Black Sheep

It was the Halloween before I left home.

Matt and I were dressed up to go out to a party in the west end held by a couple of my cool friends in a cool band. I was dressed as Liza Minelli in Cabaret, too dressed up, more dressed up than anyone else was going to be. Cabaret was my favourite movie. When I was bored, I’d imagine myself as Sally, skinny eyebrows and bowler hats.  That night, I spent an hour pinning all my hair under a short black wig. I didn’t stop until all my blonde was hidden. At that point in my life, I took a special pride in doing what I’d set out to.

An hour after I arrived, five minutes before we left, Matt looked at me. 

“Oh, you cut your hair, eh?”

There was a drawn out pause.

“It looks good,” he said.

“This is a wig.”

“Is it?” His face didn’t move. There was no inflection in his voice. 

“Yes,” I said.

Do you really think I cut my hair? Why would I do that? I’ve always loved my hair, I wanted to say. 

Though, in retrospect, this was the indicator that something was really wrong, this moment didn’t scare me. There was only one thing that scared me about Matt. The one thing that made us truly different; he did not care if he lived or died. 

The speed doctors had prescribed him from when he was seven years old, for his ADHD, made him never hungry and never tired. He never seemed to need anything that kept normal people alive. Instead, his death instincts grew stronger. He never slept because his heartbeat kept him awake. He went a week without showering and brushing his hair or his teeth. Dirty laundry was always all over his room no matter how much I tried to do the wash. 

When the Adderol was good, when it was working for him, he’d write rap songs for seventeen hours a day, always pacing back and forth, his voice echoing through our house. 

A.D.H.D was a diagnosis my father never accepted, “Please. It’s more like I.D.G.A.F.”

At this point, I would laugh when my father said this and agree. “Yeah. Matt has I Don’t Give A Fuck.”

That Halloween, Matt was the highest I’d ever seen him. I had started reading about psychotic episodes. I was always a touch psychic with my brother. We were more twins than siblings; I felt what was happening to him as strongly as I felt what was happening to me. Had he broken his leg, my leg would’ve hurt, too.

“You know why I do drugs?” Matt asked that night.

“No. I don’t want to.” 

“It’s the only time the visions stop.” And then he laughed. “That’s the opposite of most people.”

By this point, I had tried multiple interventions with Matt. So had my mother, and in his own way, by screaming and hissing, so had my father. I knew Matt wasn’t going to stop doing drugs. 

“You can tell Mom I’m getting better if you want.” He and I were sitting in the bathroom of the house party. I was on the counter, my feet kicked up against the tub, counting the runs in my black tights.

Matt was hunched over that counter, procuring cocaine. 

“You are getting a little better,” I lied.

When you love a drug addict, you don’t enable them, but, when you really love a drug addict, you can't leave.

“Why did Dad talk to you about his visions and not me? They didn’t happen to you. They happened to me.”

Are you sure? I wondered.

“He’s fucked up,” I said.

“You’re his favourite.”

I wanted to take off my wig. It was starting to itch.

Three weeks later, we admitted Matt. He was diagnosed bipolar. My mother was left was three questions. Why was he a drug addict? Had he done the damage himself, with the drugs? Or was he born sick?

My father and I knew the answer to the first one. Only, we had one more. Had we driven him crazy by telling him what he saw wasn’t real?