Away From Everywhere (25 page)

“Sooo.”

They laughed.

“So what do two brothers talk about in a rehab clinic?”

“Yeah …wanna take a walk around the place, grab a few soft drinks and play catch up?”

“Funny thing is I've seriously been having this craving for a Mountain Dew these last few days.”He cocked the recliner back into place.“Let's do it. You can try and explain to me how all this started in the first place.”

Rising up off his bed. “You wouldn't understand.”

“C'mon, you know what Momma always said.”They both laughed. “I don't have to understand to listen.” Alex held the bedroom door open for his brother.

Walking towards a vending machine. “Well … it was actually this thing Baron said, when we were living there. How there is no place left in the world for people like Dad and me. I couldn't see around that notion for a while. I could only see two things clearly: how the world is and how I didn't fit into it. And I imagined there were only two kinds of people:
successes
and those who fail to succeed. You have your CEOs, doctors, lawyers, that type, living in three-storey houses, plasma screens in the bathroom, three cars in the garage, and then you have the people who have tried and failed, or who just don't have the capacity to achieve that sort of life, so they spend their time feeling bitter, dejected, and jealous about it. But then there was me, not fitting into either of those descriptions and not fitting into the world. I got bogged down by it all after Abbie and me split.”

They were at the vending machine now, and Owen put in enough for two Mountain Dews. Handing one to Alex. “I weaned myself off the booze and took up a real sweet tooth for soft drinks in its place. There's something about the burn of soft drinks that makes them a readymade substitute.”

They sat on a windowsill, almost hidden behind the huge potted plants on either side of the window.

“And then I guess at some point, I got to hating myself for having thrown my life away trying to get a book published, putting that before everything, and hitting thirty with no solid career, no foundation set up to settle down on with someone.”Owen plucked a leaf off a tree, rolled it in his fingers, threw it back in the pot. “Anyway. Once I noticed how the wine was helping me write, it was all over then, because I could justify it.”

Before Alex left Owen's room that day, he pulled five sheets of looseleaf from his brother's garbage can and stuffed them into his briefcase while Owen was using the washroom. He'd seen his name on them and curiosity got the better of him. He'd read it on the plane ride back home, if only to pass the time.

He was hoping it was just another story, that the character name was a coincidence. Another one of his brother's dark and depressing stories, flirting with the boundaries between fact and fiction. Alex always admired Owen's honesty though, and his lack of concern about how people perceived him. Everything Alex did, he did to prove himself flawless, or at least respectable to the world. He was envious of the freedom Owen must have felt in expressing himself so openly, in not caring what others thought of his life. Owen found a liberty in mocking himself, in acknowledging his flaws; it meant there was nothing to hide from. Alex hid all of his flaws and lived constantly on edge, always worrying someone would see through him and all his achievements like Owen could. And he was always jealous of the simple places Owen could find pleasure and meaning, like in his writing, or even simpler, in a hike with a camera around his neck.

But this time around, his brother's honesty on those pages he was reading was too intimate, and it wasn't even a story. It was an essay, or a journal entry, or whatever it was that clinic was encouraging him to write, and his brother was putting himself out there on display like some bizarre sculpture in a museum. The one no one gets. The one people stick their chewed gum under and question the value of. Every line of those five pages was filled, front and back, with Owen's childlike and urgent scribbles. Alex was desperate to know what prompted his brother to write this, but would never ask.

“Reflections on Guilt” Assignment

We are not as strong as we'd like to believe. We are frail and ever-deflating, but lie to ourselves and act strong. Those scars from our childhood get infected and burn bright inside us, begging to be dealt with. They want closure, they want stitches and to heal. But how?
How do I bury a memory, how do I bury a lifetime of haunting memories that have made me who I am, without burying myself along with them?They are a part of me, and there's not much left of me to bury.

I can still see that look in my mother's eyes, in everything I see around me. I dream of it, every twisted incoherent dream sequence leads me back to that shelter, staring into my mother's dying eyes and watching all the life in her escaping. Each breath was laboured, numbered, each breath left her body more and more motionless and empty, until there was nothing left inside her. A doll now, a memory. It was the longest and most helpless minute of my life; I suppose that's why it stands out more than any other. I can still see those flakes of soil blowing on and off her face, and that pool of her crimson blood that her head lay on like a pillow. By the time they took her body away, that pool of blood had seeped down into the soil, and my childhood had drowned in it. I wondered what would grow there above it.
Grass, dandelions, nothing?Her favourite wildflowers in St. John's were always striped toadflax. It grew like weeds around that old shelter. I could hope for that. It felt like both a morbid and peaceful notion.

I saw forty-three years' worth of memories seep out of my mother in that one minute she lay there between life and death. As they fled from her, I imagine them all as being pleasant, except for those last few years with Dad losing his mind and all. None of us truly recovered from
that, we just carried on. There is a big difference.

As I think back on her now, I can't help but wonder if it was all those pleasant memories she had that made her a better person than me, because I believe we are a product of our experiences, not our genes. I believe that we head into each new day as the construct of all memories preceding that day. I think this is why my brother and I are so different, we have kept or discarded different memories. I think maybe it is my brother's ability to erase the same wretched memories I have that makes him a more stable person than me. We are all born equal, they say, and at birth we are all blank slates, no memories, no identities, no ambitions or desires. But that all changes the second we take our first breaths. That all changes with everything we see, taste, touch, smell and hear until the day we die.

My mother, the day my grandfather died, told me that my grandfather wasn't really dead. I never really understood her at the time, but she promised that someday I would. What she meant was that he had an impact on far too many people's lives to simply stop existing the day he died. He would live on in memory, in how he influenced who my mother and I were. What she said was:
all that remains of us is in our children. We live on in our children.

What does that say about me? Am I really my parents? The best of them? The worst of them? A random mix? In any case I feel a terrible let-down. It's that notion, that statement of hers, that makes me feel depressed and felonious, not simply that I am a mess or a failure. Because if it is true that all that remains of my mother is in me, in who and what I am, I have disgraced the most beautiful woman I have ever known. I have also disgraced my distinguished and benevolent father and his
family name. I am nothing, and that speaks so poorly to their character. Thank God, or whatever made us, for Alex.

When I get out of this clinic, maybe I can work towards a better life. It's a sad realization: there is no more for me outside of these walls than there is within them.
I have wasted my life, at least a decade of it, and it might be too late for me. Our whole lives Alex and I have knocked how each other lives, what the other wanted out of life. We were both capable of greatness in whatever fields we chose. I guess the difference is he chose, I got distracted. By alcohol, and the whole quixotic writing thing. Or was it the lousy childhood, something so obviously simple and Freudian? Our past was like a tumour inside of us, but mine was a cancer and his was benign.

I have no trouble accepting the blame for where I've gone wrong. I've taken the blame for plenty of shit growing up, even when it wasn't even my fault, and I have never resented or regretted doing so. Take the incident with Greg Evans' mother. She was there for us during all that shit with Dad going away. So when her ex-boyfriend started making her life difficult, we thought we were helping. The idea was to leave a note threatening him to back off, and to light his compost bin on fire. The fire got out of hand though. We'd used too much fire-starter fluid, and Alex took off, leaving me with the decision to let the guy's house burn down or get caught. I suppose there was no point in both of us getting in trouble, and as always it was understood that I was the one who should take the fall for something like this.

The stalker guy opened his patio door as I was hosing out the fire with his sprinkler. He had called the cops the second he saw me. I thought I got away with it all, since I took off over his fence before the cops showed up. I jumped his fence like a hurdle and never looked back. I guess he
recognized me as a friend of Greg's. I imagine the note helped, and he knew what school we all went to. The next day the cops questioned me, and well, convinced me not to lie, I guess. Given my age and motive, I got off with some community service. I was cleaning up litter and planting flowers as punishment while Alex sat at home playing our new video games. This meant he was always a level or two ahead of me and ruined any surprises, so I stopped playing those stupid games even though they were the simplest and easiest source of joy in my life at the time.
They sort of distracted us from the silence in the house since Dad was sent away. I remember hating Alex for that, and wondering if the hate was ill-placed.

A stewardess came by with a drink tray as Alex read the last line, as if he'd mentally summoned her, empathetic telepathy. He asked for a double scotch on the rocks, tilted his chair back, and was thankful there was no one sitting beside him. He twirled the glass in his hands, listened to the ice cubes clink off the glass, and let that piece sink in. Did Owen harbour any subconscious unspoken resentment of him? If so, was it warranted?

He brought the glass to his nose and sniffed. An odd habit of his was to smell any food or drinks before consuming them. The smell of alcohol unexpectedly turned him off. To drink it suddenly felt like siding with the devil that had done his brother in. It was alcohol that had made a bloody mess of him. He set the glass back down in the oversized cup holder and stared at the clouds.

Alex realized the most significant differences between him and Owen had always revolved around their feelings about their father, before and after the schizophrenia. Growing up,Owen never complained about their father's shitty station wagon the way Alex did, and made do with their allowance, even if it wasn't as much as their friends got from their parents. Alex was always sure to let his family know they were poor, relative to most of his friends. Their mother's never-changing retort:
Well you must have some rich friends, sweetie, because you've got your own bedroom and want for nothing!

He thought of their Uncle Ross, his father's only brother. He remembered that Ross always flew in to see their father, at Christmas and over summer vacation, but his father never traveled to visit Ross. He later pieced it together that Ross had ten times the money his father had, and that was why he was the one to absorb the travel cost of seeing the other. Ross had a home in St. John's, and another in the Caribbean somewhere. On one trip home, he offered to buy their father a new car to replace that
shitty old thing you're driving
. The old, dated car Alex hated so much. Alex couldn't believe his uncle's generosity, but their father refused, muttered something about character, and
it does the trick, point A to point B.

Alex never spoke to his father for weeks, and one morning he took his father's toothbrush and smeared the bristles along the inside of their toilet bowl. The whole situation surrounding the car made Alex think that Ross was superior to his father, and that money was a testament to a man's character and inherent worth. From that point on he was convinced that a man defines himself not through education or spiritual enlightenment, but through what he owns and earns. You couldn't look at a man like his father and see philanthropy and depth of character, but you could look at a man like Ross and see his money. He assumed that his father rejected Ross' offer because he was jealous of Ross. Alex admired Ross, his money, the smell of his cologne, the hem and fit and price tags on all his suits, and that second home down on some island he could never remember the name of. He admired Ross, but Owen admired their father. Alex thought this madeOwen ignorant and beneath him.