My brother sat in the driver’s seat of his stationary car, and I watched as metal closed in on him from all directions. Tonnes and tonnes of pressure compacted his already cramped Fiat Cinquecento, while he showed no fear in his eyes and made no noise through his wound-down window.
He just stared at me warmly, until his eyeballs popped in their sockets and the vitreous glooped down his cheeks like jellied tears. I stayed calm, knowing that this was what he wanted. The chap who ran the scrapyard was less calm, but he had that big envelope of money to take his mind off things.
We had driven there slowly, winding through trees that bowed solemnly over us in the shape of tunnels, golden raindrops of sunlight trickling through their leaves. The scenic route took us away from more populated areas, where people might be inclined to stop and stare at the intricate shapes and calculations that had been etched into the Fiat’s deep red paintwork.
I had watched my brother in the garage for hours, gouging the bodyshell of his car with the point of an old school compass, leaking blood from his palm as the instrument’s hinge gouged the shell of his own body. He would talk non-stop about what each etching signified and how they all connected, pausing from time to time for me to pass him a beer to wash down a pill, or to roll a joint in his lap. Occasionally he’d break out into inexplicable laughter, and I would laugh along with him. But maybe that wasn’t helping. However many hours I spent watching him work and listening to him explain, I would never understand. I kept serving up my empty laughter until it was too late.
Calmly, logically, I’d tried to resurrect him. I collected samples from the compacted cube of metal and flesh. There was certainly blood in there, and some clear liquid that might well have been brain fluid for all I knew. I labelled the samples in very legit looking test tubes that I kept in the freezer until I managed to make an appointment with one of the more open-minded outfits that clones pets belonging to the soon-to-be-bereaved.
But all that stuff was unusable, it turned out - contaminated with petrol, antifreeze and brake fluid. His genetic material had been diluted with chemicals: the story of his life.
Graham opted out of reality early on and went on a voyage into his own brain. Now his brain was on a voyage of its own, which in a strange way made me happy. He’d never been able to explain the things he saw or sought to see, but described patterns, planets and elves that weaved together the fabric of the universe while he cowered behind the sofa. His descriptions could take the form of a scream or a smile, or setting your kitchen on fire to reveal the hidden beauty of its raw materials. The results could be devastating, but you couldn’t fault the commitment or scale of his attempts to communicate.
I made the compacted cube of man and Cinquecento into a coffee table that became the centrepiece of my sitting room. The sides were encased in glass and sealed shut to enclose whatever fluids and organic matter remained of my brother, along with whatever smell they might be producing. It comforted me to know that Graham’s tissue, bones and haunted mind were with me now, entwined with the innards of this irreproducible piece of furniture.
Nothing was ever placed on the Graham Table, out of respect.
Within days of construction, the contents of the Graham Table began to breathe. They misted the insides of the glass with green, brown and red funguses that swirled into patterns like fingerprints left by the hand of God. Crystalline structures spiralled across the interior surfaces with mathematical precision, echoing the secret, ordered sequences that underpin nature’s infinite chaos and constitute the alphabet of a language as old as time.
Graham was talking to me through the glass - from beyond/within the grave - expressing his theories of unification more eloquently than he had ever done in life. Compared to this, his Cinquecento diagrams were childish daubings riddled with fear and confusion.
Marnie had left quite early on in the process, before Graham had even become a table. I'd felt her watching me as I lined up my arsenal of tools on the garden patio, knelt alongside the crushed cube, and gone to work poking at it with cotton buds, our turkey baster and long sticks wrapped in tissues. I looked at her face and it made me not want to look again, the way it was all wrenched with horror and grief. I heard her sobs as I stored my scrapings and squirtings away in tubes and Ziploc bags. I felt her kiss on the top of my head.
She was gone by the time I made it to the freezer.
That’s when something must have burrowed its way into the twisted metal architecture of the cube: while it was out there on the patio, before I’d managed to encase it. Because the fungus, mould, whatever you want to call it - that was just the beginning. Next came the writhing, and after that the buzzing, and then the Graham Table entered its new era as a self-contained eco-system. The population grew exponentially, climbing the walls of its universe and making pilgrimages to the spirographed organisms that tinted their sky like stained glass windows in a cathedral. I saw everything in the Graham Table: birth, death, love, war, community, cannibalism, hunger, gluttony, anarchy, hierarchy, architecture and chaos. It was all in there, in the world built on the blood and bones of my brother.
It turns out I had resurrected him after all.
Mum and dad came round, and perhaps it wasn’t the best way for them to see me after what I guessed had been several months or years. Or to tell them Graham had died. It’s possible my wide grin took on a ghoulish aspect as I whipped the velvet curtain off the Graham Table with what I thought was a joyous flourish, explaining what Graham and I had been doing together. They didn’t see what I saw, I don’t think. Dad began vomiting almost immediately - and, once he had finished doing that, dry heaving - while I tried to ask that he keep clear of the Graham Table. It might have been hard to hear me over Mum’s screaming, or to understand what I was saying through the panicked blows she was raining down on my head. Then dad was pulling her off me, staring wild-eyed as he backed away and bundled her out of the front door, the afterbirth of mum’s screams trailing behind them.
I was very alone for a good while after that. Until it occurred to me I wasn’t really alone at all.
In case of emergency, I thought, break glass.
And out he came: The Graham Diffusion. A new reality that expanded into every corner of every room, painting his unified theory across the walls and windows of our home. Now Graham and I are closer than we’ve ever been, and our conversations unfurl wordlessly into the ever after.