Thirty Two Faces - 13. Candour

The autumn wind sends ripples over the alpine lake, distorting the dark reflections of the surrounding mountains. Behind us, the tent entrance flaps like the migrating birds above, trees swaying to the whistling gust. We huddle close to the fire as the sun retreats below the horizon, leaving behind a trail of subdued amber in the darkening skies.

“Are you still cold?”

Samuel puts an arm over my shoulders and rubs my sides. I didn’t realize I was shivering.

“Not anymore.” I smile.

After Cheyenne, we drove down to Bear Lake, an alpine lake nine-thousand-feet high in the Rockies. We came here with the whole family ten years ago, including Uncle Rob and our cousins. I almost forgot how it cools off at night, even when there were eight of us to huddle for warmth. Right now, it’s just me and my brother, shoulder to shoulder, our faces poring over the iPad that he’s holding.

“Shall we key in the answer?”

I look to him for assurance, afraid to blunder again, since we only have two more tries to solve the puzzle.

He shrugs and looks back at me, “My guess is as good as yours.”

I take a deep breath and key in, C-O-R-C-O-R-D-I-U-M, hitting enter before I start to have any second thoughts. And we wait for the page to load.

The timer appears.

“The connection here sucks,” he complains.

“We’re up in the mountains, in case you forgot.” I smile. If it wasn’t for the guest lodge nearby, we would have no internet at all.

Finally, the blue background appears, but the first thing we hear, is the deflating beep sound again.

I stare at the skull fading from the screen. It is the wrong answer.

“What the fuck?!” Samuel throws up his hand and swears.

It can’t be.

The contents of my bag drops as I forage inside it to dig out the white envelope. Whipping out the question statement, I scrutinize it for every detail that we might have missed.

What holds US together?

But everything seems to fit. Even the US is capitalized in the same way and in the same font as the buckle.

“Maybe it’s another clue instead of the answer?”

Samuel gets up from the ground and kicks the empty beer can away.

“Fuck it! We’re not playing his stupid game anymore.”

“Why give up now?”

“We could’ve spent the afternoon hiking a trail or something.” He rolls himself a joint and starts to smoke.

“Come on, we still have one more try,” I tug at his sleeves. He looks at me and exhales smoke loudly through his nose, it sounds almost like a sigh.

“He’s not going to let you stay with me, Babe,” he says gently.

“But what if?”

He pauses and shakes his head. “All right, I’ll get something from Dad. I hate to see you like this.”

My brother has a way of asking without asking directly, so it doesn’t break the game rules when he writes an angry text to Dad for messing up my head with his mission and ‘mystery reward’, knowing full well what I would’ve hoped it to be.

Genius.

“Let’s hope he takes the bait and coughs up the deal,” he takes a drag and smiles in the way that seems to mean, Happy now?

I smile back in appreciation, but he taps his cheek, demanding a kiss for gratitude instead. And so I tiptoe up to kiss him.

He puts an arm on my shoulder and says, “We’ll wait and see what he says. Don’t think so much in the meantime.”

The setting sun outlines the silhouette of the mountains, casting a shimmering wedge over the lake. Darkness is descending everywhere, and we make use of the remaining daylight to collect some dry wood and twigs for the fire. Our hands are full, just like our minds, and we barely say a word to each other along the way.

Despite his own advice, my brother seems to have a lot of things on his mind, as well. I wonder if he wants me to stay with him as much as I do. And if we do, how long will we continue to be like this? Will we ever be able to return to what we were and pretend none of this intimacy had happened? It would be very cruel and cold to do so. If we don’t pretend, it would also seem equally cruel to hold back our affection.

Wrong to move on and wrong to turn back.

I dread that we might end up avoiding each other to escape from this conundrum. By the time we make it back to our camp, the sky has gotten completely dark.

Our mood lightens up as we start cooking together for dinner. On his own, my brother has always survived on microwaved food and take-home pizzas. This is his first real attempt at cooking. We make soup and roast some potatoes over the fire. We splash more cream in the soup than what Mom would approve of. We chuckle when our minestrone soup tastes more like cream of tomato, and it looks pink from the generous amount of cream he added to it.

“Are we even supposed to add cream to minestrone?” I ask.

“Everything tastes nice with cream.” He shrugs.

He grins with embarrassment as I try to salvage his soup by pouring in more water and tomatoes to balance out the texture. The soup tastes fine, even though it doesn’t taste one bit like minestrone. But we end up having a whole pot to finish between the two of us.

Pour the rest into the lake?

Feed it to the elks?

Save it for tomorrow morning?

Use it as lube? There’s enough cream and butter in it.

We laugh as we ponder what to do with so much food.

“God, it’ll be so fun to have you around.”

I stir the boiling soup with the spoon and smile. “Don’t you cook together with Beth?”

“No, she’s not a home-type girl.”

“And neither are you.”

Over the two years Samuel has known her, he’s told me bits and pieces about what Beth is like, what they do together. He doesn’t watch movies at home with her or frolic in the woods. She likes none of that.

With her, life is nonetheless exciting for him. They hit the clubs and party or drive to a movie premiere or a dinner at a fancy restaurant. Sometimes, they head to the beach and play volleyball, meet new people, make new friends. She likes to fly to Europe for holidays or take short trips, but Samuel can’t afford them often even with his holiday jobs. That’s why she goes with other boys, and that makes my brother mad.

But other than that, they sound like they were made for each other.

“You must like her a lot,” I mutter, looking down at my toes curled inwards.

“Are you jealous?” he messes up my hair and smiles.

“Yeah, a little,” I say.

He looks at me, both of us surprised at my candor. Then he puts both hands on my shoulders and says, “I’ve had many girlfriends, and even marriages can end. But I only have one brother, and that’s you. Do you understand?”

After dinner, he takes out his iPad to prepare me for New York. We’ll be flying there from Colorado tomorrow. To most people, going to New York may be just a holiday trip, but for me it’s the biggest rollercoaster ride of my life.

Every time I would go to a new environment, Mom or Dad would walk me through exactly what will happen. They show me photos or videos of what I’ll see, what I should expect, and why all of it is necessary.

When children go to a new place, they absorb every detail in the environment – the sight, the sound, the whole experience. Some love it, some get overwhelmed, but normal kids can take in everything, because their brains are still growing and their minds are relatively uncluttered. That’s why young people travel, to get the taste of freshness again.

Once they get older, people learn to filter out unnecessary details so that their brain can continue to function, to think and process. They stop noticing the price and menu outside the café; they stop seeing how blue the sky is or the color of the ceiling fan. But kids like me are unable to do so. All this information is shoved into my head, as if I’m forced to watch ten television screens at the same time, each showing a different channel, just to know what’s going on.

Showing me the photos and videos helps to desensitize the visual overload, giving me an idea where to focus when I’m there. Otherwise, moving through the New York crowds would make me feel like I’m crossing through a web of railway tracks, with passing trains barely grazing my nose every other moment.

Samuel takes his time to explain which flight we’ll take, what time we’ll land, what the plane interior looks like, what the airport looks like, where we will get a cab, and which hotel we’ll be staying in. Explaining the process helps me orient myself once I’m there, and I can remind myself what’s going on to calm down my nerves. But nothing makes me feel safer than his familiar face and scent.

“Are you nervous about New York?” He puts down his iPad after showing me the hotel that we’ll be staying in.

“I’m more scared about Boston actually.”

He nods. After all, I still have him around in New York.

“I’ll come and visit you as often as I can, Babe.”

“Don’t be crazy, you’ll be at the other end of America.”

“Or I can kidnap you to California and tell Dad I lost you somewhere.”

Speaking of Dad, it’s been more than two hours, and he hasn’t replied. Maybe he has a function today? Or he is playing coy with us? Samuel checks his phone and finds that his message has not been read yet.

In my head, I can see my brains working out the remaining seconds like a stopwatch that can’t be switched off.

353,672, 353,671, 353,670, 353,669….

“Are you all right?” He puts a hand over my back.

“Can we try to crack the puzzle again?”

“Are you kidding?”

“I just need a distraction.”

The moon is high in the starless night. Other than the occasional owl hooting and the rustling leaves, there is nothing to punctuate the long silences, not even the sound of crickets or other night denizens. The air is simply too thin and cold. I toss our remaining wood into the fire and hurry back to huddle with my brother.

Shadows flicker on his face from the licking flames as he reads about the story behind Cor Cordium, the Latin phrase for heart of hearts. It comes from the inscription on the poet Percy Shelley’s tombstone, made by his good friend Trelawney.

Shelley was a troubled and rebellious young poet. It was said that even his heart refused to burn when his body was cremated at the beach where he was washed ashore. Out of grief, Trelawney reached into the pyre to take the unburnt heart of his friend. His heart was kept close to his family while the rest of his remains were buried.

Shelley drowned at the age of thirty, leaving behind his widow, Mary Shelley, the woman who wrote the gothic novel Frankenstein.

“What is Frankenstein about?” I’ve come across the title a few times, but fiction books are too hard for me to read.

Samuel shows me a picture of a grotesque monster from his iPad and says, “A stitched-up, walking corpse hungry for love and acceptance.”

“That’s one freaky love story…”

“Sounds like most people, don’t you think?” He looks at me with a bitter smile.

Samuel thinks Dad is trying to say something. The story behind Cor Cordium is pregnant with allusions everywhere, as if Dad is trying to bring a scrambled message across to us, expecting us to piece it back together. But neither of us understands what he’s driving at, not at this time.

He scrolls down, and we continue reading.

Trelawney wrote a book about the last days of his friend and arranged for his own grave to be buried in the same cemetery with Shelley. One of Shelley’s famous poems is called the ‘Heart of Hearts’; it is his reflections on the enduring truth that brings passion and meaning to our life. It comes to mean our deepest passion, rooted in the seat of one’s truest feelings.

“Cor Cordium means heart of hearts in Latin,” he says.

“And there are thirteen characters in heart of hearts, same as the number of spaces in the field,”

“Are you sure?”

“Wait. I think we better go through it one more time.”

And we go back and forth through the website for another three times, but we still don’t find anything new.

In the end, he decides to go with it, so I lean closer to him and watch him type.

H-E-A-R-T-O-F-H-E-A-R-T-S

And he hits enter.

The timer appears again.

I hold my breath.

And the page loads.

We wait again.

Finally, one of the brick-wall icons disappears and a new page loads.

‘What lies in your heart of hearts?’

Both of look at each other and heave a huge sigh of relief.

The new question appears on a blank white page. There is nothing else on that page except for a button that says ‘continue’. No icons or anything.

“Just as I thought,” Samuel snorts.

“What is it?”

“Dad wants us to think about what we really want.”

Shelley knew what he wanted in life, and that’s why he was not afraid to live differently from others of his time. He found his heart of hearts, in a manner of speaking, hence the inscription on his tomb. Some people think maybe that the reason why his heart didn’t turn into ashes was because he was true to himself. I believe they mean it metaphorically, because those who live another person’s life will soon have their hearts drained of passion until nothing remains but a dried-up husk.

Dad is asking us a big question, Samuel thinks. And we don’t know what his intentions are, because this is a question with no correct answers. Even if we tell him what lies in our heart of hearts, how will he be able to verify it? Will he judge our answer and tell us what should be the truth? Or is he trying to make us reflect, to pause and think what we’re doing with ourselves before our raging hormones lead us to a head-on collision with disaster?

“Maybe he just thinks that we don’t know what we want,” Samuel says.

I think I do know.

Dad probably thinks I wanted to feel safe above everything else. In a sense, he is right, because he’s seen how hard I’ve worked to cope with my disability. But he is blind to the reason why I worked so hard in the first place.

I want to enjoy going to somewhere new, to be able to tune out the maddening chatter in a crowd, to know what the world is thinking about me; I want all these so that I can sprint alongside my brother instead of being a dead weight to him. But if the price comes at the cost of losing him, then all these efforts would have been meaningless to me.

I have never felt safer and freer in my life in these few weeks that I’ve spent with Samuel. Even if the world comes crashing down, it’ll be okay as long as he holds my hand throughout. Just like how he has always been doing. Just like how he’s holding my hand now. Beth, parents, school – if you take all those away from the equation, wanting to be with him will be my deepest truth.

Unfortunately, my brother’s face seems a lot less certain.

I would think he’s less blinded by what Dad always says is the myopia of youth: that we can’t see beyond our limited experience with the world.

It’s probably more like how Mom puts it, that his heart is opaque not because of his naïveté, but because he is paralyzed by too many choices and priorities. Freedom, security, love, lust, me, Beth, fat salaries, roaming the world – when everything is available to him, making the wrong choice can mean a lifetime of regret.

He looks at me, eyes searching for my thoughts, as if my answers will disentangle his conflict.

“What do you really want, Babe?”

“I want to be with you.”

“Is that all?”

“That is everything to me.”

Eyes unwavering, he takes in the full weight of my meaning.

I pause to look at his face, waiting for the guilt to show, or his perfunctory I can’t do this with you forever speech.

But none of that comes.

With no uncertainty in my voice, I tell him, “And that is my heart of hearts.”

I say it with a finality that asks, And yours?

His lips part slightly, as if he’s about to say something, but his phone beeps with the tone of an incoming text message.

“It must be Dad, at this hour,” he says.

I watch his face as he takes out his phone to read the reply. I anticipate sympathy if Samuel happens to be right about the mystery reward or excitement if Dad plans to put the chips on the table. But my brother’s reaction is unexpected when he reads the message; his eyes are wide with surprise instead.

It puts me on edge.

“What did Dad say?”

Instead of telling me, he shows me Dad’s reply:

What are you talking about? I didn’t give you boys any mission.