Angelhead Page 6

  He became a shell full of voices and pain—real, God-drenched pain, the kind of pain that is dangerous to all in its vicinity. You couldn’t find him in there no matter how hard you looked. If you caught his eyes, he'd say fuck you. If you walked into a room, he'd walk out, furious. His disease, his spiritual dread, moved to another level.

  Every source I’ve consulted over the years about schizophrenia points to the late teens and early twenties as the most volatile time, the most likely point at which a complete break from reality will occur. I was, after Michael was put away and I'd gotten myself reasonably together, an English graduate student for four years at two different Southern universities, poring over medical texts and psychological journals and religious tracts and apocrypha and transgressive literature in grand, dusty libraries, then writing pedantically complex papers about Dostoyevsky’s broken protagonists or Céline’s endless rants or Faulkner’s wildly dysfunctional Compsons (though I think we were closer to the Snopeses), writing little academic opera about the guilt of family, the complex meaning of a single shattered life.

  But this is real, not made up, not academic, not figurative: Michael literally vanished. It might have been a magic trick, an illusion—the speed with which he was gone. One day, a week after he graduated from high school, just a few weeks after the incident in room 16, his bedroom door—always closed, always locked—was open and he was gone.

  A vacant silence filled the upstairs. The air was smoke-colored. I walked into his room, looked around, picking up dirty shirts and socks, kicking over old soda cans, fingering a cheap, silver-plated crucifix on top of a knife-marked mahogany dresser. He had stained the head of Jesus red with magic marker. The smell, again, was that indescribable electric smell that reminds me of mental illness, of halfway houses and psychiatric care and the homeless.

  His milky-looking picture of Christ with roving eyes was gone; his scribbled-over Bible, gone. Food cartons, old socks and underwear, dirty tissues, crusty spots on the carpet where he had spit phlegm or shot his seed, half-hung posters, silence. Silence and a giant emptiness. A grand, cavernous emptiness like a tomb, like a church.

  My parents, when I asked about him later that night, kept their eyes on dinner and said he'd gone “away,” gone “to find a job.” There was an air of strange secrecy about the whole thing, a feeling I often got from my parents concerning Michael. I was sixteen now, precocious, inquisitive to the point of annoyance. What did that mean, I wanted to know. Find a job? He was seeing Jesus in school hallways, God in thermal windows, sacrificing snakes. What kind of job was he going to get?

  He’s almost twenty-one years old, my father said, standing in the kitchen after dinner, wearing sweatpants and suede slippers, holding a Diet Coke, the small paunch of his belly pushing out his T-shirt. It’s time he took care of himself.

  My parents, though very loving while at the same time very busy in that upwardly mobile American way, could not take another day of our life, could not let their home be this dangerous (Mr. Connelly, my rake-wielding rescuer, had come over one Saturday and spoken to my father). And my father had a propensity, a hopefulness, you might say, to believe that a good hard dose of life was always the best medicine. It had worked for him. So Michael, I found out, had been sent away.

  In the weeks before this, we all hid from each other. We lived in separate rooms. I stayed away from the house as much as possible, hanging out in arcades, at friends’ houses. Even Ron and I, who usually at least spoke, grew apart. Part of this was my adolescence, my wish to be free of family; part of it was my secret life of drugs and alcohol; but the biggest reason for it was that we had Michael to think about—our brother, our flesh and blood that we could not understand—every time we were together. Michael was connected to them. I didn’t want Michael, so I didn’t want them. We were all part of the same problem.

  We each lived a private life. We shared space, a roof, nothing else. I’ve spent many years since that time trying desperately, in different ways, to have an existence exactly the opposite of the one I knew as a boy, and I have largely succeeded, though I still have nostalgic feelings, of course, concerning my mother, younger brother, and father. But any nostalgia, no matter how beautiful or comforting or endearingly sad, eventually leads to Michael and crumbles under the weight of my memory of him.

  Just a week before he left, one day after his mostly honorary graduation from high school, which he was asked, politely, not to attend, Michael had made a cross out of baseball bats in our garage, soaked it in lighter fluid, and set it on fire. He had used six Louisville Sluggers that sat languishing in a barrel with footballs and tennis rackets. My father put out the modest blaze with a bucket of water, muttering at Michael, exhausted now, incapable even of yelling.

  Smoke had filled the room, however, and alarms went off, the windows went opaque with a yellowish gray residue. Clouds of billowing blue-gray smoke went out into the neighborhood like signals of distress.

  A fire truck showed up because Mr. Connelly, our ever-watchful neighbor, had seen the smoke and called. My father, embarrassed, not wanting anyone involved, told them it was an accident—spilled lighter fluid, a match, an honest mistake. They probably would have bought the story until Michael started dancing in a circle in front of them, shouting hallelujah, jigging on one foot to the glory of God, blessing each of them, making a point to touch their jackets and pull his hand away as if they were hot.

  My father and the firemen stood in the driveway staring at him, my father beyond speech. The firemen looked at my father, silent, waiting for an explanation, waiting to hear that this was somehow a practical joke. One of the men began laughing and then stopped. My father wouldn’t even look at them, instead saying, as he walked off, Thanks. I’ve got it under control.

  My brother no longer had any idea why such a thing was wrong, or dangerous, or antisocial. It had become a part of his thinking, a necessary action to counteract what was happening inside his head at that very moment. He had to set fire to the bats. A black crucifix stayed burned on the concrete for weeks, a reminder.

  As I have said, my father, like all of us, thought my brother’s troubles stemmed from drugs, and partially, of course, they did; this presumed fact made my father completely unforgiving of his behavior. He felt that Michael had brought all of this on himself. He had dropped somewhere between seventy-five and a hundred hits of LSD (a conservative estimate), many of these during the crucial developmental stages of puberty—not to mention all the pot he smoked, the coke he snorted, the mushrooms he ate, the speed he took, and all the rest.

  Drugs made Michael’s psychosis worse, surely, but they weren’t his psychosis. Psychoactive drugs can, obviously, cause harm over extended use, damaging important thought and memory processes. But even the most basic of mental health books will tell you there is no evidence that drug use can cause, or even trigger, the onset of paranoid schizophrenia, though paranoid schizophrenics, once in decline, diagnosed or not, have an extraordinarily high instance of severe drug abuse.

  My mother and father, however, weren’t the kind of people who went digging through books to look for answers, the way I did long after the fact, long after my brother was locked away. My father, like Michael, had dropped out of high school, only returning at the insistence of my mother when he was almost twenty. My mother and father had grown up on the cusp between lower class and lower middle class, and their parents had no formal education. Drugs were the only thing that made sense for them of Michael’s behavior. And who can forgive someone who methodically wrecks his own mind? Who can feel empathy for a person, son or not, like that?

  My mother and father, I eventually learned, had given Michael five hundred dollars in cash and a one-way ticket to Orlando, Florida. We all needed him out of our everyday lives—we were all exhausted, on edge. And he was skirting the edge of some huge tragedy. We could all feel it coming. I could feel it. The probability of his doing something irrevocable kept me up at night. I thought he might kill himself and I'
d have to find the body. I thought he might want to kill me, as he had threatened, or, worse, my mother, whom he had begun to hover around like a fly, always keeping his eyes on her no matter where she went in a room. I'd feel the blood rush in my temples when he got near the kitchen knives, or had a lighter in his hand, menacingly flicking it.

  My parents chose Orlando because they had read that, aside from Las Vegas, it was the city with the most job vacancies (the flash and brightness and noise of Las Vegas would probably send a schizophrenic hiding in the sewers; although the animal mascots of Disney World couldn’t be much better).

  My mother had spent days on the phone contacting the employment office of Disney, trying to get Michael a job as a janitor, a food vendor, anything, still believing he could somehow hold down work. She set up several interviews for him. This sounds absurd in hindsight, but my mother still had hope, was always willing to try. She made it so all he had to do was walk into the right office and remain calm and he'd have a low-wage, low-interaction job. They also offered low-rent housing for park employees.

  My father thought someone might just pull him off the street to work—labor, construction, lawn care. He might straighten out once he saw that he had to. He might check himself into a hospital. One thing was for sure, though, he could not live at home. He could live on the street. He could go to jail. He could even die. But my father was not letting that drug-addicted loser back into this house he was still trying to pay for.

  My life improved. I could not have missed my brother less. I'd wake up every morning happy that he was gone. My family would eat breakfast together, which we hadn’t done in years, and it was as if he had been erased. I can’t even explain what it was like to be free of him. It was like finding out you didn’t have cancer anymore, I imagine, or that your newborn baby was healthy after all, that it was just a smear on the X-ray of its chest. A wave of such overwhelming relief fell about our house that I remember at one point simply breaking down in tears, actual tears of happiness, when I picked up a butcher knife and it didn’t seem like anything but something you used to cut chicken or celery.

  In fact, his absence from our lives was such a relief that it was only then that I realized the true extent of the turmoil he, or his disease, had caused. My family took a vacation to Nags Head, North Carolina, and we laughed and went out and ate seafood and no one stared at us—a real family vacation. During the day, I surfed while Ron made sand castles and my parents lay on the beach holding hands, like newlyweds.

  This kind of happiness was bizarre, alien. We were so starved for it that all we wanted was life without small tragedies, without violence and anger and uncomfortable silence. Heaven, for us, was not expecting a call at four in the morning. Heaven was not having to sleep with your bedroom door locked.

  Six months passed, six eventless months. Ah, the beauty of inertia, the grace of absolute, mind-numbing suburban ennui.

  I stopped thinking of Michael because I blissfully had no knowledge of the future, no inkling of the shape of this story.

  My parents had their friends over to the house without the possibility of something surreal happening—a fire, or a sermon on the Sodomites. They had parties. I had girlfriends over. My younger brother had friends sleep over and watch movies and play video games. So this was life, we thought. Not bad.

  Michael did, however, call home several times from Florida, crying, but my parents kept me in the dark about his whereabouts and well-being. I didn’t care; I didn’t ask. I'd ask my mother who had called and she'd hesitate and say, No one, your aunt, no one.

  My mother worried privately, and sent Michael cash overnight several times. My father took a sterner stance—Michael was an adult who had proven himself to be worthless, criminal; they had given him money and a chance and that was enough.

  It didn’t last. Six months after he left, almost to the day, Michael showed up at the door—just like that, no warning, nothing. A knock at the door and there he was.

  He stood in the doorway, suffused in sunlight, near death. He had lost forty pounds, had almost starved. He stared, wide-eyed, eyes sunk deep in their sockets, and at first I don’t think he recognized anyone but my mother. He didn’t know what day or month it was, didn’t know his middle name, couldn’t remember what state he had just been in, when or where he was born.

  He said, I think I'm very old and hungry. I went to school. I was born in a manger. I am very old and hungry.

  Pale, sick, mouth agape, bewildered to the point almost of catatonia, sitting on the couch as skinny as a concentration camp prisoner from a scratchy Nazi-era documentary, he looked like someone else entirely. I couldn’t believe it was him. We all stood around in the living room as if we'd just seen a spaceship land, as if we were characters in a cruel art film and we didn’t know our lines.

  I couldn’t not look at him, though I tried. He smelled like trash, stared straight ahead, his head leaning back on a cushion, staining it with grease. His hair was long; he had a thick beard. His eyes were glassy and distant. The fly on his tattered, dirt-stained jeans was open, his shoes were untied and almost black with filth. He was helpless. It was the saddest thing I have ever witnessed. I wanted to scream, but couldn’t. I lost something of myself that day, and I’ve never gotten it back. Standing in the room with him, needing to scream, to shout, to break something, but unable to, I said to myself, I'm going to go crazy; I'm going to be like him; I feel it coming.

  My father broke down completely, sobbing, hugging Michael, and then sitting down and laying his head on the kitchen table—my stoic father, my tough, no-bullshit father destroyed by a guilt you could almost see around him like a luminous aura.

  Michael didn’t move, didn’t even eat, until my parents took him to the emergency room, simply not knowing what else to do. The nurses gave him fluids and a meal. They checked his blood for drugs and alcohol, but there was no trace of either.

  Years later, when my brother was in prison, I heard the stories about Florida from my younger brother, whom Michael had confided in one day.

  Michael was kicked out of a youth hostel the first day he arrived, then had lived in a small Assembly of God church for the first few weeks. The pastor let him sleep there on a cot, but wouldn’t let him attend church. Michael was too disturbed, too likely to have outbursts of religious zeal that scared people, even charismatics and evangelicals, who were having outbursts of their own for the Lord. At the best of times, while Michael was living at home, his appearance was frightening; away from the constant care of my mother, the sight of him was enough to make people cross the street. He looked, at his worst, unmedicated—unshaven, yellow teeth, hair everywhere—something like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. His looks, and his vastly unstable behavior, were exactly what got people burned at the stake in medieval times, or had their skulls drilled open so the spirits could escape, or had leeches placed on their eyelids to drain the evil energy from inside their heads. Florida wasn’t so much better than this.

  Other details of his journey are murky, not grounded by any specific narrative, time, place.

  He was gang-raped while living among the homeless.

  He paid for hookers, both male and female, with money he stole from other homeless kids; he once beat a hooker (a woman, I think) nearly to death in an abandoned house because she tried to steal his Bible, then went to a convenience store and called an ambulance.

  A trucker gave him money and food, in exchange for blow jobs until Michael finally tired of him and moved to a different part of town, found a different group of kids, a different corner to hang out on.

  He was robbed.

  He participated in, or at the very least was present during, both rapes and robberies.

  He prostituted himself for money or coffee or food or drugs.

  He prayed several times a day.

  A demon lived in his shoes, so he threw them away and stole a pair off a sleeping drunk.

  He became seriously ill after snorting crank and was taken to an emergency
room, where he was treated for extreme dehydration and cramps. He had no identification, no money. His wallet had been stolen and the only thing he had was his tattered Bible that had his name written in the front.

  When the hospital called my mother, having somehow tracked her down about the bill, Michael had already vanished. My mother wanted to go to Florida to look for him, but my father vetoed this, and said that they'd never find him anyway.

  Michael also had begun to hallucinate almost constantly. He saw and heard demons in malls and car washes and restaurants. He began to believe my father was sending them. He no longer felt strong surges of schizoid paranoia, evil smoldering at the periphery; he was paranoia, and reality, our reality, was now at the far periphery.

  His confusion made him cry, strike out at people, create huge scenes in convenience stores, shopping centers, on street corners, spewing epithets with the words “thou” and “thee” all mixed up with potty talk and quotations from Revelation.

  He was arrested at least twice for shoplifting and being drunk in public, though he wasn’t drunk. He must have thought that Florida was hell, a place to torture and be tortured, a place where God forgot about you, where everything that could go wrong went wrong. It had literally drained the life out of him.

  When he returned to us from the hospital after overnight observation, he began his visits to psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, and rehab. He was almost twenty-two, and in many ways this was only the beginning.

  SCIENCE