Brother Alive by Zain Khalid

Author:Zain Khalid
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic

* * *

“There is nothing like a good plotting,” Dr. Jebran said as he stepped over at the tapestry of papers carpeting his cousin’s spare room, “but it appears you’ve only taken half of my advice. I said to keep your mind and your body in motion. From what you said about your parasite, you’re going to need to do everything you can to keep your faculties about you and”—he pinched the area of the excess flesh above my waist—“you’ve grown quite round in your spare time. No offense.”

“It’s not like I have the space for calisthenics.”

“There’s a roof here, is there not?”

“And?”

“Wait here. I’ll be back in a few minutes.” He returned in an hour with dumbbells and kettlebells and resistance bands and a jump rope. “Let’s go.”

“Now?”

“If not now, when?”

Over the next few months Dr. Jebran trained me to train myself. Most of the regimen relied on pitting my fat against my limited musculature: push-ups, sit-ups, balancing on my elbows like wood, et cetera et cetera. “How do you think Bruce Lee was so fit?” he would say as he kept me from collapsing into a puddle. I made progress, lapsed into lethargy, and then progressed some more. I would go on to follow these drills, until recently. This is what you saw me do every morning on the mornings you were up early enough to watch. Between the training, the writing, and the planning, the thief barely had any opportunities to slink into my consciousness—not that it was doing its job with any aplomb. The pest telegraphed its attempts and chose its memories stupidly, going after neural pillars like my father, my faith, my first job, belongings that were too embedded to steal at once.

Dr. Jebran was fascinated by the thief. One night, after I told him of a daydream in which the thief tried to make off with the shape of Huk’s ear, he told me to ask Kashif to squirrel away samples of the liquid or a canister of the gas so that he could see about a cure.

“I have friends at a lab in Amman. I won’t send the sample to them, God knows who else they work for, but I can start to secure the equipment required for testing.”

What I liked most about him was that he never doubted me. There’s nothing worse than a doctor who sees you as ignorant of yourself.

“I’ll try, but there are a few things I’m going to need from you.”

“Yes, a Go board. I know.”

“More than that.”

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