My Brother’s Keeper
(2024 - New Release)
My Brother’s Keeper reflects a battle between two brothers as they strive for supremacy and at the same time as they battle nature to survive. The setting is a uninhabited island in the Java Sea that has become home to six castaways in the early days of WW2. They escape Singapore prior to the Japanese invasion, but never reach their destination. The protagonists, two brothers, battle for supremacy at the same time as they battle nature to survive.
Fast paced and shocking; you will not want the story to end.
A brief intro:
Sometimes a sacrifice is required.
…Anders Cartwright
We are falling. There are bumps, some large, some small, along the way down, but these are only futile attempts by our small airplane to save itself. The noise is deafening; the engines groan and wail as they struggle for life. Our fuselage is under attack by the rain, each drop a bullet that hammers into the steel and aluminum on the way downward. The plane shudders under the vibration of the wings as they cut through the wind. And then…
There is no warning, just an ear-deafening bang and Ess’ body slams into my left side with excruciating force, sending me crushing to the right into the first mate’s shoulder. He is sitting against the bulkhead; there is nowhere for him to go as his head smashes hard into the wood and steel frame. It hits not with a dull thud but with a sound more akin to the crack of a baseball bat striking a homerun. There is a final and terrible sound of fracturing and tearing metal as the nose of the plane slaps downward. At that moment, the brave Douglas DC-3 moaned and died a quick and merciful death.
It is too dark to see. We are blind in the blackness. I blink my eyes trying to get a sense as to what has just happened. The dark is disconcerting. There is no movement in the plane and I have no idea how long it has been since the plane came to rest. Can I be the only survivor? How cruel would God be? It would not be fair to be alone. I shiver with cold and my body hurts. The banging water bullets have quieted and the straining of the propellers is gone. Now, the only noise is the whistling breeze and the gentle patter of rain as it sheds over the outside hull of our downed aircraft. Where the metal skin has torn from its rivets, water streams into the cabin poring over me. I am drenched.
I close my eyes again, trying to calm myself to the pain, but it doesn’t help. I am damaged. I don’t know how badly. I fear I am lost and alone.
Chapter 1 – Why?
I am Anders, Andy to everybody except my brother and the accountants who write my paycheck every two weeks. To them I will always be Anders.
I am not alone. I have been thrown into this world with five others. Only two, Shelly and Simon, did I know before our flight started. The other three are strangers to me. We are joined together by the common need to escape our bizarre lives in Singapore, lives that had until recently been fun and unreal. For me and Shelly, life before our flight was one of endless press meetings and interviews as we competed to make up fantastic stories for our respective news agencies. I say “make up” because nobody wants to read the boring stuff of reality, so we embellished… everything. The nights were a time of drunken parties and formal evening clothes as we rubbed shoulders with the beautiful and the powerful. Everything was British prim and proper on the surface, but once you got behind the façade everything was decadent, indulgent, and, in private, xenophobic. My brother, Simon, did not fit in with the ethereal life Ess and I had fallen into, but I will touch on that later. For the three others that have been thrown onto this small island with us, Singapore had meant economic freedom, power, and yes, parties, perhaps not of the British, high-brow nature, but every bit as intoxicating. I use the past tense because our lives that had been centered around the wonders and opportunities in Singapore are now nothing more than a memory.
Now we are part of the six human beings thrown together alone on this island. We were seven, but one life was lost last night as the plane hit the ground. Even with the brevity of our association, we know we are now family. We have come from completely different lives, but we have a common bond, stronger than that of blood; we have the relation of dependence. I don’t know that I even like these people, yet I will be forced to rely on them and them on me.
Of the two individuals close to me, Shelly is my love. She hates that I call her Ess for short, but she’s grown to accept it. We met just after our respective news agencies transplanted us into Singapore to cover the Chino-Japanese War. Just two days ago I talked her into joining me and by brother to flee Singapore before the Japanese invade the island. Our employers were not aware of our leaving, but a global war was brewing and diplomatic relations were over-heating. I had no intention of being in the tea kettle when things boiled over in this small city state. I suspect my editor would have preferred me to stay; having a reporter on the ground when the Imperial Fleet landed would have made for a great byline. It would be even better if I were eventually taken prisoner. One could only imagine the boon it would be to the readership. Okay, it would be great for my career, too, but I fear it would be a very short career had I stayed.
Truthfully, the war that has already become a tragedy for millions has been a blessing to Ess’ and my careers. As I said before, we are both journalists: she with the London Times, me with the New York Times. We competed always and collaborated we needed to. When things were slow, we invented our own stories, no one at the home office seemed to notice or cared. We kept the stories exciting and the stories kept us employed, made us important, and most critically, ensured our sizable financial allowances continued to flow. I decided long ago that even if I had to fabricate a couple of “facts” to keep my readers interested back home, I would. What could be the harm? Everyone wins; the newspaper sells more papers; the reader gets to pretend they know something new about the war in Asia; and I get to live in a style I never would have been able to enjoy back in New York.
But now fact was more interesting than fiction. The rapid Japanese expansion through East Asia hasn’t needed embellishment to make it interesting and compelling to my editor and readers. The risk was real. The violence and viciousness of the warring Imperial Army was hard to overstate. Personally, I wished it had been just one of my journalistic fabrications, but the reports of terror and death waged on those conquered as the Japanese marched southwards had become indisputable. The consistency and volume of the stories meant there had to be some truth to them. Even if the stories were nothing more than the pure concoction of other inventive minds such as mine, I had no intention of remaining in Singapore to test their substance. They were too frightening.
Why I felt a need to protect Ess from the Japanese I have no idea. Bullshit. She is amazing; long legs, auburn hair, emerald eyes, perfect skin, smart, successful, and I wanted her. I wanted her and I needed to be her hero ever since I first spotted her at a gala at the famous Raffles Hotel. The grandeur of the hotel with its high ceilings, massive columns, sparkling chandeliers, and gleaming parquet floors just served to highlight her. She walked and waltzed as if she owned the place. Feigning to have accidently bumped into her, I mumbled a brief apology and then spent the remainder of the night following her with a napkin in one hand, a drink in the other, downing one scotch after another. Truth be told, the infatuation was not mutual; she spent the evening running away, avoiding my slurred advances. The hunter and the hunted. The hunted won that evening. Eventually, I had been politely invited to leave by a couple of gentlemanly fellows that folded me against my will into the back of a yellow and black taxi with the explicit directions to the driver to not stop until I had been delivered to my apartment on Orchard Road, a couple of kilometers away. They knew me well at Raffles.
If my first encounter with Ess was not successful and pleasant, it was memorable. I eventually redeemed myself with her and she’s been mine ever since. She has come to trust me, and we’ve developed a type of mutual affection driven more by her need for companionship. She’ll learn to love me. Upon reflection of our current situation, stuck on this island, it looks as though her trust in me was woefully misplaced.
There is a second individual on our fateful flight who has been an acquaintance of mine for years. I will not suggest we are friends, but let’s say we share a common past. He is Simon, my brother. He’s been with me constantly since our parents died more than a decade ago. I suspect he will always be with me. I have become his reluctant caregiver.
Our mother and father considered him slow; yet, I have found him to be anything but that. In a way he possesses an intellect well beyond my comprehension. And yet, he finds it impossible to carry on even the simplest of informal, friendly conversation. In social settings he just fades into the background. Ask him something complex, however, such as the global implications of the United States oil embargo on Japan and he will launch off on a dissertation outlining the probabilities of the act stimulating disastrous effects on southeast Asia and ultimately resulting in war between two global powers. His arguments are articulate, complete, and almost impossible to debate. He doesn’t desire discussion or discourse. A question or a contrarian point of view will shut him down, banishing him to solitude as if he is being punished.
When I first became his caregiver, I believed that, emotionally, Simon was, and always would be, a child. I was wrong; he is far from this. He possesses none of the brashness or precociousness one expects from a child. Instead, he remains quiet and isolated, typically reserving his comments until, like water in a dam exceeding its capacity, they spew over without any control or concern over the damage resulting from the impending flood. Despite his limitations, he convinced me that a Japanese invasion of and victory over the Brits in Singapore is fait accompli. The only question was when it would occur. It was best to leave now. He’s the reason we fled.
I love my brother, but I don’t like him. He tires me with his never-ending detail and his compelling need to explain things. True, he is knowledgeable – like an encyclopedia – a repository of information that nobody needs or wants to hear. He makes observations then follows them with directives. It’s odd that he can’t grasp why I ignore his ideas. He is incapable of receiving coaching or feedback, and he doesn’t respect the authority of position. To him, authority should be the result of being right, not arbitrary assignment of a title, and since he is always right, he believes he is the authority. I think it’s fair to describe our relationship as trying.
To some extent this all changed recently when he was introduced to an acquaintance of mine at the U.S. embassy. He was shocked by Simon’s ability to articulate the vast complexities of the geopolitical drivers in southeast Asia. It seems that Simon could outline likely scenarios and calculating probabilities in his head. His uncanny focus, interest, and intellect made him an indispensable resource. His indifference to others and complete lack of social skills was no longer a liability; rather it was an asset in that his assessments were surprisingly objective. Even more importantly, there was no concern with him sharing secrets with friends; he had none.
Yes, Simon was now an occasional employee of the United States State Department. His employment served two purposes for me: it helped pay the bills and more importantly, with his mind focused on the geopolitical challenges facing Asia, he’s been kept busy and out of trouble. Although I had to accompany him at his work, I no longer had to break from my day-to-day activities to retrieve a lost Simon from some out of the way hamlet after one of his walks. Simon likes to walk, but he loses track of where he is and often becomes lost. It’s a surprising aspect of my brother. One might think he would walk the exact path every day without deviation, but that’s not the case. His mind becomes consumed with whatever topic he is concerned with for the day and his walking was just to provide motion. The motion was the grease that kept his thought processes moving smoothly. He typically had no recollection from where he started or where he finished.
To be honest, Simon is my cross to bear. I am not sure that he knows he needs me, but he does. And because he needs me, I will keep him with me.
