Michael’s army men succumbed first. They arranged two in static combat on a piece of tinfoil, locked them in the toaster oven, and narrated the results.
“Nuclear combat,” Mina said.
“Napalm is covering the hillside,” her brother said. The army men would darken, then all at once seem animated and start to buckle and move until they did begin to melt, their guns and arms indistinguishable, drippy appendages, their legs molten with the enemies’ legs. They’d stop it midmelt and let them dry, melted together — half men, half mutant blobs.
“They’re discovered like this, after the bomb.”
“Like Pompeii,” she said. Their little Joe faces melted so their entire heads looked like mouths screaming. Soon they had whole postapocalyptic armies, mass graves of melted, screaming men. The kitchen smelled foreign and toxic. Soon anything plastic found its way to the oven, had to be melted. Transformed by heat, watched through the window of the toaster oven. Later it occurred to Mina they were amazingly unsupervised as children. Didn’t anyone notice they were melting the entire world, from poker chips to Barbie heads to swizzle sticks? Couldn’t people smell it?
“You exaggerate,” she had said, years later, to Michael in one of his lucid moments. “One time, one afternoon, we melted an army guy in the toaster. I think the rest is just your pyro fantasies.”
But no, she was lying. She remembered. There was fire,and there was heat. Later there were the days of secret cigarettes on the roof, the red coals the only thing visible as they sat. She wanted to say, You tried to teach me how to do smoke rings, but it was like whistling with two fingers — one of those things you seemed able to do from instinct that I could never learn. But she didn’t say that.
The hospital. When she finally forced herself to visit Michael in the hospital, it was her first and last time. He chainsmoked, making an ugly sucking sound until the gesture seemed odd and foreign and creepy. She tried to ignore it, and then she saw under his robe maybe a hundred crescent-shaped, white puckered burns. Circles with the same diameters as cigarettes. Over and over on his skin. Over and over, not once, not a fire and heat experiment, not curiosity or a flirtation with danger — but a mechanical difference. Over and over like the strange sucking sound he made when he inhaled. Mina didn’t want to think about that, didn’t want to think of him like that. Wouldn’t.
But it wasn’t really the hospital. The estrangement started long before. The hospital was just the final articulation of it. The first time she noticed how different he was, how he had really changed, was during Thanksgiving vacation his freshman year at college.
Michael had had a rough start at school. He hadn’t made any friends. He was on again and off again with Lorene. He hadn’t called Mina much at all. Mina missed him completely; his visit was about the only thing she looked forward to that fall. But the strange thing was the longing didn’t stop after his return, it was still there as a kind of quiet sadness that couldn’t be comforted, sadness about how distant he seemed, sadness about not being ten. He was glamorously lean muscled andsuddenly tall. He wore a trench coat and a torn black T-shirt. He carried a dog-eared book, some Latinate-titled philosophy thing, which he fingered at times. He pretended that nothing had changed, jumping her and wrestling, giving her looks at dinner, watching midnight TV and giggling. But he fell into longer, more obscure monologues. He was almost patronizing.
“What do you want to do tonight?” she asked him.
“One — light air. Two — light breeze,” he said.
“What?”
“Three — gentle breeze. Four — moderate breeze. Five— fresh breeze. Six—”
“What are you talking about?” She looked up at him. He clutched his book and smiled, as though he was joking.
“Six — strong breeze. Seven — moderate gale. Eight — fresh gale. Nine — strong gale. Just who is she, this Gale? I want to meet this minxish thing.”
“Shut up.”
“Ten — whole gale. Oh, yes, yes, yes.” He laughed and clutched his book. His fingernails were dirty.
“If you don’t stop, Michael, I’m going to leave the room.”
“Eleven — storm. Twelve through seventeen — hurricane.”
“Will you just stop this?” Mina walked to the doorway and glared at him.
“Wait, Mina, wait, the best part, over seventeen— devastation.” Michael smiled.
“Why do you do that? I hate when you recite things. It has nothing to do with anything. What’s your problem?” Michael just stared at her, for a moment confused, then he laughed.
“I don’t know, it’s funny.” Michael looked at her. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re weird. You act strange,” Mina said, pouting, moving back to the couch. “What’s with that book? Is it really necessary to carry it with you at all times?”
“This? I like to read it sometimes.” Michael tossed the book in front of her. Mina ignored it. He smiled at her, then spoke flatly. “All propositions are of equal value. The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value — and if there were, it would be of no value.”
“Michael—”
He continued, smiling as if he were telling a joke, his eyes glancing right as they always did when he recited things, his performance face. Michael had always been what Mina’s father called mnemonically performative. But not so relentlessly, not withher.
“If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental. What makes it nonaccidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental. It must lie outside the world. Hence there are no ethical propositions.”
“Yeah, whatever.” Mina picked up the remote control and started skipping channels with a ridiculous velocity. “I’m sure you could recite the whole thing and I would never speak to you again. So stop. It’s—” She saw he was looking at the book, and she could tell he was saying it anyway, to himself. She felt he was not only not her brother, but a sort of imposter who took the superficial details of Michael and distorted them, ridiculed them.
“So like what’s it about, anyway?” she asked. He stopped his trance and looked at her.
“I don’t know. Mina, I have no idea. It’s abstracting yourself,well, self-reference, anyway, to a kind of philosophical autism. It’s like falling off a cliff, and then you’re stuck in a labyrinth of solipsism.”
“Yeah, whatever. Like as if anything you said actually means anything to me.”
“Well, that’s the point.” “
What. .ever.”
He frowned at her. “When did you become so flip?”
“I don’t know, maybe when you became such a freak.” She shook her head. He stopped fingering the book.
“Look,” he said, gesturing at the TV.“Imitation of Life.”
“Who cares,” Mina said. “I hate those old movies.”
“Yeah, right, Mina.” Michael smiled and tried to pull her down to the floor next to the TV.
“Don’t.”
“Mina, Lana Turner. Did you hear me?Lana. Lana Turner.Just her name, the way it sounds, likewanna turn her.Her aging platinum-poached face. Her turbaned head. Her dressing gown, her vanity set. All those amazing Edith Head clothes.” Mina reluctantly glanced at the TV. Michael took her hand and pulled her to the floor in front of Lana’s Technicolor fuchsia-lipped head.
“Frosted everything,” she said.
“Sandra Dee, Mina,” Michael said.
“Troy Donahue.”
Mina put the phone down. She had to check in with the restaurant. Then she had to see Max. Again. Nearly every day now. Just the thought of how it would go once she got there, how they would start right in without talking, was enough to make her feel better.