I have called my former logic “junkie arithmetic.” It was a kind of mental magic that allowed the performance of functionality to excuse my life-threatening secrets.
While he acknowledges the crucial role of secrecy in his childhood, Jung also states that the keeping of secrets can act like a psychic poison and alienate their possessor from the community. And Bok agrees that the freedom and power acquired in secrecy can backfire. When an idea is isolated from the feedback and perception of others, she explains that “secrecy can debilitate judgment and choice, spread, and become obsessive.” The secret space becomes a prison in which moral judgment and logic are starved and development arrests.
As the days passed, my brother’s pupils spread over the green of his eyes like night settling on our pond. Ideas roiled in him and spilled onto broad sheets of paper. He scrawled them furiously in the notebook that he now carried everywhere. He found and filled with his papers an old briefcase. This he guarded fastidiously. He grew thin. He began to look like someone battling something.
My brother is a June baby. A Gemini. A majority of the people I have loved were born under the sign of the twins, Castor and Pollux, and have characters marked by their alleged binary qualities. The twins are often said to have been born from an egg with their half sisters: Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra. And like those mythological sisters, the brother I wanted to save ended up saving me.
One night he stood in our kitchen. Around him lay scattered pens and paper, shards of torn cardboard, a scattering of chalk, the briefcase. Through an open window the smell of woods, a choir of crickets. Lit from behind, he towered, a shimmering hologram of that boy I’d seen born eighteen years earlier. He stared through me and the dark windows into something I couldn’t see.
In ancient Greece, a double incidence of St. Elmo’s fire was coined after the celestial twins. The weather phenomenon occurs most often on ship masts during storms and sailors have long known it for a bad omen. Darwin saw one aboard the Beagle, Starbuck in Melville’s Moby Dick, and Prospero in The Tempest. If an electrical field grows strong enough a sphere of glowing plasma throws a coronal light that appears like blue flames on ship masts, turrets, even the horns of animals. In 1899, Nikola Tesla described creating one in his lab as he tested a Tesla coil. “Butterflies became electrified and ‘Helplessly swirled in circles—their wings spouting halos of St. Elmo’s fire.’”
I saw that fire blaze on the mast of my brother. But he saw that blaze in everything. There in our kitchen he was both butterfly and mad inventor, captive to his creation.
My mother watched us so closely. And she was a psychotherapist. But love that great always includes blind spots. Maybe it requires them. I knew something was wrong, she tells me now. There is a hesitation in this statement. She did not want to see it. Eventually, it became impossible to ignore his worsening. She made an appointment for him with a psychiatrist who came recommended.
One day she was driving through Boston with him. My brother’s restless knees jumped. His eyes flitted around the car and bore into the car in front of them. When my mother stopped at a red light, my brother opened the passenger door and got out of the car. He began walking away from her with the briefcase in his hand. She called out to him and he stopped. Where are you going? she asked. He wouldn’t say. Please get back in the car, she said. He refused. Please, she said. I need you to get back in the car. After a moment, he obeyed.
My mother then held her private practice in an office adjacent to our home on the Cape. During one of my mother’s sessions, my brother’s naked upper body bobbed by the window directly behind her patient’s back.
It’s almost funny, now, she admits. I mean, what the hell was he doing? She pauses. But it wasn’t funny at the time.
He soon explained, his body scribbled red from the brambles in the woods near our home. He’d retreated into the woods when a suspicious truck pulled up at the house, and then swum across our pond and lost his shorts.
Who is chasing you? our mother asked.
My brother’s theory was that all people have an electrical component to their thoughts and emotions and if one is sensitive enough, or pays attention in the right way, one can pick up on this electricity and read others’ minds. In his words, he was trying to put the seemingly transcendent energy and intellectual excitement of my experience to a practical use in looking at scientific blind spots. If he had discovered this capacity to mind-read, he reasoned, then certainly the government knew. He was a danger to the state, who would want to stop him from sharing this revelation with the world.
My brother has, years later, described to me his awareness back then that many of his suspicions might be paranoia. He trusted that some of his thoughts were true, but describes his flight from the mysterious truck as a hedging of bets in the case that he wasn’t paranoid. He knew what direction my mother’s clients faced and made the choice to streak by her window, knowing that only she would see him. I did the best I could not to freak anyone out, he has told me.
His self-awareness, that juggling of possible realities impresses me both with its conscientiousness and its burden. It is difficult for me to imagine that state of being—not because it is inconceivable to me, but because it is so painful. And despite his conscientiousness, we were still freaked out. Whatever had opened him so wide, now it seemed to be crushing him.
The figures of his boyhood nightmares returned. Chucky and the Nutcracker. Like the goblins in Labyrinth, these figures were the henchmen of my brother’s fear, both symptoms and agents of his own crumbling illusion. Except this time, instead of enacting his terror at our captain’s absence, they signified a different abandonment. They haunted the space where his own self had been.
I didn’t think he was sure that no one chased him or that our phones weren’t bugged. But to me he seemed skeptical enough to try believing us. Though it was painful to behold, I was grateful for his uncertainty. His fear, even. I thought it softened his resistance to the doctor’s prescriptions. That, and our mother’s fiancé issued an ultimatum that my brother take the meds or move out of their house.
My brother has since told me that it was not his own fear that motivated him to take the medications, but ours. The choice to take the meds or leave my mother’s house was not one he made easily, and one that he made primarily to appease us.
He slept for such a long time.
They diagnosed him with bipolar disorder. He was eighteen and right on schedule for when the first true manic episode strikes most sufferers. The literature that I read also stated that most future bipolar patients experience episodes of depression throughout childhood. It is easy in retrospect to say that he was a depressed child. That I was. But that word and the others that followed were not a part of our vocabulary back then. My brother and I were only ourselves: sad and conflicted, vivacious and inspired. The nickname I had given him when he was born, Boo, was a better word. That single syllable still carries all of it. That beautiful boy I saw born and the man he became. All the brilliant pain and miracle of him. How could I have defined him by any word that did not include my love for him?
This is the slippery nature of diagnoses and the reason my brother became so rightfully suspicious of them. Pathology comforts in its reductiveness, but is no true authority, just a bunch of words invented by men. A list of compiled symptoms. Categorization and definition facilitate analysis, but conflation is dangerous and difficult to avoid. My brother can be described as bipolar the same way he can be described as artist, Gemini, introvert, brother. To limit him to any one of these contextual references erases him.
His depression had also not occurred to me because I had been busy thinking about myself. My brother’s diagnosis came with one for me as well: fraud. I had always considered myself his protector, but I had failed to see so much. In my secrecy and self-absorption, I had protected only myself.
Addiction runs in our family. The Captain’s father was a mean drunk. And my birth father, Jon, is an addict. Madness is also our
legacy. My mother’s father was also bipolar, or manic depressive, as they used to call it. Though they didn’t call it anything but gone in his case. He abandoned his family when my mother was four. He died a recluse, holed up in a book-lined room in Jacksonville, Florida.
My end would have been similar. I always imagined that if it got bad enough my family would stage an intervention. I wouldn’t be able to hide it. But I would have died before reaching that moment of visibility. The moment that I glimpsed this fact was sheer grace. Nothing else could have pierced my illusion.
I was alone in my bedroom in Brooklyn with a dwindling pile of heroin and a few crumbs of crack that I was dissolving with lemon juice to shoot speedballs. I tasted citrus with each shot, the surging high like a hand on the back of my neck in whose grip I went limp. It was a night like many others. But in the midst of this one the veil suddenly lifted, and I was struck by the terrifying truth: I was not waiting to be saved. I was waiting to die.
How had I ever thought I was less vulnerable than my brother? What an old and shallow trick—to judge your insides by someone else’s outsides. For a long time, I cherished my ability to conceal my trouble. Later on, my brother’s inability to hide his own seemed a much more valuable gift.
After the doctors, the diagnosis, the arguments spiked with terror—Stop talking about me! he’d yell from the next room, You’ve been doing that my whole life!—I drove my brother and his new prescriptions to the Cape. I was mildly dopesick again. My slick hands slid around the wheel and my knee jittered on the clutch. My brother stared at the muddy bumper of the car in front of us. He spoke slowly.
Maybe some things aren’t real, but the rest is. He picked at his ragged fingernails, each crowned with a stripe of dirt. Their diagnoses are bullshit. They pretend God wrote the DSM or something.
I agreed with him, but it didn’t matter. I just wanted him to take those pills and come back to himself.
The world is fucked up, he went on. But they want me to take pills so I’ll keep accepting it.
The world was fucked up. But I wanted to take pills to keep accepting it. Not only did my brother remain earnest in his madness, but his madness actually seemed an expression of it.
You can’t hold all that in your mind at once, Boo, I said. Rain speckled the windshield and I flicked on the wipers. I think our psyches develop ways of modulating how much we can take in. They know that we can only handle a certain amount of truth at once. I didn’t elaborate on the ways this function had gone haywire in my own circuitry. I glanced at him. His hand gripped the passenger armrest as he stared straight ahead. I feel like you’ve lost that somehow, I said. You’re getting too much.
After a pause, he asked, You see that car in front of us?
Yeah.
It’s probably not following us, right?
Probably not.
I steered the car toward the beach instead of home, our bodies leaning together as the road curved. I pulled into the beach parking lot and the silence swelled around us when I killed the engine. My brother scratched his head and sighed. I could feel the tension radiate from his body. My hands in my lap and his length folded tautly in the passenger seat, we stared at the choppy water.
I’ve always loved the Atlantic, I said. It’s so broody. I don’t think I could ever live in California. The Pacific is too glamorous.
Right, he said. What with the never-ending party of the Pacific Trash Vortex.
I laughed and he smiled a little.
Waves broke against a jetty, its rocky finger pointed toward the horizon. The rain slowed.
I know you want to see clearly, I said. To not depend on chemicals for the rest of your life.
He nodded. I think there has to be another way, he said.
But Boo, I said, turning to him now, if you don’t, you will be dependent on Mom and Dad, instead. On doctors you don’t trust. On hospitals. Tears pressed behind my eyes and I made myself turn to look at him.
Our eyes met and I saw that his were also wet. His pupils were still wide as wells that ran to the bottom of him. The ring of green around them mirrored the sea all around us—inconsolable and dazzling. He nodded, whether in agreement or resignation, I didn’t know.
My biggest fear was that my brother would stay mad. Bipolar people are notorious for going off their meds—the thrill of mania is too alluring. The rates of suicide are estimated as high as one in every five diagnosed with bipolar. I believed what I said to him. I also know that I would have said anything to get him to take those drugs.
The ways in which I understood his madness also scared me. The fearsome qualities of my own mind had always felt like another secret I kept. I understood the logic of his argument: that the conventions of modern human civilization were as crazy as any madman’s delusion, they just had a consensus. But I also knew the power of my own imagination, the way my mind could nurture an image, escalate it into a weapon to use against myself. And on some level, even then, I understood that my own affliction was as twisted. If he stayed lost in his labyrinth then what hope was there for me? I could not even speak of my trouble.
But my hubris was already weakened. It was not up to me to convince my brother of anything. It was not I, nor anyone, who would keep him from a life of madness, or show him the way back. As the poet Denise Levertov said, “One can anyway only be shown something one knows already, needs already. Showing anyone anything really amounts to removing the last thin film that prevents their seeing what they are looking at.” My protection and power over him had always been a story I told myself for my own comfort.
The labyrinth, after all, is Sarah’s creation. She calls upon the Goblin King. And this is the biggest difference between my brother’s afflictions and mine: whatever the biological and historical factors, I still chose mine. And I chose to keep it a secret from the people who would have helped me. It is a pattern that has followed me all my life—from drugs, to sex work, to mad love. I have always chosen my poisons. The things that will hurt and grow me the most.
In Labyrinth, Sarah believes she is on a mission to save her brother. But Toby is a MacGuffin. The real quest is for our heroine’s own transformation. By solving the labyrinth, Sarah smashes her self-absorption, her denial, her estrangement from the people who love her.
Like her, there was only one person I needed to save: myself.
After my brother finally slept, but before his mind settled, he asked me to come up to his room.
I need you to look under the bed, he said.
I nodded and got down on my knees. I looked hard at the crooked floorboards, a sideways crate of records, some clumps of dust and hair.
There’s nothing there, I told him.
He nodded and sat on the edge of the bed. I sat next to him. I slid my big hand into his big hand and squeezed.
It would have been tempting, once, to make myself the hero of this scene—to admire my own power to rescue my brother. But the real power here is his, in knowing what he needed and in asking for my help.
There is a scene in Labyrinth where Sarah awakens in a sprawling junkyard, an infinite dump. Dazed, she turns to a goblin woman with heaps of trash piled on her, “I was searching for something.”
The woman hands Sarah her own teddy bear. “That’s what you were looking for, wasn’t it, my dear?” she says. She leads Sarah through a door into a perfect replica of her own bedroom. Sarah throws herself on her bed in relief. “It was all a dream,” she says. “But it was so real.” She tries to walk out the door into her own house and the woman stops her.
“Better to stay in here, dear,” she says, and begins handing Sarah her familiar treasured things. “Your little bunny rabbit! You like your little bunny rabbit?” She reminds Sarah of the fantasies she once valued over the people in her life. Sarah takes the dolls, but repeats, “There was something I was looking for.” With a surge of conviction she pushes her way out of the false bedroom into the junkyard, once again determined to find Toby.
Sarah was ungrateful. S
he was fanciful. She wanted escape. She wanted to be worshiped. All Jareth’s promises were tailored to her desires. But she could not accept them. Over and over, some inscrutable part of her could not give in, could not betray what was true in her by accepting a false paradise buried in a junkyard.
It is a perfect analogy of addiction. Of redemption from any illusion. Call it grace, call it survival, call it strength—whatever allowed me to seize that moment of clarity and insist that what I was searching for was not in any cloistered room. It is something that my brother and I were given by our parents and the ways that they loved us. It is a fundamental belief in the worth of one’s own life. It is the knowledge of true love, and the belief that we are capable givers and receivers of it.
When Sarah finally reaches the castle at the center of the labyrinth, Jareth makes his final plea to her: “Just fear me, love me, do as I say, and I will be your slave.” It is the song of every seductive captor, every addiction, every fearful lover, every shadowed history. Sarah finally knows that it is she who will be the slave, and his power only exists if she believes in it. The power has been hers all along. She understands this as my mother did when she left her fiancé. As I did when I finally gave up heroin.
“You have no power over me,” Sarah says, and the labyrinth breaks into pieces.
My own liberation was not so fast. Neither was my brother’s.
A year after my brother broke apart, I flew across the country and met him in Olympia, Washington. He’d deferred college for a year and spent it living there with a close friend. I had missed him that year and when it ended, I suggested that I fly out to meet him. Together we could drive all his belongings back east, where he would start school in the fall. In our mother’s battered Ford Escort station wagon with an old boom box duct-taped to the dashboard, we drove across the country in five days. He had gone off his meds a couple of times that year and I had gone to some twelve-step meetings. We were both frayed. We were both climbing out of something.
Abandon Me Page 6