The End of the World as We Know It by Robert Goolrick Read Free Book Online

Just for a minute.
    She was one of those small-town Southern girls who are raised to believe that they are just the prettiest, smartest, best little things on the face of the earth, and sometimes they are. She was from a town called Social Circle, Georgia. She might as well have owned Social Circle, Georgia, in its entirety.
    So, what with the black dresses and the aroma of bar soap andthe pregnancy and the general air of entitlement, it was pretty ghastly. My brother lying on a hospital bed with his head in restraints covered in lamb’s wool like a taxicab driver’s car seat seemed almost too abstract to take in. It was too horrible. He was my older brother and he was my beloved. Not to mention it runs in families, and siblings are far more likely to have the same thing happen to them. I did not want the same thing to happen to me, particularly not in Atlanta, at DeKalb General Hospital.
    My sister-in-law, even though she has turned out to be a much finer person as the years have passed, loyal and good-humored and capable of acts of great kindness, hated me so much that she’d actually told me how much she hated me. She was a holy terror in those days. She had come to New York, before she and my brother were married, and she had stayed with me in my disgusting apartment on Thirty-fifth Street. One night, I had taken her out to a restaurant in Chinatown and, looking at me over green tea, she had actually said it: “I hate you. I’ve always hated you, and I’ll hate you until the day you die. I hate your guts, and there’s not a thing you can do about it.” And I actually paid for dinner. A doormat, my mother had once said to me.
    We then went back to my grotty apartment, where she proceeded, in the night, to come down with the flu, so she lay in my bed for four days while I slept on the sectional aqua sofa left over from the previous tenants, who were waiters at the Westchester Country Club and who had left everything behind and did not own one thing that was not in bad taste, and I took care of her. Fed her chicken soup and listened to her vomit. Jeez. That kind of loathing.
    It was all because of another trip to New York, when she had gone to bed early and my brother and I had sat up real late drinking Jack Daniels and discussing our internal affairs, and I had finally told him it was time he did something with his life. He had been a classic slacker. Actually he had had a kind of Episcopalian nervous breakdown and been thrown out of Williams, where once, when I was visiting, I discovered that he hadn’t opened a letter in six months. So he’d been booted and drafted into the army, where he served for three years in this dreary little town in Germany. It had one distinguishing feature: It had an organ once played by Mozart. I went there to visit him because my parents hadn’t heard from him for months and I was living in Torremolinos, Spain, and they figured it was an easy hop to go over and check up on him, which I did, walking for hours the dismal streets of this dismal town, waiting for my brother to get off duty so I could meet him in a tacky discotheque and watch him get drunk and stoned. I learned the only German word I know,
kellerfensterhalter
, which means a little thing that holds a cellar window open, and I kept thinking: These people were all Nazis.
    So years later, in my apartment in New York, we were discussing, over the many glasses of Jack Daniels, his general lack of direction, and I had happened to mention that it was time he did something with his life. I told him I’d already been working for three years and he was two years older than I was and I was tired of being the younger brother and the older brother at the same time and I told him I thought he’d make a terrific journalist.
    â€œI’d never do that,” he said. “It would sully my soul.” He actuallysaid that. Sully my soul. He’s the only person I’ve ever heard use the