The End of the World as We Know It by Robert Goolrick

hospital to my family. At the hospital, the surgeon came out and told me and my brother’s wife that the operation should take about three hours. It took eight and a half. It was a disaster. I guess he wasn’t God after all.
    The brain doesn’t feel any pain. Getting through the skull hurts, although my brother was out, but once in the brain, the brain tissue itself doesn’t feel pain.
    As soon as they bored the hole and got into his brain, the aneurysm burst open, and he began hemorrhaging massive amounts of blood. The aneurysm was right at the base of hisskull, where the artery divided, carrying blood to the left and right side of his brain.
    It was interminable. The Methodists were mute or locked in silent prayer. My sister-in-law was distraught, so we sat in the chapel, reading more poems about dead people. We knew nothing about what was going on, only that it was going on for a very long time.
    I ran back and forth to my family, six or seven times, carrying the no news there was, and they just waited. My sister made lunch for everybody: cold roast beef sandwiches that went uneaten.
    When it was finally over, the surgeon came out and told us matter-of-factly that my brother had lost such massive amounts of blood that he was going to die. He was going to die in the night, before the sun came up. His brain was ruined, and he was going to die in the night. My sister-in-law behaved better than I thought she might, although she was, of course, inconsolable and talked about suicide again. I drove back to my parents to report the news. They had broken out the bourbon by that time and they were deeply, deeply moved. Stricken, as though by a snakebite. I then drove back to the hospital, where the surgeon came out again and told us that my brother had made a miraculous recovery in the last half hour, and that he would live, but he would be brain damaged and he was paralyzed on his left side and he was in a deep coma. There was no way of knowing how deeply his brain was damaged, or what form the damage would take.
    The brain is a funny thing. If you’re right-handed, they know where everything is—short-term memory, long-term memory,anger, patience—everything. There’s even a microscopic pinpoint area that is your personality, and they know where that is.
    If you’re left-handed, they don’t know anything, the surgeon explained. It’s all helter skelter, so if you lose a lot of blood, and your brain is certainly damaged, there’s no way to tell what functions of the brain will be affected. My brother is left-handed.
    My sister-in-law behaved pretty well about all this, and she retired into the arms of her family, and I drove back to the town-house to tell my family the change in prognosis, and they sort of collapsed in grief and joy; having prepared themselves for his death, they weren’t quite sure how to deal with his prospects for a limited life.
    Then I went back to the hospital, where the gull-wing surgeon spoke to us one more time and told us my brother was resting in the recovery room and then he would be moved to the ICU, while we waited for the swelling in his brain to go down.
    I fed everybody dinner, and then my sister and brother-in-law went back to Judy Judy’s to collapse. By ten o’clock, my sister-in-law asleep on her cot at the hospital, the stiff-backed Methodists gone home to their cold suppers, I managed to get my parents to bed, and then I sat down on the sitting room floor to have a drink and watch the news. I was exhausted, tired from the driving and the caretaking and the awfulness of the day in general. I was immediately drunk on one drink. I was so tired of taking care of everybody. I was so tired of being positive and polite to gull-wing and polite to my sister-in-law. While the news was going on I started crying. I cried so hard the tears shot out and ran down the inside of my glasses.
    Then the phone rang. It was the husband of the couple who