I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

  “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 strong 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 compl
exity. “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 so, 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—”

  “It wasn’t for my sake. Our sake. I don’t think he had any idea she was pregnant.”

  As she understood it, Dr. Patel said, Domenico had wanted to leave something of himself for posterity. Whether or not he knew, before he died, of Thomas’s and my existence, we were, in fact, just that: his descendants, his link to the future. My reading his story allowed him to achieve his goal, she said. Perhaps if I kept reading it, Domenico might, likewise, help me to achieve mine.

  We had gone over our allotted time, she said. We had to stop. “But come here first.” She took me by the arm and led me back to the window.

  “It is all connected, Dominick,” she said. “Life is not a series of isolated ponds and puddles; life is this river you see below, before you. It flows from the past through the present on its way to the future. That is not something I have always understood; it is something I have come to a gradual understanding of, through my work as both an anthropologist and a psychologist.”

  I looked out, again, at the rushing water.

  “Life is a river,” she repeated. “Only in the most literal sense are we born on the day we leave our mother’s womb. In the larger, truer sense, we are born of the past—connected to its fluidity, both genetically and experientially.” She folded her hands together as if praying to what we saw below. “So, that is my opinion, my friend. Should you throw your ancestry into the woodstove? Of course not. Should you keep reading it, even if it takes away your sleep? Yes, by all means. Read your grandfather’s story, Dominick. Jump into the river. And if it upsets you, come in and tell me why.”

  On the way out of her office, I got a quick glimpse of her next appointment: big, burly guy—work boots, hooded sweatshirt. We gave each other a jerky half-nod for a hello. Another “tough guy” in therapy, I thought. A fellow member of the walking wounded.

  The traffic on the way home was a bitch. I was antsy. Kept punching my way through the radio stations. “Night Moves” . . . “I Shot the Sheriff” . . . “The Boys Are Back in Town.” If you cranked up the volume loud enough, it took over your whole head. You didn’t have to think. But when I got back home, pulled into the driveway, and cut the engine, the silence came back, and with it, unexpectedly, the morning my mother died. . . .

  It was just me and her in that hospital room when I’d made that promise—the same one she’d asked me to make my whole life. Ray and I had been up with her all night—just sitting there, watching her suffer, because there was nothing else we could do. “She could go any time,” they kept saying: the doctors, nurses, the woman from hospice. The only catch was, she kept outlasting their predictions. Couple of days and nights, it had dragged on. We were all pretty whipped by then. . . .

  The sun was just coming up, I remember. She’d been thrashing around for an hour or more, moaning, trying to yank off her oxygen mask. Then, right about when it was getting light out, she quieted down. Stopped fighting.

  Ray had stepped out for a couple minutes—to make a phone call about work. And I leaned over toward her, started stroking her forehead. And she looked right at me—she was conscious at that point, I know it. . . . And I told her I loved her. Told her thanks for everything she’d done for us—all the
sacrifices she had made. And then I said it: the one thing I know she’d been waiting to hear: “I’ll take care of him for you, Ma. I’ll make sure he’s safe. You can go now.”

  And she did—just like that. By the time Ray got back, she was unconscious. Died sometime in the next hour. . . . Soon as she heard that her “little bunny rabbit” was going to be safe, she could let go.

  I love you, Ma. I hate you. . . .

  There was something Dr. Patel hadn’t figured out yet. Something I was just starting to figure out myself: how much I hated my mother for putting me on guard duty my whole life. For making me their sentry. . . .

  “Playing nice” they used to call it—whatever it was they’d do up there. Dress-up: was that all it was? Thomas clomping around in her high heels, twirling around in her dresses. . . . She had no friends. She was lonely. . . .

  Go downstairs now, Dominick. I made you a special snack. Thomas and I are just going to “play nice.”

  And so I’d sit down there, eating my pudding or potato chips, staring at that television that, later on, would explode. Set the living room on fire.

  On guard. Watching out for Ray. . . .

  This wouldn’t be any fun for you, Dominick. This is the kind of fun only your brother likes. . . . Let me know right away if Ray comes. If Ray ever found out about “playing nice,” he’d get mad at all three of us. Madder than he’s ever been before. . . .

  It’s not that she didn’t love me, Doc. She did love me. I knew that. She just always loved him more. Loved the exact thing about Thomas that Ray hated. Nailed him for . . . Her “sweetheart.” Her “little cuddly bunny rabbit.” . . .

  I’ll take care of him for you, Ma. I’ll keep him safe. You can go now.