Second Hand News (Part One)

Wade's Husk

first appeared in Potomac Review

Vol 7, No 1, Winter 1999-2000

My Brother Wade got the TV remote out of my hands with a great final tug and then he was down on the brown shag carpeting, wiggling out of his skin; he is in that 12 percent.  I should have seen it coming -- the way his hand had clamped waxy and cold around mine, the way he slurred through his loosening lips and stamped heavily around the ottoman like a mummy in snow boots -- and had I known, had I but thought! as my father says, I would have been in a better position to keep the remote.  Instead it was now going spend the rest of the evening in my brother's old hollow hand, the fingers stiffening over the buttons, stuck on some horrid sports channel.

In summers, he can get it off in one piece, Wade can, if he unbuttons his shirt, tears open his cheek from the temples to just past the shoulders and then backs out of the whole deal as if it were a tight pair of jeans.  In winter, though, it's harder for him: he grunts and whines, he flips himself around on the floor trying to get at those parts of him that haven't slackened yet.  Watching him, you think of fish struggling upstream, or the groggy bears that in storybooks shuffle stretching from their caves to scratch their hackles against pine bark.  You think of Discovery Network rattlesnakes.

It was over soon enough, and my brother stood naked and sunburn pink in the middle of the room, catching his breath.  I waved him out of the way of the television and, once he'd gone into the upstairs bathroom to cover his tender new layer in Noxema, I switched over to the cerebral palsy telethon just now hitting its stride on Channel 18.  I'd had to actually get up off the recliner and press the little black buttons on the set itself, stepping clear of Wade's skin, the remote trapped somewhere beneath the chest cavity, his stupid face beaming up in dumb eyeless surprise.

"Aren't you at least going to clean it up?" I shouted towards the stairs.  It was already drying out and stiffening up, turning in spots that sick shade of yellow.  I sat on the lip of the chair and poked at it with the tip of one Ked, having to my memory never been alone with one of his husks before.  His chest dented in over the tip of my shoe, then slowly reclaimed its shape once I'd sat back.  On television, the actor that plays Fonzie held a microphone to a little boy who's mouth could barely work around his words.

Wade returned in his soccer shorts, the smell of cold cream stinging my eyes. He draped bath towels over the couch, wound the remote from the clutches of his former self, and eased down onto the cushions.  "Fffff," he goes, blowing air through his teeth at like the slightest twitch.  He clicked the sports back on.

I told him again he'd better clean himself up.  After a while, I couldn't stand looking at them anymore -- not the old Wade laid out and not the knee-socked athletes bounding across the tube -- and went into my room.  We could be just months from a cure, they'd said on the telethon, about those other kids.

---to be continued---
first of three parts