Venezuela was bombed. We bombed them, I mean. These things don’t just go and happen. I had the feeling, because of events that happened later, important events to the story, but no more or less important than the bombing, that I bombed them, Venezuela I mean. Not on purpose, or not with the full extent of my purpose, like a wet appleseed shooting between your fingers into oblivion; inevitable, but not without that small carrion of intention, to get the appleseed between your two fingers thumb and middle and aim at an offending oblivion, Venezuela, I mean, bombed I mean, by us, not me.
I saw all the broadcasts that morning, before any sun cracked through. It was on some other network I didn’t recognize and didn’t remember turning on. They flashed an image of the president, I mean of Venezuela, clothed up, I mean with his eyes covered, and his ears covered, head down, like a sleeping drunkard. Doubly obscured by vapor trails from my own lips, so even what remained of his face: ears, nostrils, lips and chin, were just a conglomerate leading up to a man. Like if I blinked my eyes twice, three times, suddenly I’d find him detangled, unmollusced, barely, so I’d know him, somewhat.
And that was the morning my big brother hit me in the neck. So when the sunlight bled in, sores opening on the carpet, the sofa, and the switched-off TV, celiac discharge on the black switched-off cellophane, blood on covered sofa cushion, something in me bled as well. There was no red, or anything coming out. Breath slid by me, just barely. I thought of clutching my fingers around my neck but couldn’t find it. Ow. There it is. Yes, there.
I sunk hot knuckles north of his collar. He decavitized a wheezing sounding old, not that he was old, or sounded old, but that the wheezing came from a very old place, that was stuffed up in him a long long time, and I was doing him a favor, forcing it out for him, bereft of the dusty weight, but really, of course, I was punching him in the throat.
With the central force that comes only from a man who can’t breathe, he butt his head into my chest.
He always had a hard head. When he was a child, my father held him in his lap, or the story goes, on the old rocking chair, which we don’t have anymore, but once was the central object of my family, the inscrutable relic that kept us alive, unified, our tabernacle housing the all-important golden bosom, my father’s, but now was gone, somewhere else, though we still live, though not unified. My father held my brother in his lap, and they both dozed off, the story goes, my father first and then my brother, and when my brother was sleeping WAM! The little fella snoozed too hard and cracked his head, on what, maybe a toy my father forgot to put away, or a fallen coaster, or the hard floor, Uzzah’s hand, David’s hand, anyway he was felled, my brother, while my father gently sleeped.
Didn’t even need stitches. Didn’t even whimper after some time. Did not describe the gravity of any event. My father felt around his head for awhile, looking for a bump, a contusion, a murmur of doubt, on his planetary being. He felt my big brother’s little skull like one would an artifact, and finding nothing out of sorts, nothing but the alarming roundness of all babies’ skulls, he declared this baby, my brother, a great man, or sure to be one, like Napoleon, Hitler, Buster Keaton—one of those men that did not die without God’s express permission, at the end of a complicated life.
And I, who wasn’t yet born, asked, what did that make me? To which he replied, face kneaded to my mother’s stomach, as dangerous as a whore.
When he was a child, and I a younger child, he fashioned a sled out of discarded Amazon boxes, and a strip of broken twine.
We lived on the second floor of a large building, overlooking the maintenance stairs, where men spilled paint cans and sordid xylene solutions silently, as offerings. My big brother, one hand on the twine and the other to the sky, like a rodeo clown, descended the stairs buxomly, cracked his head open in droves clong clong clong dozens of times, like an old grandfather clock’s churning he went a-tumbling, the telling of time only by the severity of the hurt, or the possible hurt, as he didn’t show hurt at all.
He told me to do the same, which earned me several clongs, that went, clong clong clong crash clong, but not the same clong, and as I wasn’t hearing it at the time, I certainly can’t transcribe it now, a three-hour reprieve from life, and two weeks from school. When I awoke, he was sitting by my bed, congenital tears slipping from his cornea and drool spattered lightning McQueen t-shirt. Already, he looked like a man too old to feel bad about the things he did, for bereavement is a thing that children feel, as they can only feel so much of it.
Some people got to be careful. Said my brother. They’re closer to death than others. I would’ve reproached him, but just then, every single one of my teeth would fall out, should I open my mouth, and all my gums would ooze from me as some sci-fi gelatin cure.
Since then, he developed a habit of throwing punches at me. Every day was a battlefield, not like Venezuela, which, being that the events of today have nothing to do with the events of today in Venezuela, you should probably take out of your mind now, pluck it from your psyche and into some other place, anywhere will do, that will hold Venezuela, which is important, but not for this moment, into another place, for quiet, private reflection later, but it wasn’t like Venezuela, because ultimately I could expect it each day, like the coming of the milkman that didn’t happen anymore, and barely happened in my father’s time, but used to be a common way of telling days apart, days that otherwise slipped into each other like stiff cocks in warm holes, but that the milk man came only once a day, and not on weekends, and my brother punched me once a day, though regardless of weekends. These were not malicious, but were angry, frequently necessary. Frequently, they would be unaccompanied by the usual hurtful jibes and verbal jabs littered with fucks and little shits and so on, but sometimes they were. As he got older, and I got older too, but not like him, those times of verbal jabs and jibes grew in erudition. He started using words like “repugnant” and “miniscule” at age thirteen, “abhorrent” and “sluggard” at fifteen. At sixteen, reading from Beckett and Pynchon, he learned “rebarbative” and after finally filling in some blind spots and reading Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, other authors of the verbose nineteenth, he called me, his own brother, upon deciding to take a gap year from college and spend my time working at the local bookstore, since my mother agreed and my father couldn’t care less, he called me a blackguard! I would have reproached him, really, but he had bruised my chin so badly I wondered if the jawbone wasn’t on a kind of pully and hook, and if that final oach would stretch the muscle so far as to take it out of its socket.
I guess my reproach was then, now, killing him.
The headbutt knocked me to a fireplace with granite finishing. He slugged a knee to my face. My scalp kissed the mantle, and concaved.
I felt just like I did then, like a plate of glass, or a belly of liver, wanting to split open.
Reaching back, into some inward abscess, inward to me, inside me, I found a surprising member; I’d never known my father to own a gun. My brother, maybe, but behind a fireplace, between the pokers and the flames, was a rather stupid place to hide a gun. It was an electric fireplace, sure, but should I turn it on unknowingly? Should it get too hot, the gun loaded, safety off or on? Though the exact temperature I can’t say, I don’t have much knowledge in the sciences, if it did reach that temperature, Certainly, definitely, it would go off, maybe hurt someone, and my brother, after my father found without blame, the blame would fall on him, there would be a redress, and he would think of all this, because he isn’t stupid, but though now he was stupid, because he was dead. You don’t do much thinking then, that’s a fact.
He had a new hole, right above his temple, and he did bleed red. But the bleeding came not from the hole, which aside from some powder burns, was entirely dry, but from his eyes, the bleeding came from his eyes, pulpy, almost solid, from the same corneas, as did the tears. It was funny, I thought, funny how the wound did not always match the hole, the blood, the house, the living, the gun.
I set it down, the gun, right where I found it, nowhere, back to nowhere gone. His body slumped, though still maintained a kind of kneeling. It was the most religious posture I had ever seen. I thought of Mount Everest, the dawn kissing the frozen peaks in worship. There is only one thing in the world that has ever subsumed the sky, the mountains, the frost, which pierce the sky bloodlessly but surely, in essential arteries. I kept waiting to see, stupidly, I know, but he had the brains of the family, once, if the invisible force that allowed him his posture would suddenly give out, and die. Leaving him like this, he was a dying man, ripe with the gracious rebellion afforded the dying, but not the dead, the peace of death would not visit him.
Placing a warm hand on his chest. Aortas and bronchioles sighed deeply. Still a song in there, ancient and garrulous. The sun coming up, the flooding. His cheeks bubbled with blushing bloodcake. I tipped him over, on his knees, resembling an obscure and difficult yoga technique.
Speeding out the place, delirious, I let myself believe I was being chased, my father bereaved, his face bespattered with grief, shadowy figures swim on the living room curtains, cradling a dead thing, that could just as easily be a giant roach or a desk lamp, as much as a man, or a son. I cannot decide my mother’s position, she who cried often, and always differently. Once prone, eyes dripping off her fingernails, nose trembling, fixed, like a deer. Another time, softly, creeping like an intruder, or a pickpocket had taken some dam from her, like tears were always at the gates of her, the sluice gate always shut tightly, until the foreman pushed the lever, and the waters parted, then converged.
One time, I can’t remember when, she cried so hard I thought she may die, or become mythological, Lachryma buried under the earth, still sobbing, rejuvenating the ever-present oceans; the world is built upon the maintenance of a terrible sad woman.
These possible shadow forms came to me in a dark coffee cup, served by a bar I placed myself in, under a WE CARD sign and an Avengers pinball machine. Every now and again, the shadows are dissipated by Captain America, who screeches, under acid-temporized vocals, AVENGERS ASSEMBLE! FIGHT AS ONE! And so on, my father gone, my mother gone, resituated under different moons, lamps and compositions.
The bar is mostly filled with kids, actual kids, beyond a doubt, underage children, passing around an unknowable swig of brown swill, unknowable because, well, what would they know? As the bartender, a thin man with an unbearable stache, pays them no mind.
They are loud and terrible. Vestiges and demons. I think of prison. The police. The station is not so far. I would have to take the bus, fare is now three dollars, absurd, yes, but reasonable for a criminal, what could I need of money? Perhaps for bribing guards for cigarettes. But I don’t smoke? What else? Pillows, though three dollars could hardly buy a pillow. Books? What books could I get with three dollars? The bible, I’m sure. Dickens, maybe. That’s all I’d need.
I decided to keep my three dollars, and instead phone in my guilt. I hadn’t grabbed my phone, so I called over the pencil-bartender.
International?
No. His stache grimaced. He handed me a black member, about as heavy and suspect as the gun. Thank you.
It’s not international?
No, it’s pretty close.
How close?
I told him the street name. He closed his eyes, quietly, attuned to a distant conversation. The teens had stopped chattering. I felt their eyes clasp around my spleen.
Dirty? I shook my head. Call-girl? I shook my head. Faggy? I did the same as I did. I can’t be expected to recount the whole interrogation, stupid as it was. He handed me the phone and the manual dial. I started with the 9, then the 1, then the 1.
The woman on the phone did the whole spiel, very well, very quick, so I was mid gulp by the time it was my turn to speak. I got hung up on whether the correct term would be I wanted to “report” a murder or “confess.” I went with the former, and immediately regretted it. The questions flowed in like a river, sharp and dialed as the woman no doubt triangulated my location, my name, build, height, date and place of birth, political affiliations, recent sexual activity, opinions on the most recent federal actions, and porn intake.
Yes ma’am yes I murdered my brother yes, cold blood yes I’m sure he’s dead yes there’s not much doubt yes that’s right you have the location right pick me up when you can yes that’s the street yes I’ll be waiting just having a coffee yes would you like me to wait outside no I’ll stay where I am I didn’t notice the temperature but yes if it’s going to be a moment and it’s cold out I’ll stay in here where it’s warm yes thank you no I’m not armed you can never be sure though but no there’s no arms on me only my own self waiting with a coffee I suppose coffee could be an arm if thrown right, ha ha no, I really have no intention of throwing it, in fact I mostly think I’ll be done with it, it’ll be empty by the time an officer arrives yes so in that case, no I won’t be armed, not at all, no, yes goodbye now, yes I’ll be waiting, waiting back for you.
The phone was set down. For me, by the bartender. These things don’t just happen. I must remember this, as I write, phantom writer in the somewhere, everywhere. Writing too, doesn’t just happen. Voices speak. They swell up, vocal chords up with bile and wormrot, before the speaking commences, voices speak. I take a drink from a coffee pot. I sputter up swelling ointments from a nervous throat. The bartender has taken the phone from me. He looks at me as a friend, as a man who has held great meaning to him, and he to me; and he poured more coffee to an already overfilling cup.
The stares, which since lowered from my spleen to an organ I can only call the cervix, though I don’t have one, but sometimes things develop like that, silently, new impossible members are added to make life more difficult, to recriminate you and turn you wrong. Wrongness waits on every corner like a wraith.
Then I felt a hand, not around the cervix, but on my shoulder. A young boy with small places in his cheeks, for tears or other liquids. Otherwise, he was all filled up, in the chin and the chest and the neck, all filled up, except these little caverns which still needed some filling up, either by clay or other things, other things. He punched me in the stomach, and I toppled under his forearm.
Skin from my ribs wilted off. Lettuce leaves from a supermarket waldorf. This time, an unknown limb to the groin. Yes, I have a cervix. Yes.
I couldn’t be sure why he was hitting me, the boy, who, though representative of his class acted alone in beating the shit out of me, his cohorts cheering him on, I’m really not sure to what end, most likely just for the sake of it, what could be so reprehensible about me is more or less answered by the first part, the second part, and any surrounding part of the story, any part of the story that may have been kept quiet in the first, now coming to a head, in the end of a repugnant thing, myself, an unusually repugnant man compelled towards repugnancy and taken it, gladly, to the sternum and all other places where the boy’s closed fist held indented in the filament, his babied fat digits swelled into my own unheard repositories, opened bulbs fleshing splicing opening beletting small oozings of clouds disappointing yellow tinctures pejorative dusts. I am punched and beaten, unafraid, another member enters my hand, still unfamiliar, but constantly, caustically there, where else? But my hand, my fingers clutching rod, eyes beaten brain beaten, strange, clasping the rod, clasping the rod, pulling a node, something unfurls out of me, like a red carpet, damp with blood, red before the blood, blood before the blood, a gentle stench, an even breakage, the night recourses, an incredulous fortitude. I punched him in the face. I shoot him in the face. I do everything one can to his dumb, unused fucking face.
And the police officer comes in. Strobe lights hit the overhead fluorescents with unimagined beauty. The bartender is braced underneath the counter, tied down by slow whimpers. The officer, who is a woman, somewhat beautiful, with pomaded hands, on my shoulder, around my left wrist, reaching for my right, the other reaching toward her pocket. She crunches my elbow to the size of little oats. I punched her in the fucking face.
