DEMONS

A state trooper found Michael early on the morning after he jumped from the van. He was walking along a road eight miles from where he had landed, hunched over, dragging his left leg along the gravel, disoriented, turning his head around to look at every car coming up behind him. He was cut, bruised badly down one leg, eyes blank, nearly in shock, mumbling. He couldn’t remember his name. The trooper, making him stand by the car, shining his flashlight beam into his dead, black pupils, thought he was an overdose case, a kid strung out on PCP or crack or acid.

Michael knew that the trooper’s badge was bugged, knew what the hissing whispers of the radio on his belt were saying about him. He knew the people in the cars slowing down to look at him were a part of all this. They were trying to trick him. They were trying to kill him. The trooper, my father, the nurses and doctors and grad-student counselors, everyone.

He put his hands on the hood of the car, spread his legs.

My father, after stopping the van the night before, under a bright moon-filled sky, had followed him into the woods on foot while my mother stayed put. But it was dark and my father was scared of Michael. Perhaps this was an ambush. Maybe Michael was waiting with a knife or a branch. My father hadn’t forgotten the look in his eyes the day he wielded the softball bat, the way he would sit in a chair for hours, smiling, laughing, glaring at him, his own father. He had gone back to the van and driven to a pay phone, called the cops, then gone home and stayed up all night, waiting. He had made the right decision, he told himself. He'd done the right thing. Going into those woods after Michael would have been crazy.

Despite Michael’s attempted escape, my parents took him back to assisted living in Williamsburg once he'd been released into their custody and taken to the hospital for a quick check-over (he had a few cuts and a sprained ankle; the ER doctors also thought he had overdosed on LSD because of his odd behavior).

My father refused to let him come home now, though he never confronted Michael with this. The cops at the small trooper station had been polite and seemed genuinely sorry for my parents. They sensed how troubled Michael was, and were somewhat surprised to see my parents come pick up a vagrant like him.

Michael wanted to go home, to live at home. But that was impossible. The cross-burning, the lighter-flicking, the threats, his endless rants followed by foul, dark moods, a dog so frightened of him she shook in corners when he entered a room, and, of course, the bat incident. He couldn’t be trusted even to visit on Sundays anymore.

Michael realized, at assisted living, sitting in his filthy one-room apartment that people kept telling him to clean, watching Robert Tilton speak in tongues on a staticky old television, that the counselors were the pawns of my father, just like the doctors and nurses and probably that cop, too. My father made him come back here.

It was becoming clear. The medication was poison and meant to make his mind susceptible to infiltration by evil thoughts, to derail him from the straight track to God. Things were coming together. He was beginning to see that the face of God those many years ago, on the night I watched from the doorway, was a warning about the coming trials. It was written in Revelation 5:12, circled in Michael’s Bible: “Saying with a loud voice, Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honor, and glory, and blessing.” Michael was the Lamb. He had been slain long ago to receive the power of God. He was owed something. He would take it if he had to.

Food and clothing and wadded-up tissues and toilet paper filled his room. He blew his nose, childishly, on chairs, kicked the television. He spit phlegmy gobs into the carpet, where they baked in the afternoon sun. The smell was that of slow death; it seeped out into the shared, gated courtyard; other tenants—the thirty-year-old with Down’s syndrome and the dwarf and the manic-depressive who'd tried to kill himself seven times—all began to complain of the smell, of Michael, or “Jesus,” as they joked, ruining their community.

Below Michael’s bed, in a dusty corner of the room, he made a tiny, intricately constructed shrine out of pills he should have been taking: yellow and blue and red, antipsychotics and antidepressants and sleeping pills, aliphatic phenothiazines and thioxanthines and benzodiazepines, all stacked up like a rainbow pyramid at which to worship.

Counselors respected the privacy of the tenants, and only used their keys to enter rooms in cases of emergency. They tried talking to Michael through the door now, but he either didn’t hear them or, more likely, couldn’t make sense of what they were saying, especially now that he was entirely without any medication. They had already called my parents several times, but my parents couldn’t do any better than psychologists and shrinks, they figured, so they didn’t come up. The pattern was clear: When professionals can’t help, they throw up their hands and send the severely ill person home or out into the streets.

Through the door, the voices told Michael he had to clean his room, that he couldn’t live here—they always insisted it was a gift and pleasure to live here—if he didn’t start following the rules, if he didn’t adhere to the strict regiments dictated by the community agreement he had signed. Rule number one was be kind and respectful; number two, clean yourself; number three, clean your living quarters.

Bang bang bang. Michael.

As they knocked, he wasn’t sure what he was hearing. Demons had been knocking at the door and window a lot lately and they were living in the pockets of his filthy pants, too, which he had just discovered the night before. He had stuffed the pants into the toilet to drown the demons, but he could still hear them whispering underwater. Sometimes he got on the floor to make sure the pills hadn’t been taken by one of the invisible beings in the room with him. The flowers on the bathroom wallpaper were growing. Within the week they would have filled the room with unbreathable carbon dioxide.

Counselors liked to talk about “privacy.” It was right up there with “healing” and “responsibility” and “trust” and “coming to terms” and “hope.”But the smell was too much. Michael was too much. He constituted an emergency, a hygiene emergency, to be exact—rare, but they did happen among mentally ill populations, where a person, for instance, may see no reason to go to the bathroom anywhere but in his pants for days, may actually be storing the feces in his pants for one reason or another that is perfectly clear and sensible to him.

Using a key to gain access, two women swung open the door to Michael’s apartment. The smell that met them literally almost knocked them off their feet. It was so bad they couldn’t go in. It filled their sinuses, got stuck in the backs of their throats. They retreated quickly, leaving behind a janitor’s cart full of cleaning materials outside his door. The other tenants stood around, trying to see in the door, all gaping mouths and puzzled looks.

In a place where mental impairment was the norm, Michael set new standards, forced them to make new rules.

He had put back on his underwear and a shirt. He was crying but he was laughing, too (much as he had done during other psychotic breaks), sitting on the bed, trying to catch his breath. The underwear was yellowish gray, his T-shirt had food stains on it. His gut hung out of the bottom of the shirt, over the waistband of the underwear. He glowed gray with his own sadness.

If they'd had any idea that he hadn’t taken his medication for a week, they wouldn’t have left all those cleaning fluids sitting there. However, they didn’t usually deal with patients as risky and dangerous as Michael. He belonged in a locked ward with constant supervision. He needed to be secured for his own safety.

He stood up, looked at everyone, and said he'd clean the apartment. Tears were still rolling down his cheeks. The counselors, back now with a mop and their hands over their faces and mouths, said something about a reward, said something reassuring straight out of a manual.

Michael pulled the cart into the room, closed the door. He was going to cooperate; he shrugged, looked sheepish, which they took, wrongly, to mean he was sorry.

Thank you, they said. We'll check back shortly.

They tried to be positive. They had fangs in their mouths and microchips in their heads.

So maybe he began cleaning; maybe, just for a second, he'd pulled out of his psychotic state, pulled the pants out of the toilet, turned on the shower to rinse his waste down the drain. More likely, though, the demons were screaming, telling him what to do, what he had to do to get out of this mess.

Maybe God didn’t love him. Maybe his parents and brothers didn’t love him. He certainly had no friends. The people who mentioned his name did so shaking their heads. He was a lost kid, a lost cause. Crazy. But the demons were real, he knew that much. And God was real. He'd seen his face. He'd been chosen, but for what? Ever since the night of the Ozzy Osbourne concert, they'd been trying to trick him, to keep him from God, to break up the messages that were shot through space from the mouth of God into his brain by howling and hissing and laughing and accusing. His family was in on it. These counselors were in on it. The woman at the 7-Eleven where he bought cigarettes on special trips off the compound was in on it. Molly the dog was in on it. The President of the United States was surely in on it. CNN kept a camera aimed at his door. Robert Tilton could help, but now Michael didn’t have any money to send him, and Robert would think that Michael had lost his faith.

And he had lost faith, and along with it the last traces of his will to live. On the bottle of Drano sitting on the bottom shelf of the cart, it said that it “cleared away,” that it “cleansed,” that it was “fast-acting.” Standing in the center of the filthy room, in a stench he didn’t even notice, he drank from the bottle of Drano, slowly at first, the harsh alkaline taste sending a shock to his brain, the smell collecting in his ears and nose and chest, overpowering, like fire behind his face, dancing up behind his eyes. Then he drank more, and faster, until he fell over backwards into a bright blue oblivion that felt better than anything had in a long, long time.