Hear Our Voices: Leo's Story

This is Leo's story told lovingly by his sister, Marge Patton, a writer of insight and excellence.  Leo's story has changed the lives of his sister, brother, niece, mother, his deceased father and, of course Leo himself.  It is one of the voices that lets the rest of us understand the path of what is termed "mental illness" but what is, in truth, the everyday life of some of us.     Leo: from the Latin, meaning "Lion"  

In 1981 my father answered a nearly incoherent telephone call from the American embassy in England: It was my brother Leo. He wanted to come home -- now, four days early -- and he had no money; he didn't know what happened to his money. This was my family's introduction to a condition whose many labels would forevermore bring with it chills of reluctant knowing: paranoid schizophrenia, manic-depressive, bipolar disorder, mentally ill/chemically dependent.  

Leo was in his mid-twenties then. He had flown to Switzerland about ten days before. He had gone with the tentative hope of proposing to a Swiss girl he had met the previous summer, who had stayed with him briefly after she broke up with one of his best buddies. After her return home they had exchanged letters and phone calls. During those months, with whatever message she had deliberately or delusionally given him, my brother Leo had built himself a dream chalet in Switzerland where he and his true love would live out their days.

He had declined to come to Easter dinner at Mom and Dad's that spring, shortly before he was to leave for Switzerland. It was an inconceivable thing, choosing to miss a family gathering; everyone always came. "He must be really nervous about this trip," I remember saying. My parents noted that he had been quite anxious, withdrawn, even snappish.

When he returned from Europe he was noticeably thinner. There was a listlessness in his eyes we attributed to exhaustion … and perhaps a broken heart. We wondered what had happened over there, but he offered little to enlighten us. As the weeks progressed his withdrawal from us increased. He became more and more agitated and short-tempered. He let us know that our unsolicited visits to his house were unwanted intrusions. He continued to lose weight.

Then the strangeness began. He told me there were voices coming to him through the telephone wires, and voices coming out of his favorite LPs, out from between the grooves, on different frequencies. He played his stereo piercingly loud, day and night -- to hear the voices or to drown them out? - We don't know. One night his phone call found me home alone.

"I can prove it to you!" his excited voice said. "When the TV and the stereo play together just so, you can hear the voices. Here, I'll show you." I almost hoped I would hear something. I almost hung up. I waited as he adjusted his equipment. I wished I could laugh but I started to cry. He came back to the phone with a slight edge of self-doubt: "I don't know if you'll hear this or not," his dark and thicker voice said. "Oh, hell…" and with that the line went dead.

My father went to Leo's house, where he'd barricaded and isolated himself and would not answer the door. But my father entered that lair and sat with his son and tried to talk with him. He spoke softly of the concern he and my mother felt for his health and safety. He pleaded with Leo to come with him to see a doctor. And during the entire visit, my brother Leo sat across the carpeted room with his open switchblade, throwing it into the floor and pulling it out; throwing it, pulling it out. His eyes did not meet my father's. His face bore an expression of barely controlled rage, and it did not change. My father asked Leo to think about it, to give him a call when he was ready. And then, aching with powerlessness to reach his son through the invisible and inevitable iron fist that held him, Dad let himself out.

But the phone call a few days later did not come from Leo; it came in his behalf from the Washington County Sheriff's department. There had been an "incident" at Leo's house and now, finally, he had fulfilled the legal requirements for intercession by the authorities; finally he had done something that "threatened his own life or that of another."

Piecing it together later from police reports, medical reports, and Leo's neighbors, we learned that a man who lived across the street from Leo had looked out his window to see my brother standing barefoot in the snow in the street, staring back at his own house. When the neighbor followed Leo's line of vision he saw thick black smoke coming from a window near Leo's front door. He ran past Leo, who said "Oh-oh, I guess I did it now," entered the house, and found a mattress burning where maybe Leo had fallen asleep while smoking. The neighbor poured water on the mattress and dragged it outside. In the meantime Leo had wandered into his house and sat passively at a table in his porch waiting, it seemed, to see what would happen next. He was calm and absent, maybe sad. After he wandered back home, the neighbor called the police.

A deputy who was also a friend of my parents and was aware of Leo's situation called them before the pickup was to occur. He said he would pick Leo up himself, and would try to wait the fifteen minutes it would take my parents to get there, if they wanted him to. Mom and Dad jumped into their car and raced the nine miles into Stillwater, to Leo's street, in time to see three police cars in front of his house; to see two uniformed officers leading their docile, bedraggled and confused son out his front door, in handcuffs. Leo looked at them without recognition and was taken away.

And with that, the brother I knew, the Leo I had grown up with, was gone. He is perhaps held prisoner somewhere deep down under the delusions, or under the lull of drugs that keep them at bay; or perhaps, as the term schizophrenia suggests, a part of him did split off, and it died. Never again would I see the brother who charged through life with the reckless bravado of a lion; the wiry-muscled, tanned and shirtless brother who held aloft hawks he himself had captured, raised and trained; the mischievous adolescent brother who took my motorcycle for joyrides over the hills when I was not at home. Gone is the brother ever ready to hunt, or fish, or tip his canoe for the sheer joy of the shock of cold water and the struggle against the river's spring current. Gone is the insolent pride, the swagger of self-confidence, the long, graceful stride of a young man who knows where he's going. And gone is the hearty laughter of a guy who knows he's got life by the balls.

Of course we didn't know that then. We learned slowly about schizophrenia, and accepted even more slowly that it would not be cured. It's like cancer that way -- sometimes there are remissions; and if you're lucky, sometimes it can be partially controlled with drugs … temporarily. Some of the bitterest words ever to fall on my mother's ears were from one of Leo's well-meaning doctors that first time, when by way of consolation he offered, "You'll get used to it." We didn't know, when we saw him in the psych ward at Ramsey Hospital, that this was only the first of many such episodes. We looked in horror at his sunken eyes and cheeks, his slack jaw, and at his belt that now sat concave upon his pelvic bones, so thin had he become. We saw him, and wept with relief for his safety and with hearts made sick by his suffering. But we believed it was the end of his illness, that he was in a hospital and therefore on the road to recovery.

He had just spent three days in "isolation" when we saw him. He'd been belligerent, the doctors explained, and had refused medications. Later he would tell me he had been "four-pointed": his wrists and ankles shackled in leather cuffs and pinioned to the four posts of his iron bed, leaving him spread-eagle, utterly vulnerable and powerless against the DT beasties crawling over his skin and the ravages of malevolent spirits ever present during episodes. There was nothing to focus on in the anonymous white room, and he remembers seeing no one but the big black orderly who forever and irrevocably justified in Leo's mind his hatred for the entire race … perhaps just by his timing. No one would tell him where he was, he said, and he had no idea how long he'd been there -- he thought it might have been years. They forced injections into him, drugs that finally broke the fighting spirit that had refused their help. Perhaps they drove the demons out but in their place my brother got … nothing. When I first saw him he could not even speak.  

Thus began the adventure of psychotic episodes that would take my brother, piece by piece, by confinement and by drugs, away: away from his family, from his friends, from himself, and from an inspired life. The drugs he took returned him to a condition acceptable to polite society: he was "okay" now. He no longer played his stereo so loud it awoke neighbor children in the middle of the night; he did not tear his phone out of the wall to still the invasion of voices; he did not chase torturing demons out of his light fixtures with a baseball bat, and then run across the broken glass to escape flames he did not remember starting.

He wasn't yet seeing worms in the sink where he had just thrown up, prompting hysterical 911 calls. He hadn't yet frightened our mother with anger so intense it stood the arteries out on his neck, because she'd named him Leo. He didn't yet see airplanes and helicopters flying over his house that he knew were spies for Hitler. He hadn't yet developed the private-joke laughter, short snorts of derision or embarrassment that related to nothing visible to ordinary minds. He hadn't started drawing elaborate diagrams that might be plans for invading armies or football strategies or maybe were maps of the crossed paths of his rapid-misfiring brain.

And still coming too were the losses: Our father had not yet died and Leo’s former lover, on whom he still hung a thread of dreamy hope, had not yet committed suicide half a planet away. Neighborhood parents did not refuse to let their children go near his house -- children that had before been one of his greatest joys, and later one of his only joys, as he made Kool-Aid for them by the gallon and opened his kitchen to their unabashed knocks at his door. The police had not yet pulled him over in the dark of night and clamped handcuffs on him and taken him to the safety of the county jail until social workers could be alerted, the proper paperwork filed, the holidays over, and the judges convinced he needed yet another round of forced therapy for his own good.

But all these things loomed in his future, episodes and episodes, waiting their turn to break over him on waves of insanity.

  So now he sits. He knows he'll never get his job back, the one he held as a strong healthy man in his early twenties, before the stock-market crash of his self-esteem. He knows he can never go back to the high school where he was last truly happy and alive … where he did return, one afternoon, to wander the sights and smells that sighed through warmer chambers of his memory, but was interrupted when a cop appeared who'd been summoned by a nervous employee. He knows his friends have been scattered by their own destinies and by his alienating illness, for he knows he is sometimes cruel when besieged by one of his episodes.

So he sits at our mother's house where he spends most of his days and nights. And when his siblings come to call he perceives from their discomfort a cool contempt, which he hurls back at them with scathing fury in his not-so-nice times. He sits and, balancing a desperate desire for the taste of escape with a desperate liver, he consumes near-beer by the gallon. He lives by proxy through the television set. He lets Mom prepare his meals and send him on errands that he feels justify his presence -- or maybe his existence.

Now he is drugged to still the voices, to quash the drives and passions that made him uncomfortable to society, a thing to be feared. Why did it happen? Did a demon enter his head when he fell off his bicycle and landed in the ditch, unconscious? Did one invade his mind when his defenses were down, under anesthesia, when his appendix ruptured? Did he, maybe even unknowingly, take some drugs while in Europe? Was he affected even before birth by the residual fear in our mother's bloodstream, fear left by the birth of her previous child with Downs Syndrome?

Is his drummer different? Is his God? Is this a test? of him? of us? Does anyone answer when he prays, or have the drugs quelled that voice too?  He sits there, docile as a lamb, a memory of his whole self. All of his remaining life seems destined to be a compromise. His eyes open and close but the light that shows through them is dull. The muscles are there, but once proud, hard and tanned they are now flaccid, pale and laced with fat. He is hard to look at, my genetic sibling; sometimes it is like seeing death -- like life without life. Our mother chokes on her truth as she tells me Leo is the one child she hopes to survive. And Leo, whose periodic lapses into alcohol abuse can be but a variation of total indifference, seems to agree.

Yes, he's heavy; but lion or lamb, he is my brother.  

Marge Patton      

    Originally written in 1997; edited 2005