My brother Julian and I do not talk much. This isn't for lack of trying—I gave him an iPhone for Christmas some years back, but he pawned it for cash. Eventually he got an old flip phone held together by tape, but he kept giving me the wrong number. Made some scatterbrained apology, said he must have misremembered it. Did he have a working number? I never asked. The gray plastic block never left his clenched fist, as if he was a Very Important man expecting a Very Important phone call. A power broker. The flip phone model was so outdated, he said, that even "they" couldn't hack it.

The colder months were coming again. I strung up a tarp between some trees in the backyard, which was the extent of the shelter he would likely accept. I would have offered our spare room, the one Sean and I had been using for storage, but I knew that would be refused. This was only explicitly communicated to me once, in one of our coffee dates down at the pier. I chose the place, and he said he liked it. (Sitting outside in the breeze also mitigated his smell, which was not insubstantial.)

"You know, we have an extra bedroom," I said, looking out over the bay. "If you ever need it, I mean—"

"I can't," he said, drinking his latte with an ease that falsely suggested he drank several $6 lattes per day. "The silvering is in the wires. It dumbs me down."

"Oh yeah," I said. "That's right."

There's no easy way to say this: my brother thinks the world is ruled by an ancient race of cat people. According to him, the secret cabal of cat people—"Them," "the Meows," "the Big Ears," etc.—are pulling the strings at the highest rungs of society, manipulating the media and implementing policies to further their agenda. "Cats are survivors," Julian says. "It makes sense." They evade public attention by blinding the masses with "the silvering," a process that involves the dispersion of chemicals through microscopic silver threads in fiber-optic cables and electrical wiring, dulling certain parts of the brain cortex and, in effect, semantic memory. Or something.

"Really smart move," he said when we got our dog Dudley. "Dogs are sensitive to ionic disturbances in the air."

I remember Sean looking at him, blinking a lot, and saying something eminently reasonable like "So true..." or "Yeah, I think I read that somewhere..." before quickly turning to me and rerouting the conversation. I've trained him well.

(I don't know if that's a good thing.)

"Do you need a ride somewhere?" I once asked Julian after coffee, walking with him along the pier. "I'm just parked in the lot."

Julian shook his head, fidgeting with the phone.

"I'm meeting a friend down here," he said, indicating a stretch of railing. "My friend Bill works nearby."

I have never met or seen Bill. I am almost certain that "Meeting Bill" is a convenient excuse to avoid being in a car with me, to avoid having me drop him off at the park again, the mall with clean bathrooms, or the lenient Starbucks on Central and Pine, but I'm not really certain of anything anymore. Was he Julian's lover? Our parents are gone now, but I can so clearly picture their reactions: Two gay sons? Dad would say, throwing his arms up. Did we upset a witch?!

Nothing else has worked—state hospital, group home, having him live with me, having him live with our aunt and uncle. Nothing. (He was only arrested once, but maybe that's a product of stupid racist cops more than anything else.) The silvering is everywhere, in all the new phones and all the new computers, expanding now to drones and satellites: last month, he was camped near the interstate with a cardboard sign that read "Don't look up." I don't go looking for him, but we inevitably bump into each other. He has his haunts, too. Sometimes I wonder: am I the planet around which he orbits, a gravitational anchor in the vast gulp of everything? Don't look up. Maybe he's the planet. "This house is so drafty," Sean says one evening, pulling on a sweater, "Do you think there's a problem with the insulation?" Panic. "No, probably not," I say, suddenly nauseous. What if we moved and I couldn't find Julian, couldn't get a chance to tell him? His phone doesn't really work. What if we fall out of alignment?

"It's going to storm tonight," I say, zipping up my jacket as we perform our post-coffee ritual once more. "You can always come by—"

"No," Julian says, eyes filled with agitation, lips chapped and cheeks so red they looked bruised. "I mean, I can't—Bill and I are going to the movies. He used to work at the theater and knows how to avoid the cameras."

"Cameras?"

"So the Big Ears don't see," he replies, looking annoyed by my ignorance.

"Oh yeah," I say. "Right."

So no, I'm not certain of anything anymore. Certainty, at least around Julian, feels like a betrayal. Questioning him never accomplished much, and his body can't bear the contradiction: he rocks back and forth on his toes, obsessively tucking his hair behind his ears and cracking his knuckles. His pupils dart around, unfocused. Such confrontations made him into someone I really didn't recognize, and the Julian I grew up with—the good student, the frog collector, my mischievous kid brother—disappeared completely. Did he take advantage of this? Did he know how hesitant I was to call him out now? Maybe it's more accurate to say that, in the face of resistance, my brother forfeits the stranger I know for the stranger I don't.

That night, a storm rages over the city. Rain pelts the roof. I open the blinds, and Julian is there, a poncho-wearing lump sitting under the tarp in the dark.

He is talking into the flip phone.

Jeremiah Moriarty lives in Minneapolis. He has work in or coming from Split Lip, Fanzine, Cosmonauts Avenue, Hobart, Juked and others.

Read his postcard.

Detail of photo on main page courtesy of Duncan C.

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