My brother was a whopping eleven years older than me, so I don’t remember much of when he was still living with us during his college years. I was only thirteen when he moved out. But he was always weird. His self-professed hobby was to watch people. I remember there were times when he would pick me up from school, and, as we drove home in the afternoon sunlight, we would see something like a group of children walking home in their uniforms, and those little mundane scenes–old ladies feeding birds, shops closing down for the day–were heartbreaking to him. He took pictures of seemingly innocuous things. He was very nostalgic about things that had never happened to him.
I distinctly remember that on a weekly basis he would sit in a corner of his cramped room and scribble into an old notebook that he used for school. Sometimes I would ask him what he was drawing or writing. He would of course tell me to leave. He kept it well-hidden when he wasn’t writing, because several times during my childhood I looked for it while he wasn’t home, and never found it.
I don’t remember a whole lot else about my brother. He mostly kept to himself, but was willing to oblige when I asked him to play video games or something with me. He wasn’t very much for sports, and he had a small but recurring circle of friends. They were generally as weird as him and Mom didn’t like them around the house. But he didn’t seem lonely or hurt, he got good marks and generally he appeared satisfied with his life. He was the opposite of my sister (seven years older than me), who has always been socially adaptable, self-confident and outgoing.
Whenever my brother went out, it was either to take pictures of the seedier parts of the city, or heading straight to a friend’s house, probably to listen to music. He was big on music, especially anything that used “found sound”, i.e. recordings picked up from somewhere else.
My brother died in a car crash last year. We have made our peace with it by now. My parents decided to keep his room as it was when he left. But I haven’t been able to contain myself. For years the mystery of the notebook had settled in the far back of my mind, but months after his death it resurfaced. I needed to find it.
I scoured his room again. I checked under and inside everything, with meticulous care to make sure my parents didn’t notice I had been moving things around. And finally, by sheer luck, I came across a loose floorboard under where his bed used to be.
It was a clever hiding spot, and I never would have found it as a child. I pried the board loose with anxious expectation, hoping that this was, at last, where I would find the notebook. And I was right.
My brother kept loose documentation of his feverish scribblings. By now, time, humidity and insects had taken their toll on his writings, but most of it was entirely legible. It was kept in a pile of unassuming school notebooks, lined paper, ring-bound, bland black covers. There are marks on the cover that indicate that they were once covered with something, possibly labeled, but those aren’t there anymore.
For the past four or so hours I have been poring over my brother’s lost oeuvre with unbroken interest. What he wrote (and occasionally drew) there is of extremely varied nature. It includes lists of people he “loves”, but these are populated with people like “7:30am cleaning lady, ____ Av. ____ Hotel, wears pink ribbon” or “kindly old doorman from childhood house”. These are people who, I assume, he only knew via his personal brand of nostalgic voyeurism.
There are also interviews with people from the city about varied subjects. My brother would sometimes do this; he would pretend to be a Communications or Journalism major of some sort and interview strangers on the street about various things. Many of the interviews are recorded here.
And then there are also personal (or sometimes impersonal, stated as if they were fact) accounts of strange things that go on in the city, written as if they were the most mundane things in the world. Yet they are anything but. Sometimes his friends pop up in these writings.
