My little brother discovers an ocean. He makes the announcement at the dinner table. "Why darling, that's wonderful news," says my mother. "Do try to finish your food now." "I'm not hungry," my brother tells her. "We didn't ask if you were hungry," my father informs him. "This isn't a hotel: your mother has spent the entire afternoon preparing this nourishing meal for the family. Kindly finish what's been put in front of you."

My brother stares down sullenly at the subject in question.

"Dear, please," my mother murmurs, to my father. "Don't tell me, ‘Dear, please,’!" cries my father. "I've had enough of this boy's oceans and mountain ranges and primordial what-have-you's!  First he should clean up his plate. Our home life is being ruined with all his idiotic discoveries!" "Dad," I protest. My father's silverware clatters onto his plate. He flings down his napkin. He stalks off from the table.

Later, I tap on the door of my little brother's room. There's no answer. I open the door furtively a ways and look around it inside. "Can I come in?" I ask. My brother grunts from the bed, where he lies with his eyes closed, his hands under his head on the pillow, his feet crossed on the blanket. He still has his shoes on. In the waning evening light his eyeglasses are lying on the bedside carpet. I can see the red clamp marks on the bridge of his nose. "Is it over here, can I look?" I ask. I go quietly past him to the window. I stand there, gazing out in awe. "My god," I murmur. 

Where normally there would be the sight of the backyard, there is now a great sea, as real to the eye as the ocean I've swum in on vacations at the shore. The watery fathoms are calm, a beautiful blue-grey in color. The setting sun leaves a heavy wobbling trail leading back toward us from the horizon. "Have you named it yet?" I ask, smelling the slight voluptuous tang of salt air.  "Are you calling it after mom again, like with the mountains and the forest?" There's a soft grunt from the bed. Curiously, this news doesn't provoke my usual sniggering in scorn and disdain. Instead I find myself strangely humbled by the unabashedness of my brother's devotion to my mother, by the scope of its testaments. I look out at the waves with a feeling of somberness.

The door opens wide, noisily. "Do you mind if the head of the household takes a look at this great discovery?" announces my father. He comes tramping across the room. "Do you mind?" he repeats, pointedly. "No," my brother breathes from the bed. My father makes room for himself beside me. I have to move over. "Well, that's certainly quite a body of water," he declares. He screws up his eyes in a squint to reconnoiter the soft blaze on the horizon. "And so, have you decided to name this as well after your mother?" he inquires. There's silence.  My brother gives his grunt at last from the bed. "You know it wouldn't cost you an arm and a leg to actually speak a normal sentence, my boy," my father exclaims. "I'm talking to you! And furthermore," he goes on, "I don't think it would hurt you for once to name a discovery of yours after the person who happens, after all, to be also responsible for your existence: namely, your father." "Being a father is purely accidental," replies the voice from the bed.

"'Being a father is accidental'!" cries my father, astounded. The ensuing commotion brings my mother wearily into the room. I leave in the middle of it and go outside for a long walk. 

When I come back near the house, the stars are out in force. From this perspective, I can see only the grizzled quotidian version of the backyard, with its stiff silhouette of the lawn mower, which I've forgotten to put back in the shed. 

In the morning my brother isn't at the breakfast table. I'm sent to his room for him. He isn't there. I go over to the window. I look out at the breadth of the waves. There is a rowboat among them now, tiny and faraway, with a minifigure rowing stolidly toward the horizon. My heart hammers in shock in my chest. The courage and seriousness and independence of my brother's act overwhelm me. But I feel another emotion too, a wrenching sadness. The sentence keeps going through my head, like a dark bulletin: "He's Lost to Us Forever." My father stalks into the room. I sink down onto the bed and sit there, staring glumly into space. I remain like that, even when my father throws open the window and starts bellowing and shouting and waving his fist. My mother comes in. She claps her hands to her face as she stares out the window. "I knew this would happen," she keeps repeating calamitously. "Oh I knew this would happen one day, oh I knew it, I knew it."    

Printer-friendly version