My brother doesn’t say much. He never has. At meals, while I tell the joke about the T-rex for the third time, our little sister elongates her face and deepens her voice as she does an impression of what Spencer from her history class said at lunch today, our mother interrogates us about our friends and our friends’ parents and our friends’ siblings and our friends’ pets and our friends’ pediatricians, our father tries to explain why he bought a second Google Home or a third Amazon Echo, and those devices themselves jump in to tell us they didn’t quite catch that when my father says he left his goggles at the pool or my sister mentions how Alex knocked over the projector in class, my brother sits in his seat, silently watching and listening and smiling. His lips part only when he spoons rice into his mouth, methodically shuttling the white grains onto his tongue in his slow and deliberate way. Occasionally, my sister or I will remember the story about his stroller rolling down the hill when he was a baby, or the time he tried to put out the sun by throwing a bucket of water at the sky, and his eyes will twinkle and his dimples will deepen as his smile widens, sometimes even flashing a few teeth at the more hilarious renditions. Still, he says nothing.
My brother never complains, either. While as babies my sister and I both cried to wake the dead, my brother was so placid I often thought he was dead. When we were toddlers, my sister and I would go on hunger strike if our grandmother added one more gram of vegetable to our plates. My brother stoically plowed through meat and greens alike, shoveling butternut squash down so unflinchingly that I wanted to throw up just watching. Once, I stole my brother’s towel and clothes while he was showering, then rubbed my hands and grinned to myself as I waited for him to come shrieking out of the bathroom when he discovered their absence. Twenty minutes later, I was scratching my head at a problem on my math homework, the prank completely forgotten, when a repetitive thumping sound crept into my hearing. Annoyed, I followed the sound to its source, opening the bathroom door to discover my brother sitting on the rim of the bathtub, gently stamping his feet in place. “I’m air-drying,” he told me when I asked him what he was doing. “Someone took my towel.”
My brother’s silence, however, does not mean that he has nothing to say. The opposite is true. My brother is a sponge, constantly soaking up sounds and sights and thoughts, and while the rest of us are chattering on he’s holding on to them and mixing them and marinating in them until he’s saturated with his own thoughts and reactions and ideas. To get those juices out of him, you just have to squeeze the right way. That way, as my family discovered when my brother was eleven years old, is to put a camera in his hands.
On the day my brother’s first camera came in the mail, my mother and I came home to find an open cardboard box on the dining table, with two of its flaps bearing the halves of a freshly and neatly bisected strip of Amazon Prime packing tape. Around the box, sheets of bubble wrap were strewn across the table in all directions as if ejected from a tornado. The irresistible bubbles lay unpopped and untouched. When we peeked inside, a lonely receipt was all that remained in our cardboard Pandora’s box, resting at the bottom like coffee dregs in an empty mug.
When my mother and I tiptoed upstairs and poked our heads into my brother’s doorway that day, we witnessed for the first time a scene that would become a daily occurrence for the next two years.
On the smooth hardwood floor of my brother’s room, a branch of pea-sized red berries from the bush in the backyard was propped inside a small drinking glass. Behind them was my brother. He crouched, still as a statue, his back bent forty-five degrees forward to lean over the berries. His mouth was slightly open, leaving a one-millimeter gap between his lips. His right eye was screwed tightly shut. And his left eye - his left eye was staring not so much at the viewfinder as it was into it. As we stuck our necks around the doorframe to peek into the room, my mother and I were watching not a boy looking at a camera, but an empty body frozen in time as my brother’s soul poured through his left eye into a two-millimeter-square glass rectangle in the back of that mirrorless Fujifilm X-A2. It felt like staring through the stained-glass windows of a cathedral to spy on a private prayer. We left in silence, for once as speechless as my brother.
For the past two years, my brother has made his room his fortress, a stronghold of quiet contemplation and creation to which he retreats for hours at a time. My sister and I often think we’re home alone, only to be startled when the sudden beeping of a self-timer or snap, click sound of a shutter closing alerts us to our brother’s presence. Ever since the day my brother’s first camera came in the mail, our house has been home to a family of four and one ghost.
When I walk into my brother’s room, I have to duck under a light-diffusing fabric box, lift my knees to my belly button to avoid stepping on the excess greenscreen that pools onto the floor, lean out of the way to avoid being impaled on an umbrella light, and carefully tiptoe around the tripods, keeping my hands away from the cameras mounted on them. Inside, my brother is in one of two places: behind one of those cameras, eyes flicking back and forth as he reviews his latest shot or take, or hunched over his MacBook as he traces the outline of his body in Photoshop, one meticulous anchor point at a time. The room is silent, of course, so he always hears me come in. If I ask what he’s doing, he simply swivels his computer to face me and offers me a look.
What I see when my brother turns the screen towards me is different every day. A clip of him brushing his teeth, while his reflection in the bathroom mirror snatches his towel off the wall and runs out of frame. A photo of my brother walking on the surface of the ocean, the insertion so seamless I thought he was walking on blue glass the first time I saw it. A whirling montage of bamboo groves and temples and reflecting pools and stone gardens from our trip to Japan. An image of my brother being sucked up into a UFO over a landscape of trees and mountains, his body curved backward as if he’s being pulled into the spacecraft by an invisible umbilical cord. Every photo is a glimpse into his head, a chance to see through his eyes - a little trapdoor in the roof of the observatory where you can climb in and stand behind the telescopes and take a peek at the world.
You can find my brother's work on Instagram (@hsiehhsieh_2) or at his portfolio.
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