Molly McCloskey - Circles Around The Sun: In Search Of A Lost Brother

This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2012 by

The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

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Copyright Molly McCloskey 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

ISBN 978-1-46830-391-9

For Mike, and for our mother

There had been an underlying sweetness to Mike, I would say that was the essence of him. He had been gorgeous, athletic, bright, deeply good.

He was very confident about his mind.

He was so introverted in high school that I tried to compensate by being extroverted.

What struck me was his eyes. I couldnt see the bottom, where they ended. They just kept going.

Mike was superb in the clutch. He probably won at least four games for us on the last shot.

He loved the Band, Dylan, Country Joe & the Fish, the Dead.

He was not a warm and fuzzy person. I was a little intimidated by him.

It was hard for him to be just one of the group.

He was an inner cosmonaut. But he wasnt the slightest bit off. He was one of the cool guys.

Mike was a sweet, vulnerable guy who was trying to find his place. There was an untethered quality. He was lost, good-hearted.

If I had to choose the five sanest people I knew at Duke, Mike wouldve been one.

Mike loved to go exploring, to just pick a canyon and follow it to the end.

He was interested in truth, in the way the human mind worked.

Mike liked being outrageous. That was part of his charm.

He is the last person I wouldve expected to develop schizophrenia.

I wouldnt agree that hed be the last person to develop schizophrenia.

Mike is the most lonesome person I have ever known.

It was just after dusk when we pulled into the parking lot of the observatory, fifteen of us in three cars. My brother Tim had just gotten married and wed rented a house in eastern Oregon for a family holiday after the wedding. The resort was all sage and pine, blue skies that seemed faded by the blank, unambiguous sunlight. The streets had names like Big Sky, Ponderosa and Bobcat. There were waist-high wooden signs to point the way and cheerful yellow arrows painted on the paths, and I had the feeling that when we packed up and drove away it would all evaporate behind us.

The observatory was part of the resort, but it was different from everything else on offer. A small poster on the wall inside the gift shop read:

Looking into space is equivalent to looking back in time because the further away objects are, the longer it takes for their light to reach Earth. Light from objects further away than about 12 billion light years has not had time to reach Earth yet, since the universe has not existed for long enough. The edge of the observable universe is defined by the travel time of light rather than any physical boundary.

There were two people missing from what once would have been our family. My father, for the usual post-divorce reasons, does not attend gatherings presided over by my mother. My brother Mike does not attend family gatherings of any kind, ever.

I had seen Mike only a few days before. My mother and her husband Howard and I had taken him for lunch at a place called Sharis in an outlying strip-mall suburb of Portland, not far from where he lives in supervised housing. Sharis, the only restaurant where he was welcome, was bright and clean. The plastic menus were free of the residue of meals past, though their depictions of the special platters were a little too luridly rendered to be appetizing. Sharis is the kind of eatery that sits off exit ramps and dots four-lane thoroughfares across America. Scenes from edgy, violent films are shot in places that look just like this.

Nobody said much. Conversation with Mike is not easy. His world is small consisting of his visits to Sharis and his interactions with his case worker and with other members of the household. My mother asked how his tomato plants were doing, the ones he had on the deck of the house, and he told us hed decided to quit growing them. The others were complaining because his watering sessions coincided with their sitting outside, below the deck.

They got all wet, he said.

My mother asked the obvious. Couldnt you just water the plants at a different time?

He dismissed the suggestion. No. They dont understand. Theyre not smart enough to understand.

Thats a shame, Howard said vaguely, and we let the subject drop.

Mike didnt ask what the three of us were doing in Oregon, and we didnt tell him. He didnt know his brother was getting married that weekend. It had been more than twenty years since Mike had attended a family wedding. In the photos from that day, he looks aside from his slightly outdated suit and the odd stiffness already visible in his fingers rather well. He is slim, rakish, almost handsome. His hair and beard are neatly trimmed. He is, one might guess, a young man in possession of a flighty charm. Sometimes he appears oddly rigid, apart from us, even as he stands beside us. But to the untrained eye, there is nothing that suggests psychosis. These photos are among the last a stranger could look at and not know immediately that something had gone seriously wrong.

As we waited for lunch, fingering sugar packets, constructing Venn diagrams out of the rings of condensation on the table, I spied my mother in a rare moment of unguarded sadness. Her lips were pursed, and she was slowly pushing the straw around her glass of iced tea.

Back in the late seventies, after our parents divorce, Mike lived with us in Oregon for months at a stretch. My mother would come home from work and find him sitting in the living room on one of the high-backed black fur chairs wed hauled with us from house to house one long leg slung over the other, one foot wagging incessantly, stroking his beard and having a conversation with himself.

Hi, Mike! shed say, in exactly the same tone in which she greeted the rest of us, as though she were perfectly happy to find him there, just as he was, doing just what he was doing.

Maybe it was different when she went to see him on Sundays at Dammasch, the mental hospital in Wilsonville. When she saw him sitting in the corner of a lock-up, surely then some shadow crossed her face. Or maybe coming home afterwards, with a jittery dog in the back seat. (She used to take our dog along to visit him Mike loved her so much and the three of them would go for walks around the hospital grounds.) Maybe the day the dog threw up all over the car on the way home. Insult added to injury. Maybe then she cried.

Of course it must have happened countless times over the years, the waves of sadness, the tears, but my eyes were averted. As a teenager, my abiding wish was that my brother would quietly, miraculously, and without causing pain to anyone, as though he were simply ascending into heaven, disappear. Recognizing the impossibility of this, I had managed instead to create a blind spot where he existed where, in a way, my mother did, too. For as improbable as it seems, I had no recollection of my mother ever having appeared anything like sad in his company until that day in 2005 when we sat in Sharis waiting for our lunch, and she pursed her lips and stared into her iced tea and said nothing in a very particular way.