In my whole childhood I only ever found one photo of Brian: in the mouldering, musty Polaroid I dug out of the basement without my parents' knowledge, he is sprawled alone in his Isolette in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Children's Hospital in Boston, surrounded by a nest of gauze and wires. A respirator mask obscures everything but his chin; his waxy skin shines like that of a supermarket apple. Though I don't know exactly when it was taken, or by whom, it's safe to assume that my infant self is somewhere just outside the frame, in her own Plexiglas chamber, her matching respirator chuffing away mechanically, making her breathe.

When I found the photo (when, in truth, I went looking for it) I was 7. For a long time afterward I kept it in my jewelry box with other, childish treasures, under the guardianship of its tiny, spring-loaded ballerina; then, later, I kept it between pages 16 and 17 of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, in the middle of "A Step Away From Them." I carried that book and its broken question with me all the time (But is the / Earth as full, as life was full, / of them?) the way I assume some people carry religious medals, as an amulet and talisman, a testament to the possibility that I was not alone.

My parents probably hid the photo, I realize now, for precisely this reason: so none of us would be tempted to fetishize it, to make it a relic. And I understand that (probably, if I had been them, I would have made the same decision), but my longing and determination---what the writer Jane Alison calls an "occult craving" for evidence of Brian---was such that I think a fetish was inevitable. In retrospect, I think it probably couldn't be helped.

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