Aerogrammes (17 page)

Once Amit came home, my dad hardly left his side. He assisted Amit in shifting between the bed and the wheelchair, using a board that Amit could scoot himself across, setting aside each loose limb as he went. He also helped Amit get situated in the bathroom. I wasn’t sure what went on in there exactly, but I had an idea from the accessories along the sink: a box of latex gloves, a dented tube of lubricant. I tried not to think about it.

I’d read somewhere that pets lower blood pressure, so I went to my brother’s apartment and brought back the ten-gallon tank he’d had for years, filled with fake ferns and a presiding toad named Moses. I installed the tank along one wall of the living room. Twice a week, I dangled a doomed earthworm in front of Moses’s mouth, sometimes tapping his lips as if knocking at a door, before he awoke and clamped down on the head with a savagery that made me jump back.

For the most part, Amit lay in bed or sat in his rocking
recliner, as motionless as Moses. He kept the TV on, the shades drawn, suffusing the room in dim blue. Sometimes his leg bounced in place, like it had a mind of its own. On his second day, a back spasm slammed him hard enough to topple his rocker; he went so stiff with pain it hurt him to weep, even to breathe. My dad increased his Baclofen dosage, and we replaced the rocker with a heavy leather armchair.

Once, while I was trying to feed Moses, I dropped the worm on his head. It lay there like a coiled little turban, just above Moses’s catatonic gaze. I looked at Amit, who had cracked a smile, the first I’d seen on his face in a long time, and for a moment, my heart rose and I forgot all about Moses. “Well?” Amit said. “Go in and get it, dumbass.”

“Moses is the dumbass.” I lowered my hand into the tank. “Who even has a tank anymore?”

“Do it, Moses. Eat his whole hand off.”

While my brother heckled, I airlifted the worm and swung it into Moses’s mouth. The ordeal was disgusting and entirely worth it, just to be ourselves again, for a little while.

There was one night when Amit fell asleep earlier than usual, at 9:00, and I went upstairs, determined to work. Or check my e-mail. Nothing special, aside from a number of lefty groups urging me to sign their petitions. I spent five minutes studying the plight of honeybees. I spent another five minutes perfecting a message to Stefan Baziak, the director of the Prague program, saying I would have to put my confirmation on hold due to a family emergency.

I scrolled through my novel and weeded out a few errant semicolons. I stuffed plugs in my ears and listened to the magnified rush of my own breathing. I fell asleep on my arm, woke up at 11:11. I made a useless wish. I went to bed.

•

In those days, Amit had one standing order: if anyone was to call or visit, he was napping. His friends took the hint and stayed away. His coworkers at Blue Grass Realty sent a potted bamboo, the stalks deformed into the shape of a heart. Only Ivy, his girlfriend, continued to call. I’d almost forgotten the stuffed-up sound of her voice, the nasal quality that made a stuttering idiot out of me. “Seems like his narcolepsy kicks in every time I call,” she said.

I laughed a little too loudly. I told her he’d call her back.

“I can’t believe you’re still doing that,” Amit said, after I hung up. “Christ.”

“Doing what?”

“Your voice, when you know it’s her. Your James Earl Jones impression.” He lodged a cheese puff, like a tumor, in his cheek. “You sound like a serial killer.”

Amit and Ivy had been dating since high school. At first, my dad didn’t approve because her parents were Chinese, and he’d long held the notion that all Chinese people were calculating and aggressive, as evidenced by some decades-old invasion of India that continued to work him up. As the years went by and Ivy stuck around, she and my dad moved toward a cool détente, though it still pained him to report when an Indian person we knew had married outside the tribe. His tone would be like that of a newscaster reporting casualties—another woman lost, another man down.

I’d been sweet on Ivy since the day she asked Amit to the senior prom; that she’d done the asking suggested an alluring form of Chinese aggression. She even picked him up in her dirty white Saab, wearing a pink satin pouf that made no secret of her cleavage. “I got it at a thrift store,” she said to me, doing a twirl. “Isn’t it hideous?” Before I could answer,
Amit thundered down the stairs in his tux, and her face tilted up, filling with light.

I watched them speed off, thinking,
Him? Really?
I attributed her mistake to the fact that she was a transplant from San Francisco and didn’t know any better. Here was a girl who could surf as well as her brothers, who sang at the talent show a sultry cover of “Oh! Darling” while strumming her own acoustic guitar. Not that I deserved her either. Ivy seemed to be on another plane of special altogether, destined for a life of big cities and backstage passes. Amit, I assumed, was a youthful detour.

A week passed, and things began to improve after I ordered a copy of
Planes, Trains & Automobiles
, a movie that Amit and I had watched so many times as kids that we knew whole scenes by heart. I usually played Steve Martin, the hapless traveler forced to cross the country with John Candy, a boisterous shower-ring salesman. Watching it again, so many years later, brought a strange sense of relief. Most of the time, I was laughing because Amit was laughing.

After the first screening was over, I wheeled Amit to the bathroom and left him in there. He visited the bathroom only two or three times a day, usually for an hour each time. It took that long for his bladder and bowels to function. I kept his bathroom stocked with issues of
Rolling Stone
and
Time
, books of crossword puzzles and Sudoku.

He’d been in the bathroom for ten minutes when I glimpsed Ivy’s Saab crawling up our driveway.

“Amit?” I said through the door. “Ivy’s here.”

Silence.

“Amit, you okay?”

“I’m not here, got it? Tell her I’m not here.”

“Where do you plan on going?”

“Don’t tell her I’m in the bathroom, Neel. Tell her I’m asleep.”

“That’s what I always tell her. She’ll know I’m lying—”

“Okay then, why don’t you tell her I just stuffed a fucking suppository up my ass and I can’t come out or else I might shit all over myself, huh? How’s that?”

The doorbell chimed.

“I’ll take care of it,” I said.

I opened the front door to find Ivy standing with her hands in the back pockets of her jeans. Her hair was shorter, fringe over her eyes, which were lined and tired. “Oh, hey, Neel.”

“Hey, you!” I said, regrettably.

We hugged, then stood there, nodding at nothing. She looked down at the ramp of wooden planks beneath her feet, which Diego had hammered together. “Been a while,” I said.

“Yeah. Hey, how’s your writing?”

“Okay, I guess.” I leaned against the door frame, attempting a pose as casual as hers. “I finished a draft of my novel.”

“Really? What’s it about?”

“Brothers,” I said. “Basically.”

“Uh oh.” A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “A tell-all, huh?”

“Not exactly.” I felt a childish desire to impress her. “Actually it won an award. I’m supposed to go to Prague for this artists’ colony …”

“You’re leaving?” Her smile disappeared. “When? For how long?”

“In a couple months.” I scratched at a peeling patch of paint on the door frame. I still hadn’t discussed my plans with Amit, and here I was, unloading on Ivy. “I haven’t decided. We’ll see.”

“Wow,” Ivy said, but not in the tone I’d hoped for. “Good for you.”

She peeked over my shoulder at the tank. Moses was on his relaxation rock, his back to both of us.

Ivy said, “Still sleeping, huh.”

I shrugged, smiled weakly.

“All right, I’ll go.” Ivy lowered her voice. “But tell him he can’t sleep forever.”

She left me with a package for Amit—some PayDays, a DVD of
Sense and Sensibility
, and, oddly, a box of Darjeeling teas.

I removed the DVD. “You can probably have this one back.”

“Oh no, that’s his,” she said. “Yeah, he loves
Sense and Sensibility
. You didn’t know that?”

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, my dad helped Amit into the wheelchair and rattled him down the ramp toward the car that would take them to physical therapy. I spent those three hours in my bedroom, trying to write. Once, I used my brother’s computer and stumbled across a small, multicultural library of porn. I spent some time in the Asian division.

I also got to thinking about Caryn a lot, her bright, elfin eyes peering at me over a crappy hand of cards. She looked like a student herself, in jumpers and wool tights that rasped when she walked. Things had ended breezily between Caryn and me. She had gone home to Newton before I had a chance to tell her about my brother, and now I couldn’t find the words. So instead, in a late-night moment of beery loneliness, I e-mailed her my novel.

She sent a brief and instant reply:
!!!

I figured that Caryn would make a better reader than Amit.
He had always viewed my writing with a combination of bewilderment and dismissal, as if I were trying on a panama hat and had yet to glance in a mirror and see how ridiculous I looked. My dad told anyone who asked that I was a teacher.

Two weeks into my time at home, I called Caryn. Our conversation lurched from one piece of nonsense to the next—her new coffee press; what constitutes the ideal mug—and as the minutes gathered, my stomach began to jostle with dread.

“Well, I read it,” she said, finally.

“Yeah?”

“And I jotted down some notes.”

I found a pen, a notepad. “Okay. Ready.”

“So the first few chapters are great.” She paused. “But around page fifty or so, the story starts to sag.”

I wrote:
page 50
→
sag
.

“Partly because you spend all this time on describing every little thing,” she continued. “And, I dunno, I’m not one for fussy prose, it’s just not my thing. Like here, with the playground scene on page sixty-three:
while the four hobbyhorses, nostrils aflare and frozen, glared down on us in what seemed an apocalyptic moment
. I marked a lot of places like that, where it feels like you’re trying too hard.”

“Okay.”

She recommended cutting a number of scenes. “The swimming pool thing, for example? Where the one brother doesn’t make it up the high-dive ladder?” I heard her flipping pages. “I didn’t see the point. Other than the fact that the younger brother is kind of a prick.”

“I dunno, it sort of seemed to paint a picture of the relationship right away, their relationship.”

“Yeah, but, it’s …” She paused, searching for the perfect word. “Boring. Also, how come they never talk about the mom?”

“I don’t know. They just don’t.”

This went on for half an hour. I drew a turd with a big bow on top.

In the last five minutes, Caryn seesawed her comments in the positive direction, trying to boost me with vague praise for my thorough characterization, my attention to setting, her voice full of pity and pep. By this point, I was lying on the couch.

As the conversation wound down, Caryn reassured me that the future was still bright. “It’s awesome that you’ll be around all those writers in Prague. Maybe one of them can give you advice.”

“Yeah, maybe.” I promised to write her from Prague. I could tell that she didn’t believe me.

“Good-bye,” I said.

“Good luck!” she said, and hung up, leaving me to ponder her word choice.

Early in the evening, Dr. Pillai stopped by with his wife. Dr. Pillai was an old friend of my dad’s, a nice-enough guy with a tussock of hair growing out of each ear, which Ruby Auntie somehow seemed to ignore. She thrust three plastic yogurt containers of Indian food into my arms, though we’d all but stopped eating Indian food after my mom died. I pushed the brothy containers deep into the fridge.

We gathered around Amit like careful pilgrims, even though he was in no mood for visitors. He’d just come home from therapy, which always wrung the life out of him. He lay on the bed, propped up on pillows, staring at the muted television, where a weatherwoman gestured to a series of pulsing suns.

“The PT,” my dad said, “she is tough.”

“That’s good!” said Ruby Auntie.

“Yeah, great,” Amit said. He gazed at the weatherwoman with detached interest.

“So, Neel,” Dr. Pillai said, “what are you writing these days?”

“A novel,” I said, nodding. Dr. Pillai blinked at me expectantly. “About brothers.”

“So a biography, then?” Ruby Auntie asked.

“Autobiography,” Dr. Pillai corrected.

“No, not exactly—”

“You should tell him some stories,” Ruby Auntie said to my dad, who said, “Oh yeah, definitely,” as if he’d been thinking the same thing for years. “Growing up in India, things like that,” Ruby Auntie suggested. “How many stories can a twenty-four-year-old have?”

“He’s twenty-seven and his brother’s a cripple,” Amit said. “Isn’t that enough?”

“I don’t like that word,” my dad said.

“Too bad.”

My dad smiled apologetically in Dr. Pillai’s direction. “He’s just tired. He hasn’t been sleeping well.”

Amit narrowed his eyes at my dad, then lavished Dr. Pillai with a warm, toothy grin. “Yeah, I’m not used to sleeping on my side. But I have to, or else a fungus’ll start growing on my balls.”

I coughed, snorted orange juice through my nose.

“Fungus on your …?” Dr. Pillai said.

“Balls.”

“Amit,” my dad said.

“What? It’s true.”

“See that,” Ruby Auntie said, pointing at the television. “That was from last night’s tornado. In Mississippi, I think.”

We all fell silent for a moment, watching an old woman pick through the rubble of her home. Looking lost, she took
a seat on the concrete front steps, which was the only part of her house still standing.

Dr. Pillai was the first to speak. “It does make you think.”

“Of what?” Amit said.

“Whatever you are suffering, someone else is suffering more.”

“I feel better already.”