A year after my brother died, when I had given up on graduate school in California, I moved back east to New York.  About once a month I would take the train up to Boston to see my mother, a pilgrimage that always left me depleted and disoriented. Now that he was dead, my mother and sister were growing closer to him, though they had vilified him while he was alive. I put all my letters from him in a file and wondered how much any of us had really known about his life. Sometimes I envied him for dying young. I still had to deal with these people and their lies and grief and backbiting. I’d moved out, worked my way through college, traveled and married. I’d fought bitterly with them and promised never to return.

While he was in high school, planning his escape, my brother Joseph had carved out a private space for himself in the dank, unfinished basement. I went down there to sit on his bed in the low light. Looked around.  Took a book down from his shelf—I don’t remember what it was, something modernist or romantic, not Franny and Zooey or The Boy Who Could Make Himself Disappear—books we read and shared before he moved on to Andre Gide and Thomas Mann and Joan Didion and a new contempt for everything he was about to leave behind, including me.  The book I took from his shelf was not by Walter Benjamin, whose writing haunted me then:

’A man who dies at the age of thirty-five,’ said Moritz Heinmann once, ‘is at  every point in his life a man who dies at the age of thirty-five.’ Nothing is more  dubious than this sentence—but for the sole reason than the tense is wrong. . . .  [But] the statement that makes no sense for real life becomes indisputable for remembered life.

In the dark I could hear my parents upstairs, my mother hissing at my father, eviscerating him. Everything had changed and nothing had changed.  I opened Joseph’s book to the flyleaf and found, in his penciled, painfully familiar script, the words: “Hi there.”