Affliction

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THIS IS THE STORY of my older brother’s strange criminal behavior and his disappearance. No one urged me to reveal these things; no one asked me not to. We who loved him simply no longer speak of Wade, not among ourselves and not with anyone else, either. It is almost as if he never existed, or as if he were a member of some other family or from some other place and we barely knew him and never had occasion to speak of him. So that by telling his story like this, as his brother, I am separating myself from the family and from all those who ever loved him.

In numerous ways I am separated from them anyhow, for while each of us is ashamed of Wade and burdened with anger — my sister, her husband and kids, Wade’s ex-wife and his daughter, his fiancée and a few friends — the others are ashamed and burdened in ways that I am not. They are dismayed by their shame, astonished by it, as they should be (he is one of them, after all, and they are good people, in spite of everything); and they are confused by their anger. Which is perhaps why they have not asked me to keep silent. I myself am neither dismayed nor confused: like Wade, I have been ashamed and angry practically since birth and am accustomed to holding both those skewed relations to the world: it makes me, among those who loved him, uniquely qualified to tell his story.

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