The Book of Joe

alike,” Emily or Jenny says with a smirk.
    “Yeah, we aren’t dressed alike,” the other one concurs, and they giggle as one again. Clearly, I’ve stumbled upon some inside joke.
    “Sorry,” I say. “My mistake.” For whatever reason, my apology triggers another paroxysm of laughter from the twins, who lean back on the bench, chuckling gleefully.
    “Keep it down, girls,” Cindy says, so habitually that I’m willing to bet she doesn’t even know she’s spoken.
    “Where’s Brad?” I ask.
    “He’s in there with him.” She indicates the door of the ICU
    just as my brother emerges.
    Most people decompose after they die, but for athletes and rock stars, the process begins years earlier. With rock stars, it starts in the face; just look at any picture of Mick Jagger taken in the last ten years. With athletes, it’s the legs that are affected first. There’s a walk aging athletes have, a slight side-to-side rocking motion, as if they’re favoring each leg as they step onto it. The legs take bold strides with the memory of effortless muscled power, and then, as if suddenly remembering that those muscles have deteriorated, a slightly pigeon-toed foot comes down early, hitting the ground gingerly to cut the stride short. It’s a reality check, reminding the legs that they can’t afford to be as ambitious as they once were, because with those muscles now atrophied, their ruined knees won’t withstand the abuse. The shoulders rock as well, hunching up slightly with each step as if in anticipation of an arthritic jolt of pain. There’s an awkward grace to this walk, the paradoxical blending of age and youth. Bush Falls being the basketball town that it is, there are many men who walk like that. My father is one of them, and now, as Brad steps through the swinging door of the ICU, looking greasy and fatigued, I see that he’s grown into the walk as well.
    He comes toward me and says, “Hey, Joe.”
    “Hey.” We fall into each other’s arms and hug tightly. No, we don’t, we never have, but it would be nice, I think, to be the kind of brothers who hug. Instead, we shake hands thoughtlessly, like flicking a light switch, and the reunion is complete.
    “I’m glad you made it.” I search his voice for the rebuke that I’m sure will be there, but fail to detect any antagonism in it. He seems to be utterly sincere, without inflection.
    If you took my five-ten frame and stretched it out to six foot three, you would get something pretty close to Brad.
    There is no denying the shared DNA, but his has received the benefit of a rolling pin, rendering him long and wiry where I’m shorter and considerably denser. But we both have the same straight brown hair and dark eyes of our mother, and our father’s square, Polish jaw.
    “How’s he doing?” I say, indicating the room.
    Brad frowns. “No change.”
    “What do his doctors say?”
    The frown deepens. “Not much. They should be along soon, though, and you can ask them yourself.”
    I nod and look again at the door to the ICU. “Why don’t you go in and see him,” Brad says, glancing over at Cindy and the twins. “I’ll join you in a few minutes.”
    It takes a few seconds to locate my father through the morass of tubes and wires that have colonized his supine form, entering and exiting his limp body at every juncture.
    He is intubated through his nose and mouth, has an IV line descending into his arm, a catheter hose poking out from under the blankets near his hips, and various wires attached to electrodes on his chest that feed unchanging data to the beeping heart monitor to the left of his bed. He lies there, de-humanized, like something out of Isaac Asimov, all of his deeply personal living processes now co-opted by the machinery, which breathes, farts, shits, and swallows for him, the tube in his mouth robbing him of even the illusion of expression.
    I look above the tubing at his hair, which has changed from the jet black I remember to a charcoal flecked with silver highlights. There are small dark patches of stubble on his chin, forming like poppy seeds in odd patterns that remind me of Homer Simpson. My father lies in critical condition while his estranged son thinks of cartoon characters. His eyebrows have grown bushier, but I’m still able to locate the scar above his left eye, the badge of honor from the elbow he took in the ’58 state championship game. He tells the story often, to anyone who will listen, about how they came back