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tiny pieces. He laughed for no reason, nowhere near a punchline. He said off-color things about death and dying and torture, about corpses and axes and Satan. He would look at a clock to tell the time, but then he'd see the round frame, the glass, the hands red and black, one sweeping, one still, and the actual calculation of time suddenly escaped him, moved just out of reach of his thoughts. Everything was like this. The world was like this.
    At first it was perfect, this breakdown in thinking, this shattering of meaning, the perfect trip, the permanent high, but then he was stuck. He couldn’t get out of his head. He couldn’t say what he meant. Words got jumbled. Meaning was a series of knots. He became angry and depressed, buzzed with a kind of low-wattage rage.
    Many of Michael’s friends, those kids from Hampton who had grown into their teens with police records, had cars—Novas, Mustangs, El Caminos. They drove the thirty minutes to pick him up for the weekend, never getting out of the car, just beeping in the driveway, engine rumbling, windows smoked over, choking gas fumes bellowing out of the rusty exhaust pipe. They listened to Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden and Motley Crüe—a particularly delinquent group of kids who were so high all the time they barely noticed any change in my brother.
    My mother would peek out the window as Michael ran out the door saying he was staying with one friend or another. For a while my father tried to stop him. The fights they had over this when Michael would return on Sundays sometimes lasted hours and usually ended up in a house full of tears and overturned furniture, another Sunday night melee. I'd crank up the stereo or the TV or both to drown out the yelling, the crashing.
    My father would use a fat leather belt to beat Michael. The thwacks sounded like the punches and kicks in martial-arts films. I’ve always had an aversion to violence—it can make me physically ill. I’ve thrown maybe three punches in my entire life, which is odd for a boy who ran in the crowds I ran in. I trace my fear, my learned ability for compromise in moments of conflict, my outright—here’s the truth—
cowardice
in the face of real violence, back to the solid sounds of those blows on my brother’s back and head and legs.
    After the beatings, my father would often go into the backyard and pretend to do yard work. He'd try to talk himself away from the act, from the uncontrollable anger that made him swing and swing. He would sometimes cry if he'd really hurt Michael, if there were bruises, but that wouldn’t stop him the next time, because he didn’t know how else to handle a kid like Michael, a kid, he knew, who was heading straight for prison or the grave. He thought if he'd acted like that, his father would simply have killed him.
    At some point, worn down and worn out, my father gave up on trying to stop Michael from hanging out with kids he knew sold and took drugs, the same kids with whom Michael had taken six hits of acid at one time.
    My father was exhausted when it came to Michael. He had worked so hard to get here, to get to this suburb. He had this new life where everything but his family looked promising.

SACRIFICE
    The city where my family lived from 1965, five years before I was born, to late 1977 was built around shipbuilding and fishing. Hampton is less than thirty miles from Jamestown, Yorktown, and Williamsburg, three of America’s first settlements and beacons of historical tourism. Oddly, everything in Hampton looks as if it were built in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when the big business of Military took over, when the Tidewater area was deemed a “strategically sound location.” Since then the military has dwindled, though there are still several bases—army, navy, air force, marine—nearby, and there has always been, at least to me, a transient, characterless feel to the place.
    To the south, across