Angelhead Read online

  It’s warm and gray, wind blowing in from the nearby Chesapeake. Green leaves and branches on the ground, across the path. The world is empty, desolate. The world is his.

  He could spend all day out here on an empty afternoon like this, looking at bugs and spores, moss and mushrooms and fungi.

  He opens his fly, pisses. He is smiling, pissing in the empty woods, pissing on a natural habitat full of specimens. He zips up, but slowly, unconcerned, convinced he’s alone.

  He digs a hole, sifts earth through his fingers, looking for life, feeling the coolness in his hands. He hears something, looks around, nothing. He sighs, leans against a tree, looks up at the tree tops, branches dividing the sky. He takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes—everything blurs.

  A gang of boys ride up on bikes, white kids he doesn’t know, has never seen, like a pack of ghosts, out of nowhere. They’re filthy, spotted in dirt, holes in their clothes, some kind of lower-middle-class urban horde. They say, Look ahere, say, What the fuck, say, Ho-ly ssshhhit. There are ten, twelve of them.

  Or he does know them, knows them well. They surround him. Come on, he says, palms up, pleading with half a smile bending his face.

  It’s some older kids—seventeen, eighteen years old, maybe drug dealers, a satanic cult (a popular notion since Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, Carrie, and The Omen have made their way to The ABC Saturday Night Movie). They look dead, these kids, look like zombies, skeletal shadows in trenchcoats.

  They ride up on motorcycles, but he doesn’t hear them until the engines are whining loudly, nasally, beside him.

  A group of black kids walk up, quietly, ducking behind trees until they snatch him by the arms. Black kids from the projects a half-mile away.

  Or it’s some of those Vietnamese—or are they Cambodian?—immigrants that work for minimum wage at the seafood docks downtown. Those people are nuts, S knows, scared of everything, scared of America, driving their boats up on sandbars because they don’t understand the English channel markers, talking that gibberish my father mimicked, Heyro, you wan scarrops or free, four fish. They have orange-handled fish-gutting knives. Someone told him they eat dog.

  No. One man, white, slender, a pedophile. He walks up, a serial killer spending one single day in the city. It is just terrible luck straight out of a movie.

  He has a mustache, a beard, is clean-shaven. He has long hair, is balding, is going gray. He’s wearing a coat, a T-shirt with something written on the front, he’s bare-chested, all hair and big pink nipples.

  It is the black man, the exercise guy, who lives on top of the school. He’s hunting children in the late-afternoon warmth. His mental impairments have affected his frontal lobe and thus his moral judgment. Perhaps his brain will one day make it into the hands of science. He bets S he can do more push-ups. You go first, he suggests.

  It is my brother and his friends, just screwing around, and something, something really awful and accidental, happens.

  It is my brother out in the woods, by himself, still hearing those first, faint voices, the world a bright, glowing puzzle that has begun to make him angry. He hears God or Satan ticking off something in Morse code, using branches and wind.

  S doesn’t see them coming. The guy is just there. He sees him coming, but he doesn’t look threatening.

  The guy looks hurt. Looks helpless. Looks angry, sad, sick.

  He limps, runs, walks and whistles. He says he’s feeling sick.

  He knows him. The guy waves, smiles, says, Could you help me, son?

  He is overdressed, almost naked, doing something in the woods by himself.

  He lives down the street. He hangs out at the pool.

  Or: Maybe they’ve been meeting for weeks, months.

  Are you doing some kind of class project? he says. I'm a friend of your dad’s. Your mom sent me. How many push-ups can you do? What are you so afraid of?

  S puts on his glasses, leans hard against that tree, looking up at the branches caging the sky, and next thing, wham . . .

  S is looking down into a hole, at termite larvae wriggling around wet roots, and someone taps him on the shoulder.

  S is tying his shoe and then is on his stomach, a knee in his back, something tight around his neck.

  They slam him against a tree.

  They throw him down, hard.

  He takes off his belt, unzips his pants.

  He lifts a thick branch to shatter his skull.

  He is smiling, then, suddenly, gripping S’s face like a bowling ball.

  He puts a funny-smelling handkerchief over S’s mouth. It tastes like metal, it tastes like salt.

  He doesn’t give a fuck so everything is possible, and killing is just part of his day.

  S struggles like a champ.

  He gives up.

  He pleads, cries.

  He is just sort of blank.

  He never knows what hit him.

  The guy is touching himself, but everything is okay, then the guy starts talking about his dick, talking about his dick like it’s another person standing here, with an opinion, with a temper. Look, he says. Look, like S did something to him that now he has to pay for.

  Before S is unconscious, he sees a tree, the ground, the blurry shape of his glasses on summer leaves, a white face, a black face, an old face, a young face, a strange face, a familiar face, a bunch of faces looking down at him, edgeless and coagulating; a face from the TV, my brother’s face; he sees a knee, a bare foot, a boot, a tennis shoe, white; he sees a blur of green and brown because the guy is swinging him around by his neck and he is vanishing into a dream already.

  He just watches as his own sock moves over his face and tightens around his neck; he sees his killer(s), but he is already dead and won’t be answering any questions.

  He sees himself from above and thinks, God, I'm just a kid. What kind of world is this?

  He doesn’t believe this moment is real. And maybe it’s not.

  He is reborn in the light of God.

  He doesn’t feel anything anymore. He’s a body without a soul, or without the chemical synapses required to be considered alive. However you want to define it. Whatever you want to believe. He’s just dead. The instant came and he was no longer.

  A search party gathered early the next morning. S’s family must have been frantic. But you never expect the worst. You can’t. You'll lose your mind expecting the worst.

  Men spread out and marched through the woods. Flashlight beams pierced the dawn. Within an hour, there was a body. No dramatic complication, no Movie of the Week, nothing of the sort. They started looking and there it—he—was.

  The cops came, worked on the crime scene through the day, June 11, 1983.

  S had been strangled by his own left sock and raped. There was evidence—blood, skin, semen. It was a reckless crime, unplanned, a crime of passion. It made the front page of the local paper the next morning, below the fold. I read it sitting at my kitchen table. S was one year older than me. I watched it on the six o'clock news. I said to myself, I know this person, but didn’t feel anything. I tried to will myself to feel something. It was just words on a page, a pretty anchorwoman perfunctorily reciting a story. Another dead kid.

  Once the body had been carted away in a black bag, my brother and his friends got as close as they could to the crime scene the next morning. My mother later told me that Michael said he was going to solve the crime and collect the reward. He told her about the black man on the school roof.

  I wonder now what my brother, at seventeen, was thinking as he looked at the chalk-drawn shape of a body in the dirt. Did he feel guilt, even then, or was it only later, when the voices were chattering accusations, when the conspiracy against him was complex beyond explanation, drowning out everything?

  My father, after a long search, found Michael at the edge of the woods where the body was found. He was alone and dazed. It was close to dusk of the same day, the day after the murder. My father, frantic, after calling around for Michael for hours, ha
d driven down here in our Rambler. Michael hadn’t been home in two days. No one had seen him since that morning. None of his friends knew where he was. He was in the woods, they said, but then he said he was going home, that my mother was going to pick him up.

  In the car, my father told Michael he was never coming back here, never hanging out with those guys again if he expected to live at home.

  Do you hear me?

  Michael, filthy now after going a few days without a shower, looked out the window, out at the blurred world. Black clouds sailed over a dying sunset and he could feel a storm coming. When he closed his eyes, he could hear the dead boy whining, could see the tears streaming down his face as he tried to scream.

  The cops questioned more than two hundred people around those neighborhoods, black and white. They went door to door. They talked to all of my brother’s friends. They didn’t talk to Michael because he was living in a new town now and somehow his name never came up.

  All the kids—all my brother’s friends—said it was the vet on top of the school. They decided to murder him—to kill the nigger—but he was already gone: vanished without a trace. Michael, however, knew the vet didn’t do it. God, impersonating a tree in the woods, told him so.

  SECRETS

  In our new city, lawns were cut, cars washed. Piano lessons were given, the school band practiced on the football field, baseball season played toward the series championships. People die every day. S was just another dead kid. He barely made it through a news cycle.

  Michael slowly slipped further and further away, deeper and deeper into the early stages of madness. He began spending more time alone with the snakes he collected. He kept them as pets and built elaborate aquarium habitats for them in his room. (He had gone through a tarantula phase, too, but something had malfunctioned with the halogen light in his aquarium and fried both of his spiders into hairy clenched fists. Thank God he didn’t replace them.)

  He liked the snakes’ smooth, perfectly patterned skin, their liquid movements, the soft, cautious flicker of the tongue. He liked the way snakes sensed the dangers of the world, the dangers he himself had begun to sense. He liked, also, that people were frightened of snakes, and sometimes, even though he knew it was wrong, he savored the look of fear on a person’s face when confronted by them.

  He would watch the snakes eat large mice for hours with his lights down low. As the shiny skin bulged around the snake’s throat, the mouse stuck momentarily, wriggling, still alive, a life absorbing another—a fact of nature, he liked to say, smiling—he wondered what that felt like, absorbing another’s life, taking its spirit. He believed he could absorb life-forms through his skin.

  At night, when he was seventeen, he dreamed the snakes spoke to him in their secret language, a language of pure sense, a language without words.

  He felt confused these days, once he knew he was outside of his dreams. People—teachers, my mother, his last few remaining friends—would talk to him but then their words would get lost before they reached his mind; it was as if the words would sometimes get caught up in the air, as if the air were heavy, almost solid, and the words, like hard objects, fell to the ground before they reached him. Other times, when the words did reach him, each word was wearing a disguise, each word actually contained the meanings of many words and how was he to know, how the fuck was he to know, if he could trust the legitimacy, the honesty, of this word?

  But the snakes made sense. Sometimes he was afraid to leave his room and the snakes because an engulfing light was probably in the hall waiting for him. It might be the light of God, sure, but if it wasn’t—then what?

  And there were the times when he wanted to know something, study it, but then he couldn’t, for the life of him, remember what it was. It—this wordless feeling he associated with his earlier vision of God in our window—vanished when he reached out his hand. The pain from this was almost physical. The world was a trick, a hall of mirrors, and he couldn’t tell whether he was even himself sometimes or whether he was simply a reflection of himself, one of those reflections that had been sent out in quadruplicate from the center, the actual Michael, which he may not have ever been. Sometimes he cried and he couldn’t remember why he'd started.

  He felt, at other times, as if he were dead. He wanted to rise again but couldn’t unravel the riddle of resurrection, of how to save yourself. He started checking out books on the occult from the local library, smuggling them into the house under his jacket.

  He seemed to think that the snakes were a key to unlocking the mystery of this crisis of meaning. They comforted, kept beautiful secrets he could almost decipher when his eyes were closed. He read that snakes were a symbolic representation of sin, death, evil, temptation, sex.

  Whenever I encountered him, he would stare at me until I walked out of a room, my heart pounding, a permanent frown on his face. Michael kept to himself—hunched, lonely, looking over his shoulder always. I thought of him as dangerous, someone to lock the door against.

  The condition known as schizophrenia was named by the German psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1911. The term denotes a splitting of the various parts of the thought process. It does not make a person evil, or even necessarily dangerous. Some theories posit that schizophrenia does not actually change underlying personality traits: once affected, people who worry will continue to worry, people with a good sense of humor will continue to have one, a laid-back person will continue to be so, and so forth.

  Schizophrenics can become dangerous, though, through lack of care, which leads them into desperation, and most especially through a lack of understanding and sympathy, which was, obviously and accidentally, the case in my home.

  Evil is a tougher question, but in my brother’s case I believe it was his nature. When he wasn’t sad or hurt or lonely, Michael was the meanest person I have ever known. His petty ruthlessness when we were boys seemed almost limitless.

  Once, when I was ten or eleven and Michael was fourteen or fifteen, a neighborhood bully a few years older than me smashed me over the head with a metal-bottomed motorcycle seat. It knocked me almost unconscious. When I regained my senses, Michael had blackened both of the bully’s eyes, burst his nose into a torrent of bright red blood, and made him eat dog shit. I started crying. I felt sick from all the blood on the concrete, the lump on my head, and I told my brother to stop, to not make him eat that, that it was okay and I was fine and it had been an accident, just a dumb accident. He told me to shut the fuck up or I would eat the dog shit, too. He handed me a rock and made the kid get on his knees with his hands behind his head and his face presented to me. I made a bloody divot in his forehead the size of a dime. We left him lying in his front yard. Michael told me that if I looked over my shoulder at him I was dead.

  After reading about snakes, he wondered if they were trying to trick him. Were they really connected to the one true God, or were they merely false messengers, like the one in Genesis? He couldn’t know for sure. He was still held in by his mortality. He was trying, through dreams and prayer, to devise a way to step fully outside of this realm, the realm of the body, into the purely spiritual. He knew the world would be laid waste soon, and a recommunion with God seemed necessary yet impossible and frustrating.

  He knew that if he told anyone in the waking world about his dreams, about the language of snakes—and sometimes he wanted to tell my mother, because he loved my mother, though he made her life nearly unbearable for twenty-six years—they'd think he was crazy, think his mind was full of cracks and fissures.

  There were three snakes: a king snake, black with white stripes; a rat snake, brown, mottled, big-headed, small-eyed; and a black snake he'd found in the copse behind our home, wet-looking, as dark as coal. He would often sit in a lawn chair in the backyard, with a snake in each hand, coiled up around each arm. He would kiss them on the thin mouth, talk to them in whispers, while I stared out the back window.

  My parents didn’t like the snakes, of course, but thought a hobby, even this h
obby, was good for Michael. They imagined him, fueled by a new interest in science, biology, zoology, straightening up. They didn’t realize then that what the snakes represented to him was metaphysics, the hidden meaning of good and evil through a better understanding of the occult. To them, anything, even large live snakes in the house, was better than drugs, dark moods, violent impulses, family fights. Not that any of these things subsided. But they hoped.

  Each night during that year, the year of the murder, he locked himself away in his room, listened to Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, letting the snakes, all three, crawl over his nude body, slither around his face and neck, legs and groin. Their cool, rubbery touch gave him strength, spiritual strength, to unravel his dreams, but still it was never quite enough. Nothing was enough, and it made him angry. There was something to know, some vast plain of knowledge just out of reach. The frustration of not knowing made his mood swings monstrous, every second in his presence volatile.

  We avoided him; he avoided us. The house became more and more somber. There were moments of happiness, few and far between, and always when Michael was elsewhere and it was just my mother, my father, Ron, and me, but home life as Michael got sicker and more paranoid was dusty and melancholic and claustrophobic.

  It was when I went to friends’ homes, sat around their dinner tables talking about school, about football, about girls and current events and movies, even telling jokes, that I realized how strange my home life was.

  Occasionally, when friends of mine came over, we'd spend afternoons looking out the window at Michael with snakes coiled around him in the backyard. I once charged a dollar each for a group of five boys to look out my window at my brother talking to his snakes.