He was a living, breathing corpse. There was nothing alive behind his eyes.
My parents tried to get him help. My mother drove him to the VA doctors who specialized in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. David never went more than a few times.
I returned home from college the weekend after David came back. I was in my second year at Ohio State College where I was well on my way to becoming the happy-go-lucky art teacher I planned to be. I’ll admit I hadn’t taken my mother’s tears seriously when she said something was wrong with my brother. He’d always been tough. The strong one. It was easy to dismiss her concerns.
Anyway, Mom was the helicopter type. Hovering around, ready to wipe our noses and put Band-Aids on our knees. She was a worrier of the highest order.
So, when she called to tell me to be prepared, that something was wrong with David—that he wasdifferent—I hadn’t really listened. I had gone over to my friend’s apartment, had half dozen beers, and played a couple hours of Fortnight.
All the while my older brother was struggling in the aftermath of his very real, very devastating trauma.
Mom had been right though. Davidwasdifferent.
He had never been a funny guy. That was my role. He wasn’t the life of any party, but he was always apresence.He was real. He was in the moment.
I used to joke that he had politician written all over him. He was the kind of person that demanded respect. That others listened to. His words always mattered.
The guy I met after saying goodbye to him eighteen months before, was a complete and total void.
Mom and Dad tried. They made his favorite foods. We watched his favorite films. Mom invited David’s old high school friends over for a welcome home barbeque.
That was the first of the many meltdowns.
Mom had asked David’s childhood best friend, Ollie, to come over. Nice enough dude, though perhaps a bit thick. He was the kind to speak before his brain was engaged. His face was a complete fist magnet and growing up, David had to step in and defend him more than once when his mouth got away from him. But they had been close.
Ollie and David hadn’t spoken much since David enlisted. Things would have been on the awkward side even without the added issues my brother now faced. But that amplified them.
Things started okay. They shared a beer. Talked a bit about some dumbass basketball game they lost their senior year. And then it all went to shit.
“What happened over there? I heard a bunch of your guys got themselves blown up.”
That’s all it took for David to lose his fucking mind.
He punched Ollie right in the mouth—not that he didn’t deserve it—and then he kept on hitting. It took Dad and three other guys to pull David off his former best friend. Ollie was taken to the hospital. All he had was a broken nose and some bruising, but he went around our hometown talking loudly about David Scott—the psycho.
And in a small town, once a label was given, it stuck. So, Dave became the town nut.
My brother lost himself in those months after coming home.
I went back to school but I couldn’t concentrate. I came home every weekend to see him, hoping he’d be better. Despairing when he was actually worse.
Then one weekend, three months ago I arrived to find a new David.
My older brother wasn’t exactly his old self. He was still not eating much. He was still depressed and angry. But there was a light in his eyes—a fire in his tone—that I had never heard from him before. In all his smart, intense ways, he had never been fanatical.
Fervor had taken hold and he was hooked.
He showed me a grainy video of a man sitting in a circle with a group of people. There was nothing out of the ordinary about him. He was older, maybe in his early fifties, with greying hair that went all the way to his waist and a placid expression that bordered on blankness.
He seemed to be a preacher of some sort. I honestly didn’t pay much attention the drivel he was spouting. Something about walking a path. Of having a clean soul for when we’re called home. Same old religious bullshit I’d heard a hundred times before.
But there was something about this particular man that seemed to reach inside David and spoke to him.
“It’s like he understands. Heknows,” David enthused.
I didn’t want to say anything that would set him off so I had simply nodded. “Yeah, he’s something else.”
I watched my brother watching his computer screen with an encroaching sense of dread. I wasn’t sure why I felt that, but something about David’s expression worried me.
