He's 51 years old, and he likes Oreos and HBO. He's been a schizophrenic since his early 20's, when he came home from his last hitch in the Army, stationed in Germany. The Army could see that something was wrong with him, but we, his family, couldn't. Maybe we didn't want to.

So it took some years of him drifting from one meaningless job to another, with long stretches of unemployment in between, and "loans" from our parents, before he came to me, by agreement between him, myself, my wife, and our parents. I offered to let him stay in our guest bedroom, and to help him get a job. He arrived with empty eyes, wildly long hair, a beard, and a suitcase full of bad clothes. I talked him into a haircut, bought him a suit and a few outfits, got him to shave, and shower daily. And he looked better, and started smiling in the evenings, as he ate dinner with me and my wife. He even read the want ads, and went out looking for a job, walking to the bus stop at the bottom of the hill, as I left for work in the morning.

One week passed into the next, and he didn't find a job, and I realized he wasn't really looking. If he left in the morning to ride the bus, he wasn't going anywhere he'd remember having been later. And one morning, about 2:00 a.m., the police were knocking loudly on our door, and he was standing in handcuffs between 2 patrol officers. Turned out he'd been standing in front of a neighbor's front door, listening through it, for sounds of people being tortured, which he was sure was happening in that home. I talked to the officers, got them to take off the handcuffs, promised to take him to the hospital that morning, and I did.

He answered the doctor's questions, and I listened as he tried to describe the voices he heard, that no one else did. I saw clearly then, for the first time, his fear of our fear, and his fear of the voices. Saw him shaking, as it became clear, even to him, that he couldn't tell any more, if he'd been able to in some time, which voices came over teeth and lips, and which never had.

That was more than 25 years ago. He's one of the "lucky ones," if any schizophrenic can be said to be lucky. At least, he gets a small SSI payment monthly, and his meds, which, since 1996, have been clozapine and lately, in the last year, since our parents died, effexor. His meds work to keep the voices at bay, and he isn't afraid, and stays on them without argument. He's "medication compliant" in the parlance of the treatment world, and that's his minimum ticket to staying with me, in our home. He sleeps, he eats, he watches his HBO, and takes our dog for a walk most evenings. He's not a bad guy, and in getting along, he's even something of an inspiration to me.

But he doesn't look inspiring to others, and being host to a person with an incurable condition, who can never be self-reliant, has costs. He's not the reason I'm divorced, because that was over long before he came to live with me, before I became, at the deaths of our parents "the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you" for him, as Robert Frost said in his poem "The Death of the Hired Man."

But I don't go out much now, because I don't want to have to explain him yet again, to someone who might come to matter to me. That hasn't gone well in the last year, and I won't try it again, as that path is too costly for both him and me. It's enough now, to get along, and make the doctor's appointments and pick up his prescriptions, and do the marketing and remember the Oreos, and fix dinner, and go to work and come home, where no one needs to be grateful, and simple pleasures are simply recieved.

He has had to come here, and I, maybe strangely, but finally, am content that he has...