3

When you’re the sane brother of a schizophrenic identical twin, the tricky thing about saving yourself is the blood it leaves on your hands—the little inconvenience of the look-alike corpse at your feet. And if you’re into both survival of the fittest and being your brother’s keeper—if you’ve promised your dying mother—then say so long to sleep and hello to the middle of the night. Grab a book or a beer. Get used to Letterman’s gap-toothed smile of the absurd, or the view of the bedroom ceiling, or the indifference of random selection. Take it from a godless insomniac. Take it from the uncrazy twin—the guy who beat the biochemical rap.

Five days after my brother’s sacrifice in the public library, Dr. Ellis Moore, the surgeon who had grafted the flap over Thomas’s wound, declared him out of the woods infection-wise and stable enough to be released. That same day, Dr. Moore filed a Physician’s Emergency Certificate with the judge of probate, stating in writing that he found Thomas to be “dangerous to himself and/or others.” This set into motion a mandatory fifteen-day observation period at the Three Rivers State Hospital complex. At the end of those fifteen days, one of three things would happen to my brother: he would be freed to face the breach of peace and assault charges that had been brought against him; he could commit himself voluntarily to the hospital for further treatment; or, if the treatment team evaluating Thomas felt that his release might be harmful to himself or to the community, he could be held involuntarily at the state hospital for a period of six months to a year, by order of the probate court.

By the time the paperwork was signed and the police escorts had arrived for the transfer, it was after 8:00 P.M. They put one of those Texas belts around Thomas’s waist, then handcuffed him, taking care to snap on the left cuff six inches or so above his stump. When they locked the cuffs to the belt, it had the effect of making my brother slump forward in a posture of surrender. While an aide was getting Thomas into a wheelchair, I pulled the cops aside. “Hey, look. This handcuff stuff is totally unnecessary,” I told them. “Can’t you let the guy have a little dignity while he’s being wheeled out of here?”

The younger cop was short and brawny. The other was tall and tired and baggy-looking. “It’s standard procedure,” the older guy shrugged, not unsympathetically.

“He’s potentially violent,” the younger cop added.

“No, he isn’t,” I said. “He was trying to stop a war. He’s nonviolent.” I followed the guy’s eyes down to my brother’s missing hand.

“It’s procedure,” the older cop repeated.

Thomas led the parade out of the hospital, the aide pushing his wheelchair down the hall, the two cops and me pulling up the rear. Everyone walking toward us risked sneaky little glances at my brother’s restraints. I was holding Thomas’s stuff for him: a get-well plant from my ex-wife, duffel bag, toiletry bag, his Bible.

The trip across town from Shanley Memorial to the state hospital is about five or six miles. Thomas asked me to ride in the cruiser with him; I could tell he was scared. At first, the younger cop hassled me about going with them, but then the older guy said I could. They made me ride shotgun up front. The older cop rode in back with Thomas.

At first nobody said anything. In between squawks from the police radio, the AM station was giving updates on Operation Desert Shield. “If you ask me,” the cop in back said, “Bush ought to show that crazy Hussein who’s boss the same way Reagan showed ’em down in Grenada. Flex some muscle. Nip it in the bud.”

“That was Carter’s whole problem with those tent-heads in Iran,” the younger guy agreed. “He made the U.S. look like a bunch of wimps.”

Thomas had been given some kind of Valium cocktail for the road, but I was afraid their talk would rile him. I hunched toward the driver and mumbled a request that he change the subject. He gave no response except for a pissy look, but he did shut up.

Riding through downtown, we passed the McDonald’s on Crescent Street where Thomas had worked briefly and the boarded-up Loew’s Poli movie house where, once upon a time, my brother and I had shaken hands with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans during the town’s three-hundredth anniversary celebration. We passed over the Sachem River Bridge. Passed Constantine Motors, the car dealership my ex-in-laws own. Passed the public library.

“Dominick?” Thomas called up to the front.

“Hmm?”

“How much longer?”

“We’re about halfway.”

Three Rivers State Hospital is on the southern border of town, a left turn off the John Mason Parkway, the four-lane state highway that runs to the Connecticut shoreline. Once part of the hunting and fishing grounds of the Wequonnoc Indians, the sprawling hospital property is bordered behind by the Sachem River, on the north by the town fairgrounds, and on the south by the sacred burial grounds of the Wequonnocs. Back in the summer of ’69, Thomas and I mowed and trimmed that little Indian graveyard. We were seasonal employees, home from our freshman year at college. By then, Thomas’s illness had already started flirting with him in little ways I couldn’t or didn’t want to see. Nine months later, there’d be no avoiding it: March of 1970 was when Thomas’s brain dropped him to his knees.

It was hard to believe over twenty years had gone by between that crazy summer and this ride in the police cruiser. I’d graduated from college, taught high school history for a while, and then started my painting business. Ma had died, and the baby. Dessa had left me; I’d hooked up with Joy. Now here I was, after all that water under the bridge, still riding back with my brother to the state hospital. There’d been two decades’ worth of shifting diagnoses, new medications, exchangeable state-appointed shrinks. We’d long since given up on miracles for Thomas, settling instead for reasonable intervals between the bad spells and ugly episodes. Seventy-seven and ’78 were good years, I remember. That’s when they decided Thomas wasn’t manic-depressive after all, took him off lithium, and started him on Stelazine instead. Then Dr. Bradbury retired and Thomas’s new guy, that fucking little Dr. Schooner, decided that if six milligrams of Stelazine a day was good for my brother, eighteen milligrams a day would be even better. I can still feel that little quack’s tweed coat lapels in my fists the day I went down to see Thomas and found him sitting there paralyzed and glassy-eyed, his tongue sticking out of his mouth, his shirt front sopping with drool. Schooner had meant to check in on my brother, he told me after I let him go, but it had been so busy. He’d had to cover for another doctor; his in-laws were in town. One of the nurses told me they’d called that slimeball and left messages about Thomas all weekend long.

There was a pretty good stretch in the early eighties. Dr. Filyaw started Thomas on Haldol in 1983. My brother began doing so well that they transferred him to a group home and got him that maintenance job at McDonald’s. (Thomas had me photocopy his first paycheck before we cashed it, I remember. He kept it framed on his bedroom wall at the group home, along with a ten-dollar bill that somebody stole later on to buy cigarettes.) Thomas even had himself a girlfriend back then, this bride-of-Frankenstein chick named Nadine. Nadine was a holy roller like him but not nuts in any official way. Not categorized as crazy. They met in a Bible study group. She was in her midforties, a good ten years older than he was at the time. Don’t ask me how they squared it with God and their holy roller group, but my brother and Nadine were doing it. I should know. I’m the guy who had to buy Thomas his Trojans. It was Nadine who convinced him that if his faith was strong enough, he didn’t have to rely on medication—that what God wanted from him was a test of faith.

It’s tempting to delude yourself when your screwed-up brother becomes gainfully employed and starts acting less screwed up for a while. You begin to take sanity for granted—convince yourself that optimism’s in order. Thomas had a girlfriend and a job and was living semi-independently. If the signs were there, I guess I overlooked them. Let down my guard. Big mistake.

Nobody except Thomas and Nadine knew he’d stopped taking his Haldol. Or that he’d begun to wear a ring of aluminum foil around his head every night when he went to bed because it somehow let God’s voice through but scrambled the messages of his enemies. My brother: the human radio receiver pulling in the Jesus frequency. Mr. Tinfoil Head. I mean, it’s not funny, but it is. If I didn’t laugh about it sometimes, I’d be down in the bughouse in the bed next to his.

The new drive-thru window at McDonald’s had been installed only about a week or two before Thomas cracked. Later on, he blamed his assistant manager, who had balked that morning when Thomas showed up for work wearing his aluminum foil hat. Thomas had tried to explain to the guy that Communist agents were ridiculing him through the outside speaker—calling to him as he emptied the garbage or swept the parking lot, encouraging him to go inside and eat the rat poison in the utility closet. By the time the police got there, Thomas, wielding his floor polisher, had already knocked off Ronald McDonald’s life-sized fiberglass head and wasted the restaurant’s brand-new drive-thru speaker. The cops found him sobbing away behind the Dumpster, bees hovering all around him. Thomas had to check out of the group home, of course—check back into the hospital. About a month after that, he got a postcard of the Grand Ole Opry from Nadine and Chuckie, this other high-on-Jesus buddy of theirs. Chuckie and Nadine had eloped, were honeymooning in Tennessee. I was worried the news from Nadine was going to set Thomas back further, but he took it like a stoic and held no grudges.

“Read me something from my Bible, Dominick,” Thomas ordered me now in the cruiser, midway between Shanley Memorial and the hospital. He’d been making demands for four days: get him this, check on that. Ordering instead of asking, the way he always did when he was in bad shape. I turned around and looked back at him. The lights from a passing car illuminated his face. Despite the Valium, his eyes looked clear, hungry for something. “Read to me from the Book of Psalms,” he said.

The binding on Thomas’s Bible is broken, its loose pages nearly translucent from finger oil. The whole thing’s held together with rubber bands. “The Book of Psalms?” I said. I pulled off the elastics, flipped through the tissuey pages. “Where are they at?”

“In the middle. Between the Book of Job and the Book of Proverbs. Read me the Twenty-sixth Psalm.”

In the confusion at the library five days earlier, my brother’s Bible had been left behind, then scooped up by the police detectives assigned to the case. Later, in the recovery room, Thomas had bubbled up from the anesthetic calling for it. He called for it all the next day, too. Clamored for it. A substitute wouldn’t do—it had to be his Bible—the one Ma had given him for his confirmation back when we were in sixth grade. (She’d given us each one, but mine was long gone. Gone where is anyone’s guess.) After several hours of listening to his bellyaching, I’d finally gone down to police headquarters and told the guy behind the glass that we needed that Bible over at the hospital a lot more than they needed it at the station. I’d repeated my request to his supervisor, then to that guy’s supervisor. It was Jerry Martineau, the deputy chief, who finally cut through all the “official police investigation” bullshit and ended the impasse. Martineau and I had played hoops together in high school. Well, to be accurate, we’d mostly kept each other company on the bench while the hotshots played. Jerry was the comedian type—the kind of kid that could get you laughing so hard, you couldn’t breathe. He did this imitation of Jerry Lewis from The Nutty Professor that still makes me crack a smile when I think of it. Martineau could do anybody: Elmer Fudd, President Kennedy, Maxwell Smart. One time, our coach, Coach Kaminski, walked into the locker room and caught Jerry imitating him. Martineau was doing laps for about the next three months.

“Here you go, Dominick,” he said when he slipped my brother’s blood-splattered Bible from a plastic bag labeled “official police evidence” and handed it to me. “Keep the faith, man.”

I looked into Jerry’s eyes for the joke—the mimicry—but there was none. That’s when I remembered that his father had committed suicide when we were in high school—had gone out to the woods one afternoon and blown out his brains. The whole team went to the wake together, I remember—sat slumped in those cushioned chairs, our knees pushed against the seats in front of us, our big feet tapping the carpeted floor a mile a minute. Martineau’s old man had been a cop, too.

The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom should I fear? I read now to my brother, squinting in the dim light of streetlamps. The Lord is my life’s refuge; of whom should I be afraid? The driver reached over and turned off the radio. Even the dispatcher back at the station shut up. When evildoers come at me to devour my flesh, my foes and my enemies themselves stumble and fall. . . . Though war be waged upon me, even then will I trust.

I felt my chest tighten. Tasted acid in my throat as I read the words. If Thomas hadn’t latched onto that Bible voodoo—that “if your right hand sinneth, then cut it off” crap—then none of this would have happened. We wouldn’t be taking this ride. My phone at home wouldn’t be ringing off the wall with calls from reporters and religious crackpots. “You know, Thomas,” I told him, clearing my throat, “I can hardly see what’s on the page here. I’m going to go blind if I keep reading this.”

“Please,” he said. “Just a little more. I like hearing your voice say the words.”

I could hear him whispering along with me as I read. Hear, O Lord, the sound of my call; have pity on me, and answer me. . . . Though my father and mother forsake me, yet will the Lord receive me.

“How’s Ray?” Thomas asked, out of the blue.

“Ray? He’s okay, I guess. He’s fine.”

“Is he mad at me?”

“Mad? No, he’s not mad.” It embarrassed me to have him ask about our stepfather in front of those two cops.

“He hasn’t come to see me.”

“Oh, well . . . he just got home. From fishing.”

“Today?”

“Yesterday. Well, day before yesterday, I guess it was. This week’s been so screwed up, I can’t even keep the days straight.”

“Screwed up because of me?” Thomas asked.

My fingers tap-tapped against the open Bible. “They’ve probably got Ray working overtime or something,” I said. “He’ll come see you. He’ll probably stop in this weekend down at the other place.”

“He’s mad at me, isn’t he?”

I could feel myself blush when the cop next to me looked over for my answer. “Nah,” I said. “He’s . . . he’s just worried. He’s not mad.”

Three days earlier, when Ray had gotten back from his fishing trip, I’d driven over to Hollyhock Avenue to tell him the news. He was out in the garage cleaning his gear when I pulled my pickup into the driveway. He started telling me all about these largemouth bass he and his buddy had caught. “So you haven’t heard, have you?” I asked.

“Heard what?” I looked away from the fear in his eyes. He’d been caught with his guard down, same as me.

He didn’t say much when I told him. He just stood there and listened, his face going gray while I delivered the particulars: that Thomas had used Ray’s ceremonial knife from World War II to do it—had gone over to the house, taken it off Ray and Ma’s bedroom wall, even sharpened the damn thing on the grinding stone out in the garage. I told Ray what the doctor had said: that the complete severance had been nearly “superhuman,” given the obstruction of the wrist bone and the amount of pain he must have had to endure—that Thomas’s determination was, in a way, remarkable. I told Ray I was the one who’d decided not to have them attempt a reattachment.

Even for a spit-and-polish ex-Navy man, my stepfather seemed that afternoon to take extraordinary care to put all his gleaming fishing paraphernalia back in its proper order. Back inside the house, he scrubbed his hands with Boraxo at the kitchen sink, then went upstairs to shower and change his clothes so that we could go to the hospital.

“Jesus God,” I heard him groan to himself up there. Heard him blow his nose once, twice. Then, again, “Jesus. Jesus.”

We rode over to Shanley Memorial in my pickup, Ray reading the two-day-old front-page story in the Daily Record while I drove. A veteran of both World War II and Korea, Ray was angry with the article’s mention of Thomas’s act as a sacrifice to end the standstill over Kuwait. “The kid’s crazy—doesn’t even know what the hell he’s doing—and they’re playing it up like he’s some goddamned antiwar protester.” Alongside the story, the paper had run my brother’s twenty-two-year-old high school yearbook picture: long hair, muttonchop sideburns, peace sign pinned to his sports jacket lapel. Back during Vietnam, Ray had maintained that all draft dodgers should be taken somewhere and shot.

“But it was an antiwar statement, Ray,” I said. “That was his whole point: he thought if he cut off his hand, Hussein and Bush would both stop and notice. Come to their senses. He thought he could short-circuit a war. It was heroic, in its own goofy way.”

“Heroic?” Ray said. He rolled down the window, spat, rolled it back up again. “Heroic? I’ve seen heroics, buddy boy. I’ve been there. Don’t you sit there and tell me this stunt he pulled was heroic!”

As a kid, I had had a recurring fantasy in which my biological father was Sky King, the adventuresome pilot on Saturday morning TV. After the worst times, the loudest shouting, I’d sometimes circle around the backyard, my arms swooping wildly at passing planes. Sky would spot me, I imagined—make an emergency landing, having located us at last: his long-lost wife, his twin sons. He’d help Ma and Thomas and me into the Songbird, then make Ray pay—punch him a couple of good ones, buzz him all the way down our street to make him sorry for the way he bullied us. The four of us would fly away. Later, somewhere around the time I began to sprout armpit hair and lift weights down in the cellar, I gave up on heroes and took to buzzing Ray myself, goading him in small ways—stepping, usually, on the line but not quite over it. I was still afraid of his anger but saw, now, how he punished weakness—pounced on it. Out of self-preservation, I hid my fear. Smirked at the dinner table, answered him in grudging single syllables, and learned how to look him back in the eye. Because Ray was a bully, I showed him as often as possible that Thomas was the weaker brother. Fed him Thomas to save myself.

When I pulled into the parking lot at Shanley Memorial, I put the brake on and kept the engine running. Ray got out of the truck. I just sat there, immobile, my legs as heavy as lead. I looked up at the sound of his Navy ring click-clicking against the glass.

“Aren’t you coming?” he asked me.

I rolled down the window. “You know what?” I said. “I felt the truck pulling a little while I was driving over here. I think one of the front tires is soft. I’m just going to go to the gas station and have them check it out.”

He scowled, glanced quickly at the tires. “I didn’t feel any pull,” he said.

“It won’t take long. He’s in room 210 West. I’ll see you up there.”

I watched him pass through the revolving door. Watched visitors and delivery men and a vendor in a Patriots jacket selling hot dogs from a cart. Punched the radio buttons, settling finally for a duet: Willie Nelson’s croon and Dylan’s nasal twang, together.

There’s a big aching hole in my chest now where my heart was

And a hole in the sky where God used to be

I don’t know how long I sat there.

I was just about to throw her in reverse and get the hell out of there—drive somewhere, anywhere—when my ex-wife rolled past me in her van and pulled in three spaces away. good earth potters it says on the side. It’s his van, I guess, not hers. From time to time, I’ve seen the two of them, Dessa and her live-in boyfriend, driving around town in that truck. Dessa runs a day care place. He’s the potter.

She got out of the truck holding a pot of chrysanthemums and one of those silver balloon things. The wind had picked up and that balloon was bobbing around like crazy. When I saw her, I was glad I’d put her name on the “approved visitors” list. I figured she might come. Dessa had always been good to my brother.

She was wearing jeans and a purple turtleneck and this short little jacket. She looked more like thirty than forty. She looked better than ever. She walked right past my truck without seeing me. It wasn’t until after she’d passed through the revolving door that I realized I’d been holding my breath.

Danny Mixx, the boyfriend’s name is. Don’t ask me what kind of a name Mixx is, or what nationality. He’s sort of the ex-hippie type: bib overalls, red hair that he wears in a braid that goes halfway down his back. I saw him in two braids once. . . . If you ask me, they’re a mismatch. He’s successful, I guess, not that I know anything about pottery. He’s won awards and shit. A while back, they did a story about him in Connecticut magazine. Dessa was in one of the pictures—in the background. Dessa’s sister Angie told me about it when I ran into her in the parking lot at ShopRite, and I went back in and bought a copy. That magazine hung around our house for over a month. See this woman? I kept imagining myself telling Joy. That’s her. She’s why I hold back. This is who’s between us. I looked at that picture of Dessa so many times that, after a while, the magazine opened to it automatically. Then, one day, it was gone. Thrown out with the trash. Recycled.

They live out on Route 162, Dessa and him—the old Troger farm, about half a mile past Shea’s apple orchard. You should see that house: it’s all peeling to shit, mildew problem on the north side. The place is practically crying out for a power-washing and a couple coats of paint, but I guess they have other priorities. The other day, while I was putting gas in the truck, I caught myself in the middle of this fantasy where Dessa hires me to paint that house and, right in the middle of my work, she waves me down from the ladder and we go inside and make love. She tells me she still loves me, that she’s made a mistake. . . . By the time that little pipe dream was over, I had pumped myself nineteen dollars’ worth of gas, which was a little complicated because all I had in my wallet at the time was a ten-dollar bill and no credit card.

Dan the Man converted their barn into a studio and built his own wood-fired kiln out in the field next to it. I kept track of his progress. When they first moved there, I used to find all kinds of excuses to drive out onto 162, which, all it is is the slow way to Hewett City. More masochism than curiosity, I guess—me doing that. One time, he was out there in just his cutoffs, painting their mailbox these jazzy psychedelic pinks and blues and yellows. “Constantine/Mixx,” it said the next time I drove by. Blue skies and puffy clouds and a sun with a face on it: happily-ever-after painted onto a mailbox. I hadn’t known she’d gone back to her maiden name. Reading that mailbox hurt somewhere in the vicinity of a swift kick to the groin.

Dessa had parked just three spaces away. I cut the engine, got out of the truck, and went over to that van. Inside on the dashboard was a pair of women’s sunglasses, an Indigo Girls cassette, and a grungy-looking coffee mug with the Three Stooges on the side. “Nyuk nyuk nyuk,” it said. The guy’s a prize-winning potter in Connecticut magazine and she has to drink her coffee out of that thing? Sadie, Dessa’s black Lab, was asleep in the sun on the passenger’s seat.

“Hey, girl,” I said, rapping on the window. “Hey, Sadie.”

I’d given that crazy dog to Dessa for Christmas—when? ’79, maybe? ’80? As a pup, she’d chewed everything in sight, including our coffee table legs and half my socks and underwear and even the hose of my brand-new compressor. Goofus, I called her. She used to drive me crazy. Now, roused from sleep, she looked up at me with milky eyes. Her black face was flecked with gray. “What’s up, Goofus?” I said to her through the glass. No recognition whatsoever.

By the time Dessa came out again, I was back in my truck. At first, I wasn’t going to say anything, but then I rolled down my window. “Hey!” I gave the horn a little tap. It made her jump.

“Dominick,” her lips said. She smiled.

When I got out of the truck, she took my hands in hers and squeezed them. Came a step closer and gave me a hug. I placed my hand on the small of her back, tentative and unsure. We’d been together sixteen years—sixteen years, man—and there I was, touching her as awkward as a kid at a school dance.

“How you doing?” I said. Her curly black hair was pulled back, one or two wiry gray strands boinging in the breeze. Being that close to her was pain and pleasure both.

“I’m okay,” she said. “But, God, Dominick—how are you doing?”

I blew out a breath, nodded at the hospital’s upper windows. “About as well as you’d expect, I guess. Especially now that he’s become Freak of the Week.”

She pressed her lips together, shook her head. “It was on the news again all day yesterday,” she said. “They just won’t let it rest, will they?”

“Guy from the Enquirer called last night. Offered us three hundred bucks for a recent picture of him, a thousand for one of him without the hand.”

“Inquiring minds want to know,” she said, smiling sadly.

“Inquiring minds can go fuck themselves.” She reached out and touched my arm.

“He seemed pretty good just now, though, Dominick. Considering. Better than I expected. Thanks for putting my name on the visitors’ list.”

I shrugged. Looked away. “No problem,” I said. “I just thought if you wanted to see him . . .”

“We had a nice little chat, and then he said he was tired. He seemed pretty peaceful.”

“It’s the Haldol,” I said.

“So how’s Ray doing with all this?”

I shrugged. “You probably know better than I do.” She gave me a quizzical look.

Sadie was up and slobbering against the driver’s side window. “I see this sorry excuse for a dog is still among the living,” I said. When Dessa unlocked the door, I reached in and patted Sadie’s belly the way she used to like. “So how’s Dan the Man?”

We lost eye contact on that one, but she answered me like he and I were old buddies. “Fine. Busy. It gets a little crazy for him from now until after Christmas. He just got back from Santa Fe. Took the top prize in a big juried show there.”

“Santa Fe, huh? You go out there with him?”

She shook her head. “The Museum of American Folk Art? In New York? They just took two of his pieces.” She reached up and rubbed her knuckles against my cheek. “God, you look exhausted, Dominick. Are you sleeping?”

I shrugged. “Enough. It’s just hard, you know?”

“You know who I keep thinking about through all this?” she said. “Your mother. The way she used to worry so much about him. This would have really clobbered her.”

I stroked Sadie’s back, scratched under her chin. “Yup. She would have had to say a couple billion novenas over this one,” I said.

Dessa reached out and fingered the sleeve of my jacket. She was always like that—tactile. Joy’s different—not a toucher unless we’re fucking or she’s looking to get fucked. Then her hands are everywhere. But Dessa’s touch is different. Something I had and lost.

“And the thing is, he meant well,” she said. “He wanted to stop a war from happening. How can someone cause so much pain when all he wants to do is help out the world?”

I didn’t answer her. There was no answer. The last thing I wanted to do was tear up like this right in front of her.

“Well,” she said.

“Hey, thanks again for coming. You didn’t have to, you know. You’re not under any obligation.”

“I wanted to come, Dominick. I love your brother. You know that.”

It overwhelmed me, her saying that. I couldn’t help it. I leaned over and tried to kiss her. She turned her head away. My lips hit her eyebrow, the bone underneath.

She climbed up into the van, gunned it a little more than necessary, and backed out of the parking space. Braked. Gave me a thumbs-up. I stood there, watching her drive off. Masochistic or not, I can’t stop loving her. I’m going to love Dessa forever.

The hospital lobby was decorated for Halloween: Hallmark witches and black and orange crepe-paper streamers, a pumpkin on the desk where you get the visitor’s passes. “Birdsey,” I told the woman. “Thomas Birdsey. Second floor.”

“Birdsey,” she repeated, typing the name into her computer. “Are you a relative?”

“Brother,” I said. She and I had gone through this same little ballet the past three days. I’m the identical twin of the guy who lopped his freakin’ hand off, I felt like screaming at her. The psycho you been reading about and hearing about on TV and squawking about with all your blue-haired friends. Just give me the freakin’ visitor’s pass.

“Here you go,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome entirely.”

Fuck you, lady.

Thomas was sleeping. Ray wasn’t there. The balloon Dessa had brought him bobbed around in the air current coming out of the baseboard. “You’ve got a friend,” it said. The little card was signed, “Love, Dessa and Danny.” Her handwriting and his. Cute.

Neither the nurse nor the aides had seen Ray, they said. So where the fuck was he? I waited for ten minutes, then left.

Back downstairs, I was a step or two off the elevator when someone called my name. Ray. He sat slumped in a waiting room chair. He looked small, lost in his coat.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

“Nothing’s the matter. How’s the tire?”

“It’s okay,” I said. “You see him? You been up there?”

He looked around to see if anyone was listening. Shook his head.

“Why not?”

His voice was a croak. “I don’t know. I got halfway up there and then I just changed my mind, that’s all. Come on. Let’s get out of here. Don’t make a federal case out of it.”

He stood up and walked toward the door. “Did you see Dessa?” I asked. “She was just here, visiting him.”

“I saw her,” he said. “She didn’t see me.”

We were almost out the door when I noticed he was still holding the visitor’s pass. “Your pass,” I said. “You forgot to hand in your pass.”

“The hell with it,” he said, stuffing it into his jacket pocket.

Halfway home, Ray regained his composure—became Mr. Tough Guy again. “You know what the trouble always was with that kid?” he said. “It was all that namby-pamby stuff. . . . All that ‘Thomas my little bunny rabbit’ stuff she used to say to him all the time. With you, it was different. You went your own way. You could handle yourself. . . . Jesus, I remember the two of you out on the ballfield in Little League. You two guys were like night and day. Jesus, that kid was pitiful out there on that field, even for the farm system.”

I shook my head a little but kept my mouth shut. That was Ray’s theory? That Thomas had cut off his hand because he sucked at baseball? Where did you even begin with Ray?

“If she’d have just let me raise him the way he should have been raised, instead of running interference for him all the time, maybe he never would have landed down below in the first place. ‘It’s a tough world,’ I used to tell her. ‘He’s got to be toughened up.’ “

“Hey, Ray,” I said. “He’s a paranoid schizophrenic because of his biochemistry and the frontal lobes of his brain and all that shit Dr. Reynolds went over with us that time. It wasn’t Ma’s fault. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.”

“I’m not saying it was her fault,” he snapped. “She was a good woman. She did her best by both of you two, and don’t you forget it!”

And you’re a hypocrite and a bully and a horse’s ass, I wanted to snap back. Wanted to pull over to the side of the road and yank him right out of the goddamned truck and speed away. Because if anyone had fucked up Thomas when he was a kid, it was Ray. These days they called Ray’s kind of “toughening up” child abuse.

We rode the next couple of miles in silence.

“Want one?” he said. We were stopped for a red light on Boswell Avenue. His shaking hand held out an open roll of Life Savers, butterscotch. He’d probably sucked a million of those things since he gave up cigarettes. That had really gotten me: how he was the one who’d smoked like a chimney all those years and she was the one who died of cancer.

“No thanks,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Yup.” Neither of us spoke for the rest of the way back. When I pulled up in front of the house, he asked me if I wanted to come in, have a sandwich with him.

“No thanks,” I said again. “I’ve got to get to work.”

“Where?”

“That big Victorian on Gillette Street. Professor’s house.”

“Still?”

“Yeah, still. That goddamned place has more gingerbread on it than a bakery. I ought to have my head examined for taking that job at the end of the season.” Not to mention that it had rained four days last week. Not to mention that my goddamned brother had complicated things just a little bit.

“You want some help with it? I can give you some time tomorrow. Thursday, too, if you want. I don’t go back to work until Friday.”

Ray’s help was the last thing I needed. The only other time he’d helped me, he’d spent more time giving unsolicited advice than painting. Telling me how to run my own business. “I’ll get it done,” I said.

Maybe I wouldn’t even go over to Gillette Street that afternoon. Maybe I’d just go home and smoke a joint, watch CNN. Find out if either Bush or Saddam Insane had fired the first shot. Not answer the phone. . . . That morning at breakfast, Joy and I had fought about whether or not to disconnect the damn thing. I’d accused her of getting off on all the attention—talking with all those media assholes.

“Well, screw you, Dominick!” she’d fired back. “You think this is easy on me? You think I like everyone looking at me weird because I happen to be living with his brother?”

“Hey, how’d you like to get the looks I’m getting?” I said. “How’d you like to be his brother? His friggin’ look-alike?” The two of us stood there, shouting at each other. Having a pity contest. You think Dessa would have ever pulled that shit? You think Joy would have ever gotten her ass over to the hospital and visited him like Dess had done?

Ray got out of the truck and walked toward the house. I backed down the driveway. Braked. “Hey?” I called. “You okay?” He stopped in his tracks. Nodded. “Don’t talk to any of those reporters or TV jerks if they call. Or if they come over here. Just tell ’em, ‘No comment.’ “

Ray spat on the grass. “Any of those clowns come around here, I’ll take a baseball bat to them.” He probably would, too. Fuckin’ Ray.

I backed onto the road and threw her into first. “Hey!” he called. He was walking toward the truck. I rolled down the window and braced myself.

“Just answer me one thing,” he said. “Why didn’t you let them at least try to put his hand back on? Now he’s got a physical disability on top of a mental one. How come you didn’t have them at least try?”

I’d been flogging myself with the same question for the past two days. But it pissed me off—him asking it. A little late for fatherly concern, wasn’t it?

“For one thing, they were only giving the reattachment a fifty-fifty chance,” I said. “If it didn’t work, it would have just sat there, dead, sewn to his wrist. And for another thing . . . for another thing. . . . You didn’t hear him, Ray. It was the first time in twenty years he was in charge of something. And so I couldn’t. . . . I mean, okay, you’re right—it doesn’t make him a hero.” I looked up from the steering wheel. Looked him in the eye—that trick I’d taught myself way back when. “It was his hand, Ray. . . . It was his choice.”

He stood there, hands in his pockets. Half a minute or more went by.

“You know what the funny thing is?” he said. “I never even bought that goddamned knife. I won it in a card game from this guy in my outfit. Big, beefy Swede, came from Minnesota. I can see him plain as the nose on your face, but I been trying all afternoon to think what that guy’s name was. Isn’t that something? My kid cuts his hand off with that knife, and I can’t even remember the guy’s name I won the damn thing from.”

“My kid.” It struck me that he said that. Claimed Thomas.

That night, Joy brought home Chinese food as an apology. I sat there, eating without really tasting it. “How is it?” she asked me.

“It’s great,” I said. “Great.”

Later, in bed, she rolled over to my side and started getting friendly. “Dominick?” she said. “I’m sorry about this morning. I just want things to get back to normal.” She rubbed her leg against my leg, flicked her finger in and out of the waistband on my underpants. Got me interested with her hands. I just lay there, letting her do me without doing anything back.

She got on top and put me inside of her. Put my hand, my fingers, where she wanted them. I was just going through the motions at first—performing a service. Then I started thinking about Dessa out there in the hospital parking lot, in her jeans and little jacket. I was making love to Dessa . . .

Joy came quickly—intensely. Her orgasm felt like a relief, a burden lifted off my shoulders. I was almost there myself, almost ready, when I just stopped. I didn’t mean to. I just started thinking of things: the way the state hospital corridors smell like dead farts and cigarettes, and the way Dan the Man had painted that happily-ever-after mailbox out there for them, and the picture I’d conjured up for Ray to get myself off the hook: Thomas’s severed hand, stitched to his wrist like dead gray meat.

I went soft on her. Slipped out. Nudged her off me and rolled away.

“Hey, you?” she said. Her hand curled around my shoulder.

“Hey me what?”

She grabbed my earlobe, pulled it a little. “It’s okay. No biggie.”

“Now there’s a compliment,” I said.

She jabbed me one. “You know what I mean.”

Yanking up the covers, I turned further away from her—swung my hand up for the light switch. “God, I’m whipped,” I said. But a few minutes later, it was her breathing that was soft and regular.

I couldn’t sleep at all that night. Spent hour after hour staring up at the void that, in the daytime, was nothing but our goddamned bedroom ceiling.

“Finish, Dominick,” Thomas said. “Finish the psalm.”

I felt, rather than saw, the cop look over at me. I opened my brother’s Bible. Give me not up to the wishes of my foes, I read, for false witnesses have risen up against me, and such as breathe out violence. I believe that I shall see the bounty of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord with courage; be stouthearted, and wait for the Lord.

The police cruiser took the familiar turn off the parkway, the cop waved to the security guard, and eased over the speed bump. We rode by the boarded-up Dix Building. Coasted past Tweed, Libby, Payne. . . . Someone had told me once that back during the state hospital’s heyday, those brick monstrosities had housed over four thousand patients. Now, the inpatient population was down to around two hundred. Decay and downsizing had closed every building but Settle and Hatch.

“Hey, you just passed it,” I told the cop when the cruiser rolled past the Settle Building. “Turn back.”

He looked in the rearview mirror, exchanged a look with his partner. “He’s not going to Settle,” the other one said.

“What do you mean, he’s not going to Settle? That’s where he always goes. He runs the news rack at Settle. He runs the coffee cart.”

“We don’t know anything about the coffee cart,” the escort said. “All we know is our orders say to take him to Hatch.”

“Oh no, not Hatch!” Thomas groaned. He pulled and struggled against the restraints they’d put on him; his resistance rocked the cruiser. “Oh, God, Dominick! Help me! Oh no! Oh no! Oh no!”