Family Life by Akhil Sharma

under my blanket, my face exposed to the dark.
    “Christ was my son. I loved Job. How long did Ram have to live in the forest?”
    “What does that have to do with me?” Normally this was the time to start discussing my glorious future. But the idea of a future in which Birju was sick made fame seem pointless.
    “I can’t tell you what the connection is, but you’ll be proud of yourself.”
    I didn’t say anything. God and I were silent for a while.
    “What are three minutes for you?” I asked. “Just get rid of the three minutes when Birju was at the bottom of the pool.”
    “Presidents die in less time than that. Planes crash in less time than that.”
    I opened my eyes. My mother was on her side, and she had a blanket pulled up to her neck. She looked like an ordinary woman, her face sagging, her mouth open. It surprised me that you couldn’t tell, just by looking at her, that she spent all day every day in a hospital, that she spent all day sitting by her son who was in a hospital bed, who was once going to go to the Bronx High School of Science but who was now so brain damaged that he could not walk or talk, could not turn over in his sleep, and had to be fed through a rubber tube that went into his side.
    A ND I KNEW things were getting worse. My parents fought with such anger that it was as if they hated each other.
    One fall day, when all the trees had lost their leaves and the world looked like a fire had gone through it, my parents fought so bitterly in Birju’s room that my mother told my father to go home and take me with him. My father drove us away. The route back to my aunt’s took us along unpopulated two-lane roads. There were scrubby trees along the road, and between them I could see a lowering misty sun chasing us.
    On one of the roads was a small bar with a gravel lot. The bar looked as if it had been a house once. Now it had a neon sign, an orange hand lifting a sudsy mug of beer. Instead of driving past, my father turned into the lot. I wondered why. I had never known anyone who drank. I had always assumed that people who drank were either Muslims or poets, or else rich and depraved.
    The tires made a crunching sound as we rolled up toward the wooden steps of the little house. “One minute,” my father said, and reached past me and pushed open the door on my side.
    Inside, the bar was dark and the air smelled of cigarette smoke and something stale and sweet. The floor was linoleum, like the kitchen at my aunt’s. A basketball game was playing on the TV.
    My father spoke to the bartender, a big man in a sleeveless sweatshirt. “Is anything half off?”
    “Well drinks.”
    “I’ll have a double of your cheapest whiskey.”
    My father lifted me onto a stool. I looked around. There was an old, fat man in shorts sitting at a table. He was wearing an undershirt, and his stomach sat in his lap like a small child. He was wearing sneakers and no socks and the skin around his ankles was black like a bruised banana.
    The bartender returned with the drink. My father drank it in a gulp. It was the first glamorous thing I had ever seen him do. It was the act of a gangster or cowboy. Then he ordered another. The announcer raised his voice, and we looked at the TV. My father asked if I had ever seen a basketball game all the way through.
    “I’ve seen the Harlem Globetrotters.”
    “I’ve heard they don’t play other teams because they can defeat everyone else so easily.”
    “They only play against each other or if the president asks, like when they had to play against aliens to save the earth.”
    “Aliens?”
    I realized that my father had been teasing me and I had confused TV with reality. My ears became hot.
    The second drink came. My father drank this quickly, too, and asked for a beer. As we waited, he put his elbows on the bar. “I never thought this would be my life,” he said.
    The sun was setting when we left the bar. The air was moist and cold. In the car, my father rolled down