by Marin Sardy
In wild, fleeting moments I considered moving back to Anchorage, to work at a café and rent a place downtown and spend my free time convincing Tom to come back inside. I knew, we all knew, that Adrienne or I could try this, but I balked when I considered what it meant. I had seen enough of Tom’s schizophrenia to not expect my efforts to make a difference, though now that sentiment feels like an excuse. But I also worried for myself. Depression stalked me, coming on thick every winter despite my efforts to find a helpful antidepressant, as did the terrible tension. I was afraid that as soon as I got to Anchorage, the muscles in my back would knot up, as they always did now when I thought much about Tom, and with this would come the crushing feeling and the strange stillness, and I would be no help at all. Things were not so different for Adrienne. And we both knew that Dad would not want us to do it. In general, he preferred to handle things on his own, but we knew he also wanted to protect us. “Tom already has no life,” he said sometimes. “I don’t want you girls to have no life either.”
Sean consoled me by saying that, in his experience, mental illness tended to be harder on the sufferer’s loved ones than on the sufferer himself. But I never knew how fully his own experience could apply to Tom, and I wondered if he was exaggerating a bit in order to make me feel better. It did appear that Tom’s situation bothered Tom much less than it bothered the rest of us, and I suppose there was solace in that—however much his contentment may have hinged on being unable to grasp how much he had lost, unable to care that he had lost it, and unable to believe he would receive so little in return.
We could visit, at least, but none of us sisters had the money to fly home very often. I might have asked Dad to pay, but as a rule I avoided asking him for things. And my sisters, who had more contentious relationships with him, could not have asked. That was the way of things. Tom’s schizophrenia didn’t occur in a vacuum. It occurred within our family—a family that had already been shaped by loss and mental illness, a family that was barely functional even at its best.
* * *
—
Dad found many small ways to help, but he was largely at sea, often failing to grasp how Tom’s mind had been changed by illness. Others sometimes tried to help too, but found it no easier. Zach took on a larger role than most, regularly letting Tom crash at his house. Other times, he offered food or listened while Tom rambled. But he often left town for work, so his efforts were fraught with complications. Once, when he was away for a few days with Tom at the cabin he was renting, Tom left a candle burning on a wooden windowsill and Zach came home to find it blackened and charred. It was just luck that the whole place didn’t go up in flames.
Another high school friend, Russell, who had his own story of psychosis and jail and hospitalization, whose illness had much in common with Tom’s, took an interest in him and made efforts to connect with him whenever he could, stopping to talk, asking how he was, offering what he had. Russell was earning a degree in computer science at UAA, and in time he became like a beacon to me, his successes pointing me toward an idea of what kind of life Tom might someday have for himself. In the meantime, Russell would send us photographs and updates—Tom in matted dreadlocks, Tom midsentence, Tom with an awkward smile. Russell once remarked to Adrienne that Tom was always happy. “No,” she said, “I think it’s you. I think he likes you.”
It worked out best, though, with Sean and Kevin. Only they seemed to have the perfect touch—perhaps because Sean, with his bipolar disorder, understood hospitalization and medication from experience, and yet also had some distance from the worst of it. Tom would show up at their house, hungry and depleted, and end up camping in their living room for weeks on end, lounging on the couch while they were at work and then crashing on it at night. In his first few days there he could consume mountains of food, throwing back a gallon of milk and thousands of calories daily. And like young parents, they would coordinate runs to the grocery store to make sure there was always enough for him. They were our surrogates and our saviors, feeding him, keeping him company, keeping him warm. In their casual, easygoing way, they took better care of him than anyone but Dad ever would.
But not even Sean could change his mind about treatment. Tom didn’t like to talk about medication and would get cranky if anyone brought it up, and if Sean mentioned it too many times, Tom would move on from their living room and they wouldn’t see him again for a while. Meanwhile, Tom’s life was an exercise in futility. He was focused on a plan to swim across the Pacific Ocean to Japan, embarking on a training regimen that entailed standing, fully clothed, in Sean and Kevin’s shower with the cold water running for hours at a time. Day after day he did this, and since it was in their only bathroom, Kevin’s girlfriend, Raina, had to sometimes sneak in to use the toilet in secret. But they didn’t make him stop. I think they loved him for it.
And when Alicia flew home with her infant son but was unable to find him, it was Kevin who called her on her very last day and said, “Your brother’s at my house.” So she arrived to find Tom in his knit wool cap with his pack full of rocks, and she held her baby up toward him, saying, “Tom, this is your nephew.” And Kevin pulled out his camera and started snapping shots—there was Tom smiling softly, showing the baby a rock. There was Tom peering at the questing infant eyes, enchanted by the tiny hand that gripped his finger.
How can I convey the quality of their love? Years later, at Tom’s memorial, Kevin would retell the story of how Tom took over the shower, laughing as he remembered it. And Raina, nodding, would act out for us how she crept in to pee, watching the shower curtain, trying to hurry. And soon we would all be laughing—laughing with Kevin even as he began to cry, as he cried on through his laughter, laughing through his tears, shaking his head, saying, “Swimming to Japan.”
* * *
—
I made it home at last in 2009—nearly three years into Tom’s time of homelessness. It was June, the lightest, warmest time of year. Flying in from Santa Fe on a clear evening, I got a view of the southern mountains, massive tangles of peaks and glaciers sprawling across the landscape. In my window seat with my face pressed to the glass, I cried from homesickness. When we landed I felt my belonging the moment I stepped outside, as if in my cells. Something of the cool air, its moisture, its smell. The blue dusk. The ridge of the Chugach guarding the city like a great wall.
My goal with Tom, if I conceived it as such, was to glimpse a way to get through to him, to spot an opening to convince him to come inside and get help. But I wasn’t very strategic about it. I had no actual plan, no idea what my plan should look like if I did. What I wanted most pressingly was just to see him—to be reminded that he was real, and maybe remember again that he was mine.
The only way to find him was to go searching the streets. I put word out that if anyone spotted him or knew where he hung out, I’d like to know. Sean told me he believed he was camping out, but also that he was secretive about it and wouldn’t say where. For two days I did little more than drive around scanning the sidewalks, searching for the figure of him walking. I kept thinking I saw him, only to discover it was someone else. It made me feel a little insane, the acuteness of his nearness, the chance of driving right past him without noticing.
Finally, early one afternoon, Dad got a call from his friend Bruce, who said, “I’m looking at Tom right now.” We sprang up and drove to the intersection where Bruce had pulled over, keeping Tom in his sight, still on the phone. Dad handed me some cash, reminded me to ask Tom if he wanted some new clothes, and said, “See if you can get him to come by the house.” At the intersection, waiting for the light to change, I spotted Tom getting up from a bench and ran across the four-lane throughway to reach him.
As I approached, he didn’t initially turn. “Hi, Tom,” I said to get his attention, unsure if he had seen me yet. My eyes were already welling up. Glancing my way, he replied, “Have you figured out I’m your brother yet?”
Across the intersection stood the long, low strip mall that housed Anchorage’s giant REI store, as well as a sandwich shop where we had often eaten in years past. Thinking to feed him, I asked Tom if he wanted to go there. After a brief hesitation, he agreed. But it wasn’t a good idea. It was loud and crowded in there, the lunch rush, and as we waited in line to order food a faint look of distress grew on his face. Then he resisted my offer to buy him lunch. I finally talked him into getting a sandwich and promised we could go sit out on the patio, and he visibly calmed once we stepped outside. Then, as I ate, he started talking—a long, low monotone stream of ideas, a nearly unceasing flow that caught me and brought me right up to the fluid edge of his world.
He spoke not to me so much as at me, not noticing that I couldn’t hear much over the traffic noise. He shifted amorphously from topic to topic, circling back, digressing, repeating, skipping out, fading in, every subject coming up apropos of nothing. He talked of Catholic priests and the samurai code and a new kind of education system for which he was designing the textbooks. I could hear the schizophrenia in his speech—the “clanging.” Sometimes he would repeat a word or pause to spell it, or follow it with words that rhymed or assonated, his sentences progressing via not meaning but sound. I struggled to follow without getting bogged down in his involuted language, a little bit stunned by the earnest ambition fueling his chaotic thoughts.
Eventually even the activity on the patio started to bother him, so I suggested we go. “I could just walk along with you for a while,” I said, “until you don’t want to anymore.” He stared at me a moment and then agreed. So we walked and he talked, heading out across the parking lot and down Northern Lights Boulevard toward Carrs grocery store, and then across the street to thread around our old junior high and high schools. And as we passed under the tall wall of the West High Auditorium, with its giant mural of a bald eagle reaching for an anchor, Tom digressed midsentence to say, “West, W-E-S-T.” And I wondered what of those memories hung in his heart as they hung in mine.
Turning onto a bike path, I saw in Tom’s eyes a vulnerable kind of uncertainty that I had never seen in them before. It was faint but clear, a hesitant look that I had often seen on our mother’s face and that seemed somehow part of schizophrenia. It was unnerving—how unprotected he and Mom could appear, as if they lacked the psychic shields that the rest of us wore always. I felt, too, his paranoia. Suspicion hovered around us, in the background, at every moment. Occasionally he eyed me sidelong as if to size me up or catch me out, seeming torn between politeness and mistrust, affection and self-preservation. In the selfie I took, his face was intent, distracted by a thought, his stance guarded. Though he pressed in for the photo, his shoulders were hunched. And as if to highlight the contrast, the camera caught my own perfect on-demand smile beside him. It was instead my body that gave me away, leaning toward him so eagerly that my hoop earring swung awkwardly outward.
For over an hour we wandered through the woods around downtown, following the bike paths around Westchester Lagoon and then into the alders and spruces that lined Chester Creek, and eventually up a long hill that gave us a view. When I asked Tom how often he saw Dad, a shadow fell over his face and he began to ruminate, calling Dad by his full name, as if he were a stranger or a public figure. He was still angry—that was clear. But his thoughts were garbled, and I suspected that he no longer remembered much about what had happened between them, only that his father had turned him away. I felt a wave pass through me, sickly and unsteadying, as I registered that the message behind Dad’s decision had been lost.
Then I brought up Mom and Adrienne and watched his eyes turn gentle, fond of the thought of them, before he slipped back into his default look of confused concentration. I asked if he needed any camping gear. A tent, a tarp, a sleeping bag. He said no. I asked where he camped, if it was in these woods somewhere, but he ignored the question. I tried to give him the twenties Dad had handed me, but he wouldn’t look at them. I suggested that he come by the house while I was visiting, for dinner and a shower and some new clothes. But he shook his head. I was getting nowhere. And yet I felt that he was giving me everything. Everything he could find within himself to offer up. It was thirty years’ worth of love and madness distilled into a single summer hour.
And this was when he paused in our progress up the hill and quietly demanded, “Do you remember the time you tried to kill me?”
Abashed, I took a long time to reply. I had, he told me, come after him in a crowd with a pistol. We all had, the whole family. I had shot at him. Now he waited. “No, I don’t remember that,” I finally said. And then, finding my footing, “I didn’t do that.” But I couldn’t tell what he made of this, if he accepted the denial.
At the top of the hill, he faced me and said this was enough talking. Reluctantly I nodded and held out the bag containing the uneaten half of his sandwich. He took it absently.
And then, after I let out a few obvious phrases—Okay I love you nice to see you thanks for the walk—and again shoved some bills at him and was surprised when he took them, he turned back down the hill, rounded a bend, and was gone.
Animate
The story goes that Mario is Luigi’s brother. Nearly all we know about him is that he is a brother. We also know that he wears red and Luigi wears green. It is easy to infer that they must be close, having gone into the same line of work (plumbing) and being the title characters of the same video game (Super Mario Bros.).
* * *
—
I see us from behind, the backs of our heads, three in a row on chairs pulled close in front of the television. Adrienne, the blonde. Tom, the youngest. And me. Ignoring our mother when she ignores us, unable to hear beyond the voices in her head. Turning to this other place inside the television, to the freedom of its two-dimensional universe. I have the gray rectangle of the Nintendo controller in my hands. Hands on buttons, they stay that way for five years. The houses change, the rooms change, the TV grows and shrinks and turns color as one model is swapped out for another. The games change too, but Mario is the hinge on which all the rest hang, the alternate reality that cleaves us to the idea of alternate realities.
* * *
—
When you play the game, Mario becomes a sort of doppelgänger, enacting your thoughts in his block-and-pixel world. When you punch (button A), he punches. When you run (button B), he runs. You live his adventures along with him, and yet you are never quite inside them. You see him only and always in profile. He is linked to you and yet he is not you. So it is with brothers. Mine sat beside me year after year, face to the screen, eyes on the action. (Disregarding the foil balls our mother placed on the antennae, disregarding her warnings about cosmic rays.) Telling me which brick to punch to get the secret fire flower, or the vine that unfurls up into clouds and golden coins. Outgrowing his shoes, saving the princess, outwitting the games—version 2, version 3. One day his hands were bigger than mine.
* * *
—
In Mario’s world, the straight line of his horizon extends ever to the right, while what is behind him to the left vanishes with each step he takes forward. Mario’s past is forever irretrievable. If he turns to go back, the edge of the screen refuses to give way. This is also the case with me, as I will learn. I will learn, as I grow taller (as Mario grows talle
r when he finds a giant mushroom)—I will learn, as I reach the prime of youth and taste invincibility (as Mario becomes invincible when he captures a flashing star)—I will learn that turning back to the left and returning to the castle at the end of the previous level (the one in which Mario threw fireballs at the tortoise-dragon until it fell through its drawbridge into red lava) is impossible.
* * *
—
This does not at first seem to be the case. It seems that in my memory I can travel anywhere I have ever been. I can conjure those brothers and my own with ease. I can sense the shape of Tom’s fingers and the quality of his inward gaze, and I can feel madness like a ghost in the walls. But then comes the day when I wish to go back, to truly go back, not just to approximate that last castle but to inhabit it again. The moment comes when I hurl my cellphone down onto the bed and watch it bounce to the floor, and I find myself thinking that we must rewind this, we must return to the previous moment. The moment happens when I call Will and when he asks what’s up I say, “No no no no no no no no no.”
* * *
—
It has occurred to me that life is not the existence of a body in space but its movements within space. An animal that is animate is one that is alive. Every cell is engaged in the flow of molecules within and between the tissues, and without that movement a creature is dead. I thought about this as I imagined my brother, post-autopsy (required, confirming the suicide), lying on a shelf in a freezer that I could not visit to see him one last time. So I zoomed in close in my thoughts, trying to catch again the curve of his jaw, the width of his nose. I zoomed all the way down into his cells, where I saw that no proton pumps churned ions across membranes. No ribosomes dutifully transcribed RNA into proteins. No neurons pulsed electrical signals. Never had a stillness been more complete.