My Brother Visits

photo by Ileana Bosogea-Tudor

Three months before my wife and I officially separate and I move into a one bedroom, my brother visits. He’s a tenured college professor from Illinois, and though we’re close, I don’t talk much about the marriage. We aren’t those kinds of brothers who share everything. He has an interest in ancient eastern culture, so we go to the museum that’s housing the stele tablets with the Code of Hammurabi etched into them. 

My brother peers around at the tablets, making meaning of the words, laws, promises and punishments that bind civilization together. He peers at the glass, whispers the Akkadian words to himself. I can’t read a damn thing. The truth is, I’m mulling over the end of some things, the beginning of others. The past doesn’t interest me much these days. I’m simple and more interested in the way the glass captures part of my face, an afterimage on the tablet, a suggestion of a second self. 

The codes, a series of commercial regulations and judicial punishments, were written somewhere between 1792 and 1750 BC after Hammurabi united the series of cities scattered as seeds around the meeting point of the Tigres and the Euphrates. 

I’d read recently that the primary reason human beings had moved from hunting and gathering to an agrarian society is because wheat is measurable, and therefore taxable. The move to settlements was the cause of massive disease spread and the beginning of a caste system we still see today. No more were people wandering through fields of water, frozen over by frost, feet cracking, as they listened for the distant rumble of the herd. 

Years earlier, on my long and almost unending career detour, I taught eighth-graders about the lush river lands around the Tigres and the Euphrates. I was working as a classroom assistant then in a school where the kids routinely ran out of the classroom and mumbled fuck you under their breath. 

I spent those months at the school, flailing away, while my marriage lost the last of its shape, buried under an avalanche of diapers and appointments and disconnection. My mentor at the job was concerned with my lessons. She was worried I wasn’t learning enough about how to teach eighth graders. I was learning that I had no desire to teach people who didn’t give a fuck. And maybe my wife was learning the same thing about me as she was with our two and four year-olds and I spent my available hours with co-workers, drinking or dancing, letting the thing go.

I wish I had the same ability to bring order to the world like my brother, he of five languages, and the stable marriage. He owns his own house, has a Fulbright, and is fully vested in his 401K. And there he sits, decoding the laws, the penalties for breaking promises. 

I stand watching him, my mind in a state of constant disorder, not fully vested in my 403B, confused as to the muck I’d dragged my life into. At best, they’d pull me up like those mammoths from the tar pits, marveling at the way I’d managed to be preserved by the tar, by the stele. 

Weeks after my brother departs, my wife of thirteen years and I officially split after a year of agonizing indecision, nights on the couch downstairs, texting other people in the hollow cavern of cell phone light. I move a few essential items into my new apartment, into my new life—t-shirts, blue jeans, a futon. In the nearly empty living room, I imagine a different life, the only damn thing my imagination has ever been useful for, walls full of photography from future trips to Europe—Sun-washed courtyards, cathedrals piercing skies, vineyards on the hilltops above the city and distant denim skies. This apartment, I think, will always be full of wine and friends and laughter. 

But life isn’t etched into stele. In the morning, I awoke alone, knowing I needed to find a bunk bed before next weekend.