Big Brother (32 page)

BOOK: Big Brother

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Instead of driving Edison to the airport that afternoon in late November, should I have offered to shunt him off to an ad hoc rehab at Prague Porches, a real development a couple of miles from here? I’m never certain. In any event, this parallel universe has grown hauntingly alive to me since Edison’s death at the untimely age of forty-nine: dissecting tiny triangles of shrimp tail at the Last Supper. Dancing at our Ketosis Party. Railing and then relenting after uncovering the pizza box. Renting Edison a piano and hearing him adventure into
West Side Story
and Lyle Lovett. Seeing those cheekbones rise again into the sunlight for the first time. Biking and hiking and sandbagging together, reciting our fractured oaths,
I pledge aversion to the flab of the derided waists of America
, with all the attendant hilarity, until he steps onto a scale before a host of witnesses who’ve grown to love him and weighs in at a triumphant 161.

Of course, I never arranged to fly Edison’s son to Iowa—although the boy did meet his father shortly before Travis’s stroke. On his own initiative, Carson located his dad at Three Bars in Four-Four, where Edison was known to still congregate with his friends. My brother called me that very night—waking us up, though I didn’t mind. He was exhilarated, sincerely for once, not generating the usual billows of optimism as a smokescreen, hoping to nurture a relationship with his only child at last. But Carson never got in touch again, and the contact details he’d provided his father in the club that night turned out to be bogus. I assumed the kid was shell-shocked. Edison in that expanded form wouldn’t have offered up the image of the ideal dad.

To my surprise, Carson introduced himself at Edison’s impressively well-populated memorial at Three Bars. Tall, underfed, and sharing the bright knurl of his father’s hair at that age, he delivered condolences in great earnest. I had hopes the boy’s attendance was meant to help compensate for breaking his father’s heart—as, I reminded myself, Edison must have repeatedly broken his son’s. Effectively fatherless for most of his life, Carson had far more to forgive than his dad’s dimensions. Thanking the young man profusely for coming, I was prepared to enfold him into our family, until Cody—hardly a cynic—pulled me aside. “I talked to that little worm for twenty minutes,” she whispered. “All he wanted to know was what make of car you drive, do we have a swimming pool, and did your company ever make the Fortune 500. He gives me the creeps.”

Smashingly handsome at twenty-two, yet having shed the narcissism that marred him in high school, Tanner sidled beside his sister. “You’re not going to believe this. That guy? My
step-cousin
? I watched him slip three bottles of wine into his backpack. I mean, let him have them. But really. Pretty low rent.”

Sure enough, after a series of passionate, touchingly inarticulate testimonials by my brother’s fellow musicians, Carson impaired my enjoyment of the proceeding jam session with fulsome fawning over Baby Monotonous—the very yakking-over-the-music that Edison had often decried. By the time Fletcher rescued me, the boy was supposing that I might like to establish a “grant program” in his father’s honor, providing stipends for aspiring jazz musicians.

I’d presumed that at nineteen the boy had tracked down his father for the usual reasons: to understand his origins, to fill the maw in his childhood. Now I had to wonder if the young man had merely been nosing around for resources, which Edison conspicuously lacked. To be fair, his father must have meant something to Carson, unless a penchant for jazz is genetic. And given Edison’s neglect, maybe a son’s callous opportunism was one more misfortune that my brother had actively courted.

His paternal shortcomings aside, during this last year I’ve listened to Edison’s CDs with the concentration I might have applied when they were freshly recorded. I’ve come to believe that my brother was a fine musician. What a travesty, were he mostly remembered for being fat.

Had you told me when I was younger that my brother would get that heavy I’d have been incredulous. Yet taking a step back, I wonder if the story isn’t pretty simple. Edison’s life started out exciting and ascendant, and then it went into a spiral and he got discouraged. He reached for the one gratification at ready hand, on an assumption he had nothing to lose that became self-fulfilling. That’s a sad story, but it isn’t mysterious. As for the larger social issue that my brother unintentionally embodied, in the end I can contribute only one small thought. I keep referring back to Baby Monotonous—the baffling lassitude of affluence, the sheer boredom of garnering a surfeit of the very worldly attention of which Edison felt so cheated. The word “disappointment” doesn’t begin to cover it. However gnawing a deficiency, satiety is worse. So here is the thought: We are meant to be hungry.

It is impossible to gauge what you owe people. Anyone of course, but especially the blood relation, for as soon as you begin to calculate the amount you’re obliged to give—as soon as you begin to keep track, to parcel the benevolence out—you’re done for.
In for a penny, in for a pound.
I could not have said, “I will help you lose weight for three months, but not for four.” Once I assumed the role of my brother’s keeper there would have been no limit, don’t you see? And who’s to say whether such an escapade wouldn’t have ruined my marriage, leaving me as half of a sexless, barren sibling couple in an arid development owned by an overweight Czech? Even under the dubious assumption that my decadent big brother would have found the fortitude to diet to successful effect, who’s to say whether in the long run he wouldn’t have gained the weight right back? In preference to tackling the byzantine emotional mathematics of my exact responsibility for my brother, it was simpler to adjudge that I bore none. But nothing in this life is free. Having dodged paying the piper while Edison was still alive, I pay now instead. I pay every day.

about the author

L
IONEL
S
HRIVER
’s novels include
The New Republic
, the National Book Award finalist
So Much for That
, the
New York Times
bestseller
The Post-Birthday World
, and the international bestseller
We Need to Talk About Kevin
, which won the 2005 Orange Prize and was adapted into a feature film starring Tilda Swinton. Earlier books include
Double Fault
,
A Perfectly Good Family
, and
Checker and the Derailleurs
. Her novels have been translated into twenty-eight different languages. Her journalism has appeared in the
Guardian
, the
New York Times
, the
Wall Street Journal
, and many other publications. She lives in London and Brooklyn, New York.

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www.AuthorTracker.com
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also by lionel shriver

The New Republic

So Much for That

The Post-Birthday
World

We Need to Talk About
Kevin

Double Fault

A Perfectly Good
Family

Game Control

Ordinary Decent
Criminals

Checker and the
Derailleurs

The Female of the
Species

credits

Cover design and photography by Milan Bozic

Illustrations by Dana Mendelson

BIG BROTHER
. Copyright © 2013 by Lionel Shriver. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

EPub Edition © JUNE 2013 ISBN: 9780062199263

ISBN 978-0-06-145857-6

13 14 15 16 17 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

about the publisher

Australia

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Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia

http://www.harpercollins.com.au

Canada

HarperCollins Canada