I Had a Brother Once by Adam Mansbach

I Had a Brother Once by Adam Mansbach

Author:Adam Mansbach [Mansbach, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2021-04-13T00:00:00+00:00


i did know one person: mark,

who owned the nameless

philly record spot, a fourth

floor room in an unheated

steel building, more storage

space than store. he was

open on sundays & by

appointment, & his brother

had killed himself. i was

back in town to give a

talk at my old school, a few

months after david died.

douglas had tipped me off

& so i sought mark out.

my parents had attended

a meeting of suicide

survivors, that is the

tortured, oxymoronic

nomenclature for the

people left behind,

but only once. i had not

even considered it, could

not see any point, knew

or imagined i knew exactly

what it would be like,

everybody sitting in a

circle telling each other

it wasn’t their fault &

admitting that they were

angry, or weren’t angry

anymore. but mark was

weird & wise, smelled like

loose tobacco & the must

of ages, bought & sold rare

books, & when i had once

asked him what he liked

to read he said memoirs by

pre-twentieth-century

schizophrenics, written

before the existence

of the word, the diagnosis,

any understanding of the

affliction. books by people

who had no idea what

the fuck was happening

to them, whose terrors had

no names or the wrong

names, were blamed on demons

& treated with bloodletting,

who wrote out of desperation,

hoping it might save their lives.

so i told mark & he told me.

it turned out to be not one but

both his brothers. maybe

a parent too, i am ashamed

to say i can’t remember.

mark said he understood it,

that his brothers’ decisions held

no mystery for him. suicide,

to his way of thinking, seemed

almost an inevitability,

something you got around to

sooner or later, when you had

no fight left in you & the time

was right. i bought some

reggae forty-fives & left

thinking my god, the only thing

worse than not understanding

would be to understand,

to know it like the night

knows darkness.



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.