Nurses come and go like ghosts, checking vitals, updating charts. The sheets and walls are white. My brother lies in bed in a white gown. His skin is onion white, a shade darker than the paste-white bracelet on his wrist. The bracelet reads: Alex Parks, 12/10/65.
My sister sits with him, reading Jeremiah 29:11: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”
“Cam,” I say, “We need to go.”
“A few more minutes,” she says.
If Alex wakes, Camille will praise the almighty, call the ordeal part of God’s master plan, and Alex will tell her it was he who opened his eyes and besides, if God is responsible for waking him then God’s responsible for hurting him and that’s a pretty shitty thing, isn’t it? And what about all the other poor souls in St. Vincent Medical Center on a Tuesday night in Toledo?
The glasses, the mischievous grin, are gone. He’s never looked so harmless.
Camille, the middle child (I’m the oldest, Alex the youngest), is aging well considering all she takes on. Gray is frosting her thick blonde hair, which she wears in a ponytail, but her face—merry green eyes, dimpled chin—is the same face I’ve looked upon at holiday meals since the ‘70s.
“Cam, time to go. Come on, man.”
She shifts her weight on the bed, as if digging in.
***
Alex was different from the start: pigeon-toed, half blind, hairline receding to the crown. My father called him his “little Buddy Holly.”
He rode a unicycle all over the San Gabriel Valley. He spent most of 1975 trying to solve the JFK killing. In high school, he ran for class president, campaigning in a Gumby outfit for reasons he never explained.
He protested a civil war in Oceania, and marched for equal rights for women and gay people. His sign, the same roughed-up piece at every protest in Los Angeles, the one that offended those he was claiming to support, the one that made him an outsider even on the inside of a movement, and the one that sated his WTF compulsion to disrupt, read: “Equal rights for women and homos.”
After attending Long Beach State University for seven years, he ran for city council in Lakewood and lost. Then he ran for state assembly.
“Why don’t you get your degree?”
“In what?”
In time, he moved to Archbold, Ohio, of all places, and worked as a store clerk until the accident landed him in the hospital. He made his own beer and fought his fights. He focused on gay rights—we all knew by then that Alex was gay—and stronger legal protections for animals.
We rooted for him, but he was always broke, sometimes jailed, and generally frustrating, which brings me to his strangest habit.
It started at the dinner table when we were kids. Alex took a bite of steak, lurched forward, hands clutching his throat, and spun off his chair, gasping for air and banging his fist on the floor. My mother pounded his back.
He performed his act in the high school cafeteria, in crosswalks, during baseball games. The scenes got lengthier, more dramatic, more uncomfortable to watch.
At my mother’s sixty-fifth birthday party, he tore at his shirt, fell backwards into the oleander, limbs flailing, tongue wagging, pupils wheeling back in his skull. But even his nieces and nephews grew tired of it. Camille’s oldest daughter was eleven when she told him, “Uncle Alex, stop doing that, it’s not funny anymore.”
***
My family, Methodists, rarely talked about death, and when we did, it had to do with getting saved from the eternal kind. Alex fought the family and the church. He always said the best defense is a good offense.
***
It’s been three months since the crash on the Ohio turnpike, where a van stopped in front of him and, according to witnesses, Alex crouched on his handlebars and tried to Evel Knievel it over the van.
His brain stem was crushed and he will never be the Alex we knew. He lies there fallow, the bracelet too big for his wrist.
Camille, wearing a red scarf folded on her chest like a flag, cups his face.
“Time to go,” a nurse says.
Camille kisses her cross and presses it to Alex’s forehead.
“Come on,” I say. “That’s not Alex and you know it.”
“For I KNOW the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans to PROSPER you and not to HARM you, plans to give you hope and a FUTURE,” she repeats.
I make for the door and she claps twice, flips the cross, which I hold with both hands, and puts her mouth to Alex’s ear.
“Bravo,” she tells him. “Your best performance yet.”
Brady Rhoades’s work has appeared in Best New Poets 2008, The Antioch Review, Faultline, Georgetown Review, Notre Dame Review, The William & Mary Review and other publications. Rhoades is a journalist and animal rights activist who works and lives in Fullerton, California.