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“If only there was a future in bullshit, Aaron,” she says, “you'd be unstoppable.”

She leans in and breaks, sinking the two and the eight. She circles the table, surveying her next shot and as she passes, I lean in, yearning for a pat on the head that's not forthcoming.

“Children are inherently disappointing. As parents, we watch you disappear and be replaced all the time. That squishy pink baby who gurgled and smiled at me, her eyes trying to focus?”

She lines up the one ball and the distant seven against the rail, and drops them both into the far corner.

“Gone,” she continues without judgment, “replaced by a preschooler with a lisp, and then a ten-year-old with ballerina aspirations. And both of those vanished into a teenager who alternated between aloof in front of her friends and clingy when they weren't around.”

She eyes the five-six-nine balls in a cluster and slams the three into them, dropping the five and leaving the nine dangling over a corner pocket like a damsel in distress.

“I've watched every version of you and your sister disappear into adulthood, and however wonderful as human beings you might continue to become, all those other versions of you are as gone as a dead child. I won't see them anymore.”

I ponder the dead children Jackie and I used to be, but all Mom sees is the vulnerability of the nine ball hanging on a precipice. But the three ball, which needs to be struck first, hides behind the six. Mom has to play a deep carom off the far rail to make it work, a difficult shot even at the height of her game.

“I watched you become a man with one less arm … and today he's gone, replaced by a man with a tattoo where that arm used to be. More bullshit. And there's some version of you in the offing that's bound to disappoint anyone who lets him. But it's not going to be me.”

Instead of targeting the far rail she raises her cue stick vertically, taking careful aim straight down on the cue ball. She strikes it, squeezing it with a whirling backspin that draws it around the others and back to the three ball, kissing it into the nine, which drops into the pocket.

“I thought trick shots were bullshit.”

“It seemed appropriate,” Mom replies, laying her cue stick across the table and giving me a gentle pat on my head as she passes on her way upstairs.

 

RAMIFICATIONS

Things remain tense over dinner, the silence so thick you could stab it with a fork—which, as is apparent from her demeanor, is exactly what Jackie would like to do to her husband. For his part, Steve is surprisingly docile, a dog who knows he did something bad even if he cannot understand why, only that at the first sign of trouble there's a rolled-up newspaper waiting for him. Or a fork.

“They say proportionately, dinosaurs had the smallest brains of any creature,” Mom speaks up. “Imagine that. Those majestic beasts, lumbering around the jungle, enormous in stature and the most powerful beings on Earth, but barely able to think. Colossal in size and ignorance.”

Steve sighs deeply and I swear, Jackie's fork is poised to deliver a deathblow.

“Let's call it what it is,” Dad offers by way of clarification. “Stupid.”

“He could get gangrene, and there's nothing left to cut off!”

“Nobody's getting gangrene,” I declare to Jackie with the supreme confidence of a man about to succumb to gangrene.

“It's just nature, is all I'm saying,” Mom continues. “When the big, stupid
Tyrannosaurus rex
—or
two
of them—knock over a thicket of trees, or eat the helpless baby dinosaur, you don't get mad at them. That's what they do! They're not acting with malice or anger, or even forethought. It's simply the act of a dumb, unthinking creature. So when we expect them to behave differently, we're disappointed. And that makes us unhappy.”

Jackie
stabs
at her food.

“Or angry. The key to not being those things is to manage expectations and to accept the natural limitations of things. Pass the potatoes.”

“
How could you let him get that?
” Jackie finally shouts at Steve.

“Whoa! I'm not the boss of him.”

“
And who does that?
” Jackie shrieks. “Who would tattoo a … a … a stump?”

“Are you saying people with stumps don't have the same rights as non-stumpy people?” I object. “That doesn't seem fair.”

“Shut up! Isn't it illegal to give a drunk person a tattoo?”

“You can't tell me to shut up and keep asking questions.”

“Be nice to your brother, he's been through a lot,” Mom mediates. “Also, he's stupid.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“Have some more broccoli. It's a superfood, good for your tiny brain.”

I accept the bowl and immediately pass it to Steve.

“I wish I could shed some light on this, but I remember nothing after leaving the bar,” I strain to recall. “Actually, I don't remember leaving the bar either.”

“Great!” Jackie enthuses. “We can add alcohol blackouts to your litany of recent problems.”

“Or you can stop keeping score. No one asked you to come here.”

What follows isn't the good kind of silence—a quiet, peaceful respite—but the kind that immediately precedes explosive confrontation or foreshadows lifelong estrangement. As if sensing this, Dad attempts to redirect Jackie's fire to a different target.

“Who drove last night?” he asks no one in particular. “Weber?”

“I did,” Steve boasts.

Jackie's head swivels, an angry tank turret. “Really.”

“Whoa, I wasn't near as fucked up as those two. I remember everything.”

“Bring me up to speed,” I urge him. “There's not enough liquor under Dad's sink to make me want a tattoo. What the hell happened?”

“You weren't going to, but then the tattoo artist started talking about tribal tattoos and manhood rituals and how some cultures use them to mark life changes, and some other shit. And then you both creamed your jeans over this Sunny Lee chick.”

“
We did?
”

“Jesus God,” Dad exhales.

“Who's Sunny Lee?” Mom perks up, genuinely interested.

“
What?
” Jackie shrieks. “I went to school with her. What does she have to do with anything?”

“You went to school with Sunny Lee?” I'm stunned.

“The tattoo artist was a big fan of this
Sunny Side Up,
or whatever the fuck it is,” Steve remembers perfectly. “You were like a couple of girls sharing lipstick. Then we all did shots, and he got to work. You went first.”

“It's called
The Sunny Side
.”

“Whatever,” Steve says, bored now.

“She's on the radio,” Dad explains to Jackie. “Weird facts, science, history, that kind of thing.”

“I'm in love with her,” I announce.

“Do you even know her?”

“No! But she's your friend; you can introduce me.”

“I haven't seen her in twenty years! She barely knows me!”

“You're in love with her but you never met her?” Mom finds this unusual.

“I love everything about her. Her voice, her dry humor. And she's smart. Is she cute? I think I'd like to marry her.”

“If she's so smart, she's probably not into guys who drunkenly tattoo sea serpents on their stumps,” Mom suggests.

“Really, ‘guys,' plural? Like there's more than one of me.”

“It does seem pretty unlikely,” Dad muses.

“Mom!” Jackie shouts, desperate. “Do something!”

“This is exactly what I'm talking about, sweetie. You're letting the dinosaurs make you crazy.”

*   *   *

My sister knows Sunny Lee
my sister knows Sunny Lee
MY SISTER KNOWS SUNNY LEE!
Fuck, my nub hurts.

I'm smoking Somnambublast and plugged into podcasts of
The Sunny Side
archives—about Viking sunstones, mummy prosthetics, molecules that make music, and cocoons made of mucus—so I don't hear Steve as he clomps up the attic stairs. But when I see him, lugging blanket and pillow, it's not hard to figure out he's been banished.

“The basement might be more comfortable. We can lay a mattress on top of the pool table.”

“I slept in a bathtub last night; you think the floor's gonna bother me?”

“Bathtub! We have one of those. Why didn't I think of that?”

“Give me some of that,” he says, groping for my pipe. “If I'm gonna be accused of being stupid, I might as well be stupid.”

He takes a long toke before I tell him, “That won't make you sleep. It's designed for alertness and may cause anxiety.”

“Thanks for the fucking warning!”

“You didn't even ask. I could have been smoking angel dust laced with a laxative for all you knew.”

“Anything else I should know?”

“If you find blood in your stool, call your doctor immediately.”

I go back on earbuds and the botanically engineered alertness kicks in, heightening my appreciation of Sunny—the silkiness of her voice, the deep timbre that perfectly expresses intelligence and wry humor, the wonder of discovery:

Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a … grasshopper? Because the physiological constraints of muscle power are limited per kilogram of muscle, a grasshopper should not be able to hop nearly as far as he can—which is roughly the insect equivalent of leaping tall buildings! Researchers at the University of Cambridge discovered that Orthoptera caelifera overcome this limitation with an elastic apodeme, or tendon, anchored to the leg muscle. The use of elastic storage allows as much as seven times that of equivalent muscle—which is like a human throwing an arrow by hand instead of using a bow … and even Robin Hood couldn't make that work!

I can visualize it all perfectly: the super-enlarged image of the grasshopper under observation, its explosive slow-motion leap, the white-coated researchers in their white Cambridge lab … Sunny in a recording studio, headset on, lips wet from the bottle of water she sips to lubricate her voice, content smile from her little joke at the end. The audio engineer—as much in love with her as I am—gives her a thumbs-up, and she smiles warmly back, dark almond eyes sparkling with intelligence as she removes her headset and tosses her thick black hair, taking a final sip before recycling the bottle.

I want to run to wherever she is and take her in my arm.

Instead, I'm in my father's attic with Steve, who's videotaping me on his cell phone.

“What are you doing?”

“Cool room … taping it … maybe we can get you on one of those home-makeover shows.”

“If it's so cool, why would I want to make it over?”

“No, you'd be the ‘After.'”

“But there's no tape of ‘Before.' Isn't that how these things work? Wouldn't they want to come in
before
and do the backstory: here's a one-armed guy who has to move back home with his father … let's see if we can make him a place where he won't want to hang himself or if he does, he matches the drapes?”

This seems to sink in but it's hard to tell with Steve. If there's any alertness behind his glass-dot eyes, it's difficult to discern.

He suddenly thrusts his phone at me. “Tape this.” He pulls up his pant leg and shows off his newest tattoo, explaining that what he likes about it is the contrast of good and evil, that “Hot Stuff, the Little Devil,” does good deeds to irritate real demons.

“Then why is he pissing on your leg?”

He shrugs. “Because it's easier to draw than a good deed?”

“You could have had him rescuing a cat out of a tree with his pitchfork.”

I've always disliked the idea of tattoos—and now I have one—not because of any prudish Victorian looking-down-my-nose-through-a-monocle snobbery but because it demonstrates a lack of imagination, an inability to envision a future where one might not want, say, Hot Stuff pissing on one's leg. But Steve was a guy who barely thought even a moment ahead, about consequences or even simply a chain of events that might follow, as if in putting food in his mouth he was unaware that he might next chew and then swallow it.

Before I can object, Steve starts to expose and narrate the rest of his body parts, telling the fascinating tale behind each of his seven tattoos—where he got them, what they are, and what they mean:

•
Left Bicep:
Snake with a dagger through it. His first tattoo, and it's hard to argue with tradition.

•
Ankle:
war04, a calligraphic tribute to his dead friend Warren who drowned in 2004 (drunk, I'm guessing).

•
Inside Left Bicep:
An eagle eating a snake, which he got in Mexico and only later learned was the Mexican flag.

•
Shoulder Blade:
Stars and a crescent moon, matching tattoos he got with his then girlfriend but now feels is “a little wussy.”

•
Right Bicep:
Barbed wire. No doubt to compensate for the above after the breakup.

•
Left Pectoral:
An eerily accurate portrait of Jackie, which was his last tattoo until now, and only the most obvious reason Jackie made him promise to stop.

Equally telling is what's missing: no religious iconography, historical figures, philosophers, or philosophy; no pretension of Chinese characters, which I'm pretty sure never mean what the tattoo artist says they mean but universally represent poor judgment; surprisingly, no hula girls, bathing beauties, topless mermaids, or Cherry Poptart; and thankfully, nothing on the small of his back. I'm so fascinated by all of it—what's there and what isn't, and my sister staring back at me from Steve's chest—that I don't even question when he takes the phone from me and says, “Now you.”