There’s a demonic mole in our family’s genetics that lurks in the helices that combine and overlap deep in the marrow of every cell in our bodies.

Anatomically, they form the proteins and traits to fabricate a human animal. In our case, the animals sometimes bite.

It has produced both men and women with circuitry prone to lapses and irregular thinking, violence and delusions of vast conspiracies that center, for some reason, on their mostly irrelevant lives.

My Dad was one. Craig was another. A cousin on my father’s side, his condition proved fatal this past week, and the details are vague but appropriately tragic.

A massive man with shoulders as wide as an ax handle is long, Craig was dangerous to everyone who knew him. His rage, a gnarled and twisted trunk grown from the rapacious root of fear and disease, ultimately killed him.

Dark-haired, long-limbed, his genetics also gifted him a natural, robust physique that required little maintenance. Other than these basics, my memories of him from childhood are faint, distorted by time and later knowledge about who he became; but in every one of them, he was shirtless. And bragging, with a species of bravado I remember too well from my dad’s disconnected soliloquies on toughness and loyalty. Craig’s ego threatened at all times to erupt in a volcanic torrent of fury and self congratulations. Simply put, he was the best at being the best. He’d fight to prove it.

We come from down home stock, and his points of pride reflected those country roots. He’d claim outlandish feats of skill, sort of like shooting the balls off a woodpecker at 500 yards. With open sights and high-wind adjustments. So naturally, you’d be tempted to laugh at what would have been an easy joke out of anyone else’s mouth. But with Craig, might as well call him a liar. Bad move.

Within him roiled the hot and toxic gases of wrong thinking. The family knew he balanced on a razor wire dividing just plain mean from goddamn crazy.

We’d seen it before, with a great aunt in Oklahoma, with my dad, and now with Craig. Even further back, there were the hazy tales of murder and mayhem when one uncle beat his neighbor to mush with a round of firewood, and another one shot his wife dead for letting his dinner go cold. Or something.

So Craig’s demon was familiar to us, one to keep an eye on, to lull with solicitudes and momentary kindnesses, and worst of all, one to avoid. An empty circle surrounding cousin Craig grew as he fell further into the clutches of his disease. His family learned it was better to keep a safe distance than offer help that would later weave you into his chaos.

Only his mother Evelyn — and sometimes his equally brash but thoroughly sane brother Chris — ever sought him out.

I can’t imagine, as a father, watching a child of mine struggle on the edge of reason, tortured in a bleak world of his own creation where every word is a threat, and every passing car delivering death. You’d run the inventory of his childhood, sifting through the stacks of memories for that one moment, that one episode, where you failed the boy and made him crazy. How could you not blame yourself?

It didn’t help that the misogynistic thinking of the day laid the blame for such virulent schizophrenia on mothers. Cold mothering, insufficient affection, entirely bullshit.

Until her death, my grandmother still half believed that she could have prevented my father’s issues if only she’d tried harder.

Craig left California to build a new life in Arizona thirteen years ago. It wasn’t meant to be.

A few months after the move, the storm hit. A late night phone call tore Evelyn from her bed. In the hallway, her veined hands clutching her night coat closed against an unseasonable chill, she pleaded with her boy to see sense — no one followed him home. No one was trying to kill him.

She whispered, hoarse and ragged through her clenching throat, anxious to let her second husband sleep.

His bank account? Of course it was safe from prying hands and eyes. It’s all in your mind, son. Can’t you see?

Hospital staff assured her that they would keep him until she could get from Placerville to Arizona. Frantic, she quickly found passage and a day later stumbled into the lobby of the hospital. Craig, though, was gone.

She never heard from him again. She searched around town, researched likely hideouts, and ultimately hired a private detective. There was no trace. He vanished, and abandoned everything, including a bank account holding hundreds of dollars.

They assumed he was dead.

This past week, though, cousin Chris took a call from the desert. The police were looking for Craig’s next of kin.

Craig had been alive these past 13 years, apparently without psychological help, and had most recently been living with a roommate. Craig, after an argument, threatened the man with a gun. The roommate apparently took the threat seriously, and stabbed Craig to death with a knife.

Evelyn called my mother to give her the sad news. Craig’s death had hit her hard, reopening an old wound and exacerbating the long-held sense that she could have somehow saved Craig from himself if only she had been a better mother.

An awful end to a sad life. Unlike my father, in Craig’s case it proved his ultimate undoing, though it’s hard to argue that either of them had ever really had a chance to live.

As a kid, I’d lose sleep fearing for my own mind. It seemed the sickest kind of torture: Your mind, the operating system of your life, betrays you in such a fundamental way that you cease to distinguish the real from the imagined. It whispers lies and half truths, makes you into a character caught in the crosshairs of an early novel by Stephen King. Randall Flagg follows you, always, and your life is reduced to fight or flight.

In those circumstances, who wouldn’t be difficult? Who wouldn’t sometimes be an asshole? Such fronting seems now to be a method of deflection, and camouflage.

Now, I lose sleep worrying about my kids. My siblings and I were spared the worst of our family’s legacy, though several of us do suffer from more mild forms of mental illness.

Yet in my dad’s case, his sickness didn’t fully manifest itself until the age of 19. None of my nieces and nephews showed the familiar signs, yet I’m left to watch my own kids and wait. The odds are in my favor, but with your children, any risk is high risk.

I’ll keep my eyes open, my heart engaged, and try to be ready. You can never be ready.

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James Faulk is a writer living in Eureka. He can be reached at faulk.james@yahoo.com