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  But my brother insisted. He took them to the exact spot where the body was found, told them how it had happened, what he had done. He had used a sock. There were clothes, a shirt over there, on a branch. He had liked doing it; at first he didn’t think he could, you know, really kill someone, really send his soul on to the next world, but when he did it, man, he felt a hundred feet tall and made of nothing but blood and muscle. He told them how snakes ate mice and it was like they were absorbing their essence. They stared at him.

  They took in the show, his unbelievable insistence. He was obviously unstable, probably just bullshitting. But they took him back to the station anyway, just to be sure, to check, even though crazies admitted to stuff like this at least a few times a year.

  Later that afternoon, Michael sat in an office at the police station. He smoked cigarette after cigarette, going through a pack in a couple of hours, asking for another, rocking, the room filling with smoke. He sat by himself, the door closed, mumbling, moving his lips to form words, tapping his feet, rubbing his hands through his hair, exhaling in exaggerated bursts.

  And the cops must have searched through computer files—or, better yet, they went digging through old file cabinets, like Kojak used to, like Baretta used to, in manila folders, trying to figure this out. Somebody. A kid, maybe eleven, twelve. No, thirteen. S. June 10, 1983. Sexual assault after the fact. Some seriously fucked-up stuff. Sodomy. First- or second- degree murder. Unsolved.

  Sergeant M began matching the story he had just been told with the known facts of the case in the old, dusty folder. Every one matched, right down to exact location, wounds, the positioning of the body, the color of the sock. The officers couldn’t believe it. The whole thing, the fact that Michael had decided to call from a 7-Eleven, was the stuff of legend, of late-night, booze-filled stories with other officers. You just didn’t get this lucky in police work. That should have been their first clue that something was amiss.

  They moved Michael to a private cell.

  The phone rang at my parents’ house while I sat, alone, drinking a beer.

  Hello, I said.

  I gave up my apartment and stayed at my parents’ house during the four months that Michael was awaiting trial for the murder of S. He was moved to a psychiatric hospital, two hours west of Hampton. The information had finally sunk in with the police that he was schizophrenic once my mother produced documentation, though this information, once proven, didn’t change the fact that Michael knew far more than he should about the murder. And there had been cases of paranoid schizophrenics killing neighbors, roommates, friends, their entire families. If anything, his illness made him fit the profile even better.

  My mother and my father spent many afternoons with his public defender, discussing his illness, the case against him, quietly wondering if they shouldn’t take out a loan to get another attorney, someone with more experience.

  My mother, by now, knew her son hadn’t done it. When she asked him over the phone why he had admitted to the murder, he'd said, Dad thinks I did it.

  She said, No, Michael, Dad doesn’t think that. Dad loves you. You didn’t do this.

  Dad thinks I did, he said. I know he does. He thinks I'm a murderer. He thinks I'm a very bad person.

  She was hoping that everything would be found out and that this, finally, would be enough to have him institutionalized in a state facility. But getting through this wasn’t going to be easy.

  I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t eat. I lost fifteen pounds, my clothes hanging off me. I dropped all pretense of attending university, briefly took a job landscaping, thinking the hard work would do me good, get my mind off things, but I quit when the boss said my name sounded really familiar to him, that he'd heard it somewhere recently—not the kind of name you forget—and if he thought of where, he'd let me know.

  I stayed in Michael’s room, the only room with a bed upstairs, because mine had been turned into a den. I lived out of a single duffel bag full of books and jeans and T-shirts. I stayed up all night some nights, my eyes a couple of circles stubbed out into my head, reading, listening to music. Not only could I not eat, but now I had insomnia. I spoke to no one but my family and a few friends. The case was in limbo. They would keep Michael until DNA tests came back, then proceed accordingly.

  Journalists called constantly in the first few weeks, hundreds of calls in a day. We let the answering machine catch everything. I often wish that I had spoken, that I had had the nerve to explain his illness, his delusions, but I didn’t. And what if he'd done it? Unlike my mother, I wasn’t at all sure he was innocent. Not yet, anyway. Was I willing to try to justify him, if a part of me doubted his innocence, if a part of me had always feared that he was capable of just such a grisly act?

  I found Michael’s Bible in a drawer of his desk one night. Over the next few weeks I read the New Testament, beginning to end, twice. He had written things in the margins, particularly those of Corinthians and Revelation. Sometimes there was just one word: past or father or luxury. Other times, fragments of sentences: path to glory is sacrifice, death is beginning. It was hard to make sense of it; it was muddled, sloppy, haphazard. No narrative arose in the margins, but I often read passages within the Bible text that I thought might have elicited his response.

  According to Kierkegaard, it is only when one has lost everything, has been defeated so utterly by life that he can no longer function, that he might, from the true bottom of his existence, make a bid for Christian faith and the hope of salvation through the teachings of Christ. Michael and I found an interest in God in the same way: from looking up out of the bottom of our existence, two losers making a last bid for meaning.

  I was stunned by the Bible on my first reading, how poetic it was, especially the Gospel of John and the Song of Solomon and Revelation; and how cautionary, how packed with tragedy and sacrifice. It was full of brutality and taboos. It seemed open to endless interpretation. Every passage was terse on the page but expansively aphoristic when you stopped and thought about it. I found it funny that anyone would profess to know the full meaning of it, especially someone as evidently dense as, say, Robert Tilton.

  “And immediately I was in the spirit,” begins a passage, “and, behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne. And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and sardine stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald.” (Revelation 4: 23) It struck me as astoundingly beautiful and creepy at once. I needed to know this stuff, it was where Michael was coming from. It was metaphorical to such an extreme that it seemed at times inscrutable, leading you toward ideal or Platonic truths, like Romantic poetry or even the more abstruse passages of Joyce, but not literal truth. It made me think that the small number of Christians I had listened to didn’t know what the hell they were talking about, were in fact so ignorant of the book they professed to know and live by that I felt offended.

  The Bible was by turns preposterous, entertaining, and profound. It was weird and beautiful, dated and new, murky and clear, sometimes on the same page. It felt like the truth in some way—it still does—but read like a fairy tale. I read and reread the Gospels of Christ in my schizophrenic brother’s seared-smelling room. I sat in an old chair and looked at his posters—Bruce Lee was still up, as was the American Pop film poster. There was the aquarium where the snakes had lived, the window where God’s face had shone. It was all here, his life was all here, and I wanted more than anything to understand it, to see it from the inside, no matter the cost.

  I never visited him at the psychiatric hospital. I was too frightened, embarrassed, unconvinced of his innocence, paralyzed in my own disbelief and belief. But during this time I got to know him, as much as one could know Michael. I began to understand how he thought, how his mind worked, and where the essence of many of his thoughts came from, through reading scripture. I began then to try to understand his demise, and still later I tried to understand the facts of his disease, the sickness itself, through th
e metaphors of Christianity. I began to believe wholeheartedly in the existence of the Soul, because I needed to. I began to believe in the power of forgiveness and in the humble place of the individual in a grander, unknowable scheme. I began to believe in God in my own, very personal, way and to understand not only the power but the necessity of forgiveness.

  It was all here, ready to be unlocked. The Gospels of Christ spoke of the ills of judgment, the necessity of humility, the frailty and sanctity of all human life. Jesus was a seditious radical of the first order. He was sorrowful and full of rage for this life; he buzzed with an intense humanity. He loved everyone, forgave everyone, and these thoughts, in this world, are radical. His people were the sick, the broken, the deranged—whores and lepers and orphans and thieves and, I suspect, the insane—those who went through life in pain, unloved, and he took them in, all of them, and, wiping their tears away, he said, You are my brother.

  Michael was in the psychiatric hospital for four months and six days. My parents visited him once a week or so, and usually he didn’t speak; sometimes he wouldn’t even look up from the floor as he sat in an orange plastic chair in the middle of a white room. My mother asked the nurse if he was taking his medication, which he was, but he refused showers (he said he didn’t trust the water).

  It took all of my parents’ strength to get out of bed on the days they were to go there. Every time they drove into the compound, they were afraid of being attacked by journalists, though journalists were never there because it was surrounded by a gate and security guards.

  This was all unbelievable, beyond imagining, that this had become their lives, driving past guards and through high, gray metal security gates, but every day there it was—a fact: Their son had admitted to a particularly heinous murder and rape of a child; everyone knew their name.

  In the third month of Michael’s incarceration he was put in a new, private cell with a bunk bed. He was glad to be alone. In his private cell, he took off his orange standard-issue overalls, tied the left leg of the overalls around his neck, the right leg to the top of his bunk bed, and attempted to hang himself. A guard found him just after he had passed out, naked except for his underwear. Another minute would have killed him. Michael’s knees were on the ground and he did it by simply falling forward, his sheer will to die.

  The next day a facility psychiatrist prescribed a new psychotropic drug and stronger antidepressants. A week after the new prescription, Michael told the guards he had just been kidding, that he didn’t really kill S, and he didn’t know who did. He said he'd like to have his mother pick him up now.

  Three weeks later, the DNA tests came back. As I’ve said, there had been a lot of evidence at the scene of the crime: skin, blood, semen, hair. The murder itself seemed unplanned, a scene of reckless carnage and brutality. The test results concluded that it was impossible that my brother had killed or sexually molested S.

  During two psychological evaluations while in the hospital, Michael couldn’t name the president, the year, or his date of birth. Yet he could remember every detail of the crime, down to the color of the sock used to strangle S. He could also remember things my father had said to him when he was a child, the kind of petty cruelties most of us are lucky enough to forget. From sparse details, memory, and continuous emotional trauma, he had created a wholly credible memory of himself as rapist and murderer. Then he remembered, a little late, that it was possibly a false memory.

  When my parents went to pick him up, petrified, my mother shaking—once again, the state set him free, and free meant home—he recanted his innocence. As he walked down the hallway toward the outside and the waiting car, he insisted, despite the evidence, that he had done it. He then went on to explain how he had come up behind S in the woods, how S’s breath was fast and hard, and he had strangled and raped him.

  Nothing appeared in the paper about Michael’s exoneration and release, the fact that he had invented the whole thing. I looked for this, and I’ve gone back through archives since then. Nothing. For years, when I saw people from my past while visiting my mother, I could always tell that they wanted, more than anything, to ask me about my brother the murderer, who had been released on one of those terrible technical legal glitches that entire television shows are based upon. Once you’ve been branded guilty by the press, you’re guilty, period, despite any evidence to the contrary. If I didn’t know this before, I know it now.

  ABSENCE

  Here’s one for the absence-of-God argument, for life as absurd and lacking in all evidence of divinity and never adhering to a tidy plot. Here is the kind of narrative curve, lachrymose and violently cruel, that makes me doubt.

  My father had been having pains in his side for some time. He had been so preoccupied with Michael that he hadn’t gone to the doctor in years. Now, since Michael’s life was in a temporary lull because of the near-toxic dose of antipsychotics he had been prescribed after leaving the state psychiatric hospital, my father visited a physician, who listened to his raspy chest, and sent him on to a specialist.

  There were X rays, blood tests, MRIs, CAT scans, stool samples, a complete physical. What they found was a death sentence: a grapefruit-sized tumor in the lower lobe of his left lung.

  He went into the hospital immediately for an emergency operation to remove the mass, and spent several weeks there recuperating, my mother, Ron, and I beyond shock now—feeling jinxed, hexed, at the wrong end of some karmic debt, three sad Jobs waiting for the next pestilence, the next wrath—sitting in my father’s hospital room until late every night, and the strange thing—strange to me, considering the rage I felt—is that I bowed my head and prayed.

  My father was diagnosed with malignant mesothelioma, lung cancer caused by asbestos, that brilliant and cheap American industrial insulation of midcentury used so generously in our “strategically sound location” for a home. He had contracted the disease while working at the Newport News shipyard for thirty years, punching a clock to pay our bills, to support me, watching his life slip past.

  He'd probably inhaled the toxic fibers sometime in the seventies. Sometimes, doctors said, the disease sits dormant for years, until very old age (my father was fifty-one and in good physical shape); stress, though, brings down the body’s natural defenses. Do you live under much stress, Mr. Bottoms?

  My father went home from the hospital to die. While he still had strength—the first six months or so—my parents forgot about Michael, or tried to (they had relatives come by to talk to him while he sat and smoked, to make sure he took all of his new, stronger pills), and took a couple of short trips, blowing money on fancy restaurants and fine wine. But malignant mesothelioma is inevitably fatal.

  My father had, the doctors said, maybe two years to live. The approach to this kind of thing was mainly pain management and containment. My mother and I bought him shark cartilage and bottles and bottles of pills—supplements, root extracts, condensed herbs, anything we heard about. We read every book on the disease, rented videos, investigated highly experimental procedures and checked about centers for last-chance patients, but those places are for charity cases or for the wealthy, and we were middlebrow, middle American, middle class. We had to solve our own problems.

  After the short trips during the time when he still had a little strength, he became so sick that mostly he sat on the couch and whispered, stopped eating, and stared at the TV. He had a box on his hip and a catheter stuck through his side and into his lung that pumped a light dose of chemo through his body at regular intervals. After a few months he began to react to this medicine as if it were poison.

  I’ve mourned my father a great deal over the six years since his death, though our relationship, during his life, was strained. I didn’t really know him, the way I know my wife or good friends, the way I know my mother.

  He took care of me, loved me as his son; I loved him as my father. And I believe these different loves, his and mine, were absolutely sincere and real, if perfunctory and distant and safe. But t
hey existed within rigidly defined parameters. To reveal your true feelings was a breach, a way, he remembered from his own father, of opening yourself up to unbearable assault (he could still hear his father’s voice some nights when he couldn’t sleep, telling him how stupid his ideas were, how he got the son he deserved). We got along like colleagues working on vaguely the same project—our life—but at different ends, to stretch the metaphor, of the office. I learned how to stay out of his way. We acted as if we were both afraid of being rejected by the other, and acting this way meant that on some level we had been rejected by the other.

  Four years after I watched my father die on morphine in his own bed, my mother gave me several letters he had written me through my life but had not given me. Most of them were dated in the mid-eighties, when I was a teenager. She had found them in a drawer. They were written in faded pencil, on yellow legal paper, with formal beginnings: Dear Greg, or, Dear Son. Many of the words were misspelled, sentences ran on. He told me in writing how proud he was of me, how I was a goodhearted person, smart, special. He said he worried that I thought about the bad things too much, that I was “too soft,” too contemplative, spent too much time quiet and alone. He wrote in big, blocky letters, like a schoolboy sending a secret to a friend, that he loved me very, very much, always had and always would, that he saw good things in me, that if I worked I could probably go to college and have opportunities he never had. In a couple of the latest letters, he said to try to avoid thinking about Michael (these were dated long before the false murder admission), that he would be out of our lives soon enough, one way or another.

  He implied that to live any kind of life I had to get away from here, away from all this accidental wreckage. Look forward, he wrote; don’t dwell on all this. Never squander your dreams. Since I’ve squandered mine, sometimes I'm hard on everybody else’s. I don’t mean to be, he wrote. He loved me so much, he wrote. But he hated saying things like that because he “sounded like a jerk!” It was weird to say something like that to another grown man, or almost grown man. It was just easier to write things down and never show them to anyone. Like me, my father knew that the most dangerous thing was to love openly.