Other Light
Anthony Varallo
What kind of fifteen-year-old would be out here tonight, a Sunday, a school night, knocking on neighbors’ doors? You, for one. Because tomorrow is Monday, the marching band fundraising deadline, and you have yet to sell one Total-Glo holiday candle, this year’s sad and regrettable merchandise, nowhere near as desirable as last year’s Texas Ruby Red Grapefruit gift boxes. You have been instructed—threatened, you would like to say—that you are to have a minimum of five sales by tomorrow. Or else no trip to Toronto, Canada, for you. This, the site of next year’s marching band competition and the fantasy of the upperclassmen, who have already researched the bars most likely to serve underage drinkers. But you are a lowly sophomore, so this means little to you. Who can blame you then, for putting things off? Plus with everything that’s been going on at home lately—but you do not wish to think about what’s been going on at home lately. No. So you do not think about it. Not thinking about things you don’t want to think about is something you are good at, unlike sales.
Now, you stand on the Levinsons’ doorstep, a place not entirely unfamiliar to you. Years ago, you forged a friendship with Nathan Levinson, two grades younger than you, but this friendship did not survive the summer that inspired it. Chief among the reasons for failure being Nathan’s realization that, although video games were fun, and although hanging out with someone with whom you had little in common was an effective enough cure for boredom, winning the admiration of attractive girls at the community pool
was far more preferable, all-encompassing, really. You have not spoken to Nathan in years. Take heart then, that the moment after you press the doorbell, and the porch lights flick on, you see Mrs. Levinson, not Nathan, eyeing you from the door’s side window. She holds Sammie, the Levinsons’ Yorkshire Terrier, in her sweatshirted arms. Sammie’s growl is nostalgic, frightening.
“Oh, Connor!” Mrs. Levinson says. “I thought that was you.”
“It was,” you say, not loud enough to hear. One day you will stop mumbling, and that will be a fine day indeed.
“Oh, shush!” Mrs. Levinson says to Sammie, who has been barking this whole time. “Sammie, shush!” She places Sammie on the ground, who stares up angrily at you from behind Mrs. Levinson’s legs. “Pay no attention to him,” Mrs. Levinson says. “That’s just his way of saying hello.”
You tell Mrs. Levinson you are sorry for disturbing her on a Sunday night. Mrs. Levinson says you aren’t disturbing her at all, she’s so glad you stopped by—but her expression conveys otherwise. It’s an expression you’ve encountered more and more lately, in the weeks since your brother returned home. A look that greets you in hallways, school buses, and, occasionally, supermarket aisles, you accompanying your mom on a late night run for tomorrow’s breakfast supplies. You must pay no attention to that look, if you are to make a sale. Smile. Say you stopped by for a good reason. Say you are a sophomore trombonist in the Greenview Marching Band, as you have been instructed to say, and were wondering if Mrs. Levinson would like to sponsor your travel to the Twenty-Ninth Annual Mid-Atlantic Marching Band Tournament and Competition, to be held next March in Toronto, Canada? If so, you would be glad to thank her with a Total-Glo holiday candle at no extra cost.
“I have a sample right here,” you say, reaching for your TotalGlo Sample Pak, but Mrs. Levinson cuts you off.
“Oh, I’m so sorry, Connor,” she says. “But I already sponsored someone last week. Emily, I think her name was? Emma? Sweet girl. Super friendly. Quite the salesperson!”
Emma Schiff, you want to say, but don’t. Emma is the marching band treasurer, first-chair clarinet senior, and the winner of the past two years’ fundraising drives. Last fall, you stood in the school gymnasium with the entire student body and serenaded Emma with whoops and cheers as she received a $1,500 scholarship to any in-state college, a reward for having sold more candles than you could likely sell in a decade. A century. Besides Emma’s killer smile, abundant self-confidence, and genuinely warm and winsome personality, it is rumored that her true tailwind just might be her father’s willingness to fit out his vast empire of Airbnbs with holiday candles depicting scenes of snow-laden branches and joyous, top-hatted snowmen chewing unlit pipes.
“She said I’d be getting my candle next week.”
You are about to mention that it is possible to sponsor multiple students when Sammie begins a call-and-response barkfest with a dog across the street. Sammie seems to want to make the same point, over and over again, but the other dog will have none of it. The across-the-street dog’s bark suggests that his point is the only point that truly matters.
“Oh, I’d better get him inside,” Mrs. Levinson says. “Sammie! Shush!” She gives you the look again, in case you’d forgotten it, which you haven’t. “Good luck with your marching band trip. Have fun in Canada!” And then the door closes, which the dog across the street must tally as a victory. The neighborhood offers up a defeating silence.
What’s the worst part of standing on a darkened doorstep in the middle of your neighborhood with a Total-Glo Sample Pak clutched in your hand? When the next-door neighbor pulls into their driveway and illuminates you in their headlights, of course.
Put it out of your mind. Ignore it. You can skip this house and this suspicious neighbor, who has already been tipped off by the sight of you. They fear they are next to be pitched to, spieled to, pattered upon, the recipients of unwelcome wheedling. Breathe easy, you want to tell them. No Total-Glo candle for you, Mystery Neighbor, who is now hastily unlocking his front door, as if to flee. Yours will never know the true pleasure of sponsorship.
Keep walking. There. The next house is no stranger to you, not in the least. For this is Mr. Dietz’s home, a squat ranch bordered by a winding mulch bed that gave you endless trouble, all those years ago when you were the one to mow the Dietzes’ yard, your first ever summer job. Mr. Dietz is a widower now, his yard mowed by a crew that arrives every two weeks and whirls around on zeroradius mowers, mowing the yard like it is nothing at all, the tricky mulch beds irrelevant, beside the point. You haven’t spoken to Mr. Dietz since Mrs. Dietz stopped hiring you to mow the yard, mostly because you did a lousy job. Also because Mrs. Dietz is dead now. And also because why would you speak to Mr. Dietz? From the corners of the porch, two preternaturally bright floodlights assault you before you’ve even had a chance to knock. Mr. Dietz materializes behind a storm door and gives you a look like you are late to dinner. His outfit is heavy on flannel. A logo-less camo baseball cap adorns his elderly head.
“Go ahead,” he says, the moment he opens the door.
“Hi, Mr. Dietz,” you say.
“Go ahead. Say what you’re going to say.” Mr. Dietz, already old-person-old back when you mowed his yard, seems to have entered a new strata of aging. His eyes, strangely magnified behind bifocal lenses, peer out at you with a clear lack of recognition. His skin seems somehow implied now, an idea of something that’s come and gone.
You begin your spiel. About the marching band competition next spring in Toronto. About sponsoring you. About receiving
a free gift. The whole time you are speaking Mr. Dietz is holding the storm door open, whose pneumatic closer fights against his efforts. You wonder if you should hold the door open for Mr. Dietz. Should you? You are about to offer, when Mr. Dietz says, “What the hell is a ‘total glow’?”
You explain that that’s the kind of candle he will receive for his sponsorship. Then, recalling the contours of the script you’ve neglected to memorize, you say, “Most holiday candles look nice enough from a distance, sure, but did you ever notice how the light doesn’t reach the base?” Here, you produce your sample Total-Glo candle from your Total-Glo Sample Pak, a cardboard box that’s been fashioned to look like a briefcase. The sample candle is called “Winter Fantasy” and features a snowy woodland scene where deer, cardinals, and rabbits trim a cozy cabin with bright bunting. You hold this candle up for Mr. Dietz to see. “But, with Total-Glo,” you explain, “the candle is always holiday bright, from the top all the way to the bottom.” You demonstrate this by moving your finger along the length of the candle’s exterior, as mentioned in the script. “That’s the Total-Glo difference.”
Mr. Dietz looks at you as if you have just claimed that pizza can talk. “All the way to the bottom?”
“Uh-huh,” you say, forgetting to hide your uncertainty.
“Let’s try it out,” Mr. Dietz says.
“Oh, well, this is just a sample,” you say. “I mean, it’s not for demonstration.” But Mr. Dietz is already motioning for you to step inside.
“Come on,” he says. “I won’t bite.”
The correct action, of course, is for you to decline. But what you would like the correct action to know is that you need five sales by tomorrow, and very much seem on the precipice of one here. “Thank you,” you say, shouldering the storm door.
Mr. Dietz’s home: from the family room, a flat-screen television injects your visit with Law & Order, closed captioning on, the
volume somewhere between a coffee grinder and an outboard motor. Closed umbrellas, enough for multiple monsoons, sprout from behind a magazine rack. A corduroy sofa wears a quilt on each end and a sleeping cat atop its middle. Above the entranceway to the kitchen, a Sacred Heart of Jesus calendar informs you that it is still four years ago. An idea that pleases you. Perhaps you’ve stepped back in time, where furniture and carpets are nostalgically brown, and where a scent of boiled hot dogs, neither agreeable nor offensive, attends your arrival in the kitchen. Mr. Dietz rummages through several drawers before finding his utility lighter.
“Aha,” he says, giving it a few squeezes. “We’re in business.”
He motions you to place the Total-Glo candle on the countertop, which is stacked with newspapers and soup can labels, more proofs of the past.
“I don’t think I’m supposed to light it?” you say, pointlessly, for you have already handed the candle to Mr. Dietz, and Mr. Dietz has already worked the lighter to the candle’s wick, his shaky hand be damned. The lighter sparks, flames.
“Let there be light,” Mr. Dietz says.
You watch. The wick sputters, catches fire. The top of the candle glows, yes, but the middle lags behind, the rabbit and cardinals adorning a darkened house.
“Hmm,” Mr. Dietz says. “Looks like we have ourselves a case of false advertising.” He gives you a smile to show he means to include you among the duped, not the one doing the duping. “Buyer beware.”
But wait. Look again. The flame grows, lengthens. The light makes its way to the rabbit and cardinals. Beyond.
“There we go,” you say.
“I’ll be damned,” Mr. Dietz says.
For “Winter Fantasy” is now aglow, from top to bottom, as promised. The candle emits a whiff of holly.
“Well,” Mr. Dietz says, “I guess you got yourself a sale.”
Resist the urge to correct Mr. Dietz. This is a sponsorship, not sale, you have been instructed to say. But that distinction seems hardly worth making now. Thank Mr. Dietz. Tell him he will receive his candle next week.
“This one’s fine by me,” Mr. Dietz says.
How do you tell Mr. Dietz that you need the sample back, that you aren’t supposed to give it away? Carefully, that’s how. Make it sound like you will be in trouble if you don’t return the sample, which isn’t totally a lie. Tell him there are better candles to choose from anyway. From your Sample Pak, produce the Total-Glo catalog. Hand the catalog to Mr. Dietz.
“You can choose from up to thirty-six different styles and designs,” you say.
Mr. Dietz looks at the catalog as if you have handed him a map of the moon. “That’s too many to choose from,” he says. “It’s just like that sandwich place, they say ‘oh, you can pick this, you can pick that,’ and they say ‘you can have it hot or you can have it cold,’ and ‘what kind of bread and what kind of mustard,’ and I say ‘I thought that was your job, not mine.’” This speech goes on for several beats too long while you nod your head politely. At the end, Mr. Dietz seems to have forgotten his point. You remind him about the catalog.
“Oh, you choose,” he says, waving his hands dismissively. “Makes no difference to me.”
Is this what old age will be like for you? Is Mr. Dietz a kind of forward scout in the world of loneliness, senescence, and senility? Before you can give these questions their fullest due, Mr. Dietz says, “Aren’t you the one with the brother?”
You feel your face grow warm. “Yeah,” you say.
“Hoo boy,” Mr. Dietz says. Lets out a low whistle. Don’t say anything. Wait.
“Well, he certainly got himself into a pickle, didn’t he?”
Don’t react. You must not lose this sale.
“They put up with just about anything down there at the college,” Mr. Dietz says. He is filling out the sales form. Almost finished. “But I guess they don’t put up with everything, do they?”
These words linger as you complete the sale and thank Mr. Dietz for his sponsorship. Don’t let them get you down. You’ve got four more sales to go. Tell Mr. Dietz you will let yourself out. Give him a friendly wave.
Outside, the night is starry, gorgeous. Who is to say it isn’t perhaps on your side?
Three weeks ago, your brother, Jacob, twenty-one years old and a junior Psychology and Communication double major at the local college, and the lifelong object of your admiration, awe, fear, wonder, and occasional terror, chained himself to a statue of Gunning Bedford Jr., member of the first Continental Congress, and one of Delaware’s first attorney generals. These accomplishments did not shield the statue from becoming the accidental centerpiece of campus protests, the statue’s unfortunate placement in the president’s rose garden earning it a vantage from which to look out upon a sea of tents, encampments, and angry undergraduates. Your brother, one of this tribe, took it upon himself to splash Gunning Bedford Jr. with red housepaint, demanding divestment. Divest, divest! That’s what your brother and his friends wanted the college to do.
But the college had ideas of its own. Ideas which included cleaning the statue and setting up police barricades around the rose garden, where the president occasionally spoke to the students, or more accurately, received their taunts and yells. Your brother’s response? Chain himself to Gunning Bedford Jr., naturally. But in such a clever fashion that the only way to safely liberate Jacob was
ANTHONY VARALLO
to saw off the statue’s head and separate him from the statue’s torso. This, the image on the local evening news. This, the footage shared on social media. The one picked up by a half-dozen other news outlets. Your brother being led away by police from a newly headless statue. Your brother, the decapitator. Your brother, your hero and ruin.
What do recently expelled college students do while awaiting their disciplinary hearing? Occupy their former bedroom. Sleep until noon. Listen to music late into the night, while you procrastinate, a wall away, finishing your homework. Meet you in the hallway, on accident, with knowing grins, looks you aren’t sure how to read. Carry their meals up to their bedroom so as to avoid you, your mom, the world. Neglect showers for days on end. Delete their social media accounts. Stack their nightstand high with five semesters’ worth of accumulated books, titles that range from Man and His Symbols to Nickeled and Dimed to The Political Unconscious, with thicknesses that veer from coasters to pizza boxes. Do not ask your brother if he has read these books. Do not try to make small talk. Your brother can be a dangerous conversationalist. Wander into his waters and he can lure you onto strange reefs. No. Better to keep your distance.
And maybe that’s why you don’t mind being out here tonight, when you could be at home worrying about what others think of you, while avoiding your mother and brother at all costs, your usual Sunday night, of late anyway. If you stay out late enough, maybe you can avoid your mother entirely, who prefers to fall asleep to Bravo TV, and who is as conflict adverse as you, if such a thing is possible. Tonight could work out for you, it really could. Don’t resist its offer of possibility. Let it lead you where it may.
Alas, the night already has other news for you. For one thing, the night would have you know, there are people in the world—
in your very neighborhood, in fact—who have no compulsion whatsoever to answer their front door, even when a high school sophomore (you) can clearly be seen through the window, as clearly as you can see them watching Sunday Night Football with their feet on the coffee table. For another thing, even the Sunday Night Football neighbors who feel compelled to open their doors and listen to the first measures of your Total-Glo sponsorship speech, have already heard this tune before, when it was played with far greater skill by one Emma Schiff. How impressed they were by this young woman, these neighbors wish you to know. What poise, what charm, what natural ease—now that’s a young person with a bright future! Face it: you are no Emma Schiff. You don’t stand a chance. Even if you had a chance, which you don’t, courtesy of Emma. Tell these Emma-besotted neighbors thanks for their time. Head to the next house. Onward. That’s your new motto.
But onward only leads you to more houses with more polite refusals, friendly goodbye waves, or flat out rejection. At one house, a middle-aged dad-type laughs at your description of the marching band competition.
“Toronto, Canada,” he says, “in March?”
“Yes, sir,” you say, although you never say “sir’ in real life, only when you are in the presence of potential Total-Glo customers.
“Wow, that’s rough,” the dad says. He is clutching a neonkoozied beer. He takes a sip, shakes his head. “Sounds like they booked you in shoulder season,” he says. “Gonna get a cheap group rate at your hotel and then send you kids out marching in the snow.” Behind him, from the living room, a TV shows the Sunday Night Football game. You had no idea Sunday Night Football was so popular. Now you do. Something you can thank your procrastination for, along with the unpopularity of holiday candles and your sub-par sales skills.
“Listen,” the dad says, then reaches for his back pocket. Produces a billfold. “I’ll make a donation to the cause, but I don’t want any candles.” He hands you a bill. Half the amount of the minimum sponsorship, but hey, it’s something, right?
“Thank you,” you say.
He waves his hand. “Just make sure to wear a scarf,” he says, laughs at his own joke. “And a hat!”
“Yes, sir,” you say, but he has already closed the door.
You are supposed to get the customer to fill out a donation form, but don’t worry. You can fill out the form later. “Neighbor,” you can write, under NAME, and “cash,” where it says PAYMENT. There’s even a box you can check to indicate no candle. You’ve got to hand it to the Total-Glo folks; they’ve thought of everything. Your mission takes you to the new part of the neighborhood, homes that were built just a few years ago, and not part of your personal history, aside from having trick-or-treated here in the last years of middle school, when Halloween lost something off its fastball. No one should trick-or-treat after eighth grade, you announced to your mother, hoping she’d argue, persuade you otherwise. How disappointed you were when she said, “Well, it’ll be nice to have you at home. You can help me hand out candy.” The truth is you miss trick-or-treating. The candy! The license to walk through your neighborhood at night, your face just beginning to sweat beneath a mask whose eye holes never failed to misalign. The feeling of effortless acquisition. The sudden transport to childhood, when nothing could be better than nibbling a few Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups en route to your next house, your mask raised for the occasion.
You stand now at a stranger’s house. A two-story colonial with a well-kept yard, unlike yours, which seems forever in need of raking, weeding. These jobs, yours and yours alone, in the years since Jacob left for college. Surprise: you have an older brother who
enjoys yardwork. Or used to, anyway, before college came along to flip his notions of the world, as it seems to have done in recent weeks and months. Will college do the same number on you? Do you even have to go to college? Face it, you’ve always been more of a follower than leader, so the odds are stacked in academia’s favor. Soon enough, you’ll be headed off to some campus somewhere, no doubt, most likely the same one where your brother’s escapades will since have been forgotten, old news. Already you feel doomed to follow in your brother’s footsteps, when no one, your brother included, has encouraged you to do so. What does it say about you that you wish to follow when not even being led?
Don’t think about it. Put those questions out of your mind. Approach this well-tended home’s front door. Clear your throat. Ring the doorbell. There.
A girl answers the door. Your age, maybe a bit older. You’ve seen this girl before, at the bus stop, where you congregate with other teenagers in front of a not-yet-open CVS, the congregation staring into phones, avoiding eye contact, conversation, vulnerability. This girl attends the arts magnet school downtown. Olivia is her name, at least according to the stencil stamped on her cello case, the one she lugs to the curb each morning as you pretend to be checking your phone.
“Hi,” you say. You begin your spiel. During said spiel, Olivia nods politely, without smiling. When you are about to get to the heart of the matter, the crux, the nimble turn from objective presentation of facts to outright pleading, Olivia cuts you off.
“Emma Schiff already got us,” Olivia says. “Sorry.”
It does not help your confidence to notice, as you had not noticed until now, that Olivia is attractive. Beautiful, in fact. Put that out of your mind. Smile. Say you understand.
“Emma and I are friends, actually,” Olivia says. Gives a playful shrug, as if to say, What can you do?
“Oh,” you say. “Sorry to bug you then.”
“No worries,” Olivia says. “I mean, how would you have known?” “Yeah.”
Has there ever been a more awkward silence than the one that attends this moment, as you stand at a beautiful girl’s doorstep, with no chance of a sale? Decide that no, this is the awkward silence of all time. And you are just about to bid an apologetic, mumbled adieu, when the silence is broken by Olivia’s mother, who appears at the door and says, “Do you know anything about bats?”
“Mom,” Olivia sighs. “Enough about the bats.”
The mother, who is wearing workout clothes and those kind of pants that don’t come down all the way, says, “We need someone around here who knows something about bats.” She looks at you without the least trace of craziness. I am a sane person, her gaze seems to say, one simply in need of a bat specialist.
“She thinks there’s a bat in the dining room,” Olivia sighs.
“There is!” Olivia’s mother says. “I saw him earlier tonight. He was hiding in the curtains.”
“They like the curtains,” you say. Thus revealing that you have been the one summoned to rid your house of wayward bats ever since Jacob left for college. A comforting thought: now that Jacob has been expelled for vandalism, he will be around to deal with bats, should they slip inside the house. A fairy common occurrence in these parts, in fall.
“My dad is out of town,” Olivia says, by way of explanation.
“On business,” Olivia’s mother says.
“He told us to call someone,” Olivia says.
“Apparently, he’s never heard of Sunday evening,” Olivia’s mother quips. She is gripping an angle broom, an instrument all wrong for bat extrications. Swing an angle broom at a bat, and he’ll be off to elsewhere before the broom is even halfway to his creepy head. Might as well try swinging a telephone pole.
“Do you have a tennis racket?” you say.
The dining room is dark when you arrive, but Olivia’s mom fixes that. “Please don’t hit the chandelier,” she says, flicking it on. The room bursts into elegant light. “I mean, I guess unless you absolutely have to.”
“I won’t,” you promise. Will you? Not if the bat is hiding in the curtains. From there it should be a few brisk swings of the racket to subdue him into compliance. You’ve already instructed Olivia’s mother to open the dining room windows, through which cold air pours in, adding a seasonal note to you mission.
“There’s no bat,” Olivia says. But she is standing beside her mother, just outside the dining room entranceway, watching.
“There’s definitely a bat,” Olivia’s mother says.
You nudge the dining room curtains with the racket. One set and then the others. Every time you’ve had a bat in the house, the bat is in the curtains. “He could have flown to another room by now,” you say. But you are wrong. For no sooner have you said the bat could have flown away, you see him atop the breakfront at the opposite end of the room. The bat has merged himself so thoroughly with the breakfront, that his body nearly matches the adornment at the breakfront’s top, two posts that point up, skyward. “There he is,” you say.
“Where?” Olivia’s mother says. But then she follows your gaze, spots him.
“Oh my God!” Olivia says. “It is a fucking bat!”
“Olivia,” Olivia’s mother says.
But you have already taken your first strides toward the bat, and now both women, mother and daughter, are screaming. Pay them no mind. Move forward. Bring the racket down on the bat with enough force to knock him from the breakfront, but not enough to injure his wings. A precise, restrained touch. Feel the bat’s heft beneath the racket’s webbing. See the bat fly to the ground, and
land, where he resembles a rat more than anything else. Prepare for what comes next. The bat will spread his translucent wings and fly. That’s the moment you will send him through the open window, a well-placed shot. Heavy enough to do the job, but light enough to spare the bat’s life. A gentle lob across the net. Watch the bat disappear into the wherever of the night. Hear Olivia and her mother’s whoops of adulation, thanks, applause. Who knew you had it in you?
And, later, when Olivia’s mother insists on buying not one, but two candles, who are you to disagree? Show her the catalog. Wait in the kitchen as she selects “Red Robin’s Delight” and “Inspirational Moments,” the latter the strangest offering in the Total-Glo inventory. A white vanilla candle, free from holiday imagery, whose inscription, in heavy calligraphy, reads Good people are like candles, they burn themselves up to give others light. This is a message one could feel several ways about, you decide. Consider which is the way you feel as you walk home, three and a half sales stronger. Not enough to meet the minimum, no, but maybe enough to earn a trip to Toronto anyway. If your decade or so in school has taught you anything, it is that most teacher’s threats are toothless. Feel thankful for that. Grateful.
It is late by the time you arrive home. Later than you thought. The bat escapade took longer than you realized, but was worth it, wasn’t it, if ridding a stranger’s home of a racket-stunned bat meant two sales? Plus no one seems to have noticed your absence. Something you might otherwise feel resentful about, but not tonight. No. Tonight your family’s benign neglect and inattention is something you cherish the way other families surely must cherish time together, shared meals, popcorn movie nights, and the like. Feel good about tonight. You’ve achieved a lot. You have! Even if you are still one sale and a half shy of your goal, you
aren’t the kind of person to beat yourself up about something as meaningless as “goals.” Goals are meant to be broken. Isn’t that a saying?
And maybe that’s why you don’t feel the usual dread when, reaching the top of the stairs, you see the sliver of light coming from beneath your brother’s bedroom door. So, Jacob is up. In a moment, he will hear you in the hallway, of course. And he will call out your name, in a way that sounds both like an invitation and a rebuke. Your brother is good at that. He can make Hey, Connor sound exactly like I know you’ve been up to no good tonight. It’s a talent your brother has.
Tell your brother hello. Say what’s up? Show him you aren’t afraid. Are you? You aren’t sure.
“Come in here for a second,” your brother says.
“That’s okay,” you say. “I should probably be heading to bed.”
“Come on,” your brother says. “Open the door.”
Surprise: you do as you are told.
Inside, your brother sits on top of his bed, headphones around his neck. He’s wearing the same thing he’s been wearing for the past three days, which is basketball shorts, a hoodie/long-sleeved T-shirt combo, and black ankle socks. He’s got his MacBook on his lap, a legal pad set beside him, as if for taking notes, and stacks of books in what look like orderly piles. Is your brother researching something? Writing a paper from expulsion-ville?
“If you wore that jacket in Spain,” your brother says. “You would be a dead man.”
You look down at your red windbreaker. The one you’ve worn all night. Owned for years.
“In Spain, a red jacket signifies that you are in debt to another,” Jacob says. “In arrears to a lender.”
Do not respond. Nod, if you must.
“And your lenders have marked you out as one not to be trusted. A deadbeat. A liability.”
Try something noncommittal here. “Oh” is good for occasions like these. Go with that.
“Shopkeepers, on sight, would send you away. Bartenders and baristas would turn their backs on you. In the town square, you would walk alone, an outsider, with only pigeons and the shadows of lemon trees for company.” Here your brother stops to jot something down on the legal pad. Is this speech somehow connected to whatever he’s writing? He types something on his laptop. “Of course, your family would ostracize you,” he says. “You’d be without home.” This produces a smile. Jacob’s smile: what is there to say about it? The one that has attended so many childhood degradations, so many humiliations, you are better off looking elsewhere. Which you do. There. Better.
“Eventually you would be the town pariah, known only by your red jacket and your checkered history.” Your brother gives you a look, as if to say, And what do you think of that?
“Interesting,” you say.
“Of course, you could always pay back your debt,” your brother says. “But, let’s be honest, the odds are against it. You know it. Everyone knows it. Your lenders know it.” Your brother raises his hands in mock sympathy, shrugs. “So, what are you to do?”
“Wear the jacket?” you say.
“Wear the jacket,” your brother says.
Outside, a car passes, sending elongated light across Jacob’s windows. A moment later, the room returns to its ordinary ordinariness. Except that your brother has never been a fan of the ordinary, has he? Maybe that’s why he keeps dirty dishes on his nightstand, small plates stacked in teetering piles, the topmost plate wearing a trio of licked forks. Perhaps that explains the soda cans resting on the windowsill, their tops popped, their proximity to window suggesting they may have been repurposed as ashtrays,
from time to time. Yes, your brother has been smoking in this room, this former repository of baseball trophies, stuffed animals, video games, and big brother mystery.
“In time,” your brother continues, “you would move out of town and into the hillside. But your reputation would follow you anyway. There would be nothing you could do about it.” Here, Jacob shrugs. “Years would pass. You would grow old, lonely. The jacket would get ripped and torn. The zipper would refuse to zip.”
Do not mention that it already does that now, sometimes. Wait.
“And, in the end, when the townspeople found your body rotting in a squatter’s den, the only thing they’d have to identify you, your red jacket. This, they would place in your pinewood casket.”
You feel your brother winding up. Ready to pounce, to make his point, whatever it is. Ready to assert his big brother dominance once again. Your job? Don’t let him do it. Don’t let him win.
“Do you have a lighter?” you ask.
Your brother looks at you. Assesses you. A smile he likely wishes to suppress plays at the corners of his mouth. But you don’t care. For you have already produced your Total-Glo Sample Pak from the hallway entrance, where you’d hidden it before entering the room. But that was back when you were afraid of your brother, scared of what he might think of you toting around a briefcaseshaped cardboard box. You’ve left that person behind.
“Have you ever noticed that most holiday candles look nice enough from a distance, but up close the light doesn’t reach the base?” you say, opening the box. Hold “Winter Fantasy” in your left hand. Clutch the lighter your brother has produced from his desk drawer in your right. Tell your brother about the Total-Glo difference. Flick the striker. Feel the flame, hot against your thumb. And then place the candle on your brother’s desk, where the wick
ANTHONY VARALLO
has just begun to glow. Watch your brother peer closer, as if in doubt. Watch the flame widen, the candle acquiring light. That’s your brother with his hand held to his chin, the universal pose of the sceptic. Your brother, your former guide, your erstwhile yardstick, in his childhood bed, in all his disgrace and longing. See him move his hand away. See him witness what is certainly a miracle.