Somebody's Brother

 When I was 7 years old, my great-grandparents decided to renew their wedding vows for their 65th anniversary.

And this quickly became a family affair given the rarity of such an occurrence.

They decided they wanted the entire family together for the ceremony: grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, anyone remotely connected to the family by blood, marriage or adoption. And the only venue big enough was a cruise ship, which made the whole celebratory event that much more exciting. 

I was really looking forward to the trip -- a giant family reunion vacation -- where I could hang out with all of my cousins, eat all the food I wanted (and whatever kinds of food I wanted -- dessert first every single night even!) and try out all the fun activities both on and off the boat.

Obviously the percentage of rooms booked by my family and relatives was a small percentage compared to all the rooms available on a giant cruise ship, but by sheer force of numbers, we had quite a bit of celebrity status, second only to some political leader from some country. He was the biggest deal.

On the day we were to set sail, I woke up vomiting with a high fever. At the dock, I was still vomiting. The captain would not let me on board. So my parents were faced with a difficult decision, which one of them would sacrifice their ticket for a once-in-a-lifetime trip and stay home with a kid who, in all likelihood, would be better in twenty-four to forty-eight hours. The likely choice was my dad because he had married into the family, but the final decision -- and I don't want this to sound like my parents were insensitive or selfish people -- was that they would call a cab and have me go to one of their friend's houses for the ten days while the rest of the family was away.

I completely understand their choice, and I'm not even sure it was a bad decision. But it turned out to be less than ideal given the circumstances of the whole situation -- specifically, that the random political leader happened to be from a country where he was not all that well liked.

The bomb was set to go off when the cruise ship was at its farthest point from any land, and the bomb itself was located in a part of the ship that would split the hull in two like the Titanic. The terrorist insurgents hated -- or feared -- this man so much that they were willing to kill everyone aboard. Thousands of people died. There was only one survivor.

As it turned out, before he had staged a military coup and taken power as dictator-of-wherever, this leader had been the captain of an elite corp of marine black-ops soldiers. So even at 65-years-old, a swim through a bazillion miles of shark infested water was hardly a challenge for him. In news reports that followed, he said the experience had been "bracing, but not too cold."

But this left me alone. 

With every single member of my entire family drowned at the bottom of the sea or being digested inside the stomachs of sharks.

Except for one family member, Uncle Ira. Nobody in my family was ever quite sure about whose brother he was or even how old he might be. Most of the family had never met him. He lived alone in a hand-built cabin in the middle of the woods in Minnesota without running water or electricity. His only form of communication with the family -- and likely the only source of information he had about the outside world -- came from the letters he wrote to my maternal grandfather.

One letter, once a month that was exactly one and one-half pages long and written in a random, often dead, language because apparently my grandfather loved the fun of translating updates about moss growth, snowfall and rare insects. Had I known any of this, then for Hanukkah, I would have made him stuff out of sticks and leaves I found in the backyard instead of always just getting him another mug with a bag of coffee. With fifteen grandchildren, the poor old guy's cabinets were basically overflowing with different renditions of "World's Greatest Grandpop."

Anyways, back to Uncle Ira. I had actually met him once when I was two years old and a snow storm had grounded our plane in Minnesota. I remember, young as I was, because I cried at the front door, refusing to go inside. I was convinced that hirsute Uncle Ira was in fact the grandmother-eating wolf from Little Red Riding Hood. 

His beard and hair had only gotten longer in those five years, so you can imagine that Uncle Ira, walking into the child services building in handmade clothes, smelling like dirt and animal musk, was not -- in the eyes of the government -- the ideal candidate to be taking over as guardian for a young boy. It's not that anyone thought he was a child predator, just a regular cannibalistic predator. He looked the part very convincingly. 

Moreover there was a rather curious detail in every single will for all my relatives. After the lines about spouses or children inheriting property, there was always something along the lines of "and if there's no one else left, it goes to Uncle Ira, cabin in the woods somewhere north of Red Lake Reservation." Under other circumstances -- like not having a super swimmer senior citizen dictator with enemies on board -- it's possible the government would have jumped to conclusion that Uncle Ira had masterminded the cruise ship attack. 

But when you looked at him, it was clear that in terms of explosive weapons, his brain was still coming to terms with a ball and musket. Now, if the ship had been pierced with bone sharpened arrows, it would have been a different story. 

Still, I could tell, even back then as a child, that the Child Protective Services agent was uncomfortable with even the suggestion of releasing me into Uncle Ira's care, so much so that she even point-blank asked me what I would prefer.

When you're a kid and your entire family has been wiped out in a single day except for one random uncle -- who looks not like he could, but that he at some point already had bitten a bear's head off -- it's hard, even then, to not want to be near someone you're related to. The idea of going to live with some adoptive parents, when I knew there was at least someone who could tell me stories about coded letters he'd written to my grandfather about songbirds and acorns was hard to swallow.

So I asked the best make-it-or-break question I could think of: If I went to live with Uncle Ira, would he make me go to college?

"You mean school?" he grunted in the CPS agent's office.

"No, college," I said. My parents had already taken me to visit three universities that year. Their goal had been to take me to five colleges every year, probably until I graduated with a Bachelors degree, just in case there was an even better university experience out there for me.

"The thing you go to after high school," I said when he didn't respond.

"Can't make you pick up a sock after eighteen."

But his tone said something more along the lines of "if you even managed to live that long," which to be frank, at the time, I wasn't even too keen on making it to 10. It's hard to imagine there being much of a point to life when everyone who loves you is dead, and the only remaining person has the appearance and personality of a baby conceived by Spock and a werewolf.

So that sealed it for me, right then and there -- I was under no obligation to survive. But it was hardly enough to convince CPS. They ran background checks to the best of their ability on Uncle Ira, which is a hard thing to do when a person has no criminal record, no employment history, no tax record, no Social Security number, not even a birth certificate. The CPS agent was definitely disappointed and perhaps even a bit concerned by this, so she ordered a drug test, but of course the results came up negative.

When the day came for me to finally and officially go home with Uncle Ira, I could tell the CPS agent was ready to grasp at straws.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" she asked. "You'll be living in a log cabin without any way to play your video games."

I bit my lip. That thought had not occurred to me. I had assumed we'd be living in my house. With my stuff and not his house with no stuff.

Sensing this, Uncle Ira said, "Your house'll do fine."

For a moment, the CPS agent seemed to think he meant her house, but she recovered, and in one final attempt to swing the power of the law in favor of adoption, she said, "Unfortunately, unless mister...ah, Mr. Ira does something about his hair and beard, I will not be able to permanently release you into his custody due to hygiene concerns.

At this point, Uncle Ira reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a knife -- that was absolutely carved from bone because it had not set off the metal detectors when we entered the CPS building -- and hacked off around two and a half feet of beard-or-hair, both were so long and entangled it was impossible to tell where one started and the other ended.

"That enough?"

The CPS agent nodded.

"Speak up," he said like he was her father and she was some little kid getting reamed out for misbehaving.

"Yes," she said half-whimpered, "sir."

Uncle Ira stood up, hair fell all over the place -- on the woman's desk, the chair, the floor -- then he grabbed my hand and walked out of the building.

It shouldn't surprise you to learn that we ate most of our meals together in silence. Not an awkward silence. Nor an unfriendly or cruel silence. Just plain old silence, as if words just simply hadn't been invented yet.

He typically brought a book to the table and sat there reading and eating. Sometimes it was fiction, sometimes non-fiction. He had a separate book for each meal though. 

After a few months of this, one day he put his book down and spoke to me. 

"You can talk..." he began, as if reconsidering his acquiescence to some undesirable compromise, "at the table."

And let me be very clear, he clearly meant, at the table, and not to be construed to mean in any way, shape or form, to mean "while seated at the table, I was allowed to engage in conversation with him." He simply meant, if I need an opportunity to exercise my tongue or check and see if my vocal chords still operated, I was permitted to practice at this location. 

In other words, if he had had a hearing aid, he might've said, "Go ahead, talk all you like," and then switched off his hearing aid completely in full view.

But being 7 years old, I took the invitation to speak and ran with it. For months, I blabbered on about school, about things I saw outside, about things I watched on TV, sometimes about how I missed my parents or the good memories we had had together. For months, until eventually enough stacked up that it had become a full year since Uncle Ira had informed me that I was permitted to speak at the table if I so desired.

And then he spoke again.

"Shoulda hit'em."

I had just been talking about my friend Dustin who kept making me switch snacks with him at lunch because he didn't like popcorn like his mom packed, he wanted the Cool Ranch Doritos that I had, and I was getting fed up with it because I didn't want the popcorn either.

"What? But he's my friend."

"Never been."

This floored me. Was Uncle Ira stupid? What else did you call a person who came over for sleepovers, played video games with you, sat with you at lunch and made sure you always saved him a seat on the bus? I said as much to Uncle Ira, leaving out the insult on his intelligence because it was possible that having spent unknown decades living as a recluse in the woods, he had simply forgotten how human interaction worked.

"Last year, on April 22nd, during dinner, you told me that this Dustin fellow that you claim is a friend of yours said that you were a baby for still watching cartoons and you couldn't be on his whatever-you-call-it video game team if you kept it up because it would mean you'd be too stupid to have good raid strategy."

I dropped my spoon into my bowl. Soup splashed everywhere. It was possible that Uncle Ira had spoken my words to me in that single moment than in the entire year, but more importantly, he had been listening to every single thing I had said. No matter how embarrassing or pathetically sad or anything else, and he remembered, quite possibly, all of it. Even when I told the story about getting stuck to the urinal because someone left a piece of chewed up gum on it.

Uncle Ira continued, "That's not friend material. That's a bully. You should've hit him. But instead, you caved. And now, you've been bending over backwards so far that you could kiss your own butt tryin' to get him to validate you by impressin' 'im, thinking then if you're great enough, he'll respect you and finally be a good friend to you. But all that's happened is you've made yourself even more pathetic in his eyes so he just resents himself for even associatin' with you, which makes him want to be mean to you that much more."

I honestly didn't even know that Uncle Ira knew that many words in English. In Akkadian or Powhatan sure, maybe, how else could he have written so many letters to my grandfather, but in English? I just stared at him, stunned.

"How do you know all this?"

"It's all you talk about. And it's why you're havin' such a bad time."

Uncle Ira was silent for a while after this. Normally, most people would say that losing my family was the reason I was having a bad time, that's what the school counselor said in our monthly check-in meetings. Trauma and grief and living with a weird uncle who used about four words per day, rationing them for some unknown verbal-drought apocalypse. 

"Hit 'im, ditch 'im, get new friends."

"But I'll get a detention or maybe even suspended!"

Uncle Ira looked at me until I felt the exact amount of stupid that he wanted me to feel. This was a man who hated "human systems" so much that he preferred digging his own well and using an outhouse rather than be on the grid -- it would be impossible for him to consider that "getting suspended" could actually feel like a punishment.

"How do you know all this though, like about people? How do you know that that's even what Dustin's been doing?" I asked.

"I'm one hundred fifty seven years old."

I frowned, trying to make sense of what I had just heard.

"Heard me right."

"But you don't look that old. And people can't live that long."

"Vampires are people too."

My mind was racing for corroborating evidence. Seeing this, Uncle Ira tilted his mug towards me. Inside was a deeply dark, viscous liquid that glinted on the surface.

Somehow, I had managed to spend a year living with this man and never noticed that he was a blood-drinking monster. But he wasn't really a monster, at least not to me. He must've been killing some people, but not it seemed enough for anyone in town to notice. Had anyone else in the family known this? Or even suspected it?

I wasn't scared of him though. I had been scared of him when I was younger, and even right after the cruise ship accident when I saw him at the CPS agency, but appearance and selective mutism aside, he took care of me -- he made my breakfasts, lunches and dinners, got me the stuff I needed for school or sports, took me places to have fun (usually outdoors and away from technology), and apparently, cared enough about me to even listen to my problems.

 I've never found out whose brother Uncle Ira is, and it's possible he's not actually blood related to me at all, but I love him, and I know that someday if I have kids, and something happens to me, he'll be there to take care of them too.