His Brother's Keeper by Jonathan Weiner

Author:Jonathan Weiner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

If emotional intelligence is the ability to feel many sides of a question at the same time, as Daniel Goleman says, then by the time the shadows lengthened in the street outside the café, I must have had a very low IQ. I forgot my reporter’s objectivity. Jamie and Robert had charmed me so completely that I forgot myself, and the sick, and the life-and-death questions that lay ahead for all of us. All I knew was that they were offering me a wonderful story on a charmed summer day, and I was ready to join their adventure.

It was easy to feel that way—and it was just as hard to force oneself to stay realistic. For Jamie and Stephen that had to be hardest of all. Jamie told me that Stephen and Wendy had decided to put the Cave behind them and get a place together. They had found a beautiful apartment on Beacon Street, in Boston’s Back Bay. Jamie could not understand it. The place they had picked was a fourth-floor walk-up.

By the end of dinner at the café, Jamie seemed to think he had sold me on his story almost too well. “Still,” he reminded me at last, “we’re painting a pretty picture here. There’s really hard stuff going on. My brother is probably going to die.”

I wanted to deny it.

“That’s reality,” Jamie said. “He’s someone I love dearly, someone I am very close to. That makes these things hard. Rob can tell you. It’s going to be murder to go through as it happens. So I don’t want to paint too pretty a picture. It’s very scary and hard. I don’t mean in a business sense. When I saw Stephen collapse! You just want to go put your fist through walls.”

When I got to know Jamie better, I realized that he very rarely mentioned the possibility of Stephen’s death. In fact, I do not think I ever heard him mention it again. Once, much later, I asked him if he had really believed what he said to me that day at the café. “What your rational mind knows and what your heart knows are different things,” Jamie told me. “I think I knew rationally exactly what the chances were, and every time I sat down and thought about it I went to that correct understanding. And I don’t think I ever deluded myself. The other side of that is, I haven’t had a problem I haven’t been able to fix yet. I’ve managed to fix everything I’ve tried to fix in life, whether it be a house or a machine or a design. So I knew the chances were close to zero but I also haven’t missed yet.

“I think that’s a constant internal struggle. It takes hope to dream about opportunity. And yet you need to keep yourself in the real world all the time. I knew the odds were incredibly slim. Yet I was still hopeful. It’s that combination of realism and hope that makes you go like crazy for those small odds.

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