by Lamb, Wally
I nodded. “My mother used to keep this big scrapbook—all her family pictures. God, she was always dragging that thing out. She even rescued it once.” I saw Ma burst from the burning house, screaming—that scrapbook clutched to her chest.
“Rescued it?”
“We had a fire at our house. When Thomas and I were kids. . . . You know what’s weird about reading that thing? The more I get into it, the less I can stand the son of a bitch—the way he treats people, the way he thinks he’s better than everyone—but at the same time, I can sort of recognize him, you know? Relate to him, on some level.”
“You’re talking about more than physical resemblance then?”
“I guess. Yeah. . . . Last night? After I read how he drowned the monkey? I started thinking about how I’d gotten trapped by a promise, same as him. Same as Papa. . . . That was the last thing I ever said to her, you know? I ever tell you that?”
“The last thing you said to whom?”
“My mother. I promised her I’d take care of him. Keep him safe—her ‘little bunny rabbit.’ . . . It was the very last thing I said to her before she died.” I locked my arms across my chest. Watched two boys hike along the bank of the rushing river.
“Do you think you relate to your grandfather in some respects because—?”
“Because we both welshed on our promises. Went back on our word.”
Dr. Patel said she didn’t see how I had arrived at that conclusion. Hadn’t I campaigned tirelessly—aggressively, for better or worse—on my brother’s behalf? What made me feel that I had failed to honor my word to my mother?
The question made me laugh. “Look where he is,” I said. “Locked in his cage down there. A year, minimum, with an option to renew. Rubbing elbows with every goddamn psychopath who . . . Yeah, Doc, I did a great job of keeping him safe for her, didn’t I?”
“Dominick, we’ve been over this before. For you to take responsibility for circumstances beyond your control is both counterproductive and—”
“Look, you can say whatever you want to try and make me feel better or whatever, but the truth is I blew it for him. Fell off that freakin’ roof over there, missed his hearing, and then bam! He ends up long term at the Hatch Hotel.”
Dr. Patel shook her head. In the first place, she said, she doubted whether my appearance at Thomas’s hearing would have changed a course of action that was most likely inevitable. And second, the pledge I had made to my mother while she was dying—merciful and well-intentioned as it might have been—had exacted a very high personal cost. Too high a cost, in her opinion. It had made me unhappy, unwell—suicidal, even, for a brief period last fall. Certainly, my mother would not have wanted me to sacrifice my own well-being in a futile attempt to secure the well-being of my brother.
“That’s debatable,” I mumbled.
“Yes? Why do you say that?”
I shrugged, looked away. “No reason. Never mind.”
I could feel, rather than see, her watching me. Neither of us said a word.
“Dominick,” she finally said. “In talking about your grandfather, you’ve been quite critical of what you see as his delusions of grandeur. I ask you to consider if that is, perhaps, another of the resemblances you share.”
I let out a one-note laugh—asked her what that was supposed to mean.
“It means that Thomas became schizophrenic and you did not because God or fate or random selection made it so. It means that your brother is at Hatch for the next year because the state thinks that is where he best belongs. You cannot control these things, regardless of what promises you made, or to whom.”
“Yeah, well, if I ever need a lawyer to help me beat a rap, I’ll call you, Doc. But the truth is, I could have gotten him out of there. I know I could have.”
She disagreed, she said.
“Okay, fine. We agree to disagree.”
She stood up and walked toward the window. Stood beside me, looking out. “I’ve watched you stare out this window many times now,” she said. “What are you always looking at so intently?”
Nothing, I told her. Just the river.
“Ah,” she said. “Well, do me a favor, please. Give me a demonstration of these great powers you have to direct the course of things. Throw open the window, please, and call to the river. Tell it you want it to stop flowing in its present direction and reverse itself. Let me see this power of yours.”
I looked into her mischievous eyes. “I suppose you’re trying to make a point?”
“A little point, a little joke,” she said. “Would it not be futile for you to make such a command? To assume that the river would ignore its inevitable course and bend to your wishes? You are limited, my friend, in what you can and cannot control, as are we all. If you are to become healthy, you must acknowledge the ineluctability of your brother’s course. Acknowledge your limitations in directing it, Dominick. And that will free you. That will help to make you well.”
I looked from her smile down to the one on Shiva’s face. “So what am I supposed to do?” I said. “Shove him in a burlap bag? Drag him down there and throw him off the bridge?”
She reached out and touched the small of my back. Looked out at the river with me. “Is that what you’d like to do, Dominick?” she asked. I closed my eyes and saw, again, my morphine dream: saw and felt myself strangle my brother, cut him down from the tree, carry him toward this same damn river. “Answer my question, please,” she said. “Do you sometimes want to destroy your brother?”
“No,” I said, struggling to hold it together. “Yes.”
She waited. Watched me crumble.
“No! Yes! No! Yes! No! Yes!”
I must have wailed for a minute or more, and when I was finally finished—was spent, doubled over from my admission—she guided me away from the window and back to my chair. Had me do some deep breathing. Waited until I was so calm, I felt drowsy.
Only when I faced my limitations regarding my brother, Dr. Patel said, could I begin to address my conflictedness about him. Free myself. Move forward.
“I love him,” I said. “He’s my brother. But all our lives, he’s made me feel so . . .”
“Go on. He’s made you feel . . . ?”
“Ashamed. Humiliated. Everybody whispering about what a fuckin’ freak he is. Turning him into a fuckin’ joke. . . . And half of you wants to defend him, you know? Punch their lights out when they say something. And the other half . . . the other half . . . just wants to run in the opposite direction. Get the hell away from him so you don’t catch what he’s got. So that none of it lands on you.”
“None of what?”
“The ridicule. The disease. . . . The weakness.”
She uncapped her pen and wrote something down. “So what you’re saying is that being Thomas’s brother makes you feel bifurcated.”
“Bifurcated?” I looked up at her. “I couldn’t tell you, Doc. I don’t speak Phi Beta Kappa.”
“Divided, Dominick. Separated. Simultaneously sympathetic and repelled.”
I nodded, sighed. “And scared shitless. Don’t forget scared shitless.”
“Scared of what, please? Specifically.”
I got up again, went back to the window. “’Oh, look, Martha! Over there—identical twins! Are you their mother? How in the world can you tell which is which?’ . . . You know what that was like, growing up? Having that be your big claim to fame? Hearing your whole life that you were . . . interchangeable or something? And after he got sick, after he started to fold from it, I just waited . . . just waited. All during my twenties, my thirties—just waiting for it to get me, too. . . . And my mother: She expected it! Expected me to look out for him, keep myself strong so that I could keep him safe. Be his personal guardian or something. That was my function in life, you know? To keep my brother safe from Ray, from the tough kids at school . . . And even now. You know how panicky I get coming here, sometimes? Walking up those stairs of yours? Coming to see a shrink? Because I’m not supposed to need fixing; I’m the stro
ng one—the lookout. After . . . after he hacked his hand off last October? When it was on the news every two seconds? On the front page of the goddamned New York Post, for Christ’s sake? And I . . . It’s still like that sometimes. I’ll be stopped someplace for gas or coffee or something. I’ll have my guard down, and then I’ll look over and catch someone staring. Just staring at me like . . .”
“Finish your thought, please.”
“Like I’m the weak one. Like I’m . . .”
“Like you’re Thomas.”
I nodded. “I don’t know. Maybe I ought to get it tattooed across my forehead or something: ‘I’m the other one.’ “
She smiled sadly, jotted something down on her pad. “That would be an unnecessary gesture, in my opinion,” she said. “Despite your strong physical resemblance, your shared genetic coding, you and your brother are quite distinguishable.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m the one with two hands.”
“Well, yes, but that is not what I meant, my friend,” she said. “In some respects, you seem to me more like fraternal than identical twins. So much so that, at one point—back when I was treating Thomas—I checked his medical records to make sure you had both been tested.”
“Tested for what?”
“To establish your monozygosis. And tests had been made, of course—two of them, if I recall. In terms of your genetic makeup, you and he are identical. Nevertheless, Dominick, you quite defy the hereditary odds. Not only in your fortunate avoidance of your brother’s psychosis, but in other ways as well.”
I nodded, poker-faced. On the inside, I was rejoicing.
“And, of course, you’ve worked very hard to cultivate and capitalize upon those differences, too. Dedicated your life to the cause, I would say. Exhausted yourself with the effort. So what’s less clear to me is which of the differences between the two of you are genetically based and which ones you’ve orchestrated.”
I let out a laugh. “Which ones we’ve orchestrated ?”
“Not ‘we,’ Dominick. You, personally. You and your fear that what claimed your brother would claim you, too.”
She stopped, wrote down something else. All that writing she’d been doing the last couple sessions was making me nervous. When she looked up again, I nodded down at her pad. “What are you working on there?”
On me, she said, my dilemma. My fears were becoming clearer and clearer to her. She had just then been listing them. Did I want to hear her list?
Unsure whether I wanted to or not, I said I did.
First and foremost, she said, I was afraid that the shadow of my brother’s schizophrenia would descend on me—of course I was. As an identical twin, how could I not fear it? Second, I seemed to be—and she would use my phrase, she said—“scared shitless” that the world would fail to recognize the distinctions between my brother and me—understand that we were two separate people. “And then there is your third apprehension,” she said, “the one which I am just now beginning to better understand.”
“Yeah?” I said. “What’s that?”
My third apprehension, as she saw it, was that there were, perhaps, fewer distinctions between my brother and me than I would like. Than I had acknowledged.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Well, for instance, Thomas has a very gentle nature—a sensitivity toward others that is evident even now, sometimes, years and years into his psychotic existence. And from what you’ve told me of your shared childhood and adolescence, his gentleness—his sweetness—was even more pronounced before the onset of his illness. ‘He was the nicer one,’ you’ve told me many, many times. By which I take it you mean that he was the more sensitive, the more vulnerable, brother. Yes?”
“Yeah. . . . Yes.”
“Thomas was the twin who, in some respects, was easier to love?”
I looked away.
Dominick’s my little spider monkey, and you’re my cuddly little bunny rabbit. Come sit down next to me, bunny rabbit. Come sit in Mama’s lap . . .
“Easier for her to love,” I said.
“Your mother? Yes?”
I sat there, watching my right hand uncinch my wristwatch strap—cinch it again, uncinch it. When I looked up at Dr. Patel, she held my gaze.
“Let me ask you something,” she said. “Given your brother’s gentleness, his sensitivity, would it be fair to characterize Thomas as the more feminine of the two of you? Is that one of the distinctions you would make, Dominick?”
I shrugged. Felt myself tense at the word. Go downstairs now, Dominick. I made you a special snack. Your brother and I are just “playing nice.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“What is ‘maybe,’ please? Is that yes or no?”
“It’s yes!” I snapped. She was beginning to piss me off.
“Ah. And has that been the case all your lives? In childhood as well as adulthood? That you were the more masculine brother and Thomas was the more feminine?”
“Yes.”
“And was it that aspect of your brother’s nature, that quality perhaps, that made Thomas easier for your mother to love?”
I forced myself not to look away from her face. “What’s your point?” I said. “You saying he’s gay or something? That he’s schizophrenic because he’s queer?”
She smiled. She was not saying that—no, no. That had been Dr. Freud’s hypothesis, more or less, but psychotherapists had gotten quite beyond that early theory and into a realm of much greater complexity. “However, your immediate leap to that conclusion interests me, Dominick,” she said. “It might be worth our while to examine why you equate sensitivity—vulnerability—with homosexuality.”
I shook my head. “Oh, I get it,” I said. “You think he’s straight and I’m gay.” She waited for the wiseass smirk to leave my face.
“What I suspect,” she said, “is that you share some of your brother’s sweetness, his gentleness and vulnerability—his weakness, as you put it—and that that has frightened you. And that, perhaps, it is the constant denial of those qualities in yourself which has exhausted you. Made you sick.”
“He’s the sick one,” I reminded her. “I’m the other one.”
“Yes, yes,” she said. “The tough guy. The not-so-nice twin. Which doesn’t necessarily make you well, Dominick. Does it? Look around, my friend. Here you are, in therapy.”
She saw it over and over again in her male patients, she said—it could probably qualify as an epidemic among American men: this stubborn reluctance to embrace our wholeness—this stoic denial that we had come from our mothers as well as our fathers. It was sad, really—tragic. So wasteful of human lives, as our wars and drive-by shootings kept proving to us; all one had to do was turn on CNN or CBS News. And yet, it was comic, too—the lengths most men went to to prove that they were “tough guys.” The gods must look down upon us, laughing and crying simultaneously. “My twelve-year-old grandson, Sava, stayed with me recently while his parents were away at a conference,” she said. “And all during his visit, he begged and begged me to take him to a movie called Die Hard the Second.”
“Die Hard 2,” I corrected her. “Bruce Willis.” It was kind of nice, actually: this time-out. Imagining her as some kid’s grandmother instead of my shrink.
“Yes, yes, that’s right,” she said. “ ‘Oh, Muti, please, please!’ he kept begging me. ‘I must see Die Hard 2 or my life will be ruined!’ And so, at last, I complied. Capitulated. And as I sat beside him in the darkened theater, watching all the far-fetched mayhem in front of us, I thought to myself, well, here it is: a cinematic catalog of all the things boys and men are afraid of. All the things they feel they have to shoot at and punch and kill in order to kill off their own sensitivity—deny their X chromosome, if you will.” She paused, laughed at her own joke. “We were seated near the front of the theater, you understand. Sava had insisted upon it: in order for him to be happy, he had to have a large Coca-Cola, a large container of popcorn with butter, and a seat up near the front. And s
o, in the middle of Die Hard the Second, I had occasion to look back and see, in the reflected light from the movie screen, the illuminated faces of the audience members. Men and boys, mostly, staring trancelike at the screen. Letting Bruce Willy shoot and punch and kill for them everything that made them afraid. It was very instructive, really. I was enormously grateful for the experience.” She shook her head and smiled. “Well, forgive my polemic, Dominick. But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?”
At the end of our session, she said she thought we had covered some important ground, made some worthwhile progress. She suggested that, between now and our next visit, I should examine what I had been trying to shoot at and punch and kill for so long—whether or not I had, perhaps, denied some more gentle part of my nature, and if so, what it had cost me. “And don’t get a tattoo for your forehead,” she said, smiling. “It’s entirely unnecessary.” As proof, she held her hands in front of her. Wiggled her fingers and smiled. Our being human made us tragic and comic both, she had said; the gods both laughed and wept.
At the door, she asked me if I had any questions before we said goodbye for the week.
“My grandfather’s story,” I said. “Should I just stop reading it? . . . If all it’s doing is getting me worked up?”
The question put a frown on her face. She was a bit puzzled by that impulse, she said; she thought my past was precisely what I was searching for. She reminded me that I had been frustrated by my mother’s unwillingness to divulge our family history and now, here I was, in possession of a unique opportunity: the gift of my grandfather’s posthumous voice. My grandfather, problematical or not. Why would I wish to avoid such a gift?
“I didn’t want my grandfather,” I said. “I wanted my father. As far as my father was concerned, she never even gave me a name.”
“Granted, Dominick. But one must accept what one is offered, no? It would be an ungracious thing to say to a gift-giver, ‘No, no, I do not want this thing. I want another thing.’ And my goodness, to have at your disposal this communiqué from the past—well, I see it as a rare opportunity, Dominick. Potentially, at any rate. After all, how many of our grandfathers rented a Dictaphone, hired a stenographer, and spent afternoons recalling, for their grandsons’ sake—”