Madness

Chapter 60

~We, who have the Souls, die oftener.~

Before I went to bed, I looked for some things to take with me to the hospital the next day. I passed the large library where he spent much of his time. I found the last book he was reading before he got hurt, Le Fantôme de l'Opéra, on a small table and decided to take it with me. I had studied a little bit of French in junior high school, but unfortunately I had not had a chance to really delve into it. I chose all the books he might like, even those in the original language. I knew he would have no problem reading them when he woke up. Then I went to his room in search of a bag in which I could arrange all these books so that I could carry them around more easily the next day. As I walked in, I accidentally bumped into a piece of furniture. A perfume bottle fell to the floor and broke into a thousand pieces. I huffed and puffed my way to the bathroom in search of a mop to dry the floor. In my search through the cupboards, my eye fell on a small bottle that was similar to the one I had found in the hotel that night. As I picked it up, I noticed that there were many others like it, and as I read the names on the labels, my mouth dropped open in amazement: antiepileptics, antipsychotics, antidepressants... there seemed to be no end to them, and the more medications I took, the more came out. I didn't understand why there were so many, and I knew who was the only person who could have answers to my questions, and this time I would have the truth. I opened the door to her room wide, causing her to flinch slightly. But when she saw what I was holding in my hands, her expression became serious and she tried hard to avoid my gaze.

"Why are all these psychotropic drugs in the bathroom?" She tried to evade my question, but this time I had no mercy. I grabbed her by the arm and forced her to turn around and face me, making her sit down on the bed next to me. "It's time for an answer! This time I want to know the truth!"

She sighed, knowing that she had no way out of this, and began to tell the whole story:

"Since my mother died, my brother changed. He became withdrawn, he would not talk to anyone, not even my father or my brother. The only contact he had with my family was me and my grandmother. When Joanne came, it got worse. At first he was unfriendly and reserved with her. In elementary and middle school he was bullied, he wouldn't talk to anyone, then all of a sudden he changed. Douglas was ... uncontrollable: he started to beat up all his bullies, he went out with three or four different girls every night, he only came home at the crack of dawn, he still got up to go to school. In high school, I remember that everyone was afraid of him, and even when I walked in, there was still a halo of terror around his name. He was full of friends, he was considered the most popular in school, I must admit that a kind of... tyranny had been established, in short, no one dared to contradict his word, then he began to do reckless things: racing cars, alcohol, we even found drugs once in his room, which I think he replaced with these." She told me, pointing to the drugs while I watched her rapt in her story. "From that moment on, we noticed that there was something strange about him: one morning he would be euphoric and hyperactive, and the next morning he wouldn't even be able to get out of bed. Many times it was difficult to be around him when he was having fits of rage or depression, so my father took him to several psychologists and we... we found out that he is... that he is bipolar. There! Now know everything!"

At that moment everything was clear in my mind, now all his different behaviors were clear. It was really as if there were two people inside of him, and they were keeping him a prisoner in his illness. Even the sentence he said to me before he left: he was in a black hole without being able to get up again, and he kept going down and down, choosing to go down. As he continued to talk, I found myself violently jolted out of my thoughts, shaking with anxiety.

"A few years ago he developed an addiction to these drugs. We tried to curb it, but I don't think we succeeded."

I had a look at the package and noticed that it was almost completely empty. I wondered if he was crazy enough to take them along with the alcohol that he drank all the time, or if he was sticking to the dosage that was listed on the package. It made me feel sick to think of him all alone in the darkness of his room with nothing to hold on to but the drugs.

"You know, at first Joanne wanted to send him to one of those communities for drug addicts, then it worked itself out, we got him in time. Later on, with the discovery of the disease, she wanted to send him to one of those fancy psychiatric hospitals."

"And why?"

"She said at least there they would know how to handle him, but fortunately my grandmother was against it, as was I, my brother was more willing."

"And your father?"

"He would never allow his favorite son to be taken away from home, in part because he did everything he could to keep his scandals from being revealed."

"I've noticed he has a weakness for him."

"He almost forgot that he had two other children, but I never resented him like my brother did."

"Steve, on the other hand..."

"...he took my stepmother's side. He had reached a point where he hated Douglas with all his heart, at times I thought they would kill each other. Then things got worse, the dysphoric episodes were on the rise and..."

"The... dysphoric phases?"

"They are in between the manic phases and the depressive phases, where he would have fits of rage all the time and he used to get into trouble, especially when he went to parties."

After all the information I could not understand, my head was bursting. Seeing me confused, she told me to be quiet and smiled reassuringly as we got up to go downstairs to eat.

Dinner was strangely quiet. In fact, it even lacked those damned case discussions about Steve and his father that went on for hours without paying attention to the rest of the family. Grandma's empty seat was cold, and I missed the lightning-fast glances and venomous banter she gave her sister-in-law. The chair that Maat usually sat in was lonely, and the sound of her ringing laugh was missing in the air, along with the winking smiles that she and her sister used to give me whenever I sat next to Douglas. And of course, what I missed most was him. Sometimes distant and elusive, but when he wasn't, he made me feel the most important person in the world. His hand caressing my thigh from time to time, the warm breath on my neck that tasted like wine, was something I had gotten used to by now. Even when he betrayed me, the warmth of his body knew how to soothe me. I was lost in those wonderful memories when Joanne's harsh voice pulled me out of my dreams. I gasped and looked around groggily, noticing Steph's absence.

"Are you okay, dear?"

"Yeah! I was just... where is Steph?"

"She said she was tired, she went to her room. Poor thing! After all that has happened..." She shook her head bitterly as she turned the teaspoon in the coffee cup and gave a sigh of sadness.

"That poor boy! Too many tragedies for a single man! He is not fit to live in the real world. He was never able to forgive himself for being out of action that night. But he was a seven-year-old boy, he had already risked a lot by trying to disarm and shoot him, what else could he have done?"