My Brother's Keeper

There were pieces of the walls scattered across the floor like confetti. The room smelled like bile and two scared animals. He had been watching August as he lay unconscious on the floor.

August was far from well. He wouldn’t stop rolling his head across the concrete in the same nauseating motion, over and over and over again. Occasionally he would groan in pain or discomfort but such were the sparsity of these noises that Oscar jolted when they happened. Every thirty seconds or so, his eyelids would part just slightly, and his pupils would roll back, leaving behind a narrow sliver of bloodshot whites for Oscar to look at. If ever he were to wake up, it had to be soon.

Oscar was not right himself, either. His saliva tasted like bile and metal. The mucus on his tongue was tacky, and the roof of his mouth was dry. He was dizzy, and there was blood on the back of his head, caking his hair. But that was all. His malaise was not nearly as worrying as August’s. A hangover, it must have been. A bad one. But he didn’t remember drinking.

The walls were a sick, greenish off-white with huge shreds of paint and drywall missing, chipped away from decades of wear, the dark cinder blocks making themselves known beneath. There were stripes of black mold leaking from the ceiling, itself brick and bare. There were large rectangular overhead fluorescent lights like the kind one finds in a school or a prison, they flickered with the spasticity of a trembling hand. The floor was naked cement and littered with little bits of rock and rubble, a piece of trash here, a rusty screw there. A crack house for tetanus and pneumonia.

Oscar checked all four walls three times over and did not find a single window. But there was a door, a huge, thick aluminum door with rusty hinges and a thin, indestructible handle. At its lips was a massive hasp the size of his biology textbook and a large padlock clamping it shut. He couldn’t see any light coming from behind the threshold.

There was a dog bowl beside the door filled with cloudy water.

Suddenly August retched. It was loud and obnoxious, enough to startle Oscar out of his tentative trance and put him on his feet. Oscar scooted closer to him and tapped his shoulder with the toe of his shoe.

“Auggie,” he whispered. “Hey. Wake up.”

August opened his eyes, sat up slowly, and wobbled.

“Fuck,” he rubbed his head and groaned.

“Auggie,” Oscar knelt beside him. “Where are we?”

“What?”

“Where are we?”

August blinked slowly and rubbed his crusty eyes. Then he looked around, at all the walls, at the lack of windows, at the locked door. His nostrils flared at the smell of the mold and his fingers grappled at the drywall chips on the floor. He wiped his dampening palms on his shirt as his brown eyes widened with concern.

“Shit if I know…”

August gagged again.

“Are you okay?” Oscar asked.

“No, dude,” he groaned and rolled over onto his side. “I feel like shit.”

“What did we do last night?” Oscar stood and got a better look at his surroundings, rubbing his head and blinking.

“I don’t know. Last I remember I was in my room.”

“I was walking home.”

“We really didn’t do anything?”

“No.”

“Did you come over?”

“Not that I remember.”

August belched, then gagged again. A hot trickle of sour bile dripped from his throat to the tip of his tongue.

“Shit, dude.”

Oscar staggered to the door. He pulled at the stainless steel handle. The door moved just a little, jiggling within its socket, but the padlock stopped it. The sound of the impact echoed. Oscar pulled at it again, harder this time.

“There’s a lock on it,” mumbled August.

“I see it. It’s just a padlock. I can kick that shit off.”

Oscar reared his foot back and kicked the lock. With a loud clang the padlock jingled against the hasp and the door shuddered. Oscar reared back his foot again, August covered his ears.

Again this happened. And again. The hasp did not budge, and the padlock did not give.

Oscar fell backward, panting.

“No,” he whispered. “No.”

August covered his face. “Oscar,” he said.

Oscar jumped back onto his feet. He furiously yanked at the door, as if by some miracle the bar on the lock would snap in half. The sound of metal slamming against the hasp as he jerked at the handle scrambled August’s eardrums, and he salivated with nausea. He covered his ears with his hands.

“FUCK!” Oscar screamed. He slammed his fist against the door. His knuckles were red, wet and raw and there seemed to be the beginnings of a hole on the bottom of his shoe.

“Oscar,” said August.

“What?”

“We’re trapped.”

Oscar fell to the ground, panting.

“No shit.”

August rubbed the back of his neck.

“I have a fucking quiz in the morning…” Oscar breathed.

“You’re seriously worried about class right now?”

“I’m sorry I actually have shit to worry about.”

August pressed his face into the concrete. He covered it, pale and damp as it was. Gently, he wept. A sniffle puffed from his nostrils and his shoulders heaved.

Oscar’s expression loosened, and his shoulders relaxed. The guilt settled. He scooted closer to August and stroked his back.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m just… scared. We’re gonna be fine. There’s gotta be a way out of here.”

August gagged again.

Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.

Oscar was not yet convinced of the padlock’s infallibility. In between furious fits of kicking and yanking the hasp, he wrapped his fingers tightly around the padlock and hung from it like a chimp until the soreness from his feet had dissipated. And while he hung, he thought.

The images flashed like strobe lights in his mind from serial killer documentaries, shock pornography he’d been exposed to in middle school, sickeningly contemporary news headlines. One could not help but wonder if this wasn’t the prelude to something else, something profoundly, historically horrific, something to be used in later literature as a scholarly example of the extremities of human depravity, the lengths that man is willing to go to immortalize himself. Oscar imagined a picture of his face on the screen of a family television, the story out for all to hang their mouths open to, a house member casually sweeping the floor nearby, muttering, “oh my god,” having their obligatory moment of silence and staring, and then passively moving on, not to think of it again unless as a reason to convince themselves to keep the door locked at night.

Oscar hammered his fist on the side of the hasp frantically, then tried hanging on it again, loosening himself as much as he could, mentally adding pounds to his body weight. He heard August shuffle and groan.

August. August. And what of him? Oscar could not help but be frustrated by his dormancy. Reasonably, he was compassionate. Compassionate as he could be, understanding how abdominal discomfort worked, of course, but not quite understanding just how cruelly August’s gut had been crocheted. But even then, he could not help but let his anger at being the only one who cared about being trapped slither into the gap between his heart and his mind. Had August no survival instincts? Was he so weak that he could not bear the pain for long enough to double the weight hanging from the padlock to more quickly force its collapse?

Despite everything, Oscar could not stop his mind from drifting back into affection for him, recalling their high school years as vague acquaintances who seemed to always click like partners with never the time to spend with each other, their late-night intoxicated oaths as friends for eternity in college, their habitual academic intersections in every city library, midnight plans, blunt rotations, lunch together, things he knew he would miss. Suddenly his frustration was replaced with panic. He pounded his fists against the door, rested his head on it, and sighed.

He recalled an old, vague memory with the vividity of a fresh trauma. It was what had sowed the seeds for his fascination with surgery, with the body. Frog dissection, eighth grade. There was a lump in the spaghetti-like tangle of its small intestine, perfectly smooth and artificially spherical. Oscar, unknowing, had thought at first that it was the stomach, as large of a space that it had taken up. It was half an inch in diameter, this unnatural bulge, the girth of the small intestine only being about half a centimeter. This wasn’t an obstruction. But when he took his scalpel and cut into it, expecting it to be soft with walls of strong, stripy muscle, something shiny and hard rolled out of it. He picked it up with his gloved fingers, held it into the light.

It was a ball bearing. The bastard had swallowed it whole, and it had traveled down along with everything else. It was a marvel of Nature or God that the thing hadn’t died because of it.

Or maybe it had.

And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the LORD. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof.

Oscar traced his hand along every crumbling brick, every soft spot on the floor, every inch of the narrow crack in between the door and the wall. August kept swaying, retching every handful of minutes, his head rolling to and fro on the floor as one intoxicated. Oscar jerked away from his exploration and snapped his head in his friend’s direction.

“Auggie,” he snapped, “Do you mind telling me what the hell is wrong with you right now? Maybe it’ll help me understand why we’re here.”

“I don’t know, man. I’m so sick.”

“Like puking sick? Cold sick? What kind of sick?”

“Clearly puking sick, Holmes.”

“What did you eat last night?”

“Nothing that would make me feel like this.”

“Did you drink?”

“I’m not dehydrated.”

“Alcohol.”

“N… no…”

August bore his teeth like a rabid animal and threw his head back. His eyes rolled back into their sockets.

“What’s wrong?” Oscar pounced onto the floor beside August just in time to watch him lift up his t-shirt and reveal the jagged, angry red surgical scar beneath. It was fresh, not more than an evening old, still wet with the discharge that oozed from it.

Oscar gasped and covered his mouth with his hand.

“I’m gonna die…” August cried. “I’m gonna die…”

“Hush. You’re not going to die. Stop.”

Oscar pinched the hem of August’s shirt to keep it lifted, and he leaned in closer to examine his abdomen. The wound had purpled with internal bleeding, black and yellow with tissue damage. It lacked the professional straightness and precision of a proper surgical incision. There were bits of red flesh peeking out from under the skin where the sutures had not been properly tightened. The sutures themselves were sloppily done. They were diagonal, made by one single, long thread. Whoever made the incision had cut August open and sewn him back up just like a doll.

He reached out and touched the wound. The orifice where the two pieces of flesh met each other was raised and pale. Bits of white fascia were making their presence known beneath the half-assed sutures. He pressed his fingers against it and August squirmed and bit the back of his hand.

The abdominal wall had been severed.

“I hope you’ve been studying,” August panted.

“...what?”

“Use your pre-med for some good and tell me what’s wrong with me.”

Oscar ran a sweaty hand through his sweaty hair.

“Go on,” said August. “What’s the prognosis? Am I fucked?”

“...Someone’s been playing around in your guts.”

August gripped Oscar’s wrist. Oscar pushed him away.

“Someone put us here,” Oscar continued. “Pervert. Serial killer. Something. I don’t know. We just need to wait till he comes back.”

“Don’t say that,” August begged. “Please don’t say that.”

“What else can I say?”

August rolled over onto his side and curled into a fetal position. Oscar laid down next to him. Beads of cold sweat were starting to form on the dome of August’s forehead and on the bridge of his nose. Oscar wiped his friend’s face with the sleeve of his shirt.

He began to think.

An image of his mother trying to call him darted across his racing mind. When she would have done this, if done at all, was impossible to tell, with no windows and not a clue what time of day it was, if the sun was up at all. He had a neuro exam a week from the night he had gone missing. There had to have been missed classes by now, a roommate pacing across the floor with the police outside their door, asking with their foreboding, implicit voices to come talk.

He looked at August’s damp face and the misery strewn mercilessly upon it. How cruel a human could cut open someone so young and so utterly helpless was God’s knowledge. August was vulnerable. He was weak, brittle, completely unfit to—

“Oscar,” whined August, gripping his stomach.

“What?”

“Do you think we’re going to be okay?”

Oscar looked at the sutures. He traced with his eyes the lines of the scar and noted how the hypertrophy was starting to ensue, how livid and ugly it seemed to grow every second.

“Yeah,” said Oscar. “We’ll be fine.”

“What do we do?”

“We’ll…”

There was only so much time. None to think.

“We’ll wait. We have to wait for now.”

“I’m thirsty…”

Oscar’s eyes darted toward the bowl of water on the floor. He clenched his teeth at the thought of it. But it did not take much contemplation for him to drag the bowl from the wall to August’s head and scoop a mouthful of it into his cupped hands.

And the LORD had respect unto Abel and to his offering; But unto Cain and his offering He had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell.

And so they waited.

Neither was sure how much time had elapsed since they woke.

It had to have been days. A hundred hours of thinking for Oscar and a hundred hours of writhing and pain for August. With no windows there was no telling. Neither had a cell phone or watch.