By Kevin Nicholas Wong

It must have been a sight for anyone who might have passed me, to witness a mammoth of a man lying face down on the rain kissed tarmac. One would think – after clocking a weekend night shift at a 7-Eleven, or stumbling home after a fun evening out – that they had come across a dead person, then, upon hearing the snores, would walk away snickering. I later imagined looking at myself from above, as though my soul was leaving, watching this pitiful excuse of a man fashioning a handicapped parking space for a bed, his plain, black designer T-shirt that shouldn't cost two hundred dollars (but did) scrunched up to his armpits, exposing his brown hirsute body, like a wild boar displaced from its natural habitat, wandering.

Specks of gravel, like granola, cling to my face as I start to roll away from the damp, pocked ground. My head knocks against something hard, the cinder parking blocks built to stop reversing cars from going any further. If I were a car, I would be one of those loud monster trucks with shooting flames painted on the sides, or a tongue sticking out, big thrusting wheels mounting the curb that would soon spin into overdrive. I am merely waiting for the day when I'd eventually crash and burn; it sort of runs in the family.

"You're always so quiet when you're drunk, I can't tell if you're normally like that," Andrew said to me earlier that morning as we laid beneath the linty mint sheets of his IKEA easy-made bed. We first met each other two weeks ago at May's, a gay bar atop a two-storey shophouse in Chinatown, tucked along a small street festooned with fairy lights. It was a cosy setup – fitted with saucer-shaped paper lanterns where loud men sat on little wooden thrones which helped lift their ballooned egos, in a darkened room submerged in a Tide laundry detergent blue; the L-shaped outdoor balcony had a rainbow flag draped across its ceiling, a proud, flowing cape that seemed to go on forever as it scudded across the corner.

Andrew had approached me for a light. "Oh, you mean lighter," I said, fumbling around the pockets of my worn leather jacket, brushing past the creased vinyl of a lone wrapped condom that was probably expired. He then introduced himself willingly, which startled me, that and his supposed bachelorhood. Men who came alone, besides my anomalous self, were usually burly old men in Hawaiian shirts with one button down too low, wearing their unmanaged facial hair that announced their wisdom. Andrew was different. He was younger, mid-30s, had slicked back hair that exposed his square-shaped head, and was stalwart in his dressing and etiquette, complete with a silk tie. He held his cigarette like it was carved into him, like a sixth finger, delicate as air.

"Oh, I don't think you'll like me sober," I said dismissively, wondering how many blue spins, whiskey sours, gin and tonics, tequila shots and mojitos were needed to lure the quiet back into me. I visit May's whenever I run out of alcohol at my place (their 1-for-1 house pours on weekends are a steal), riding on a wave, slipping into this fuzzy feeling like the lush, warm embrace of an old friend, or past lovers who never stayed, whose names I had forgotten; Andrew would soon be next.

"Give me a chance to? Call me sometime. In the day for a change," he said. My feet had started to itch at this point. Maybe because they had slipped out of the covers, exposed to the tickling breeze of the air-conditioning, or maybe it was a trigger from studying his insouciant face, attached to someone who still believed in true love. Once, in the living room as Mum mopped the floor, a confused 14-year-old me asked her about love; I was starting to feel things for a hockey player in my class who had a naturally permed updo and thunder thighs. "How should I know? Your father never loved me. I'm stuck with raising two boys on my own, that's love," she quipped. "Now stop asking stupid questions and get out of my way, you're dirtying the floor," she continued as she buffaloed across the room.

"Yeah, we'll see."

I slowly sit up and proceed to check my pockets for the essentials – wallet, mints, house keys, mobile, expired condom, yes, still there. My phone is at a pitiful two per cent, not nearly enough juice to call another cab; I don't remember stepping into one or leaving May's. Oblong bubbles of messages hover on the screen like rain filled clouds. Most of them are from Andrew, emojis of kisses and teary-eyed faces cling at the end of each sentence, and a picture from Mum that when opened, revealed a Bible verse flanked with doves pinned perfectly in mid-air, the words typed in cursive font, tentacles that curled at the end of every stroke.

"In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make straight your paths."

Perhaps God was truly guiding me this evening. Even through the imbibing haze, I know exactly where I am; the taxicab uncle must have pulled the old address still printed on my identity card. I still have my mail sent to Mum and Sol's; if I had gone down to the police station to have it changed, I wouldn't have had an excuse to come back.

God is the said driver, he takes you where you're supposed to go, and at the end of the trip, he merely hands you the fee, and waits to collect.

The lights are much harsher here in Boon Lay. The streetlamps still use incandescent bulbs, a sign of woeful neglect. Apartment blocks are bathed in hellish amber, blinking halos that hug the sides of paint-chipped buildings blister like the tail-end of a barbecue. Perhaps this feeling of regression comes from the diminishing lights themselves, containing its own cannibalising darkness, waiting to creep in, wanting to swallow these sleeping shelves of families whole, and nobody would care because this is purgatory. You don't see this part of Singapore advertised in cloy, smiling posters as vacation deprived tourists mouth in disbelief: Look over there, wow! 

A smell of burnt chocolate adds to the gritty flavour of this old neighbourhood from the Cadbury factory down the street, wafting in the air like sweetened ammonia, jolting a malodorous picture of adolescence. Mum, with an extended finger aimed at us, always used to joke in a low, sardonic voice, "If you're naughty, I'll throw you into the vat of hot cocoa!" I used to think Mum would fling us in, using both her arms to see what would happen if we were to disappear and melt into the thick conglomerate of sticky, brown paste. Home was an empty moniker describing only a place, and never a feeling.

I hear the sinister screech of metal from behind the door. Not one, not two, but five locks in total, each forceful click and retraction firing a shot in my chest as I wait for another to ignite. Besides the rusty main door lock, all other contraptions were newly installed and could only be unlocked from the inside. "Your brother insisted on them, helped him sleep better at night," Mum said when I first noticed. I wondered what Sol was so afraid of letting in (or letting out), but knew the answer, quickly withdrawing into the cold ignorant world I've been living in, cold as those silver bolts latched firmly.

The door opens, but only slightly, as though it has been accidentally tipped backward by a mischievous breeze. I can barely make out the shape of Sol's head as he peers out from the dark, though the hallway light above catches the frizzy curls from his caramel mop of hair. From this, I am able to paint the details, separating the different shades of brown as I blink the crust out of my eyes: the sharp jawline we both inherited from Dad; his mottled cheeks puberty unforgivingly forgot to reclaim, with a thin lawn of stubble sprinkled on top; his cracked lips, frowning.

"Oh, it's you," Sol huffs in his stiff, mopey voice, doing his best Eeyore impression, a sad grey donkey in search of his lost tail. There was something incomplete about him, an invisible appendage which dropped off growing up in this household. He is naked from the waist up, his rug of a body exposed, and has those bohemian elephant pants on that I absolutely loathe. The shapeless frock is named after the animals that are printed on them, batik style, though the name could well be inspired by the sheer indolence of their wearers.

"You're up late, considering," I say. "Is it late or early?"

"I don't know, the days kind of just blend together now."

I barge my way in before he even steps aside but stop just shy of where the shadows mark their territory on the icy linoleum floor – a straight borderline, a clear demarcation between light and dark, in and out, past and present. I can feel the trepidation prickling on my skin telling me to turn back. Part of me shrivels back up into the lanky, bespectacled kid who always had his head down in this household, wanting to slip into our bedroom on tiptoe at first chance, a capsule with two frumpy mattresses on the floor, a dark universe awash with the colour of mildew.

Quickly, I search for the light switch on the wall behind me and the room is soon illuminated in a haunting firefly glow. My body soon starts to acclimatise, and it knows – something about the room is a little off. Picture frames are out of their usual place, walls peer over shrunken furniture, and a peeling wax figurine that is supposed to be my brother stands unmoved. Even the makeshift grotto in the corner of the living room looks different. Porcelain statues of saints surrounded by tubs of fleshy pink candles smelling of incense, a mosaic fresco of Mother Mary covering the wall above – they all seemed to overwhelm the alcove now, too small for someone to say their prayers where Mum used to crawl into. She would be there kneeling on scraped knees, sometimes plastered with bloody continents or a broken finger from Dad (which she attributed to her clumsiness), unable to clasp her hands together to pray. It's as though I am visiting an exhibit in a museum, a staged, watered-down recreation of the real thing. But the thing about museums – you wouldn't want to be living in one, trapped in a prison of history, especially one this filthy.

And the quiet, it has never been this quiet in the night-time.

"You look terrible," Sol says. "And you smell like piss."

"Thanks, I needed that."

"No, seriously. You really should stop drinking," he pokes even further. I have a witty comeback already lined up about those awful pants, though I suppress the temptation. Seeing him at close range, this basset hound of a face with skin drooping, I realise just how much Dad's letter has affected him.

"Can you be a dear and get the mail on your way up? I'm not wearing a bra, and I'm too lazy to put one on," Mum said to me on the phone two weekends ago.

"Please lah, no one will look at you," I replied.

"Since you're going to walk past the mailbox anyway, might as well, right?"

"Fine."

Every Saturday, I take the hour-long train ride to the West to visit her. There are definitely more productive ways to spend an afternoon, but I'm used to it by now. When sacrifice becomes a routine, better options no longer seem to be available. We would have packed lunches from the nearby hawker centre, then sit and have a cup of chai tea while watching her favourite Wheel of Fortune. During commercials, I'd nod mechanically at her recanting the gossip she heard at church the week before, giving the occasional "Oh wow, really?" to appease her "Did you knows".

"Nobody I'm close with calls," she said once. "That's the thing when you grow old. If you aren't married, you're all alone out there. Friends go and go, they no longer come at my age. That's why I always worry about you boys."

The letter arrived in a plain, innocent white envelope like any other, blended in with the pile of humdrum bills and real estate ads printed on glossy paper. I would have missed it if not for the large scrawl etched at the front listing both our names in full. Seeing them being written side by side was unnerving. I imagined staring at our future crematorium plates, the only other time "Jedidiah and Solomon Subramaniam" would be printed in such proximity.

Dad was a firm believer in the power and meaning behind a name, one that commanded attention, announcing its prestige just by speaking it, the way it rolled off one's tongue like a poem. He already had one in mind for his first-born son: Solomon, after the last king of a united Israel. When miraculous news broke that they had to prepare for two, Dad went combing through the scriptures, and discovered an incidental wrinkle: Solomon was also known as Jedidiah, or "beloved by the Lord". He knew it was meant to be. Both his boys were going to be equally wise and strong, no, they had to be.

"My beloved sons:

I hope you both are doing well. No, this isn't a plea for money so you can relax (I would have reached out years ago if this were the case!). I am sure you must have wondered what happened to your old man after all these years, as I have with you two, maybe even wished me dead. Your Auntie Usha and Pavitra would be having a field day with this piece of news. I can see it now, them with one hand massaging your mother's shoulder to comfort her while the other cupping their mouths, whispering the gossip to the other ladies of the family.

Bali is where I call home now. I own a little shack of an eatery far from the town's centre, away from all the tourist nonsense. My business seems to attract labourers from warehouses in the vicinity and the occasional Westerner who has lost his way. All this doesn't sound like much, but good enough to be called mine. I am happier here. The residents look and behave like me: shirtless, belly protruding jokers with a bad suntan, but never feeling ashamed. We enjoy the same simple pleasures of enjoying a bottle of cold beer on the beach, and watching the high tide come in for hours on end, no matter how late it gets.

Here, I am finally able to catch up and walk alongside the pace of life and embrace its uncertainty with open arms. You boys should come."

I didn't care to finish the rest of it. If I did, it would have been like picking on an aging scab that would knowingly bleed and stain me. Before leaving that afternoon however, I sneaked the letter into Sol's room, slipping it in between the pages of a weighty true crime novel lying innocuously on his desk (simply leaving it on the desk would have been too easy of a target for vulture Mum). I pictured him reading it later that same evening, his hands gripping the edges of the coffee-stained script, holding it to the light like a patient trying to decipher his own x-ray. But what he felt during, I dared not to imagine, because I myself didn't know how to feel.

The week after that, Mum called to ask if I had a suitcase she could borrow. She usually only calls when she needs extra money, or help for something her diffident mind can't handle, like a return for all that online shopping she does these days, with my money no less. And as any son would, I typically reciprocate one of two ways depending on the mood I'm in: prosaic dutifulness or plain ignorance, the latter only working to a certain extent until her incessant nagging bulldozes over.

I showed up at the house with a glossy Rimowa in hand looking like a lost tourist. Mum was off to save the children in Myanmar, one of those Christian mission trips where they paint houses and teach fellow brown girls how to sew, the transference of skills from one domestic to another. 

"Those kids need me," she pledged with an earnestness I hadn't seen before. Mum was sitting painfully upright in a wicker chair by the open dresser, in a ratty, oversized T-shirt that looked wet (but in fact wasn't, just stains of dried sweat immovable even with Febreze). The scents of herbal massage oil and dried jasmine doused her bedroom, perfume of the past lingering, permeating through the Persian rug I was sitting on and the jaundiced walls surrounding us. I had to leave the door open, with the front gate in my line of sight – a reminder I could leave at any time. But this didn't seem to bother her. She was too focused choosing old sunburnt clothes and toys of ours for the village younglings. I wondered if this was her way of having a maternal do-over, now that Dad was out of the picture. 

"I don't know what's gotten into your brother lately," she said suddenly, in an exhaustive breath that sounded like an epiphany and an ending, her arms flying up in surrender. "I pray. I pray every night that Sol will get better, oh how I pray. Even ten times with the rosary isn't helping. And I'm even more worried now that he will be left alone."

"Is he ill? You know how Sol is, not liking doctors and such."

"Even if he was, he wouldn't tell me. Won't you stop by and check in on him when I'm away, Jed? For your mother?"

Mothers, they all have their tactics, hers was old-fashioned guilt.

"He's a grown man, Mum."

"Doesn't change the fact that he's your brother. Gosh, all grown up, I still get so many headaches from you both. Just look at the two of you back then, what happened?"

On her lap was an old photo album, encased in pebbled ivory leather that was badly flaking, crusty bits embedded in my palms as she handed it to me. In a faded photograph taken at our births in the hospital, a wan-looking Mum lets out a crescent moon smile, her eyes half shut. She has us cradled on each arm, tucked to the centrefold of her bosom. Both of our gummy bear fingers are outstretched, almost touching, mouths agape in mid-sentence calling out the made up, garbled names we had for each other those nine months in captivity. We were born barely a minute apart. The staff in the delivery room told our parents that they hadn't seen such a rapid succession of twins.

"They must love each other very much, cannot bear to be alone. See, they stop crying once they are together again," the nurse remarked as she handed us to our mother. This was the story Mum always told us whenever Sol and I got into a fight, that as twins, there was some special bond we shared, that we always needed each other.

"If it isn't one causing me heart pain, it's the other," Mum continued ruefully. "I pray for you too, you know? Some nights more because you're not here with us." Guilt, strikeeee two!

Flipping to the other pages of the album, Mum had inadvertently taken a trip back, as one would simply by being in this house, but fragments are missing. Dad's faces in every photograph are cut out, white ellipses mounted on his neck like car headlights set on high beam.

"Your father, another one," she said. "Another heart pain." Her hand was now on her chest, slowly squeezing itself into a fist, trying to rip out a hole, one that perfectly traced the shape of Dad's head. If only it were that simple to slice unwanted histories away. 

Why is it always the bad memories we remember? Or was it because all the good ones we had were tainted too?

The kitchen, like the rest of the house, is surprisingly clean. Even if you were sick in bed, the bed had to be made whilst you were in it; Mum wouldn't allow for such nonsense. Everything had to be in its designated place, like the fully equipped spice rack mounted above the kitchen counter, neat rows of plastic containers filled with gilded hills of delicious dirt, arranged in alphabetical order with printed labels facing proudly outwards, for only the woman herself to admire.

"Mum has a pot of curry leftover. Come, I'll heat up some food." I take the unsealed pack of ready-made chapatis out of the freezer, afraid to check the expiry date, merely discerning from the road of ice piled atop the plastic sheath. 

"Please don't. Mum doesn't like it when I use the kitchen. She'll know."

"Jesus Christ, Sol. You're 33."

Sol doesn't answer. His silence, a Darwinian trait passed down from Mum, was a sign of weakness which irked me. I never understood why he chose to stay here, to hibernate and not be out scavenging for life, leaving a brittle stillness between us, a dried up well echoing, one that yearned to be filled.

I stare out the window as the oil from the frying pan crackles to life. On the opposing wall are two mynah birds, charcoal sketches shaped by the phantom moonlight, curiously perched on cylindrical receptacles where laundry poles would normally be hung. I name the pair Bert and Ernie, after the puppets on Sesame Street, their similarities in appearance and implied personality are uncanny. Ernie sports a lemony, dishevelled mohawk for a hairdo, while Bert is looking more stolid and proper, not a feather out of place. 

Bert fusses over Ernie, helping to pick dirt off meticulously with his beak. Ernie flaps his wings to bring this matter to a close and flies off in annoyance, with Bert chasing after, spinning around in a cyclone before disappearing out of view. This surreal display is like a Hopper painting marred with bleak symbolism; if there ever was a time to believe in God, this would be it. If Mum were here, painstakingly washing dish after dish with a tumbleweed sponge (and sometimes just relying on her pruned hands), she would be reminded of her babies downstairs playing, and name the birds after us.

For every Bert and Ernie fluttering outside, perhaps there was a Jed and Sol too, fragile little things left stranded in the open.

The couch in the living room looks like it has been turned inside out, coral guts exposed, sitting far too low to the floor having now lost its youthful spring. We, "harmless giants" as Mum would put it, hunch over as we eat our supper, our backs oddly shaped like the pathetic rumps we call hills here in Singapore. Sitting at opposing ends of the couch, the two of us gnaw on our chapatis in silence, the helicopter whirring of the ceiling fan substituting for elevator music. We were not aware of the proper etiquette, having never actually owned a proper dining table. Sitting around as a family, serving food to one another, having chirpy small talk about how our day went – these were all storybook devices, reserved for pale skinned folks with perfect teeth and perfect nuclear families.

After a bout of prolonged chewing and staring off into space, Sol turns to me with a flick of a brow, owl eyes homing in with such precision. I immediately know what is about to happen; call it a twin thing.

"You didn't read the letter from Dad."

"What are you talking about?"

"Oh, please. You're just as bad as Auntie Usha and Pavitra. No, worse, you're worse," he scowled.

"Okay, then I shouldn't be spoiled. I don't want to know, Sol."

"Too bad, I'm telling. You're still waiting for your phone to charge anyway."

From memory, he proceeds to tell me that Dad has since remarried to a Balinese local and has a grown daughter who is already old enough to be extending wedding invitations. In the letter, Jeannie, the bride-to-be, had expressed a strong desire to meet us both, calling us her brothers.

"She says it would be a privilege to get to know us if we were anything like our father. Can you believe it?"

Hearing those words come out of Sol's mouth, the rough, grated sound of it, is like a parody of a song with lyrics changed to something funny and absurd. A constructed image of Jeannie sits in the cloud of my thoughts – dazed, long Pantene hair blowing in the breeze, with a smile that bends like a trained dolphin doing a trick, floating through life as how one deserved to; I don't even know her and I hate her already. She is nothing like the two of us, or the version of Dad we knew. Had the mystical waters of Bali, or the little temples built on each property which filled the island with an air of convalescence, neutered him?

"A wedding in Bali. Makes for a good excuse to go on a beach vacation."

"Don't even joke about this, Jed. Don't." Sol tosses his plate onto the glass top of the end table in front of us, reverberating an angry tune. He shoves the piece of chapati he was holding into his mouth and bites so hard I think he will scar the sides of his cheeks.

"What is it?" I ask.

"It's just not fair," he replies gravely, not petty and childlike, but a demand, his own muted form of protest. He looks malnourished in the harsh evening now, shadows cutting into him in sharp diagonals. You want to feed him but are unsure if what you have to offer is enough, like passing a homeless beggar on the street.

I want to say: Do you remember, Sol? Do you remember the day when you changed, buried yourself within a cocoon, still unhatched to this very day? We were seven, or eight. An invisible mosquito net made from ropes of heat ripped through our bodies as we chased each other around our cramped little flat playing cops and robbers, the air stiff and heavy on a typical, sweltering Sunday afternoon in June.

"I want to be the robber this time!" I complained.

"You're too slow, you know I'll always catch you," you said haughtily.

But even then, as all siblings do, you relented, and within five seconds, you pummelled me to the ground. Your arms felt fuller even though we were exact in size; you were my shelter, and I was yours. We stayed on the floor laughing, making angel wings with our sweat, flapping, flapping away, cooling the beaded drops that birthed goosebumps on our skin.

That tingling, did it ever remind you of being awoken on countless late nights, as the sounds of war from Mum and Dad's room encroached into our small, desolate world? The darkness that surrounded us was thick and opaque, digging a hole between us. But I knew you there, awake and afraid like me, your laboured breaths shivering like you were in harsh winter. In the daytime, we were easily distracted with our own adventures around the estate – attempting to jump down staircases barefoot from one landing to the other; hogging the rickety seesaw of the neighbourhood playground; watching television at the coffee shop till the beer aunty chased us out to make way for paying customers – blissfully ignorant of the dangers when night fell.

In the kitchen, Mum was making our favourite dessert. She pulled a metal baking tray from one of the bottom Formica cabinets and filled it with Ribena, raising the glass bottle in the air as the liquid gurgled a slithering waterfall onto the concave surface. She would then put the whole thing in the freezer, long enough to turn the blackcurrant drink into a snowlike slush, a poorer man's version of ice kachang.

"Let's see who can finish first!" 

"Ready. Set. Go!"

We armed our way towards the tray, trying to scoop the softening ice with our Mickey and Donald spoons, and when that wasn't quick enough, we simply used our mouths to inhale with our heads bent low, tongues wagging.

"Both of you hooligans are going to make a mess. Stop, please," Mum said gingerly. Her words, like the pile of crushed ice before us, would soon melt away, drowned out by our innocent, high pitched shrieks as we fought to finish the last swirls of icy soup.

"What's all this goddamned noise?"

Dad was standing by the entrance of their bedroom, with one arm up against the door frame like a slumping tree branch burdened by its own weight. He was by no means big in stature, Gandhi-like with a patchy melon head and a slightly hunched back. Mum could easily overpower him if she wanted to, but she didn't have the nerve.

"They were just playing," Mum said, her voice suddenly an octave higher, appeasing.

"I don't care. You're always at home, you should know how to handle them." His eyes were two buoys bobbing in the choppy sea he had poured for himself, an expanse of alcohol topped with a glazed foam that made him impenetrable. Even without the bottle of beer in hand, Dad never looked our way, treating us as he would if he were to accidentally bump into furniture, letting out a surreptitious mutter of something vile under his breath.

Mum stood up from her seat soldierly, knocking the chair back that produced a feline screech against the shiny webbed floor. She tugged at the waist of her walnut-coloured kaftan which hugged her Michelin Man body, then with her palms, flattened the creases of the worn fabric, anticipating the fight that was to come.

"Boys, go outside and play, okay? Go now," she said.

Then, like a fairy-tale, or a fable from the Bible that spoke of turning water into wine and killing giants with a slingshot, you marched up to him.

"Don't talk to Mum like that!" you shouted, a clanging shrill that bookended the ball of pent-up energy you were harbouring. Where did that go, Sol?

Before any of us could react, Dad lunged at you. His branch of an arm had turned into a weapon, like the cricket bat he once stowed by his bedside, swatting you cleanly to the ground, this annoying house fly that deserved to be killed. All I remembered in the frenzy after was Mum calling for me to run. So I did, as fast as my piglet-sized feet could out of the apartment, rounding the corner into the alcove of the common stairwell. I imagined us playing another round of cops and robbers, that you were tailing right behind, waiting for that rich, tackling embrace.

But you never showed, your body still on the ground, laying limp and quiet, or did you happen to call my name as I ran past you? For the life of me, Sol, I can't remember.

Words fail me. Everything we had gone through was, and is still, largely inferential. We never once talked about it, we didn't have the vocabulary to express what we were feeling, we were too young then. The past is a pit of grief, we circle and teeter around the edge, afraid to jump in, covering it with tics and false charms that people mistake for "personality". But the grief still sits and festers patiently, an unhealable bruise bubbling to the surface of skin.

I place my hand on Sol's eagle-winged shoulder, his muscles move ever so gently beneath my palm, like minute ripples of the ocean at rest. Tipping his head sideways, he nudges my hand inwardly towards the cliff of his neck, trying to fit these two pieces of the puzzle in place.

But I'm already there, locked in.

Never have we been more in unison than our chasing Ribena days, and before that, in the womb, our once tadpole bodies wrapped around each other when we had no one else. We had a glimpse of love before love even welcomed us into the world, after which, we simply forgot, crushed and moulded into something unrecognisable. I wonder what that nurse who carried us would have said if she saw us now; I wonder what Bert and Ernie could have taught us about love on Sesame Street.

I turn and face the portrait of Mother Mary, her black, glassy grapes for eyes looking directly at me. I expect some form of relief, her saintly warmth to tide me through, assuring me with her maternal wisdom as she flaunts her child on one arm. But within these pools of dark water, all I see is myself reflected, a distorted amoeba.

And then I hear it – first, a deep expulsion of air, then a rumble after, a cough, like the forceful pop of a sealed oil drum. I feel the thumping pulse on Sol's neck, punching through the parietal walls, defiant, wanting to be heard.

We all do what we can to survive, to beat life into ourselves.

I am afraid to lift my hand, afraid to interrupt this delicate process. If I shifted my palm just the tiniest bit, would he just simply break apart and open, like leaves of mimosa?

Lifting his head, Sol readies himself like an athlete at the starting line, and without warning, starts to howl. For how long, I cannot say. But it goes on and on, interrupted only by intermissions of infantine mewling and heavy breathing in haphazard staccato, a song I never want to hear again.

"Jed, Jed," he slurs, over and over.

"Oh, Sol," is all I can say, rubbing his wet, clammy back.

My arms reach around the slobbery thick of him. We are on the floor now, two children again, as though Sol never got up after Dad hit him that one time, taking me 20 odd years to pick him up. He leans into me and curls into a yarn of soft hiccups. His hands cover his face, and suddenly I am him.

Jed and Sol, Jed is Sol; this assumed symbiosis we shared, the serendipitous naming of us like a parable. I try to rebuild that equilibrium, a transference, an osmosis – feeling the gush of ineffable heartache that springs, a geyser sluicing up his chest, unrelenting in its warpath through this sickened body; the nauseating pressure of impending mourning as it sits right at the tip of his tongue, trembling, eager as a precocious child waiting for the final school bell to be rung, clamouring to run out those classroom doors, free.

_____