He's not fatherly. Hell, he's not even avuncular. But Ares, the Greek god of war, has two kids anyway; twin boys named Phobos and Deimos; Fear and Dread. They are the two cold moons that circle desolate Mars.

Phobos is there when you're surrounded by darknes. You never see his face, but you can imagine that it's horrible, disfigured, oozing blood and pus. He waits for you, whispering your name, shuffling through your basement and your attic with soft creaks and moans.

Deimos inhabits all the well-lit places whose lights you'd love to douse. He puts his dry, cold hand in yours and walks you through the tableaux of the inevitable: loneliness, old age, heartache, pain, death. "Look," he says. He does not force or cajole. He points and says "Look," and then leaves you to contemplate your own inescapable doom.

Deimos

I first met Deimos in an elevator.

I was seventeen years old, freshly graduated from high school. I'd gotten a job at a hospital in Dallas as a transport aide in Radiology, which simply meant that I picked up the patients in their rooms and carted them down to the x-ray department in their wheelchairs and their gurneys. When their x-rays were finished, I carted them back again. In movies and television this role is generally played by a stocky, ebullient, sarcastic guy with a buzzcut and old navy tattoos or a shaved head. If the patients were disappointed by my slim, lanky body or my soft-spoken, if genial, temperament, they never let it slip.

The day I met Deimos began like any other. I started work at seven a.m. (hospital day shifts always begin at seven; the goal, I think, is to keep you off-balance so that you forget you're in a hospital). I rounded up a complement of usable wheelchairs and gurneys in good working order and stowed them in my favored hidey-holes so that the ER orderlies couldn't find them and steal them back. I helped people out of beds and onto cold, sterile-looking x-ray tables. I stooped and lifted them by the shoulders into waiting wheelchairs, dropping the footrests with soft squeaks, whistling while I untangled IV tubes and transferred dripping bags to the IV pole of the wheelchair if one was available, or onto my shoulder if not. I liked my work; I got to talk to people who were in vulnerable positions and help put them at ease with a soft joke or a friendly smile. It is impossible to feel noble or superior in a hospital gown that ties in the back; exposing your bare ass to some seventeen-year-old white kid has the desirable effect of annihilating barriers of class, race, age, and culture.

I can't remember the man's name, only his face. He was a white man, in his fifties. His hair was brown streaked with white and his eyes were sunken and pained. He was a patient in the oncology ward and had been there longer than I had. Lung cancer, advanced and metastasizing, was eating him alive. And yet, he had his good days. This was one of them.

"Hello," he said, waving when I entered his room. The rooms in the oncology ward were all private. Burdens of this type shared perhaps not beings as lightened as other burdens, I suppose.

"How are you feeling today?" I said. I asked every patient that same question; sometimes I was genuinely interested and sometimes I was thinking about my girlfriend, or what I was doing that night, or what classes to take in college. In retrospect, it probably annoys long-term hospital patients to have every jerk in blue scrubs ask them how they're feeling, but I was just doing what I'd seen others do.

"Feeling pretty good today," he said. "Not so much pain, not so much nausea. Could be worse."

Despite his chipperness, he was a long way from being ambulatory in any sense. I'd brought a gurney and a backboard with me. A nurse stood on the far side of him and gripped the sheet beneath him in both hands, rolling him toward her while I wedged the backboard between the patient and the bed. He submitted to this quietly, resigned, perhaps feeling Deimos's cold fingers along his ribcage. Taking the sheet from the nurse, I gently pulled him onto the backboard, then pulled the board onto the gurney. He would remain on that cold slab of plastic until I got him on the cold slab of metal that was the x-ray table, and then ride it back to his room. But of course, this time he wasn't coming back.

He grinned. "Take it away, maestro," he said, pointing toward the door. As I wheeled him to the elevator, he asked me what I was going to be studying in college.

"Oh, literature probably," I said. "Or theater. Maybe French or Italian. Haven't really decided." He nodded vaguely and I continued talking in the elevator lobby. Teenagers possess a miraculous coping mechanism called the "personal fable". The personal fable is the adolescent's inherent belief that he is unique and invulnerable, and that the rules that apply to everyone else give him a pass. It's why teenagers laugh during the supposedly terrifying films in Drivers Ed., and why I was able to converse so blithely with a dying man.  

When the elevator doors open, I backed the gurney in, whacking the button as I passed by, then leaned against the far wall of the elevator. I checked his IV to make sure it was still dripping. He hadn't said anything since we'd left his room, but I figured he was probably feeling more nauseated than he'd let on, so I just continued talking, holding down both sides of the conversation. The elevator was very slow. The eight floors between Ten and Two could take as much as a full minute to traverse. We were alone in the elevator.

He sighed. A single, brief sigh. And then it was quiet in the elevator. I looked at his face. His lips were pursed, as if he were in pain. His eyes were squeezed shut. And then I noticed the color of his skin. It was no longer pink, but a mottled bluish purple. Cyanosis. He'd stopped breathing.

I quickly felt for a carotid pulse. Nothing. I kept moving my fingers around, thinking I'd missed the artery, but I never found a pulse. My stomach folded; my testicles crawled up inside me. I was still looking frantically for the pulse when the elevator doors opened on the second floor.

The radiology department was down a long, much too long, hall from the elevator. I raced down it, breathing hard, lightheaded, until I found what I was desperately seeking; the blue code button on the wall. I bashed it with my palm and its tiny blue light came on. An instant later, a soothing female voice came over the intercom. "Code blue to radiology. Code blue to radiology." Hospitals don't like to announce to everyone that someone is dying and needs immediate medical condition, so they use code phrases like the pleasant-sounding "Code Blue", or the popular "Paging Doctor Leo." What happens at a hospital when they hire a doctor whose last name is actually Leo? That's what I was thinking while I waited. I couldn't look at the man dying next to me, so I turned away, leaning my back against the gurney, waiting. As a mere orderly, I wasn't required to have CPR certification prior to starting my job; the class had been delayed because the department was so busy and I still hadn't taken it. I had no idea what to do other than stand and wait for the crash team to arrive.

I looked up and saw Deimos strolling down the corridor toward me, holding a ham sandwich. Not Deimos, precisely, but Phil--the acerbic, redheaded CT technician known for his dark humor and flippant attitude. He was heading to the breakroom to eat lunch.

Phil stopped and looked at me, then the gurney, then the blue light primly flashing on the wall. "You call that code?" he asked.

"Yeah," I answered, unable to think of anything else to say.

Phil reached down and took the man's wrist, feeling for a pulse. "This guy's dead," he said, as though he were telling me that it was Tuesday.

Just then, two doctors raced around the corner, followed by a nurse heaving a rattling red crash cart. They descended on the gurney, and Phil and I backed away. I looked at Phil and he shrugged as if to say, "Whaddya gonna do?" He took a bite of his sandwich and walked off down the corridor. The sight of him casually eating his lunch while another man's life hung by a thread just three feet away filled me with horror and disgust. I backed away from the crash team and hurried into an unused, darkened mammography room. I sat on the counter and tucked me knees up to my chest and cried. I didn't know who or what I was crying for. I cried out to God, to my mother, to Fate. No one answered.

I couldn't understand why God, if there even was a God, would let such things happen. I didn't understand what I'd seen, or the importance of it. I only knew that something was different. It was my personal fable, of course, come to an end, with no happily ever after in sight. Later, when I checked the hospital computer, I learned that the man had died.

After I went off to college I got another job at another hospital. This time, I was an orderly in the Emergeny Room. I saw two other people die at that job. One was a girl who, not without a sense of irony, had attempted suicide by swallowing over two hundred antidepressants. She was chatting with a nurse one minute and convulsing the next. The other was an elderly man who'd been brought in with chest pain and who'd arrested on the table. I'd stood on a footstool applying chest compressions while the ER doctors and nurses worked ardently to save him. After twenty minutes, they were forced to admit defeat. It was my job to wheel him downstairs afterward; I wanted to pull down the sheet and look at his face when I was alone with him in the elevator, but it seemed disrespectful and I was too filled with dread. By that point, my personal fable had been replaced with cynicism and fatalism, and I convinced myself that I felt nothing on both occasions. Had I been able to confront my feelings and look old Deimos in the eye, I might have sensed something of God's presence. I might have considered whether sometimes God shows us the darkest voids because staring into them makes us stronger, because they are true, and truth is a more noble quality even than mercy. I wonder those things now. But not then.

Phobos

Phobos did not make such a clean, incisive entrance into my life. He erupted into my belly and bones, shrieking into my thoughts and dreams.

I'd quit my last hospital job and moved to Arizona to spend the summer before my junior year in college with my parents. Because I am a terrible liar, I admitted to each potential summer employer that I'd be returning to Texas at summer's end, and nobody wanted to hire me for a full time job. I finally made a last-ditch application at the local movie theater which, to my horror, hired me. I did not want to work at a movie theater. I was far too sophisticated, too old, too proud, to stand behind a counter asking glassy-eyed moviegoers if they wanted some ice-cold Coke or some delicious buttered popcorn with their Twizzlers. The hit film of that summer was Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, a film that I watched an hour of during my one and only lunch break at that job. Kevin Costner's leaden performance matched my mood perfectly.

Working at a movie theater concession stand is difficult, and the smell of popcorn starts to make you sick after a while. After the first day, I went home bleary-eyed and despondent. I fell into bed smelling like butter substitute.

The next morning, I was scheduled to be at work at eleven a.m. My alarm went off at nine, and I turned it off. I rolled over and went back to sleep. At ten, my mother came into the room and told me that I'd better start getting ready for work.

Something inside me snapped.

I floated up to the ceiling, and from that cool distance watched myself have the first, and by far the worst, panic attack of my life. I was aware that the me lying on the bed was terrified of something, that his fight-or-flight reflex had just gone into massive overdrive. He was gasping for breath; he couldn't breathe properly. He grew dizzy and weak. He thought he was going to pass out. I watched all this with great interest. When my parents asked him to get up and come out of the bedroom, he refused. Then, perhaps possessed by the spirit of Phobos, he started shouting, "Leave me alone! Leave me alone! I'm not going! You can't make me go!"

Well. That was something.

Some other things happened; I've lost track of them. My next coherent memory is of lying on a float in my parents' swimming pool, staring blankly at the water. Very calm; Xanax calm. It was the next day, or maybe two days later. I had an appointment to see a psychiatrist that afternoon. I could go, or not. I didn't really care.

Somehow I managed to get to the shrink's office. He prescribed some pills. I took them. I got another appointment to see a therapist.

At the therapist's office, I described a dream:

"In the dream, I'm walking on a hill of corpses, or a hill covered in corpses. I'm not sure; there's so many of them. Everything is grey and there's mist on the ground. I feel bad walking on the corpses, but there's nowhere else to walk, so I have to step on them, and they make sick crunching sounds. I'm holding a fishbowl, and inside it there's a goldfish. The fish is the only thing that has any color, and it's bright gold and orange."

"Then what happens?"

"Then I'm on a bus, and everyone but me on the bus is dead. I'm still carrying the fishbowl. I have to protect it; if the bus goes over too big of a bump I'll drop the fishbowl and everything will be lost."

I went back to school in the fall, but I was different. More withdrawn. Unwilling to try at anything or take any risks. I didn't date. I started loathe myself. Everything around me was scary. Phobos had cast his spell.

As quickly as the panic attacks had come, they receded. It seemed that depression was an ample substitute. Lassitude was good enough for Phobos. I stumbled through the final two years of college, confused and unhappy, hiding my sadness from everyone around me except for the few clumsy interns who earned credits at the Student Mental Health Center. Nothing helped, and I didn't even care that much.

I graduated from college with no direction, no plans. It was hard enough just getting through the day. I discovered that marijuana was especially effective in combatting the symptoms of depression for hours at a time and began ruthlessly prescribing it for myself. I had friends who had the same prescription, and we spent many long and laughter-filled evenings escaping from ourselves with the help of massive bong hits. When my parents told me that they wouldn't send me any more money, I went out and got a job, the least demanding one I could find: temping. I only knew how to do two things: perform critical analysis of literature, and type. Typing has gotten me plenty more jobs that literary criticism ever has.

I spiraled deeper and deeper into self-loathing and unhappiness. I got into a bad relationship. A really bad relationship fraught with anguish and pain and betrayal. When it was over, I was so forlorn that I could barely move. I called in sick to work for a week and almost lost my job. My GP wrote three different prescriptions for anti-nausea medicine, but nothing would keep my stomach, or my soul, from aching. In the weeks after the breakup, the panic attacks returned. I began to feel a knifeblade of pain in my chest; my heart raced. When I closed my eyes all I could hear was my heart pounding, pounding, pounding. I was losing it, I was giving myself over to terror. Phobos was winning. I lay in bed and begged God to help me, begged to be shown a light.

Then something happened. One day I went to load my roommate's pipe with some pot. I lit up and inhaled deeply, hoping to take the edge off of . . . well, of everything. The smoke suddenly seemed noxious, foul. I spit it out and inhaled again. This time the nausea was so bad that I ran to the sink and vomited. I didn't understand.

Later that night, I loaded the little pipe that I had by my bed and tried to smoke again, and was again unable. The nausea closed my throat and tightened my stomach. Fear enveloped me. I threw the pipe down and stared at the ceiling. I felt utterly lost, utterly alone.

I couldn't get high anymore. This might seem like a good thing to someone who isn't a major pothead, but for me it was dismaying. No matter what, I couldn't bring myself to smoke pot anymore, or even be around the scent of it. So I stopped. My friends thought that I'd gone straight and was just too polite to admit it. They became suspicious of me, even angry. I came home from Thanksgiving that year to discover that my roommate had vanished, taking all of his things, and owing me over five hundred dollars. I never saw him again.

I felt more alone and empty than I ever had in my life, and for several months, I simply existed. I went to work, I came home, I ate in front of the TV, and I went to sleep. I went days without speaking. I avoided the telephone.

A few months later, I flew to San Francisco for my brother's wedding. I'd never been to the city before. I'd reserved a hotel room in the heart of the city. The room had a window that opened on the fire escape, and the first morning I was there, I walked down to a corner store and bought a breakfast of croissants and cheese, then went back to my room and climbed out on the fire escape to eat it. The air was fresh and cool. The croissants were delicious. The sky was the deep cerulean blue of postcards and warm memories. Below me traffic moved and people walked. This city lived. I felt the sunlight on my skin and said, out loud, "I'm going to move here. And I'm going to live."

And that, to make a long story short, is what happened.

Four months later, I left a party at a friend's house in Pacific Heights, and walked the ten blocks back to my own building in the Marina. The air was dark, but not cold. The San Francisco night was alive with sounds and smells of cooking and car exhaust. I laughed out loud. I felt so light that my feet barely touched the pavement. Phobos had been banished; the night held no fear, only promise, unending promise. I had a job, new friends, the stirrings of a future. Filled with bliss, I raced down the hill overlooking San Francisco Bay, and my soul exulted.

Next: Who Are My Brothers?