Chapter 3 — The Apple IIc War

Before any of what comes next, I want you to know about the Apple IIc.

It had arrived eight months earlier, Christmas morning, 1985, the most expensive thing under the tree by a mile, and everyone knew it. So did Mark, and not by guessing. Sometime in the weeks before, while the house slept or shopped, he had located every gift, unwrapped each one with surgical patience, memorized it, and resealed it so cleanly that Marty, who could spot a mis-scored test from across a room, never found a seam.

Then, on the morning itself, he performed. “No,” he said, lifting the IIc box as if it might be dishes. “No. You didn’t.” The hand to the chest, the stunned reverence of a man witnessing a miracle. “This is exactly — how did you know? What an amazing coincidence.”

“Incredible,” Marty said dryly, playing her part. “The odds.”

“Astronomical,” David agreed.

He ran the bit at every unwrapping, the coincidence more amazing each time, all four of us knowing, nobody saying — the same joke as everything with Mark: the snooping confessed through the performing of innocence, transparency wearing the mask of mischief and daring you to name it. Fifteen years old and already fluent in the management of a grown man’s ego. I bounced off the walls like the gift was mine.

It lived on the desk in Mark's room, a squat beige miracle with a handle like a briefcase, and it was, by unanimous family ruling, his. Which is exactly why, one afternoon when he was out, I let myself into his room, sat down in his chair like I owned it, and started playing his games.

He came home. He stood in the doorway. "Get off my computer."

"I'm almost done with this level."

"Michael. Off."

"You weren't even using it," I said, which at ten I believed was one of the great airtight arguments of Western thought.

So he pushed me out of the chair. Not viciously — efficiently, the way you'd move a cat off a keyboard. I hit the carpet, shoved him back on the way up, and ran.

I made it about fifteen feet down the hall.

He tackled me from behind, flipped me over, and pinned my arms with his knees, and then my brother — the philosopher, the pianist, the boy who wrote aphorisms about integrity in his journal — tickle-tortured me until I couldn't breathe, gathered a slow deliberate loogie, and let it stretch down toward my face on a glistening thread while I thrashed and screamed. He let it drop. Direct hit.

I shrieked loud enough to crack glass and kicked him, with everything my ten-year-old leg had, square in the balls.

Which is of course the exact moment our mother came out of her office.

Mark folded sideways with the wounded dignity of the technically innocent. Marty took in the scene — her youngest pinned and spit-glazed, her oldest doubled over — and somehow, by the ancient laws that govern little brothers everywhere, I was the one who got in trouble. I did the time for the whole war: his room, his chair, my mouth, my foot.

Mark stood behind her the entire time she lectured me, wiping his chin, grinning at me over her shoulder.

The other thing I want you to know about is the dog.

We had an Irish Wolfhound in those years, Colin, and no one who met him ever forgot him, mostly because he was likely to knock them down. He was enormous — a gray event, not a pet — and magnificent, and dumb in a way that felt almost principled, as if intelligence had been offered and he had politely declined. He was trained to do nothing and did it constantly. He drank from the toilet like a horse at a trough. He mistook closed sliding doors for open ones at a full run. He was the one subject in our house on which every member of the family held the same opinion: whatever else was happening under that roof — and plenty was — there was always the dog, galumphing through the frame, knocking something over, being forgiven. Some houses have a fireplace. We had a Wolfhound.