The car had sped down Hell’s Canyon Road, alongside one of the steepest, deepest cliffs in the United States. There were no signs of braking. No alcohol or drugs in Benny’s system. My brother had suddenly, spontaneously gone over the edge, straight down. Judging by the distance, he must have been going ninety-five. The Prius had been mashed into a pulp, and my brother along with it.
He should have been dead. And yet…
And yet.
“Nearly miraculous” is what the doctor said. She was tall, clipped, no-nonsense, which made her wide-eyed surprise at his recovery all the more intense. “He should not be alive. Nothing that came out of there should be.”
Benny had lost an arm outright, one leg so mangled that they removed it on-site, and what remained was only half of my brother—less, even. In the months since the crash he had lost even more muscle mass, wasting away while the rest of his body healed. Now his tan had faded, hair was turning prematurely gray. To me, he was unrecognizable.
The fact that he survived was one in a million, a billion, the doctor repeated. So we couldn’t, shouldn’t expect more. There are some things the brain just cannot recover from, and at this point he was not going to.
Benny, the perfect firstborn, the man I was supposed to aspire to be. Now he wasn’t a golden child, though. He was a braindead one.
The doctor said nothing, the insurance investigators said nothing, but I knew this was his way of making revenge. That he had done this to himself. A suicide attempt or something. It’s always the ones who you think have it all, isn’t it? Just like Benny. And just like Benny, he hadn’t thought of what I would have to do once he was gone.
Don’t take this the wrong way. I loved my brother. I did. He had been my best friend growing up, and, after our parents were both gone, my only family. Despite our differences (there were many) and our disagreements (there were more) he was, at the end, my brother, and I was his. When I first saw what had become of him after the wreck, I bawled my eyes out.
The thing is that after five, six, nine months of overseeing all of your brother’s operations, of watching as nurses turned him over and sponged the shit that dribbled out of his ass, well, you start to only remember the things that you hated about him. The way that he never lorded his success over you, even though you deserved it. The way that he knew not to give you more than a little bit of money at a time. The way you’d see the sadness in his eyes, sometimes, when he looked at you.
Now when I looked at him, pulling one eyelid open, I’d see nothing. A glassy, dead stare. Like a hole in the side of an abandoned house, revealing cobwebs and dust and a curious absence of people.
…and yet.
And yet it was so, so hard to tell the doctor what she was waiting for, what she was fearing I would say. Like everyone else in the world, she had gravitated to Benny, decided that he was one of her flock to look over, that his successes were her successes. He had always got that treatment, always because people wanted to support him without him asking. Even completely braindead, without that charming smile, that spark hidden behind his pupils, people tripped over themselves to help him.
Nothing could help him, now, of course. Which is why I eventually told the doc what she was waiting for: that I was ready for her to let it, at last, end. To cut the power. Pull the plug. Stop the machines that were doing their damndest to keep my perfect brother alive.
Nodding, swallowing her sudden, unprofessional tears, she made a motion to the nurse. There was a small flurry of activity as the wires and tubes tethering my brother to this side were disconnected. Then one last switch was flipped.
Life exited the room as the droning machines lost their power, as their capacitors ran down. The only electronics left on were the sensors, to tell us the exact moment that Benny’s soul ran out, too, if it was even still in there. All of our eyes were on the little readout as it showed his heart faintly, faintly beating.
One.
Two.
…three, four, five…
He should have been dead. He should have died. It should be over. That well of relief that I had been waiting to wash over me, the dam of “finally, this part of my life can end,” should have broken.
And yet, miracles of miracles, Benny would not die.
***
I moved into one of Benny’s houses, a nice modernist place around Payette Lake. Everything in it had rounded corners and clean, white surfaces, exactly how Benny liked it. Managing his finances was a full-time job, which is why I used some of that deep reservoir of money to pay someone else to do it. Benny wouldn’t have let that happen, but Benny always wanted to do things himself. I think at one point he had three full-time jobs. The only job I had ever held for any long period was as a part-time drug dealer, which satisfied me the same way playing with Benny’s chemistry set had, back when I was a kid.
Now my only job was taking care of Benny.
He got his own special room, the one with a gigantic round window, outfitted with all of the necessary medical doodads that basically kept him from stinking up the place. Nothing that would actually help to keep him alive, apart from the ones that transferred nutrients into his blood, to take the place of eating. I didn’t want him starving to death, after all. That would be cruel.
Wasn’t this half of a life cruel enough? They said he didn’t think, didn’t even dream, as he lay there. He wasn’t sleeping, because this was the most awake he’d ever be again. Dead, but not dead. Alive, but far from alive.
Some nights I’d sit in there with him with a bottle of vodka and a jar of olives, mixing martinis in my stomach. We’d talk. He was a shitty conversation partner, but then it was nice to finally have the upper hand in something. I’d tell him how he had been so good at school that I felt no reason to even bother trying. How things had come so much easier to him than to me, and how he had been praised for his good luck. How I had never had so much as a pat on the back for getting a promotion. I guess moving up the food chain from drive-through worker to burger flipper isn’t that impressive to a dude who could make a few thousand bucks via one smart phone call.
He didn’t have any smart things to say now, the fucker. Nothing that made me nod and feel bad about myself until he left the room.
Out of boredom and some unplaceable urge I dug through his things, pretending I was a treasure hunter on a TV show. There were a few nice finds: stacks of the same sort of paintings that hung on the clean white walls of his house; odd, tacky jewelry that was probably worth thousands to a collector; some antique books written in a language I hadn’t known existed. Was he into mysticism, I wondered? Voodoo? Now I would never know. There was a box of letters, too. Some were hand-written ones from Mom and Dad, because apparently daily calls weren’t enough. I was mildly surprised that he had printed out texts and nudes from old lovers—it seemed so rude, maybe even illegal. I had no idea Benny could think the word “illegal”. There was even a note addressed to me, scribbled on his letterhead. “It’s my fault” is all it said.
It sure was.
I would beg, plead with him, tears rolling down my face, vodka scorching my throat, to die. To leave me free of him, finally. From the day I was born he had hung over my head, telling me without a word that I wasn’t good enough, and now, after what nobody but me would admit was a suicide attempt, he was still doing it, even though he did nothing but shallowly, slowly breathe. By all rights I should have been done with him. We both finally agreed that the world would be better without him.
And… yet…
I don’t know when I changed my mind. When it became clear to me that I had one path forward. I woke up one morning, the sun dappling off of the still surface of Payette into the kitchen, and knew that it was finally time to be rid of Benny. This part of my life, nearly three decades, was going to end, today.
I had watched it in enough movies to feel like I was just going through the motions of a play, seeing out a conclusion that was already going to happen. The pillow clenched between my hands, I looked down at Benny’s face. His eyes weren’t fully closed, a slight gap between the lids revealing the greys of shadows. I didn’t mind; I didn’t feel watched. I didn’t even feel acknowledged.
I pressed the pillow down across his face, smothering his nose and mouth.
I counted, slowly, and had a flashback to the day we had pulled the plug. A laugh bubbled up my throat as I realized this wasn’t even the first time I had tried to kill my brother. Now his chest was stopping its steady, slight rise and fall. The whisper of breath that came out of his nostrils ceased, blockaded by silk pillowcase and downy stuffing.
I counted, and counted. When I reached sixty I kept going. I got to one hundred and couldn’t stop. After all, he had survived an impossible crash. I needed to be sure.
At two hundred Mississippi I at last lifted the weight from my brother’s face, and leaned back. It was done.
He was dead.
I held one wrist and pressed my fingers against the veins there, half remembering my short stint in the Scouts before also remembering Benny’s Eagle ceremony. No, those memories would be leaving, now. They’d be gone soon enough, along with Benny.
…and yet, a slight thump against my fingers.
“No,” I croaked, my mouth drier than it had ever been. I fumbled for his neck, pushing two fingers into the major artery there, but already saw that his chest was rising again, that air was being forced, gently, ever-so-gently, out from his lungs.
His pulse was weak but persistent, until both of my hands clamped down around his throat and squeezed as hard as they could.
I saw the monitors at his bedside fall silent. I saw the steady line of his heart rate stop. I watched it for one long moment, then another, and another. It felt like hours, but the clock said that I kept his throat closed for five minutes. When I at last relaxed my grip my fingers refused to open, they were so cramped.
A moment of silence, of stillness. That dam began to let the waters out and my heart felt like a weight was lifted.
Then the monitor beeped.
His chest began to rise as his lungs filled.
And I screamed.
***
Life became a purgatory. Time passed for me about as quickly as it did for Benny—that is, it slowed to an impossible crawl. Days blurred into a single never-ending haze. I’d fall asleep whenever or wherever I felt like. I’d eat rarely, but eventually nothing was left. I started to drink most of my meals. Trash and empty bottles piled up, turning the whited sepulcher into an animal’s den, but I didn’t care. I didn’t even bother opening the shades or turning on lights.
I drank and I watched Benny.
I suppose, at that time, I could have left him, couldn’t I? I knew there was no point in monitoring his pulse, in keeping up with his vitals. I knew then what I know now, even though I hadn’t quite confirmed it as officially.
He could. Not. Die.
So why not abandon him? Why not dig a hole and bury him, or throw him in the lake? Why not just leave the house, board it up, refuse to sell it? Leave him there until his gross, wispy beard was down to his toes. I could go back to the city, reconnect with my old friends, get back into cooking like I had always wanted to. After these months of hospice care, and rent, and everything else, the money was already running out. But I was allowed to spend more, more of his money, because now it was my money.
There was also the fear of getting caught, of someone I gave a shit about finding me in my squalor, surrounded by trash and my older brother’s decrepit, living corpse. They would see me and know me, at last, for what I was: a parasite who couldn’t do anything right, not even let his brother die.
And, in the end, he was still my brother. He always would be.
I fired the nurse that came by every other day. I stopped the nutrient drip and the saline. It saved several thousand bucks, and besides, why bother? I was tired of changing the bags, anyway. With no liquid entering his body, he stopped pissing himself, too, which was great. I didn’t bother cleaning him but after a time the smell went away. It’s not like you could tell that smell from the rest of the house. And though he starved and thirsted more than I think I could possibly imagine, though he became a pile of twigs under a sheet, he lived on.
“Miraculous,” the doc had said. She hadn’t known how right she was. This was beyond a medical mystery, or pure luck. There was something else going on here, something beyond what I could understand, but I tried. God did I try.
And yet, eventually, I got bored. And tired. And lonely. And so one day I snatched up a butcher knife from the kitchen and plunged it into his chest.
The point slipped right between his ribs, punching through like the skin was paper, like his lungs and heart were nothing more than crumbly hamburger. Blood spurted and spread and I did it again, then again. I left five gaping holes in his sweat-stained, urine-dyed, filthy hospital gown, then dropped the knife and curled up on the floor, sobbing.
I fell asleep in that position. When I awoke I was stiff as a week-old carcass and forgot, for a moment, where I was. What had happened.
But Benny was fine, or at least what counted for him. The wounds were scabbed over, looking almost like someone had stitched them up. I knew from the blood on the knife, still wet to the handle, that I had stabbed through his entire chest cavity. And. Yet.
It was at this point that I truly began to experiment.
***
For the first time in years I had a purpose, something gifted to me from my brother, something that he couldn’t take away or put on an allowance. I felt that old curiosity well up inside me, a drive that I hadn’t felt since I was a kid.
I started with some simple cuts. Those took as long to heal as you’d imagine: a week for a small one, a bit longer if I went a little deeper, but if I made the cut too deep, the rate of healing would increase.
The more life-threatening a wound was, the faster it would scab.
Things escalated quickly from there.
Head wounds healed the fastest, but only the ones around his brain. When I removed an eye, nothing came of it, although the skin healed over so quickly that I swore I could see cells form.
Afterwards I crushed his skull with a hammer. The mess was… indescribable. At the time I didn’t think anything more of it than if I was fileting a fish, or making a meatloaf. He was hardly a person at that moment—just a weird, insane biology lesson, draped on top of a bloodstained and rotting bed.
Of course, the instant passed, and after my thoughts caught up and realized he was a person I vomited more and longer than I ever had before. Then his head began to inflate, skull fragments reassembling under the skin, the shape of him—the shape that said “Benny” to me—realigning. I’ve never been able to remove that image from my memory.
The game continued. Was there anything he couldn’t come back from?
Not from amputations, that’s for sure. I removed the rest of his limbs myself with a hacksaw, and though they healed over nicely, they didn’t grow back.
Naturally the next thing I removed was his heart.
After all, that was what clued me in that he was still living, wasn’t it? His heart pushing a thin stream of blood to his other organs. That must have been what kept him coming back. His head was already so much sparkless gray matter—they don’t call it “braindead” for nothing. But the heart, that was what was keeping him alive.
I looked up how open-heart surgery was performed and ordered a bunch of equipment from some online black sites. Spreaders for holding the rib cage open, bone saws for cleanly cutting away the defensive tissues and cartilage. The accountant had long since quit after I messed up paying her, but I had already taken out a couple of loans, so it was no big deal to get another. Benny’s credit was good.
When I removed the sternum plate I saw knicks in his bone from my butcher knife, the only evidence remaining that I had stabbed him straight through, multiple times. With a few slices the heart was out, sitting in my hand. I wondered if it was all over. As I watched, blood drained out of his ventricles and pooled in his chest.
Then the veins and arteries, still dangling and tangled where his heart used to be, moved.
My mouth hung open as slowly, ever so slowly, new, tiny blood vessels slithered out where I had cut away the old ones, then blossomed, snaking into the open air and filling, beat-by-beat, the shape of a human heart.
When I screamed I don’t know if it was from fear, or rage, or revulsion. I don’t know if it was from the pure madness that gripped me in that moment. I had seen the impossible so many times already, but this was new. This was a step too far.
In just a few minutes there were now two copies of Benny’s heart in the world: one that had fallen to the floor, the other beating, ever beating, in his open torso.
When I saw that the bones were pushing together, ribs re-forming to protect their holy ward, I stepped outside for some air. I didn’t come back for several days.
***
Months passed. When the bank came to collect, it shook me from my drunken, fetid stupor. The money, the cars, the other properties were all gone, but I still had the Payette house, and I still had Benny.
The solution was simple, honestly.
A new will entered my lungs as I cleaned up the floors stained with human tissue and blood and other organic debris. Benny was still on his bed, his heart once more beating, his lungs filling with air and emptying, pushing fresh oxygen to the remaining extents of his body. Like him, I was a new man. And after a solid week of emptying trash and scrubbing walls, the freshly bleached and white house was like new, too.
Cleanly-shaven, in fresh clothes for the first time in months, I washed Benny. With care, I tended to the marks the previous year had left on him. The scars both old and new. The wounds both cleanly healed and ragged. His tattered head I went over with a razor, not even thinking about the fact that, somehow, his skull was perfectly round once more.
I took out a quick loan, one last loan. I ordered ice, and fridges, and shelving. Lots of shelving.
Most of my adult life had been spent buying and reselling odds and ends. In the final equation, selling organs wasn’t that different from selling drugs. You use channels that the everyday person would never think of to find those in need, and you make a connection happen. My customers don’t ask where their miracle lungs or kidneys or livers come from, and I don’t bother trying to explain. They think that they’re exchanging someone’s life for theirs, or their loved one’s. I don’t tell them that it is literally impossible for my brother to die, and they are exchanging nothing but money.
How many people are walking about right now, due to my brother’s condition? How many lives have I saved with his perfect hearts, his tumorless bladders? I don’t know. I don’t keep records. I take the money and I wash it through some of Benny’s side ventures. It satisfied all of the banks, and it keeps the lights on and my liquor cabinet full.
I don’t know if the cops are trying to find where this black organ market originated from. After all, if nobody’s reporting an organ missing, why would you even care?
I can’t escape from my older brother, and he’ll never escape from me. When I look down at him, at his frail, wasted, tiny corpse of a living body, I can think of nothing but revulsion, and jealousy, and pure, white-hot hate.
And yet…
Editor’s note
This story is what happens when a great idea meets a centre theme that works. If you have siblings, this one will hit a note. It did for me, at least. Jealousy and family dynamics meets a horrific situation, and it’s all very well written.