Midnight

         The man ran into the store. The night was damp without being rainy, more like stepping into a wet towel that enveloped you, not the sweet embrace of your mother holding out a bath towel when you were a kid, but a stranger who means to do you harm smothering you with this crazy wet one, trying to push it into your mouth, and down deeper, down into to your lungs. I stood there, back to him, struggling to keep the impulse to shrink away from taking over, by facing my back to him, watching him on the monitors.
         Here are Gas’n’Wash, sort of a knock-off name meeting there between Stop’n’Go and Loaf’n’Jug full of all those little key chain trinkets and tiny flashlights that burn out after one week. I watch the man look around, his black and white psuedo-self fuzzy and slightly out of time with the noise his rustling clothes and pawing through items made. 
         I knew him, but couldn’t place him, not really.  He seemed frantic, looking for something, pawing through the shelves of crap.
         “Excuse me, sir, can I help you?”  I said, speaking before I fully turned to him, and the last vowel sounds came out strangled and rough.  I didn’t recognize him, but the man, sweating profusely, bruises on his face and arms was my brother. 
         Silence ensued then.  What do you say?  The man who wears a slightly older, slightly stronger version of my own face was holding a gun, a ridiculously dull, heavy-looking gun, with a ridiculously fat barrel, one that, had this been a few years earlier I would have stuck my finger down into, laughing in that brother-way, the one that would make Steve settle down, no matter how pissed he was at me. 
         “Hey Steve-o, what’s going on?”  I asked, trying to put that familiar ring to my voice, as if this was the norm.  “Need yourself a light? Smokes?”
         “You got to get out of here.”
         “What?”
         “You have to get out of here. Now!  Get out, Ted.  Something isn’t right.  Something is going to happen.” 
         “What’s going on, Steve.  You don’t seem well.  Come back here, back to the break area.  Sit with me for a minute, have a smoke, calm down. You can tell me what’s going on.”
         “Ted! Get your stuff, where is your car?  You need to go!”
         “Okay, but you have to come with me.  If something bad is going to happen, you need to come with me.”
         My pulse was throbbing, my pulse pounding in my temples.  Calm down, breathe. Count: 1, 2, 3,4,5,breathe...6, 7, 8, 9, 10.  Running though the checklist of things. 
         This is what you learn living with a crazy person. 
         You live according to the checklist. 
         You remain calm; you have to intervene before things get out of hand.  The old way of living closes back over, a billowing sheet that you thought you had escaped, but now you realize that it has been draped over you again, making you a ghost again.  This is your childhood, a ghost boy living under a sheet locked out of the house of normalcy, to roam around the backyard in the dark as, through the translucent fabric you watch all the lights in your house go out. 
         You are no longer one of the normal, and you don’t know why.   
         Calm him down. 
         Get him to tell you what is going on. 
         Humor him. 
         Gauge the damage.
         Get help.  Get Mom, except she’s dead.  Get a doctor.
         This is what happens: you grow up in this crazy-ass world where your brother is a psycho and you can’t tell anyone. You try to blend in as best as you can, you learn to lie. You learn how to manage him so your father can drink himself to death and so your mother can escape into her work.  You become his best friend, his nurse, his everything. 
         The high school was told that he was bipolar and had ADD, so they were not too concerned by anything that happened.  But that was far from the accurate picture.
         Steve’s been living in a private mental institution about an hour away.  His behavior became more and more erratic, until one night he tried to jump off a balcony of his apartment.  His live-in girlfriend decided to move out, and forgot he existed.
         Mom passed away.  Dad lives here in town, but we never talk.  Never, not even if we see each other in the store.  There is something too horrible in the past to be covered up with small talk, a void that was childhood, the hole where my father should have been.  The hole that my taking care of my crazy older brother filled, to a frightening extent.
         Steve was mostly okay when he remembered to take his medication.  A mood stabilizer and I don’t even know what else.  But he would decide he was cured, and quit taking them, and next thing you know Steve has his calloused, smoke-smelling hands wrapped around Moms neck again, and his throwing her around the room.
         He should have been committed sooner, but I think they felt guilty.  They thought it meant they were bad parents.  But what are you going to do with him?  When a lean 240 lbs of rage comes flying at you in the night, what are you going to do?
         “Sure Steve, let’s go,” I say. I am wracking my brain, trying to remember the phone number of his doctors, but then just figure to get him away from my customers, and maybe take him here to the local hospital where they will have some sort of equipment to treat him and transport him.  I grab my coat, motion for Steve to come too.
         I am grateful that it’s 4 am, not 2 am.  I am grateful that I don’t work at a busy store.  I am thinking that I will be losing my job, for my crazy brother coming here, for leaving the store unattended, locking the doors behind me. 
         Steve walks unsteadily behind me.  His forehead is bleeding.  I wonder where I will be able to be hired after a stunt like this. Probably back to fast food, somewhere.  His hands are shaky and full of dirt.  The right knee of his baggy, ill-fitting jeans has been ripped out and Steve is not wearing any shoes. 
         I slipped into the driver’s seat of my beat to shit Pontiac, unlocked the door for Steve, and started it up.  I stepped on the brake and pulled the car out of the parking spot.  I took one last look at my job, wondering what the hell was wrong with me. 
         Guess Cindy is right.  I probably am codependent.  I have lived so messed up that I no longer fit in the real world, the normal world.  I am still the ghost boy in the yard, looking in on everyone’s normal little lives. 
         I signed a left turn.  The red semi turned the corner without slowing, ran straight into the first row of pumps, angled right into the store window that I normally look out of.  I craned my neck to look but Steve was punching my arm, "Go! God, just go!”
         The smoke and the fire where visible from the other side of town.  I didn’t know how Steve knew what was going to happen but I was sure it was sort of hoax, something he had started but only finished somehow through me.  There some big unanswereds here, the gun, the sudden appearance of a mental ill man after 5 years of institutions, and how did he know where I was going to be.  Oh, and only the most obvious, why was my gas station a ball of flames and how did he know.
         “Ted, my boy, don’t even try to understand. None of it makes sense. It never does.  The doctors, mom and Dad, they all said it would go away, that it would stop.  Maybe it’s time to think of me, of the truth of living for a change.  What I do know is that I am not crazy.          
         “Steve, just tell me what’s going on.”
         “There’s nothing going on.  I just know. I just know.”
         “You did this! You sent a semi through my tiny life!  That was my world back there! That burns mess!”
         “Close your eyes for a minute and listen.  Maybe you believed the wrong people.  Maybe I am not so crazy.  Maybe I can know things, see things before they are real.  Maybe they are trying to shut me up now.  Where can we go?  Where can we go that no one will know us?  Know you?”
         As the sun, a rosy cascade of light, came pouring from over the Rockies, I pulled the Pontiac over the highest part of the pass.  The road was a purple ribbon spooling down the side, into the far-off desert.
         “Okay. Okay Steve, I am listening.”