Angelhead (5 page)

I love you, he said.

Get out.

A few weeks after this incident, a neighborhood kid, walking through the woods behind our house, found all three snakes dead. Michael had smashed their heads with a large rock on which he had written the word god with a marker pen.

The kid, named Bart, and something of a neighborhood tattletale and nuisance and an avid Eagle Scout, came to our door on a Saturday morning to tell us what he had found, knowing, after seeing Michael in our backyard, that the dead snakes were his.

My mother, still in her bathrobe, with a cup of coffee in her hand, told Bart to go home, that the snakes weren't ours—if there even were snakes out there—and that he didn't know what he was talking about. Bart was thirteen or so and was shocked. He couldn't believe my mother, a soft-spoken, even meek, woman, as generous as anyone I've ever known, the woman who gave the best candy for Halloween, the woman who every kid liked, would
shout
at him. What had gotten in to her? He was just trying to help.

My mother spent the rest of the day trying not to think about the dead snakes and the rock, about what all these clues might be leading to. When I brought up the snakes at dinner that night, one in a gloomy stream of gloomy dinners while Michael was around, my father told me to shut up and eat.

I hate this fucking family, I mumbled.

What?

It's a little late for me to be rambling.

Eat your dinner, smart guy.

JESUS

By the next year, 1986, after burning all of his books on the occult in a fit of satanic paranoia, Michael had begun to study the Bible constantly. It was his way of staving off the demons. A person passing on a street became a message he had to decipher; every face in the window of a school bus was engraved with profound, elusive meaning. He wasn't ill, not in his view, but acutely aware of a deeper world operating inside, or just below, this one.

Time became confused for Michael—it slipped away, sped up, didn't move. Sometimes he'd get stuck inside a minute, get panicky and cry, knowing he might never get out, that time could be solid, tangible; but then he'd blink his eyes and days, weeks, even months had vanished.

He knew that Jesus' forty days in the wilderness were really forty seconds and forty years and forty centuries, too, vision upon vision, each crumbling into the next. What was time for those who believed and would live forever? What was time when life was eternal?

His family existed, for him, in an altered reality, and when we intruded upon his reality, this carefully blown crystal of shifting ideas, there was some degree of violence—always verbal, often physical.

Michael felt he had been sentenced like Jesus, tested while upon this earth by immense cruelties. He was being tested like Job, by the Heavenly Father and he was failing every test. He had evil in him, soul-deep, and he wanted to purge it. He didn't want to hurt people, but he couldn't help it, couldn't control his anger, and the only way to feel any better when he was angry was to hurt someone. And he didn't want his father, his earthly father, to hate him so much. And his brothers—he knew his brothers hated him too. He made his room, blue carpet and rock posters, incense and the purple hue of a black light, a locked temple, as Saint Mark would have called it, a place designed for prayer.

Nights, I would often stand at his door, ear to the wood, and listen to his mumbling, his weeping, his laughing. Downstairs I could hear my mother in the kitchen clanking dishes around, my father on the couch in front of the TV. We never talked about Michael, partly because his insane behavior was “normal” to us, partly because it was too much to deal with to put our feelings into words and exchange them. What was there to say? Or rather, there was everything to say, and with that in front of you language becomes daunting, a burden, a pack of lies and false feelings, a trap you set for yourself, sentence by sentence. My father wanted to watch TV, not talk about Michael. My mother wanted to be busy, doing something, not thinking all the time. I sat around drawing pictures, inventing places not at all like this one.

The year before, Michael had quit school with two months left to go in the year, so in 1986 he was repeating his senior year. And until 1986—despite quitting school, despite all the signs—Michael managed to function without alarming people (other than his family). What I mean is, he was troubled, yes, drug-addicted, sure, violent and depressed, absolutely, but no one could imagine how far this might go, how badly his story might turn out.

The storm was all behind his face, locked down in his skull. He was “crazy,” or whatever you want to call it, but he was also very cognizant of others' perception of him. Paranoid schizophrenics, I read years later, sitting in Alderman Library at the University of Virginia while I was a graduate student, are often acutely aware of how others perceive them, delusional as that awareness might be, which makes diagnosis all the more difficult because they are often not honest in describing their thoughts to doctors, whom they may perceive as another cog in the massive conspiracy against them. In other words, schizophrenics are often easily smart enough to tell people what they want to hear. In fact, what we think of as intelligence—the complex processing of information—is only moderately affected by the disease.

Michael saved his strangest behaviors for home. For most of the year he went to school, sat quietly in the backs of classrooms, and went unnoticed in the crowds of students. I noticed him, of course—I thought of him, our life, what the things he did meant, why my family, including myself, seemed to act as if none of this were real—all the time. But in school I tried to pretend that he wasn't my brother, that I didn't even know him.

I attended a high school, like most public high schools, full of troubled kids: heads, loners, future dropouts. It was impossible to tell who would go off, who would go crazy, who would grow out of it. The kid selling dope now could become a corporate lawyer, a missionary, a cop, or a writer within the decade. The one in the chess club, or the Baptist Choir, might waltz in with a shotgun slung over his hip (that same year, a football player at a neighboring high school went to school with his father's .30/30 hunting rifle and shot his girlfriend and himself in the entranceway).

One of my best friends, Sammy, a kid I loved and still have dreams about, was shot in the face and killed at the age of thirteen by a girl whose younger sister he was making out with, or so the story went. (His father, at the wake, squeezed my hand and prayed into my face until I cried and said “please.”) The girl who shot him called herself  “Purple Haze.” She used her father's pistol, which he kept loaded in a drawer by his bed. She was charged with involuntary manslaughter and given probation. Ray, a kid no one talked to, whose girlfriend of four months had recently broken up with him, hanged himself in a tool shed while his father sat in the house twenty feet away watching TV. Lawrence got drunk and flipped his car onto his best friend, Steve, who had been leaning out the window, throwing beer cans, when the car failed to make the turn. I didn't go to the funeral because I had the flu. It was a closed casket and his mother lost her mind and cursed God in front of the minister and the large crowd. By thirteen I was obsessed with death and gloom, the seeming randomness of the world.

My brother, in this context, wasn't as alarming as he might have been. He was odd, depressed, irritable, and volatile, but who wasn't?

But then something snapped inside his head. That seems the only way to describe it: a snap, a breaking, a coming undone. He stopped caring about the gaze of others; it was as if he had lost the ability for pretense, and it was as sudden as a gunshot.

In the spring of 1986 he stopped trying to mask his delusions, or he suddenly became incapable of doing so, and now he didn't try to control himself in public. He'd just turned twenty and, like my father had done, was struggling to finish high school. He started carrying his Bible everywhere he went, one in which he had scribbled notes in every margin.

Ours was a small Southern town—white colonial homes, churches. Community mattered. Everyone was friendly, even if only for appearances' sake. My mother and father knew the principal, the guidance counselor. These people began to feel sorry for them, concerned, in that administrative way, about Michael's tenuous—and dwindling—ability to function in the world. They would call my parents for conferences. My parents would often cancel, make up some excuse, their shame over their son having become nearly crippling. My own embarrassment over my brother's odd religion was at first debilitating, then simply numbing.

Michael wanted to know the Savior, to memorize the Word. He would actually use this language—Savior, Word, Redemption. God was his only chance. Knowing the Bible was his only way to save himself from what he felt—the anxiety, the voices, the insomnia, his head full of thoughts not even his.

He became the talk of the town, the bad boy who'd lost his mind, because of the Bible toting and random quoting of scripture. He would stop kids on the street, in the school parking lot, in hallways to remind them of their sins and quote scripture. He was a kind of village idiot, our small, all-white, suburban school's one truly great spectacle.

Michael's decline, both mentally and physically, was astonishingly fast. He had gone from being a decent student and an amazing athlete to failing everything in the space of four years; had gone from being a black belt in karate—lithe, aggressive, handsome—to being a disheveled, Bible-toting one-man show in less than one year. The rapidity of his decline once he hit twenty—particularly his physical decline—caught us all off guard. His poor marks in school had nothing to do with aptitude, but rather with his shifting of focus. He had a mission in life and little time to pursue other things, even if people insisted these things—school, a job, friends—were important.

His body softened dramatically, his hygiene could produce a gag reflex. Where he had once been inordinately handsome, he now had smears of blackheads across his nose, a double chin, greasy hair. All of this happened so rapidly that when I remember it I think I must be wrong, the physical deterioration must have taken two or three or even five years. But it didn't. It all happened in only several months.

He started smoking three packs of Camels a day, sometimes rocked back and forth uncontrollably in the school smoking section during lunch, looking up through his long bangs at the other dopers to tell them that Jesus loved them, loved us all, that none of us, if we would only believe, would ever, ever die. Eternity was real, he would say, as kids stubbed out their cigarettes and headed inside, laughing. By the end of the year he had the smoking section to himself.

At home he locked himself in his room, smoked, watched evangelical preachers, Robert Tilton mostly, and
The 700 Club
until late in the night, lighting one Camel off another, the sounds of praise, the screams of rapture, brightening his face in blue light, leaking under his door.

His teeth and fingers turned yellow from tobacco tar. He listened to Led Zeppelin, somehow finding a Christian message in it.

He never slept—or if he did, it was maybe an hour or two at a time. He drank huge amounts of Folger's (
only
Folger's) instant coffee from a giant thermos.

Sometimes he'd scream in the middle of the night. None of us dared check on him.

We lived
around
him, not
with
him. He would go days without speaking to any of us. Get home from school, disappear over to Bill's, get high on whatever was available, come home, whispering prayers, talking to himself, the voices and his thoughts his only company. He became the most dogmatically Christian drug addict ever, memorizing—
memorizing
—large parts of both the Old and New Testaments. Everything he said—which was very little—came laced with biblical quotes.

When everyone was in bed, he lurked about the house, hung out in the garage, sitting in a lawn chair, smoking, talking to himself, puzzling over his strange and cruel distance from God.

At two, three in the morning, he cooked, rattled pots and pans. He ate fried bologna, endless cheese slices, bowl after bowl of soggy cereal, instant grits, Wonder Bread, Vienna sausages, beef jerky. He stopped lifting weights and working out. He became as compulsive about eating as he was about smoking or drinking coffee or quoting scripture. My parents told him to go to bed; he told them to fuck off; they went back to bed because they had to get up for work, to start another one of their regimented days. They didn't have time for this. They had busy lives. They couldn't devote all their time to him.

Michael gained thirty pounds in a matter of months. He wouldn't shower unless my father insisted, often with the threat of not giving him any money.

No one knew what was wrong with him. The counselors at school were predictably baffled. He refused to go to psychologists or psychiatrists, and my father subscribed to the shake-it-off, snap-out-of-it, pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps school of manliness, so he wasn't in any rush to take him to doctors, even though he'd watched his own mother temporarily lose her mind years earlier. We all assumed—me, my parents, teachers—that it was another loss, albeit a graphic and uniquely strange loss, to the perils of teen drug abuse.

One day the world turned white for Michael. Each object—door, floor, table, human—was wrung dry of all its meaning and he was left floating in a stark nothingness. It was his second severe psychotic break that I witnessed, and it happened during one of the last days of school. He was getting ready to graduate with almost straight Cs and Ds (a gift from his teachers at the insistence of the administration).

It was after lunch, your basic midweek school day—lockers slamming, bits of conversation and gossip drifting through hallways. Michael had just left his remedial math class, where he had realized that the teachings of Jesus were encoded in numbers. He knew His spirit was everywhere, in everything, but he had never considered numbers, never considered looking at the small things, at ideas. It was all bits and pieces, fragments, and no one had told him about the importance of numbers. It was everywhere in the Bible. How could he have missed it? He began to feel a horrible sadness at the fact that he didn't understand math, had never paid attention to it, and now, today, he realized that Jesus Christ, our Savior, our coming Lord, was also contained in numbers and theorems.

Michael floated through the halls in a state of confusion. Faces hovered past like images of faces hovering past, flat and inhuman. The yellow lockers stretched toward the single window at the end of the hall that was now filled with concrete-colored sky.

And then there he was: Jesus Christ, the real guy, the giver of life, the forgiver of sins, the breaker of bread and maker of wine, standing at the end of the hall, suffused in white light, as if in a picture, his hands raised and bloody, a deep wound wet and glistening in his side, a crown of thorns on his head. It was the Christ we've all seen in paintings, except for two modern affectations: a pair of black Levi's 501 jeans and black combat boots.

Michael began speaking in tongues.

Ssshhhaaaaammmmmaaaaaaallaaaaabok.

Kids turned, looked, laughed.

He bumped into the flat, lifeless people—
hey, hey
—walking, then running down the hall.