What for? by Arlon Jay Staggs

The first time I talk to Paul after his episode, my chair is uneven; it keeps rocking diagonally. We are on the outdoor patio of the Residence Inn in Florence, Alabama, and the front-right chair leg, upon landing, makes this uneasy scraping sound. The back-left one, a more decisive clomp. Back and forth, they compete for solid ground — scrape, clomp, scrape, clomp — as Paul and I sit there.
        The hotel felt like a safe place when I suggested it after Paul’s request that we meet away from Mom and Dad and the rest of our family. We are all home for Christmas, Paul’s first with us in a while. Andrew, my husband, waits upstairs in our hotel room in case I call. 	
        Paul takes a drink of his ubiquitous Mountain Dew. Whenever I think of him, I always picture that green plastic bottle in his hands, those red letters. Do the Dew, I think as Paul sips.	
        “What’s this about?” I ask, although it’s a garbage question, really, since I know, generally speaking at least, what this is about.
        “Just felt like I needed to clear the air.”
        “What for?” It’s another garbage question; it’s easy to think of things my brother might be sorry for over the years.
        The thing that comes to mind right now, though, is what happened a year ago, when Paul was picked up by the police in Alabaster, Alabama, after running down Interstate 65, hysterical and convinced he was being chased by “goons” who were trying to kill him. That’s not necessarily something he should apologize for, but it’s the latest tipping point, the catalytic event weighing on all of us. The way Mom and Dad told it, when they arrived at the hospital in Birmingham that night, Paul kept his face covered with a sheet. The goons had implanted cameras in his eyes, and he didn’t want them to see my parents and place them in danger, too.
        “I can’t lower the sheet,” Paul kept saying. “Please don’t make me lower the sheet.”
        He’d asked for a Bible, a request Mom gladly fulfilled.
        “They sold them right there in the hospital gift shop,” she told me over the phone. “Downstairs next to the little café where you can get coffee and pastries, and I think they had salads, too. I ordered a muffin, and it was okay. I probably shouldn’t be eating muffins, though.”
        Dad said that as bad as Paul’s condition was, all the other patients there were far worse off. I remember trying to imagine what could possibly be worse than believing you had spy cameras implanted in your eyes by goons.
        Here at the Residence Inn, though, Paul has been on his medication for several weeks. He’s been living with my parents, which isn’t ideal, but it’s a lot better than being holed up in a psych ward. Isn’t it? Especially in his mind since, in his mind, the doctors and nurses are all in on the scheme to find him, lock him away, kill him. His illness is a modern-day Catch-22: getting the help he needs requires him to place his trust in white-coated strangers wielding syringes and pills. Hold him in the hospital long enough, and he’ll take the pills just to get out and run again. The longer you hold him, the more time the goons have to track him down. He knows this because they talk to him. They installed speakers and microphones in his head.
        At the Residence Inn, the goons don’t seem to pose a threat; it seems like Paul and I are experiencing the same reality. As much as any two people can share a single truth about a single moment, we are doing that, perhaps for the first time in our lives, maybe for the last, although right now, I don’t know that part yet. There’s a lot about Paul I don’t know yet.
        The irony that I am the one who is hearing voices now doesn’t escape me; my mind sounds like a committee going back and forth, the same way my chair legs are arguing with one another.
        God, this is hard, I tell myself.
        No, screw that, another voice bites back. Here we go, Paul dominating Christmas.
        Again! a third, more cynical character offers.
        Is he really going to kill himself? Mom said she was worried about that.
        What does somebody look like when they’re planning suicide?
        On and on, the committee deliberates.
        I’ve been warned about this rendezvous with Paul from other family members who’ve already endured theirs.
        “It’s like some sort of apology tour,” said Clark, our adored middle brother with his unwavering Christian faith, his unpretentious wife, and his two gifted kids. “It’s weird.”
        “Yeah,” said Jason, Paul’s 33-year-old son, who has refused to come to Christmas this year since Paul has shown up. “He just kept saying how sorry he was.”
        It is seventy-one degrees, warm for December twenty-third, but shedding a layer feels too vulnerable, especially since my sweater is a pullover and would require me standing up, risking getting caught up in the sleeves, and exposing my abdominal flesh. So I sit there and sweat, thinking foolishly, This must be why it’s called a sweater. My mind keeps trying to escape the moment with tangents.
        I realize it has been a minute or two — which seems on the verge of inappropriate — since I asked my garbage question, “What for?” Paul hasn’t answered; he just gives me the blank stare my mom mentioned. 
        “Just keeps staring off into space,” she said. “I’ve never known him to do that, stare off into space.” 
        He seems to return my gaze, and I try, hard, not to break the intimacy of eye contact, the way you might try to look comfortable with someone whose face is deformed, burned off in a fire, perhaps. What do unfazed, compassionate eyes look like? Maybe they look the way my therapist looks whenever I share my terrible thoughts. Like that time I told him about the panic attack I almost had before yoga. I wasn’t even late, but the room might as well have been full because people had sprawled so selfishly across the entire floor. Not a single person would make room for me. I told my therapist how I had fantasized about finding the one wearing the most basic-looking Lululemon clothes, stuffing my yoga mat in their mouth, and then offering to get them another Starbucks as they choked on it. “Venti Mocha Frappucino, is it? Hold the whip?” My mind has gone on another tangent, so I focus again on trying to make my face look unfazed, but then my chair rocks back to the clomp leg and I end up shifting my gaze, too much, away from Paul, and the possibility of any real connection is lost.
        Paul starts talking, but I don’t really listen because he is speaking in vague metaphors, referencing facts and names as if I should know what he is talking about, but I don’t. And then he says something about not being the best big brother. “No shit, Sherlock,” I want to say, but I don’t. Maybe, if I just let him carry on for a bit, this will pass quickly.
        Paul and I are ten years apart in age. Technically we are half-brothers, but I knew him as my brother until I was seven and my mom confessed to me a previous life with a previous husband, Paul’s biological father, who drank and hit her.
        My first memory of Paul is how he’d turn his class ring around so that the large, polished gemstone faced inward, the same side as his palm. He’d slap me on the head with it, hard, leaving knots that radiated pain across my head and down my neck when I touched them. Every time, I would cry to Mom and Dad, and they would, inevitably and dutifully, dole out another knee-jerk punishment for Paul. A grounding. The loss of telephone privileges. That had to have been hard: losing the telephone as a high schooler in the eighties. Equally difficult must have been living with a little brat seven-year-old who always got his way. The adult who sits across from him now realizes that maybe, to my brother, I am still the same little brat I was when he moved out at eighteen, his high school girlfriend pregnant with my nephew.
        “I’m sorry,” he says finally, and we make eye contact again.
        His apology shakes my memory loose, and I pay attention for a tiny bit before I grow uncomfortable.
        “Sorry?” I fake confusion. “What for?” The garbage question. This tactic of mine — weaponizing feigned interest, acting as if I have no clue what he’s referring to, pretending to be at the beginning of a conversation instead of decades into the middle of it, pretending his transgressions are long settled and forgotten — is a tried-and-true failure of a strategy that I can’t seem to ditch. Let him talk and talk and talk, but leave him without the experience of being heard. It’s my way of avoiding the whole thing altogether, refusing to face it, indulging in my impatience. But I’ve been so resigned because these conversations are always about the same things: the times he didn’t show up, or got too angry, or mistreated us and said horrible things. This is not, in fact, his first apology tour. 
        What for?
        I don’t need to force him to say it; he’s obviously sorry for so many things. Most vividly, I think, he’s sorry for that time in 1992 when I was seventeen and he was twenty-seven and Mom and Dad were in Hawaii, and I was home alone for a week. He’s sorry for waking me up in the middle of the night, his breath smelling of Mountain Dew, liquor, and marijuana, sweet and earthy and rancid. He’s sorry because that’s when he slammed my head into the wall before I was even awake or knew who was assaulting me in my sleep, accusing me of having sex with his girlfriend, who happened to work with me at Stephanos, the little pizza joint in town that didn’t serve beer, which Paul thought was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard of: pizza with no beer. I hadn’t come out yet, so I couldn’t simply say that I wouldn’t have sex with her precisely because she was a her. The sole evidence he had of me having sex with his girlfriend was the soiled hand towel he’d found in the laundry, which he now thrust under my nose. 
        The obvious explanation for that didn’t come to me, either: that I was a seventeen-year-old boy, home alone for a whole week while his parents vacationed in Hawaii. What else would I be doing? Instead, the thought I had when Paul shoved me — first my shoulders, then my head, breaking the drywall — was, Oh God! Mom probably knows too! Perhaps the embarrassment overwhelmed me, and kept me from realizing we’d gotten all the way down the stairs and outside in the driveway. No matter how many times I have replayed that morning, I can’t remember how I ended up in my underwear over the hood of my 1988 Nissan Pulsar, before the sun was up, being slapped across the face and called a faggot, trying so hard not to dent my car. It didn’t occur to me then that I could have pointed out the flaw in Paul’s logic: if I was a faggot, how was I also sleeping with his girlfriend?
        I’ve likewise forgotten how I escaped Paul’s attack that early 1992 morning. I only remember a lump growing on the back of my head, like the ones from the old class ring smacks, and that I eventually found myself back in the house, clothed and crying on the couch below the watercolor of pink and yellow and blue tulips that Paul’s ex-wife had painted and my mom had left hung in the den. The tulips had become the fuel for his constant complaint: if Mom loved him, why’d she keep that painting up? 
        He was right about that one now that I think about it.
        Growing up with two older brothers, being smacked around wasn’t unusual; it was expected, and, some would argue, necessary in a house so full of testosterone and evolving manhood. But this attack carried a particular meanness and a desperate and delusional belief. It felt more dangerous. I knew that at the end of this conflict, we would not end up on the same side of things the way two scuffling brothers normally do. Perhaps an overreaction, but I worried he might kill me, so I called my best friend, Todd, who said I could come stay with him the rest of the week. I don’t remember what we told his parents, but they had very few questions when I arrived. It was summer and there was no school; I remember that.
        What for?
        He’s not saying so, but I imagine Paul is apologizing for that: waking me up before sunrise during Mom and Dad’s Hawaii trip thirty years ago. Maybe Paul is also apologizing for all those nights we had to endure Mom’s crying. He is sorry that he left us back home to shoulder her worry and guilt. He is sorry for forcing us to listen to her anguish, like something feral, as he hurled bitter insults and cursed at her, enumerated in extraordinary detail every single mistake she ever made raising him. Or for the lifetime we’ve all spent trying to convince her that his illness is not her fault; I imagine he’s apologizing for that, too.
        What for?
        By asking this, I am making Paul work, so hard, at the Residence Inn; I know that. But “I’m sorry” doesn’t just disappear years of resentment and resignation. That’s not even why I’m asking him the garbage question; I don’t mean to make him work. I am uncomfortable myself. My chair is unstable and rocking back and forth. I pick at the cuticle on my right thumb like I do whenever I get impatient. Honestly, I am already too bored with it all to be angry. So, I ask him, “What for?” with the same tone a bored, county-courthouse clerk might use. But I am also being overly polite and ditzy, trying to keep it light, so I ask, “What for?” with the same tenor you utter looks great, or that’s nice, or your house is beautiful, and other insincerities.
        What for?
        Something occurs to me, in the silence: is Paul apologizing for the future? Could it be that he’s sorry for something he’s seen in a premonition, which he claims to have about everything from SEC Football to geopolitics? Because three weeks after this moment at the Residence Inn, he will stop taking his meds, the one condition Mom and Dad have insisted is required for him to live at home. They’ll make him leave their house. A month after that, the Secret Service (the actual United States Secret Service) will show up at my parents’ house in St. Florian, Alabama, with black and white photos of Paul on a park bench in the Washington Mall, his head bowed in defeat. The agent will explain how Paul demanded to see President Obama so he could warn him of an imminent threat to the White House. A premonition. How could Paul possibly be apologizing for inciting this interrogation in which the federal agent will question my seventy-something parents about their political loyalties, whether they own guns, and what groups they are associated with? Any connections to Donald Trump’s campaign? Does Paul know that my mom will answer the agent honestly? Does he know that she will also try, rather desperately, rather unsuccessfully, to convince the agent to help save her son, to help find him? Not his job, the agent will tell her as he hands her his card and, from the front door, she will watch him get into his black sedan and drive away down Lauderdale County Road 47.
        There’s no way Paul knows that we will spend the next two years learning about how the missing persons list works. Clark, our middle brother, will provide a DNA sample (we’ll learn that a half-brother’s DNA is just fine), and I’ll listen to my mom recite, from memory, the exact years-long chain of events down to the detail, including all the different cities where Paul has been picked up by the police and held in psych facilities for a few days. The freeway in Alabaster, Alabama. Swimming with alligators in a Tallahassee swamp. Tyler, Texas, where the psychiatric nurse will confess to my mom over the phone how her own brother had the same condition and “unless they take their meds, honey, there’s nothing nobody can never do about it.” 
        “Bless their hearts,” she’ll add.

Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve. I need to wrap gifts and I am craving a coffee that isn’t from the Residence Inn’s free breakfast bar, so I am not thinking about what might happen in two years. I have no premonitions.
        Nonetheless, two years from now, when I am back in San Diego, Paul will call me in the middle of a rainstorm that will be pummeling Southern California, a rarity that brings life to a near standstill in America’s Finest City. He will say he is in Los Angeles, under a bridge in North Hollywood. He will tell me he had to get on a Greyhound and get to the West Coast where the goons can’t find him.
        “I just need a place to stay for a little while,” he’ll beg.
        I’ll picture him. I will. Soaked, breathing heavy, bleary eyed and hyped up on the Mountain Dew in his hand, huddled under a freeway.
        “Just until I can find work,” he’ll bargain.
        I will think of that class ring smacking into my noggin.
        “I’m sorry,” he’ll say.
        I’ll remember when Mom and Dad went to Hawaii.
        “What for?” I will ask.
        He won’t know how to answer this time either, so he’ll just launch a salvo of scatological insults that make no sense. I will have driven him to do that with my smug and righteous sanity. I will have heard it all before, and besides, the professionals will have told us to ignore this behavior; responding to it only enables his illness, they will say. So, I will simply hang up on my brother without knowing that I will be the last person in the family he’ll ever speak to. 
        There’s no way Paul is apologizing for the guilt this will leave with me forever, is there? Because it isn’t even his fault, right? 
        Surely, here at the Residence Inn, neither of us can foresee the clue this final phone call will give Mom: Paul is in LA. Neither of us can predict that my parents will insist that my husband, Andrew, and I take them there at Thanksgiving the following year, even though Andrew and I will plead not to. “Los Angeles is not like Alabama, Mom. You can’t just find someone by driving around.”
        Mom will threaten to go by herself if we don’t take her, and I will release a million passive aggressive sighs at the slightest irritations on the six-hour drive in holiday traffic up the I-5. 
        Sitting here at the Residence Inn, there’s no way Paul knows that in eleven months, we’ll all arrive — my mom, my dad, Andrew, and I — at the LAPD Culver City substation looking for him. Mom, incredibly, will march right up to the counter and demand information. I will stand in nothing short of amazement as the officer, Mr. Hernandez, gives her plenty: an arrest on Venice Beach for smoking on the boardwalk. That he knows exactly who Paul is, that his team talks to Paul regularly. That, a few weeks ago, my brother was polite and didn’t give them any trouble when they told him he couldn’t sleep in the abandoned warehouse he’d holed up in.
        Paul can’t possibly know that this hope will do terrible things to Mom for the next three years: keep her up at night, make holidays unbearable and sad, leave her unable to celebrate Clark’s birthday since Clark and Paul, though six years apart, share the same one. 
        She’ll stay in contact with Officer Hernandez, whose job is to connect families with transients like Paul. He will give updates on Paul’s whereabouts. He’ll send Mom a picture in which Paul’s hair will be long; he will have grown a beard and lost a front tooth. But the beard and the tooth won’t be the things that make Mom cry. In the photo, he’ll be begging for food outside a Carl’s Jr. in Culver City. His hunger, despite her warm home with plenty to eat, is what will bring her to tears. And when Hernandez misses a week, Mom will climb the walls. 
        Even if Paul is sorry for all of this, sorry for the future he’s set in motion, how can I accept an apology for something that hasn’t happened? Either way, Hernandez will disappear in the summer of 2019. Mom will email and call and email and call, but Hernandez will never respond again. He’ll ghost her. And speaking of ghosts, Mom will make a decision: “I’m turning Paul over to the Holy Spirit,” she’ll say. And bless her heart, she’ll barely even mention Paul for the next three years. None of us will.
        In July 2022, however, Dad will pass away suddenly during a routine heart procedure, a simple task for which they don’t even use anesthesia. The procedure will be successful, but right at the end of it, he’ll code, and they won’t be able to save him. It will absolutely break us as a family, leave us swimming in confused grief. 
        By then, Paul will have been missing for six years, and we will have no way to contact him. My mom will insist that Clark and I speak at our father’s funeral. In my eulogy, I will tell a story about how Dad always joked that he had three sons: one who broke all the rules, one who followed all the rules, and a third son (me) who made up all new rules. It always got a laugh when Dad told it, mostly, I think, because it was an easy, lighthearted way for old Southern men like Dad and his friends to acknowledge the gay one without having to say, “the gay one.” I am thankful for that joke; I always loved being the star of it, the punchline. It will certainly come in handy at the funeral, and I will use it the way Dad did, as a way for me to say, “I’m the gay one, and we loved each other madly despite our differences.” 
        In the middle of retelling Dad’s joke, though, I will realize that the one who broke all the rules has broken the biggest rule of all. He’s missed our father’s funeral. We have no idea where he is, and we haven’t known for so long. When I tell the joke about three sons with only two of us present, none of us will be able to ignore the proverbial elephant in the room. Standing on the stage, with my father’s lifeless body in a casket at my feet, I will think back to this moment at the Residence Inn and my uneven chair and the Mountain Dew. I will remember Paul’s phone call in the rain and how I turned him away and hung up on him. I will lose all composure, and, since I will be in a church, I will pray in front of one hundred teary-eyed people for God to help us find Paul. All those people after the funeral will tell me how beautiful it was to pray for Paul, but I’ll wonder if they’d be saying that if they knew about my flippant, dismissive, impatient, garbage question: “What for?”
        But God will answer that prayer even so. Four months after Dad’s passing, on the Monday before Thanksgiving, our first without him, the Las Vegas coroner’s office will call to tell me that Paul is dead. Found on the streets by passersby. Shirtless. Lifeless. The only person kin to him according to the database, weirdly enough: me. 
        Whatever healing we will have accomplished in the four months since Dad died will be shattered, but this time there will also be this disgusting sense of relief. A not-small part of me will be glad that there’s a resolution to the mystery and chaos of Paul. As the coroner’s deputy conveys what facts he knows with soulless, press-conference language, the unholy concoction of grief and guilt and gratitude that he’s dead will make me vomit. 
        That terrible emotional mix will slosh around in my stomach, and I will carry it with me to Paul’s funeral, which will feel pathetic juxtaposed so closely to Dad’s where so many people celebrated a life, sang hymns about flying away, spoke confidently of seats in Heaven and differences made on Earth. Very few people will come to memorialize Paul. 

Perhaps if I could see the future from the Residence Inn patio, I wouldn’t disengage. I wouldn’t be so aloof. If I could see what’s coming, I might not choose comfort over connection, distraction over listening, impatience over compassion. I might not continue telling myself that, by agreeing to meet him, by humoring him with my very presence, I am the one who is really trying. If I could see the future, I might choose authentic engagement over garbage questions. But instead, I ask, “What for?”
        My uneven chair has been a kind of pacifier, a little way to cope with my annoyance with Paul’s ramblings. I will not, however, have an uneven chair to distract me at Paul’s service, where they will dig a small grave, just big enough for a box of ashes, cover it with a warped, crude sheet of plywood, and unceremoniously place the box of him on top of it, a perfect little black cube — so inappropriately small when I think of Paul’s six-two frame and the bigness of his smile whenever he thought something was funny.
        Mom will ask me to speak at Paul’s funeral, too.
        What for? I’ll think and I’ll shake my head and say, “No.” But as everyone goes through the motions, unsure how to grieve this piteous life, I will think about what I could say, what the people there should know. 
        That Paul was the smartest person I had ever known. 
        That he never lost a game. Any game, it didn’t matter, chess, billiards, Risk, Scattergories, basketball. 
        That he was never “homeless,” and people shouldn’t call him that. He paid cash for his house in Tennessee. 
        That he had an accounting degree, was an entrepreneur, and made boatloads of money as an Oracle software consultant.
        That when I was in the seventh grade, I ran for class president. And while I couldn’t prove that my opponent, Jack Warren, had anything to do with it, the campaign signs I’d so painstakingly made and hung all over school had been torn down, ripped in two and tossed on the floor. That Paul had shown up at lunch and told Jack Warren, in no uncertain terms, exactly what would happen if he so much as thought about touching another one of my campaign signs. 
        That when I finished law school in 2000, Paul drove five hours to my graduation. The night before commencement, we went out with my friends, and on the way home, Paul asked when I was planning to tell him I was gay. That when he asked me that, he was giving me the greatest gift of any relationship: the freedom to be myself. Perhaps he knew what it was like to go through life pretending to be someone you’re not, what that can do to a soul. “You’re my brother,” he had assured me, “and nothing will ever change that.”
        But I won’t say any of this at his funeral. I will just stand there, gazing at Paul’s plywood-covered grave, no uneven chair, no eyes with which to avoid contact, no unwrapped presents to worry about. All I will be able to do then is ponder the garbage question: What for?
Scott Brennan, a photographer and writer, divides his time between Miami, Florida, and Vermont. His recent work has appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, The Hopkins Review, and River Styx. His first book of poetry, Raft Made of Seagull Feathers (Main Street Rag Press), was reissued this year. Find him at scottbrennan6.weebly.com or on Instagram @scottbrennan 6
Arlon Jay Staggs worked as an award-winning copywriter and brand strategist for two decades before earning his MFA in fiction from the University of California, Riverside. He also holds a law degree from the Mississippi College School of Law. He is currently seeking representation for his debut novel. He and his husband split time between Seagrove Beach, Florida and San Diego, California. Find him at www.arlonjay.com