The Anecdote; or Why the Professional's Biographer Quit After Chapter 1

I remember my best friend from grade school. I remember meeting him that first day, him coming up to me in his glorious pudginess, me with my crayons trying like hell to color one thing, just one thing inside the lines (this, of course, long before white out made coloring much easier), and him asking me what my name was.
“Myer,” I said not even bothering to look up from my paper.
“Hey, that's cool. My name's Brian, too!”
At this point, I looked up.
We were friends ever since, and I never bothered to correct him, so he called me Brian ever since that first day. Brian was clumsy, pudgy, and extremely slow. Mentally, I mean. It was like his ring of fat inhibited all of his exterior actions as well as the interior ones. I mean, coloring was my hardest subject due to a lack of dexterity in my fingers, as proven by my equally inept attempt at learning to play piano, but outside of that, my intellect only suffered from the fact that teachers couldn't teach me enough. Brian, on the other hand, his worst subject was everything. While this constantly made conversations one-sided, especially when I became interested in things like black holes somewhere around the 4th grade, I still liked having him around. I guess it kind of felt good to have a lackey of my own.
Not that I treated him like a lackey, mind you. We were good friends, and I treated him that way. Even though he always called me Brian, even introduced me to his parents as Brian, and I still let it go unnoticed.
Brian and I were generally inseparable through our formative years, playing at recess together, sitting in desks right next to each other, passing notes about video games or the stupid fad where girls decided to change their names to such and such pop star that they idolized. We even toyed with the idea of being blood brothers. We spent a few afternoons sharpening sticks into knives to cut our hands with, but after a bit of reading, I got the impression that if we happened to be different blood types, we would catch diseases and die, so we decided against it.
But it soon came to my attention that, though I was tolerably popular with the other kids, poor Brian was socially retarded. He would do the strangest things to get attention and usually end up crossing some line you didn't think possible for an eight year old to cross. While in grade school, I could deal with my best friend being unpopular, even very disliked, but once we got to middle school it became impossible to handle. How could I continue being a likable social creature when my closest companion revolted all others? If I was going to, say, throw a party, most people, assuming that Brian would be there, would give some excuse as to why they could not attend. Instances like this became more frequent and more enraging until I finally decided to confront Brian to discuss this with him, the goal being to cut ties. It was the only answer I could find to solve my social problems.
To end the relationship.
I began the discussion with reminisces, quoting the age-old, “... we've been friends for a long time, now...” and finally broached the subject:
“Brian, I can't be your friend anymore if it is only going to keep me from making other friends,” I know it was tactless, but I've never really been one for tact. “Other people don't like you, and it's making me suffer socially. Basically, you're dragging me down with you, you see?”
I remember him shuddering and averting his eyes, his forehead soaked in perspiration, a look of mingled shock and sadness smeared across his chubby face. I remember when he looked down and to his left, and his curly hair shook with his jowl, and I felt a brief tinge of pity.
“But Brian...”
“My name's not Brian. It's Myer.”
At this point, he looked up.
“I know,” he said, and then he walked away sobbing to himself as he trudged down the corridor. “I knew all along,” I heard him say to himself.
For a long time I was confused about that. For years, I didn't know what he had meant when he had said that he knew my name was Myer. It was such an enigma to me. I wouldn't say it tortured me, but it did confuse me a great deal, and sometimes when I was alone, his voice would pop into my head, telling me he knew my real name the whole time, but still insisted on calling me Brian, and I would think about what he meant. I honestly didn't come to any conclusions regarding this mystery until after I had graduated from Dartmouth.
I figured maybe he was trying to impose his identity on me. Let me explain: By giving me his name, he was able to live vicariously through me. He was intelligent, well liked, attractive; through me he could be all of these things. I assumed that whenever he heard, “Great job, Myer!” or “Myer, do you want to be my boyfriend?”, or any of the things that happened throughout our grade school lives where I received some sort of attention, he heard his own name, subconsciously substituting it for mine. In this way, he was able to be who he wanted to be: Me.
I can only guess that losing that sole part of his identity that could do anything, that had a limitless future, losing this caused him to take his own life. His parents found him in the living room where we used to play video games, the television left on and blaring. He had stabbed himself repeatedly in the stomach with one of the wooden knives we had sharpened to make us blood brothers. The news said that he had apparently stabbed and cut himself until there was nothing left of his insides (well, maybe they said that, or possibly I romanticize the past).
After his funeral, which I dutifully attended, becoming the social creature I had wanted to be was a very easy task. No one avoided my parties, everyone wanted to be my friend. I've had a theory that Brian's death somewhat facilitated this, that possibly at first, people felt sorry for me. But any way it came about, I was given every opportunity to succeed in my life, socially, politically, and fiscally immediately after Brian was out of the picture, and I made those opportunities count.
Now, looking back on that tragedy, I think of all the Brian's in the world and smile down on them from my office overlooking the city. I smile because I know what makes them tick. I know who they are, and why they are. And I think about how I'll never have another friend like Brian.