Brother and Not-Brother

  A few weeks after my brother’s funeral, I saw him walking down Weidler. I made a beeline, arms outstretched. I exclaimed, “Paul? Is that you? You sonofabitch! You had me so worried. Really thought you were dead.” Paul shuffled backward, and I laughed. This was his greatest con yet. I should’ve been angry, but the entire thing seemed funny.

     Paul reached into his herringbone purse and fished around. “Stay back!” he commanded. His voice was too high-pitched, not strained from years of cigarettes.

     “What the hell are you wearing? You scamming someone? Need money? I can help if you’ve got debts again,” I said. He had talked about faking his death more than once. He was the kind of guy who always owed somebody something. But he was also generous. His friends always owed him too, so it usually balanced out.

     Paul pulled something from his purse and spritzed my eyes. Viscous tears clouded everything. Shades of black, punctuated with reddish hues. Heeled shoes click-clacked away. Sure, we were no longer very close, but I didn’t think things were that bad. I stumbled back to my apartment, smiling against the pain. I rinsed my eyes under the bathroom faucet. Through my blurred vision, I saw Paul’s silhouette. But it was just my reflection in the mirror.

     The next few encounters were much like the first. Each time a new version of my brother brushed past, I assumed I’d busted some elaborate ruse. I ran up to these lookalikes. I shook them and shouted, “Paul? Is that you?”

     In response, each doppelgänger would sneer and squirm loose. “Christ! I’m not Paul. Who’s Paul? Who are you?” The voices were still off. Their clothes, too—pleather pants and wool skirts and fancy blazers and flannel shirts.

     Everything else was spot-on. The eyes. The nose. The forearms, covered in my brother’s tattoos. Stubby ears. High eyebrows. These copies of my brother even bit their nails. They all wore his usual dopey smile. He was such a happy guy, even when things went to shit. I wanted to hug all of them—but they wanted to get the fuck away from me.

     I had just watched the guy go into the ground. I was a pallbearer, for fuck’s sake! I’d seen his face, shellacked in the undertaker’s makeup, an attempt to hide burst, hyperthermic blood vessels. Intellectually, I knew he was dead, but it was so hard to see him everywhere and not say hello, smile, laugh, cry. I wanted to spend time in those moments and reminisce about the distant years spent growing up together.

     I soon discovered an outlet for this pent-up nostalgia. At work, the brother lookalikes had no choice but to interact. For eight hours of forced proximity, I could pretend he was still alive. I went to the marketing cubes and told Wanda every joke I knew from Laffy Taffy wrappers and Saturday morning cartoons. She beamed and laughed, and I basked in my brother’s smile, over and over. I finally ruined it when I said, “Oh shit, like that time we burned that old canoe. Remember? We jettisoned it right onto the lake, and we—”

     “What the hell are you talking about?” Wanda-brother asked.

     “Never mind,” I said and I searched for another person to play pretend with. As long as these reminders were popping up, I figured I might as well enjoy myself. I didn’t spend enough time with Paul when he was alive. As kids, sure, but not as an adult. I had my life in Portland, and he was in-and-out of rehab back home. It was easy to save it all for the obligatory holiday gatherings, where our collective familial longings spilled out over a couple beers.

     “What are you doing in marketing? Go clean the break room,” my boss—who also looked exactly like my brother—shouted from across the cubes. It was hard to take boss-brother seriously. I had flashbacks to after-party cleanups, desperate to erase the evidence before Mom and Dad got home. “Come on! Get the lead out,” boss-brother repeated.

     “Like the lead in your ankle?” I prodded, remembering the time Paul accidentally shot his ankle with a BB gun. The ball remained in his ankle ever since, lodged against bone and cartilage, a bumpy testament to teenage mistakes. It felt so natural, a call-and-response to my brother’s presence.

     “Forget the break room. Let’s have a talk in my office.” Boss-brother crossed his brotherly arms, flexing the raunchiest of his pinup tattoos. I beamed and fought the urge to hug him. He closed the door behind us and placed a box of tissues on his desk. “You had a death in the family recently, right?”

     “Yes,” I said.

     “Why are you so—” boss-brother began. He didn’t finish, his face contorting into a scowl. I knew what he wanted to say: Why are you so manic all the time? What the fuck is wrong with you?

     “I’m okay,” I said.

     “Whatever is going on with you, it’s impacting your work. Take some mental health time.”

     I wanted to stay at work. The outside world was full of people who wouldn’t play along. Boss-brother leaned back and drummed his well-bitten nails on his desk. “I’m serious. Sort this out by Monday, otherwise we’ll need to talk about disciplinary action.” 

     I called Sue from the train. “Yeah, off early,” I said. “I’m on the Red Line right now. Should be back in the neighborhood soon. Wanna grab an early dinner and see a movie?”

     “Sure.”

     She sounded like herself. But so did the others. “Just promise me you’re not Paul,” I said.

     “What? I’m not—”

     “I mean, put on lots of makeup. Okay? Wear that nice dress. How often do I get a day off? We’re gonna paint the town,” I proclaimed.

     “It’s a movie on a Thursday. Are we painting the town beige?” 

     “But won’t it be fun to pretend like it’s a fancy night out? Seriously. Nice dress. Super gaudy makeup, with that bright red lipstick you love,” I said. I hoped these accoutrements would hide any parts of her that might’ve morphed into Paul. “I’ll wear that new shirt you got me, too. It’ll be fun.”

     “Fine, but dinner better be at someplace nice. I don’t wanna feel overdressed.”

     “Deal,” I said. “I’ll meet you at your apartment in like—I don’t know—maybe thirty minutes?”

     Of course, when Sue opened her apartment door, the dress, lipstick, and sparkly necklace didn’t help. Even with all the trappings of my girlfriend, she looked like my brother. It reminded me of the time he visited, and we went to Rocky Horror at the Clinton Street Theater, both of us in drag. Paul’s dress was ill-fitting, but he walked in heels better than me.

     I presented Sue-brother a bouquet of fresh cut roses—or as fresh as the corner bodega allows—and she leaned in for a kiss. I moved to the side and embraced her tight. She smelled like Paul too. Smoke with a hint of pine, like a campfire or a burning canoe.

     “I missed you,” I whispered. I hadn’t admitted that to myself at the funeral. Before his death, those holiday visits had always felt like enough. And I had almost dreaded the thought of reconnecting more often. It felt like we were two people who shared blood but were wholly incompatible as friends. He had different interests, different friends now. The kind of friends that I outgrew. 

     “I just saw you last weekend,” Sue-brother said.

     “I know,” I held her tighter. “I love you. I don’t think I ever told you that.”

     “You said that last weekend too. Are you sure you want to go out? Let’s just order pizza and rent a movie. You’re kind of off today.”

     “Nah, I feel great.” I smiled and kept embracing her.

     “Nobody who feels great says it like that.”

     “Like what?”

     “I don’t know. It’s your tone. It’s all airy. Are you on morphine again?”

     “No,” I said, pulling back. I recalled the time Paul was doped up in the hospital. He had tied a rope to a friend’s car bumper and tried to glide behind the car on a skateboard. It didn’t end well. In his post-injury, morphine-addled state, he kept telling the same joke and cackling. It was long and convoluted, and I only remembered the end. “I’m a potato,” he said, beaming as if he had just conquered the world with that nonsensical punchline.  

     I mumbled “potato” to myself, and Sue-brother must’ve heard.

     “You’re definitely weird today. I’m ordering in.”

“     What about the nice dinner?” I asked, afraid that ordering in might mean she wanted to snuggle later too. I couldn’t have sex with her—not like this. “I already called ahead and made reservations.”

     “Okay, fine,” Sue-brother said.

     At the restaurant, she ordered a sparkling cocktail. I thought of New Year’s Eve senior year, when I sat on the roof with Paul, and we polished off several bottles of cheap sparkling wine together. We both confessed to having crushes on the same girl at school. We lit fireworks, and Paul held one of them a little too long, turning his left thumb into a nerve-damaged stump. “I wonder if we can get the waiter to light this candle,” Sue-brother said. She picked up the little tealight.

     “No, don’t!” I shouted, fearful that the candle might burst in a second thumb-destroying blunder. Paul had such a poor track record with flame—the firework, the burning canoe, the grill, the chimney incident.

     “This is what I meant earlier. Something’s up. Talk to me,” she demanded.

     “I just need to get my head straight,” I said. Sue-brother didn’t look amused, her mouth collapsed into a tight snarl, pudgy brotherly nose pushed inward and wrinkling. She stayed like that a while, glaring. She wasn’t going to let this go. There was no way I’d play it cool the rest of the night, so I tried to explain: “Okay, it’s my brother. Everything reminds me of him.”

     “That’s normal,” Sue-brother said. “Back when Tiffany died, the littlest things would trigger a memory. It might not seem like it now, but eventually you can remember and be happy for the time you had.” She reached out for my hand, and she leaned in for a kiss again, my brother’s mouth pursed tight, Rocky Horror lipstick glistening. I pulled back and slid out of my chair.

     “No, you don’t understand. You—” I started but caught myself before saying, You look like my brother. I had enough common sense to know that such a confession would doom our relationship. I shook my head as if to suggest I had no words left to offer. Awkwardly bailing on our dinner plans felt safer than divulging any more details. I sighed and left Sue-brother alone in her fancy dress with her expensive cocktail and free breadbasket. She didn’t say anything as I pushed past a crowd of diner-brothers and caught the next bus back to my apartment.

     I kept my head down, avoiding eye contact with the bus-driver-brother and a cohort of passenger-brothers, each vying for the one seat without gum on it. I needed to get back indoors, where I could be alone and decompress, away from all these reminders of Paul. Away from this horde of laughing, smiling, boisterously alive brothers.

     I turned on my Xbox, certain I could lose myself in some zombie-busting goodness, but even the game avatars became Paul. I rummaged through my junk drawer looking for something to occupy my time. Crossword puzzle to the rescue.

     3-across: your brother (four letters)

     4-down: also your brother (four letters)

     7-down: your brother again (four letters)

     I pulled a novel off my bookshelf and found that every character was now simply Paul. It made for rather confusing and anticlimactic reading. In chapter three, Paul told Paul that Paul was divorcing Paul because Paul had slept with Paul. “Shit!” I shouted to an empty room.

     I opened the fire escape window for some air, breathing deep and closing my eyes. The squeak of my brother’s sneakers echoed below. The honk of his car horn blared. He was everywhere and everything. My phone vibrated, and the caller ID said Paul. I answered, and it was Sue cursing me out. I said, “I’m sorry. I’ll make it right. I’ll figure this out.”

     “You better,” she said, and in that moment, her inflection changed. Her voice dropped an octave and took on a slight smoker’s wheeze. “I know you’re going through a lot right now, and—” my brother’s voice continued. I hung up and turned off my phone.

     There was no running from this. Everyone was Paul. I could either resist or join the group. Maybe it wouldn’t feel so strange. Maybe it’d be like I was back home in Wisconsin, back with the family, whole again.

     I broke open some Bic pens, got a safety pin, and began recreating Paul’s tattoos. When I ran out of ink, I wiped away the blood and used a Sharpie to draw the rest. Next, I hit my ankle with a hammer, desperate to recreate my brother’s BB gun wound. I held my thumb to the flame on the stove until it blackened and blistered like Paul’s Black Cat accident. I wanted to relive our greatest moments with all their pain and vibrancy. I wanted to remember what it was like to be young and have the world ahead of us. I wanted to feel like my body was as invincible and permanent as Paul’s. I wanted to be happy, like he always was.

     I inspected my bloodied handiwork in the bathroom mirror, but it wasn’t enough. A battered version of myself stared back. I told myself the jokeless punchline: “I’m a potato.” My smile found a shape somewhere between Paul’s big grin and my usual close-lipped smirk.