Before convincing my brother not to kill himself, I checked in at a desert resort.
“Tell me about your pool,” I said to the woman at the Phoenician. I wore a charcoal sharkskin bespoke suit. I trailed her across the tiles, wobbly on Ativan. She was unsparing in her detail—this was clear from the movements of her mouth alone—but I could no longer listen once confronted with the peculiar spectacle of the water: a vast pool, glistening. A fountain in the center offered up water into the light.
Yellow cloth cabanas. A pronged block of mountain. Beneath the sun there were no people on the chairs. I stood there, vacant, finding beauty in all that was unoccupied. The Phoenician woman continued to detail features of the water mass as if my behavior corresponded to a regional logic.
I walked to the restaurant to meet my brother and his wife. “Whatever you do, make sure you don’t mention IHOP,” my sister-in-law, Melinda, had told me. “There’s bad blood between the Original and the International Houses.”
The Original House of Pancakes appeared to be the true remains of an original something. Bordering a Motel 6, the building was a squat two-story with rooms I imagined smelled of moist cigarettes and shotgun shells. Inside all the walls were pink with green trim, the booths a worn sage. The waitresses all wore the same wrinkled pink as the walls. Grill smoke, silverware, the frightening hue of flesh. Drip coffee. Skull-sized pancakes. A gray mug was placed before me and refilled precisely to the brim in the lost pause after a sip. Soon I was prepared to never exit this space, to spend all eternity bearing witness to the rising mornings. I waited for my family while staring at the menu, wishing instead of fried eggs I had ordered the silver dollar combo.
◆
My brother was forty, a full eight years my senior, but he showed no obvious signs of his age, not the indefatigable paunch nor the victorious bald spot—only a bitterness common to those who felt themselves impossibly diverging from their true hopes. Steve had many hopes. This was what fueled his dreams and his despair.
For example: he wanted to end education inequality and be a millionaire. He was not a teacher. He was not even a teacher’s aide. He was a mailperson, a frontline man for the United States Postal Service. And he now advanced his family’s financial ruin through the pursuit of an ill-advised investment. A 1985 Ferrari Testarossa, getaway ready—a hardtop with less than fifty-thousand miles, nearly four-hundred horsepower, and door panel strakes. Steve bought the car with all of his savings from a dentist in Gamblers Anonymous. The plan was sold at the same time as the car. Flip the Ferrari for double the cost at the upcoming Barret Jackson auction, where carnival workers pedaled funnel cakes to fiscally-conservative men who bid against each other for vehicles long out of production.
I remained unclear, however, on exactly why this led to my brother being found unconscious in the driver’s seat of his mail truck. The cause of near-death, an intentional overdose. Had he not been found in the truckyard by a janitor in need of an unapproved smoke break, it would have been too late for my brother to have his stomach pumped, be kept for observation in the psychiatric hospital, receive a bloated bill, and then be tossed forth to his wife and children, where in the days since his release he remained in bed, devoted to the ceiling. Nor did I understand why my sister-in-law thought I could possibly help.
◆
Melinda arrived first, in full uniform, with a searching twirl near the door. She was talking into her headphones as she walked toward my back booth, her face scrunched. My sister-in-law carried herself with the athletic ease of a much smaller woman. Her ponytail seemed tight enough to constrict blood flow, and her gun moved on her crowded hip as she walked.
“I’ll need to place you on a brief hold so we can resolve the issue.” This was what Melinda said, smiling, as she took the seat across from me. She held the cord of her headphones close to her mouth. “I’m doing remote work now,” she said. “No—not you. You just need to wait on hold.” She took out one headphone, and I heard the disturbing melody that announced a long wait. Melinda was a police officer, and I reminded her of this. “But I picked up a second job,” she explained. “Outsourced customer service support. The scripting is very simple. Empathize, then ask the person to wait. I put him on hold, he hangs up, and I get paid eighteen bucks an hour. An hour? That’s more than I make for my real job.” I found this confusing given her not insubstantial promotion. Melinda said, “But the promotion didn’t come with a raise.”
Melinda ordered the 49er flapjacks with a side of bacon. There was such exhaustion in her face that I wanted to reach over the table to hug her. Faint hold music played through the dangling headphone while she spoke.
“The Ferrari ruined everything,” Melinda was saying. “Steve became massively depressed right after he bought the thing.” Is that what Steve would be driving here? The Testarossa? “He can’t drive it!” Melinda said. “He says you can’t drive an investment. He’s very serious about this. It’s not supposed to be touched before the auction.” I said it was a positive sign that Steve was still thinking ahead, committing to fun events. “Well, he said that before he tried to kill himself,” Melinda clarified. She stared at her watch, then out the window. “When I left for patrol this morning he was still in the shower.” I said it was a good sign that Steve was upholding some obligations to hygiene, but Melinda cut me off. “He was lying down in the shower. This is a newer thing with him. He’ll lie down in the shower, fully clothed, and stare at the ceiling. He says he likes the privacy. That’s where he spends most of his time now, in the shower or in the garage.”
In the garage, Melinda continued, Steve displayed a similar state of catatonia. If she did not open the garage door for him, he would forget and end up sitting there, in the dark, in a hundred degrees, no food, no water, a sure sufferer of heat stroke. She said he stared at the Ferrari as if it was a new world wonder. He had a process: once he entered the garage, he removed the protective cover from the car, then he took a seat staring straight at the front trunk, then he moved to the side of the car, then he moved to the rear of the car, then he lifted the hood to stare at the engine, and so on, completing several clockwise viewing rotations throughout the next twelve hours. He bought a creeper to slide underneath. Melinda often found him like this: his skinny legs protruding from under the vehicle—”very Wizard of Oz”—for hours straight. He had even taken to sleeping in the car. After covering all possible surfaces with plastic, he lowered himself with tremendous hesitation into the racing seat.
Steve had never been a car guy. So what was he after? In the garage, in the shower? Was he thinking about killing himself in the Ferrari? Or was the Testarossa the only thing keeping him alive? The wait for the auction, his lone reason to live?
All he offered Melinda was silence, and although he talked to the children, it was only about the Ferrari. Yes: relentless talk about the Ferrari. His children were nine and six. Their lack of understanding did not stop Steve from listing details about the machine’s valve actuation.
“I knew it wasn’t an accident right when I got the call,” Melinda said. “I was just grateful he didn’t shoot himself. First thing I said to him in the hospital. Grateful you didn’t shoot yourself, Steve. His response: ‘Did you not read my note?’ Turns out Steve spent weeks on a hand-written suicide note that somehow got lost. Multiple pages of this thing. Laminated. And yet none of the EMTs found it. Supposedly it was all in the note, why he chose this particular method to end his life, why he wanted to end his life, his hopes for his family, the deep truths of Steve. The janitor probably threw it away, I don’t know. I’ve asked him what was in the note. I’ve even asked him for the abridged version. But all he says is there’s no point. No point to what? Anything. No point to anything? Everything, he says. No point to anything and everything? That’s as much as I can get. My hope is he’ll open up to you, his brother.”
It was at this point that I comprehended the impossibility of what was before me. To talk deeply to my brother. The defining quality of our brotherhood—a loose and frictionless bond—was that we had concluded at some point in our youth to never speak directly of material of consequence. Yes, to talk deeply to my brother. Better were my chances, I thought, of learning to fly.
“I should’ve stopped home to drive him here myself,” Melinda said, biting off an edge of bacon. “I guarantee he’s still in the shower. In the shower, or sitting in the Ferrari.”
We stared at the same window in silence, knowing there was nothing more to say, yet waiting for the other to speak.
◆
Finished with breakfast, now driving west to my brother’s house, I began to feel a vague but stubborn allegiance to the Ferrari. I was not one who generally found himself in the radiance of major brands. Nor did I find any pride in being an Italian-American, in any notion of an old country. Nevertheless the convergence of brand and nation now brought about an unshakeable pride. Ferrari Testarossa. I found myself repeating the name aloud, slowly. Was this what my brother knew when he encountered that red coup in the driveway of Dr. Mashar’s mansion? The Ferrari Testarossa—historic machine, a sign for Steve of his own genetic potential to be great? Or instead the cause of boundless shame? In that car, in that garage, waiting for the auction, did this object force Steve to understand himself as, in essence, less than? I became embarrassed by my practical rental blinking along the freeway.
It was not embarrassment, however, but confusion that overcame me as I drove up and down the street that had to be my brother’s street, passed again and again the house that had to be my brother’s house, and yet found the garage open and empty—as in without the Ferrari Testarossa.
“But that’s not possible,” Melinda said, on the phone. She was on patrol an hour south of home.
And because my calls to my brother went predictably ignored, it was with no shortage of dread that I walked through the garage, where I found the door to the kitchen unlocked. Inside all seemed unharmed. My niece and nephew, on the couch, in the TV light. No sounds that signaled the presence of Steve. “Hi kids,” I said. They both turned to look at me. “It’s me, your uncle Phil.” They began to cry. How beautiful they looked, standing with their arms slack, singing in fear. I felt so hopeless, so dumb. My family had no idea who I was.
◆
Here were the facts: the Ferrari was gone; Steve was gone; the children did not know where Steve or the Ferrari had gone; the children were not comforted by my title of uncle; my sister-in-law’s attempts to calm the children down over the phone resulted in my teary niece locking herself in the bathroom; my nephew followed me outside to, in his words, hold me prisoner until his mother got home; it was a dry and defeating one-hundred degrees; I was still missing work, and the reason why I was missing work—the reason why I was here in the desert at all—seemed increasingly less clear.
I sat on a shaky lounge chair and stared at my brother’s pool. My nephew stood beside me, scrolling on his iPad. Planes rumbled through the air. The backyard had a plot of gravel, a torn skimmer lying across the gravel, and toys in varied states of deflation. At the center of the yard was the shallow inground pool. I stared at the still water. Far off from the hydrosphere at the Phoenician. Here was an unwelcoming blue: thick, cloudy, specked with dead leaves. I listened to the filter, trying to remember the last time I had seen a pool. City life. Hard to remember the last time I had gone this long staring at an area without seeing a person. In my fourth floor pre-war there seemed to always be a woman in a doorway preparing to exit. But here, but now: wall, water, rock. I found myself transfixed by the absence, by the unmixed space. Was this sight what drove my brother insane?
“Hey.” It was my nephew, Sammy. I forgot he was standing next to me. He had dried snot crusted around his nose. His voice terrified me. “Hey,” he repeated, “did you know that the Ferrari Testarossa has a twelve-cylinder mid-engine that can reach zero to sixty in five point two seconds?” I assumed he was reading this off of the iPad. Nevertheless, I did not know why he was reading this off of the iPad. “Did you know,” he continued, “did you know that the Ferrari Testarossa has a compression ratio of nine point three to one?” Should I have known that? “And did you know the clutch is a two-plate? That the oil system is a dry sump?”
Light turned the textured rims of my loafer toes gold. Light erased the edges of the backyard forms. The rod of the skimmer glowed, the once gray rocks went red. Light rolled, light swelled. Light came down on the flat roofs of the neighboring homes, on the satellite dishes, on the solar panels. This was the sky of the west. No ascent of windows, no obstructing scaffolds. Here mountains took their forms from the clouds. Here the sun offered suffocating charity. Here the sky told me I was less than the floating leaf scraps on the pool crust.
“Did you know that the ignition is a Marelli Microplex electronic? A single spark plug per cylinder?” Sammy, again. “Forty-five-hundred RPM of maximum torque—did you know that? And that there are four valves per cylinder? That the fuel feed is a Bosh K-Jetronic mechanical injection? That the top speed is one-hundred and eighty miles per hour?”
I began to understand how lonely it was to walk. I had been driving all day. In the city I never drove. I walked. I walked to the train, while on the train, up the stairs of the station with an umbrella under my arm, flinching. The longer the walk lasted, the more meager my destination. A fast walk, a labored motion for little distance. Parading corners, judging windows. Spring winds charioting trash. Each step more embarrassing than the previous. Heel sounds off the unloved walls of commercial space. My footsteps, I realized, sounded odder than my voice. I now wished I had an engine that could hide my noise.
“Did you know,” Sammy was saying—but before he could finish I already knew I did not.
◆
A Ferrari Testarossa in a five-star hotel’s pool. An unlikely union. Or so I would have thought. But here it was: beneath the arc of the fountain, a Ferrari Testarossa, floating like an apocalyptic buoy, the upturned vehicle a mark of the limits of reason. Night on the waterscape. The hiss of the fountain water spraying against an alien surface. It was the front of the car that stuck up in the air, the headlights shining. Water streaked the smooth design. The front tires slowly rotated against nothing. Standing among the twisted debris of runover chairs, I felt proud to be a member of the species responsible for such destruction, and for the absurd laws of physics that made this possible.
“I’m such a fucking idiot.” This was what Steve said, once the police let me through. I was pleased he had reached this conclusion on his own. He was sitting on the ground, handcuffed, soaked. He must have lost twenty pounds since I’d last given him a hug. He looked old, lost, burdened. “I had the whole thing planned perfectly,” Steve said.
The police were clear: Steve had passed the sobriety tests; no one, luckily, had been hit; the charges would involve endangerment; Melinda had already been called, and all there was to do now, while the police interviewed a few more witnesses, was wait.
I took a seat next to my sopping brother. We stared in silence at the Ferrari floating in the pool.
“The Testarossa is a fake,” Steve said. “The Barret Jackson appraiser told me. Evidently there’s a long history of this, fake luxury cars. It started with Miami Vice. That wasn’t a real Daytona that Sonny drove—Ferrari wouldn’t budge on North American rights.”
“Well,” I said. “Now I understand why you wanted to live in Arizona. Desert nights. This weather. Wow. It’s got to be what, seventy-five right now?”
“Part Supra, part Camaro, part Eclipse, with some other cheaper sports car details thrown in. The only real Ferrari thing on that is the emblem. But not the front emblem. The side emblem.”
“Hey, Melinda and I went to this place this morning, The Original House of Pancakes?”
“Did you get the silver dollar combo?”
“I didn’t,” I said, “but I wanted to.”
“You didn’t mention IHOP, right?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Good, good.”
The scrambled noise from cop radios, a helicopter beneath the moon, mountains in the night. The vehicle that resembled a Ferrari floated in the pool.
“I wanted to figure out if Dr. Mashar knew the car was fake,” Steve said. “I wanted to pick you up here, then drive to Dr. Mashar’s house. But even if that’s not a real Ferrari, it’s still got some power. I’m not used to driving stick. And this place has the most confusing fucking parking lot I’ve ever seen.”
“Don’t worry about the money Steve. I can help you. With this weather, how can you even worry about money?”
“I always thought the worst part about getting old would be the monotony,” Steve said. “Every day, the exact same. But I’m too fucked up to even achieve monotony. That’s how big of a loser I am.”
“Well,” I said. “You know.” And then I didn’t say anything.
I wanted to see how the Testarossa would be removed from the water. All those humans and machines, in harmony. A miracle of logistics, I thought. Of course I was plagued by questions. How would the crane fit in the pool area of the Phoenician? Or would it be aerial? An aerial crane? Was that why a helicopter continued to circle above us? But what was an aerial crane? And why did the phrase come to me when I had never seen such a tool? I wondered how one became an aerial crane pilot. Are all helicopter pilots trained on removing strange loads with their aircrafts, or was there a subset of pilots who displayed the potential? And how many people, in total, I wondered, would be involved in this operation? People on the ground, people in the water. What would be their titles, their qualifications? Maybe most important: where would the fake Ferrari go? The inauthentic speedster, suspended in the air beneath the helicopter, into the perfect moon. I described this to my brother.
“Well that’s stupid,” he said. “The axle would rip through the frame.”
“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m not the asshole who drove a car into a pool.”
“Mr. Bigshot. Mr. New York Finance. So rich he’s got not a care in the world. So rich, he can’t look up from his glass of champagne on his yacht to note the rising sea levels. So rich, but he can’t possibly give a cent to the preservation of the Bengal tiger. And oh so smart that he thinks a helicopter is going to fly with a fucking car.”
“Right, right. Because you know.”
“You hear that?” Handcuffed Steve shrugged his shoulders and swiveled a finger behind his back. “That’s the sound of a tow truck reversing. This is going to be very simple. One man, one truck, one task. Hook and extract.”
I heard the beep. I also heard the helicopter lapping through the air. Something about this inspired me to punch my brother in the shoulder. “What the hell,” Steve said. I decided to punch him again. He stood and tried to tackle me, but, because he was handcuffed, all he did was ram his shoulder into my stomach. I sank down, aware of an audience: police, tourists, Phoenician pool staff. Steve planted a leg behind my heel and jammed me with his shoulder again. We went down, rolling, shouting. It was the most alive I felt since my plane landed.
It’s possible that what I saw next you’ll dismiss as a concussed hallucination, some final firing of desperate neurons that came about when, tripped, the back of my head smacked the pavement. Nevertheless, as my brother attempted to perform a full mount and then bludgeon me with his shoulder, I lay there staring up at the universe, and the stars began to undulate, the crest of their galactic light behaving like a swelled tide, and across the spacetime surf drifted a helicopter, the aircraft now lowering fast until I felt the beat of its blades, all sound lost in the force, and there on the side of the aircraft were our ebullient parents, mother and father, long gone, each holding out an obscure stone.
Is this how the world would end? My brother, handcuffed, wet, strange, wrestling me, both of us surrounded by broken designs while we waited to learn if a fake Ferrari would fly?
As you might expect, I wasn’t the only one curious about what would happen next. The faces of the transplanted rich, in the windows of the Phoenician, whispered why.