LJ Idol Week 42: Flies
What follows is the best account I can give of the last three times I saw my brother.
The third-to-last time, it was mid-August, and he rang my doorbell. I can still remember what he looked like when I answered. A mirage with the heat-lines from the road all around him.
I said, “Jesus,” and he smiled.
Back then -there are years and years in between these three incidents, you understand, and at that time I couldn’t have been more than twenty-six-looking at him was still like looking into a mirror. Fraternal twins, but identical save for sex. We hadn’t seen each other in seven years.
He asked if he could come in.
I stood out of the way and held the door wider. He came in with his head bowed.
“This is a nice place,” he said. “You aren’t married, are you?”
“No. Working.”
I remember that exchange, and the smirk on his face at that moment. Funny what you hold onto, isn’t it? It’s less clear how we wound up across from each other in the sitting room, as you and I are now, in fact. He sat very like you -leaned forward, hands clasped between the knees. Oh, don’t move…I don’t mean to make you self-conscious..
Anyway: I asked him, “Have you seen Mom and Dad yet?”
“No. I’ve only just…got back.”
“So you’ve been running around with a band of mystics this whole time?”
His hands tightened. “They weren’t mystics.”
I took a packet of cigarettes out of my pocket. He only looked up at the click of the lighter. Frowned.
“Don’t. Those things will kill you.”
“These are Camels. Doctors smoke them.”
He slid forward on his chair then, snatched the lit cigarette from between my lips and stubbed it out on my coffee table.
“I am a doctor,” he said.
I wanted to slap him. I wanted to stand and order him to leave my house. I only straightened my back: “An unfinished Bachelors of Medicine hardly makes you a doctor.”
“Do you know what a degree is? It’s paperwork. I’m a doctor in ways that matter. I may even be the best doctor in the world. Listen to me.”
And he reached forward, and tried to take my hand. I didn’t let him, but he caught my gaze and held it, as surely as if he’d grabbed me physically.
“I’ve finally done it,” his passion shone out of him. “I’ve figured out how to stop death altogether.”
And what was I to say to that?
This time, I did stand. He did too, seemingly unconsciously, like he couldn’t help but mimick me. I tried to exude cold. I tried to put out the fire in his eyes with the ice in mine.
“Before you go, promise me one thing,” I said. His shoulders wilted at the word ‘go,’ but I pressed on. “Don’t bother Mom and Dad with that, if you see them. They’ve gone through enough of that shit with you.”
He didn’t promise. He just left. I found out later that he never showed on their doorstep.
After I closed the door on him, I went upstairs, dug out an old yearbook. Our graduation pictures were there, right next to each other. Smiling the same smile. Even angling our shoulder the same way. With my hair tied back and loose robes, you could barely see a difference at all.
I closed the book, and began the twenty-year wait until his next appearance.
He was right about the cigarettes. In the interim of those twenty years, cancer sprouted in my lungs and spread, like a fungus. In my forty-sixth year, I was bedridden, and hospitalized.
I can see that this surprises you. Yes, I survived, clearly. But I’m coming to that. At the time it did not look as if I were going to pull through. They even put me in what seemed like the ward for the dying. A woman with advanced senility to my left, a recently ‘vacated’ bed to my right. My father was gone by then, and my mother had her own health issues keeping her from visiting. Those days passed as a series of rotating shadows on a beige ceiling.
And then, there he was. Again.
Against all odds, he was still my mirror.
The color had gone out of him, and taken almost every shred of fat with it. Cracked lips protruded from a concave face, and the fever I saw in his eyes was, this time, the same as that in my own.
It was like the fungus inside me -the spores-had blown out my ward window and found him, my poor brother-double, and infected him for the sake of symmetry. Completed the set. I opened my mouth to apologize, or laugh, but neither came. My throat was ash.
He kept looking at my hand, fingers twitching. I thought he wanted to grasp it, and turned my palm upwards. But his fists remained anchored at his sides.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I would’ve come sooner if I’d known.”
Why? But my mouth hung open, empty of words.
He leaned over me then, blocking the sun, tricking my eyes into thinking the room had gotten darker. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I can’t bear to see you like this.”
Quicker than I could see, his twitching hand shot out, snatching something from the air over me. I hadn’t noticed anything there until that moment. I started, blinking up at his closed fist -his knuckles were white-before looking back to his face and seeing the hatred there. It wasn’t directed at me. He was looking at his fist.
Slowly, as if every movement pained him, he uncurled his fingers, and I could see what he’d caught; a fat, black fly, resting in the center of his palm.
I expected the fly to escape, now my brother’s hand was open, but it did not. Instead, every tendon in my brother’s arm tightened. His veins raised, and darkened, and though I could scarcely believe it, the fly…sank into his flesh. Or I should say it was absorbed.
It did not go willingly. It struggled until the last sign of it was swallowed. At that moment all the raised veins shot through with black.
I’d been so transfixed I hadn’t noticed how labored his breathing had become, as if his chest were being crushed. For myself, an incredible lightness came over me, and it just kept getting lighter, until I had to drop my head on the pillow and I span away from that ward. Wherever I went, I stayed there for hours. When I woke, he was gone.
It’s hard to describe that first moment of wakefulness. For the first time in months, I could breathe. For the first time in months it was effortless. Thought I didn’t dare remove the cannula, I knew I didn’t need them. When the medical staff discovered this, they were stunned. They may have spent more money trying to discover what killed my cancer then they did trying to cure it. But the mushroom forest in my lungs was gone, every spore vanished as if blown away by a stiff breeze.
Do you see? Do you see what I’m saying to you?
But there was a price.
The night I woke up without my brother in that ward, I was not the only one there. To my left, lit yellow by a single stained lamp, a handful of people surrounded the shrunken form of the old woman. Doctors and nurses, mostly, but the younger, crying ones must have been family. They sat on either side of her, each clutching one hand, but the woman didn’t seem to feel them. She was staring with her teeth bared at the ceiling, her shallow chest heaving.
I realized, of course, that this woman who’d lain silent beside me for weeks was about to die, and it was polite to feign sleep, to give them what little privacy they had. But one can’t shut off one’s ears, and among the labored breathing and the whispers I heard a sound which made my eyes fly open and my head turn to watch.
It was the sound of a buzzing fly.
I only saw it in snatches, a streak of black against the yellow light, a darting shadow on the faces of the grieving, but it was there. I kept expecting someone’s head to turn, someone’s hand to move, something, but no one acknowledged it. No one, that was, but the old woman. Her milky eyes were no longer just staring, but following it, rolling around in their sockets after its movements. Every time it swooped below the bowed heads of her visitors, her lips would pull back a little further -what I’d taken for a grimace of pain was a grin at its approach.
(Or maybe it was both).
Finally, finally, just when I thought I could take her rolling eyes and grinning teeth no more, her chest slowed, sunk, and at last stopped. One of the doctors took her pulse, muttered something I couldn’t hear. The young girl let her head fall onto her forearms, and shook there.
I was about to turn away, finally excuse myself from the circus of death, when the old woman stirred under her sheets.
With a strength utterly misplaced in her small frame, the woman heaved herself into a sitting position, the blanket falling into her lap. She didn’t look at the people surrounding her. Nor did they look at her. The girl still wept into her arms, and the rest stood with their heads bowed, murmuring, as if she had not moved.
The woman stared ahead, through the doctors, and she raised her arm. It was bone-thin, bruised from disease and needles, but she stretched it out before her as if she were trying to reach into the next life, as if death had passed by and left her behind; her desperation made it shake. At the end of the arm her hand was a claw, curled and gnarled with one finger extended in accusation, summoning, I couldn’t be sure which.
Her eyes were blind, her mouth wrenched open in a howl that would never come. The fly -even fatter than the one that had been absorbed into my brother’s palm-lit on the end of her outstretched finger, and stayed there.
Even from that distance, in that dim light, I could see its distended mouth nudging at her flesh, and that was finally too much. I shrank down into my blankets, covering my head.
But the yellow light cast a shadow through the wool, and I could see the corpse still sitting up amongst the unwary living. One by one they left, and the last out switched off the lamp, and left me alone in the dark with that creature. I shivered under my blankets the whole night. Eventually, the sun rose, and the doctors discovered me and my miraculous recovery. The corpse had been moved.
You only half-believe me, I can see. That’s okay. That’s half more than I expected, and you have every right to be skeptical. Well, I won’t suspend your disbelief for much longer. My story is almost over.
What I’d seen for the first time that night was a sort of communion between the dying and death, and it doesn’t always happen at the brink. Look through my eyes for a day, and you’ll see that people interact with death all the time. When I was allowed back into the world of the living -and they only let me go reluctantly-I saw the way people’s heads turn toward death, the way they flirt with it. They’re not aware of this, of course, any more than the mourners ‘round the old woman’s bed were aware of her. No one sees what I see. Do you know how many times in this interview you yourself have turned toward the buzzing at the door?
Don’t look so alarmed. It’s nothing to worry about. Death isn’t close until they track the sound with their eyes.
But that’s enough about me; you’re here for my brother. My ingenious, broken brother.
I won’t tell you how many years ago that last encounter was. I will say…more than a decade. But I haven’t aged. I may have even gotten younger. My mother finally passed, and I got to be at her side. I married, for whatever that’s worth, and am now divorced. A full life has been lived between what should have been my death and now. But in all that time, I did not see my brother again. Not until just under a year ago.
I was walking the streets of this very city, breathing in the fall air -whatever else I’ve been, I never took my lungs for granted. One doesn’t drown for months on end and then forget it-when a shadow caught in the corner of my eye. I looked and saw someone standing across the street, watching me.
They were tall and wide, so much so that every inch of their brown long-coat seemed to be filled. The seams of it were straining. They wore a hood, and between the shadows and their dark color, I could make out no features. But I was certain they were looking my way; and then we made eye contact, and I could see their eyes. They were huge, black, and wet. Alien. Not human eyes at all.
There was no buzz around this person. Like me, they were silent.
I stepped forward, and they more fell than stepped back. Their movements were erratic, insect-like, at odds with their hulking frame. I understood. I was not to follow.
I stood and watched them turn and disappear down the alleyway, and down some unseen street on the other side. When I crossed and looked where he’d been standing, there was a trail of what looked like oil. But I didn’t follow.
And, to date, that’s the last time I saw my brother.
How do I know it was him? I knew it the moment I saw him. There was no one else it could have been. What he did to me -I guess you could call it a sort of lobotomy-it stands to reason that he did it also to himself. Maybe he was even the first.
No, it’s true I’ve not physically changed. But I…when I looked at him, I saw something that I see also in myself, something I see in the mirror. Because he is my mirror, still. We have the same…inhumanness. Whatever he is outwardly, that’s what I am. Inside.
It WAS him. Of that, I am absolutely sure. Yes.
Have I satisfied your questions? Good. You won’t find him, of course. I don’t know who else he’s ‘healed.’ If any of the claims have stories similar to mine, well…
Now I would like you to leave, please. All of you. One does get so tired of the buzzing.
The third-to-last time, it was mid-August, and he rang my doorbell. I can still remember what he looked like when I answered. A mirage with the heat-lines from the road all around him.
I said, “Jesus,” and he smiled.
Back then -there are years and years in between these three incidents, you understand, and at that time I couldn’t have been more than twenty-six-looking at him was still like looking into a mirror. Fraternal twins, but identical save for sex. We hadn’t seen each other in seven years.
He asked if he could come in.
I stood out of the way and held the door wider. He came in with his head bowed.
“This is a nice place,” he said. “You aren’t married, are you?”
“No. Working.”
I remember that exchange, and the smirk on his face at that moment. Funny what you hold onto, isn’t it? It’s less clear how we wound up across from each other in the sitting room, as you and I are now, in fact. He sat very like you -leaned forward, hands clasped between the knees. Oh, don’t move…I don’t mean to make you self-conscious..
Anyway: I asked him, “Have you seen Mom and Dad yet?”
“No. I’ve only just…got back.”
“So you’ve been running around with a band of mystics this whole time?”
His hands tightened. “They weren’t mystics.”
I took a packet of cigarettes out of my pocket. He only looked up at the click of the lighter. Frowned.
“Don’t. Those things will kill you.”
“These are Camels. Doctors smoke them.”
He slid forward on his chair then, snatched the lit cigarette from between my lips and stubbed it out on my coffee table.
“I am a doctor,” he said.
I wanted to slap him. I wanted to stand and order him to leave my house. I only straightened my back: “An unfinished Bachelors of Medicine hardly makes you a doctor.”
“Do you know what a degree is? It’s paperwork. I’m a doctor in ways that matter. I may even be the best doctor in the world. Listen to me.”
And he reached forward, and tried to take my hand. I didn’t let him, but he caught my gaze and held it, as surely as if he’d grabbed me physically.
“I’ve finally done it,” his passion shone out of him. “I’ve figured out how to stop death altogether.”
And what was I to say to that?
This time, I did stand. He did too, seemingly unconsciously, like he couldn’t help but mimick me. I tried to exude cold. I tried to put out the fire in his eyes with the ice in mine.
“Before you go, promise me one thing,” I said. His shoulders wilted at the word ‘go,’ but I pressed on. “Don’t bother Mom and Dad with that, if you see them. They’ve gone through enough of that shit with you.”
He didn’t promise. He just left. I found out later that he never showed on their doorstep.
After I closed the door on him, I went upstairs, dug out an old yearbook. Our graduation pictures were there, right next to each other. Smiling the same smile. Even angling our shoulder the same way. With my hair tied back and loose robes, you could barely see a difference at all.
I closed the book, and began the twenty-year wait until his next appearance.
He was right about the cigarettes. In the interim of those twenty years, cancer sprouted in my lungs and spread, like a fungus. In my forty-sixth year, I was bedridden, and hospitalized.
I can see that this surprises you. Yes, I survived, clearly. But I’m coming to that. At the time it did not look as if I were going to pull through. They even put me in what seemed like the ward for the dying. A woman with advanced senility to my left, a recently ‘vacated’ bed to my right. My father was gone by then, and my mother had her own health issues keeping her from visiting. Those days passed as a series of rotating shadows on a beige ceiling.
And then, there he was. Again.
Against all odds, he was still my mirror.
The color had gone out of him, and taken almost every shred of fat with it. Cracked lips protruded from a concave face, and the fever I saw in his eyes was, this time, the same as that in my own.
It was like the fungus inside me -the spores-had blown out my ward window and found him, my poor brother-double, and infected him for the sake of symmetry. Completed the set. I opened my mouth to apologize, or laugh, but neither came. My throat was ash.
He kept looking at my hand, fingers twitching. I thought he wanted to grasp it, and turned my palm upwards. But his fists remained anchored at his sides.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I would’ve come sooner if I’d known.”
Why? But my mouth hung open, empty of words.
He leaned over me then, blocking the sun, tricking my eyes into thinking the room had gotten darker. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I can’t bear to see you like this.”
Quicker than I could see, his twitching hand shot out, snatching something from the air over me. I hadn’t noticed anything there until that moment. I started, blinking up at his closed fist -his knuckles were white-before looking back to his face and seeing the hatred there. It wasn’t directed at me. He was looking at his fist.
Slowly, as if every movement pained him, he uncurled his fingers, and I could see what he’d caught; a fat, black fly, resting in the center of his palm.
I expected the fly to escape, now my brother’s hand was open, but it did not. Instead, every tendon in my brother’s arm tightened. His veins raised, and darkened, and though I could scarcely believe it, the fly…sank into his flesh. Or I should say it was absorbed.
It did not go willingly. It struggled until the last sign of it was swallowed. At that moment all the raised veins shot through with black.
I’d been so transfixed I hadn’t noticed how labored his breathing had become, as if his chest were being crushed. For myself, an incredible lightness came over me, and it just kept getting lighter, until I had to drop my head on the pillow and I span away from that ward. Wherever I went, I stayed there for hours. When I woke, he was gone.
It’s hard to describe that first moment of wakefulness. For the first time in months, I could breathe. For the first time in months it was effortless. Thought I didn’t dare remove the cannula, I knew I didn’t need them. When the medical staff discovered this, they were stunned. They may have spent more money trying to discover what killed my cancer then they did trying to cure it. But the mushroom forest in my lungs was gone, every spore vanished as if blown away by a stiff breeze.
Do you see? Do you see what I’m saying to you?
But there was a price.
The night I woke up without my brother in that ward, I was not the only one there. To my left, lit yellow by a single stained lamp, a handful of people surrounded the shrunken form of the old woman. Doctors and nurses, mostly, but the younger, crying ones must have been family. They sat on either side of her, each clutching one hand, but the woman didn’t seem to feel them. She was staring with her teeth bared at the ceiling, her shallow chest heaving.
I realized, of course, that this woman who’d lain silent beside me for weeks was about to die, and it was polite to feign sleep, to give them what little privacy they had. But one can’t shut off one’s ears, and among the labored breathing and the whispers I heard a sound which made my eyes fly open and my head turn to watch.
It was the sound of a buzzing fly.
I only saw it in snatches, a streak of black against the yellow light, a darting shadow on the faces of the grieving, but it was there. I kept expecting someone’s head to turn, someone’s hand to move, something, but no one acknowledged it. No one, that was, but the old woman. Her milky eyes were no longer just staring, but following it, rolling around in their sockets after its movements. Every time it swooped below the bowed heads of her visitors, her lips would pull back a little further -what I’d taken for a grimace of pain was a grin at its approach.
(Or maybe it was both).
Finally, finally, just when I thought I could take her rolling eyes and grinning teeth no more, her chest slowed, sunk, and at last stopped. One of the doctors took her pulse, muttered something I couldn’t hear. The young girl let her head fall onto her forearms, and shook there.
I was about to turn away, finally excuse myself from the circus of death, when the old woman stirred under her sheets.
With a strength utterly misplaced in her small frame, the woman heaved herself into a sitting position, the blanket falling into her lap. She didn’t look at the people surrounding her. Nor did they look at her. The girl still wept into her arms, and the rest stood with their heads bowed, murmuring, as if she had not moved.
The woman stared ahead, through the doctors, and she raised her arm. It was bone-thin, bruised from disease and needles, but she stretched it out before her as if she were trying to reach into the next life, as if death had passed by and left her behind; her desperation made it shake. At the end of the arm her hand was a claw, curled and gnarled with one finger extended in accusation, summoning, I couldn’t be sure which.
Her eyes were blind, her mouth wrenched open in a howl that would never come. The fly -even fatter than the one that had been absorbed into my brother’s palm-lit on the end of her outstretched finger, and stayed there.
Even from that distance, in that dim light, I could see its distended mouth nudging at her flesh, and that was finally too much. I shrank down into my blankets, covering my head.
But the yellow light cast a shadow through the wool, and I could see the corpse still sitting up amongst the unwary living. One by one they left, and the last out switched off the lamp, and left me alone in the dark with that creature. I shivered under my blankets the whole night. Eventually, the sun rose, and the doctors discovered me and my miraculous recovery. The corpse had been moved.
You only half-believe me, I can see. That’s okay. That’s half more than I expected, and you have every right to be skeptical. Well, I won’t suspend your disbelief for much longer. My story is almost over.
What I’d seen for the first time that night was a sort of communion between the dying and death, and it doesn’t always happen at the brink. Look through my eyes for a day, and you’ll see that people interact with death all the time. When I was allowed back into the world of the living -and they only let me go reluctantly-I saw the way people’s heads turn toward death, the way they flirt with it. They’re not aware of this, of course, any more than the mourners ‘round the old woman’s bed were aware of her. No one sees what I see. Do you know how many times in this interview you yourself have turned toward the buzzing at the door?
Don’t look so alarmed. It’s nothing to worry about. Death isn’t close until they track the sound with their eyes.
But that’s enough about me; you’re here for my brother. My ingenious, broken brother.
I won’t tell you how many years ago that last encounter was. I will say…more than a decade. But I haven’t aged. I may have even gotten younger. My mother finally passed, and I got to be at her side. I married, for whatever that’s worth, and am now divorced. A full life has been lived between what should have been my death and now. But in all that time, I did not see my brother again. Not until just under a year ago.
I was walking the streets of this very city, breathing in the fall air -whatever else I’ve been, I never took my lungs for granted. One doesn’t drown for months on end and then forget it-when a shadow caught in the corner of my eye. I looked and saw someone standing across the street, watching me.
They were tall and wide, so much so that every inch of their brown long-coat seemed to be filled. The seams of it were straining. They wore a hood, and between the shadows and their dark color, I could make out no features. But I was certain they were looking my way; and then we made eye contact, and I could see their eyes. They were huge, black, and wet. Alien. Not human eyes at all.
There was no buzz around this person. Like me, they were silent.
I stepped forward, and they more fell than stepped back. Their movements were erratic, insect-like, at odds with their hulking frame. I understood. I was not to follow.
I stood and watched them turn and disappear down the alleyway, and down some unseen street on the other side. When I crossed and looked where he’d been standing, there was a trail of what looked like oil. But I didn’t follow.
And, to date, that’s the last time I saw my brother.
How do I know it was him? I knew it the moment I saw him. There was no one else it could have been. What he did to me -I guess you could call it a sort of lobotomy-it stands to reason that he did it also to himself. Maybe he was even the first.
No, it’s true I’ve not physically changed. But I…when I looked at him, I saw something that I see also in myself, something I see in the mirror. Because he is my mirror, still. We have the same…inhumanness. Whatever he is outwardly, that’s what I am. Inside.
It WAS him. Of that, I am absolutely sure. Yes.
Have I satisfied your questions? Good. You won’t find him, of course. I don’t know who else he’s ‘healed.’ If any of the claims have stories similar to mine, well…
Now I would like you to leave, please. All of you. One does get so tired of the buzzing.