His voice was hoarser than usual. His eyes seemed to move in a frenzy beneath their heavy, half-closed lids; his brow was damp, labored by a convulsive twitch.
“Charlie…” his raspberry lips uttered again.
And in one hasty motion, Charlie set the cork and wine bottle aside and hurled down to assist her brother.
“I’m here,” she said. “God, you’re bleeding…”
“No… That’s … that’s not mine.”
It took a second for Charlie to register. It had never occurred to her that the blood could be someone else’s. Then a despairing realization came into her face as she began connecting the dots. Her hands, she observed, shook very slightly. But she put them to work, feeling Max’s torso for wounds through the stained fabric of his sweatshirt.
“Are you hurt, are you in pain?” Charlie asked. The blood had a faint smell of alcohol about it, which, now and then, fouled her nostrils. “I need a towel.”
Dom quickly broke out from the others assembled around Max and headed to the kitchen.
Simon stepped forward and asked, “What happened to him?”
“Is he going to be okay?” Jen asked, her hands now hanging a little ways below her lower lip. “We should do something.”
“Charlie…” Max whispered quickly, his breathing coming in short, jagged rasps. He looked quite groggy. “It’s happening again…”
Charlie regarded him as if an insecure feeling was stirring within her.
“What … what’s happening again?”
“It’s happening again, Charlie,” Max repeated. “It’s happening and it’s all over the place this time. I’m going to … to … lay myself out to the moon and will get the poor and the homeless to tag alongside because they don’t have anywhere else to go, you know what I mean. They’re cast out; they all crawl in the slum, toiling, hustling, existing with nothing but whatever springs out of the rabbit hole. But you can’t lump them all in the same box, you know that. They’re not trash, not all of them… Some are worth more than the scraps they carry in their trolley; some can even see beyond the sky and interpret the stars. No one, and I mean no one, does it better when it comes to that. And the moon––the moon could be their new home, a shelter… Do you understand?”
Following Max’s delirious tirade, everyone wore a troubled air on their face. They had never seen him rave with such disturbing alacrity. Hell, they had never seen him flip and talk crazy like that before. Suddenly, Max burst into tears, wailing as if gripped by some sort of demonic anguish. His fingers clamped rigidly on Charlie’s arm.
“You will help me, won’t you Charlie?” he said. “You’ve got to. God, I’m losing my mind over this stuff…”
Eyes widened with fear, Carol muttered, “Now I’m starting to freak out.”
Dom came back from the kitchen with a handful of paper towels. He passed them to Charlie.
“So what’s the deal here?” he asked. “What did he say?”
“He said something about the moon,” Carol replied.
“The moon–– What?”
Charlie wiped the dried blood from Max’s face. Even without it, his once-straight laced countenance was still befouled by jolts from his throbbing delusions. She tried to get him to ease and quiet down. Then she helped him up to his feet and steered him toward the common area of the living room. But Max slumped to the floor only halfway there, emotionally exhausted.
“Okay, just sit here,” Charlie said, bringing him to rest against a loveseat.
The alcohol smell coming off his top was now nagging brutally at her nose. And she wondered whether Max had drunk too much last night. In fact, a million questions quickly took form in her head, but none came out her mouth for her mind was still mothballed by shock.
“Hey guys,” Max said, addressing the people staring at him. “I’d gladly pass some hugs and love around but I’m afraid my hands are a little dirty right now.” He looked at his hands without any particular expression. He added, “I mean, they’re filthy, all right, as you can see. I’m sorry, I just don’t want you to have the wrong idea, you know, like I don’t have any manners anymore. Or something… They just happen to have a headache right now ––” He broke out in laughter. Their eyes were still on him. He said, “For sure, it pisses me off when some people won’t shake your hand because of some misguided sense of superiority or some stupid shit like that, you know what I mean. Anyway, I’m still civilized, just in case you’re wondering–…”
Tara said, in a croaking whisper, “I’ve never seen him like that before.”
Jen shared Tara’s distressed feeling and turned to Charlie. “What’s wrong with him, Charlie?
Charlie looked at her and felt hollow in her heart. She knew she had some explaining to do. And she knew it would be painful too.
II
Instead of explaining what was wrong with Max (wrong in the idiosyncratic sense inferred by Jen’s question), Charlie chose to stall. There would be time to address that. Right now, her brother’s immediate welfare was her priority.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked him again.
“Yeah, I’m okay,” Max said. “I’m okay now. I kind of feel a little weird … drowsy … and my head is spinning. My legs—I can feel them now too… You want to feel them? They were a little numb before, but after that little stretch we did, they should be able to take me anywhere anytime.”
Alvin stirred his head and said, as calmly as possible, “How long have you been staying in the laundry room?”
“Oh that–– How the hell would I know? I don’t even know what time of the day it is.”
Dom murmured, “No wonder no one saw him this morning.”
Charlie picked at Max’s bloodstained sweatshirt with mixed feelings. She said, with difficulty, “Max, if the blood isn’t yours, then whose it is?”
“I don’t know.”
“Please, try to focus.”
“I don’t know, Charlie,” Max said. “I don’t know.”
“Where were you last night? Where did you go? Please, think…”
The words were crying sounds in her throat. She pressed his arm with her hand. But Max, in a moment of rapid outburst, shook the hand off.
He said with enmity, “Why are you acting like that, huh? What is your fucking problem? Why don’t you just … just fucking leave me alone, all right?”
Something hardened in Simon’s chest. He called angrily, “Take it easy, Max…”
“Max, please,” Charlie said. “I’m trying to help you.”
“Big news! You want to help me. That’s what people say all the time. ‘I want to help,' ‘I want to help.' But deep down they don’t care… But, sure, they want to look good to others. They want to feel good about themselves too. That’s how you have all these non-profits sprouting all over the place, right? But still, it’s a farce, an exploitation game for people looking to get a nice pat on the shoulder for their good fucking will. But what do they know about this suffering, this sickness living right there on their back stoop? I was there Charlie… I was there… So I know it first-hand. And I saw the likes of you look at this thing and drop a quarter in some collection box so they could quickly walk away from it. And you call that helping? You’re no better, Charlie. You––”
The flat of Charlie’s hand struck him across the side of the cheek. All stared at the scene, gasping. It was something between them and the others figured they had no business chiming in on this sibling interplay.
An acid aftertaste built up in Max’s mouth and he swallowed noisily. At length, he then beheld the tears in his sister’s eyes and finally lowered his head.
Taking her hand, he said, regretfully, “I’m sorry, Charlie… I don’t know what’s going on … Those things I said, it’s not… Oh God, they’re not meant to hurt you… I swear, it’s like … it’s like… I … I don’t think I’m doing well right now; so don’t you mind what I just said.”
“What the hell happe
ned to you?” Charlie said, her voice wavering. “Why do you have all this blood on you?”
Max concentrated for a bit before answering and it showed on his face. But the mental exertion was fruitless.
“I don’t know,” he told her at last. “I don’t remember… It’s all a blur. My mind reads like a patchy scrapbook with lots of blurry pictures in it.”
“You have to try harder.”
Once more, his voice quickly changed. “I’m trying, I’m trying! I’ve been trying hard all my life and you know that already. So what do want from me now? I told you I’m totally blanking out. You think maybe I like being like that. So exactly what else do you want me to tell you?”
Staring at Max with a sick look, Carol said, in a nervous fit of fright, “Christ, will you please knock it off and get a hold of yourself?”
Max returned her look for a second and shrugged. He went on, speaking softly: “I guess I’m just tired and hung over, you know. I didn’t really sleep. Tried to. But it was so crowded up there”—he touched the top of his head—“it was like congress arguing about a bill. And they were going over and over the same stuff… I hardly closed my eyes with all that. I couldn’t sleep. I just need to lie down for a minute––”
“—Alright,” Dom said. “Let’s get you cleaned up first.” He helped Max up off the floor.
“Thanks, Dominic,” Max said. “You’ve always been a good friend.”
Dom walked him to a small corridor where one bathroom was situated. Still bewildered by the recent turn of events, the rest of the group began to disperse nonetheless. Alvin picked up the cardboard box from where it had fallen and put it down on a side table, near the laundry room door.
III
Charlie collected the paper towels (used and unused) off the floor and started toward the garbage bag, having no heed for both the cork and the wine bottle that she was leaving behind near the site where Max’s drama had played out. Jen was immediately on her heels, anxious to have a word.
“What’s the story here, Charlie?” she asked. “What’s up with Max? I mean I never saw him act like that.”
“He … hum … he’s just confused. That’s all.”
Evasively, Charlie placed herself so that her back was to Jen and her qualms to herself, hidden from anyone’s sight. The others slowly approached the two girls, intrigued as much as the next fellow about what had just happened.
“Yeah, he’s confused all right,” Jen said. “I think we all saw that. But all this rambling…”
Alvin said in agreement, “There’s something else; all that back there sounded way more than that.”
Charlie kept quiet, obviously preoccupied. She crumpled the towel papers with palsied hands and discarded them into the garbage bag.
“Charlie…?” Tara called out.
The disarming appeal in Tara’s voice startled her. Coming down from the clouds, she was now aware of their expectation. She turned her head so she could face everyone.
“At nineteen, Max was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder,” she said, despite herself. “But he started developing it earlier than that, after we lost our father. And ever since, he’s been experiencing moments when he just stops being himself.”
“What?” Carol croaked with dismay. “You mean like he just snaps?”
“Not like that … he just … he just has problems keeping it focused sometimes. He was doing fine; I mean it was hard in the beginning, but his meds gave him a leg up. And that’s how he was able to keep a lid on the disease. But he got off his meds now because they were having some pretty detestable side effects on him. But still he got on using alternative therapy, you know. Physical exercises, meditation … the whole body-mind training stuff. And he got better. He was better at socializing––” She stopped, her face working. “It’s like he’s relapsing into it…”
The very catastrophe of that implication siphoned into her heart so piercingly that she felt a chord break and a kind of sorry pain filled her entirely. It was not fair, between him and her—between twin brother and sister—that she may conserve her faculty intact while his was marred in a constant struggle against mind deterioration.
Something was to blame for the relapse, she thought to herself. Some kind of catalyzing event which, she assumed, was related to the great amount of blood besmearing him from head to waist. However, to deny assigning the blame to herself would have been behaving like a self-indulging kid. For she knew she was to blame as much. If only she had not submitted to his decision of getting off his medication. She should’ve fought him harder on this. But Max wanted to become a travel photographer. And his best work, which had garnered nice accolades in some small local papers, had come about as soon as he’d weaned himself off of his antipsychotic drug.
A real pity of a tradeoff since the drugs had successfully contributed to stabilizing his chemical imbalance and she should have made him stick to them. She had a weak spot when it came to his requirements. It’d always been so since they were children and alone, left to their own devices while their father withered in a jailhouse and their mother coped in the arms of another man...
Someone asked her, “What kind of drug was he on, do you know?”
She thought for a few seconds about its queer-sounding name. “Quetiapine, I think.”
“Pretty strong stuff,” Simon said, fingering his chin expertly. “It can flatten an elephant right out in a matter of seconds.”
Several eyeballs fell on him and, to stop right off the gate any misconstrued idea that drug use was his line of country, he added, “I know someone who knows someone etcetera, etcetera.”
Tara said to Charlie, “You never brought up any of this before; why not?”
“Tara… It’s complicated.”
“No, it’s not,” Tara said. Her eyes were scolding. “You can’t have something so big like that all bottled up on your chest and not tell.” She added after a moment, “I tell you everything—”
“—I wasn’t always there for him when he needed someone,” Charlie said, remembering how she’d shunned Max many times at the onset of his condition.
She did not know then how to manage. She had no real notion of the toll the ailing was taking on him. She did not see past the discomfort it provoked for her.
“This whole thing is not easy to deal with,” she said again. “And I guess… I guess I just didn’t want to have him endure any kind of prejudice.”
“What, because you think I would’ve judged?”
“Of course no––”
Tara said nothing more. Instead, she looked at Charlie at length and Charlie looked back at her in silence. Between the two of them, a different vibe could be awkwardly felt all around the room. It was akin to the one felt after newlyweds’ intimacy is put through the wringer following a first serious fight.
Finally, Tara just turned her back on Charlie and walked away. She sat down on the first seat she found and her kitten came and curled up around her feet. She picked it up and stroked it.
At a slightly different pace, the rest of the group mirrored Tara’s drift and they sat down too, except for Simon, who came up to Charlie and said, “You could’ve told us, you know; you could’ve told me.”
His voice wasn’t carrying a remonstrative tone; rather it held a sweet and warm note of understanding. Simon slowly ran his fingers through the silky mass of her hair. And the touch robbed Charlie of an involuntary—though imperceptible—little smile.
She said, “Yeah, I know now. It was stupid of me and I’m sorry. I had this feeling this morning… Like I knew he was in trouble, you know? Goddamn it––”
“—Don’t beat yourself too hard. How could you know?”
“I’m supposed to look after him…”
Her grip on the garbage bag tightened impulsively and her lips pressed together into a rosy straight line. Simon put his hand over hers and she let his touch work through her uneasiness and unwind her fingers.
“And you have,” Simon said, taking the garbage bag from her. “I’ll take care of this.”
Charlie let him and watched as he proceeded to the kitchen with the load that was now his.
IV
Sitting on a two-seater with Jen at her side, Carol crossed her legs and said, in a sober tone, “This whole mystery thing nearly scared me out of my senses, I can tell you that. I’m just glad it’s solved.”
Charlie overheard from where she was standing. A look of deep consternation flitted over her face. “Glad it’s solved?” she said, quickly coming around toward Carol’s chair.
“I’m sorry, that’s not how I meant it.”
“You think Max did it, don’t you?” Charlie asked head on. “You actually think he’s responsible for this; is that what you’re saying?”
Jen’s eyes went up and were met with the peeved expression misting over Charlie’s face. She got worried.
“Charlie, I’m sorry to be spot on, but I’m just pointing out the obvious,” Carol said, shifting uneasily on the cushion. “A minute ago we had someone’s head in our hands without any single clue as to how it got here, right?”
“And now we have a clue…”
Carol grew irritated and snapped back, “You make it sound like I’m happy about that or something.”
Alvin raised an arm, calling for a timeout. “Hey, we’re not going to get anywhere fighting now.”
Peter said, conversationally, “I’d just like to say that he doesn’t strike me as someone violent who would do such a horrible thing. I mean it takes a real monster to kill someone and cut their head off.”
“Well, I read somewhere that people, when in a manic state, are capable of doing some pretty fucked-up things…”
Before even saying the last words, Alvin suddenly realized his blunder. He didn’t know what had made him issue such an inconsiderate remark. He cast a sheepish look over to Charlie and said, apologetically, “Sorry; that came out wrong.”
“For Christ’s sake, we’re talking about Max here,” Charlie said to the group, her voice rousing a little. “He wouldn’t do something like that and you all know that.”
“But what about the blood, Charlie?” Jen asked. “I mean, if anything, that’s pretty telling.”