In my mother and step-father’s house, my brother had two rooms. One was his bedroom, which is on the first floor, across from the entry to the laundry room. His other room was a game room, and this is downstairs, in the basement. Because the house is built into a slope, one side of the basement, the west side, has windows and a door out onto a stone patio shaded by the wooden deck above. From there, the yard slopes down to a pond that, when the pump runs, has a little waterfall. Uphill is a Christmas tree farm, and beyond, down the other side of the hill, is the interstate. When we moved into the house, the dense stands of trees on the other side of the Christmas tree farm deadened the road noise, but many of these old trees were cut down to make way for new lanes. My brother’s game room, being on the uphill side of the basement, is underground and windowless. Even with the lights on, that underground dimness pervades the room.
My brother started college in 2008, and for the next fifteen years, his game room changed hardly at all. Only when my mother and step-father began preparing to move to a smaller house, now that none of the children lived with them, did anything in the game room change.
There had been a blue-and-white-striped loveseat. This also folded out as a twin bed, which I slept in a few times when visiting in 2014 and 2015. The loveseat had been in my bedroom at the old house, a yellow house at the top of a hill with a Dead End sign at the edge of the yard next to a tree stump. In his game room, my brother had the loveseat set up facing a television that had also been in my room at the old house. I bought it and a Nintendo 64 with birthday money in sixth grade, at a time when it was no longer the cool new system to have. Sometime before we moved into the new house in summer 2006, the spring that made the television’s power button resist your push and return to its original position was broken. My brother had somehow managed this on one of the occasions when he sneaked into my room, although he never admitted to any act of sneaking or breaking. The loveseat, the television, and the Nintendo 64 all ended up in my brother’s game room. Judging by the wear on the controllers and console, he and his friends gamed heavily, probably on Super Smash Bros., a sleepover favorite since middle school.
Consoles, cables, and controllers were in a tangle in the cupboard of the television stand. My old Nintendo 64 was down there as well as my brother’s Xbox. He also had a PlayStation and PlayStation 2, which were usually at our dad’s house but sometimes ended up at our mom’s. My brother especially liked the Madden series and long, convoluted role-playing games such as Final Fantasy VII and The Legend of Dragoon. I mainly watched him play those games because, when he first got them, he gave misleading advice (to never use materia in FF7, for example) so that I would not get ahead of him. In role-playing games that allow the player to name characters, my brother always named all the male characters after himself. Each had a different form of his name, but it made it confusing to keep track of which was which. In The Legend of Dragoon, he named the principal female character after our mother. My brother thought it uncreative that I always used the default names. We also liked to take turns playing Tenchu, which had frustratingly difficult gameplay but entrancingly dark, ethereal atmosphere and music. Jedi Knights of the Old Republic we also played, a game in which the appearance of and storylines for the player’s avatar character changed based on whether one chose good or evil. My brother stopped watching me play at some point because he found disturbing my penchant for choosing evil.
My brother’s game room also had a desk, a printer, and a computer. The desk and computer came from the old house, where my brother and I had shared them. We had used these for homework some of the time but far more for Battlefield 1942, SimCity, and StarCraft. My brother also played Age of Empires and some of the Civilization games. Of all these, though, he seemed most devoted to StarCraft, perhaps to its mythos and imagery as much as to actual gameplay. He liked to the speech of cut scene characters and in-game units, especially the more surly lines they would speak when you clicked on them a lot. He and a few friends took to calling each other “my dear Alexei,” riffing on the game’s plot to create their own imagined alternate storyline. I was a poor player of strategy games and needed the Prima official strategy guide open and to put in cheat codes to make units invincible and to reveal the whole map, and even then I still found the game stressful. My brother claimed to have beaten Brood Wars for all three races without cheat codes. I couldn’t imagine beating the first Protoss mission without at least invincibility.
All of that is gone now. After fifteen years of keeping my brother’s game room as it was in 2008, my mother sold or donated much of what was there—the loveseat, the television, the television stand, the desk, the computer, the printer, all the assorted cables. The room feels bare compared to what it once was, but it is still far from empty. Boxes of his things we are not ready to dispose of sit along the wall. Posters of his favorite movies still hang on the walls: Scarface, The Wedding Crashers, The English Patient, The Shawshank Redemption. He used to like quoting one line in particular from Shawshank: “Get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’.” Before selling his DVDs, my mother made a list of some of the other movies my brother considered among his favorites: The Green Mile, Lawrence of Arabia, A River Runs Through It, and others.
Some of his personal memorabilia still hangs on the wall. There is a black-and-white photo of his friend straining awkwardly to catch a football, his legs crossed as if trying to move two directions at once. My brother and I both took photography in high school and learned some basic shot composition and how to develop film. My brother had a good eye, and even shots taken as a joke are balanced and capture the moment as well as some underlying essence. My own photos were only ok.
A coconut bra hangs next to the photo. I don’t know what it signifies, and I never had the chance to ask him. It has now hung there for sixteen or seventeen years, its meaning perhaps never to be known.
Also hanging on the wall is a white SportsCenter t-shirt, its logo faded with many washes. From the collar down to the hem are blood spatters, dark and brown with unsuccessful cleaning attempts and years of ageing on the wall. Somebody—maybe my brother—must have taken a bad hit in lacrosse practice and finished out the drill with blood running from his nose. There would have been some ribbing afterward and some boasting, followed by endless retellings of the incident, each recounting more imaginative and dramatic than the last. My brother and his friends thought the blood funny and indicative of toughness. They probably went for fast food afterward, my brother proudly wearing a shirt on which the blood was still wet. They probably laughed and took photos that have since been lost.
They weren’t thinking of death.
They weren’t thinking that one among them would not live to nineteen. They didn’t think that one of them would collapse on a dorm room floor in a pool of his own blood and that he would lie there unmoving for an hour or more before anyone did anything. They didn’t think that one of their own would, weeks after starting college, be flown back home in a casket stowed in a commercial jet’s cargo hold. They didn’t think they would be signing a memorial book at a funeral before their high school yearbooks had been printed. They didn’t think the years would go on—that they would graduate from college, go to medical school, go to law school, travel abroad, get married, and watch our parents become old—for all but one of them. They didn’t think that a bunch of video games and bits of junk accumulated in their first eighteen years of life would, for one of them, be all that was left, an imperfect record of a short life.
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