None of us understood it, and me least of all. Don’t misunderstand. I realize that’s the usual reaction to suicides. Everything seems to be going fine and then, crack! It hits like a brick from the sky. Everyone always says that they had no idea what was coming. “They seemed fine last week.” I don’t know, maybe it’s just because it happened to me, probably because it happened to me. But this was different, you know?
My brother, he wasn’t fine. He was better than fine. He was perfect. Everything around him was perfect. I guess you’d have to have known him. David was like a saint. Back when our dad was still around… Well, David saved me in more ways than one. The first broken arm I ever got was the last one too. And even when all that was over and done with, he never had a bad word to say about the man. A saint, I swear.
He just moved to the city. He was going to get his master’s so he could dig up bones or something. I was in college, sophomore year, no major yet. David would always send letters in these beige envelopes that he would stain with coffee before sending off to make them look old. Same with the paper inside, everything handwritten. He should have been an artist or something, mom always said.
And it did look real nice. He called sometimes, too, but it was just for basic things. When he wrote us it was like poetry.
I’ve still got the last one. Ten pages. Well, nine and a third. It was different than most or them, but he was funny like that sometimes. It just sounded like he was getting old, talking about when we were kids. I figured twenty-five was pretty old by both our standards. I didn’t even read it all because I was headed to a party off campus.
Three days after I got the letter I heard about what happened. He actually went out and bought a brand new suit. I don’t think he expected any of it to be intact after the train was done running it over, but the gesture was probably important to him. David had doubts like any other person, but always told me he liked to believe he would see God when the end came. I hope he did. I think he did.
Anyway, he left me another letter. There was a suitcase full of them by the tracks, practically for every person he knew. I don’t know what most of them said, but there were novels’ worth of words. The people that talk to me about it, they all say he told them not to be too sad about it. Kind of a funny thing for someone who played chicken with a train to say. Most of it was apologies. The poor guy even left a little sticky note on the suitcase apologizing that it was such a long walk from where the bigger pieces of his body would end up. Hah, and another one for whoever had to clean him up. “To whom it may concern.” He had all the bases covered, I tell you.
I didn’t even want to read mine. After the shock wore off I was more angry than anything. I figured if he didn’t care enough about me and mom to stick around, I didn’t have to care enough about him to read a stupid apology letter. Of course, that didn’t last too long either.
I did finally read it, two or three months later. Most of it was like I expected. He was sorry for everything, he didn’t want me to feel sad, things were going to be ok, it wasn’t my fault. But by the last two pages, he was done with all that. He started to talk about things I didn’t understand at all.
He said his world was falling apart. Not like things weren’t going his way or anything like that. A lot of things didn’t go our way, and he just floated through the storms like something not human. He said it was like being able to look at all the words in a sentence, and understanding every one of them, but not being able to put them together. They made perfect sense alone, but the pieces didn’t add up. There was nothing bigger that he could see.
It went on like that until near the end. How he didn’t feel like a real person, but like a person riding the horse that was called his body, and trying to get it to do things against its will. How he was afraid of the Dragon in the monkey suit. It didn’t make sense at all back then.
He told me about dad. I was only six when they put him away, so I never knew him, or never really knew him. He told me dad tried to kill the Dragon back when we were kids, but he wasn’t strong enough. I was crying when I finished the letter, but more confused than anything. David wrote that the Dragon wouldn’t be able to hurt me, because he knew how to kill it forever.
There hasn’t been a day since that I haven’t thought about it at least once. And that’s why I’m here. I’m afraid, because I don’t think the Dragon can be killed. He doesn’t talk to me, like dad. But I think I’ve seen him, sometimes in the dark. I don’t turn the TV off at night anymore, because I hear him too. Not talking, but moving. Getting closer.
Does this make sense? Any of it?
