We were eleven and twelve. I couldn’t believe it, the bunk beds ripped apart, the steel web that held his mattress no longer my nighttime ceiling, my sky. He swept up everything he loved in our room, all the Lego embedded in the carpet, every tangled wire, every connector and specialized wrench, all his comics, his books, his long tube socks, his two plastic banks heavy with quarters, and he moved down the hall to my mother’s office. I stood by the bed, holding on to the post after the top bunk was removed, feeling as if the injury to the furniture had been done to me, as if something of myself had been lopped off. He wouldn’t look in my direction as he packed up his possessions, the Tintin compendium stacked on top of The Complete HyperCard Handbook.“Don’t go,” I managed on his last load.He was standing in the door with a laundry basket filled with fat white pipes, a dismantled radio, and a samovar-type thing he’d taught me was a carburetor. “You can spread out,” he suggested, nodding his head at my doll junk and dozens of pulpy books about the babysitters.“Don’t—”
