Angelhead (4 page)

In the car, my father told Michael he was never coming back here, never hanging out with those guys again if he expected to live at home.

Do you hear me?

Michael, filthy now after going a few days without a shower, looked out the window, out at the blurred world. Black clouds sailed over a dying sunset and he could feel a storm coming. When he closed his eyes, he could hear the dead boy whining, could see the tears streaming down his face as he tried to scream.

The cops questioned more than two hundred people around those neighborhoods, black and white. They went door to door. They talked to all of my brother's friends. They didn't talk to Michael because he was living in a new town now and somehow his name never came up.

All the kids—all my brother's friends—said it was the vet on top of the school. They decided to murder him—
to kill the nigger
—but he was already gone: vanished without a trace. Michael, however, knew the vet didn't do it. God, impersonating a tree in the woods, told him so.

SECRETS

In our new city, lawns were cut, cars washed. Piano lessons were given, the school band practiced on the football field, baseball season played toward the series championships. People die every day. S was just another dead kid. He barely made it through a news cycle.

Michael slowly slipped further and further away, deeper and deeper into the early stages of madness. He began spending more time alone with the snakes he collected. He kept them as pets and built elaborate aquarium habitats for them in his room. (He had gone through a tarantula phase, too, but something had malfunctioned with the halogen light in his aquarium and fried both of his spiders into hairy clenched fists. Thank God he didn't replace them.)

He liked the snakes' smooth, perfectly patterned skin, their liquid movements, the soft, cautious flicker of the tongue. He liked the way snakes
sensed
the dangers of the world, the dangers he himself had begun to sense. He liked, also, that people were frightened of snakes, and sometimes, even though he knew it was wrong, he savored the look of fear on a person's face when confronted by them.

He would watch the snakes eat large mice for hours with his lights down low. As the shiny skin bulged around the snake's throat, the mouse stuck momentarily, wriggling, still alive, a life absorbing another—a fact of nature, he liked to say, smiling—he wondered what that felt like, absorbing another's life, taking its spirit. He believed he could absorb life-forms through his skin.

At night, when he was seventeen, he dreamed the snakes spoke to him in their secret language, a language of pure sense, a language without words.

He felt confused these days, once he knew he was outside of his dreams. People—teachers, my mother, his last few remaining friends—would talk to him but then their words would get lost before they reached his mind; it was as if the words would sometimes get caught up in the air, as if the air were heavy, almost solid, and the words, like hard objects, fell to the ground before they reached him. Other times, when the words did reach him, each word was wearing a disguise, each word actually contained the meanings of many words and how was he to know, how the fuck was he to know, if he could trust the legitimacy, the
honesty,
of this word?

But the snakes made sense. Sometimes he was afraid to leave his room and the snakes because an engulfing light was probably in the hall waiting for him. It might be the light of God, sure, but if it wasn't—then what?

And there were the times when he wanted to know something, study it, but then he couldn't, for the life of him, remember what it was. It—this wordless feeling he associated with his earlier vision of God in our window—vanished when he reached out his hand. The pain from this was almost physical. The world was a trick, a hall of mirrors, and he couldn't tell whether he was even himself sometimes or whether he was simply
a reflection
of himself, one of those reflections that had been sent out in quadruplicate from the center, the actual Michael, which he may not have ever been. Sometimes he cried and he couldn't remember why he'd started.

He felt, at other times, as if he were dead. He wanted to rise again but couldn't unravel the riddle of resurrection, of how to save yourself. He started checking out books on the occult from the local library, smuggling them into the house under his jacket.

He seemed to think that the snakes were a key to unlocking the mystery of this crisis of meaning. They comforted, kept beautiful secrets he could almost decipher when his eyes were closed. He read that snakes were a symbolic representation of sin, death, evil, temptation, sex.

Whenever I encountered him, he would stare at me until I walked out of a room, my heart pounding, a permanent frown on his face. Michael kept to himself—hunched, lonely, looking over his shoulder always. I thought of him as dangerous, someone to lock the door against.

The condition known as schizophrenia was named by the German psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1911. The term denotes a splitting of the various parts of the thought process. It does not make a person evil, or even necessarily dangerous. Some theories posit that schizophrenia does not actually change underlying personality traits: once affected, people who worry will continue to worry, people with a good sense of humor will continue to have one, a laid-back person will continue to be so, and so forth.

Schizophrenics can become dangerous, though, through lack of care, which leads them into desperation, and most especially through a lack of understanding and sympathy, which was, obviously and accidentally, the case in my home.

Evil is a tougher question, but in my brother's case I believe it was his nature. When he wasn't sad or hurt or lonely, Michael was the meanest person I have ever known. His petty ruthlessness when we were boys seemed almost limitless.

Once, when I was ten or eleven and Michael was fourteen or fifteen, a neighborhood bully a few years older than me smashed me over the head with a metal-bottomed motorcycle seat. It knocked me almost unconscious. When I regained my senses, Michael had blackened both of the bully's eyes, burst his nose into a torrent of bright red blood, and made him eat dog shit. I started crying. I felt sick from all the blood on the concrete, the lump on my head, and I told my brother to stop, to not make him eat that, that it was okay and I was fine and it had been an accident, just a dumb accident. He told me to shut the fuck up or I would eat the dog shit, too. He handed me a rock and made the kid get on his knees with his hands behind his head and his face presented to me. I made a bloody divot in his forehead the size of a dime. We left him lying in his front yard. Michael told me that if I looked over my shoulder at him I was dead.

After reading about snakes, he wondered if they were trying to trick him. Were they really connected to the one true God, or were they merely false messengers, like the one in Genesis? He couldn't know for sure. He was still held in by his mortality. He was trying, through dreams and prayer, to devise a way to step fully outside of this realm, the realm of the body, into the purely spiritual. He knew the world would be laid waste soon, and a recommunion with God seemed necessary yet impossible and frustrating.

He knew that if he told anyone in the waking world about his dreams, about the language of snakes—and sometimes he wanted to tell my mother, because he loved my mother, though he made her life nearly unbearable for twenty-six years—they'd think he was crazy, think his mind was full of cracks and fissures.

There were three snakes: a king snake, black with white stripes; a rat snake, brown, mottled, big-headed, small-eyed; and a black snake he'd found in the copse behind our home, wet-looking, as dark as coal. He would often sit in a lawn chair in the backyard, with a snake in each hand, coiled up around each arm. He would kiss them on the thin mouth, talk to them in whispers, while I stared out the back window.

My parents didn't like the snakes, of course, but thought a hobby, even this hobby, was good for Michael. They imagined him, fueled by a new interest in science, biology, zoology, straightening up. They didn't realize then that what the snakes represented to him was metaphysics, the hidden meaning of good and evil through a better understanding of the occult. To them, anything, even large live snakes in the house, was better than drugs, dark moods, violent impulses, family fights. Not that any of these things subsided. But they hoped.

Each night during that year, the year of the murder, he locked himself away in his room, listened to Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, letting the snakes, all three, crawl over his nude body, slither around his face and neck, legs and groin. Their cool, rubbery touch gave him strength, spiritual strength, to unravel his dreams, but still it was never quite enough. Nothing was enough, and it made him angry. There was something to
know,
some vast plain of knowledge just out of reach. The frustration of not knowing made his mood swings monstrous, every second in his presence volatile.

We avoided him; he avoided us. The house became more and more somber. There were moments of happiness, few and far between, and always when Michael was elsewhere and it was just my mother, my father, Ron, and me, but home life as Michael got sicker and more paranoid was dusty and melancholic and claustrophobic.

It was when I went to friends' homes, sat around their dinner tables talking about school, about football, about girls and current events and movies, even telling jokes, that I realized how strange my home life was.

Occasionally, when friends of mine came over, we'd spend afternoons looking out the window at Michael with snakes coiled around him in the backyard. I once charged a dollar each for a group of five boys to look out my window at my brother talking to his snakes.

Man, one said, I can't believe they haven't locked his ass
up
.

PENANCE

Michael was a black belt in karate. Despite the voices and the depression and the anger, he'd been studying martial arts twice a week at a local dojo for three years, since he was fifteen, and he excelled.

He had always been a great athlete; built like a big gymnast, he had, in the last few years, become fanatical about the martial arts and lifting weights in the same way he had become fanatical about God, reading the Bible, studying the occult, and trying to listen to the messages of the snakes.

His athletic ability was amazing: he could jump up, kick the hanging light fixture in our kitchen, a good seven feet high, softly enough so that it didn't even move, snapping his leg back at the last second; he could drop, instantly, into a split; he could spin in the air, wheeling one hard, weaponlike foot around in a flesh-colored blur.

Michael and a neighbor, Bill, who took karate with Michael on Wednesday nights and was one of his last remaining friends, had discovered the potent combination of speed and working out. They were getting to be—according to me, a kid who also dabbled in speed—speed freaks. They took pills with absurd names: blue torpedoes, white crosses, black beauties, sometimes got their hands on a line or two of crystal meth.

Michael loved speed because it amped his nerves, which he thought was good for both karate workouts and listening for God. Like a ninja, he could hear the sneezes of rodents, the steps of a grasshopper; he could hear angels in trees and raindrops bubbling in the ripped-apart clouds above. If he took enough, he could hear his spine vibrate like a struck triangle, sending a steady harmony down to those weaponlike feet.

We were latchkey delinquents, my brother and I, our parents doing all they could to keep ahead of their debt. The house was almost always empty of adults. But the only real danger my brother and I faced in our suburb, a place with virtually no serious crime, was ourselves. My younger brother spent his afternoons at an overpriced local day-care center for kids aged five to twelve.

In our garage, after school, Michael and Bill sometimes whaled on a punching bag chained to a wooden ceiling beam. They would get revved up on pills, fling sweat all over the place, shout, the chain ringing and clinking.

Bill was a brown belt, but lanky, weak, and less coordinated than Michael. My brother, on the other hand, looked like some Caucasian version of Bruce Lee, his hero, all sinewy muscles, striations, full of long, complicated silences. Michael was smart enough to keep his grander delusions to himself, to guard his secret life from his friends and family, and this, certainly, had a lot to do with how quiet he became.

One day, a year or so after the murder of S, I was in my room sketching, my artistic outlet back then. I was coming off a lunchtime high—a good time to sketch. My brother was out cutting the grass, a dictate from my father—it had to be cut by the time he got home.

Most days I went to a guy named Kirk's house, who was fifteen but looked thirty, whose college-age brother sold cocaine and had a propensity for high-speed, somehow survivable, car crashes. Years later, Kirk lost everything and then went into rehab and found God. He got a girl pregnant after that and married her to do the right thing without considering how much he secretly hated her. But back then he had these parties every day after school because his parents traveled for weeks at a time on business—actually, there was just kind of an ongoing party at Kirk's house, a kind of puking, fucking, teenage bacchanal. I shot pool and drank cheap beer and smoked weak pot. You could hear kids creaking the beds upstairs sometimes, usually the football players and their girlfriends. Evidently there were some layovers, some business deals gone bad, and now Kirk's dad was home for the week and I didn't have anything to do but go home and sketch myself down from a high.

So I was at home, upstairs, nothing to smoke, nothing to drink, nothing to do: door closed, a breeze blowing the curtains in, the smell of freshly mown grass, the voices of kids shouting in the distance. The lawnmower engine sputtered, stopped. I was lost in what I was working on. So it took a few seconds, or maybe minutes, for me to notice the silence, look up.

When I looked up, Michael and Bill were standing over me, Bill grinning, Michael blank-faced, empty-eyed. I tried to look nonchalant, like I was ready to ignore them. I said, in a half-whisper, What's up? I felt my heart beat in my throat and temples.

What the fuck are you
drawing
? said Bill over my left shoulder (usually I drew surreal, menacing-looking landscapes).

Go cut the grass, Michael said, deadpan. Me and Bill got stuff to do.

I said, calmly, it was his turn this week, feeling tired and distant from the pot I'd smoked earlier.

They wanted me to answer this way. It was in their smiles. This wasn't about grass-cutting. It was about karate. They took an arm each, then floated down the stairs, out the sliding patio door, into the yard—tall green grass, high wood fence, trees, long fat shadows.

Start the lawnmower.

Fuck you.

Bill laughed, said,
Oooh myyy God.

Michael clenched his fists, as if this were the cue to begin, assumed his karate stance. Start the mower, motherfucker, or I'm going to kill you.

Fuck you, I said. I smelled fresh-cut grass. The sun was burning hot, the heat dry. Everything was green. I tried to smile, to break the tension.

The first kick stunned me, landing in the center of my chest, my ribs giving under it.

Start the mower. Or I will
kill
you.

I was on the ground now, on my hands and knees, and I couldn't breathe. I got up, world hazy at the edges, and started walking toward the house. I was afraid to fight, especially my brother, who towered over me with his strength like a God at that time. The house wobbled, tilted, leaned, moved away.

Next came a swing-around foot sweep. Right out of
Enter the Dragon,
a movie my brother had seen at least thirty times. I looked up at the white-blue sky, the light purple scars of cloud. Grass clippings stuck to my back and arms. I heard bugs as if they were tunneling in my ears.

I got up, leaned over, waited for my breath, which didn't come. I turned bluish, then green. My brother kicked me softly in the ass, pushed me forward with his heel.

Start the mower. I'm
serious
.

I walked over to the mower. Hot gas fumes blurred the grass ahead of it. Putting my foot on the metal base, I pushed it a few feet forward.

Bill was ecstatic, as happy as I ever saw him, laughing and leaning over and slapping his knee. He flashed his speed-freak tooth-grinding smile.

Practice for the test tonight, he said. Sidekick, stance, frontkick, stance, punch, block, roundhouse.

I saw it coming, saw all that energy coming in slow motion—the tense curve of Michael's ankle, the point of his toe. I didn't even put up my arms. Didn't flinch, duck, or even close my eyes.

Once I was on the ground, everything went still. Things just stopped. I couldn't hear anything. I felt no pain or shame. I was beyond all that, or suffused in it to the extent that it no longer registered as unique. I was a coward, sure, but a hardened one, one who could take a good share of abuse before cracking, which, in my case, usually meant pleading for some kind of amnesty. I thought, for an instant, because I had hit my head so hard on the ground, that I was going to die—that Michael had actually done it this time—right here, alone in my suburban backyard.

Up above me, against a big background of sky, Michael was shirtless, shoeless, wearing only shiny blue Adidas sweatpants with three white stripes down each leg. He crouched, hiking up his pants at the thighs to assure flexibility in the next kick.

Fake the front and roundhouse, said Bill, fake the front and roundhouse.

I got up slowly, not even thinking, not even trying to be defiant, and spit one of those high-viscosity cottonmouth pot lugies right in the middle of my brother's sweaty, muscled chest. Not a cowardly act, and honestly I don't know where it came from.

Michael wiped it off quickly, flung it, stringy, from his fingers. He faked front, roundhoused. I'd seen the move before—was a Bruce Lee fan myself—knew what was coming. I ducked. He missed, landed hard on his back, and immediately jumped up.

Oooh myyy God,
said Bill, laughing.

Michael had me on the ground in seconds. He hocked up a good one, spit, and let it hang, thick and lumpy, over my face. I shook my head back and forth, clenched my lips.

Open your fucking mouth, pussy, Bill said. Open it! He's going to spit in your fucking mouth, you motherfucking cocksucking pussy motherfucker.

You fucker, I screamed, but with my mouth half-closed so he wouldn't spit in it.
Moo fuffer.

Just as it landed hot and sticky on my face, our neighbor, Mr. Connelly, the guy who had accidentally backed his truck over our dog the year before, came into the yard with a rake.

Leave him alone, he yelled. Michael, let him up. Greg, you want to come over to my house until your mom gets home? Come on. Stay over here for a while, he said, holding the rake, his face red, his giant belly hanging over his belt and jeans.

I wiped my face on my hand, my hand on my jeans. I thought Mr. Connelly was probably glad that I got a good beating. He knew I was a little hellion, mixed up in all kinds of unlawful stuff. I used to grind up his curb with my skateboard. He thought I deserved it, and I probably, for something, did.

My nose bled. Drops of blood spotted the ground in front of me.

No, I managed finally, and I was crying and pissed that I'd let my brother make me cry. I was also pissed at old man Connelly because I hadn't started crying until he'd asked me if I was okay.

I'm fine, I stammered. I'm going inside.

Old man Connelly stood watch, rake in hand, from his yard. Michael started the lawnmower to finish the grass. Bill cruised, blowing me a kiss on his way out of the yard, laughing, rubbing his eyes to mimic crying, flipping me off.

Maybe ten minutes later, as I was looking out the kitchen window after cleaning the blood off my nose and upper lip, tears streaming down my face now that I was alone, I noticed the mower idling by itself in the middle of the yard.

I leaned forward, craned my neck, to see where Michael was, if he was coming inside. What I saw sent a jolt through me. I thought of it later as the most tangible evidence, since the shouting about seeing God four years earlier, of my brother's loosening grasp on the world.

Michael was out by a tree in the corner of the yard. He'd found the sharp stump of a broken-off branch at face level and he was
talking
to it, arguing with the tree or himself, gesticulating as if giving a grand speech, a sermon. He then reared his head back and slammed his forehead onto the branch.

He backed up, blood pouring down his face. I backed away from the window—
what
—went back to the window, thinking my brother was going to kill himself.

He slammed his face on the sharp branch again.

I sat down, dizzy.

Within a few minutes Michael came in the back door, theatrical, absurd. Oh man, he said, blood all down his face. Oh God!

I didn't look up.

Rock flew up and hit me in the head, he said, trying to gauge my expression, my body language. I got what I deserved, you know. I got what I deserved. Right?

I looked at him now, at his forehead. It was a big open gash, fairly serious, a mouth on the wrong part of his face. All the anger seeped out of me. I put ice in a towel and handed it to him. We were standing alone in the kitchen, brothers after school, a slice of twisted Americana.

Blood dripped from the towel onto the kitchen floor, falling in red oblongs, splatting wetly. He needed several stitches, although later he would refuse to go to the hospital, say that he was fine, even though the wound would ooze through the night, making pink circles on his pillows.

He saw the whole thing, he told me.
He
sees everything.

I hoped he meant Bill or Mr. Connelly, but I knew he didn't.

His snakes got loose that night. It must have been ten or eleven, maybe midnight. Earlier, just before my father got home, Michael had made a big deal about the incident on the lawn, said he was sorry, that he wasn't really thinking about killing me, acted nicer than he had in months, repeatedly apologizing. Then everyone arrived home—mother, father, my younger brother.

I didn't mention the beating, the bloody nose. After several beatings, this one simply being emblematic, I knew telling was the worst thing, a way of insuring that the next one would be worse. In this way my brother and I became closer in our secrecy, and further from our parents than we already were. My father, if he found out Michael had hit me, would kick Michael out of the house for a few nights and then sulk around feeling bad about it and this, in turn, would make Michael, when he returned, want to kill me all over again, which would make my father kick my brother out, and so on.

Michael and I stuck to the flying-rock story about his wound. I was petrified—of my father kicking Michael out, of Michael coming back and beating me, of Michael killing himself, of the life we were all stuck in. I lived with an almost constant adrenaline flow when I was at home.

We all looked around for the snakes, under beds, behind sofas; in the garage, in tool cabinets, behind an old freezer; my father lifted up heating-duct grates. Nothing.

The next morning I opened up my underwear drawer to three writhing snakes. I jumped back, momentarily panicked.

I called Michael an asshole, told him to take them away. My father, dressed for work, stood in the doorway, not wanting to be bothered by our fighting. All right, you guys, my father said, I'm getting really sick of this.

When my father left, Michael leaned over me, whispered in my ear: It's good to have snakes in your room when you sleep. They absorb your pain while you dream.

I could smell his rotten smoke breath. Get out, I said.