"A Paper Memory"

The body wouldn’t listen. I tried commanding it to sit up, turn off the alarm before Jordan woke up in the next room over. The apartment walls were paper thin, and Jordan was a light sleeper; he treasured every second of every dream, even though most mornings, he complained he couldn’t remember any details anyway.

I was convinced the rage was still there, that it was pent up in those muscles, a dam just on the precipice of breaking. For a while, it had been so easy: I’d open my eyes and find it pooled in my chest, humming like electricity, animating limbs.

The alarm rang again, and I heard two angry knocks on the wall.

“Noah—man, are you kidding me?”

I imagined a stagnant lake, green water rotting with algae and flies.

It took an hour to coax myself out of bed and to the shower. The water was cold, as it had been for the past three weeks. Jordan would complain about it after dinner; I could already hear the entire exchange. Something like, These assholes. Scraping me dry and they can’t even give us hot water? For God’s sake, and then I would nod and say something back, like Yeah, they’re so goddamn lazy, I’ll call Humberto again.

It wasn’t actually Humberto’s fault.

If anything, he was a competent super: always responded within the hour, had a kind smile when I ran into him in the elevator. I just hadn’t messaged him to begin with. Nowadays, a cold shower was the only thing that could kickstart my muscles into action; it made me scrub quickly, rinse quickly, towel quickly.

By the time I had dressed myself and buttered a piece of toast for breakfast, Jordan was already up at the kitchen table grading papers. We’d known each other for two years now, ever since a mutual friend recommended we room together, but he was so productive that sometimes I regretted signing a lease with him. He made everything look so easy.

I poured myself a glass of milk, and tried not to look at the small pocket calendar on the refrigerator, the red circle over March 8. Six days, I thought, and it would’ve been an entire year since everything happened. I sighed—Jordan looked up at me with a raised eyebrow—and before he could attempt a conversation, which was very much like him, I put on my coat and headed to the train station. There was a man passed out just right of the turnstile, his palms open towards the dingy ceiling. An unanswered prayer.

See, Noah? You could be doing worse, I thought.

The train was late. I stood on the edge of the platform, watched a little rat make its way across the tracks, and began to tip forward. A woman in her fifties grabbed my arm.

“You probably shouldn’t stand so close,” she said. "Didn't you hear someone fell in last week?"

“I was just looking,” I said defensively.

It was the truth—really it was—but then I wondered why I should have to defend myself. I pulled my arm away and stood on the edge again. Curled my toes over the ledge, rocked back and forth. The woman shook her head and let me be, though I could feel the weight of her gaze.

When I could hear squeaky wheels and the high-pitched whistle of metal grinding, I stepped backwards and shot her a look, as if to say, Told you so. There wasn’t much of a reaction, and she wordlessly got into a different car.

Inside the subway car, I saw my reflection in the window and nearly laughed. I had been avoiding mirrors as best as I could for this reason: I looked like shit. There was no way around it. I had lost weight, my cheekbones were gaunt, eye bags shadowed, shoulder bones sticking out through the fabric of my cotton shirt.

A little girl’s voice caught my attention. She was sitting next to her mother, a woman in her early thirties, and presumably they were headed to the park before the snow arrived next week. There was a picnic basket, a blanket—and then I saw it, a bright blue kite in the girl’s hands. I turned away, eyes stinging, and pressed my hands into my eyelids until the moisture was gone. My mother used to do the same, when the pain was too much but she didn’t want us to worry.

Something pulled my gaze to the window, and then I saw him.

It was just for a second, but my heart nearly stopped: he was positioned so I could only see his profile reflected in the glass, but even then, I knew that face anywhere. The contour of his nose, the mole just above his eyebrow. He wore a black sweater, and slung over his arm was that familiar tote bag, where he used to keep all his music scores.

Elliot?

His name hurt to say, even in the silence of my own head.

But before I could turn around, the train pulled into a tunnel and plunged into darkness. The lights went out, but I swore I could feel him there, watching, reaching. I held my breath until the end of the tunnel, as children do before making wishes.

By the time we emerged into light, my brother was gone.

I didn’t even have to turn around. In the window, I could see the bench was empty, that it had always been empty.

I got to the lab at around ten. Leslie, the thirty-four-year-old postbac, was complaining about how one of the undergrads had messed up her cell line and now she had to start over. She’d actually messed it up herself—I saw it happen the night before, but didn’t say anything. Out of everyone, I liked Leslie best: she was the least put-together, hair perpetually slick with oil and dandruff, always running between daycare and her petri dishes. I felt for her, I really did. She cried after every lab meeting, after most arguments with her husband, after every failed experiment. It was fascinating to me, her willingness to cry so openly.

I imagined what my father might say. I’d only ever seen him cry once.

Around lunchtime, when it was just Leslie and I, she turned to me and said, “I know I’m not supposed to bring Amy, but tomorrow’s babysitter cancelled and I….it’s just us on Sundays, will you mind? I’ll keep her on the iPad, she’ll be quiet—”

I waved my hand. “Leslie, it’s just me. Bring Amy, I won’t say anything.”

She smiled. “Thanks. She’s a good girl, I promise.”

A few minutes later, her smile was gone, and she asked, “Noah, what if research just isn’t for us? I mean, clearly, we’re not very good at this.”

I almost dropped the pipet in my hand. A part of me wanted to say Speak for yourself, but Leslie and I were in the same boat and both of us knew it. Our experiments kept going wrong, none of the data pointed to any definitive conclusions. A coherent paper seemed years away, and our PI was always on our asses about it.

“I’ve got nothing else to do,” I said eventually, shrugging.

“But you’re so young, Noah. You could do anything. Twenty-five is just the beginning, you know? What excites you?”

I shrugged again. There was nothing, really. I ferried my body back and forth from lab and the apartment, the bar one street over.

“Strip clubs, maybe. The ones in Florida, though. Not New York.”

“I mean it, Noah.”

“Fine. Strip clubs in Chicago, then.”

She sighed. “Any progress on your thesis?”

I couldn’t hold back a snort, and tried to play it off as a cough. Leslie, bless her heat, was genuinely concerned.

“I know it’s been hard this year—”

“It hasn’t been hard. I’ve just been unlucky,” I cut in. “Can’t always be lucky like May.” May was the lab’s poster child: she had three papers published by Nature, the most recent one on intraflagellar transport impairing sensory perception, which had landed the lab a huge NIH grant. I called her the worm whisperer.

Leslie regarded the look in my eye. “Anyway,” she said finally, “they won’t go easy on you just because of...well, you know.”

I didn’t need her to tell me. I could imagine a wiry old man sitting there in the front row, nitpicking through the data, telling me this was wrong, this other figure wasn’t statistically significant, and oh, why didn’t I consider this? Still, I didn’t want to talk to Leslie any more than I had. Clumsily, I fumbled for a rack of test tubes I kept on my shelf for emergencies.

Water placebos, which I could pretend to run experiments on. A year ago, when it all happened, everyone in the lab and their mother kept checking in on me, asking how I was, if they might be able to help with anything; the placebos were a lifeline, a way to escape all the questioning and sympathetic stares.

“I’ll be in the mass spec room,” I said, and left without hearing her response.

After lab, I went straight to the bar and ordered a beer. After my exchange with Leslie, I’d gone to the dark room to track mutated worms under the microscope. I kept the data in a neat Excel spreadsheet and ran the numbers, but nothing stood out. Worse, when I closed my eyes, I could still see the worms rolling in circles, making their way across the agar.

The bar always stunk of alcohol. I used to hate the smell, how it clung to my father’s clothes, but now I could understand a little: the promise of dull euphoria, a deadening of nerve endings. It was disgusting, how weak-willed I’d become, but even as the thought crossed my mind I ordered a second. The bartender seemed apologetic as he handed it to me, which shouldn’t be allowed. Bartenders pitying you, I mean. I ordered a third, a fourth.

Two undergrads at the table next to me were talking. One wanted to go home for the summer, the other wanted to move even further away. I could empathize. The last time I’d gone home was nearly a year ago, when my father had arranged a series of funeral rituals at the house. On the last one, I was cleaning Elliot’s bedroom and found a stray note, yellowed with time. I suppose he had a knack for leaving little things like this; when he died, he had left me a letter, too, though I refused to open it. He was dead, what could it matter? I kept it in a safe in a closet at the apartment.

As for the stray slip of paper: from the handwriting, Elliot must have written it when he was very young. Elementary school, most likely. He’d put it underneath the Laughing Buddha on his bookshelf—clever, I thought.

The first line read, Things that make me happy.

The second line: Flying kites. An amazing feeling when the thing lifts off.

I hadn’t been able to bring myself to read the rest. I finished dusting the shelf, put the note back underneath the Buddha.

Later that day, we burned paper gifts and paper money, offerings for my brother to use in the afterlife. There were Rolexes, a few Mercedes Benzes, houses, food, about a million dollars’ worth of currency.

“Your son will be very comfortable,” said the monk, after we had burned everything and there lay a mountain of ash in the fireplace.

“Thank you,” my father said, and the genuine relief on his face made me livid. I didn’t have to read the little note to know that none of this could make my brother happy. Between us, Elliot had always been the more sentimental one; it was why Mom loved him so much more, at least when she was around. Stupid things could make him happy—a bird hopping onto his table at a coffee shop, a funny-sounding sneeze, a Corgi’s butt. Once, when we were at Saturday Chinese school, he’d gotten detention because I told him a stupid pun and he couldn’t stop laughing, even when the teacher told him to shut up. He wouldn’t care if magic silver watches began appearing on his wrist in Heaven, or whatever strange place he was now—if there even was a place.

I watched the interaction between the monk and my father go on, and then, without thinking, the words slipped out of my mouth: “When I die, just burn me.”

There was a brief silence, in which my father’s head mechanically turned towards the sound of my voice. I watched his hand come down on my cheek.

For a while, we stood there in shock, both of us.

A moment later, he was touching that same cheek, the caress tender. I could tell he was sorry, that he regretted it as soon as he’d struck me. If I died, he’d truly be alone; that fear had possessed him. He pulled me into his shoulder, and I almost choked on the scent of incense and ash. It was a deep act of humiliation, admitting fault in front of the monk, who averted his gaze to the floor and eventually left the room. There shouldn’t have been any hesitation on my part—I should have just reciprocated the gesture naturally—but by the time I thought to return the embrace, my father had already moved away.

I woke up in a daze. The bartender was looking at me again. “It’s closing time,” he said, “can you walk?” I paid my bill, staggered out the door. I think I forgot to tip him, but honestly, I don’t think he minded.

By now, it was automatic: the trek from bar to apartment. Apartment to bar. Apartment to lab to bar. Variations of the same stupid motif, over and over and over.

When I die, please just burn me.

It really was the best way to go, I thought, climbing into bed. There was something poetic about man returning to dust—Mom would have liked that. She wasn’t Christian—Buddhist, actually—but she had loved literature, and a good Biblical allusion. I laughed a little.

When I die, please just burn me.

I dreamt of a great funeral pyre.

Bright orange-yellow flames; a dragon’s tongue licking the sky.

When I arrived on Sunday, Amy was sitting in Leslie’s chair, watching an episode of Winnie The Poo. Leslie herself wasn’t anywhere to be found, which meant she must have been in either the dark room or the room where we did spectroscopy.

“Hi, Amy,” I said lamely.

Amy looked up from her iPad. “Is Mom done yet?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “You like Winnie the Poo?”

“It’s alright,” Amy said. “Where’s Mom? I’m hungry.”

She went back to her iPad screen, as if she hadn’t expected my answer, anyway. Still, it was almost three in the afternoon, so I headed to the dark room and, as expected, found Leslie crouched over a slide.

“Hey, Leslie,” I said.

Her head whipped up. “Yes! I’m sorry, is Amy causing trouble?”

“She says she’s hungry.”

“Hungry?—My God, what’s the time? Three. Shit.” She started to pull at her hair, one of her many tells, and then she was out the door and hurrying to Amy, who herself began crying at the sight of her mother.

“I want to go home,” said Amy. “It smells bad here. I’m hungry. It’s boring.”

“We can’t go home, Amy. I have to finish my work. Honey, I’m sorry—I’ll get your lunch now. What do you want? A sandwich?”

“No, I want to go home,” Amy repeated, louder. She began to flail her arms, and in the process, knocked over a stack of petri dishes on the table. They must have been important to Leslie’s experiment, because suddenly she was yelling, nearly hysterical. I watched as she fell to the ground, nursing those petri dishes the way she perhaps should have been nursing her own daughter. Almost every plate had fallen face-down on the floor, the tops popping off, so that they were all totally contaminated.

“Amy! Now look what you’ve done! They’re ruined—God, one month of work—look what you’ve done! Look!” I could see the panic in Leslie’s eye, the exhaustion.

Amy began crying.

“I hate you,” the child said, running past Leslie. “I want to be with Dad.”

I could tell Leslie was shocked and hurt, that the girl herself did not understand the terrible weight of those words. But I felt equally for Amy, whose mother had gone first for the petri dishes and not for her own child. It was a crappy situation all around.

That night, at the bar, I thought about Leslie and Amy, and then my thoughts drifted eventually to Elliot and my parents. I kept thinking about how messed up everything was.

I was halfway through a drink when I overheard a young man talking about Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus.

“It’s really such a great piece,” he was telling the woman across him.

“Sisyphus? Not syphilis?” She had a confident, winning smile.

“Sisyphus, you know? The guy who has to push a rock up a mountain, just for it to roll back down when he’s done—and this happens every day, for all of eternity?”

“Right. I know a guy like that,” the woman said. “He’s an investment banker at Goldman.” There was a pause, during which she realized the man was quite intent on telling his story. “Okay, what’s so important about Sisyphus?”

“So most people think Sisyphus’ life is terrible. You might even say it’s downright depressing, right?—” I thought he might wait for the woman’s answer, but he continued without missing a beat. “—Wrong. Because Sisyphus accepts life as having no real meaning, because he accepts that he’ll struggle for all of time without hope of success, one must imagine him happy. I think that’s just so profound, you know?”

“That’s crap,” the woman said. “How is that profound? Where’d you even find this?”

He ignored her. “He has an hour of consciousness—that’s what Camus calls it—when the rock has already fallen and Sisyphus walks back down, and he knows he’ll have to do it all over again,” he said. “And during that hour, he is superior to his fate. He beats the Gods.”

The woman scoffed. “So just because he’s conscious of his unending struggle, we should imagine him happy? Come on, James. I’ll be choosing to go to the firm tomorrow morning—my choice? yes—but I’m still not happy about it at all.”

“No, no, you’re missing the point, Linda. He’s happy because—”

At that moment, the waiter seated a rowdy group of four between our tables, and I couldn’t hear them anymore. I ordered another beer. One must imagine Sisyphus happy? The man didn’t know anything, I thought sourly. At least the woman was funny; I found myself hoping she would dump him. When I looked over some time later, though, they were kissing over a cold side of fries. I ordered another beer.

I couldn’t remember how I got home, and when I woke up, it took a moment to ground myself. I was in bed, in the same clothes from the night before, shoes still on. The bottoms were sticky. I kicked them off into a corner and sat up. With horror, I realized I was holding an envelope—Elliot’s letter, the one I had never chalked up the courage to read. Sometime during my drunken stupor, I must have pulled out my winter blankets and opened the safe buried at the bottom of my closet. Sure enough, when I looked across my room, the door to the safe was wide open, and empty.

It was four in the morning, and Jordan was snoring in the next room, the sound so obnoxiously loud I considered going over and bludgeoning him to death. I massaged my temples, returned the letter to the safe, locked it again, and rearranged the blankets on top of it. After a deep breath, I stumbled towards the bathroom to wash my face.

In the mirror, I found Elliot’s eyes transplanted onto mine. They must have been Elliot’s eyes, ripped straight from his sockets—there was that same blank emptiness, as if someone had hollowed out my insides with a spoon. I could still remember the first time I saw those eyes on my brother: at a shitty frat party, with cheap beer and diluted jungle juice—not Elliot’s scene, normally, but he had just botched a panel review at Juilliard, and I convinced him to come uptown to blow off some steam. Girls loved the whole classical piano thing, he could talk Stravinsky with them or something. Back then he only told me the review went poorly, as poorly as any review could possibly go. I assumed performance anxiety, bad luck, maybe not enough practice. It wasn’t until later that I found out it was he had developed a tremor, the same one as our father's. It made his playing uncoordinated, messy.

Halfway through the night, I caught him gazing out the window with that empty look in his eye. It was terrifying, to see a bright kid’s eyes go flat like that.

“Elliot, what’s wrong?” I’d asked, words slurring.

He turned to me, and the mask was back on a second later. Perfect boyish smile, a light laugh. After he died, I couldn’t remember if the deception really was that perfect, or if I had just let myself forget for convenience’s sake. Some days I was certain one or the other was right. Now he was gone, and I was still being haunted by those eyes; something about it was so disturbing that the rage flared up again, a final protective measure. I drew my fist back and punched the glass as hard as I could. Once, twice. With deep satisfaction, I watched the eyes fracture into several pieces. For the first time in months, I felt truly alive—electricity humming in my stomach, my throat. I punched the glass once more, and in that stagnant green lake, I imagined a small ripple at its center, spilling outward.

Before I could get to lab the next day, Jordan stopped me at the door.

“Seriously. I’ve tried to be patient, I know you’re going through a lot, alright, but—”

“Don’t want to hear it,” I said, pushing past him.

“Noah, look. I’m just trying—”

But I had taken the stairs two at a time, still riding off my high from last night, and was already out of earshot.

At lab, I was trembling with excitement. I kept replaying that scene in the bathroom: the way I had cocked back my fist and shattered the eyes into fragments. I was so out of it, I tripped over my shoes and knocked over a bottle of E. coli broth. May looked at me and scoffed, as if to say, Amateur; the PI happened to be in his office, poked his head out to see the commotion, then returned to his desk.

I felt the back of my throat clench; the electricity seemed to evaporate on the spot.

I wanted to disappear.

It was that easy, wasn’t it?

Leslie’s hand on mine ripped me out of my thoughts. She’d kelt beside me and was helping me mop up the liquid. We cleaned up the floor, disinfected it. I thanked her quietly and went to my work bench.

A courier came twenty minutes later with PCR results, and I opened the paper to find yet another failed experiment.

I picked up my jacket, headed to the liquor store, and bought a handle of vodka.

He had showed up ten minutes late that day, bags under his eyes. This was a week before my brother stepped off a chair in his dormitory. It was the middle of his junior year at Juilliard; I had started a Ph.D. at Columbia. The tremors hadn't gotten any better, despite trying all the medications his neurologist offered. “It’d be a career killer, you know?” he said, laughing.

It wasn’t a laughing matter, but for some reason, we both laughed for awhile.

After we sat down and ordered, he asked, “You know, Noah, do you remember that day on the hill? When we flew our kite—the red one?”

I signaled for the waiter to get our menus, and then I said something like, “Maybe. More or less? I mean it was so long ago.”

“You wouldn’t give up,” he said. “You just kept going and going. Dogged.”

“Well, it’s gotten me this far.”

“It took you hours. I told you—remember?—I said, ‘I don’t think today’s a kite-flying kind of day,’ those words exactly, and then you flipped me off and kept throwing it up, running around like some madman let out of the penitentiary.”

I ordered for the table, hoping he’d take the hint that I wasn’t interested in rehashing some obscure childhood memory. But he kept at it. “It took until the end of the day, but somehow a breeze caught it, and you started running around, chasing the kite, and you gave it to me, and all the other kids gathered around, and it flew. Like an airplane, just straight up.”

“Right,” I said. Elliot frowned.

Our food came, and I moved onto other subjects: a girl I’d been seeing at the time named Sally, midterms, Elliot’s upcoming recital. He had been preparing for a big international Chopin competition, a dream of his since he was ten years old, before the tremors had started acting up. So the competition was now out of the question, and it was debatable whether he'd be able to complete the recital without embarrassing himself.

There eventually came a lull in the conversation—I was lifting a glass to my lips—when he turned towards me and I saw those eyes again. It seemed as if he were looking past me, searching for something lost to time.

“You know, Noah, sometimes I wonder what it’d be like to chase a kite to the ends of the world,” he said. "To just run until you fall off the edge of the earth. It'd be a pretty great feeling, don't you think? The best kind of adventure, something like falling down the rabbit hole. Or is that a kind of hubris? Thinking you can get to the end of anything? Wasn't there something about that in Inferno, Ulysses trying to get to the end and being engulfed into Hell instead? Noah, you listening?"

Noah, you listening?

As I staggered into the subway station, I began to cry. The homeless man—the same one I had seen passed out the other day—looked at me as if I were the one rotting away on a piss-stained floor.

Noah, you listening?

I’d already cleared a quarter of the bottle and took several more swigs, ignoring the looks I was getting from the people around me. It was much too late, though—something had dragged me back into the memory, and I was helpless to relive it. There was the phone call, of course; I had been at the library when my father broke the news. Elliot’s body was at the hospital, he said, he was driving down from upstate, be there in an hour.

My breath became shallow. I took another long drink of alcohol, a last ditch effort, but then I was there in that room where the old lady lowered the cover and we saw Elliot’s pale face. They’d closed his eyes, and if it weren’t for the marks, he would have looked as if he were sleeping.

I kept hearing, in my head: You know, Noah, sometimes I wonder what it’d be like to chase a kite to the ends of the world, to just run until you fall off the edge of the earth?

Someone was wailing.

Someone was wailing, and it was my father.

I couldn’t reconcile those two clauses together.

He’d flung himself over the body and was touching Elliot’s cheek, shaking the corpse as if the act might bring him back to life. I had to look away, but I could still hear him pounding on my brother’s chest. I wanted to tell him to stop, that he would leave dark bruises on Elliot’s sternum—hadn’t he suffered enough? The wailing grew louder, and in Cantonese, my father kept saying, My son, my son, my beautiful son, why would you do this?, how can you do this to me?, my dear son, until eventually the murmuring stopped, as did the tears and the rocking.

For a long time, my father just knelt there.

Noah, you listening?

I drained the rest of the bottle, felt the effect finally kick in. The world grew darker, number, and then there was nothing.

I opened my eyes and the subway car was empty. I must have ridden the line to the very last stop. Great, I thought, head throbbing. Now I’ll have to ride it all the way back uptown.

I staggered onto the platform and blinked. It was also empty.

The train I had stepped off of was dark, and when I ran to the conductor’s booth, it was empty, too. Something welled up inside me and suddenly I was screaming at the top of my lungs: “Hello?”

I was running now, towards the exit. A staircase later, I found myself in pale daylight. I’d never ridden the train to its last stop, but immediately I knew something was wrong. I recognized the street I was on—and as I walked further down, I recognized other things: the elementary school, the park across it, the deli I had gotten sandwiches from in high school. I was home. And home was empty—for all I knew, the entire world was empty.

They’d really lock me up this time, I thought to myself. When the alcohol wore away a final time, some old man in a white-coat would diagnose me as insane and throw me into a cold room; I wouldn’t even get a chance to defend my thesis, watch mutated worms roll on agar. Say goodbye to Leslie. I kept running, though, and eventually I was at our front door—the old front door of my childhood, when my mother used to hang a fake wreath on it all year long, because it “looked welcoming” and “very American.”

There was music coming from inside—Chopin. My brother's favorite.

I pushed and it swung open, wide.

The piano was where it had always been, to the right of the living room. Elliot was there, his hands curved over the keys, pulling sweet music from the ivory. My mother sat beside him, turning the pages, with a familiar smile.

I held my breath—I was afraid that if I moved prematurely and made a noise, if either of them turned towards me and knew of my presence, everything would melt away. I was intruding on a private moment, clinging to the sound of the nocturne; it took a while for me to notice that a twig had begun to sprout from my jacket pocket—that the more Elliot played that sweet melody, the more the twig grew into a great sprawling thing, branches hardening over my torso. I knew the piece well enough to recognize its ending, and in a fit of desperation, I reached for Elliot’s shoulder—but just as my fingertips brushed his skin, the branches circled my arms and arrested them mid-air. Elliot, why did you do it?, I wanted to say, but by then the bark had closed over my mouth, and then my ears, so that I couldn’t even hear the ending of the Chopin.

When I came to, the subway was crowded, and we’d only just passed Penn Station.

Commuters were stacked in elbow-to-elbow, all of them entranced in their own little worlds. My head still ached, the vodka bottle was nearly empty in the crook of my arm; I’d spilled some on the ground, too. While unconscious, my scarf had fallen, and as I bent forward to pick it up, something fell out of my jacket pocket.

There, on the dingy subway floor, was Elliot’s letter.

Had I grabbed it in another drunken stupor? I was sure I’d locked it away that time, I was sure of it. Hands shaking, I broke the seal with my thumb.

It wasn’t even a letter.

I began to laugh. The girl next to me made a show of walking to the other side of the subway car.

It wasn’t a letter. All these months, I’d been afraid of opening the envelope, and it wasn’t even a letter.

Instead, Elliot had left me a music score to Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture. It was the first piece we listened to in a real concert hall—our parents had taken us to Carnegie to hear the New York Philharmonic. I was ten, Elliot was eight. Later he had studied the piece at Juilliard; during our lunches, he’d tell me the dumbed-down, non-technical version of what he had learned. I remembered something about how the motif passed between string and wind instruments—how that mimicked the circular nature of tides coming in and out.

“And the crescendo and ascending scale here,” Elliot said, pointing to the place in the music, “—that’s what makes the audience feel like it’s soaring. Actually, it reminds me a little of you. You’re always climbing, you know? Going places. Mom always said you were an explorer. And the water imagery. Remember when Mom said she named you Noah because you came out squirting piss on everyone?”

I closed my eyes and saw a great concert hall, deep-red velvet seats and gold-gilded pillars. I could hear it in my ears with strange clarity: the same crescendo Elliot had pointed out, the echo of the main motif between different instrument sections. I saw Mom before the cancer ate away at her body; my father, before her death ate away at his soul. In between them, I saw two little boys’ heads, childlike innocence in their eyes, an awe for the world.

Towards the end there came the delicate oboe solo, which lay suspended in the air, as fragile and sweet as a whisper. The conductor’s baton fell eventually to his side, and there followed a long silence, as if Carnegie had been put under a spell; and then I remember Elliot leapt to his feet, compelled to begin a roaring round of applause. I could hear that applause now, remember the way it reverberated through my body. I saw Elliot’s eyes—the eyes he was always meant to have—and strangely, despite the forecast predicting snow in an hour, I found I felt very warm.

The next day, I showed up at the house a few hours earlier than expected. The Christmas wreath was gone, as it had been in all the years since my mother’s death. There was no music waiting beyond the door—just my father, who appeared with a surprised expression, and the barest hint of a smile, which he tried immediately to dampen.

“I thought you would come later,” he said. “I haven’t made dinner yet.”

“Okay. I brought work,” I said.

I opened my laptop at the table. My father sat across from me, hands deftly folding wontons. They were my favorite food growing up, and I wondered if this was a coincidence. Probably not. I turned back to my Excel spreadsheet, at the numbers which said absolutely nothing. Ten minutes later, I closed my laptop, washed my hands, and sat down next to him this time, grabbing a circle of dough and a spoonful of filling.

After my first wonton, I heard my father snort.

I looked up, and he said, “Ugliest wonton I’ve ever seen. Your Mom would be very disappointed.”

He hadn’t mentioned my mother in years.

Come to think of it, none of us had. There were photographs of her everywhere in the house—family portraits in the hallway, a high school photo of her pinned on the fridge—and yet we hadn’t dared breathe her name, it had been so painful to see her go.

I kept thinking of our family at Carnegie, listening to the Hebrides Overture. In a fit of courage, I asked, “How did you meet Mom?”

My father paused, before reaching for another wonton wrapper. I thought he might not answer, but then he said, matter-of-fact, “English class. I copied her homework.”

“She let you?”

To my surprise, he laughed. “Well, no,” he said. “She got very mad. The teacher found out, and we got detention. Your Mom, she wasn’t like me. Good student. She wanted to go to a good college.”

“Would you marry her again?”

I watched my father’s fingers dip into the bowl of egg yolk. “Of course,” he said. “I’ll only ever love your Mom. This life and the next.”

I didn’t believe in past or future lives. “Even if she still had cancer?”

His fingers glided along the edge of the wrapper. With ease, he folded the wonton and dropped it onto the plate, then looked me square in the eye. “I would,” he said. I could feel, in his gaze, everything he wanted to say all these years.

“I think there’s something we should read together,” I said, and went to Elliot’s room for that old yellowed slip of paper. I left it on the table between us, and we read in silence.

Things that make me happy:

- Flying kites. An amazing feeling when the thing lifts off

- Mom’s egg rolls

- When Mom doesn’t feel sick

- When Dad brings us to the pool and buys us candy, since Mom doesn’t let us buy it

- Playing piano without the metronome

- Clair de Lune

- Chocolate chip ice cream

- When Dad drives the convertible with the top down. The wind is so fun

- Strawberries in the summer

- That thing Mom and Dad used to do where they swing me on the sidewalk

It was quiet for a long time, before finally my father said, “He was always a very happy boy. Very soft. Before your Mom died, she knew he would take it very hard.”

“Everyone took it hard,” I said.

He considered this, and nodded. “Yes. Your Mom was special like that. I couldn’t do what she did.”

It was true—he paled in comparison to her warmth. But now, in the waning light, I could see for myself all the love my father had tried to give us. I could see the loss and helplessness he must have felt, the love of his life gone, two young boys under his wing, a dreadful job at the insurance company. I thought about Leslie—the hurt in her voice when Amy had taken off running, the way she had looked so awfully tired and beaten—and I saw now that my father had done all he could. That even if it hadn’t been enough, he’d tried his very best, and then some.

Cautiously, I put my arms around my father’s neck.

It was awkward, and foreign, and when I felt no movement, I began to panic. For a moment, I thought he might try to spite me for not returning the same gesture a year ago, when he embraced me in front of the monk. I recoiled, trying to mask my disappointment, but it was then that I realized his hands were in the air only because he hadn’t wanted to get egg and flour on my blazer. His face was wet; he was silently weeping.

“I’m sorry, son,” he said.

I felt something in my rib dislodge—a stone that had been stuck there for what seemed like forever.

We cried for awhile, mourning the time we had lost with Mom and Elliot, the time we had wasted avoiding each other, the time we had spent hating the world and ourselves. We mourned the unfairness life dealt us, for all the things that could have been; and finally, when it seemed we had exhausted that well of tears, my father moved to the kitchen stove and boiled the wontons for us to eat.

It was the hour of consciousness.

Tomorrow we would wake, and mourn again.

Early the next morning, we drove to the cemetery and visited Elliot’s gravestone. I took a rag to the plaque, scrubbing meticulously. In the year since we had buried him, moss had grown in the divots of Elliot’s name. We left several plates of roast pork and sweet green rice balls on the grass, drove sticks of incense into the soil.

My father began burning paper money, paper cars, paper watches. When he had put everything into the metal can, and the flame was at its height, I stepped beside him and let the music score of the Hebrides Overture fall onto the pyre. Bright orange cascaded along the paper, liberating quarter-notes and eighth-notes and rests. In a moment the music score had curled up and was no more.

It began to snow huge, beautiful crystals.

“What’s that?” my father asked. His cheek glowed with the light of the fire.

I imagined that concert hall again: velvet seats, the oboe solo as fragile and sweet as a whisper, the way Elliot had leapt onto his feet in pure unadulterated delight.

“It’s a paper memory,” I said.