I couldn’t shut my eyes. I could, but it hurt my brain. My ear, leg, and arm were sore, but I couldn’t flip to my other side to relieve them. I was completely still, pretending to sleep, staring at the sliver of light leaking from the space between the door and the floor. It was funny, honestly, that I thought the simple act of shutting off the lights and pulling a small blanket over my body would suddenly induce sleep, allowing anxiety to leave my body. I would fade away, silently, into sweet loss of thought. Instead, I was screaming, forever falling, paralyzed in the darkness of my childhood bedroom.
I still saw the swinging of the hammer. I heard the rush of air as its rusty claw ripped through my imagination, my sense of safety, my life at home.
“This is my hammer.” We were on a walk when my brother had found the hammer on the side of the road earlier that day. It was laying in a patch of uncut grass, left to rust like a carelessly abandoned murder weapon. My brother had been having a bad day. He took to the hammer, adopting it as if it was a new friend. I saw the look in his eye as he proudly declared his ownership of the relic, gripped the wooden handle, and swung it so hard around and around that he lost control of his body in a flurry of reckless rage. He had a lot of things to be mad at, I understood that. For some reason, I was afraid I was one of those things.
When we got home, he laid the hammer on his bedside table. It found sorrowful belonging in his room–one where the air was thick, and the walls were covered in sweat stains and marks of snot and phlegm that he coughed into his hand and rubbed against the wall. A relic of a giant erasable weekly planner faced his bed, a week from three years ago left unerased from when he gave up using it. Clothes, papers and trash littered the floor. There were old childhood toys and books that now held a sinister quality, as if decorations in the room of a haunted house meant to tell the story of tragic childhood loss. They didn’t belong in the room of a grown man, and yet they were everywhere. He laid the hammer down between an empty beer can and a neatly folded rosary. He flopped down on his bed to take a nap, not bothering to wait till I left.
As I had completed my evening routine that night, I periodically checked the sliver of light that came from the door of my brother’s bedroom, right across from mine. I brushed my teeth. It stayed on. I changed my clothes. It stayed on. I went to get a midnight snack I wasn’t hungry for. It stayed on. I knew that I had run out of things to do, but I desperately tried to make excuses to stay awake. I inexplicably cleaned my childhood bedroom at 1:30 am, the light stayed on. The later I waited up, the more purposeful its staying power felt. It was as if he was doing the same thing, waiting for my silver to go out. Waiting for his time to strike.
The last time I had come home, he had an internship at a local computer repair shop. This time, he was working at the liquor store, part time. There was only so much my parents could do. I’ve led you to water, now you have to drink. My mom’s familiar childhood refrain hung in my head. Her platitudes had become so familiar to me, despite the fact that they were never directed towards me. I would hear her scream and yell and cry through my door. No matter how hard I plugged my ears, how loud I turned up the music, I still heard the same refrains rattle through my head. I knew her lines like a stand up knows their favorite jokes–the timing, tone, and punchline repeating on loop as I worked on my homework, pressed my face into my pillow, hit my head against the wall.
I still lay paralyzed, tensing my muscles to stillness without even realizing. I had resigned myself to another sleepless night, until I couldn’t take it anymore. Something had to be done. I slowly removed my blanket, lifting my body weight with my arms and swinging my bare feet onto the carpet. They were jarred by the pressure of the fibers, my legs painted by pale moonlight. I tiptoed over to my wardrobe like a cartoon character, pausing at even the slightest bump from across the hall, my face hot from the thumping of my heart, now in my throat. I lined up against the wardrobe, pushing my legs slowly but purposefully until the wardrobe slid with a low groan across my door. Its thick wood paneling began to eclipse the sliver of light, until there was finally total blackness. The thought of a fire came and went, my will to protect against the hammer unmoved by the prospect of burning alive.
He had to see it. We never talked about it, but I knew that he did. To me, the contrast was impossible. I made it. He didn’t. I lived in an apartment, alone. I had friends. I went out, I had a job, I did all the things he couldn’t. I’d want to kill me too. I’d sink the hammer deep into my own head, slamming and slamming until I couldn’t see my own face anymore, drowning my perfect life in blood.
I woke up in the morning, refreshed. There were no signs that my wardrobe had been pushed, no blood or gore soaking my bed sheets. Another day at home with my brother and my mind that couldn’t see his mercy.