Angelhead (13 page)

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 they 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.

My father's illness more or less sent me over the edge. He was at home now, there was nothing more the doctors or a hospital could do, so I fled, which has always been my impulse, though I never completely succeed at doing this. At twenty-two, I decided I wanted to quit life. I had recently read
Walden,
and most of the curmudgeonly books of Edward Abbey, and the idea of living alone, away from everyone, away from these highways and shopping malls and suburban homes and kids and families, was alluring.

A friend from college was working for a guy outside of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, a couple of hours away, restoring a nineteenth-century plantation house. He asked, because of my brother and the whole fiasco, if I wanted a job for the fall and winter, wanted to get away from it all, live in a tent, get high and scrape old paint and sand boards and caulk windows. I would have said yes to anything. It gave me an excuse—work—to leave all my problems, to abandon my dying father and my brother, whose manic behavior seemed temporarily controlled, or almost controlled, by the new medications.

North Carolina was a haze. It was long days of work through cold, blue mornings and crisp, sunny afternoons, stoned, standing up on makeshift scaffolding made of aluminum ladders and bungee cords, pliant and unstable, holding a heavy sander to blast lead-based paint off a giant, old house, the owners of which were absent. By midmorning each day I was white with paint dust, as if dipped in flour, needing to change the filter in my respirator.

The work was hours disappearing, the sun sliding like a drop of water down the sky. I spent whole days performing the same motion: a sander back and forth, a paint scraper hacking away at what seemed like the same shutter, though by nightfall I'd have finished them all, without remembering exactly when one ended and the next began. I was thankful to have somehow missed a whole day.

At night, which fell like a stage curtain at five in those cold months, we slept in separate high-tech Arctic tents set up in the empty living room of the giant house, among boards, wiring, stacks of wallboard, tools, and rodent turds.

When my friend and I received a payment—a lump of cash, maybe a hundred bucks for my friend and me to split while the “boss” went to Greenville to stay with a girl he knew who kept breaking his heart—we'd go to a Mexican restaurant, drink margaritas and beer and laugh and make a commotion and I'd look at other families and feel like fucking crying. We'd blow all but gas money for the next week, and I didn't care. We'd wake up with hangovers like a ballpeen hammer to the forehead. Once we got tattoos. Another time we bought two ounces of pot to make sure we'd have weed to smoke (we decided it was better to be broke
with
pot than have money without it). We talked about Darwin and the Big Bang and God and the stranger fundamentalists in the news and how we both viewed organized Christianity as based upon the repression of pleasure. We spoke like the high, half-intelligent pseudo-bohemians we were.

I realize that it was here, on a plantation in the middle of endless North Carolina fields and farms, that I truly hit bottom, that the pressures of life began to seem too ridiculous to continue dealing with. It felt as if this was the beginning of the final act of some drama I could not control.

The most important thing for me in those months, after my brother left the state psychiatric lockup and my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer, was to be numb at all times, drunk or high and alone as much as possible. I thought of killing myself, pondered it in a philosophical way—weighed its pros and cons—but my aversion to violence, my astounding cowardice in the face of all physical pain, kept me from making any rash decisions. I was just so tired. I wanted to sleep and never wake up. I wanted to vanish and never be heard from again.

When the boss came back from the girl-who-broke-his-heart's house on Monday morning, February 22, 1993, he told me that my mother had called. Usually I called home on Sundays, collect from a pay phone outside a Rocky Mount Piggly Wiggly grocery, where I imagine the locals thought I was a hitchhiker, a vagrant. I had given my mother my boss's girlfriend's number, in case of emergency, which seemed, given the circumstances at home, always likely. My boss didn't know the details or the degree of damage, but there had been a fire. Everyone was okay. That was all he knew.

I borrowed five dollars for gas, got in my old station wagon, and left. My car shimmied along highways cutting through East Carolina fields that stretched out, golden and dead, to the hem of the sky. By the time I got home, late that morning, my brother Michael was in police custody.

INTENT

Michael ended this, his short, sad history of life out in the world, on a cloak-black morning during the coldest part of winter. Heating units humming through the neighborhood, windows locked and full of clear, cold sky.

Michael sat in a lawn chair in the garage, looking at the floor, waiting. He couldn't sleep, hadn't slept in days. In the last several weeks, while I was in North Carolina, he'd adjusted to his new dosage of psychotropic medications that had been prescribed to keep him calm after his release from the state psychiatric hospital. He'd grown back into his anguished self like a cloven worm. For months after his false admission, his thoughts had been smudged and indistinct, his bloated body heavy and almost immovable; hallucinations hung to the periphery.

Now, though, his world flowered again—intricate conspiracies of emotion, good and evil, God and Satan. They were trying to steal his soul. There was a bug in his head that had been planted while he was under observation at the hospital, which my father had told the guards to put there while he was asleep from all those fucking pills. He thought there might be poison in the air, released to make his skin itch and break out. He rocked, smoked, chanted, prayed. He was back, and even worse.

My father was getting weak now from the chemo. In the last few weeks, every day had seemed a possible disaster, my father cutting his eyes at Michael to check his location, to make sure he didn't sneak up behind him. He told my mother he couldn't take watching his back at home all day, said his nerves were going to kill him faster than the cancer. You shouldn't have to be frightened in your own house. He and Michael, he said, circled each other like angry dogs waiting for an opening at the neck.

He had dreams of Michael shoving a knife into his chest and twisting it while he napped, which he literally could not help now. Dreams of ropes looped around his neck, shotgun blasts up against his face, dreams of Michael eating his flesh like a wild animal.

My mother kept looking for psychiatric treatment, a hospital, a group home, a supervised halfway house, a new drug. She was diligent about helping him, helping us, to the end. Just when she'd find a place, get ready to sign the papers to send him off somewhere, she'd realize that even with insurance and his disability status, the cost would be several thousand a month, well beyond what they were capable of paying. She wrote letters to the state, letters to whoever would listen, wrote that in the last few years “Michael had become extremely dangerous to both himself and others,” trying to mimic the legal language that kept tripping her up.

My parents and younger brother slept each night with locked doors as Michael now took to stalking through halls and rooms at all hours, listening up against doors, playing the TV at full volume.

My mother would sleep only an hour or two a night, listening to his footsteps in the hallway, hearing him stop in front of their bedroom door, whispering something, some prayer, some curse, much of which, she said, didn't even sound like it was in English.

The night of February 22, Michael put fifteen tablespoons of instant coffee into a mason jar full of water and boiled it in the microwave. He added fifteen tablespoons of sugar and a splash of milk (always fifteen and always Folger's for this ritual). He stirred it with a metal spoon, clinking the glass nearly hard enough to break it, pacing, bowing his head, saying Amen, going back to stir again, harder. He was electric, charged. He was an angel and the more coffee he drank the more powerful he felt.

The green digits on the microwave read 300, which he read as G0D.

Michael had called my grandmother the day before to tell her he loved her and that he had a plan, something really big that would dramatically change the difficulties of the world, the course of history and suffering. Alarmed, but acting nonchalant, she asked what it was.

A secret, he said. He said that he was just waiting for them to tell him what to do, when to do it.

She tried to get him to talk. I love secrets, she said.

He told her she'd know when it happened; oh, she'd know, all right, and things would be a lot better for both of them. He said he'd like to come live with her maybe, so they could both stay up late and watch TV, watch David Letterman and do puzzles and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes, because Dad, he said, because
Dad
hates it when I turn up the TV at night. Then he hung up.

My grandmother called my mother at work. They had to get him out of the house now, she said. Michael was going to do something. He was talking nonsense about some mysterious they. Just call the police, she insisted. You need to call the police to let them know to watch out.

We can't, my mother said. He hasn't done anything and he won't leave. If we kick him out, he'll just come back.

Michael's plan was simple. He was going to burn our father alive before the demons completely overtook his soul. He believed our father would kill our mother by strangling her one night in bed; he had seen this in a vision given to him in a dream by a mysterious force named Utok the Angel, who didn't have a body but was instead pure energy and translucent, a wave of colorless movement speeding about in his room.

The same angel, in a different dream, told Michael that the bug in his head, a tiny metal transistor, had been planted by his father and was to keep Michael from interfering, to always know his whereabouts in the house. His father was the origin of all the voices. His father had made Michael a prisoner. Michael had finally been given full disclosure from the other world, the real world of dreams. All the tricks, all the lies, all the pain he had suffered and nightmares he had endured, were radiating from the center of his father's head. The whole cancer thing was an obvious ploy, more tricks, a way of getting Michael to drop his defenses in what had become a silent war.

Kill that motherfucker, Utok had said. It's the only way.

His father was flooding the world with demons, so no matter where Michael went, the forces of evil could squeeze through window frames and up through vents and along corridors, always shadowing him, always oppressing him. His father controlled the sewer systems and the radio towers and the satellite dishes in space. He controlled the demons and the demons controlled the world and that made our dying father the true nemesis of God, the Antichrist. That had been the message in the window when he was fourteen, only he hadn't known enough scripture then to read it correctly. The demons would always find Michael as long as his father was alive, acting sick, acting
innocent,
scooting around in his underwear with that ridiculous chemo tube stuck in his side.

Michael waited in the garage, smoking—he had to smoke in the garage now that his father was dying of lung cancer, further reason to hate him—until 4:30 a.m. He had set an alarm on a small digital clock that sat on a work-bench. Then he put out his cigarette and began to pray. The voices were becoming clear, but soon, if it all worked out, they would vanish forever with his father, vanish into oblivion with all evil. There would be light, a new world.
Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city. For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.

First he went upstairs, to my younger brother's room, which was locked. He lifted the smoke alarm off the small hook on the wall and put it in his coat pocket. On the stairs, coming down, he tried to be quiet, but some of the boards squeaked under his weight. My father heard him, but his stalking was normal. My father wheezed at night, couldn't sleep in certain positions because of the fluid that stayed in his lungs. He ignored the noise.

Michael went to the hall adjacent the living room. The smoke detector there wouldn't pop off the wall like the one upstairs, so he twisted the white cover until it broke off, then ripped the wires out, putting it all in his pocket. He took both detectors and threw one in the kitchen trash can and one in the bathroom trash can.

Now he went back to the garage. The good voices, the ones from God, were telling him what to do. The bad voices, those radiating from my dying father's head, were trying to trick him into stopping now while he still could, before anyone was hurt, before anyone was dead. They were saying bullshit things like his family loved him and that what was wrong was wrong with him. He
knew
he was right. The message was through an angel, from God himself. He wouldn't be tricked, not this time. He knew what he had to do, knew he had to kill his family to be free and to set them free. To murder was to free the soul from its cage, from pain and hopelessness, a noble, godly deed. In his mind he was doing my family a favor. They would never be lonely or afraid or worried again. They would never fight or yell or cry or sit quietly and gloomily in that somber house. They would know only love and God's grace and forgiveness. They would go to heaven, maybe even my father, too, if God found it in his heart to forgive him. They would lose their bodies and live forever.

Picking up the gas can, he headed back into the house. It was now ten after five. At the bottom of the stairs, in front of my parents' room, he poured a pool of gasoline on the floor. He held the can close to the ground to quiet the splash. He lit a wooden match on his zipper, tossed it into the pool of gasoline, and watched the rising breath of flames. Heat radiated in concentric circles past him. He waited a few seconds to make sure it closed off the doorway in fire, then headed back to the garage.

In the garage he dumped the rest of the gasoline around, splashing it on the floor and up over his shoes, over sporting equipment and gardening tools and coolers and fold-up lawn chairs. Putting his cigarettes in his pocket and making sure he had more matches, he got my mother's old bike, a blue three-speed from Sears with a baby seat. He opened the big garage door, lit another match on his zipper, and tossed it into the gas. The entire garage, because of the open door and the slight breeze, went up in an inferno instantly, lighting up the night a white-yellow.

Michael rode off into the dark morning, with his clock radio and Bible in the baby seat of the bike, his orange cigarette ember a single point of light along the road away from the house.

He felt better already. It had been the right thing to do, the only thing to do. He had left the gas can, with his fingerprints all over it, tipped over in the driveway, the burned matches on the hardwood floor, smoke detectors covered in more fingerprints in trashcans in the house, wires and batteries from the alarms in the pockets of his coat. He went to the end of our road, about a mile away, and sat at the edge of the black river, where wooden fishing boats were tied to pilings, floating on their own dark reflections. He prayed, pulling hard on his third, then his fourth cigarette. He waited for the blue souls of my family to go flying past, toward the safe, bright stars.