“Ada,” I said, “we barely know each other. It’s fine.” I used my talking-to-an-irrational-person voice again.
“I know we aren’t friends and I know this is stupid, but I can’t stop thinking about this. I just got to town and this is the first place I came.”
Her eyes had more sincerity in them than I’d seen in just about anyone who had given me an “I’m so sorry” or “We’re praying for your family” in the past few weeks. This beautiful, talented, intelligent girl had really been worried about me and about my family and my brother. She had really cared. And in that moment, I suddenly felt unable to stand up any longer. I backed up slowly to the metal chair behind me and eased down. I closed my eyes. My hands were shaking.
“Cullen?” she whispered. “Are you all right?”
I didn’t answer her because when I tried to speak, I felt as if I’d either throw up or scream, and I didn’t want to do either in front of Ada Taylor. I lowered my head down onto my knees, and as my body began to shake uncontrollably, I felt a warm arm wrap around my shoulders. Ada Taylor knelt beside me on the floor as I cried for the first time over the thought that my favorite person in the world was probably dead.
Book Title #79: The Business of Making Girls Cry.
CHAPTER TEN
Cabot Searcy
It is said, in the Book of Enoch, that two hundred angels led by Azazel, the keeper of God’s throne, came to Earth after falling in love with the human women they had watched. And in doing so, these fallen angels began to reproduce with the daughters of Earth and bore what were then called the Nephilim, great giants who consumed all the possessions of man and, because man could not stop them, eventually began devouring him as well. And after destroying the birds, beasts, reptiles, and fish of the Earth, the Nephilim began to eat one another’s flesh and drink one another’s blood.
At the same time, the fallen angels, known then as the Grigori (or Watchers), began teaching all the remaining humans the arts of war, astrology, and vanity. It was then that the heavens heard the cries of those men who had died from the lawlessness of the Earth. And God ordered his left hand, the angel Gabriel, to go down to Earth and stop the lawlessness. And so Gabriel, along with the angels Michael, Uriel, and Raphael, caused the Nephilim to wage war against one another. Their fathers, the Grigori, were then bound to hell for all eternity for the sins they had brought to Earth.
Then God spoke to Noah, the great-grandson of Enoch, instructing him to save his family and the animals from the great flood that would cleanse the Earth of the corrupted humans. And Enoch, who did not die but was taken away by God and made into the angel Metatron, kept God’s throne, invented the art of writing, and communicated God’s word to those on Earth.
When Cabot Searcy was told that his roommate and friend had killed himself, he immediately walked into the bathroom of his parents’ house, splashed warm water onto his face, and stared at his reflection as tears began to roll down his cheeks. Benton, he thought, wouldn’t do such a thing as jump off a bell tower on Christmas Day. But he had, and now Cabot Searcy would face his second semester of college alone and without his friend. After drying his face, he straightened his eyelids and shoulders and walked out of the bathroom, where he was then tackled by his little sister Megan, who growled like a lion and pretended to claw at his chest.
It should not have been his responsibility to do it, but Cabot Searcy had waited two long weeks for Benton Sage’s family to send for his things and no one had, so he began to box up the half of the room that did not belong to him. By doing so, Cabot Searcy felt that he would be able to keep himself from getting too distracted by Benton’s death and move on with his life. On the second day of slowly rifling through Benton’s things, Cabot Searcy came upon a photo album labeled with a strip of masking tape and a black marker. It read: family.
The album was like any other, complete with a few childhood photos of playing in the yard and by the pool and things like that. There were several shots of a teenage Benton sitting by his siblings on the couch or making a silly face at the camera while doing homework. One showed Benton hanging upside down from a swing set as his mother sat nearby, her face blandly gazing toward him. And only one photo showed his father, dressed in a suit and tie, shoulders broad and powerful, with a neatly trimmed mustache. Benton stood next to him, a small space between their arms, and what looked to be uncomfortable smiles on each of their faces. On the last page in the album, there was a picture of Benton standing next to a very tall, very slim black man, whose smile seemed to leave little room for Benton’s, who squinted, smirking slightly as the man held his shoulder tightly.
Three boxes were more than enough to hold all of Benton’s things, and so Cabot Searcy began the final task of taking off the sheets and bedspread from Benton’s bed, planning to take it all downstairs for someone to hopefully mail home to Benton’s parents. However, it was when he ripped the bottom sheet off that Cabot found what looked like a diary of some sort stuffed under the mattress. The book was narrow, bound by a cardboardlike cover, and had a rubber band wrapped around it. Cabot set it down on the floor next to the bed and continued to fold the sheets, stacking them neatly into the last box. He sat on his bed, staring down at the book. He picked up the book. He set the book on the bed next to him. He picked it up again, and then put it back down. He carried the first box, filled mostly with books and CDs, down to the first floor. When he walked back into his room, Cabot Searcy went straight for the book. He quickly tore off the rubber band and turned to page one. It read, in bold black ink:
Warning: The following pages, whether used as a
journal or for ideas, are most assuredly filled with
melancholy, cynicism, and woe.
Cabot grinned as he flipped through the pages of the book to find often short, mostly random musings over things ranging from strange phrases Benton had heard to television shows he’d watched to people he had encountered. Benton’s first entry in the book was dated about three months before he began college, so Cabot quickly thumbed through to find the point at which he had met Benton. The page numbered forty-seven in the top corner began like this:
I met my new roommate today. He seems nice enough,
although I wouldn’t ever want to make him angry.
I think he seems to like me, which is good. He was
already flirting with the girls next door.
Cabot Searcy laughed. He closed the book and lugged the second box down the hall and down the three flights of stairs to the main floor. Before picking up the third box, Cabot tossed the little book on top of the sheets and began his journey downstairs one last time. Just outside the office where he’d left the first two boxes, Cabot set the box down, snatched the book from the top, shoved it in his back pocket, and then left the box downstairs, as he had done twice before. Back in his room, he put the book in the drawer of his nightstand and went to bed.
In 1773, a Scottish explorer named James Bruce heard wind that a surviving copy of the Book of Enoch existed in Ethiopia. There, Bruce discovered three copies of the ancient text and returned to Europe with them, leading to their later translation into English by Oxford professor Dr. Richard Laurence. At that time, the books had been missing for nearly one thousand years, having been banned from the church by powerful theologians who claimed the text heretical and ordered all copies to be burned or shredded. Later, copies of the book were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, dating them back to a time before Jesus Christ, who himself is said to have referenced it through his ideas and elaborations on the fall and judgment of man. Though many Christian and Jewish theologians give little to no credit to the book, which at one time was considered an accompanying apocryphal, or secret writing, to the New Testament, there is one church that includes it within its Christian Bible, this being the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. This church adheres to many of the strict practices also promoted by Orthodox Judaism and has somewhere around forty million followers, such as Rameel and Isadora Desta of Addis Ababa.
It
took only two nights of casually flipping through the book for Cabot Searcy to read all of Benton Sage’s mostly comical entries. He had laughed loudly when he read Benton’s description of him as “looking much smarter than he actually is.” The book was not even half full, and though he hesitated for a moment, Cabot Searcy decided to write something on the first blank page he saw. He dug around at the bottom of his book bag until he finally came up with a pen, and after taking the cap off with his teeth, he began to write.
Benton Sage died when he leapt from a bell tower on
Christmas Day. He will be sorely missed.
With that done, Cabot Searcy decided that it was time to perhaps find something else to do with the book, simply because the thought of keeping something once owned by a dead person gave him a very uneasy feeling, which would explain the two nights in a row he was unable to sleep. And just as he was about to rewrap the rubber band around the book, Cabot used his thumb to quickly fan through the book’s pages, causing a noise that he remembered coming from an elderly man in church years before. He did it again, though, because he thought he had seen something on one of the pages near the back. He stopped the fanning and turned a few pages, and there he saw written in black ink:
And heal the earth which the angels have corrupted, and
proclaim the healing of the earth, that they may heal the
plague, and that all the children of men may not perish
through all the secret things that the Watchers have
disclosed and have taught their sons. And the whole
earth has been corrupted through the works that were
taught by Azazel: to him ascribe all sin.
—The Book of Enoch 10:7–8
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Vilonia Kline
Because my father refusing to go back to work had nearly exhausted our funds, my family decided to accept donations set up through the local bank by the First United Methodist Church of Lily, which we attended on a semiyearly basis. The website my dad had set up proved only to serve as a forum for a few ass-hats to send in false sightings of my brother and a few housewives from surrounding states to write in and express their “deepest regrets” and shit like that. Lucas’s research had done little more than make him the most paranoid person I’d ever met, and my mother had finally accepted the fact that people would eventually stop getting bad haircuts just because they felt sorry for her.
I, on the other hand, found some strange sort of refuge in being with Ada Taylor, whom I quickly discovered was a lot more than just a pretty girl in unbuttoned blue jean shorts and a bikini top.
“Maybe he just woke up and said, ‘Screw it,’ and hopped on a train to, I dunno, New Mexico or something,” Ada suggested, running her fingers lightly through my hair, my head in her lap.
“He wouldn’t do that,” I replied.
“Or maybe,” she continued, “he was a spy for the government all along and he’s being held captive in Russia or something. Maybe your brother is the most dangerous man on the planet!” She laughed.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Do you hope he’s run away, Cullen?” she asked, her tone still almost lighthearted.
“What I hope is that the sky opened up and he floated right up into it.”
“Me too, then,” she said, leaning down to kiss my forehead.
At some point over that next week I had decided that even if Ada Taylor was showing me attention and affection purely because she felt sorry for me, I was still madly in love with her. Lucas told me that she would eventually be the end of me, and when I reminded him that I had little to live for anyway, he didn’t speak to me for two whole days. When he did return to my house, however, he did so with Mena Prescott by his side and a smirk on his face.
“I’m sorry, Cullen. I was mad,” he said, looking down at the floor.
“It’s fine, Lucas. You’re allowed to get mad every now and then,” I said.
“Aww, you two should kiss and make it official!” Mena shouted, crossing her arms and tilting her head to one side.
“Well, not with you here, Mena,” Lucas joked.
“Yeah, we save that for when you fall asleep at the movies,” I said, winking.
“Okay, that’s enough. You’re creeping me out,” Mena said.
Mena Prescott had become, at some point over that summer, someone I learned to truly appreciate, which is not something I do easily with most people. For at least one night a week since Gabriel’s disappearance, Mena had shown up at our house with a sack full of groceries and cooked an entire meal, dessert and all. She had also begun helping my mother around the salon, refusing payment, and had hassled the editor of the Lily Press to run Gabriel’s photo on the front page until he was found. How she accomplished that last one we were all too hesitant to ask and too appreciative to care either way. And the more I began to appreciate what she did for my family, the less her accent and hyperactivity bothered me. And regardless of whether or not he really loved her, Lucas seemed to be spending more and more time with Mena and less time sitting on the counter of the store as I shelved cigarettes and mopped the floor.
The road was lonely and desolate and all those things that a road is not supposed to be when you are driving down it at five minutes to midnight after leaving your new girlfriend’s house and wondering whether or not she really exists or is part of your imagination—some mental coping mechanism that has taken over your thoughts and actions. I began to think about my brother and how, when he was in a car at nighttime, he would always roll down the window and rest his head on the door, staring up into the sky and whistling or humming some song he was obsessed with. My brother was often obsessed with songs. He obsessed over books the same way, which was evident when you looked in his back pocket, on any given day, to find a fingerprint-stained copy of The Catcher in the Rye, which I had read out loud to him when he was twelve years old. The week before he left, Gabriel claimed to have read it for the eleventh time.
When I got home I went into Gabriel’s room to search for the book. It was in his top dresser drawer, next to his empty wallet and a magazine about bands and musicians that I’d never heard of but knew that Gabriel would have been an expert on. There was a folded piece of paper marking the last page he’d read in the book, and as I opened it, the bookmark fell to the floor. I picked it up and began to unfold it, not even pretending to be hesitant about being nosy. On it was scribbled handwriting that could barely be deciphered, which was something else my brother and I had in common, and it read:
You came to take us. All things go, all things go. To
recreate us. All things grow, all things grow. We had
our mindset. All things know, all things know. You had
to find it. All things go, all things go.
When my brother could find nothing better to do, he would jot down the lyrics to whatever song was playing in his head. It was usually something I’d never heard before. In this particular case, it was a song about a man driving with his friend to Chicago and sleeping in parking lots. One time, about a year and a half before that, I had found a notebook with pages and pages of songs, all of which had played in my brother’s head. He never sang them, just wrote them down diligently as if he had been assigned to or something. Similarly, whenever I used to think a conversation I’d had with someone was especially funny or enlightening, I would jot it down in my notebook, the same one I kept my book titles in. An example of one such conversation was the one I had with Officer Lansing of the Lily Police Department on the day after my brother went missing. It went something like this:
“You say you saw your brother yesterday afternoon, right?”
“Yes. He was sitting in his room,” I answered robotically.
“What did you two talk about?”
“Birds.” “Birds?” Officer Lansing asked quickly.
“Well, actually, we were talking about hamburgers.”
“Hamburgers? Not birds, then?”
“We were talking about th
e Lazarus Burger and how it was just a Number Three without cheese.” I laughed.
“It isn’t very good, is it?” Officer Lansing joked, breaking away from his serious demeanor.
“It’s just a Number Three,” I said, shaking my head.
Dr. Webb says that sometimes the sibling of a missing child goes through some sort of strange angry episode. This happens when the child who is not missing begins to feel embittered toward the child who is missing purely because he or she is getting all the attention of everyone around. This is one of those strange concepts like Munchausen’s syndrome, where you make yourself sick to get people to notice you. I will tell you this: I did not crave attention from anyone. Actually, I found the amount of attention that I was getting to be very off-putting. My least favorite thing about that summer was the way in which strangers looked at me in stores, restaurants, and places like that. I would walk by them or enter a room and suddenly, as if they had practiced and been waiting to do so, people would lean their heads down or turn to someone next to them and begin to whisper, saying things, I assumed, like, “That’s the boy’s brother,” and “They still haven’t found that poor brother of his,” and “He seems to be holding up all right, but I hear his mother’s going crazy.”
It was not my mother who was going crazy that summer. It was my father. After the website he’d spent a fortune to get running had failed to do anything but waste his time, he began to read book after book on missing children. My mother, on the other hand, pretended that everything was okay. Maybe she was going crazy too, but it was a less offensive and in-your-face crazy, so it was a bit easier to swallow.
It was the day after my brother had been gone for six weeks that my father brought Vilonia Kline into our house and sat her down in the living room. My mother, Lucas Cader, Mena Prescott, and I all stood across from her on the other side of the room. My father, awkwardly enough, introduced her as “someone who I think can help us find Gabriel.”
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