Free Kamikaze Lust by Lauren Sanders Page B

anti-depressants and spa in New Jersey with her gentleman friend, Hyman Hogan. Thankfully, Rowdy was around to clean Aunt Lorraine’s commode and change her IV unit or bandages when the nurse wasn’t there.
    Looking at him sitting on the edge of Aunt Lorraine’s bed with his clammy face and those big yellow stains under the arms of his T-shirt, I thought it odd that at the age of forty my balding, dim-witted brother had become Florence Nightingale.
    He caught me staring at him. “How’d you know about Beta site anyway?”
    “The what?” I squinted as if focusing on him might give me some insight into his world.
    “See it’s got the test scanner on it.” He walked over to me and pointed to the panel of buttons on the television set. “You know like in the supermarket how they got those scanners, right? Well, a lot of people don’t know this, but they can read your brain with them, but only if you got implants. They started with dogs, and then they moved on to people, prisoners first. That’s where I got mine. In prison.”
    “Do I have one?”
    “Nah, only people who been down by the government,” he said. He walked back to the bed and sat down, bugging his eyes back and forth between Aunt Lorraine and me. “It’s going to blow up when she sleeps,” he said.
    “Don’t worry, I know how to hook up a TV.” Despite the various instruction manuals and stray wires all over the floor, I knew what I was doing. It was an ego thing that I had a handle on technology. My father was the autodidactic electrician, after all.
    Rowdy laughed hysterically, his mouth open so wide I could see all of his missing teeth. “No, I mean Aunt Lorraine.” He held both of his hands over his stomach. “Her face blows up when she sleeps.” I had to laugh along with him. “Then, she starts shrinking and by the end of the day she’s a skeleton like the faces they got in the drug store, you know, for Halloween. Oh man, she’s so sick…” his voice tapered off, and I watched a tear drip from the corner of his eye.
    “It’s okay,” I said.
    “No way, man. You don’t know.” His voice was getting contentious.
    “Please. Let’s not fight about it.”
    “I’m the one who takes care of her,” he cried. “You don’t know nothing!”
    “What’s it she don’t know that you think you know?” Mom said. I had no idea how long she’d been standing in the doorway watching me hook up the television set.
    “Hello, Mom,” I said.
    She smiled slyly beneath her creamy brown bouffant and walked toward me, turning her cheek for me to kiss it. She smelled sickly sweet, like Poison or Opium. “And what’s this?” she said.
    “It’s a television.”
    Rowdy was flustered. “Both of you don’t know dogshit, I’m the one who’s here all the time.”
    Mom ignored him. She’d been jealous of Rowdy since he became a credentialed schizophrenic, robbing her of the family’s Most Mentally Ill title. I thought she had it all wrong; his illness, if anything, gave credence to her own.
    “I know what it is,” Mom said. “How did it get here?”
    “I bought it for Aunt Lorraine.”
    “Rachel’s some big spender now. No job, but she’s buying TVs and you, what do you care? You’re off in Atlantic City—”
    “Shut up, Rowdy.”
    “Atlantic City?” I said. “I thought you hated gambling.”
    “We’re not talking about me.”
    “They go for that Merv Griffin stuff. You know, Ma likes the shows.”
    “Look, there’s nothing wrong with me spending some time with my boyfriend.”
    “Boyfriend,” I said. “You’re almost sixty-five years old, you don’t have a boyfriend.”
    “Maybe she’s jealous,” Rowdy said. I ignored him this time.
    “Look, don’t you blame me that you can’t keep a man,” Mom said. “I’m sick of all your projecting.”
    “What do mean, projecting? I don’t project!”
    Just then, Aunt Lorraine’s eyes opened. I jumped up onto the bed with her and took her hand. Though frail and bony,