He’s a high-functioning asshole, I wanted to say, but instead, to be noncommittal, “He’s my big brother.” I was not a talker. I was the elusive brother, the geologist, who’d left home to be a rock hunter, and an adventurer in the extractive industries.

Yet I was often fascinated by Frank’s stories. You don’t have to like someone to listen. When I was in the mood, I heard him repeat them, noting how he changed them in the telling, what he left in, what he omitted, the exaggerations, the irrelevancies, the new details, the whoppers.

The nun who caught him smoking. In one version she told him to confess it as a mortal sin and lingered outside the confession box to hear him bare his soul to the priest. In another, she forced him to kneel on a broomstick a whole day as punishment. In the one I liked best, the nun handed him his unsmoked half pack of cigarettes and made him eat them. But I knew that because of wheezy lungs Frank had never smoked.

The one about his being brutally murdered in Florida by a drug gang, his bullet-riddled body discovered in a Miami mansion, his face mangled beyond recognition. Our parents got the call, on a weekend when Frank was on vacation, and they were devastated. Turned out, the man had Frank’s stolen passport on him. A great story, but untrue.

Another: his saving the life of my high school friend, Melvin Yurick, whom he’d found bleeding at a campsite in the local woods, Yurick having gashed his hand with a hunting knife. In Frank’s telling, by rescuing Yurick he’d altered the course of history, because later Yurick became a billionaire, as a pioneer innovator in digital media. The story was mine—it was I, hiking with Yurick, who’d stanched the blood on his gashed hand and helped him home. The part about Yurick becoming a billionaire was true, though.

I listened to know Frank better, because even as a child I found him tricky, cruel, dangerous, and unreliable, as well as (people can sometimes be their opposites) direct, kindly, reassuring, and helpful. There was so much of Frank, and he was so contradictory, the whole of him so overwhelming, I had to deal with him in pieces. Although he made a convincing enough pretense of being my friend, I knew he didn’t like me.