My brother's keeper

I remember this: The night of Kevin's homecoming, a freight train woke me just before dawn. I opened an eye and was too sleepy to know anything. I didn't know what was under my head. It was a pillow. I asked myself, what is this? It was soft and under my head. My second eye opened and I floated nicely in space for another minute before things made sense again. The next day, I told friends the pillow news. It seemed like a very good story. It had: 1) a pillow, 2) disorientation, 3) nighttime, 4) reconciliation. My friends let me finish the story, did not complain afterward. Their lives are as dull as mine.

One is inclined to take stock at junctures like this. I am in my mid-20s. I work in an office and there is a Rolodex on my desk. Also I tuck certain shirts in, avoid hard drugs, shoo the cats out of the rhododendron, eat cottage cheese, consider gas mileage, have one of those stupid patches of hair under my lower lip even though those patches are stupid. I don't own a toaster oven but that could change.

I still go to parties, like Kevin, but mine seem to end earlier. Maybe I break a glass, maybe not. Halfway through I put in some extra-large fake teeth and want the music/talking to be louder. When it's over I say goodbye. Back at home I lie around with my roommates or look for thread to fix the hole in my pants.

No room for decadence in this new life of mine. I'm not a prude -- I offer "damn," "shit" and "fuck" -- but I can't deny the recent emergence of rules in my head: I do not think people should have sex in the back seat of my family's car or really in any kind of vehicle my brother is operating. They should get in a bed. Also, no holding up of condoms.

My life happens three time zones from my brother's. We talk when we can, do so in update format. I deliver news about my job (I think I have carpal tunnel syndrome), my band (we are bad), my friends (Jose thinks he has carpal tunnel). Kevin listens actively, sagely and, because he's the best, responds with an imitation of a donkey. It's like this: Eeeeaaaaawwww. I can't do it. It comes from the diaphragm. Deep inside.

Kevin's news is of the fast life. Sometimes I can get him to tell me about his job at the zoo, and this is what I like best. The invertebrate house is his beat, and when he is catching me up on Sylvester, the giant octopus, who plays with toys, who pulls toys to his giant rolling head for inspection, whose tank is surrounded by AstroTurf on which he can enjoy no traction and thus no escape -- when Kevin is telling me this I do not worry about his future, what he will smoke, what he will jump off of. I relax among images of octopus feedings, a realized life, safety, my brother holding shrimp on a stick and not scaring me to death, really, to death.

I don't have sex in the back seat of anything. I'm 24. Seasoned. Graceful. An owner, now, of folded road maps and hand soap. (The hand soap, technically, belongs to my roommate, but I do use it, because I am seasoned, graceful.) I used to dive headfirst into the waves from the rocks, but now I ease in slowly, but I could dive into the waves headfirst from the rocks again. I might do it tomorrow. I will work on my brakes, buy more cottage cheese, drop off the film, call the guy about the gas line, pick up the drywall, get that recipe for the goulash and dive headfirst into the waves from the rocks.

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