by Brian Hodge
"Oh, let me guess," was the first thing out of his mouth. "You come down here and already you're taking his side."
"I'm not on anybody's side," I told him.
He sneered, but not like he was copping an attitude. You can sneer like that out of hopelessness, too. He said, "Oh yeah? Then tell me this: Between me and Enrique, who would you rather testify against in court?"
God, Wendy, he knew. He knew I wanted him to be the guilty one so I wouldn't have to implicate Enrique for making a stupid mistake.
There was an oil stain on the floor a few feet from where Kevin was sitting. He stared at it, like it gave him a focal point and an excuse not to look anywhere near my direction. Just like Sherman when we were growing up, the way Daddy used to tell him that he probably knew what the tops of his shoes looked like better than he knew any of our faces.
"That's OK," he said, finally. "I wouldn't believe me either. It's just funny, is all. Usually, a video game's got to exist before it gets you into deep shit…and it's always with people who don't understand that somebody my age can actually make the distinction between reality and animation."
I asked him, "If that's all those plans were, you don't think it was an overreaction to attack Enrique when you saw he had them?"
Kevin said it happened the other way around.
When he looked up, he remarked on my workout clothes, why I'd come down here in the first place. So we talked about weightlifting awhile. As it turned out, we both bench the same, which is why I could come over and usually find things the way I'd left them…although it obviously bothered Kevin to realize he wasn't doing any better than someone twice his age and female.
Then he recovered. You know the way boys are: "I didn't even think someone as old as you would want to go near weights."
Why, you little shit, I thought. You just about lost me with that one.
But then I looked at his arms and chest, lost inside the T-shirt he was wearing, and knew why he was coming over…that something at school was making him desperate to bulk up but it wasn't working for him because nobody had ever taught him that you don't quit as soon as you get tired, that you have to keep going a little longer after it starts to hurt.
So I explained it: Keep lifting through the pain and fatigue, that sort of thing.
"I know that," he snapped at me. "You think I don't know that?"
Which is about when he started staring at the oil stain again.
I tell you that so you'll know how difficult it was for me to go into his home. There's something so crushing when you see the fragility of all that bravado. Especially since he wasn't complaining about being chained to a vise nearly as much as you'd think he would.
Maybe he wanted somebody to stop him, I thought. Maybe he wouldn't admit to anything, or couldn't, until it was forced out in the open.
So I took the next key from Enrique.
Breaking and entering, that's a new one.
And I told you earlier, but maybe it's time to remind you: I'm still me.
With his mother gone, he was living about the way you'd expect. So did we, remember, when M&D would go on vacation after we were old enough to leave alone…at least before the thing with Sherman. So, all that mess and clutter, I tried not to see it as one more symptom of a disintegrating mind, just the habits of a kid with no supervision and a 100% pizza diet.
Enrique had spent most of the time over here looking for weapons, obviously without finding anything, so I didn't bother with that. Even if Kevin did have them, he could've been storing them elsewhere…or with someone else, if he wasn't planning on acting alone.
I went straight for his PC, instead. That's all I'd agreed to, right? While it was booting, I sat at Kevin's desk, surrounded by his walls, trying to soak in anything that would give me a clue as to his mindset…the pictures, posters…that odd teenage boy blend of tough-guy stuff and vulnerability…pop star bimbos and actresses he knows he'll never have, and bands that look brutally angry even in still-life, and a few steroidal wrestlers, maybe for gym inspiration.
But all this did was remind me how much of our lives at that age consist of total fantasy. It was no gauge of anything, just the same stuff I'm sure you could find on millions of students' walls or inside their lockers.
So it hurt. One way or another, I was going to have to rat out somebody…either a screwed-up kid or the overprotective big brother of one of his classmates.
His PC: I started with his e-mail archive, because it's more centralized, and also on the theory that if he was planning something with a partner, he wouldn't have deleted all their communication. Nothing, though…so I moved on to the much bigger task of the rest of his hard drive.
After an hour and a lot of keyword searches, the only thing that seemed like a possibility was a folder whose entire contents were password-protected. The folder itself was labeled "Fryday"…judge for yourself whether or not the misspelling was intentional. But considering all this was happening on a Thursday night, it seemed important to get to the bottom of it.
If Enrique was expecting an expert at cracking encryption, he'd overestimated me. I do mid-level investment banking, for god's sake. All I could try was guesswork, stuff off the posters, but that didn't go anywhere. Then I thought back to the diagrams he'd shown me, and tried a few of the slogans from it.
You know what finally let me in? "FUCK EVERYBODY."
It was all there, Wendy.
Written plans, some of which corresponded with the timeline on the diagrams. A hit list. Bomb-making instructions he'd downloaded. Rants. Poetry. A journal going back more than a year. It was the motherlode and it broke my heart, and I imagine what allowed me to feel that way…for Kevin, and not so much for the names on the list…is because he hadn't actually done anything yet.
Here's a line that stood out to me:
I can't remember a time when humiliation wasn't a spectator sport.
And how about this one:
I keep praying I have one more growth spurt in me, but I don't know why, cause I should know by now that even if there is a god, he's on their side and not mine. I don't have to be a giant, trade being one kind of freak for another, I'd just like to stand tall enough so I could walk by and the assholes of the world would have to think twice about fucking with me.
That's the one that really got me. Sound familiar? It's not word for word, and maybe you never heard it, but I remember something very close to this coming out of Sherman back then, in a rare moment of honesty instead of trying to squash it all down and put the best possible face on his pain.
So I read as much as I could stand—more of which I'll get into later—then shut down the PC and turned out the lights.
As you can imagine, Enrique was extremely anxious by this time. Back at the clubhouse, I found him in the upstairs area, sitting in front of the fireplace, although it was cold and dead. He didn't have to say anything…all the questions were in his eyes.
"From what I could find, everything looked like they really were designs for a video game."
It was out of my mouth before I even knew I was going to say it.
"A pretty tasteless video game, maybe," I added, "but that's no crime."
I was hearing myself say these things and wondering where they were coming from. My voice and someone else's words.
Poor Enrique, though…one look at him and you knew he was on the verge of getting sick. I took the workshop key again, then had him give me one last key: for the lock he'd used on the chains. I patted him on the arm and told him to wait there, let me see what I could do to smooth things over.
And Kevin…I don't know if he suspected where I'd been all this time or not. I'm sure he had to. He wasn't stupid. Even if he still played innocent at first.
"Let me spell it out for you," I said. "F - R -Y - D - A - Y."
He still wasn't giving in without a fight. Said so what if I'd run across the recipe folder for his home ec class.
I unfolded one of the papers I'd just run off on his printer
and started reading his own words to him: "'All these motherfuckers can die, die, die. Give me matches and gasoline, stakes and ropes and kindling, and I'll give you a barbecue of legend. I'll grind the ashes of their bones into a powder and fertilize a field of thorns, and then I'll drive their children through it naked and raw with my whip at their bleeding backs.'"
Now he didn't have much to say.
So I said, "Some barbecue recipe."
Now, finally, he admitted that what Enrique had found was no video game. It was exactly what it looked like. Except he didn't really mean it, he said…he was just blowing off steam, putting everything down to get it out of his system.
But it was getting easier and easier to see through the lies. As long as he'd had that room for doubt, he could maintain a plausible level of denial, but now that it was gone, he was crumbling along with it. He started to cry then, and the most awful thing about watching this was that he couldn't even wipe his own nose. He had to turn his head and smear it across the sleeve of his T-shirt.
I couldn't not unchain him.
"You just don't know what it's like," he kept telling me.
You can probably guess what I had to do next.
I told him about Sherman.
I think it was the only thing I could've said at this point that would give me any credibility with him. And it did seem to make a difference, even if it happened nearly 15 years ago. Having a brother who went to school one morning on his own 2 legs, and after the end of the day never walked again…Kevin could relate to this, no matter how long ago it happened.
"A thing like that, and they got away with it?" The way he was asking, it was like this confirmed every fear he had about the world.
All I could tell him was what we'd been told until we were sick of hearing it: that what happened was an accident, it was just a friendly game of football, that Sherman shouldn't have been playing with bigger, older guys that way.
And then the other half, what we knew but couldn't prove: how they'd hit him from 3 directions at once when he didn't even have the ball; that maybe they hadn't meant to go as far as breaking his spine, but they'd definitely meant to hurt him.
Kevin sat there awhile, taking it all in, then asked, "What did you do?"
"What do you think we did?" I said. "We lived with it."
"Those guys who did that to him…didn't you want to waste them?"
Now how was I supposed to answer that one honestly and still avert a potential tragedy?
*
I need to tell you something else now. At first it may not seem connected, and maybe it really isn't…but I've come to the conclusion that it is.
I've been into the general idea of fitness all of my adult life, but there came a marked turning point 7 months ago when it seemed to take me over to a much greater extent. I know exactly when and why this was, because it didn't happen in a vacuum.
Two things, back to back:
The first was when Lynette divorced Sherman, and what that did to him. If he wasn't my brother, maybe I could've understood her perspective a little better, but Jesus Christ, she didn't know what she was getting into when she married him? He wasn't standing there waiting for her while her father walked her down the aisle, he was sitting in his wheelchair. Then one day she wakes up and realizes she's got a gimp for a husband? I'm sorry if it sounds harsh, but I despised her for it.
The second thing came on the heels of this. The mail brought another annual alumni newsletter from my high school class. You probably get them too. I don't even want the things, and have never once sent in an updated address, but no matter where I move, they always find me. If we'd gone to a public school, we probably wouldn't have to contend with these intrusive little flashbacks, but because we went private, I suppose we're obligated to feel we're part of some grand legacy.
I'll usually flip through the newsletters in case a name jumps out that can still make me smile, but this time…I suppose it was bound to happen, that it shouldn't have come as a surprise, but it was just the timing, you know? On that page 3 feature, "What Are They Up To Now?," there he was: Matt Standerfer. It was a family photo, Matt with an anemic-looking wife and 2 little kids who appeared to have a good start on growing up to look just as listless as their mother. As for Matt himself, he didn't look all that different, mostly a little heavier, although I spent a minute wondering what about him was different that wasn't so physically obvious. Then it came to me: He looked like he'd worked hard to lose that "entitled-to-everything asshole" air that I remember about him. He looked like it was important to be everybody's friend now. I can't explain how I knew, but even before I could force myself to read the write-up, I thought, "Oh my god, it looks just like a campaign photo."
That's right. State Senator Standerfer, that was the latest plan. And why wouldn't it work out for him? Everything else has.
Except I could not shake the feeling that everything he has, this little empire of business and family and now so-called public service that he's constructed, at least what wasn't handed to him on a platter…it was all built directly on Sherman's broken back. That never being held accountable for instigating that incident was the single greatest lesson in Matt's life about how the world would work for him and people like him.
Having my nose rubbed in this within days of hearing the news that Sherm's wife was abandoning him…that's when I started working out so obsessively.
I can't overstate how therapeutic it was for me, because I thought I'd gotten beyond the anger, yet here I was, totally unprepared for the way it flared up again. It was so utterly consuming, Wendy, and forced me to confront what a deep, black well of hatred I still had inside for Matt Standerfer and Anthony Chapelle and Doug Van Der Graff. Because not only had they never been held accountable for targeting our brother the way they did…to my recollection, not one of them even said he was sorry.
This was almost 15 years ago, but it was still eating away at me the way it did when I walked into his hospital room and saw Sherm lying there after the first surgery. No matter where life leads us, there are times when it feels like we've hardly managed to take a single step.
But I had the weights and the privacy, and the desire to make at least something constructive come out of all this negativity, so that's where I channeled it. I'd work out until it burned, until I could hardly move my arms and legs, and it wasn't even like I was doing it out of vanity anymore, the way I first got into it. It wasn't about looking better, or even feeling better in the normal sense. The closest thing I can compare it to would be an exorcism. I'd work and work until I was drenched and it felt to me that somewhere in all the burning and pain and exhaustion, one more little piece of the fury I'd never turned loose of was squeezed out and I could finally leave it behind.
So. Now you know my mindset of a few months back.
And how does this possibly relate to the events of the other night?
I'll let Kevin take over for a minute, word for word, with some entries I found in his journal, from about 6 months ago:
I don't know her name, but O.M.F.G. is she hot. She's older, and normally that'd be telling me to step off right there, but it's like in this case it doesn't even matter. She's got this killer hardbody and in my head I'll stand her next to girls at school, especially the ones with the shorty tops hoisted up to show off the belly button rings pierced into their muffin tops, and I'll just be thinking, You pathetic twinks, you can't EVEN compare, so why don't you just stop embarrassing yourselves.
It's staying light out later now as spring goes on, and that's just KILLING me cuz it's not dark anymore when she gets over to the weight room!!! As long as it was night out, I could sit close enough to those ground windows that look down into the basement and she'd never know I was there. So I've decided I hate the sun now cuz of what it took away from me, and I'm just living for the fall and longer nights again.
Now this one, from a few days later:
Yeah, I'm a world class perv, what of it?
At first I thoug
ht it was gonna be just some consolation prize, like, well, I can't watch her work out, so I'll take what I can get. All I have to do is watch out my window and see when she leaves the clubhouse and I can be over there a minute or two after she's gone. Mom's still an idiot, actually thinks I'm going out for a walk to clear my head and get some air.
I guess THAT much is the truth. If I get over fast enough it's like she's still there, in the air. I can smell her and if you think about it, that's almost as good as touching her would be, cuz what's a smell but molecules, right? So I'm breathing her down inside me.
Some nights it's obvious she's had a superintensive workout, cuz her sweat will be all over the vinyl on the weight bench, and
Jesus, I'm such a pussy!!! Can't even come out and type it when nobody else will be reading it.
The first time it happened I wasn't even thinking. I just did it. Or let it happen. Like, oh look. A few minutes ago that was inside her skin. Now here it is. And now it's inside mine.
You wouldn't think it would burn as much on my tongue as it does. Not that I mind. It's a good kind of burn, actually. Like a good hard workout must feel.
Over the next several entries he goes on with various fantasies, which I see no reason to repeat, or things in his daily life that have no relevance at all. After a couple of weeks, Kevin gets the idea that he should take up lifting too, because if he goes through the exact same motions that I do (and apparently he watched me long enough to get my routines down), immediately after I've done them, and in the same place…then in his way of thinking, it's a way of getting closer to me.
Or as he put it: First I get inside her space, then I get inside her skin.
