Angelhead (10 page)

He called home. No matter where he went, whether things were bad or good, he simply had to be with my mother. She was the only one he trusted, though he treated her worse than most people would treat a stray dog. She was the only one who had ever really shown him love, or even the slightest tenderness. He begged her: Please come pick me up. I can't stay here. I'm so lonely. You don't love me. No one loves me. I'll die here. They'll kill me, they'll eat my heart and take my soul.

My mother listened, cried while holding the phone. The voices were real, she knew, and the messages were real and the pain was real. Maybe the doctors could up the dosage of his medication. Maybe there was some surgery, even electoconvulsive therapy or ETC, commonly known as shock treatment. She'd heard of ETC, and maybe that was cruel, but what was crueler than watching him suffer like this?

My parents didn't sleep. They made phone calls. They took his phone calls, always the same, Please, God, come get me. I'm better now. I really feel pretty good.

Two, three in the morning, a phone ringing and ringing. My father in a chair, face sagging, eyes red. My mother pacing.

Michael came home every other Sunday. Counselors recommended this—family time,” they called it, “connection-making.” My mother would go get him. She had to; he wouldn't get in the car with my father. He'd trundle out from behind the glass doors only if he saw my mother was alone. Michael had become certain that my father had something to do with the voices that muffled and confused the voice of God. My mother never even told my father about the lighter-flicking, the threats she tried to ignore, afraid that her husband would insist they completely abandon their son, which, despite everything, despite all this, was never an option for her.

I often went home on Sundays, the one night I ate a good meal. We all sat around somberly. The television droned through Redskins football games in the background. Throats gulped. My father's nose whistled. Michael rarely spoke. He ate loudly, and would have sent less hearty souls out of the room with all his slopping and belching, but we were used to it, could almost ignore it.

After dinner one evening, a few months into his stay at the adult community, both of my parents—not just my mother—took him back to his apartment.

It was dark. Michael sat in the back of the family van, edgy. He wouldn't sit down. He fidgeted. He lit a cigarette, put it out, lit another, started humming a church hymn, then singing it as loudly as possible. My mother would make sure to get Michael his“night”medication before the trip, a large dose of clonidine, a heavy sedative. This usually cut down on problems.

My father told him to sit down, to stop acting like this. My father's method was to act as if Michael were being ridiculous or childish. Grow up, he might say. Give me a break. For Christ's sake.
Unbelievable
.

Tonight nothing worked, no amount of talking, not even my mother's soft voice. He didn't want to go back, didn't want to live there.

While they were going forty-five on a secondary road, a back route from our home to Williamsburg, Michael opened the side door and jumped out into the darkness, tumbling into the grass, flipping and spinning and sliding down an embankment.

My father slammed on the brakes, screeching to a halt on the shoulder. In the side mirror, in the pinkish light of his brake lights thrown against the dark foliage of the woods, he saw the shadow of Michael take off running in a half-limp into the woods.

DEMONS

A state trooper found Michael early on the morning after he jumped from the van. He was walking along a road eight miles from where he had landed, hunched over, dragging his left leg along the gravel, disoriented, turning his head around to look at every car coming up behind him. He was cut, bruised badly down one leg, eyes blank, nearly in shock, mumbling. He couldn't remember his name. The trooper, making him stand by the car, shining his flashlight beam into his dead, black pupils, thought he was an overdose case, a kid strung out on PCP or crack or acid.

Michael knew that the trooper's badge was bugged, knew what the hissing whispers of the radio on his belt were saying about him. He knew the people in the cars slowing down to look at him were a part of all this. They were trying to trick him. They were trying to kill him. The trooper, my father, the nurses and doctors and grad-student counselors, everyone.

He put his hands on the hood of the car, spread his legs.

My father, after stopping the van the night before, under a bright moon-filled sky, had followed him into the woods on foot while my mother stayed put. But it was dark and my father was scared of Michael. Perhaps this was an ambush. Maybe Michael was waiting with a knife or a branch. My father hadn't forgotten the look in his eyes the day he wielded the softball bat, the way he would sit in a chair for hours, smiling, laughing, glaring at him, his own father. He had gone back to the van and driven to a pay phone, called the cops, then gone home and stayed up all night, waiting. He had made the right decision, he told himself. He'd done the right thing. Going into those woods after Michael would have been crazy.

Despite Michael's attempted escape, my parents took him back to assisted living in Williamsburg once he'd been released into their custody and taken to the hospital for a quick check-over (he had a few cuts and a sprained ankle; the ER doctors also thought he had overdosed on LSD because of his odd behavior).

My father refused to let him come home now, though he never confronted Michael with this. The cops at the small trooper station had been polite and seemed genuinely sorry for my parents. They sensed how troubled Michael was, and were somewhat surprised to see my parents come pick up a vagrant like him.

Michael wanted to go home, to live at home. But that was impossible. The cross-burning, the lighter-flicking, the threats, his endless rants followed by foul, dark moods, a dog so frightened of him she shook in corners when he entered a room, and, of course, the bat incident. He couldn't be trusted even to visit on Sundays anymore.

Michael realized, at assisted living, sitting in his filthy one-room apartment that people kept telling him to clean, watching Robert Tilton speak in tongues on a staticky old television, that the counselors were the pawns of my father, just like the doctors and nurses and probably that cop, too. My father made him come back here.

It was becoming clear. The medication was poison and meant to make his mind susceptible to infiltration by evil thoughts, to derail him from the straight track to God. Things were coming together. He was beginning to see that the face of God those many years ago, on the night I watched from the doorway, was a warning about the coming trials. It was written in Revelation 5:12, circled in Michael's Bible: “Saying with a loud voice, Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honor, and glory, and blessing.” Michael was the Lamb. He had been slain long ago to receive the power of God. He was owed something. He would take it if he had to.

Food and clothing and wadded-up tissues and toilet paper filled his room. He blew his nose, childishly, on chairs, kicked the television. He spit phlegmy gobs into the carpet, where they baked in the afternoon sun. The smell was that of slow death; it seeped out into the shared, gated courtyard; other tenants—the thirty-year-old with Down's syndrome and the dwarf and the manic-depressive who'd tried to kill himself seven times—all began to complain of the smell, of Michael, or “Jesus,” as they joked, ruining their community.

Below Michael's bed, in a dusty corner of the room, he made a tiny, intricately constructed shrine out of pills he should have been taking: yellow and blue and red, antipsychotics and antidepressants and sleeping pills, aliphatic phenothiazines and thioxanthines and benzodiazepines, all stacked up like a rainbow pyramid at which to worship.

Counselors respected the privacy of the tenants, and only used their keys to enter rooms in cases of emergency. They tried talking to Michael through the door now, but he either didn't hear them or, more likely, couldn't make sense of what they were saying, especially now that he was entirely without any medication. They had already called my parents several times, but my parents couldn't do any better than psychologists and shrinks, they figured, so they didn't come up. The pattern was clear: When professionals can't help, they throw up their hands and send the severely ill person home or out into the streets.

Through the door, the voices told Michael he had to clean his room, that he couldn't live here—they always insisted it was a gift and pleasure to live here—if he didn't start following the rules, if he didn't adhere to the strict regiments dictated by the community agreement he had signed. Rule number one was be kind and respectful; number two, clean yourself; number three, clean your living quarters.

Bang bang bang
. Michael.

As they knocked, he wasn't sure what he was hearing. Demons had been knocking at the door and window a lot lately and they were living in the pockets of his filthy pants, too, which he had just discovered the night before. He had stuffed the pants into the toilet to drown the demons, but he could still hear them whispering underwater. Sometimes he got on the floor to make sure the pills hadn't been taken by one of the invisible beings in the room with him. The flowers on the bathroom wallpaper were growing. Within the week they would have filled the room with unbreathable carbon dioxide.

Counselors liked to talk about “privacy.” It was right up there with “healing” and “responsibility” and “trust” and “coming to terms” and “hope.”But the smell was too much. Michael was too much. He constituted an emergency, a hygiene emergency, to be exact—rare, but they did happen among mentally ill populations, where a person, for instance, may see no reason to go to the bathroom anywhere but in his pants for days, may actually be
storing
the feces in his pants for one reason or another that is perfectly clear and sensible to him.

Using a key to gain access, two women swung open the door to Michael's apartment. The smell that met them literally almost knocked them off their feet. It was so bad they couldn't go in. It filled their sinuses, got stuck in the backs of their throats. They retreated quickly, leaving behind a janitor's cart full of cleaning materials outside his door. The other tenants stood around, trying to see in the door, all gaping mouths and puzzled looks.

In a place where mental impairment was the norm, Michael set new standards, forced them to make new rules.

He had put back on his underwear and a shirt. He was crying but he was laughing, too (much as he had done during other psychotic breaks), sitting on the bed, trying to catch his breath. The underwear was yellowish gray, his T-shirt had food stains on it. His gut hung out of the bottom of the shirt, over the waistband of the underwear. He glowed gray with his own sadness.

If they'd had any idea that he hadn't taken his medication for a week, they wouldn't have left all those cleaning fluids sitting there. However, they didn't usually deal with patients as risky and dangerous as Michael. He belonged in a locked ward with constant supervision. He needed to be secured for his own safety.

He stood up, looked at everyone, and said he'd clean the apartment. Tears were still rolling down his cheeks. The counselors, back now with a mop and their hands over their faces and mouths, said something about a reward, said something reassuring straight out of a manual.

Michael pulled the cart into the room, closed the door. He was going to cooperate; he shrugged, looked sheepish, which they took, wrongly, to mean he was sorry.

Thank you, they said. We'll check back shortly.

They tried to be positive. They had fangs in their mouths and microchips in their heads.

So maybe he began cleaning; maybe, just for a second, he'd pulled out of his psychotic state, pulled the pants out of the toilet, turned on the shower to rinse his waste down the drain. More likely, though, the demons were screaming, telling him what to do, what he had to do to get out of this mess.

Maybe God didn't love him. Maybe his parents and brothers didn't love him. He certainly had no friends. The people who mentioned his name did so shaking their heads. He was a lost kid, a lost cause. Crazy. But the demons were real, he knew that much. And God was real. He'd seen his face. He'd been chosen, but for what? Ever since the night of the Ozzy Osbourne concert, they'd been trying to trick him, to keep him from God, to break up the messages that were shot through space from the mouth of God into his brain by howling and hissing and laughing and accusing. His family was in on it. These counselors were in on it. The woman at the 7-Eleven where he bought cigarettes on special trips off the compound was in on it. Molly the dog was in on it. The President of the United States was surely in on it. CNN kept a camera aimed at his door. Robert Tilton could help, but now Michael didn't have any money to send him, and Robert would think that Michael had lost his faith.

And he had lost faith, and along with it the last traces of his will to live. On the bottle of Drano sitting on the bottom shelf of the cart, it said that it “cleared away,” that it “cleansed,” that it was “fast-acting.” Standing in the center of the filthy room, in a stench he didn't even notice, he drank from the bottle of Drano, slowly at first, the harsh alkaline taste sending a shock to his brain, the smell collecting in his ears and nose and chest, overpowering, like fire behind his face, dancing up behind his eyes. Then he drank more, and faster, until he fell over backwards into a bright blue oblivion that felt better than anything had in a long, long time.

CONFESSION

After this suicide attempt, Michael had to have his stomach pumped and was in the hospital for two days. In a way, though, a way in which you may need this level of insanity in your family to understand, this was something of a blessing in disguise. Michael lived. We all cried, we all lost our minds a little more. But within a week he was back to himself, tattered, broken-souled, head full of God, but on his medication again. And now, because of the incident, because he had, according to the law, attempted to “commit harm to himself or another,” he was committed to a local psychiatric home for adults, where he had to have a pass to leave, which meant he could not leave, period. It was called, somewhat euphemistically, a home for adults.

Finally he was in a place, we thought, where they could handle him. And this time he could stay, at least for a few months, maybe even a year. In the relative world of my family, Michael being locked up in a place with twenty-four-hour care and locked steel doors was a bit like winning the lottery.

For a long time I wished my brother had succeeded in killing himself, in snuffing out the last embers of his heart, in destroying all the misfiring synapses, or demons, in his mind. I didn't voice it, maybe not even to myself, because it seemed so hideously cruel and aberrant and frightening, but I felt it, this want, this secret wish for death and freedom, burning deep down inside me.

What does that mean—to wish someone dead whom a part of you still loves, whose memory haunts you like some illness in remission? I'm ashamed I felt that way now, but in the interest of honesty, of rendering something approximating Truth—as much as that is possible—that's how I felt then: disappointed he didn't finish the job. I'd like to say I was a different person from the one capable of these thoughts—I'd like to paint myself a stronger, more forgiving soul, to take more after my mother than my often angry father—but I wasn't.

I felt now, after this attempt, even more so than when I was a child, as if I were dreaming my life, dreaming this story of Michael as it unfolded. I felt as if my recent life were a bad movie, the memory of which I couldn't get out of my mind. My reality began to seem questionable, literally unbelievable.

Sometimes, when I'd be out in the world, out among people and friends, which was increasingly rare, I'd have to duck into a public rest room at a fast-food joint or a shopping mall, or go sit in my car because thoughts of Michael overtook me, though they didn't even seem like real thoughts, but rather thoughts based on, inspired by, movies or books or dreams—based on life, maybe, but not life itself.

In those days, in my early twenties, one minute I'd be fine, or what passed for fine then, and the next minute I'd be nauseous with anxiety and sadness, and I'd have this whole archive of filmlike memories and regrets to sift through before I could carry on to the next task of the day, which may have been simply turning off a light or putting a CD on or capping a pen.

I once, around this time, tried to break my hand by punching a brick wall,
just to feel some tangible, physical pain
(I quit after spraining my thumb and ripping the flesh off my knuckles). Years later, thinking of this act, the memory of which seemed suspect, I came across a book in a graduate-school library about mentally ill patients, usually women, for some reason, cutting themselves with razors as a way to test the bounds of their reality, to make sure they were actually
here,
that all this around them, this unfathomable world, was real.

I thought of going to a doctor, a shrink, but then I was afraid of someone officially telling me how messed up I was, because diagnosis, in my mind, would give how-messed-up-I-was a concrete name and a name would make it a fact, indisputable. My brother's insanity worsened once it had a name, once it was called schizophrenia—it then, it seemed to me, became something giant and solid and indisputable. I didn't want anyone giving the way I felt a name. My name for anxiety was “Michael.” My sadness was called “family.” The dangerous parts of living were called “love.”

Michael's suicide attempt occurred in January of 1992. Three months later, I was sitting at the bar at my parents' house, drinking a beer. I'd grown my hair into a wild mane of curls, because I didn't have the energy for anything as banal as a haircut, wore the same filthy Atlanta Braves baseball hat every day to assuage how unkempt I was.

It was Saturday, the Easter season, sun shining, grass green, its scent heavy on a breeze blowing through the house. My parents were out.

Over the years my constantly working parents, raise by raise, promotion by promotion, had made improvements to the house: landscaping, new furniture, wooden flowerpots hanging below windows. We were solidly middle class: my father's great dream, to not have to be ashamed of his life and abilities.

I think we were all sure now that Michael would succeed in killing himself soon. Despite the fact that a part of me had secretly wished he'd succeeded with the Drano, I was petrified of him trying it again. Both my father and I were approaching breakdown. I believe my father would have fallen over the edge without my mother. I watched him on weekends when I visited, black-eyed from insomnia, quiet.

I was thinking about all these things—my father's depression, how much I was drinking nowadays, what seemed my brother's impending suicide, how my mother was the only one holding us all together—when the phone rang.

I usually didn't answer their phone—didn't even answer my own anymore—but today I picked it up. And in that split second, as the phone left the receiver and made its way to my ear and mouth, everything changed yet again.

It was Sergeant M from the Hampton police department. He wanted to know my relationship with Michael.

I'm his brother, I said, wanting to hang up, wanting more than anything not to have to hear what he had to say.

He asked if my mother or father was home, or if there was any number where he could reach them immediately. He then told me that Michael was in police custody for the murder and rape of S on June 10, 1983, in our old neighborhood. He said to have my father call him, he said thank you, and then he hung up. It was all very polite, very businesslike. There was no more passion in his voice than in a phone solicitor's.

At first I just sat there, probably for a half hour or more, my thoughts as blank as they had ever been, the blood beating in my temples. It was like I turned off. I couldn't think. After a while I went into my parents' bathroom and vomited up beer and bile. After that, I wondered if I had dreamed the whole thing. There seemed a porous border between the actual and the possible, the real and the imagined. And I hoped this had taken place in the realm of the possible and the imagined, that perhaps I'd been sucked into Michael and God and Satan's void, an upside-down world where dreams were as solid as stone. I wanted, for one fleeting moment, to have hallucinated, to have broken through reality's delicate plane and into the world of the insane.

On the day before the call from Sergeant M, my brother had become convinced that the workers in the adult home were working for the devil. The medication was poison. The intercom read his thoughts and the room was bugged. The heater hissed threats. If he sat on the bed, demons would grab his ankles and pull him under, straight into hell. He had no belt, nothing sharp, no chemicals to drink. Twenty-four-hour surveillance.

But there was routine. And Michael learned it.

On Monday afternoons the well-behaved patients were allowed to go to the recreation area out back: an exercise course with pull-up bars and various other workout equipment, a basketball court, and benches, just a few hundred yards from an industrial park, less than half a mile from a residential area and strip malls. The benches filled with patients quickly because everyone was medicated, filled with light and heat, their thoughts just out of reach.

Michael was, I believe, taking his medication at this point because he was forced to. But medication only works to an extent for cases as severe as my brother's, the positive effects often diminishing over time. Then a new treatment procedure becomes necessary. And sometimes the treatments most effective to the mind become toxic to the body, poisoning the blood, swelling the kidneys and the bladder.

Michael wasn't really planning to escape, or perhaps “sneak away” is a better way of putting it. That, with taking the heavy sedatives, would have been far too sophisticated a mental undertaking. He had a head full of thoughts, memories, fantasies. They mixed together to form story-dreams that were, to him, real. He had crumbled under the world's many shifting meanings.

A part of how we survive has to do with our ability to accept the reality within which we live, and adhere to its basic rules of conduct. All religion and philosophy point us to this end or point out this end. This is the ultimate message of ideologies—religious, philosophic, scientific, consumer-based. Schizophrenia, however, destroys this innate human reasoning ability, our ability to literally
fit in,
and life thus becomes unacceptable on every level. You conclude, again and again, that you simply
do not matter
, so you begin to construct intricate mental worlds in which you not only matter but in which you are the epicenter. That is, of course, until some small chink of reality's light wrecks the delusion and those worlds crumble, as they always do, and others must be created. You need a signifier, as Dr. Smith would have put it, for why you don't matter, for the unbearable, seemingly sourceless oppression and persecution: the devil, your father, satellite messages, big government, the CIA, the president, the liberal media, minorities, lawyers, your own guilt, chemicals in cupcakes, the stock market, and so on.

During recreation hour on Monday April 13, 1992, Michael made his way over toward the main building of the home, waited until the two male psych nurses had turned around, and scaled a short fence that surrounded the building (this was not high-security in the least; most people here were addicts or depressives, no threat to anyone; even the schizophrenics besides Michael were less severe cases and for the most part docile, working toward living independently).

He landed on his feet, kept close to the building and out of sight of the workers. He walked away. It was easy. He strode through the city of Newport News, which borders Hampton, past old homes and convenience stores and Laundromats, under hissing power lines.

It was his fault, all of it, the whole world, the universe spinning endlessly away from God. My brother believed, today at least, that he had to pay for the world's sins with his own blood. That's what my father expected of him. He realized, though, that he shouldn't kill himself; that was a sin against God, a constant pull in his mind, but a mistake, impure, insuring certain damnation. He had to be killed by the state. He had to be made into a martyr for lost, murdered children by—and it made perfect, intricate sense to him—admitting he murdered one.

The death of S—he had seen the crime scene, studied its arrangements, the movements of the cops through the woods—was something preeminent in his mind, one of those thoughts that became confused with others, attached to others—things real, imagined, heard, read. To be a murderer, a child murderer, is to be defined, to have concrete meaning, to be the true godlike center of a world that does in fact make perfect, horrible sense. To be a murderer is to have a solid identity.

At a 7-Eleven, nine years after the murder and rape of S in our old neighborhood, Michael called 911 to confess his sin: He was the one. He was a rapist and murderer. Please come pick me up, he begged. He'd be waiting right here.