My brother had always been a fool. Sure, he had brains, he was smarter than most of the college kids burying their heads in books to get a doctor’s degree, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a fool. Heck, our last name even meant ‘fool’ in German. Was that still not proof enough?
I mean, it wasn’t his fault he was the way he was now. Ever since he’d been born, he’d had these funny eyes, mismatching ones. I called them ‘ghost eyes’ because I was definite that his eyes were why he could see all those ghosts and stuff. For our parents though, his strange eyes made him special, unique, destined to be different and great. He got the best education, daily trips to beauty salons, private fitness trainers and whatever else he needed until he became the very embodiment of our parents’ worldly desires and dreams, smart, handsome, athletic. In fact, they revered him so much he became their God, every word from his mouth an enlightening quote, a standard to follow.
So yeah, I’m rather surprised he didn’t end up as a proud and haughty brat.
But that was besides the point. He was a fool for all he was, letting himself toil for others rather than for himself. It was sort of my fault, I knew, that he ended up having to take care of our parents through the difficult times, further cementing his spot in their hearts as their pillar of emotional support. Still, that was no excuse for him to give up all the things he’d wanted to do in life, so, after years and years of toil and boredom, I thought of a plan.
He could kill them.
“No,” was his immediate reply. He didn’t want to break the law.
“But you know that they aren’t happy right now,” I stressed, rolling my eyes. It wasn’t a lie. Our parents had been getting worse and worse in how they dealt with life. Mom never quite got over the initial shock of her daughter’s death; in fact, none of us had. Dad took us all on vacations plenty of times during the year to pristine white beaches with glowing sunsets vanishing over the seas, but it didn’t help much. Mom still fell into restless sleeps while Dad had trouble with his job. Death would have been so much better for them, where they could finally face the tragedy, where they didn’t have to worry about work.
“Yeah, I know,” he just muttered back, glancing away. “I know death is probably the easy way out for them, but they’re our parents. We can’t just kill them.”
I pouted. “Then ask them what they want,” I suggested, determined not to drop my case. I was going to make sure my brother could be free to do what he wanted instead of living a life as a fool serving others.
With a tired sigh, he agreed. He’d probably expected them to reject our little idea, to still see the worth of life, as little as it was. It was, however, to my delight that our parents welcomed the idea, to be freed from all their troubles and to see their long lost daughter again. Alan could only smile and say it was nothing when asked why he’d wanted to know.
I could tell his smile was forced, but as for why, I wasn’t quite sure. He should’ve been happy, really. He’d just been given the okay to go and fulfill his disciples’ wishes. Wouldn’t the next plausible step be to go and do so?
“Hey, Alan, what you lazing around for?” I asked, studying him as he lay sprawled on the couch, head back as his dark eyes stared up at the ceiling in deep thought. The solemn frown on his face, the disappointed eyes, I saw them all, but I didn’t comprehend.
“I don’t get what I’m supposed to be living for,” he suddenly remarked, his voice cracking mid-sentence.
“What do you mean?”
His eyes rolled towards me, almost with of look of broken-heartedness. “If even they want to die,” he started, “if even they don’t see the point in living anymore, what choice do I have but to kill them? I want them to be happy, I really do, but then what about me? What do I do?”
After a moment of thinking, I remarked, “You could join us.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” he replied rather hesitantly, “I have a dream.”
I couldn’t help it. I snickered and collapsed on the sofa, my head right near his body. His face had a miffed expression, eyebrows knitted together with narrowed eyes, but for that moment, I didn’t care. Alan, Alan, Alan. No wonder I loved my brother so much. He was a fool in so many different ways, from not wanting to go with his parents into death, and for claiming he had a dream when he himself had denounced dreaming as useless.
“Stop it?” he sighed, more a question than a order of any sort. When I didn’t, his eyes narrowed as he harshly snapped, “Stop it.”
I shut up after that. My brother usually never got angry at me. This was certainly a first. I sat up straighter and asked, “So what’s little Alan’s dream?”
He sat up for a moment before hunching over like a tired old man who’d been deprived of all life’s joy. He mumbled, “I just want to be normal, and killing people would make it all the more impossible.
“Well I want to be normal too,” I placidly retorted back.
“You’ve achieved it already,” he informed me, as if I didn’t know. When he was off, getting rushed around to places to become what our parents called ‘perfect,’ I was going to school like a normal student, hanging out with friends after school and stuffing my mouth with fattening marshmallows just to tease my brother. It was as normal a life as it could get, and I had no right to ask for more, but I didn’t care.
“That doesn’t mean I didn’t want it to last longer than it did,” I finally argued back, frown set with a bitter tone. “I know you say I’m selfish, but so what if I am. I had in every way the same rights as you to enjoy that normal life for as long as I wanted.”
Alan didn’t reply. After a long silence, the ticking of the clock blatantly reminding us of the passing time, he got up and headed into the basement, mumbling a sorry, to me or to himself, I wasn’t quite sure.
That night, after our parents had come home from work, the three of them had dinner as usual, a nice hearty meal made by our Mom who was still a great cook albeit being a mindless follower of Alan’s. He asked if they’d been sleeping well lately. When they replied that they hadn’t, he handed them each a bottle of sleeping pills and told them they’d sleep better if they took the entire dose of medicine I’d seen him tinker with himself.
Our parents by then were just puppets for my brother to play with. They listened to his every word, didn’t question anything he did. Alan could never be wrong in their eyes, so they accepted the pills and headed for the stairs.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he whispered after them, his words just barely making it past his lips.
Mom and Dad just smiled back and went upstairs. I watched as they took the dose Alan had prescribed them and settled into bed, dozing off into eternal sleep.
They looked so peaceful in their sleep, their faces carved into marble like kings and queens over their final resting place. I knew they’d wake in just a day’s time, reborn as beings of a ghostly world, but staring at them now only left a cold empty feeling in the pit of my stomach, as if something important had been ripped out, as if my parents had really been stripped from us, from me.
A cold tear trickled down my cheek, something that hadn’t happened in ages. Suddenly, I knew why Alan had been so reluctant to initiate the act. Happy they might be in death, who wouldn’t want to always have their family, their parents beside them, there with a material form to comfort them when needed? Now we were all reunited as a happy family, but what about Alan? All alone in the material world, with no one to be there with him. He could do what he wanted now, he had that freedom, but he, no, I had sentenced him to a life of isolation. Even worse, I’d just taken away his dream from him, his chance of ever becoming normal stripped away by this murder.
“You see what I meant, don’t you?” a whisper breezed past the tip of my ear.
Something cold and slender thrust into my back, right into the middle of my spine. I snapped my head back to see Alan there, silent tears streaming down his face with a bitter smile on his lips. The knife in his hand didn’t move from my body as he cried, “I don’t want to have to be by myself, alone, suffering, but it doesn’t really matter anymore, does it, Lily? After all, you’re all really dead now, aren’t you?”
The knife slid out of my body just as easily as he wandered off down the stairs, a clattering soon following as he tossed the knife back into its drawer downstairs. I stared at the staircase where he’d disappeared from sight, the sounds of him bustling around and gathering his stuff clearly ringing in my ears. My eyes suddenly narrowed into a hard glare as I spat under my breath, “I don’t need you to remind me how dead I am, you dumbo.”
The morning had easily been the most exciting time of my life, from laughing at the lady who ran the store to talking to the little girl to chasing after the bus and successfully getting on, but my brother had this passive expression on the whole time, almost like he was bored. Well, I guess he was, considering he was having fun by himself on the bus, getting all proud for not splitting his head open on the seat in front of him every time the bus gave a jolt. Then the lady had come and started talking to him. I knew that look on his face, all delighted to share his thoughts with other people even though not only would no one really understand it, I doubted Alan even believed himself.
Still, I couldn't help but smile whenever I saw that expression of his, the true inner self of the brother that had taught me to slow dance in his own free time, the boy who was always excited to show other people what he knew. That, and he might’ve also been using the lady as a replacement for a mother that he wished he had, one he could touch and rely on if necessary.
Of course, too bad both of us knew what the lady really wanted. Alan had probably noticed just from studying her. I cheated and went over to the man that had just gotten on the bus out of boredom only to find that he was hiding a gun in his belt, a police badge lurking out of his shirt pocket. I decided he wasn’t worth my time and went to look over the shoulder of the other fellow passenger on the first deck of the bus, reading some strange book in another language. I couldn’t understand a word, but that didn’t matter. I liked staring at his face more, his forest green rimmed glasses square and proper on his bony nose as his bluish gray eyes skimmed the text. He looked like he could’ve been the adult version of a friend I once knew, my mind already imagining that serious face which was always in a frown and his obviously fake glasses that were supposed to hide his secret identity. He’d been a nice, smart person, but there was never time to dwell in the past. There was only the present to focus on now, no time to regret anything that hadn’t been done. It was all in the past now, the towering bullies in the rain, the
What happened next was the boring part of the plan. Alan knew that despite what we’d decided, he’d still broken the law. The police would deduce that our parents hadn’t killed themselves sooner or later, so Alan did the thing he’d always wanted to do.
He ran away with nothing but a bit of money and his entire family in tow. We went everywhere in the city, sightseeing stuff we’d never gotten the chance to see before.
After a day or two, however, it got boring. I knew it, he knew it, even our parents knew it. They’d woken up that day, surprised to find themselves in a new world, a place where they could finally see their daughter and be happy again. I think Alan cheered up after seeing the relatively happy family reunion washed in tears and smiles, but I couldn’t forget those words he’d told me. I’d thought long and hard about what I could do for my brother, who lacked the ability to care about himself.
It was through this idea of killing himself so that he could be reborn anew in death that led to my brother getting on this round trip bus that drove on and on until it was closing time. For fun, I convinced my brother to ride the bus three times around the city before we went through with the plan, enjoying his annoyed faces as the bus jolted him back and forth, once even slamming his head on the window. He never got mad at me for laughing at him. He even threw me a box of cookies like the good boy he was.
The police interfering hadn’t been part of the plan, but Alan, as always, found a way to go through with what we’d decided to do. It was part of a test Alan had wanted to try out, to see what would actually happen if a human hit his head really hard on a thin pole of metal. I just wanted him to hit his head and finally rid himself of whatever was left of the fool inside my brother, the one that couldn’t think for himself, the one that couldn’t live a normal life.
So far, everything had gone as planned. The bus had screeched to a stop in front of the station where we all used to live, and it’d been sitting there for a good ten minutes as everyone was rushed off and medics flooded the scene where my brother lay, head in a pool of blood, unconscious.
I settled down next to my brother, ignoring the chaos around me. Our parents were hanging back, watching almost as if in a trance from seeing their God like this. I whispered, “It’s almost time, don’t you think?”
“No.”
I gave a start. It was my brother’s voice, ringing in the walls of the bus. He was still there, in front of me, eyes shut almost like he was asleep. Perhaps I could hear his very soul itself as it lay there, encased in his human prison, waiting for something to happen.
Before I could ask anything else, his voice continued, “I’m not going to die.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t want to, not yet.”
“That won’t help you, you know,” I remarked, tapping him on the forehead.
“It will.”
I sighed and sat back, watching as the medics struggled to keep his heart rate up as they tended to his head on the scene. Here was a boy who’d murdered his own parents, and yet they were trying to save him. I asked, “Didn’t we agree on this already? This is the easiest way for you to fulfill your dream. You won’t be alone anymore, and you don’t have to play God either. You can just live however you want.”
There was no reply. The medics’ voices were a blur in my ear as time slowed to a stop, waiting for something, anything to signal my brother’s fate, a piercing beep blaring every once in awhile as they tried to keep his heart beating.
Just as quietly, as if it were an eerie cool breeze that should’ve been nonexistent over a spring field of flowers, he replied, “You’re always saying I’m a fool for not doing anything the way I want, right? Well, from now on, I’ll stop being that fool you claim me to be. I’ll make my own decisions from now and be the one to choose my own fate, so I will return to this thing called ‘life.’ I will face whatever it has in store for me. I don’t need to be normal anymore.”
“What? But then what about your dream?” I demanded, crossing my arms with a pout.
I could almost hear a cheerful laughter echoing from my brother’s pale lips. “There’s no such dream as being normal. I gave up that dream myself, the moment I followed Mom and Dad’s wishes and became their God. Life might be a pain sometimes, and some people might not be able to take it. Our parents will be happier with you, so no matter how much you might resent them, learn to forgive and take care of them for me, will you?”
“And what about you?”
“I think I’ll take on life’s challenge,” came his cheeky response. “I don’t know what will happen when I get up again, but I’ll live for both of us and see just what good can come from living a fulfilling life before an eternal death.”
The medics suddenly stopped the CPR, focusing more to bandage Alan’s head as his body was lifted onto a stretcher. Sitting there in the middle of the bus, staring after the ambulance that flung its backdoors open and handed my brother his ticket back to life, I let out a happy snort.
“Now that’s more like it,” I snickered, picking myself up with a sigh. I plopped the last cookie from the box into my mouth, my teeth gnashing the snack, flour and chocolate crumbling until only pure delicious flavor was left. “Congratulations, my dear little brother, you’ve graduated from the world of fools.”
I skipped over to my parents and grabbed their hands, leading them out the bus and into the open air. It might take a long time, I knew, before they could recover from their initial shock, before I could forgive them for focusing all their attention on Alan we were alive, but surely time could heal everyone, even ghosts. After all, Alan was off to create his own legacy of life, and, I with my parents, we would see him off and stay together as a new, reborn family forever and ever after.
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