By my 20s, hanging out with him had become tiresome. He wanted to watch old tapes of Led Zeppelin being played backward to point out to me the hidden satanic messages and preach to me about the perils of witchcraft and how I was worth saving, which made me roll my eyes. Still, we could find our old rhythm here and there: doing our poor interpretations of beatboxing; debating which was the better movie, New Jack City or Deep Cover; and his scoffing as I told him about my newest boyfriend or latest breakup. Sometimes I thought he could see through me, as when he would suddenly ask if I was still doing coke when indeed I had been. He never stopped giving me the older-brother treatment, either. One afternoon, he wanted to show me how to use my keys to create little claws by placing them between my fingers and making a fist and how to punch someone without hurting myself. It made me wonder how often he was worried about someone hurting him.

After a stint at Creedmoor, Zack had a short stay in supportive housing with counselors and social workers where, according to my dad, he thrived. “But when he got well enough,” my dad added, “they kicked him out.” And he wasn’t willing to fight and stay. “Your brother didn’t want to take the room in case someone else needed it.” With his disability allotment and some money from his parents, Zack moved into small apartments at the edges of the city, spending most of his time alone. For a while, he worked for our dad, who owned a chain of Mexican fast-food restaurants called BurritoVille, and later at an AutoZone, then a Pathmark. Once, he told me that he was lonely and that he had tried to talk to the guy who sold weed in front of his bodega. “Man to man, don’t you ever get lonely?” Zack said to him. “Don’t you ever wonder if there’s more to life than just this?”

Following a breakdown in the summer of 2012, Zack was released from the hospital after two weeks. His mother begged the hospital to keep him a little longer since he was having suicidal ideation. It let him go anyway. She was powerless — the law even prevented her from knowing which outpatient service he was in. Meanwhile, she and my father had spent years fighting for every little thing concerning Zack’s care. It wasn’t just navigating the system that was tough; it was advocating and insisting that my brother receive help, period. We were armed by knowing our rights, his rights, and the hospital’s responsibility. It was a constant argument. If you gave an inch, the system would deny you everything.

Alex, Zack, and their father, 1997. Photo: Courtesy Alex Brook Lynn

On February 21, 2013, Zack climbed out of his converted basement apartment in Kew Gardens that would flood when it rained. He shared it with other men like him who had recently been released from one of the three major hospitals nearby with psychiatric wards. Then he walked to the Briarwood–Van Wyck Blvd. subway station. The Daily News ran a three-sentence blurb about “an unidentified man” who had “died at the scene,” causing “several trains to be rerouted.” At his funeral, I said I supported his decision to end his life, not because I liked it but because I would never truly understand the pain he was in. I suspected that if any of us had to live for one moment with his illness, we would all be running for the nearest train station — and not after 20 years. His fortitude and the fortitude of those similarly afflicted inspired in me a sense of awe.

Zack died unnoticed by the city at large. Men like my brother, the ones who get harmed or harm themselves, don’t make the front pages, and their stories don’t further the disparate fair-weather agendas of every mayor-come-lately. If Eric Adams wants to expand the parameters of involuntary commitment so that “a danger to one’s self” includes smelling bad, then the policy is clearly aimed at the homeless, who make up only a small portion of the New Yorkers with severe mental illness. Zack was never homeless. What’s more, even if the state succeeds in funding the psychiatric beds the mayor and the governor have promised, it will restore only the losses from the pandemic, not from decades of cuts and closures. Any plan without the money or willingness to create affordable, supportive housing and a better paid and better staffed mental-health workforce will address only the optics and only for a short time.

A month before he died, Zack gave me a comic book called The Killing Joke about the origin of the Joker, the maniac clown who started out as an ordinary guy who was “one bad day” away from villainous insanity. I spent weeks after Zack’s death trying to figure out what he was telling me when he handed me that book. Was he warning me about what he was going to do? Had he managed to escape death like Batman and the Joker? I wanted to believe Zachary Flash Lynn was too important a character just to kill off. I took his diaries and his two goldfish from that basement room, and I listened to voice memos he had put on cassettes that were catalogued like mixtapes. They were the thoughts he hadn’t wanted to forget when he wasn’t on his medication, when he was speeding out of control. I might have been trying to drive myself into madness, I don’t know. I thought if I could decipher his thinking, map the way he made connections, I could figure out what he wanted me to know. “What if you really believed this was real?” his words kept repeating in my head. “What if you knew you had something important to do and it was life or death? Like really, Alexandra, do you know what I mean?”