When my brother was in college he used to send me long letters written on notebook paper. The letters hinted at some larger life being lived and made real the other side of the world between us. I kept them in a pile in the sliding compartment of my bed.
Now he sends postcards, fans, rice paper journals from Japan, with short notes in earthquake handwriting: "clean, nice people, cheap food - the opposite of France." Wisecracks from California, myths from Israel. The evidence in support of the existence of an outside world is slowly growing larger, graduating through years and across cluttered tables, in piles inside piano benches and tucked into books stacked in the window sills to keep them open in the summer.
Once he told me - not in a letter, but in a traffic jam, as I sat beside him in his car - about the kinds of buildings he works in when he's overseas. He told me how the scientists are led through a series of air-locked rooms by pathologically polite guides, stripping and redressing into suits of nylon armor. Once in the lab, they conduct their work like astronauts sifting through the atoms of the moon, in rooms so spotless, so meticulously clean, that there is only one particle of dirt for every hundred thousand particles of air. You have never been in a room that clean, he says. Asian maids in white suits are continuously scrubbing spotless surfaces with invisible cloths, breathing into masks, peering through plastic for the illegal dust. Should one have to cough, because science has not yet found a way to shut this function off before entering the lab, one must hunker down and cough into a floor made of silent vacuums, sucking air down into the belly of the building and expelling it through vents in the exterior walls.
He is glad to be home in Texas, he says, with the elements: with dirt and swelter and exhaust, and a son forever in need of a bath, and a wife with curly hair that catches bits of sun. He confides in me that he sometimes dreams of being a goat farmer on a patch of his father-in-law's land.
