Josh stood in the middle of his brother’s room. He left the door open so he could hear approaching footsteps coming up the stairway. With no music playing he could hear his parents downstairs in the kitchen. They weren’t yelling, but it was clear from the tone of their voices that they weren’t agreeing on whatever the topic of discussion was.
Gray light filtered through the blinds, blanketing Julian’s room in gossamer dreariness. Up until two weeks before Thanksgiving—when he’d started hearing Julian’s voice in his head—Josh had made it a point to come here every day, sneaking into the room in the morning before heading downstairs for breakfast. It had been therapeutic. No, not quite that. What was the other word the shrinks had used…cathartic? Yeah, that was it. Being in Julian’s room was—had been—cathartic for Josh. He didn’t pretend to understand exactly what it had done for him, but it had done something.
Whispers of Julian’s voice and echoes of conversations they’d had in this room over the years floated through Josh’s mind. Julian talking about the latest book he’d read by S.E. Hinton, Robert Cormier, John Knowles, or one of those Russian guys who wrote those impossibly long books; Josh extolling the virtues of the latest and greatest Zeppelin, KISS, Kansas, AC/DC, or Rush album; Julian asking Josh if he wanted to play pro ball for the Celts; Josh asking Julian if he wanted to write a bestseller someday, both answering yes with Julian adding that instead of writing a bestseller he’d much rather write a book that meant something to someone. Julian, ever the idealist with his head in the clouds and heart in his hands. Had Josh heard that somewhere before? Must have been something Julian had read to him, or maybe it was one of Abby’s poems she liked reciting. Either way, it sure wasn’t something Josh had come up with on his own.
He could hear Julian over-enunciating his ‘s’ sounds and pronouncing every ‘t’ and every ‘d’ at the ends of words, not hiding them as most people did. Josh could still hear his brother’s voice in his mind’s ear if he concentrated enough, but lately—except for the episodes back in November when he really had heard Julian’s voice inside his head—it had started to fade.
And if Julian’s voice faded away into nothingness, what did that mean for Julian?
That, more than anything, scared Josh. The thought that he would completely forget what Julian’s voice sounded like, and that there was no hope of ever hearing those s’s and t’s and d’s again. It meant that every aspect of who Julian had been would, over time, fade away. Maybe that was inevitable. Memories didn’t last forever, at least not in undistorted form, so maybe it was for the good that Julian’s voice faded into nothingness. And maybe, by thinking such psychobabble thoughts, Josh was doing nothing more than sprinkling a little salt on the entire load of shrink-speak bullshit the head doctors had force-fed him and that he was now force-feeding himself, hoping it would make the whole pile of crap taste a tad better going down. As if you could add a pinch of salt to a pile of dogshit and hope it tasted like sirloin steak.
Josh moved to Julian’s bed and sat on the edge. Compared to his room, Julian’s was bare, and it wasn’t because his parents had packed away all of Julian’s stuff; they hadn’t. It was that Julian had never felt the need to cram his room with a whole lot of stuff. There were no posters of superstar athletes like Dr. J, Bruce Jenner, or O.J. Simpson hanging from the walls, no championship banners of the Celts, Steelers, or Bruins, no rock bands or swimsuit beauties. Not even a Red Sox pennant from the couple of games their father had taken them to. There was no stereo, no chest stuffed with toys he couldn’t bear to toss out, none of that kind of stuff that Josh thought was important to have in his life.
What there was in Julian’s room was everything he had needed—according to what he’d told Josh on numerous occasions—to live and enjoy life: a bureau, a desk, a bed, and two bookcases crammed with books, the shelves sagging under the weight of hundreds of novels. Like their mother, Julian read—had read—whenever and wherever he could find the time. Upon waking and before eating breakfast, while waiting for the school bus and while riding said school bus, in study halls, in the cafeteria during lunch, walking home from the bus stop, before homework, during homework, after homework, and before bed. The only place Julian never read—and Josh had always thought this was a riot—was in the bathroom. Yup. The guy could read anywhere else except while sitting on the john. Something about having to involve his entire being in the act of reading while simultaneously going to the bathroom simply did not work for him. So he said. Such was Josh’s brother.
Josh slid off the bed and knelt on one knee in front of the bookcases, tilting his head to read the titles: The Catcher in the Rye, Flowers for Algernon, Atlas Shrugged, Fahrenheit 451 (that sounded like it might be an interesting read), War and Peace (yeah, like Josh would ever try reading that monster anytime soon), Crime and Punishment, The Old Man and the Sea, The Pearl (that one was thin-enough to try reading someday), and on and on, book after book. How anyone could read so many books and still have time for living was beyond Josh’s comprehension.
He reached for a particular book and had to use both hands to pry it out from between the two that sandwiched it. The books weren’t dusty, and although Josh had never seen his mother in Julian’s room, he couldn’t think of any other explanation other than she slipped in and out to dust when Josh wasn’t home. He flipped open A Separate Peace to one of the dog-eared pages. Four years ago when the two of them had been in junior high, Julian had convinced Josh to read this book so they could ‘discuss its underlying theme.’ Those were the exact words Julian had used—‘discuss its underlying theme.’ Josh hadn’t known anyone in junior high, outside of the English lit teachers, who talked like that. Except Julian. He thrived on finding underlying themes in everything he read. Themes are everywhere, Josh. You simply have to open your eyes to them.
In spite of the fact that Josh was less interested in discussing the underlying themes of books than he was in reading them, he’d read the stupid thing. Hell, Julian had played enough one-on-one basketball in the backyard at Josh’s constant begging that he figured he owed Julian that much. Why not read one book, especially a really thin one like this one by Knowles. So he’d read it. Turns out, the book wasn’t that boring of a read after all. This Knowles guy knew how to say what he wanted to say without killing an entire forest to do it. They had discussed it, though Josh couldn’t make heads or tails of any underlying—nor, for that matter, overlying—themes anywhere in the book. He may not have looked too hard, but then again, themes shouldn’t be too hard to find. If they were, well, then the author hadn’t done a good enough job then had he.
One of the dog-ears marked a scene that Josh had reread last year after he’d had a bad day. They were all bad days, but this one had been one of those my-life-sucks-I-wish-I-had-the-guts-to-slit-both-wrists kind of bad day. It was one of the passages Josh hadn’t fully ‘grasped’ when he’d read it as a seventh-grader. Josh, do you get it? Julian had asked one night. Do you grasp what Knowles is getting at here? No, Josh hadn’t grasped it. Not that he didn’t know what had happened in the scene, just that he didn’t get it—the underlying theme and all. Or ‘grasp’ it, as Julian would’ve said.
Now, years later, experience having sledgehammered him upside the head, Josh couldn’t help but grasp it.
Squatting next to the bookcase, Josh flipped to that same passage and read it. He pictured Gene and Phineas—what a funny name for the sort of character that Phineas was, don’t you think Josh?—climbing up the tree, Phineas easing out onto the limb, Gene ‘jouncing’—what a funny-sounding word, don’t you think Josh?—the limb. Josh wondered—which was a funny thing to do when it came to wondering about fictional characters—what was going through Gene’s mind the split-second before he sent Phineas plummeting to the river bank. Superimposing his own thoughts onto the images of the scene playing out in his mind, Josh thought back to that Fourth of July two years ago. He had been playing basketball in the backyard with Julian and their cousins, none of their parents or aunts or uncles paying any attention to the game. Except his father. He had paid attention, damn him. He had been watching them. Watching Josh and Julian, paying especially close attention.
Damn him.
Josh wiped his eyes and closed the book. This was the second time today he’d let his mind slip back to that day. What the hell gives? Why today? Sure, there weren’t two days that went by without him thinking about it, but he’d gotten better at not dwelling on it, per Dr. Wentworth’s orders.
He shouldn’t have come back to Josh’s room. It was too soon. He obviously wasn’t ready.
He squeezed the book back into its slot between The Outsiders and The Chocolate War. Even Josh, bibliophobe that he was, knew that a book written by a guy named Knowles didn’t belong between books written by Hinton and Cormier. That was another thing about Julian. As much as he had loved reading books and everything about books, Julian had never been too keen—much to the consternation of their mother—on the whole keeping-books-in-order thing. Josh, he’d said, there are too many books to read for me to concern myself with keeping them all in order, whether alphabetical, numerical, or Dewey Decimal.
Josh found himself smiling. It didn’t last long, though. Footsteps in the stairway. He stood and left his brother’s room. He closed the door as his mother reached the top of the stairs. She apparently did not notice him as she went to her room without acknowledging him. Josh stood outside his room and turned back to look at the door to Julian’s. He regretted that he hadn’t spent more time in there with Julian when he’d had the chance.
If he had, maybe he would have developed a better grasp of the underlying theme of things.