The Things a Brother Knows (6 page)

“I think you’ll like Popcorn Guy,” Pearl says.

“I doubt it.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right. He’s not really your type.”

I pick up a broken piece of the roof’s slate tile and hurl it into the yard.

Pearl lies back and closes her eyes to the sun.

“Levi, what’s going on?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. With Boaz. And with everyone. It doesn’t seem like much has changed around here since he’s come back.”

“That’s because he’s not really back. He just hangs out in his room and comes downstairs occasionally to eat. He’s the surly teenager he never was when he was a real teenager.”

“What do you think he’s up to in there?”

“I have no idea.”

“I hate to sound like an after-school special, but do you think maybe it’s drugs?”

That question has crossed my mind. You hear about soldiers coming back so screwed up they turn into drug addicts. That idea is totally at odds with what I know about Boaz, but at this point, I can’t rule anything out.

“Maybe he has an online girlfriend,” Pearl says. She stubs out her cigarette on the sole of her hot-pink Puma. “Or maybe he’s stuck in a bidding war on eBay.”

There’s a knock at the door.

“Come in,” I shout.

I’m expecting Zim, or maybe Mom with a pile of laundry. When the door opens there stands Boaz, looking like he’s gone and gotten himself lost.

“Hey!” I scramble back in through my window.

“Hi, Boaz!” It comes out like a squawk. Pearl can’t do peppy.

“Hey, Pearl.”

She starts shoving her books into her backpack.

“Well, boys, I gotta run. Mama Goldblatt no likey when Pearl’s late for dinner.”

She darts around Bo and turns to shoot me the
call me or I’ll kill you
look.

“It’s broken,” Bo says.

“What’s broken?”

“My computer.”

I think of pointing out that my days as a card-carrying
member of the computer club are over. But still. Here’s my brother. Standing in my room. And he’s talking.

I don’t want to ruin the moment.

Plus there’s no denying I know a thing or two about computers. I’m just not sure what I can do about Boaz’s. It’s ancient. The same big, bulky desktop he used in high school. It’s a small miracle it’s held up this long.

“Do you want me to come take a look?”

“You don’t mind?”

“Not at all.”

I follow him down the hall to his room.

This is it. My invitation into the den of darkness.

It’s a colossal mess.

I mean epic.

A bare mattress off its frame lies on the floor with nothing but a tangled cloud sheet. Clothes, shoes, towels all over the floor. A couple of barbells, and papers everywhere. All the while the radio spits out static.

Mom would have a coronary if he ever let her in here.

I try my best to read all this as a good sign. Maybe he’s letting loose. Rebelling against the rigid life of a marine.

And anyway, messiness is something I can understand.

I make straight for the computer. I don’t want Boaz to think I’m inspecting or judging his room, even though that’s what I’m doing.

His computer screen has gone pale gray, and in its center is a sad little face with
X
s for eyes and a tongue sticking out an upside-down U of a mouth.

The message indisputable: Game Over.

I drum my fingers on the desk. “I’m afraid it’s your motherboard.”

“What’s that?”

“You know, the central system that makes your computer work properly.”

“That’s bad, right?”

“It’s not good.”

“Shit.” He sits down in his chair and puts his face in his hands.

Maybe I should comfort him. Say something encouraging. But instead I use this moment, with Boaz’s eyes in a web of his fingers, to take a closer look around the room.

The papers on the floor. They’re maps. All of them.

Some are printed from the computer. Some look like the kind you’d buy at your local gas station if you ever left the house. Above his bed is an old Rand McNally map of the United States that once hung in my room. Abba bought it for me when I first started trying to understand places in relationship to each other, pestering him with my endless questions:
Where’s Boston? Where’s Israel? Where’s Gotham City?

I wonder where Boaz found it. It’s been a lifetime since I saw it last.

I squint at the pastel-colored states and baby-blue oceans and notice that the right side, the Atlantic, is covered in pencil scrawlings, but I’m too far away to make any sense out of them.

Boaz lets out a deep, guttural groan. “Damn it,” he whispers. For a second, I think he might actually cry.

Suddenly, I can see him at nine, running into the house
with a wrist bent the wrong way. He’d taken a fall off his skateboard and was screaming and cursing, running around in circles, but his eyes were dry as the desert.

I’ve never seen my brother in tears. Watching him cry over a dead computer is something I just don’t think I can handle.

“It’s all right,” I whisper. I almost place my hand on his shoulder. “It’s probably time you get a new one anyway.”

“Shitshitshitshitshitshit.”

I picture a trip to the Apple Store. A swarm of tattooed hipsters in matching black T-shirts and headsets asking Boaz how they could help him. I know I can’t watch him go through that.

“Look, I can get it for you if you want. Or you could just use my laptop. I’ve got finals to study for and I don’t need it all that much. As long as I can have it for a few hours in the afternoon to check my e-mail and visit my favorite porn sites, I’m all set.”

This doesn’t earn even the hint of a grin.

I decide to give it one more go. “Right now I’m all about Gigantic Jiggling Jugs dot com.”

Nothing.

Boaz clears his throat. “Can I print?”

“Of course. I’ll configure it. No problem.”

He lifts his head. Cloudy eyes and an unreadable face.

“Thanks, little brother,” he says.

Even though it might seem like I had this in mind when I offered my computer to him, I really didn’t. I promise. I’d swear on my grandmother’s grave if she hadn’t bucked tradition and insisted on a burial at sea.

I didn’t plan this.

But sometimes you’re handed an opportunity.

And every day, when I get home from school, Boaz meets me at the threshold to his room, and he puts that opportunity right into my hands.

My days of hunting for some trace of Boaz, running my fingertips over his possessions may be long gone, but there are other ways to retrieve information.

I know I shouldn’t.

I can’t tell what my brother is thinking or what is happening to him inside his messy room, but I can find out where he’s been.

Virtualsoldier.com

Memorialspace.net

Inthelineofduty.com

Desertcam.net

And a long array of sites with detailed maps of the northeastern United States from Boston to the Chesapeake Bay.

He has an e-mail account, and I know I could figure out how to log in as Boaz, but that, for the time being at least, is a line I can’t cross.

Maybe I do believe in something after all.

A
BBA WAKES ME
at eight-thirty.

Eight-thirty on a Sunday? To make matters worse, I was having a dream about Christina Crowley. All oil-slick slippery with no shred of a plot. The butterfly on her shoulder. Things were just getting good when: “Levi!
Kum!
It’s time we get to that fence!”

Now it’s nearly two in the afternoon, and I’m covered with sawdust, nowhere near done with the fence and out of things to talk about with Abba. The obvious topic for discussion is why
I’m
out here instead of
Boaz
, when we all know that he’s the one who knows how to fix things. He knows how to work with tools that rattle your limbs and blow out your eardrums. But I just let the electric sander eat up the silences.

Zim stops by, hoping I’ll go shoot some baskets, which typically involves me sitting down watching him shoot baskets, because any other way is just downright humiliating.

He beats a quick retreat before Abba enlists him in Project Fence.

A big storm last winter knocked a branch off our neighbors’
tree, which knocked down our fence, which to my sense of order means the neighbors should be the ones out here fixing it, but Abba says their mess is our mess too.

I hand him a freshly sanded board. He inspects it. Slides his big hands up and down the flat sides. He blows some dust off its edges and nods his approval. I hold it upright while Abba fills a hole in the ground with wet cement. I watch beads of sweat congregate around his bald spot.

He sticks a post into the hole. He holds it there and I watch him count to thirty under his breath.

Abba could have lived his life like this. Instead of running Reuben Katznelson Insurance with five branches in the greater Boston area, he could have stayed on the kibbutz and spent his days fixing fences. Picking oranges. Maybe milking cows.

But he wanted to own his own house. He wanted to eat at his own dining table, line his own pockets with his own hard-earned money and raise his children in a melting pot. In the land of opportunity. In a country that wasn’t constantly defending its very right to exist.

When we finish, Abba strips down and showers himself with the garden hose. I take in the stomach that’s now more flab than muscle. His pale and beefy back. The mole or two on his ass.

I’m pretty sure there’s nothing in the world uglier than the sight of your own father’s pubic hair.

“
B’seder
, Levi. Go inside and get me a towel.”

For Abba, the immigrant, everything was turning out just fine for a while.

He had the house and the dining table and the pockets. He had the American wife he’d met in Israel who would have stayed on happily but returned because it was what
he
wanted.

He had the American sons.

Then Boaz had to go and make his choice.

And now I’m out here on a Sunday fixing fences.

I dream of maps.

Continents and oceans. States. Highways. Rivers. Places I’ve never been swarm beneath my closed eyelids.

Maps. Maps. Everywhere maps.

I’m desperate to understand his maps, but I don’t have the courage to ask, and anyway, Boaz doesn’t give me the chance.

Why?
I want to ask him.
Why all those maps? What are you planning? Where are you going? Or are you just dreaming, like I am, of someplace else?

We’re sitting at dinner with Dov when it strikes me.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” I say. “And I think, maybe, I want to go to Oberlin.”

Dov looks at Abba. “What’s this nice lady talking about?”

“Oberlin. It’s a college, Dov. Hard to believe, but Levi’s almost a senior. He’s got to start looking at colleges.”

Abba says this like it’s just occurred to him. By the time Boaz was taking final exams his junior year, Abba had a three-sheet list of schools on yellow legal paper.

Mom wipes her mouth with her napkin. “That’s wonderful news, baby. It’s a great school. I have a friend who went there and she loved it.”

“Where’s Oberlin?” Dov asks.

Aha.

See, Dov’s a smart man. He knows a ton. But everyone has a weakness, even Dov, and his is the geography of the United States. It’s probably because when my grandmother died Dov moved from the kibbutz straight to Boston and has barely been anyplace since.

I put down my fork. “It’s in Ohio.”

“So that would be west of here.”

Abba laughs. “It certainly isn’t east, Dov.”

“Shut up, smart-ass.”

“We have a map somewhere, right?” I say. “I’ll show him.”

“We must. Somewhere.” Abba shrugs and goes back to frowning at his eggplant.

“What about that Rand McNally map that used to be in my room?”

At this Bo turns his gaze on me, laserlike. I can feel heat.

Mom says, “Why don’t you show Dov on your computer. Find a map online. That way you can show him the school’s Web site too.”

“Ohio.” Dov shakes his head. “Who ever heard of such a place?”

Pearl broke up with Popcorn Guy. If he had another name, I never learned it.

“He just wasn’t the kind of boy I could bring home to Mama Goldblatt.”

“Your mom doesn’t even know you date.”

We’re driving around without any place to go. Zim is stretched out across the backseat. It’s Saturday night.

“And he misused the word
penultimate
. He told me that
Asteroids of Doom
was the penultimate popcorn movie.”

“He
is
Popcorn Guy, after all,” Zim says. “This
is
his area of expertise.”

I point to the left. Pearl turns.

“So that’s why you broke up with him? Because he doesn’t know what
penultimate
means?” That sounds awfully shortsighted to me.

“Tell me what
penultimate
means, Levi.” She throws a look over her shoulder at Zim. “I’m not asking you, Richard Zimmerman, because everyone knows you’re a moron.”

“You won’t get any argument from me,” Zim replies.

“Are you testing me?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“Penultimate
means second to last.”

“See?” She slaps my thigh. “If you weren’t so homely I’d totally date you.”

I point to the right. She turns again.

“Where are we going, anyway?”

“I don’t know. We could go get milk shakes?”

“Screw you, Levi.” She shoves me hard.

“Ow. What?”

“Have you even looked at me lately? I’m so fucking fat! What normal Chinese girl gets fat like this? I’m supposed to be delicate. Diminutive. Demure.”

“You’re insane.”

“I blame the Jews. Mama Goldblatt and her goddamn brisket. It’s not natural. Biologically speaking, I should be on a totally different kind of diet.”

Zim sits up and leans forward. “So let’s go get egg rolls.”

“No.” She makes a turn onto Route 2 heading west. “Let’s go to the pond.”

We park underneath a cluster of pines.

The dried-out needles crunch beneath my flip-flops.