When she leaves, Geryon feels like all the air is sucked out of the room, because he’s forced to stay at home with his abusive brother and the ineffectual babysitter. No longer feeling in control of his own body, Geryon decides that the difference between “outside and inside” is that “inside is mine.” The next day they go swimming, and Geryon starts writing his autobiography, in which he “set down all inside things,” and “coolly omitted/all outside things.” His brother manipulates Geryon into a sexually abusive situation through promising him a cat’s-eye marble, “and so they developed an economy of sex/for cat’s-eyes.” Later, his brother threatens him into silence. Geryon’s brother continues to bully him, and Geryon, a little bit older, has a better sense of his brother’s intentions now: “He knew the difference between facts and brother hatred.” But he’s still a child, and easily manipulated by his brother. But then his injured grandmother moves in with them, and Geryon and his brother have to share a bedroom. His mother teaches him the word “each” in the context of each brother having their own room, and this feels right to Geryon. This chapter begins at a time in Geryon’s life when everything is how it should be: Geryon and his brother each have their own bedroom, their own space, and Geryon sleeps well each night and wakes up happy. He doesn’t draw attention to himself even when he becomes covered in snow. This is how he eventually finds his own way of getting to the classroom: he avoids the Main Door entirely, and runs around the school building, waiting quietly in the bushes outside the kindergarten windows until someone outside notices and lets him in.

He’s angry at his brother, but he doesn’t express it-he just runs away. He is also easily made anxious-he experiences the school hallway as “a hundred thousand miles/of thunder tunnels and indoor neon sky slammed open by giants.”Ībandoned by his brother at the Main Door to the school, Geryon struggles to remember the route down the corridor to kindergarten.

We learn that Geryon has an attentive and empathetic nature: he stops and imagines the lives of every stone he sees on the way to school. Geryon, in his sweet naiveté, understands his brother’s rock-throwing as something that “makes my brother happy,” and “had no doubt that stupid was correct.” A dynamic is established where Geryon’s brother bullies him, and Geryon accepts that treatment. His brother is aggressively unkind-he throws rocks, calls Geryon “stupid,” and refuses to lead Geryon to his kindergarten classroom. He follows behind his older brother on the way to school. The narrative portion of Autobiography of Red begins with Geryon in kindergarten.

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson