Circling the Drain (3 page)

9.

Once we lived in a small northeastern university town where both our parents were professors of religion, and atheists. Here is my theory: two people who were fascinated by belief so much that they could not believe with their hearts, placed the object of their fascination in a glass case—the glass case of the academy, here—where they could study it carefully without touching it. Without it touching them. But then where did that passion go? The lust of initial belief? It didn't wither and drop off like the dead limb of a tree. It didn't harden and become scaly. I cannot believe something so warm solidified like that. Rather, I think it flew out into another place. All that belief tucked itself somewhere within reach of the believer denying herself, so that she might stumble on it. In its new form, like a certain lover, the belief waited patiently to be discovered.

But all things affect each other. Everything changes. These laws of the world twist us in their palm. My parents' passionate beliefs thundered through them and into the embryo of my brother, waiting to blossom. The belief, which drew them close to begin with, loved my parents back. This belief escaped the glass case of the university and lay in wait for my brother to be born. That's what I think.

10.

The woman had left New Age/Self Help when I wandered up front. She headed to the register with a copy of Zolar's
Dream Encyclopedia
under her arm and fished around in her huge black bag for something, money I assumed. But then, in a flash the book was gone. I didn't see her duck it into her bag but I also didn't see her put it down. She started to thumb through the road map display and I tried to think what to say.

Hey!
I called out, before I was even ready.
Hey!

She looked right at me. I saw her eyes were black and pupil-less. She looked right into me and then she smiled and her saggy face was suddenly beautiful. I couldn't say anything. The transformation lasted only a moment. Her smile was abrupt and its completion collapsed her face back into its original slide. She bolted past the free newspapers and out into the street.

I followed.

11.

The things he whispered were beautiful. Jack's words always came like water, in one stream of images after the next.

My own words fell to the earth with a thud. I was clumsy and easily flustered. Late at night I wished that I could wake
up smooth and graceful, like Jack, but in the morning I always greeted my familiar bumbling self.

Growing up he told me what to do. I don't mean in a bullying sense or a bossy way—I mean they were his words I passed off as my own, it was his voice I heard in my head when I was alone with a situation.

Ideas didn't come easily for me. I was slow and thick in my thinking, so Jack did my homework. Jack took my exams for me. A's in Civilization and the Americas, in Algebra, Trigonometry, Chemistry, Physics, Calculus. In European History, in American Literature. None of them were earned by me alone. When I had to write a paper, things I didn't even know flowed from Jack and into me. I sat with my pen and my paper and I passed his sentences off as my own.

Thanks
, I said, when I felt Jack's voice in my head at a particularly important moment.

For what?
he replied, like I mystified him, but I saw the playfulness, the wink in his smile.

12.

Outside, the street was loud—crazy with movement and people. I lost the woman from the store for a moment, but then her lumpy form bobbed up ahead and I took off running as hard as I could, gulping down the cold gray air,
feeling the wind beat my green apron. My blood thumped and pounded. I was unquestionably alive, moving through the world with one purpose: to catch up to the woman who'd fled with her song. Everything else faded. The street blurred. The grind and crank of the city united in one distant hum. I could see only a tunnel of her: the prophetic dreamer running from me as fast as she could.

13.

The book was what was left: Jack's whisperings and my book of him. He wrote all the time, in tiny, precise letters. Scraps of paper collected in shoeboxes and notebooks. My Books, he called the boxes, and labeled them carefully: The Book of Loneliness; The Book of Sorrow; The Book of Astonishment. There were many. Some days I found him in his room surrounded by these boxes. Scraps arranged in careful circles or spirals around their box. Jack froze when I opened the door.

Shhhh
, he whispered.
We're busy
, and I quietly closed the door and retreated into the hall.

That was near the end, when Jack lived with my parents and I'd dropped out of college. I was working at a gallery and trying to figure things out. I wanted to be near my big brother, too, and this was clear enough to my parents that they tried to talk me out of it. We were all resigned to his illness by then. We'd stopped pretending it would melt away, that things would return to the cheerful slide of life before God's whispers.

Still, my parents reassured me, Jack was fine. Undergoing treatment, seeing doctors. Condition not improving, no, but neither had it worsened and wasn't that good news.

He's with us all the time, Erin
, my mother said, her voice warbling across the crackle of long distance.
Don't you let Jack pull you out of school, honey. We're doing just fine. Just push through it
.

Her voice was so warm that I wanted to cry. Truth was, I had already withdrawn from classes. I'd slipped so far beneath the gloomy blanket of homesickness that school seemed like punishment and I knew that wasn't right. What I wanted was to go home.

I packed my few belongings into three duffel bags and hopped a bus. It was a long ride—bus to train to bus—and I'd planned it as a surprise, figuring my actual presence less arguable than the theory of my leaving school.

I took a cab from the station, and let myself into the house and everything was the same: hall table with fresh flowers below the big oval mirror. Kitchen smelling faintly of garlic and coffee. And then I entered a hastily abandoned living room: an explosion of couches and chairs and blankets, as though a crowd of sleeping people had been surprised into action.

Immediately I headed for Jack's bedroom. He had left the clues I needed, my father filled in the rest later.

While both my parents napped in front of the television, an old Hitchcock playing on the late Sunday afternoon lineup, Jack had shaved his head with an electric razor. By then sharp things were locked away—no straight razors for our boy Jack—but my father heard a thump, and it was enough to lurch from the blanketed chair and race up the stairs where he found Jack passed out on the floor of his room, blood leaking from his crumpled body. Jack had shaved his head, wrapped a belt around his neck and pulled it as tightly as he could, then begun to shave his tongue.

My father yanked the belt open and Jack gasped air.
Blood covered his chin and puddled on the floor. My father carried all six feet of his boy down the stairs, hollering for my mother the whole time.

Ellen
, he yelled,
the car! Jack, Ellen!

And my mother was, by now, trained to whir into motion at the sound of that tone, at yet another terrifying act of this boy of hers, this creature who had come whole out of her womb but was coming apart here, in the world. She had the car running and ready to go in no time at all.

When I arrived at the interrupted house, lined up neatly against the bedroom wall were his boxes. In front of them an unmanicured pile of Jack's ginger-colored curls moved in the breeze from the door, his blood pooled and dried a path to the hall and I knew I was home.

14.

I had a lover who was jealous of Jack.
Of course you are jealous
, I whispered late in the night, a cacophony of crickets and june bugs keeping us company under trees and a fat, shiny moon.
Who wouldn't want to be touched like that?

That's not what I meant, you understand, what I meant was connection. Connection inspires jealousy. But my poor lover was unconvinced.
He's with me all the time
, I whispered,
even here with you, under this moon. But that's no reason to be jealous. Yes, Jack is everything to me but I love you too
.

It was the wrong thing to say.

15.

In the beginning there was Jack and then Erin. God spoke to Jack and Jack spoke to Erin and to the world. When the things became too much, Jack tried to blot them out but eventually he couldn't and they destroyed him. The things. The voices. God.

And I was the first disciple of Jack. The truth he harbored, the light in him—I followed it.

In the hospital, Jack was observed. They monitored my brother and consulted each other about his voices.
It's the voice of God
, I told them.
Jack says
. But I stood by myself and the doctors clustered, and Jack, in traction, was with the voices in a glassed-in room.

Apparently God had wanted Jack to tell us something and he refused. Jack had stood on the top of the cathedral roof. It was a chilly day, clear-skied and vibrant and from up there he could see the Connecticut River, the hospital and homes on the hill beyond. He could see the Portland bridge and the cars along the highway. He was surrounded by air on three sides, the spire of the church behind him. God wanted to chat and Jack had had enough. He was crying. He stood with his arms outstretched and his head back.

No!
he shouted.
I don't want anymore
. He waved his fist in the air and yelled:
I don't want anymore! I am not your servant! I'm not!

He was loud and fierce up there on the church. Below, people gathered in the street to see what the noise was about. It was about an argument between my speck of a brother and the Great Almighty who'd been plaguing him for so many years.

Leave me alone!
Jack bellowed.
One more thing and I go!
He was sobbing, you could hear him from the street.
Leave me alone or I fly! No more!

That was the last thing:
No more!
Then Jack howled and crouched and the crowd, who'd been too captivated by the noise to act, suddenly moved like a great wakening beast, murmured and scattered, sirens howling in the distance. But Jack was quiet. Just crouched and flung himself in an airy and graceful swan dive off the roof.

He did not fly.

He was broken, but lived.

He landed on a couple from the mall and they were a cushion.
God wanted us right there
, they say now:
For Him
.

16.

I saw her up ahead and I knew suddenly, with unchangeable certainty, that the woman was coming with me, that I was catching up to her and we were leaving together, dashing into another reality, somehow making everything different. This knowledge was a bright and shiny thing; it pushed me to run faster. My lungs burned and my heart thundered and I could feel the heat in my cheeks, the steam rising off my skin, but I kept after her and didn't slow down and neither did she.

We ran down Broadway for blocks and blocks, crossing Canal against the light and dodging angry honking cars. I just missed a Suburu, she almost got nailed by a green pickup, but we were undeterred, we ran on. We passed into the sprawl of Tribeca and the strange cleanliness of the financial district and then she veered. I followed, both of us slowing by now, still moving steadily but dragging slightly and before I knew it she was scattering pigeons in South Street Seaport and then we were on the docks and she stopped with the Jehovah's Witnesses' towers spread behind her, across the green river.

She faced me and bent double and, rather than grab her, I did the same: keel over with my hands on my legs and my head down, the blood pounding so loud I could barely hear, and we both stood like that sucking air for a long while, or what seemed like a long while before she spoke.

I don't have it
, she said.

I raised my head and watched small stars swimming around her face and mine and everything faded to pale and then crashed back to color for a moment.

What?
I said.

Whatever it is you want
, she said, panting.
I don't have it

17.

I know God spoke to my brother Jack. Whispered things he couldn't always translate, things he didn't want to know, things he already did. My brother, Jack, talked back, begged to be left alone. Assured God that he didn't want to tell the world anything, and pleaded for Him to go away. But God stayed, and when Jack was well he would tell us things,
scraps of information, shavings of insight that floated through the air.

And when Jack was not well he did what he could to keep himself from talking.