The Portal

I remember when a portal opened up inside my brother Lucas. The whole Event still resonates in my memory as being among the most definitive of our shared history. The way it happened was that my brother, who was not accustomed to interdimensionality or really anything that might transgress his very rigid parameters for what could constitute reality, who had lived the first years of his life quite literally in a bubble of poly-urethane with a compromised immune system, and who had understandably and without any prompting begun early on to seen the exterior world as an intrusive threat, had therefore no extant psychological defense against the portal that opened from nothing deep in his right thigh as he played gladiator with a wooden sword in our ordinary suburban backyard, underneath the swing set. The portal, not large by any conventional logic, yet encompassing universes, embedded neatly into the surface of his right superficial femoral artery and by doing so sprung a small but nonetheless excruciatingly painful and life threatening internal hemorrhage, which we didn't know at the time but would soon learn.

What we did know, those of us who were present (which is to say, myself, my mom, dad, our little sister, mother's sister, father's brother, and a couple neighbors, so in fact a great many people and certainly everyone who was of any significance to the family and Lucas in particular), was that Lucas had gone from happily slaughtering an infestation of imaginary Gruelbats in the Bleakpits of Daemonia to lying completely prostrate and as sickly pale as I had never seen him, a horrifying gasping wail issuing from his throat, his mind abandoning all capacity for the palatal phonemes of articulate speech. An ambulance was summoned, mother in hysterics (having practiced for many years a refined automatic neurological collapse at the slightest appearance of regression in my brother's health), father assuming his equally refined stolid gaze and robotic efficiency, myself and sister Amy huddled in a corner, bequeathed by the situation and our precious years with an uncomprehending but total dread, as poor Lucas, by now covered in sweat and entirely Beyond All Recognition, was carted off on a stretcher to his proximate salvation.

We, the children, visited Lucas in the hospital the next day, with our aunt and uncle, to the incontrovertible impression that Something Was Terribly Wrong. The signs were abundant and unmistakable: in addition to the general pallor that hung palpably in the air, my mother sat in the waiting room, her eyes bleary red from weeping, while father paced up and down the hall saying nothing but communicating the first truly perceptible cracks in his armor of implacable efficiency that we'd seen since Lucas had been diagnosed with leukemia at the age of four. Amy and I played as best we could with the cheap plastic toys in the kid's waiting area. Being 8 and 9 already and as such far past the age where such trinkets might genuinely intrigue us, we could at best generate a facsimile impression of amusement, if for no other reason than that such a reassurance might impress on my mother that the world, or at least her family, could still muster a modicum of normalcy, even or perhaps especially in times of crisis. We weren't fools, and understood dire necessity when surrounded by it, and thus we calmly stacked oversized lego blocks one atop another with all the brave enthusiasm of actors on a stage that is in the midst of being burned to the ground.

Now children are seldom credited with as much comprehension of adult psychology as they quite often possess, and it was certainly no mistake that I, then, perceived the last shreds of maternal sanity give way to a prevailing hysteric wind as the doctor drew the pair of them aside and conveyed some horrific, though evidently not fatal, news. In that moment I could somehow tell that my mother would never be the same, that the final nail had been firmly embedded in the coffin that was her already pathos-ridden understanding of the universe; I could see, though cripplingly unable to articulate the perception for many years, that her world view had presently shifted to reflect a new and total belief, namely that existence itself had probably always conspired against her happiness in this her sole and most precious domain of power, to confound her every attempt at protection of her wards, and leave her irresolute and defeated.

What I learned later, communicated to me and my sister with the quiet seriousness of parents attempting desperately to avoid utterly shattering the already fragile and diminishing happiness of their children, was that the two-dimensional half-centimetre of circular portal in Lucas' thigh, which had opened at a right angle in the surface of his arterial wall, was causing an alarming amount of blood to escape into his body, while at the same time the half-section located inside his vein, acting as a trans-dimensional gateway of sorts, whisked away to Lord Knows Where another equally precious quantity of plasma, so that internal bleeding and the peculiar and unprecedented internal-yet-in-fact-external bleeding together meant that Lucas was very rapidly Bleeding to Death.

Unfortunately, modern medical science lacking experience with intravenous trans-dimensional portals, and entirely incapable of manipulating them with conventional medical instruments, elected for the drastic but nonetheless time-worthy approach of hacking the whole leg right off, just below the hip. My mother had to leave the room when it came time to explaining this, and I still remember the awkward metaphor my father used: “It's like when you have a candy cane, only the end of it got broken in your pocket and kind of crushed, and you still want to keep the whole thing but you can't keep it with the end hanging on, because bits of it are getting everywhere and its making a mess in your pocket, so you throw away the end bits that you don't want so you can keep all the good stuff. You know?” We nodded, of course, and bit our tongues at the absurd juxtapositions of severed limbs and mint-flavored candy. The odd and vaguely cannibalistic confluence of the two gave me nightmares consisting of crumbling, blood-drenched legs marching through corridors towards me, blossoming gaping toothless mouths all over their surfaces and whispering my name, always in my brother's voice, but horrifically distorted with a perverse melancholia, rasping also with a dark slow-motion baritone that shook my subconscious and intimated at mysteries that would unravel my skin and cause the flesh of my eyes to blister.

When Lucas came home we assembled like a Royal welcoming committee on the driveway, with helium balloons and presents we'd meticulously selected from Toys 'R' Us to avoid prompting unnecessary awareness of his dismemberment (as if such a thing could be avoided); I remember that I got him a big super soaker water pistol, and my sister got him a chess set. Strangely enough, I don't remember what my parents bought him. Soon after the Event their actions began to blur for me into an indistinguishable continuum of helpless guilt, one futile gesture after another, each one too little and too late to banish what had already transpired, the evil that could not have been prevented or even remotely anticipated, the great Denial against which all the heretofore assumed parental omnipotence consummately vanished, revealing only the sad and altogether human weakness of their paternal and maternal forms.

I remember holding my gift up as the nurse wheeled Lucas out of the para-transpo vehicle; I remember my arms lowering involuntarily at the sight of him, face down, expressing a dejection I did not until then know to be possible, a manifest full-body, one-legged sadness that was vastly in excess of what any twelve-year old child should, in the fullest throes of their most potent, attention-starved emotional hyperbole, be capable of mustering. I remember his eyes looking up at me, leaden, too far gone to even judge or recriminate: a spectre of something against which my pathetic offering seemed a ludicrous bathos. I remember dropping my gift and crying, too overwhelmed, rendered once again into a simpering babe, hastily silenced and ushered away by a woman, probably my mother, but recollection blurs into coos and swaddling gestures and eventually silence. It all blurs.

That night I heard him crying in the bunk above mine: a relentless, whispered, gasping sob hearkening to the deepest cthonic agonies his soul had thus prematurely become witness to, and eventually his arm slumped down with the release of someone entering a new plateau of misery, where the crying becomes muted but the suffering turns heel and lodges itself in the emotional registers of the stomach, heart, and sacrum. And he said to me what I could never hope to forget or banish or in anyway make right, “Ethan, I'm scared.” My brother was scared. The unknown mysteries that ordinarily imbue a child's fantasies with delight and possibility, with soaring Peter Pan cloud-decamptments and rolling hills of infinite splendour, had for Lucas been exposed as a fraud: the vast uncertainty of the world, proven to be as supernatural and real as anything he had comprehended in his dreams, was defined by a prevailing note of malice, bearing down right now and right here, and of all the people and children and sufferers in the world, on him.

I did then what I had never done before or would do again, what we never spoke about afterwards but which the situation seemed to demand, and suffering my own private collapse of security and immortality – because with precocious wisdom I knew what had sundered him forever from happiness could just as easily befall me – and my young heart bursting with uncontrollable filial sympathy, I climbed up to his bunk and wrapped my arms around him and held him until the sun rose and illumined nothing but the skin of our trembling hands and the stark unremitting future that bears portals into children's thighs like the sparkling eyes of god.