MEMORY OF ALEX

BY OWENM
memoryofalex@hotmail.com

[ part 2 ]

“Pizza’s here, boys!” Dad yelled from the hallway. Alex and I looked at each other, and at exactly the same time we jumped off the couch, except Alex shoved me back into the couch before I could stand all the way up. I growled at him, but he just laughed as he made it into the kitchen first. The heady smell of dough, cheese, and warm cardboard drifted into the living room, and I smiled. Pizza was a rare event these days, but so was Dad being home for dinner.

“Did you get mushrooms? I wanted mushrooms,” I whined as I slid into a chair at the table.

“Just plain,” Dad said sympathetically. I pouted, but the smell of pizza was enough to clear my mood quickly. Alex threw the box open, a cloud of steam rising to the ceiling, and deftly dealt three pieces onto paper plates, pushing one in my direction. I grabbed it and began to wolf it down ravenously.

“It’s not like pizza from home, but it’s ok,” commented Alex between bites.

“I’m glad you approve.” Dad pushed his plate away and leaned back in his chair.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No, I already ate,” he said quickly. “The pizza is for you boys, eat up.” Looking at his watch, he stood up. “I’ve got to be going.”

“When are you going to be home?” Alex asked.

“I get off at six, but I probably won’t get home until seven thirty or so with the bus schedule.”

“You have to work all night again?” Alex sounded a little worried, and I looked over to him, wondering if I should be worried too.

Dad tousled his hair. “They pay good money for graveyard at the hospital,” he answered. “A few more nights like this and we might be able to think about getting a car again.” I smiled at the thought of having a car, taking the bus everywhere was such a pain.

“I think I could get a paper route,” Alex said. “Jimmy said that he makes almost ten dollars a week.”

Dad sighed. “Can we talk about this when I get home in the morning?” Alex didn’t answer. “I’ve gotta go, boys, see you later.” I stood up from my chair to give him a hug, which he returned warmly, ruffling through my hair just as he had done with Alex a moment earlier. Alex didn’t get up, though. He was too big for hugs, but I didn’t feel too big for hugs. He didn’t even say good bye like I did as Dad left the room, the front door closing softly behind him.

I grabbed another piece of pizza and wolfed it down as fast as I could. Alex pushed his chair from the table, muttering something I couldn’t hear, and headed for the living room. A half-eaten piece was still on his plate. I stopped chewing myself, wondering why Alex didn’t want to have pizza. I mean, it wasn’t like it was bad pizza or anything. I got up from my chair and padded softly over to the entry to the living room. Alex was sitting on the couch, his knees pulled up to his chest, his head bent down.

“Don’t you want pizza?” I asked him.

He looked up, his face streaked with tears, his eyes furious. “Get the fuck out of here!” I took a step backward but stayed, petrified, until a pillow from the couch sailed through the air and connected with my face. “Leave!”

I turned and sat back down at the table, feeling like I wanted to cry myself but not knowing why. The pizza still sat mostly uneaten on the table in front of me, but I didn’t feel really hungry any more either. I picked at the cheese absent-mindedly, remembering how we used to get pizza every Friday night. Back when we were in our real house, not this dump. Back when Mom was still around. My job was to hold the pizza on my lap when we went out and picked it up. She even let me pick some of the mushrooms off and eat them before we got home. It was like a secret, but I think Dad always knew.

But Dad kept on saying we can’t live in the past, that we had to think about the future. I didn’t know if that meant if we weren’t even supposed to remember how things used to be, but I didn’t think it would be all that bad to keep on trying to remember what things had been like. Like where my bed was in my old room, or what Mom used to smell like when she used to go out with Dad on Saturday nights and leave us with the babysitter. I looked up and stared at a dirty spot on the wall. I couldn’t remember the babysitter’s name anymore. Somehow, that seemed important, to remember her name. I began to get angry, and pushed my chair away from the table, kicking my foot hard and accomplishing nothing.

The TV came on in the living room, so I got up and stood in the doorway. Alex was just sitting back down on the couch, gathering his legs and hunching over the same way I found him before. I shuffled my feet and coughed. “Are you still mad at me?”

“I’m not mad at you,” he said sullenly. He didn’t explain any further.

“Can I watch TV too?”

“Whatever,” he said, barely loud enough for me to hear him. I went and sat down in the chair, not wanting to share the couch with him right now. He didn’t seem to notice I was there.

I missed my big brother. I mean, he was still there, but it was like he had been beamed away or something and replaced by some kind of mutant big brother. Mom always said that Alex had a smile permanently plastered on his face. He had never seemed to get sad or angry, and even though he sometimes teased me and called me a pain he never did it that much. He made me laugh every time I was crying just by making my stuffed bears do suicide jumps off the banister. I smiled a little, remembering how he would make the grossest noises when they hit the floor.

Now, well, things were different. More like he was now. Dad said it was just that he was becoming a teenager, but I thought it was more than that. And then there was the other thing, the thing that even though I had tried not to think about for the last four days, it kept creeping back into my head. I just couldn’t understand it, and it played over and over again in my head. I mean, there was no way he could have gotten out, and he wasn’t really trying to get out after a few minutes, so why did he keep on telling me that he wanted me to leave him? There was only one explanation I could think of, that he actually wanted to be tied up. That just didn’t make any sense, why would he want to be like that?

Even though I just didn’t get it, a thought had been nagging at me all day. Twice already I had thought about saying something and chickened out. But looking at Alex, his eyes still red from crying, my resolve hardened. It was only fair, after all, for me to do something nice for him, after all the nice things he had done for me. Even if it didn’t seem nice.

“Wanna do something?” I asked.

“No,” he said pointedly.

I took a deep breath, my face turning red. “I could tie you up if you wanted.” His head whipped around, his eyes suddenly wide and boring into me, not saying anything. I fumbled for the words. “I mean, ummm, if you…wanted to.”

His eyes suddenly narrowed. “Why do you think I want to be tied up?”

I shrugged. “I dunno, I just thought.” I looked at the floor. “Or we could do something else.”

The room fell completely silent, but I was shouting inside my head. Stupid, I thought. I was right, why would he actually want to be tied up? Now he’s even madder at me than before. I could feel his eyes drilling a hole right in the top of my head. It seemed ages before he spoke, and when he did his words were slow and kind of careful.

“I wanted another chance to get out.”

I looked up. “So you want to?”

He smiled and nodded, standing up and walking to the bedroom. I followed him, a grin on my face too. I was just happy that I could do something nice for him. He sat down on his bed, taking the boot laces out from under the bed that he had never put back into his boots and the socks we had used from last time. He had never even untied the two that we used as the gag. I wrinkled my nose. He just sat there for a moment, looking down.

“Same way as last time?” I asked. He nodded, getting awkwardly to his feet. I watched, surprised, as he pulled his t-shirt over his head and shed his shorts, standing in his underwear. “Why are you taking off your clothes?”

“Cause it’s more comfortable,” he answered quickly, lying back down on the bed on his stomach, crossing his hands behind his back. Not waiting to see if he would change his mind, I sat down on the bed beside him, picking up the bootlace and wrapping it around his wrists the same way I had done the last time. I could hear him breathing, loud and fast.

“Make sure it’s really tight,” he said between breaths.

“But last time it made your hands all red and cold,” I answered. “I should leave it a little looser.”

“No, that doesn’t matter. Just make sure it’s hard for me to get out.” I nodded and pulled the laces tighter on his wrists, knotting them off four times before turning my attention to his bare feet. Without me asking, he crossed them as well, and I wound the lace around his ankles, pulling the cord so tight that I heard him gasp a little.

“Sorry,” I said quickly.

“It’s ok,” he answered. “Just make it really tight.” I finished tying off his feet, leaning against his legs like he showed me to force his feet in close to his hands, then tying the remainder of the cord around his hands. I pulled away when it was all done.

“Is that tight enough?” I asked.

He pulled a little bit. “Yeah, that’s pretty good.” I picked up the sock to tie around his eyes, but he shook his head. “Wait a second, I’ve got an idea.” I paused. “What if I had a good reason to get out, like if I couldn’t get out then something would happen.”

“Like what?”

“I dunno, something that I wouldn’t want.” He didn’t speak for a moment. “Like getting tied up all night.”

“All night? How could you sleep like that?”

“We could do it a different way so that I could sleep. C’mon, it would give me a reason to try harder. So let’s say that if I don’t get out in an hour, then I have to be tied up all night.”

I thought about what he was saying. Why did he say that being tied up would be something that he didn’t want? I mean, I was completely sure that he wanted to be tied up, and it seemed the tighter he was tied up the better. So then he probably would want to be tied up all night. I shrugged. “If you want.”

He nodded his head slowly, and I shrugged. I tied the sock over his eyes, knotting it tightly in back of his head. “Open up,” I ordered, and as he did I pushed the knot of the other two socks deep into his mouth and tied it securely behind his head as well. He mumbled something that I couldn’t understand, but I ignored him. With a grin on my face, I traced a fingernail down the sole of his foot. He rolled over onto his side, his protests muffled. I giggled.

“I could do whatever I wanted to you,” I teased him. He laid there completely still. I wasn’t really going to do anything to him, I just wanted to scare him a little. After a minute, I left him alone on the bed and went to watch TV, noting that the time was just after 7:00.

The problem was, I couldn’t concentrate on the TV. At first, I got up to check on him after five minutes, padding quietly across the room to stand in the doorway, silently, watching him. By the way he was struggling around, he was really trying to get out. I grinned to myself, because I knew there was no way he could. I had knotted everything really well and made sure that the knots were on the other side of his fingers so that he couldn’t reach them. He couldn’t even find the knots on the lace on his feet to try and let them out. Satisfied, I sat back down, but it was only a couple of minutes later before I was standing back in the doorway, watching him.

I didn’t really know what was so fascinating about it, watching my mostly naked brother writhe around on his bed. Before long, I went to sit down on my bed, unable to take my eyes away from the scene in front of me. His body was covered with a sheen of sweat from the exertion he was going through. Beads of sweat were running down his forehead but they got mopped up by the blindfold. With all the struggling, his underwear had been pulled down a little, showing just the top of his butt-crack. He eventually stopped wriggling around, laying still and moving nothing but his fingers and toes. His chest heaved as he tried to catch his breath, and then he started to whimper a little bit.

I figured that was my cue. I got up and sat down on the bed next to him. “Do you want me to let you out?” I looked over at the clock. “It’s only been 35 minutes. If I let you out now you lose.”

He shook his head no. As I watched, a mosquito landed on his arm. I didn’t do anything, and by the way he reacted I could tell that it had bit him. I guessed that was part of being tied up, if a mosquito bit you there was nothing you could really do about it, except that Alex rolled over onto his side and crushed it on the bed. He turned back onto his stomach, and I saw that his underwear had been pulled down a little more. It was kind of embarrassing to see his butt like that, almost as embarrassing as when I actually took it and pulled it back up for him. He grunted something into the gag.

“Sorry, they were kind of coming off,” I said, getting back off the bed. “22 minutes left.” I went back to my perch on my bed, lying on my stomach propping my head up on my elbows, my feet in the air, my eyes glued to him. The last twenty minutes went by very quickly, and before I knew it the clock had made a full circle around. I went back and sat down on the bed beside him.

“One minute left,” I said to him. Even though he had pretty much been still, he started to struggle again really hard, but there was no way. The seconds ticked off, and I watched the clock change from 8:05 to 8:06. “Time’s up,” I said, reaching behind his head and undoing the knot that held the gag in place. He spit it out as soon as it came loose, coughing a little.

“That wasn’t really a whole hour!” he said.

“It was a whole hour!” I retorted, untying the blindfold. He blinked as it came away from his eyes. “See, it’s after eight already. So you lost.”

“Shit,” he said. “Let me out, I gotta go to the bathroom.”

“Eww,” I said. “Don’t pee in the bed.” I started to pick apart the knot that held his feet to his hands. All of the knots had gotten even tighter from him pulling on them, so it took a little while to get them all untied. He started to wriggle a little bit, and I knew he had to go badly. “I’m going as fast as I can.” When his hands finally came loose, he pulled them out of the laces and jumped off the bed to go take his piss. It came out so hard I could hear it hitting the water even from the bedroom, and I couldn’t help but giggle. He came back into the room when he was finished, a sheepish look on his face.

“You’re really good at tying up,” he said, putting his arm around my shoulder as he sat back down on the bed. “I didn’t think you would be so good at it.”

“It’s not like I figured it out on my own, you showed me how.” I looked over at him curiously. “Who showed you how to do it?”

“Ummm, Davey and Tim and some of the other kids…from scouts,” he stammered. “It was how we practiced tying knots sometimes.” His face looked a little red. “I guess I have to get tied up now.”

“If you don’t want to….”

“It’s ok,” he interrupted. I knew that he would. He took a deep breath, and then got up off the bed. I watched him go over to his closet and take the shoelaces out of his sneakers, bringing them back to the bed.

“What are those for?”

“We need four,” he said, without any further explanation. One by one he tied one end of the sneaker laces and the boot laces to the feet of the bed, leaving the other end on the bed. When he finished, he looked at me expectantly.

“I don’t get it, how am I supposed to do this?”

“See, I lay down on the bed like this,” he answered, rolling onto his stomach. “Then you tie this one to my hand and this one to my other hand.” He spread his arms out so that they were at each corner of the bed.

“Oh, I get it,” I said. It did seem a lot more comfortable than being tied up like he was before. “What about the blindfold and the gag?”

“I have to have them both, they’re part of being tied up.”

“But what if you can’t breathe or something and I’m sleeping?”

“I’ll be able to breathe, don’t worry about it,” he said, sounding like an older brother again. He shuffled his feet.

“Ok, so lets start then.”

“There’s one more thing.” His face looked like it was turning even more red than it was. “When we…played this game at scouts, the loser…the loser had to…”

“Had to what?”

He shook like he got the chills. “Had to get tied up with no clothes on.”

“Duh, you’re not wearing any clothes.”

“I mean naked,” he said softly.

“Naked?” I blinked. “Why?”

“Because,” he answered. “It’s…it’s more like a punishment for losing that way.” He stared at the wall. When he started to talk, it seemed like he was talking to someone else, not to me. “Sometimes the loser got to stay in the tent, but usually we went out into the woods where anyone who came by could find him. Sometimes the loser would get tied to a tree, hands behind the back, sometimes with hands tied above his head, sometimes lying on the ground and all stretched out. Always naked.” He shivered again.

I breathed out, not even realizing I had been holding my breath. “Wow,” I said. “Did you ever lose?”

He looked over at me, his eyes a little wet, but not like he was crying. “I lost a lot. Most of the time.” He wiped his hand across his face. “If you don’t want to, it’s ok.”

“It’s not like its me that has to be naked,” I said. I felt a little twinge in my stomach. If before, tying him up in his underwear had seemed ok if a little strange, now it felt like some kind of line was being crossed. Now it became something that we could get in trouble for, something that we shouldn’t be doing, something that was somehow forbidden and naughty even if no one had ever told me not to tie my brother up naked. The thing was, the fact that we were crossing this line made me even more curious to participate rather than less. It made me want to take the chance, to try and find out the hidden things that I could sense were behind all this but just couldn’t quite grasp. “C’mon,” I said playfully. “Take ‘em off and lay down.”

A little smile spread on his face, and then he turned back over onto his stomach before pulling his underwear down and off. That disappointed me a little, because I had wanted to take a look at his front. Even though I frequently saw him naked, it was usually just a glimpse, and he was always careful to face away from me whenever he was changing or coming in from the shower. His butt just wasn’t as interesting to me. After all, a butt is just a butt. Things in front, that was different.

“How am I supposed to do this?” I asked him, my eyes still fixed on his bare rear. He scooched down until his feet were hanging off the bottom of the bed.

“Just tie the ropes around each foot. Make sure that the rope is really tight to the bed so that I can’t move my foot too much.” I got off the bed and stared at his foot, wondering how I could make it really tight. The idea came to me, much the same way as I had done when I leaned on his feet to make them go closer to his hands. I pushed down on his foot and then wrapped the lace around really tight. He grunted a little, but was otherwise silent.

“Ok, try that.”

He pulled at his foot, but it didn’t move at all. “Damn, you’re really good at this,” he said, a hint of admiration in his voice.” I smiled and did the same thing to his other foot, making sure it was hanging off the bed the same way and pulled to the other corner. His legs were spread a little apart, and when my eyes wandered back to his butt I could see just a little bit of his other parts sticking out underneath the bed. Fascinated and embarrassed at the same time, I pulled my eyes away and went to the other side of the bed. I didn’t need to ask him, I just grabbed his hand and pulled it out straight until it was stretched out as far as it could go, not quite hanging over the bed like his feet were. Quickly, I tied the rope tightly around his wrist, making sure to keep everything taut. He didn’t say a word, and I did the same to the other wrist, making sure again that the knots were all behind his hands where he couldn’t reach them.

When I was done, I stood up next to the bed, my mouth hanging just a little open at the sight in front of me. My brother, all stretched out on his bed, arms and legs spread apart, completely naked. He struggled gently. “Wow, this is really tight,” he said softly, and then his tone changed a little, sounding a little hesitant. “Are you going to gag and blindfold me?”

As an answer, I sat down straddling his bare back, picking up the sock that we used to cover his eyes. He obediently lifted his head up and I tied the sock off behind his head. Without missing a beat, I picked up the gag sock, the knot all wet with his spit. Just as I was about to put it in, he turned his head away. “Jake?” he said, his voice even more shaky.

“What?” I said, annoyed that he had kept me from finishing.

“Just…keep an eye on me, ok? Make sure that nothing happens.”

I rolled my eyes. “Like what?” I didn’t wait for his answer, I just reached around and shoved the sock into his mouth. He tried to spit it out at first, but I held it tightly and had it knotted off before he could do anything. He was trying to say something, but I couldn’t understand a word he said. I got off his back and stood at the side of the bed. “I’m not letting you out until morning, ok? I’m gonna set the alarm to go off before Dad gets home.” He pulled at his bindings, hard, and I smiled. He wasn’t going anywhere. For some reason, an idea struck me, and before I could think I acted, slapping his butt hard with my hand. He shouted in the gag, which hardly made any noise at all. “Have fun,” I said, leaning in to speak right in his ear, and then I turned and left the room as he kept shouting and pulling at the ropes that held him down, going back to the television.

By the time I was done with TV and getting sleepy, he was lying still on the bed. I watched the gentle rise and fall of his chest as he slept quietly. I turned off the light and climbed into bed, falling asleep to the sight of the moonlight coming in through the cracks in the blinds, reflecting off his bare skin.

At some point, I woke up in the middle of the night. Groggily, I looked over toward Alex, who was still securely tied to the bed. He was making noises into his gag, soft grunting noises, which wasn’t loud enough to have woken me up, but the creaking of his bed had been. It’s not that he was trying to get out or anything, but he was moving around a lot, his lower body sliding back and forth on the sheets. I stared at him, wondering if he had to pee or something, but then he arched his back strangely, moaning a little louder into his gag and staying there for a few seconds before collapsing back into the bed and lying still again. I figured since he didn’t keep moving he was fine, and turned over, drifting back off to sleep.