Ethan Chatagnier - Warnings from the Future

My brother, charged with looking after me, had installed a hookand-eye latch on the inside of his bedroom door and spent most of his time behind it.

One of those nights, fish sticks going cold on the stovetop while I ate a bowl of cereal by myself, the floor started heaving below me. The whole house felt as if it had been buoyed up on a wave, a moment of nauseating weightlessness. The tremor tipped my chair back against the wall and the oak table into my guts, pinning me between the two. My bowl of Cap’n Crunch slid against me without overturning, draping a cold splash of milk and crunch berries on my shirt. The rumbling was still shaking plates on the wall when Rick streaked by toward the back door. It was only as he turned the handle that he glanced over his shoulder. He paused when he saw me pinned there, his panicked eyes met mine, and then he was gone.

A few minutes after the world had calmed down, he came in and shoved the table off of me, and we sat in front of the TV, watching quietly together. Few memories of our aborted brotherhood are so dramatic, of course. And the memories are not so much memories as an agglomeration of neglectful years. Though I’m old enough now to be past measuring people—brothers, mothers—against their ideal versions, I still feel it’s fair to judge mine against the average.

My parents had been waiting in line for the Bay Bridge tollbooths when the quake happened. The bridge collapse terrified my mother so viscerally she made us move to Sacramento, which was the beginning of the end for their marriage. I told myself that, as far as I was concerned, I was moving without a brother, and I wanted to believe this lie more than anything. How many more years until I stopped wanting it? Have I stopped wanting it now?

A real brotherhood needs the fire of a shared childhood to form. Is it even possible to build one, now that the forge has cooled?

There are so many versions of this ride tonight. There’s the ride Rick’s on and the ride I’m on, his side of the phone and mine. There is the truck I see, Rick’s old truck, Rick’s self as I last saw him, Shasta as I last saw her. There is the truck of reality, which might not even be a truck. There is a ride in which Shasta doesn’t make it to the hospital. There is a ride in which she does. There is a ride that ends with him and me saying we’ll talk again soon, and meaning it. But these are not the only ways tonight’s ride might end. If my estimation is right, he’s on one of the stretches of road that runs like a shoestring over the top of a ridge, so steep that even in daylight you have to stick your head out the window and look down to see anything but sky. And if my estimation is wrong, he either hit that stretch five minutes ago, or he’ll hit it five minutes from now.

As much as my concocting these different versions may sound like just a bit of mental masturbation, I think of them more like variances in time zones. I’m in Sedate Pacific Time. They’re in Retrograde Mountain Time. What would Rick think if I told him about Schrödinger’s cat, if I explained the thought experiment? How would he react to the words thought experiment ?

And since we’re playing with time, let’s rewind a bit further. Let’s see Shasta on a barstool as she turns toward the sound of the opening door and sees Asshole Steve has arrived. This picture is odd, because in my story it’s seventeen-year-old Steve Hillenbrand, his oily hair long and slicked back. The black mole above his eyebrow is the size of a gumdrop. Does she smile at him? Or does she grip the bar, make worried eye contact with the bartender? Is Steve able to approach in peace, or does he charge, knife in hand, the moment the door closes behind him? The answers to these questions must matter, my gut tells me, but there’s no truth to that. They’re all retroactive extrapolations from the same result, which generated the questions in the first place.

Shasta, how right were my predictions for you? And if I saw where you were headed and your father didn’t, am I the one to blame for not steering you off that course? The idea of God is nice, but I’d find it easier to believe in an entity omniscient but the opposite of omnipotent. Let’s be honest. Adult trajectories are no more difficult to trace. My teachers knew where I was going and were just happier with the answer—or at least the teachers who didn’t think I was a prick. And my current trajectory is well and consciously triangulated by the house payments, the college funds, the retirement accounts. The Song of My Mortgage.

That’s probably why our dad took so little interest in us after the divorce. We were too easy to predict. There was no thrill of the unknown. And if most lives are like movies whose endings can be anticipated before the close of the first scene, a certain percentage of parents are like the theatergoers ready to walk out on such predictable fare.

Dad liked to take us to movies, actually, and mostly movies we were too young for. That was the one thing he could think of to do: an entertainment for us that would entertain him, too. We sat parallel to each other, staring forward at Goodfellas , Pulp Fiction , Silence of the Lambs , Unforgiven . Everyone had a popcorn, and no one could take from anyone else’s after he’d finished his own—a rule directed at Rick, who looked like he was holding a softball when he pulled his hand out of a tub. Dad was a partner at a major accounting firm in Sacramento before the divorce. He commuted from Tahoe for a year before starting a ramshackle CPA firm up there catering to small businesses and households. He became obsessed with skiing, and tried to initiate us into the sport, but the trips stopped after two winters of us disappointing him and holding him back. He went on days we weren’t there; he never mentioned this, but you could see the wear on his skis. After that, he became as predictable to me as I was to him.

But on this strange night, in my darkened kitchen, here Dad is for his close-up. Jesus, now everything was pouring out of this wound. I won’t lie, a part of me wanted to hang up the phone, close it all off like putting a stopper in an oil well. Something of the situation reminded me of when Denise and I were young and newly together, talking late into the night, convinced we could heal our wounds better by picking at them than by leaving them be. How complicated it is, how impossible, to sort out one’s feelings toward those early life embarrassments. I long for them at the same time that I long to be further away from them.

Rick said he was coming into South Lake.

“How’s Shasta? Can you still feel a pulse?”

“She’s still mumbling.”

“Making sense?”

“Mother fuck er, mother fuck er… something something… mother fuck er.”

“Makes sense, considering.”

“Not too far from my own sentiments.”

The kitchen light came on, and I slammed my eyes shut. A little scream muffled itself. Opening them a crack, I saw a blurry shape too small to be Denise. When she spoke I knew it was Chelsea. She was holding the red Spiderman cup she still uses to rinse after she brushes her teeth. She came into focus as I adjusted to the light. She watched my hand as it clapped the phone to my shoulder.

“What is it, kiddo?”

“Daddy?”

“What is it?”

“Is that another woman?”

“Jesus Christ, Chelsea.”

“I won’t tell Mom.”

Her manner bore this out. She seemed entirely unbothered by the prospect. Perhaps interested by it.

“I would hope you would tell your mother. It’s your uncle.”

Her eyes were unfocused. She was searching her mind for an uncle. His persona non grata status was not something she’d been privy to. Like her grandmother, he just didn’t come up. I could see her mind turning, thinking I kept a secret line of communication with her uncle in the hours when she was asleep, kept him to myself. She processed a betrayal differently when she thought she was the one being betrayed.