I Know This Much Is True (2 page)

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WALLY LAMB

a while, he’d quiet down. Just stare out the window and sigh, with his arm bent at the elbow, his hand making that fist. But who’d have taken it for a
sign
? Who in their right mind would have put two and two together and guessed he was planning to do
that
?”

No one, I said. None of us had.

Mrs. Fenneck said she had worked for many years at the main desk before becoming the children’s librarian and remembered my mother, God rest her soul. “She was a reader. Mysteries and romances, as I recall. Quiet, always very pleasant. And neat as a pin. It’s a blessing she didn’t live to see
this,
poor thing. Not that dying from cancer is any picnic, either.” She said she’d had a sister who died of cancer, too, and a niece who was battling it now. “If you ask me,” she said, “one of these days they’re going to get to the bottom of why there’s so much of it now and the answer’s going to be computers.”

If she had kept yapping, I might have burst into tears. Might have cold-cocked her. “Mrs. Fenneck!” I said.

All right, she said, she would just ask me point-blank: did my father or I hold her responsible in any way for what had happened?

“
You?
” I asked. “Why you?”

“Because I spoke crossly to him just before he did it.”

It was
myself
I held responsible—for having tuned out all that babble about Islam and Armageddon, for not having called the doctors and bugged them about his medication. And then, for having gone to the emergency room and made what was probably the wrong decision.

That Sunday at Friendly’s, he’d ordered only a glass of water. “I’m fasting,” he’d said, and I’d purposely asked nothing, ignored those dirty hands of his, ordered myself a cheeseburger and fries.

I told Mrs. Fenneck she wasn’t responsible.

Then, would I be willing to put it in writing? That it had nothing to do with her? It was her husband’s idea, she said. If I could just write it down on a piece of paper, then maybe she could get a decent night’s sleep, eat a little of her dinner. Maybe she could have a minute’s worth of peace.

Our eyes met and held. This time she didn’t look away. “I’m afraid,” she said.

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I told her to wait there.

In the kitchen, I grabbed a pen and one of those Post-it notepads that Joy lifts from work and keeps by our phone. (She takes more than we’ll ever use. The other day I shoved my hands into the pockets of her winter coat looking for change for the paperboy and found dozens of those little pads.
Dozens.
) My hand shook as I wrote down the statement that gave Mrs. Fenneck what she wanted: food, sleep, legal absolution. I didn’t do it out of mercy. I did it because I needed her to shut her mouth. To get her the fuck out of my foyer. And because I was afraid, too. Afraid for my brother. Afraid to be his other half.

I went back to the front hall and reached toward Mrs. Fenneck, stuck the yellow note to her coat lapel. She flinched when I did it, and that involuntary response of hers satisfied me in some small, cheap way. I never claimed I was lovable. Never said I
wasn’t
a son of a bitch.

I know what I know about what happened in the library on October 12, 1990, from what Thomas told me and from the newspaper stories that ran alongside the news about Operation Desert Shield. After Mrs. Fenneck’s reprimand by the study carrel, Thomas resumed his praying in silence, reciting over and over Saint Matthew’s gospel, chapter 5, verses 29 and 30:
“And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out
and cast it from thee . . . and if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off and cast
it from thee: For it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.”
Thomas removed from his sweatshirt jacket the ceremonial Gurkha knife our stepfather had brought back as a souvenir from World War II. Until the afternoon before, it had hung sheathed and forgotten on an upstairs bedroom wall at the house where my brother and I grew up.

The orthopedic surgeon who later treated my brother was amazed at his determination; the severity of the pain, he said, should have aborted his mission midway. With his left hand, Thomas enacted each of the steps he’d rehearsed in his mind.

Slicing at the point of his right wrist, he crunched through the bone, amputating his hand cleanly with the sharp knife. With a loud I Know[001-115] 7/24/02 12:21 PM Page 6

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grunt, he flung the severed hand halfway across the library floor.

Then he reached into his wound and yanked at the spurting ulna and radial artery, pinching and twisting it closed as best he could.

He raised his arm in the air to slow the bleeding.

When the other people in the library realized—or thought they realized—what had just happened, there was chaos. Some ran for the door; two women hid in the stacks, fearing that the crazy man would attack them next. Mrs. Fenneck crouched behind the front desk and called 911. By then, Thomas had risen, teetering, from the study carrel and staggered to a nearby table where he sat, sighing deeply but otherwise quiet. The knife lay inside the carrel where he’d left it. Thomas went into shock.

There was blood, of course, though not as much as there might have been had Thomas not had the know-how and the presence of mind to stanch its flow. (As a kid, he’d earned advanced first-aid badges and certificates long after I’d declared the Boy Scouts an organization for assholes.) When it was clearer that Thomas meant harm to no one but himself, Mrs. Fenneck rose from behind the library desk and ordered the custodian to cover the hand with a newspaper. The EMTs and the police arrived simultaneously. The med techs hastily treated my brother, strapped him to a stretcher, and packed the hand in an ice-filled plastic bag that someone had run and gotten from the staff lounge refrigerator.

In the emergency room, my brother regained consciousness and was emphatic in his refusal of any surgical attempt to reattach the hand. Our stepfather, Ray, was away and unreachable. I was up on the scaffolding, power-washing a three-story Victorian on Gillette Street, when the cruiser pulled up in front, blue lights flashing. I arrived at the hospital during the middle of Thomas’s argument with the surgeon who’d been called in and, as my brother’s rational next of kin, was given the decision of whether or not the surgery should proceed. “We’ll knock him out good, tranq him up the ying-yang when he comes out of it,” the doctor promised. He was a young guy with TV news reporter hair—thirty years old, if that. He spoke in a normal tone, not even so much as a conspiratorial whisper.

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“And I’ll just rip it off again,” my brother warned. “Do you think a few stitches are going to keep me from doing what I have to do? I have a pact with the Lord God Almighty.”

“We can restrain him for the first several days if we have to,” the doctor continued. “Give the nerves a chance to regenerate.”

“There’s only one savior in this universe, Doctor,” Thomas shouted. “And
you’re
not it!”

The surgeon and Thomas both turned to me. I said I needed a second to think about things, to get my head clear. I left the room and started down the corridor.

“Well, don’t think for too long,” the surgeon called after me. “It’s only a fifty-fifty thing at
this
point, and the longer we wait, the worse the odds.”

Blood banged inside my head. I loved my brother. I hated him.

There was no solution to who he was. No getting back who he had been.

By the time I reached the dead end of that corridor, the only arguments I’d come up with were
stupid
arguments: Could he still pray without two hands to fold? Still pour coffee? Flick his Bic?

Down the hall I heard him shouting. “It was a
religious
act! A
sacrifice
! Why should
you
have control over
me
?
”

Control: that was the hot button that pushed me to my decision.

Suddenly, that gel-haired surgeon was our stepfather and every other bully and power broker that Thomas had ever suffered. You tell him, Thomas, I thought. You fight for your fucking rights!

I walked back up the corridor and told the doctor no.

“No?” he said. He was already scrubbed and dressed. He stared at me in disbelief. “
No?
”

In the operating room, the surgeon instead removed a sheet of skin from my brother’s upper thigh and fashioned it into a flaplike graft that covered his butchered wrist. The procedure took four hours. By the time it was over, several newspaper reporters and TV

research assistants had already called my home and talked to Joy.

Over the next several days, narcotics dripped through a catheter and into my brother’s spine to ease his pain. Antibiotics and I Know[001-115] 7/24/02 12:21 PM Page 8

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antipsychotics were injected into his rump to fight infection and lessen his combativeness. An “approved” visitors’ list kept the media away from him, but Thomas explained impatiently, unswervingly, to everyone else—police detectives, shrinks, nurses, orderlies—that he had had no intention of killing himself. He wanted only to make a public statement that would wake up America, help us all to see what he’d seen, know what he knew: that our country had to give up its wicked greed and follow a more spiritual course if we were to survive, if we were to avoid stumbling amongst the corpses of our own slaughtered children. He had been a doubting Thomas, he said, but he was Simon Peter now—the rock upon which God’s new order would be built. He’d been blessed, he said, with the gift and the burden of prophecy. If people would only listen, he could lead the way.

He repeated all this to me the night before his release and recommitment to the Three Rivers State Hospital, his on-and-off home since 1970. “Sometimes I wonder why I have to be the one to do all this, Dominick,” he said, sighing. “Why it’s all on my shoulders. It’s hard.”

I didn’t respond to him. Couldn’t speak at all. Couldn’t look at his self-mutilation—not even the clean, bandaged version of it. Instead, I looked at my own rough, stained housepainter’s hands. Watched the left one clutch the right at the wrist. They seemed more like puppets than hands. I had no feeling in either.

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f

One Saturday morning when my brother and I were ten, our family television set spontaneously combusted.

Thomas and I had spent most of that morning lolling around in our pajamas, watching cartoons and ignoring our mother’s orders to go upstairs, take our baths, and put on our dungarees. We were supposed to help her outside with the window washing. Whenever Ray gave an order, my brother and I snapped to attention, but our stepfather was duck hunting that weekend with his friend Eddie Banas.

Obeying Ma was optional.

She was outside looking in when it happened—standing in the geranium bed on a stool so she could reach the parlor windows. Her hair was in pincurls. Her coat pockets were stuffed with paper towels. As she Windexed and wiped the glass, her circular strokes gave the illusion that she was waving in at us. “We better get out there and help,” Thomas said. “What if she tells Ray?”

“She won’t tell,” I said. “She never tells.”

It was true. However angry we could make our mother, she would
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never have fed us to the five-foot-six-inch sleeping giant who snoozed upstairs weekdays in the spare room, rose to his alarm clock at three-thirty each afternoon, and built submarines at night. Electric Boat, third shift. At our house, you tiptoed and whispered during the day and became free each evening at nine-thirty when Eddie Banas, Ray’s fellow third-shifter, pulled into the driveway and honked. I would wait for the sound of that horn. Hunger for it. With it came a loosening of limbs, a relaxation in the chest and hands, the ability to breathe deeply again. Some nights, my brother and I celebrated the slamming of Eddie’s truck door by jumping in the dark on our mattresses. Freedom from Ray turned our beds into trampolines.

“Hey, look,” Thomas said, staring with puzzlement at the television.

“What?”

Then I saw it, too: a thin curl of smoke rising from the back of the set.
The Howdy Doody Show
was on, I remember. Clarabel the Clown was chasing someone with his seltzer bottle. The picture and sound went dead. Flames whooshed up the parlor wall.

I thought the Russians had done it—that Khrushchev had dropped the bomb at last. If the unthinkable ever happened, Ray had lectured us at the dinner table, the submarine base and Electric Boat were guaranteed targets. We’d feel the jolt nine miles up the road in Three Rivers. Fires would ignite everywhere. Then the worst of it: the meltdown. People’s hands and legs and faces would melt like cheese.

“Duck and cover!” I yelled to my brother.

Thomas and I fell to the floor in the protective position the civil defense lady had made us practice at school. There was an explosion over by the television, a confusion of thick black smoke. The room rained glass.

The noise and smoke brought Ma, screaming, inside. Her shoes crunched glass as she ran toward us. She picked up Thomas in her arms and told me to climb onto her back.

“We can’t go outside!” I shouted. “Fallout!”

“It’s not the bomb!” she shouted back. “It’s the TV!”

Outside, Ma ordered Thomas and me to run across the street and I Know[001-115] 7/24/02 12:21 PM Page 11

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tell the Anthonys to call the fire department. While Mr. Anthony made the call, Mrs. Anthony brushed glass bits off the tops of our crewcuts with her whisk broom. We spat soot-flecked phlegm. By the time we returned to the front sidewalk, Ma was missing.