TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN
By Ernest Alanki
Something isn’t quite right in my brother’s voice. It’s Saturday ― we’re on the phone. He caught me at breakfast; scrambled eggs, toast and coffee. He’s talking like a convict on the run ― jittery, guarded and mysterious.
We talk about the storm that has crippled most of the power supply lines in Northern Sweden, promising several villages days of dark ages and leaving a few people and perhaps more dead.
He tells me, “It’s disgraceful to let yourself be killed so recklessly.”
“Show some emotion, psycho,” I say.
“I don’t know these people … they don’t know me, so I can’t be bothered.”
“Are you insane?” I tell him. I mean every word of it.
“Not quite … at least not yet.”
“Sounds to me like you’re rather far down a lonely track to a loony bin.”
“They should have heeded the warnings and stayed inside, that’s what I’m saying.”
I tell him a 64 year old woman and her golden retriever were crushed by a tree in their home while asleep. I expect that to put some reasoning into his head, if he isn’t quite insane as he says.
He says, “They should’ve been smart enough to stay alert until the storm blew over, before they went to sleep.”
I push down my frustration with a sip of tepid coffee. What do you say to someone who talks and thinks like that ― especially if he’s your identical twin?
After I make sure I mention the world economic downturn, just because every media outlet in the country is yapping about it. I didn’t have much in the banks to work up too much sweat about the whole issue.
“President Bush and his cohorts ... see what has happened to the world economy?” I’m careful how I say this.
“I don’t see how you can blame this on one man,” my brother, a staunch Bush supporter, protests.
I find his allegiance strange because I don’t know anyone else in Sweden who likes the guy beyond pass his silliness.
“I don’t know. He’s a clown nonetheless,” I say.
“Tell that to the American people who voted him into the office of the most powerful man on earth.”
“Why are we back to this debate?” I ask.
“Ask yourself.”
“Screw it,” I say.
“Screwed!”
“The voice has a way of telling its story … something you want to tell me?” I prompt Marcus to tell me why he called, since nothing can humour him.
“Huh, what voice?”
“Screw it!”
“Screwed!”
We hang up.
What’s the matter with him?
Before I finish this thought, the phone shrills and incites the hair on my skin to protest. I put my coffee on the top of the hardwood table and snatch the receiver.
“Jeremy,” I say my name.
“It’s Marcus, your brother.”
“I can hear that … so?”
“I don’t know what to do with myself,” he says.
“What do you mean you don’t know what to do with yourself? Take a shower, eat something ... it’s a damn fine Saturday morning and Mamma Mia is playing at the movies.”
“I say very mean things to Megan.”
“Ok, I wasn’t about to suggest you do that,” I say.
I can hear Marcus breathing hard over the line. It feels hot and very close.
“My mouth runs like rain,” he says.
“Fix it.”
“What do you mean by fix it?”
“Zip it up,” I say. “You make Mike Tyson seem like a saint.”
He giggles and says, “Last night I told Megan we need a break.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Show some emotion, psycho.”
“What’s wrong with that?” I repeat.
“Everything, Jeremy. Everything! I’m supposed to love this woman, not hate her.”
“I appreciate your telling me, but as you know, I’m no counsellor on these all time big issues of the heart,” I say.
“I didn’t say you were.” He laughs, which is good.
“Why do relationships fail?” I whine. “Why do we get bored with someone even when it all started off well? Why do we lose track of the beautiful things that brought us together, in the first place? Why do things just fade and pale into despicable nothingness?”
“You’re asking me?” my brother says.
“I just did,” I say. “I may have bagged thirty-two years of life, but I’m still single like a shipwreck rotting at the bottom of a black ocean.”
I hear the clock over the fireplace bashing time in my head.
“I’m absolutely sure everyone has someone they love, endlessly,” I say.
“Who’ll that be for you?” I hear the mockery in my brother’s voice.
“Mother.”
“Mother?” He bursts into sudden laughter that startles me.
“Seriously. The thought of the possibility of not loving her nauseates me. Remember how it was like growing up in Africa?”
“Good times, crazy times.” His voice is warm.
“Remember how we’d fight the other kids to a bloodied end, just because one of them said, ‘Yo Mamma?’”
“Yeah.” There’s nostalgia in my brother’s voice.
“Would you do that for Megan?” I ask.
The humour bubbling four hundred kilometres over the phone line disappears somewhere in the cables.
I tell my brother, “In every relationship we need space. The best we can do is ask when we need it.”
“This is common knowledge.” The mockery returns.
“I’m trying, don’t you shit on me,” I say.
“That’s why you are my brother,” he says.
“Well, don’t run ahead of yourself. In any case, you need to work every cog in your wheels to keep the fire in your relationship going … sort of like when we fought for mamma.”
“I’m too damn lazy,” Marcus replies, his voice distant.
“There you go!”
“Hey mister, I’m not alone here!” What about you? It’s easy for you to sit there and dispense pieces of advice. It sucks to be at the receiving end.”
* * * *
My longest relationship lasted two years. It only did so because Janet lived in London and I in Stockholm at the time. When she moved to Stockholm it went to hell in the space of a month.
Marcus is the one who always is in a relationship. Two years ago, he came to me almost in tears — he'd found his other half, his Madonna, his Aphrodite and other descriptive words I’ve never heard. Later that year, while on a trip to Africa, he came close to turning me into a jealous skunk, with his frequent utterances of how much he missed Megan. The conniving bastard almost deserted me and the trip to return home to Megan.
When he got back, he was going to have that baby she'd been nagging him about. Marcus is such a great planner — always making plans that later become the grave in which he suffocates. On the contrary, I’m always without a plan, which explains why I never can see further than a few inches into the journey ahead of me.
“Either way, we both have our demons to fight,” I say.
“Grown up life is crap!”
“Well, you guys are still together. That’s a good thing.”
He grunts and says, “Now to the big question.”
My hearing sharpens.
“You may need to see a shrink, Marcus.”
“You’re my shrink … what’s your opinion?”
For the first time my voice gets stuck in my throat.
“Well,” I say at last. “I don’t have an answer for you. I’m looking for one myself.”
He grunts again.
* * * *
The discussion with Marcus gets me into a thinking frame of mind for days, lost in a wilderness complete with contemplation. I hate this thinking thing, all this pretentious musing over the whole philosophy of life and its blah blah meaning. The conversation hauls me into the deep vanishing past.
There’s this day I got up in the morning, ran a warm shower, while singing sunshine by Michael Frantic. Later, I grabbed a great breakfast, donned a good outfit. I could have owned the world. I left home, and summer, waiting just outside my door embraced me with its warmth. The easterly sun in the far horizon soothed and stroked my body — its way of saying good morning. My blood boiled and adrenaline rushed into my head, in anticipation of a beautiful day.
I quickened my steps. They were lissom. I plucked a blood-red rose, from a bush nearby, on my way to the bus stop. I thought of the new girl, Rose, I was seeing and sparkling excitement of a certain novelty surged through me.
Life was great and complete. That day was a good day from the moment I stepped out of my home. It wasn’t like the day when the weather was awful, when I walked out and plunged into knee-deep runoff, and got drenched head to toe by the time I got to the bus stop.
I noticed as I went past that the arctic cold had crushed the rose bushes. This reminded me of a girl I used to see, called Rose. The thought of her saddened my heart and the day got even colder. In the bus some drunk almost spat on me, for no reason. I went to work, but I couldn’t work. No motivation.
Noon came. The eager phone call from the other new girl, I met Friday didn’t come. I was forced to join my colleagues for lunch. They talked about kids and then about more kids and then even more kids — more birthdays soon to be celebrated. I didn’t have kids, a subject in which my inexperience placed me in the worst of states.
So went my happiness ― flung out, straight through the window, like a planet hurled out of its orbit by the force of another. I returned home to sleep in the same bed I'd gone up from with an inflated ego.
“Not every day is a bad experience,” I whispered as I curled up under the lonely sheets. Pulling the blanket over my head, I squeezed my eyes tight and waited until darkness took me beyond, to the place where fantasies became reality.
* * * *
The next day, Lilly the new, newest girl called at noon and invited me out for lunch. My brother got married to his Megan a year after that haunting phone conversation. He did call me a few days after the phone chat to express some kind of gratitude.
While he’s at it, he says, “Not that you said anything meaningful when I had my doubts about Megan, but sometimes we just need someone to listen to us ramble to feel good about ourselves.”
“Soulless, selfish prick!” I chew the words and spit them out like a naja naja cobra.
“It isn’t my decision to become an uncle,” I tell my brother a few months after Megan gave birth to their son, Daniel. “But these days, I talk about kids … a lot, at lunch.”
“In the end, it’s our collective responsibility to help each other through life’s Herculean ways … at least I taught you something,” my brother says and chuckles.
I bite my lip.
“People who are silent usually don't have opinions about anything,” Marcus says when I don’t say anything.
“Hopefully that explains to you how I feel about you right now.”
“You’re the one who’s silent, Jeremy, not me. Silence explains nothing,” Marcus says.
“That’s because you can’t listen to anything beyond the beat of your own trivial heart. Well … triumph in your folly.”
“Folly is a thing for country lads, Jeremy. Besides, my heart has never been afraid to be trampled upon, though it never would allow such insanity to happen.”
“Then you must be that country lad,” I say, “Wary of cleverness, static in his ways like a stubborn donkey and wrinkled like an unpalatable raison.”
“What do you say to someone who has contrasting opinions from yours, but lacks the guts to say so to your face?”
“Silence is strong will, I dare to say,” I say.
“I’m a certified neurologist, Jeremy. I thought talkative journalists like you always have something to say … Jeremy.”
“And yet you talk as if you just discovered my name?”
“What do you mean, you’ve always been Jeremy?”
“Well ... your inability to comprehend me proves you are a country lad … not that I approve of your indiscretion toward country lads … utterly rude of you.”
“You’re a waste of my time, Jeremy.”
“I thought you called me, Marcus,” I say.
“So you could waste my time?”
“Which is why I was silent, so as not to waste your useful time, Marcus," I say.
Marcus groans and says, “A true brother will advise you to chew gum when your breath stinks.”
“I don’t know about you, but I don’t have bad breath, Marcus,” I say.
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I know just what you mean … just fine … Marcus,” I say.
“Stop saying my name … as if you just got to know me,” my brother says, his habitual monotone up an octave.
I get my chance to smile at last. “I’m going to have coffee now,” I say, “And think about nothing.”
“Have a good thinking about nothing time … it’s a good occupation.”
“Especially after a phone call from you,” I say.
When, we hang up.
* * * *
I vow not to talk to my brother for the next year. In the process of vowing, which I did many times, I drink three cups of the blackest coffee possible, while attempting to think about nothing.
In the end, my brother’s words on collective responsibility subvert my determination to forget our bitter chat. I reflect on how I seek happiness with such passion that it was the dream I went up with from bed and return to bed still dreaming of, but how this internal determination is often undermined by external circumstances, outside my control.
It could be a nostalgic scent of a crushed rose, which reminds you of a girl called, Rose, who could have sold her heart for a penny only to be with you, but whose credentials you considered too short. Or the smiling sculpted face of a brown girl, called Lilly, to whom you could have sold your soul for nothing, but who found your credentials too long. Or an unpredictable girlfriend and a bouquet of flowers she presents you, for no reason other than that her heart is confused ¾ the one you find the next day scuttling away with your best friend, Joy. Or that enduring wife, who’s your work colleague, in whom you are secretly in love, in your spare time and in your busy time ¾ the woman who despite her husband’s shorting comings, offers him nothing but care. The one who tells you she desires to beat some sense into her husband and leave him to waste in a landfill, but refuses to do anything about her dilemma.
Each morning you squirm at your desk, upon seeing the veil of sadness stencilled like dry seal on her face. Or it could be a neurotic twin brother, who’s also a neurologist, who thinks he knows everything about life, and that your becoming a journalist is a complete waste of your life. That notwithstanding, the brother whom you love the most, whose son, your nephew is your Godson. The Godson dearest to you like the son you don’t know, because you don’t have one. Or perhaps, it could just be the elusive good feeling of simply being part of these whimsical uncertainties on the thoroughfare of life, the journey you embarked upon with no idea as to your destination.
Exhausted, I empty my head, make myself another mug of black coffee. Gazing into the smouldering luminous dark liquid creating ghostly whiffs in the still air, I return to thinking about nothing, sipping the coffee, which begins to jar my nerves like a carpenter and his hammer. Through the open window, across the garden sprinkled with blooming flowers, up to the summer sky, I catch a silvery plane cruising away in the blue clouds.
I tell myself; at least I’m here now. Tomorrow may be different.