STAND ON ZANZIBAR

What happens is your brother’s got cancer, a few years now. It’s the killer kind. Kids he meets in treatment are always dying. By the bushel, he says.

You would have been scared shitless but your brother’s just mad, more furies than even the Greeks could name.

Your mother swears she’s keeping death at bay with all her prayer but you already know you ain’t a believer because you laugh at that shit.

After you laugh, in front of her, does she say if he dies it will be your fault?

Of course she does.

At school no one says anything. They pretend it ain’t happening.

Actually, that’s not totally true. The whitegirl you’re crazy about (she’s not actually white) stops you in front of your locker and whispers condolences in Spanish but your Spanish sucks so bad you have no idea what she said, Only that she said it.

Her family moves a few months later, parts unknown and you’ll never find out or see her immaculate sneakers again.

But besides her and your closest boys it’s mostly silence. And prayer. And a lot of fearsome dreams.

Also: there’s so little money that you’re often voraciously hungry and there’s nothing approaching health care. The only time you see a doctor in all those years is when your doubly-impacted wisdom teeth flare up so horridly that you stop being able to see out of your left eye. When the dentist wrenches that molar out it’s the closest you’ve come to ecstasy.

On your brother’s third year another kid at the school pulls the cancer card. Leukemia, detected much earlier than your hermano which is good. Cancerboy 2 is also a brother but of the American kind — on the football team and popular as fuck.

You are actually in the class where someone proposes they raise funds to help the football player’s family. You say nothing. You are reading Stand on Zanzibar. You are in the Innis mode.

They start spitballing plans and events and then someone suddenly says, Wait, a minute, doesn’t Y—’s brother have cancer too?

No one will ever believe it but you don’t look up at all. You’re trying to figure out Shalmaneser.

At least they have the courtesy to stop talking about it in front of you but the next day the fundraising kicks off — an announcement over the speaker system, flyers with homeboy’s face on it and no mention of your brother natch.

You try not to take it personally. You finish Stand on Zanzibar. You finish The Shockwave Rider. You finish The Sheep Look Up. You visit your brother at Beth Israel Hospital.

Read, he says. Anything.

You try (The Jagged Orbit) but he never makes it past a page.