I crawled out at noon like the bug that I was. I’d be starting from zero. I’d be tracking backwards. Seven years ago, what made me think that I knew?
Barbra, shining, twelve feet tall. The survivor who knows there are no forsaken human beings.
§
I see Divine Presence ablaze in the dark of the block, wrote Ka-Tzetnik. I am my own cortège; I am behind my own bumping head.
§
Abigail sat with me on the L-shaped leather couch. My dad was in Florida for a week with his ‘woman friend.’
‘What does that mean?’ I asked my sister. ‘Is he getting remarried?’
‘If he does we’ll be his flower girls,’ Abigail snorted.
Me and my sister clinked glasses full of cheapskate red wine. Abigail had cooked us some kind of soup with kidney beans.
Abigail had blossomed. I knew that word was disgusting. But I just mean she’d become this vital human being.
‘I told Dad I’d remind you to take your medication,’ she said.
I rolled my eyes. She was also a pawn for parental reasons.
‘I know that there is no perfect treatment for schizoaffective disorder,’ Abigail said, taking a deep breath. ‘We know that it afflicts people of all ages, all races, across gender and class lines, we know that there is not one accepted or agreedupon method of treatment, pharmaceutically or therapeutically speaking.’
‘No such thing as a clean exit wound.’ I looked at my sister. I slurped the soup she had made.
‘She meddled with you. I’ll give them that. And for that I’ll never forgive her,’ Abigail said. ‘But I can accept that that’s just me and how I go about things.’
As me and my sister at home drank the same wine that she drank, Barbra remained by the fire in the refugee camp.
Abigail said, ‘When people divorce – which I can totally understand in Mom and Dad’s case – you are supposed to keep the siblings together. That’s not rocket science. Me and you should’ve been on planes together. We should’ve had a schedule, we should’ve had vacations at the same time. Instead, look what happened, I didn’t know who you became. And you ignored me, too. Seven years is a really long time.
‘Mom always told me that you had a “mental condition.” She always said it was good that I was out of the house for all of high school so that there was no, I don’t know, contamination? Look, it wouldn’t surprise me if she used that word, okay? Basically, she didn’t want you to influence me. Which is totally fucked. They are two educated people who both seriously somehow thought that mental illness was contagious.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I think they just didn’t want it for me.’
I thought of a good working family slogan: Bruh’s in your broth.
‘Look, sometimes,’ Abigail said, ‘when I came back to visit you and Dad, you just seemed completely normal to me. Like, you were always reading. You were in school. You had girls over almost every night in the basement. And when you started going out with Ariane, I thought, how can he have a serious “mental condition” if he’s going out with her? Ariane was so fucking smart, she was hot, I liked her so much. But Mom just kept telling me to be careful, to leave you alone. She kept saying, “He’s not the kid I raised.”
‘I’m sorry,’ my sister continued. ‘I’m just telling you, for seven years, I did not really know what to believe.’
My mother’s vision was making me distressed. I did not like my sister’s version of the story either. I wiped my face. I put down the soup.
‘Look,’ Abigail said quietly. ‘I’m angry at them. I’m happy to be right here now, with you.’
Heat swelled into the back of my throat.
‘Like, they both mourn some sort of “good son no more,” which is trash, in my opinion. Both of them somehow think that she was the force that triggered your “change.”’
I nodded in silence. My heat smouldered and spread.
‘And I’ve broken it to them in words that they can understand: no one is able to trigger a mental disorder. It’s no one’s fucking fault. Schizoaffective is pre-existing.’
Trying to swallow, I regarded my sister. Pre-existing forking is the ability to think.
KZ: If you see a boundary, cross it, cross through to the other side.