The Price of Seeing Him

He brought it up himself. Everything I did for the next year rests on that, and I have never got underneath it.

I had asked once, on the fourth day, and been told to do what I was told. I did not ask again. I am not brave and I learn quickly and those are the same sentence.

Three weeks later he mentioned my brother to me.

He was not looking at me when he said it. He said it the way a man tells you the road is closed on Thursday, and what he said was that Chepe was fine, and that there was a way for me to see him, and he told me what the way was.

Then he waited.

I said yes.

I said yes. Nobody held me down for that one. There was a sentence, and then there was a pause, and then there was me saying yes, out loud, in my own voice, using my own mouth, and I knew exactly what I was agreeing to because he had just described it.

It is a different wound from what was already happening to me, and it is in a different place and it did not heal along with the rest.

He did not lie to me, either, not in a way I could catch. That is the other thing. I have spent a lot of time looking for the lie, and it is somewhere outside the sentence. He said there was a way. There was. It simply was not the way he named, and there was always one more, and the one more was always slightly further than the last one.

The price went up. The promise never changed.

You can see it from here. Of course you can. You are sitting somewhere with the whole of it in your hands and you can see the shape of it in about four seconds, and I could see it too, eventually, and it made no difference at all, and that should worry you more than it does.

I had no proof he was alive. None. Not once, in twelve months. No voice, no photograph, no scrap of anything. They never showed him to me. People assume there must have been something, a glimpse, a shirt, a word. There was nothing. There was only a man saying Chepe is fine, in the same flat voice as the road on Thursday.

And I could not feel him.

Nobody gets this part. I can feel a room. I can feel eleven people I have never spoken to, I can feel which one is lying and which one has given up and which one is going to be trouble, I get all of that whether I want it or not, and I could not feel my own brother, because he was not in the building, and the gift does not carry that far. It has never carried that far.

So I had the whole world’s insides arriving in me all day, every day, at full volume, and the only signal I actually wanted was the only one I could not get.

I have described that as loneliness before and it is not loneliness. Loneliness is an absence. This was a room full of shouting with one silence in it, and the silence was the only thing I was listening for.

Which meant the only way to know he was alive was to keep paying.

If I stopped, and he was alive, I killed him. If he was already dead, then everything I had done up to that point had bought nothing, and I would have to go and live in that. All stopping could do was close the door on the version where I could still fix it.

So I did not stop. For a year, I did not stop. And this was not courage and it was not love in the way people mean when they say it approvingly at a funeral. It was arithmetic, and it only worked in one direction, and I did it on purpose every single time.

The second half of it I learned faster, because that one they demonstrated.

Disobedience cost twice. There was what they did to you, which you could survive and which I will get to. There was also the other thing, which was him. You will not be seeing him now.

Six words. No heat in it at all.

After the second time I stopped refusing anything.

I would like to tell you there was a slow erosion, because that is a better story and it distributes the blame more comfortably. There was a night when I said no to something, and then there were those six words, and after that I did not say no again.

I have been asked, by people who meant well, why I didn’t fight.

I did fight. I fought for about five weeks. Then somebody showed me the actual price and I paid it, every day, for a year, and the paying was the fighting, and it was the only fight I had.

And they never once showed him to me.