Statement of Profit & Loss (an excerpt from The Ledger, 2024)
V
Unlike me, my twin was never detached. He may envy my comfort (if he has time to envy), but I’ve come to envy his sense of purpose, as his path is clear, his challenges concrete. He is steeped in an authenticity that for him is useless, while I leverage it to justify my disquiet. He allows me the privilege of stepping outside of myself, of watching this all unfold from beyond the blast radius, but I’ve grown exhausted by it all, of seeing things from too many angles, of empathizing.
My only solace is that it is quite possible, even highly likely, that my backward world will utterly obliterate his, and that he, his children, his friends will one day no longer haunt my day-to-day with ominous implications, that my comfort will no longer feel the result of a zero-sum game played between us. That they all will simply be erased, blown apart and buried in one gesture by some airborne smart device, a plume of heavy brown dirt and smoke to serve as the funerary announcement, a ramshackle geometric mausoleum comprised of rebar, concrete, and the smell of burnt plastic appearing where their home used to be.
The Mediterranean breezes will make short work of the odors and residual haze, and perhaps I would visit that brutalist monument to pay my respects, siphoning off a bit of authentic rage in the process. Without that, the anger remains objectless. All this could transpire once my backward world succeeds in fulfilling its program of completely absorbing everything, leaving nothing beyond its borders, not even the fantasy of an alternative. Then, truly, we can all move on. It’s shameful to want such a thing, but I see no other way out of his collapsing world, nor a solution to my existential disquiet.
You see, I’m very bad at navigating discomfort, it’s simply how I was raised; I’m sensitive. I take anti-anxiety meds, sleep meds, beta blockers, SSRIs, Neurontin for a pinched nerve, Xanax for the rest, and ingest even more that doesn’t come from a pharmacy, all proof that the world affects me disproportionately, for I’ve never experienced true suffering, never endured real trauma, never confronted a truly hopeless situation.
Sure, I’ve seen members of my family die, the cousins who brought us sickeningly sweet biscuits and grainy coffee, an uncle who forced me to dance in front of others, an auntie who touched my face too much while mumbling missives into my hair, her hands affixed to my ears, her earrings attached with rubber bands because the holes in her earlobes grew open from years of oversized jewelry, a niece with doe-like brown eyes, just a year or so younger than me who always seemed to be in the hazy pink girl-Ziggy sweatshirt my parents got her from JC Penny.
I saw them die on CNN. I was on the couch, the one that tasted like a salty exotic herb when licked (which I had a habit of doing lazily as I watched the TV, my cheek resting on one of its arms, my mouth absent-mindedly open), the beige one with blue-green palm fronds. I saw them die in real time from thousands of miles away, while I lay prone on the salty couch. I saw them die with a room temperature caffeine-free Diet Pepsi shimmering yellow gold in my hand, on a TV that was imbedded in a plastic faux-wood cabinet, complete with fake drawers that I spent years trying to force open until my parents finally sent the thing to live at the end of the driveway, where it waited patiently through winter and much of spring, before it finally disappeared.
In the midst of the untold hours spent in audience with that strange, electrical quasi-furniture, laying in front of it fingering its intricate moldings, its plastic formed banisters, its useless brass-like fittings, were the curious images of Tripoli at night and on fire. The only evening that compared was the night a year earlier when MOVE was firebombed, a similar tense boredom hung in the room as we watched for hours, a corporate logo and a news crawl framing a view of the city lit by street lights and fire, with intermittent bursts of light and rumbling: a similar disbelief passed between us, my parents on the floor, me perched on the couch.
But Tripoli was worse, it was punctuated by frantic phone calls and my father pacing. It continued long after I fell asleep, and as my father carried me off to bed, I awoke to see the TV was still on, along with every light in the house. I could see that my mother’s eyes were pink, wet, and small, her glasses dropped at her side.
It was good that there was distance and a screen between me and what was happening. I could not have kept a level head in the midst of bombs dropping, I could not have searched for the missing in the shattered concrete or carried their broken bodies. I don’t mean that I can’t imagine it or that I was too young (children my age were and are certainly in the thick of it), but that I physically could not.
I go cold and white at the sight of blood, I sweat uncontrollably, I pass out. A doctor at the emergency room once told me it’s the vasovagal reflex, and that mine is unusually strong, then he asked if I get light-headed while shitting, that he’d seen a number of people with my condition come in with head trauma from passing out and cracking their heads on the sink or bathtub. Some such cases even ended up in the morgue. “No, I haven’t,” at least not yet. And so I had to make peace with a whole new array of death scenarios, another banal fear to add to the list, like the possibilities of cancer and diabetes that disrupted my thoughts while I tried to get to sleep. My twin is spared these humiliations, his body does not sabotage his character, he takes to his responsibility cavalierly, a natural born patriarch; he is resolutely uncomplicated.