Working Title

“I just can’t get enough of this shit.”
I looked up at Raymond as he muttered this to himself. He was prone to fits of sarcasm, and this was one of those incidents. It got on my nerves, really, but I was willing to put up with a certain amount of Raymond’s bullshit. “What shit?”
He set down the paper he had been reading. “Nothing, just…” he made a strange gesture, more with his wrist than his limp hand, which he circulated lazily as he tried to gather his thoughts. “Some notice of a new government program. It’s garbage.” The paper had been set face down, and Raymond, lifting his beer and pulling from it long, set it down on top of the leaflet with a sneer. I noticed a distant look in his eyes as he watched the condensation gather on his glass and run down, soaking into the paper, warping it. Cheap ink began to bleed through.
“What’s the program?”
Ray glanced around the bar, noting the other patrons in the dimly lit establishment. He picked his beer back up and just before sipping it he muttered, “Tell you later.”
My brother could also be prone to fits of paranoia. In recent years, I had noticed him acting increasingly frustrated, agitated and angry at nothing at all. His posture had begun to slump, as though he had been struggling against something and was losing, the slow realization of defeat gradually creeping its way into his eyes. I wished that I could know what tortured him; all I wanted to do was help him come to terms with… whatever.
Which was why I accompanied him to the bar and drank with him. At first I thought it might be a way to get him to talk to me about what was bothering him, but we started coming to the bar more and more and he was talking less and less. He would bring newspapers and other leaflets along with him, sipping beer or whiskey and reading in silence. And I would sit with him quietly, drinking what he drank and probing, waiting to hear from him.
We used to be so close, as boys. He was my older brother, though only by two years. Often it felt more like I was the older one, the way I would look after Ray. He tended to get preoccupied. Sometimes I think he might see the whole damn world as a distraction from whatever it is that goes on in his head. I worry about my brother.
He had brought no newspaper this time, so when he broke his stare away from the leaflet he had nowhere to look but at me. He took a deep breath and held it, eyes closed, he held the breath so tightly I though his chest might burst open. Then he opened his eyes, let the breath out slow, and squarely met my gaze. “I’m frightened, Eli.”
And I became frightened, too, though of what I wasn’t sure yet. I could just see the abject fear on his face, the wet trembling in his eyes as his teeth sought out that small spot on his lip that had been scarred from years of anxious chewing. I prodded him, asked him to tell me more, begged him to tell me why it was he was so scared, but he would speak no more of it. We drank in silence until I blacked out, and the next morning he would speak no more of it.

It was another seven months, when I had almost given up, before I heard another word about it from him.