I slept an entire day away. The rain puts me in this dramatic sort of mood, and lately I've been too fragile to cope with the memories it stirs. It's invisible when I look through the window right now, but I know it's there, pissing on us all, reaching down at a distance looking like a cloud of filaments dragging emotional degeneration across the city like a sharp, blood-letting comb.

But those ominous waves are, as I said, somehow occulting themselves from me, cozening me into staying awake, and all I see is pustulant slate clouds and I'm thinking that were Hell an actual place (a notion which, oddly enough, Scripture does not support), it would not be a living color like red. It would in fact be the color of the Six Ports sky; tomb gray with mournful streaks of black.

I may as well have been an Ah Kin when I was a boy, as I utterly lived for the sun. Not understanding the power arbitrary fluids had over my experience of life I assumed it was the color of gold that brought me joy, and so I wanted to surround myself with it, begging my parents for toys and books and blankets of every shade of yellow to harness the sun's gift and wrap it around my anxious little heart like a blanket.

Summer nights were my favorite time of every year. The juxtaposition of the sun's warm embrace and the moon's cold stare fascinated me. I think now that may have started me on my descent into insomnia, as my clueless mind spread associations like spiderwebs from object to subject at random. So bit by bit I became an acolyte of that skybound wolf totem, loving night time to my professional detriment, for I suffered at work and school until finally I landed myself a graveyard job. But then my social life suffered, and, as I had not yet discovered that some humans were designed from conception onward to be chronically forlorn, I sought to alleviate my lonesomeness by returning to the day shift where I would resume my lagging plod through adulthood.

But I still have my memory of childhood summer, inevitably stained by my parent's divorce. I just couldn't catch a break, could I? I do my best, losing myself as well as I can in bygone days when Noah followed me everywhere I went. If I was reading, he'd bring a popup or a coloring book, sometimes a National Geographic or one of my Zoobooks. If I was playing with my action figures, he'd bring his own toys, far less aggressive and cool looking as my G.I. Joe and Ninja Turtles. Those days, though at the time were fraught with all the annoyances and grievous pains that I shielded my little brother from, are Heaven to me now. Now I can erase the arguments that drove us deeper and deeper into the park outside our apartment. Now I can, with my internal painter's brush, remake each scene with only my brother and I and the silky grass field ringed by those brooding, forested hills.

He came to visit me again, but I was mostly asleep, and as I was in dire need of rest I lay still while he told me how big Layla's belly was and all the names they'd considered for their unborn twins. He then walked with me through those lost days in the park, and thanked me for keeping him occupied while our parents' marriage, then the giant space turtle who held our entire world on its shell, was tearing itself apart at the seams.

I followed his voice to the fitness center that many of the neighborhood kids used as a jungle gym. Once in a while we'd spy an adult exercising, but typically it served as a playground, nestled on a flat clearing on the nearest hill by a grove of willow trees I would one day lose my virginity in.

I tended to keep us close to home. For one, I didn't want anything to happen to Noah, and the neighbor kids were unilaterally annoying. Most of them were abused in one way or more, as I would later learn. Many of them too lived in broken homes. I would observe them from a distance and swear to myself that if my own parents were unable to patch the ship before it sank, I would not socially devolve as these other children had.

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The worst of them urinated on another boy, and was eventually sent to juvie after beating up a boy much younger than him in front of an audience. For a month or so after he was institutionalized, stories spread of many other atrocities he'd committed, including, but not limited to, exposing his genitals to many of the girls in the neighborhood. He was an extreme example, of course, but he well conveys why I kept both Noah and myself as close to home as we could.

This grew difficult over time, however, as the screaming matches in our apartment grew louder and fiercer, incorporating more and more profanity and direct insults. Never once was infidelity mentioned, I'm happy to say, but in a way that made the situation worse. If a husband/father and a wife/mother couldn't work past ordinary differences, then who could?

When Noah was six, he created a list of superheroes and villains that he would loudly pretend to be regardless of where we were. He wanted nothing more than for me to join him, and his begging was as relentless as my refusal. I was just old enough to be embarrassed by that kind of play, which of course was stupid, considering the low opinion I had of the kids in that neighborhood.

But for some ineffable reason I staunchly limited our games of pretend to the apartment when things were quiet. Sadly, for Noah, that became an infrequent state of affairs when his love of that game was at its height.

But I feel satisfied that, on this count, I was a good big brother, as I did indulge him in one truly epic game of pretend, onlookers be damned (and of course the field was filled with them), where we made full use of the park, even the fitness center... no, especially the fitness center, traversing each piece of exercise equipment as we dodged enemy laser blasts and heat rays. The trampoline served as a precipice to launch from, the thick wood chips on the ground giving way as we imagined ourselves diving heads first to ground, the windows of surrounding skyscrapers a blur as we sped downward, landing in heroic poses with our enemies laying bruised at our feet.

We had so much fun I'd almost forgotten how the adventure began. I was reminded of course when we came back home.

"Where's mom?" I asked.

Dad was on the couch watching Star Trek, his comfort show. "She's at your aunt's." His voice was hoarse.

I made grilled cheese sandwiches for Noah and I and through herculean effort kept my composure, even going as far as to laugh while we relived our battle at the dinner table. But laying in bed after Noah fell asleep, my headphones soothing me with Pink Floyd, all I could see was the worried, confused look on Noah's face when our game of wiffle ball was interrupted by our mother screaming the 'F word' repeatedly.

I wondered if I really had managed to chase his fears away by dropping into a battle pose and pretending to fly across the field.

"They're attacking the city!" I shouted, the fitness center proving an ideal prop for a bustling urban center. He followed me immediately, but I couldn't shake the feeling that he was still affected on some level.

When my tape finished and my walkman alerted me with its signature click, I thought of my dad sitting alone on the couch and went to the living room to watch tv with him. But I was too late. The living room was dark and he'd already gone to bed. Our apartments had small, one car garages. We never parked in ours. Instead we used it for storage and my dad had a small workbench where he and I used to glue model spaceships together. I went into the garage and sat at the table, balling my eyes out cursing myself for not being with my dad when he needed me.