I grew up in a trailer. We never called it that though. It was a "mobile home," or as they'd later be marketed, a "manufactured home." Regardless, it was what the kids at school called a trailer, and it was my secret shame. It was also a piece of crap that literally fell apart around us. I always heard that the life of a mobile home was limited by its roof, but really it was the floor that gave out, room by room. Blame the Gulf Coast humidity. We lived in a little town about an hour away from Houston, by the way.
The first time we lost a toilet to one of these collapsing floors, we had that bathroom closed off for a while. Somehow, my younger brother Caleb found his way in there and picked up a baby copperhead snake. It had apparently come up through the gaping hole in the floor. It never bit him (miraculously), and (also miraculously) I didn't get bit by the baby copperhead I picked up in our backyard. We both were too young to know better and didn't mean any harm. My guess is the snakes could sense that. Also, there's God.
And here is where I drop the bomb—the single most defining element of my personality and worldview: My brother Caleb is severely autistic. I say "severely" to differentiate his condition from the "high-functioning" end of the spectrum that's recognized these days. Back then, we just said "autistic," which people invariably heard as "artistic," (causing a lot of confusion since I actually was artistic). If anyone we talked to had even heard of autism, it was probably through the movie Rain Main, which is about a very different sort of autist: a "savant." People who knew of that type always had to find a way to ask what my brother "could do," as if he were bound to have some special power just waiting to be discovered.
In all honesty, I probably fostered that hope more than anyone. The best special power I ever found was that he could put simple puzzles together fairly quickly, face-down. He was no quicker with the pieces face-up; he just went by the shapes either way. I always felt like my special power was the ability to talk, a skill Caleb failed to acquire during the crucial years of early childhood. He used to babble a lot when he was really little, but then... you know... he was vaccinated. That is the sequence of events; do with it what you will.
Eventually, Caleb learned a handful of barely intelligible set phrases, but you can't always take those at face value. Whatever hope he had of improving his mental state was flushed down the commode decades ago in a mélange of unmetabolized psychiatric drugs. Yeah, that's right. When I was a kid we said things like "commode." Not "mélange" though; I learned that one later.
Of course, there was good reason for putting my brother on drugs. When he got agitated, he was violent as all Hell. Even when he was little, this might mean he'd smash his head on something (or somebody) or bite his arm or whatever else got near his teeth. You know how much pressure it takes for a human bite to draw blood? I do. It's not so easy as biting into a steak, but it can be done, and Caleb did it fairly often. He still does occasionally. Drugs aren't perfect.
Through Caleb's teenage years especially, he was on such a mix of psychiatric drugs that it was impossible for anybody to keep track of what was helping, what was hurting, and what was interacting with other drugs. My parents tried their best to keep the doses low and reduce the number of medications as far as possible, but it was a constant struggle. He'd switch to some new doctor or school or something, and then everything they'd worked at tapering down would go right back up again—and then some.
I don't want to get too bogged down in this because it makes me sick to my stomach thinking about it even now. I'll just give one example: He was on a drug called Depakote for two or three years, and the whole time he was swollen up with what we now know was an allergic reaction (or something like that). Nobody knew what it was back then because there were too many other variables, as I said. Doctors just assumed he got fat. It happens. Especially to people who live in trailers. We suspected something was wrong, but it took way too long to correct the situation. Needless to say, my faith in the medical community is... Well, it ain't great.
Help! How do I save this piece? It got too dark too fast. This is a tendency I have in my fiction as well, which is why I try to keep things light with gnomes and trolls and elves and such.
I guess I'll just flash forward to 2014, when I discovered Philip K. Dick. I knew I had something really essential in common with him from the start. I'd say we share a worldview. He'd call it a "Weltanschauung," but that's pretty much the same thing. Phil was born six weeks premature along with his twin sister Jane. Six weeks later, around the time she'd been expected to enter the world, Jane died. This had such an impact on Phil that you can't even say it "affected" him—more like "defined." Can you imagine survivor guilt from your earliest memories? At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I can.
Caleb's not dead. Not yet. His health is terrible though. How could it be otherwise? But in a way, he's never really been alive in the same way that I am. No freedom, no way to way to communicate with other people, no hope for any kind of a love life... The most basic forces that drive and motivate human behavior don't really apply to him. Of course, I don't know what's happening inside his head. Maybe he has a rich dream life going on in there, but his connection to this world is tenuous at best. I've always felt like it could have just as easily been me on the medication, me getting babysat in "special ed," me settling into a state institution to serve out my life sentence. So yeah, there's guilt.
I'd go so far as to say that like Phil Dick, I grew up with a phantom twin. Caleb's not really my twin, of course, but we're close enough in age that he feels like one to me. I used to pride myself on being able to understand him better than other people, to translate for him. I have two older half-sisters, but there's nobody on earth as genetically similar to me as Caleb. And he doesn't get to live in this world. Hopefully, I'll be able to get him out of that institution someday. Maybe we'll even find a way to communicate. Until then, I'll have to live for two.
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