Angelhead Page 5

  The storm was all behind his face, locked down in his skull. He was “crazy,” or whatever you want to call it, but he was also very cognizant of others’ perception of him. Paranoid schizophrenics, I read years later, sitting in Alderman Library at the University of Virginia while I was a graduate student, are often acutely aware of how others perceive them, delusional as that awareness might be, which makes diagnosis all the more difficult because they are often not honest in describing their thoughts to doctors, whom they may perceive as another cog in the massive conspiracy against them. In other words, schizophrenics are often easily smart enough to tell people what they want to hear. In fact, what we think of as intelligence—the complex processing of information—is only moderately affected by the disease.

  Michael saved his strangest behaviors for home. For most of the year he went to school, sat quietly in the backs of classrooms, and went unnoticed in the crowds of students. I noticed him, of course—I thought of him, our life, what the things he did meant, why my family, including myself, seemed to act as if none of this were real—all the time. But in school I tried to pretend that he wasn’t my brother, that I didn’t even know him.

  I attended a high school, like most public high schools, full of troubled kids: heads, loners, future dropouts. It was impossible to tell who would go off, who would go crazy, who would grow out of it. The kid selling dope now could become a corporate lawyer, a missionary, a cop, or a writer within the decade. The one in the chess club, or the Baptist Choir, might waltz in with a shotgun slung over his hip (that same year, a football player at a neighboring high school went to school with his father’s .30/30 hunting rifle and shot his girlfriend and himself in the entranceway).

  One of my best friends, Sammy, a kid I loved and still have dreams about, was shot in the face and killed at the age of thirteen by a girl whose younger sister he was making out with, or so the story went. (His father, at the wake, squeezed my hand and prayed into my face until I cried and said “please.”) The girl who shot him called herself “Purple Haze.” She used her father’s pistol, which he kept loaded in a drawer by his bed. She was charged with involuntary manslaughter and given probation. Ray, a kid no one talked to, whose girlfriend of four months had recently broken up with him, hanged himself in a tool shed while his father sat in the house twenty feet away watching TV. Lawrence got drunk and flipped his car onto his best friend, Steve, who had been leaning out the window, throwing beer cans, when the car failed to make the turn. I didn’t go to the funeral because I had the flu. It was a closed casket and his mother lost her mind and cursed God in front of the minister and the large crowd. By thirteen I was obsessed with death and gloom, the seeming randomness of the world.

  My brother, in this context, wasn’t as alarming as he might have been. He was odd, depressed, irritable, and volatile, but who wasn’t?

  But then something snapped inside his head. That seems the only way to describe it: a snap, a breaking, a coming undone. He stopped caring about the gaze of others; it was as if he had lost the ability for pretense, and it was as sudden as a gunshot.

  In the spring of 1986 he stopped trying to mask his delusions, or he suddenly became incapable of doing so, and now he didn’t try to control himself in public. He'd just turned twenty and, like my father had done, was struggling to finish high school. He started carrying his Bible everywhere he went, one in which he had scribbled notes in every margin.

  Ours was a small Southern town—white colonial homes, churches. Community mattered. Everyone was friendly, even if only for appearances’ sake. My mother and father knew the principal, the guidance counselor. These people began to feel sorry for them, concerned, in that administrative way, about Michael’s tenuous—and dwindling—ability to function in the world. They would call my parents for conferences. My parents would often cancel, make up some excuse, their shame over their son having become nearly crippling. My own embarrassment over my brother’s odd religion was at first debilitating, then simply numbing.

  Michael wanted to know the Savior, to memorize the Word. He would actually use this language—Savior, Word, Redemption. God was his only chance. Knowing the Bible was his only way to save himself from what he felt—the anxiety, the voices, the insomnia, his head full of thoughts not even his.

  He became the talk of the town, the bad boy who'd lost his mind, because of the Bible toting and random quoting of scripture. He would stop kids on the street, in the school parking lot, in hallways to remind them of their sins and quote scripture. He was a kind of village idiot, our small, all-white, suburban school’s one truly great spectacle.

  Michael’s decline, both mentally and physically, was astonishingly fast. He had gone from being a decent student and an amazing athlete to failing everything in the space of four years; had gone from being a black belt in karate—lithe, aggressive, handsome—to being a disheveled, Bible-toting one-man show in less than one year. The rapidity of his decline once he hit twenty—particularly his physical decline—caught us all off guard. His poor marks in school had nothing to do with aptitude, but rather with his shifting of focus. He had a mission in life and little time to pursue other things, even if people insisted these things—school, a job, friends—were important.

  His body softened dramatically, his hygiene could produce a gag reflex. Where he had once been inordinately handsome, he now had smears of blackheads across his nose, a double chin, greasy hair. All of this happened so rapidly that when I remember it I think I must be wrong, the physical deterioration must have taken two or three or even five years. But it didn’t. It all happened in only several months.

  He started smoking three packs of Camels a day, sometimes rocked back and forth uncontrollably in the school smoking section during lunch, looking up through his long bangs at the other dopers to tell them that Jesus loved them, loved us all, that none of us, if we would only believe, would ever, ever die. Eternity was real, he would say, as kids stubbed out their cigarettes and headed inside, laughing. By the end of the year he had the smoking section to himself.

  At home he locked himself in his room, smoked, watched evangelical preachers, Robert Tilton mostly, and The 700 Club until late in the night, lighting one Camel off another, the sounds of praise, the screams of rapture, brightening his face in blue light, leaking under his door.

  His teeth and fingers turned yellow from tobacco tar. He listened to Led Zeppelin, somehow finding a Christian message in it.

  He never slept—or if he did, it was maybe an hour or two at a time. He drank huge amounts of Folger’s (only Folger’s) instant coffee from a giant thermos.

  Sometimes he'd scream in the middle of the night. None of us dared check on him.

  We lived around him, not with him. He would go days without speaking to any of us. Get home from school, disappear over to Bill’s, get high on whatever was available, come home, whispering prayers, talking to himself, the voices and his thoughts his only company. He became the most dogmatically Christian drug addict ever, memorizing—memorizing—large parts of both the Old and New Testaments. Everything he said—which was very little—came laced with biblical quotes.

  When everyone was in bed, he lurked about the house, hung out in the garage, sitting in a lawn chair, smoking, talking to himself, puzzling over his strange and cruel distance from God.

  At two, three in the morning, he cooked, rattled pots and pans. He ate fried bologna, endless cheese slices, bowl after bowl of soggy cereal, instant grits, Wonder Bread, Vienna sausages, beef jerky. He stopped lifting weights and working out. He became as compulsive about eating as he was about smoking or drinking coffee or quoting scripture. My parents told him to go to bed; he told them to fuck off; they went back to bed because they had to get up for work, to start another one of their regimented days. They didn’t have time for this. They had busy lives. They couldn’t devote all their time to him.

  Michael gained thirty pounds in a matter of months. He wouldn’t shower unless my father insisted, often with the
threat of not giving him any money.

  No one knew what was wrong with him. The counselors at school were predictably baffled. He refused to go to psychologists or psychiatrists, and my father subscribed to the shake-it-off, snap-out-of-it, pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps school of manliness, so he wasn’t in any rush to take him to doctors, even though he'd watched his own mother temporarily lose her mind years earlier. We all assumed—me, my parents, teachers—that it was another loss, albeit a graphic and uniquely strange loss, to the perils of teen drug abuse.

  One day the world turned white for Michael. Each object—door, floor, table, human—was wrung dry of all its meaning and he was left floating in a stark nothingness. It was his second severe psychotic break that I witnessed, and it happened during one of the last days of school. He was getting ready to graduate with almost straight Cs and Ds (a gift from his teachers at the insistence of the administration).

  It was after lunch, your basic midweek school day—lockers slamming, bits of conversation and gossip drifting through hallways. Michael had just left his remedial math class, where he had realized that the teachings of Jesus were encoded in numbers. He knew His spirit was everywhere, in everything, but he had never considered numbers, never considered looking at the small things, at ideas. It was all bits and pieces, fragments, and no one had told him about the importance of numbers. It was everywhere in the Bible. How could he have missed it? He began to feel a horrible sadness at the fact that he didn’t understand math, had never paid attention to it, and now, today, he realized that Jesus Christ, our Savior, our coming Lord, was also contained in numbers and theorems.

  Michael floated through the halls in a state of confusion. Faces hovered past like images of faces hovering past, flat and inhuman. The yellow lockers stretched toward the single window at the end of the hall that was now filled with concrete-colored sky.

  And then there he was: Jesus Christ, the real guy, the giver of life, the forgiver of sins, the breaker of bread and maker of wine, standing at the end of the hall, suffused in white light, as if in a picture, his hands raised and bloody, a deep wound wet and glistening in his side, a crown of thorns on his head. It was the Christ we’ve all seen in paintings, except for two modern affectations: a pair of black Levi’s 501 jeans and black combat boots.

  Michael began speaking in tongues.

  Ssshhhaaaaammmmmaaaaaaallaaaaabok.

  Kids turned, looked, laughed.

  He bumped into the flat, lifeless people—hey, hey—walking, then running down the hall.

  But then Jesus disappeared, and Michael knew it was because he had failed him, failed Christ, failed God, by being so lazy, by failing to learn what needed to be learned. He looked up at the numbers above doorways. They crushed him with their secrets. They whispered. The numbers were real. If he just concentrated on the numbers he'd be okay, he'd find Christ again; he'd learn about numbers, the curves, the lines, what they meant, how they related to things.

  He saw the number 16. It was magical, important, a last tether—he began to cry.

  Michael stood in front of room 16, tears streaming hot down his face, dripping off his chin and landing on the floor. He made squeaking noises; snot bubbled out of his nose; he punched himself in the face, hard, screamed. How could he have missed this?

  Kids began to gather around him. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty . . . a crowd.

  The hissing was soft, distant. Whispers behind a wall. Snakes behind the glass. Voices in distant regions of his skull. He heard the tears squeeze out of his eyes.

  He walked into room 16, sat down among the students, an advanced placement history class. Even though he was crying, he was happy, too, in a way, because now he knew what he had to learn. He started laughing. He was laughing and crying, but he was mostly sad, but then sometimes when he was really sad he couldn’t help but laugh at how sad he was. He put his greasy bangs in his mouth and chewed them, sniffling.

  Everyone stared silently—at Michael, at each other. He began shaking the desk, tilting it up on two legs.

  Miss Smythe, the teacher, was old, popular with students. She walked toward Michael, smiling. Her hair was in the shape of a giant sticky bun, glasses hung off her nose. She wore the bright designer clothes of wealthy Southerners: penny loafers, navy skirts, orange and pink and teal oxford shirts, a scarf.

  Michael, she said, but he could barely hear her because she wasn’t even real. Michael, this isn’t your class, dear. You need to go to your own class now because Jesus Christ died a long time ago and is never coming back; he was just a man, like you. He can’t save anyone now. Or maybe you should go to the nurse.

  He put his head down, cried harder, began shaking the desk more and laughing; he was a fat, filthy twenty-year-old still in high school, a retard or something, and some of the students had to laugh.

  The assistant principal, a guy named Kraft with greenish gray hair, came and got me out of my own math class. I started sweating when he said my name. I was sitting in the back of the room, trying to be inconspicuous.

  Outside, in the hall, as I stood confused and paranoid, Mr. Kraft explained the problem to me, explained that he wanted me to go get my brother, to try to talk to him, because if anyone came into room 16 he started screaming. He leaned down into my face, his breath nearly toxic—coffee, spearmint, a clogged drain.

  All I heard after that was your brother . . . your brother. I was in the habit, then, of denying, as much as possible, the existence of my brother, or at least the existence of any relationship between us, or, if that didn’t work, I usually pleaded about how ineffectual I was concerning him, how, yeah, he was my brother, but we didn’t really communicate much.

  I said I couldn’t help; I couldn’t do it; he wouldn’t listen to me. But Mr. Kraft already had me by the arm, leading me to my brother.

  We walked down the long halls, past the yellow lockers, past classrooms, past all the kids I knew, the kids I wanted desperately to like me. We walked and walked and I wanted to go home, to walk out the door. My sneakers squeaked, my jeans swished. I could hear the hair move under Kraft’s shirt.

  The door was open, Miss Smythe standing in the hallway, waiting, I guess, for me, as if I knew what to do.

  I sighed, felt faint, but kept walking, listening to my sneakers, my jeans, Kraft’s chest hair. I walked into the classroom without looking at anyone, feeling them all looking at me. Why did this have to be my brother? What had I ever done?

  Someone giggled, but mostly it was all somber silence, the energy having been sucked out of the room. By now some of the kids saw Michael as an actual threat.

  My brother had tears streaming down his face, one hanging off his chin. He stopped laughing and crying when he saw me. There we were, staring at each other, in a dead silence except for the low hum of the heating unit, the muffled buzz of the bright fluorescent lights.

  I was scared. That’s what I remember more than any one detail—that feeling of complete fear and helplessness that would come back to me over the years. Sometimes, even now, almost fifteen years later, when I'm lying in bed with my pregnant wife, in our nice comfortable life, I get this sensation that feels like falling but isn’t, and I think, I once had a brother named Michael, and this simple fact weighs on me more than my life, weighs more than God, and I spend days afterward depressed, unable to read, unable to work. That day I could taste my fear the way you can taste the beginning of a cold, the way you can taste a penny. This all seemed so much bigger than me. It was so much bigger than me.

  I gently touched Michael’s arm, unable to think of anything to say. And touching him was a foreign thing, as awkward as a first kiss.

  He looked up at me, eyes empty, face shining with tears.

  Greg, he said. Jesus. Fuck.

  He stood up, simple as that, completely calm. We were face to face. He smelled rotten, as though he hadn’t showered in weeks. He smelled of cigarettes, smelled vaguely electric, a smell—almost impossible to describe—that I have come to associate, in
recent years, with paranoid schizophrenics. It looked as if he were going to hug me, which he had never done, but he didn’t.

  Jesus, he said again.

  I started walking out of the room and he followed. It was almost the end of the day. I looked back at Kraft and he mouthed the words “thank you.”

  We walked to the nurse’s office, my older brother limping along behind me like a sick child, where he told me an incomprehensible story about numbers and seeing a shirtless Jesus wearing black jeans and boots. We sat there, across from each other, in green, faux-leather chairs, waiting for our mother, who had been called at work. I could see kids drift past the office door, quietly glancing in, whispering to each other.

  Michael held his Bible, looked down at his shoes. I stared at him for almost an hour. He sniffled, moved his mouth as if to speak. He had become an alien to me. I didn’t know him or understand anything about him. I thought I might cry, but didn’t. Not here, not in this closed, incestuous universe of high school, where everyone knew you. I tried to act cool, to find a cool way to sit. I watched the second hand inch around a clock. I waited for our mother.

  FLORIDA

  That day in school, in room 16 where neither of us should have been, was one of the last times Michael spoke directly to me, and it would be years before I tried to understand what he had meant. We never had much to say to each other, even as children, but now, once he'd added Jesus to his set list of hallucinations, he'd lost most of his ability to speak in any consistently coherent way.

  It had been the end of the day, the end of school, the end, looking back, of any grasp Michael had on reality. He vanished. He figuratively vanished that day when he was twenty. He—figuratively—became a foundling, a lost lamb, a whore among the city streets, a leper, a child of God, and headed to “a place in the Hebrew tongue called Armageddon” (for figurative language there is no better book than Michael’s favorite, Revelation). He would never return, never fill out his body again as the person I once briefly knew.