One morning I stopped at his door (on my way downstairs) on hearing the most curious sound I'd heard him make. It was a little like the horsey laugh he'd insert at any moment where he felt self-conscious or was attempting to some blame due him, a mirthless stuttering falsetto. This was different. It was more drawn out and rose and fell in a more laboured pattern. It took me half way through my shower to realise he had been sobbing. Correction: he had wanted to sound like he'd been sobbing. He'd wanted me to hear it.
I let it go. Something had happened but his way of living reduced my concern for him to practical matters only. When he joined me in the lounge for some idle tv I let him get to it himself. Eventually it did, after a commercial break but I was more interested in the coffee and halva I had than what was on. Without looking away from the screen he told me that a friend of his had had a difficult labour which had resulted in the baby being strangled by its own umbilical cord. This would devastate the coldest heart and it got to me for a moment until I realised he was saying it to have an impact. It might have been partially true but I had too many memories of him trivialising the suffering of others by fabricating details to aggravate the story. Also, I could only remember how repellent his attempts were at sounding like he cared. I knew him far too well to consider that the pity he expressed was sucking inward; he wanted it all to himself. I afforded him a serious look and took another sip.
Towards the end of the day he understood he'd reached the limit of my sympathy for his emotional panhandling and he suggested Scrabble, one of the few things we shared. He volunteered to make pasta for dinner and we played while it cooked.
Like most highly affected people Brian confused the concepts of a large vocabulary with a vocabulary of large words. This materialist approach to language can lead to odd values. He discovered that pulchritude meant beauty and inserted it whenever he could, as though practicing until it sounded natural. (I'm of the type who thinks love and hate are big words and infinitesimal is a tiny one.) Also, like brinkmanshipping vocabularists, Brian delighted in correcting others' pronunciation and usage. Until I realised his proficiency in this stopped short of looking anything up in the dictionary but going with whatever the conversations (eg. the notion that cute means "ugly but interesting") decided I'd acquiesce for form's sake. After I'd heard him use "acrimonious" to mean its opposite repeatedly I curbed my usual concern in the hope that someone nastier than I would one day ridicule him for it.
But Scrabble is a numbers game using words and not the other way around. It can only improve your vocabulary if you encounter words you hadn't known. A large vocab is useful to begin with but really a general command of the language will set you up with decent chances as long as you are observant and can add. That's what Brian was good at, calculation. But, boy, was he good at it. I don't think I won a single game in the course of two years.
During this time we didn't have a stereo and would borrow ghetto blasters from anyone who could spare them. When we played Scrabble I had no objection to his putting on either of two cassettes: a mishmash of 50s commentary, novelty pop songs and Negativeland-style subversions of same and; a tape made from a cd that had come with a magazine. This last was mostly then current exponents of the new derivation-heavy rock bands and passed by in anodyne pleasantness. But one track stopped both of us. We'd actually stop playing, turn it up and listen.
A hit of a chord, some feedback and a sudden wall of multiracked guitars and then as suddenly a sparse few bars of the drums playing time and a wispy female vocal singing aah. Another wall of big distortion. Repeat. It was like the Pixies great lost demo. In fact it was the Breeders featuring an ex-Pixie. Getting past the big wall to the eerie spaces of the song and back through the wall took both of us to different but equally compelling places and on that day I witnessed the one moment that softened my congealing revulsion for Brian. Perhaps I'd heard the steam push the saucepan lid in the kitchen or just noticed the sound of the boiling water but I looked up. Brian's arms formed an arc that held his head perfectly still, a palm flattened on each temple. His eyes were down. He was crying silently.
As the song closed I got up from the table and went in to check the food.
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