This wing of the Mayo Clinic is a bright malignant spaceship manned by aliens in face shields and surgical gowns and puffy bootie-feet. All the doorways are disturbingly wide, and inside them are machines pumping stuff in and out of prostrate victims. Every door that isn’t open is hung with a garish sign warning of radiation and biohazards. Roaming the hallways I feel like a UFO abductee between appointments. Done with the anal probe, waiting for the mind control implant.

Then my tense circumnavigation of the ICU unit is complete. I’m right back where I started, hovering at an extra-wide doorjamb, ladled in sorrow. My fingertips trace the room number — 1157. This is where Brian will officially die sometime, if you believe there’s still life in that flaccid husk. An overhanging monitor lies about that fact, counting electrical impulses which masquerade as human existence. But the heart is just a muscle, like froglegs that twitch when hooked to a 9-volt battery. The ruin above his eyebrows is the real death.

At least the hospital room is empty of Mom and Dad’s stony rage. They obviously wished their first-born son had made it all the way to the obit page, instead of getting stuck halfway in this hospital bed. Then they left, just like that. Back to Iowa and the family farm where Brian lived and toiled for 37 years. Back to the bloodstained mats in the milking parlor. For them his botched suicide was the ultimate validation of their loveless disdain. I’ll never forget the rawboned silhouette of my father, looking down on Brian’s shattered body, muttering “He couldn’t even kill himself right.”

That was the closest I’ve ever come to patricide in a lifetime of near-patricides. But close never counted for shit with me — this time, same as all the rest. I retreated to my emotional periphery, an outsider looking in. Life in my fucked-up family is a reality TV show, and I’m watching just like you. Time for a commercial break. Change the channel and never click back.

“Mmmph a mmmph mmmph?” Wendy says, a pixie dissolving into the recliner next to our brother, next to all the blinking beeping machines.

“Say what?” I ask.

She adjusts the wad of chewing tobacco in her mouth. A chainsmoker’s coping strategy for the bedside vigil. “You done pacing around for a while?” There’s something plaintive and damaged in her expression. She looks the way I feel.

I cross the threshold and collapse into the other chair, a punishing relic of steel and black vinyl. It’s a century-old anachronism from the old wing of the clinic, where patient files are still sent through pneumatic tubes.

Wendy is saying, “I can’t believe our grief counselor is named Bree.”

“I can’t believe our grief counselor is named Bree spelled wrong. At least spell your name B-R-I-E. Christ.” I fumble in a pocket for her business card. Bree Hundevader — MD, Ph.D. — Grief Counselor. Apparently you can make a career of surfing from one death to the next. I don’t know whether to be disgusted or envious.

“Why’d you come back, anyway?” My sister’s tone darkens. “When I called you, I didn’t think you’d come back. Not even if it was for a funeral.”

“Why are you here?” I snap. A typical exchange in our family. Answer every question with a question.

Her eyes are hard enough to smash atoms. “Because I wanted to see Mom and Dad’s reaction to all this. I wanted to see them suffer.”

“For how they raised us? For everything they did to us?” The noise welling up my larynx is a sitcom laughtrack.

Wendy hunches into a defensive posture, pulling knees under her pointy chin. It takes a while for her to speak. “Why do you think he did it? To get back at Mom and Dad?”

“Nah. If Brian wanted to get back at them, he would’ve shot them and then himself. Or blown out his brains in the kitchen or living room. Someplace that would’ve made a mess.” For a moment I’m transfixed by a vision of the living room, all the Hummel figurines and doilies spattered with skull fragments and gray matter. “Instead he walked out to the milking parlor. He wanted to die among friends.”

“The cows,” Wendy says, a little incredulous, a little sad.

“Yeah. The cows.”

There’s a pause filled with sidelong flickers from the recliner. I watch her watch me in tentative glances. Every once in a while she spits tobacco juice into an empty styrofoam cup.

“What?” I finally ask.

“So why’d he kill himself, then?”

“Because of Kimmie, I figure.”

Now Wendy’s face is a mask of disbelief. “Kimmie? Kim Krenzel?”

The Krenzels were our closest friends growing up, a Catholic birth control experiment that resulted in five boys and three girls. They were one of those families perpetually on the brink of losing their land, mailbox stuffed with FINAL NOTICE envelopes, every harvest maybe the last. Kim — Kimmie in the Krenzel family nicknaming convention — was the center of Brian’s sad mooning universe. She broke his heart into smithereens when she married the owner of the Kwik-E Mart and had three kids with him.

“Back at Thanksgiving he was telling me how Kimmie finally divorced that asshole. She got the house and snowmobiles and child support and everything. It was going to be Brian’s second chance to get with her, right? Except — ”

“She’s out of his league.” The words are dismissive and cruel, but true. Kimmie is a pale cornfield Ophelia. Brian is — was — a boorish farmboy.

“She got tight with a new boyfriend. Some dude with money, surprise surprise. Brian couldn’t deal with it. He started stalking her. Calling her, watching her house, shit like that. It was bad enough for Ruthie to ask me to warn him off. Finally Kimmie had to get a restraining order against him.”

“No fucking way,” Wendy says.

“She was really afraid Brian would kill her boyfriend. Apparently he made some threats…” Suddenly I’m too exhausted to finish. My veins are silting up with remorse. All the things I’d change if I could do it over again.

“Brian? Is that why you killed yourself?” Wendy slips out of the recliner and pauses at his bedside, a hand perched on the bedrail. She looks like a grown-up Tinkerbell. “I hope it doesn’t hurt anymore, wherever you are.” Her shearling boots recede out of the room and into silence.

I spend a long time staring at the near-corpse in the bed. What a fucking way to shuffle off this mortal coil. Head wrapped in bandages, tubes snaking into nostrils and mouth, dark bags beneath half-open eyes. Nothing moves when I touch it — not the feet jutting beneath the covers, not the pale arm with elbow crook exposed. I can even scrape a fingernail across the dry mush of his dilated pupils.

My poking finger turns into a palm, laid gently against his cheek. Every heartbeat is a riptide of emotion. I bob and drift, not knowing what to feel. But after a while my emotions coalesce into poignancy. There is no denouement to Brian’s life — no wife and kids to leave behind, no family to mourn him, no nothing. His suicide is the exclamation point at the end of a long run-on sentence that nobody ever bothered to read.