But he no sooner reached the tavern when suddenly a window opened, and through the open window, his brother, Ivan himself, shouted down at him: “Alyosha, can you come to me in here or not? I’d be much obliged.”
“Look what a little demon is sitting in your heart, Alyoshka Karamazov!”
“The world is based on stupidities, and without them, perhaps, nothing would happen at all.”
-Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translation mine
We’ll call him John. We’re in America now, and we don’t pronounce Ivan the way the Russians do anyway. We’re not in a provincial town either, not a city. We’re in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Jersey side, where in 1956 Ted and Phyllis K bought a three-bedroom split-level in a brand new housing tract. John, their middle son, all grown up at 63, is sitting at the bar of a tavern frequented some thirty years ago by Keith Richards, when he was in rehab, and Mick Jagger, who deigned to visit him in his designated 25-mile radius of the innovative treatment center in Pennsylvania. In that spirit, John turns to his younger brother, on the stool next to him, and asks his permission “to introduce” himself, “a man of style and taste.”
Alex 6’2, the waxed brown curls of a handlebar mustache extending his small mouth, laughs, taken back to the time he flunked out of the little shit college he couldn’t stand, only to find his brother dropped out in his senior year—from a far better college, one Alex could not get into, the only K brother who did not.
John asks a philosophical question: “A man lures a seven-year-old into his suburban house with the promise of a litter of kittens. Once she’s in, he locks the door. In the act of forcing himself on her, she suffocates. Before rigor mortis sets in, he enjoys her one more time, then folds her up into a very large cooler and drives it to a park, where he leaves it to smell its way into the beam of a ranger’s flashlight. What do we do with him? Lethal injection? Anti-psychotic medications? Or lock him away until he dies?”
“Kill the sonofabitch.” Alex’s steel-colored eyes pierce the cloudy mirror behind bottles of vodka, scotch, whiskey, rum and gin. “But only after cutting off his dick and sodomizing him with it—repeatedly—before stuffing it between his knocked-out teeth.”
John laughs, a strained artificial cackle that squares the dark-brown Fu-Manchu around his thick, vodka-soaked lips. “Little brother, where is your Buddhist nonviolent compassion now?”
Alex squares his shoulders and his stomach strains against the triple-X button-down shirt he had to buy for his father’s funeral. “My Buddhist compassion, as you call it, has been exhausted in the service of our parents. It was nothing less than an act of bodhicitta, three lamas told me so, to give up my career to be on call twenty-four hours, seven days a week. You’ve been unemployed since Silicon Valley decided you were costing them too much in health care. What kept you from coming back to help me nurse the parents who raised us?”
“You said you didn’t want me because I drink. If I didn’t stop drinking, I couldn’t come.”
“I didn’t say that. Mom said that.”
“Mom doesn’t say anything you don’t tell her to.”
“That’s not true. Grandpop was an alcoholic. Mom shouldn’t have to live through that abuse again.”
“What abuse? And what are we doing now? Eating ice cream?” Again that cackle, forced and bitter.
“After what I’ve been through, I need a drink.” Alex’s eyes fill with tears. “Doctors gave him six months.” Tears roll down his pale, reddening, full cheeks. “Under my care, he lived for six years!” He picks up a cocktail napkin and blows his nose.
“We’re long livers.” John nods. “On both sides. Grandma lived into her hundreds. Mom is so old she can’t walk, can’t remember shit, or do anything for herself. We could live another forty years. Through nuclear war and nuclear winter, global warming, radiation sickness, cancer, starvation, pandemics, the loss of the ozone layer and each one of the Bill of Rights, one by one, violated in the interest of special interests, not to mention pain, surgeries—”
“And no one to care for us the way I cared for Dad,” Alex says bitterly. “What am I to do when Mom goes? Who’s going to hire a sixty-year-old man?”
“I thought you were in seminary.”
“If I want to be a minister, I have to take whatever congregation the United Methodist Convention gives me, and Mom doesn’t want to move. How can I take her away from the doctor she has trusted all these years? And how was I to finish a degree with Dad going in and out of the hospital every time I had a project due?”
“You’re too old to be a minister,” John says. “Besides, you’re Buddhist.”
“I am a Buddhist and a Christian. You know as well as I do, all of the great faiths share beliefs: love thy neighbor, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It was Constantine who made certain: Christians would not remember what it means to be born again in Christ.”
“You preach reincarnation and you’ll never get a degree, let alone a congregation.”
“The degree won’t do me any good. I told you.”
“Especially since it’s an online for-profit institution.”
“There’s nothing wrong with online education! Besides, how was I to commute with Mom and Pop ailing?”
“Well, you can’t live off Mom for the rest of your life.”
“Who says I’m living off Mom? Do you have any idea what health-care workers get for twenty-four hour care? In fact, there is no twenty-four hour care. No one will work for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week with no vacations, no days off. Eight years ago when you told me Mom didn’t want me moving back, I had an offer. Product manager at a start-up that is now a multi-million dollar company! I called her. I asked her: ‘Do you want me to come home?’ She begged me. She needed me! Her hip was shot. She couldn’t care for Dad and recover from surgery at the same time.”
“Mom doesn’t know what she wants.”
“She’s sharp as a tack.”
“She doesn’t remember anything. She’s like a little girl.”
“You haven’t lived with her. You haven’t even seen her in the last two years.”
“I talk to her every day.”
“Well, aren’t you the model son? You’d sell the house, put me out on the street and Mom into a nursing home, just like Teddy.”
As if summoned, the eldest K, called Teddy to distinguish him from the late Ted Senior, lumbers through the sparse Tuesday night crowd and says, “Hey,” in the manner of the members of the Virginia country club to which he has belonged for forty years. “What’s on tap?”
John and Alex turn around, their mouths hanging in shock beneath their mustaches. Teddy is, in contrast, clean shaven, his cheeks full and rosy despite the hair-thin lines that riddle his skin. “Thought I’d join you.”
“How did you get away from Agrippina?” John asks.
Teddy’s wife was named after the glory her Italian-American parents had associated with Rome. She is a large, assertive woman, and the very thought of her releases a cloud of doubt in Alex’s mind: what if she notices his mom asking the same question over and over? Would she conclude that her mother-in-law is suffering from Alzheimer’s and have her declared non compos mentis in order to contest the will? When Ted Senior was alive, Alex’s mother had asked, he would never forget, lying on the rollaway cot he’d put up in the same room as his father’s hospital bed: “Ted, shall we leave the house and savings to Alex?”
His father, propped up in the bed medicare had paid for so he could be bedridden at home, looked around the room, as if he were making sure no one was listening. “Well, I don’t see anybody else here.”
But Phyllis K does not have Alzheimer’s. Her dementia is only short-term memory loss, a consequence, in part, of the post-traumatic stress disorder a visiting nurse had told Alex they were both suffering from. His father’s emergency hospitalizations, twenty-four in all, had been almost continuous before the night, three days ago, when his heart could not be started again.
Teddy chuckles. “Aggie’s pretty worn out. I dropped her and Lacy off at the motel.”
Lacy is Teddy’s daughter, the only member of her generation still communicating with her father’s, the only member of the family still working forty plus hours—in human resource management for a large government contractor.
“Who’s with Mom?” Alex asks.
“Mom went to bed.”
Alex considers going home. But he deserves a night out, doesn’t he? Whatever damage his sister-in-law might do has been done. There’s nothing he can do about it, except, maybe, convince his brother that she’s wrong. He moves over so Teddy can sit between him and John. He is sick to death of his middle brother, and little as he’s ever related to Teddy, he prefers sitting next to a cold materialist to the nasty drunk he knows his middle brother will become with one more vodka.
Teddy orders a microbrew and folds his ass over the stool between his brothers. He’s even taller than John, broader than Alex, his hair clipped close to the temples, still brown above his square brow. “So what are your plans?” he asks, turning stiffly to Alex. Over the years Teddy has had several vertebrae fused, his shoulder joints replaced, both hips and both knees. He is the bionic, multi-million-health-care-dollars man.
Alex glowers into his lager. “What plans? I gave up ten years of my life to keep Dad alive. And what happened? He died. In my arms. I told him, ‘It’s okay to let go, Daddy. I’ll take care of Mom.’ And there is no way on God’s green earth I will ever go back on that promise.” He peers at Teddy with piercing blue-gray eyes. “You’re not a Buddhist, but even Christian—”
“I know. But she doesn’t need a three-bedroom house anymore.”
John chuckles, his hand wrapped around his glass of Grey Goose on ice. Alex’s eyes narrow. “It is the only home I have ever known. After I came back from college, when I had that nervous breakdown—”
“You had a bad trip is what you had,” John says.
“—I could not tell the difference between dreams and reality. I was so dysfunctional, I wanted to have myself committed. The shrink wouldn’t do it. He wanted to put me into rehab. I was not addicted. I never took LSD again after that tab you gave me.”
“Oh, so it’s my fault.”
“Mom and Dad were there for me,” Alex says. “No one else.”
“You never skimped on the mescaline,” John says.
“Mescaline is not LSD, and you know it. When my marriage fell apart—because that bitch told me the baby for which I’d given up my life to marry her at the tender age of nineteen wasn’t even mine—”
“Tender age,” John says. “You were never tender.”
“—I suffered from clinical depression. Every time I needed a job and the economy tanked—Mom literally begged me to come home. I’d be homeless on the streets if it weren’t for that house, living in my car, if I can keep it—”
“Mom and Dad bought you that car.”
“I loaned Pop the money for it,” Teddy says.
“How else was I supposed to drive back from California? I made it back in three days.
Then my knees went out—a consequence of lifting Dad—he weighed two-hundred pounds! Even Mom weighs two-hundred!”
“And you’re three-hundred fifty,” John says.
“Well, how was I to exercise with two defective knees? And on-call inside a sick-room for twenty-four/seven. Thank God I had health insurance—then—though Cobra cost me nearly a thousand bucks a month. Depleted my savings, nor do I have any health insurance now.”
“Not to mention the money to take care of the house,” Teddy says. “The bathtub—”
“That bathtub is leaking. I’ll get it fixed. The tiles have to be removed. And that takes money, and I just have to find a plumber who won’t rob me.”
“That’s my point,” Teddy says. “The upkeep is—”
“Mom says that house is the cheapest place for us to live. The mortgage was paid off in 1976.”
“Taxes must be five-hundred a month.”
“What can you rent these days for five-hundred a month? I’d be homeless—”
“You don’t need three bedrooms,” Teddy says. “All the boxes—”
“Those boxes are from deliveries of medical supplies—”
“—and the junk mail on the table—”
“Where am I supposed to get the time to go through it, to file what I need—”
“That’s what I mean. You use only the living room and kitchen, two bedrooms. One of the bedrooms you can’t even use because it’s full of empty boxes, soda cans full of cigarette butts—”
“You’ve been going through my things!” Alex says, rising from the stool.
“No,” Teddy says. “Calm down. Aggie went in there looking for a vacuum. She’s been cleaning ever since we got here. Haven’t you noticed?”
“What I noticed is you want to kick me out, that’s what I noticed. To sell the house and take the money, put Mom in a nursing home, and leave me on the streets.”
“That’s not true, Alex.”
“Look who’s paranoid and abusive now,” John says, and he quotes a saying attributed to the Buddha: “You will not be punished for your anger; you will be punished by your anger.”
“Shut up, Johnny,” Alex says.
John stands up too, Teddy still sitting between him and Alex. “We were having a philosophical discussion,” he says, weaving in place and slurring the multi-syllabic words.
“Well, don’t let me stop you,” Teddy mutters, and he takes a gulp of his Flying Fish.
“Dad was ninety,” John says. “Mom could live another ten years without even trying. The question is: how do we live the next thirty-forty years, let alone the next forty minutes?”
Teddy shrugs. “Aggie and I are busier now than before we retired.”
“Yeah, I know, you’re a deacon in that church you converted to for Agrippina. I know as much about Catholicism as the Buddhism Alex thinks he turned me onto.”
“I did turn you on!”
“Not to mention Hinduism, Taoism, Judaism, Mormon, and Christian Science. Not Islam. I never got into Islam. And you know what? I am as much a believer as you are. More so. Though you could argue that anyone who follows the rules as much as you do, Teddy, doesn’t have to believe. But I believe, brothers! I believe with all my heart. I just don’t approve.”
“Of what?” Teddy asks.
“This shit-ass world God created.”
“What about all the greenery you were gushing about this morning?” Alex asks. “How green it is on the east coast, how beautiful—”
“What about your daughter?” Teddy asks.
John’s brown eyes darken. “You don’t see her here at her grandfather’s funeral, do you? I haven’t heard from her in six months. Not since that bitch I divorced convinced her I did something she was too young to remember.”
“She what?”
“That’s not the point. The point is I’m willing, have been willing, to drag on as long as Mom’s alive, though that could be another fifteen, twenty years. Then I will respectfully return unto God what is God’s, and—” He picks up his glass, drains it, and throws it onto the floor. Glass and ice skitter across the sparsely populated linoleum.
“Hey!” the bartender shouts, running down his side of the bar. “You’re outta here!”
John laughs and teeters, one hand holding onto the bar. Alex grabs his arm. “You can’t talk like that.”
“I can’t?” John shakes Alex’s hand off his flabby bicep. “Why not?”
“Let’s go,” Teddy says, taking John’s other arm.
John reels.
“Steady there, cowboy,” Teddy says. He looks at Alex. “How many did he have?”
Alex shrugs. He pulls a few bills out of his pocket and leaves them on the bar. “I’m sorry, guy,” he says as the bartender scoops them up, glowering.
“Let’s get him—where’s he staying?” Teddy pushes open the heavy door. “Where’d you park?”
“I’m not sick,” John slurs. “I’m heartsick. No. It’s my head. I’m headsick. Brain fever. That’s what I’ve got. Brain fever.”
“Do you have a fever?” Alex asks.
John wrenches his head away from Alex’s palm. “How do we know you kept Dad alive? Maybe you killed him. Maybe he would be alive right now if you’d let Teddy turn him over to professionals.”
Alex releases John’s arm. “Do you know what goes on in nursing homes? Dad never even had a bed sore until he was in the hospital. Maybe you killed him. Look at the list: In high school I found you in your room, blood draining from your wrists; you dropped out of college with one semester left. Who does that? When I was married, trying to make a life for myself with two jobs and college, Mom and Dad used to come into the record store to beg me to get you out of your room. And what did you say you did to your own daughter?”
“You killed him!” John shouts. “You killed him for the money.”
“What money?”
“The money you’re not going to get unless you kill Mom too.”
Alex swings the palm with which he’d tried to feel John’s forehead and hits his brother’s cheek with a resounding smack.
“Whoa!” Teddy pushes John away before John manages to get his own hand into Alex’s face, and John’s wobbly legs give out under him.
“I can’t do this,” Teddy says, flailing both arms. “I’ve got two artificial shoulders.”
Flailing his own arms, Alex walks to his SUV, opens the door, gets in and starts the motor. Let Teddy do what he wants with the three-hundred-pound weight on the tarmac, see how it feels.
Alex negotiates the streets he learned to drive when he was sixteen, sedans and SUVs stampeding down the two-lane roads like cows driven to slaughter. He almost wishes the drinking had killed his brother before it could torment his parents. And then he feels guilty. He loves his brother. His parents taught him that friends would come and go, but he would always have his family. His father worked day and night to keep them in a nice, suburban house. Well, actually, it wasn’t much of a house, but the neighborhood was full of kids then and working parents, and the schools drew more and more professionals into the tract. His mother came home every day at five-thirty and cooked, cleaned, stayed up until midnight ironing their father’s shirts. The conflict between him and John and their father had to do with the war, spirituality, and social change, not his absence or his obvious preference for their older brother. Teddy’s I. Q. was the highest of all three, and if he hadn’t turned out to be such a conservative materialist, he might have done something with his PhD.
Alex and John were the spiritualists in the family. To get John out of his room, Alex took him to the Philadelphia headquarters of a famous maharishi, a Tibetan lama, and a Japanese roshi, looking for the truth he had heard would set them free. Then John got a job and Alex got his girlfriend pregnant, or so she’d said, and moved out to be a father, or so he’d thought, before John married Clarice and got her pregnant out of jealousy for both his brothers, Teddy’s daughter always their parents’ first grandchild and favorite.
Alex lights a cigarette and draws in the wish that he could get John into a monastery, a Buddhist one. He wishes he could check into a monastery himself, any denomination. But he’d tried, back when he was forty and between jobs and wishing he had followed his heart when he first fell in love with God. A priest told him he was meant for the world. What does that mean? Meant for the world. This world that John says he does not approve of. Well, it’s Samsara, that’s the truth, Maya, not our real home. But he’s in it, and he can’t get out of it—until his mother dies.
As he negotiates the mind-boggling lanes that were supposed to improve a traffic circle he’d loved tearing around when he was a teen, he remembers a show he watched years ago when he was out of work in California. A baby chimpanzee had lost its mother. Though rescue workers tried to give it the affection and attention it had lost when Liberian bushmeat hunters had killed its mother, it grew thin and died. Tears run down Alex’s face as he remembers thinking at the time: when Mom goes, I go.
“What are you watching?” his girlfriend asked, coming into the room on her way out the door to sun herself at the apartment complex’s pool. “Are you crying? You’ll get a job. Don’t worry. Why don’t you go to Home Depot and ask them if they’re hiring? You like to help people. It would only be temporary.”
He’d be better off, he knows, if he had a wife to support him. But that girlfriend had needed his income to make the rent. If he had children to care for him the way he’d cared for his own father, he would not be alone. But how was he to know if any child was his? Fool me once, he thinks. When that California girlfriend told him she went off the pill, something about the risk of cancer, or some other bullshit, he moved back to New Jersey for the first time. He didn’t love her. He’d only moved in with her because he couldn’t stand to live with his brother anymore—John had gotten the Silicon Valley job even before Alex had applied for the product management position. He’d been sleeping at her place anyway, and it was a luxury complex, a lot of fun. It would be a pity if she had to move—which she did, he heard, not long after he moved out. He was nothing more a meal ticket for her. She had no spiritual life. And there was no way he was going to be duped by another girl into marrying to give a baby a father.
As he drives down the highway, lined with strip malls, to the tract in which he grew up and moved back to, he is thinking about the bodhisattvas who gave away not only their material possessions but even their families. He’d give away his family in a heartbeat. Except, of course, his parents. How is he going to live without his father? As for his brothers, what good were they? They never helped. The bodhisattvas gave away their friends too. He has no friends. When he ran out of money, everybody stopped calling. One friend told him, when he’d asked, “It’s depressing to talk to you.” Well, he is depressed. He has to be true to his reality. Those bodhisattvas even gave away pieces of their own bodies. He had done that, destroying his knees, going without sleep, putting on two-hundred pounds on the meat and potatoes, bread and ice cream that was the only thing he could get his parents to eat. Bodhisattvas sacrifice their own well-being to save others. They recognize their incarnations as illusory, the earth not their real home. Their reality is eternal, without thought or individuality. So why not give everything but your soul?
But what if there is no soul? What if this illusion is the only thing he has? If making love to beautiful women, traveling all over the world to sell more products than any other employee in the history of the corporation—until the company went under in spite of his efforts—if all that was an illusion, why did it feel so empty when it was gone? If sacrifice, like the crucifixion of Christ, is supposed to bring joy, resurrection and freedom from sin, why does he feel so unhappy?
He turns onto the street he remembers playing in, outside with his friends until the sun set every summer night. Thanksgivings and Christmases had lit up the yellow split level he pulls up to, birthdays and Easters. Every afternoon his brothers, home from high school and junior high, waited for him to walk home from the elementary school around the corner so they could ambush him and beat him into terrified submission. Maybe John is right: it is not worth it to go on in a world in which children could be brutally raped—a world that does not care for its elderly. If the world doesn’t care, why should he?
Mom would be asleep. He’d sit up and have a cigarette. In the morning, he’d give her a cup of coffee, make her one of his Egg-Beater omelets. They’re healthy; he packs them with vegetables. John is staying across the street with John Carlucci, the high school friend who gave Alex that acid. So Alex doesn’t have to worry about putting John to bed or getting him up in the morning to make his flight. John is sick. What did he say? His brain? Fever? If only John would let Alex get him off the booze, cook healthy for him, put him on an exercise regimen, they might get along, the way they had when they were both spiritual explorers in Philadelphia and San Francisco. Alex would do it too. He would go back to California, again, get John into detox, and clean his apartment. After, that is, their mother is gone. But he can’t bear to think about his mother’s death. What will he do? He’s too old to work, too old to date—read “get it up”—too old to start his own family, that’s for sure. His mother is his family. And he knows that if he could just get Johnny to stop drinking, he would stop this talk about cashing in his ticket. Johnny would live. He would never be a bodhisattva, never be enlightened. But he would live.