My brother is chained to a bed.
I don’t know what they’ve used to tie him down. Rope, maybe. Something around his wrists, his ankles. I don’t want to get close enough to inspect it.
He growls. Then he screams. Then he cries.
My parents move around the house as if there isn’t a human being restrained in the next room.
“How long has he been like this?”
A few days.
“A few days?!”
They are trying to keep him safe from himself and themselves safe from him. This is the explanation, and technically I understand the words, but I keep looking between my parents and the bed waiting for someone to react appropriately.
My brother pulls against whatever is holding him there.
I want him restrained. I don’t want someone to untie him. He scares me. He is my little brother and he scares the shit out of me.
We used to be best friends.
He is four years younger than me, which means nothing when you’re five and nine and everything when you’re nine and thirteen.
At thirteen, I discover boys. I discover the possibility of a world outside my family. I want more and more of it.
My brother wants more of me. So does my dad. And my mom.
I have always needed a lot of time alone. I go into my room and shut the door and stay there for hours. Nobody technically stops me, but eventually I have to come out.
My dad will make a sarcastic comment. Something about finally joining the family. Something meant to be a joke.
“It’s not a big deal,” he’ll say if I react. “I’m just joking.”
But I can feel the hurt underneath it. I feel guilty anyway. I am beginning to understand guilt as the cost of choosing myself.
My boyfriend becomes another place I can disappear. Every time I choose him, I can feel this undercurrent from my family telling me I should be choosing them instead.
I could break up with him. I could stay home. I could pour myself back into my family and make everybody feel better.
I don’t. I do the opposite. I lean harder into him. I fight harder to leave.
My brother has always been able to disappear into things too.
He’s eight and he becomes Mowgli for a week. He walks around the house wearing underwear with a towel wrapped around his waist. He doesn’t speak. He moves like an animal.
“Stop.”
I want him to snap out of it. Come back to reality. I can play something imaginary for hours. He can live inside it for weeks.
Later, when he tells me he wants to be a writer, he says he would have to go to jail before he could write about jail.
“That’s stupid,” I tell him. “You can imagine being in jail.”
He disagrees. He has to experience something to understand it. He has to be inside of it.
I don’t understand this about him. Because I don’t want to.
Before everything becomes whatever it eventually becomes, Eric Sears dies.
Eric is one of my brother’s childhood friends. His older sister, Stephanie, is my friend. We used to hang out in pairs.
On Eric’s eighteenth birthday, he goes into the desert, takes peyote, gets lost, waits underneath a tree to be found, and dies from dehydration.
There is a celebration of life afterward. I stand among people who knew him, feeling like everything has become slightly unreal. Dreamlike. Eric was here. Now he isn’t.
I watch my brother. It hits him harder than it hits me. Things always seem to hit my brother harder than they hit me.
Later, in college, another of his friends die. Aaron. He was driving drunk. He wrapped his car around a telephone pole or something like that. I don’t actually know the details. I never ask.
I have never talked to my brother about Eric. I have never talked to him about Aaron.
By then our lives are moving in opposite directions.
I am building. He is retreating. I work. He doesn’t. I resent him for it. My parents pay for everything.
“They just let him freeload,” I think.
The reality is they probably would let me freeload too, but I would never allow it. I have too much pride. Too much ambition. I want to build something.
My brother seems to want less and less from the world. He grows his fingernails long and doesn’t cut them. His beard grows. He doesn’t wear deodorant. I hate the way he smells. I feel dirty when I’m around him. I don’t want to hug him.
Once he gives me a bird feather.
“Ew. That’s disgusting.”
I don’t want to touch it.
Years later I will have bird feathers all over my house. I collect them now, but the feather from my brother feels dirty. So does he.
He meditates constantly. He is quiet. He gets farther and farther away from the world while I am trying as hard as I can to conquer it.
My mother calls me in a panic. My brother has been found outside the motorhome where he lives on twenty acres my parents own in Willits, California. He is hypothermic. He has lost blood. He has multiple knife wounds. He tried to cut off his penis. I have just quit my job in San Francisco. I’m two weeks into doing work for a new company in Salt Lake.
“There’s a family emergency,” I tell my new boss. Then Gianni and I drive to Willits.
By the time I see my brother, his wounds are covered. His face looks intact. His arms look intact. I can almost pretend.
Then we go to the motorhome. The air inside is stale. Food has been sitting out. There are tarot cards and melted candles. Everything smells. I stand there looking around.
“Pull yourself together.” I tell myself, “What the fuck is this?”
I want to clean it before my mother sees it, so I start moving things around. Tidying. As though wiping off a surface could somehow change what happened here. As though I could make the room look less like the inside of whatever my brother has been experiencing.
Mostly, I half-ass it. I tell myself I am helping, but really I am curious. Morbidly curious. I want to see where it happened. I want to know what happened without having to actually experience what happened. Gianni and I walk around the property in shock.
Eventually my dad will have to clean everything up. I am relieved it won’t be me.
We sleep at the hospital for several days, taking turns.
I feel like a good daughter. I dropped everything. I came. I am here. When my brother wakes up, I want to leave. He talks in third person. He says he is a demon possessing my brother’s body. His voice changes. His energy changes. I don’t know what to call it. Psychosis. Delirium. Possession. Mental illness.
I only know I’m afraid.
I want him drugged. I want him restrained.
The doctors mention his thyroid. Maybe there is something wrong with his thyroid. The possibility hangs in the room like a little offering. A thyroid can be treated. A thyroid has a name. A thyroid is something I can understand.
I work from the hospital because I have a new job. My parents look destroyed. I feel destroyed. Nobody tells us what we are supposed to do next. Eventually I get to go home. I am grateful.
Not long afterward, I move to Salt Lake. Farther away. Farther away from the quote-unquote problem.
My parents stay.
There are more incidents. Most of them reach me through my mother. My brother tries to throw himself out of a window. He becomes violent with my parents. Violent with himself. My mother tells me things. I listen selectively. I stop asking questions. I keep suggesting therapy.
“You all need therapy.”
My brother doesn’t want therapy. He doesn’t want medication either.
“It makes me feel unlike myself.”
I hear this as resistance. Take the fucking medicine. Get better. Do something. My mom doesn’t want therapy. My dad doesn’t want therapy. Nobody wants help in the form I think help should take. Everybody seems committed to continuing.
So I continue too. From farther away. Until I walk into my parents’ house and find my brother chained to a bed.
I call the police.
“What can we do?”
Unless he is an immediate violent danger, essentially nothing.
Even then, they explain, he might be held for twenty-four hours and released.
Twenty-four hours.
I look at my parents. I don’t look at my brother.
We have no fucking system for this.
My parents don’t tell people what is happening.
I do. I tell everybody. I can’t stop myself. It pours out of me. My brother is schizophrenic. My brother is insane. My brother is hurting my parents. My brother is chained to a bed. Saying it out loud makes it real. Saying it to other people means I don’t have to carry it alone.
I feel like speaking out loud is betraying my family, but I just keep talking. I can’t let this rot inside of me.
And then I go home again.
At some point he moves into one of my parents’ rental houses.
This is apparently better. I don’t know what better means anymore.
He’s had multiple hip replacements while still ridiculously young, a twenty-something-year-old with what feels like an eighty-year-old hip. He is always in pain. He can barely move. He mostly lays around. He receives government assistance. He doesn’t owe rent. He doesn’t have a cell phone. He doesn’t use Facebook. He doesn’t use email.
As far as I know, he doesn’t have friends. There is a girlfriend sometimes.
I know all of this through my mother.
My brother has become a person narrated to me by someone else.
Then my parents bring him when they visit me in Park City.
They say things have been relatively normal.
Normal.
I don’t know why we keep using that word.
Something happens between my brother and me. I don’t remember what starts it. He yells. I yell. I don’t know who started it. Everything that has been sitting quietly between us begins coming out at once.
“You’re a stranger to me.”
Or maybe I say it is hard for me to love him because he is a stranger to me. I don’t remember the exact sentence. I only remember what it does.
He is devastated. My parents are devastated. Everybody wants me to stop.
Why can’t I just let it rest?
Why do I have to open Pandora’s box?
Why can’t we just have a peaceful visit?
Because the quiet is unbearable.
Because pretending is unbearable.
Because I cannot sit in a room with all of this and act like none of it happened.
My brother refuses to leave.
“The only way I’m leaving is if you call the cops.”
So I tell them all to leave.
My brother. My mother. My father. All of them.
Then my dad starts yelling at me.
“You’ve been abandoning this family since you were thirteen.”
I am crying so hard I can barely respond.
“You’re always running away.”
Always shutting myself out.
Always leaving.
Gianni steps between us.
“That’s enough.”
My dad keeps trying to talk.
Gianni won’t let him.
I stand there bawling in my own house.
Thirteen again.
I am just trying to protect myself. I am just trying to express myself. I am just trying to get everyone out.
My brother and I have never spoken since.
My parents try for a while to reconnect us. Eventually they stop. My mother still gives me updates about him as though the disconnection itself doesn’t exist. He and my dad no longer speak either. As far as I understand it, my brother has cut almost everyone out of his life except my mother. They play pickleball. They travel together.
I don’t know what the fuck any of this means.
I know I hurt him. I write him an apology letter. He doesn’t respond. I know one apology letter doesn’t erase telling your brother you don’t love him. I know he has lived through things I barely understand. I know I was afraid. I still am.
Sometimes I imagine reaching out to him and my body contracts before I can even construct the conversation. I am physically frightened of him. I also feel enormous empathy for him. Both are true.
My parents will die someday, and when they do, my brother and I will still be here. Probably? I imagine us having to speak because there will be paperwork or belongings or a funeral or some other practical thing death demands from the living. I don’t want their deaths to be the thing that puts us in the same room again. I also don’t know if I want to repair this now. I don’t know if I can.
Sometimes I think about the little boy who followed me around. The one I wanted to teach everything. I wanted him to know everything I knew. Just never more than me. I wanted to save him from making mistakes. I wanted to speed him up. I wanted him to become something.
Then I spent years wanting him to pull himself together. Then I spent years wanting the whole thing to disappear. And eventually he did.
