Winners by Eric B. Martin

didn’t call again.
    The explanation that he has settled on, finally, is that there is no explanation. Or that maybe their father never understood how money worked, and maybe Shane doesn’t either.
    In the bed, Jimmy’s body. A spare arm dangles over the edge, a hairy leg splays out on top of the covers. He is always relieved to find his brother in some absolutely normal state. A part of him always half expects to open the door and find gore or shame. Disaster.
    “Get up.”
    “What time is it.” The body doesn’t move but one eye opens. “Am I dead? Is this heaven?”
    “The other place.”
    “Again.”
    “Your breath stinks.”
    His brother farts and rolls away from him in a bundle of flesh and sheet. “Ah man. I had the most fucked-up dream.”
    “Yeah, tell me in the van.”
    “Okay. But really,” Jimmy says, not moving an inch. “Michael Jordan was the devil but nobody believed me.”
    “Doubted even in your dreams.”
    “Especially.”
    “Get up.”
    “Okay, okay.” He sits, kneading his head gently with both hands as if checking a tropical fruit for ripeness.
    Paragon dominates a wide intersection at the downtown edge of Potrero Hill. Once this was the middle of nowhere, but things are hopping now. A new neighborhood has been decided. They slog through traffic behind new bulbous Bugs and hulking SUVs and sporty Outback wagons with bikes and surfboards lashed on top. They pass three extensive construction projects: one beginning, one middle, one end. An entire city block sits empty, gouged three stories into the ground, poised for something more massive than them all. The old warehouse buildings that started it have been cleaned and burnished to hold design firms, game coms, software companies. Mild bustle lines the street, young men and women looking purposeful with coffee. Bike racks. Juice bar. Deli, salads, wraps. Starbucks. The gym. It’s a big one, filling a healthy portion of the block. Shane hasn’t been over here in a long time, but he has a dim memory of a dim place in the emptiness: Mike’s Muscle, without even a sign outside. Now the whole front of the building has morphed into glass, flashing shiny steel girders within. Upstairs, a row of exercisers is bobbing on machines.
    Jimmy catches his eye as they cruise for parking.
    “What the hell is this?” Jimmy says.
    “Yeah, yeah. I know.”
    They loop around the block and stop behind another line of traffic. Up ahead of them, Shane can make out part of the problem: two delivery trucks backing into a loading dock. He recognizes the trucks, which are painted beige and green. They have a small, almost pseudo-European shape, these trucks that used to park their tilted way at his front door in his convalescent days, when Lou would order their groceries online.
    “Holy shit!” Jimmy says, spotting the van. “So this is where they live.” Online groceries, Shane knows, stand for much that Jimmy believes is wrong in the world. He watches his brother roll down the window. Jimmy leans out and bellows cheerfully, “Hey…Webvan!” One of the drivers turns his head, finds Jimmy smiling at him out the window. The guy nods back, smiles. “Yeah, fuck you, Webvan!” Jimmy yells. “Damn you to hell!” Jimmy is almost completely out of the window now, shaking his fist in a lavish show of rage.
    The guy stares, briefly stunned, then shrugs and ignores them as they pass. “He’s probably not allowed to give me the finger,” Jimmy says.
    “But I am.” A part of Shane could drive around and shoot the shit with Jimmy all day long.
    They park and enter the gym, where Lou has two guest passes waiting for them. She has offered a million times, but they both know they never really want to see the other at the gym. That way lies the end of love. It’s still brute and dirty maintenance, even if Paragon is six hundred times as nice as the place Shane goes. The floors are polished concrete, the stairs are shiny steel, the glass ubiquitous and