beta waves

you are fourteen and your brother is eighteen, which happens to be the age marker where schizophrenia starts to come out, it's not all at once, nothing is ever all at once, there are tics you see when you look back, but you are looking back with an adult’s eye, not your fourteen year old’s eye, there is so much you will forget about being fourteen and your brother being schizophrenic, you will dig and dig trying to recall the day the switch was thrown, you’ll realize there was never that day.

there is coming home from school to find him screaming alone in the house, your parents gone which isn’t unusual, but this is unusual, he is screaming when you walk in, until he sees you, sees his fourteen year old sister, he reaches out thank god it’s you cause you know don’t you, you know about the beta waves, he is desperate, you nod your head, say yes of course the beta waves, you set down your Jansport backpack, you tell him to come sit so you can make him a sandwich and he does, he sits, pulls his hoodie over his shaved head, watches you layer meat bread cheese into something he understands, you plate it, he eats, while his mouth is full of something he understands you slip away and do something you don’t really understand, you collect the razors matches scissors screwdrivers, you do this without thinking about it, he eats, you act, the two of you alone with the beta waves.

there is the night he starts to sleep on the floor of your room, he says it's the only clean place in the house, not clean like tidy, clean like there is no static in your room, you are fourteen, still leave a nightlight on, he is eighteen, he sleeps on your floor, he is a dog on your floor, no he is your brother, he is almost but not quite the monster you always pictured under your bed, no he’s your brother tucked into himself, he’s part-brother part-dog part-monster under the bed, no he is just sleeping on your clean floor, you need to get up to pee, but you hold it so you don’t wake him, don’t startle him, you reach your hand down, gently stroke his shaved head with a single finger, the static of the short hairs electric.

there is the day in July when he disappears, it is July in Arizona, you watch your little brother all day while your parents take separate cars in separate directions, he doesn’t have a license anymore, he shouldn’t have gotten far, but the hours go by, you give your little brother a whole box of Oreos, turn on cartoons, then you hide in the pantry to eat Crisco out of the canister with your finger, no one knows you do this, it is so smooth, so bland, it is velvet, it fills your mouth yet is nothing, you put the lid back on, close the pantry, look out the front window, eventually they bring him home, he sits on the couch next to you, says nothing, in the other room you hear your mother tell her mother they found him riding his bike on the highway toward the hospital, it’s 107 degrees outside, he was headed toward the maternity ward to try to get a new soul you hear your mother tell her mother, then she cries, your brother shivers in his hoodie, it is 107 degrees outside.

there is the day your parents put him in into psychiatric care, where he takes up smoking, there is the day two weeks later when they take him out, he comes home, goes back to sleeping on your floor, your older sister comes from college for a visit, when you come home from the ice cream shop where you work, you find her sitting by the pool weeping, you touch her shoulder, she looks up at you and says I had no idea, no idea, you shrug and sit down, you are both the same height, have the same hair, yet she is not you, she is twenty and you are fourteen, she doesn’t live here but you do, red bougainvillea leaves come off in the wind and fill the pool with little red waves, she goes back to college early, you stay.

there is the day he tries to force his way into the bathroom when you are taking a bath, you tell him to go away but you say it nice, with love, he tells you that he wants to make out with you, you tell him to go away, but again with love, your father hears this, within twelve hours you and your little brother are walking through Sky Harbor Airport alone, you have tickets to Oregon, you are going to your mother’s mother, you aren’t sure for how long, your little brother holds your hand through security, you let him have the window seat so he can see the ocean from the sky, you look at him looking at the ocean, and you think about your part-brother part-dog part-monster under the bed, whom you love, who knows that you know about beta waves that you don’t know about, you wonder who will soothe his head full of static now that you are flying along the edge of the ocean.

there is the day four years after the screaming day when your brother who is now twenty-two kills himself, you are eighteen and something is over and something else is swallowing everything that came before it, when people ask if there was a note you say no, when people ask you if you saw it coming you say no, and you didn’t, twelve years later you will name your first son after your part-brother part-dog part-monster under the bed, you name him with love, then year after year you will keep a precarious ear to his head, wary of the beta waves.