Issue 153 Is Online!

search index
of all issues

Search This Site Enter word(s) to search for:

My brother was eighteen when he was sent to the provincial psychiatric hospital. I knew his leaving was a tragedy because of the way my mother spoke of it, and the quiet that descended on our home after he left. Tragedy suited me then. I could look at it without flinching and say, "So, this is the truth that lurked beneath my childhood." I imagined saying things like that then, strong things. I was sixteen and convinced truth was found in agony. Now I can't even watch a sad movie.

The episode that led to my brother's first hospitalization, that forced me to realize his behaviour was a condition and not part of what was always considered his willful nature, happened one afternoon when I came home and found our house had been ransacked. Cutlery was thrown on the floor in the kitchen where boxes of cereal and pasta from the cupboards were scattered and splashes of mustard and ketchup streaked the walls. In the living room ornaments and lamps were toppled, some had broken and had been left where they had fallen.

Three teenage boys my brother had met at a club in Hull had done this. They also stole a ring and watch that belonged to my mother and had gone through my room emptying drawers of clothes on the floor. My mother arrived home shortly after me. She dropped her grocery bags in the vestibule and sat slowly in the chair closest to the door. Her look was one of quiet amazement, as if she was deeply impressed by the transformation of the room. My brother, sitting in the living room in the middle of the mess, looking back and forth between the two of us, said, "They're my friends." And later, "Besides, it's just a little mess."

In answer my mother said, "Do you understand, Stevie, I have to call the police and they'll ask you questions?"

"God," he let his head drop on the back of the chesterfield and stared at the ceiling. "I'll clean it up, for Christ's sake."

"That's not the point."

"I'll get your things back. It was just a joke anyway."

My mother was across the room from him, on the edge of her chair, her elbows on her knees. He started to hum, to annoy her or perhaps just because he wanted to. After a few minutes my mother said, "I'm taking you to a doctor. This is it. I have to."

He brought his head forward and said, "Why? I'm not sick." She left the room and we could hear her in the kitchen, putting pots and pans away and running water to clean the floors and counters. Without speaking or looking at me he got up and left the room and I heard the front door open and close behind him.

When he returned three days later, I called my mother at the department store where she worked and she told me to have him stay there until she arrived home. "Yeah, yeah, yeah," he said. He was still dressed in the jeans and denim jacket he wore when he had left, but they were soiled and dusty as if he had slept in dirt and his hair hung in his face in dirty black curls. "So, little sister," he said standing at the kitchen table, eating from a bowl of macaroni and cheese he found in the fridge, "how's it been here alone with Mother Crow?" He smirked, cheese sauce caught in the corners of his mouth.

"Well, she was worried, you know."

"Yeah, I guess," he said, without looking at me.

We heard my mother open the front door and he went to the living room. "Look, I'm sorry Mom," I heard him say. "I'll get your stuff back soon."

"It's not that, Stevie." Her voice sounded tired. "I have a cab outside. Put your jacket on, we have an appointment." I stood by the front door and watched them leave. My brother turned before he entered the cab, saw me and waved. He looked young and wayward even to me.

The first psychiatric ward where he was admitted was in an old hospital in the west end of the city where the grounds were as groomed and kept as a university campus. The staff wore casual clothes like the patients and shared an attitude of calm detachment so that often patient and staff were indistinguishable. My brother stayed here for three months, in a private room that looked out onto a parking lot, a field, and beyond, a highway.

He said that being in therapy was like being in a contest. "You sit there and spill your guts and you know how after you puke so much you can't puke any more? Well, that's how it is there. You keep thinking, okay, I told them about my childhood, my father's death, about you, the successful A student sister, about the mother who no doubt is classic something, and they still sit there waiting, expecting."

We were sitting in the sunroom at the end of the ward. I could see the same flat field that I could see from Steve's window, and beyond, the skyline of the city. It was a bright, cold day in December, the expanse of field was covered in snow, smooth as flawless skin. I had come directly from school, carrying my book satchel and dressed in my school uniform. My brother was dressed in jeans, smoking a cigarette, his long hair pulled back into a ponytail.

His face had an angular look and the muscles were pinched above his eyes as if he was squinting or in pain. This was a new expression, the first sign of the aged sadness which would settle there.

"Do you lie?" I asked. "I mean, it must be tempting, to make up stuff."

"No, not really, the attention quickly moves around the group to someone else and some other story." He looked away from me toward the hallway. "There's such sadness in the world, such fucking sadness. I feel it everywhere around me, in me, as if it's a thick mist I'm walking through that I'm forced to inhale." A silence fell between us, as beyond the window the first signs of night made the sky grow dim. "I've learnt something being here, that what we come to believe is true is really just a product of our mind. Knowing this is liberating, it makes everything less serious." I followed his gaze out the window and across the field to the highway where the distant street lights shone like milky pearls, evenly spaced against a darkening sky.

"Stephen is manic-depressive." The doctor was speaking to my mother and me in his cramped office on the psychiatric ward. He was young with long hair that fell into his face as he spoke. I had seen him on the ward and thought he was one of the patients, but here in his office, he spoke with an authority that made his sandals and black hair seem like a disguise. "He will need treatment. This can be a long-term disease, or it may correct itself by the time he's in his mid-twenties. What manic-depression means is that he has mood swings, like us all, but his are extreme. There are drugs to neutralize the intensity of the moods and I've started him on some."

My mother looked past the doctor out the window as he spoke, so that he turned to me and said, "Well there isn't much more I can tell you, wish there was. It's something you will all have to learn to live with."

My brother left the hospital soon after this conversation. The nights he didn't come home my mother would sit in the armchair facing the door, her legs curled beneath her, the floor lamp illuminating the book she was reading. She came to know his illness intimately, its signs, patterns, to depend on it in a strange way, as you come to depend on weather, mercurial and yet constant.

There were times when my brother would not leave his room, times when dark circles grew under his eyes and he'd refuse to speak. Within six months, by the summer, it again became necessary to hospitalize him. At times when I'd visit he'd greet me jovially introducing me to his companions and at other times he'd be in the sun room and eye me suspiciously.

It was during this stay at the hospital, when he didn't seem to be improving, that it was decided he should be sent to the provincial facility, a large campus of buildings built fifty years before. My mother and I drove him there, a two-hour drive through desolate farmland and small towns. We were quiet during the trip, occasionally breaking the silence with comments about the distance remaining, the old houses in the towns and the chance of rain.

The campus, composed of twenty or so red brick buildings joined by a labyrinth of pathways, looked like a Depression-era housing development. My brother was placed in a ward with thirty other men. During the week when I'd be at school or working in the corner store in the evenings, I'd think of him there and think of the maze of brick buildings, the dim alleyways between them and the men who would stand along the hallways. There was something final, extreme, in their condition, as if uncovering truth was the purpose of the ward. I sensed this pursuit in the silence of their stares, their disengaged stance and calm dismissal of everything beyond themselves. They shuffled between the dining room and game room to the porch where they would sit or rock and stare at the view from the window. I too came to recognize this view through all the seasons, the lazy flow of the willows' branches on hot summer days, the snow-packed fields in winter. The landscape moved through the seasons, placid and patient as a parent, oblivious to the pain that existed within those buildings. On Saturday afternoons when I'd sit with my brother in the sun room at the end of the hallway, the trees and paths out the window seemed to flow gently away from us, toward a place just beyond our sight.

At first my brother was happy there. He made friends and played cards most evenings in the game room. Most of the men were middle-aged or older. Their illnesses had made them soft, pliant, asking for nothing except the common comfort of the ward with its routine and familiarity. But gradually he became restless, and eventually angry with the other men. He would tell me about card games where he had thrown the cards into the air. "They let me win ... goddamnit. They're gutless, taking their pills like rabbits, like scared bunnies."

We heard from the doctor that he stopped dressing in the morning and spent the day in his pajamas and robe, watching cartoons in the game room and becoming abusive if someone tried to change the channel. On the weekends when I visited, he'd say, "They're crazy here, you know. Not like the other wards. These guys are the real thing, like fucking aliens are running them or something. I can almost hear the little alien 'bing' just before one of them does something really nuts. The other night I woke up and Sol, the big one over there, was performing some kind of ritual at the end of my bed." He nodded toward one of the patients, a large, awkward man, who was sitting on his bed listening to us across the ward.

My brother stayed at the hospital most of the years I was in high school. In the end because treatments of deprivation, shock therapy, and behaviour modification did not change his condition, it was decided he should come home. His moods still alternated between inconsolably sad and irrationally exuberant.

I left home shortly after he returned from the hospital. My mother and I argued about the way he moped around the house in his pajamas all day, how he ate without speaking or without helping with the housework. "How would you feel if you went through what he went through?" she'd say, adding, "The poor kid."

The years after I left home when my mother and brother lived alone, I would visit them in the small two-bedroom apartment where they had moved. My brother spent whole months in his room staring at the walls, humming songs popular in the sixties before he was sick, or he would disappear for two or three days, returning tired, hungry and uncommunicative.

The story of my brother, the hurt and loss I feel when I think of him, these things that I reasoned could not continue forever, continue, punctuated by holidays and seasons. For fifteen years now I've lived alone, while my mother and brother have lived together. During this time my brother would often leave home without warning or telling my mother. She would then call me at work and inform me that he was gone again. I work for a government department, in an office responsible for hiring. My office on the seventeenth floor is a cubicle in a long line of cubicles. At night when I work late the black of the evening presses against the window so that I am reflected there, floating above the street, above the moving lights of the cars and the store fronts. When I catch my reflection, bent over the desk, the light from the fluorescent lamp gleaming white, so that my image seems to be haloed, I see what I am now, what other people see, a single woman, tall and thin, with an austere stance, and a look on my face, constant and unflinching, of mild disdain. The room around me is functional and uncluttered and for an instant I wonder what conspiracy of fate has led me here. It is always a fleeting thought before I put my head back down and continue working.

My brother is sitting on the curb, his head droops, his thinning hair now mostly grey is long and uncombed. He is wearing a shoe on his left foot, a sneaker with velcro fasteners, because for the past few years he has been unable to tie laces. The sock of his right foot is wet and has a hole in it. He is mumbling, rocking back and forth. I kneel to speak to him and he manages to raise his head, but his eyes can't focus. Cars rush by on the road close to us, they make long, swooshing sounds.

"That's it, that's it, I know it, that's it," he says over and over, captive to the chant of his own voice. There is desperation in the words, in the breathless way he says them and the unfocused gaze set behind my shoulder.

It is February and cold, but he is not wearing a coat. I say to him, "Stevie, come with me." He stares ahead, but puts his hands on my arm. They are shaking and I wonder if it's the cold or some other, more hidden, affliction. The cardigan he is wearing is soiled, and buttoned unevenly, under it he wears a T-shirt with the name of a rock group on it.

I bring him to my car. It's a slow task, as if I'm teaching him to walk, but when he's in the passenger seat he puts his head back and stops chanting. His face is pinched.

Earlier that night I had received a telephone call from my mother's neighbour who'd seen him walking on a major thoroughfare close to their apartment building. "I didn't think your mother should see him like that, so I'm calling you," she had said. My job as a personnel administrator in a government department meant that I had spent the day conducting interviews in an airless office, under fluorescent light. My mind was heavy from the day's pattern of words and images that would settle later in the night into the pattern of my sleep. I enjoy the logic and order of my job, the fact that there are correct answers to questions, that it is possible to evaluate and rate people and assign them to a position.

When I see my brother, now a man of forty-seven, sitting on the sidewalk mumbling, rocking back and forth, I am overcome with a weariness that settles like a weight in my bones. It permeates the car as we sit side by side facing the front window as if we are moving toward an ordinary destination.

I take him to the emergency ward of the hospital where he has been admitted many times before. There I speak with the nurses, telling them his diagnosis, listing as much as I can remember, his doctors, medication, and hospital stays. They take his blood pressure as he stares at the ceiling and then the nurse tells us to sit in the waiting area, a crowded room with chairs linked by metal bars. We find two seats together and I pick up a magazine as my brother tilts his head to watch the TV that hangs from the ceiling. He is no longer shaking. The nurse has given him slippers to wear and a blanket to put around his shoulders. The expression on his face, which had alternated from rage to fear to confusion, has softened and for a while we are content, sitting side by side, brother and sister, waiting.

I think of the years filled with such hospital visits, of other times when I've waited with him outside doctors' offices or emergency wards, to when we were children, Christmas mornings, and spring days when he'd shout with excitement at me and his friends while driving his bicycle recklessly. I remember too when our father was dying, how he'd play outside with these same friends using garbage can lids as shields and sticks for swords and my mother would come to the veranda to quiet them. "Your father is trying to sleep, Stevie," she'd whisper harshly. At the service, after my father died, we sat together, my mother, brother and myself, in the front pew of the church. I worried that what I was feeling was somehow not important enough. Stephen sat beside me, uncharacteristically quiet, almost obedient, until we arrived home and he refused to change out of his clothes. My mother, who was pale and distracted, told him he could sleep in his clothes that night. He stood staring at her for a moment, angry but without the words to explain his anger, then he stomped up the stairs, slammed the door to his room letting the sound fill the house as a final comment to the day.

When the doctor examines my brother he admits him to the psychiatric ward. I leave him in a wheelchair, a nurse standing with him by the elevator. He looks like he could be one of the lost and unloved people who line the streets of the downtown core, living in subways and indoor parking lots.

It's after midnight when I get to my car. Snow starts to fall, heavy flakes, so that the windshield is covered and I'm isolated from the other cars in the parking lot and from the red neon sign that reads 'emergency' over the hospital entrance. I know I will soon have to drive out to the road, but I am mesmerized by the peace that floats down with the snow. When I start the car its lights search the space before me, showing the softness of the snow's fall. My brother, I know, will be just settling into his room. In my mind I can see him watching the snow gather as its powerful silence fills him with forgetful sleep.

The next day when I visit I am surprised to find my brother sitting in his bed watching the news on the television. There had been an earthquake in California the night before and he says calmly when I enter his room, "Looks like a bad quake."

"Yeah, I heard," I reply. The newscast shows scenes of destruction, store windows cracked, houses reduced to rubble. The announcer speaks to homeowners who have lost their houses and the final image on the screen is of a doll wrecked and battered beside the debris of a destroyed duplex.

"Remember that time we ripped the house apart on Kingley?" he says after a few minutes. "It was these guys I met. I knew they thought I was stupid. They made faces behind my back. I could see them." I am staring at him and he is staring at the television. I can see the reflection of the screen in his eyes which are wide and liquid. "It was wrong what they were doing. I knew it but I couldn't stop them. That bothered me, that I couldn't stop them, because they were in my house." Listening to him I wonder if he is going to cry or if he had been before I came in. "But I just couldn't. It seemed so funny, like in a dream. I kept saying to myself, this is real, this is real, this is real."