Listen (from the Munich Tales)

LISTEN
By Michael Kroetch

Her brother again. Some new problem. She knew it even before she clicked the button down on her cell phone to answer. Sometimes she wished he would lose her number. She didn´t know what to do with him. More and more his troubles were getting beyond what she could deal with. But she didn´t say this to him. She didn´t say it to anyone. Better to be quiet and besides, right now the weather had turned nasty. She had four bags of groceries slung over the back of her wheelchair and with the wind and rain getting into them, they were like parachutes pulling her backward down the sidewalk while she struggled to get the phone as close to her ear as possible. People who saw her brother for the first time thought he was fine. Unlike with her, there were no outward disfigurements. He had all his fingers and none of his bones corkscrewed around on him. The one thing they both shared, and which everyone always always commented on, was the unusual striking beauty of their faces. With his height and well developed muscles, people often thought he might be a model or an actor of some kind. Nobody ever said this about her. Not at first anyway. But that slowly changed once they knew her and discovered all the foreign accents she could do and saw how much she could change her facial expressions or heard the dozens of Shakespeare soliloquies she knew like the back of her hand. But she had never acted, never even been on a stage. She had no interest in it really. None. Well, okay, maybe a little bit, but she prided herself on being a realist. In this she lived a life in direct contrast to her brother who lived in the clouds and did not usually stay up there very well. But the scars on his body were inside, so at first people didn´t know how often and hard he would fall from his cloud haven—hitting the ground with the same gentle elegance as a fully loaded Mac truck falling from space. And who picked up the pieces? She didn´t mind. She really didn´t. He was her brother. It was her role in their little stage play. She alone could make him laugh when all around was darkness and despair. It had always been so since he was a very young child and their parents were in hysterics about how to calm him during one of his episodes. She would wheel her chair over to him and make her rubber duck face or burping tiger or strangled giraffe for him and soon enough his smile would return. These days those easy tricks didn´t work. What he was injecting into himself to keep the monsters at bay, she didn´t want to know. He would try to tell her, but always she would refuse to listen. It was the one thing above all others she didn´t want to know. She knew it was killing him slowly. She didn´t like admitting this, but she knew it was true. Much as the wind in the grocery bags might be pulling her back down the little hill she´d just wheeled herself up, she knew what these things were doing to him was so terribly worse. But she couldn´t get him to listen to that. All she could give him now it seemed was her ear, something he could talk into for awhile. She couldn´t let herself feel sad, she had to be strong and just hold the cell phone as close to her ear as she could for his words. It´s what he needed most.