Artifact

1. 
I have a brother, two years and three months younger than me. For a long time, we didn’t really have much to say to each other. And then we did. And then we didn’t. 

2. 
Our father was a geophysicist, which means he looked at geologic formations and tried to figure out what they meant, what was in and under them. He was finishing his PhD at Washington University in St. Louis when I was born, and then he took a job with an oil company in Houston, where my brother was born. 

3. 
Both my brother and I went to boarding school. My father had been transferred many times, and we were living overseas in Hong Kong while the company searched for oil in the South China Sea. They would pay for us to study back in the US. I went to an all-girls boarding school in Connecticut; my brother went to a coed boarding school in Massachusetts. A few years later, we flip-flopped—I went to college in Massachusetts while he transferred to a new school in Connecticut. 

4. 
The study of geology and geophysics is the study of the earth. You use gravitational, magnetic, and seismic methods to figure out the earth’s internal structure, its evolution. Rifts, continental sutures, mid-ocean ridges. Earthquakes. Volcanoes. 

5. 
My brother and I don’t really know each other. I can say that now, looking back at what we had and what we didn’t. We have some things in common—I hold on to this. We both love Baskin-Robbins’s Jamoca Almond Fudge. We both bite our nails. We are perfectionists, we are hard on ourselves, we can be obsessive, we have a temper. 

6. 
What is important to him now? What are his passions, his bucket list, his thoughts about religion? I wonder if he thinks about death. I just turned fifty, and for the past couple of years, that’s all I could think about. I wonder if he worries about it like I do. 

7. 
Geophysics is fundamental to the needs of society. It’s how we find energy, water, mineral resources. It’s how we monitor environmental impacts. It’s how we assess natural and manmade hazards. 

8. 
I can’t tell you why my brother and I no longer talk. As people like to say, it’s complicated. It’s not just about us, but about people we love. We have our allegiances. There’s no getting around it. 

9. 
A few years ago, my father told me I was the one who needed to fix things. I bristled. I had already apologized multiple times, though I wasn’t sure what I was apologizing for anymore. That might have been the problem. I tried to tell my father it wasn’t just me, but he couldn’t hear me. Fix it, he said. 

10. 
I apologized again. I still couldn’t fix it. 

11. 
I admit I am attached to an idea of our relationship, a kind of hologram that had been thrown up for my viewing pleasure in the few years we were together. I created a story that might have been flawed; I was its only author. That’s not to say what we had wasn’t real. We cared about each other—I tell myself we still do. In our own way. 

12. 
From my parents, I sneak the occasional picture. My brother is in good shape, relatively healthy, a nonsmoker, not diabetic, in his late forties. I hear from him for the first time in years when he has heart failure. The email begins with Hi. He doesn’t call me by name. When he signs off, it is just his first initial. He writes that doctors were shocked he had managed daily activities for six days after his heart started to give out. You have a strong heart with limited blood flow, they told him. We have that in common, too. 

13. 
I write him back. 

He never replies. 

14. 
Fractures are sometimes called faults. They are the dominant cause for rock failure. But scientists point out that fractures also allow for movement.  

I can live with that.  

Darien Hsu Gee is an international bestselling author of five novels published in eleven languages and multiple short prose collections, including Nonwhite and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World and Other Small Histories, winner of the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship Award. Darien teaches micro prose workshops at UCLA Extension, Hugo House, and Craft Talks. Find her at writerish.substack.com. 

This essay first appeared in Allegiance (Haliʻa Aloha Series, Watermark Publishing, 2021).