When I was 10 years old my twin brother Joey started getting dizzy spells. He’d be fine one minute and then the next totter in a slow semi-circle like a pirate trying to dance with a peg-leg. Once, as we were coming downstairs, he fell and rolled the rest of the way down, hitting the floor so hard it made him black out. An ambulance came screaming to the house but no one could find anything wrong with him in the emergency room except a few bumps and bruises.
Mom took him to our family doctor, a man who liked to be called Doc, wore cowboy hats and big silver belt buckles under his sport jacket. Doc gave him pills and ear drops but the kid tottered, wobbled and buckled even more. Pretty soon he had trouble using his hands and started dropping pencils, spoons and glasses as if his hands were soapy. Mom and Dad took him to a bigger hospital, and then to an even bigger hospital in another city. Joey was X-rayed so many times it’s a wonder he didn’t glow in the dark like that skull we brought back from the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland. But finally a bunch of white coats with long initials after their name told Mom and Dad that my brother had a tumor and, even worse, that it was in a part of his brain that made it inoperable.
They brought him home in a big chrome plated wheelchair that made him look like a midget or, I thought at the time, a broken ventriloquist’s dummy that had been locked in a trunk a few years too many. Mom put on her brave smile, carried him upstairs and then laid him on the new bed that had rails, one of those nice additions to the bedroom that will remind you at all hours of the day that you’re now living with a cripple, and a dying one at that.
Every night after supper Dad sat beside him on a hard wooden chair, holding a newspaper that he never got around to reading. He talked a lot about stuff that didn’t make any sense, played his Marine Band harmonica, dutifully massaged his son’s legs and feet and brought him water with a straw to sip. Every hour on the hour Mom crept up when she wasn’t on the phone to see her baby, her poor little darling boo-boo. They never bothered to say a word to me, of course. Joey was getting weaker by the day and as far as they were concerned I didn’t exist.
I began to act as if I didn’t exist. For weeks at a time I stopped talking to my brother. I wouldn’t look at myself in the mirror, could hardly stand to touch myself and for hours at a time I lay perfectly still to see how long I could close my eyes and not breathe. I hated him the way I hate anything lame, useless and disgusting; and yet the thought of Joey dead in a casket, rotting under ground, filled me with the kind of blind animal terror I hadn’t felt since the day a crazy man came to the door and told me that television leads to eternal damnation and Hell.
So I got up close to him when no one was around to make sure he was still breathing and had a pulse. If he had never been born, I thought, maybe things would have been different. Mom and Dad loved him but not me and that was the way it had always been. I had never complained. It’s weird, though, when something that is absent turns into something that is almost tangible and omnipresent. Something was wrong with Joey but something, I now knew, had always been wrong with me; but I was just old enough to know that things were the way they were for reasons I had no control over; and so I watched and waited, wanting Joey to go on existing no matter how frail, weak and defenseless he became.
It came to me one night that if he died they would mourn and remember year after year until they were old enough to turn into dust. If I died, though, it would be as if I had never been born.
One day Mom got a phone call at one in the morning. A medical big-wig was on the other end, telling her about an experimental surgical procedure that could possibly save her boy. Could they fly to Boston in two days?
Mom wept so hard that she sounded as if she were laughing with the hiccups. Dad ran downstairs to call the airlines from the phone in the kitchen. No one but Joey got any sleep that night. In the morning the house was full of people. They sounded like frantic magpies. Aunt Josie helped Mom pack. Mildred from next door came over with food. A big pasty-faced nurse with arms like a steel worker came to help Mom and to be with Joey on the flight. Dad’s brother, Uncle Frank, came over to watch the house and feed our little wiener dog Hap. Harvey Harrison, a little man with nervous eyes and hands the size of a raccoon’s, came over from the other end of the street to say that he would be glad to drive everyone to and from the airport.
I stayed with Joey, listening to all the commotion but not saying a word to him or to anyone. The day seemed to drag on forever, like some horribly long, boring movie that tells you how it ends in the first minute. Joey goes to the hospital, dies on the operating table. Poor puppy! What else was there to expect? And so the more I heard them upstairs and downstairs, the more I heard Joey breathe and wheeze and gurgle, the angrier I got. The goddamn kid would come home in a box and then what would become of me? That was the only thing that I cared two cents about.
That night, when we were finally alone, I said, “You’re going to fly to Boston tomorrow. That’ll be fun. I bet they put you up front, bring you pillows and a blanket and maybe you’ll see the captain. When you land they’ll put you in an ambulance that will take you to the hospital. I bet they let Mom and Dad get in with you. When you get to the hospital you’ll probably have a room all to yourself and the nurses will make you wear a gown and then they’ll stick things in your arm.
“The surgeon will come in to check up on you, say hi and tell you that everything will be fine. Then a nurse will come in to shave your head. They have to do that because it’s brain surgery, you know. I saw them do it once in a movie. Your head will be all pink and smooth just like when you were a baby.
“In the morning they’ll wheel you into the operating room. You’ll see a big bright light and people will be all around you with trays full of instruments. A nurse will tie you down so you can’t move. Everyone will have gloves and masks on. It’ll be cold in there but they’ll put a blanket on your legs and chest.
“When they operate on someone’s brain they can’t put him to sleep. It’s kind of like going to the dentist. You have to be awake. The first thing you’ll hear is a whining sound from a saw. Someone will rub alcohol on your head. I guess they’ll use a knife to cut through the skin first, and then they’ll use the saw to cut off the top of your skull.”
When I saw him tremble and heard him moan my heart rose.
“You won’t feel any pain,” I said. “The brain doesn’t feel anything, even when they pull it out and put it on a metal tray. That’s what they got to do. To get to the part they got to cut out they have to slide the whole thing out, like when Mom pulls a whole ham that’s covered with gelatin out of the can.
“Then comes the tricky part, because if they cut something they shouldn’t you won’t be able to hear, or move or even think again. You might sit in a corner the rest of your life, peeing on the floor and sucking your thumb. Or you might be able to think but not move or hear or feel anything.”
That was all I had time to say. Mom came into the room, took off her robe and got into bed with Joey. After sniffling and whimpering he fell asleep in her arms while she stroked his head and sang under her breath. A thin trickle of moonlight spilled onto the floor, and then there was deepening darkness, twitching pale skin under blue sheets, and silence except for the sound of Dad and Uncle Frank downstairs shuffling cards.
After the surgery Joey came back with his head wrapped in bandages. He used a wheelchair for a little while and then began to walk again, first with a walker and then by himself. When he talked about me, Mom and Dad looked amused, puzzled, and then worried.
“Sweetie,” Mom said. “I don’t know who you’re talking about. Before we had you Mommy lost a baby, remember? I told you that a long time ago. Maybe you were too young to understand. Do you understand now?”
They had to hire a shrink, some guy with a pink face and no hair who held little Joey’s hand and explained what a delusion is, what a hallucination is and how they are caused by a little pressure on the brain by a tumor.
And so I went into the dark. Joey grew up, married, had kids of his own and, I suppose, has almost completely forgotten about me. But I can’t help the feeling that pretty soon I’ll be coming back.
And won’t Joey be surprised.
