Turn Around and Check on Daniel

My brother Daniel and I are close in the low-maintenance way of people who text memes and see each other monthly. There was no context for what happened. No worrying phone call, no bad news, nothing.

I was halfway through my commute, stopped at the lights by the retail park, when a sentence arrived in my head. Not a feeling — a sentence, complete, in my own inner voice but with none of my inner hedging: turn around and check on Daniel. I actually said 'what?' out loud, alone in the car.

I am a project manager. I hold a modest reputation for being un-spookable. I sat through one green light arguing with myself — he is thirty-four, he is asleep, you have a nine o'clock — and then the sentence came again, identical, with the pressure of a hand between my shoulder blades: turn around and check on Daniel.

I turned around. I jumped an amber, took the ring road at a speed I will not put in writing, and rang his doorbell for a full minute. Nothing. His car was there. The spare key lives under the third flowerpot because our family never learns; I let myself in, and the hallway smelled like a struck match waiting to happen. Gas, thick enough to taste.

He was asleep upstairs with the windows shut. The hob's back burner was turned to full with no flame — he had made tea at 2 a.m., he pieced together afterwards, nudged the knob while cleaning up, and gone back to bed. Hours of it, pooling.

I got him out coughing into the garden, threw open every window, and did not tell him about the sentence until the engineer had been and gone. He asked the obvious question: what if you had argued with yourself one light longer?

I do not entertain the question. I just answer the sentence, if it ever comes again.