The Price of Admission

My baby brother passed when I was five years old. He was the first person in my whole immediate and extended family who had shared in my southpaw-ness. He colored, and ate his crackers, and swung a plastic baseball bat with his left hand, and I always felt uniquely connected to him in that way. We – together and exclusively – carried on the lefty privilege. We would fight the prejudices by our domineering and right-handed counterparts, but we’d sock it to ‘em later with ink-stained fists and probably higher IQs.

He was born with a nasty and unexpected heart defect that promised to loom around for a while and maybe stay. Also like me, he had inherited Mom’s really blue eyes and toe-headed tendencies. My brother’s broken, stingy heart made sure that I didn’t experience his much-anticipated birth. I had existed in those weeks prior developing my responsibility as the oldest sister – holding hands and looking both ways before crossing, echoing Mom’s demands like I had thought of them myself. I was three, but as a self-governed malcontent, I stood taller than the sky. My line between boss and big sis was pretty ambiguous, but he wouldn’t know the difference and I was ready. And just as quickly as I was ready, he was paraded away by tubes and machines and frantic persons who all got to meet him first.

Back then, we all lived at the hospital, coming and going for a few weeks, sometimes lingering to watch the cable TV. Now I know that our visits lasted much longer than my young person timeline. Most days, it felt as if we were important hotel guests, lavished with snacks and the breakfasts of our choosing. The hospital hotel maids kept the place tidy and white for us. “GET WELL” balloons lined the perimeter of his already small space, and if one more was allowed in, we’d all suffocate. We had a sick boy, but the doctors were fixing him, and strangers were still bringing us dinner. I ate lasagna a lot those months, but I appreciated it because my parents said to.  

The nurses became like distant aunts – the ones that all looked the same and that you’d heard conversations about, and as characters in your life, their roles were somehow significant, but their names, (no offense) irrelevant. Each of them scratched their heads in unison when they sent my brother home. Obviously relieved as a child with zero percent chance was relinquished from their care, but almost embarrassed as their math had betrayed them. They called his getting better a miracle, but I don’t think they really believed in that, or maybe they did now.

The next two years were a blur as we adjusted and settled into life outside of the hospital hotel – Mom, Dad, my brothers, and me. I guess I had my fourth and fifth birthdays, which I don’t remember. I’m sure he (Corban – that’s his name) wore a variety of outfits, but I can only see him in denim overalls and a red, Old Navy cap. He was sort of quiet for a little one, but creative, and he was happy. He owned every Beanie Baby in the entire collection, and I learned how to tie my shoes in his room. Since the doctors had done their jobs and made him well, I felt confused when he started to get sick again in the coming year. His feet looked like a cartoon, puffy because of the swelling. He was fussier and he always smelled bad. His cheeks overcame his eyes like a bee sting, and his skin tinted blue. He needed breathing treatments at home, and I wanted to leave the room when he put on that ugly mask. It was clear with green, elastic straps, and it made him look scared.

Dad was a pastor and had helped to start our church. I knew that place better than I knew my house. As Corban’s sickness visibly progressed, I wasn’t worried because, of course, I was five years old and also because there were hundreds of people praying that my brother would be healed. The Lord hadn’t answered my Easy Bake Oven prayer yet, but this one – well, he had to answer this one. There wasn’t another option. Two-year-olds don’t die, and definitely not him. He doesn’t die.

There was a night that I woke up late, because Corban wouldn’t quit crying. He was uncomfortable in bed, and Dad came to rock him so that Mom could sleep. I picture the two of them at the top of the stairs at our old house. I could see them but no one could see me back. He calmed down enough to be lulled into silence and breathing like a car does on fumes. Dad looked down in his lap, keeping track of Corban’s short breaths as he held his son’s heavy head in one of his hands. He somehow knew that in just a few moments we’d lose him, but he touched his face and just waited. Certainly minutes were like hours as Dad grasped tightly, fighting for the fleeting present, here, with his dying boy. If there ever were a time for those superhero powers to kick in, now would have been good. But just in case Dad was nothing but human – his mind worked overtime to create space for two years worth of memories that to forget would be worse than the impending death.

I remember the way Dad had him, at first like something delicate and then like a doll. He drew out his breath long to match his baby’s last one, and then he walked his eyes up a staircase that I couldn’t see, leading to someplace else that now held my brother. He didn’t struggle to pull him back down, and he didn’t cry. He called for my mom, and I think an ambulance came. I don’t have any recollection of later hearing from Mom or Dad how Corban died, how they felt the night that it happened. I kept a personal record of his dying between myself and I until a year or so ago. They told me that it was an interesting and partially true account with a few lapses, but that night is as clear to me as a five-year-old day, replayed for seventeen more years like a dream that you write down so as not to forget.

GROWING up after that was weird. In hindsight, life should have been worse. Granted, there were days that seemed it might all be over right then and there. I was seven and went to the upstairs bathroom to puke because I didn’t want to hear Mom and Dad yell like that anymore. I took my other brother by the hand and learned how to be old, as we existed with two parents who were grieving a parents’ worst nightmare. I didn’t know what depression was, but Mom had it. Dad was still a pastor, but somewhere along the line of disappointment, I’d start to think that this lowercase god seemed truer. Someone who let my brother die and one who might make my parents divorce and would eventually land me on a flight to neurosis – weeping in the bread aisle because, all of a sudden, I’m way too much and not quite enough. Freud would say that this was a result of repressed emotion from my damaged childhood and could be treated by acquiring a better self-understanding. Screw Freud.

In any case, I was fourteen and still sad. Not always, but I was easily bothered, and for no conceivable reason other than unwarranted impatience. For instance, if I had planned to eat cereal for dinner and came to find that the milk had expired, I would turn into flames and go to sleep hungry. I wasn’t an ingrate; I felt like I had real trouble solving problems that the rest of the world found funny. Everything was serious, I didn’t have a favorite joke, and people who made light of the world were ignorant. Racked with unrest and no excuse to be, I was ashamed of my so-called bad attitude that met me in bed every night.

After sticking it out for better or for worse, my parents were now marriage counselors, and they told me they loved me eighty-five times a day. We weren’t poor, and I didn’t have daddy issues. My youngest brother (who you can’t tell apart from Corban in pictures) was the last addition to our happy and well-functioning family. We would take vacations to places like Tennessee and laugh to death about the grouch who spilled barbeque down his front because he had it coming to him. “Friday Night Party” became a consistent tradition when all five of us could make it home in time. We would pick up take-and-bake pizza from Nick-N-Willy’s, which sounded like “nekkid willy” if you said it fast. We’d stay up late watching Idol, and none of us wanted to be anywhere else.

Why, then, was I dissatisfied, biting my nails to the quick and suffering through a perfectly good life? Had my dead brother whom I had hardly known made me this way? Most people consent to the opinion that I was too young to attach anyways, so I guess that answers that. Maybe it was just that being a six- and seven-year-old mother had caught up to me. I had adopted some twisted form of narcissism that lied to me: You can do it all. I couldn’t do it all, or even any. Topographically, it looked like independence, but it felt like neglect.

. . .

I fantasized about the circus. About what it might be like to feel so bound or so free that one makes the decision to run off with that bunch. I didn’t dream about the modern-day, corporate Ringling Bros. production that charges thirteen dollars for a water bottle, but rather gawked at the grunginess and desperation surrounding the nineteenth-century first American freak show – the one that appeared just upon the emergence of the railroad. The train of acts would leave at dark, traveling through obscure towns, getting drunk and practicing magic, until finally arriving at their next destination by dawn to set up The Big Top. Obnoxiously colored and large enough to hold the circus ring. It was more like a desert field festival back then, but still, everyone had his or her rightful duties. Ticketer. Ringmaster. Lion-tamer. Acrobat. Elephant. Contortionist. Clown. And the poor soul whose only talent was to eat and so became the Fat Lady spectacle.  

It had a certain sex appeal that drew audiences in from all over, especially men away on “business.” It was aggressive and wildly entertaining. The early circus was risqué (think Moulin Rouge), and it was dangerous. Performers who joined, it was suicide, except instead of giving up and dying, they were giving up and living entirely. The circus was for people who wanted to escape the monotony of life, to forget about its indecencies for a while, and to see the greatest show on earth.

I was fascinated by this dirty, divine, and separate place that gave me “Good Old Days” syndrome and held itself only within the pages of my most treasured coffee-table book, titled The Circus: 1870-1950. But at the height of my trance, what seduced me were the inherent similarities that I knew hid behind the flashy, exacerbated differences of each individual, each fire-breather and plate-spinner and persons in attendance. Energetic organisms. Transient. I wasn’t them, but I was like them, and why? What were we all running from?

Don’t tell any of the circus people this, but I enrolled in college and decided to pursue an undergraduate degree in Behavior Analysis, whatever the hell that meant. It sounded like it might help answer my question, and I had just gone through a really huge Criminal Minds phase. I thought I’d learn about the idiosyncrasies that laced the heart of human nature. Maybe I’d study why people were so sure about Big Foot or perhaps how it makes sense that six billion maniacs get behind the wheel of a two-ton vehicle everyday and a lot of us are still alive to tell about it. If nothing else, I’d likely meet another afflicted soul who shared in my cynicism.

However deluded I must have been to hamper my hormonal expectations to these professors who happily bide their time convincing the public that vaccines don’t cause autism. I tried for two semesters to care about constructing a line graph and another four semesters faking it as B.F. Skinner’s number one fan. Forgive me for being so vain, but the obligations demanded by a university were cake, my credentials decorated with perfect attendance and only A’s. But God forbid I ever need to tell you how to arrange data in a systematic order or present Piaget’s cognitive view of development. If I had been granted such a fortune to take on this new world of ideas at face value then I suppose I might have been more inclined to the perception that I was learning something of benefit and that my lesbian teacher loved her job. But since nothing is as it seems and I still felt like running, I started to write. And, like all tormented contenders who set out to discover themselves, I became – in the loosest of terms – a writer.

I’ve heard it described once as having been born with some “presentiment of loss,” meaning that the knowing we’ll at some point be deprived is a natural tendency, if not instinct, and to lessen that is to arrange things in just the order that we please. To string some reader along and impose the menagerie of our thoughts onto the unsanctioned being. It’s a selfish endeavor, really, to feel your shoulders drop and to allow your nightmares to become the world’s. And it’s risky, unsafe even. I find myself in the man on the trapeze, teetering between coherent and ludicrous, translucent and heavy, unsure of where he’s going but exactly knowing. A writer is, by no definition, limitless in his creation of ideas and the way in which he’ll choose to formulate them. Plainly or metaphorically, long sentences or too many fragments, out of focus or decidedly subjective, juggling his way through the white space – accepting that he’ll likely be fiercely misunderstood but saying it anyway, because to be a writer is to figure it out on the way.

I’ve been okay in acknowledging that not all people – in fact, few – share in this same impulse. The majority are pleased to be blown about, satisfied in being told what ought or ought not happen. They don’t pride themselves on travelling one hundred miles to see “a grand procession of dazzling splendor,” for it’s right before their very eyes or they’re fine in not seeing it. I used to envy the implicit acceptor of things, but this sentence-creating species would shake their heads at the bondage. A writer positions himself to make meaning of the wonders and horrors that get left unattended, and in doing so, he finds out what to feel – something he hadn’t known before.

. . .

I was honest and responsible in recognizing that I might, in writing about my brother, be forced to feel grief. I would expect it to play heavy, as all grief revisited does. Nods of sadness or regret are predictable, even welcomed at this point…helps with authenticity. But it’s taken me a month to get this far. Writing and then crying and then writing again, trepid. Remembering him in the mask, unable to breathe properly on his own. I never ask to go this far, but writing has some covenant in tempting me there. It offered me a good story and I took its hand, and now suddenly, I’m having to make amends with this foreign, bitter version of myself who knows he’d be nineteen today. I wonder what his voice would sound like.

A good lot of people are left writhing through their perfectly agreeable lives and they’ll die the same person that allowed their misery to win, no better than the lonely grave that welcomes his company. But I tell you all of this to say that if you can find it in you to endure the internal agony of whatever it is – the wrestle between whom you are now and the person you are becoming – the propensity for a wretchedly safe and artificial life becomes less by one. And on that day when the ache knocks again, I’ll start my running with seemingly empty scribbles until I’m doubled over, living in the thick of my inadequacy, only to step off the train and find myself on the other side of indifference, enjoying the greatest show on earth.