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By Root 370 0

I didn’t know any of these people as well as I should and that I might never know them well enough. There were simply too many spaces between me and my brothers, and Gaylen, like Gary, was somebody who was gone from our home a lot— either in jail or halfway across the country or carousing in the night, looking for the same forbidden rapture that we all ended up looking for. There is only so much I know about what went on during Gaylen and Gary’s absences from our home—and, of course, it is in the space of those absences that the two of them tried to make or remake their lives. In other words, it was in their private lives away from the scrutiny of my family that they pursued their biggest desires, committed their worst sins, and felt their worst fears, and whatever those experiences were, their memory and meaning died along with my brothers. Maybe that’s for the better. Maybe I should know only so much about those secrets.

Still, I’ll never stop wondering. I look at what happened to Gaylen’s life and I know that I am looking at another mystery—one that I feel especially disturbed by. If it is true that the way a person dies can sometimes tell us truths about the way the person lived, then I know this much: Gaylen lived with horrible wounds that could not be healed, but they weren’t what killed him. What killed him were the things he could not stop doing to himself.

I have never missed anybody in the world as much as I miss Gaylen. Not my parents. Not Gary. Not even the woman I thought could take the place of them all. If I could choose one lost person to spend one more hour with in my life, Gaylen would be that person. I would ask him to solve the mystery, and tell what it was that made him obliterate himself.

GAYLEN WAS PROBABLY THE brother I had the most combustible relationship with. I know that we played together as children. I can see that from some of my father’s photos, and I can even recall it, in a fuzzy way. But even in the best of families, the fraternity between us could not have been that easy, given the gap in our ages. By the time I was six, Gaylen was twelve. He was already discovering the wonderful passions and anxieties that come with adolescence, and a kid who reads J. D. Salinger and Jack Kerouac, and who is on the brink of sex and rock & roll, does not want to be caught lingering in the world of Disney. When I would beg Gaylen to take me downtown to see a film like Darby O’Gill and the Little People, he would instead take me to see something like Suddenly Last Summer, a Tennessee Williams story about a cruel family, cursed by God and its own demons. When the movie would get too talky for me and I started to complain. Gaylen would say: “Be quiet and sit still or you’ll miss the leprechaun scene that’s coming up.”

By the time my memory really takes hold, I remember Gaylen as somebody who not only pulled tricks on me, but also was one of the more hostile forces in my childhood. Some of the strain between us had to do with the relationship we each had with my father. For years, Gaylen had been my father’s favorite son. He was a good-looking, exceptionally bright and charming boy—the one, before me, that my father kept closest to him. But as Gaylen grew older, he began to grow strong in his own ideas, and he also began to develop a quick and nasty temper. My father saw these developments as signs of willfulness and insubordination, and he started beating Gaylen in the same way he beat Frank Jr. and Gary. Also, around age thirteen, Gaylen began putting on a little weight—a brief period of fattening out, before he turned rail-thin for the rest of his life—and my father would make fun of this gain, blaming it on an uncurbed appetite. If Gaylen had a second helping of food at the dinner table, my father ridiculed his request. “Where are you going to fit that?” my father asked. “In your leg? I think your gut’s too fat to take much more.”

The rupture that developed between Gaylen and my father was exactly that: a rupture. My father’s relationship with Gary had always been bad, but Gaylen had once known my