Angelhead by Greg Bottoms

true, but at the same time, looking back, I was afraid that if I didn’t make my mind strong, I'd lose it, just like Michael had. I was afraid that wave of insanity, the currents of which I knew were already in my blood—I thought I could feel them like an itch at the base of my skull sometimes at night—would close over me if I didn’t prepare myself, if I didn’t constantly read and spend all my time building up my defenses against unreasonable thoughts, if I didn’t engage all troubling ideas, cut them off at the pass, and bend them into tolerable, understandable things.
    I found Calvino and Bruno Schulz and Beckett and Borges while sitting around, hanging out in libraries, skipping classes—all writers, in my mind, compelled to map the devolution and fissures of the mind in extraordinary ways. I went on, later, to get three rather impractical English degrees, my way of buying time to learn how to learn and to write, and still think of my education—or the part of my learning that actually matters—as something I figured out on my own, though I realize this is a romantic and mostly false notion, probably something I first came across in that Pirsig book.
    Michael had drowned in thoughts and ideas, twisted notions of the metaphysical. More than anything, I did not want to be my brother. I did not want to suffer as part of my family; I wanted, foremost, somehow to be free of connection to these people, whom I desperately loved; barring that, I wanted to be
philosophical
about them and our lives. I am not exaggerating when I say books saved my life; or, put another way, books saved my mind and helped me to learn how to understand my life.

    Michael told my parents, in one of his moments of psychotropic lucidity, that he had met two friends at the mall. He wanted to move out, to move in with them. He hated my parents now, he decided, wished them dead. Sorry, I love you, he said.
    My mother often dropped Michael off at the mall like a teenager, the only way she could get him out of the house now that even Bill, the speed freak, the collector of porn and continuous enrollee in junior-college business courses, had abandoned him. Mall security guards had called my parents several times. They'd call to say that Michael stalked women, made lewd gestures to kids, told a woman he wanted to baptize her baby.
    My mother took him back, again and again. That’s where he wanted to be, smoking on a bench in the mall, staring at all those people with their secrets. And what else was there to do? She couldn’t find anywhere else to put him.
    Dealing with insanity became about improvisation and compromise, figuring out minor solutions while looking for a big solution. The hospitals she'd contacted about Michael were taking months to get back to her. Her job became putting out emotional fires around the house. Michael would get angry—she'd distract him with a promised trip to the mall. He'd start chanting and rocking—she'd ask if he wanted to go to McDonald’s for a shake or a sundae; he'd look up and smile like a five-year-old. Bargaining became her way of dealing.
    Frazzled, depressed, stressed beyond what is tolerable by Michael’s presence at home, she told him he could move in with the “two friends.”
    He was an adult. Wasn’t he?
    My mother and father were relieved and didn’t think to meet the two men with whom Michael was moving in. They were two guys who had an extra room, nothing more. And what if my parents found out the two men were dangerous, mentally handicapped ex-cons or totally imaginary? Michael would have to keep living at home. And any questions would have brought on a violent tantrum, anyway. In many ways my brother was like a child you could never discipline.
    They figured as long as he took his medication every day he could function. The one constant about my family was our ability to downplay all the negative possibilities, to pretend, to go