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Two years after Dave up and leaves, you find him on Facebook, and not even on purpose. You were spending the evening nursing some beers and trolling the web and somehow you wound up on a two-bit west coast record label's homepage. That would've been the end of it if you didn't bother to scroll to the bottom, but you did, and there he was. Dave is framed in a thumbnail shot in the lower left corner of the web page, talking into a microphone and lit up stage-light red. You finished your beer while debating the benefits and drawbacks of investigating, then you cracked open another one and figured, why the hell not.
Dave Strider, frontman of a shitty little lofi mumblerap ensemble. He's based in San Francisco now, apparently. How the hell did he end up there? San Francisco's the land of hipsters and queers, but then again, he's definitely both. You already knew, you guess, about the queer thing and definitely about the hipster thing, but it doesn't sit right knowing he's out there fucking dudes and wearing tight pants so far away from you.
The blue desktop light sizzles your eyes as you click and scroll and stare and drink; time passes without you realizing and now you're sweating in the stale dark of your empty apartment and feeling vaguely like a creep. The photos just don't end. He's gotten bigger, you're pretty sure. The tendons on his neck pop out in the pictures where he's really giving it to the mic. In other pictures, his shirt is sheer with sweat and he's standing in front of his turntables, shiny and intense, a full man for sure now. Something about it makes you sick, or maybe it's the Corona not sitting right on the way down. You can't stop examining how his clavicle shows sharp and abrupt in his low cut shirt, and his arms.
His band's Instagram is attached to his Facebook, and a little digging gets you to his personal account. It's set on private, but Instagram is actually fairly easy to break into, and the effort it requires to bust past his security settings and into his profile is minimal. That kind of throws you. You expected it to be harder, but now your computer screen is searingly bright and gridded full of photographs that your estranged baby brother posted, of his life. Spit dries in your mouth, so you pull on your fifth beer of the night and start to browse.
He's on the beach. He's skating down a steep hill with the palm trees and clapboard Victorian houses whizzing by. Oh shit, he landed a kickflip tailside, the friend who's filming shouts, Dave grins so easily it knocks you in the chest. His friends have dyed hair, tattoos, tryhard vintage T-shirts, and they take pictures of him with the flash on in the dark. He has his arm around a girl. He sits on benches and at picnic tables with boys. There's even photos of Dave without his sunglasses on, and his eyes are just how you remember, luminous and milky with the pupils dark as blood. This bothers you more than any of the other photos, for some reason. You somehow assumed that no matter how far away he was, or who he'd end up becoming, his red eyes and white eyelashes would stay something only you were allowed to see. Not that you're allowed to see fuck-all, now.
When it's the small hours of the morning and you're getting too dizzy and beer-sick to stay up much longer, your drunk self makes a split second decision to leave a present for your sober who's gonna have to deal with this shit in the morning. Plane tickets to San Francisco aren't cheap, but you haven't had a vacation in a long time.
The room is hushed and motionless except for the clattering fan and the wedge of blue light that softens the dark shapes of wires and monitors crowding the walls, and suspends dust mid-air. You're muzzy and drunk, but it still takes a while to fall asleep, and while you're lying with your body tuckered out but your brain itching like a sore, you run through the last time you saw Dave piece by piece. That night you beat him bloody, you remember. You only stopped once he was choking too much to ask you to. Then you led him by the wrist to the couch and felt animal and vindicated while he held a pack of frozen corn on his face and snuffled to the tune of Jersey Shore. Watching him curled up there, white and red, pulpy and soft, you didn't feel much of anything. Feeling wasn't something you'd do for him, then, but there were things you knew, like he was yours to keep.
Except you guess that wasn't quite true, with your twenty-twenty hindsight, because in the morning Dave was gone, along with the keys to your truck and all the cash and non-perishables in the house. You felt something, then, when you were knocking his possessions off the shelves in his room and trying to think of reasons not to burn the whole building to the ground. You seethed, and wanted. You raged, hated, and later in the dark you missed him so bad it made your heart beat the hot angry blues all through your limbs, into your throat, everywhere. You didn't put out a missing persons report.
As you ride the wave closer and closer to sleep, more memories of Dave arrive unbidden. You can go for days, weeks, without thinking about him too hard, then something shifts and the thoughts come all at once, like a stone slipping in a great big dam. How his hair was so soft and dry, like dandelion tufts, and how he looked when he was asleep. Your liked his right shoulder blade where he got burnt up by a firecracker and the skin was shiny and ravaged. You liked to tear him up then sit him on the bathroom floor and thread him full of amateur sutures while he chewed his lips bloody and grunted as quietly as he could. He was such a softie, right to the end, never hardened up no matter how many times you ground him into the pavement. Now, with all the vast deserts between Texas and California, you can admit you never wanted him to. You liked how you could sink your fingers in and twist and it would hurt him so bad, every time. Did he not expect it? He always seemed to want more.
You keep thinking of Dave until the thoughts stop making sense, and when you wake up, your mouth tastes like garbage and you're chased by a dream of tiny white hands.
The flight out to San Fran isn't too long, and there aren't any delays, so you take your time indulging in all the trappings of modern air travel. Cinnabon and chewing gum, and an in-flight cocktail while you doze through the screening of Night at the Museum and look out the window until the plane finally lands right at the coast. Your rental car is waiting in the airport's parking lot, and you spare a thought for your lost truck as you whiz down the freeway. The ocean stuns you, with its sheer size and the smell and moisture that blows off of it and simmers in the air for miles. San Francisco is a lot colder than Houston, but tropical in a way that Texas could never manage. You roll down your window just to drink in the cool, wet air, and take the scenic route to where you reserved a room.
The motel you picked is adequate, and the television even has cable. You kill a couple hours channel surfing, and shower before you sleep. All the tiny hotel toiletries are spent before you're near done steaming off your angst, so you go in for a boredom wank, right there in the closet-sized shower with the mildewy curtain, less than an hour drive from where your baby brother lives. You try not to think about that, or anything, and jerk yourself through the world's most unsatisfying orgasm. Your cum spirals down the drain. You stare until it's all gone, and feel weirdly, deeply sad.
It's barely past midnight when you run out of ways to occupy yourself, so you get ready to sleep uncomfortably early. The sheets are overstarched and smell unpleasant. You lay for hours trying to get comfortable, and wonder just what the hell you think you're doing.
San Francisco is a pretty dry tourist destination, as it turns out. You hit a couple record stores and hike a few of the more notable hills, just for the hell of it, but most of your day ends up spent on a bench by the Golden Gate bridge. The ocean is really something. The Pacific looks green as a bottle and frothy and mad; fog lifts off of its surface and rises towards the city in fat swells, so thick the legs of the bridge are swallowed, and its red arches marooned in the air. It's cold as fuck, but you kind of enjoy it after so many years of dusty Texan heat. You think maybe Dave feels that way, too, and if he wears a lot of sweaters now, or has a space heater in his bedroom. On the bench, you waste a lot of time on thoughts like that, and go through three quarters of a pack of cigarettes before deciding to get to the point of this whole ordeal and track your brother down.
Being smart comes in handy when you least expect it. Nowadays, you spend most of your life rationing out your thoughts. The cacophony of adolescence and the hissing, spitting cruelty between your ears when you were young and stuck taking care of a little kid, these things make you wary of thinking too hard. But when you need to hack and slash your way through proxy servers to find an address, you're grateful and a little surprised to see you haven't gotten any stupider. The address you have written down is far from the bridge, and if anything the fog is heavier in the narrow side streets, like the moisture has nowhere to go between the cramped houses and absurd slanted roads. Your shoulders are damp by the time you're in front of Dave's house. He lives in the lower half of a charming clapboard walk-up. You see his name on a strip of paper, hand-written, slid into the label next to his doorbell.
What the hell. You lean on the button for a cool two seconds and get ready to face the music.
Dave answers the door in flannel lounge pants and a big green sweatshirt. His wrists are so narrow, and his hair so thick and white, you're breathless for a second. That's fine, tactically speaking, because it takes him a second to recognize you, too, or register you, or connect the image of you in his doorway to the fog and cold of his new hometown -- you can see gears whirring, a Windows boot-up noise, error sound, his heart's jackrabbit thud -- then his eyes go wide and you can see that they're very red.
He doesn't speak, and you don't speak. You find that you can't. Just like how staring out at the choppy green sea struck you dumb, you feel like you've been hit over the head by his ankles and his eyelashes. Dave is the one to break the silence, when the silence becomes oppressively awkward and it's clear that someone better say something soon.
"Shit, bro, could have told me you were coming down. Might have cleaned up the place a little." His Texan accent has thinned out, and his voice is deeper. His tone is light, but you know how he is and you know how is when he's afraid. It stuns you all over again, how you know him. Your stomach swells unpleasantly.
"Wanted to surprise you." You lift one shoulder; he shifts on his feet. "That so bad?"
"Well. Thanks, I guess. Christmas came early this year, huh?" Then he gives a weak smile. It's one you haven't seen before on his face, not much more than a twitch of the lip, but so easy. You try a smirk in return and something softens between the two of you, though Dave is still perched nervous as a bird in his doorway, ready to dart.
"Cold enough for Christmas, anyway. Lemme in, yeah? I'm freezing my tits off out here."
So he steps aside, pushing the door open with his shoulder as he goes and just like that, you're in Dave's apartment. The air is warm and dry, and carries the mild foul odor that a bachelor pad inevitably accumulates. He's got a television, a nasty sloping couch, a tall lamp, and a coffee table smothered under a thick layer of garbage and dishware. That's all the furniture he has. The rest of the living room populated with amps and instruments and weird clutter. He's amassed a new army of creepy dead animals. They twinkle at you from their jars of formaldehyde and stare you down with their skull socket eyes.
Dave is living in a basement apartment and the lamp isn't on, so the only light in the room is the thin, wet daylight from the high half-window on his wall. You like how it colors the room, how it mutes all the street sounds and casts everything blue. You especially how it turns Dave spectral and soft where he lingers by the door, so much it makes you ache, briefly. You put your hands on your hips and make a show of surveying his shit.
"Nice place. I'm impressed, I'll admit it. How's the rent?"
Dave skirts around you and climbs into the corner seat on the terrible couch, so you sit, too. The couch is truly shitty, saggy enough that it's a struggle to keep your ass in place. He tucks his knees up to his chest, like he always used to do. "It's all right." He replies. "I manage, for sure."
"Yeah, I can see that. You're doing pretty fuckin' well, if I'm in any place to say so."
Dave's shoulders go up to his chin, like he's cold, except you can see that he's pissed and honestly, you're sort of glad for it. "You're not." He says. "You're definitely not."
You shrug assent. That much, you know.
"How'd you even -- how'd you find me here? How the hell are you just gonna show up like this?" Oh yeah, he's real pissed, your sweet little man. He turns on you and his face is livid and bright. "What the hell are you doing?" He adds a little softer, after a second. As if you know the answer to that yourself.
"Oh, come on. Is it such a crime for a guy to check up on how his fledgling is doing after he went and jumped the nest? Ain't it nice of me to care? Check and see that you're not dead? If you're eating right?" Your voice is flippant and hard. You didn't plan on getting defensive like this, but then again you didn't plan any of this very well, right from the start, when Dave was just a small pale shape in your mother's brown arms, when you held his hand at the funeral and felt unglued.
Fuck it. Dave opens his mouth to say something else, but you cut him off. Gently. "Hey. Peace. I didn't come here to fight." His mouth shuts and he deflates a little, looking less angry and more hurt. You take that as a win and go on. "I just wanna catch up a little, you know, man to man. You're doing your own thing now. I respect that. My flight back to Texas is tomorrow afternoon, I'll be out of your hair before you know it." You're placating. You bet he didn't even know you could placate, feel a weird sense of pride. Dave grew up, huh? Well, so did you.
After a moment, your conscience nags. "I found your Facebook page. On accident, of course. Then, you know." You shrug, but keep yourself from lowering your gaze.
It takes Dave a second to process that, but you can pinpoint the moment his shoulders unclench and he gives in. "Ah, fuck." Dave pushes his hair back, and lets it fall down onto his forehead again. He has pressed himself back into the couch, and is staring out his tiny window. Then he glances back your way. "You want a beer or something?"
So the two of you drink his stupid craft beer, order San Francisco Chinese takeout and eat it over television with the volume dialed to a murmur. The lamp goes on. Two beers a piece gets both of you groovy but not drunk, which is for the best, and the Chinese food is the best you've had. Dave gets more verbose as the night goes on, spinning stories about life in San Francisco, skirting artfully around how he got there and what came before, gesticulating with his chopsticks. You offer up details about how things are going in Houston, how you quit skin-flicks and work at an auto-body shop part time. He's going to therapy, he says, and you say you went to a couple groups but your insurance doesn't cover that sort of thing and it's true, just close enough to the truth of things that you both feel a little lighter.
Later in the night, when it's dark and truly chilly, you head out to Dave's front stoop for a smoke. He offers you a flannel from his closet and joins you out there with his rumpled pack of American Spirits.
"Those are for hippies." You tell him.
"Fuck you, they're chemical free and taste fuckin' nice, too. Philistine." He's laughing. He looks good taking long deep drags and letting them out again.
"That preservative free thing is a big fucking hoax. They're not any safer and they taste like licking a plank of wood. What the hell were you thinking picking up smoking, anyway? Stupid." He laughs a little more and bumps his shoulder up against yours, then leaves it there for a while without saying anything.
"I mean. You were always smoking, back when. You know. When we were living together." It's true, you were, so you nod and light a fresh smoke on the butt of your last one. "Got burnt a couple times, remember that? You got me with 'em on the shoulder sometimes, when I wasn't paying attention. Burns hurt the worst, more than anything." He trails off.
It's true, you did. You nod again. Your shoulders are warm where they touch, and you think about his ravaged right shoulder blade. You remember the flash and the smoke, but not how he cried. He must have. You just thought it was funny. Dave doesn't talk anymore, and eventually the two of you go back inside and watch more television, in silence this time. He gets his head up in your clavicle. You never let him touch you like this, before. He's desperately sad, and warm as a furnace. Two reruns of Fresh Prince play before he speaks again. When he does, it's in a hoarse murmur, like it kills him to get the words out.
"Why'd you do it?" He asks you. You know what he means, and he knows that you know, for sure. The specter between you has been building in the air all night. It'd be pointless to play dumb, no matter how much you want to go to sleep on his couch and leave in the morning and not say anything about any of it. When you're silent, Dave elaborates. "Why'd you fuck me over like that. Fuck me up like that? You knew what you were doing. Did you not care? Do you." He grunts in his throat like he's frustrated, or injured. "Do you hate me?"
You want to think a little more before answering, but staying quiet makes you feel like you're salting Dave's wounds, so you go quick and you go honest. "Not really." His throat works against your arm. You can feel his body clench and unclench, and his breathing getting wobbly. "I mean, I sure as hell didn't like you, having you around and shit. But the honest truth is, mostly I didn't give a fuck." Dave is so quiet. The television is on commercial break. "I didn't give a rat's ass about you, not even a little. That's the truth. And I feel like shit, okay? I do. I guess I care now. Don't know if that's cool or not. That's why I'm here when I should be leaving you be."
Dave puts his face in between your clavicle and your jaw, just a hot cheek and twin damp spots from his eye and where half his mouth is smeared on your shoulder. "God. I'm glad, that you came. Fuck me but I am." He's shuddering, now, every muscle vibrating so you know he's swallowing awful, ugly sounds. "I hate you."
"Mm." You agree, without moving.
"I hate you so much. You're the fucking worst. You're evil. I hate you, I hate you." He's crying for real now, can't hold it in. You figure you'd better let him so you don't move a muscle, even when his tears start soaking your tee shirt.
Eventually Dave tuckers himself out wracking and crying. He keeps mumbling right up until he falls asleep with his head on your thigh. He hates you, he hates you. It hurts so bad to hear him say it and see him shake with how much he means it, but it's a pain that cleans you, in a way. This is as close as you've been to him without violence.
You let him snore on your lap until Adult Swim runs out of programming and starts playing Off The Air, when you figure Dave's deep enough asleep that you can move his head off of you and get up. When you lift him up, though, he cracks his eyes open blearily and stares up at you, uncomprehending. "Bro? That you?" His eyes, Jesus Christ. Back, what, twenty years ago now, while your mom lay hemorrhaging on her birthing bed, you watched baby Dave through a layer of glass as he cooked away in the incubator. You weren't allowed in because you could have been carrying diseases that he might have caught, because he was so weak and so small. Shriveled and freakishly pale, different from you and your mother and his father, too, wherever he was, all varying shades of brown. You lived in that hospital, for those terrible days. The nurses knew you didn't have anyplace to go, really, without your mom or brother, so you slept in spare beds and waiting rooms and ate vending machine snacks.
The first time you held Dave, your mom had been dead for a couple of days already. He cooked for a while, in that incubator with all the tubes, but whatever the doctors did for him must have worked because he looked pretty normal, except for the albinism. Plumpish, he gurgled in his blue onesie and squirmed peevishly in your arms. It was strange, holding him. You'd never held a baby before, and already you were starting to hate him, until he opened his eyes and looked right at you. His eyes were so red. The pupils looked like shots of blood, transparent like tiny portholes right through his skull. Dave is looking at you now, like that. Confused, so defenseless it makes your skin crawl.
"Bro?" He repeats. "Where're you going?"
"Go back to sleep." You say, and then don't say anything else. You can't. When you walk out the door, even, you're sure to keep quiet. It'll be like you were never there. It'll be like the two of you won't have ever met.
The walk back to where you parked your rental car is long, and cold. You don't think about much, but you feel a lot of painful things despite that. Walking through San Francisco, you hate yourself so much your limbs feel stiff. The fog diffuses the street lights into ghostly white phantoms. It clings to your skin and shirt, dampens your jeans. You left Dave's flannel at his apartment, and you're kind of regretting it. Only because it's chilly out, and getting chillier.
In the motel parking lot, you lean your head on the steering wheel of your car and scream silently, so your tears roll down your cheeks and into your mouth. You let yourself taste the salt, and drool and leak snot all over the place. Just this once, you cry for as long as you want, until you find that you can't anymore. In less than a day you're back in Houston, where dust clings to every brick and the sun is dry as hay. Texas isn't technically landlocked, but you feel like a speck in a terrible endless desert, your first days back home.
But then you don't anymore, and never do again, because you never go back to San Francisco and there's never any fog in Texas, and that's fine.