Summer of 1995, Highland Park, New Jersey

By Lia Gurevich

My little brother Ari is the funniest person I know. Even as a baby, he was funny, with bright red hair sticking up at improbable angles around his pudgy little face and an array of expressions that Groucho Marx would have envied. He chewed his way out of his crib one night, crawling into my room, his mouth a wounded mess of splinters and paint chips.

As time went by and he began to talk, his actions were less extreme, presumably because he could now communicate his desires and dislikes to us without resorting to Papillion-style feats of daring. But his natural quirkiness, his talent for living and doing things differently, never wavered.

Some people thought him odd, and even some members of our extended family gossiped amongst themselves that Ari was a bit “touched in the head.” Ari overheard an aunt repeating this phrase one night and promptly came over to me, grabbed my hand, and placed it on his disheveled scalp, yelling loudly, “I’m being touched in the head! Help!” flailing his arms and flopping on the ground in a fit of laughter. He was 4 years old, and already he knew what was what.

I made feeble efforts to control his boisterous, if somewhat bizarre, precocity. Having a single working mother left Ari in my charge most of the time, and I was conflicted between the desire to make him ready for the world and the desire to let him be his own true, wonderful self. These two things often conflict, I realized early on, and every day was a challenge.

There was the day he came home from first grade three hours late (we lived about four blocks from the school). I was just about to go scour the neighborhood for his remains when he marched in the door, eyeing the ground carefully.

“Where have you been, Ari? I was about to call the police,” I said, bluffing.

“I was on my way home,” he said with a straight face, looking me dead in the eyes, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. Duh.

“For three hours? We’ve talked about how bad it is to lie, and don’t give me that theory of yours again.”

Ari had invented a sort of calculus for truth over the years, a maddeningly impervious system no logic could assail. His tools were his imagination, which produced for Ari a reality as true as any other, and his sheer force of will. I’d learned over time that the only way to stop him at this expansive game was to stop him before he could start, otherwise he’d be adamantly telling me up was down this afternoon and he had to climb home, on his belly, up the sidewalk.

“Where were you? There’s perverts around, you know.”

His eyes lit up. “Where? Here?”

“No,” I sighed. “Not here. Out there. Listen. Where were you, goddammit.” I thought a second and opted for a bribe. “If you tell me the truth, I’ll tell you all about the perverts who live down the street.”

“The Millers? It’s the Millers, right?”

“Look, Ari, you better tell me what you were doing or I’ll tell Mom when she gets home and then you’re gonna get it. And don’t say that about the Millers, they’re Mormons, not perverts.” Ari had been insisting since he found out about Mormonism that the Mr. Miller kept a harem tied up in his basement.

“I swear I was walking home!”

I looked at him with my most serious face. What could I do? I had to play his game; for him, it was real, as real as anything. “How, Ari? How were you walking home?”

“Very, very carefully,” he said solemnly.

“Why?”

“Because of the ants,” he said. “They’re everywhere. They have cities all over the sidewalks but they’re dumb I think cuz they don’t notice all the big feet around them. I had to walk very carefully not to kill them by accident, and then I had to tell everyone I saw about their cities on the sidewalk, so no one else would step on ‘em either, but people wouldn’t listen, so I had to try to get them to go into the grass where less people are. And you know it’s really hard getting them to do what you want, not like a dog. I tried scaring them into the grass and I tried using food but nothing worked so finally I just had to pick ‘em up and put ‘em there one by one.”

I sighed. “Ari. Listen. I was really worried. You can’t do that. Since when do you care about the ants anyway? Do you realize how many ants you’ve accidentally killed over the years? And what about all the living things on your body that die every time you take a bath or wash your hands? What about your skin, dying all the time?”

Ari turned very pale and stared at me.

“Look, it’s not so bad. Things have to die, to make room for other things to live.” I often had to give Ari these half-truths to explain the world with, to get him to behave “correctly”, and they made me feel both cruel and stupid. I wondered what I would do when he got a little older and realized how I was cheating him.

He was staring at the ground, stubbornly working something out, lines of trouble on his forehead. “So … ants have to die so feet can live?” he asked. He looked at me.

“Well … no, not exactly. But … you can’t save all the ants. And if you try, that is what you are doing with your whole life. You’d be the boy that saves ants. So you have to sacrifice everything else in order to save the ants. You couldn’t go to school, because you’d have to constantly be on a campaign to tell other people not to step on ants, or get the ants to a safe place, or whatever. And so that’s what your life would be, and you want to be an astronaut, right? So, for you, Ari, ants have to die so you can be an astronaut. And anyway, probably if you really wanted to save all the ants and gave up all the other stuff you want to do for that, there would be way too many ants and that could be really bad for other animals or for the flowers or whatever.”

I took a deep breath. Was he going to buy this load of horse crap? He was a smart kid, but still a kid. He looked at me suspiciously for a minute and then a big grin broke out on his face. “Can I go play outside?” he asked me.

“Yeah, sure, but stay on our street, OK?” That was way too easy, I thought. “Think fast,” I said, and threw an apple to him. He caught it and ran out the door, and I went back to my trig homework.

An hour later Mom came home with pizza. I went to find Ari. I didn’t see him on the sidewalk or riding his bike on the street, so I went to the wooded lot a few houses down where all the kids like to play. And sure enough, there he was, with a bunch of other neighborhood kids.

He was leading four of them in a stomp fest that made them look like spastic punk rockers. They were spinning in slow circles, fists clenched, and periodically a foot would come down with great emphasis and dirt and dust would fly up and one kid or another would shout, “Got ‘em!” All around the lot were other kids, doing the same thing, and one even had a magnifying glass. I stared at the carnage.

“Ari! Mom’s home, come eat! What the hell are you doing anyway?”

Ari ran up and started pulling me over into the heart of the battle. “Look! We’ve killed like a hundred of ‘em! Now I can be an astronaut and Joey can join the circus and Dee can have her beauty shop, although I think that it’s probably more fun to save ants but anyway that’s her thing…. How many ants do you have to kill to be my big sister?”

“Look, Ari, I didn’t mean you have to try to kill ants in order to be an astronaut, just that you couldn’t worry about saving them all. It’s not good to kill them all either.”

He thought about this a minute. “OK, OK,” he said, but I could tell he was still thinking.

For two months, going outside with Ari was an exasperating act hardly worth doing. He was always late coming home, till I simply gave up and decided to drop him off and pick him up myself. Often he would walk so slowly and circuitously that I had to piggyback him, pointing and instructing me from up there.

He had decided to take me at my word, infuriatingly literal. He could not save all the ants, and he could not kill them all, so he decided every third ant must go. Nothing I said could dislodge him from this magical conviction: Every third ant was doomed.

I hoped it was a phase that he would soon grow bored with, but it persisted, on and off, for quite a while. People would stop and stare in the street as he hopped around, carefully choosing his steps and then POUNCE, down he’d come. He had convinced a bunch of the neighborhood kids to do the same and often you’d see troops of them, carrying out their sacred mission.

I tried every piece of dirty logic I could think of, but nothing worked. In the end, I had to simply be glad that he had not decided to stop washing in a crusade to save his microorganisms. And henceforth I picked my words with a great deal more care, and vowed to tell him the truth as much as I possibly could, no more games, no more tricks.

The world would tell him lies soon enough.