This entire inquisition, by the way, this protracted rant, squeezed itself into the sliver of space between the burly passenger’s response to the flight attendant’s beverage query and the moment when, armed with the same routine and rudimentary question, the same flight attendant turned to my brother and said:
“And for you, sir?”
“Coffee, black,” my brother responded.
There, in that moment, with that response, my brother’s future and mine were sealed. The moment in which I write these words, the conditions under which I write them, were not only decided then, but engineered down to the smallest detail: this loft, this rainy day, this marbled composition notebook, this pen, the length of 5/8-inch blue marine rope dangling from a ceiling beam behind me. From the moment when my brother utt
