THE HANDSOME BROTHERS

I got a job as a professional friend to the tall, pale son of a rich man who I met while removing the sale sign outside a house that he owned. Laboring in the hot sun, I'd felled it with a lasso and he'd emerged from the shade to congratulate me on my ingenuity and ask me to mentor his boy, a socially paralytic 21-year-old named Sebastian. I misunderstood the dynamic between father and son: I thought the father was disappointed in Sebastian, but discovered he was just anxious about his son's lack of worldliness; and I thought Sebastian resented his old man, but discovered he was just tired. For six months I dragged him around the pool halls and aquariums of the city trying to get under his skin. In pursuit of a reciprocal exchange I confided in him. I told him about my university professors, a few doctors I knew, about the holiday to Miami I'd taken, the affair that my former best friend had with a woman he'd met in the laboratory. Every time I went to their family home to pick Sebastian up for an outing I stole something. Nothing big. A coaster once, a Bluetooth soundbar another time, a beautiful yellow drinking glass a third. Sebastian continued to follow me. I took him to free cultural events hosted by the city and got him a haircut. Sotto voce I told the barber to clean up his beard while he was at it. He came out looking fantastic. My name was drawn in a competition for tickets to a film premiere and, as we walked up the red carpet, I imagined that glamorous young women were looking at us and calling us "the handsome brothers". I began to think of myself as a kind of puppetmaster - not exactly that, or not in those words, but in a kind of vague way, if I thought about it at all, which I didn’t - not at the time, although in hindsight I identify the subconscious thought, if indeed it had been present, as a potential behaviour-shaper. Sebastian’s father paid me $300 each time I left the house with him, but the time came when I’d have done it for free. I became fond of the somnolent freak. One wet evening we sat in a bus stop and he told me he was going to talk to his father about ending our arrangement. I’d nodded. No need for money to change hands. “I hope I never see you again,” he’d told me. “You are so empty. You have, like, a million nothings inside you.” Then we rode the bus home together. I would never allow myself to feel emotional about a trivial thing like that. But I’d wanted to.

Apologies to regular readers for the quiet times on INFINITE GOSSIP - I'm trying to be focused and disciplined in my work on a larger project, in which this short piece may or may not appear at a later date. I'm spending a lot of time thinking about structure and "the obligatory act" and am finding it difficult to keep up my normal regimen of short fiction writing. I am sorry if I have disappointed you in this respect but hope to make it up to you in the future!