Another way to title this one would be just, “five variations on an infinite theme.”
I.
I know my brother mostly by darkness, roughened by the garish, unfocused glow of old MuchMusic TV. This is our time, his and mine. I lie in bed until my mother falls asleep and then, careful not to let slip a creak, tiptoe down the hall to the living room, where my brother sits with legs akimbo and the fat orange cat at his feet.
He points at the couch cushion beside him. He does not look at me.
“Shh,” he says. Is all he says.
I sit next to him and say nothing. I sit next to him in eggshell-blue pyjamas with tiny ducks on them and try to slow my breathing. Vince Neil gyrates on the TV, moaning, screaming. He’s the one to make you feel alright. I don’t know what this means. My brother stares ahead with the same slight smirk with which he observes everything. I stare ahead too, but sneak glances at him from the corner of my eye.
Other times, when my mother isn’t home, I try to sit next to my brother. He pulls a cushion off the couch and then, with a jab of his finger, orders me to lie down in the empty space. I do. He presses the cushion on top of me and sits on it. I am five years old and tiny; he is seventeen and six-foot-two.
One day, my sister starts a fight with him over this. She says he shouldn’t pick on his little sister. He says she should mind her own business. I sit motionless, drenched in their yelling. I do not want things to change. I have already learned that, for some, love is only shown when it is shoved down and pushed away. But my sister’s intervention works: my brother jumps off the couch and stalks to his room.
He never puts me under the cushion again.
My brother has many talents. He rides BMX, and solves Rubik’s Cubes, and gets a big Boxer dog who he trains to be perfectly obedient. I do not yet know that he is smart, very smart, because that’s the part he doesn’t let many people see. One day, he teaches me his finger trick. It’s a simple motion, but hard to execute at speed: first, press the two middle fingers together, with the two beside them spread apart. Now switch it up, pressing each pair of two fingers out to make a “V.” Repeat. Now do it with both hands at once. Now do it both hands, but each making the opposite gesture, and quickly.
“Stay in your room until you can do it,” he says, and pulls my door shut.
I sit in my room for hours, spreading my fingers apart and pressing them together, apart and together, until the movement is burned into my muscle memory. When I proudly show him my progress, he grunts and lets me sit on his bedroom floor for a few minutes, quietly fiddling with his things.
When I am 15, my brother moves to Montreal to become a famous surgeon. He learns to fix what is broken. That first summer, he comes home for a few months, and makes me look at his reconstructive surgery textbook, images of bodies mangled in accidents, of a face ripped off by threshing machines. He tells me how even these can be stitched back together, remade into a shape the world won’t flinch to see.
The next year, he stops coming home. I never speak to my brother again.
Still, every so often, I look up his reviews on Google, or on RateMDs.com. People write: “absolute artist.” They write: “The doctor took his time with my child and is very easy to work with, love our doctor.” One person writes: “I'm not a religious Man by any means, but if there is a God out there, I would imagine he probably goes to Doctor Martin for advice.”
And sometimes, when there are things I feel but cannot say, I hold up my hands and press my middle fingers together, and then push them apart. Together, and apart. A little faster each time, and a little more precise, until it overwhelms the nerves that bind body to brain and, in a tangle, I lose the feel of it completely.
II.
A poem by Mary Karr, shared with me in an unerring evaluation of what speaks to me, haunting me ever since. It has many thoughts that burrow somewhere far deeper and more vulnerable than the shallow, hungry heart, but none more than its closing lines.
“…and if we every / single one of us (it would only work / if we all agreed) listened to our own / deaths growing inside us geologically / slow inching forward as the skull / will someday edge through skin, then we would / each speak only the truest lines: / I’ve always loved you.”
It would only work if we all agreed.
It would only work if…
Delete, delete, delete.
III.
Tyler’s only wearing tinsel and Mike isn’t wearing pants and Daniel is passed out on the couch, asleep but beer in hand. It’s Christmas Eve. I’m sober, because at this time in my life and for no particular reason, I don’t drink. My role here is thus understood not as a participant in chaos but as an observer, or better yet as a control subject, a stick against which to measure how messy the flail of these dying nights can be.
“Melissa Martin,” they say, because for some reason everyone who loves me has always used my full name. “That’s why you’re sober. So you can remember. So you can write the book about this someday.”
The Orphan Party has a slogan. The Orphan Party is For People Whose Families Don’t Love Them. The Orphan Party, for a few years running, has drawn the city’s misfits to a rambling old Crescentwood house on Christmas Eve. Everyone who comes here has a story about why they don’t have somewhere better to be: death, for instance. Or just distance. Nobody really asks. If you came, that’s all the explanation anyone needs.
Of all the house parties this crew holds — and there are many — The Orphan Party is always the most wild, the most unbound, the most desperate in its beauty. Clothes are shed and bottles get broken and, on one notable occasion, darts are thrown into the bared buttocks of a willing target, who yelps but then, feathered pins bobbing in his skin, giggles and calls out: “Okay, do it again.”
There is just one rule, unspoken, and it is this: you don’t have to participate, but you can’t interfere either. You are welcome to do whatever you want at The Orphan Party, even if it’s just sitting in silence. So long as you don’t hurt anyone. So long as you don’t judge others. We are all chasing the same thing, which is to forget, for just one night, that this life can’t last forever.
I mostly sit and watch from the corner, laughing until my ribs hurt and my eyes water.
“Melissa Martin,” they call out. “Are you watching this?”
When everyone has fallen asleep, Christopher descends from his room on the third floor, under the eaves. He’s been hiding there since he stopped drinking, a ghost of yesterday’s mistakes. We know him now by the messages he sends to the party, like great shimmering bubbles blown down the stairs from his bubble machine.
But now, when it’s quiet, he pads down those stairs and settles on the couch. We talk about life. We sit awake until dawn, surrounded by beer bottles and scattered socks. We talk about time and becoming. We dig through the ashtray for unspent cigarette butts. We talk about the yearning to burn out, before one fades away.
Big brother, little sister. Never intimate on any axis but always, in a word, safe.
That was a long time ago now. To everyone’s surprise, none of us burned out, but in fact stayed alive; I see Christopher at the grocery store sometimes. He doesn’t smoke cigarettes anymore and his hair has gone grey. We share smiles like coals from a sleeping fire. We linger for a few happy minutes amongst the bread and cakes.
I’m never going to write that book. But if I did, it would be only a single sentence on a single page, and it would say: I have loved you for a lifetime, in just one incandescent night.
IV.
A Zen Buddhist koan, from 13th Century Japan:
Twenty monks and one nun, who was named Eshun, were practicing meditation with a certain Zen master.
Eshun was very pretty even though her head was shaved and her dress plain. Several monks secretly fell in love with her. One of them wrote her a love letter, insisting upon a private meeting.
Eshun did not reply. The following day the master gave a lecture to the group, and when it was over, Eshun arose. Addressing the one who had written to her, she said: "If you really love me so much, come and embrace me now."
The question asked here is: so what is the true nature of the monk’s failure?
At first read, the answer is something akin to that held in the Karr poem: back to that idea of shedding the self-conscious shame that is so often attached to love that doesn’t fit the standard parameters. To know it as truth and, in being truth, deserving of light. The koan, after all, is titled “If you love, love openly.”
But it’s not quite that.
Because here’s a key background fact: at that time, monks were expected to be celibate. What Eshun was challenging her admirer to do was not to find the honesty of love, but to use love to find honesty of the self: to make naked the fact that, by his request, he betrayed his own ego. He would never allow others to see his love, because doing so would reveal — to them and himself —that he was not the living image he had built through his vows. And this construction was something he was so afraid of losing, he could not help but bare his pride through its protection.
Or, as one student of this koan put it: “keep it real, man,” is what she was saying.
Yeah, love can do that for us, alright. Thanks for the reminder, lady.
V.
I have one photo of us. I have five photos of us. I have a thousand. I have a photo of us embracing on a mountain in South Dakota. I have a photo of us sitting on the bright blue carpet, you in your proudest jacket, me with a nervous smile. I have a photo of you face-down on the hotel bed after you had a panic attack and I danced a jig to make you laugh. I have a photo of us alone on the riverboat’s dance floor, my back to the camera, your long blonde hair flying as you whirl.
I have a photo of us in Haiti. I have a photo of us in Osaka. I have a photo of us pulling the canoe onto your favourite island on the Whitemouth River. I have a photo of us in Maggie’s basement, you holding up a beer, me caught with my eyelids down. A photo of us with nestled shoulders in a location outside space and time; my face barely shows in the dark, but I cherish this one more than many. There is a brightness to our eyes, and we may never take another one like it again.
I have a photo of the first night you came to Winnipeg. I have a photo of the night you left. I have a photo we took in the farmer’s field when the barbed wire caught my silk dress. A photo of the work Christmas party where an editor pretended to eat your head. Of the time we made a slip’n’slide out of a garbage bag and mineral oil in the park by Confusion Corner, and learned that stuff is a nightmare to wash off when it coats your skin. A photo of us at your wedding. On the media bench. Atop the rocks. On the couch, your legs akimbo, me in my blue pyjamas with the little ducks.
All these faces, all these names, all these now-forever-or-not-agains, all these pieces of a waylaid heart, every story different but moving much the same. Together and apart, together and apart. Thrown about by the waves of an ocean so much bigger than us, all the time breaking through the surface, not knowing when we will let go, or hold on.
“Okay,” he said, with a yelp and a giggle. “Do it again.”
Every kind of love is a metaphor for another.