Doctor jack bright (part 5)

Dream Sequence:

From bed, Jack finds the strength to move.

He is shaking with anticipation but never has he even thought of doing this before, no, all thoughts are driven, pointed, he is sure, not Mikell, not his mother, not TJ, no, nothing and no one could stop him- the hallway to the bathroom is a dark green mile that he walks briskly. Someone has pulled the trap door out from under him and there is nothing below but hate and disgust.

Claire is (not anymore shes not here anymore) sleeping in the bedroom next to his own, and when he locks the bathroom door someone drives down the rickety concrete outside and he sees the headlights continue into nothing from the tiny bathroom window, hyperaware. Jack refuses to see himself in the mirror- he has not moved far from bed in weeks- and instead opens it to the tiny metal shelves and scans quickly, like a man dying for water, like a man craving. His mother's medication sits gathering dust. Mikell's toothbrush. His father's razor.

Some strange, distant part of him doesn't take apart the razor for the blades because he cannot bring himself to break something of his father's, but the blades are still sharp- Jack has accidentally cut himself with less. There's a moment, as Jack holds it in his hands, that he wonders what his mother would say. It is not factored in. Jack knows what she thinks of him.

Damage:

Pain screams down his arm and leaves him stunned, drunkenly happy, high off fumes. There's buzzing in his body and screaming in his mind that tells him to strike again and he complies, dazed and ruptured, riding the feeling that feeling gives him. His breathing starts to slow. Relaxation. His mind is spiraling down like a dying plane from the sky.

Damage!

Jack's knees are week, the world is spinning. He strikes a third time, barley able to see his skin through the nine even scores of ragged, bleeding flesh, and the craving leaves his body like a soul. It stings and burns like nothing he's ever felt in his life, exploding and shrieking, his breath comes in a calm, even rhythm. There are black spots in his vision. He rinses off the razor and red fluid he forgot he had runs in streams down his arm and dribbles into the sink. Jack is okay. Jack is calm. Tranquility comes over him as the hate starts to leave his body with his consciousness.

Ethereality:

Jack is awake.

Crickets sing out in the summer air that rustles the soybeans outside in the grey heat of early morning. He's thin enough now that Mikell is able to scoop him up from the bathroom floor and out of the puddle of red fluid staining his shirt. Jack feels like all the energy he had is gone from his body, and lets his older brother carry him-slumping into his chest in the most direct form of human interaction he's experienced in weeks. Another car drives by outside, a farmer headed to the fields. When he's laid down on the beaten couch, Jack almost wishes Mikell would keep holding him, for just a while longer; human touch has become a rare commodity. Gauze and bandages pull against half-clotted blood, swollen red cuts and bruised skin sting with rubbing alcohol. He feels sick, lightheaded, but satisfied. Mikell squeezes the cloth wrapping his arm gently, letting it soak up the access fluid. All the hate is gone from his body. He deserved that. He deserved that. He deserves more, is too weak to deliver. His brother presses an ice pack to the wounds, lays his arm at an incline on Jack's chest. The popcorn ceiling is a color in the early morning light that Jack hasn't noticed before. There are blankets pulled over his pale body, up to his chin, and feels a warm hand on his forehead. It's shaking with fury in the moment it lingers there. He has made Mikell angry in the past, but not like this, not furious into silence. Jack feels no remorse, lays there in a silence of his own. Cold, feverish, distant. Floating. The scum of the earth.

Suddenly, Mikell has a bulky cell phone that he's never seen before in one hand and is running his fingers through his hair with the other, sillueted in dawn light flooding through the kitchen windows, reading "Travis, Elder, Forty-two, sixty-six-oh-eight". He vaguely remembers TJ and Claire, but there are no feelings, no connection in this moment in time. Briefly thinks of mom and dad, and wished they were here in an odd, offhand sort of way, as he's wished for the past ten months. Dreamlike, condensation beads on the windows as the humidity rises. Mikell is pacing and talking on the phone, then redialing, redialing again, reading off numbers and letters and words. The old radio turned on low sings a song his father liked. Jack feels strange, but content with the pain searing in his arm. Claire left a polly pocket on the floor near the rocking chair. He's so tired, angry. Across the street, the sound of the dogs TJ likes to play with waking for breakfast. He wants to fall asleep and not wake up. In a distant, far off place, Mikell exhales in relief, "Mom".

13

Jack is awakened by the kind of deep, rolling thunder that accompanies Midwestern summer storms, the kind that leaches humidity through the windows and coats the streets in a thick, sickening heat. The clock reads 2:24 PM and the world outside is cast in a deep black hue, the shadow of thick grey clouds forming a solid, rolling wall in the sky, like water rushing over a dam. There is no rain pounding on the window, and Jack becomes deeply, innately aware upon this realization of what this means; from where he lays still in his bed, the middle brother bright feels the wind whistling through the cornfields, hears the lack of hearing children at play and sound of the TV turned to the weather channel in the other room, senses the fundamental disturbance that comes with the testing of the old great plain. No dogs bark. No cars rattle down the cracked suburban asphalt. There is only the thudding of his heart in his bandaged arm and the sound of the clouds approaching.

Mikell is at his bedside, absentmindedly picking under his fingernails with his pocket knife. He sees the ember glow of a lit cigarette hanging from his mouth.

"I told you." Mikell growls under his breath, and the past two days hit Jack like a truck. "I told you to keep her safe. I told you."

The room falls into silence, and Jack grips the sheets tighter. He grimaces for a moment, and looks at the ceiling. Mikell knew where she was. He must have known.

But Jack has failed profoundly in many ways in the past six months. So instead, Jack looks back at him and says,

"Don't smoke in the house."

Mikell looks at him, takes a long, slow inhale, removes the cigarette, and exhales the smoke pointedly into the air.

"Asshole." Jack croaks. He feels like a grey scale; weak, sick, hurting, empty and strange, but no longer floating. Mikell takes another drag on his cigarette and leans forward, elbows on knees.

"You were really out this morning."

Jack squeezes his eyes shut. He had been hoping they wouldn't talk about this, especially not with Mikell. His older brother removes the cigarette and exhales smoke thoughtfully, looking at the floor. Jack holds his breath. He doesn't want to talk about it. He isn't sure that Mikell wants to talk about it, either, in the solemn way that his father wouldn't. Wind rustles the soybeans behind their house and disrupts the neighbor's wind chimes. It's a cold wind in a stark heat.

"Sit up."

Jack complies, surprised at the searing pain his arm makes when he puts pressure on it. It didn't feel real when he did it; it felt real now.

"Where's TJ?"

Mikell transfers his cigarette from his right hand to between the middle and index finger on his left, and slaps him.

Jack reels back out of surprise, then immediately throws off the blankets and bolts up to meet his brother eye-to-eye, world swimming gently as he does so— he's a bit out of breath and off balance, but after a moment of wavering, his eyes bring Mikell into focus, and he feels his own breath boiling hot in his throat with rage,

"Hey! What's your fucking problem?!"

"You're my fucking problem." Mikell takes a drag from the cigarette. "What the fuck do you think you're doing? You think I have the time for your melodramatic shit?" Smoke comes out of his mouth hot as his words. Some ash falls into the carpet.

"I don't know, maybe if you were ever here you'd have the time for it." Jack feels the familiar heat of frustration rising in his chest. Mikell laughs and shakes his head, smiles, and takes another drag on his cigarette.

"Look, Jack, I love you just as much as the next guy." Mikell starts, voice deep and sarcastic, scraping the edges of his tenor register. "But our sister's gone now, too, and you know, that might be a problem, you know? Say, did you consider that, huh? Did you even try when they came to take her? Did you even care?"

"Don't you try to tell me I don't care about them!" Jack screams, anger boiling over. Mikell's face contorts into a look of humor and surprise.

"Well, I mean, you sure don't act like you care. You don't really act like you care about anything, actually, so maybe if you really don't-"

"-You don't fucking understand—"

"Oh, fuck, I don't understand you. That's right. No one understands you." Mikell pushed him back, getting ash on his shirt. "Poor you. You know, I think it's always been about you, you know that?!"

"All about me?" Jack guffawed, blood boiling. "You know, I think that's pretty funny that you say that, you know, since you've been gone all this time and I've been trying to handle both of them at once. I don't know, just a thought here; maybe if you cared you would actually be here at all."

Mikell laughed. "Oh, shit! I forgot I was actually doing something. You might want to try that."

"You know what? That's fine. Fuck you." Jack grabbed his backpack and threw open the dresser. "Fuck you. You wanna play that shit? Fine."

"What do you think you're doing?"

"What does it look like I'm doing?" Jack threw some clothes on and extras in the pack and pulled on a pair of discarded worn sneakers. Thunder boomed in the distance. Mikell laughed again.

"You're fucking stupid. You're a fucking stupid, impulsive little brat, you know that?"

Jack grabbed the bag and swiftly walked to the kitchen, throwing open cabinet doors. Granola bars, water bottle.

"Oh, shit! He's running away!" Mikell snarled, leaning on the counter, exhaling cigarette smoke into open air. "Better call the fucking police, folks, he's a walking menace. Look at that. He'll fuck you up just as soon as he stops fucking himself up." Cabinets slam shut. Jack's breathing comes in hot, ragged breaths, and Mikell continues in a slow, angry drawl. "That's right folks, man of the hour. Look at this melodramatic little shit. Spineless fuck, that's what he is."

Before he can stop himself, Jack whips around and throws a punch directly at his older brother's face; Mikell catches his clumsy throw by the wrist and twists sharply, sending him slamming onto the ground.

"Oh, fuck, folks, he's fighting! We got ourselves a fighter! Damn!" Jack closes his eyes sharply and lets his back take the impact of hitting the kitchen floor. Mikell is on his feet now, cigarette discarded, hand still around Jack's wrist; Jack grabs his arm with his other hand and pulls sharply. Mikell crashes to the ground just as the tornado sirens start, taking off in shrill, sweeping tones that roll over the prairie like a flood. Jack spots something he hadn't before, on the table a few feet away, above his head- a heavy looking grocery bag. The smaller of the oldest bright brothers wiggles free from his brother's grip just as Mikell has time to reorient himself and grab his ankle; Jack awkwardly hits his arm with his other boot, thankful for the first time in his life that they're steel toed, and makes a go for the blunt object, not really knowing what to do with it-

But the bag is heavy in his hand. Heavy and clunky- it's a metal box inside, labeled with a thousand numbers and codes and "IN TRANSIT" stamped on the front, but before he can slide the lock and yank it open he hears the click of a gun, and turns to see his older brother standing, no longer smiling and laughing with rage. Still, calm. Both hands on one revolver, his older brother backs him up until Jack's back is pressed against the wall of the kitchen. Jack realizes with stunning clarity that he has crossed a line, and decides with the same stunning clarity to cross it further, driven with rage and the thin electric wire shooting pain into his thoughts and driving his body to self destruction.

"Put it down." Mikell growls. His fingers are steady on the gun; it's pointed, direct, confident. There's a moment of silence as sirens sweep back up into a pitching howl.

"What, this?" Jack swings the lock box up; something metallic clatters inside. "What are you gonna do? Shoot me? You seemed pretty obsessed with me living a few minutes ago."

"Jack." Mikell is solemn and clear. "You don't understand."

"What did you do with TJ?" Jack demands. Clearly he has some leverage here.

"Damn it, Jack, he's fine!"

"You took him away, didn't you!" Jack's ears ring; he knows what Mikell's done. "You took him to that…that place!"

"Jack." Mikell keeps the gun trained on him. "Put that down. Now."

There's a moment, as Jack Bright looks down the barrel of his brother's gun, that he becomes aware of the weight of the box in his hands- the heavy, important feeling, the godlike divineness, the strange, prophetic kinship- all this and rage drives Jack's thumb to the latch and the latch to the left and the top of the iron box open on welded hinges.

Mikell's gun jams.

He hears it go off, and it's in this moment that Jack no longer cares about the mud-caked ornate amulet approximately 15 centimeters in circumference made from white gold, with thirteen (13) ██k brilliant-cut diamonds surrounding a ██k oval-cut ruby in a starburst pattern presenting itself to him from inside the shoddily locked box. Mikell's eyes widen. The silver ivory creature in his brother's grip has never jammed and will never jam again, and Mikell, understanding the weight of this cosmic decision, does not shoot as Jack thinks he will, instead lowering the gun, one slow, creeping inch at a time, until it is level with his leg. Mikell looks at him a long, careful second- and makes a decision of his own.

It's in this moment, and the moments that follow- when the tornado sirens shriek up into the sky and down to the ground just as Mikell orders him out onto the street and he drops the metal box onto the tile floor and takes off into the stormy world outside- that Jack knows he cannot die, and somehow becomes complete, a fully developed person, like a his brother's guns or his sister's cows.

14

In another life, not far away from here, it takes the wound a moment to bleed.

There's a moment as Jack Bright, level 2 researcher, looks onto the metal pole impaling his abdomen, that everything remains in suspense. Briefcase open, artifact rolling to a stop against his skin. He moves his head a little to the side as it gleams. His body settles. The florescent light shines.

It takes the wound a moment to bleed.

There's a moment, as blood wells from his snapped body and soaks through his stiff button up shirt, that Jack begs not to live in a forceful, horrid way he hasn't before, not with all the days of summer slipping through his fingers and smearing together in an ugly heat, no, Jack Bright has never been more sure in his life that he is not wanted then he is in this moment in October of 1973. Not with the days unable to move from bed, not with the rain coming down on the concrete, not with the night with the razor or the sound of the radio on low singing an endless, melancholy song, nothing has changed, and nothing will change. Jack is still nothing. Jack is still no one.

The amulet glimmers in the florescent light, and in a moment, with the first leaves falling from the trees outside, Jack is not Jack anymore.