A Mouthful of Lost Thoughts

1

I want to tell you all--if there is any "you" later on to read this, a story deserving thousands of pages and a whole shelf of volumes, but you'll have to settle for a freeze-dried version until I can find an end to this mess. I figure I have anywhere from fifteen minutes to two hours to tell this story, depending on my blood type. I believe it's A, which should give me more time, but I doubt I could remember for sure. If it turns out I'm O, you're in for a great deal of blank pages, my hypothetical friend.
I'm using my wife's old laptop--mine is faster but I don't trust it for a second and I've only got one shot at this. I can't risk being nearly completed and having the damn thing crash on me. Anyway, my name is Daniel Brock. I was a non-fiction writer working in inner-city Portland, settled down with a wife. No kids. My little brother, Isaac Brock, might've been a modern day Messiah. Only a shame such a brilliant man died in his own discovery. Collapsed in the back nearly four hours ago. I could save him, but I don't think that's what he'd want me to do. He called it a cure-all, although a very crucial mistake in the history of humanity may have been a better name to go by.
Oh well, whatever. I've no time to wallow in it.
I'll start from the beginning. Our parents had no reason to expect anything other than what they got; bright children. Our father was a history major who got his Bachelor's at Yale when he was thirty--hell of a good guy, too. He taught me about life and politics and had just about every indie rock song ever cut. Played a damn good bass guitar, too.
My mom was a psychologist, graduated from Stanford and met my dad on a trip to Mexico during her school career. They were happy, and we were no disappointment to them. I maintained a decent GPA throughout my public school career and wrote well early on, as far as I know. I jumped at just about every opportunity to write, starting with the yearbook, the school newspaper, and my first magazine piece when I was twenty-one. I sold it to an airline for three-hundred fifty bucks. My dad, whom I loved deeply, replaced the check with his own and hung it over his office desk. As long as I'd lived there and as many pieces as I wrote, he always refused to take it down. I was sort of the child they had every reason to expect--a baby-faced kid with a bright mind and a mediocre talent.
But of course, Isaac was different. Nobody expects a kid like Isaac. Not ever.
Isaac had admittedly always been much smarter than I, but I can tell you, after a certain point, jealousy becomes irrelevant and all you can do is hang back and shield your eyes from the flash. Isaac could read at two and began writing short essays, often about silly things, such as our dog, but you'd have thought it was the inscriptions of a fairly well-written fifth grader.
Isaac developed headaches. Pulsing, throbbing headaches, and as loving parents, my mom and dad always squabbled over this. They'd assumed the worst, something physical--a brain tumor perhaps, and took him to a doctor. Said there was nothing wrong with Isaac but stress, and copious amounts of it. My mom cleverly referred to this as a "mental kidney stone." I liked the phrase, and the authenticity of it struck a chord in me. It had been no surprise to me that my little brother was not only a child prodigy on most subjects, but a genius. Unfortunately I had to live with it every damn day.
Guys like him only come along once in every few generations. People like Aristotle, Einstein, and Newton, and it's no exaggeration to say he was among them. By the age of nine he was attending physics and pre-calculus classes at Georgetown. There was one day, over the summer of nineteen eighty-six when he cut out every TV and radio station within the surrounding four blocks using a HAM radio and scraps from an old television set. How he did it, I've no idea. When you lived with him, you learned not to ask questions. Now I have little time to spare but I'm telling you this to let you know life with Isaac was a constant, uncontrolled chaos. For about two hours that evening, he sat on the roof, reciting some poetry, reading some of my short stories, telling knock-knock jokes and explaining that the high sulfur content in dad's baked beans was the reason our dad would rip it in Church.
"But he gets most 'em off pretty quiet," Isaac broadcasted to an audience of more than three-thousand, "or sometimes he holds the real bangers in until it's time for the hymns."
My dad, who was understandably not overjoyed, ended up having to pay at least $350 in fines and took it all from his allowance for the next year and a half. Despite his clear interest in some of the most intellectual studies out there, Isaac dropped out of high school at sixteen. Though our parents were less than pleased by this, they were financially supportive while the guy figured out what to do with himself. Last I'd heard, Isaac was somewhere in Washington, living what had been our parent's lives.
I could vaguely recall what may have indicated what he'd do to create the most crucial mistake in the history of humanity. I didn't think anything of a six year old, crying alone in his room, screaming into his pillow, blubbering about how unfair inevitable demise really is. Hell, it was just a dog. This sort of thing depressed everybody, but it depressed the hell out of Isaac.
I didn't think much of it until he showed up at my door thirty five years later, purple bags protruding under his swollen, heavy eyes, and a muddy, crumpled clump of jet black feathers dangling limply in one hand, a jar of clear blue liquid in the other.