Yukata Japanese Robe

Japan, 1984

We were in many ways polar opposites. Jordan was an aesthete, I a sensualist; he was an academic, I a restless polymath. He was as formal as an Arthurian knight, while I can be crass. He ate no sugar; my own sweet tooth is insatiable. I’m terrible at learning languages—but by the time of his suicide, my brother spoke nearly twenty.

Jordan and I had an admiration for each other that was founded in love, but our day-to-day exchanges were based more on projection that mutual understanding. He once presented me with a gift of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, a first edition in German. I spoke not a word. I purchased for him a hardcover edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which he declined with a snort: “There is no such thing as a translation.”

Still, our lives and memories—when they didn’t collide—marbled together. Like many strange people, Jordan had an extraordinary memory, and could fill in the missing details of family stories I barely recalled. I trusted that he’d always be there, like a library reference section: a repository of puzzle pieces that made the mural of my life complete.

In the late summer of 1984 I was visiting Japan, staying with my girlfriend Teri. Every evening we would leave our stifling and shower-less apartment and walk the few blocks to the neighborhood sento, or public bath. It was permissible to make the trip in one’s yukata. Mine was simple: a handsome black-and-white cotton print, light and functional. It became so much a part of my experience in Japan that I bought a similar one for Jordan—one of the few souvenir gifts I carried home.

But my homecoming was a strange event, as described elsewhere in this book. I don’t recall how long afterwards I gave Jordan this robe. Though I’m sure he accepted it, it lay unwrapped among the artifacts that I found among his possessions.

I was 30 years old in 1984, and 36 when my brother shot himself in his Philadelphia apartment. I’m 67 now. It seems impossible, how time races by. His suicide was 30 years ago. If I live another 33 years, I’ll be 100—all but the first few decades of my life passed in a solitude of my own—threaded with unanswerable questions, and unfinished stories.