there on the asphalt, looking at Arnold Mikesh’s square, vulnerable face, I didn’t suspect him of anything criminal. Not for a heartbeat.
“I’m sure that’s true. My brother wasn’t good with directions. He might have been coming to Decorah. We don’t know. He rarely drove. I’ll have to admit to you that he wasn’t very good at keeping his mind on the road. He ended up not watching his speed, making mistakes.” Josh’s list of mishaps was long: a mailbox knocked sideways, missed turnoffs, driving on the wrong side of the centerline, passengers white-knuckled on a curve. By the time I was working with him, we always arranged to have someone else at the wheel if Josh needed a car. He was not born to drive. With age, his distraction and helplessness behind the wheel got worse instead of better.
“As for this journey last night, we didn’t know he was gone. The call from the authorities woke us. Nobody knew Josh was away or why he would have left. All the way here we kept wondering how we let Josh slip away before dinner without any of us knowing he was gone. We each felt part of the blame.
“But I heard from the deputy that my brother was still alive when you got to him, that you talked to him.” I hoped Mikesh could dispel the mystery. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to hear what he said. Could I get you a cup of coffee?”
Mikesh and I walked to a place just up the hill, on the corner of Decorah’s main business street. The college kids with their laptops were away on break, so the coffee shop was nearly empty. Coming in from the damp, the warmth, the strong smell of freshly ground dark roast, and the roar of the espresso steamer felt good. Near the counter four women more Mikesh’s age than mine were leaning over their lattes, catching up on the week, their eyes checking us over when we entered. A pair of retirement-aged men sat at one of the booths. I got two filter coffees and we took a table at the far back.
“I’m sure you don’t like to think about it, but it would mean a lot to me, and to the people around Josh, to know how he died.”
In the last few months before the accident, my brother talked quite a bit about his death. Josh was attuned to a world whose existence I often questioned. He said plenty that I let pass unconsidered. The sudden prospect of a future without him left me clutching for any words of his that I had missed.
“I can see that.” Mikesh wondered who the “people around Josh” might be: somber Christians, women in trippy flowered dresses, or Latino meth runners. So far, in Arnold Mikesh’s short introduction to the world of Joshua King, the reports were contradictory.
Mikesh needed encouragement. “According to the deputy, he was still able to speak. Did he say anything I could relay to his Shekinah followers?”
“Who?”
“Shekinah. That’s the name of the group Josh led.”
“What’s the word again?”
“‘Shekinah.’ It means ‘where the Spirit dwells’ or ‘Spirit in you.’”
Mikesh squinted in concentration. “I think that was one of the last words your brother said. The word, it started with that “shh” sound. ‘Shekinah, take my spirit.’ I’ll bet those were his last words.” Mikesh felt tired, thinking of Josh dying with this antique word, like a well-worn rosary, on his lips.
Mikesh told me what he remembered: Josh’s attention to the light, his feeling alone, “join in infinity,” “comfort my mother.” I had him go through it all. Did he remember the tune Josh was singing, did Josh say anything about where he was going? Did he show any emotion? We were talking about my twin brother, the person to whose body I conformed even before we were born.
“Do you know anything about Shekinah, Arnie?”
Mikesh shook his head. “I didn’t know enough about it to recognize your brother when I was trying to help him last night, or the word he was trying to say, if that’s any indication. He asked for my name, but he didn’t live long enough to tell me his.”
“People will tell you that my brother started something that was all about him, that he was the whole show.” Mikesh recalled Seegmiller’s words: Josh as kingpin in a cult of drug runners. “But I don’t believe that. My brother was pointing to something within him but more important, something beyond himself, something that he believed includes you.”
I sat at a coffee shop table trying to explain my brother, while he lay dead in a hospital room down the road. The image of that fought with others: Josh’s face animated with the message he carried, Josh’s hands on an old woman’s shoulders, Josh helping hold the oven door as someone pulled out a tray of loaves, Josh’s voice when he called me “Tom-Tom.”
“He was in shock, and only partly conscious, but didn’t you feel the way he reached out to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“He asked your name. He asked you to comfort my mom.”
“True. That rattled me.”
Mikesh’s reaction was not unique. People were unsettled by the effect my brother had on them. What he said could jar you. Some got angry and turned that against him. Those people and the media saw my brother as a wolf. They circled the wagons, protecting themselves and their flock against him.
I, your story teller, have to admit that Josh had finally unsettled me, too. I worked as a contract archeologist through fall 2007, but after that digging season ended, I moved in with Mom and Josh. More than moved in. After I’d filed my final reports, I helped Josh with his work and decided that from then forward I would divide my year that way. I wished I had a way to tell Mikesh, over coffee, that stepping back into the long shadow cast by my twin brother after having freed myself of him for ten years was neither automatic nor wholly pleasant. It threatened my pride. Deciding whether I was going to continue that work now that Josh was dead was the next issue to face: once the shock passed and the grim business of my brother’s death got completed. That morning in the coffee shop, I had little to offer but questions.
“The people who followed Josh are going to want to know about what you saw and heard. It’s going to sound crazy to you, but those people are very definitely going to want to hear from you whether you saw my brother die, whether he quit breathing.”
While I pictured the faces of the ones who were not going to believe, would never believe Josh was dead, the thought at the front of Arnie Mikesh’s mind was just the opposite: remembering the feeling of his fingers in the airway of my brother’s mouth after he quit speaking, and the silence that pounded in Mikesh’s brain after that last breath. Josh’s dying moment was not an experience Mikesh wanted to speak about to a group of religious fanatics, much less think about himself.
“My mother and I don’t care about an autopsy. We want to bury Josh and move forward. But the sheriff says it has to happen. He feels there could be alcohol or drugs involved. In a way I’m relieved that we are going to get a doctor’s signature on a report that will detail exactly what killed Josh—that it was nothing illegal.”
My phone rang: our friend Simon. I told him where we were, and soon Mikesh, heading back to the parking area, felt my hand—the unfamiliar hand of the dead man’s brother—on his back, guiding him toward a pair of people. One was my mother, Maria, and the other was the bearded man who Mikesh saw when he stumbled into the Sheriff’s office: Simon Peña, Josh’s assistant. Standing outside in the cold, looking into Mom’s splotchy face, Mikesh told the story again, thinking about my brother’s last request: “Comfort my mother.”
“You are sure he didn’t say anything else?” Peña pushed. “You are sure he didn’t say why he was on that road or why he went off it? Something maybe you forgot?”
Mikesh could taste his dislike for Peña. He thought back to what he saw in the sheriff’s office: this man saying he didn’t know what Josh was doing on that road. Peña had nerve to press Mikesh on the same question.
“No. I remember it. I wish I could put it more out of my head.”
Mom placed her hand on Mikesh’s