took back the belt. (And during all this back-and-forth I didn’t doubt for a single instant that we would spend more time together: other sunny days, other trips to the supermarket, other lunches, other TV movies — I didn’t doubt for an instant that we would go on living and seeing each other and knowing each other.)
When I got to the house, my father was waiting for us outside. I told him that Fabio hadn’t woken up, and only then did I think, We’d better take him to the emergency room. But I didn’t say it. I waited for my father to say it. My father said, “Let’s bring him inside.” I don’t recall thinking anything else. But that’s impossible. I must have thought that he was only sleeping, that he was going to wake up.