Virtues Of Restraint

By Noel Hansen

It was getting dark by the time Jacob got out of the building. Samantha had pulled into the small, empty parking lot and been waiting for him since before the light started to fade. She had had a difficult time finding a space in the lot that wasn’t filled with suspicious looking trash, standing water, or torn up by the roots from nearby trees. It was obvious that nobody used this lot regularly and that the city had long ago abandoned it like it had abandoned most of the other buildings in this area when the shipping business moved east. The clouds covered the sky in every direction; high and light gray, they promised a dark but peaceful night.

Jacob looked furtively back and forth as he exited, like he expected to be jumped. Samantha just stood there, leaning against the hood of her car, her arms crossed and a blank expression on her face as she watched her brother approach. He didn’t wave a greeting and she didn’t call out to him; the most they exchanged as a glance as he passed her and walked around the front of the car to the passenger-side door. Samantha stood up as he did this, opened the driver side door and unlocked the car. Jacob crawled in and buckled his seat belt, while Samantha sat down, buckled hers, and started the car. Rain started to pour from the heavy gray clouds that filled the sky.

The car engine broke the silence like a peal of thunder. Samantha thought it was comforting; it relieved some of the tension the quiet had been generating in her mind. She put the car into drive and puttered along to the street, eager to get home as soon as possible. She had been waiting for Jacob to leave his new job for over an hour, (an hour later than he said he was going to get out), and she was getting hungry; she expected Jacob was as well.

She was glad when her brother told her he had gotten a job, finally. It had been a long road to this, ever since his breakup and ensuing depression had seemingly made him a husk of a man. He had been fired from his last job for attendance issues after, and had been couch surfing with various friends and family members until their patience ran out. Samantha had been the first person he had called after he broke up with his partner, and the first person's couch he had slept on.

And also the last person's couch; everyone else eventually kicked him out. Samantha worked with him to get that job at one of the last warehouses in town, and she had worked with him to find a place of his own. She had even helped him move in.

The last year had been difficult for Samantha. She had always had a close relationship with Jacob. Even after the breakup, after his life went to shit, he was always there for her. He was her big brother, and he meant the world to her. He was always good at listening to her spilling out her problems, and always had a joke that could elicit a smile from her, if not a full belly laugh. He was always so supportive and encouraging. In a sense, she felt like she owed him for being there for her so often, even after all the times she had hurt him as a kid. It didn’t seem fair not to.

And then he just shut down completely. It was like his soul had died, like he let his soul die. The person she had grown up with, the brother she loved, was just gone. It was like the rug was pulled from underneath her feet. Like the foundation she had built the house of her life on suddenly collapsed. It made her desperate to find a solution to at least some of his problems; even though he would never talk about all of them, some of his problems, like the lack of a job and a space to call his own, were obvious. She supposed if she could help him with those, she might get her brother back. It was worth a shot at least, she had figured; doing nothing for him wasn’t going to solve any problems.

Most of the drive to the apartment passed in silence, with Jacob staring out the window at the empty streets. Samantha tried to concentrate on the road and the moment: her brother back and in a healthier spot. Things are going fine, she repeats to herself over and over. Healing takes time, you can’t rush it; let him do what he needs to.

Still, the silence eventually got to her. She reaches over to turn on the radio, hoping that at least filling the car with some soothing music might calm her myriad anxieties. She dials in to a local soft rock radio station; the DJ gives shout-outs to some couples who called in about their anneveries before playing songs that were twenty years out of date when Samantha was born.

“Can you turn that off?”, Jacob remarks, without turning from the window.

“Its just soft rock”, Samantha remarks, stunned at Jacobs response.

“Its evil”, he replies, without elaborating further, balling his left hand into a fist.

Samantha reaches over and switches the radio off. The rain begins to pour down harder, the sound filling the car. Samantha glances over at Jacob again; he hasn’t looked at her the entire car ride so far. He just stares into the storm, clenching and unclenching his fists in his lap.

“So, how was your first day?”, she enquires, trying to sound cheery and friendly, afraid her inner fears will slip out.

“Fine”, Jacob replies, with no change in demeanor.

“Meet any interesting people there?”, Samantha asks.

“No”, Jacob replies.

“What did they have you do?”, Samantha presses him, increasingly desperate to get any sort of response.

Jacob is silent at this, completely unwavering in his insistence on isolating himself. Samantha turns her attention to the road ahead and continues to drive.

After another 15 minutes of silence, they are in front of Jacobs new apartment. Jacob lives on the 4th floor of a small building on the outskirts of the city, in a studio apartment with very little furniture or personal possessions (most of those having been sold or pawned at various points). The place is small, with an electric stove and no in-unit laundry. But its clean, its safe, and its first, last, and security where all Samantha could afford on her salary.

Samantha parks on the street, right outside the entrance to the building, without turning the car off. She has parked in the bus lane, but out here the buses don’t run very late, so she isn’t worried about being disturbed. The rain is still pouring down, it looks like her windshield wipers are trying and failing to stop a flood. She unlocks the doors and Jacob gets out.

Before he makes it to the door, Samantha leans over the empty seat and waves to Jacob through the rain. “Good night Jacob, I love you”, she says, not sure what else to say after the long, silent car ride.

Jacob stops and turns to her and nods in acknowledgement. “Good night Samantha, I love you too”, he says in a monotone voice, before heading inside.

After Jacob has entered the building, Samantha closes the car door and pulls out into the street. She drives home through the rain and the dark, the water running through the street like a small river. She drives over the old bridge to her side of town, the water underneath the bridge churning like its boiling. She doesn’t turn on the radio the entire drive home; silence in this moment seems important to her. During the drive she worries about her brother, worries about whether he can keep things together, worries about where his mind is, worries about whether or not he could ever go back to how he was (and if that is even a realistic expectation at that point).

And she chides herself for being so foolish as to expect more.

A week goes by. Samantha tries to put her brother out of her mind as she goes about her job at the craft and hobby store. She answers customers' questions, directs them to the locations of the modeling clay and packs of small trees for building dioramas. She deals with angry customers, sad customers, apathetic customers. She deals with angry co-workers, sad co-workers, apathetic co-workers. She goes about her life, going home to her small apartment each night, spending a few hours with her partner before he departs for his job at the bar. She makes dinner, watches television, reads books, plays with her cat. One night she even goes out with friends to a show. And the entire time, she tries not to think about Jacob, what he is doing and how his life is going. And most of the time she is successful.

Eventually however, the desire to try and see if she can enter into his life again returns during her shift, and she decides to call him. He does not have a landline but he does have a cell phone; so after her shift, she brings out her phone and rings him up. The phone rings over and over, with no reply; eventually it goes to voicemail, the computerized voice instructing her to leave her message after the beep. She leaves a quick message, just saying she wants to know how he is doing and she hopes he is doing okay and that she would love to hear from him and that she loves him, and leaves it at that for the evening. She goes to bed, hoping to hear from him.

This does not result in a response. She receives nothing from her brother the next day, or the day after that. She waits one more day before calling again, not wanting to annoy him and potentially drive him further away.

This time he picks up the phone.

“What is it?” is the only thing she hears on the other side. He doesn;t sound annoyed or frustrated by her intrusion; he sounds merely apathetic. Bored.

“Hey, just wanted to see how you are doing, how the new job is going now that training is done!”, she says in reply, forcing cheeriness.

“It's going fine”, he replies.

“How are you liking the work?”, she asks.

“Its okay”, he says.

“How is the new place? Have you had a chance to explore the area a little?”, she asks, getting more and more desperate to find some connection as the conversation goes on.

“Not really”, he says. “Hey, I gotta go now. Good night”, he follows up before ending the call, not even allowing her to reply “Good Night” in turn.

She stands there after the conversation is over, concerned over her brother and his state of mind growing. She doesn’t really know what he is doing in his time off work now; she figures he must be doing something. She decides she needs to talk to his friends; Jacob always had a large stable of close friends when they were growing up, friends she met and knew in turn through her relationship with jacob. She knew he kept up with most of them over the years, so it shouldn’t be difficult to get ahold of them and see what they know about Jacob; specifically what he is doing now and what he has been doing with his free time lately. This level of responsiveness isn’t like Jacob, and it makes her worried.

The bridge is up the next day when Samantha comes home from work. She slams on the brakes, she almost didn’t notice. Her shift ends so late in the day nowadays, she never has to think about the fact that boats regularly need to cross under the bridge. Not much happens in the river at night around here; nothing worth knowing about, at any rate.

She sits in the dark, the quiet hum of the engine soothing, alone with her thoughts. Her attention drifts to the conversations she had over the past few days with Jacob’s friends; how they haven’t heard from him in years; how they all largely parted either on bad terms after they had to kick him out, or he just disappeared one day; how they didn’t even know he was back in town; how he was apparently getting into some shady stuff (though what exactly, she couldn’t extract from them). She finds her mind often going back to this, perhaps naturally considering how close they were growing up. She wants to believe he will be fine, but she can’t bring herself too, and so she worries.

As she sits waiting for the bridge to lower, a call comes up on her cell phone. She answers it.

“Hello?”, she says in response, not having time to pay attention to the caller ID.

“Hey”, comes Jacobs voice from the other end.

Startled, Samantha quickly responds. “Hey, good to hear from you!”

“Hey yeah”, he replies, sounding startled as well. “You got anything going on the 20th to the 23rd?”

“Not really, just the usual. Why, whats up?”, she replies.

“I need someone to come over and watch my place and take care of my cat while I am out of town”, he replies, a nervous edge in his voice.

“Oh wow, I didn’t realize you had a cat, that is great news! What is their name?”, Samantha replies.

“Sticky. Look, can you do it or not?”, he says.

“I mean sure, I would love to. What are you going out of town for?”, she says.

“Just some personal stuff, nothing you need to worry about. Thanks I appreciate it”, he says, obviously eager to end the conversation.

“Yeah I mean, its really no trouble at all, I am sure it will be lovely to play with little Sticky”, she replies.

“Great, I will leave a key for you under the mat and instructions on the counter. Just follow those and don’t touch anything, or I swear to god”, he says, growing angrier for a reason that Samantha doesn’t follow.

“Of course, whatever you want, its your space”, Samantha says, a little taken a back by the edge in his voice.

“Okay great. Bye”, Jacob says as he hangs up the phone, not giving her a chance to return his goodbye.

Stunned, Samantha tries to process what just happened and who her brother has become.

Samantha stands in front of the door to her brothers apartment, spare key in her hand, staring at the door. She is afraid to go inside because she does not know what she will find. She fears it will show more about who he has become, it will give a view she cannot handle. She is gripping the key so hard her knuckles have turned white

Slowly, she relaxes her hand. She closes her eyes, and practices the deep breathing she has gone through with her therapist many times before. She takes the key between her thumb and forefinger and unlocks the deadbolt, then the main lock on the door. After she finishes, she pauses for a moment and closes her eyes again, taking another deep breath. Then she unlocks the door.

The apartment beyond the door is fairly normal, if a bit bare. There is a couch that looks like it was either left by the previous tenant or acquired from a thrift store. There is a coffee table with a few books on it, and a small television in the corner sitting on top of what looks like leftover boxes from moving. Beyond the living room area there is a small kitchen, and doors to the bathroom and the single bedroom. Jacobs' cat sleeps soundly on the couch, a small thing, all black on top with a white belly. When he is curled up, he looks like a black hole.

Samantha moves to the couch and sits down, leaving the front door unlocked. She places her purse on the couch and then leans over and pets the cat. He responds by lifting his head up without opening his eyes, pushing his head into her palm. When she stands up again to close the door and take off her shoes, the cat stretches his entire body. Samantha always admired cats, she admires their ability to feel comfortable and confident anywhere.

Samantha heads to the kitchen, looking for the instructions that Jacob left for her on the counter. She finds them tucked in between the bag of coffee grounds and the sink. It simpled reads “Cat food in the cabinet on the ground nearest the fridge. Fill his bowl of food and water once a day, and that should be sufficient. Don’t disturb anything. Thanks.”

Samanatha puts down the note after read it and visually scans the kitchen until she finds the cabinet mentioned. Along the way, her eyes notice how bare the shelves are and how little is on the counter; Jacob has no dishes in the sink and only has a coffee maker and coffee grounds on the counter, with a single mug sitting beside it. She strongly suspects he has very little other silverware.

She opens up the fridge and inspects its contents. It is almost entirely bare, except for a few takeout boxes. She opens up the freezer, and finds only packages of various meats she cannot identify, wrapped in butcher paper (though the paper itself makes no mention of the business he acquired them from, and Samantha is familiar enough with this area of town that she knows there are no butchers close by).

She closes the fridge and moves to the bathroom, driven by a curiosity about her brothers current state of mind. The bathroom is foul; a smell of piss radiants from the toilet, and the mirror is flecked with small white specs, and the occasional smear where it appears something splashed against the mirror and was just wiped away with a paper towel. There is a toothbrush and a cup next to the sink, but the sink itself has an odd red-brown ring about halfway up, that seems to imply something was dumped down it or some water was left sitting in it for a day or two. The tub has a similar ring about halfway up, and the drain is full of long blank hairs (which confuses Samantha, as Jacob has blonde hair).

There are sticky notes stuck all around the mirror as well. Samantha takes the opportunity to read them, and they appear to be affirmations or quotes from a scripture, though Samantha cannot tell from which holy book. They are all on the general theme of ignoring the world, distancing oneself from it, that the world does not deserve oneself. It also implies a distancing from other people to focus on some sort of spiritual self-development and self-sacrifice; all the sticky notes that appear to be from a holy book are on this theme, and it looks like Jacob has doodled small symbols over these sticky notes in particular, though again Samantha does not recognize what religion those symbols are from. The symbols are unsettling however; full of harsh angles and points, they look almost like outlines of old, barbaric weapons one would find in books recounting the worst of medieval atrocities.

That is not the most disturbing thing however; some of the passages that appear to be from a holy book are the most disturbing. They seem to imply a holiness in deception and manipulation of non-believes towards one's own ends, and implying that non-believers in whatever spiritual system they reference are less than human. It also implies the same thing around queer individuals and women; the former portrayed as aberrants in the plan of the universe, the latter portrayed as childish and inferior. Jacob did not have such opinions before, Samantha remembered; he was always accepting and kind with everyone he met, he treated everyone as equals.

Out of everything so far, these scant passages unsettle Samantha the most. Not just because of what it implies has changed in Jacob’s opinion of her, but also for the general changes it implies in Jacob himself. That he has given himself to something out of some quest for meaning, and has been made worse as a result of it.

Driven now to fully understand just what Jacob has gotten into, to unravel the puzzle of his start of mind and life, she moves from the bathroom to his bedroom.

The bedroom is almost as bare as the living room; there is a mattress with a few blankets twisted into a wad on it, and a small writing desk on the corner with a cord to charge a laptop resting on top of it (though the laptop in question is nowhere to be seen). The entire room is covered in sigils that seem to have been drawn on the wall in very specific places; there are three sigils on each wall, each placed an equal distance apart from each other, and nine on the ceiling. The symbols on the wall resemble those Samantha saw on the notes in the bathroom, all spikes and edges, though they are also all different. They appear to have been drawn on with red paint; Samantha, thinking it is blood at first, moves horrified over to touch it to confirm that it was indeed paint.

The floor is covered in books as well, they lay scattered all around the bed. These books seem to also be religious texts of some kind, all on a specific theme of attaining magical power or changing the universe in some way. Samantha spots books various names such as “The Summoning the Worm”, “The blazing gospel of the three golden pillars”, “A blaze in the northern sky”, “A History Of The Great Work”, and “Choronzon and his followers”. She opens up one out of a sense of morbid curiosity and finds herself reading a description of a ritual that requires multiple human sacrifices to summon spirits from the ocean to do the magicians bidding. The work goes into exact detail about who the sacrifices have to be and how the sacrifices must be done in order to appease the spirits mentioned within. The ritual also mentions the precise location the final incantation and summoning must take place at, pointing out exactly what type of body of water these beings needed to be summoned from in order to properly form and follow the magicians will, and giving advice on how best to prepare the ritual from the boat needed to get out far enough on the water.

Samantha closes the book in disgust, and tosses it onto the bed. She sits down on the bed trying to process everything she has seen today; all the things about magic and strange religions. It seems like Jacob has gotten involved in something far above his head. Jacobs cat jumps on on the bed besides her and rubs its head against her thing. She reaches down and pets the animal as her foot rapidly taps on the ground.

He needs to be confronted, she thinks. He needs someone who loves him to talk to him about this stuff, make he realize how deep he has gotten into it. That should bring him back out.

She stands up from the bed and when she does so, the cat runs off to the other room, leading her to the food bowl. She then remembers why she original came here and moves to give the cat its food, all the while starting to plan how she will confront Jacob.

Samantha goes several days without hearing anything from Jacob. Even past the date they agreed upon to feed the cat, she hears nothing. She still has the key, so she ends up going back to the apartment just in case; when she gets there, she finds a very hungry cat. Jacob has not been there at all, it seems, as the place is still in the same condition she left it. She continues to feed his cat, waiting for him to show up.

Four days after he was supposed to show up, the police arrive at Samantha's doorstep. They inform her that they recovered a body that they think was her brothers yesterday, and they need her to come to the morgue and identify it. She agrees with just a nod and follows them.

Samantha stands over her brothers body at the morgue, and looks down on its bloated visage. Apparently he had been in the water for a few days when they found him; the police had followed a tip about a boat that was seen sinking off the coast of a nearby lake. They found him near the engine. There where several other bodies as well; all had their hands tied behind their back and hoods pulled over their faces. These hoods were covered in symbols that resembled those Samantha saw in Jacobs room the other day. She is unsure if she needs to inform the police of this fact.

These same symbols seem to be carved all over his body, including his face. He is completely bald. Samantha almost cannot tell that it is Jacob. For a moment she thought it was someone else and her heart leaped at the hope for a second. It didn’t last.

And now she stands here, staring at him on the table, the police coroner working off to the side on some data entry. It's just another day for him. It seems unfair somehow that he isn’t as affected by this tragedy.

Samantha balls her hands into fists and holds them at her side, trembling. She struggles to maintain compuse, struggles to keep a straight face, struggles to fight back tears. Somehow it seems too cliche to cry here, even though she desperately wants to. All she can do is just stare at her brothers water-logged, puffy, pale face, trying to burn it into her mind. It pulls her attention. Something in the back of her brain tells her that this is the last time she will see that face; that the mortician will cover it in makeup to make it more appealing, will add so many prosthetics that it will look like a wax model of a memory of a photo of him, and not like him as he is. Even with everything that happened, she wants to make sure she can remember him as he is.

After she gets home from the mortuary, she just sits on the couch. She knows she has to tell her parents, Jacobs friends. She knows she has to figure out what to do with the body, how to set up the funeral, how to deal with his remaining things and assets. And the cat! The cat needs a home too, just another innocent burnt by all this.

But instead she just sits on the couch, silently crying. She doesn’t make a sound; she just stares at the blank television in front of her and lets the tears run down her face.

Suddenly the door opens and her partner comes in. She turns and looks at the clock, realizing it is 3 am; she didn;t realize she had been sitting here that many hours.

Roger rushes over when he sees her crying on the couch and hugs her. “Honey, what is it, whats wrong?”, he asks.

“Jacob is dead”, she replies, leaning her head against his shoulder.

“What? How?”, he asks.

“He drowned. It was an accident or suicide or…”, she pauses for a moment, tears welling in her eyes, before recounting the entire story of what she found in Jacobs apartment, the arrival of the police, and her time at the morgue.

“Thats heavy stuff”, Roger says, still holding her and leaning back on the couch. “I don’t know what more to say. I wish I had words, but I just don’t”.

“I do too. I wish I had words, or answers. I just feel so helpless. And guilty, like I should have tried harder, tried to talk to him more, tried to intervene sooner. And angry, I just feel deeply angry at him. And I feel guilty for having that anger, because I know it doesn’t do me any good.”, She replies, still sniffling.

“You couldn’t have possibly known what he was planning, you can’t beat yourself up over that”, he replies.

“I knew that he was hurting! I knew that he was hurting and something was wrong even before I started getting an idea of what kinda weird shit he got into, but… I just let it happen, I did take any action. I just feel despair at his death and despair at myself for not intervening”, she says.

“Do you truly think talking to him would have changed the path he is on, redirected him?”, Roger asks.

“I don’t know. Maybe. I mean, he was already in so deep… But I don’t know. I felt I should have at least tried, regardless of the chances of success. At least then I would know that I tried”, Samantha replies, her read drooping to her chest.

The couple sits in silence for a few more minutes, Rogers arm around Samantha holding her close, Samantha leaning against him, putting her head on her chest, letting her tears soak his shirt. She breathes in the fumes of his sweat, of his deodorant, of the whiskey from the bar that spilled on his shirt. She takes comfort in the warmth of his body.

“I know its probably foolish to dwell so much on my own actions”, she finally says. “I know that kind of regret can destroy a person. And I didn’t do anything outside my own moral code; I did what I thought was right at the time, based on the information I had. I made some bad assumptions I know, but… part of me didn’t think he was capable of all that, of killing those people, of doing something that heinous. It didn’t seem like the Jacob I knew. And I guess I thought that person was still there underneath it all”.

“Maybe it still was the Jacob you knew”, Roger replies. “People do some crazy stuff all the time. And people can change, but they can’t completely change; even if some bad stuff happens to you, you still have the same memories you did before and after, right? You still have the same experiences informing you. The Jacob of a year ago and the Jacob of last week still had the same memories of you two as kids growing up, right? There is still the same foundation down there”

“I can’t believe that Rog, its… Its too painful. I have heard stories about people doing stuff like that before, seen movies about it, seen it on the TV. Its too painful to think that someone I knew, someone I loved, is capable of something like that. Rog, I still love him. I don’t think I will ever stop loving him. He was my older brother, he was the world to me, he was my best friend for so long and he taught me so much. I can’t get rid of those feelings, that is part of my foundation”, she says to him.

“I am not saying get rid of it, its just… This is always gonna be him now, Sam. Whenever you think about those days, there is always going to be this shadow now, sadly. But you can’t just ignore that, squash it down”, he says.

“And I know that too. I have basically been sitting here since I got back from the coroners office at 8”, she says with a hollow laugh. “I have been doing a lot of thinking. But it's so painful. I don’t know how to mourn him. In addition to killing those people, he killed that too; maybe killed my memory of him forever, I dunno. I can;t get rid of those memories, there are always gonna be things that bring them up, little things. A book he loved will make me think of us reading it together on a blanket under a tree in the yard, laughing. A movie he liked coming on TV will remind me of him excitedly explaining the plot. Going by the old library will remind me of walking through town with him, talking about our futures. But over it all will be that final image of him, bloated and pale and carved up on that table in the morgue, a dozen feet away from those that he killed.

“And lying about it to myself is no good either, I know that too. But what is left after that? How do I mourn my brother knowing what he did? At the end, ignorance and suppression seems like the easiest, least painful option”.

“I dunno hun, I truly don’t. All I have figured out in life is that you can’t run away from pain or struggle. Thats the only way you get the joy in life, its like salt with sugar. And you can never get rid of it, not by pushing it down and away. It eats everything around it”, Roger says after a slight pause.

“I am so tired Rog”, Samantha replies after a little while. “I cried for a long time, but I got no tears left. But the feeling like I need to cry hasn’t stopped.” She puts her head on his lap and closes her eyes. Roger leans back on the couch and closes his eyes too, stroking her hair with his right hand, Samantha's hands gripping his left. They stay like that the rest of the night. Eventually they both drift off to sleep.