Circling the Drain Read Online Free Page B

hands and began to cry. We were in the living room. My father was out in the garage trying to remove the glue with which my brother had filled the toaster. His quiet curses drifted in through the open door.
    I touched my mother’s shoulder. Maybe he doesn’t want to go to college , I said, needing to find a way to escape what wrapped around all of us. My brother had been accepted to Harvard for the fall. My mother’s shoulders shook under my hand.
    He has to go to a doctor , I said, surprised at my own words but believing them, just the same. We did not protect him from himself, I knew. I left my mother and went upstairs. Jack lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling.
    You here? I asked, trying not to sound afraid.
    Erin , he said.
    What? I stood at the foot of his bed. Above his head a poster of the Beatles curled at one corner.
    Erin , he said again, softer this time and I went over and sat by his feet.
    You’re sick , I said. I love you, but you’re sick .
    I know , he whispered. I know .
    4.
    The only earthquake or storm will occur in our hearts when we become our true selves. That will mean we are going to be heard, understood and alive the way GOD wants us to be.
     Los Angeles, CA USA
    What did I want from her, that bedraggled lumpy customer? I wanted to find that she was a prophetic dreamer, connected to time in an intimate way. I wanted to ask about my brother, about myself. I wasn’t a Christian lunatic afraid of the world ending, either. I just wanted context. Why else would I scroll through other people’s dreams? Maybe because I had none of my own.
    I didn’t mind, really. It’s hard to miss what you’ve never had. I’d always felt different, being dreamless was just more evidence that I was. My mother, alarmed that I never woke on my own, slept on demand, and seemed rested and refreshed whenever she roused me, took me to doctors. I lay on a glass table. Wires attached me to monstrous humming and beeping machines, lights blipped and flickered. I was terrified of them. Dr. Lathere came into the room and tugged at his gray beard. Erin , he said in his gravelly voice, I want you to go to sleep . I was a good kid, accustomed to oddity, and accustomed to Dr. Lathere, who had been treating my family as long as I could remember. I complied.
    I woke when my mother smoothed my hair back from my head. The wires were plucked from my skin and I was free to return home. No REM cycle, was what Lathere told my folks. Highly unusual, the subject of studies, etc., etc. And dreamless. I didn’t understand, really. But even at that early age I knew that Jack had all my dreams.
    5.
    Later I came to believe that God talked to my brother Jack. Whispered things he didn’t want to hear and asked him to do things he found difficult or horrible. No one talked to me. I lay awake nights, waiting, but heard only the murmur of distant crickets, the whisper of air. My head was empty of voices except for Jack’s.
    No prophecy. No secrets. No holy words. Unfair, I thought, since I wanted them so much, yearned to be a vessel for truth and mystery. Jack wanted none of it. I guess you could say we were different that way.
    And that wasn’t the only way, but most essentially: Jack was chosen. I was not. I loved Jack, believed in him, but could never live up to him.
    My brother was a brilliant man. A brilliant boy first, and then a gifted, unbelievable teenager and then a man who people turned to, followed without a question, worshipped instinctively.
    How can I tell the story of a velvet voice if mine is one of burlap? I am eight years younger than Jack. I was eight years younger. Now I am twenty-nine and Jack is still twenty-seven.
    6.
    Strange things happened all along—way before Jack’s night fits. There was the time, twelve and very much asleep, Jack walked three miles through snow in his pajamas to the train tracks outside of town where witnesses saw him