Use Your Imagination

by Kris Bertin

  I should say that there were moments of peace between the four of us, when we drove around in Cowan’s car and had nothing but ordinary things to say to each other or movies or girls. Times when you’d get to turn up the radio because there was a good song on. Put the windows down and hang a leg out. Play basketball on a sunny day and manage to go an entire afternoon without so much as one elbow thrown. Go swimming and throw Holbrook’s little brown body around in a way that wasn’t cruel or condescending in the least. But you remember and really hold onto the stuff that makes you feel bad. Guilt can take up so much room it rents space where good memories ought to be. Crowds them out.

  And no matter how ordinary it got, it always felt like something else was going on. It had been going on for years before I got there, between him and them, but now I was a part of it, and making it worse, making it happen faster. Even in those happy moments, I was always looking at his sunny face, because I could see it in there. I know the others were too. We were getting ready. We didn’t have words for it, and we couldn’t even tell you what it was at the time, but I think it was this: for all the shit we took from our parents and teachers and each other, none of us ever got fed up or lashed out. But maybe Cowan could.

  Maybe Cowan could, and he’d do something amazing.

  Things were worse when we were drinking. Whenever there was alcohol involved, it meant that anything that would otherwise remain a threat when sober could now happen. It could turn an empty little joke into an event. Cowan would do things like cross the highway—the one that produced more dead deer than we could count—and do it blindfolded, then with his pants down, and then amidst a hail of rocks and bottles that ricocheted off his body or burst on the pavement. All of us trying so hard to make him budge.

  That year, a kid named Cameron Wuornos tried to jump between these two apartments near the high school.

  He blew the landing and came down back-first and there was a sound like firecrackers popping off. His vertebrae, I guess. I wasn’t there but did hear about it from Holbrook, who was a notorious tagalong with a tendency to be around when disturbances occurred. Cameron was encouraged to jump—maybe by Holbrook and maybe by others—and this encouragement was called bullying. There was an assembly and the principal spoke about the danger of “dares” before inviting a paramedic with a gory slideshow to drive his point home. The way cars wrap around each other when they hit, and how all that metal just eats the people inside. A picture of a kid who got fried black as ash on a power line because his friends dared him to climb it.

  Rosenbaum, with his slicked-back hair and surgically-altered smile gave a speech that reiterated all of that stuff, even though anyone who knew him knew that he was one of the worst offenders, and there was a lot of snickering about it.

  I remember being frustrated. Wanting to stand up and shout that nobody dares anybody to do anything, and if they do, it has nothing to do with it. You just do it. Later, I said to the guys that Cameron Wuornos was in a wheelchair because he choked. I’d made that same jump a dozen times. So had Rosenbaum himself. The assembly should’ve been about the importance of follow-through. Sneakers with grip.

  Everyone laughed and agreed, but I wasn’t being honest. What I really felt, what I really wanted to say, was central to all of my thoughts and feelings about myself and Cowan and the world. It was that we all really ought to get what we deserved.

  Then I started to get sick all the time.

  I was sick and I wouldn’t go to school and my father was furious with me over it. I had a fever that would come and go and nausea that could come on so fast they thought I had an ulcer for a while. It was like something had been filling up in me, little by little. Like an internal organ that was swollen or leaking or something. I was prescribed pills, but I didn’t know what for, exactly. It felt like something was broken, and I even said that to the doctor, and he pressed his hands into me, right around my hip.

  I remember thinking: It’s somewhere around there.

  I stopped seeing Cowan and the other two. I got better by building a routine that kept me on my own, just like it had been when I’d first arrived. I was in the woods when I wasn’t at school, and against the hallway walls between classes. I would get into the clouds of kids waiting for buses, and take the long way home in that stupid, screaming mess, but feel safe and sane and healthy.

  Those half-bulldozed pits weren’t enough for me anymore and I skipped them completely, along with my window gazing. Instead I would go through the trees until I hit the highway, cross without looking, and keep going on the other side. Train tracks and swamps and things I’d never seen before.

  When my father told me we were moving again, I was staying home from school so he made me get out of bed and stand up. Explained all the reasons I wasn’t going to get anywhere in life like this. With this kind of mind frame and attitude and ability. A lot of what he said was about me being spoiled rotten. It got louder and more confusing until he was shouting in my face that he wasn’t sure if I should be allowed to drink his water.

  Then my father went across the hall and into the bathroom.

  He turned the tap on and off a couple times. Shouted at me about his water from there. When he filled up a glass and brought it in the room to show it to me, I realized for the first time that he wasn’t crazy. I just didn’t know what kinds of things he was seeing in that water, that’s all. He held it to the light and looked hard for something he’d probably done, or maybe had done to him.

  This answer came to me when, during the worst of my illness, my mother took me to get my driver’s licence. When I paid the fees and wrote the test and took the eye exam, when they got me to look down into that machine and search out the little green dots. That’s when I saw him.

  Cowan.

  I saw Cowan’s face, way down in the machine.

  This was after I had finally gone too far, long after I had stopped seeing them. After I had pushed past the clear membrane of his windows and begun physically trespassing in the Cowan house. Going in through the garage and the side door that was never locked, crawling through the blue light of the TV, past his blacked-out father’s bald head and hairy arms. Up to Cowan’s bedroom.

  The three of us would meet up in the street and not even say a word to each other before we went in, but the first time I’d gone by myself. I’d watched him for a while, trying to decide what to do. Maybe hide in his closet, jump out and scare him. Cut his hair or draw something on his face. Drop something really heavy onto his head from as high as I could hold it.

  I judged the value of each action by imagining myself in his place and it being done to me instead. I remember feeling uncertain as to which position was the better one to be in. I remember thinking about his sister, on the other side of Cowan’s wall, just a doorknob’s turn away from me. I remember feeling so terrified that I might break into laughter that would destroy the silence of the house and bring the whole thing to an end.

  Once the others were involved, it was even easier to get carried away. In that state, you could do absolutely anything to him. You had all the power in the world and could make anything you imagine come true. The only thing holding us back was each other and the knowledge that if we did any of it on our own, it’d be a terrible crime. Together, it was just a bit of tomfoolery. Horseplay. Acting out.

  I threw up in the little DMV bathroom.

  Then I was made to drive my mother home in her car. These were my father’s instructions and I followed them perfectly. I drove down through noon traffic and onto the same highway that I feared crossing on foot. I was afraid then, too, and my mother didn’t care one bit. She didn’t tell me what to do, she just put on makeup in the mirror and checked on it every couple minutes. She and I hardly spoke at that point, and I can see now that she was—in her mind—already gone away from my father and this life. Her eyes were always out the window, in the sky above the neighbourhood, where she must’ve been behold
en to no one.

  I tried to stay focused, and when that didn’t work, I did the same as she was probably doing and tried to think about going somewhere new. But I was feeling bad again. There were dozens of Cowans strewn all over the road.

  Cowans all duct-taped down into beds. Cowans with blood coming out their noses or ears or scalp. Cowans with their pants pulled down and hog-tied. Cowans with clothespins on the ends of their dicks and every kind of pen and pencil and marker shoved up their asses in a bunch. Cowans pleading. Cowans crying.

  He phoned the house the next week, and when my mother called up the stairs for me I realized I was paralyzed. Sitting in my room feeling more than sick, feeling like everything inside me might just shut down. I’d been working so hard to avoid him, I’d forgotten all about the fact he could dial my number and then I’d have to hear his voice.

  I called down and told my mother to hang up.

  I told her we weren’t friends anymore, and I remembered thinking not only that we were never friends, but that I didn’t know what we were. There wasn’t a name for it. And whatever it was, we weren’t even that anymore.

  The last time I saw them, it was maybe two weeks until the last day of school. They either didn’t see me in between the trees by my house, or ignored me.

  They were all wearing that same blue track suit, all jogging down the street at sundown. I had no idea what they were doing, what they were training for, but it occurred to me that of the three of them, Rosenbaum looked the most like me. It had never dawned on me before, but we were the same height and build, had similar hair, demeanours. If I were down there, if I were in a funny blue track suit, I’d be him.

  They didn’t notice me, or my spear, which was bright yellow on account of the electrical tape I’d covered it with, which made it possible to find it again when I threw it at a deer, and missed. I didn’t feel the decision being made to throw it at them. Whatever thing in my body that’s supposed to stop me from doing it is gone. It’s a function of the body but not the spirit.

  Later, I imagined that my actions had brought them into a new era, that they would become real, true friends or else be rid of each other as a result. This was a thought I went back and forth with for years, an idea I had difficulty keeping balanced, because it felt dishonest in that it alleviated that my guilt, though it still could have been true, even if it was self-serving. Eventually the memory hardened and became flat, became a fact that couldn’t be manipulated any longer. A picture, like in a book:

  A projectile, hung in the air above them, on a perfect descending arc.

  In my weeks alone, I had changed again. I had entered into a new phase to help me get through my time in the subdivision, during which I hardly spoke, spent almost no time indoors, and remained in a state of perpetual movement. Whenever I arrived somewhere, at a train yard or a bare clearing or an interesting thicket, I felt like I had arrived too late, like I had just missed something important. But this time it felt like I was right where I was supposed to be.

  In my time alone I had learned how to control my spear completely, and this was my best throw ever. Someone looking out their living-room window might’ve seen it and had their breath taken away. Cowan’s sister, maybe. It goes over a power line and comes down onto a moving target. Rosenbaum sees it and makes the beginnings of a warning, but it’s already too late.

  If it were a real spear and not just a railroad spike tied with string to a mop handle, it could’ve gone through him, or at least stuck in him. It was heading right for his head. There could’ve been blood and ambulances and court dates. There could’ve been something you couldn’t take back. But I was lucky. He flinched at the last moment and it got Holbrook instead.

  Bounced off his collarbone with a hard snap, like someone shutting a book. He made a sound like an animal and toppled over.

  Some birds took to the air and then I was in the woods, up and down the pathway in behind all of the houses in the subdivision, my reflection flashing by in basement windows. Then I was over the hill and into the pits, all of it feeling like a dream. That’s when something goes wrong. I hadn’t been through the area in months and months, and everything had changed. It’s like I had opened the wrong door into a place where I wasn’t supposed to be, or not ready to be. It looked like another world.

  There weren’t pits anymore.

  Just houses.

  Bigger, better houses than ours. Stone houses with huge, dark windows and nobody living inside. Houses with turrets like castles and double-wide two-door garages. Pointed, wrought-iron gates that the wind seemed to whistle through. There were no people, no cars, no lawns, no roads, no street names. Just the houses, all covered in dirt and dust like they had rumbled up and out of the earth.

  I could see that the houses had doors but no knobs, so nothing was stopping me from going inside. When it was over, I did exactly that. I went in and put the swollen pulp of my face onto cold, poured concrete, and waited out this final phase. Thought about how I’d get to be the quiet guy for my senior year, cut my hair short and wear new clothes. I thought about the new me, and imagined him on the floor him next to me, pure and clean. The new me in the new house. Blank slates, ready to be filled in.

  But that was after. First, there was the sound of something beating its way after me. A big body making a big sound, crashing through brush, all muscle and vengeance. Some amazing thing coming up that hill just for me.

  So I sat there, hands on my knees, and waited for it.

  We had always dreamed of teaming up with Oprah.

  Of course, anyone who makes books or products or anything would have killed to have her mention their wares on-air, to have her audience reach under their chairs and pull out your book, your ten-disc meditative program, your guide to self-improvement. For the self-help community back then, her show was the end goal of everything you did. Getting your guru featured on her show would mean you’d made it, and it was what Grant always talked about when he was dreaming about the future, when we talked about big, impossible things.

  He’d say:

  Just wait until we’re on Oprah.

  And we’d both laugh. But back then, I didn’t just think we could get on the show, I thought we could get her.

  I never met her, but I saw in her a collection of behaviours that we had come to seek out. What Grant called The Yearning, and what I called THE LOOK—a personal susceptibility to charismatic types. To Grant’s special blend of spiritualism and positivity. It wasn’t merely because of the slew of self-help types Oprah had on her show, either. It was written on her face. I saw it when she spoke with guests, with the Tom Cruises and Quincy Joneses, but also the victims of cross-burnings and tortured people with dark family secrets. It was in the way she searched their faces. She would ache not just to understand them, but to be understood—and accepted—herself.

  And her smile. The way it would blossom on her face so easily, at the slightest tension, at things that weren’t even funny. It was something I saw again and again from our subscribers, our attendees, the ones who ended up becoming long-term clients. Once I understood it, I realized I had been seeing it all my life. I had been doing it myself.

  In our world, that smile and the need to ask questions were the big two tells. If you see a microphone and have an urge to speak into it, you’re ours. Because what you really have is a need for acceptance, for love and acknowledgment. What you really want is someone to nod while you talk, and you don’t care how much it costs. What you really want is a membership form.

  The Oprah dream is over now.

  Not because she’s off the air, either. We were on our way to her, right up until 2011, the year when it all went away. Behind us were the failed attempts, where Grant was trying to be a champion of fitness and health, when it felt like we were always preparing for a never-ending string of marathons, trying our best to get in good with Runner’s World and Men’s Health, who were more o
r less repulsed by Grant’s intense new-age vibes. When he was pulling stunts like running winter marathons wearing nothing but a Speedo, begging for attention and finding nothing but contempt from athletes and mild interest from local news outlets. Back then, we were self-publishing and Grant had put out a run of books without my knowledge, filled with typos and mangled margins, repeating passages. That had set us back. His past had hurt us too, his petty criminal record and some mental instability. A few blog posts that were more conspiracy theory than self-help. And then there was the fact he had studied with the craziest of the crazy gurus—a husband-and-wife team who claimed to channel an alien from another planet when they held hands and spoke in unison—a pair now convicted of sexual misconduct with a minor.

  We got past all of that by rebranding ourselves and getting a real publisher on board, a PR person, and a good, forward-thinking agent, all of whom agreed with the things I said, and who made Grant take me more seriously as a result. Then, all at once, his new book was a bestseller, and our bingo halls and theatres were jam-packed across the country. The website and YouTube channel were actually bringing in money, and we were in more conference rooms than ever before. Even the back catalogue of books was selling and I had to scramble to make it all into a coherent theory. To drive a stake through the heart of all the contradictions, to graft disparate philosophies onto each other. To excise certain dangerous passages altogether. The truth was we didn’t know what we were doing up until that point, and I still don’t know why it even worked. It just did.

  Grant was doing radio spots on satellite and terrestrial radio and we were drumming up huge interest in the program, moving from a mid-level operation to something bigger. He was especially good with DJs and local TV people, who often had precisely the right disposition to be charmed or mesmerized by someone like Grant Basso. We had T-shirts, totes, water bottles, and most of all, one number-one bestseller. Grant’s last book, The Grand Self.