Shoot me, brother

Sometimes shooting someone can be a favour.

One day last spring it was colder than usual, so cold that it would wake you in the middle of the night and keep you just enough awake so that you knew you weren’t asleep. Before the sun rose, my brother came into my bedroom, sat down on my bed, handed me a pistol, and asked me to shoot him in the thigh.

 

“Shoot me in the thigh,” he said. “Because you’re not a man until you’ve felt your flesh torn apart like tissue paper by hot metal, you’re not a man until a bullet moves through leaving you a whimpering heap, a raving malcontent. I won’t be a man until I’ve felt that. So I want you to help me. Shoot me.” It was one of the best things he ever said to me, but he doesn’t talk like that anymore.

 

I refused. I often wonder if I made the right decision.

 

He didn’t make this choice lightly, he assured me, now filling the chambers with .22 caliber rounds. The decision was so that he could connect with the people with whom he identified most strongly outside his immediate family: Hemingway, Thompson, Fitzgerald " all who had been shot at some point in their life.

 

He said he had reached the limit of his understanding of these men and to genuinely move further he had no other option except to experience what they experience, to empathize properly, he must be shot.

 

This surprised me " I had always idolized my brother, he always seemed to have the most unassailable vision, an unshakable allegiance to logic and reason, it’s probably why Hemmingway appealed to him so deeply. The other thing that surprised me is that his voice didn’t falter, it held strong. It’s one of my favorite memories.

 

So I took the pistol from him and looked at the shiny metal shaft. It was small, a snub nose, I didn’t know much about guns, but I knew about this one. I had seen it before, but never in my brother’s hand, and never in my house. It felt foreign and unwelcome.  An emotionless, cold harbinger of pain. A tool that belonged in the hands of a gangster, not my brother.

 

I got out of bed and looked at my him, expecting to see some feverish madness or hot dysfunction in his eyes " instead they were clear, just like they usually were, unflinching and unforgiving.

 

He said his pathology didn’t cover self-immolation, so it would have to be me. I told him that if he wanted to get shot, he should join the army or do it himself. I said a bullet under false pretences was just as bad as no bullet at all.

 

He used to talk like that, my brother, in large, clumsy words, inelegant molasses spilling out of his mouth with confidence and authority, with naivety and affection, like he chose every word because he read it in a book he loved, or heard it fall out of the mouth of someone he admired. He used to give me his work and say: “wait, let me contextualize this mediocrity” and launch into a detailed explanation of why this play or story was the way it is. He was afraid " he never allowed his writing to stand on it’s own two feet.

 

I remember we both use to talk like that " running from the malaise" we called it reading and watching and hoping that one day our ideas would be made into films, he would speak with such insatiable and beautiful demented instability that I thought the gap between our page and everyone else was shrinking.

 

So it was me who held the gun, loaded, as we went into our backyard so I could shoot him. They say that when you die, your life flashes before your eyes, well, when you’re about to inflict pain in someone you love, pieces of their life flash before your eyes.

 

I remember the time I had to be rushed to hospital because my brother had made me laugh so much that I fell off a swing and broke my shoulder. I remember the day he left and went to live in New York and used to tell me about the East Village and Jonathan Ames and diners and whiskey. I remember him talking about the girls he chased and saying that when I came we would walk around and build a movement devoted to sincerity and authenticity and faith and trust.

 

These are things I remembered when I cocked the gun and pointed it at my brother’s thigh. I looked at him again, expecting some cheap, excitable incredulity, but again, nothing. Just that salient gaze, that mad, indignant passion, that ferocious auburn hair.

 

I looked down the barrel and started shaking. I wanted to do it " I trusted my brother implicitly but my hand was still shaking. The gun was heavier and harder to aim than I thought it would be, and the pistol felt cold in my hands. I stood there for about five minutes, my brother with his thigh protruding out to the side, wincing in anticipation and me, shaking because it was cold and because I was scared.

 

After my brother saw that I couldn’t shoot him he walked up to me and snatched it out of my hand, put it back inside the shoebox and told me to go back to bed. I did, but I didn’t sleep.

 

What my brother was asking me was to shoot the voice that dogged him. That voice that scorned us for walking slowly through the rain, or chasing a girl until the sun comes up, or dancing through an empty house.

 

That voice that sounds like our parents that wants us to ignore the childlike melodrama that our heroes embrace but our parents repress. He wanted experience, and he had chosen me to give it to him. And I ignored it. This was the most important thing he had ever asked anyone to do and I refused.

 

And now he writes copy. And owns a Ford Focus. And is married to Jessica.

 

And the convoluted language we spoke is extinct, and I have trouble recognizing him. Because I didn’t shoot that voice inside him, he learnt a different language, one that I can’t understand.

 

The last time I saw him I asked him if he remembered the time he came into my room and asked me to shoot him in the thigh. He said “Yeah, geez I was an idiot back then.”

 

Then he asked me if I need any money, and that I was making rent. And I looked in his eyes, and all I saw was the same malaise that was in my parent’s eyes, the same malaise that we despised, that were supposed to run from together. I realized that the day I refused to shoot him was the day I killed my brother. Because it was cold, because it was dark and because I was scared.

 

I should have just shot the f****r.