My Brother Thought He Was Jesus Christ

He deserves a tribute. I want to say that first, before anything else, because everything that follows is complicated and some of it is uncomfortable and I don’t want the complications to obscure the one thing I’m most certain of: he deserves a tribute, and I owe him one, whether or not he ever reads it.

We came from the same fire. The same apartment, the same father, the same nights, the same telephone, the same broken ceramic elephant and the same gun pointed at the same door. The same formation, in the same household, under the same conditions. We were in it together — my brother, my sister, my mother, and me — and whatever it was, we were all in it.

He was the one it broke most completely.

I want to be careful about how I say this, because I don’t say it as a verdict on him or as a claim about myself. I say it as the honest observation of someone who was there, who watched it happen, who was close enough to see the damage accumulating and not far enough to stop most of it. He took the worst of my father’s aggression more directly and more consistently than I did. Whether I was less damaged because I could endure more, or because I was damaged differently, or simply because the targeting fell differently — I genuinely don’t know. It doesn’t matter in the way that knowing would have to matter for it to be worth pursuing. He was the primary victim. That’s what I know.

I had to fight him sometimes. I want to say this honestly, because the tribute requires honesty and honesty requires saying the uncomfortable things alongside the easier ones.

Once he was sitting on the window’s edge of our apartment — fifth floor.

I remember my reaction happening before the decision did: the martial artist’s body moving on its own, crossing the room, grabbing him by the neck with a grip strong enough to challenge physics for exactly the second it needed to, falling backward with him wrapped in my arms. He didn’t go through the window. That’s the only thing that mattered about that moment, and it’s the only thing I’ve let myself keep from it.

Other times he was aggressive — bipolar, burning through trauma with no floor under him, reaching for anything that could make him forget what had happened and what kept happening. Alcohol primarily. Whatever else he could find. He would arrive home in the mornings, bleeding, beaten up by someone in Lisbon’s underworld who’d run out of patience for whatever he’d said or done in the night. My mother crying. My father — by then diminished but not gone — being confronted with accusations that were real and incoherent simultaneously, the charges true and the trial impossible, everything falling apart the way it always fell apart at some point.

I’d break it up. And sometimes he’d turn on me. And sometimes I used force. I’m not proud of it.

I was exhausted and ruthless in the specific way that someone becomes ruthless when they’ve been the one holding things together since they were thirteen and can feel themselves running out.

I was too hard on him sometimes. I’m sure of it. I was placed in a role that shouldn’t have been anyone’s — the one who stopped the beast, who redirected the violence toward something manageable, who kept the household from complete collapse — and I inhabited that role with the specific rigidity of someone who had nothing left but the role. He was weaker than I was. I knew it and sometimes I held it against him, which is one of the more shameful things available to someone in my position, and I did it anyway.

I want to tell you about the Jesus Christ period, because it’s the part of his story I’ve thought about most, across the years since, and I’ve come to think it means something that’s easier to see from outside than it was to see when I was living next to it.

Among the many things that were wrong with him, by that point, was a specific mania: he would go into Lisbon’s underworld — the areas where the night operates differently, where the people are the people that daylight Lisbon prefers not to acknowledge — and he would make speeches. To prostitutes, to aggressive men, to whoever was there. Speeches as if he had been sent with a message, as if the sending were real, as if the message mattered and someone needed to hear it.

He would be beaten for this, regularly. By pimps, by men who didn’t want to be spoken to that way, by people with shorter patience than the situation required. He would come home bleeding, still drunk, with the certainty still somewhere in him that the speech had needed to be given.

For a long time I saw this as only one thing: the most visible expression of how completely he’d broken. And it was that. I’m not going to romanticize it — he was a bipolar alcoholic having manic episodes in dangerous environments and getting hurt for it, and that’s a description of suffering, not of heroism.

But I’ve also come to see something else in it, something that I think was real even if the form it took was ruined. In a household with that much darkness — a household that needed, desperately, someone who could stand between the darkness and the people inside it and say this stops here, this ends now, something better is possible — my brother reached for that role in the only way left to him. Not effectively. Not sanely. Not in any form that helped anyone, including himself. But he reached.

He was looking for something to redeem. He was trying, in his broken way, to be the thing the household had never had — the one who spoke truth to people who needed to hear it, who stood in the dangerous places and said something that mattered, who was sent to help.

The delusion was wrong. The impulse underneath it was not.

We almost don’t talk now. When we do, it’s ordinary — the surface of things, the daily update, the checking in that family does without going into what family knows. We don’t talk about it. We’ve never talked about it, not in any way that would count as talking about it.

We have almost nothing in common and we have everything in common. We came from the same fire.

We carry the same formation in different bodies, expressed in different ways, with different outcomes. He lives with my mother still — who is eighty years old and still handles it, still laughs, still has a life, a strength I cannot fully account for and don’t try to. He has his heart condition, his medication, his drinking, his life that has no clear direction. He is the person the fire made him.

I couldn’t stop it. I want to say this plainly, because I think the tribute requires it and because I think I’ve spent years not quite letting myself say it directly. I stopped some of it. I stopped more of it than anyone else in that apartment could have stopped. I grabbed him off a window ledge. I put myself between him and my father more times than I can count. I held the household together, badly and with too much force sometimes, from the time I was thirteen.

But I couldn’t stop the fire itself. I couldn’t stop what my father was or what my father did or the specific, irreversible damage that specific man did to that specific child over years of being the primary target of something that shouldn’t have been pointed at anyone.

None of what happened to him should have happened. Not to him. Not to a child. Not to anyone.

I wish I could have stopped it. Now, looking back, I wish I could have.

I couldn’t. And that’s the thing I carry from him — not the exhaustion, not the fights, not the window ledge or the mornings he arrived home bleeding. The knowledge that I was there, and I was the strongest one there, and the strongest one there wasn’t strong enough.

He is my brother. We came from the same fire. What it made of each of us is different, and the difference isn’t a judgment on either of us, and I’ve had to learn to hold that without turning it into something cleaner than it actually is.

The tribute is this: he survived something that shouldn’t have happened, for longer than it should have lasted, and he’s still here, and none of it was his fault, and I was too hard on him sometimes, and I know it, and I’m saying it here because the tribute is owed even if he never reads it.

Especially because he never reads it.

That’s the only kind of tribute that doesn’t ask for anything back.