I don’t know why I told Bron about our letters. I guess I was looking for a second opinion about you and the way you stand out so much. And how you do it on purpose, it seems. Wearing all those costumes et cetera. Drawing fire, is how I think of it. How you draw fire.
Writing that makes me think of something I read for the PSA assignment. In an explosion you will naturally want to hold your breath. Don’t though. The blast wave will overpressurize the air and burst your lungs like balloons. Most explosion victims die from bleeding lungs not shrapnel.
So I asked Bron why you wear those clothes. Today it was that shirt with the little red flowers and that greenish-brownish blazer. Tweed or something. Like you’re about to go hunting in Wales or someplace. Or that bow tie the other day with the swirly blue-and-yellow pattern. I mean I see those outfits on you and I nearly break into a sweat thinking about your safety. A walking target.
She goes, Hasn’t he introduced you to his idol Walt Whitman yet?
I had to laugh. Yeah, me and Walt are already on friendly terms, I said.
Bron goes, It’s cosplay.
I ask her what that is, and she explains that you’re a hard-core Whitman fanboy, so you dress like him. Bron’s exact words: hard-core fanboy.
Is that a thing? I ask her. Like, is there a club or something?
Nope, there’s just Jonathan, she says.
Do you remember that dog walker I mentioned? I’ve been paying a bit more attention to him lately. This morning the dogs were sort of pulling him along the sidewalk, and he goes, They are scenting the death of the natural world. Those were his exact words. I mean it almost sounded like poetry, like some of that poetry you’ve been sending me. Or maybe he actually said sensing, not scenting. Sensing the death of the natural world.
So apparently what you’re supposed to do in an explosion is reduce your lateral profile. This means lie on your side and put your arm over your exposed eye.
I guess the dog walker didn’t have time to follow these instructions. When I talk to him he has to turn his head all the way around to the other side so he can see me with his one eye and hear me with his one ear.
Sincerely,
AK
Thursday, October 1
Dear Kurl,
This is an extra letter, as I don’t have English again until Monday. I hope you don’t mind receiving two letters this week. It’ll just be a quick note, really—Lyle’s picking me up for a dentist appointment at 3:30 p.m., so I’ve just ducked into Ms. Khang’s classroom momentarily after school.
I want to explain why it looked like I was crying at lunch today at the bike racks, when you approached Bron, Shayna, and me. The moment was somewhat awkward all around, wasn’t it?
You didn’t technically approach us—it’s more accurate to say that you were just passing by us on your way to the bus stop. I suppose it must have been a surprise, looking over and discovering me with tears leaking down my face and both girls laughing unabashedly at me.
“What’s the matter?” you asked. “What happened to him?”
“Whoa!” Bron said. “What happened to you?” That black eye, Kurl! I’m sure all three of us were equally taken aback at the sight, but naturally it was Bron who didn’t hesitate to inquire.
“Nothing. A fight,” you retorted, and you veered off across the driveway before any of us could say anything more. I looked for you this afternoon, to apologize for our nosiness and to see if you were okay, but you didn’t come back to school after lunch.
Anyhow. Please know that you’re welcome to tell me about all this fighting if you care to (I can’t help but observe its frequency: that bruise on your cheekbone, today a black eye), but in the spirit of our “write about whatever you want” agreement, I won’t press the issue.
Meanwhile, though, I’d like to explain the phenomenon of my tears. My sister had just shown us an old postcard she found in one of Lyle’s books at home, in his Encyclopedia of Band Names. The postcard pictured a dive bar downtown called the Ace—do you know that place upstairs from the Skyline Diner, that diagonal sign with the sleazy-looking neon arrow pointing up the stairs? Anyhow, Shayna thought it might be our mother Raphael’s handwriting on the back of the card. Two short sentences: I must have impressed Axel anyways. He said the gig is mine if I want it. No address, no salutation.
Bron said she thought it must be an ironic postcard, printed as a joke by the bar, because there was no way the Ace would have been a bona fide tourist destination even back then.
Shayna said she was totally missing the point. “It must have been a solo gig, right? Not a Decent Fellows thing,” she said. “Mom must have had a side thing going.”
I badly wished to inspect the postcard more closely, but Shayna snatched it out of my hand and stuffed it in the inside pocket of her jean jacket. It was the snatching and stuffing that must have led to the tears on my face when you happened to pass by us. Something about this precious artifact from the past being handled so roughly. As I may have mentioned, there aren’t any photographs of Raphael Vogel in the Hopkirk house, so any evidence of my mother’s existence on this earth is freighted with extra emotional significance.
The truth, Kurl, is that I tend to cry quite easily. It’s a physical reflex I can’t seem to control, and I cry not only in reaction to sadness but to almost any emotional experience, including atypical ones like surprise and embarrassment. Cry is actually too strong a word for it. It’s more like involuntary leakage of a few tears, which I hardly notice and can try to hide with a surreptitious sweep of my fingertips. Naturally, though, it tends to throw more fuel on the fire when it comes to bullying and public-mockery scenarios.
Yours truly,
Jonathan Hopkirk
PS: I’ve found myself wondering, these last few days, how your brother got injured in Afghanistan. Don’t feel you have to disclose it, if you don’t care to.
Friday, October 2
Dear Little JO,
All right. Here’s a quick note back to you. It’s not a secret or anything. Mark’s hip bone got shattered on a rock when he was thrown from the back of a truck. He’d been over there a little more than eighteen months. Apparently he was standing in the truck bed with everyone else, and they came around a corner and there was a goat in the road. So of course the driver slammed on the brakes and swerved.
Mark was the only one who fell out. His rifle slid down an embankment and he lost it. He also broke his wrist. The bad luck was that the hospital in Fallujah was so under-resourced that he had to wait ages for surgery. Way too long. Then an insurgent attack on the base filled up the whole hospital, so in the end he got sent to Germany for the surgery. All that waiting apparently made the damage worse.
Sincerely,
AK
Saturday, October 3 +
Sunday, October 4
Dear Kurl,
Have you ever been to Basement Records? Shayna and I practically grew up there. As kids we would loiter in the store on Saturday afternoons while we waited for Lyle to finish teaching his classes at the music school upstairs.
Today Bron and Shayna were there with me because Bron has undertaken a project on her blog she’s calling “Life Notes.” She finds a fan of a particular record, interviews them about the role the record has played in their life and its influence, and then turns the interview into a song-by-song mini-biography (accompanied, of course, by the playlist). I’m enchanted by the notion that one could conceive of a project like this and just go out there without further ado and execute it. If it were me, I’d get utterly hung up about which record to post first. I’d be paralyzed with the implications of every choice: What tone would I be setting for the blog, what sort of readers might gravitate toward title x versus title y, what is the color scheme of the album’s cover art and will it clash with the blog template I’m currently employing? I’m exaggerating here for effect, Kurl, but only a little.