FICTION | James Roseman The Intermediary of Abraham

FICTION

The Intermediary of Abraham

By James Roseman

Although both brothers are in the house, neither is in the living room, which is where one traditionally sits when sitting shiva. Donald is in his room doing push-ups. Phillip is in the bathroom, alternating between scrubbing the porcelain cover of the toilet tank and snorting lines of cocaine off it.

There’s a rip of fire up his nostril and then clumps of baking soda bitterness at the back of his throat. He was twelve the first time he heard of cocaine. A fat cop named Officer Rene had come to homeroom to tell them all about drugs.

“This one is no good,” he’d said, “makes you all alert and twitchy.”

Rene had said it and winked at the substitute teacher before clicking the slide projector forward. Alert and twitchy. Bullshit. A cup of coffee makes Phillip alert and twitchy. This is more like digging his fingernails knuckle-deep into the nape of his neck and yanking out fistfuls of long knotty fibers between the gaps in his vertebrae and jamming the frayed nerve endings directly into the terminals of a fucking car battery. The world

goes sharp and clear and for a few beautiful minutes everything ticks like a clock.

Phillip sprays every surface of the toilet until it goes sudsy with chemicals and then scrubs with the rough side of a sponge. His reflection stares at him in the mirror, slack-jawed and menacing. He hates that reflection, how it looks nothing like him, and he remembers that you’re not supposed to have uncovered mirrors when sitting shiva so he punches it as hard as he can.

There’s a certain beauty in the duality of a broken thing, something whole that is irrevocably changed. And there is beautiful certainty in the knowledge — not opinion, but fact — that the thing is worse for it, that it can never go back to being unbroken again. Phillip likes this idea. He likes it so much he carries on punching even when the mirror’s reflection is free from its frame and lies in splinters on the floor and in the flesh between his knuckles. He moves on to the family photographs hanging on the wall and his fist goes through the frame of one of Mom’s portraits that Donald forgot to set out in the living room with the flowers. The whole thing rips off the wall and hangs off his forearm like a wristwatch.

The basin is still smudgy so Phillip jerks a fresh antibacterial wipe from its sachet and feels a bit funny like he can’t feel his toes when the door kicks in and there’s Donald, fists clenched, teeth grating, screaming at Phillip for getting blood everywhere. The words go to mush and the world turns sharply to the left and the tile floor rushes up to meet his head and he hears his brother yell and then feels himself being lifted. He thinks that feels nice, the lifting, the being carried away. If only his brother would stop shouting.

They strap him down and there’s a man in white who puts

a needle in Phillip’s arm and there’s a sensation of drowning in cold water. Phillip looks through the bubbles and sees his mother standing beside him, and there’s G-d, and he thinks that there ought to be a hyphen there because that’s what they taught him in Hebrew School so long ago, that you weren’t supposed to spell it out.

“Should I call you Hashem? Adonai?”

“You can call me Dr. Rosenthal,” G-d replies.

The hyphen is very important to remember. G-d, just like that. And G-d tells Donald to take Phillip to the mountain Moriah and sacrifice him there and Donald agrees and tells the doctor that they will leave straight from the hospital and get Phillip checked into a place called Tranquility. There’s an aunt up in Vermont nearby that can look after him. Phillip opens his mouth to argue but only bubbles come out and the current of the freezing water is too strong to keep his eyes open so it becomes easier to submit than resist and the blackness takes him.

“Will they have a Kelly’s Roast Beef up there, you think?”

Donald chews at his thumbnail, his jaw snakes dancing.

“Donald. Did you hear me?”

“Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know.”

Phillip adjusts his right hand, the one that’s all wrapped up in gauze, so that it rests on the back of his neck. Having it pinned back there helps him resist the urge to stretch his fingers. He’s been told by Dr. Rosenthal that if he stretches his fingers then he’ll rip his stitches. That’s what junkies do apparently, they rip their stitches. “I won’t stay if they don’t have a Kelly’s. That’s overboard. You can’t really expect me to stay up in bumfuck nowhere if there’s not even a Kelly’s.”

Donald switches lanes to the off-ramp and the engine of the beat-up sedan coughs as he downshifts. The headlights light up an exit sign, green and reflective and stark against the darkness. Three more hours to Burlington. It’ll be all freeways from here. Donald takes his right hand off the steering wheel and stretches. He twists the hand until the wrist pops. He repeats the motion with his left arm.

Phillip puts his head against the cold window and cups his hands around his eyes but it’s too dark to see anything. There’s a noise like a quarter bouncing off a tin can. “It’s raining,” he says to the window.

They’re on the freeway for two more exits before the next rest stop. They pull up next to the gas pump and Phillip reaches for his door handle.

“Stay in the car,” Donald says.

“I just wanna stretch.”

“I don’t care. Stay in the car.”

“Well I don’t want to stay in the car.”

“Well I don’t care.”

Phillip stays in the car. He watches Donald pump gas and his stomach gurgles. The rest stop is part of a larger complex so Donald parks the car and they go in together.

It’s one of those food courts Phillip has only ever seen in the middle of the night when half the lights are off and all of its restaurants are closed with metal grates and padlocks. The Mickey D’s is still lit-up even though there’s nobody at the counter.

Donald raps his knuckles on the counter until a pimple-faced zombie yawns out of a side door. The kid is so stoned that he can barely focus his bleary eyes on them which makes Phillip’s gauzed-up hand itch something fierce. They write their order

down on a napkin and the kid still comes back with the wrong amount of food. Donald orders three chicken burgers but gets four and Phillip orders a chocolate milkshake that never comes and a small order of fries.

They sit in silence and eat. Donald vivisects his burgers, leaving a discarded pile of buns and ketchup and chicken breading on the paper wrapper. Phillip picks at his fries and looks around the rest area. There are a few other chain restaurants and in the corner is what looks like a family-run Chinese joint. It’s so out of place that Phillip rubs his eyes, like he might be looking at the wrong side of a Burger King or something, but sure enough, there it is.

“Do you remember that time we went with Mom to Gourmet Garden when we were kids and they gave me the learning chopsticks with the little bit of paper rolled up in the bottom and the rubber band around the backside of them?”

Donald shakes his head no and stuffs another bit of dissected chicken patty into his mouth.

“I convinced her that I’d made the learning chopsticks myself. She made the manager come out from the back to show them off and she even offered to sell them the patent for them.”

“That sounds like Mom.”

“But it was theirs. Like, the manager knew the restaurant had provided them. He just didn’t say anything.”

There’s a clanging of pots from somewhere inside the kitchen and then a tinkling of glass.

“I’m sorry,” Phillip says into his fries.

Donald looks up from his food, a piece of white meat stuck to his bottom lip.

“This,” Phillip says, and motions around him. “But you don’t need to send me away to rehab, come on. I took too much,

sure. Everybody takes too much sometimes. I got a little out of control. I don’t belong up there with those people. I’m not like them.”

Donald stares at Phillip and sips from his plastic cup of water and swallows and then wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He breathes in and breathes out. His fists are clenched. “I don’t know what to do except for this.”

The rain gets pretty bad and neither of them needs to vocalize why driving at night in the rain reminds them of Mom, so Phillip knows sort of subconsciously that they’re going to turn into the motel just before the blinker comes on.

There’s a man in a poncho with a cardboard sign and a dog in the parking lot. His cheek is smeared with something black. His teeth are yellow. “Change? Please, change?”

Phillip flinches as he sidesteps around him. “No, sorry.”

Donald talks to a sleepy looking woman at the front desk and gets them set up in a room so tight the door hits the bed when it opens.

“You’re not going anywhere, right?” Donald pulls off one sock and folds it and then the other. “Not gonna sneak off or anything?”

Phillip shakes his head no. Donald slaps his wallet onto the nightstand next to the car keys and pulls off his jeans and folds them, sliding them underneath his other clothes so that they stand in a neat stack. He picks up the wallet and keys and finds a safe in the wardrobe and throws them in. There are four beeps as he enters a code and he closes the metal door. It doesn’t beep a fifth time.

“You didn’t hit the button to lock the — ”

“Look,” he interrupts, “it’s nothing personal.”

“It’s all right,” Phillip says. He opens his mouth to say something else and closes it instead.

Donald gets into bed and flips the light switch. He watches Phillip until his eyes flutter shut and his meaty head sinks into the pillow and then he starts snoring.

Phillip lies on his bed and he’s so cold he’s shivering but there’s no way he’s getting under the shrink-wrapped duvet in some grimy motel so he just lies there on top of it shaking and staring at the ceiling. He can just make out these dark brown blotches like malignant skin tumors, like the whole structure is rotting from the inside out. The wallpaper is peeling. He scratches at his scalp and it only itches more. The skin flakes off and gathers under his fingernails.

Phillip pretends that he heard five beeps from the safe, not four, and that then the safe whirred as the lock engaged. But he hadn’t and it didn’t. He pretends that the car keys are locked up and that Donald isn’t a heavy sleeper and that there isn’t enough cash in that wallet to leave Donald bus fare back to Boston if his car were to go missing and then Phillip tries to unimagine what even that bus fare could score on the street and how many hours it’s been. There’s a standard-issue hotel alarm clock with glowing red block text on the night stand: 22:09.

He slowly stands in the narrow space between the beds. He takes a cautious step towards the wardrobe. There’s a thrash from the bed and he freezes. Donald’s thick arms shoot out at awkward angles and his breath goes ragged. Phillip thinks it’s sort of funny how his strait-laced brother turns into a wind-up toy when the lights go off but then he hears a throaty sniffle and when he looks over at Donald, the red light from the alarm clock catches off tears coming down his face. Phillip sits on Donald’s

bed and puts a hand on his brother’s shoulder. He doesn’t know why he does this.

“Shhh,” he whispers, “it’s okay.”

“I-I-I-”

“It’s okay Donald, just shut up and go back to sleep.”

“Where am I?” Donald mumbles.

Phillip sits on his brother’s bed facing the hotel room door in the darkness and he tries not to think about getting high and he tries not to think about the car keys and he tries not to think about what a fucking disappointment his mother would think he is and he tries not to look around because when he looks around at this ramshackle hotel room he thinks it should just be torn down or forgotten but that it’s kind of like him in that way, and that if he were a hotel he too would be beyond “fixer” and well into “raze and rebuild” territory. Phillip stretches the fingers of his right hand and feels the dull rip of his stitches and a thick warmth spread underneath the gauze. He sits on Donald’s bed and looks at the clock. It says four minutes have passed since he checked it last. It feels like four hours.

A car drives past their window and lights up Donald’s face through a gap in the blinds. He clutches a pillow to his chest. His hulking frame looks almost small when he’s asleep. He looks so peaceful alone. A dog barks in the parking lot. Phillip hears something like the bleat of a trumpet.