An incident far from here

My brother passed away in a death ward for incurable cancer patients on the night the riots broke out after the assassination of Martin Luther King. It was May 26, 1968, and he was twenty-seven years old. It marked the end of an errant, somewhat groping life that puzzled my parents and disappointed everyone. It was lived in the fury of demons and disasters, unintended harm and even a killing, which was not what he wanted. But he lived against the grain, against time itself, in pursuit of something other, something for which we had no word or understanding. He simply lived like a stray melody caught in some larger, perhaps deafening symphony played madly by an official orchestra.

I had come from Washington, D.C., earlier that afternoon, after turning on my car lights in the smoky haze of the inner city; cars passed with their brights on, honking angrily at me until I turned on the lights. Then I got high fives from passing black motorists. It was almost time to knock off from my job at a little publishing house in Alexandria, Virginia, when I turned around and headed for the National Institutes of Health, a huge medical complex where my brother was languishing in a coma. I had a feeling this was the day.

My parents were there, so was my oldest brother, a quiet, serious man who had become a chiropractor instead of a regular doctor, because he didn't believe in drugs. Now he was in the government's own temple of Cartesian medicine, with machines humming and tubes pouring in every sort of pain killer and supplement my brother's veins could absorb. He stood at the foot of the bed alongside my dying brother's wife, a short, thin Sardinian woman he married in Cagliari when he was in the Coast Guard. They had two kids.

It was a death watch. I stood leaning against a wall thinking of all the odd things that had befallen my brother Joe, as he liked to be called. For some perverse reason he had been given the name Clarence Serenus, after my grandfather, a horrible name that goaded him to abandon everything he could associate with its heritage--his education, his social class, his expectations, his ties to the future, in short, the metaphysics on which the rest of us based our vision of the world. Joe consciously and deliberately plotted his way down to the blue-collar world and accepted employment as a deliveryman and lived among plumbers, carpenters, postal workers, and waiters--who waxed the family sedan on Saturday afternoons alongside his friends doing their own sedans, and who put the radio out on his window ledge and sat with neighbors drinking beer. He made his introductions when I showed up in my MG and long-sleeved shirt, looking a bit too academic for the neighborhood. I sat among these lean, handsome men and their w ives in tight sweaters and slacks, all trading one-liners that flew back and forth like the comedy shows on TV.

I drank the beer, and listened while my brother, a leader among them, plucked his guitar and sounded every inch like Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson, Roy Orbison, and Johnny Cash. He grew up learning through his ears, not his eyes, leaving behind books and the visual complexity of the world to go only by his ears, which enabled him to mimic everything he heard, including the languages he mastered without tutoring of any kind. He learned to speak fluent Arabic, Italian, French, even some Vietnamese while merrily flunking out of the schools my father put him in.

Growing up with him was like a slow-moving journey in which his back was always turned to me and I could see the terrors and misfortunes coming at him from all sides. His outsiderhood began early in life. When we were very young, someone had shown Joe how to reach up through the legs of someone in front of you, grasp the hands and by pulling upward in a quick jerk, turn the person completely around and have him land on his feet. It was a swell trick and when done perfectly left the subject dazed and elated, happy not to be hurt. It shocked you hard to be so upended and then put down again, and so Joe decided to practice on a kid who lived for my brother's affections. He was a slender, unhealthy looking boy with sallow cheeks and a large forehead. He put his hands down below his crotch, my brother pulled up but not high enough to keep the boy from scraping his forehead on the sidewalk. He came up screaming, blood falling in gouts over his eyes. He ran blindly to his front door, and Joe stood helplessly by, fea ring he had really hurt the kid. He came out later swathed in bandages and kept his distance from Joe.

It was another incident, five years later, that made me think something was odd about Joe. He had received two fencing foils with cork tips, and in the alley behind our new house in Philadelphia, under dim back door lights, fenced with his buddy and didn't know his own cork tip had come off. When he made a lunge, in imitation of all those matinee movies we had seen, the boy was bending over and took the steel rod into his right eye, over the ball of the eye and through the lid. The tip entered the socket and drew much blood, and the boy ran screaming to his house. His father came out and asked to see the foils, and my brother, afraid, chastened, presented them to him. Without expression the man put the two foils against his knee and bent them in two and gave them back. He walked away, and a friendship, I believe, ended in that moment.