When he didn't have Mark with him, Bill worked far into the night on the hysteria constructions. Violet was often asleep by the time he finished. She told me that he rarely sat down to eat, and when he did, he would sit with the plate on his lap in front of the piece and say nothing.
Neither Bill nor I had much time for coffees or lunches that year, but I also knew that Violet had altered the outlines of our friendship. It wasn't that Bill actively neglected me. We spoke on the phone. He wanted me to write about the hysteria works, and whenever I saw him he brought me something to read—a Raw Comics or a book of medical photographs or an obscure novel. The truth was Violet had opened a passage in Bill that had taken him further into his own solitude. I could only guess at what had passed between them, but I sometimes felt that their intimacy had a courage and fierceness that I had never known, and the awareness of this lack in myself made me vaguely restless. The feeling lodged itself in my mouth as a dry taste, and I suffered from a longing that nothing could satisfy. It wasn't hunger or thirst or even sex that I wanted. It was a dim but irritating need for something nameless and unknown that I had felt from time to time since I was child. There were a few nights that year when I lay awake beside my sleeping wife with that emptiness in my mouth, and I would move into the living room and sit on the chair by the window to wait until morning.
For a long time I thought of Dan Wechsler as another missing man in a family of missing men. Moishe, the grandfather, had disappeared. Sy, the father, had stayed, but had sprinted away emotionally. Dan, the youngest of these three generations of men, had been hidden away in New Jersey, the phantom resident of either a halfway house or a hospital, depending on his state of mind. That year, Bill and Violet hosted a small Thanksgiving dinner on the Bowery, to which Dan was invited. For days Dan called Bill. One day he canceled. The next day he reinstated himself. The day after, he called again to say he wasn't coming. But at the last moment, Dan found the courage take the bus to the Port Authority bus terminal, where Bill picked him up. We were seven, altogether: Bill, Violet, Erica, Dan, Matthew, Mark, and I. Regina had gone to Al's family for the day, and the Bloms had felt it was too far and too expensive to travel to New York for the holiday. Dan's craziness wasn't hidden. His fingernails were heavily rimmed with dirt, and his neck was thickly covered with ash- colored flakes of drying skin. His shirt had been buttoned wrong, giving his whole upper body a lopsided appearance. At dinner I found myself seated beside him. While I was still unfolding my napkin and putting it on my lap, Dan had already picked up his dessert spoon and was pushing turkey and stuffing into his mouth at an astonishing speed. His ravenous eating lasted for about thirty seconds. Then he lit a cigarette, sucked on it deeply, turned abruptly to me, and said in a loud excited voice: "Leo, do you like food?"
"I do," I said. "I like most foods."
"That's good," he said, but he sounded disappointed. With, his free hand he began to scratch his forearm hard. His nails left red stripes on his skin. Then he fell silent. His large eyes, which looked very much like his brother's except that their irises were darker, suddenly withdrew from me.
"Do you like food?" I said to him.
"Not much."
"You were eating crackers when I called you yesterday, Dan," Bill said, interrupting us.
Dan smiled. "That's right. I was!" He said this happily and then stood up from the table and began to pace. With his shoulders hunched and his head lowered toward the floor, he made a curious gesture with his left hand as he walked. He turned his thumb and index finger into an O, then closed his hand into a fist, and after a second of clenching repeated the O sign again.
Bill ignored his brother and continued his conversation with Erica and Violet. Matt and Mark sat for a few minutes longer and then jumped up from the table and began to run, announcing loudly that they were "superheroes." Dan paced. The warped floorboards creaked as he trod back and forth, back and forth. While he paced he muttered to himself and interrupted his own monologue with short bursts of laughter. Violet glanced at him repeatedly and then looked at Bill, but Bill shook his head at her, telling her not to interfere.
When we had finished dessert, I noticed that Dan had retreated to the far end of the room and was sitting on the stool near Bill's worktable. I stood up and walked toward him. As I came closer, I heard him say, "Your brother won't let you go back to that stinking joint. Mother's old now. She just pretends to like you anyway."
I said his name.
The sound of my voice must have startled him, because I saw his whole body jerk to attention. "I'm sorry," he said. "I hope it's okay to be here. I had to think. I've been thinking pretty hard."
I sat down beside him. I could smell him. Dan reeked of sweat, and there were big wet patches under the arms of his shirt. "What are you thinking about?"
"Mystery," he said. He pulled at several hairs on his forearm and began to twist them into a small knot "I told Bill about it. It's funny, because it has two sides—male and female."
"Does it?" I said. "In what way?"
"It's like this—it can be Mr. Ree or Miss Tery. You see what I mean?"
"Yes, I do."
"They're the hero and heroine of the play I'm writing." He gave the hairs on his arm a severe wrench, lit another cigarette, and stared at the ceiling. Dan's eyes were circled with blackness, but his gaunt profile resembled Bill's, and for a moment I imagined the two of them as small boys standing in a driveway. Dan lapsed into his own thoughts and the O sign reappeared, his fingers going through the motions urgently and rapidly. He stood up and paced again. Violet interrupted us.
"Would you like to join us at the table for a cognac?" she said.
"Thank you, Violet," Dan said politely. "But I'd rather smoke and pace."
After several minutes Dan did come to the table. He seated himself next to Bill, leaned close to his brother, and vigorously began to pat his shoulder. "My big bro," he said. "Big Bill, old B.B., the Big Boom Bill…"
Bill stopped Dan's patter by putting his arm around him. "I'm glad you decided to come. It's good to have you here."
Dan grinned hugely and took a sip from the snifter that was standing in front of him.
An hour later, the dishes had been washed and put away. The two boys were playing with blocks near the windows while Violet, Erica, Bill, and I stood over the mattress where Dan had fallen into a dead sleep. He was curled up into a tight ball, hugging his knees as he wheezed softly with his mouth open. A broken cigarette and his lighter lay on the blanket beside him. "I probably shouldn't have let him have that brandy," Bill said. "It might have interacted with the lithium."
Dan didn't come often to the Bowery, but I know that Bill spoke to him on the telephone regularly, sometimes every day. Poor Dan was all cracks. His life was a daily struggle to ward off a breakdown that would land him in the hospital again. Wracked by bursts of paranoia, he would call to ask Bill if he still liked him or, worse, if Bill was out to kill him. And yet despite his illness, Dan had traits that linked him to his brother. They both coursed with emotions that weren't easy to contain. In Bill that potent feeling found an exit in work. "I work to live," he once told me, and after meeting Dan I understood far better what he had meant by those words. Making art was necessary for Bill to maintain a minimal equilibrium, to keep himself going. Dan's plays and poems were mostly unfinished, the tattered products of a mind that ran in circles and could never leap out of itself. The older brother's brain and nerves and private history had given him the strength to withstand the strains of ordinary life. The younger brother's had not.