Angelhead (6 page)

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.

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.