I Am the Ghost Here

I Am the Ghost Here

It is not until my older brother is thirty-­three that I learn he’s controlled by a puppeteer. The truth comes out after a family emergency, when Jeff is unable to summon the puppeteer on short notice and must appear as himself for the first time. I don’t immediately recognize my brother as he hurries through the automatic doors of the hospital. He’s usually an alpha male, a tech founder who takes big strides and has a deep, booming voice, but this man is nervous, twitchy, weird.

Normally my brother greets me with a compliment about my appearance. “Looking good, SunnyD,” he’d say. “Really fit. You’ve made some gains?” He nicknamed me for the drink I chugged after judo practice as a kid. I am no longer a jock, but the nickname stuck. This man doesn’t use my nickname. He doesn’t greet me at all. He slinks up to me with his head down, like I am unfamiliar, except he is the one who is unfamiliar.

“Is Dad okay?” he asks, sitting down next to me not far from the triage window.

“I don’t know,” I reply. “I’m waiting for an update. Mom’s in the back with him. We should know something in a few hours. Are you okay?”

“Fine, fine,” he says brusquely.

I ask my brother what is going on, why he is so unfriendly. He says that now is not the best time to get into it, that we should focus on my father’s surgery and forget about how weird he is acting. He slumps over in his seat as we wait for news. The hospital is noisy with other emergencies. I hear what sounds like a seizure. I hear the aftermath of surgery, screaming that sounds naked in its timbre. I thought a hospital would have better walls. I hope my father will not be screaming like that when he wakes up from his surgery.

“Remember when Dad accidentally ate one of your magic mushrooms and thought he went to Jupiter?” I ask Jeff, attempting to conjure a happier mood. My mother had found these mushrooms in Jeff’s backpack and put them into a salad.

“The only time I saw Dad relaxed,” Jeff says, nodding. “Maybe if he’d tried a few more shrooms, he wouldn’t have had a heart attack.”

A few hours later, the doctor emerges. My father has survived the operation and is expected to make a full recovery.

*  

A few weeks later, my mother holds a family dinner to celebrate my father’s return to health. She prepares stir-­fried rice noodles, papaya salad, chicken wings, and sticky rice. My brother decides this is the moment to introduce us to his puppeteer. He arrives as the brother we are familiar with, but after a few minutes of chitchat, a petite redheaded woman pops out from inside him and stands by his side. Her name is Michelle, she is Canadian, she is thirty-­six, and she has over fifteen years of puppeteering experience. She says she has been scripting Jeff’s dialogue since he was in college. I didn’t become close to my brother until after he left for Stanford. In the summer breaks, when he returned home, he seemed happier, interested in connection. I’d assumed he had simply grown up, that the time away from home had been good for him.

I can tell my parents are uneasy with Michelle. They’ve heard rumors of celebrities hiring puppeteers, but no one we know has mentioned using one. Using a puppeteer is not the kind of thing a well-­adjusted person should do. My parents don’t have to speak to make their opinions clear. As they take turns making faces at Michelle, I ask her polite questions, like how she ended up in puppeteering. She tells us that she is an empath and being other people comes naturally to her. She says that she always wanted to work in the arts, that puppeteering uses her writing and acting skills. She even tells us a long, boring story about her high school theater days. My brother and I nod along politely.

As Michelle talks, it becomes clear that tonight’s intro was her idea, not Jeff’s. She says she’s grown tired of doing her work anonymously. Unfortunately, no one is interested in offering the praise she seeks. We are preoccupied with noticing how my brother is diminished without her. He isn’t gregarious, his arms are crossed, and his lips are arranged in the same permanent frown that he wore through high school, back when he would take his dinner to his room and eat alone while blasting Jane’s Addiction.

I try to imagine the kind of relationship I would have with this unmanned brother who quietly broods over his noodles. This guy doesn’t seem capable of organizing pickleball games. Instead of accompanying him to concerts, I would see him only at holidays. I refill Jeff’s whiskey glass, but the alcohol does nothing to lubricate him. As he sits hunched over in his chair, I hold out hope that the brother I love is somewhere in there. My mother is wearing a sweater that features a panda bear made of Swarovski crystals. Michelle leans over to inspect her face in the crystals, as Jeff would. She pretends to pick food out of her teeth.

“Where do you get a sweater like that, anyway?” she asks. “Do you have to insure it?”

My mother only glares.

I know what Michelle is doing. She is showing off her ability to embody Jeff. She doesn’t care that we are upset. I tell her to read the room, but she won’t stop doing her Jeff bit. After another fifteen minutes, my mother has apparently held in her feelings as long as she can, and now she erupts. She is a small woman, just four-­foot-­ten, but the anger makes her tall. My father leans back as she leaps out of her chair.

“This is sick,” she shouts at Jeff. “This woman is a stranger! You let a stranger control you?”

“Let’s give her a chance,” I say. “He’s done well with Michelle. Look at what he’s accomplished!”

I don’t understand why my brother has chosen to be controlled, but after he went to college, he became a good older brother, more like a father or uncle at times. I think back to his holiday visits home when, during my parents’ explosive fights, he did his best to reassure me. He said their mutual dysfunction had created two puzzle pieces that could never fit with anyone else.

“It’s counterintuitive,” he told me. “When they say they want a divorce, what they actually mean is that they want to remain fighting with each other forever. If they really wanted to leave each other, they would have by now.” I would have run away from home if not for his assured tone.

“What if this lady drives you to murder someone?” my mother asks. “Only a weirdo would do this job.”

“You can trust Michelle,” he replies. “I checked her references.”

“Michelle seems like a trustworthy person,” I say, even though I don’t know if that’s true.

My mother is upset I am siding with my brother. She stomps out of the dining room, flinging her chicken bones at Michelle on her way out. My father follows, with a look that says, See what you’ve done? Michelle picks the bones out of her lap. My brother looks distraught.

“This was a mistake,” he says.

“Give them time,” I reply, even though I know time won’t help.

Michelle doesn’t bother popping back into him now that the evening is ruined. She leads Jeff out with her hand pressed against his back like she is still guiding him, even from outside. A few days later, I text my brother to ask if he wants to play darts. He doesn’t reply. The next weekend, he misses our standing NBA Jam date at the arcade. I eat my mother’s pad woon sen noodles alone in my bedroom. Jeff doesn’t contact my parents. As weeks pass, he sees me only sparingly. I ask him about Michelle, but my questions disappoint him. He says I remind him of our parents, that I have absorbed their views. He is mad that I didn’t leave them. I lived at home during college and have only recently moved a few blocks down the road, close enough to make my mother happy but far enough that I can shut the door on them when needed.

The holidays are triggering for my parents. They stir up secret memories from their childhoods. Ghosts of angry relatives fly around during these fights. My mother’s mother is the one who haunts us the most. She’d once said it was a mistake for my mother to move to America. She said my mother was no longer Thai because she left. My mother is racked with guilt even though her mother is dead.

Usually, Jeff would make the situation better with his cheerful stories, his jokes about his bad Tinder dates—­though I guess these were Michelle’s jokes. But he isn’t around to help this time, and his absence adds a new layer of sadness. This year, my parents make a colorful shitstorm. They cry through Thanksgiving dinner, then break dishes on Christmas. My mother threatens to rip out her hair, and my father stands clothed in a bathtub full of water in an attempt to show us he is drowning. My mother threatens to leave my father and move back to Thailand, though she didn’t like her life there to begin with. “You think I liked squatting to go tinkle?” she once asked me. Her alcoholic mother had made her life there hell, but still, she always threatens to move back when the days in Washington get too short.