Madness had always arrived to me in the strangest of ways. My first bout with madness involved an argument with my nose, which would not stop pulsing for a moment. It would pull air from the room at a whim and push me into lightheadedness, or refuse to draw air altogether and, with utter command over my mouth, would prevent any inhaling of air whatsoever. I was not able to stand the sudden rush of air; nor could I tolerate the sudden depravation of air. Suffice it to say, the nose could have easily disposed of me; the autopsy would have never revealed my true cause of death: Asphyxiation, brought forth by nose rebellion. It would have been discounted as a peculiar suicide, and the criminal nose, along with any evidence it might have left behind, would have been buried with me in a shroud of mystery and six feet of fine mulch and dirt.

Madness is an unspoken, unseen, frequently denied, and unaddressed member of the family. It has occupied kith and kin since the day our name was born, and was so subtle a visitor, like an estranged neighbor bearing summer fruit, that it was eventually accepted and treated as a member of the family. Madness had struck my father. Madness had struck his father. And their madness, unlike mine, was more or less an advocacy of every unholy thing that is man, the absolute denial of Christ and God, the Church and the established ideas of marriage. My mother’s madness followed quite closely to my father’s; they both denied their Creator. But her insanity was such a sad and unmotherly kind that it could never be construed as anything beyond undesirable. In truth, her madness amounted to a voracious appetite for her husband’s sex, and an absolute denial of her child. It would seem, then, that my immediate family’s madness was nothing more or less but degradation into the ways and mores of whores, liars, fools and bastards. And to all who knew us, who hadn’t known them beyond the routine of hellos and goodbyes—that was exactly what we were: a collection of whores, liars, fools and bastards.

Why they had died was always in conflict—my grandmother was absolutely sure that their madness was responsible for their sudden death. They had taken the El Camino for a final spin one rainy winter day, and slid straight off the road into the San Joaquin River. Investigators had expected foul play or suicide. And they had arrived at some odd conclusions, that it was an honorable suicide, because he had found them clutching one another in some sort of final embrace. Their deaths seemed intended, planned and well-executed. My grandmother, if to do nothing but save face at all, blamed the evils of alcohol and my father’s horrible coordination for their deaths. They did not want to die, she said. They loved life. And so read their obituaries. They were young, bearing children like they were rebuilding after the flood. They were happy, and life, ah, wondrous life, was cut short, ripped away from them.

I spent the extra time their death had brought to me in front of the bathroom mirror, pondering how I would gracefully, or quite ungracefully, bring my life to an end. The children of those who commit suicide are apt to commit suicide themselves, or so it is thought (but all too true (who else might commit the suicide for them?)). I had thought about electrocution, of The Bell Jar, and I had thought of Pascin and nylon rope. Hemingway came to mind--Hemingway and a thirty-eight special, but the suddenness of his going, the messiness, did not appeal to me at all.

Death was glorified as madness was accepted.

All who died in the family were seen as heroes of sorts, perhaps the foundation which my grandmother had built her lies upon. They died gloriously, or they did not die at all. My grandmother’s fixation with such ideals, with her swearing that we were the offshoot of mad love affairs between peasants and revolutionaries, romanticized our existence, and brought tragedy to us like the plague, like locusts.

“Why,” she once said, “your great, great, great uncle knew the man who swore one day that he would kill that traitor, Benedict Arnold, with his own hands. And your great, great, aunt! That poor old lady once gave biscuits to starving Union soldiers. Biscuits, child! And the Union won that war, didn’t they? Why?”

“Biscuits?”

“Biscuits and bullets, child!”

“I thought it was my great, great, great uncle Charley who gave the biscuits to the Union soldiers?”

“He gave his biscuits to Lincoln. And don’t interrupt child! Your great grandfather lived to be a hundred and thirty--he fought in every American war, and stormed Pusan with the Marines in Korea! And I, dear child, I am a renown civil servant, holding the record for the most notorious criminals ever imprisoned by an eighty year old woman!”

I wasn’t too sure about that one. In truth, my great grandfather, her father, would never leave the house, fearing fruit flies and barkless trees. His godson nearly hospitalized him one Easter morning when he had brought him a tiny rocking horse he had whittled from an old piece of firewood. My great grandfather shot that poor rocking horse dead, with an old thirty-eight special, no less.

“How many, grandma?”

“One for each year on my life, child! Ted Bundy met his match when he met your old grandma! And you, my child, you are destined for greatness, like all who carry our blood have been since we came to this great country.”

I wasn’t too sure about that last one, either--but that was why her son dying the way he did shattered something inside of her. It was such a paltry, dull way to go, a suicide in embrace with his only lover. It was unheroic, and it was unoriginal, for nothing, as she said. Every other death in the world was seen as subservient and trifling to the death of her spawn, the children of peasantry and revolution, who seemed to have always died for some great reason.

The mirror would not birth any ideas whatsoever; my death was as vague and distant as any other man’s thoughts of death. It did not seem like it would arrive at all, and, at best, was an illusion of some immaterial, an ethereal, blessing that I was not so anxious to accept. Instead, the mirror became a conversation piece, if anything at all. I would bring it up with some kind of obsession with my closest friend, Charles. We would discuss it at length--its implications, its subliminal nature, and the utter fascination with my left becoming my right, my right becoming my left, and the unbreakable stare that my reflection and I would indulge in.

Charles and his family were also plagued, perhaps gifted, with madness. He was unspeakably ingenious, an erudite speaker and reader of all things, and could not stand one moment of intellectual atrophy. He didn’t have any family that died in any famous wars, either. Nobody in his family gave biscuits to anybody, nor did they make biscuits. His family made tortillas. His left was my right, so to speak. Despite that, or because of that, we were inseparable since birth. I would visit him often, as often as I could since I had first met him some time before. I did not notice him till I walked into the bathroom during a family reunion; we crossed paths. I said “Hello” and he responded, and that was that. We were reflections of the other, his bravery to my cowardice, his vigor to my lackadaisicalness.

It seemed like it all had stemmed from his madness. He would go from chaotic spurts of knowledge, to quiet, introspective meditations in moments; and when he was done, would become such a focused power that he could create anything, give it a name, and were he a materialist, sell it for millions. But he could not, would not do so, because of a sort of love for his creations. We had discussed it in front of the mirror one morning:

“You can be such a successful young man,” I said. “Why aren’t you?”

“And why would I want to be successful?” he replied. “Am I measured by my successes? Was it ever my intention to be measured by such a relative and paltry thing?

Do you, dear friend, measure me by my successes?”

And I could not reply, not intelligently, anyway, because he had hit on such a humanistic point that I could not help but feel swooned and impassioned.

He was quite the humanist, by the way, a murderer of my cynicisms and misanthropy.

“I tell you, dear friend,” he said. “Find something that de- fies success, and you shall be free. You gain freedom by defying such things, by defying this insane demand that you cannot progress any further than that which has been limited to you. Be a Renaissance man, be knowledgeable. Feed the birds in the park with the only breadcrumbs you have to spare, that you spared out of guilt and pity for such starving creatures.”

“And if I am starving myself?”

“Then you dine with them, and do not feel at a loss of heart because you could not afford the wine.”

I had laughed quietly to myself; he was such a humorist, such a humanistic nut-job that I could not deny the lightness of heart that he would inspire. And such a lovely human being, such a naïve and empathic young man.

“Charles!” my grandmother had called out. “Come to dinner, child, before it goes frigid on you.”

“Yes, Nana,” I replied, and quietly shut the bathroom door behind me.