Rob Thurman - Blackout

Well, no fixing that tonight, unless there was a twostory ladder hiding under a futon I didn’t know about. I double-checked all the spiders to make sure they were dead—deader than dead; the leftovers of an exterminator’s worst nightmare. They were. It didn’t matter. More could come—or one of these sons of bitches … or just plain bitches could pop and out could wriggle ten thousand baby spiders. It wasn’t quite as bad as the diaper image, but it was enough that I spent the next few hours with all the lights on, fighting the storm’s gloom in case I saw a baby eight-legs looking for its bassinet. I watched TV with the sound muted. I scanned the bookcase for those books Niko said I read. They were there. I touched a finger to one and grinned. Big breasts and guns—it was like peanut butter and jelly; green eggs and ham; salt and pepper. They went together.

I found a picture I hadn’t noticed before taped to the side of the otherwise-unadorned refrigerator. I almost didn’t look. I didn’t want to see another picture that could be like the one I’d seen before my relapse. I couldn’t remember it, but I knew it was bad news regardless—how? No idea. Isn’t brain damage fun? But at the last second I manned up for this one. The photo was of a little kid, maybe four or five, jumping up and down on Santa Claus’s nut sack. A cheap picture taken by an elf in a cheap costume; that was the way those things went, and that was me going apeshit on Santa’s equipment. The kid had black hair like mine, but that wasn’t the giveaway. It was the attitude. I wondered what Santa had done to piss me off so much.

The rest of the day I spent wiping up spider goop and putting those suckers in Hefty trash bags. I was lazy, but I had no desire to live in a place that was going to have spider stink embedded in it for the rest of eternity. It was dirty work but easy enough. The biggest one that had me thinking about carrying extra underwear was no problem either. Once it was dead, no more arachnophobia. Mirrors and monsters were still bad; dead spiders big enough to play in the Super Bowl were no big deal. Did that make me strange?

Compared to what? Against the last six days, the only six days of my life? No, I didn’t think it did. And that in itself was far stranger.

After the cleanup and piling the bagged spiders in the workout area, I took another run through the place. I’d done it before. That I did remember. That hadn’t fallen into one of the holes that swiss-cheesed yesterday. But as with the other memories I’d kept, some were blurry, such as a fish shimmering under the water, looking twice its true size one second, then half the size the next; others were clear. A refresher course wouldn’t hurt me regardless, as long as I stayed away from the picture in Niko’s room. I wandered around, peering into drawers and cabinets, and the fridge. The top two shelves were pure sugar and grease, obviously mine. There was a board mounted on the wall by the door that led outside. It was divided in half, the right side labeled Niko ; the left labeled Cal . In dry-erase marker, Niko’s side had precise and perfect handwriting spelling out appointments and chores, some of which were labeled in red, more for me than him, I was sure. Check GPS programming on Cal’s phone. That was curious. GPS was a good thing for keeping track of brothers who were attacked by a nest of spiders and managed to get amnesia; I could see that. But this sounded more specific, as if it weren’t something the phone already did.

Keep Cal from starving . I didn’t think it would actually come to starvation before I hauled my ass to the grocery store, but the following one was painted a biblical red kick in the ass.

Reassure neighbors the smell of Cal’s laundry is not a decomposing body. I snorted. There was more in that general category about sparring and running and making sure I was capable of fighting off a Pomeranian if the need ever arose. On my side of the board, in handwriting so sloppy I should’ve gone to med school, it read 1) Sit on ass 2) Kill things. And that was it. That covered my day every day of the week, three hundred and sixty-five a year.

We didn’t have a lot of family-type things around. Goodfellow had said something about a fire and Niko had added that our mother had died in a fire. That would tend to wipe out a good deal of when-we-were-little-and-cute mementos. I was surprised the Santa photo had made it. Mementos didn’t make a family, though. They made a convincing TV commercial if enough were plastered through a fake house with fake people, but real life wasn’t TV.

And didn’t I have something more convincing than solid, tangible souvenirs of the past? I had a brother who’d been half dead on his feet from no sleep when he found me after a four-day disappearance. From all the hints I’d gotten, including the horrific diaper one, I gathered that he, rather than our mom, had raised me. His patience was unreal when anyone else would’ve been looking for a baseball bat to beat me to death. I also had the battle that had happened barely an hour ago. If I was going down, this guy was bound and determined to beat me to the grave by a mile.

What did I do in return? Bagged spiders and told him, no worries, he’d get all of his brother back. He wanted it all too. For all he said I might be happier to be only part of Cal, one that had been born less than a week ago, he wanted me back—the entire package. My past was his past. Before Promise and Goodfellow, it had been him and me alone for a long time. You didn’t live with fake IDs and find lying easier than telling the truth if you were surrounded by a caring circle of family and friends. That was easy enough to figure out. It had been him and me, and now he’d lost half of me. If I didn’t get the rest back, I wouldn’t be whole and neither would Niko.

Oddly enough, I cared more about his being whole than about me.

Softy. Goddamn softy. I didn’t even know him. I mean, I knew what he told me and what he showed me and what I felt, what I’d almost remembered… .

Because I had almost remembered earlier, and that other picture had been a nudge that had speeded up the boulder already rolling down the hill. The venom had been wearing off. I’d seen the picture and then we’d gone to the museum to talk to that mummy informant and … shit … something had happened. I didn’t know what, but something had happened—something that, like the picture, I didn’t want to remember. At the same time, though, it had felt … good. It was a bizarre combination of “Don’t look, don’t see” and the feeling of riding a roller coaster when you’re a kid. That adrenaline rush. I’d remembered part of me; I’d been coming home and bringing my past with me. Niko said my past had baggage. That meant his did too. What kind of fucking brother would let some bad memories stop him from being the family his own brother needed him to be?

Not the kind of brother I had. He’d shown me that. He deserved better, and my chickenshit ass was going to give it to him. I was a good guy and good guys didn’t leave their brothers twisting in the wind. I was going to start the ball rolling again, no matter how much I didn’t want to do the one thing that had started it. It was a picture, for God’s sake. I was standing in a mass monster graveyard partially of my making and I didn’t want to look at a picture.

Fuck that cowardly shit.

Hours later when Niko woke up, it was six p.m. He came out into the hall, pants on—thank you, God, and just give me a little time on the naked-guy thing—to take in the place. “You cleaned up.” It was said as skeptically as if I’d called in a maid service and passed it off as my own work.

“The smell.” I shrugged. “Apparently that’s the one motivation my laziness can’t beat back down. How’s the leg?”