I’m convinced now that Inga was suffering from absence, what used to be called petit mal seizures, which resolved themselves spontaneously as she grew older. What has remained with her are migraines and their auras and something fragile in her personality. As a boy, I knew that Inga had a quality that separated her from other children and that it was my job to take care of her as best I could. Inside the family, she was safe, but once we boarded the school bus, her vulnerability became a target. I can still see her walking down the aisle to her seat, holding her books against her chest, long blond braid trailing down her back, brown glasses on her nose, trying to look as if she didn’t hear the rude whispers that followed her: “Weirdo” and “Inga, dinga-bat.” She quivered. This was her fatal error. Her shuddering encouraged the verbal assaults, and because from early on she had decided to live a life of purity and goodness, she never answered her tormenters. This gave her a feeling of inner superiority but did little to ease her trips on the bus or her suffering at recess.

Neurological debilities always have content; this is something that hard science has been loath to recognize, just as psychoanalysis has often disregarded the physiology of various forms of mental illness. The stuff of Inga’s early seizures and auras turned on our religious education. Neither my mother nor father was particularly devout, but out there in the American heartland just about everybody went to some church or other. We attended a Lutheran one, and our Sunday school teachers fed us stories about God and Jesus and that third and most distressing deity—the Holy Ghost. Because I felt that my parents were relaxed about the God problem, and I was not prone to “funny lifting feelings” or seeing “sparklers” the way Inga was, my connection to the divinity was more abstract. I worried about an invisible God looking inside my head and listening to my thoughts. Sometimes, before going to sleep, I’d cup my penis in my hand and think I heard him speak harshly in my ear, saying single words like “No” and “Don’t.” My sister, however, had angels inside her. She heard wings rustle in her ear and felt flaming hands touch her head and lodge themselves in her chest cavity and pull her upward toward heaven, and sometimes they spoke to her in rhythmic verses. She didn’t like their ministrations one bit, and when the seraphim paid her a visit at night, she would sometimes come to me. If I wasn’t sound asleep, I would hear a soft knocking at my door and her voice say, “Erik, Erik, are you awake?” A little louder. “Erik?” When it was late, and I was completely unconscious, I would feel her tapping my shoulder. “Erik, I’m afraid. The angels.” I would turn over then and hold her hand for a while or let her hug me until she had the strength to return to her own room. Sometimes her courage failed, and I would find her curled up at the end of my bed in the morning.