Free Angelhead by Greg Bottoms

honest mistake. They probably would have bought the story until Michael started dancing in a circle in front of them, shouting hallelujah, jigging on one foot to the glory of God, blessing each of them, making a point to touch their jackets and pull his hand away as if they were hot.
    My father and the firemen stood in the driveway staring at him, my father beyond speech. The firemen looked at my father, silent, waiting for an explanation, waiting to hear that this was somehow a practical joke. One of the men began laughing and then stopped. My father wouldn’t even look at them, instead saying, as he walked off, Thanks. I’ve got it under control.
    My brother no longer had any idea why such a thing was wrong, or dangerous, or antisocial. It had become a part of his thinking, a necessary action to counteract what was happening inside his head at that very moment. He had to set fire to the bats. A black crucifix stayed burned on the concrete for weeks, a reminder.

    As I have said, my father, like all of us, thought my brother’s troubles stemmed from drugs, and partially, of course, they did; this presumed fact made my father completely unforgiving of his behavior. He felt that Michael had brought all of this on himself. He had dropped somewhere between seventy-five and a hundred hits of LSD (a conservative estimate), many of these during the crucial developmental stages of puberty—not to mention all the pot he smoked, the coke he snorted, the mushrooms he ate, the speed he took, and all the rest.
    Drugs made Michael’s psychosis worse, surely, but they weren’t his psychosis. Psychoactive drugs can, obviously, cause harm over extended use, damaging important thought and memory processes. But even the most basic of mental health books will tell you there is no evidence that drug use can cause, or even trigger, the onset of paranoid schizophrenia, though paranoid schizophrenics, once in decline, diagnosed or not, have an extraordinarily high instance of severe drug abuse.
    My mother and father, however, weren’t the kind of people who went digging through books to look for answers, the way I did long after the fact, long after my brother was locked away. My father, like Michael, had dropped out of high school, only returning at the insistence of my mother when he was almost twenty. My mother and father had grown up on the cusp between lower class and lower middle class, and their parents had no formal education. Drugs were the only thing that made sense for them of Michael’s behavior. And who can forgive someone who methodically wrecks his own mind? Who can feel empathy for a person, son or not, like that?

    My mother and father, I eventually learned, had given Michael five hundred dollars in cash and a one-way ticket to Orlando, Florida. We all needed him out of our everyday lives—we were all exhausted, on edge. And he was skirting the edge of some huge tragedy. We could all feel it coming. I could feel it. The probability of his doing something irrevocable kept me up at night. I thought he might kill himself and I'd have to find the body. I thought he might want to kill me, as he had threatened, or, worse, my mother, whom he had begun to hover around like a fly, always keeping his eyes on her no matter where she went in a room. I'd feel the blood rush in my temples when he got near the kitchen knives, or had a lighter in his hand, menacingly flicking it.
    My parents chose Orlando because they had read that, aside from Las Vegas, it was the city with the most job vacancies (the flash and brightness and noise of Las Vegas would probably send a schizophrenic hiding in the sewers; although the animal mascots of Disney World couldn’t be much better).
    My mother had spent days on the phone contacting the employment office of Disney, trying to get Michael a job as a janitor, a food vendor, anything, still believing he could somehow hold down work. She set up several interviews for him.