“Symbolic Autonomy” (fiction)

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“Back from the library?” she asks, which sounds like an accusation. He staggers into the kitchen, shaking his arms. His Bronco doesn’t have heat.

“For now,” he says.

She walks to the kitchen table. A smoldering cigarette butt is in the ashtray on the counter where she had been standing. Papers are scattered all over the table. The house’s calculator, which at some distant time has somehow gotten black streaks all over it, is at the place where he normally sits. Zack thinks of the stray crumbs and grains of salt that are always on the table and imagines them sticking to the papers. A bag of corn chips is open and facing her. Licking her pen, she starts to write.

“Taxes?” he asks.

“Tis the season,” she responds. “Tis the season for Uncle Sam to screw me up the ass.”

Though he’s heard her talk that way his entire life, it still makes him uncomfortable. “Gross,” he says.

“So you’re done with your homework,” she says.

“I need a break.”

Picking up the calculator, she continues without looking up. When he tries to use it, its display is always too faint for him to be able to read its numbers.

“What is your paper about?”

He shifts his weight and stands evenly. “Babylonian mythology. I’m studying all the details, like the stuff most people don’t even know about.”

“Ok,” she says distantly.

“Hey, little bro,” Mark says as he walks into the kitchen with no shirt on, his hair draped over his back.

“Working tonight?” Zack asks.

Mark stares into the refrigerator before taking out the orange juice and setting it on the counter.

“Yup, double tonight.” He gets a bowl from the cabinet above the dishwasher and pours OJ into it. “Super-duper double tonight, all night,” he says like a ’50s rocker. He smiles at Zack.

His mother looks at Mark from under her brow. “Get so high you’re mistaking bowls for glasses now, Mark?” she says.

“You can take hits out of a bowl and not just bowl hits,” Mark answers. Zack laughs even though he doesn’t get it. Mark smiles at him conspiratorially.

“Besides, you can take bigger sips out of a bowl,” Mark says. To demonstrate, he raises the bowl to his mouth and tilts his head back. She doesn’t look up. Silent, she scribbles something on one of her forms.

“What are you up to tonight — hitting that homework so hard it screams for help?” Mark asks him.

“I’m hitting it, but, man, this paper on the symbolic autonomy of Babylonian mythology is hard,” he says.

Mark refills his bowl. Zack has always admired how natural Mark looks without a shirt on. His muscles are compact, his chest clear and hairless. Mark must shave his chest, Zack realizes. It’s hard to imagine him doing it. He thinks of the wiry hairs scattered on his own shoulders, back, arms, and chest.

Zack takes in Mark. His body looks young, but his face is marked and lined from hard living. The scar on his face from when he was jumped by a gutter punk in San Francisco seems weirdly incongruous with him standing there in their raised ranch in Dover.

“Sounds like you’re killing it to me,” Mark says.

Zack hadn’t been sure what to say when his mom had said that Mark would be moving back from California. It was impossible to imagine a person growing up in Dover and ending up anything like Mark was when he’d moved back. He’d already been halfway to hippy before moving out West, and that was back when all he had to draw on was the store at the mall’s small selection of hemp jewelry and Grateful Dead trinkets. Zack still can’t think of Jerry Garcia as anything but a stuffed animal.

Mark seemed to be right on the edge of finding something back then. Even in 1990s suburban Pennsylvania, he was cracking the code of the universe’s hidden winks and nods. He tried, but Zack could never make sense of it. Mark had showed him the lyrics to Pink Floyd’s ‘Brain Damage,’ but they just didn’t seem that profound no matter how many times he read them.

“Yeah, um, ‘symbolic autonomy’ — what is that again? And what type of job do ‘symbologists’ get?” his mom asks.

“It’s not a job. Studying symbolic autonomy will make me smart, which will get me a job,” he says.

“Well, I guess you don’t need to be so smart to know that,” she says. She looks up as she says it, revealing a shard of corn chip on her lip.

“Symbolic autonomy means I smoke weed till my eyes bleed,” Mark says, shaking his head like he’s rapping. He stares at her as he says it.

Symbolic autonomy. At least that’s what he thinks Professor Spiro said. That and “phenomenology,” which he guesses is the study of phenomena. Professor Spiro kept saying something like that, so it seemed like a good idea to write a paper about it. The school calls his math class “Pre-College Math,” and he can’t put the credits from it toward his degree (his “not-college college class” Mark had called it).

“I’m just trying to get a good report card,” he says.

“You will, honey,” she says.

“Only with a lot of work, and a lot of symbolic autonomy,” he says, and she laughs.

Mark rinses his bowl in the sink. “Me, the way I see it, there are lots of ways to learn. I just don’t see why you gotta strain your eyes staring at a screen all day to feel like you’re learning something.” His voice rises, “It’s like, why don’t you try talking to someone? Right? Why don’t you try asking someone what they mean? Maybe then you’d learn something.” He puts the bowl in the dishwasher. Zack notices that he took the time to rinse it first.

“Right on,” Zack says to his brother’s rant, which seems naïve but also kind of right.

“Yeah,” Mark says so that it comes out sounding like a laugh. “Sinosat Community College? I call it Quick-in-the-Sack Community College.” He walks out of the kitchen, and soon Zack hears him on the stairs.

“You can learn the ways of the world after everyone recognizes how brilliant of a son I’ve raised when you finish college. Then you can go live some weirdo hippy life in California and forget everything you learned,” his mom says as she returns to her taxes.

Then why bother learning it?

He walks to the table but doesn’t sit down. Taking a handful of chips from the bag, he tries to think of other things he can write about in his paper. Symbolic economy? He decides against it after looking at his mom’s tax forms. Literal autonomy? That one trips him up. If symbolic economy looks like a tax form, then what would literal autonomy look like?