Unhinged

  There’s a pause on the line. “That’s it?” Obviously this wasn’t the answer Mark was expecting.

  “What do you mean, that’s it? I’m not going to do your job for you, if that’s what you’re implying.”

  Mark clears his throat several times, as if he’s trying hard to stifle a smartaleck reply. Finally, he speaks. “Well, Anna, that’s helpful. I’ll look into it.” He hangs up.

  About two weeks later, I get another call from Mark. Or rather, a voicemail message. Several of them, actually—each one more frantic than the last.

  All the messages are the same: “Anna, it’s your brother. Please call me.” Only the tone becomes different after the third or fourth one. He sounds upset and scared.

  I call him back on his cell, half-dreading that he’ll be bearing bad news about our mother or grandparents. But that’s not it at all.

  He answers the phone on the first ring and starts talking right away; he recognizes my number on the caller ID so I don’t even need to identify myself. “Anna, something’s happened,” he says. Then he starts rambling, the words falling out of his mouth at such a breakneck speed I can’t make heads or tails of any of it.

  “Mark, slow down. I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”

  He pauses, takes a breath. “I just found out something,” he says. “I just got a look at my VA file. It says I have some [medical gobbledygook term I’ve never heard before that likely doesn’t exist] neuropathy. Nobody told me this. My psychiatrist didn’t tell me. My boss didn’t tell me, and he has my file. He’s hiding my file from me now. I think I got it in Korea from breathing VX gas. I—”

  He rambles on, making no sense. Something about nerve gas, and poison, and his shady attorney “boss” (who has yet to pay him anything) hiding information from him. Another psychotic episode, I’m sure.

  I listen to his rambling nonsense, mutter a few meaningless words of encouragement, and hang up. There’s not much else I can do.

  Predictably, a week or so later Mom reports that Mark is no longer working for the attorney Stephanie hooked him up with. I don’t think he ever got paid a dime for any of the work he did either. Stephanie feels responsible for the whole debacle, so she once again backs out of her ultimatum to kick Mark out of the house.

  Meanwhile, Mark makes his family’s already-serious debt situation even worse by sinking their money into yet more foolhardy get-rich-quick schemes. They buy a rental property they can’t afford to maintain, and when that goes bust, Mark spends several thousand dollars of his wife’s money to train for his insurance sales license. He spends three months in a training course, then he takes the licensing exam once and fails. He never tries to pass it again, let alone sell any insurance, though he does spend a couple of mania-fueled days passing out water bottles at local summer festivals to help promote a local insurance agent—again, for no pay.

  After all these ventures fail, Mark spends a couple of years enrolled in endless “computer classes” at the local VA.

  Mom and I discuss Mark’s latest “career move” by phone one afternoon when I’m pregnant with my second child. “Mark can’t drive me to the doctor today, Anna, because he’s busy with all these computer classes. What should I do?”

  “Can you take a cab? If you’re short on money, I’ll wire you some.”

  “I guess I can take a cab today,” Mom sighs. “But Mark is booked in all these computer classes for months at a time, and I can’t take a cab every single time. Can’t you come down here and drive me?”

  Now it’s my turn to sigh. “Mom, you know that I can’t leave my job and family in Chicago just to drive you to doctor appointments. Mark lives close to you, he doesn’t have a job, he has nothing better to do than to drive you places. Why can’t he do it?”

  “Well, he says these classes he’s taking at the VA are really important for him to be able to get a job.”

  “Mom, Mark has been taking classes for twenty years. He already has a college degree he’s never used. He’s never worked a day in his life. What makes you think he’ll get a job now?”

  “Well, he insists that this time it’ll be different.”

  “Yeah, likely story.”

  More than a year passes, and Mark is still taking the same introductory-level computer classes at the VA, “studying” how to use the same word-processing programs he’s already used for the past fifteen years. He never seeks employment because of course that was never his motivation in the first place. The VA career classes he can take for free are just an excuse for him to get out of his house.

  Some months pass. I visit my mom and grandparents in Indiana. Memaw and Papaw Jones don’t mince words when it comes to my brother. “Mark is the laziest thing I ever did see,” Papaw says in his thick mountain accent. “Mark told me when he was a teenager that he’d never do manual labor, and boy, he kept that promise, all right.” Memaw just sighs and nods her head in agreement.

  While I’m visiting relatives in Indiana, I see Mark very briefly at a historical reenactment festival event that Dad and several other family members are attending. Mark doesn’t speak to me, or to anyone else for that matter. He just sits in his chair motionless, his eyes glazed over, a blank expression on his face as he stares into space. Mom tells me later that he recently got a job serving subpoenas. “He gets paid for each subpoena he serves,” she explains.

  I have trouble understanding this, as usual. “I thought only deputy sheriffs serve subpoenas in Indiana,” I say. “Mark’s not a deputy sheriff.”

  Mom just sighs. “I don’t know Anna, I don’t ask him too many questions about it.” And she leaves it at that.

  But only a week or so later, when I’m back in Chicago, Dad comes to visit on Father’s Day, and he has a very different story to tell. According to Dad, not only has Mark and Stephanie’s financial outlook brightened enough for them to be able to afford to accompany Dad and his wife on a week-long vacation at a large historical reenactment jamboree in central Pennsylvania the following month, Mark also allegedly has not just one, but two jobs.

  “He’s still serving subpoenas,” Dad confirms, not commenting on the fact that the job is pretty weird for a heavily medicated paranoid schizophrenic to have in the first place. According to Dad, Mark also just joined the staff of an Indiana congressman, working out of his Indianapolis office.

  I do a double take. “What? Are you sure?”

  “Yep.”

  Are you fucking kidding me?

  I don’t say this aloud. I blink several times, trying to regain composure. I cannot get my mind around this at all. “A congressman hired Mark? To work for him? Are you sure?”

  “That’s what he says.”

  I wonder then why on earth Dad would believe a tall tale like that given my brother’s checkered past, but I know that Dad has always had a blind spot where Mark, his eldest son, is concerned. Still, my husband and I exchange bewildered looks. This makes no sense whatsoever. I think my brother Mark is about as likely to get hired by a congressman as he is to be named the next king of England.

  I shrug off this news and retreat to the kitchen in search of some fresh iced tea. But Dad’s wife Tracy follows me and takes me aside in the pantry. “I just found out Mark is going on this vacation with us on the way over here,” she whispers, seething. “Your Dad has known for weeks and just got around to telling me. And do you know why Mark and Stephanie and the baby can suddenly afford it? The registration fee for the jamboree alone is almost five hundred dollars for the three of them, to say nothing of all the other expenses.”

  I admit that I really have no idea.

  “One of your dad’s business associates fronted Mark the money,” his wife explains. “On your dad’s recommendation, no less. Not to mention sold them some camping equipment on an IOU. I told your dad not to go down that road, but of course he won’t listen to me. He never does when it comes to Mark.”

  I pat my stepmother lightly on the shoulder, not knowing what to say. Something tells m
e that in a month or two, that so-called business associate is going to be out a significant chunk of money, not to mention pretty upset with Dad.

  But I have to find out more about Mark’s supposed new job working for a member of Congress. Either Dad has fallen hook, line, and sinker for Mark’s latest line of bullshit or the whole world as we know it has just come crashing down.

  The reporter in me wants to just call the congressman’s offices directly and ask if they employ my brother (I have plenty of experience dealing with congressional staffers in my work as a policy analyst and journalist, after all), but since this is a family issue I decide on a more discreet approach. So I call my mom instead.

  “Mom, I need you to find out something for me,” I tell her when I call her the next day.

  “What?”

  “Does Mark really work for a congressman?” I give her the politician’s name and she recognizes it immediately from hearing it dozens of times on the evening news.

  “Wow! Mark works for him?”

  “That’s what Dad told me yesterday.”

  “Really? Well that’s great!” So this is news to Mom too.

  “Mom, I need for you to find out if it’s really true. Because I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s not.”

  “Why would your dad lie about something like that?” Mom asks. “I mean, I can think of plenty of other things your dad would lie about, but—”

  “Mom, I think maybe it was Mark who lied to Dad. Just look into it for me, okay? Mark talks to you more than anyone else. And report back to me right away. Otherwise I’m just going to call the congressman’s office myself.”

  “All right hon. Just do me a favor and don’t call anybody until after I talk to your brother first. I don’t want you to embarrass yourself.”

  I cast my eyes skyward. I am well past embarrassment where my brother is concerned. “I promise I won’t, Mom. But I want you to look into that whole subpoena-serving thing he’s supposedly doing too. That seems pretty fishy in and of itself, given Mark’s background.”

  “All right, I’m having lunch with Mark tomorrow. I’ll see what I can find out.”

  Sure enough, Mom calls me back two days later with a full report. “Well, I talked to Mark about the congressman thing,” she says. “Turns out all he did was apply for a job at the guy’s office, but it didn’t pan out. Something to do with all the work he does for the veterans.”

  “What work Mark does for veterans? I thought he quit doing that when he quit working for that crackpot lawyer who never paid him.”

  “No, he still does it. It’s all on the computer. I don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s all on the computer.”

  “Uh huh. Are you sure he isn’t just messing around playing World of Warcraft or something? Because you know how he likes to do that.”

  “I don’t know, Anna. I don’t ask Mark too many questions these days. Whenever I do it just gets me too depressed.”

  Gee, I wonder why.

  “I did talk to him about the subpoena thing too. He’s doing that for sure. And he does get paid for that. He gets paid for every subpoena he delivers successfully.”

  This still isn’t adding up for me. “I always thought you had to be a deputy sheriff to serve subpoenas in Indiana,” I say. “You know, with a gun, and law enforcement training and everything. Since most people who are getting subpoenaed don’t want to be and tend to get pretty pissed off about it.”

  “Well, Anna, that used to be true, but I called around and found out that because of budget cuts, in our county they can’t afford to pay sheriffs to do it anymore, so they’re hiring people like Mark to do it. He’s done one of them successfully so far. I asked him if it scared him to do it and he said no.”

  “One? So he has served exactly one subpoena successfully. In more than two months of supposedly doing this?”

  “Far as I know, yeah.”

  The very notion of my grossly obese, heavily medicated brother Mark, who moves with all the agility and speed of a tree sloth, chasing people down to serve them with legal papers is nonsensical. Boy, the Indiana taxpayers are sure getting their money’s worth when it comes to him. Then again, they’re privatizing prisons and paying the private prison guards minimum wage in Indiana these days too, so what else can I possibly expect?

  “You know Mom, people get shot and assaulted for serving subpoenas sometimes. Which is exactly why they used to have cops do it.”

  “I know, Anna. Like I said, I try not to think about what Mark does these days too much. It’s just too much for my nerves. Last time I got so worked up about Mark I almost ended up in the hospital.”

  I thank Mom for the legwork and hang up.

  Sometimes my family resembles an Alexander Payne movie.

  I’m up late one night watching a reality-TV program on cable that takes place in the psych ward of New York City’s Bellevue Hospital. I find it while flipping channels, and I’m immediately transfixed.

  The show’s narrator explains that it takes place in the lockdown unit at Bellevue, where many of the patients are lifelong schizophrenics. The patients share their current set of delusions with the camera. I watch a middle-aged man tell the camera that he is God and the only reason he’s been readmitted to Bellevue for the umpteenth time is because the rest of the world does not recognize him as the Supreme, All-Powerful, and All-Knowing God. Another middle-aged man walks up, tells the camera he’s been living in Bellevue on and off for seven years and he’s met at least eight different Gods in that time, and walks off.

  The camera wanders up and down the ward, and there are interviews with patients whose stories and symptoms I recognize instantly. A screaming young man who sits locked in an isolation cell as he raves about the unfairness of the world reminds me of my brother the failing college student who falsely accused a professor of sexually abusing him rather than deal with his own demons. The middle-aged man who thinks he is God is cut of the same cloth as the Mark who claimed the Catholic Church should fight a fascist religious war of his own design. A beautiful young woman who says the FBI is coming to Bellevue to kill her next week could be my teenage brother when he claimed World War III was imminent and UFOs were landing in our backyard.

  I recognize these people and their symptoms because I’ve grown up alongside a brother who’s had every single one.

  My husband shuffles into the living room, pajamas rumpled from sleep. He looks from the flickering television screen to me, then back to the TV again. “Why are you watching this?”

  “I have to,” I say. “I know these people. I know them all.”

  1. Not his real name.

  2. Associated Press, “Newtown Shooting Police Files Released,” CBC News/World, December 27, 2013, www.cbc.ca/news/world/newtown-shooting-police-files-released-1.2477011.

  3. Sergio Paradiso, MD, et al., “Emotions in Unmedicated Patients with Schizophrenia during Evaluation with Positron Emission Tomography,” American Journal of Psychiatry 160 (2003): 1775–83, http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/article.aspx?articleid=176453.

  4. National Institute of Mental Health, “What Is Schizophrenia?” www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/schizophrenia/index.shtml?utm_source=wordtwit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=wordtwit.

  5. P. V. Gejman et al., “The Role of Genetics in the Etiology of Schizophrenia,” Psychiatric Clinics of North America 33, no. 1 (2010): 35–66, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2826121/; Daniel R. Weinberger, “Biological Phenotypes and Genetic Research on Schizophrenia,” World Psychiatry 1 (2002): 2–6, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1489838/.

  6. Munchausen’s syndrome is not to be confused with Munchausen’s by proxy, in which the sufferer deliberately inflicts physical injury or feigns illness in a child or loved one under his or her care to receive attention and sympathy.

  7. Not her real name.

  8. John Price and Anthony Stevens, Prophets, Cults and Madness (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 2000); Steven Hassan, Combatting Cult Mind Control (Rochester, N
ew York: Park Street Press, 1988); Linda A. Teplin et al., “Crime Victimization in Adults with Severe Mental Illness,” Archives of General Psychiatry 62, no. 8 (2005): 911–21.

  Chapter 7

  Where Are They (and Where Am I) Now?*

  Life doesn’t stop at the end of a book. I wrote this book in fits and starts over a period of about seven years, with many revisions to reflect the ever-changing state of my family’s mental health. Like any family, we’ve had our ups and downs. My own pattern is mostly ups; since my rock-bottom in 2002, I’ve done extraordinarily well, both personally and professionally. After working a series of staff writer jobs, I launched my own freelance-writing business in 2007 shortly after the birth of my son, and I remain successfully self-employed. I’m happily married with two great kids, and I’m mentally very stable and healthy. I haven’t had a psychotic break or even mild depression since those dark days in 2002, though I did have a brief problem with stress-induced anxiety a few years ago that was directly related to the ongoing mental health problems people in my extended family continue to struggle with and the damaging impact those problems inevitably made on my own life. To deal with it, I saw a psychotherapist for about ten cognitive behavioral therapy sessions to help me brush up on my coping skills, and I came off that brief bump in the road stronger and healthier than ever. Even given all the work I’ve already done, though, these occasional “tune-ups” are essential to staying well, I’ve found.