‘—pistachio, pine nut.’
Although Shepherd strove mightily to keep his chin down, Dylan relentlessly forced his brother’s head up. ‘Listen to me, talk to me, look at me!’
Muscled into a confrontation, Shepherd closed his eyes. ‘Acorn, betel nut—’
Ten years of frustration, ten years of patience and sacrifice, ten years of vigilance to prevent Shep from unintentionally hurting himself, thousands of days of shaping food into neat rectangular and square morsels, uncounted hours of worrying about what would happen to Shepherd if fate conspired to have him outlive his brother: All of these things and so many more had pressed on Dylan, each a great psychological stone, had piled one atop another, atop another, dear God, until he felt crushed by the cumulative weight, until he could no longer say with any sincerity, He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother, because Shepherd was heavy, all right, a burden immeasurable, heavier than the boulder that Sisyphus had been condemned forever to roll up a long dark hill in Hades, heavier than the world on the back of Atlas.
‘—pecan, litchi nut—’
Pressed between Dylan’s big hands, Shepherd’s features were scrunched together, puckered and pouted like those of a baby about to burst into tears, and his speech was distorted.
‘—almond, cashew, walnut—’
‘You’re repeating yourself now,’ Dylan said angrily. ‘Always repeating yourself. Day after day, week after week, the maddening routine, year after year, always the same clothes, the narrow little list of crap you’ll eat, always washing your hands twice, always nine minutes under the shower, never eight, never ten, always precisely nine, and all your life with your head bowed, staring at your shoes, always the same stupid fears, the same maddening tics and twitches, deedle-doodle-deedle, always the endless repetition, the endless stupid repetition!’
‘—filbert, coconut, peanut—’
With the index finger of his right hand, Dylan attempted to lift the lid of his brother’s left eye, tried to pry it open. ‘Look at me, Shep, look at me, look, look.’
‘—chestnut, hickory nut—’
Although standing with his arms slack at his sides and offering no other resistance, Shep squeezed his eyes shut, foiling Dylan’s insistent finger.
‘—butternut, Brazil nut—’
‘Look at me, you little shit!’
‘—kola nut, pistachio—’
‘LOOK AT ME!’
Shep stopped resisting, and his left eye flew open, with the lid pressed almost to his eyebrow under the tip of Dylan’s finger. Shep’s one-eyed stare, as direct a moment of contact as ever he’d made with his brother, was an image suitable for any horror-movie poster: the essence of terror, the look of the victim just before the alien from another world rips his throat open, just before the zombie tears his heart out, just before the lunatic psychiatrist trepans his skull and devours his brain with a good Cabernet.
LOOK AT ME… LOOK AT ME… Look at me…
Dylan heard those three words echoing back from the surrounding hills, decreasing in volume with each repetition, and though he knew that he was listening to his own furious shout, the voice sounded like that of a stranger, hard and sharp with a steely anger of which Dylan would have thought himself incapable, but also cracking with a fear that he recognized too well.
One eye tight shut, the other popped to the max, Shepherd said, ‘Shep is scared.’
They were looking at each other now, just like Dylan had wanted, eye to eye, a direct and uncompromising connection. He felt pierced by his brother’s panicked stare, as breathless as if his lungs had been punctured, and his heart clenched in pain as though skewered by a needle.
‘Shep is s-s-scared.’
The kid was scared, sure enough, flat-out terrified, no denying that, perhaps more frightened than he’d ever been in twenty years of frequent bouts of fright. And while but a moment ago he might have been afraid of the radiant tunnel by which he had traveled in a blink from the eastern Arizona desert to the California coast, his alarm now arose from another cause: his brother, who in an instant had become a stranger to him, a shouting and abusive stranger, as though the sun had played a moon trick, transforming Dylan from a man into a vicious wolf.