people are strange when they are strangers

My older brother came up in a conversation in passing the other day. And its stuck with me. I always talk shit about him. I don't hate him, I feel like I do sometimes, but its not the real picture. We used to be each others closest friends. When you move 6 times in 4 years, your brother becomes your de facto oldest and closest friend. He shared the same burden of having a funny Arabic name in the 80's, and asking kids at birthday parties if there was any pork in the cake. That time this woman in Atlanta called us Muslim terrorists at the Po' Boy restaurant, we turned it into a running 5 year joke about how dumb southerners were. We use to laugh for hours about the Abdul Maliks. This family in our Arabic school made up of two wives and over a dozen kids. They were poor. I don't know why it was so funny, but it was. When he used to get spankings, usually because he kicked me, I would cry outside his room. Eventhough he had made me cry minutes before. He was always smart, really smart. They tested him once and he qualified to be in MENSA. Somewhere along the line the genius turned into madness. One day he came up to me and said he was going to do a scathing critique of the Bible and the Qur'an. As the years passed and he holed up in his room, papers everywhere with crazy chicken scratch writings, I thought maybe this is not so great. But I was half way out the door, running away from my family. I wish I could know the exact moment when it all turned. I wish I could have known that he wasn't just being weird, or an attention seeker, or lazy, or all the things I've called him over the years. I wish that time when he told me he was going to kill himself I called myself calling his bluff and told him that he didn't need my permission. I wish I wasn't an asshole sometimes. I wish he wasn't an asshole. I wish he would talk to me, and not scowl and knock me out of the way whenever I visit home. I wish I didn't see such hatred in his face. I wish I knew why he was so so so angry. I wish when my family brings up his name they didn't have that look. The look that he's lost. I want them to fight for him to make him better. But he won't be better. I know that now. And there is nothing anyone can do.