The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (81 page)

I have learned a lot from these gals — important, useful stuff for me to know both as a writer and as a human being. When you give, you get back. The NEA taught me that. Please continue to safeguard the awarding of fellowships to writers of promise and to work toward bringing in from the cold our brothers and sisters who paint and sculpt and dance and make art with cameras. Art, as you know, illuminates life and in these confusing and scary times, we can all use a little illumination.

Thanks for listening.

—Wally Lamb

On the afternoon of October 12, 1990, my twin brother Thomas entered the Three Rivers, Connecticut Public Library, retreated to one of the rear study carrels, and prayed to God the sacrifice he was about to commit would be deemed acceptable. Mrs. Theresa Fenneck, the children’s librarian, was officially in charge that day because the head librarian was at an all-day meeting in Hartford. She approached my brother and told him he’d have to keep his voice down or else leave the library. She could hear him all the way up at the front desk. There were other patrons to consider. If he wanted to pray, she told him, he should go to a church, not the library.

Thomas and I had spent several hours together the day before. Our Sunday afternoon ritual dictated that I sign him out of the state hospital’s Settle Building, treat him to lunch, visit our stepfather or take him for a drive, and then return him to the hospital before suppertime. At a back booth at Friendly’s, I’d sat across from my brother, breathing in his secondary smoke and leafing for the umpteenth time through his scrapbook of clippings on the Persian Gulf crisis. He’d been col
lecting them since August as evidence that Armageddon was at hand—that the final battle between good and evil was about to be triggered. “America’s been living on borrowed time all these years, Dominick,” he told me. “Playing the world’s whore, wallowing in our greed. Now we’re going to pay the price.”

He was oblivious of my drumming fingers on the tabletop. “Not to change the subject,” I said, “but how’s the coffee business?” Ever since eight milligrams of Haldol per day had quieted Thomas’s voices, he had managed a small morning concession in the patients’ lounge—coffee and cigarettes and newspapers dispensed from a metal cart more rickety than his emotional state. Like so many of the patients there, he indulged in caffeine and nicotine, but it was the newspapers that had become Thomas’s most potent addiction.

“How can we kill people for the sake of cheap oil? How can we justify
that
?” His hands flapped as he talked; his palms were grimy from newsprint ink. Those dirty hands should have warned me—should have tipped me off. “How are we going to prevent God’s vengeance if we have that little respect for human life?”

Our waitress approached—a high school kid wearing two buttons: “Hi, I’m Kristin” and “Patience, please. I’m a trainee.” She asked us if we wanted to start out with some cheese sticks or a bowl of soup.

“You can’t worship both God
and
money, Kristin,” Thomas told her. “America’s going to vomit up its own blood.”

About a month later—after President Bush had declared that “a line has been drawn in the sand” and conflict might be inevitable—Mrs. Fenneck showed up at my front door. She had sought me out—had researched where I lived via the city directory, then ridden out of the blue to Joy’s and my condo and rung the bell. She pointed to her husband, parked at the curb and waiting for her in their blue Dodge Shadow. She identified herself as the librarian who’d called 911.

“Your brother was always neat and clean,” she told me. “You can’t say that about all of them. But you have to be firm with these people. All day long, day in, day out, the state hospital van just drops them downtown and leaves them. They have nowhere to go, noth
ing to do. The stores don’t want them—business is bad enough, for pity’s sake. So they come to the library and sit.” Her pale green eyes jerked repeatedly away from my face as she spoke. Thomas and I are
identical
twins, not fraternal—one fertilized egg that split in half and went off in two directions. Mrs. Fenneck couldn’t look at me because she was looking at Thomas.

It was cold, I remember, and I invited her into the foyer, no further. For two weeks I’d been channel-flipping through the Desert Shield updates, swallowing back the anger and guilt my brother’s act had left me with, and hanging up in the ears of reporters and TV types—all those bloodsuckers trying to book and bag next week’s freak show. I didn’t offer to take Mrs. Fenneck’s coat. I stood there, arms crossed, fists tucked into my armpits. Whatever this was, I needed it to be over.

She said she wanted me to understand what librarians put up with these days. Once upon a time it had been a pleasant job—she liked people, after all. But now libraries were at the mercy of every derelict and homeless person in the area. People who cared nothing about books or information. People who only wanted to sit and vegetate or run to the toilet every five minutes. And now with AIDS and drugs and such. The other day they’d found a dirty syringe jammed behind the paper towel dispenser in the men’s restroom. In her opinion, the whole country was like a chest of drawers that had been pulled out and dumped onto the floor.

I’d answered the door barefoot. My feet were cold. “What do you
want
?” I asked her. “Why did you come here?”

She’d come, she said, because she hadn’t had any appetite or a decent night’s sleep since my brother did it. Not that
she
was responsible, she pointed out. Clearly, Thomas had planned the whole thing in advance and would have done it whether she’d said anything to him or not. A dozen people or more had told her they’d seen him walking around town, muttering about the war with that one fist of his up in the air, as if it was stuck in that position. She’d noticed it herself, it always looked so curious. “He’d come inside and sit all afternoon in the periodical section, arguing with the newspapers,” she said. “Then, after
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.

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
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.

“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.”