“Yeah,” Burke said, and poured out another drink. He carried it and the decanter to the sofa and settled into it. “Nice sofa,” he said. “Nice living room. Nice house. Not very normal, though.”
“No,” Andrew said. “I’m not fitting in very well.”
“I fit in great.” He drank back another glug of whiskey and poured out another twenty dollars’ worth. “Just great, it’s the truth. I’m totally invisible and indistinguishable. I’ve been sleeping at the Scott Mission for six months now and no one has given me a second glance. They can’t even steal my stuff, because when they try, when they come for my shoes or my food in the night, I’m always awake and watching them and just shaking my head.”
The whole living room stank of whiskey fumes with an ammoniac tinge. “What if I find you some clothes and a towel?”
“Would I clean myself up? Would I get rid of this protective coloration and become visible again?” He drank more, breathed out the fumes. “Sure, why not. Why not. Time to be visible. You’ve seen me, Krishna’s seen me. Davey’s gonna see me. Least I got to see them first.”
And so he let his older brother lead him by the hand upstairs to the bathroom with its damp-swollen paperbacks and framed kitsch-art potty-training cartoons. And so he let his brother put him under the stinging hot shower and shampoo his hair and scrub him vigorously with a back brush, sluicing off the ground-in grime of the streets—though the calous pads on his hands remained as dark with soot as the feet of an alleycat. And so he let his older brother wash the stumps of his toes where the skin was just a waxy pucker of scar, like belly buttons, which neither of them had.
And so he let his brother trim away his beard, first with scissors and then with an electric razor, and so he let his brother brush out his long hair and tie it back with an elastic taken from around a bunch of broccoli in the vegetable crisper.
And so, by the time the work was done and he was dressed in too-big clothes that hung over his sunken chest and spindly legs like a tent, he was quite sober and quite clean and quite different.
“You look fine,” Adam said, as Brent fingered his chin and watched the reflection in the full-length mirror on the door of Alan’s study. “You look great.”
“I look conspicuous. Visible. Used to be that eyes just slid off of me. Now they’ll come to rest on me, if only for a few seconds.”