Jagged Metal Pieces

by Noah Milligan

            My brother, before he’d asphyxiated after mixing too much methadone with whiskey, used to tell me time was not linear but fractal, wherein all possibilities converged and bifurcated into a labyrinthine maze, so when I found him raiding my fridge, very much alive five years after his death, I wasn't all that surprised.

            “How do you survive on this shit?” he asked, tossing apples and lettuce and grapes behind him. “Where's the red meat? The beer? Hell, a turkey leg?”

            “Luke?”

            “I haven't eaten in years for fuck’s sake. I’m starving.”

            He was nude and covered in dirt. Parts of him, his face and thighs and feet, were in various stages of decomposition, and he reeked of death. The stench was so strong I could barely keep from retching up my dinner.

            I had so many questions, how he’d been rejuvenated, why he'd returned now, had I gone insane, but all I could muster was, “What? How? When?”

            “Don't tell me you went vegetarian,” he said. “I swear to God I’ll disown you.”

            Finally, he found some packaged roast beef and fed himself slices a handful at a time, never stopping to catch his breath. “Oh my God,” he said. “It's so freaking good.”

            Once he’d eaten, I gave him some shorts and an old t-shirt that draped over his bony shoulders, and we sat in the living room staring at each other. It certainly looked like Luke. Same stringy hair, though caked and knotted. Same sunken cheeks even more wan. The same butt chin I’d used to glue together when we’d been kids, but it couldn't be, could it?

            “I’ve lost my mind,” I said.

            “Probably.”

            “Dead for five years and still an asshole.”

            “Does death inherently change a person?”

            “I guess not.”

            He shrugged. “Kind of disappointing, huh?”

            When he’d died, I’d spiraled. Got into cocaine and drinking Redbull vodkas and picking up older women at Wranglers, this honky tonk bar in south Oklahoma City. I lost thirty pounds and suffered constant nosebleeds. Got arrested outside a strip club and addicted to stealing candy bars from 7-11. For weeks I went without running water because I forgot how to pay the bill.

            “Listen,” he said. “I have an idea.”

            He found the house because he said it called to him. Illuminated in a glow only he could see.

            “Nothing will go wrong,” he said. “I promise.”

            He had a gun. A budget nine-millimeter Taurus G3c. It felt too small in my hands.

            “Just in case,” he said.

            They didn't have motion lights in front of the garage. The porch was dark and the windows open, letting in the ragweed and pollen.

            “Seriously,” I said. “What are we doing?”

            He was right. The door was unlocked. No alarm system. No dog. A house out in the middle of nowhere. We walked right in.

            “The bedrooms are upstairs,” he said and pressed a finger to his lips. “Shhh.”

            “Who are they?” I mouthed as we walked into the living room.

            “They are the difference between every other version of themselves.”

            Tiny particles floated in the moonlight, and shadows flickered in the corners. The smell of honeysuckle wafted in from the backyard.

            “Are you a ghost?”

            “No.”

            “What are you then?”

            “I don't know,” he said. “Not a ghost.”

            My mother had been the one who found him. The morning after her birthday. Later, she told me she'd been awake when he came home the previous night. He lied to her. Kissed her on the forehead and told her everything would be all right.

            “Trust me,” he said. Through the utility room was the garage. “They came to me in a dream.”

            Inside was a workbench and a towering tool chest. From the walls hung saws and hammers and a hatchet. Shelves with buckets of nails and turpentine. Pipes and copper wire. On the bench were chemicals: fertilizer, sodium nitrate, and good old American gasoline.

            “They're making bombs,” I said.

            He snapped his fingers and pointed at me. “Bingo.”

            They never woke during the heist. We took everything. The bombs. The chemicals. The wire. Even the jagged pieces of metal stuffed inside the pipes. Luke sat in the back rummaging through it all like he was looking for a lost watch.

            “What the hell are you doing?”

            “Don't worry,” he said. “I already know how this plays out.”

            Dad had cried after Luke’s body had been found. It was the only time I remembered him ever doing so. He shook and contorted his face like he might burst through the prison of his body, begging for his Lukey to come back. Please, come back.

            “Turn here.”

            Luke grabbed the steering wheel from the backseat and jerked it right toward downtown. Came in hot at the sixth street exit but kept it under control and stopped at the light past the bridge.

            “Where are we going?” I asked.

            We rolled by where the old federal building had once stood, the granite arches shimmering under the streetlights.

            “I’ll know it when I see it.”

            “We’re not bombing anybody,” I said, careful to stay under the speed limit.

            “Why not?”

            “Because it's wrong. We need to go home. Get some sleep. Clear our heads.”

            “Sometimes you understand. Sometimes you don't.”

            “What does that even mean?”

            The streets were deserted. The bars had closed about an hour before. A car or two crossed the intersection in front of them, Ubers picking up drunks from house parties and IHOP, their headlights bouncing over potholed roads, but that was it. Otherwise, the night stretched out in a sweltering silence.

            “This way,” he said, pointing to our left.

            He directed us to a squat three-story brick office building illuminated by cast iron lamps hanging from its balcony. A fog floated down the alleyway. Someone in the distance cackled uncontrollably.

            “He's the ghost,” Luke said, pointing at the sky. “Not me.”

            He carried five or six pipe bombs. He didn't hide them. Held them in his arms like loaves of bread. I followed behind by listening to the sound of his footsteps. It was too dark to see beyond a few feet or so. Couldn't see the moon or the stars, only the soft haze of light pollution obscuring the infinitely black sky.

            “Over here,” he said.

            Covered in dirt, he almost disappeared in the darkness, but he stopped me before I passed him. He knelt near a dumpster and a metal grate cut out of the bottom of the brick building.

            “Who are these people?” I asked.

            “What people?”

            “The people who work in this office.”

            “Does it matter?”

            “Of course it does.”

            After he’d died, our parents buried their lives, too frightened to leave the house where they'd found him. They didn't bury him, though. They kept him in an urn and carried him from room to room until they could no longer lift their feet.

            “You have a choice to make,” he said.

            Luke stuffed the bombs between the metal bars and covered the grate with trash bags overflowing from the dumpster.

            “What do you mean?”

            “You're the only person who knows about this.”

            “Will they go off?” I asked. “The bombs?”

            “I don't know.”

            “How do you not know?”

            He shrugged. “Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't.”

            We fled the scene heading north through downtown, past First National and the Devon Tower, past Commonplace Books and Bimbo, the bakery, and for a moment, time stood still, the globe no longer spun, and all the world smelled like freshly baked rolls.

            “Now we sleep,” Luke said.

            Mom and Dad waited for us when we returned home, sitting where they always sat, on the mantle above the fireplace. When they, too, had died, I placed them inside the urn with Luke, my turn to carry their ashes wherever I go.