“Yes, she was, but-”
I heard footsteps tearing down the hallway. “Hide!” I whispered. Terry didn’t move. The footsteps were almost at the door. “Too late!” I shouted uselessly. The bedroom door swung open and Caroline ran in.
“You have to get out of here!” she shouted.
Terry gazed at her with bright eyes. That threw her off balance. They stared at each other, unmoving, looking like strangely arranged mannequins. I was utterly isolated from the energy in the room. This was a shock to me. Caroline and Terry had a thing for each other? When did this happen? I resisted a strong impulse to pluck out my eye and show it to them.
“I’m helping him pack,” I said, breaking the moment. My own voice was unrecognizable. Caroline liked Terry, maybe even loved him. I was furious! I felt drenched by all the world’s rain. I coughed impatiently. No one looked at me, or gave any hint that I was among them.
She sat on the edge of his bed and drummed her fingers on the blankets. “You have to leave,” she said.
“Where are we going?”
I looked to Caroline to see what her response would be. “I can’t go,” she said finally. “But I’ll visit you.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Sydney. Go to Sydney.”
“And hurry up about it!” I shouted so loudly that we didn’t hear the second round of footsteps.
Two men came in, eager early members of a lynch mob. They took on the role of a strong-arm taxi service. Terry put up a futile struggle while more people filed into our house, all with hostile, determined faces. They dragged him outside, his face bled white in the moonlight.
Caroline didn’t cry but held her hand over her mouth in a twenty-minute gasp while I was in a frenzy, screaming myself hoarse at my parents, who stood helplessly by.
“What are you doing? Don’t let them take him!”
My mother and father cowered like frightened dogs. They were afraid of going against the oracle’s command and the unstoppable will of the townspeople. Public opinion had them on the back foot.
My father said, “It’s for the best. He’s unbalanced. They know how to fix him.”
He said this as he signed the necessary paperwork and my mother looked on, resigned. Both wore obstinate grimaces you couldn’t have removed with a hammer.
“He doesn’t need fixing! I think he’s already fixed! He’s in love!”
No one listened to me. Caroline and I stood together as they dragged Terry away to a mental asylum. I looked at my parents incredulously, at their inexorably tepid souls. All I could do was uselessly shake a clenched fist and think how people are so eager to become slaves it’s unbelievable. Christ. Sometimes they throw off their freedom so quickly, you’d think it was burning them.
Transcendence
It’s not that insanity is contagious, although human history is littered with tales of mass hysteria- like the time everyone in the Western world was wearing white loafers with no socks- but as soon as Terry disappeared into the crazy house, our own house became a place of darkness as well, starting with my father, who came to his senses a week later and did everything in his power to spring Terry from the hospital, only to discover that once you put someone under forced psychiatric care, the administrators take that care as seriously as the money the government pays them to do the caring. My little brother was judged to be a danger to himself and others- the others mostly being the hospital staff he fought to break himself out. My father petitioned the courts and consulted numerous lawyers but soon realized he’d lost his son in a tangle of red tape. He was stuck. As a result, he started drinking more and more, and though my mother and I tried to slow the momentum of his downward spiral, you can’t stop someone from taking the role of alcoholic father simply by telling them it’s a cliché. Twice in the months following Terry’s internment he lost his temper and hit my mother, knocking her to the floor, but you can no more easily wean a man off the part of Wife Beater than you can convince a woman to flee her own home by assuring her she has Battered Wife Syndrome. It just doesn’t do any good.
Like my father, my mother oscillated between madness and sadness. A couple of nights after Terry was taken away, I was preparing for bed and said aloud, “Maybe I won’t brush my teeth. Why should I? Fuck teeth. I’m sick of teeth. I’m sick of my teeth. I’m sick of other people’s teeth. Teeth are a burden, and I’m sick of polishing them every night like they’re the royal jewels.” When I threw my toothbrush down in disgust, I saw a shapely shadow outside the bathroom. “Hello?” I said to the shadow. My mother came into the room and stood behind me. We looked at each other in the bathroom mirror.
“You talk to yourself,” she said, placing her hand on my forehead. “Do you have a temperature?”
“No.”
“A little warm,” she said.
“I’m a mammal,” I mumbled. “That’s how we are.”
“I’m going to the pharmacy, get you some medicine,” she said.
“But I’m not sick.”
“You won’t be if you catch it early.”
“Catch what early?” I asked, examining her sad face. My mother’s reaction to having put her son away in a mental asylum was to become a maniac for my welfare. It didn’t happen gradually but all at once, when I found I couldn’t pass her on the stairs without her crushing me in an embrace. Nor could I leave the house without her buttoning up my jacket to the top, and when that still left a little expanse of neck exposed to the elements, she sewed an extra button on so I would be always covered to the lower lip.
She went to the city almost every day to visit Terry and always came home with good news that somehow sounded bad.
“He’s doing a little better,” she said in a distraught voice.
I soon discovered these were nothing but lies. I had been forbidden to go to the hospital because it was assumed that my weak psyche wasn’t up to a battering. But Terry was my brother, so one morning I went through all the motions of a boy preparing for school, and when the bus thundered by I hid behind a thorny bush I later burned for pricking me. Then I made my way to the asylum by hitching a ride with a refrigerator repairman who laughed snidely the whole way about people who don’t defrost.
Seeing my brother was a shock. His smile was a little too wide, his hair unkempt, his eyes vague, his skin pale. They made him wear a hospital gown so he might remember at all times that he was too unstable for a zipper or button-up fly. Only when he joked about the electricity bills for his shock therapy was I convinced that this experience wasn’t going to destroy him. We ate lunch together in a surprisingly cozy room filled with potted plants and with a large picture window that had the perfect view of a teenager with a persecution mania.
Terry turned dark in reference to the suggestion box. “What fucking tit put that there, I’d like to know,” he growled.
At the end of the visit he told me that he had not had one visit from our mother and that while he wasn’t blaming her, he thought mothers were supposed to be better than that.
When I arrived home, she was in the backyard. It had rained all afternoon, and I saw she had her shoes off and was digging her toes in the mud. She urged me to do the same because cold mud oozing through toes is a pleasure greater than anyone could imagine. She was not lying.
“Where are you going every day?” I asked.
“To visit Terry.”
“I saw him today. He said he hasn’t seen you.”
She said nothing and squelched her feet as deep in mud as they would go. I did the same. A bell rang out. We both looked up at the prison and watched it a long time, as though the sound had woven a visible path across the sky. Life up there was regulated by bells that could be heard inside every house in town. This bell signified it was time for prisoners’ afternoon exercise. There would be another bell shortly to stop it.
“You can’t tell your father.”