Imagined Places

My brother was an only child till I ruined everything. He never quite forgave me for having been born. I'm told he had an imaginary friend he called Borneo. I’m not sure if Borneo was a stuffed animal or a place to hide in which case Arthur was way ahead of his time.

He was born two months before the market crashed in 1929. Maybe he got blamed for that. The Depression became his depression, whereas I swam into this world two weeks after FDR was inaugurated and got credited for that.

When war broke out, he was already at war with himself, defenseless against the artillery of life.  I grew up driving Nazis from Stalingrad and the Allied forces advancing across the front page of the New York Times.

When I was about thirteen, plus or minus, my friend Stanley and I invented a country we called Abaldabia. It was our Borneo. We picked an island, from the spinning globe, off the Siberian coast. What where we thinking? That’s where dissidents were sent to disappear yet we probably imagined some Gulf Stream current to make it tropical.

By that time Arthur was stationed in Korea. Not so far from Borneo. He returned still feeling ill-equipped. Suddenly I became four years his elder. Perhaps I could impersonate an adult better than him.

Abaldabia is now my secret room, my sanctuary. From a spot on the map I brought it to my inscape. I've become fluent in the lost language of imagined places. My passport to poetry, not for hiding but for launching.

Arthur was never at home in this world. Did he see Borneo when he drove his car into the side of a mountain at age thirty-three? Perhaps he was telling us that it was of Eden he was dreaming all along.