No matter how hard I might try, I'll never forget the day. Miguel and I were in the backyard playing in the sandbox, the bright yellow sun shining down on us from the blue, virtually cloudless sky, and a woman with soft skin and deep, soulful eyes approached us in her flower-patterned blouse. This was my grandmother. She had a tray in her hands, atop it two glasses of lemonade, each filled with a few gargantuan cubes of ice. Crouching down, smiling so broadly, so warmly, she extends the plate towards us and we each take a glass, thanking her, feeling the cold glass against our lips as the cool fluid slipped down our throats and seemed to stretch out across our bodies. Though I'm sure there must have been words exchanged, as I can see her mouth moving, I haven't the faintest clue what she said; I only hear the chirping of the birds, the sound of lawn mowers in the distance, the sound of the pressured water from the hose splashing up against the plastic siding of the kiddie pool, the indiscernible chatter of the neighbors next door over that tall picket fence.
From behind her we saw our mother's car pull into the driveway. My grandmother's face turned, my brother's attention and my own following her lead, watching as my sister climbed out from the back seat of the Buick, leaving the door ajar behind her. She was running towards us with a bundle in her hands long before our mother even got the chance to open her door and drop her first foot to the ground. In her arms, two puppies, two adorable golden retrievers, and the look on her rosy little face was so blissful she was nearly in tears. As she ran, the brown hair that flowed passed the small of her back danced elegantly in the wind behind her.
I was out of the sandbox, running towards her as she crouched down in the grass and gracefully put down the two curious creatures, who sniffed and looked around curiously, finally looking up at us as if we were benevolent gods. I knelt down myself, scratching one behind the ear, and my mother walked up behind us, looking to my grandmother, to the side of us, and they exchanged smiles.
Some distance behind me, my brother was in the sandbox, looking at all of us without thoughts, really; there was just this perplexing swarm of emotions flooding him, as if finally coming to some realization. It didn't make him happy or frighten him, it was just neutral, like that intense calm you sometimes feel before a storm hits. It was a sudden state of enlightenment coupled with an unavoidable acceptance, or at least that's how he seemed to take it. As enthralled as I was with playing with our new pets, as engaged in the moment as I was, I could not escape what I sensed from my brother, and he could not escape the awareness that I could not escape it.
We had always been like that. When the doctors surgically severed us, we were no longer bound to the same form, but there was nonetheless a connection retained, a receptivity there that they would never be able to abolish with their knives and stitches. I could feel my brothers emotions, sometimes even hear his thoughts and sense his bodily sensations. When we were still bound together by the same skin we used to throw mental pictures back and fourth between one another through our minds, and the surgery had not eliminated that capability, either. Looking at him was like looking in a mirror, but only on the outside, and while we somehow had this amazing link between our insides we were nonetheless altogether different people. But never before had that been a problem.
Still, people grow. People change.
He didn't come sit beside us to play with the puppies that day. He just played in the sandbox awhile and then got up and walked out of sight towards the front porch, where my mother sent me to get him at lunchtime so we could both wash our hands and get ready to eat as she put the puppies in the box she had gotten for them beneath the weeping willow in the back. On the porch, I found him sitting on a chair, piecing together a puzzle sprawled out on a card table. He didn't look up, and I just stared at him, confused. I could feel what was going on within him, but I didn't understand it. I wasn't sure he even understood it, but he nevertheless accepted it.
"We're different, Micheal," he said to me without looking up, locking one piece into another.
"Mom wants us to wash up for lunch."
"This is the first time we haven't been able to fully share something, but you still can't hide the fact that you're scared."
"I'm not afraid, Miguel."
"You're terrified."
"I can still feel you."
"But you don't own it. I do."
And he was right. Before, it seemed as though anything either of us felt the other equally owned; most children cannot bear to share the same toys or the same room or the same cloths, but we shared everything on the inside and on the outside. Today, it was different. Something had happened.
"It's like it was when the doctors separated us," I told him.
"Separated, but still receptive to each other."
I nodded. "Yeah." I didn't like the feeling. I was alone, cold, scared. I felt privacy, something I'd never experienced before, at least not without trying to. It was as if my soul were instinctively recoiling from his.
The door on the front porch opened. "Boys," our grandmother said, poking her head out, "your mother wants you to wash up for lunch. Come on, now."
Miguel put the puzzle piece down and I spoke for us. "Okay, grandma," I told her warmly. "We're coming."
Miguel hopped down from his seat and met my eyes. From out of the intense silence, or maybe in the sudden, peculiar distance between us, I caught a subtle sadness from him. We walked inside and to the restroom, scrubbing our hands with soap and water, still strangely close yet at a distance.
At the table, we ate our chicken and mashed potatoes and our grandmother hovered around the table, filling our glasses with orange juice. My mother, a slice of chicken on her fork, sighed. "Mom, will you sit down," she said, her agitation showing through in her voice. When my grandmother finally did and began placing the napkin in her lap, she paused. We all looked at her curiously.
"Oh heavens," she said, "I forgot to turn the water. The hose. The one in the pool."
"I'll get it," Miguel said, placing down his fork and getting up from his seat.
She smiled. "Oh, thank you, dear."
As I continued eating, the dark feeling I initially felt when my brother had gotten up out of his chair began to grow. I eventually excused myself to go to the bathroom and then stepped outside, onto the back porch, the overhang above me draping me in a cool shadow, hiding me from the blazing sun at it's zenith. I looked across the lawn towards the pool, and there I saw the back of my brother. He seemed to be rigorously moving his hands in the water of the pool, splashing all around chaotically, and while such an act seemed strange for him, it seemed, even at the time, to strike me as far more disturbing that it should have been.
I slowly approached him and he didn't turn around, which was also unusual; though I felt certain that he knew I was there, my presence did not alert him, or even deviate him from the object of his concentration. I got closer until I suddenly heard a clinking noise at my feet. I stopped dead. My brother turned his head sideways, not quite in profile, and though he could not see me perhaps but for a blurry silhouette in his peripheral, I could clearly see the smile creeping across his face. I looked down to see what my feet had hit; to see what had caused the noise.
There are the ground I saw a chain, it's end bound to a thick red collar.
Looking back up at him, I felt my body fill with something hot, vicious, raw; it made me light headed and nauseous, it made me both the most frightened and the most enraged I had ever been.
"Miguel?"
"Relax," he said, turning his head again so I could only see the back of it as I slowly came up behind him. I looked down, down passed the point where his arms broke through the skin of the water, down to where his hands met around the small neck of the puppy.
"What the fuck did you do?"
"I ended a life," he said nonchalantly. "I never knew life was so fragile. Isn't it beautiful? Isn't it fascinating?"
It wasn't just the change in my brother that frightened me, but that he didn't seem to be insane in the way in which I had at that point come to understand it. He seemed calm. Collected. He seemed clear, certain, but his way of perceiving the world was so diametrically opposed to my own and it had changed so damned abruptly that at moments with him there at the pool I felt as if I did not know him at all. That I hardly recognized him.
"Miguel," I said, "you killed it."
He laughed lightly under his breath. "I know," he told me, sighing, the ends of his lips curling up into a smile. "Just think of it. Think of the power."
"Its immoral." I whispered it, as if it was a secret I was bestowing upon him and which I wished for no one but him to hear. He shook his head from side to side and, keeping his smile, lifted his upper lip in disapproval, which somehow transformed his expression from amazement at the scene before him into a disappointment yet amusement with my apparent ignorance.
"Was it immoral when dad was still alive and he used to go hunting?"
"It was for food."
"It was for sport," he said, "and you know it."
"This is sick."
"Is it sick when a man goes out to war and kills an enemy?"
"Its for his personal survival, Miguel. This is different."
"Choosing to overpower and kill another life because he favors his own, and that's the case any way you slice it. Same thing."
"No its not. This is wrong, Miguel."
"You never seemed to have any problem frying those ants with the magnifying glass."
"Those were ants. This is an animal."
"Still life," he said, "still precious, fragile, transient life. And death is just its twin brother. The other half of the process. An element just as important in the grand scheme of things. Its not sick, its beautiful."
"I don't see it," I said, shaking my head at him. "I don't see it at all."
"I want you to take the other one," he said, looking to his right, towards the box lying in the shade beneath the weeping willow. "I want you to take its life away like I've done with this hunk of lifeless meat here."
"No."
With a soft splash, he held the puppy up out of the pool, blood and water dribbling down from it like wax from a candle at high speed, trickling to the surface of the water, disturbing it's surface as the image disturbed as my soul. It hung like a rag doll in his hands, and he squeezed his fingers which he had coiled around its neck, holding it towards me, wiggling it slightly.
"This is nothing," he said, looking at me dead in the eyes. "Understand that. This is empty. There is nothing here to fear. It's a meat machine and the ghost is gone. The ghost doesn't hurt anymore. Its free from hunger and heartache and thirst and the drive for sex and the need for sleep and affection. This is just an abandoned vessel. The tenant has been evicted."
I began to back up, back away from him, and I turned my head around to see if anyone had come to the windows looking out the back. If anyone else might be witness to this madness. There was no one.
"You killed it," I whispered angrily, choking back tears. "Its murder."
"I know your IQ," my brother said, "So do yourself a favor and don't be reactionary and redundant. Think about it a second, will you? If the soul exists, what could be truly called life lives on and death is an illusion offered to us by the coupling of the exterior's existence and the presence of our shallow eyes. If no soul exists, no consciousness is there to mourn its own death."
"That doesn't make killing right."
"But what makes it wrong? Either life has not ended or it has and cannot mourn its own death. At best then, we have taken away its body, its shell -- either a prison, as some have seen it, or what would have ultimately been a temporary shelter. At best, we have freed life. At worst, we have given it an inconvenience. A detour."
"But I will miss it. Sis will miss it."
To this, he only laughed. "Do you remember dad's funeral? All the people crying -- all our Christian relatives crying? Why? They are the most devout; the most faithful. Just as strongly they believed our father was a great man. Not a good man, a great man. Then why were they crying? In their eyes, they should have believed that he made his way to heaven."
"I see no reason to suspect they did not believe that."
He smiled, indicating that my response had fulfilled his prediction. That I had fallen into his trap. "Nor do I," he said. "Which is the point. For if that's the case, then why the sorrow? It isn't for the loss of the dead, for in the Christian view a moral man only gains at death. No, they mourned for their own loss. Those tears were tears of selfishness. Tears of greed. They could not be happy for him; no, they had to be sad for themselves. But dad is either in a better place, he is no longer, or he was given a minor inconvenience by his allegedly 'premature' expiration."
"But you killed that puppy with your bare hands, Miguel. Our father died due to an accident."
"His accident," he quickly corrected, seemingly viciously, but then he paused -- an almost sarcastic pause, like a pause demanded by a script, a pause meant to let something sink in, to call the listener for consideration with the speaker. It was a pause for dramatic effect. "Or was it? The entire universe is governed by laws, and nothing occurs which is not permitted by those laws. It could not have been an accident of circumstance external to him, then; there are no accidents in the universe. And yet if there is no soul and consciousness is just the product of the brain, or even if there is a soul that works through the matter of the body, would that consciousness not be governed by the same laws as matter -- the same laws as the brain that produces or shelters it? As such, would it not also be immune to this silly concept of 'accident'? His intention would have been the sum of all prior events; as with all other events at any point in space-time, it would have been a culmination of all that had occurred prior to it in the cosmic web of cause-and-effect. Meeting at that point in his neural circuitry, the determinate or probabilistic results of all that had come before that moment would have manifested as a predestined force we've called his intention, or his accident. So was it truly an accident after all?"
"Are you saying he committed suicide? That he killed himself on purpose?"
"No, only that what we call intentional or accidental are really the same thing, which is to say products of historical forces that stretch far beyond ourselves. There is no free will, no accident, no randomness; there is only fate -- and that large portion of fate we might call as-of-yet-undetermined fate, which we can label as intent or accident in accordance with our predestined perspective or probabilistic interpretations."
"So no one's responsible," I say in summation, shaking my head at him in frustration, unwilling to accept it.
"Possibly. Regardless, any logical train of thought you take on this matter ends not with an answer, but with the question as to why the act of killing would be immoral. But it is not immoral. It is merciful, irrelevant, or inconvenient in the ultimate perspective of the life being delivered unto death in question. None of those conclusions seem to me to be synonymous with immorality."
"So it's moral, is what you're saying?" I found myself responding bitingly, sarcastically.
"No," he said. "It's amoral."
"All right," I said, nodding my head, forcing a smile; a sarcastic smile. "Okay, brother, imagine for a moment that everyone went ahead and did what you just did. Just took a life because it was inherently amoral and seemed to elevate the awareness and appreciation of their own life in the process. In other words, because ultimately it didn't matter and it gave them a rush, a high, a fix. You know what would happen? Life would cease. Conscious life would extinguish itself."
"That's just it, Micheal," he said, smiling, laughing. "It doesn't matter."
"So you could just as easily kill mom, or grandma, or sis," I said. "Or me." He laughed under his breath. "Or yourself," I added.
He didn't answer. He just looked at me ambiguously.
Then the words came to me: "You're dead to me."
I didn't say it, but thought it involuntarily; I knew he heard it, too, and for the first time I feared him hearing my thoughts. As frightening as the sudden distance was between him and I, I found myself desiring all the more privacy. I felt vulnerable. Afraid. But he didn't respond. Did not show any kind of reaction to the thought. Just that same, flat emotion. He looked at me with, as contradictory as it sounds, an empathic kind of indifference as he said, "Tell them if you must."
This was in response to a thought that had not yet manifest into words in my mind -- my act of considering informing my mother regarding what he had done. As soon as he spoke it, I felt myself juggling, as to not tell her would require me to lie, which I hated doing, but to tell her would, in a non-literal but no less real sense, kill her. Miguel, it was clear to be, heard all of my inner deliberation, and just as easily I heard him when he thought, in the flat emotion that now seemed ever-present in him, "I could kill you."
It was as if someone had popped out of nowhere and socked me in the gut, knocking the wind out of me when I heard that thought from him. He was a stranger.
I ran back towards the house, frantic, but tripped on the hose, falling on my knee; I quickly propelled myself back up, however, darting towards the back porch as fast as I could, face red, eyes welling with tears, screaming for my mother over and over and over. My mother ran through the front door, concerned and confused, my grandmother and sister remaining in the door frame just behind her. I fell to the grass right at her feet and then rolled over on my back, pointing behind toward the pool, towards Miguel -- but he was already running towards the house, the limp, wet body of the puppy in his hands, his face red and full of tears. He just wanted to give the puppy a drink of water, he said. Then it just, just, just swam away from him, wriggled away, wriggled free from the gentle grip of his hands, and he tried to help it but it just started sinking and sinking and, and he couldn't, couldn't do anything and now, now, now the puppy won't move.
Within, he held the same flat emotion; it was, of course, all an act, but no one but me could see within him. It was easy now to remain silent about the truth, about the fact that my brother was a killer, and it was unnecessary for me to lie.
My mother knelt down, putting her arms around both of us, embracing us when my brother approached, telling us it was all right, it was okay, it was an accident, it isn't your fault, it isn't your fault, honey, it isn't your fault. And by this time my grandmother had adopted a solemn, sympathetic look and my sister had joined in on the crying.
How much more horrible they would feel if they knew.
The hose was still on, and over my mother's shoulder I saw as the water flowed off the edge, forming a puddle around the base of the pool which grew and grew.
I hated my brother, but I loved him. I wanted to tell on him, to kill him, but I was just as incapable of doing either. Neither would protect the rest of the family as much as my silence. As much as Miguel's lie.
If they knew, it would kill them. Kill them.
We buried the puppy in the yard that night on the other side of the weeping willow, out by the tall picket fence. In the box, the remaining puppy whined, even after we gave him a bowl for food and one for water; even after my grandmother put a clock in his box which tick-tocked, tick-tocked, which was meant to simulate he heartbeat of the mother he had been taken from, meant to soothe him and lull him to sleep and make him feel protected, as vulnerable as he truly was.
Dinner was quiet, and we all willingly went to bed -- a strange phenomenon in itself. I lay in the silence of the room I shared with my brother, the space between our beds not far enough to comfort me.
"I know what you are," I thought to him.
"Of course you do," he thought back. "I told you the truth."
Verbally, I said to him, "The truth is that you took that life in order to enhance your own. You're like a vampire. You're insane."
He laughed out loud. "I'm surprised at you, brother," he told me. "That is as blind as defining a person based on the color of their skin. You're simply discriminating against someone just because they appear to be different from you. Its not just a failure to understand, it's an unwillingness to understand."
"Or perhaps an inability," I added. "But don't think for a moment that makes you superior."
"We're equal," he said softly, sincerely, and those two words frightened me.
I shook my head back and fourth. "No," I told him, "we're different."
"These concepts are not incompatible, brother."
I remained silent, unable to bear conversation with him any longer. We had never spoken so much as we had that day, be it in or outside our heads; we had never needed to, as we understood each other at a level deeper than words, a level that made words unnecessary. It forced me to wonder if we were using our words to bridge a gap that had come between us or to build up a wall we were intentionally creating for the purposes of distancing ourselves from one another. And the answer, I believe, came in the silence as he drifted off to sleep.
Remaining in bed awake, restless, afraid, angry, I could see the motion pictures in his mind, the content of his dreams. And what were dreams to him were nightmares to me. I saw him pick that puppy up out of the box, petting it, looking at it in the eyes; I saw him squeeze it, heard it yelping in pain; I saw him carrying it to the pool, holding it under water, watching in fascination and wonder as it struggles; I felt him fill up with its life as its lungs filled up with water; felt him being enlivened as it died. I felt my brother squeezing the animal, crushing its bones. I felt him do it as if I had done it with my own hands and I shuddered, pulled away, opened my eyes and proceeded to think in a thousand voices in my head just to bury his; I went on to give volume to my own emotions and vividness to my own mental imagery to drown out his own.
I stared at the ceiling. Tucked in our beds, alone with each other in the darkness, more separate from him, from anyone than I had ever felt, I was terrified. Outside the open window I could hear the puppy clawing at the side of the box, whimpering over the ticking of the clock, so scared and so alone, unable to speak to anyone, unable to understand anything that might be said to it. I no longer felt my brother, but I felt a deep connection with that poor, isolated creature. In the darkness of the room, above the darkness of my brother's dreams and my nightmare dancing deadly in my mind, I wept for that poor dog. Wept for his loss, for his own brother's loss. And for mine.
From behind her we saw our mother's car pull into the driveway. My grandmother's face turned, my brother's attention and my own following her lead, watching as my sister climbed out from the back seat of the Buick, leaving the door ajar behind her. She was running towards us with a bundle in her hands long before our mother even got the chance to open her door and drop her first foot to the ground. In her arms, two puppies, two adorable golden retrievers, and the look on her rosy little face was so blissful she was nearly in tears. As she ran, the brown hair that flowed passed the small of her back danced elegantly in the wind behind her.
I was out of the sandbox, running towards her as she crouched down in the grass and gracefully put down the two curious creatures, who sniffed and looked around curiously, finally looking up at us as if we were benevolent gods. I knelt down myself, scratching one behind the ear, and my mother walked up behind us, looking to my grandmother, to the side of us, and they exchanged smiles.
Some distance behind me, my brother was in the sandbox, looking at all of us without thoughts, really; there was just this perplexing swarm of emotions flooding him, as if finally coming to some realization. It didn't make him happy or frighten him, it was just neutral, like that intense calm you sometimes feel before a storm hits. It was a sudden state of enlightenment coupled with an unavoidable acceptance, or at least that's how he seemed to take it. As enthralled as I was with playing with our new pets, as engaged in the moment as I was, I could not escape what I sensed from my brother, and he could not escape the awareness that I could not escape it.
We had always been like that. When the doctors surgically severed us, we were no longer bound to the same form, but there was nonetheless a connection retained, a receptivity there that they would never be able to abolish with their knives and stitches. I could feel my brothers emotions, sometimes even hear his thoughts and sense his bodily sensations. When we were still bound together by the same skin we used to throw mental pictures back and fourth between one another through our minds, and the surgery had not eliminated that capability, either. Looking at him was like looking in a mirror, but only on the outside, and while we somehow had this amazing link between our insides we were nonetheless altogether different people. But never before had that been a problem.
Still, people grow. People change.
He didn't come sit beside us to play with the puppies that day. He just played in the sandbox awhile and then got up and walked out of sight towards the front porch, where my mother sent me to get him at lunchtime so we could both wash our hands and get ready to eat as she put the puppies in the box she had gotten for them beneath the weeping willow in the back. On the porch, I found him sitting on a chair, piecing together a puzzle sprawled out on a card table. He didn't look up, and I just stared at him, confused. I could feel what was going on within him, but I didn't understand it. I wasn't sure he even understood it, but he nevertheless accepted it.
"We're different, Micheal," he said to me without looking up, locking one piece into another.
"Mom wants us to wash up for lunch."
"This is the first time we haven't been able to fully share something, but you still can't hide the fact that you're scared."
"I'm not afraid, Miguel."
"You're terrified."
"I can still feel you."
"But you don't own it. I do."
And he was right. Before, it seemed as though anything either of us felt the other equally owned; most children cannot bear to share the same toys or the same room or the same cloths, but we shared everything on the inside and on the outside. Today, it was different. Something had happened.
"It's like it was when the doctors separated us," I told him.
"Separated, but still receptive to each other."
I nodded. "Yeah." I didn't like the feeling. I was alone, cold, scared. I felt privacy, something I'd never experienced before, at least not without trying to. It was as if my soul were instinctively recoiling from his.
The door on the front porch opened. "Boys," our grandmother said, poking her head out, "your mother wants you to wash up for lunch. Come on, now."
Miguel put the puzzle piece down and I spoke for us. "Okay, grandma," I told her warmly. "We're coming."
Miguel hopped down from his seat and met my eyes. From out of the intense silence, or maybe in the sudden, peculiar distance between us, I caught a subtle sadness from him. We walked inside and to the restroom, scrubbing our hands with soap and water, still strangely close yet at a distance.
At the table, we ate our chicken and mashed potatoes and our grandmother hovered around the table, filling our glasses with orange juice. My mother, a slice of chicken on her fork, sighed. "Mom, will you sit down," she said, her agitation showing through in her voice. When my grandmother finally did and began placing the napkin in her lap, she paused. We all looked at her curiously.
"Oh heavens," she said, "I forgot to turn the water. The hose. The one in the pool."
"I'll get it," Miguel said, placing down his fork and getting up from his seat.
She smiled. "Oh, thank you, dear."
As I continued eating, the dark feeling I initially felt when my brother had gotten up out of his chair began to grow. I eventually excused myself to go to the bathroom and then stepped outside, onto the back porch, the overhang above me draping me in a cool shadow, hiding me from the blazing sun at it's zenith. I looked across the lawn towards the pool, and there I saw the back of my brother. He seemed to be rigorously moving his hands in the water of the pool, splashing all around chaotically, and while such an act seemed strange for him, it seemed, even at the time, to strike me as far more disturbing that it should have been.
I slowly approached him and he didn't turn around, which was also unusual; though I felt certain that he knew I was there, my presence did not alert him, or even deviate him from the object of his concentration. I got closer until I suddenly heard a clinking noise at my feet. I stopped dead. My brother turned his head sideways, not quite in profile, and though he could not see me perhaps but for a blurry silhouette in his peripheral, I could clearly see the smile creeping across his face. I looked down to see what my feet had hit; to see what had caused the noise.
There are the ground I saw a chain, it's end bound to a thick red collar.
Looking back up at him, I felt my body fill with something hot, vicious, raw; it made me light headed and nauseous, it made me both the most frightened and the most enraged I had ever been.
"Miguel?"
"Relax," he said, turning his head again so I could only see the back of it as I slowly came up behind him. I looked down, down passed the point where his arms broke through the skin of the water, down to where his hands met around the small neck of the puppy.
"What the fuck did you do?"
"I ended a life," he said nonchalantly. "I never knew life was so fragile. Isn't it beautiful? Isn't it fascinating?"
It wasn't just the change in my brother that frightened me, but that he didn't seem to be insane in the way in which I had at that point come to understand it. He seemed calm. Collected. He seemed clear, certain, but his way of perceiving the world was so diametrically opposed to my own and it had changed so damned abruptly that at moments with him there at the pool I felt as if I did not know him at all. That I hardly recognized him.
"Miguel," I said, "you killed it."
He laughed lightly under his breath. "I know," he told me, sighing, the ends of his lips curling up into a smile. "Just think of it. Think of the power."
"Its immoral." I whispered it, as if it was a secret I was bestowing upon him and which I wished for no one but him to hear. He shook his head from side to side and, keeping his smile, lifted his upper lip in disapproval, which somehow transformed his expression from amazement at the scene before him into a disappointment yet amusement with my apparent ignorance.
"Was it immoral when dad was still alive and he used to go hunting?"
"It was for food."
"It was for sport," he said, "and you know it."
"This is sick."
"Is it sick when a man goes out to war and kills an enemy?"
"Its for his personal survival, Miguel. This is different."
"Choosing to overpower and kill another life because he favors his own, and that's the case any way you slice it. Same thing."
"No its not. This is wrong, Miguel."
"You never seemed to have any problem frying those ants with the magnifying glass."
"Those were ants. This is an animal."
"Still life," he said, "still precious, fragile, transient life. And death is just its twin brother. The other half of the process. An element just as important in the grand scheme of things. Its not sick, its beautiful."
"I don't see it," I said, shaking my head at him. "I don't see it at all."
"I want you to take the other one," he said, looking to his right, towards the box lying in the shade beneath the weeping willow. "I want you to take its life away like I've done with this hunk of lifeless meat here."
"No."
With a soft splash, he held the puppy up out of the pool, blood and water dribbling down from it like wax from a candle at high speed, trickling to the surface of the water, disturbing it's surface as the image disturbed as my soul. It hung like a rag doll in his hands, and he squeezed his fingers which he had coiled around its neck, holding it towards me, wiggling it slightly.
"This is nothing," he said, looking at me dead in the eyes. "Understand that. This is empty. There is nothing here to fear. It's a meat machine and the ghost is gone. The ghost doesn't hurt anymore. Its free from hunger and heartache and thirst and the drive for sex and the need for sleep and affection. This is just an abandoned vessel. The tenant has been evicted."
I began to back up, back away from him, and I turned my head around to see if anyone had come to the windows looking out the back. If anyone else might be witness to this madness. There was no one.
"You killed it," I whispered angrily, choking back tears. "Its murder."
"I know your IQ," my brother said, "So do yourself a favor and don't be reactionary and redundant. Think about it a second, will you? If the soul exists, what could be truly called life lives on and death is an illusion offered to us by the coupling of the exterior's existence and the presence of our shallow eyes. If no soul exists, no consciousness is there to mourn its own death."
"That doesn't make killing right."
"But what makes it wrong? Either life has not ended or it has and cannot mourn its own death. At best then, we have taken away its body, its shell -- either a prison, as some have seen it, or what would have ultimately been a temporary shelter. At best, we have freed life. At worst, we have given it an inconvenience. A detour."
"But I will miss it. Sis will miss it."
To this, he only laughed. "Do you remember dad's funeral? All the people crying -- all our Christian relatives crying? Why? They are the most devout; the most faithful. Just as strongly they believed our father was a great man. Not a good man, a great man. Then why were they crying? In their eyes, they should have believed that he made his way to heaven."
"I see no reason to suspect they did not believe that."
He smiled, indicating that my response had fulfilled his prediction. That I had fallen into his trap. "Nor do I," he said. "Which is the point. For if that's the case, then why the sorrow? It isn't for the loss of the dead, for in the Christian view a moral man only gains at death. No, they mourned for their own loss. Those tears were tears of selfishness. Tears of greed. They could not be happy for him; no, they had to be sad for themselves. But dad is either in a better place, he is no longer, or he was given a minor inconvenience by his allegedly 'premature' expiration."
"But you killed that puppy with your bare hands, Miguel. Our father died due to an accident."
"His accident," he quickly corrected, seemingly viciously, but then he paused -- an almost sarcastic pause, like a pause demanded by a script, a pause meant to let something sink in, to call the listener for consideration with the speaker. It was a pause for dramatic effect. "Or was it? The entire universe is governed by laws, and nothing occurs which is not permitted by those laws. It could not have been an accident of circumstance external to him, then; there are no accidents in the universe. And yet if there is no soul and consciousness is just the product of the brain, or even if there is a soul that works through the matter of the body, would that consciousness not be governed by the same laws as matter -- the same laws as the brain that produces or shelters it? As such, would it not also be immune to this silly concept of 'accident'? His intention would have been the sum of all prior events; as with all other events at any point in space-time, it would have been a culmination of all that had occurred prior to it in the cosmic web of cause-and-effect. Meeting at that point in his neural circuitry, the determinate or probabilistic results of all that had come before that moment would have manifested as a predestined force we've called his intention, or his accident. So was it truly an accident after all?"
"Are you saying he committed suicide? That he killed himself on purpose?"
"No, only that what we call intentional or accidental are really the same thing, which is to say products of historical forces that stretch far beyond ourselves. There is no free will, no accident, no randomness; there is only fate -- and that large portion of fate we might call as-of-yet-undetermined fate, which we can label as intent or accident in accordance with our predestined perspective or probabilistic interpretations."
"So no one's responsible," I say in summation, shaking my head at him in frustration, unwilling to accept it.
"Possibly. Regardless, any logical train of thought you take on this matter ends not with an answer, but with the question as to why the act of killing would be immoral. But it is not immoral. It is merciful, irrelevant, or inconvenient in the ultimate perspective of the life being delivered unto death in question. None of those conclusions seem to me to be synonymous with immorality."
"So it's moral, is what you're saying?" I found myself responding bitingly, sarcastically.
"No," he said. "It's amoral."
"All right," I said, nodding my head, forcing a smile; a sarcastic smile. "Okay, brother, imagine for a moment that everyone went ahead and did what you just did. Just took a life because it was inherently amoral and seemed to elevate the awareness and appreciation of their own life in the process. In other words, because ultimately it didn't matter and it gave them a rush, a high, a fix. You know what would happen? Life would cease. Conscious life would extinguish itself."
"That's just it, Micheal," he said, smiling, laughing. "It doesn't matter."
"So you could just as easily kill mom, or grandma, or sis," I said. "Or me." He laughed under his breath. "Or yourself," I added.
He didn't answer. He just looked at me ambiguously.
Then the words came to me: "You're dead to me."
I didn't say it, but thought it involuntarily; I knew he heard it, too, and for the first time I feared him hearing my thoughts. As frightening as the sudden distance was between him and I, I found myself desiring all the more privacy. I felt vulnerable. Afraid. But he didn't respond. Did not show any kind of reaction to the thought. Just that same, flat emotion. He looked at me with, as contradictory as it sounds, an empathic kind of indifference as he said, "Tell them if you must."
This was in response to a thought that had not yet manifest into words in my mind -- my act of considering informing my mother regarding what he had done. As soon as he spoke it, I felt myself juggling, as to not tell her would require me to lie, which I hated doing, but to tell her would, in a non-literal but no less real sense, kill her. Miguel, it was clear to be, heard all of my inner deliberation, and just as easily I heard him when he thought, in the flat emotion that now seemed ever-present in him, "I could kill you."
It was as if someone had popped out of nowhere and socked me in the gut, knocking the wind out of me when I heard that thought from him. He was a stranger.
I ran back towards the house, frantic, but tripped on the hose, falling on my knee; I quickly propelled myself back up, however, darting towards the back porch as fast as I could, face red, eyes welling with tears, screaming for my mother over and over and over. My mother ran through the front door, concerned and confused, my grandmother and sister remaining in the door frame just behind her. I fell to the grass right at her feet and then rolled over on my back, pointing behind toward the pool, towards Miguel -- but he was already running towards the house, the limp, wet body of the puppy in his hands, his face red and full of tears. He just wanted to give the puppy a drink of water, he said. Then it just, just, just swam away from him, wriggled away, wriggled free from the gentle grip of his hands, and he tried to help it but it just started sinking and sinking and, and he couldn't, couldn't do anything and now, now, now the puppy won't move.
Within, he held the same flat emotion; it was, of course, all an act, but no one but me could see within him. It was easy now to remain silent about the truth, about the fact that my brother was a killer, and it was unnecessary for me to lie.
My mother knelt down, putting her arms around both of us, embracing us when my brother approached, telling us it was all right, it was okay, it was an accident, it isn't your fault, it isn't your fault, honey, it isn't your fault. And by this time my grandmother had adopted a solemn, sympathetic look and my sister had joined in on the crying.
How much more horrible they would feel if they knew.
The hose was still on, and over my mother's shoulder I saw as the water flowed off the edge, forming a puddle around the base of the pool which grew and grew.
I hated my brother, but I loved him. I wanted to tell on him, to kill him, but I was just as incapable of doing either. Neither would protect the rest of the family as much as my silence. As much as Miguel's lie.
If they knew, it would kill them. Kill them.
We buried the puppy in the yard that night on the other side of the weeping willow, out by the tall picket fence. In the box, the remaining puppy whined, even after we gave him a bowl for food and one for water; even after my grandmother put a clock in his box which tick-tocked, tick-tocked, which was meant to simulate he heartbeat of the mother he had been taken from, meant to soothe him and lull him to sleep and make him feel protected, as vulnerable as he truly was.
Dinner was quiet, and we all willingly went to bed -- a strange phenomenon in itself. I lay in the silence of the room I shared with my brother, the space between our beds not far enough to comfort me.
"I know what you are," I thought to him.
"Of course you do," he thought back. "I told you the truth."
Verbally, I said to him, "The truth is that you took that life in order to enhance your own. You're like a vampire. You're insane."
He laughed out loud. "I'm surprised at you, brother," he told me. "That is as blind as defining a person based on the color of their skin. You're simply discriminating against someone just because they appear to be different from you. Its not just a failure to understand, it's an unwillingness to understand."
"Or perhaps an inability," I added. "But don't think for a moment that makes you superior."
"We're equal," he said softly, sincerely, and those two words frightened me.
I shook my head back and fourth. "No," I told him, "we're different."
"These concepts are not incompatible, brother."
I remained silent, unable to bear conversation with him any longer. We had never spoken so much as we had that day, be it in or outside our heads; we had never needed to, as we understood each other at a level deeper than words, a level that made words unnecessary. It forced me to wonder if we were using our words to bridge a gap that had come between us or to build up a wall we were intentionally creating for the purposes of distancing ourselves from one another. And the answer, I believe, came in the silence as he drifted off to sleep.
Remaining in bed awake, restless, afraid, angry, I could see the motion pictures in his mind, the content of his dreams. And what were dreams to him were nightmares to me. I saw him pick that puppy up out of the box, petting it, looking at it in the eyes; I saw him squeeze it, heard it yelping in pain; I saw him carrying it to the pool, holding it under water, watching in fascination and wonder as it struggles; I felt him fill up with its life as its lungs filled up with water; felt him being enlivened as it died. I felt my brother squeezing the animal, crushing its bones. I felt him do it as if I had done it with my own hands and I shuddered, pulled away, opened my eyes and proceeded to think in a thousand voices in my head just to bury his; I went on to give volume to my own emotions and vividness to my own mental imagery to drown out his own.
I stared at the ceiling. Tucked in our beds, alone with each other in the darkness, more separate from him, from anyone than I had ever felt, I was terrified. Outside the open window I could hear the puppy clawing at the side of the box, whimpering over the ticking of the clock, so scared and so alone, unable to speak to anyone, unable to understand anything that might be said to it. I no longer felt my brother, but I felt a deep connection with that poor, isolated creature. In the darkness of the room, above the darkness of my brother's dreams and my nightmare dancing deadly in my mind, I wept for that poor dog. Wept for his loss, for his own brother's loss. And for mine.
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