The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  I looked out the window, tapped my fist against my lip. I wanted her to stop the tape, but their voices went on and on.

  “Mr. Birdsey, do you feel that the CIA and President Bush are in collusion? Trying to steal your thoughts?”

  “Trying and SUCCEEDING, thanks to their goddamned electric eyes. Their brain siphons.”

  “Why are they doing this, Mr. Birdsey? Why are they singling you out?”

  “Because of what I did.”

  “What did you do?”

  “This!” There was an unidentifiable noise on the tape, a staccato thumping sound.

  “Mr. Birdsey, please stop that now. I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”

  I looked up quizzically at the doc, then suddenly realized what the sound was. “He was whacking his stump against something, wasn’t he?”

  She nodded. “Against the table where we were seated. Only for a moment, Dominick. Only to make his point.”

  “Jesus,” I mumbled. Sighed.

  “I followed God’s dictate! Cast off the hand that sinneth! And it humiliated Bush. Rained on his Desert Shield parade. He hates the fact that I opened people’s eyes.”

  “About?”

  “About the stupidity of war! About how, in his bumbling, incompetent way, Bush is going to bring about the end of the world unless I intervene. If he orders the bombing to begin, then we’re done for. S-A-D-D-A-M. S-A-T-A-N. It’s so OBVIOUS! Read your Bible, Suzie Q! Read about the Pharisees and the moneylenders and the serpent in the garden. Be my ever-loving guest.”

  “Mr. Birdsey, when your thoughts are being robbed, what does it feel like? Can you feel it happening?”

  A disgusted sigh. “Yes!”

  “Yes?”

  “During the day I can. Sometimes they do it while I’m asleep.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “They’re getting back at me.”

  “Does it hurt, Mr. Birdsey? Is there any pain when it happens? Any headache?”

  “They can’t just annihilate me—I’m too high-profile. Newsweek, Time, U.S. News & World Report. I’ve been on the cover of every major news magazine in this country. You people can hide all the newspapers and magazines from me that you want to, but I know about them. I have my sources. Don’t think I don’t. I’m one of People magazine’s 25 Most Intriguing People of the Year. I have a following! They can’t kill me, so they have to settle for mental cruelty. Incarceration. Brain theft. He gets printouts, you know? Twice a day.”

  “Who does?”

  “George Bush, that’s who!”

  “Okay,” I said, bolting out of my chair. “That’s enough!” I walked over to the window. Dr. Patel stopped the tape. “You call that session a breakthrough?” I said. “That crap he was just talking is progress?”

  “Progress in that he was much more verbal than he had been. Much more trusting and communicative. Which is good. May I pour you some more tea?”

  I shook my head. Strapped my arms around myself.

  “You’re all right, Dominick?” she asked.

  “It’s just so weird. How lost he is in this fantasy bullshit. In his own ego.”

  “Well, Dominick, to a certain extent, that is true of us all. Just yesterday, I was on the road, hurrying to a meeting in Farmington when an elderly man pulled out from a side street. He was going twenty or twenty-five miles below the speed limit, and I caught myself wondering why this man was trying to make me late for my meeting.” She laughed at her own folly.

  “Yeah, but . . . presidents studying his thoughts? Only he can save the world?”

  “It’s narcissistic, yes. But please keep in mind that these grandiose delusions are not delusions to him. They are his reality. These mind-thefts and dangers are happening.”

  “I know that, but—”

  “Do you? When you say, ‘I know that,’ do you mean you understand it intellectually or that you can feel the fear and frustration as he must feel it? Imagine, Dominick, how frightening his days must be. How exhausting. The weight of the world is on his shoulders. He can trust almost no one. What’s interesting to me as an anthropologist—what fascinates me, really—is that he has assigned himself a task of mythic proportions.”

  I looked up. Looked over at her.

  “Your brother is alone in the universe. Lost to his twin, lost to a conventional life. He is afloat in a world of evil and malignant power, his mettle tested at every turn. Thomas is, in effect, starring himself in his own hero-myth.”

  “Hero-myth? That’s a little bit of a stretch, isn’t it? Aren’t you mixing up your two majors a little there?”

  Her smile was sad. “It’s his futile attempt to order the world. Do you have children, Dominick?”

  We lost eye contact. The little girl in the yellow leotard flashed before me. “Nope.”

  “Well, if you did,” she said, “you would most likely read them not only Curious George but also fables and fairy tales. Stories where humans outsmart witches, where giants and ogres are felled and good triumphs over evil. Your parents read them to you and your brother. Did they not?”

  “My mother did,” I said.

  “Of course she did. It is the way we teach our children to cope with a world too large and chaotic for them to comprehend. A world that seems, at times, too random. Too indifferent. Of course, the religions of the world will do the same for you, whether you’re a Hindu or a Christian or a Rosicrucian. They’re brother and sister, really: children’s fables and religious parables. I believe that both your brother’s religiosity and his wholehearted belief in heroes and villains may be his brave but futile attempt to make the world orderly and logical. It’s a noble struggle, in a sense, given the chaos his disease has put him up against. At least, that’s one way of interpreting it.”

  “Noble? What’s so noble about it?”

  “Because he is struggling to cure himself, Dominick. To rid himself of what must be his gravest fear: chaos. If he can somehow order the world, save the world, then he can save himself. That was his motivation when he removed his hand in the library, was it not? To sacrifice himself? To stop the destruction that war inevitably brings? Your brother is a very sick man, Dominick, but also a very good one and, I would venture to say, in some ways, even a noble one. I hope that gives you some small comfort.”

  “Yeah, right,” I scoffed. “He goes to the library and hacks off his freakin’ hand. Gets the attention of every media bozo he can. . . . Yeah, it’s been real comforting, Doc, I tell ya.”

  She said nothing. Waited. But I was finished.

  If she were to work with Thomas long term, Dr. Patel told me—and whether or not she did would be the decision of the probate judge—her eventual goals would be to help him develop better insights about his behavior and to assist in honing such life skills as money management, the conscientious performance of household tasks, the conscientious taking of the medications that could maintain him outside of the hospital setting. “The thinking now is that long-term institutionalization prepares patients for nothing except more of the same,” she said. “We would dwell on his future, your brother and I, not on his past. We would, perhaps, think in terms of successful group-home placement. But, of course, that is the cart before the horse. For now, his history is what is important to my understanding of who he is. And was.”

  “You’re a little behind the times, aren’t you?” I said.

  “Yes? Explain.”

  “His other doctors did that kind of thing for years: went over his potty training, his elementary school records. Then everybody changed their minds—decided it was all about biochemistry, the genetic cocktail.”

  “Oh, it is, Dominick,” she said. “No question. I’m only attempting, as much as possible, to map your brother’s past and present realities. To become him, as it were—try on his skin. And toward that end, you can be of enormous help. If you are willing.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “How?”

  “By continuing to listen to the tapes of your brother’s sessi
ons and sharing your insights. And by sharing your own remembrances of the past. I am particularly interested in your recollections of early childhood, and of the onset of the disease—the months when the schizophrenia began to manifest itself. The hows and whys of that time.”

  Nineteen sixty-nine, I thought: our work-crew summer.

  “Because, as we said before, you are your brother’s mirror. His healthy self. In scientific terms, you are the equivalent of a control group. And as such, it may be helpful for me to study you both as I design the shape of his therapy. If, as I say, you are willing.”

  I’d been suckered in before by optimism. By the bullshit of hope. I didn’t know what I was or wasn’t willing to do anymore. I told her I’d think about it.

  “What solitary child hasn’t wished for a twin, Mr. Birdsey?” she said. “Hasn’t imagined that a double exists somewhere in the world? It’s a hungering for human connection—another way of sheltering oneself against the storm. So who is to say that ‘twinness’ might not provide a key to your brother’s recovery?”

  A key, I thought. Chiave.

  One thing was clear: she sounded sincere. For once, my brother hadn’t been assigned someone from the hit-or-miss, take-the-money-and-run school of state-appointed psychology. For once, he had a doc who hadn’t majored in indifference.

  At the door, at the end of the session, she asked me what I had taught.

  “What? . . . Oh. History. High school history.”

  “Ah,” she said. “That is challenging work. And so very necessary. It is important for children to learn that they are the sum of those who have come before them. Don’t you agree?”

  “Yeah, well . . .”

  “Why are you blushing, Mr. Birdsey?”

  “I’m not blushing. I’ve just . . . I’ve been out of the classroom for over seven years. Thanks for the tea. I’ll think about what you said. Call me if anything else happens.”

  She asked me to wait a minute. Went over to her desk and wrote down something on a slip of paper. “Here is your prescription from me, Mr. Birdsey,” she said, handing me the paper. “If you are a lover of reading, read these books. They are good for the soul.”

  Her prescription: as if I was the patient. As if she was treating me.

  I took the paper, glanced at it without reading it, and stuffed it into my jeans. “Thanks,” I said. “Only the problem isn’t my soul, Doctor. The problem is my brother’s brain.”

  She nodded. “And toward that end, you will do as I ask? Begin to retrieve for me any childhood memories you feel may be significant? And try to recall your brother’s earliest schizophrenic episodes? His initial decompensation?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Okay.” A step or two out into the hallway, I stopped. Turned back. “I, uh . . . you know before? When you asked me if I had any kids?”

  “Yes.”

  “We . . . my wife and I—well, my ex-wife . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “We had a little girl.” She waited, those eyes of hers smiling, still. “She . . . she died. Crib death. She was three weeks old.”

  “Ah,” she said. “You have my sympathy. And my gratitude.”

  “Your gratitude? For what?”

  “For sharing that information with me. I know you are a private person, Mr. Birdsey. Thank you for trusting me.”

  The next morning, a Saturday, Joy passed by me, her arms full of dirty laundry. “Do you want this?” she said. She was waving Dr. Patel’s “prescription”: the list of books I’d already forgotten about. Joy had fished it out of the pocket of my jeans. In fat, backward-slanting script, Dr. Patel had written: The Uses of Enchantment, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The King and the Corpse.

  “Toss it,” I said, and Joy walked toward the laundry room. “Well, wait a second. Give it to me.”

  16

  1969

  Ma was thrilled to have us back home from school after our first year away at college, but she didn’t like the fact that Thomas had gotten so skinny. She set out to put some meat back on his bones, baking lasagnas and pies and getting up early every morning to cook us bacon and eggs and make our lunches for work. Ma packed extra sandwiches in Thomas’s lunch pail and enclosed little handwritten notes about how proud she was of him—how he was one of the best sons any mother could have.

  Jobs were scarce that summer, but my brother and I had landed seasonal work with the Three Rivers Public Works Department. (Ray knew the superintendent, Lou Clukey, from the VFW.) It was tough minimum-wage labor with fringe benefits like poison ivy and heat rash. But I actually liked working for the Three Rivers PW. It got us each a paycheck and got us out of the house during the day while Ray was home. After a year’s worth of being cooped up with the books, confined in a dorm room with my brother, it felt good to catch some rays, breathe in fresh air, and work up a sweat. I liked the way you could take a scythe or a shovel and tackle a job, then look back at what you’d accomplished without waiting for some know-it-all professor’s seal of approval.

  The job I enjoyed most was mowing and weeding out at the town cemeteries: the ancient graveyard up in Rivertown with its crazy epitaphs, the Indian burial grounds down by the Falls, and the bigger cemeteries on Boswell Avenue and Slater Street. That first day out at Boswell Avenue, I located my grandfather’s grave: a six-foot granite monument, presided over by a pair of grief-stricken cement angels. Domenico Onofrio Tempesta (1880–1949) “The greatest griefs are silent.” His wife, Ignazia (1897–1925), was buried across the cemetery beneath a smaller, more modest stone. Thomas was the one who found Ma’s mother’s grave, halfway through the summer. “Oh, I don’t know. . . . No reason, really,” Ma said when I asked her why the two of them hadn’t been buried together.

  I was nervous, at first, about Thomas. For one thing, I was still a little freaked out about that busted typewriter bullshit. For another, he wasn’t exactly the manual labor type. But I shut my mouth and kept my eyes open, and after the first week or so, I began to relax. Let down my guard.

  Sometimes he’d lose track of what he was doing or drift off in a fog somewhere, but nothing out of the ordinary. He pretty much held his own. By the beginning of July, he had tanned and bulked up a little and lost his Lurch look. So college hadn’t driven him over the edge after all, I told myself. He’d just been exhausted. He was okay. And come September, he could begin digging himself out of the academic hole he’d dug for himself with all those class cuts, the stupid asshole. The jerk.

  Thomas never ate those extra sandwiches Ma packed for him. I ate them. Sometimes, when he didn’t hand them to me outright, I’d go looking for them and find the notes Ma had written him. She knew better than to write me those things. One time she’d pulled that in high school, and my buddies had snatched the note away and passed it around. I’d gone home and screamed bloody murder at her. But that TLC stuff never embarrassed Thomas the way it did me. He thrived on that kind of crap.

  I’ll say this for Thomas: he went out and got our typewriter fixed without my bugging him about it. Without Ma or Ray catching wind of what had happened. He took the initiative, paid for the repairs out of his first paycheck from the city, and had the machine back within a week. The only problem was, he couldn’t buy another carrying case. When Ma noticed it was missing, it was me she asked about it, not Thomas. I told her someone at school had swiped it. She stood there, looking worried, not saying anything. “It’s no big deal, Ma,” I assured her. “Better they took the case than the typewriter. Right?”

  Ma said she couldn’t believe that college boys would steal from each other.

  I told her it would surprise her what college boys did.

  “Is it drugs, Dominick?” she said. “Is that why he lost all that weight?”

  I reached down and gave her a smooch. Told her she was a worrywart. Teased the fear out of her eyes. He’s fine, Ma, I said. Really. It was just his nerves.

  Each workday morning at seven-thirty, Thomas and I reported to the city barn where Lou Clukey dispatche
d the work crews around Three Rivers. Thomas and I were assigned this big burly foreman named Dell Weeks. Dell was a strange one. He had a shaved head, a silver tooth in front, and the filthiest mouth I’d ever heard on anyone. Dell couldn’t stand Lou Clukey, who was an ex-Navy officer and a straight arrow, and you could tell the feeling was mutual. You could feel the tension when Dell and Lou were within twenty feet of each other. So it was no big surprise that our crew usually drew the day’s dirtiest work. All morning long, we shoveled sand, cut swamp brush, pumped sewage, disinfected campground toilets. We saved the mowing jobs for afternoon.

  Not counting Dell Weeks, there were four guys on our crew: Thomas, me, Leo Blood, and Ralph Drinkwater. Leo was seasonal like Thomas and me, a year ahead of us at UConn. Drinkwater was full-time. If the draft or Electric Boat didn’t get him first, he ran the risk of becoming a Three Rivers Public Works “lifer” like Dell.

  Drinkwater hadn’t grown much since that year in high school when he’d gotten thrown out of Mr. LoPresto’s class for laughing out loud at the concept that the red man had been annihilated because of the white man’s natural superiority. He was still only five-six, five-seven, maybe, but he was tougher and cockier than he’d been back then. A bantamweight. He had tight, ropy muscles and walked with the trace of a strut; he even mowed lawns with an attitude. That whole summer, Drinkwater wore the exact same clothes to work. He didn’t stink or anything, the way Dell sometimes did. He just never wore anything else but these same black jeans and this blue tank top. Leo and I had a twenty-dollar bet going as to when Drinkwater would finally break down and change his clothes. I had the odd calendar days and Leo had the evens, and we both waited all summer to collect.

  Although I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time, Drinkwater was the best worker of the four of us, focused and steady-paced, no matter how hot it got. All day long, he listened to the transistor radio he kept hitched to his belt loop—Top 40, baseball if the Red Sox had an afternoon game. He played that radio so relentlessly, I still know half the commercials by heart. Come alive, you’re in the Pepsi generation. . . . You’ve got a friend at Three Rivers Savings. . . . Come on down to Constantine Motors, where we’re on the hill but on the level. All day long, the music and talk moved with Drinkwater.