Circling the Drain Read Online Free Page A

bookstore, buried myself in words and mostly kept to myself. That’s what I did on the normal days, the days like other days. I listened for salvation, but pretended to get on with things. I worked and watched and waited.
    2.
    The warning I say is that…canned goods should be stocked up on and water. The water is soon to run out. Everyone love each other and do not commit crime against your neighbor…. I am pleading with the world. Stop the madness or it will be your undoing. People who abide by what I have said shall be saved.
    jenny thomas calgary, ab canada
    It was three o’clock in the afternoon on a late autumn Friday that I saw the woman. She was draped in shawls. Mauve, gray and dusty blue cloth layered and piled around her, so that she moved through the store like a stuffed sock. Experience with shoplifters made me follow her, but she took nothing, just drifted from New Nonfiction to Cookbooks, then quickly pivoted and dashed into New Age/Self Help. Was it something in her movements I recognized? Familiarity prickled me, but who was she?
    I stayed in Geography and peered over one of the new pine bookshelves trying to get a better look.
    Her face was slack and uneventful. Her features slid softly, as down a mud hill. She was not pretty: her mouth was a garnet slash of uneven lips. Her hair hung in straight gray wisps. I had never seen her before, but I knew her. I knew, somehow, that she posted her dreams on the Internet andthat I had read them. I felt it like a shudder: a current she gave off, or a barely perceptible shift in the world’s gravitational clutches. I stepped out into New Age/Self Help as though I could say something that mattered, could redeem both of us. Then I balked and charged past her into Women’s Studies and stood there cursing myself for being so clumsy, so insecure, so invisible.
    3.
    The symptoms were obvious. Thinking back, I see old driver’s ed movies of our lives with red lines around the warning signs: Beware, car turning without signal. Look out, there are voices living in your brother’s head.
    With Jack, there were no absolutes. Rules dissolved in the vicinity of my brother: places we were not allowed to go, curfews, strict guidelines for conduct—all delineations evaporated in the glow of his laugh. Exceptions were always made for Jack. My big brother was the king of exceptions.
    People gravitated toward him. He was thoughtful, responsible, meant what he said and unfailingly did what he promised, but he was never normal.
    Then the definite, unmistakable episodes began.
    In our quiet house, while my mother, father and I slept, Jack rearranged all the furniture. Lined up the couch and chairs as though giving a presentation. He took all of the dishes from the wooden cabinets in the kitchen, put them in the bathtub and covered them with syrup, or once, with potting soil. He took the clothes from his dresser and lay them out in the backyard so that they carefully covered the grass. He disconnected all the appliances and pulled them into the center of the kitchen.
    These fits happened at night and were nearly always discovered when Jack was in the act of trying to undo whatever he’d done. At first we ignored it. He was a remarkable person, and no one wanted to admit he was broken. It challenged our faith in everything: that the sun rose continually, that the earth rotated on its axis, that the sky was held firmly above us.
    My mother mentioned sleepwalking and cheerfully crossed the lawn gathering Jack’s shirts and trousers. But when the frequency increased, my parents asked Jack to come with them to a psychiatrist. He refused.
    I’m sorry , he said, I really am. It won’t happen again. It was a bad dream. I dreamt I had to rescue the plates. I dreamt I had to hide them underground .
    I was ten when he finally came to me and begged to be tied to his bed at night. I refused and told my mother, who put her head in her