I Know This Much Is True (61 page)

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He was a nervous wreck all through the holidays, I remember.

He tried calling Angie so many times that her father threatened to notify the police. He hadn’t bought anyone any Christmas presents—not even anything for Ma—which was
really
weird. Which wasn’t like him at all. Thomas had always been a big Christmas guy, generous to the point where you’d open up your present and be embarrassed about what you’d gotten him. But that Christmas, nothing. Not even for Ma. He burst out crying right in the middle of opening
his
presents, I remember. Started talking about what a bad person he was and how by Christmas of the following year, he probably wouldn’t even be alive and didn’t deserve to be. Then Ma was crying. Ray got so disgusted with the both of them that he got up and walked out—didn’t come back until late afternoon. Ho ho ho. Happy Holidays at the Birdsey house. It was typical.

On Thomas’s birthday a week later, Ma made him a cake. Dessa and I were going out for New Year’s Eve, so we sang “Happy Birthday” early—Ma, Dessa, and me. Ray wouldn’t come away from the TV. He hadn’t spoken to anybody for that whole week. Thomas stood fidgeting in front of his twenty candles. Then, when the singing stopped, instead of blowing them out, he picked them up one by one and shoved the lit ends into the frosting. The three of us just stood there, watching him, speechless. And when he’d extinguished the last candle—when the room was hazy with smoke and burnt sugar—Ma started singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” As if everything was normal. As if everything was what Ma liked to call

“hunky-dory.” That was the night Dessa told me about Thomas and her sister: all that
Lives of the Martyred Saints
bullshit—Thomas lying there, getting off on all that ripped and burned flesh, all that suffering. Happy New Year, folks! Happy 1970! Welcome to a brand-new decade!

In mid-January, I went back to school and Thomas stayed home.

Stayed up till all hours, Ma said, and then slept all day long as if he was working the night shift, same as Ray. She was trying as hard as she could to keep Ray from flying off the handle, Ma told me, but he was getting fed up. It could be months before the draft board I Know[340-525] 7/24/02 12:56 PM Page 406

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called up Thomas, Ray said; he should be out there looking for a job instead of goofing off. He was lazy and irresponsible. The Army would knock that out of him, quick.

“Something’s wrong with him, Dominick,” Ma told me over the phone. “I think it’s more than just nerves.” He kept refusing to see the doctor, she said. But what could she do? She couldn’t pick him up and carry him there if he didn’t want to go. She just hoped he stayed out of Ray’s way. That was all she asked for.
Prayed
for. She didn’t want to bother me, but she was just sick about it. I should stay up at school and study hard, she said. She was so proud of me. I had enough to worry about. She could handle things at home. She was worried, but she could handle things.

In February, the Selective Service Board notified my brother that he’d been reclassified from 2-S to 1-A. In early March, Thomas was ordered to New Haven for his preinduction physical. Ray drove him there. Later, Ray told Ma that Thomas was mostly quiet along the way, but fidgety. He’d had to go to the toilet three different times en route. He probably hadn’t said more than ten words. He’d acted “in the normal range,” though, according to Ray. Ray told Thomas that the service would be good for him. Reassured him that more guys stayed stateside or got stationed in Germany or the Philippines than ended up in Nam, anyway. Whatever happened, the military would change him for the better, Ray promised. Toughen him up. Give him something to feel proud about. He’d see.

Thomas passed the vision, hearing, and coordination tests. His heart rate and blood pressure were fine. He was neither color-blind nor flat-footed.

He failed the psychiatric examination.

Ray drove him back home again.

“I don’t know, Dominick,” Ma said. “If you
could
manage to get home over the weekend, that would be great. I know you’re busy.

But he’s not eating, he won’t take a bath. I hear him traipsing around the house all night long. He won’t even talk to me anymore, honey. Remember how he used to talk to me all the time? ‘Hey, Ma, let’s have one of our talks,’ he always used to say. But now he hardly I Know[340-525] 7/24/02 12:56 PM Page 407

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says anything, except all this mumbling under his breath. And when he does say something, it doesn’t make any sense.”

“What do you mean? What’s he saying?”

“Oh, I don’t know. He keeps talking about the Russians. He’s got Russians on the brain. And I’ve been finding blood in the bathroom sink. I ask him where the blood’s coming from, but he won’t tell me.

Maybe he’ll talk to you, Dominick. Maybe he’ll tell
you
what’s bothering him. If you can make it home, that would be great. If you can’t, you can’t. I understand. But I’m worried sick about him. I used to think it was just his nerves, but I think it’s more than that. I don’t know what it is, honey. I’m afraid to talk to Ray.”

The following Saturday, Thomas and I went to lunch at McDonald’s. It was my idea: get him to take a bath, get him out of the house. He neither welcomed the idea nor resisted it wholeheartedly. Ma said he was having one of his good days.

It’s stupid—the things you remember: we both got those shamrock shake things McDonald’s has every year for St. Patrick’s Day.

Cheeseburgers and fries and green milkshakes: that’s what we ate. It was crowded; we were seated near a kids’ birthday party. The kids kept looking over, staring at the two identical twins eating their identical orders. I remember asking Thomas if he’d seen in the newspaper that week about Dell and Ralph and that whole mess.

The trial was over. Dell had been found guilty and sentenced to fifteen years at Somers Prison; his wife had gotten six months in Niantic. They’d let Ralph off with a suspended sentence. “Weird, isn’t it?” I said. “That all that stuff had been going on and here we were
working
with those guys? That that shit had been going on since you and me and Ralph were in grammar school?”

“No comment,” Thomas said. He was doing something weird to his hamburger bun: picking off the crust bit by bit. Examining each little shred he pulled off.

“What are you doing that for?” I asked him.

He told me the Communists had targeted places like McDonald’s.

“Yeah?” I said. “For what?”

He said it was better for me if I didn’t know.

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“Hey, what’s going on with you, anyway?” I asked him. “Ma says you’re having a hard time. She’s worried about you, man. What’s bothering you?”

He asked me if I knew that Dr. DiMarco, our dentist since boyhood, was a Communist agent and a member of the Manson family.

“Dr. DiMarco?” I said. When we were kids, Dr. DiMarco had given us his back issues of
Jack and Jill
magazine, serenaded us as he worked on our teeth with songs like “Mairzy Doats.” It was so ridiculous, it was funny.

Dr. DiMarco had drugged him and planted tiny radio receivers in his fillings, Thomas said. It was part of an elaborate plan by the Soviets to brainwash him. They sent messages to him twenty-four hours a day. They were trying to enlist his help in blowing up the submarine base in Groton. Thomas was key to their success, he said—the “linchpin” of their entire plan—but so far he’d been able to resist. “The body of Christ,” he said, placing a shred of his hamburger bun on his tongue. “Amen.”

The birthday kids and their parents got up and left, taking the noise with them. In the sudden quiet, I looked around to see if anyone was listening. Watching him. Was he just yanking my chain—putting me on for some sick reason. “Dr. DiMarco?” I said. “
Our
Dr.

DiMarco?”

Now something had malfunctioned, Thomas said. The radio receivers were heat-sensitive and Thomas had made himself a cup of hot cocoa and scalded the inside of his mouth. Since then, he’d begun to pick up other messages as well. He’d tried to rip out the receivers but he’d only cut the inside of his mouth.

“Yeah?” I said. “Let’s see.”

He opened wide and pulled at both sides of his cheeks. There were raw, purple gashes on his gums and tongue, slashes in the roof of his mouth. That’s when I started to get
really
scared: when I saw how he’d mutilated himself like that—saw where that blood Ma had seen had come from.

“What . . . what do these messages say?” I asked. I was afraid to hear his answer.

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He told me about a voice that had been encouraging him to hang our mother’s crucifixes upside down, another that kept ordering him to go to the maternity ward at the hospital and strangle the infants. He wasn’t sure whose the latter voice was, but it might have been someone from the Manson family. Maybe Charles Manson himself. He wasn’t sure. “You should hear the way
he
talks,” Thomas said. “It’s disgusting.”

He took a sip of his shamrock shake. “Nothing I can repeat in public.”

“Thomas?” I said.

“Then there’s another voice—a religious voice. He keeps telling me to memorize the Bible. It makes sense, really. Once the Communists take over, watch out! The first thing they’re going to do is burn every single Bible in the United States. Don’t think they won’t, either. That’s why I’ve started memorizing it. Who else would do it if I didn’t?”

I felt light-headed, robbed of oxygen. This wasn’t happening, I promised myself.

“Is this . . . is this the same voice that’s telling you to do the other stuff?”

“What other stuff?”

“The bad stuff.”

Thomas sighed like a parent whose patience was ebbing. “I just
told
you, Dominick. It’s a
religious
voice. He disapproves of everything the other voices say. They bicker all night long. It gives me headaches. Sometimes they
scream
at each other. You know who it might be? That priest that Ma used to listen to on television. On Saturday nights. Remember? He had white hair. I can see him, but I can’t remember his name.”

“Bishop Sheen?” I said.

“That’s it. Bishop Sheen. He’s our father, you know? He impregnated Ma through the television. It can be done; it’s more common than anyone thinks. ‘This is Bishop Fulton J. Sheen saying good night and God loves you.’ . . . I don’t know. It might be him, but it might not. You know that Dr. DiMarco and the Manson family have orgies, don’t you? In Dr. DiMarco’s office. One of them guards the door so that patients don’t walk in on them accidentally. They do anything I Know[340-525] 7/24/02 12:56 PM Page 410

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they want to each other.
Anything.
It’s disgusting. That’s why I’m in danger. Because I know about the link between Manson and the Communists. I shouldn’t even be out here in public like this. It’s a risk.

I know too much—about the plan to blow up the sub base, for instance. They’re very, very dangerous people, Dominick—the Communists. If they ever suspected I’ve begun to memorize the Bible, I’d be shot in the head. There’d be orders to shoot on sight. Listen!
‘In the
beginning God created the heavens and the earth; the earth was waste and
void; darkness covered the abyss, and the spirit of God was stirring above the
waters.’
I’m only up to chapter 2, verse 3. It’s a lifetime’s work. It’s risky business. How’s Dessa?”

“Dessa?” I said. “Dessa’s . . . ”

“That’s why I had to break it off with her sister, you know. It was too dangerous. They might have hurt her to get at me. What was her name again?”

“Her . . . ? Angie? You mean Angie?”

He nodded. “Angie. It was just too dangerous, Dominick. Do you want the rest of my fries?”

That conversation—and the psychiatric lockup that followed it later that night, Thomas’s first—occurred a full ten months after the panic attack that had made my brother trash our jointly-owned typewriter in May of the previous year. In the interim, the war had escalated, man had walked on the moon, and I’d tried as hard as possible not to see what was coming—what, inch by inch, had already arrived.

On that first night of many nights when I drove my brother between the brick pillars and onto the grounds of the Three Rivers State Hospital, I went home to our shared bedroom on Hollyhock Avenue and dreamed a dream I have remembered ever since.

In it, my brother, Ralph Drinkwater, and I are together, lost somewhere in the Vietnamese jungle, wading ankle-deep in muck.

A sniper, perched in a tree, raises his rifle and aims. No one sees him but me; there’s no time to tell the others.

I duck, pulling Ralph down with me. There’s a dull crack. A bullet rips through my brother’s brain. . . .

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f

“Almond, peanut butter, or crunch?” Lisa Sheffer asked.

“The usual,” I said. “One of each.” I fished into my wallet, slid three bucks across the desktop.

Since my brother’s commitment at Hatch, I’d had five meetings with Sheffer and had bought fund-raiser candy bars for Thomas each time. It was part ritual and part thanks to Sheffer for watching out for him. Part connection between me and my brother during our state-enforced separation: a candy bar bridge, a link of chocolate, nuts, and sugar. It was the first thing Thomas asked about whenever she saw him, Sheffer said. Had she seen me? Had I bought him any candy bars?

“Make sure your daughter remembers me when she graduates from Midget Football and becomes a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader,” I said.

“Oh,
please,
” Sheffer groaned. “I’d have to shoot myself.”