Sandra Allen - A kind of mirraculas paradise: a true story about schizophrenia

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For Uncle Bob

Late one hot summer night several years ago, I got a call from a number that wasnt in my phone. I had recently moved to the Midwest for graduate school and was at a party in someones living room. I wouldnt usually answer such a call, but in recent days Id met and given my number to a lot of people. I found a bedroom and, shutting the door behind me, answered.

Hey, man. How you doing? It was my uncle, my moms older brother Bob.

Though I couldnt tell you when wed last spoken, I recognized his voice right away. Bob had been a teenager in Berkeley in the sixties, and his voice sounded stuck there. He sprinkled his sentences with Yeah, man and Right on and Far out. He laughed a lothis was a wild, wheezing laughand, given that he was a smoker, his laughs would often devolve into a loud hack.

Hey, Bob, I said. I set my glass on a dresser and flicked on a light. He asked if I had moved yet, and I said yes. Some relative must have told him that and that I was studying writing.

Hey, I wrote a book, man. I wrote the story of my life, he said.

Is that right?

He talked for a while. He asked for my new address, and without much thought, I gave it to him. I told him I had to go, though.

Oh, alright, sorry, man, he said, and repeated several times, Thank you, Sandy, thanks, man. It was unclear what he was thanking me for or what I had agreed to do.

Its totally fine, I said, and hanging up, quickly forgot about the conversation altogether.

:::::

I didnt know my uncle well. The most time Id spent around him had been when I was a kid, in the nineties. Id grown up just north of San Francisco, in a little enclave of aging hippies on the coast, and most of the rest of my moms family lived about an hour away, in the East Bay. Bobs house was somewhere else, somewhere Id never been. Sometimes Bob would be at my grandfathers house when we went for Christmas. In the summer, my grandfather would fly us all out to his vacation place in northern Minnesota, and sometimes Bob would be there, too.

The property had a main lodge in its center, and an old tennis court, and a dock. Little sandy paths ran through the birches, connecting everything together. The single-family cabins were each named after a different tree. When my parents, my little brother, and I joined, we stayed in a cabin with a sign beside its screen door that read PINE .

Bob was single and didnt have kids. He didnt often water-ski or swim or play tennis. Hed mostly sit off to the side, in the shade, wearing long sleeves and jeans, sometimes a vest. His hair was long and blond beneath a dusty cap, and he wore glasses. He smoked all the timemostly cigarettes, but sometimes a pipe that smelled like wood and cherries. He didnt sleep in a cabin like the rest of us, but in the lodge, up a dark staircase I dont remember ever ascending.

Bob was a musician, and he knew I liked to sing. In the evenings, before the bell in the lodge was rung for dinner, Id hear him playing guitar through our cabins screen. Id go sit beside him. Id fiddle with the moss on the cement step and Bob would strum, and wed try to figure out what to play. We didnt know many of the same songs. Sometimes we just took turns describing those we did know. Sometimes he just played, or I just sang. Sometimes we made up songs together, songs that were absurd and funny to either or both of us. If youd asked me then, that would have been my main opinion of my uncle Bob: he was hilarious.

:::::

One day Bob and I were buckled into the backseat of a rental car, waiting for someone to drive us into the town nearby, probably to play miniature golf and get ice cream. From his pocket, Bob pulled out a powdery plastic bag of pills. He removed one, held it up, and then chewed it with his teeth, like steak. He laughed like he wanted me to laugh, too. So I did.

He produced another pill and did the same. Several pills later, the ritual was finished and he put the bag away. Something was frightening about this.

Why are you taking pills? I asked.

Its noon. Gotta take pills at noon, he said, and grinned.

I smiled back.

Later I found my mom. She spent her days down on the dock, wearing sunglasses and a big hat, killing mosquitoes and horseflies with a pair of swatters.

Why does Bob take pills at noon? I asked.

The lakes water stank in the midsummer heat.

Because hes crazy, she answered.

Why?

I think Dad sent him to military schools after the divorce or something, she said, and he got messed up in there.

My mom is a shy woman, and this was the kind of topic that made her face redden and her voice fall.

:::::

Hed call us fairly often back then.

Hi, Bobby, my mom would sigh when shed realize it was him. Shed pace around with the phone to her ear, muttering Uh-huh or Yeah, too polite to hang up but also not that interested. Eventually, shed say she had to go, that she was busy, which was never a lie.

Sometimes shed hand me the phone. Hed say, Hey, Sandy, and launch right into talking about whatever was going on where he liveda neighbor who kept bees, a friend who was going panning for gold. Hed talk about stuff hed seen on TV. Hed ask me questions about my interests and schoolwork, and no matter what I said, hed seem really interested, saying, That right, man? and Far out.

Hed mail us cassettes of his music, which were labeled things like HERMIT and March 96. His songs were long, sometimes very long, and unvaried, always low and melancholy. Sometimes thered be a noodling electric guitar, or a synthesized drumbeat, or unintelligible vocals, like someone yelling underwater. Sometimes hed share a new song by playing it into our answering machine. Occasionally, he ran out our tape.

Hed leave comedic monologues on our answering machine, too, ones performed as a duo of characters hed created by recording his voice and then either speeding it up or slowing it down. The first character was called the Slow Man. His messages always began Helllllllo. This. Is. The. Slooooooow. Maaaan. The fast-talking character was called Timothy Headache. Timothy Headache usually wanted somethingto sell you a car or be elected to office. His messages would screech real fast: Hey oh boy this is Timothy Headache and wow have I got a deal for you! In fourth grade, Id perform imitations of both the Slow Man and Timothy Headache to my friends at recess. I referred to their creator as my crazy uncle Bob.

What crazy meant I wasnt exactly sure, and the fact that I didnt understand it bothered me. As a child, I often quizzed the adults I knew about their pasts, and back then Id ask my mom fairly often about her brother, about what happened to him and why. About why their parents had divorced, and why Bob lived with just their father after the divorce while my mom and her sister lived with their mother. My mom didnt seem to know the answers to these questions. She didnt like talking about her past, often saying she had a bad memory. My mom, whose family called her Debbie, had been the baby of her family, four and five years younger than Bob and their older sister, respectively. My mom was quiet, like her dad. My sense was that, as her family split apart over the course of the sixties, few in her family paid her much mind. I picture her, little pretty Debbie with her milky hair, running by and out of view.