By TAMAS DOBOZY
The videos of Christmas dinner were for Mom, or so Pete said. His gift, honoring the hours she’d spent preparing the meals. But he couldn’t fool me—or her. He filmed the dinners because it got him out of eating what she cooked: the tofurkey he hated, the beet salad that made him gag, the quinoa that sparkled like a plateful of sand. Pete would rather have starved than eaten food he didn’t like, which was most food, staying skinny as a nail with the hunger he preferred, as if craving was better than sustenance, desire superior to satisfaction, and want itself his personal god.
The first video was made shortly after my brother came back for Christmas from university in Montreal.
The camera flits to faces around the table. Maybe it’s the dim lighting, the garish wash of decorations on the tree, but everyone looks like soldiers who’ve spent the last four years gnawed on by rats in the trenches of Flanders. Except instead of torn-up meadows, mud pits, blasted trees, the table is a no-man’s-land of my mother’s food, and the mortars being lobbed back and forth are words.
Who the hell decorated the tree? Uncle Bill asks. It’s as lurid as a porno. To which Aunt Jackie responds, There is nothing wrong with pornography. She looks at us like a marquee star staring down her extras, because we’ve heard this before, we’ve been hearing it for years, the whole spiel—pro-sex feminism, the need for women to take over the making of erotic films, ending the misogynist raunch of the sex industry, the poetics of a visionary feminist erotica, paving the way for expressions of alternative sexualities!
From the look on my face, I have no idea what she’s talking about, but as someone who’s only recently discovered the joys of puberty, first solo, then in groups of two, I can’t help but agree: Porn is necessary, desperately necessary, and while I don’t know a thing about the feminism stuff, I’m all in on the pro-sex.
My other aunt, Lilian, has towering black hair, like a cross between a 1950s country singer and a still of a vampire’s mistress from silent-era horror. Pornography, she sneers, is the scrawl of perverts on the walls of ancient Greece. It’s the reduction of the other to an object of desire. And any objectification of anybody for any reason is misogyny. I don’t care if it’s a bunch of your so-called feminists pleasuring themselves!
The camera returns to my face again, where you can see it in my expression: Given the sorts of fantasies I’d started having—fantasies no living human, maybe not even my filthy ghosts, would have wanted any part in—I have to admit Aunt Lilian has a point too.
But before either of them can gear up for a fresh assault, Pete sighs in the background—the sound crackles faintly across the recording—weary with years of listening. Hey, he says, there are whole groups of people in Germany, and elsewhere for all I know, who find shit sexy. I mean literally. Shitting on others; being shit on; in the most refined of cases eating shit. Coprophagia, they call it. Who are you and me to tell anyone—any consenting adult—what they are or are not allowed to find sexy? You’ve just got to keep an open mind about these things!
Lifted forks are lowered. A mouthful of wine is held for a second in the cheek, then quickly swallowed. Dad looks at his food, fork hovering above the plate, as if it’s suddenly gone rotten. My brother-in-law Jorge jerks his napkin off his lap, angrily wipes his lips, tosses it on top of his half-finished tofurkey.
And that, Aunt Jackie says, is most definitely not what I’m talking about. But Aunt Lilian senses an opening: See! See! That’s what I’ve been arguing for years. This is exactly where your line of thinking leads. Copro—What do you call it? Have you even seen the insides of a porno store lately? Filth and degradation and pedophilia and incest. Middle-aged men with the teenage babysitter. Stepmothers with stepsons. Stepfathers with stepdaughters. Aunt Jackie’s unfazed. She starts to repeat herself: That is not at all what I’m talking… But Pete swivels the camera onto Aunt Lilian: It sounds to me like someone is going to need to practice a little more open-mindedness. Aunt Lilian leaps out of her chair, clawing at the lens. The film ends.
I wouldn’t say we were radicals; I wouldn’t say we weren’t. Everyone in the family voted left, but that didn’t matter. Voting was just what people did. What mattered was how far left your vote went, how far left you took it. We had an understanding: For the general public, politics were confined to reading certain newspapers, voting for their team every four years, and making fun of the other side for being so stupid. But in my family, we called that political inaction. We called that being part of the machine. You needed to attend rallies, send letters, sign petitions, and, if you were really committed, you needed to engage in the sorts of protests that left you with a criminal record. A rap sheet was the highest honor; without it you had no legitimacy. Uncle Bill wore an ankle bracelet for two years, along with a number of his associates, after being caught trying to pour sugar into the gas tanks of directional fellers and wheeled harvesters and bogie skidders in an attempt to save the old growth of Mill Valley. Jorge had to be sentenced retroactively for disturbing the peace after he chained himself to a Japanese whaling ship while covered head to toe in fish guts so rotten no cop would touch him. A cousin, Cindy, was arrested for taking a police car for a joyride, supposedly to hamper the mobility of the police state—that’s what she said—but we were suspicious because she had a mohawk and liked to party.
Pete was the family outlier, dragging himself to every march, rally, protest we were made to attend—last out of bed, late eating breakfast, slow into his coat and shoes, needing to pee before we’d even pulled out of the driveway. I watched him like a young disciple. He was the boy sitting curbside with the picket between his knees, reluctant, dispirited, thirsty; the boy who lets himself be moved back by the crowd until he’s out of sight of the rest of the family, so far on the periphery, so not part of it, he might as well go into the nearest corner store for a bag of chips and some candy and an hour at the pinball machine while everyone else chants and fist-pumps; the boy who always wanted to hear about the other side from the other side—he didn’t want to hear it from you.
On the afternoon I’m remembering, he glanced back from the Charlie’s Angels pinball machine and found me in the aisle behind him, having disengaged my hand from Mom or Dad or some aunt and uncle too focused on the cause to notice my absence, and trailed after him. He hissed, Get over here, and offered me a handful of chips or Smarties. Then we sat by the comic rack and he read to me the latest developments in The Amazing Spider-Man, and it felt like everything I could possibly want was compressed into that tiny circle of him and me and the story he patiently explained, panel to panel, making sure I got it. When Mom and Dad finally found us, Pete jumped up. It was my idea; I made him come along; if you’re going to be mad at someone, be mad at me. It sounds protective, I know, but was it? Part of it felt like he wanted them to be mad, to blame him, because it wasn’t enough, what he was getting, what they were giving us, and maybe if they were forced to recognize what he’d done—taking me into a corner store to rot my guts and mind with candy and pinball and comic books—and why he’d done it—because, holy shit, another Sunday spoiled by having to attend a protest, like seriously?—they’d also be forced to admit their part in it. Maybe Pete had even allowed himself to be followed, using me as a prop in the game of outrage he’d learned to play, the tic-tac-toe of his X’s against the O’s of Mom and Dad’s encirclements, their unseeing of him, in a game growing more sophisticated as it wore on.
By 1987 Pete was tired of learning to be an artist and decided he was just going to be one. His professors couldn’t get their heads around the videos he’d started making, unable to sort the art from the documentary, to find in them any intention of Pete’s beyond pointing the camera and hitting record. They were videos of us. But it felt like only I could see what it was that Pete had recorded. He’d turned us into a hole, and his visits home into an exit, filming not so much the parts of the world Mom and Dad and the various aunts and uncles had denied him, but denial itself. His exit led nowhere. It was there in how thin he’d become. Pete had always been a sickly kid, gangly and tall, so skinny that, when he shifted, you could almost hear his bones rattling inside his skin. November would knock him out for a week. He could barely get his chin halfway to a chin-up bar. But he came home to us skinnier than ever. In fact, I’m not sure he ate at all while he was back, certainly never in front of me. At most I’d see him with a glass of water, taking eyedropper sips, looking as empty as the camera eye he trained on us, recording the world he’d lost, and who’d lost it for him, and how, when you lose that as a kid, it becomes unrecoverable forever. That dead-eyed lens, vacuuming up the scenery, including us—it terrified me.
Aunt Klara had gotten into liberation theology, part of her research on Latin America for a doctorate in political science, and in Pete’s video of that year’s Christmas, she plays it for us, every note of her new belief: If there was ever a reason for God to exist, it would be to help the oppressed band together to eliminate poverty—and by extension wealth—from the face of the Earth.
We’d been raised as devout atheists, with all the fire and brimstone you’d expect, damning the witch hunts and inquisitions and papal infallibility and burnings at the stake, and Aunt Klara’s words felt dangerous, if not blasphemous—giving God a reason to exist. Hadn’t God proven for the billionth time—via genocide and thalidomide babies and the invention of skinning people alive—that he in fact didn’t exist? Didn’t God love to prove, over and over again, that he wasn’t there?
My father mashes tofurkey between the tines of his fork, seconds away from another history lecture on the victories won by the working class through their own blood and muscle, but it’s Jorge, Aunt Klara’s husband, who speaks: Listen, honey, the whole point of revolution is to make people realize the collective is the only agency there is, and God’s got nothing to do with it except to help postpone that realization.
Well, I don’t know, says Pete. There are times when I’m aware of God’s existence. For instance, when I’ve stubbed my toe into the concrete slab under the woodstove for the second time in two minutes and tear the nail half off and I yell out, God fucking damnit Jesus fucking Christ!—he’s definitely alive for me then. If I kept stubbing my toe I’d believe in him forever.
Aunt Klara ignores him. No, you listen to me, honey: Maybe the spiritual is exactly that…
Oh, please, God, Pete moans from behind the camera. Please, please, please, make them realize their collective power in shutting up together. Aunt Klara and Jorge turn in synch, as if they’re taking Pete’s advice. You know what, Pete? Aunt Klara says. Your little apolitical act is chickenshit conservative bullshit. Everything is…
I know, I know, says Pete. Everything is political, including what’s not political. You know what kind of theology I believe in?
Aunt Klara and Jorge aren’t interested, nobody around the table’s interested, but Pete tells them anyhow. Not liberation theology, he says, but quantum theology. My god exists and doesn’t exist at the same time. She blinks in and out of being. How else do you explain Gandhi and the Holocaust in the same century? Antibiotics and the Cultural Revolution? Advances in anesthetics and the Holodomor?
When are you leaving? Aunt Klara asks. Jorge nods. Yeah, when?
Me, I’m laughing. It’s like Pete has pulled the words and phrases out of my head and tossed them at Aunt Klara and Jorge. And it’s wrong to laugh, I know, but this kind of laughter can’t be stifled by knowing. It keeps going, creating itself out of itself like some perpetual motion machine, each laugh generating another and another and another until I’m bent over and it feels like my ribs are cracking.
1988 was the last year Pete came home, a milestone Christmas. It was the first time we got a live tree, on Uncle Bill’s insistence—the root system still attached, covered in sponge and burlap, needing to be regularly watered. The last video begins with that: the soggy sack, my mother’s watering can, panning outward to us seated around the table.
Uncle Bill, a researcher in climate science, then an obscure field, is talking us into replanting the tree that very night, after the festivities. Let’s take it to the eighteenth green of the Eastlake Golf Club, he says. Golf courses are, he reminds us for the thousandth time, the H-bomb in humanity’s war against the environment. Jorge suggests we plant it in the parking spot of the CEO of the Germaine Fertilizer Co., who authorized the illegal dumping of effluent into the Grand River. Aunt Lilian glares at Aunt Jackie and says, Let’s go down to the Red Hot Video on Victoria and toss it through the window. The tree, replies Uncle Bill, as if speaking to a child, cannot put down roots in a store.
Hey, I know, my father says: Let’s put it in the slash off A-Branch and get some snowy owls to move into it. Oh fuck, Pete whispers behind the camera. You can almost hear his eyes rolling in their sockets. My father’s old-school, a union guy, Local 71, with an obscure math for how many union families could be fed from the untouched timber set aside for the snowy owl, the sum of which comes to this: No work equals no food equals no people around to enjoy the environment. But Uncle Bill has his own arithmetic: No environment equals no food equals no people to work jobs, union or otherwise. The camera spins full circle, smears our faces together—watching it later, I will feel seasick—while my brother says: No Christmas dinner equals no work for Dad and Uncle Bill arguing equals a pretty good environment.
But before either of them can respond, my mother steps in. She’s been volunteering at Sign the Petition! tours, wielding a microphone at the front of the bus, describing who lives in the mansions and monster homes at each stop, the terrible things they’ve done—the guy who deals in armaments, the guy who funds the oil lobby, the guy dedicated to changing laws around corporate funding for election campaigns. I know the perfect spot for that tree, she says.
Why go way out there? Pete asks, an edge of hysteria to his voice. Let’s just burn the tree on the front lawn. Tell the neighbors we’re protesting the hijacking of Christmas by capitalism.
Uncle Bill stares at him a while, then shakes his head sadly, as you would at an idiot. Carbon emissions, he says.
Emissions what? my father asks.
Later that week, as Pete packed to go, three days earlier than planned, he told me it was the last one, he would not be back for another Christmas. The seven years between us felt like a lifetime then, a whole chapter of family history I should have been part of but wasn’t, that I’d arrived too late for. Back before you were born, when you were still a baby, Mom and Dad and everyone else were even worse hippies than they are now, he told me.
He was turning his underwear back and forth, trying out folds, like he didn’t want to go, or he wanted me to tear them from his hands, force him to stay or at least promise to come back. But I knew it by then, all that underwear being folded and refolded, for what it was: a trap. He wanted me to admit that, like everyone else, I saw him only through myself. If I tried to stop him, he’d tell me I was just like the rest—I saw only my own needs and desires. Don’t you realize how much I hate this place? he would’ve said. How badly I need to get out? Don’t you want anything for me other than your emotional security? I didn’t know how to play it, so I stood very still, watching the underwear pile up, get disassembled, pile up again.
Back then, he continued, we weren’t even allowed to call it Christmas—not like now. It was Festive Holiday, or Winter Solstice, or Christian Appropriation of Pagan Celebrations Day. He snorted. We didn’t get presents. We got thought experiments. One year, I got a bundle of used clothes from Mom, with a handwritten disquisition on how the fashion industry keeps itself going by forcing you to get rid of perfectly good clothes every three months when new ones come into style. It’s true, he said, looking down and jerking the clothes out of his suitcase and rolling them into tighter bundles to make more space. But it’s merciless! One year Uncle Bill gave me a Saturday for a Christmas present. Can you believe it? Any Saturday of my choice, and we’d go out picking trash off the Saint Jacob’s hiking trail, then have lunch on him afterwards. I was nine years old, Pete said. I thought it might be worth it: pick up a little garbage and then get to eat French fries. But we ended up at some vegan place, eating food that tasted like boiled pencil erasers. But the worst gift, every fucking year, was the library books Judy Gaines gave us. She’s dead now, thank God. Mom’s best friend. Yeah, library books! In gift wrap and everything. She said the real gift was the thought she’d put into picking out the books, the hours spent considering this one over that. But we’d better read them fast, because they’re due in a month. You know what she said to me when she saw how unhappy I was? Why waste all those trees, all that paper? Can you believe that shit? Why waste all those resources on books people buy and read maybe once. There are perfectly good books in the library that get read over and over because some people know how to share.
My brother groaned: Judy told me this every year like I was a bad kid—or, even worse, a criminal. As if there was something wrong with me expecting anything else. Pete looked at his suitcase, packed now as tight as he could get it, a ring of clothes around the edges, with a big empty hole in the middle. I wondered if I could crawl into it. If I’d fit.
He sighed. I’d go back to school after every Christian Appropriation of Pagan Celebrations Day and there’d be kids with new skates or jackets or comic books or action figures, and what’d I have? An essay about why my ratty secondhand clothes were better than their brand-new clothes. A fucking library book. And a Saturday picking garbage! Do you realize my earliest memory is opening a box filled with creased coloring books and broken crayons, probably lifted from someone’s garbage, and bursting into tears? It took me seven tantrums across seven years, from four to eleven, before Mom made the rule that every kid gets one gift they really want, brand-new, no questions asked. Which was around the time you would have started getting the recycled crayons my tantrums saved you from. Pete looked at me. So, you know, you’re welcome. Mom never forgave me for making her do that, moping around every year all disappointed. She actually said that—it was my fault. I was bad. Want, want, want—that was all there was to me. Need, need, need—that was how I thanked them all! Festive Holiday was supposed to be about us being together, the moment of it, the intentions, the happening, rather than greed and stockpiling.
You know what? I shook my head. His suitcase was now zipped and belted, and I was chewing my tongue and blinking rapidly to keep my eyes clear. There’s a point where being right—and they’re right, all of them, all the time—sucks the life out of a room. It turns you into a corpse on strings, you know? Dead except for how they want to see you move. Who in his right mind would want to live in a utopia with these people? I’ll take hell.
Pete turned and kicked the suitcase once, twice, three times, until he’d kicked it off the bed. He left it there, on the floor, stuffed full of everything he’d owned, plus that hole in the middle—the one thing he could both leave and carry away with him.
The postcards we got from Pete after that time were mailed from New York. The stamp across the postage told us as much. But there was no return address. The postcards were homemade, a photograph pasted to card stock, and the words written on the back revealed nothing. They were reports of freak weather, descriptions of art deco buildings, three-sentence anecdotes about the rats in Washington Square Park.
He never came home again for Christmas.
This resulted in one huge blowout with my mother, who hit the wall with the postcards. She’d spent hours every night, on weekends, staring at the images he’d pasted to the card stock, presumably pictures he’d taken, or, I guessed, stills from videos he was working on. One night I overheard her yelling at him on the phone, and snuck down to the basement and gently slid the extra receiver off its cradle. If you want no part of this family, then you needn’t come back, she said, her voice freighting him with guilt. My brother was quiet on the other end. A train screeched in the background. There was a blast of air. My mother didn’t seem to care if he was responding. These pictures you’re sending, is that our punishment? Our spanking? Is it mine? I’m sorry if you suffered because we were trying to do some good in the world. Was that it? Did you suffer? Very much? She was trying to be hard, but the words sounded more like begging, a plea, each letter splayed open in its hurt and defeat like a rib cage on the surgery table.
If you’re against our politics, you’re against us, she said. We are those politics.
There was a long clanging sound as a distant train coupled violently with another. No, my brother finally said, his voice distant and airy, a forced kindness. You’re not. Nobody is, not really. And it’s not the politics I’m against. Or your politics isn’t what you think it is. It’s not what you believe; the real belief is in how you practice those beliefs… But here he was cut off by the screech of air brakes. Afterwards, he only had time to say goodbye. I stayed on the phone a long time after he and my mother had hung up, still hearing that screech, the shriek of it, the stream of disapproval through which he’d tried to make his own voice heard, until his voice became that sound itself.
Everyone found the images on the postcards extremely disturbing.
Pete had gotten skinnier and skinnier with each return visit, we’d all seen it, but even with that, it was hard to believe the photographs on the postcards were real. He must be using makeup, I thought, and lights, and costumes, to look that sick, so loose in what clothes he wore, so loose in his skin, you felt his presence not in what remained of him but in what wasn’t there, in the half of him that had vanished.
We must have flipped through them a thousand times.
My brother in the half-light of morning, pale and emaciated, as if he was about to evaporate, or already had, and this was all that was left.
My brother on a street corner, so skinny in his pants and shirt it seemed as if he could slip free of them just by straightening his back.
My brother shirtless on the edge of an old bathtub, with lesions on both arms that seemed too big, too heavy, for his skin, like silver dollars on eyelids.
My brother in a Speedo, held in the arms of a friend the way Tarzan holds Jane, smiling into the camera, so diminished his head seems incapable of carrying its teeth.
My brother with translucent skin, daring us to look through him.
I kept examining the photographs and noticing a strange light, an excess of shadow, a layer at certain edges of Pete’s skin, as if he’d applied pancake mix.
Everybody in the family had their theories, voiced during our new Christmas ritual of passing around the latest postcard in the living room.
Aunt Jackie was positive it was AIDS. She talked about Pete as if he was a martyr. She brought up the names of doctors and scientists on the front lines of the “gay epidemic,” as it was still being called by the enemy back then, identified by Aunt Jackie as Reagan and his skeletal wife and cruel administration that refused to respond to the crisis. She spoke at length of the prevalence of homophobia in our official institutions, of the indifference of the status quo toward people involved in alternate modes of sexual being.
Uncle Joe wondered if it wasn’t poisoning of some kind. Cities were terrible environments, he said. Lead in the water; industrial waste dumped illegally, buried in places it shouldn’t be; building materials long outlawed and linked to cancer left to stand, to be rented out, made available, no warning signs anywhere, people herded into them like vermin for extermination. Had anybody had the postcards tested for heavy metals, PCBs, insecticides? Had anybody tracked down the parts of Manhattan that Pete’s various phone numbers originated from? We should cross-reference those against industrial development.
Aunt Lilian said the photographs were the body of protest against misogynist institutions. She said Pete was clearly using physical wasting to draw attention to the embodied norms of masculinity. It was a hunger strike. Any day now, she said, we’d find a newspaper article showing the same photographs in some gallery, with a reviewer going on about the politics of art-making in the age of Reagan’s cowboy doctrine, and there would be the skinny kid, her nephew, talking dirt on our rotted society, his eyes otherwise wheeling with alternate utopias.
My father said Pete needed a real job. Food on the table. Roof over his head. It was the constant attacks on unions by the forces of neoliberalism that had led to such dismal prospects for boys of his generation. He spoke wistfully of the postwar boom, as if its disappearance equaled my brother’s wasting, as if Pete was not his son at all but the ghostly embodiment of a whole generation handed a substandard existence.
Me, I kept looking at the photographs as if they were a performance, though I couldn’t figure out what was being performed, except for maybe protest itself—protest without object or aim. They were too open to interpretation, even as they badly wanted you to interpret them, tempting you to come up with the key that would decode their meaning, or, more accurately, that would fill up their emptiness, their demand for substance. Nobody else could see it, but I could: Pete’s fixation on what he’d missed, how he’d come to feed on it, like an emptiness trying to eat itself until it was full. This was Pete’s art.
My mother never did get to New York to visit Pete—not that he invited her—because she couldn’t figure out where he was living, no matter how hard she tried to track it down, and she kept tracking it, or trying to, for years. Pete would drop hints to where he was over the phone, but a few months later, as my mother was organizing the trip, she’d call him back to firm up plans and find the number disconnected, the operator on the other end speaking like someone circling around a connection, dead to love. More months would go by before Pete got in touch again. She’d give him hell, telling him this was no way to treat her. Didn’t he care at all about what other people were going through, what they might want, what they deserved? No, he replied, he’d been trained not to think that way, he’d been trained to take no notice of what other people might think whatsoever. All that mattered was what you thought of the world, he said, how you arranged other people and their places in your idea of it. My mother hadn’t a clue to what he was talking about, and after the phone calls, she’d ask me to explain, but I couldn’t. She was too invested in herself as a victim to ever understand it.
After that, Pete barely appeared in the postcards, or, rather, they kept him in the act of vanishing.
There’s one with his face half sunken into the surface of a mirror.
There’s another of a distended human form behind a translucent curtain.
There’s a third with a pair of bulging eyes peering from between soap suds.
When a cousin speculated that it was heroin, the photos were passed around once more, re-inspected for track marks, collapsed veins, receding gumlines, but where one person found a speck of evidence, another said it was just dirt on the camera lens. Cindy jumped in and said it had to be prescription drugs. She knew what she was talking about, believe you me! The pharmaceutical industry had the government by the balls; they were paying doctors big bucks to prescribe stuff whose main purpose was to turn all of us into addicts, hollowing out an entire population from the inside. She knew!
Overfishing, Jorge said, looking at the photographs. Giant drift nets towed across the ocean, picking up every single thing, legal or otherwise. Porpoises slaughtered in hidden bays in islands off Japan. Whales driven to extinction.
What any of this had to do with the postcards, none of us could figure out.
Chemicals in the food, my mother said. He’s eating meat, I know it, pumped full of steroids and antibiotics and God knows what else, and processed shit, instant rice and potatoes from plastic bags and cardboard boxes, riddled with chemicals mixed in labs. She was so worried. I’d find her at night sitting at the kitchen table with the postcards and a coffee, going on to me about how Pete was never smart about food, how all he ever wanted was the bags of chips on the top rack at the supermarket, tubs of ice cream, candy by the pound, and that she’d told him, warned him year after year, there were thousands of kids developing intolerances, allergies, immune deficiencies—girls menstruating at age nine—but he never believed her, or he didn’t care, he always just wanted the snacks even knowing all that. The amount of times I had to say no to that kid, my mother said. Millions and billions of times. She shook her head as if it was his fault, as if she was the one who’d suffered, as if the casualty of all that refusal had been her.
By the mid-1990s, my brother stopped sending the postcards. I pictured him considering one last photograph, drafting one last empty paragraph, then saying, Fuck it, and tossing them into the garbage. During the Christmas of 1995, shortly before I also left home to go to university, Aunt Klara confided to me that in her opinion Pete was neither a drug user, nor an AIDS patient, nor poisoned. He’d become an ascetic—a Buddhist or Jain or follower of the ancient Coptic texts of Abanoub Salib. She and Pete had talked about this long ago, or he’d listened to her talk about it, or it seemed like he had, she was sure of it. Salib was a practitioner of apatheia, which proposed a renunciation of all passions—gluttony, lust, greed, pride—all the things that lurked at the base of the vast superstructure of late capitalism and its exaltation of the individual will and the individual prize; and if you looked closely at Pete’s photographs, very very closely, you’d see a universal refusal of all modes of selfhood, whose logical end could only possibly be the end of the postcards themselves, a full stop to their creation, since that too was an effort of the ego.
What would Pete have said to that? He’d have pulled the lever on the chute under Aunt Klara until she dropped like the Coyote in the Roadrunner cartoon: feet, then hands, then torso, then face, until only the eyes are left in the air, popped out of their sockets.
And yet the photograph that came to matter most to me was exactly the one Aunt Klara spoke of: the unsent picture, empty in its frame, not there. I was living in Montreal then, its dirty east end, in the midst of Quebecois resentments, my small flat floating two stories above Rue Saint-André, its windows on the river, bobbing with ice, shrouded under squalls. I wandered the city between classes. There, north of Parc La Fontaine, there was a used bookstore, a hole of a place, mainly French, secondhand volumes jammed into bookshelves in no particular order, tossed into boxes stacked along the entry corridor, rising from the floor in pillars toward the ceiling. With my limited French, I most often found myself in the fine arts section, looking at books with pictures, examining plates of sculpture, etchings, oils. And that’s where I found it, in the middle of a stack, between cast-off volumes of Cezanne and McCarthy—The Gert Snyders Compendium. I’d not heard the name before, but the cover image was a skinny man in a Speedo being held by another man also in a Speedo, submerged to the thighs in a sea of torn photographs. The man being held was Pete.
I found all the pictures my brother had sent, now with titles—“Summers with the Wraith,” “Tarzan and Jane’s X-Ray,” “Fingerprinting the Ghost”—and dates, plus dozens of others. They were stills from videos, lifted from the stream; and there, in the middle of the book, in a section called “Seasonal Holiday,” were reproductions of our family dinners, actors standing in for everyone, from Uncle Bill to Aunt Lilian to me. At first I thought I was being narcissistic, but no, there I was. The actor playing me sat right at the focal point of every image. It was like we’d never finished that conversation the day he left, or the conversation had been misplaced, and here it was again, planted for me to find. But of course that was wrong—finding it was an accident, and as an accident it made more sense, since Pete’s whole childhood had been wasted on trying to escape the rats’ maze he’d been locked into with every turn of the conversation, desperate for someone, anyone, to admit the unexpected, the surprise, the infinite alternatives to every rule. He didn’t know if I’d find the book, but he didn’t need to know, since acknowledging the odds of it happening, the slimmer the better, would have been enough for him.
The pictures were lurid, colorized, each figure posed with the rigidity of mannequins, mouths open in force of repetition, spitting their lines in what I could only imagine were robotic squawks—Jorge, Aunt Klara, Aunt Jackie—nobody happy except when they got to deliver their sound bites, release their outrage, force their visions on the rest of us. Except for me—my mouth was always closed—staring straight into the camera as if it was possible to be over there, not in the captured image but on the other side of it, in the freedom, the plenitude, of the viewer’s side of the lens, beyond the chains of dialogue endlessly repeated, endlessly binding us together. That was Pete’s invitation: Here, step through the screen, you’ll find me.
But my screen that afternoon was the store’s window onto February, Montreal wasted to thirty below, the flitting yellow of streetlamps, wind-forms of snow various in the air, frost wreathing the panes in dead flowers melted and reformed by the hour. That’s what I saw through my screen that day—Pete’s winter—a desire never satisfied, never delivered to the other side of itself, moving toward no object—only Pete would have called it hunger. Even if he thought he’d made it, escaped—found a space apart from the fundamentalists seated around the Christian Appropriation of Pagan Celebrations Day table every year, glutted on tofurkey and themselves, needing each other only as walls to bounce echoes off—he hadn’t, not really. He’d received disapproval and sent it back, been deprived of his reality and deprived them of theirs, was himself denied and denied them of himself. Maybe not with the same words, maybe not point by point, but he’d given what he’d gotten all the same, rejecting them over and over just as he’d been rejected, until he’d rejected everyone, including himself, to smithereens.
It was a surrender, and why I wouldn’t follow. I would float free of it.
They would, of course, not understand.
And with a last look at that photograph—my brother’s bones and Speedo and sea of ripped photographs—I did just as I’d decided I would: I bought the book and carried it through the afternoon’s subzero until I could get to a phone to call my mother and tell her what I’d found, even if I knew she would say it was proof, Pete had cut himself off, he had no use for us, we might as well be dead, and I would tell her, No, it was proof he needed to keep disappearing from our view to recover himself, to keep waving us away as a signal for us to attend to him, to keep making himself missing so we’d realize he’d never been the person we’d seen, and she would say, You’re a sucker, he planted that book as another fuck-you, and you fell for it, and I would say, Bullshit, he didn’t know I’d find it, but he wanted me to, and she would say, No, you’re wrong, and I would say, No, you’re wrong, and then we’d both be laughing despite ourselves, as if Pete’s secret gift—a humor hidden so well it was hidden even from himself—had stepped back into the room, pulling us from the rigor mortis of those old arguments, back into the uncertainties of being alive again.
Tamas Dobozy has published over ninety short stories in journals such as One Story, Fiction, AGNI, and Granta. He won an O. Henry Prize in 2011 and the Gold Medal for Fiction at the National Magazine Awards in 2025. He lives in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada.
