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Recently in Salon Health & Body

Urge
The spirit and the flesh
Out of her storefront church, ordained minister Kellie Everts mixes religion and hardcore fetish videos.
By Daren Fonda
[12/11/99]

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Urge: Naked World
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Sub-Saharans' disdain for vaginal wetness accelerates the plague.
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[12/10/99]

Urge: Naked World
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Six merchants were put to death last week for selling poor women to northern Chinese farmers.
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[12/09/99]

Health Urge: Nancy Chan
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Hot wax and bad news don't mix.
By Tracy Quan
[12/09/99]

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God in the lives of men is nothing new. It's a story that unfurls backward through the history of thought, meaning, reason. I've spent a lot of time tracing it, reading it over and over, in a hundred different ways. Characters change. There’s a new setting, a twist in this plot that wasn't in that one. But it is an old, old story, as old as Story itself. I compare my brother with other narratives involving God. He, She, It is the common language between us. That's how I place Michael, make sense of him, re-imagine him -- alongside saints and martyrs, lunatics and heretics, those who have fallen, shaken and supplicant, pleading, palms aimed heavenward, at the thought of God, His voice, the sweet, terrible whisper in their ear.

Jesus. Abraham, Jacob, Paul. St. Mark, Matthew, John. Joan of Arc, Hildegaard, John Brown. Charles Manson, Jim Jones, David Koresh.

Blake saw angels in trees. Thoreau imagined the possibility of divinity, the sublime, in a knothole. Whitman saw God in the salivating mouth of a soldier's bullet hole. Mother Teresa knew the force of God lived even in the fecal rivers of Asian cities, the venereal fever of a beaten whore. I used to watch a man who lived on the streets of Richmond, Va., who spent hours shouting "Jesus" while in paroxysms, drooling, his fly open. But they didn't see Him. None of them. Not like my brother.

So I dwell; I obsess; I remember in unmoored chunks, half-scenes, things that have to be pieced together, arranged.

That night, when I was 10, I couldn't move. The feeling of immobility, of being trapped, sticks in my mind. I stood in his doorway, a night-light golden behind me, wearing pajamas, fat-faced and freckled, looking at my brother while he screamed, all open mouth and high-pitched wail. His face was contorted like a snake handler's, like a strychnine drinker’s in the documentaries I would watch years later, late at night, with a VCR remote in my hand.

I stood, squinting into darkness. The memory is a series of fragments. Maybe, at 10, with my eyes barely open, I saw the future. Maybe I saw in the dark of the room, heard in the screams, that one day soon he would be living on the streets, hungry; that he would be diagnosed as an acute paranoid schizophrenic; that he would leap from a van going 45 miles per hour to avoid institutionalization; that he would frighten women, children, neighbors, us; that he would be raped; that he would admit to a murder he didn't commit; that his face would be on the front page of local newspapers, the killer, the rapist; that he would attempt suicide for the first time by drinking Drano, the second time by hanging himself; that he would dismantle the fire alarms in my parents' home and light it on fire, ultimately ending up in a Virginia maximum-security prison, praying and crying, by then all but dead to me, locked away in a place I would never visit, a brother -- same curve of flesh, angle of jaw, color of eyes -- who had become a few cryptic letters full of biblical quotes, who I don't think would recognize me.

Next page | Suicide and psychiatric wards: Mental illness was our family’s sickness