I can remember pretty clear that ever since I was a kid I carried notebooks around with me, and pens. A lot of the time my pens would be pencils, or Sharpies, or Vis-à-vis, or ballpoint, or whatever was around that would make a mark. The ends were always chewed to hell. It worked like a kind of territorial marking: say if I needed to write something right that minute and my brother was doodling some cartoons or something, all I had to do was point out the chewed-up butt and the pen was as good as mine. I was always losing my notebooks, too, so sometimes I used scrap papers or pages from my mom’s diary or a boring corner of the morning’s newspaper tucked into my pocket, but I always made sure I had a piece on me, in case of emergencies. So pens and paper were some things I never lacked. If I didn’t have paper, I’d just write right on my arm. I was never too proud a kid to do that, so long as the info went on a permanent thing later. I always kind of prided myself on being a humble guy.
I got it into my head at some point—I must have been four or five, maybe seven—that when bad things happen, there’s a kind of deal made, a treasure-credit that God racks up for you up there in the clouds. Being good and following all the rules never means your life is going to be peaches and cream, so I figured that when bad stuff happens to decent folk, God sets up a sort of reparation-plan. Eventually, He just starts owing you. You’re running along, just a little happy kid, and suddenly you fall, you scrape your knee, shed a couple tears—God owes you one. Your pop gives you a lecture when your brother’s the one who dropped his favorite bowling ball on the linoleum and left a big fat dent—a little mark goes down for you on God’s great notebook. You get rear-ended, the jerk speeds off, and you’re left to foot the bill—you may be in it for a couple hundred bucks on this earthly plane, but up in the wild blue yonder you’ve got a hoard of swag just waiting for you to keel over and float on home. And if something big happens, something very, very unfair, like your cat drinks some antifreeze or you become some sad drug addict or the economy tanks and your family has to file for bankruptcy, then God really owes you. To tell you the truth, when I was about seven my cat Dinky really did drink some antifreeze, and that night he just curled into the tightest hardest ball, breathing all fast and twitching his whiskers and ignoring the whole world. My ma was desperate, heating up some chicken broth and dribbling it on his whiskers so he’d lick it off seeing as he wouldn’t eat on his own, stroking his soft little narrow head, cooing some nice low words to him. In the morning we found him on his little cat-bed, breathless and rigid.
When my ma got back home from the pet crematorium she hopped right in the shower and stayed in there for two hours straight with the radio blasting. I know she must have been running cold water seeing as how our water heater was only three-quarter size. Her eyes were bright red when she came out and when my brother asked she said she’d been clumsy with the shampoo, but I saw a slug-trail of snot sneaking out her nostril and I knew she’d been crying. I went in the room I shared with my brother and blared some Nirvana on my tape player and curled up against my pillow, like our little cat, sort of hugging myself tight as I could. I guess everybody else was feeling pretty soft and soggy too because for once nobody came in to bother me. I think we all just found different little nooks to fold ourselves into for the night and chased our own thoughts for a while. I remember I took out a pen and a small blue journal I’d got from my brother for my seventh birthday with the word SECRETS stamped across the cover in big blue letters, opened it to the first page that had only a half-drawing of a little black cat on it—just a face and some whiskers and a neck—and marked a thick, wavery line down on the paper. I don’t know why I did it; maybe I’d been playing too much Yahtzee, maybe I just needed to slime all my frustration out into a puddle of black felt-tip ink. Whatever my reasoning, I knew one thing for sure: God owed me for this one. I imagined Him up there, cringing as my pen scratched His black judgment on the page, really regretting my little cat’s death. I'd make Him think hard about what He’d done. I didn’t care one bit how bad He was feeling. He in His omnipotence could have saved my little cat without a hitch. If my ma hadn’t had him cremated so quick I bet God could've even resurrected him. It took Him seven days to punch out the Earth; it would take Him one celestial nano-second to mop up that green puddle of poison before Dinky got to it. I was in there sniffling with my baby eyes all red and prickly when my brother finally came in to go to bed. He looked at me and I remember my heart going all clenched like a fist. Usually most anything I tried to feel would earn a pinch or a shove, which I guess is the natural-born right of a bigger brother, but this time his slightly-wiser eyes just looked into mine and one corner of his mouth tucked in a little at the side, and before I knew it he'd climbed up our red bunk-ladder and had his arm around me.
“We can get another cat sometime,” he said to me. The pat he slapped on my shoulder was kind of clumsy, but I remember it warmed the colder parts of me.
God tried to pull a lot of fast ones on me in the couple of years after poor Dinky died, but I caught Him every time and each little infraction cost Him a big black tally mark. I got Him for all the tests I failed even when I studied, for the time I broke my finger in P.E. playing a game of four-square, for all the times I had to see my ma cry, for every time my brother came home pissed-off and red-faced and smacked me one. Every time I was feeling pretty low I would just think of the treasure trove piling on up for me in the heavens and get all warm and smug inside picturing God, white-bearded and white-robed and sorry, shaking my hand and shaking His head and giving me crock explanations, that He was busy or overwhelmed or careless. I’d wave Him off with a nice smile and maybe a little wink to show Him no hard feelings—not too hard, at least—and turn to my just desserts and eat ‘em right up. I dreamt of this a lot and it cheered me up every time. Maybe it helped my ma to see that at least I was doing okay, even if the rest of us weren’t.
I think I must have been twelve when I caught my brother in our room, leaning out our window, the screen of which he had pried right off, with his back to me and his hand to his mouth. It was a night when ma and our pop both worked late and yesterday's mac-and-cheese was in the freezer ready to be nuked and I was going to do some worthless algebra, which needed to get done no matter how useless and boring it really was. I flipped the switch and the light flashed on and he turned to me and swore, and what he’d been holding dropped to the rug, almost as low as my mouth.
His little white joint was twisted like a peppermint candy wrapper and I almost wanted to laugh when I saw it, except I knew he was going to be murdered if ma or pop found out and also because it unrolled when it hit the floor and all the little green flecks of marijuana leaves spilled everywhere and I saw that his rolling paper was marked with a a piece of big black half-burned-up tally.
“Get the fuck out of here,” he said to me, squatting, his fingers picking pieces of green from the gray curls of the carpet, and I fled.
I had forgotten to grab my homework and even though I knew I was going to get yelled at in class the next day, my heart was pounding practically right out of my chest and there was no doubt I’d get beat if I tried to go back in our room. I wondered where he’d found my scrap paper, why he’d decided to use it to roll his joint, and what exactly that tally he smoked up was meant for. The paper had been clean and white, probably torn from my journal. I pulled it from its hiding place in the hall vent and flipped through real quick, glancing around like some kind of criminal to make sure nobody was spying. Sure enough, a big triangle was torn right off a page near the middle. It had been the only thing on the whole page, front or back, and I remembered pretty quick why I’d first drawn it. He had done something straight stupid when our folks were at work, Frisbee in the house or maybe rollerblading or something like that, and ended up breaking this special commemorative plate my pop gave my ma on some anniversary. It had a decal of the Space Needle like a tall gray tally cutting it in half, where they had their first date and first kiss and all that stuff, and he cracked it right down the middle. I knew he’d get pretty well killed when they got home on account of his always pulling dumb stunts like that, and so I took the blame and the spanking and later drew myself one long sad tally down on the page, sort of a reminder to God of my sacrifice.
I wondered, too, when my brother had started doing this kind of stuff. We weren’t too far apart age-wise but it never even crossed my mind to smoke a joint, and honest, I was a little hurt that he’d gone and grown up to this next level without me. I even felt a little bit of a prickly feeling in my eyes and I smashed my knuckles against them, pulling my notebook from my back pocket and sliding three big fat tallies down the page: one for my hostaged homework, one to replace the tally he’d stolen to get his high, and one because I felt sorry for myself, having to find out I had a drug-addict for a brother.
I was kind of crying and I decided I better give in and read some of the Bible, maybe make some sense out of these sorts of things. I had some extra time on my hands, seeing as how my homework was holed up with my screwed-up brother, and I could use a few minutes alone to let my face dry off and fade back from red. I didn’t really know where to start, though; those hundreds of pale pages with their black words like strict straight tallies put a kind of fear into me. Before now, all the bad stuff that had happened to me were like little flea-bites on a mutt: pretty harmless alone, just hurting for a second and then settling down into a memory that pulsed and itched every once in a while, all together making for a pretty irritating time. The more those bad-luck parasites kept sucking at me, the more I wanted to scratch them all to Hell. But watching my brother drag that stuffed black tally into his lungs gave me this still, shivery feeling down in my belly. I felt like a dog burned bright by the headlights of a car that didn’t mean to stop, and I got that God-awful sweaty panicky feeling that grabs you when you can’t turn back from something, where you feel like you’re thirty feet away from yourself and everything sounds like there’s cotton in your ears and your throat’s clenched tight and your brain feels like it’s been hit by a tornado. Seeing my brother with that little twist of hot paper in his mouth showed me this flashing glimpse of a really depressing future, different from all the things we’d ever played at as kids: as far as I knew, Batman had never smoked a joint in his life, and the Ninja Turtles had their own ad campaign against any kind of drug, even beer, that aired every weekday morning at seven-thirty-seven on the dot. For a second I couldn’t really breathe, cruddy thoughts cramming my lungs worse than any smoke ever could, and that Bible seemed to me like the last gulp of fresh air I might ever get. I pulled it down and opened it up and steeled myself for the enlightenment I could just feel was coming.
I thumbed through and eyed little pieces of words, waiting for the right ones to find me. I figured that if God were really sorry for doing this to me, He’d use His own holy SECRETS journal to show me that lovingkindness I heard so much about from my ma. I tore through His little black-leather journal without mercy, reading all those tallies He had against us down here, looking for just the right secret. And all of a sudden it just fell open like its spine broke and there it was, right on the thin little page, as if written just for me:
“…Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.
For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
Matthew said it straight out loud, no bells or whistles or doomsday nay-saying. I was on the right path. Relief hugged me close all over. I think I’d always felt kind of guilty, keeping such a close eye on God, like maybe I better not act so high-and-mighty, but the Good Book Itself stated plain and clear that I better lay up for myself my treasures in that Most High-security place. Every black line I’d ever drawn was my treasure, and up on high is where I’d find my hoard of tallies stacked up like gold, with my ma and my pop and my brother, complete with clean pink lungs, perched like royalty, waiting for me. For a minute I really understood my ma when she stood up in church and wrung her hands so tight they were white and veiny, all from Holy Joy. This wave of happiness kind of trickled tinglingly through my body all the way to the ends of my fingers and toes, and I felt a little smile cut across my face. I was feeling so good, I even scribbled over one of the three tallies from before, out of all that extra good-will.
Anything anybody feels with their whole body fades away sometime, though, doesn't matter if it hurts or thrills, and that happiness streaming through my blood only carried me so far, pretty well until I caught my brother at his habit a few times more. He’d always been the guy who’s not scared to make good on his threats, so I never let the cat out of the bag, not to ma or pop or anyone. That was a depressing thing, and I think it was getting me down. He was blacking up his lungs and his heart and his brain like fleshy rotten tallies inside him, and I didn’t even know why because he never told me. He just kept his tallying to himself and I could only guess at his reasons, which were probably centered around how ma and our pop weren’t getting along so well anymore, or how he was getting held back a year, or maybe he hated being stuck alone with me in our bunks every night and how I’d try to talk to him about serious stuff when it was dark and my voice felt far-off and brave. I wasn’t doing my homework because he was always kicking me out of our room and because it frustrated me so bad that I would just make tallies instead of parentheses or minuses or numbers, and I ended up failing the Statewide Aptitude Test my school put on in the spring. I only messed up on the math part but I guess they counted it as too important to fail, because I had to go to summer school that year and get special algebra tutoring. It wasn’t even a regular summer school, either; I had to pack up some clothes and lots of notebooks and pens and some books and pictures and go sleep over at this crummy whitewashed building complex the next town over. The other kids there were mostly Special Ed or real bad news, the kinds that either carry around cartoon lunch boxes or butterfly knives, so most of the time that I didn’t have to study or be in class, I was doodling in my bunk alone, or tallying, or counting up my tallies and dreaming of treasure.
I started to get the hang of it all pretty quick. After a couple of days I started to notice how algebra was just fitting the right tallies to the right problems to solve things, and that was satisfying enough for me to start to like math. It wasn’t really worth it, though. Four weeks in I got a letter from my ma. The words seemed kind of like she’d written with her left hand or something, it was so shaky and hard to read. I almost couldn’t make it out, but I tried really hard since it was the first letter I’d gotten so far. What happened was that my pop had left us. Didn’t even say a word to her, didn’t even say goodbye to my brother or me. Didn’t take our measly college funds or the checking-account money. Just left. My ma seemed pretty torn up over it in the letter—I could tell mostly just because she didn’t say much at all. She thought she did a great job hiding it all with her showers and her little hungry sentences, but what she left out told me more than if she squeezed my hands and we looked each other in the eyes and cried and cried. I didn’t feel too much of anything just then; I guess it hadn’t really hit me. All I did was turn over her letter and start making little black lines, left to right, top to bottom. I filled up that letter with black tallies until it looked like a flat dead zebra skin. Then I turned it over and made little tallies above and below her words, between her letters where there was space, and all over the margins. I had nothing else to do. I tallied the whole night, millions of little black lines decorating all the paper I could get my cramping hands on. I wasn’t bored; I couldn’t be bored with my mind so blank and clean and white.
The next week my brother mailed me a joint hidden in a box of Altoids. It nestled in the mints like a sleeping little baby swaddled all up in a blanket, a sick-sweet white tally he'd written in my honor. I think it was the only nice thing he’d tried to do for me in a couple years, so I felt kind of jerky not taking advantage of it. I almost felt like it was old times. He was miles and miles away from me, but I was pretty sure we were doing this together. I bolted my door and leaned up against my open window, sticking my chin way out, and tried to smoke it. It didn’t work so well; I puffed when I should have pulled, stubbed when I should have flicked, and when it was finally burnt up and gone, I’d say I felt lower instead of higher. I just couldn’t fill myself with black hurt the way my brother did, and so I coped the only way I really knew—I unrolled that last stump of paper, pulled a Sharpie from its home behind my ear, and sliced a little black line on what was left of my drug.
The next couple of years after my pop left us are pretty hazy for me to remember. Maybe I don’t mean hazy so much as I mean hard. Half an income halves a family. Pretty soon, taking care of us kids and all, my ma had to file for family bankruptcy. We lost our house and half our stuff in a yard sale and moved into this slummy apartment near downtown. My brother, who’d been smoking more and more pot and not even caring who knew—ma, me, the neighbors, the cops—ended up getting in a big fight with us. It happened when he found my SECRETS tucked under his mattress—I’d run out of hiding spots in our smaller place, and I’d figured he was too stoned to look around, anyway. Maybe I wanted him to find it, maybe I wanted him to know me like when we were kids. Either way he stared at me for a while like I was some kind of psychopath—I had some little sketches in there of him smoking his brains out or having tallies for lungs or of me dueling our pop with a big black tally-sword—and then he hit me.
“What the fuck’s the matter with you?” His voice was different, deeper and cracking on his curses. I hadn’t heard him say anything for a while, I suddenly realized. He was decked all out in black and he was real skinny and tall, and I wondered if he was still just tallying the little white slips of paper or if he’d moved on to long black spoons and black needles and all the other kinds of tallies people made that I’d seen in action movies and bad TV dramas and sometimes the alley behind our apartment complex. My mouth hurt where he’d hit me and I swallowed away the extra spit that foamed up under my tongue; it felt like a guilty black tally scraping my throat all the way down, snagging on my heart and sitting sharp and straight in my stomach. I remembered how he had always been Batman and I had always played Robin, and I sort of wondered why I’d never really done my duty as a bright little sidekick.
Ma was crying in the open and scratching her long nails at his arm and he smacked her too, and I got so riled up I smacked him right back, right on his temple where it hurts worst. I know because he smacked me there plenty of times growing up and a couple times I thought I had a concussion or possibly brain damage. Either way it was the first time in my whole life I’d ever hit him back right in his face, and instead of fighting me like he would have, like my real and true brother would have, he just swayed and looked in my eyes a minute, with these empty sort of shark-eyes. I thought for a second that I saw a little spark of something in them, far in the back of his big black dilated stupid pupils, maybe hurt, or a real unspeakable sadness. Maybe nothing at all, except my little bit of hope. For a second I remembered a time when he'd hugged me, when his eyes were big and leaky with this wise sadness; they weren't wise now, and they weren't sad. They weren't much of anything—just holes. He turned and left after that, didn’t even say he was sorry. Just left. I drew a big black candle down a page of my SECRETS journal, colored it in as dark as my brother’s pupils, left it unlit. I wondered if God had a treasure stored for me up there big enough and great enough to match that tally.
My brother didn't come back for a long time after that night. Probably half a year flew on by before I saw him again. It was my winter vacation already but pops was long gone and single mothers don’t get a break so my ma was at work, and I was left at home to do things like the dishes and the laundry. I had finished my chores and was in the middle of blacking up the margins of a page of homework when I heard this one single pound on the door, like somebody just kicked it or something. I’d gotten bored with my tallies so I didn’t really mind slumping my algebra to the floor and answering. I swung open the door without asking who was there and didn’t see anybody 'til I looked down and saw this big black stick figure folded up on the floor and I realized it was him, it was my brother. That far-away fuzzed-over feeling of panic crusted around my brain and all I could do was stand there for a minute, staring down and starting to breathe too fast to get any air into my chest and pushing my fingers into my skull as if it were clay and gritting my teeth so hard I felt them sink deeper into my gums. I knew, for that moment staring at him, that he would have drawn the blackest, fattest tally against me, bigger and darker than any I’d ever had to draw. I wanted to run to my journal and tear out every black mark I’d ever counted against him. I wanted to smack God hard in the face and force Him to forfeit my treasure and bully Him into giving back what I’d let slip past.
Fast as anything I snapped out of it and stooped to bring him into my arms and I started rubbing his back back and forth, back and forth, trying to erase the big black tally he’d become. He was too tall for me to hold and it was like trying to balance a mattress on its end all on your own: he flopped first forward and then back, forward again and then sideways. And then he lurched back and when his eyes opened I saw they were clear and white, and their tally-black pupils met mine and I loved him, I loved him. His tallies were all marked up inside of him and I knew I should have found them just like he found mine under his bed. I knew I should have shouted at him and asked what the fuck was wrong with him and smacked him upside the head until he understood that we were piling up our treasures in heaven—in heaven!—that we didn’t need these black marks, that we should have just forgot the papers and the pens and the drugs and knelt together at night and prayed by the lower bunk, his bunk, that even if he didn’t believe God was there to tally up what treasures He owed us, we could have had at least the one. We were looking at each other and I like to think that all of this was going through his mind too, that the drugs hadn’t messed him up too badly even to feel, and we kept our eyes together as he fell forward and came so close he looked like a Cyclops. I almost fell down when he hit me, but I didn’t, I held him instead. And for a second I frowned and I didn't know if he'd smack me for it or what, but I put my lips to his too-hot forehead and I pressed them there. We sunk to the floor and he was in my arms, breathing real slow and light, and I felt like a mother with my new little baby, which would have been a pretty uncomfortable feeling if I'd had any pride left to mix it with. I brushed his sticky hair away from his eyes and his head rolled into the crook of my elbow and he started to snore very lightly, like the tiny grumble of a happy cat, like he was glad to be there with me, so sick and near-dead and safe. Even now I don't know if I've ever felt as good as I did just then. The worry and the fear is just a little yellow stain on that almost-painful love-swell I felt. We love things—cats and babies and mothers and overdosed brothers—we love them so much because they need us more than drugs or air. We were perfect then, my brother's blackened body tight in my arms and some cloudy light hitting us from a crack in the curtains. I figure not a whole lot of people experience a perfect moment, and I thought that maybe if the big treasure waiting for me up there in the stars was a big heap of perfect moments like that, maybe it would make up for my brother and my pop and my always-sad ma, my ruined summers and the lump that sticks in my throat every time I swallow and my little cat.
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