Entanglement Read Online Free PDF

said to the recruiter, “Can my brother and I talk alone for a few minutes?”
    William walked down the hall and got on his cell phone.
    â€œYou’re too smart to do this, bro.”
    â€œJack, I’m not going to walk around owing a hundred-thousand-dollar college loan for the rest of my life.”
    â€œI’m not going to do that either.”
    â€œYou don’t have any other choice —you’ll be in debt if you finish art school. You just told me that tuition’s twenty grand. Where will you ever get that?”
    â€œSo we’ll learn a trade or something. Remember how Grandma always told us that being an electrician or plumber was honorable work? And the pay is good.”
    Charlie looked at his brother’s long hair, pierced ear, and elaborate sleeves of tattoos. “I just can’t see you doing that. There are long hours of apprenticeship; you have to get into a union—it’s hard work.”
    â€œWhat, you’re saying I’m lazy?”
    â€œNo, but you’re artistic—you’ve always been more artistic than I am. That’s what you’re suited for. Doing something with video or computers.”
    â€œYou always liked that stuff, too.”
    â€œNot as much as you. We do have differences.”
    Jack turned away. He didn’t like it when Charlie reminded him of this.
    That was the last time Jack had seen him face-to-face, in what he considered the Before Time—before the war. Charlie was gone within the week, departing for a base in San Diego for boot camp. Jack looked up the basic training program and saw that, within 21 days, Charlie would have to be able to do 3 pull-ups and 40 sit-ups in 2 minutes, and run 3 miles in 28 minutes. This seemed laughingly impossible, at least to him, and yet Charlie didn’t change his mind, as Jack had privately hoped and prayed.
    â€œYou didn’t even say good-bye,” he said when Charlie eventually called him from San Diego.
    â€œThey didn’t give me much time to get ready. I called, but you weren’t there.”
    And you didn’t leave a message? Jack thought but didn’t say.
    These were new times, separate times. He would not have the access to his twin that he’d always known and mostly taken for granted.
    When they hung up, Jack checked his incoming cell calls and saw that Charlie had indeed tried to call him, not once, but nine times, on a day when Jack’s cell had been dead in his jacket pocket. At least this made him feel better. Because, otherwise, Charlie was gone, gone, as far away as he’d ever been.

    He came home after training for one short and exasperating visit, when he seemed like an automaton, his head shaved, his eyes cool and as if they contained points of steel. Then he was swiftly deployed to Afghanistan, just as Jack had feared.
    But this time Charlie made sure he actually spoke to his brother before he left.
    â€œI told you, man—I knew that’s where they’d send you,” Jack said.
    Charlie was silent for a minute. “I thought so, too.”
    â€œYou did?”
    â€œYeah. I didn’t want a desk job in the States. If I’m doing this, I want to really do it.”
    Jack still found it amazing that his brother would willingly leave home and engage in becoming a soldier—something so antithetical to what he thought they both believed.
    Since Charlie was going to be stationed so far away, Jack began studying possible regions where he might be deployed. The Internet wasn’t enough now.
    He traveled downtown to the ancient brick library and dragged down volumes of maps and spread them out before him. His brother was in Asia, another continent, even farther away than Africa, near the Red Sea, which Jack vaguely remembered from the Bible. He read aloud the exotic and foreign place names: the Tropic of Cancer, Turkmenistan, the Dardanelles Strait. On the map, the pink-colored Islamic Republic of Afghanistan