Free After the Plague by T. C. Boyle

they were afraid somebody was going to steal them. We were all grinning. “What’s that on your eyebrow?” Josh said.
    I reached up and fingered the thin gold loop. “It’s a ring,” I said. “You know, like an earring, only it’s in my eyebrow.”
    No one said anything for a long moment. Jeff, the younger one, looked as if he was going to start crying. “Why?” Josh said finally, and Philip laughed and I couldn’t help myself—I laughed too. It was all right. Everything was all right. Philip was my brother and Denise was my sister-in-law and these kids with their wide-open faces and miniature Guess jeans were my nephews. I shrugged, laughing still. “Because it’s cool,” I said, and I didn’t even mind the look Philip gave me.
    Later, after I’d actually crawled into the top bunk and read the kids a Dr. Seuss story that set off all sorts of bells in my head, Philip and Denise and I discussed my future over coffee and homemade cinnamon rolls. My immediate future, that is—as in tomorrow morning, 8 A.M., at the clinic. I was going to be an entry-level drudge despite my three years of college, my musical background and family connections, rinsing out test tubes and sweeping the floors and disposing of whatever was left in the stainless-steel trays when my brother and his colleagues finished with their “procedures.”
    â€œAll right,” I said. “Fine. I’ve got no problem with that.”
    Denise had tucked her legs up under her on the couch. She was wearing a striped caftan that could have sheltered armies. “Philip had a black man on full time, just till a week ago, nicest man you’d ever want to meet—and bright too, very bright—but he, uh, didn’t feel …”
    Philip’s voice came out of the shadows at the end of the couch, picking up where she’d left off. “He went on to something better,” he said, regarding me steadily through the clear walls of his glasses. “I’m afraid the work isn’t all that mentally demanding—or stimulating, for that matter—but, you know, little brother, it’s a start, and, well—”
    â€œYeah, I know,” I said, “beggars can’t be choosers.” I wanted to add to that, to maybe soften it a bit—I didn’t want him to get the idea I wasn’t grateful, because I was—but I never got the opportunity. Just then the phone rang. I looked up at the sound—it wasn’t a ring exactly, more like a bleat,
eh-eh-eh-eh-eh
—and saw that my brother and his wife were staring into each other’s eyes in shock,as if a bomb had just gone off. Nobody moved. I counted two more rings before Denise said, “I wonder who that could be at this hour?” and Philip, my brother with the receding hairline and the too-big glasses and his own eponymous clinic in suburban Detroit, said, “Forget it, ignore it, it’s nobody.”
    And that was strange, because we sat there in silence and listened to that phone ring over and over—twenty times, twenty times at least—until whoever it was on the other end finally gave up. Another minute ticked by, the silence howling in our ears, and then Philip stood, looked at his watch, and said, “What do you think—time to turn in?”
    I wasn’t stupid, not particularly—no stupider than anybody else, anyway—and I was no criminal, either. I’d just drifted into a kind of thick sludge of hopelessness after I dropped out of school for a band I put my whole being into, a band that disintegrated within the year, and one thing led to another. Jobs came and went. I spent a lot of time on the couch, channel-surfing and thumbing through books that used to mean something to me. I found women and lost them. And I learned that a line up your nose is a dilettante’s thing, wasteful and extravagant. I started smoking, two or three nights