By Bri Long
I realized what suicidal looked like on us in late October, around five months after me and my older brother moved to Pittsburgh. Sure, I had my smoking addiction and fourteen hours of sleep a day, the lack of appetite and the cynical outlook on life, but I wasn’t Alex: molded to the floral couch in the evenings, stand-up special on TV, a nightly bottle of Jack Daniel’s in hand. Alcoholism, now that was depression. Nothing screamed self-destruction like a fully stocked one-liquor cabinet, and inevitably, all my issues paled in comparison to that amber running down his throat.
The morning of my suicidal epiphany, I was having the usual early cigarette in the kitchen, leaning out the tiny window with my arms loose and lazy, fingers brushing against the chipped brick of the shitty duplex’s exterior. Alex had poured his ritual glass of whiskey to stave off the daily hangover, pencil in hand, scratching out a sticky-note grocery list. “Do we need cereal?”
“Yeah,” I said, tapping the brick to no rhythm, the cigarette between my fingers, my view of the neighbor’s ivy-covered wall the only bit of appreciable nature for miles. “Healthy kind, though. Not that Fruity Pebbles shit.”
“I’ll get both.” He paused to drink. “Any other special requests?”
“Nope.”
Chair legs groaned across the tile. Setting his empty glass in the sink behind me, he tucked the bottle back into the cabinet above the fridge. I checked my cigarette; I could get one more drag, maybe.
“Tobacco ends up killing half the people who use it,” he said, opening the pantry door. “Half. Fifty percent.”
I twisted the end against the brick to smother it, laughing out smoke. “You’ve used that one before. And I’m pretty sure everyone dies.”
“It doesn’t scare you?”
“No.” I pulled my head back in and shut the window, tossing the end into the trash. “You smoked when you were seventeen.”
“Yeah, but I quit.”
“Once you discovered pot.”
“Which is proven to be a thousand times better for you than cigarettes,” he said as he flung open the fridge door, setting the condiments rattling. His shoulders slumped. “Fuck, we need milk. And eggs. We have nothing.”
I took a seat at the kitchen table and pulled out my phone, going straight to Google and typing in weed vs. cigarettes.
“I smoked less once I started selling, anyway,” he said, opening a cabinet and tapping the boxes of mac and cheese. “Right now, I’m probably the healthiest I’ve ever been.”
I nodded, going to the next page of search results. Nothing was coming up in my favor.
“And I’m having someone over tonight, if that’s okay.”
“I don’t pay rent.”
“I’m just letting you know, Jesus.” Alex closed the cabinet and took a seat at the table, a pad of canary-yellow notes and pencil in hand again. I gave up on the third page of search results and set my phone face down, elbows on the table, fingers to my temples and eyes closed. I wasn’t in the mood to talk or in the mood for visitors, but I wasn’t going to bother arguing for another quiet night. We had plenty of those.
The fluttering thud of an eraser against the sticky notes sounded, fast and nervous. “I’ve been thinking that you should re-enroll.”
I looked to him, but he wasn’t looking at me. He set the sticky notes down and started tapping the eraser against his palm, chewing the inside of his cheek, and I couldn’t help the snort. “You want me to finish high school after you dropped out to be a drug dealer?”
Alex dropped the pencil and rubbed his face, like he was dreading the logical response. “What I do shouldn’t decide what you do.”
“What, because you’ve suddenly decided to start acting like an adult?” I dug around for another cigarette. “You want to take some responsibility for me now? Should I start calling you Dad?”
He stood and reached for me, the chair bumping in the wall behind him, a fistful of my gray hoodie twisted up in his hand. He couldn’t decide on an eye to focus on, pupils bouncing over the bridge of my nose. “Don’t pull that shit.”
I pushed him off. He stumbled back, grabbing the chair for balance. The two of us hadn’t fought in a while, not since the first time he caught me smoking and lost his shit over it. Why, I’ll never know. Thing is, I would’ve deserved the bruises that morning, because I damn well knew the two things that made Alex flare: mentioning his alcoholism or bringing up Dad. In all honesty, I was asking to get my ass kicked.
“You don’t have to get a diploma, fine,” he said, shoving his chair in and ripping the grocery list off the top of the pad, heading out. “Do nothing. Be a dropout. I don’t care.”
The front door slammed shut, rattling the kitchen window.
***
I closed the blinds in my room and lay down on the bed, fully dressed and cleaned up for the day. I had planned to go out and get breakfast, but barely had the energy to finish taking a shower, much less pull on a jacket and walk the few blocks to Dunkin’ Donuts. Instead, I stared at my barren nightstand, the crooked white blinds, face against a duvet that still smelled new and plastic. I made the effort to kick off my shoes and turn away from the window, facing the wall, exhausted.
Going back to high school was a reasonable suggestion, given that I should’ve been graduating in the spring. I just couldn’t see myself walking in locker-lined halls again, carrying textbooks, talking to people, returning to a semblance of normal life after two years of nomadic living. Dropping out had happened out of necessity: with a dead mother, missing father, eighteen-year-old delinquent and a bright, promising young man (the highest scoring member of the Quiz Bowl team and a serial reader of hard classics), social services was more than ready to shuffle me through foster home after foster home, away from Alex. No fucking way he’d let them take me, and no fucking way I’d go. We refused to be separated, and in order to stay together, we couldn’t be found.
So, we left when I was sixteen, crashing at older friends’ apartments closer to the city. Alex spent more time selling drugs until he could afford rent, gas, and food for two. I tried to help out and sell once he started dealing more than weed, but didn’t have the same knack for it. Alex was amiable, good-looking, and charismatic beyond belief, and there was something inherently cold about me, something that made cashiers and customers shrink up across counters and aisles. Pale face, dark hair, and gray eyes made me look corpselike, even to myself if I studied the mirror too long; the structure of my mother’s face had sharpened from the lack of weight on my frame. Alex took after Dad, with brown eyes and a full laugh. I took after Mom, stoic and quick-witted, tongue a little too sharp for my own good. Which also didn’t help me sell drugs.
When two of Alex’s friends were arrested in Ann Arbor, we hooked up with a distributor in Madison. And when the police started cracking down there, we went to Detroit, then Cincinnati, Buffalo, and finally Pittsburgh, bouncing from city to city as threats closed in on us. In less than two years we had lived in five different places, and I hated every last one of them.
All I wanted was to get away from pavement. Maybe out west. I liked imagining the nothingness in Alaska or the Dakotas, where it probably went pitch-black at night and the ground didn’t cling to the stench of gasoline. I missed having woods behind me, creeks and brush and the occasional wandering family of deer. Sometimes I missed Mom, taking me to go steal cornstalks for decorating the porch or commissioning my keen eye to be honest, now: is the wreath crooked? Asher, I see that look. Don’t lie to your mother. Tell me which way to turn it.
I couldn’t figure out how to miss Dad. After my mother was buried, car destroyed, skid marks and glass etched into the highway, he didn’t move from the recliner. Or couldn’t, too swallowed in grief, wearing the same black dress shirt and pants for four days and only moving to piss or eat when Alex and I weren’t home. Two weeks earlier, he was drafting expansion plans for the restaurant, and five days after burying Mom, I walked into an empty house. He didn’t even pack his things or leave a note. He just left.
It didn’t bother me. We took off before it could bother me, before I could look too closely at framed family pictures of a life six feet under: Alex bulked up in lacrosse gear, heavy arm around mine, Mom and Dad on the couch together, faces warm with exhaustion and the glow of Christmas lights—perfection if I ever knew it. It all felt like another life, or maybe someone else’s, because my parents would never recognize Asher the smoker, Asher the apathetic, Asher the dropout. I didn’t want them to recognize him. I didn’t think they could.
I fell asleep to these thoughts and, consequently, woke up from my nap with something helpless and sad in my stomach, like the feeling of watching someone toss baby animals into a lake or the unfortunate happenstance in a movie that ruins everything, everyone, all at once—something that puts a bullet through your heart, and you can’t help excusing yourself from the one date you’ve managed to grab in this new, Americana-soaked life of yours, ditching a pretty blonde girl with wide hazel eyes to stare at the small screen back home in Madison.
And eventually, Madison wasn’t home. Every move changed who I was, what I did. Detroit made me sleep too much, Cincinnati made me eat too little, Buffalo molded me into a smoker, and after a few cigarettes on the front porch in Pittsburgh, staring at my cracked hands like bloodless open wounds, I truly was someone—something—unrecognizable.
***
I listened for the last sounds of unloading groceries before heading downstairs after my nap, trash bag overflowing distorted messages of THANK YOU and Have a nice day! — icing on a cake of empty liquor bottles. Four bottles of wine were lined up on the table. Alex fell into a chair and leaned back, inspecting each. “Which one should I go with for tonight?”
“What did you spend the most money on?” I said, opening a new box of sugary cereal and taking the seat across from him, a fence of green glass between us.
He reached for the darkest one, ink in a bottle, label sleek and modern. “This one. Forty bucks.”
“There you go,” I said, plunging my hand into the bag and shoving a dry handful into my mouth. The sad, empty pit in my stomach was growing, and I didn’t know what to do with it.
“Awesome.” He set the bottle aside, grabbing the other three and stowing them away in the cabinet above the fridge. “Are you sticking around tonight?”
I stifled a laugh. “Hard pass.”
Glass clinked as he reorganized his stash, mouth twisted in concentration. “You don’t have to take off every time I have a girl over. We’ll stay upstairs.”
Alex and I had tried the arrangement before, but the ceiling actually seemed to be thinner than the walls. “You can have the place to yourself,” I said, forcing another handful of dry cereal down. “I said it’s fine.”
“If you’re sure.” He shut the cabinet, laid out on the couch, and turned on the TV.
I stared at our kitchen window, hand halfway inside the cereal box. Old glass, chipping white paint, view pointlessly aimed at the neighbor’s wall. Sunlight never quite made it inside the kitchen, but it drenched the front porch at dusk, gold and intense, false warmth in the early spring. Back when I kept my smoking contained to the porch, and back when Alex ventured to join me for conversation in the evenings, we’d hunch our shoulders and plunge hands deep into our jacket pockets, squinting into the sun as we talked. We didn’t usually discuss anything substantial: just sports and television and the occasional hypothetical. He squeezed a conversation about Mom and Dad out of me once, but it made me feel sick for days.
I put the cereal away and headed for the steps. Remembering any remotely happy memory only brought the depressing aftermath, the pathetic reality of the present. I couldn’t dwell on anything good for too long.
“Ash, wait.”
I tightened my hand around the railing, one foot on the stair. “I’m not discussing school.”
“Relax, I’ll drop it. Stay and watch TV with me for once.” He leaned his head back on the armrest, trying to catch my eye. “You’re always running off.”
Reluctantly, I took a seat on the living room floor, back against the base of the couch, soaking in the content warnings for whatever movie he’d picked: graphic language, graphic violence, viewer discretion advised. The opening credits hovered us over a mountain range, silent.
I bent a leg and picked at the fuzz on my sock, feeling suffocated by how fake it all felt and how hard Alex was trying. I only ran off to escape the intervention these kinds of gestures hid. The last time Alex and I had a real, substantial discussion had to be on that porch.
He shifted on the couch, stiffly. “Do you ever think about Dad?”
I stopped picking at my sock, sights trained on a dark stripe of uneven wood grain next to my foot. There it is.
“I mean, do you ever miss him. Or wonder. Or anything.”
“Fuck no,” I said, a little too quick and a little too loud. “No. Mom didn’t have a choice to leave us, but he did.” I focused back on my sock, fresh out of old lint to pick off. “He probably killed himself, anyway.”
“C’mon, you can’t think like that.”
“Or what?” I snapped, facing him. “Either Dad committed suicide or hasn’t bothered to see us in two years. Pick one.”
Alex’s expression softened, like he was hurt. Like he actually thought our father was still out there and maybe even searching for us, trying to reconnect after five days of the most severe depression I’d ever witnessed. And I watched my brother become an alcoholic, which didn’t come anywhere near Dad’s face sitting in that recliner, every light inside of him extinguished. The man looked like there was absolutely nothing of worth left in his life, much less two teenage sons. Screw them, right? Forget them. Leave them. Kill yourself. It’d be a favor.
I stretched my legs back out and put my hands behind my head, on-screen mountains blurring into white, blue, black. “Personally, the thought of him blowing his brains out is easier to stomach.”
“What the hell has gotten into you today? Why are you acting like this?” he said.
I stood and headed for the stairs, taking them two at a time.
“Ash, get back here. Don’t—”
I slammed my door shut behind me, going straight to the window and leaning my arms across the sill. The frame and glass were cold, sun weakly warm. I bent my head and closed my eyes, trying to feel it.
He burst through the door a second later, handle denting the drywall. “What the fuck have I ever done to you?” he shouted. “I buy food, I pay rent, I get your goddamn cigarettes when a place asks for your ID, and all you do is treat me like this. Like shit. And you weren’t like this before. You either tell me what I did, or what the hell someone else did to you. Now.”
“I’m the same piece of shit I always am, you’re just sober enough to notice it,” I said, digging a toe into the matted carpet.
He grabbed my arm and spun me around, the two of us face to face. There was a familiar glint behind his brown eyes, sparking and violent and struggling to surface. Do it, I thought. Say something. Swear to god I’ll punch first this time.
Instead, Alex shook his head and backed off, pulling the door shut behind him. Heavy footsteps traveled down the stairs, and the TV volume was turned up until I could feel the bass beneath my feet. He switched it over to some war movie. Gunshots reverberated through the floorboards.
I turned back around and pulled up the blinds, resting my forehead against the cool glass of the window, still trying to feel any warmth at all. Suddenly and intensely, I felt small. Childishly though, like how looking up at the stars or tall trees makes you feel. I hated Pittsburgh, I hated moving, and I hated how clueless Alex’s constant state of being buzzed made him. Saying “fuck the man” and trying to strike it out on our own was fun at first, exhilarating even, but we’ve just been running for so long. One more month and we could celebrate two years being on our own, zero of living. It occurred to me: did he ask about high school because we were about to settle down and call this shitty duplex home? God, I hoped not. I couldn’t stand it.
***
Alex woke me up from my second nap of the day by kicking open the door and tossing my jacket on the bed. Then he disappeared into his room with no mention of the afternoon, door shut, music on. It was the same process every time: clothes shoved in the closet, pillows straightened, a spritz of air freshener. Didn’t ever distract from how awful our place looked, how it reeked of smoke and alcohol, how pathetic it was for him to explain that he lived with his younger brother. Why? Because his younger brother needed him. Asher’s had it tough, with our mother dying and all. Oh, how sweet and tragic. How wonderful and sensitive.
It was pure bullshit. Alex needed me to run him to the emergency room on nights he went too far.
I pulled on my jacket and grabbed the keys left out on the kitchen table, driving the car to a church by Carnegie Mellon, one with a big lot the cops never cared to check. Then I walked the mile and some to Pitt. More often than not, I wandered around college campuses to kill time during his “dates.” The campuses were usually well-lit, and I liked passing groups of friends or even just taking a nap in the library, because everyone napped in the library. I thought it was cool. Imagine working so hard you had to sleep in a public place.
The temperature was unusually cold for October, and I wasn’t particularly tired after two naps, so I found my way into a classroom building and took the stairs up to the fourth floor, planning to walk through every inch from the top down. It was like the game I used to play with the back of cereal boxes in the mornings before school, reading all the discernible text, including the trademark statements at the bottom. It offered a sense of two-dimensional accomplishment, and I wasn’t sure what else I wanted in the moment.
On the fourth floor, big posters full of graphs and dense blocks of text lined either side of the corn-yellow hall, too bright against the 70s-brown tile. Each poster had color themes and certain layouts, pleasing ones with pictures of skulls and cells and countries. I gravitated toward a clean gray and blue one: “A Geophysical Survey at Fort Peck Lake,” Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh. And I read the entire thing, every bit of boring text and strange terms, and then moved to the next well-designed one. I read the next, and the next, and the next, until I had to read the ugly ones, and even they were interesting.
The pit in my stomach swelled, because for the first time since leaving home, I really thought about my future. About graduating high school. Going to college. Getting a job, marrying someone, having kids, rotting in retirement, the whole nine yards, entire eighty-some years in a slideshow of cinematic tropes with complications boiled off, the life simple and pure.
I thought about how ridiculously wonderful it sounded, and how incredibly unfit I was for… I wasn’t sure what to call it. Unfit for life? Unfit for a future? I had it in front of me, this intangible, intelligent desire, and it was dead. I killed it when I stopped trying to make friends in new places, when I left my favorite books in the cities I hated, when I bought two packs of Newports for something to do. And the space its death left was empty and sad, with nowhere to go besides up, up into my head.
I checked the time on my phone about halfway through the second floor. 12:06 a.m.
***
Walking up the porch and taking a seat on the banister, I cradled a lighter flame against the end of a cigarette. The warmth of it felt fake on my hand, and even the smoke didn’t give me the usual comforting burn. I took longer drags until my lungs were forced to heat up, give me some sense of life. The periodic car or drunk passed by, and I waited patiently for someone to take a second look at me. To ask themselves if I looked too young. If I looked out of place. If I even looked alive.
No one did, and it wasn’t like I expected anyone to. I just wasn’t ready to go inside, despite knowing exactly what was there: Alex, passed out in his bed, and his date gone or lying next to him for a few hours before the regret set in. I wanted to say that I regretted what I’d said earlier that day, but I didn’t. I truly didn’t. The only difference was that the girl could leave and get as far away as possible, never look back. She didn’t have to watch after Alex. That was my job.
I stamped out the cigarette and kicked the butt into the mulch. I hated this shit.
Stepping in, I didn’t bother locking the door behind me, kicking my shoes into the closet and tossing my jacket on the couch. I went up the stairs and passed Alex’s half-open door, almost jumping when he spoke: “Hey, you’re back.”
Hand on my own doorknob, I thought about ignoring him and collapsing into bed, but turned and pushed the door open into his room to humor him, because I owed him something for being an asshole that morning. Four empty wine bottles rolled across the room as I entered, glass knocking together.
Alex was sitting up, back of his head leaned against the wall, eyes shut. His right hand was closed around the neck of his trusty favorite, Jack Daniel’s, fingers drumming to a slow, beatless tune, wearing the same clothes he’d been in all day. One eye opened and caught mine, and it took a few seconds for him to form a smile. “Ash.”
I swallowed hard, never quite knowing how to handle him this drunk, especially considering how well his “date” must’ve gone, if I judged the clothes and relatively clean bed. “What?”
Alex nodded to his silent music, closing his eyes again, slow in every way. “Come sit.”
I took a distant seat on the edge of his bed. My eyes stuck to the half-full bottle of whiskey in his lap, his dead arms, the way his skin seemed to be melting off. He didn’t look the right kind of drunk.
“You’re really putting it away,” I muttered, more to myself than to him.
“Those and these,” he sighed out, laboriously searching his disheveled bedsheets. Finally, he handed over two orange bottles with white labels and white caps, completely empty of white pills. Still, he shook the containers. Silence. His mouth curled up into a smile before his eyes met mine, the usual happy drunk of his somewhere far, far away from me. And beyond that stood my brother: proud, kind, sober.
My stomach melted into nothing as I took the bottles away from him and tried to decipher the worn labels, every part of me stinging and shaking with hot blood and acid. “Wait. Wait. No.” I turned them over in my hand, reading nothing.
“I called an amb’lance,” he slurred. “On their way. It’s fine.”
I stuffed the empty pill bottles in my jacket pocket and took away the whiskey, pulling his arm over my shoulder and dragging him up to his feet. No part of him worked, not his brain, not his voice, not his legs. I tried to ask why, when, how, simultaneously trying to guide his uneven feet to the steps. All he did was breathe. Every now and then he tensed up and put a free hand to his stomach, pressing down like he was trying to keep everything in. I never hated him more.
At the base of the stairs, I hooked my arms under his and essentially dragged him to the porch, out of breath by the time I sat him down in a camping chair facing the street. I crouched to eye level, trying to get his head to stay upright, eyes open. “Stay awake,” I said. “C’mon. Don’t drift off on me.”
He made a movement similar to a nod of the head, but didn’t speak. Our little student suburb was dead quiet, enough to hear the rustle of plastic bags and muffled bass. Sirens started mixing with the local sounds, grating against the beat of a nearby party, and I wanted it all gone, everything gone. I wanted a soundproof white room with just me and him in it, and the moment we walked out of that box, we’d forget what happened inside.
Alex dropped his head and coughed wetly into his hand. He pulled it back so we could both see bright red splattered all over his palm. “Sorry,” he mumbled, wiping it on his jeans. “Shit.”
I’d tell him that I missed Mom in the box. We never had a chance to properly break down and lose it over her, to mourn the mangled body they made us identify. I’d say that I didn’t think Dad killed himself, and I didn’t think he abandoned us either—some glitch in the universe had him floating between those two options, like ether.
Ambulance lights illuminated the entire front of the duplex, red and white against the brick while the siren reverberated deep in my eardrums. Alex’s eyes tried to follow each flash and approaching paramedic, sleepy and blank like a buck’s. A bit of blood had dried to his chin. I let the professionals do their thing, dissociating, halfway dead myself.
I found out what suicidal looked like on him the hard way. On me, it looked like lighting up a fourth cigarette outside the hospital, alone, waiting.
