r-chop

There is a timeline wherein none of this happens. Where I don’t wake up in the first ever morning of the rest of my life in the apartment I bought and I don’t walk all the way over to the far wall of my bedroom to grab my charging phone and I don’t get a disembodied, garbled call from my brother that I almost think is a prank. 

In that world, my brother is not vomiting. In that world, Cuyler Gore Park is nothing more than a lesser known sliver of shaded benches and playground coming to a sharp point atop the bifurcation of Greene Avenue into Hanson Place, a few blocks from the apartment that I will call home for the foreseeable future. In that world, the eastern light slides in below the blinds and bounces off the steel wool accent wall and the only thought I have to have on that morning is how much I hate that accent wall and want to repaint it. 

Instead, I jammed my feet into shoes without socks and threw on a ratty Wesleyan fleece and ran out without brushing my teeth. I found my brother in that park with a tilted CitiBike throwing up like a college sophomore who had drunk too much Four Loko. I held him while he puked and puked and puked and tried to take him to the bodega to buy pepto and ginger ale and tried to take him to urgent care but nothing took. Eventually, I checked in the bike around the corner so he stopped getting charged while he begged me not to leave him, even for that second. An eight minute walk from my home, I called a cab. 

I took him back to my apartment, where he became the second person to ever wake up in my bedroom. Our relationship has always been one of pairs; the two of us, born two years, two days apart. We watched, together, as our parents started fighting in front of us. We navigated the space of their divorce as a unit – the two of us at Mother’s Day dinner with our mom, going to basketball games with our dad. Our parents can separate but we never will. 

My brother woke up and ate white rice and drank some fluids and for a second, fleeting and wondrous, I felt like maybe the entire morning had been a bad dream. A passing imbalance, an inner ear nausea episode triggered by him biking to work. I like to say that I write about things that have happened to and around me, or things that could have happened to and around me. The world in which my brother never gets sick, however, isn’t a speculative fiction exercise. 

When we were little, my brother and I played baseball and read Captain Underpants and mixed together every liquid in the medicine cabinet and dunked my barbies in it. We used to ‘pretend cook’ until our parents made us stop because we got white pepper in his eyes and they had to call poison control. We shared a room and made up stories where we were Pokemon and wouldn’t go to bed because we were too busy singing nonsense songs. We grew apart as teenagers, and grew back together when he started going to parties and came home telling me how much he loved playing beer pong. 

As adults, I helped him plan his third date with his now girlfriend. He showed up at my apartment with Aloo Gobi after my ex and I broke up. All of these moments are choices and commitments we made to each other throughout the minor scrapes and bruises of growing up. But in this timeline, there is no sliding doors moment, no roads diverged in a yellow wood. A butterfly flapped its wings and my brother threw up and threw up and threw up for weeks on end and was eventually diagnosed with lymphoma. 

It’s hard to talk about someone getting sick without mentioning in the same breath that they are now well. My brother got sick, and then he went to chemo and got better. Our parents got divorced, but we still have family holidays together and everyone gets along just fine. My ex and I broke up and I think it was for the best. I repainted the accent wall and the entire bedroom. This story is about all of those moments and all of those timelines and how they converged in a place where everyone is mostly, actually, genuinely okay. We all moved on in the same place. 

Aesthetically, the intersection where I found my brother that morning is the border between the leafy slate brownstone sidewalks of Fort Greene and the traffic laden tangle of Downtown Brooklyn. Cuyler Gore is named for a little remembered turn of the century minister whose name has been erased from every other part of this city but seared in my memory. I walk by in winter and in summer, in sickness and in health, wondering every time if familiarity can erode trauma like water on stone, shoes on pavement. Maybe, one day, like Rev. Theodore Ledyard Cuyler, this story too will be forgotten. 

There is a timeline where I, like most of the people who live around here, never think about this liminal patch of public land. Cells mutate in predictable patterns and my brother grows old without knowing anything about Rituximab. I can write myself into every world but that one. 

Author’s Note: my brother would like you to know that he didn’t get white pepper in his eyes while we were pretend cooking. He got white pepper in his eyes because he wanted to sniff all the spices in the cabinet. I do not regret the error.