Nick Olson

I’m getting to the part in brainspotting now where I can see what he looked like in the hospital, after they’d hauled him out of the river, and the way the red on his arms had diluted into a faint pink, a perfect Crayola pink set against the wrappings they’d put on to keep him looking decent for the family.

For a couple months, that was just a blank. I’d say brain, recall seeing brother for the last time, and it’d give me nothing. There was nothing there.

The way the therapist explains trauma to me makes sense, for the most part. She talks about replaying tapes in the mind and memories lodged that need to be un-lodged, of things that happened months or years ago being processed as if they’re happening again, right now, and that the tightness in my chest and numbness in my arm isn’t a heart attack, but it’s not just in my head, either. That deep emotional pain can manifest itself physically. It all tracks.

She’s got this pointer she uses for sessions, has me follow it with my eyes as I go over the memory. I see her pointer, and I think of magic wands we’d get at the dollar store with grandma, waving our abracadabras and having wizard battles out in the snow, pretending our breath was smoke that we’d conjured. Then, when one of us had slain the other, using our magic wands to bring our opponent back to life. To reconcile and join forces to face a greater evil together.

I try grounding. I put my bare feet in the grass, connect thumb and forefinger, and sip my tea slowly as the wind comes in to cool it down. She has me processing the trauma in the present tense, which feels weird at first but makes more sense the further we go. She picks up the plastic bottle on her desk, the one filled mostly with water but with a little bit of sand too. She knows I’ve heard it a thousand times, but she reminds me that the brain is like this bottle. After a shake or two, it’s cloudy. She reminds me that we just need to let it settle. But I’m not sure what I’m supposed to let it settle on. I’m watching my brother live out a parallel life beside me. Two lines headed in the same direction but which can never intersect. I want to tell my therapist, but I don’t. It’s not a delusion if you know it’s not real. If it’s just that you want it to be real.

There’s a different kind of forgetting. Other things are coming back now, in pieces. Glimpses of being swung by my arms in an empty park, my brother keeping the centrifugal force going and the way my feet would lift then dip then lift again as I spun, seeing only flashes of green and brown behind him as we went. That’s where it stopped before, but there’s more now. When his arms got tired, my brother would let me down onto the ground, try not to tip over from balance compensation, and we’d sprawl out with the dandelions coming in, and to be out here was better than being inside with our parents whose moods we couldn’t chart, couldn’t fathom. My brother would make a game out of distracting me when their moods would flare up into a full-on fight. He’d put on a show he knew I liked, probably The Wiggles back then, and he’d pump up the volume, and we’d just catch flashes of the fight outside our door, peeking when it got really bad, pretending to watch the show when it quieted down, and then a McDonald’s run when dad would storm out of the house, going who-knows-where.

I passed this tendency onto my little brother, with only the distraction changing — something like Nintendo Wii or early YouTube. And he stayed there as long as he could, my big brother did, stayed past the divorce and the way my mother became symptomatic, and we learned that we were the biggest targets when she was manic, even if we didn’t have the words for it back then. He stayed and took the hits for us, and it wasn’t until later, when he finally had to leave and she set her sights on me that I realized just how much he had put up with. How much he had shielded from us.

So much of my brother is an unknown. Beyond the stuff I talk with my therapist about — the expected “Why did he do it?” “What could I have done to prevent it?” and “Was it my fault somehow?” that comes with having a family member die of suicide, I wanted to solve for that unknown variable of his internal life. With my brother, you only saw what he wanted to show. The rest was simply inaccessible.

I haven’t talked to my mother since just after the funeral. She went through the cycle of questions that I would later, once the shock had faded a bit, and I assured her that no, it wasn’t her fault, because regardless of what she might’ve said or done, I wasn’t going to be cruel. And dad like prey staring down its own end as he sat there, wide-eyed, across the funeral home from my mother, staring at the box they’d put my brother in.

I’m making serious progress, my therapist tells me. She doesn’t make a habit of telling clients this, but she can see how much it’ll mean to me, how much it’ll help. She says things like keep putting in the work, keep reaching out, and one foot in front of the other. I see hope peeking past professionalism, so it makes me hopeful too. I don’t know what else to do, what else to be. She picks up this pointer that isn’t a magic wand but could be. And we go again.

NICK OLSON is a writer and editor from Chicagoland now living in North Carolina. He was a finalist for Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Award, and he’s been published in SmokeLong Quarterly, Hobart, decomP, and other fine places. When he’s not writing his own work, he’s sharing the wonderful work of others over at (mac)ro(mic). His debut novel, Here’s Waldo, is forthcoming from Atmosphere Press, and he tweets updates @nickolsonbooks.