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smelled rotten, as though he hadn’t showered in weeks. He smelled of cigarettes, smelled vaguely electric, a smell—almost impossible to describe—that I have come to associate, in recent years, with paranoid schizophrenics. It looked as if he were going to hug me, which he had never done, but he didn’t.
    Jesus, he said again.
    I started walking out of the room and he followed. It was almost the end of the day. I looked back at Kraft and he mouthed the words “thank you.”
    We walked to the nurse’s office, my older brother limping along behind me like a sick child, where he told me an incomprehensible story about numbers and seeing a shirtless Jesus wearing black jeans and boots. We sat there, across from each other, in green, faux-leather chairs, waiting for our mother, who had been called at work. I could see kids drift past the office door, quietly glancing in, whispering to each other.
    Michael held his Bible, looked down at his shoes. I stared at him for almost an hour. He sniffled, moved his mouth as if to speak. He had become an alien to me. I didn’t know him or understand anything about him. I thought I might cry, but didn’t. Not here, not in this closed, incestuous universe of high school, where everyone knew you. I tried to act cool, to find a cool way to sit. I watched the second hand inch around a clock. I waited for our mother.

FLORIDA
    That day in school, in room 16 where neither of us should have been, was one of the last times Michael spoke directly to me, and it would be years before I tried to understand what he had meant. We never had much to say to each other, even as children, but now, once he'd added Jesus to his set list of hallucinations, he'd lost most of his ability to speak in any consistently coherent way.
    It had been the end of the day, the end of school, the end, looking back, of any grasp Michael had on reality. He vanished. He figuratively vanished that day when he was twenty. He—figuratively—became a
foundling,
a
lost lamb,
a
whore among the city streets,
a
leper,
a
child of God,
and headed to “a place in the Hebrew tongue called Armageddon” (for figurative language there is no better book than Michael’s favorite, Revelation). He would never return, never fill out his body again as the person I once briefly knew.
    He became a shell full of voices and pain—real, God-drenched pain, the kind of pain that is dangerous to all in its vicinity. You couldn’t find him in there no matter how hard you looked. If you caught his eyes, he'd say fuck you. If you walked into a room, he'd walk out, furious. His disease, his spiritual dread, moved to another level.
    Every source I’ve consulted over the years about schizophrenia points to the late teens and early twenties as the most volatile time, the most likely point at which a complete break from reality will occur. I was, after Michael was put away and I'd gotten myself reasonably together, an English graduate student for four years at two different Southern universities, poring over medical texts and psychological journals and religious tracts and apocrypha and transgressive literature in grand, dusty libraries, then writing pedantically complex papers about Dostoyevsky’s broken protagonists or Céline’s endless rants or Faulkner’s wildly dysfunctional Compsons (though I think we were closer to the Snopeses), writing little academic
opera
about the guilt of family, the complex meaning of a single shattered life.
    But this is real, not made up, not academic, not figurative: Michael
literally
vanished. It might have been a magic trick, an illusion—the speed with which he was gone. One day, a week after he graduated from high school, just a few weeks after the incident in room 16, his bedroom door—always closed, always locked—was open and he was gone.
    A vacant silence filled the upstairs. The air was smoke-colored. I walked into his room, looked