EVIDENCE

My father could barely eat, couldn’t sleep, days stretched out into absurd, endless things, but then when they were gone he wanted them back, just one more day.

His lungs were filled with fluid and decay. He wheezed, sometimes coughed up blood in the mornings, tossed and turned each night beside my mother, who slept with her face pressed into his back so she could hear his heart. A smattering of BB-sized tumors spread and steadily grew throughout his left lung, emanating from where the one large growth, removed months earlier, had been (though we did not know this at the time).

He was dying quickly; the cancer was in his lymph nodes, poisoning his blood, heading for his liver. He had fevers, headaches, open sores in his throat, the taste of dying in his mouth, and he had lost twenty, then thirty, then forty pounds.

He didn’t want to die. He wanted to scream and break things some days because he simply refused for this to continue, but he couldn’t muster the strength to do it. He wanted to resist, to put a stop to this, and he began to think of not just this but his entire life as a failed resistance, a battle endlessly lost, over and over, the specifics of each defeat slightly different, sure, but defeat all the same. He was fifty-one, not just dying but obsessed with it, thinking about it all the time, reading about the exact symptoms he was going through in articles and pamphlets given to him by his doctor.

This couldn’t be all there was to his life, he thought. Life could not simply be a slew of disappointments, punctuated by moments of happiness, leading toward death. Could it? Could it really be, as he had once heard me say in one of my pedantic early college Eastern philosophical rants, that all that you suffer is all that you are, that not extinguishing suffering but in fact coming to terms with it, making sense of it, was the key to the only earthly peace we might ever have? Because if that was the case, fuck it. Fuck God.

My father would have sold his soul for just a few more years of life. What was eternity—if there was such a thing—compared to lying beside your beautiful wife while she slept, listening to her breathe, telling your sons all the things you'd always been too uncomfortable and self-conscious to say? What was eternity compared to fresh air, your health, watching grandchildren toddle around and smile, making love with someone you loved more than anything? Life had slipped away before he could realize how much he wanted it, how much he'd give for a small piece of his future back. He wanted, on his deathbed, to turn into the kind of man who held the ones he loved, who breathed them in, touched them, put his lips against their faces. But how do you change who you are? And what would people think of him?

Once, a few months from this night, when he had become even sicker, my father told me that if we owned a gun, and if Michael hadn’t already used it to kill us all, he'd go ahead and put it in his mouth and blow his brains out, as his grandfather had. He could not bear his own death, and at moments he wanted to spread the misery, to share a little of the pain. He wanted to make sure I felt just some of what he was feeling. It was only fair. He couldn’t take this all alone. No one can be expected to take it all alone.

I remember he spoke to me slowly, clearly enunciating every single word, his voice on the edge of breaking, his eyes filled with tears, with how much he did not mean it. He said he'd walk outside, so I wouldn’t have to get rid of the furniture or paint the walls. There’s a limit, you know, he said. There has to be a limit. Then he stared hard in my face, as if he expected me to say something, to thank him for promising that favor, the favor of not making me clean up the mess of another lost life. But I couldn’t speak.

The night of the fire had been an exceptionally bad one for my father. Winter nights were hard on his lungs. Earlier he had expectorated blood, bending over the toilet, hacking and coughing until his face went pink and his temples pulsed with the force. My mother stayed in the bathroom with him.

Michael had been stomping through the house, going upstairs to his room, then walking down the stairs heavily, going out the front door, walking around to the garage so he didn’t have to walk directly past my family. It was thirty degrees out and he had on only a T-shirt, but my mother noticed sweat dripping off his face, his greasy, unkempt bangs stuck to his forehead.

Later, when my father could sit on the couch, they could hear him praying in the garage, the word “God” cutting through the night. Then he started chanting “Utok Utok Utok.” They wondered what he was doing but knew better than to ask. Better to let him be by himself until the next day, when, they hoped, he'd be calmer, closer to rational. Sometimes he'd snap out of it and have a few fairly calm days of TV watching and smoking before the next episode. My mother knew she had to get him to a doctor and get a new prescription of drugs to try. They all knew to lock their doors tonight. My younger brother would turn on a loud fan so he could sleep through all the stomping.

Several hours later my father woke up in bed, wheezing. He couldn’t breathe. He sat up. The air was blue, thick. Sick, barely able to move earlier, he got out of bed and shook my mother awake. Pain shot through his side.

Michael’s trying to murder us, were the first words out of his mouth, my mother told me. He’s trying to kill us.

The fire in the house was out and smoldering. Smoke smudged out the shapes of furniture, doorways. My father coughed. The hardwood floor was treated and fire-resistant. The closed windows kept the flames from spreading to the drapes or furniture, which would have gone up quickly. Once the gasoline burned off, the fire went out, leaving big black circles on the floor. It was the smoke that was dangerous. And the quickly spreading fire in the garage, at the other end of the house, where the large door was wide open and flames billowed out in waves.

My father, in suede slippers and a robe, barely able to move earlier, made his way upstairs, over charred wood and through smoke so thick he couldn’t see the walls or his feet or the floor. He banged on Ron’s door, but the fan was on and Ron was a heavy sleeper. He banged some more, then kicked the door with the bottom of his burnt left slipper, a nearly miraculous act considering his health, until Ron finally woke up and opened the door.

By 5:40 a.m., my father, mother, and brother were outside, in sweat clothes and robes and slippers and ski coats. The garage, attached to the house, was lighting up the night in bright flames.

My father, coughing, got the garden hose and began spraying it futilely into the flames, the heat drying out his eyes, making his skin itch. Because of his weak lungs, he would contract pneumonia on this night and die in exactly seven months and twenty-nine days, a good year earlier than his prognosis. So, in a way, my brother got what he wanted.

Within minutes—because of the small size of our town and a call from a neighbor—three police cars, an ambulance, and two fire trucks were parked in front of the house, lights blue and red, circles of color spinning in the darkness.

Neighbors came out to stand with my mother in their nightgowns and pajamas, shivering, asking had what happened, saying how sorry they were, how awful it was, hugging her as she stood in the street, in the darkest part of morning, everyone there knowing it was Michael who had set it.

My father felt dizzy and weak. The EMTs took him to the ambulance. He sat on the bumper, refusing to get in, breathing from an oxygen tank.

By 6:00 a.m., five hours before I returned home from North Carolina to see the damage, my father was talking to Investigator B in muffled tones about what had happened, how it was his twenty-six-year-old schizophrenic son—a really sick kid, a very sick kid (still calling him kid even now)—the clear oxygen mask steaming up over his mouth and nose, the paramedic telling him to calm down.

My father, that night, told Ron and my mother through wheezes that this was the best thing that could have happened. We’re alive, he said, voice muffled through the mask. We could be three charred bodies in there, he said, pointing toward the house. He'll be put away. They'll put him somewhere where they can take care of him. Now they'll have to help . . .

He stopped before he could finish the thought. My father, in that instant, feared Michael might have tried to kill himself, set himself on fire. He thought, in fact, that Michael was in the garage right now, writhing around, blazing, skin separating from bone. He started to panic. He told the investigator and the other police officers to go into the garage with the firemen and look for his son. Go in there now, he shouted. He tried to get up, but the EMT held him. His son had tried to murder him, but he was still his son, and he didn’t want him to die, not now, not here in the home he'd built.

Just as my father and mother told the police to go in after him, Michael rode up on the soot-covered bike, scribbled-over Bible and alarm clock still in the baby seat. He stopped between the squad car and the ambulance.

The entire scene, the literal end of his life in the free world, had an odd air of the anticlimactic. He sat, one foot on a pedal and one on the ground, and lit a cigarette. He acted as if the house weren’t burning, as if there weren’t neighbors and cops and an ambulance and fire trucks. He was gone forever, and there was nothing anyone could do about it, and this story, as much as I wish it could, as much as I need it to, cannot change the world as it was, as it is.

The firemen, now inside collecting evidence, were stunned by the incompetence of the arsonist. One of the cops, I'm not sure which one, thumbs wedged between his gunbelt and gut, walked over to Michael, asked him if he wouldn’t mind getting in the car for a few questions.

Michael smiled, the tiny metal transistor in his head ticking like flies’ legs on glass, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He put out his hands for the handcuffs, turned to my mother, and nonchalantly asked her what she was going to make him for breakfast.

From the local section of The Daily Press, Wednesday, February 24, 1993:

ANGRY AT FAMILY, MAN SETS FIRE TO HOME

FALSELY CONFESSED TO MURDER LAST YEAR

A 26-year-old man who confessed last year to killing a 13-year-old Hampton boy but was cleared by police allegedly set two fires in his house while his parents and brother were asleep, police said Tuesday.

Michael Scott Bottoms of the first block of Rue Degrasse was being held without bond at Central State Hospital in Petersburg Tuesday on three counts of attempted murder and one count of arson, said police Investigator _____ B_______.

Bottoms was sent to the psychiatric hospital for evaluation after the Monday morning incident, ________ said.

About 5:30 a.m. Monday, Bottoms’ father, Ronald, woke up when he smelled smoke outside the master bedroom on the first floor of the two-story house, ________ said.

He saw smoke in the halls and found a fire in the garage, which is connected to the house, ________ said. He then got his wife and youngest son and took them outside, ________ said.

Investigators discovered signs of a splattered liquid at the scene and found that a second fire outside the master bedroom had gone out on its own, ________ said.

“When a fire’s in two locations like that, you know right off the bat it’s arson,” he said.

Smoke detectors outside the downstairs bedroom and in an upstairs hall had been removed and were found in trash cans inside the house, ________ said.

Michael Bottoms was not home at the time, ________ said.

While investigators were at the scene, Michael Bottoms returned home, riding a bicycle, ________ said. The bicycle had soot on it, suggesting that it had been in the garage when the fire broke out, he said.

Bottoms was taken to police headquarters, where he confessed to the crime and was charged, ________ said. Bottoms said he had poured gasoline and had started the fire with matches because he was mad at his family, ________ said.

The fire caused about $10,000 damage, he said.

The family could not be reached for comment Tuesday evening.

Last spring, while he was a resident of the ____ ____ Home for Adults in Newport News, Bottoms called police to confess to the June 10, 1983, murder of 13-year-old ______________.

He was held at ______ State Hospital for observation while Hampton police checked DNA evidence from the original crime scene and matched it with samples from Bottoms’ blood.

The test showed Bottoms was not connected to the slaying.

Bottoms said at the time that he confessed to the killing because he wanted to get out of the adult home where he was living.

Nine months later, from The Daily Press, Wednesday, November 24, 1993:

POQUOSON MAN SENTENCED TO 30 YEARS FOR SETTING FIRES

GUILTY OF ARSON, ATTEMPTED MURDER

A man who last year falsely confessed to the 1983 murder of a 13-year-old boy was sentenced Tuesday to 30 years in prison for setting two fires in his house while his parents and brother slept.

Michael Scott Bottoms, 26, of the first block of Rue DeGrasse Street, Poquoson, pleaded guilty to three counts of attempted murder and a count of arson for setting the fires Feb. 22.

In court, Bottoms “made a statement to the effect that he never hurt anyone before and he already spent a year in jail and thought it was enough,” said Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Eileen Addison.

Judge Samuel T. Powell handed down the 50-year term, then suspended 20 years. He also recommended that Bottoms serve the sentence at a facility where he would get psychiatric help. . . .

Ronald Bottoms, Sr., has since died and his widow [and two other sons] did not attend Tuesday’s hearing. They submitted victim impact statements to the court and Addison said they supported the sentence.

“The father passed away about a month ago, which just leaves his mother and younger brother at home, and his mother is just not able to care for him,” Addison said. “He’s not getting any better, he’s continuing to deteriorate and she’s very frightened of him.

“As much as she cares for him and loves him, she’s no longer able to care for him at home,” the prosecutor added.