passed through his feverish brain, it had ceased to be a story about
someone else and had become a story about him. If the Government
was after Randy Weaver, surely it must also be after Gene Westover,
who’d been holding the front line in the war with the Illuminati for
years. No longer content to read about the brave deeds of others, he
had forged himself a helmet and mounted a nag.
—I BECAME OBSESSED WITH bipolar disorder. We were required to write a
research paper for Psychology and I chose it as my subject, then used
the paper as an excuse to interrogate every neuroscientist and
cognitive specialist at the university. I described Dad’s symptoms,
attributing them not to my father but to a fictive uncle. Some of the
symptoms fit perfectly; others did not. The professors told me that
every case is different.
“What you’re describing sounds more like schizophrenia,” one said.
“Did your uncle ever get treatment?”
“No,” I said. “He thinks doctors are part of a Government
conspiracy.”
“That does complicate things,” he said.
With all the subtlety of a bulldozer I wrote my paper on the effect
bipolar parents have on their children. It was accusative, brutal. I
wrote that children of bipolar parents are hit with double risk factors:
first, because they are genetically predisposed to mood disorders, and
second, because of the stressful environment and poor parenting of
parents with such disorders.
In class I had been taught about neurotransmitters and their effect
on brain chemistry; I understood that disease is not a choice. This
knowledge might have made me sympathetic to my father, but it
didn’t. I felt only anger. We were the ones who’d paid for it, I thought.
Mother. Luke. Shawn. We had been bruised and gashed and
concussed, had our legs set on fire and our heads cut open. We had
lived in a state of alert, a kind of constant terror, our brains flooding
with cortisol because we knew that any of those things might happen at
any moment. Because Dad always put faith before safety. Because he
believed himself right, and he kept on believing himself right—after the
first car crash, after the second, after the bin, the fire, the pallet. And it
was us who paid.