Brother's Keeper

Hunter Caine turned when he heard his name called over the loudspeaker. He dropped the cigarette he was smoking to the ground, than stepped on it to put out the spark. He walked into the building he had just exited and stepped in front of the receptionist desk at which he had presented himself ten minutes earlier.

           The young blonde receptionist smiled at him and handed a surprisingly thick file to him. “The patient is ready for you, Dr. Caine,” she said. Caine looked her over for a minute. She was attractive and Hunter could tell from the slight tilt of her head when she apprised him that it would not take much for her to come home with him. He made a mental note to come back to see her when he was done with the patient.

           The ward was surprising quiet; the only sound was the heels of Caine’s expensive kangaroo hide boots clicking on the tile floors as he walked down the halls toward the cell which held his patient. The glow of the fluorescent lights seemed to cleanse the hall. Wearing leather boots, an expensive silver blazer and trousers and a mango colored shirt, Caine did not look like the average clinical psychologist. He was not.

           When Caine reached the end of the hall, he looked down at the label of the dossier in his hand to compare it to the name on the plate of the cell door he stood in front of. It matched. That’s interesting, thought Caine; he is still using his Christian name. It was interesting because Caine had stopped using the name his parents had given him at his baptism years ago; in fact he had changed it multiple times. I could never stick with one, Caine thought to himself, I guess something can be said for his consistency.

           Caine opened the door slowly and stepped through it. The patient was waiting for him, seated on a metal chair at the metal table. He was wearing the standard issue uniform of the mental institution. He had not shaved for a few days and the stubble was clearly visible on his face. He sat up straight with his hands on his knees and his face forward with his jaw set. The only part of him that looked tired was his eyes. He did not appear to be crazy, but his file said that he had checked himself into the institution two months ago. Other than the eyes, thought Caine, he looks exactly like he did the last time I saw him.

           Caine pulled the empty seat out and sat down in it, across from the patient. He addressed the patient.

           “Israel Shepherd,” he said, “is that correct?”

           “That’s my name,” the patient answered.

           “Very good,” responded Caine. He placed the dossier on the table and opened it, casually flipping through its contents. He reached into his inside pocket and pulled out a pen.

           “Let’s get started than,” Caine said. “Your basic information states that you have no living family. Is that correct?”

           Israel only nodded.

           “Do you want to talk about them? It says you had two children and a wife. What happened to them?” Caine asked.

Israel said nothing. After a few moments, Caine said, “Look, Israel, I can’t help you if you aren’t willing to talk to me.”

“With all due respect, Dr. Caine,” Israel answered, “I didn’t call you. The people at this zoo did.” 

           Caine replied, leaning slightly forward over the table to bring himself closer to his patient, “Don’t you want to find a solution to your condition or at least a reason for it?”

           Again, Israel said nothing but after a brief silence, he composed himself and began, slowly, “They were killed. My daughter was kidnapped and murdered when she was five. My wife and year old son were killed when my house burned down three months later,” Israel stated simply.

           “The file states that the fire was ruled as an accident at first, but that ruling was changed to arson later and that you were arrested and put on trial for the murder of your family. They said that you had a psychotic break and wanted to destroy your remaining family because they reminded you of the daughter you had lost.”

           “I was acquitted,” Israel answered sharply.

           “But were you innocent?” Caine asked, just as sharply, pointing his finger at him.

           “Yes,” Israel answered icily. The word bit and Caine could sense the barely sheathed edge of hostility behind it. Good, he thought, time to push him.

            “I believe you,” Caine said, switching back into the role of the understanding psychiatrist. Israel was sitting in his chair with his arms crossed, eyes averted and staring off into space. “The evidence is clearly in your favor. You do however seem guilty of something,” Caine continued. “What about your brother? It must take some powerful kind of emotional disconnect to do what you did. Perhaps you stopped crying when you killed your brother.”

           That did it, thought Caine. Israel’s eyes flashed as he jumped off the chair, sending it clattering across the floor behind him. He slammed his palms down on the table in front of him and leaned forward, which caused Caine to draw back in alarm.

           “I did not murder my brother,” Israel said angrily. “The Aaron Shepherd I knew was dead years before I pulled that trigger.”

           Caine held his hand up in front of him to keep a safe distance between himself and his irate patient. “It’s okay, Israel. Just calm down and we can talk about this,” he said. Israel nodded and quickly calmed down. He walked to pick up his chair and had returned to his stoically collected self by the time he had returned. In the meantime, Caine had pulled a cigarette out of his pack and was lighting it with his Zippo. He offered one to his patient, but Israel refused.

           “Your reaction tells me that your relationship with your brother still deeply affects you,” Caine said. “I think if we discuss it we will find the root cause of your inability to cry. Please, start from the beginning.”

           “Aaron was three years older than me,” Israel said. It seemed that the years began to roll back in his eyes, like an old movie rewinding. “I always admired him. He was my role model in everything. He went off to college, but I wasn’t smart enough to get in so I enlisted in the Marine Corps. I did two tours in Iraq and came home and got married. My superiors told me they wanted me to join a covert ops unit called IMMANUEL. The things we saw, some of the things we did,” Israel stopped because his voice caught. He shook his head and continued, “You had to kind of divorce yourself from the reality of the situation and not think about what you were doing. It was the only way you could make it out with your sanity intact.”

           “So,” said Caine, taking a long drag on his cigarette, “you became emotionally detached. You could not feel anger because that would make you do irrational things. You could not feel sympathy or compassion because that would make you weak. Emotions were obstacles to mission completion. They were liabilities. So you eliminated them.”

           “I felt nothing after we completed missions,” Israel admitted. “Not even satisfaction or pride for a job well done. The only emotion that I could feel was the love for my family, because that was what kept me motivated to come home.”

           “You came home two years ago,” Caine said, once again glancing down at Israel’s folder. He did not have to. He knew the whole story, backwards and forwards, probably better than Israel himself knew it. And he was intimately familiar with what came next.

           “I got home just in time to see my son born,” Israel said. “We named him Aaron after my brother. Not less than three months later, my handlers from IMMANUEL found me again and said that they had one final mission for me.”

And now, thought Caine, we shall get to the crux of the matter. This is it. The moment we have all been waiting for.

“Aaron had gone off to Europe after his second year of college. We hadn’t heard from him,” Israel said, “since his graduation when we all traveled to London to see him. No one was sure what he was up to and the only time he visited was a Christmas when I was in Afghanistan. Well, it turns out that Aaron had joined some sort of organization. He was a terrorist. Aaron was a genius and that made him dangerous. He was also an enforcer. He was brutal; they showed me pictures of some of his handiwork. The worst part about it was that he did not have to do that. He was negotiating arms deals and drug sales and working plots and double-crosses too complicated for anyone who was not a genius to understand. He did not need to get his hands bloody. But he did anyway, because he was a sadist or something. In a word, he was evil. He wasn’t the brother I knew.”

  “So when IMMANUEL told you he needed to be eliminated,” Caine said with a measured voice, “you accepted the mission.”

           “Without a moment’s hesitation,” Israel affirmed. His voice was steady and his face did not waver.

           “You didn’t feel anything,” Caine said. “No reluctance, not the least twinge of guilt that you were killing your brother.” Dammit, thought Caine. Feel something, you have to feel something!

           “Nothing,” Israel said without his expression changing.

           “He was your brother!” Caine yelled, suddenly losing control of his emotions and slamming the table. “You had to feel something!”

           “Nothing,” Israel repeated, as if Caine’s outburst had not taken place. “I saw what he had done.”

           Caine slowly nodded. He collected himself and said in a slow, soft voice, “What happened next?”

           “It took us three weeks to track him down,” Israel moved to the conclusion of the story as calmly as if he was relating a childhood story. “We finally caught up to him in Rome. The night he died, he knew someone was tailing him. He bolted. When I caught up to him, he turned around and saw me. He stopped, but as I walked into the light, he saw I had a gun in my hand and realization flooded into his face. He didn’t even try to get away. I never broke stride and without words, or any emotion whatsoever, I put three bullets in the son of my father in St. Peter’s Square.”

           “I notice how you refuse to refer to Aaron as your brother,” Caine noted.

           “He wasn’t my brother and he wasn’t Aaron,” Israel said defiantly. “The man who died that night had no relation to me”

           “Tell me about what happened after,” Caine said.

           “You know what happened,” Israel answered. “It’s in the file.”

           “Very well,” Caine said. He was not going to push Israel to speak about it. “In mythology, those who slay their family are punished severely. In Genesis, God told Cain that the innocent blood of his brother screamed to Him from the earth for vengeance.”

           “I already told you,” Israel responded, “my brother was not innocent.” The answer was dull and automatic.

           “Neither was Clytemnestra,” said Caine, throwing his arms wide. “She and her lover killed her husband Agamemnon when he returned from the Trojan War. But that didn’t stop the Furies from tormenting her son Orestes after he killed her. Do you think all the things that happened to you afterward might be divine retribution for your crime?”

           “It was no crime,” Israel said. “It was justice.”

That’s it, Caine thought. He yelled at Israel, “He was your brother, no matter how hard you try to deny it. He was your brother, you killed him, and at the memorial service they had for him, you did not shed a single tear. I know. I was there.”

           Israel looked up. For the first time his expression changed to one of confusion. “That’s not possible,” he stammered, “I didn’t even know you until today and…” his voice trailed off as realization crossed his face.

           “I’m your brother Aaron, Israel: back from the dead,” Caine said with a note of triumph.   

           “That’s right,” Caine continued gloating over the speechless Israel. “I survived your shooting. My men got to me before your CIA did and revived me. But I decided to stay dead for a while. I got some plastic surgery so no one would recognize me. I saw you there at the service in front of the tombstone with the name Aaron Shepherd, not weeping, not even caring about me. I vowed than, and there, that by God I would make you weep. Everything that happened to you after that was vengeance: my vengeance.”

           Israel’s head was starting to spin. He struggled to speak, “Everything? My daughter? The fire?”

           “Everything,” Caine answered, drawing out the word. “I used my contacts in the world markets to arrange things so that your company failed and you lost that precious house of yours in the mountains that you paid for with the money the government gave you for doing its dirty work. I introduced your best friend Jonathan to drugs and crime and destroyed his life. Don’t worry I never touched your little girl, I hired people for that and than killed them when the work was done. And finally, I burned your house down. And through all of it, you never shed a tear-not one. I thought since love was the only emotion you felt, you would weep over the death of those you loved but you did not.”

           Caine stopped, looking at Israel to see him break down finally or explode into anger and try to attack him but there was nothing. “You must feel something,” he said in astonishment. Israel just continued to stare at him, his breathing calm and not so much as a spark of anger in his eyes.

“You have to feel something,” Caine said as his voice began to rise. “The ones you loved died because of what you did to me. Do you realize that? You are responsible for their deaths!”

           “I know,” Israel replied, “I knew that a long time ago.”

           Now it was Caine’s turn to be speechless. Israel got out of his chair but he still spoke in the same calm, clear voice. “They found cigarettes at the scene of my daughter’s murder. Cigarettes just like the ones you smoked: the same ones that they found at the scene of every execution and torture session in which you participated. I knew what kind you smoked; you’ve smoked the same kind since you were sixteen. And when they ruled the fire was arson, they said that a cigarette had started it. I was acquitted because I didn’t smoke.”  

           “I know,” Caine said. His voice was smug because his brother understood. Caine had won. “I was there in the courtroom.”

           “I saw you,” Israel answered. “Even though it wasn’t your face, I knew it was you. So I disappeared. I knew you. I knew how you liked to watch as you slowly tortured someone to death. I knew you wouldn’t just let me fade away. I knew you would come looking for me. So I came here and you followed.”

           “Great,” Caine shrugged. He still had won. “You got me. I’m here. Now what?”

           “Now,” Israel said, stepping closer to Caine. His voice dropped, the tone changing for the first time since Caine had walked in the door. “I end this,” he said.

           Caine laughed. Maybe it was over; it had been ended by Caine not by Israel. Still, Israel only smiled.

“You don’t feel that, brother,” he said. “The tightening in your throat and chest?” Israel reached over and picked up the pack of cigarettes from the table. “Your signature,” he said, “and your one weakness. I knew you would have a pack when you came here. So I got one of my own, exactly the same except that these ones were laced with cyanide. I switched them when I slammed the table. I say you have about fifteen seconds before you go into cardiac arrest.”

           Caine dropped his still lit cigarette. His chest was tightening, he could feel that. He placed his hand over his heart and quickly realized that he was, indeed about to die. It was not possible. He had won.

           Israel walked up to Caine, grabbed the lapels of his jacket, and pulled his brother closer to him. “Let us go, brother, out into the field,” he said. He kissed Caine on the forehead and said, “Goodbye, Aaron.” Then Israel threw Caine to the ground. Within five minutes, the man who had once been Aaron Shepherd was dead.

           Israel Shepherd looked at the body of his brother for a few minutes. A single tear flowed down his face. This tear was soon joined by others.

           And Israel wept.

           He did not stop when they came to take away Aaron’s body. He did not stop when the sun set that night or when it rose that morning. He wept for forty days and nights.

           At dawn on the forty-first day, Israel Shepherd was dead.