May We Be Forgiven

another direction.” “I can take it. The tougher it gets, the cooler I get.”

    I think of my book and what I want to do with it next. I think of my mother crawling like a roach, of George, imagining him coming to the nurses’ station at night—in enormous one-piece footed pajamas, saying, “Want milk.”
    “The kitchen is closed, go back to bed.”
    “I want milk!”
    And the nonplussed nurse pushes the button under the counter, and there are large men coming from every side, with batons and a Taser gun, and they zap him. George crashes to the floor and is taken back to bed riding on what looks like a luggage cart.
    I hear what sounds like a thousand feet running and crashing into a wall and realize that my room is next to an ice machine and it’s just dumped a load into the bin.
    I begin to panic, to feel there is no air in this place. I obsess about what’s behind the blue velvet curtains. I peel them back with one urgent yank. Worse than nothing, there is an ugly cinderblock wall. I search for a window and find only a tiny vent in the bathroom. Pressing close to it, I suck up air, convinced that there is something poisonous about this place and that I am about to die. I hurry back to the lockbox and break out my supply of Ambien as though it’s the antidote. I almost never take a sleeping pill, but tonight I take two, suck up a few more breaths from the vent, and then force myself to lie back down in the bed.
    An enormous banging wakes me up. The chair tucked up and under the doorknob is moving, jumping, and I hear a muffled voice: “Are you awake? Are you all right?”
    It takes more than a moment to get my mouth working. “Arhggymmby,” I call out and the chair stops moving.
    “You missed breakfast,” the voice says—it’s Rosenblatt.
    “Onanasshchclllp,” which I think is me saying I overslept.
    “Can you be ready in twenty minutes?”
    “Yemmmina.” I take myself into the bathroom, feeling like now I know what it would be like to live two hundred and fifty years, and take a cold shower, talking aloud to myself, carefully enunciating my words. Twenty minutes later, I am dressed, sitting on the chair that I had jammed in front of the door, eating the protein bar from the basket, and wondering what the day will bring.
    “You scared the crap out of me,” Rosenblatt says when he comes knocking for the second time. “I thought maybe you killed yourself.”
    “That would be too easy,” I say. “I couldn’t sleep, I missed the dog, I took a giant sleeping pill.”
    “Guess it worked. How about some coffee?”
    “Please,” I say.
    I am given a large cup of coffee, and then Rosenblatt says, “We’d better get on with it. George is working with the coach right now, and I’ve got something to show you.”
    We go to a conference room where a machine, a pair of wired goggles, and a screen have been set up. “We ask you to put the goggles on—they simply track eye movement,” Rosenblatt says. “And on this screen a series of words will come up.” He hands me a little clicker that is wired to the same machine as the goggles. “We’d like you to click this when a word resonates for you in the context of your relationship to your brother. Are you ready?”
    “Yes.”
    The first word comes up. “Flower.” I click.
    “Did you mean to click?” Rosenblatt asks.
    “I did, George loves flowers.”
    The second word, “Benign.” No click.
    “Sympathetic.” My finger is at rest.
    “Wrath.” Click.
    “Antagonism.” Click. Click.
    “Did you mean to click twice?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Hostility.” “Spite.” “Rancor.” Click, click, click.
    “Benevolent.” Trigger-happy,
    I almost click.
    “Gentle.” I rest, take a breath.
    “Openhearted.” My fingers are numb from inaction
    “Wound.” “Annihilate.” “Bully.” This seems too obvious: click, click, click.
    “Attached.” Click.
    The screen goes off.
    “Are you familiar with intermittent explosive disorder—IED?” Rosenblatt asks.
    “Sounds like bowel trouble,” I say.
    “It’s often described as ‘partial insanity.’ It’s more common than you think, the inability to resist the aggressive impulse, extreme expression of anger, uncontrollable rage. That’s what I’m thinking is at play here.”
    Why am I waiting for him to say “devil’s work”?
    Rosenblatt goes on. “In a situation like this, it’s clearly not one thing, but many—chemistry, stress, drugs, mood, and other mental