I got emails all of the time. Sometimes they’d ask me to click links and sign up for websites, and sometimes they’d tell me that something on my wishlist was on sale. Once a week, I got an email about my brother.
My parents weren’t at home when I went to school, and they weren’t around when I got back. On occasion, I’d hear them come in at night.
I went to school in a hollowed out building, sat in a hollowed out classroom, and listened to my lovely teachers talk about things I’d never understand. They wrote symbols on the board, pointed to them, explained them, and everyone nodded along. I’d never seen them in my life. I looked at them, the vast array of dotted lines and squiggles and empty dark spaces, and knew that there was a lot I was never going to understand.
I saw through my teachers. I knew they were all vacant, all hollow inside.
I never raised my hand, but they always called on me. Their eyes were dark holes. I didn’t know what the symbols meant, and they knew that. Everyone stared. Without using words, they told me that the entire class knew that I was endlessly vulnerable, always at the whim of something I didn’t understand.
I liked to sign up for porno sites. Nobody ever showed me porn. I never went to a neighbor’s house when his parents weren’t home so that we could use the family computer. I was never shown the ins and outs of the internet, how to find naked girls, how to find free games, how to pose like a girl online to get free RuneScape memberships. I never did anything like that. One day, I woke up and knew all about it. I got out of bed in my big empty house—no furniture, no paintings, no heirlooms—and I understood the computer, how it works, all of it.
I woke up every day with the feeling that something was deeply wrong and would never be fixed. I got dressed and went to school.
When I looked at my email, I’d see a lot of numbers and words desperately wanting me, desiring me. Their bodies were made up of blue hyperlinks and soft images. The emails about my brother were different. They didn’t want anything.
Two years ago, when I stopped going to school, a truancy officer came to my house. He told me that bad guys come and torture kids who don’t go to school. When he stooped down and got close to my face, his pupils dilated. He smelled like urine.
Ever since, a 2004 Ford Explorer with dark windows has parked outside of the model home across the street. I can’t see inside, but I know that whoever is at the wheel watches me as I walk to school. Sometimes, if the sun hits the windshield at the right angle, I can see the silhouette of a high and tight through the tinted glass.
My brother never told anyone that he was going to leave. One day, he was gone.
My parents hired professional cleaners to scour his room after he left.
When I'd get an email about my brother, it was always addressed to me directly. They’d tell me what I ate for breakfast and what time I left for school. Most of the time, the content of the email was roughly the same.
The emails explained that my brother was somewhere far away, in the center of a vast nothingness where there’s little hope of entering or escaping, a place full of shuttered storefronts and broken chain link. Houses stand on their own, detached from their surroundings, hardly tethered to the ground. Beneath it all, my brother works the only honest job left in town. He turns tricks for all of the old people, all the rotting flesh that thought everything would be alright in the end. All of this happens in the basement of a bar called Smokey’s.
Every town in the USA has a bar called Smokey’s.
My brother does exactly what they tell him to, and it’s just about the only honest thing left in the world. He sleeps on a stained mattress next to a rusted drain.
My brother knew something that everyone else didn’t. He set up hidden cameras in his room and showed me videos of our parents doing weird stuff. He said I could never trust them again—and I haven’t.
When I tried to understand the symbols on the board I got rashes. I got headaches that hurt so bad that I vomited. Sometimes, I got emails with the symbols. Those were the only ones that I deleted.
I looked for my brother on the porno sites, thinking that, someday, he might be there.
My parents never bothered to search for him. In fact, we never even talked about it. On the occasions that I saw them—usually in the mornings, on the weekends—they’d stare as if waiting for me to say something, but I never had much to say.
I had the feeling that he was too far for me to ever find him. Even if I somehow figured out where he was, he wouldn’t be there. Instead of a town there’d be a highway, a gas station, a strip mall. The emails were forever, though. I would never get away from the emails.
When I walked past my brother’s room, I couldn’t do anything but marvel at the emptiness. Barren eggshell walls blended into pristine low pile carpet. The windows were unadorned. The camera was still there, active, broadcasting to anyone who wanted to keep tabs on the empty space. Sometimes, I’d step into the center of the room and stare into the dark lens, hoping that I was being analyzed, broken down into something that could no longer be contained.
My brother lived below a bar called Smokey’s, and he couldn’t get in or out. There’s no storm door; there’s no staircase. People appeared when he wasn’t looking and demanded service. Leather-clad decaying flesh would whip him with a cat of nine tails and laugh. Red lips cracked and revealed pink flesh. The men all smelled like rot. They always wanted to do it all—everything.
My brother showed me videos of us as children, sat in the living room, staring into a camera. We didn’t move or speak. We stared into the lens for hours. An oblong shadow waxed and waned as time elapsed. At the end of every video, one of us approached the camera and turned it off. I have no recollection of these videos being filmed, but there were hundreds. On the night that my brother showed me them, I saw him cry for the first and last time.
After that, I didn’t speak for six months, but nobody noticed.
School seemed to linger even in the summer. The symbols would appear in the clouds and on license plates.
During the summer, the car parked across the street lingered outside all day and wouldn’t leave until late at night.
My parents left for a long time. The house was empty. I started eating canned diced tomatoes and refried beans. I had the feeling that the car across the street was waiting for me. They sat in anticipation of the day when the lights would go out.
There was no use thinking about it. The house was too empty. I didn’t know what to do, so I went to my brother’s room and stared into the camera, waiting for it all to make sense.
