Lamentation Read Online Free PDF Page A

since a single beer had had that kind of effect on my brother.
    “You almost drowned,” he said.
    “No, I didn’t. When?”
    “It was at night,” he continued, still not looking at me. “The Dindas—they rented the place next door—had stopped by. There was a party in the kitchen, everyone drinking, music playing. Mom had gone to bed with a headache. You wandered down to the beach, waded in. An undertow pulled you out, dragging you far, far from the shore.”
    “You’re making that up. I don’t remember anything like that. Where was Dad?”
    Chris nursed his beer, shrugged.
    “How am I still here then? I couldn’t swim when I was five. Why didn’t I drown?”
    “I had hooked up with Jody White.” His voiced droned as if in a trance, just another story told to a stranger at closing time. “God, I liked her. She was this tasty blonde-haired doll. Teeny, high voice. Swear if you stuck a finger in her, she’d squeak. Family had a cottage up the road. We were in her room, her parents out somewhere. I had my hand up her shirt. She was one of those pristine Catholic girls, so it was a big deal just getting to second base. Perfect sixteen-year-old tits.” He sighed with fond remembrance. “And I stopped. I knew something was wrong. Felt it right here—” Chris poked a scarecrow finger into his bony sternum. “Didn’t say a word to Jody. Just hopped up and bolted out the door, ran all the way down the beach. I instinctively knew to go to the water. I don’t know how I knew. But I did. It was like I could hear you screaming. In my head. Nobody could hear you a stone’s throw from the cottage. But I could hear you. Half a mile away. I dove in the water and pulled you out.”
    It was perfectly still for a moment.
    Then Chris took another glug of beer and belched loudly.
    “A regular fucking Superman,” I said.
    It’s funny when people start talking about things that happened to you before you can really remember them. It’s like their stories worm memories into your brain. I certainly didn’t recall almost drowning, and I’d never heard my parents mention it, but after he said that I started to get pictures in my mind’s eye of swirling black water, felt the shivers of panic and desperation, tasted the thick salt clogging my throat as consciousnessslipped away. Then I saw a hand reach down in the murky depths and hoist me up into the clear, clean moonlight.
    Suggestion is a powerful thing.
    “Did that really happen?” I asked.
    “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “Maybe.”
    Chris got up and went to the window, peering out into the swirling snow as though trying to locate something precious in the abyss.
    He stood there a long time, T-shirt draped off his bony frame as if it was a wire coat hanger.
    “I tell you something,” he said. “You got to keep it under wraps, okay?”
    “Sure.” Who the fuck would I tell?
    “Pete and me, well, Pete mostly—he’s a whiz with computers—so we got this business on the side.” He peered over his shoulder. “Electronic recycling.” He enunciated the words clearly, since he knew he was talking a different language. “Disposing of old hard drives, smartphones, anything with digital data, that kind of shit.”
    “And people
pay
you for this?”
    “Fuck, yeah, man. You can’t throw that shit in the
garbage
.”
    “Why not?”
    He looked at me as if I was missing half a head.
    “Because it’s got, like, all your personal information on there, little brother. Your computer is as personalized as a goddamn fingerprint these days. You’d know this if you joined the rest of the twenty-first century.”
    Coming from a homeless junkie, that stung. But I had to admit he was right; I didn’t know jack about computers. I wasn’t big on technology, period. Honestly, if it wasn’t for Jenny pressing me, I probably wouldn’t even have gotten a cell phone, not that it matters up here; half the calls get dropped anyway. I don’t like being plugged in to