If It’s My Time

Since April 2017, the first anniversary of my foster brother’s death, I’ve opened my Schirmer’s edition of Beethoven’s complete sonatas and sat at the piano for half of each day, replaying songs I’ve known since I was a child. I repeat the ritual two to five times a year, during important dates of our relationship. Once I’ve played through all thirty-two sonatas, I’ll ask Alexa to play his string quartets, which I can still transcribe by ear. Of the sixteen, my favorite is the last. It’s a departure from my usual preference for pieces written in E♭ minor, in six flats—all the black keys to profess my longing, to come to terms with my grief.

The String Quartet in F major is smaller than the sonatas, plying out four simple movements in just twenty-five minutes. The fourth and final movement begins with slow chords that mimic the question Muss es sein? (Must it be?), and embraces the response—the unmistakable Es muss sein! (It must be!): two eighth notes and a quarter note played forte. Grave, but not too much. The listener—and the performer, who must maintain a commanding grasp of tempo and timbre, knowing when to lighten for the protagonist’s love—comes to “Der schwer gefasste Entschluss,” the difficult decision, themselves. If they return to the beginning of the movement, they will discover the chords for this resolution, as simple as leaves falling into earth—a darkening.

It’s in this reverie, eyes closed and finishing the response to Beethoven’s call, that I feel I’m ten again, sitting at the recreation-hall piano at Weekes Community Center Park.

“Syl!” Evan Isaiah yells. He’s outside, nesting with the stray neighborhood husky who sometimes follows us to the park. I’ve only just started the final movement; I’ve yet to move past, unseen.

“Syl!” Evan Isaiah’s breath fills my right ear. He’s panting from having run back and forth alongside ditches, digging with the husky. He smells like the rain-swollen dirt.

“Syl!” Evan Isaiah, for all his closeness, doesn’t tap my shoulders. I keep playing, and Evan Isaiah finally stops me, resting one hand gently on my left, my instrument. He puts the other hand on my shoulder and squeezes, then looks at my eyes.

“You a pianist, you hear?” he says. I grin. He squeezes my shoulder again, having already forgotten why he wanted me to stop playing.

In the string quartet, Beethoven asks, “Can we alter fate?” How do we know what we can and cannot change? It’s this resistance to our fosterhood, to the conventions of loving someone who is not my real brother, that makes me love Evan Isaiah, the boy who will kneel in front of me until my tears—from boys or parents or bullies—stop running. He’ll push back my hair, braiding it into threads, creating a beautiful crown. Then he’ll wipe my face and tell me to get over it: he’s still there.

This afternoon when I’m ten and he’s thirteen, we don’t make it out of the rain. As we’re leaving the recreation hall, the water beats down in sheets. My long hair hangs limply like a thick wall around my face. Evan Isaiah cocks his head and laughs, loping ahead before I can even catch my breath. But he turns around and waits for me to catch up, throwing his windbreaker over us. The only shadow I see as we run through puddles and streets is Evan Isaiah, with his wiry shoulders and slightly crooked back, his mouth set in firm determination to get us home.

I met the boy I call my brother, Evan Isaiah, in 1998, when we were wards of the state of California. As foster youth, we often played near the train tracks behind Mickey D’s and Dairy Queen, running around the wooden crossties. I remember stretching my legs and watching Evan Isaiah launch his thin and muscular body into cartwheels, a feat I could never accomplish. I ran at full speed and jumped into what I called a “princess twirl,” flinging out my arms and one leg as if I were ice-skating. We treated the tracks as a continuous line where, uninhibited, we could trace our own lives—a haven we wouldn’t have known had we not been placed in the same home together. Other kids reminded us that a Black boy and a yellow girl shouldn’t be friends; we should be grateful to sleep in the same space as white foster children. They told me to go home, which wasn’t that far, because my parents were in the next town over. The kids never told Evan Isaiah to go home to Prince George’s County in Maryland, where his father was shot after being pulled over for drunk driving. His mother told him his father didn’t cooperate with the authorities, that he tried to grab the officer’s gun and spat at him.

We didn’t know how to speak to our parents, the ones who saw us as burdens. Evan Isaiah’s mother, Charlie, had remarried and was raising two stepchildren while teaching Harlem Renaissance poetry to tenth-graders in Oakland. My father earned money but would let it drain into his addictions: heroin, cocaine, and gambling. My mother, finding solace in a man who followed her from her modeling days in Hong Kong, pimped me out to him in order to keep him. I was seven and a half years old. I couldn’t bear to say “I love you” to either of my parents.

Summer 2016. I squeeze my eyes shut after a subdued monsoon: the Tucson air smells like ocotillo. I replace the thought with lilacs—the flowers our guardian had grown in his front yard—and there we are, my brother and I standing together again. Not: squeeze my eyes and my brother’s in prison, the one on the news for running into the Hayward Hills after raping and killing a white girl. Not: squeeze my eyes and I’m standing heartbroken on my front porch, holding an envelope marked return to sender by San Quentin, the letter I’d written to him two months ago. Never: squeeze my eyes and I didn’t even realize he was gone because by the time I thought to write to him, he’d been dead for eight months.

For all my compressions of time and pride, the truth is that I failed to be present when Evan Isaiah died. It’s like the four years since I left Hayward, since I chose to stop visiting my brother every week in prison, have sifted through my fingers. An unburdening: I had never been responsible for him. At the piano, my fingers are unable to unstick from the keys. My shoulders curve and concave like a bird’s wings, crying.

Two days before I drive out to Tucson for graduate school in early August 2012, I drive across the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, past Tomales Bay, to see him one last time. I’ll visit him once or twice a year thereafter, but it won’t be the same: not our weekly Saturdays, when I’m the first, the only, visitor for him as the sun rises and visiting hours begin at 7:30 a.m.

On this last Saturday, Evan Isaiah looks reinvigorated. I’m worried; though he’s smiling, I see the hollowness in his cheeks. When he smiles, his dimples recede. I sit, rest my arms on the table—something we try not to do, because it’s imprinted with the sweat and spills of each visitor. I feel small, watching the other inmates meet their loved ones.

“You going,” he says, at first glance. He knows I’m thinking about what will happen to him when I’m fifteen hours away by car. “Don’t even think about not going for your dream.”

We have an hour together. I unfold the two poems he’d asked me to bring last time, two stutter memories I’d written about my father. The pages are carefully folded into a Bible, the only permissible book I can bring to death row. My father, who, for all his failures, taught me that memory eats at all of us: my father grew leaner and harder with age, and he said at our meetup a year ago that I’d inherited his pain. When I was disappointed by my mother, he said I looked like I was about to cry, as if I expected her to love me unconditionally. When has that ever been true? my father scoffed.

Evan Isaiah reads the six pages carefully. He thumbs through each page, licking his index finger to mark them. I don’t quite suppress my disgust. He grins.

“Well?” I say. “Should I never leave California because I don’t deserve to be a poet?”

My brother looks at me like I’ve inhaled a line—never my addiction, after I watched my father and then Evan Isaiah with it. “Nobody deserves to be a poet,” he says. “You grow into it. You full grown. You decide you deserve it.”

He pushes the poems to me and nods his approval. “Know what my ma said?” Charlie, whom I’ve met and spoken to over the years, calls me the short Asian who’s always with her son.

“Songs are supposed to lift, to light.” He takes the first poem and scans it again. “See this drawn-out conceit?” he says, thumbing a thick six-lined stanza. “You too complicated. If you’re going to show off the subject of your metaphor, you need to ground us with an image that can carry it. The way you create that image—that’s what will allow you to go further, to be positively obsessed, not just a rambling maniac.” He grins. “Thank me for giving you Extended Metaphor 101.”

I laugh and throw up my hands in confusion. Evan Isaiah always mocks me for knowing music, something innate, but being unable to fathom poetic terminology and process; I fail to see how they’re one and the same.

“You can’t laugh it all away.” He grows serious. “Syl, the secret to writing not just poetry but poetic prose—the stories that’ll make any heart sink—is to use poetry devices for following the lives of the people you love. That’s how you draw out devotion.”

He says it simply, like I should’ve known why he wanted me to be well versed in his mother’s art, even though he never desired to be a writer himself. I could see him as a high-school teacher, too, English or social studies or a combination of social action in film and literature. Evan Isaiah loved to talk about his ideas—if, in fact, he was not in prison for life. Before, his social justice took shape as a position as a recreation-center aide, with crossover youth, foster children who were in the juvenile justice system. He chose to work with Black children. At the time of his crimes, Evan Isaiah had been part of a surge in the Black Lives Matter movement: he chanted in the name of Oscar Grant III; he contributed his body as a human chain in the BART shutdowns—a protest that would be replicated after Ferguson. In 2015, when he heard about the new BLM—a Bay Area movement that should have included him—my brother had asked me to think about joining it. “I’m not asking you to do the same work,” he’d said. “I want you to love what you do, and to fight for people, if you believe they deserve your support.”

He knocks me out of my reverie with a quick snap of the fingers,

sharp and stilted. “It is easy,” he adds, “to make someone like me be callous.” He shrugs. “Maybe I am. Ever think about how you’re going to render me? Am I going to be your protector? Or what the rest of the world sees me as—”

I stop him before he says murderer. Throw up my hands, like I’m the one with something to hide. Evan Isaiah stops for a moment, then shakes his head.

“Ever wonder, these visits could be as complicated as going to jail to see your brother, thinking you’re still with him even though you get to move onto the outside? Or it can be as simple as us grown kids working on how to get along with normal people, as if we have never been discriminated against for having parents who didn’t want us. Our lives depend on it.”

He makes a clicking sound, “Nah,” when he sees my disagreement. “Once you understand that you can write our people as they are—as they’re delusional, bent to follow their consciousness even when it’s bad—then you’re fine.” He crosses his arms. “You have to make normal people feel unsafe, as if they’re the ones who are fostered.”

I nod slightly. “Yes, sir,” I say. “How do you come up with this? How do you tell me again what to do?”

And Evan Isaiah tells me, without prompt, that it was his time in the Special Housing Unit (SHU). Something about being in solitary confinement, which Evan Isaiah never experienced as a foster child, tempered his darkness like a finely putted stone from its slingshot. Even though I spent just seventy-two hours in confinement when I was ten, I never forgot the abandonment and isolation I felt at being made someone to be forgotten. I was the only one in our group home who would never be incarcerated as an adult. Watching my brother look like his fear was bloating his chest, I couldn’t help but wonder why I didn’t tell him what those seventy-two hours meant: no amount of reflection, regret, and retelling could make my loneliness go away.

His isolation broke him, in the way slight cracks appear in a wall, and I chose to ignore it.

Only once did I fail visitor inspection. I’d driven without the boyfriend whom I wanted Evan Isaiah to meet. In my fury at his refusal to see my convict brother, I’d fallen asleep in my black tank top and blue jeans, then driven to San Quentin without thinking about what I was wearing. Blue denim was an adamant no, but my tank top also blocked my entrance. I didn’t have a spare change of clothes in my trunk.

I remember walking calmly to my car, getting inside, and sitting at the driver’s seat for twenty minutes. What a waste of time: to literally be right outside, for Evan Isaiah, and fail to make it to him. Years later, when I realized the darkness that made me feel I deserved to be hurt was the same darkness Evan Isaiah carried too, I thought back to this moment. For a long time, afterward, all I wore to his visits were slacks and long-sleeved shirts, fearful of being denied the right to see my brother.

I discover that Evan Isaiah has been in solitary for a week on April 7, 2012, when I try to visit for Easter. I’m told to return in another week, when he should be released. I can do nothing but believe the prison officer’s words. Every morning before I go to work in the nociception lab where I study pain in rats and mice for eight hours, I hope that missing Easter won’t weigh him down. It can’t.

I see him on April 14, as expected. My brother has a scar beneath his chin, as if he’s been scuffed. When he speaks, his words weigh heavily—they don’t slide across his mouth with the lightness I am used to hearing from him.

His speech is a haunting and romantic gesture. I see his laughing and lighthearted body running ahead of me at Weekes Park, but before me, I see my brother, pained and deadpan. We don’t talk about his confinement, at least the logistics. He reveals that the only redeeming part of isolation is his reflection. “When I’m not tortured by my inability to make sense of the same four walls,” he says, “I figure out my dreams and nightmares. Doesn’t matter if I’m imagining. I figure it out. It’s for my peace of mind.”

My brother says some of the other inmates keep their hands busy making knickknacks out of residue, like one who used the foil lining of Lay’s potato-chip bags to create a tiara. “For his daughter,” Evan Isaiah says. The man’s daughter is no longer sixteen but twenty-six. She never visits him.

It’s one of the few visits I don’t talk about myself. I know this is my flaw, my self-absorption. Even when I hear how I cut others off with my explanations, even when I try to shut up, I can’t.

Evan Isaiah speaks a little about his Microsoft literacy class. “Syl, you know I don’t need a class to teach me how to type.” Now he cracks a smile. “But it is an opportunity to write. Look at me now. Maybe we’ll be one and together: trashbag kids turned writers.”

He doesn’t fall into the “too-late” mindset I’ve witnessed in him at times. Instead, he jumps into stories of our future successes: me, a poet who’s going to write at least six books. Him, a prose writer who’s going to pen his memoir from inside San Quentin. Hell, he’ll get a Lifetime movie made about him.

“Only if you write the screenplay,” he adds.

He predicts I’ll die of old age, in my sleep. Whether he dies in prison or makes it out in old age, Evan Isaiah says our world will know about him. “If, at first, the monster I am,” he admits. “But also, I am not the same man anymore. I know there are people who see that.”

Nearly a year after his death, indefinite solitary confinement ends at San Quentin. Instead of leaving every dangerous suspect in the adjustment centers, the authorities declare that only ten to twenty-two inmates remain there. “It would have been the tail end of the dog,” said my brother, whose metaphors grew more unsettling the longer he remained confined. This prediction on January 2, 2016, our last visit, meant nothing to me at the time. I’d heard his thoughts about solitary confinement, but I wasn’t listening. I was simply ready to return to Tucson, ready to begin a new semester. In four years of teaching, I’d never told anyone about my foster brother. I wouldn’t talk about him until after he died.

Evan Isaiah did not live to see that San Quentin could become more humane, that there were people fighting for his rights. Maybe he would have lived the rest of his days surrounded by his fellow inmates, telling stories in the way that made me love him. Maybe, after serving thirty years, he would have earned parole or enough clemency to be released back to his community and to his remaining family. It’s the unknowing that haunts me: what if he had lived just one more year?

My brother often described San Quentin as a site of violence, even in the adjustment centers. “You’re in the Q’s most uncivilized torture for twenty-three hours a day, in a windowless cell, left to your devices,” he said. “It breaks your soul.” Evan Isaiah was one of the lucky ones, if you can call it luck. After his solitary confinement, that first time I saw him behind a glass partition—the first time I was unable to lace my fingers with his—I discovered he had fallen prey to a gang fight, though he’d said he didn’t belong to any. I assumed he was released because he wasn’t a gang member. Only years later, when I’m researching his death, do I learn that becoming an informant was still popular practice when he was imprisoned. Did Evan Isaiah snitch—was that his way out?

And, once out, did my brother pay for his words with his life?

For us, authenticity depends upon the navigation of our heavier beginnings—and throwing away their weight for lightness. Bad faith is the opposite of authenticity. According to Evan Isaiah, it’s insidious: it starts with the rejection of responsibility, because the person fears burdens, especially the people who love him.

Evan Isaiah was the one who taught me to watch out for people who didn’t love me. First, it was my parents, who would weave into and out of my life whenever they needed money—drug rehabilitation, mortgage, groceries. It didn’t matter how much I paid; I’d never earn their love.

Evan Isaiah met all my boyfriends, except for the one who refused to visit him. He warned me about the one who would call me a heroine for visiting my brother in prison, then take it back, once he realized who my brother was. This would be the man who called my brother a burden and told me to let him go.

“Don’t feel bad for them,” says my boyfriend after I return home from Evan Isaiah’s makeup Easter visit. “They deserve their kennels. They made their beds; they’ve got to lie in them.”

He says it with firm conviction, unrelenting. “You have to think of it this way, Sylvia,” he continues. “He’s in SHU because of the offenses he committed in prison, not before.”

My boyfriend refuses to call me by my nickname, by the name only the people who love me most, Evan Isaiah and my best friend, use.

He turns, shoving away the Japanese chicken curry I’ve cooked for dinner, as if in anticipation of my disagreement. “Can you tell me why I should care?” he asks, before leaving.

Once confined, passing the time was a matter of luck, no matter how strong my brother was. Just like when we were foster youth, we counted the hours and days by imagining how to live in a world without people—without, even, each other. It’s as if we were in the confined bathroom at our guardian’s home, examining one another in the mirror. Waiting for our guardian to voice his discontent. My fear at his call of my name—I imagine that might be one echo of Evan Isaiah’s fear in SHU, like waiting for the crackle of plates thrown by our guardian.

“It’s a kennel.” I hear the woman behind me in the visitors’ inspection on our Christmas visit in 2015, our second-to-last. She fingers her wedding ring, slightly loose on her skin. “That’s what he tells me. The point of locking them up is to make them conform to the right results.” She looks at her spit shield and mutters under her breath.

I don’t see it as the death-row visiting room, even though I walk into my holding cell each week. It’s no bigger than four feet by eight feet, large enough for children and small people like me, not my six-foot, two-inch brother. We’re never quite alone because the guards in the center row—to guard both rows of visitation cages on either side—are locked inside too. There are more guards outside. There’s even, Evan Isaiah said, a gunman in a hidden office.

I think about how popular music is often dictated by the reigning cultural values of the people in power. I think, also, of how Evan Isaiah doesn’t appear to respond to the prison’s rehabilitative programs, including creative writing. His only commitment is to me—to writing these letters and speaking to me during my visits. When I ask if he’s talked to Charlie—if she’s even visited—he doesn’t answer.

In our visitation cage, we sit on our plastic chairs. We rarely use the table, which is too low and filthy. This is why we created our system of moving our hands in the air, so we didn’t have to touch our surroundings. Everyone is locked in, a steely reminder that if I wanted to continually see my brother, I’d need to forget about the fact that I could leave after an hour.

“I know how to sell myself in a way people can identify,” he tells me. “To find a story that’s compelling. Haven’t I always been this way?” he asks, winking.

I laugh. Smooth talker, a gentle but firm Big Brother—that’s what other foster kids, the ones we met at the library during our coinciding visits, called him. Nothing got past Evan Isaiah. He knew everybody’s drama: what was real and what was noise. Today he looks more like his old self: ready to talk. Eager to please.

“Serious, though.” He pauses, waiting for my grin to fade. “I know when our guardian came for you, it took something out of you. I didn’t want you to think you have to live with his hands sewn on your body for the rest of life. I told some of the inmates about you,” he said, nodding when I start to say, “For reals?”

“You know what more than one of them said? That they knew a girl who had been raped, who carried it like a secret. And all these men were tuning into me like this was my story.” He shakes his head. “That’s how I know I can sell myself,” he repeats. “For repeating your story. For failing to protect you.”

I won’t remember later if I spent the rest of the visit insisting that Evan Isaiah did everything he could, as I usually do. We don’t talk about our guardian often, even the good memories, the ones when he tells us both to stand back from the front door as one of his friends pounds on the gate, demanding to be let in. Our guardian had a protective nature: besides putting himself forward whenever we were threatened, he made sure we were well-fed; he got us to school; he bought books, even, for us to read.

I will remember my brother holding his hands in the air when the guard watching him turns his head, mouthing for me to match him. I put my hands up. For the length of our shared breaths, we’re together.

The third movement of Beethoven’s quartet is “Lento assai, cantante e tranquillo.” Slowly, always; singing and tranquil. It’s too pretty to be the real ending. Like all classical music and its return to darker themes, I expect the change in my brother.

Evan Isaiah knows how much time I take to see him. I always tell him it’s no trouble. After all, he’s my brother. I would drive back and forth, bearing with my stomach flipping on the mountainous curves after the bridge, for the rest of my life.

He counts the hours, though. He asks me the price of gas and calculates the mileage in his head, or repeats the numbers I tell him until I leave, and then he returns to his cell and adds it all up. He hasn’t forgotten that besides getting normal visitation approval, I had to procure a medical letter from my surgeon to affirm that I cannot clear the metal detector since I lost my hand in a 2010 car accident; the one they see is a metal base and silicone fingertips, perfectly sculpted, as if I’ve never lost it.

It’s August 2012 again. Evan Isaiah tells me to take my graduate-school acceptance and leave for Tucson—to regret nothing. “It’s okay,” he says. “It was never your job to see me every week. It’s God’s will for you to follow your dream.”

He doesn’t look me in the eye. Speed, we know, has everything to do with forgetting. The faster we live, the lighter we feel. Freed from responsibility, we may let go of our fears. We have seen the kids we grew up with go like this: too fast. A girl who ran off with her man, who trafficked her for sex. A boy who got ejected from his group home and sent to a mental institution because the foster agency couldn’t handle him anymore. Others, we bet, were sure to end up in juvie or the big house: our common fate was inevitable.

Funny how we never consider ourselves in these stories, in writing our fates.

It’s as if a single moment of happiness justifies however we get there. I forget my brother has nothing but time to reinvent and to rehabilitate himself. I’ll know later that he chooses to limit himself: yes, he talks to and gets along with certain inmates, but he doesn’t sign up for most extracurriculars, not even the writing ones. My brother’s content to stay by himself, even when he could walk the yard and talk to someone.

It’s a departure from the Evan Isaiah I know who strove to watch over everybody’s business, to be a guiding hand when us kids asked him for his advice. He’s not the same person. The Evan Isaiah of my youth would never have said, “If it’s my time, it’s God’s will,” as if it must be.

Melodies develop and modulate; they are supposed to syncopate, to be light. Beethoven’s primary theme in the quartet’s finale is short and persistent: after canonical measure 53, the contrasting melodies of light and dark fulfill the resignation of the song.

Since I lost my hand, I am no longer the pianist I used to be. I play until my fake hand gives out, when I can no longer control the coordinates of my fingers, the matching of each leap to the next bar line. Sometimes I’m unable to finish the quartet.

On these days, when I fail to play a music I have known for most of my life, I close my eyes and think about Evan Isaiah’s breathing next to me, as he pants from his basketball drills. From chasing the husky. From running tired through the auditorium. Even when my fake hand is dead, I start playing the right-hand melody. At times, if I play long enough, I see my brother sitting down next to me and matching his movements to mine.

Read more from Issue 19.2.