SATURDAY
22 SEPTEMBER, 1990
DORIAN

               From my nest on the recliner, I glance at the stack of notecards on the desk. It must be the fourth time within the last ten minutes and my plan to soothe my fitful fingers with a look alone continues to prove unsuccessful.

A melody has been forming in the cracks of my palms since Isaiah left yesterday and I've had to fight the need to write it down since. It'll be beautiful, I can't allow myself to forget it, but the clock moves slower the more I look at it. I turn to the window, instead. It's almost sunset. Shabbat will have passed within the hour. Surely HaShem won't be offended if I write down one line of music on the day or rest.

Checking the door, I dart for the desk, snatch a pen and notecard without sitting down, and scrawl the melody onto it as quick as my hand allows, as if G-d won't know if nobody else does.

Punishment is immediate. Not only does G-d find out but so does my brother.

'Arts are forbidden on Shabbat, Dorian.'

Elijah stands in the doorframe and cold trickles down my neck.

'I-i-it was just a few bars so I don't f-forget.'

Elijah smiles as I spin desperate excuses, happy to torture me for several seconds before he steps over the threshold and raises his hands. 'It was a joke.'

It wasn't. It's a warning: I won't tell anyone this time but don't let me catch you doing so again.

He ambles into the office and looks around with the sort of expression people often wear to review things they've forgotten and have no intention of imprinting into memory. His black suit is perfect as if he has just put it on (I've taken off my jacket and rolled up my sleeves though I know it's improper).

'Have you been hiding in here all day?' Elijah asks.

Save for meals and rituals, I have been here all day. The lights in my bedroom are turned off and as much as Shabbat is intended to be spent with family, I'll be trapped in prison sooner than in the sitting room. Hiding is exactly what I'm doing, hiding is what I always do on Shabbat.

I've never been a good liar and my denial sounds like a question: 'No?'

Elijah doesn't listen either way. Once settled on the recliner I just vacated, he studies me with the same indifference as he did the room. 'How are you?'

'What?'

'I haven't seen you in months. Am I not allowed to ask about my brother's well-being?'

I spiral the pen in my hand. 'I just... go to school. Not much... else.'

Elijah exhales a laugh. 'You expect me to believe you spend all day studying? There's nothing you think about but school?' He looks at me with raised eyebrows and a suppressed leer I can't read. 'I was eighteen once, you know.'

I have no idea what he wants to hear. Though he's my brother, he's nine years older and, like all the men in my family since they came to this country and Coeus was founded, went to boarding school, then to Oxford. I never was close to Elijah or Rueben — I know virtually nothing about either aside from basic biographical facts. (Even less, when it comes to their families. Though both are married and have children, they never bring them to Halsett.)

I have no signposts to navigate body language the way I do with our parents. Does he smile out of anger, disappointment, or mockery? Or something else entirely?

Dread builds up in the pit of my stomach, identical to the kind that wakes me up from nightmares where I arrive at a lesson only to be thrown into an exam everyone but I knew about. Why am I never informed?

I jam my finger between the pen's barrel and clip, harder still when the metal cleaves my cuticle. 'Like my music? I think about it all the time.' I glance at the notecard even when shame makes me a little sick. A mere glance at it is all it needs to emerge again, louder than before. I swear my fingers ache with the need to play it. 'I've fivefold what I need for a portfolio.'

'No.' Elijah laughs again and scratches his beard at the corner of his jaw. 'I mean other things like... girls, maybe.'

I grimace and immediately turn away in case he misinterprets it. It's not that there's anything wrong with girls, only I've never envisioned them as a part of my future. I've never envisioned anyone as a part of my future other than you.

'You're almost an adult, Ima and Aba will expect you to find someone.'.

They put him up to this. What is it they wish I do, browse girls my age from a Woolworth's catalogue and pick one?

'Coeus is an all-boys school.'

'Which is exactly why you should be using the weekends. Ima said you go back to school the moment Shabbat ends. You should be using your Sundays to socialise a bit. We've got that fundraiser tomorrow. That's an opportunity.' His voice flattens and he sounds so much like Aba that I venture a glance to make sure they haven't changed places. 'Girls aside, you need to start establishing your own connections. People won't open doors for you forever because they know your dad.'

The metal clip of the pen finally cuts through my skin and I jerk my finger from it, instinctively lifting it to my mouth to suck the blood from the torn cuticle. Mistake. I may not be able to read Elijah well but even I can identify the censure on his face: consuming blood once it has left the body is forbidden. Everybody knows this.

I try to wipe my shame onto my trousers with the same ease as the saliva.

'I don't really want to.'

'You're nervous. It's normal to be.' Elijah drags out the adjectives in a way I'm sure he intends as reassuring but is actually humiliating. 'But that's exactly why it wouldn't hurt to practice. Try to look people in the eye when they talk to you, not out the window.'

I snap my stare to him. When had I turned to the sway of trees outside? Why didn't I notice?

Once I'm looking at him, however, his features blur like an evolutionary response to danger that keeps me from bringing harm to myself and it becomes much more difficult to focus on his words. The act of listening is enough to make me burn hot under my shirt and when I have to look at him too, his knives serrate.

'People like to feel like they're being listened to. I know you don't do it with ill intention, but you have a tendency to shut out conversations when they're not interesting to you. It's rude to be lost in your own head in company.'

Elijah's criticism disguised as advice doesn't slice me swiftly in half, but hacks away with a rusty blade, gives up when bone proves too tough, and starts the same blunt hits at the next limb until I'm left a clump of breathing sinew.

'Also, you ramble a lot. It can be quite charming, but when you're getting to know someone — it's as I said: make sure you're actually having a conversation.' The weight Elijah packs on the word renders it into a foreign language.

Tears brim in my eyes — whether from confusion, frustration, embarrassment, or the discomfort of these clothes and my scalded skin, I can't tell.

'Conversation,' I imitate. 'What does that mean?'

'It's great that you have passions, but most people don't want a twenty-minute seminar about something they don't care about.'

He leaves me gutted and shivering. My brothers are biblical — as in murderous. I've always known that and yet, now I'm finally butchered, betrayal sweats viscid into my blood. They put him up to this. Did he resist once or did he toss aside their script and reveal he had already written his own?

Now, Elijah has the audacity to clean up the cuts as though he happened to stumble upon me like this. 'Don't stress about it. You only have to be a little more aware of other people. Nothing a bit of practice won't fix.' 

His smile looks, by all means, genuine. 'I understand you're an introvert but you're too old to not have any friends.'

I stare at the dissected parts of the pen in front of me. When did I disassemble it? Blue ink stains my fingers.

'I have Isaiah.'

For a moment, Elijah weighs out his options until he shifts to the edge of the recliner with a clack of its ageing mechanism and leans forward. 'That's just it, Dorian. He isn't the kind of friend you should have. Look, it was fine when you were six — no one thought anything of it. But you'll be adults soon. Perhaps it's time you grow apart.'

My eyes cut to his. 'He's my best friend.'

The pity in his gaze coagulates. 'I know when you're young, everything feels like it'll last forever, but he doesn't belong in your life. You don't actually expect it to last after you graduate, do you? You probably won't ever see him again — there's no harm in cutting the string a bit early.'

Elijah over-annunciates his words to reveal their true nature to be a threat. This is what we've been talking about all this time. This is what they wanted him to talk to me about.

They don't need me to get a girlfriend, they need me to disprove rumours that I'm like him. I don't need to network for my own career, they need to brandish me around so everybody sees I'm still respectable.

I couldn't care less about his warnings.

'I will see him after graduation. God willing, we're going to Oxford together.'

Elijah scoffs a laugh. 'Even if he did, by some miracle, get into Oxford you will not be socialising with him there.'

I open my mouth but he cuts me off.

'This isn't a suggestion.' Brushing creases from his black trousers, he stands. 'It's not proper for someone of your standing to spend so much time with someone like him. He's a mamzer, for God's sake. His mother is a heroin addict and a whore too. And he's... a queer. Of all the kids in this town, you had to pick him.' Elijah sighs before his voice cuts again: 'All that sin will rub off on you eventually.'

My body burns hot, though, rather than my skin, it's my blood that boils now. It stitches my jaw shut with barbed wire; I have no choice but to allow him to speak his mind without protests.

'Do you feel bad for him? Because there are better ways to practice tzedakah.'

I muster every drop of venom in my body into my glare even if I have to frack it from the gaps between my spinal disks until the whole structure erodes.

It deters Elijah as much as a butterfly net does a shark. He loiters to the desk to stand opposite me with the grand walnut between us. Without looking at me, he picks up the pieces of Aba's space pen and assembles it.

Replacing it to its designated spot between the notecards and the telephone, Elijah smiles again. 'Just talk to some other people tomorrow. Or at school. Isn't there a Pereira in your year? That's a respectable family. Befriend him.'

Bechor. He wants me to be friends with Bechor?

I shake my head.

'Why, because he made fun of you when you were kids?' Impatience drives his tone up in pitch. 'You can't judge people on that forever. Everyone made fun of you when you were a kid.'

I tear the wire that keeps my jaw shut and spit my response out with blood. 'Not Isaiah.'

'Find a new friend.'

'No.'

'Dorian...' Elijah shuts his eyes for a breath. When he looks at me, there's a shiver somewhere behind the depths of brown. 'I'm trying to look out for you. One way or another, you aren't going to be friends with him this time next year.'

'I'm going to my room.'

Without waiting for his opinion, I grab the notecard I wrote the bars onto (which has been effectively wiped from my memory by this conversation and replaced by Giuseppe Verdi's Requiem) and stride around the desk.

Elijah steps into my path, placing a hand over my arm and, though he doesn't grip, pressure threatens to break my bones. 'You have a duty to your family.' This is all he says before he lets me go.

My room is dark. It faces east and sunlight has bleached from my side of the sky, denouncing me to the shadows when I sit on the edge of my bed.

As though my body knows it's safe, anger washes out through the soles of my feet. I manage only half an exhale before dread pounces onto the vacated territory. I drop the crumpled notecard from my fist. It hits the floor with a faint rustle.

It's time for Havdalah soon. No more than thirty minutes from now, I have to face them again. I have to spend all of tomorrow with them. (I wish I could see you.) Tears flood my eyes and I try to cram them back in with the heels of my palms. (I want to talk to you.) I don't want them to know.

I don't want them to know I can't breathe. (When did I stop breathing?) I don't want to walk into the dining room in thirty minutes for my parents and Elijah and our maid Tanvi to discern me in seconds. I can already envision Ima's expression. She'll deliver a sardonic "are allergies still bothering you?" or a cruel "I hope you aren't crying over nothing, or are you aspiring to be the reason our temple burns down?"

No matter how hard I try, willpower fails. Panic crashes against my roughened ribs like the storm that surges into the cliffs only two hours from here. My tears spew faster as if trying to expel the ocean before it engulfs me. I shiver in its icy clutch.

The human body is sixty per cent water. What other options are there than to drown in it?

I wish I could listen to music, it normally calms me down, but now I settle for playing Chopin on my thighs as though they're ghost piano keys and rock myself.

I wish I could talk to you.

Does everybody think I'm weird and rude? (Do you?) Memories flit behind my eyes of every social interaction I've had in the past month, analysing them with Elijah's checklist: eye contact, questions, no rambling, no irrelevant tangents. Why are there so many rules? Why has nobody told me? And how does everybody else know? Do I know how to talk to people at all?

I bounce up and stride to my mirror. I need a bit of practice. I only need a bit of practice, right?

Even my smile is hideous. My teeth weren't intended for smiling. My small eyes only shrink further. How do other people smile so easily when my attempts turn into scowls or grimaces?

Nobody smiles in our family portraits. The framed photos in the sitting room depict a lineage of rich brown skin and stoicism. To this day, I don't know who I inherited my dimples from. Perhaps the illustrious lack of expression has finally coded into our DNA to birth my physical incapability to show joy or grief in any socially expected manner.

I give up. With a deep exhale, I recount the rules and try.

'Hi, I'm Dorian.' I offer my hand for my reflection to shake. (Remember a firm handshake. It's important for a good first impression.) 'Yes, like the book. Actually, I didn't know about the book until Isaiah told me. My parents don't let me read anything that doesn't further my relationship with God. But last year, Isaiah said he'd "had enough" and if I wasn't going to read it, he'd read it to me.

'Isaiah has the nicest voice I've ever heard: it's melodious and angled at the same time. And he's spectacular at imitating accents which I've always found wonderful because I couldn't fake an accent to save my life — things never sound the same on my tongue as they do in my head.'

No.

Try again.

'I'm Dorian Andrade. It is a Spanish surname — Galician, to be specific. Judaism was first brought to Jamaica by Portuguese and Spanish Jews fleeing the Inquisition in the fifteenth century.

'Which is counterintuitive because it was a Spanish colony at the time, but the Spanish government didn't have the authority to prosecute Jews in Jamaica. It was still illegal to be Jewish but at least they didn't get murdered for it. Most Jewish-Jamaicans have Sephardic surnames, though actually, plenty got Anglicised under British rule... Rambling. I'm rambling.'

I can't even maintain eye contact with myself.

What would Elijah or Bechor say if they knew that I'm talking to myself in a pitch-dark room? (Weird weird weird weird—) I cover my face with my hands to dig my blunt nails along the arch of my brow. (—weird weird weird.)

The darkness I jam over my eyes with my palms vanishes behind the thought of Isaiah's smile, the kind that brightens his eyes and displays the gap between his teeth, the one harmonised by laughter he frees only when we're secluded enough for him to stop policing his behaviour. Unlike my family, Isaiah has a face drawn for smiling.

He has never been bored by my rambling or bothered by my daydreams. If anything, he encourages them. Nobody else, no matter how respected, has ever been as kind to me.

Notes

Tzedakah: Charity. Practicing tzedakah is a religious obligation for Jews.

During Sabbath, turning on lights that weren't on before it started is forbidden, hence why Dorian doesn't just turn the light on in his room and rather sits in the dark.

Havdalah: Ritual that marks the end of Sabbath and the start of the new week. 

According to scripture, Jews "cried before [God] pointlessly" and as a result, God allowed the Temple in Jersusalem to be burnt down so they would have a reason to cry. The story is much longer, you can reserch the origins of Tisha B'Av if you're interested, but that's all you need to know to understand Ima's comment about Dorian being the reason their temple will be burnt down.

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