March 15, 2007

When I was younger, my brother and I wiled away our summer hours in the backyard pool--an above-ground Doughboy with a blue plasticene liner. A goldfish-bowl of a pool to think of it.

It's curious what you don't remember. I don'tremember too many of the games my brother and I must've played together in the artificial cerulean. I remember the perfume of chlorine blossoms, the filter trap which housed a menagerie of struggling water-bugs, the swirling leaf-litter. I remember pushing off the aluminum sides of the pool with pruny feet and savoring the chemical burn of eyes-open underwater. But I don't remember any Cousteau games of make-believe or little-kid splash fights.

I do remember this: every afternoon, usually when I was in the middle of some self-involved gme (me as tugboat captain, me as merman), my brother would tuck his arms close to his body, hands meekly a-dangle above the water's surface like some aquatic T. rex, and he would trod a tireless circle round the pool's perimeter. I would be underwater and would see his body from mid-section down. Through chlorine-fuzzy eyes, this: a slow plodding, hippo's feet. A plumb-line footfall all aqueous slo-time, circles upon dizzying circles round the pool perimeter. My brother would push chest-forward, fingers skimming the water, a far-away look glazing his face. And he would turn circles as if on the long end of a mill's arm. The pool-water would begin a sluggish whirlpool, and behind my brother eddied a shipwreck of plastic boatsand half-inflated beach balls.

Imagine me strawberry-hair-plastered in the middle of the pool. I've a diving ring in my hand and look as if my six-year-old kingdom has just burned down. "Mooooom! He's making a current again!" And my brother doesn't look at me--just keeps plodding to some Greenwich-specific time--while my mother uncrosses her legs on the patio stoop, puts down her magazine and says: "Quit fighting."

Fast-forward a number of years. My brother is in prison. I'm awake in bed next to my wife whose chemicals are correct, aligned. I'm whispering words to her back come 4 a.m. Latin words, taxonomical words. Song lyrics. Anything.

I'm thinking about sepia-toned biology-class films and chalky illustrations of nerve cells. How neurons look like jellyfish, tentacles waving round orb-like neurotransmitters--precious pearls of serotonin.

All my pearls washed out the oyster's mouth.

My brother's in prison and he's still jogging circles and suddenly I'm the plastic boat-wreck behind him.

I don't remember any games my brother and I used to play, but I do know the current he pilots.