John Hodgen

My brother is dying and I am not. I drag him behind me like a spiritless balloon, like the first robot, like the last clown-car clown, his ridiculous Fiat, his lot to be crushed, left for dead, covered in snot, his puffy hands, his outsized shoes, his flower pot, like Virgil Earp, Clanton-ganged, at the Not OK Corral, un-brothered, gutshot, like the night without sleep in Turandot. From the get-go I have always sought to know (what,what?) if this is all I’ve got, to show up in a vestibule, all bothered and hot, like silver-fingered Iscariot, like the smiling highwayman,tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, while all about me are consigned to slather and rot. I drink to my faith, to what I am not, to all who’ve come before me, every rutty Lancelot, every Huguenot, every hotsy-totsy hot to trot, every Dylan, besot, who doesn’t have the strength to get up and take another shot. I know my Morse, code blue,dot-dot-dot, dit-dit-dit, dot-dot-dot. I know what God hath wrought.

He’s supposed to call his doctor, but for now he’s the May King with his own maypole. He’s hallelujah. He’s glory hole. The world has more women than he can shake a stick at. The world is his brickbat, no conscience to prick at, all of us Germans he can

All day I have been thinking about the color of his cauterized skin, the burned young man lying flat on his back on the rehab slab in Wiesbaden, and think, finally, that it is the color of rhubarb, that drab maroon and green, but seared on, blasted into a mottled, speckled, crystallized sheen. Rhubarb, meaning a fight or disagreement, the ump getting into it with a player, their faces turning red, sputtering, blustering, kicking dirt on each other, until finally someone gets vulgar, says something about the other one’s mother. Rhubarb, from the ancient word for the Volga River, its watery line of demarcation, and the barbarians who lived beyond it, the real ones, Vandals, Visigoths, Huns, not the ones we see now as buffoons in commercials, battle-axing, caterwauling the civilized world for the right credit card, for Capital One, asking us what’s in our wallets. CNN says the rehab here is good, so the film crew has come in. They thank him for his service. They tell him he’s a credit to his country, to all of us, all our brave young women and men. They ask if he has any hobbies, if he can tell us what he’d most want to do that he used to enjoy doing. He says he’d like to walk again. I hate everyone, all of us who have sent him into flames. I hate the film crew, hate CNN , the rehab facility, every tube that goes in and out of him, every monitor that beeps, even the morphine feed that drips and seeps. They ask him if it is frustrating and he weeps.