I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

When you’re the sane brother of a schizophrenic identical twin, the tricky thing about saving yourself is the blood it leaves on your hands—the little inconvenience of the look-alike corpse at your feet.

You should see the views of the river, especially in early June when everything’s just come out—the leaves on the trees and the mountain laurel. You look out there and you can almost believe in God.

“If he needs to babble, then just let him babble. Who’s he hurting?” My answer to that question—Me! He’s hurting me!—went unspoken. If you’re the sane identical twin of a schizophrenic sibling—if natural selection has somehow allowed you to beat the odds, scoot under the fence—then the fence is the last thing you want to lean against.

Fighting took too much energy. Fighting would have ripped the scab right off the raw truth—that either God was so hateful that He’d singled us out for this (Dessa’s theory) or that there was no God (mine). Life didn’t have to make sense, I’d concluded: that was the big joke. Get it? You could have a brother who stuck metal clips in his hair to deflect enemy signals from Cuba, and a biological father who, in thirty-three years, had never shown his face, and a baby dead in her bassinet . . . and none of it meant a fucking thing. Life was a whoopee cushion, a chair yanked away just as you were having a seat. What was that old army song? We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here. . . .

People are not like Tupperware, with their lids on securely. Nor should they be, although the more I work with American men, the more I see it is their perceived ideal. Which is nonsense, really. Very unhealthy, Mr. Birdsey. Not something to aspire to at all. Never.”

And the thing is, I think I finally get it, you know? I finally get it.” “Get what, Dominick?” “That he’s my curse. My anchor. That I’m just going to tread water for the rest of my whole life. That he is my whole life! My fucking, fucked-up brother. I’m just going to tread water, just breathe . . . and that’s it. I’m never going to get away from him! Never!”

It didn’t work, that swim. You can’t swim away your sins, I learned that much. I came out of the pond feeling just as dirty as when I’d gone in. I remember standing there on the shore, naked still, panting like a bastard. Just looking at my reflection in the water. Not looking away. Not lying to myself for once in my life. Facing what I really was.

Thomas never squealed on me—never told Ray that it was I, not he, who had smuggled the candy into Mass. And I never confessed—never picked up the heavy end of what had really happened that morning. That was the irony of it, the bitter pill I’ve swallowed my whole life since: that I was the guilty one, the one who deserved Ray’s wrath. But it was always Thomas he kept in his rifle sight. It was always Thomas who Ray went after.

. . . Let go of my ankle, Ray. I’m ready to float away. Ready to cut my brother down from that tree and carry him to the Falls and throw him over the side. Jump in headfirst, after him. Because it didn’t matter. It was all just a joke. Riddle me this, Batman. What’s the point? And the answer was: there was none. Pain pills and Scotch—that was how I’d do it, because there was just no point at all. . . .

Wouldn’t that be one of suicide’s big perks—throwing the look-alike talking corpse, once and for all, off my shoulders? Getting my life sentence as my brother’s keeper commuted? It was funny, though—not at all what I’d figured on: Thomas outlasting me. Winning.

And so, in the middle of Die Hard the Second, I had occasion to look back and see, in the reflected light from the movie screen, the illuminated faces of the audience members. Men and boys, mostly, staring trancelike at the screen. Letting Bruce Willy shoot and punch and kill for them everything that made them afraid. It was very instructive, really. I was enormously grateful for the experience.” She shook her head and smiled. “Well, forgive my polemic, Dominick. But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?”

Our being human made us tragic and comic both, she had said; the gods both laughed and wept.

Like any other living thing. You starve something long enough, it dies. Dr. Azzi was more right than he realized. . . . Thomas’s drowning out at the Falls had only been the official cause of death; he’d died down at Hatch, cut off from hope, from family. My brother had starved to death. . . . And my grandmother: she’d died in prison, too. The Old Man had installed that guard dog—had kept her captive in that goddamned, godforsaken house of his. Had raped her on weekends because she was “his.” And so, in despair, she’d done what she’d done before. Run. Escaped. Dragged her daughter out to that pond and . . .

Renovate your life, the old myths say, and the universe is yours.

I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family’s, and my country’s past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things. This much, at least, I’ve figured out. I know this much is true.