The Brother I Had

The Brother I Had

I reached over and typed one line and sent it:

"Did you kill Michael?"

The mail icon blinked. A line came back under it:

"No. But I know who did. Basement, nine o'clock."

Eight fifty.

I went down the wood stairs to the basement. The house was dark and cold. The old treads went off one at a time under my weight.

I stopped on the bottom step. Nobody had turned the light on. What light there was came down in strips through the gaps in the floor above.

GhostInk was already there.

He sat on the torn foam mattress stacked in the corner. He sat easy, hands folded and set on his thighs. No knife, no gun, nothing in his hands at all.

He had on an ash-gray work jacket a size too big for him. Dried white paint was still across one shoulder of it, cracked into flakes. He was a little under six feet, thin, and put together harder than thin usually looks.

His skin was pale with gray under it, the skin of a man who had been out of the sun for years. His eyes were a brown dark enough to read as black. In the time it took him to say his first two sentences, he blinked once.

I counted his breathing without deciding to. The shoulder of the ash-gray jacket lifted four times in a full minute. A man sitting still runs 12 to 16. I put it on the cold and the bad air down there and let it go.

I stopped where I was with my hand still resting on the light switch.

"You don't need the light, James."

His voice was low and even and it came out clear. For two years he had been black type on a screen, and nothing in that voice went with it.

"The light off the floorboards up there is plenty for what the two of us have to say."

I pulled the broken wood chair over and sat down across from him. There was less than six feet between us.

I had carried a glass of water down with me and set it on the wood table against the wall. I never picked it up. The furnace in the corner had been shut off since April, and the basement was holding somewhere near 50 degrees, cold enough that my breath showed when I leaned forward into the light coming through the floor gaps.

"Who are you?"

The man on the mattress tipped his head a little. Something thin came up at the corner of his mouth.

"You already wrote my name down yourself, James, in the eighth book, the one you quit at page 22 this year and shoved in the back of a cabinet."

He let a beat go by. The dark brown eyes stayed on my face.

"I'm Ethan."

I had heard that name once before, out of Kessler's mouth, and Kessler had been afraid when he said it.

Ethan. My parents' own son, dead of pneumonia at four, 42 years ago, the way they always told it. I grew up knowing there had been a brother born the same year I was, and knowing there was not one photograph of him anywhere in that house. Two pencil marks four inches apart inside my bedroom doorframe, the same year written under both. A second white plate that lived in the back of the hutch and never once had food on it. A name line inside the cover of an old composition book, filled in twice, the top one in red crayon, five letters with an E at the front.

I asked about the marks once, standing in the doorway with my back against the frame. My mother put her thumb on the lower one and said the painters had made them before we moved in. The frame had been repainted at some point in a white that ran a shade off the rest of the trim, and the new paint stopped two inches short of both marks. She never brought it up again and neither did I.

The plate I asked my father about at dinner the year I was 10. He said the set had come with six and we were down to two, and he kept cutting his meat. About the composition book I never asked anyone. I put my own name under the crayon one in ballpoint and carried the book through two schools.

"Ethan died 42 years ago."

My voice came apart on it in the wet air.

"My parents said—"

"Your parents lied."

Ethan cut me off without bringing his voice up at all. He told it at his own pace, like a man who had gone over it many times.

"They didn't plant that maple for some dead kid."

His mouth moved a little. His eyes stayed on me.

"They planted it the year I was born."

"And I never died. I have never been out of this house for one day, James."

I got both hands around the arms of the wood chair.

"Your parents. Our parents, if you want it right."

Ethan went on, and his voice stayed level, like a man reading off a report.

"They weren't writers and they weren't ordinary academics, whatever you were told."

"They started out on staff at a research outfit that did applied experimental psychology and never put any of it in a journal."

"The project studied how dreams work on a person, how suggestion works, and whether criminal behavior can be moved from one head into another with chemicals and sound."

He stopped for a beat. His hands stayed folded on his thighs.

"Then they decided to run it on their own son."

"They wanted to know if you could build a child into a killer and nothing else."

"By the time I was four they had their answer, and they didn't like it."

"I wasn't the prodigy they had written down. I wasn't coming up on the numbers the project wanted."

"So they made a second decision: keep me under the house and let me be the one who does it, and adopt another child to finish the other half."

I sat with that. The one lit seam in the floor above us was what I looked at.

Above us the seam ran the length of the dining room floor. My fingertips had gone numb and I worked my hands open and shut against my knees, 10 times, then 10 more. He waited it out without moving. The chair gave a little at the left front leg every time I shifted my weight.

"That business about how it was meant to be, the children's home up in Albany, all of it was written before you ever got there."

Ethan kept going. What was in his face was close to pity.

"You were picked, James."

"Do you remember the yellow pills with nothing printed on them that you were given every night before bed, from the time you were five?"

"Do you remember them driving you out to those neurology offices and calling it treatment for sleepwalking?"

He came forward a little. Half his face went out of the light.

"They injected you, ran tone patterns on a schedule, and worked suggestion into you from the time you were small."

"The point was simple. I was the one who did it, under this floor and out in the world, and then chemicals and sound put all of it into your head while you slept."

"They wanted a writer out of you. A machine that puts down on paper every killing I do."

"Blood turned into the crime novels that sell best in New York."

I shook my head. I kept shaking it while he waited.

"No. That's not possible."

"I write my own books. Those dreams were where the work came from."

"Those dreams were my memory, James."

Ethan cut across me.

"What my eyes were on in the dark. What my hands were on."

"The drugs and the tone patterns in this house made your brain build them again every time you put your head down on the desk."