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

laughed and cried in the night and I finally went to sleep on the sofa.
    The next day, my sister and brother-in-law, in shock, went to the ICU to see my comatose brother for two minutes, which was all they were allowed, and then they came over before they started to drive back home. My sister said the most extraordinary thing. She suddenly looked up and said, “Gosh, all week I’ve missed my soaps.”
    â€œThis
is
a soap opera,” I said.
    Then they got in the car and drove home, to start picking through their ruined things. They never caught the boys who did it.
    The swelling in my brother’s head didn’t go down. They were afraid that the swelling would cut off the blood supply to his brain, leaving him a vegetable. So the surgeon came back and operated again. He patiently explained to my sister-in-law and me that he was going to go in and remove small parts of thefrontal lobes of my brother’s brain so it would have room to swell and not cut off the oxygen.
    â€œHe’s having a frontal lobotomy,” said my mother. “He’ll be a zombie.” I guess she was right, as I understand the term, although it didn’t turn him into a zombie.
    The operation took place, the surgeon said it was successful, and my brother went back to intensive care. He was still in a coma. He was still paralyzed, and there was an empty space in the front of his skull where part of his brain used to be.
    The intensive care unit was an awful place, filled with little cubicles in which these horribly sick and wounded people lay, mostly waiting to die. We were allowed in twice a day for fifteen minutes.
    There was this one guy who had had the most unusual accident imaginable. His name was Eric. He looked like Elvis Presley, just a Georgia redneck, but as handsome as a Greek god, black hair and blue cheeks and a finely chiseled nineteen-year-old face, and we had to pass him every time we went in to see my brother. He had been riding his motorcycle and he had lost control and run into a light pole and the gas tank of his bike had gone up his rectum and then it had exploded in flames. He sort of won the sweepstakes for the weirdest accident. There was a tent over his middle section, and all his organs, his vital organs, were hanging in little bags off the side of his bed. His face was totally calm and composed, not slack, just sleeping and handsome. You figured there was no way this guy was going to live, what with his liver and kidneys dangling in baggies off the metal rails of his bed, and he had nineteen operations, but somehow he lived through it.
    His family waited in the waiting room with all the grim Methodists, even a minister came to wait and pray, and they were all beautiful. His fiancée looked like a runway model. Like a biker’s wet dream.
    Then we just waited while my brother did nothing. I took my mother swimming at a rich friend’s mother’s house. We drove out to Buckhead, to West Paces Ferry Road, in the Alfa Romeo. It was really hot, and it was barely summer. It was the kind of pool that only really, really rich people have, with flowers and vines and a changing house and falling water and nothing turquoise or vulgar about it anyplace. I swam, while my mother sat on the edge of the pool with her legs in the water. She was the kind of woman, even in her late fifties, who looked very good in a one-piece bathing suit. She always said she only went in the water once a year, at Nags Head. She wore a bathing cap when she went in. But being there on West Paces Ferry Road seemed to make her feel better, and I loved swimming in a rich woman’s pool.
    My parents came to see my brother before they flew back home. My mother put a cross around my brother’s neck and kissed his hand. My brother suddenly said, without opening his eyes, his right hand fingering the cross, “I want to see Stevie Wonder. I have something to tell Stevie Wonder.” Then he lapsed back into