“do you think you can kill a brother off so easily?” Magdlen

I don’t know if you are expressing a loose incredulity with the story as a whole, a story that is reaching to show that there are a disproportionate number of beginnings and endings within the context of a life, including the ending of a genuine friend equally ending as a sort of adopted brother, and then having a sort of kissed off euthanasia ending.

Either way let me answer the question but first let me admit that I have never killed or hacked a gopher to death much less a brother at least in the literal sense.

The Watcher’s is an attempt at dealing with the incessant disconnect that is surmounted by our incessant persistence at consistency and indeed connectivity. Life blinks all the time, when we blink our consciousness remains alert only because the brain shuts down so that we don’t notice incessant blinking. Perhaps the same thing happens when we hack a gopher, the very act shuts something off inside of us, perhaps the very same thing happens in the act of torture, perhaps we blink, perhaps our entire consciousness blinks; perhaps genocide is an act permissible by a humanity blinking away.

In The Watchers, our protagonist is dealing with a disassociation that I associate with blinking, he is trying to continue his research, he is figuring out how to continue his research while dealing with the ordeal that his research assistant, Dr Randall, has become a quadriplegic. In short he is looking the other way so as to ignore the obvious, Dr Randall is never going to recover, Dr Randall is like a brother to him and he doesn’t want to face that ending.

In my real life Magdlen, (sorry I don’t know your real name) I have suffered the ending of a great friend Antonio, a wonderful brother Gabriel and a phenomenal mother, Patricia; all endings that I didn’t want to face, I always hoped I would die first but then evidence shows that I had my part in their dying first.

I never knew Antonio in person as he was a pure theatric of an Internet friendship, we must have poured 600 letters between us but we never spoke a word or saw each other alive. In a sense the absence of presence made for a more promising friendship; which indeed it was. One day however I had to fly to Minneapolis Minnesota to see his corpse, I should have never gone, that put an unwanted period in our semantics.

My brother died of AIDS, I suppose I know how pestilence and famine destroyed civilizations, AIDS making bed with my brother brought our entire family to a stand still. In a sense I went a little crazy when my brother took his own life, because he could not sit in a bed anymore; when he called to say goodbye I didn’t answer the phone. That made a runon on our semantics.

You think by that point I would have learnt how to say goodbye but I hadn’t. Mother suffered a stroke and by doing so ended my time in America; but as I came to be with her and to sooth some of her ills there was still the challenge of being her son, and I never overcame that; we argued a lot more than either expected to argue, and then when her time was near, she could sense that she would have no further to go with me. She stopped taking her medicine, she told me so, I did nothing to encourage her to resume taking it, I might have helped killed her with the absence of my urgings.

In some ways I guess I think it is easy to kill a brother but not as easy as having something to do with killing him by way of everyday simple life associations. Maybe a mother too may be killed in this assimilated manner of indifference.

In The Watchers our protagonist is looking at Dr Randall’s wife and he realizes that she is his connectivity to Randall and that Randall must be let go by those that love him; and thus then assumes the only kind and irresponsible and irrational act, he kisses Nancy and ends the blinking slightly off key.

Perhaps it was a terrorist act, perhaps it was an act of extreme kindness, perhaps it was an acknowledgement of the feelings had by someone that had not ended.

Ricardo