BRAIN, BRIAN

Marvin’s tumor is the size of an unshelled walnut. His doctor, who wears bile-colored Crocs, has told Marvin and Marvin’s wife, Cathy, that he plans on removing the tumor with a knife that’s not really a knife but a beam of light. When the surgery was first explained, Marvin saw a hot spatula cutting cold cheesecake, but now that the operation is tomorrow, he keeps seeing a red, plastic flashlight pointed at a dense, winter wood. Who goes there? He hears the surgeon call out, gleefully. Make yourself known!

The neurosurgeon is as young as Marvin’s son, Brian. Brian no longer speaks to Marvin. Brian lives in Arizona with a girl Marvin and Cathy have never met but whose name is Begonia. They’ve seen a picture of their son and this girl. A dog that looked like a coyote was also in the picture. “Who wants a cartoon for a dog?” Marvin asked Cathy. “Who wants a houseplant for a girlfriend?”

Marvin was a terrible father, but the tumor has lessened the reality of this. The larger the tumor grows, the better the father Marvin was. And the faster Marvin walks, the faster the tumor grows. Which is why, every morning, he goes to the mall in his big white shoes, the ones that look like loaves of junk bread, and walks eight-thousand steps. He walks the length of Pinesap Plaza fourteen times, back and forth, and as he does, he recalls things he thought about doing with Brian as things he actually did. Camping under a swirl of stars. Shooting clay pigeons. Making cowboy beans in a cast-iron frying pan. “There’s Orion,” he hears himself say. “More pintos?”

In the early morning mall, the managers raise the gated storefronts with much audible ado. The mall fountains sputter to life. Together, the fountains and the gates sound like static, and Marvin’s mind becomes the roaring space between canyon walls. He passes stores. There’s Queen B., Banana Pants, Mr. Stupid. He stares at the things for sale and cannot remember what they are for. He imagines a pair of underwear on a potted begonia. A woman’s yellow sweater on a coyote. A whoopee cushion as a map of Arizona. Marvin moves his big white shoes faster. He forgets Brian’s thin shoulders and crystalline singing voice. He forgets Brian’s pitiful deer eyes, his milkweed hair. Instead, Marvin remembers throwing a football that was never thrown, laughing at a joke that was never cracked.

At the end of Marvin’s morning walk is Sprinkles, the ice cream kiosk. If Marvin times it right, he takes his last step when Dashel, the ice cream boy, flips over the OPEN sign. “Good morning, Marvin,” Dashel says. “The usual?” Marvin’s excitement is such that he can only nod. His head nods and the tumor nods, and fireworks go off in Marvin’s mind— red and green and violet.

Dashel scoops the vanilla while Marvin watches. It’s a sphere of snow rolled through a pristine field, the belly of a snowman that Marvin and Brian did and didn’t build. Dashel rolls the vanilla through rainbow sprinkles, a brain dragged through artificial memories. He puts the ice cream into a paper bowl and places a shelled walnut on top. He hands the ice cream to Marvin, and Marvin goes and sits on a bench by the fountains. Every morning, he sits there until the ice cream has melted and the sprinkles have bled, and all that remains is the walnut—floating in gray matter. Tomorrow, Marvin will have his brain, but today he has Brian.