It’s good to be out here with you
(or Death is God)
Her brother’s standing in front of the bathroom mirror and she has to wait for him downstairs. It’s a joke — and always the same. He avoids being too early to any occasion and the possibility of himself maybe having to wait for something or someone. So once again he takes his sweet ass time to make sure he is the anticipated party in the upcoming congregation of his sister and him. He actually just started brushing his teeth this very last minute.
The brother lets go of the brush in his mouth and strikes a pose. He puffs up and thrust a nonexistent superhero-chest outward. Then in quick contrast he shoves his head back creating a triple-chin and sticks his belly way out under his t-shirt. With a horrid duckface, crooked lips and one eye slightly more closed than the other, he looks at his own reflection. Da capo! Super hero pose, ugly fat face, repeat. All of this, while his sister’s yawning her jaw loose down in the living room. He kind of dreads hanging out with her. It can get pretty real. That’s probably why, he commits only half-heartedly to his oral hygiene.
The sister watches TV and is getting antsy. There’s a documentary on, something about public transportation with a shot of a young girl looking out of the big window and chewing on her headphone cables. The sister too starts grinding her molars with a phantom cable between them. Then she hums the synth-part of “Baby’s On Fire”, as her glance glides away from the screen and drifts along the cupboards of their parents’ dusty living room. She shakes her head at some misshapenly old-timey painting of the home town full of hunters and scoffs at the horrible family photo right next to it. Without realising it, she unintentionally folds her arms just like her father does in the photo. He always was so distant to her; wasn’t there supposed to be this special father and daughter bond? She cracks her neck. Or maybe it’s because she doesn’t take after any of her parents in regards of looks. She stands up, walks over to the photo, looks the the family faces over and thinks: “It must feel like having given birth to a total stranger.”
On a desk bills and mail are piling up and the sister tips over a calendar leaning there, without a reason really. One of the smaller piles she pokes at as well, but it remains stable. There’s this figurine she or her brother had made for their parents in kindergarten. It looks depressingly bad. Smirking about herself being this little troll with all these little troll thoughts, she takes a really nice fountain pen off the table. It wanders in the pocket of her jacket, the pressed but delighted expression on her face seems to say: “I can’t believe it, why?! I don’t even have ink for it. It’s mine now, I love this!”
She returns to wondering why her brother’s tardy. He probably doesn’t want to see her. She always found him odd. Although he doesn’t steal fine office supplies from the family. Was she actually the weird one and the world never had a chance to treat her any differently? Hypnotised she stands in front of the stereo. While staring at knobs, here comes the usual introvert-routine: First she slowly begins to put herself down, she, who’s an extraordinarily lovable person, sincere, heartfelt and all those sorts of adjectives. She relives all the different times, she was wrong, weak and uncool to someone. How she can turn shit-scared of life, of anything and of nothing, in the blink of an eye. Just like her mom. And then, as always, the head shaking commences and all those prickly thoughts swirl into a confusing milkshake of unsubstantiated self-hate in her mind. She is smart and reflects on stuff. So she fully knows how self-deprecating she’s being. Another flaw ! Oh, it’s too easy. The finale of this classic spiral of unhappiness is undiluted apathy. She just turns grey and caves in on herself, into a docile aversion against herself being so broken, messed up and — worst of all — realising every damn bit of it. So many miles traveled in only a few moments. Still this fucker’s not done in the bathroom.
The brother still in front of the sink grins uncannily wide and thinks right into his own mirrored eyes: “Of course we would want to have extra healthy pearly white teeth. We want to look attractive to our potential owners, don’t we!” This makes him feel quite the cool edge-lord. He nods: “We are all just owned by something.” He had heard that somewhere. Not a new thought. He almost remembers that and how this was in actuality a bit of a cliche observation, but doesn’t. Instead of pondering what being owned could mean, for himself, for others, how to change things, he continues brushing, even over his tongue. Hard and loud strokes, intense enough to be distracted from the notion of being unoriginal.
He freezes, slowly draws closer to the mirror and then inches the toothbrush down his throat until he starts to gag. He freezes again, resets and does the it again. A short snippet of radio music blares from downstairs and it startles him; okay, session’s over, he snapped out of it. Whatever it was. After a quick rinse, he grabs his sweater and leaves this special chamber of self-sanitation and intimacy of the mind.
The volume button on this stereo’s ramshackle. The sister forgot that fun fact about the parental home, so while innocently playing with FM-channels it turned out to be set way too loud. Enough, she points the remote, using it to turn off the TV and chucks it on the couch-cushion. In a moment of common annoyance it bounces off from the armrest and falls on the floor behind the furniture. No way, the sister’d pick that up, physics be damned for embarrassing her like that.
She hears the brother skip down the staircase, who then takes the last pommel of the handrail with a tired leap just as he used to as a fucking kid. The sister really wants to leave the house: “Is the bakery down by the park still any good? Should be open by now.”
“Sorry for taking so long,” he says.
Fuck off. She cracks a fake smile: “Oh, I didn’t mind.”
“The bakery? I don’t know. Bad memories.”
“Really, what?”
“You know, I think I got in a fight there on my way to school or something…,” he drifts off.
“Oh, damn. How… ? So, no to the bakery?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I got molested there.”
“That’s… I can’t tell if you’re kidding.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?! Maybe you got molested?”
The brother plays coy: “I just feel bad about the place. Children forget stuff!”
The sister tries to stay diplomatic: “Look, all I know I want some coffee. You are talking shit, right?! …don’t you like the walk down there? I do. …seriously though, are you for real?”
“Sorry, no, nooo. I was just playing around with dumb thoughts. I mean there are people who suddenly out of nowhere flash back to horrible forgotten memories of their past, of their childhood, after having lived half an oblivious life.”
She shrugs and regrets wanting to spend time with her brother immensely: “You don’t always have to say things out loud the second you think of them.”
He continues and kind of laughs: “I know! No-no-no, man. Dumb! It was just something that popped in my mind.”
The brother always likes catching people off guard and making them uncomfortable. An easy way to feel superior, and fast. Their mom used to be very gullible about stuff like that. He hums: “Some fun, just some fun… I did get beat up near the bakery a few times though.”
Already it’s a complete train wreck of a sibling-hangout. But he isn’t finished: “Hey, this whole thing with Mom’s lungs. Don’t you think it’s a bit over-exaggerated.” He sits down on a step.
“She has trouble breathing. I don’t think she’s faking any of that.”
His hands downplay: “No, no, of course, I worry too. But she sounded pretty okay back at the hospital, and yeah, no, I get that. But why does Dad start to dole out the savings as soon we get in from the hospital yesterday. That was a tad dramatic and inappropriate, don’t you think? Is there more about to happen?! He isn’t sick, is he?”
“Dad probably got infected with Mom’s constant worrying. I don’t think there’s a deeper reasoning behind it, just average shitty or rusty communication skills. He’s healthy, I think. It’s more like manners, ‘the right thing to do’ acting like an old-school head of the family. He wants to show he takes care of us, the provider has to, you know, it’s all stern and hard-headed. But I don’t know…” the sister explains almost chuckling, while putting on her dirty tennis shoes, and a beige coat she has committed to but doesn’t like. They are both part of the downplaying the situation.
He sluggishly slides of the steps and walks to the dresser: “So bakery?”
“Yeah, come on, I want to hear more unfunny spiel from my brother.”
“Felt like a panicky reaction, you know. Tell us what’s up or shut up. This vague shit, it’s not for me. Dad’s behavior made me want to leave and stay away from the whole thing,” he accentuates with tightening the knot of his boot’s laces. Those shoes are slick and shiny, just like his hair — everything in-between is as bland as it can get.
“Then do. Maybe it’s for the best.”
“Let’s see how this whole thing is going to shake out.”
She opens the house door and they cross the threshold, setting out on their first walk as siblings since they’d been minors, decades ago.
The blue sky is always up there, even behind the thickest layers of clouds and fog. That’s part of an online meditation guide the sister recites in her head as she looks at the bad weather. A chilly wind moves the treetops along the dirt road they walk on away from the street their parent’s house is on.
“How’s your lady? Together for five years or so?” the sister asks. She actually doesn’t want to know and the brother doesn’t respond at first.
“Cockballs, it’s cold!” he shakes his head, no. Then he smirks and starts talking without looking at his sister: “You know, on a day like today me and Dad were headed this way. And Anna’s little kid was there too, we looked after her, I guess. It must be maybe five years ago... And we were walking to the cemetery because of some special holiday. I forgot. I had brought my vaporizer and took some drags, strolling, totally chilled, while talking to Dad about tree bark colors and how I never remembered trees names and stuff.”
The sister looks at her giggling brother and puts on a cool face. She gives off a cute sigh of disappointment: “What, come on?”
“Talking to the kid at gran’s grave, about how people die and then there are bones under the earth… it was so surreal but at the same time it felt really right. Life lessons.”
“Poor Dad. Mocking him like that.”
“What?! He didn’t know what was going on. He doesn’t know about vaping and my weed. It was a relaxed situation and I didn’t make fun of anyone.”
“He didn’t know… maybe he did and you confounded him or he was respectful, which you weren’t. Waving it in front of his nose like that. Getting away with something. Yeah, I don’t know. It feels mean, your cheeky game. If he picked up on it or not, anyway it is a dick move.”
The brother, blindsided, can’t understand how she ended up with making him feel bad. When I was just telling this awesome story of getting stoned alongside the father and shepherding children into the world of existentialism and death!
“It wasn’t some game. We were spending time with each other, I was a little high, and more in the moment. So even more bonding could happen.”
“Look, I don’t care and didn’t want to make a thing of it. Just don’t tell me stuff like that.”
After a cynical laughing sound: “Okay, I won’t! Wasn’t aware of it though, that I told you ‘stuff like that’.”
The sister remembers this really terrible evening at her place. A single’s apartment, meaning she was alone as customary. She smoked the tiniest of joints and after the first few drags plus coughing, she immediately was convinced of being too high. The flood gates opened right away. She started freaking out sitting on her kitchen’s floor, checking her pulse and improvising breathing techniques. She took a hot 20-minutes-shower, which can and did have the reverse effect on a system with poor circulation, meaning she got even more woozy and uncomfortable — especially when there’s mostly steam left to breath in the shower cabin and not too much oxygen. So she got light-headed and prolonged the panic-attack. It was a mild one, but really soured her on cannabis overall. The true animosity of this walk with her brother is about something different.
If she shared her bad experience, right now, the brother after a short pause would confess his own issues and panic attacks he has been suffering from. He has them kind of under control, but they can be triggered by getting high. So instead of finding common ground and an empirical bond, doubling down on his rudeness comes more naturally to him: “What’s going on with you? You’re being a nag.”
“I love weed, but it seems to make you a bit dull.”
“Fuck off, sis. Don’t be dumb.”
“Dick.”
“The kid asked about the blood of the dead, right there at the graves. And where the blood went, the bones and all that. It was kind of… special. “
“I’m sure, scaring kids feels very special.”
The sister heard the tone she uttered that last part in and how arrogant it sounded. Again she hated herself. The blood talk took the sister’s mind right to her menstruation cap, she’s been using over night. How it bops around in the pot of water, when she boiled it out after usage. She shudders, remembering and experiencing low blood pressure at the same time, paired with the nasty gusts of wind. Those are loud, so the brother speaks up: “I wasn’t scaring it, I confronted it with real shit. I treated it like an adult, as you should. Dad stood there, didn’t say a thing. It was fine.”
The sister sniffles and pulls up her shoulders.
He squints: “Are you shivering, because I am so intimidatingly right or because you’re so dumb.”
The sister takes the highroad: “You know, I don’t mind being dumb, if that means I know how to treat important people in my life right. You know how you meant it, others might not. Your whole loveable asshole schtick isn’t so airtight as you might think. Things aren’t always like you build them up in your head, you damn messed-up troll — Jesus, I remember those woods. Why are they so small?!”
They’ve arrived on a small hilltop and look over some ugly farm buildings behind the mentioned forrest. Both siblings have medium long hair, both are equally annoyed by it flapping in their faces. The brother decides to entirely ignore his sister’s comments and their accuracy. He changes the register of his voice: “They may be smaller, they built a lot of warehouses around her. But probably also because we remember it back from when we were kids. Did you know that this area was bombed and over there… there, probably thousands of soldiers died.”
“I heard about that, yeah,” the sister nods.
He cocks his neck as if he wanted a different reaction: “People around here love that story, it’s so patriotic, martyrdom and all that.”
“It sucks.”
“Yeah, well. Stuff like that defines what home and homeland means for some,” he continues in this odd schooling tone.
“You can tell what kind of people those are. The right’s definition of homeland is a lie. I love this country! I love it, its traditions and quirks and I love it despite its nationalism and narrow-minded people.”
“Uh juicy,” he interjects sarcastically and kind of wants to shoot down his sister’s idealistic rant: “Of course it sucks that old stuffy dudes sit on this whole ‘I love my country’-credo and make you feel reluctant to say the same, so you don’t ideologically fall in line with them. Who wants to show solidarity with assholes? Who cares, where you’re born?”
The sister starts walking slightly ahead: “I do. It matters. I hate it. The whole thing. Because the base discrepancy seems to be exclusion or sharing.”
“Huh, you mean, they define themselves over who and what they are not, especially not foreigners? And you talk about sharing the stuff you like about this country, with everyone.”
She only nods. On point, brother. The brother grins smugly: “I guess… You know what would be fun? A deepfake video of one of those hate spouting populist fucks doing the speech from ‘The Great Dictator’.”
“What?” she asks indifferently.
“You know it? Charlie Chaplin makes a speech for the first time in transitioning silent film history and it’s a goodie!”
“No.”
“It’s a classic. He’s playing this Hitler-pastiche and there’s a switcheroo and some normal guy gets behind the podium in the whole Führer-outfit and surprises the whole world with this genius rant of pure love. He fucking crushes it with the greatest, most life affirming, morally critiquing, goodness praising and allover awesome speech ever. He unites humanity! It’s all about the potential of humans and solidarity. And I thought, making a modern fear monger speak like that, with face scanning, CGI-deepfake-tech, you know… it’d be trolling but with a super-positive message. ”
“Okay.”
“That’d be funny, right?”
“A funny prank.”
“Yeah, just funny.”
“I was constipated the other day and started singing ‘Let it go’ on the toilet,” the sister narrates dead pan stare. The brother’s eyes widen, then his smile.
“Did you now?”
“Oh yeah, and it helped.”
He is holding it together, just about: “Did it?!”
The sister fights a whiff of a smile in the corner of her mouth: “It started with a long fart. You know, one of those that are just a long windy wafting sound.”
“Mhm…” he is almost breaking.
“I like to imagine, that’s what ghosts sound like when they speak,” she imitates a spooky wind-sound saying “brother”. Burst. They both share a sincere laugh. The brother has to follow up with a joke: “Do you want to know what it feels like to have a foreskin?”
“Can’t imagine that, and I don’t. But go ahead.”
“It feels pretty much like when you wiggle your toe through a hole in your sock.”
“What?!” It’s a delighted squeal.
“You started with the poop jokes.”
The sister smilingly dismisses that, shakes her head “no” and points with her finger towards the bakery they were headed for. She combines her big beautiful smile with a tiny frown: “We should visit home more often, together. See each other more. I know it sounds like a drag, but it’d be good for everyone, us, us two too.”
The brother curbs the smile: “And then they put you down about work or how long you took for that school thing.”
“They don’t mean it.”
“Sure, they do. When they nitpicked every little thing you tried for the first time. Made you feel, like you’re not good enough. I heard that shit. Cruel.”
“Some of their expectations were really weird and specific.”
“Why do you let them take advantage of you all the time. Still? They’re low level abusive. Do you like it? Feeling like an idiot? Feeling bad because you are never good enough for your parents?!”
“You are abusive, dude.”
“Where do you think I got it from? Our family is hopeless.”
“No, it’s not, that’s the point. I want to at least try and stay positive. We gotta be there for family, for others and foster behavior like that — rather than cynically destroying every flicker of good intent.”
The brother still wants to keep the dumb jokes going: “Which road was it again, the one paved with good intentions? How did that go? Look, I really don’t want to be with people, who are exactly as narrow-minded as you mentioned before. Sorry!”
“Obviously your priority’s to stay comfortable.”
“That way at least I can decide. I won’t let them nag and grumble me until I give in to something I never wanted. We all should fucking ignore toxic relationships like that, the emotional vampires, cut them out and keep away from them.”
“‘Emotional vampires’ is exactly an expression somebody would use, who can’t even fathom a different way of living together, a better society. One, in which people help each other and stand together. All this baggage and insecurity is gone as soon you are in a strong group of united people. You explained the key problem of how people think about ‘home’ so well. Now you position yourself along with the ‘excluders’.”
“How can you be sooo obsessed with made-up hippie concepts about shit? That’s not how real life works.”
“Come on, I won’t let you make me feel bad about trying to be close to others, Mom and Dad and you…” The sister slows down her pace. She wants to keep this harsh turn in their conversation from possible bystanders in the bakery.
“They will make you feel bad about trying every time. And maybe you want that, because you’re such a pity party girl.”
“What does that even mean?”
“You know!”
The brother’s mind jumps to this situation with his girlfriend. They were lying in bed and she told him all these terrifying stories, about a time she had been harassed by a co-worker. He always gets so angry, when he hears about stuff like that. It’s in the past and she is over it. She simply wants to share and connect. He then asks himself, for what though? When he reacts , it’s always too “invasive”, “controlling” or he’s a “bad listener”. He doesn’t get the masochism of being the shit-bucket. Letting yourself be filled up with other people’s crap until you feel just as bad. It’s not practical, not logical. Why the fuck won’t anyone allow themselves to be fixed? They need to be passive and ignorant.
His girlfriend told him about being touched by this creep at a work party, when she was drunk and how she didn’t do anything about it, not in that moment and not in the years following. It was infuriating. For him, is what he thought.
And again, if he shared all of this with his sister, right now, a real chance of profound connection could emerge. The sister had enough gross encounters with guys and knew too many stories of friends about the same sort of thing. She feels similarly about inaction just as her brother, but also would be able to tell him about the therapeutic worth of confiding in loved ones. About how practicality isn’t always the only and best way of coexistence. But the brother doesn’t share any of his thoughts, of course. After a pause he continues quite viciously: “Why would you actively expose yourself to other people’s shit. You can’t get enough of it.”
“Calm down, why not engage with people who suffer. Especially if it is people close to you?”
“Because being told about suffering brings suffering.”
“Isn’t that an incredibly selfish way of thinking?”
“But it’s true! Listening to hurt people fucking hurts.”
“Do you even listen to yourself?”
Again he feels littled by his big sister: “All of your idealist bullshit, that’s just stories, stories you tell yourself to make you feel like being on ‘the good side’.”
“I never said there are ‘sides”. You keep trivializing everything. And of course, I tell myself stories, we all do.”
“Yeah, stories are good, good to make us feel in this or that way. But it’s not about what they are about, it’s about what they affect.”
The sister tries not to shut the bakery’s door aggressively, but fails. A stoic old clerk-lady behind the counter starts eyeing them. The siblings awkwardly stand in the corner acting as if they were still deciding what to order, but really were just too deep in this argument snowballing into philosophy, semantics and plain old pretentiousness. How did it get so competitive, although both seemingly are on the same side.
The sister asks: “How can you say that? It does matter what all our stories are about, very much so, almost all of the time. Something can only resonate, when it’s not true and substantial. It cannot be just anything. To humans everything is a story. Only we lost the ability to share them, celebrate each other’s stories. We lost all those ideals and higher meaning, that used to fuel humanity. It’s really not bullshit.”
“See, so it is about how and what these stories affect,” he steamrolls in for a second. The sister closes her eyes to evade the heckling and says: “It’s really about fear!”
As she says that she gets goosebumps. “Don’t you see how all our definitions, made-up systems and social dynamics are in the end always based on fear? Laws against the fear of fellow people, art and culture against the fear of nothingness, religion against the fear of death…”
The lady at the counter seems to be listening now and wags her nostrils at the sister’s last words, who goes on in her monologue: “Insecurity, shame, how I am scared of not fitting in or being wrong in some way. The whole patriotism-nationalism thing from before… think about it. Nations are only stories, and flags are nothing but cover art, borders are fictitious, but we long ago agreed on believing in them, because we were scared and are still. Scared of exile, not belonging. If they threw us out, locked us away, we wouldn’t belong to that or that group anymore. The fear of being left behind by our tribe. So better punch some strangers from another tribe! Power, money, fame, somebody came up with a story, others believed it and made it reality. Why though?? So another guy thought, we gotta get in on that shit! Let’s tell our own story, a different one, a better one, a more righteous one, a truer one. And the fucking clash of stories began. All while finding the greater story should be our goal, the one story for everyone. For people like you, who’re scared of hearing stories of pain, and might result in empathy that in turn hurts as well. For me, because I try to solicit love from my dumb family.”
“Since when are you so preachy?”
“Isn’t much fun, having to listen to some preachy asshole, pontificating all the time, ist it?!“
“Cultures and countries have their own little attributes though. Their own local stories so to say, there’s overlap.”
The sister isn’t on fire, she blazing: “And exactly that’s the problem, because as soon stories like this, regional ones, religious ones or national stories, when they encounter other stories that are different, even if the difference is minuscule, it reveals that they’re just stories. The old rites, the beliefs, the gods and goddesses, the tradition, the ownership of things, the history of some fucking tree trunk, suddenly it’s all unmasked: my belief, their belief, all just a fable created to make things easier, so shit makes sense. So this realization, that many of the important things are not even real and and we don’t have it figured out yet, that brings back old existential fears.”
The brother stares down at his feet, while his sister talks. He remembers how she used to read to him as children and how he was a jerk to her intentionally so many times. Just to feel superior. What she was saying, it makes sense and applies to him as well. Now there wasn’t much he could do, but listen.
The sister glances in a short pause over to the counter and at the stern lady behind it, breaths in and continues slightly quieter: “It’s what we have being talking about before, the woods. I mark my community with a flag, a backstory, a myth of something greater than the individual, to generate unity and solidarity. One essential part of this unification method is the expulsion. To define a group, the easiest and fastest way is to say: ‘Sorry, but this is not how we are, not who we are.’ It needs an implicit belief, that all the other flags, groups, borders and their stories are false and only our’s real. So out of fear and denial of the truth we rather smash others to bits, and with them their stories. Kill the alien story.”
The lady behind the counter drinks a big shot of gross yellow egg-liquor and chimes in: “And all of this insanity, aggression and spreading of fear just to effectively tell ourselves some stories. Stories that ought to take away fear in the first place, the fear of death, fear of all the chaos. Ridiculous really.”
The sister involuntarily clucks her tongue: “Yeah, right.”
With nervous pupils the brother looks from woman to woman mouthing inaudibly: “Fuck me.”
The woman at the counter deeply sighs and complains while she sets up some nice fresh pastry in front of her: “You kids are funny. You always think you are the first to find out this stuff. But all the generations, so many, mature into the same thoughts, repeat the epiphanies as millions did before them. Almost like a sort of arrogance of the youth. That only their journey is special. It can be, of course, because we need new things, on top of the old pile. Making the pile bigger and reach for the stars. But improvement of the world and the self will never work by shutting out the elderly nor others, the ones down there. Yeah, everyone’s scared and everyone’s in such a hurry. Let’s deal with that. That’s a good first step.”
The lady winks, as if she had been saying only light and cute things. The brother has to giggle. The sister is awestruck and also triggered by this lady: “I hope I don’t do that. Shutting others out, I mean.” The brother is more bothered by the implication his thoughts weren’t something entirely unique.
“Of course you are, Sweety. But it’s fine. Hungry for some cake?”
It all becomes a whirl of meaning and nonsense: their mother’s lung-disease, the pragmatic and odd way the father reacted to it, how the sister argues with her brother and what she was saying about stories and fear. She sees the image of some holy person on the bakery’s wall behind the counter.
Religion. Religion’s just another tome of stories, people get bent out shape over, especially when its genuineness is in question. Absurd, how somebody would kill in the name of a religion, in the name of a story that was supposed to take away your fear of god. Isn’t that, what the clerk lady just was saying? Isn’t that irony of the darkest kind? The sister imagines religion being like a film or a comic book, maybe a cheap trashy one even, and over the joy and satisfaction it provides for some, they start hurting others, because the others like a different comic book. That can’t be right.
The sister thinks about her thing with numbers, almost like a superstition. She accepted it as a part of her life, fully aware of the absurdity of it. She thinks in and sees numbers like 3, 5, 7, 13, 23 everywhere. They have become important to her. She will always prefer them over the other numbers, no matter the circumstances. Some have conspiracy theories or horoscopes, but that’s how she deals with the chaos, forces a pattern and a sense into it. That’s her story. Believing by numbers. Goodness and badness in the sister’s life are interpreted on the basis of emergence and frequency of her favourite numbers. That’s how she takes control and finds order. But can it be the wrong order? Was the brother right, and it’s only about the result and how things are affected by the stories we tell ourselves, not by what they actually are saying? 7 might not mean shit. Of course chaos is scary, it means there’s nothing you can depend on and life’s ultimately without meaning.
The brother answers a tad to loud: “No, just some coffee to-go.”
They receive two paper cups and the sister’s lips open silently one or two times before saying: “You think it’s all about the fear of death. What about god?”
The lady smiles.
“Death is God.”
.
The wind outside blows less chilly and the clouds even let through an inkling of sunshine. On the way back the sister and the brother are quiet for a while, then they grin at each other. He sips and swallows: “What was with her?”
“I don’t know, what the hell?! What a weird week.”
“Almost wanted to call an exorcist on you two. Damn!”
“But she was on to…”
The brother feels a short sting. He suddenly misses his girlfriend. He was so mean to her. They had a fight the minute they arrived at his parents’ home, and she ran off to find somewhere in town she could kill time at. The very first time he had brought her with, the same thing had happened. Sometimes he regretted his cruel words right away after saying them and he felt really bad. But his ego wouldn’t let him apologise. It would invalidate the point he wanted to make in the first place, before starting with the verbal jabs. The brother remembers how the old cat, the parents had owned once, had been watching that primal fight years ago. It thought it was a dog, wagging her tail like one and rolling in dirt. A bit dumb. The fight they had had back then was dumber. And the most recent one, he is bitterly regretting by now, even more so. She only showed some sympathy for the brother’s mother and he couldn’t take the sad immediacy of the whole situation. He wasn’t ready to accept, his mom might be really sick and called his girlfriend an idiot. Of course, as you do.
The sister and the brother take a different route back to their parents’ house and pass her car. She places the side of her hand on the driver’s window and looks inside for some magazines she wanted to give her mom. She already carried them inside though. She looks up in the direction of the house: “When I got this car and I came to visit, only to impress Dad with my new motorised independence.”
“Yeah, epic.”
“I stayed for the weekend I think. Everything went so smooth, there was almost no fighting, instead we had some deep meaningful conversations I remember. How we had those crazy sponge brains, when we were little. And generally how kids see the world, how they suck in and digest the bad traits of grown-ups. And then I had this perfect goodbye, a parade of me the neighbours’ kid, the cat and Mom, we walked up to everyone, kissed and said bye. Just the right amount of emotionality. Even the neighbours came out and waved, when I drove off, like in a silly sitcom. Perfect, score ten out of ten on the family-bliss-meter.”
“Maybe they were too tired to bug you. They have gotten old and ran out of steam a little.”
In front of the car the sister holds up the palms of her hands like a holy figure: “No. Just perfect. But then I became concerned, that it must be too good to be true. Nothing’s perfect and so it’d be conveniently fateful for something bad to happen right then. A little bit like: ‘All’s right, I am content and in balance, I could die now — does that mean I might?!’ When I got home, Dad called and told me the cat had been hit by a car and died.”
“That nosy cat. Is that supposed to mean anything, prove anything?”
“No, I just wondered, if I worried the cat’s death into existence.”
“Again with this. You worry like Mom. Pathetic,” it oozes coldly out of her brother.
“Ironic. Now that it would be other people’s turn to worry about her…“
“Stop it!! You saw her, she’s fucking fine!”
”Settle down. By the way, you act choleric like Dad used to.”
“Well, we get stubborn and grumpy with age, in case you didn’t know.”
“You are younger than me. And that’s what Dad used to say. Extraordinary how people just become their parents, not just their quirks and the hairline…”
The brother scoffs: “He never said that.”
“Sure, he did.”
“This understanding-the-family-and-healing-us-all-shit. I don’t think anyone’s appreciating what you do, sis…”
“Jesus, are you really that inconsiderate and egotistical, that a little bit of my effort makes you so uneasy? Mom and Dad can be naive, conservative and all that. Whatever. But they are also nice, joyful, cool even — not the soulless creatures you trying to make them up in your head. What for? You want your distance, alright. And why are you trying to keep me away too? Can I please just be their daughter, and your fucking sister?! For just a moment? Can I please at least try to be nice to them? Or is it just that you didn’t think of it first?”
“All of that shit about stories and fear… that’s it really, isn’t it. You are scared of everything. You are afraid of having an opinion, of listening to me even just a little, of confronting our parents on their bullshit. You can’t cope because Mom’s got a cough... Reality scares you so much, you rather play house and make pretend. Fuck that! Don’t make me the unstable villain in this. You know, I am not surprised you still live alone. How could anyone bear being around a fake person, shitting her pants every time there’s a sincere moment happening in her life. Get a clue, seriously!” The brother wipes off some spittle he generated barking like this.
The sister walks backwards to her car, leaving him standing there but still facing him: “I have been trying to sustain a relationship with you, you, my asshole brother. Why!? I don’t fucking know. You’ve never been a brother to me, you are a brute, mean and have no sense of empathy. You are an imposter, you knw, you can only ape others anyway. Always the smartass, always the corrector. I give up then, okay. Yeah, you are smarter, better than me, I give up, on you, and this. Nice job, you successfully drove me away. You won! Hey! You stole that little bit of warmth and homeliness I had. Yeah, that’s what you are, a thief. So take this day, the walk, the crazy lady at the bakery, all this shit we said, all of it, it’s yours! Have fun with it. ” The sister pulls out the pen she swiped and throws it on the asphalt.
.
A light bulb on the mirror cabinet turns on with a clanging sound. It’s the sister’s small bathroom and she’s propped up on the sink. Weak. She makes faces a little bit like her little brother did this morning. She fills and drinks a glass of water, then pours the leftover back in the drain. The faucet keeps running. There’s a little trick she attempts, by pressing her tongue against the front teeth and blow liquid through the tiny gap between the biggest incisors. She does it, shoots a squirt of water onto the mirror and the rest runs down her chin. Didn’t her brother show her how to do that?
She hates how she always gets defensive and competitive around him. She should be the mature one. He really knows how to get to her. His attitude was rude and it is a big deal how hurtful he spoke to her. No way to sugarcoat it. What’s he trying to succeed? In the end, if something ought to really change, there has to be a break with convention and the old rites. End the repetition. We can’t always expect the adversary to make the first move. The annoying fact is, she loves him. He’s a part of her. We find out who we are by colliding with the ones closest to us, siblings, parents. A character is shaped by interaction with others, by friction. She is scared all the time, it’s true. But it has gotten easier and continues to. The sister feels sad. They were almost having an honest and revelatory encounter. The sister turns off the faucet.
At the parent’s home, the brother kicks off his fancy shoes and avoids the mirror. He greets his girlfriend, who reads the newspaper. They exchange quick hellos and a kiss. She’s arrived not that long ago and missed the fight between the siblings only by minutes. He explains that he was on a walk with the sister. She explains how she decided to read until her boredom goes to sleep. He nods and leaves the room. She isn’t a fan of the family visits, but feels compelled to always come along. The brother tends to really get agitated here in some sort of bipolar frenzy. She can’t handle these Jekyll and Hyde-weekends, but the sick mother’s got her worried. There are issues he should face head on.
The brother spends an hour in the family kitchen not making tea, a wet newspaper, luke-warm water in a cup and some honey on a spoon. He is so tired of his own shit. His dad should come home soon and he dreads what to tell him about the sister.
His girlfriend walks in and touches his neck, massaging it gently. He wants to be dismissive but decides not to be. He hold’s it back like a sneeze. Something else is loosened by that strain: “I had a fight with my sister today. I think that, I don’t know, I wanted to be honest. She is such a goodie– –“
“– –calm down. You have been Mister bossy-pants all day. Quit telling everyone what they are. I tired of it. Let it be, alright?”
“I told her, she was wrong. But probably… I was… What do you think?”
“Hey… Now that’s a first!”
“So?”
“Well, I think… you can get aggressive and steamroll people. And at the same time you are so insecure. So you use people as affirmation objects, manipulate them so long to get the response you want. If you don’t, you call them an idiot, you idiot.”
“Am I really such an egomaniac?”
“You can be. Hey! I’m being straight with you.”
The brother touches his girlfriend’s hand, stroking it, shaking is head but very willingly surrendering to her. She isn’t done: “But you are smart, so it all gets complicated. All…knotted and meta. Just… try not to fucking satisfy your lust for confrontation and competition by jumping on ambushing unsuspecting targets. Like people who love you! We shouldn’t be things you can mine for affirmation and then leave. Give and take. Okay? It’s not so hard, you big baby.”
“Thanks, I’ll remember that …and that you told me. I will.”
His phone beeps.
The brother reads the sister’s text message, which will turn out to be the first of two hours worth of text conversation, full of apologies and bonding on whole other level. He even senses that vaguely as he reads his sister’s words:
“It’s good to be out here with you.”
The brother types hastily: “the walk or waht?”
After a minute or so the sister answers: “Yeah, that too.”
…
(2021.4.21)
