Break It Down

The Brother-in-Law

He was so quiet, so small and thin, that he was hardly there. The brother-in-law. Whose brother-in-law they did not know. Or where he came from, or if he would leave.

They could not guess where he slept at night, though they searched for a depression on the couch or a disorder among the towels. He left no smell behind him.

He did not bleed, he did not cry, he did not sweat. He was dry. Even his urine divorced itself from his penis and entered the toilet almost before it had left him, like a bullet from a gun.

They hardly saw him: if they entered a room, he was gone like a shadow, sliding around the door frame, slipping over the sill. A breath was all they ever heard from him, and even then they could not be sure it hadn’t been a small breeze passing over the gravel outside.

He could not pay them. He left money every week, but by the time they entered the room in their slow, noisy way the money was just a green and silver mist on their grandmother’s platter, and by the time they reached out for it, it was no longer there.

But he hardly cost them a penny. They could not even tell if he ate, because he took so little that it was as nothing to them, who were big eaters. He came out from somewhere at night and crept around the kitchen with a sharp razor in his white, fine-boned hand, shaving off slivers of meat, of nuts, of bread, until his plate, paper-thin, felt heavy to him. He filled his cup with milk, but the cup was so small that it held no more than an ounce or two.

He ate without a sound, and cleanly, he let no drop fall from his mouth. Where he wiped his lips on the napkin there was no mark. There was no stain on his plate, there was no crumb on his mat, there was no trace of milk in his cup.

He might have stayed on for years, if one winter had not been too severe for him. But he could not bear the cold, and began to dissipate. For a long time they were not sure if he was still in the house. There was no real way of knowing. But in the first days of spring they cleaned the guest room where, quite rightly, he had slept, and where he was by now no more than a sort of vapor. They shook him out of the mattress, brushed him over the floor, wiped him off the windowpane, and never knew what they had done.