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Brent was beginning to realize that the old adage, “If you aren’t wearing class two nuclear shielding, stay out of the active supercollider” was more than just a cliche. The doctor’s voice droned on above him, the words streaming softly over him with the same ineffectuality as the science fiction techno-babble Brent couldn’t discern them from. Something about experimental particles, exposure to some extreme sort of energy field the name of which he doubted he could even spell, and no way of knowing how long he had to live since no one had ever blah blahblah... Brent had been tuning out most of it since arriving, and once he’d figured out they were releasing him today, their jargon seemed doubly dismissible.
“Six weeks in one room is too long,” Brent thought to himself as the doctor continued on about risk factors and bodily fluids, “especially a hospital. Especially when there’s nothing wrong with you.”
Brent was right that the doctors, the specialists, the scientists and every other stranger that had poked, prodded, taken samples from, and otherwise examined him in the month and a half since the incident occurred had been unable to find anything going wrong with him, even down to a micro-cellular level. The small tears in his skin where his piercings had been ripped out by the electromagnets had long since healed, and the damage to the supercollider by their supersonic impacts in its housing had likewise been repaired. The police hadn’t been involved since Brent had signed a mutual release of liability; the research facility wouldn’t charge Brent with trespass or any other such crimes, and he wouldn’t ever bring suit with them for future medical problems. As long as they were paying for the last six weeks of tests, not to mention not ending up in jail, Brent figured he’d come out ahead without having to lift more than the pen to sign away his right to litigation. Soon he would be back on the road.
“Do you understand what I’m saying, Mr. Horschadt?” The doctor, whose name Brent had managed not to learn on any of the last hundred times they’d interacted, seemed as disinterested as always.
“Sure, sure. Don’t donate blood, don’t share needles, don’t get another MRI, and notify you if I notice anything out of the ordinary... We’ve been over this. And over this. And over this.” Brent was exasperated. “When can I put some pants on?”
“Your new clothes are in the cupboard. It looks like all your paperwork is in order.” The doctor made a show of flipping through the stack of pages on the clipboard he held, but Brent knew the important papers, the legal forms and non-disclosure agreements he’d signed, had never crossed under this man’s nose. “You’re free to leave at any time.”
Brent literally leapt out of the hospital bed, the open flaps of his hospital gown blowing open behind him as he hurried to the cupboard. Having been so naked before so many strangers for so long had made getting himself covered more important than the cultural standard instilled in him to dress in privacy, and Brent pulled on the clean, new underpants and pants before the doctor could turn away. “Is there anything else, or can I just go?” Brent tore off the paper-like hospital gown and discarded it to the floor with all the disdain he could muster, then continued dressing.
Brent didn’t wait for him to finish. He pulled his shoes on as he hopped to the window, jacket under his arm and wallet in his teeth, and made a half-dismissive wave and a wink to the doctor as he climbed out. If he never returned to a hospital bed, it would be too soon for Brent. He crossed the back lot of the hospital and had donned his jacket and pocketed his wallet before he climbed over the wall at its perimeter and disappeared. The doctor hadn’t moved so much as to close his mouth as he watched his patient beat this hasty and unorthodox retreat.
Brent had used his time in isolation to plan his next move, but without any new information coming in, and while under such constant observation, he couldn’t be sure things would work out the way he hoped they would. He hoped Charlie would let him crash after everything that had happened; he didn’t want to have to try this out in the open. The trek across town took the better part of the day, and as Charlie’s place finally came into view Brent knew his new shoes had given him some new blisters along the way. The sun was kissing the horizon as Brent stepped up to the door and didn’t knock.
He turned away. “This was a bad idea,” he muttered under his breath. He turned back to the door, then around again, taking half a step away. Brent was cursing himself for coming to Charlie, and he stared into the fat brilliance of orange light that was descending behind silhouettes of suburbia with his fists thrust hard into jacket pockets, his head shaking slowly left to right and back again. The purple light of twilight cast everything into cool hues, and a hand landed firmly on Brent’s shoulder from behind, taking him unawares.
“I wasn’t sure I’d be seeing you again after what you said at mom’s funeral.” Brent turned around to face his brother, and they hugged. “We all thought you really meant it this time. No one could find you, none of your friends knew where you were.”
“I’m sorry,” was all Brent could muster as he collapsed into Charlie’s warm embrace, “I’m sorry...”
“It’s okay, you’re here now. Are you alright?” Charlie pushed Brent back to hold him at arm’s length and take a good look at him, “you look thin, have you been eating enough? Come inside!” Charlie didn’t release contact with his younger brother, pulling him through the door and into the warm interior of the house by the hand. “You’re just in time for dinner,” and Brent wasn’t worried any more. He was home.
Charlie lived alone, since the divorce. It had been years, but missing pieces of furniture still hadn’t been replaced, bare nails stood out from the wall where pictures had been taken down in haste, and other tiny visual reminders of the life he had once had were hiding around every corner. Like a submarine pinging out the contours of an underwater landscape, each thing left behind or thing taken and not replaced echoed out against the hollow, heart-shaped cavity in Charlie’s chest. Brent knew not to mention a thing.
When dinner turned out to be of the frozen variety, Brent was just happy to see something fried in front of him, half a step better than anything at the hospital if only for the MSG and salt so generously flavoring the microwaved processed foods. Both brothers tore into their meals without a word until the plastic trays were discarded and they went to the living room to collapse into overstuffed furniture.
“I took a wrong turn or two and got in the way of someone’s research project. Everyone kept expecting me to get sick and die, but it never happened.”
“Nevermind that, Charlie. There’s one other little thing, but I didn’t want to let the doctors know. Can I trust you not to freak out?”
“I’m your brother, Brent. You know me better than anyone but Angela...” Charlie’s voice and face dropped a bit as he mentioned her, remembered her face. “What do you think?”
And then a strange thing happened. Brent closed his eyes to concentrate - he had only done it a couple of times by accident before, and wasn’t sure he could do it on cue - and when he opened them he was sitting beside himself on the couch.
He tried turning to look at himself, or at his brother, and became immediately disoriented, closing his eyes as the world turned the wrong way all around him. “Relax, you can do this,” he thought to himself, and he turned his head away from his double and opened his eyes just in time to see his own eyes open and hear himself suck in the odd sound of “.hctaW”
The fact that he seemed to be seeing a mirror image out the back of his head began to approach normalcy, and the strange glow and contradictory dimness of everything began to fascinate him in between bouts of dizziness every time he turned his head.
“?ti si tahW” The sound preceded the movement of Charlie’s lips by the slightest fraction of a second, but it was enough that the backwards-speech took on the feeling of a badly-dubbed kung fu flick.
“.ot og ot esle ohw wonk t’nod I tub ,tuo kaerf ot gniog er’uoy kniht I” His double seemed to be in full-on gibberish mode, speaking fast enough that Brent couldn’t even remember what he’d been saying anymore. It didn’t really matter, though, because he wanted to do more than just sit there and watch himself utter nonsense. Brent stood up, keeping his eyes open despite the intense disorientation; he needed to get used to seeing out the back of his head.
Brent turned his body around and walked backwards across the room. This was less awkward than standing up, since he was seeing in the direction he was headed by facing away from it, but the muscles of his legs and the sensations generated by his inner ear were not designed to do it. Halfway across the room, Brent reached into his pocket and threw his wallet back to his double, still sitting on the couch.
Charlie’s voice still expressed his sadness as it continued, “...alegnA tub enoyna naht retteb em wonk uoY .tnerB ,rehtorb rouy m’I” The wallet landed in Brent’s lap, unnoticed. Brent continued walking backwards out of the room and down the hall as his double spoke.
“?tuo kaerf ot ton uoy tsurt I naC .wonk srotcod eht tel ot tnaw t’ndid I tub ,gniht elttil rehto eno s’erehT .eilrahC ,taht dnimreveN”
Charlie tried to concentrate on the shift with his eyes open this time, but in the instant it happened everything went momentarily black. “So...” came from the next room and he was standing by a very odd-looking version of himself. He didn’t have time to marvel at his appearance again, but it was like looking at a shadowed version of himself, like the light wasn’t quite hitting him right.
“Nevermind that, Charlie.” Brent walked ahead of himself back to the living room, and noticed the seated version of himself make eye contact, but continue speaking. “There’s one other little thing, but I didn’t want to let the doctors know.” The wallet was sitting in Brent’s lap, and he knew what was coming, so didn’t touch it. “Can I trust you not to freak out?” Brent continued into the room, ahead of himself, made sure he had Charlie’s attention, then turned back to the seated Brent so he wouldn’t miss his cue.
Suddenly, the wallet flew out of Brent’s lap towards the dim version of Brent walking awkwardly forward into the room. The normal-looking Brent caught it in mid-air, and strangely-shadowed Brent seemed to un-throw it, and place it in his pocket. Charlie sat silently staring, and the seated Brent did not speak the words he had said the first time. As the dim Brent took wary steps toward the couch, his slightly-glowing eyes moving unnaturally, the other standing Brent reached into his pocket and pulled out the wallet that had just been placed there. The dark-shrouded Brent turned and sat with an uncanny slowness, looked around as though confused, closed his eyes, and then the two copies of Brent sitting on the couch disappeared entirely. The remaining Brent sat down where the first one had been, reached out, and handed the two wallets to Charlie.
“You, uhhh... You were sitting right there.” Charlie looked back, over to the hallway the two additional copies of his brother had emerged from, back to Brent, then back and forth again. “You were sitting there, and then two more of you came out of the hallway, except something was wrong with one of you.”
“I don’t know, Brent! Like something out of a horror movie! The light didn’t hit you right somehow, like you were in the dark, and you moved ... Ugh,” a look of disgust came over Charlie’s face, as though thinking about what he had seen literally left a bad taste in his mouth, “You moved wrong, okay? The darker one moved unnaturally, like... I don’t know what it was like. Maybe like the ghosts in a Japanese horror movie. It was sick.”
“And then your wallet,” Charlie suddenly realised he had the wallets in his hands, and looked down at them with that look of disgust on his face. He looked like he wanted to drop them, but wasn’t sure what would happen if he did. “Your wallet leapt out of the lap of the one of you that was sitting there, and then both of the standing copies of you caught it, somehow. The ghost one catching it was weird, though, like it didn’t see that you’d already caught it, and... I know it sounds weird, but it was like watching a video in reverse somehow. The physics were all wrong. But he caught it somehow, and put it in his pocket, and then you took it out of his pocket without him noticing it.
“And then the weird one sat down like his joints were all on backwards, looked around like he was going crazy, and the two copies of you that were sitting on the couch disappeared.” Charlie looked back up at Brent, a pleading look on his face. “I thought that if I answered you... I thought that if I said it out loud, it would make sense somehow, or you’d tell me it hadn’t happened.” Charlie looked deep into his little brother’s eyes, “but it did happen, didn’t it?”
Charlie opened one of the wallets and looked through it. Everything in it looked weird. Dark. Like the unsettling copy of Brent that had disappeared. Like somehow it wasn’t catching the light correctly. He took out a twenty dollar bill and turned it over and over in his hands. The colors were right, just a shade darker than normal. He held the bill up to the light, and Charlie saw something even stranger. When he held it up to the light, instead of light passing through it like a normal bill so he could see the watermark and the security strip, it suddenly looked normal. Like somehow the light from the other side of the bill was hitting it from the side he was looking at.
Charlie picked up the other wallet, and it was the same. Not only same in the way it looked, which was like nothing Charlie had ever seen before that day, but also identical to the other wallet. The driver’s license, the money inside, the photos, everything was identical between the two wallets. Charlie looked to his brother for an explanation, “They’re the same?”
“They’re actually the same wallet, yes.” Brent took the two wallets from his brother, closing them as he spoke. “But you couldn’t let someone else see them like this. You couldn’t spend the money. They don’t look right. But give me a minute...”
To Charlie’s perception, suddenly two versions of Brent - one normal and one dim - appeared, standing beside the coffee table, and two normal-looking copies of the wallet appeared resting on the table. The normal-looking standing Brent was holding two more copies of the wallet, which appeared normal, and the dim-looking standing Brent was holding yet another two copies of the wallet that appeared to be dim. The normal-looking standing Brent quickly handed his wallets to Charlie and took the two normal wallets from the table. Then the dim Brent leaned over and handed the two copies of the wallet he held to the seated Brent who had already been holding them. Then the dim Brent reached down to where the wallets had just been on the table and picked up the normal-looking wallets that weren’t there. He did that strange, horror-movie-esque walk to the couch with the two normal-looking wallets in his hands, sat down disturbingly, and the two seated copies of Brent again disappeared. The standing Brent sat down and opened the two wallets he now had, and Charlie opened his.
They were all identical, but now everything in them looked normal, including the money. “When I started out, I had twenty-eight dollars. A twenty, a five, and three ones. If we put together all the money from the four wallets, it would be one hundred and twelve dollars.”
“A hundred and twelve. From twenty-eight. That can’t be possible. Where did the other eighty-four dollars come from?” Charlie asked this as he proceeded to pull the fifty-six dollars out of the two wallets in his possession and lay it out on the table.
“I don’t have a good explanation for that, except that it seems like the universe thinks it’s easier to duplicate things than to deal with what would happen if effects happened without causes. But it doesn’t really matter what forces created the money as much as it matters how we handle it. There’s a problem with the extra money.”
“No, nothing like that.” Brent paused, “at least, I haven’t noticed anything disappearing yet...” Brent had only had a couple of opportunities to test his newfound abilities out at the hospital, and they had been in the bathroom in the middle of the night. He wasn’t really sure what the long-term effects of duplication might be, but he hadn’t had any problems so far. “But let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, ignoring possible weird side effects like disappearance, there’s a big problem with this money.”
“Look closer.” He handed Charlie the four twenties. “All four bills have the same serial number, and the same corner torn off.” Brent reached into his pocket as his brother verified what he was saying, then held up a small piece of torn paper. “I tore it off on the walk here, and left it in my pocket so it wouldn’t be copied.” He handed the corner of the twenty to Charlie, who matched it to all four bills. “It fits all four, because they’re copies of the original, and that’s the original corner.”
“I don’t know. As far as I can tell, they’re all the same bill, all identical. Which means that you can’t spend them all in the same place, or take them all together to the same bank. Someone might notice they were identical.”
“Well, we can spend it, we just have to be careful. We also have to be careful what we do with the rest. We can’t leave four copies of my driver’s license just sitting around, and we can’t just throw them away. Too many people go through the trash these days to be so careless.”
“Watch.” Brent made sure all the money from the wallets was out on the table, and held three of the wallets out in front of himself, his hands cupped a little too widely. He waited a moment, then concentrated on that twisting feeling of shifting. Blackness, then he was sitting next to himself again, holding three dark copies of the wallet. He didn’t hesitate, quickly turning his head away and awkwardly placing the three wallets he held into the outstretched, cupped hands of the other copy of himself, on top of the three already there. Only being able to see what was behind him made things a little more difficult, but Brent was beginning to get the hang of it. He set back in his seat, and before the other version of him could say “.hctaW” he shifted again.
And it was suddenly very crowded on the couch for a moment, as he was suddenly squeezed between two other copies of himself. He leaned back to stay out of his own way as the dim version of himself reached across to take three of six wallets from the normal-looking version of himself’s cupped, outstretched hands. Then, with each of the two duplicates holding three copies of the wallet, both disappeared at once. One copy of the wallet remained, on the table, and one copy of Brent, on the couch, and all $112 was laid out before them.
“HeckifIknow.” Brent just smiled, not worried about how this was all working, just glad that it did. Most of what he was showing his brother had been things he’d thought of but been unable to attempt in the hospital. Long hours, day after day without a television or a book to distract him had given Brent ample time to consider the basic problems of his new ability. His brother seemed to be taking it in stride, somehow, and Brent asked him about it, “How are you okay with this?”
“What else am I supposed to be doing? Calling the police to report a counterfeiting operation? I’m sure you wouldn’t demonstrate ... whatever it is you’re doing, so the only evidence is the $112 in front of me. Maybe try to weasel out of you what hospital you came from so I can call them up to turn you over to the nice young men in the clean white coats?” Charlie looked his brother hard in the eye, “I trust you, Brent, and I don’t want to lose you again. This - whatever this is - is more reason to go on living than anything else in my life has been since ...” Charlie’s gaze didn’t falter, but his eyes changed, went wide and sad, “... well, you know.”
“I know, Charlie. And I’m glad you’re taking it so well. There’s just one more thing I want to try. Are you sure you trust me?”
“Stand up.” Charlie didn’t hesitate, and Brent stood up and they both walked to the open part of the room. When Brent reached out to embrace his brother in a deep bear hug, Charlie reciprocated with all the heartfelt compassion he felt for his little brother, returned as from the dead. Charlie thought Brent had just wanted a hug, and so didn’t expect what happened next. Suddenly everything went black.
And then Charlie was seeing the world in a whole new way. At first he felt like the ghost his brother had appeared to be, because while Charlie still felt like himself, he could see himself hugging Brent a few feet away. This was no out of body experience, though. Charlie could still feel his brother in his arms, his clothes on his back, the air on his skin. But everything looked strange. Like the entire world had taken on the dim quality his duplicated brother and the multiplied wallets had displayed, but also a sort of blooming inner light. A glow. Like everything he was seeing was on overexposed film, pushed a step too far into darkness to compensate. Which wasn’t quite right, either.
Especially after Brent let him go, and he moved, and was overwhelmed with disorientation. Instead of seeing what was in front of him, Charlie was seeing what was behind him, and that as though in a fun-house mirror; his eyes were having trouble focusing on anything, on communicating depth, and every time his head moved he lost his bearings again.
“.pu dnatS” Charlie tried to turn in the direction of his brother’s strange utterance, but ended up looking away from where the duplicate he knew must be the original version of Brent was sitting, and almost fell down before the other Brent reached an increasingly accustomed arm backwards to steady him. “Whoa, whoa, are you okay Charlie?”
“?ti si tahW .tnerB ,esruoc fO” Charlie’s former self continued as though not seeing what was going on. The standing, nearly nauseous Charlie leaned against his brother and his wall and tried to get his bearings. “I’ll be okay.”
“?em tsurt uoy erus uoy erA” Brent spoke over himself, “It takes a little getting used to...” “...tsuj s’erehT .llew os ti gnikat er’uoy dalg...” “...going backwards in time, I mean.”
“What did you think? Here, before we go back too far and it gets too crowded,” and Brent tried shifting both of them with the mere contact of his steadying hand on his brother’s arm. “,dedworc oot steg ti dna raf oot kcab og ew erofeb ,ereH ?kniht uoy did tahW”
“...what’s going on now?” The seated Charlie never finished his sentence, reacting to the appearance of four more people in his living room, two of them himself. “It’s okay,” the standing, normal-looking Charlie answered himself as the other version of himself asked “?emit ni sdrawkcab gniog er’eW” “...or is it?” Charlie turned to the standing, normal-looking copy of Brent and ignored the dim-looking Brent’s backwards, stilted explanation, “what if those two of us don’t get up and reverse time, now that we’ve interrupted them?”
“Then there’ll be two of each of us, just like the wallets and the money when their course was interrupted.”
“.yako eb ll’I” “Is it even possible for them to reverse time at the right instant now that they’ve seen us? What if they try, but hit the wrong instant?”
“We’re just going to have to try,” said the seated Brent just before the dim, backwards Brent asked his dim, backwards brother, “?eilrahC yako uoy era ,aohw ,aohW” “But there seems to be a sort of ...pull on things. I can feel myself working against it every time I take something out of its normal course,” said the standing, normal-looking Brent. “I’m willing to bet that the other me will instinctively be able to shift the two of us at the right time. Watch.”
And the seated Charlie just went along as his seated brother drew him up to stand next to the dim-and-disoriented pair of them, and into a hug. And at what appeared to be the same instant, the four hugging brothers disappeared.
“And do you remember how you felt while you sat there, watching yourself question what would happen?”
“I felt...” Charlie’s eyes glazed over a little as he thought back, “I felt like the other me was making a big deal out of nothing. I knew somehow that I was going to stand up and hug you and that everything would be okay. But I definitely didn’t remember what had happened on the first pass at the time. Not consciously.”
“No. When I think about one of the two versions of events - and there isn’t much there, it was only an moment or two - the other one seems like a dream, like something I imagined. And then when I think about the other one and it seems real, and the first memory seems like it was the dream.”
Brent just nodded in response as he crossed the room to his original position on the couch. Charlie followed his lead, returning to his own seat.
“You mean, what do I do, now that I can travel backwards and forwards in time and perfectly duplicate physical items simply by plucking them from the past? That what now?”
“Well, for starters, what about this money? Assuming one is not foolish enough as to get caught spending multiple bills with the same serial number in the same place, is it ethical to spend the same money twice? Or four times?”
“Is it unethical to contribute to inflation, to deflate the value of your own currency? If it is, what about purchasing things that are not at the lowest price available? What if you know you can get a lower price for the same product at Wal*Mart, but you buy it at a higher priced store? Doesn’t that reduce the buying power of your dollar?”
“Literally. But is it the same thing, ethically, to shop with money that hasn’t been earned as it is to shop without concern for value?”
“What about people who shop with money they get from social security, from welfare or other government programs that give money to people that they haven’t directly or personally earned? Is that ethical?
“Some would say it was unethical for the government to give the money to them in the first place.”
“But that isn’t the question. The question is about whether it is ethical for the recipients of social welfare programs to spend money they haven’t earned. Because the real question is whether it’s ethical for the two of us to spend this money that we haven’t earned in any normal way.”
“I’m not sure I’m breaking the laws of physics. On the contrary, I’m pretty sure the scientists don’t have a good grasp on the real laws of physics. They certainly couldn’t tell I’d been altered in any way.”
“Okay? Now,” and Brent was suddenly light and jovial again, like nothing had happened, “the ethics question.”
“Is it ethical to disappear something, like you did with what looked to me like six copies of your wallet at once? To remove something from existence like that? And what if it was money, and what if it was real, earned money? And what if it was a person?”
“A person presents a significantly different ethical proposition than an inanimate object or a piece of paper that merely represents potential exchange value for goods and services. But it’s another good question.” Brent paused a long moment in thought, and Charlie didn’t seem to have an answer either. “I don’t know, really.”
“Of course, none of these questions is as cut and dry as we’re making them sound. What about the people who shop at places other than Wal*Mart in the hope that the extra money they’re spending on the equivalent product is going to pay for better working conditions? Isn’t there a bigger picture than their individual purchase, where they’re assigning part of the value of each dollar to something beyond the capitol and labor that went into producing whatever it is they’re consuming?”
“If it does, the same thing goes for people who spend more money trying to protect the environment. Better working conditions for employees is one thing, but an investment in renewing and recycling the resources used to create consumer products is a much larger one, financially, at every step of the market.” Brent liked being able to talk to his brother like this, but didn’t want to start getting off track. He tried to steer the conversation a little, “but is the transaction of the dollar spent at the lowest-cost for greatest tangible value ethically superior or inferior to a transaction of lower cost to value ratio, on the basis of its contribution to inflation as a whole? Because what we really want to know is whether we can go spend the $112 on the table, right?”
“Does it really matter to you whether it’s ethical? Knowing that unlimited resources are available to you, could you resist taking advantage of them just because you believed it was unethical?”
“Okay, so let’s say that shopping at Wal*Mart isn’t morally superior; most people do. And let’s say that people on welfare aren’t immoral by spending what has been given to them. And let’s say that day traders on the commodities market aren’t unethical when they buy their groceries and their sports cars.”
“I’m not about to agree that day traders on the commodities market earn their living ethically.”
“That isn’t the question. Not how they got their money, but whether spending it is ethical, remember? We don’t think taking from the past without diminishing the present is unethical, do we?”
“We were just wondering whether adding cash to the market without adding value is ethical, right?”
Brent slept better that night than he’d slept in months. He slept, and he rested. Rest like he hadn’t been able to find in the sterile environment of the hospital, rest like he hadn’t been able to find on public benches or under bridges or even underground where he had usually gone undisturbed for days at a time. He dreamt, and his dreams weren’t interesting or troubling enough to stick with him, dispersing from his mind like a whiff of perfume into the crisp dawn air before he even began to rouse from sleep.
When he stumbled out of the guest bedroom in the morning, Brent saw that his wallet and the $112 were undisturbed on the coffee table. He also saw a note left next to them from Charlie: “Went to work. Eat whatever. I’ll see you tonight. -Charlie”
The day buzzed by as Brent allowed processed foods and daytime television to permeate his being after so long in isolation. The programming was inane and almost incomprehensibly bad, but it was like a light rain on desert sands and Brent was too thirsty for input to look away. Eventually he found one of the twenty-four-hour news networks and got sucked into the propaganda machine’s grinding wheels until the sound of Charlie’s key turning in the lock on the front door jarred his mind back to life. He switched the TV off before his brother surprised him with unexpected pro-activity.
“I had an idea, and I brought you something.” Charlie handed over a small, deceptively heavy package, and Brent looked inside. “It’s gold bullion. Unmarked. Unregistered. I could only afford one ounce of it, because of the daily cash limit on my debit card. But it’s a start.”
“Do you have a plan for selling it without raising suspicion? You can’t exactly take it back to where you bought it, identical copies in hand.”
“There are plenty of places to take it. There are two major exchangers in town, not to mention banks, jewelers, pawn shops... We don’t have to hold out for fair market prices to come out ahead every time.”
“It’s better than cash. Not even the alchemists figured out how to counterfeit gold. No matter how much we come up with, it will always be real gold, right? And no tricky serial numbers to work around.”
“Right, and platinum wasn’t in my budget today. But maybe next week we can move up to something pricier.”
“Sure, and next month we can start selling weapons-grade uranium or plutonium. I’m sure it’s worth a thousand times more than platinum on the black market.”
“A little harder to handle, a little more dangerous clientele, a little stickier ethical question, but certainly something to discuss.”
“If I went nuts, it was well before you came home, Brent. You just woke me up. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel like a puppet or a zombie. I had something to think about, something to look forward to. A dream.”
“Not as far as selling nukes to terrorists, Brent. Not as far as imagining myself driving a Hummer or covering myself in useless jewelry.” Charlie’s voice was raised, not quite angry, but definitely eruptive. “But how about getting out of this goddamned house? How about getting out of a job where I have to see people glaring at me every day because they took Angela’s side in the divorce? How about getting out of a city where every street, every restaurant, every fun thing to do just reminds me I wasn’t good enough for her?” Brent could see tears streaming from his brother’s eyes, and Charlie’s voice trembled as he spoke now, “I’ve been trapped here, Brent, and I know it’s my own fault. I know I could have walked away at any time, but it was like I was frozen in a time long gone, stuck to keep re-living this loss again and again. I don’t know if I could ever have escaped if you hadn’t come along and literally un-stuck me in time, Brent.” Charlie paused, his voice barely above a whisper, sniffling despite himself. “I don’t know if I can go back to that life again. I don’t think I could survive it, Brent.”
Brent didn’t know what to say, but without thinking about it he took Charlie finally into the genuine embrace of brotherly love he had only pantomimed the previous night. Charlie shuddered and sniffled and hugged right back. He hadn’t had anyone to turn to, anyone to talk to in so long. It had seemed as though the entire world had turned on him at Angela’s decision to leave. She had cheated. He had forgiven her. She refused counseling, refused to accept his forgiveness, refused to admit she had ever loved him. Somehow he ended up the bad guy in people’s minds, perhaps for wanting to try to reconcile, for wanting to try to work things out. He had been alone in his empty shell of a home, empty shell of a life, ever since. He had been waiting for his dried-out husk to crumble to dust and blow away on a passing wind until Brent had shown up with a way to break free. Charlie fed all this, everything that had been building up, everything that had been wearing him down, into this moment, these tears, this embrace, trying to let go of this burden so he could move forward. Brent just knew he needed to hold on, give in, until his brother let go, gave up.
They stood there for as long as it took for Charlie’s breathing to begin to even out, his nose to stop sniffling, his entire body to stop quaking, and the tension and pain to melt away from all the