The Houseguest by Kim Brooks Page B

themselves up. If they’re dirty, they want to make themselves clean. If they’re poor, they dream of being rich. If they’re ignorant, they wantto go to school. But you, you’re good and clean and clever and rich enough, and you want to be filthy and low.”
    He smiled. He had the feeling that no one, not his parents, not his brother, had ever bothered to look at him as closely as she.
    â€œNow,” she said, “Tell me some of the fancy things you’ve learned at school this week.”
    He began reciting Pushkin’s The Gypsies, but she interrupted him after a few verses. “That’s enough,” she said. “Now, want me to teach you something new, something that will serve you well the rest of your life?”
    The next day, he brought her a single strand of his mother’s pearls.
    â€œThey’re seeded,” he told her while she held them to the light.
    â€œWhat does that mean?”
    â€œThat they’re valuable.”
    She laughed then, at his earnestness, his generosity. When she laughed, he didn’t care if he was caught or not. He didn’t care about anyone but her. And yet the night he came down from his bedroom unable to sleep, it was not Sonia’s ghost he saw in his living room but his brother’s, Shayke’s, sitting on Irene’s ivory sofa, leaning forward and rolling tobacco between his fingers like it was gold leaf. He was exquisitely careful rolling the tobacco and yet he’d never been careful when it came to living his life. He was still wearing his worker’s cap, still wearing his muddy boots. If he’d been real, Irene would have had a conniption for the mess it would make, but Abe knew he was not real because he could not perceive him with his other senses. He had no scent and his movements, his shifting on the sofa, leaning forward, sitting back, made no sound. He sat suspended in silence, and Abe knew that this silence was death. He smiled, raised his eyebrows at Abe, who now, at forty-seven, was more than twenty-five years his senior. Of course, it was not Shayke. The arrangement of skin and bone and blood and brain and uncompromising spirit that had been Shayke no longer existed. Abe knew that. He was neither religious, superstitious,nor delusional, and yet there Shayke sat. Leaning back on the sofa, crossing one leg over the other, he lit his cigarette without a lighter or a match. The paper ignited quicker than a lock of hair, an orange spark that flared then shrunk to nothing. He brought the cigarette to his lips, inhaled, then exhaled until the exhalation became a sigh.
    â€œWhat are you doing here?” Abe said.
    Shayke put the cigarette into his mouth and put his hands behind his head, leaning back on the sofa. “I could ask you the same thing.”
    â€œI live here,” Abe said.
    Shayke laughed softly. When the cigarette was gone, he stood up and began looking around, picking up picture frames with photos of Irene and Judith, running his fingers over Irene’s crystal ashtrays and porcelain figurines. He walked across the parlor to the piano by the fireplace, pushed a key near the middle, then near the top. It made no sound, or none that Abe could hear.
    â€œHave you ever had this thing tuned?” Shayke asked.
    â€œWhy bother? No one ever plays it. Irene wanted Judith to take lessons when she was a kid but the girl would never practice. No patience.”
    Shayke played another soundless chord. “Do you remember that girl back home, beautiful Sonia? She knew how to play . . . the piano and other things. You used to follow her around.”
    â€œUntil you took her from me.”
    â€œYou never forget anything, do you?”
    Abe closed his eyes, willing the vision away. But when he opened them his brother remained. “Why are you here, Shayke?”
    â€œI am here and not here—nowhere and everywhere.”
    â€œ Drek .”
    â€œIs this any way to greet your