Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  Well fuck that little theory. My right leg has fallen asleep. The phone rings.

  “Hey,” says Caitlyn Carson Lewis.

  “Sissy.”

  “DJ.”

  “Don’t call me DJ.”

  “Don’t call me Sissy.”

  “Daws calls you Sissy.”

  “Daws can call me whatever he wants to.”

  “Why is he so special?”

  “It’s a depth of desperation thing.”

  “You obviously have not been paying attention, Cee.”

  “Hmm. So bring me up to date. I’m all ears.”

  I relate my conversation with Phil Barnes.

  “He’s not coming,” she says when I finish.

  “Shit. I know.”

  “Maybe you should call your dad.”

  “That again? No. But I am a little worried about him.”

  “Why?”

  I explain about my mom’s efforts to reach him, and about him not even telling her he was leaving, and the aborted message he left for me on my cell. I leave out the part about the letter behind the bathroom sink. I am still trying to block that out of my consciousness. But now that I am thinking about it again, I morbidly imagine that the letter ends in some suicidal declaration, which I know is ridiculous. Absurd. But still. My whole life is ridiculous and absurd. Ridiculous absurdity is my new normal.

  “So I called him to give him my sister’s number. Straight to voice mail.”

  “Yeah,” she says, oddly confirming.

  “Yeah? What do you mean?”

  “…”

  “Cait?”

  “I… okay, Dave?”

  I wait. Reading the odd silence.

  “I called him.”

  “You called who?”

  “Your dad.”

  “You did what? You talked to …”

  “No.”

  “You talked to my dad?!”

  “No, I called him. It went to voice mail.”

  “Why? How do you even know his number?”

  “It was on the fridge. I wrote it down. Just in case.”

  “In case of what?”

  “In case you refused to call him before the hearing. I waited as long as I could.”

  “You didn’t say anything about…”

  “I did.”

  Something heavy and small detonates in my head.

  “Fuck! Cait? Fuck!” There is blinding rage and the sound of twisting, grinding, groaning metal. Questions gouge at each other in a fight for the exit. “What did you… what gives you the right… how can you…”

  “It was a five minute message. I gave him the broad brushstrokes. I told him you were too proud to ask, but that you need support, moral and financial. And, by the way, nothing gave me the right.”

  “Then…”

  “Because it needed to be done. Because I’m your friend.”

  “My friend?! My friend?!” I am screaming into the phone.

  “Dave…”

  “No. Fuck you, Cait!”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry. Great. You’re sorry. But you’d do it again. You’d fucking…”

  “Yes.”

  We are silent for a good two minutes.

  “Dave, it’s gotta’ get better sometime.”

  I remember these words as the first she ever spoke to me, leaning out of her van in the parking lot as I ate my burger over my union contract, handing me a tip for a discount car painting I did not yet even know I needed. She has been one step ahead of me from the very beginning. It’s gotta’ get better sometime? Fuck her.

  “Yeah, well you know what, Yoda? You keep saying that but it never happens, does it? It never gets better. It just gets worse. And worse. And worse.”

  “It’ll get better as soon as you let it get better.”

  “Oh really? I’m responsible for all this shit happening to me.”

  “No. Shit happens. But you’re responsible for deciding what it all means.”

  “Ahh. And just what do you think I have decided it all fucking means?”

  “Doesn’t matter what I think.”

  “That’s the only thing that matters, Cait.” I spit the words at her, summoning every ounce of hatred I can muster. “What. You. Think. Fucking coward. Let’s hear it.”

  She sighs. Silence.

  “Come on. You want to fuck me over? I at least get to know why.”

  “I’m not trying to fuck you over.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Okay. I think you’ve decided that all of these events, all of these collisions, have presented you with an opportunity.”

  “You’re either crazy or stupid. An opportunity.”

  “Yes.”

  “For what?”

  “To shore up your self-concept. To prove all over again that you’re not worthy.”

  “That I’m… not worthy?”

  “Right.”

  “Of?”

  “Your father.”

  I laugh like an insane person. “That is the most asinine thing I have ever heard another human being utter. And I fucking teach high school so that’s saying something. An opportunity to prove I am not worthy. Jesus Christ. Why would I do that? Why …”

  “Because it feels safe. It’s what you know. You’ve made it your home, Dave. And you keep coming back. Since you were a teenager. It’s who you believe you are. Same reason Daws keeps climbing back inside that bottle. You’re hangin’ onto the past like some sort of life preserver.”

  “A life…”

  “Yes. But it’s not a life preserver. It’s a steel cage and it’s taking you under. You’re a prisoner of your own historical dogma.”

  “Oh, gee, is that what I’m doing? Really? Clinging to my history?”

  “Yes. Because that’s not nearly as terrifying as letting go. But that’s what you’ve got to do, Dave. Let it go. Cut it loose. You were made to float.”

  “You know… you are fucking brilliant. You really are. Dr. Freud step aside, there’s a new kid in town. Tell me this, genius, if I’m so intent on proving to my dad that I’m so not worthy, why am I so hell-bent on keeping him from finding any of this shit out? Why not parade this sorry spectacle through his living room?”

  She laughs.

  “Oh, this is fucking funny now? Are you sufficiently entertained?”

  “Dave, you’re not trying to prove anything to your dad.”

  “Hey, it’s your theory, Einstein.”

  “No. No. You’re not getting it. This is a one-actor play. You’ve got every part.”

  “Not any more, thanks to you.”

  “Right. Now you have to contend with the only person on the planet who can prove you wrong.”

  “You’re an idiot. God damn it. I can’t believe you’ve done this.”

  “I know this feels like a betrayal. It is a betrayal. But I’m on your side.”

  “I don’t want to see you at my hearing. Stay the fuck away from me, Caitlin.” My words are like shards of frozen steel. “Forever.”

  I end the call and fling the goddamned phone away from my body as if it were a hand grenade. It explodes into pieces against the corner of the grill.

  It is an hour before I can think coherently of anything other than random mayhem. Gradually, emotional exhaustion allows practical concerns to bob to the surface.

  It had been my expectation that my father would be back in time to resume responsibility for Ben or, alternatively, that Cait would pick him up from school and stay with him, while I attended the hearing that would serve as the prelude to my execution. But it is increasingly clear that Ben will be my responsibility. A one o’clock hearing means that I could drop him off at school but would not be able to pick him up.

  I go into the kitchen slamming the door behind me and find the phone number for Martina Davis. I call. She answers just as the machine picks up.

  “David! My David!”

  I have only met her twice, but she acts as though I am her cousin, lon
g lost in the war. She emotes about my family; about Ben mostly. She calls him my Benjamin. She speaks rapidly, like I have caught her inopportunely having to pee. She has an accent I have never been able to place.

  “It has been so long that I have seen you! How is you girlfriend, David? And you sister! How is my Matilda?”

  My anger with Cait is like a sludge thickening over my heart. I want to break things. Having destroyed my phone, I want to destroy this phone too. I want to rip it off the wall and jam the thing into the garbage disposal. Barring that, I want to take everything out on Martina. Just shut the hell up and do the thing I need you to do! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! And that’s not how you pronounce tabloid! Who says tab-o-loid?! Shut… the… fuck…

  But I resist the urge. She is a perfectly nice woman and I am an ass in need of a big favor. I indulge her until she pauses long enough for me to explain. She says she is happy to help. I will call Jenny Daley and let her know to expect Martina. Martina will bring Ben to her house. I will pick him up after my… parent-teacher conferences… which, when I think about it, is not that big of a lie. I give her directions to Ben’s school and hang up, marveling that it is the only thing that I have actually accomplished all day.

  Ben is subdued on the way home. Distant. He looks out the window of my car, silently wishing he was reclining in the back of the vanbulance, looking up at the sky and the undersides of birds. He asks about Cait and I tell him that she is busy today.

  “She has her own life, Ben. She can’t be hanging around us. We don’t need her.”

  It is easy for me to blame Ben’s disappointment on Cait, and I do. Bitch. Traitor. I know it is piling on, and I don’t really care. I give my hurt feelings full rein.

  But I also know that Ben is highly susceptible to emotional influence. There is a paper-thin membrane that protects his emotional center from the rest of the world. His mood has less to do with Cait not being here than it does with me. He can sense the anger and the stress seeping out between every tight-lipped, chirpy-toned question I ask about his day. He knows, in his own perfect way, that all is not right with the Bro-Dude. It is my mood filling the car like a gas. He is breathing second-hand rage and angst. I want to spare him. I want to just turn it off. Compartmentalize the horror and put it away for later. But I cannot do that any more than I can just give Ben the car keys, get out and walk home.

  The evening would not be any better but for the narcotizing assistance of the television. I heat up a frozen pizza and we sit on the couch eating and watching bad sit-com reruns. Ben frequently looks over at me, laughing inappropriately, not because he thinks anything he sees on the screen is especially funny, but because he wants me to laugh. He wants me to be as emotionally susceptible as he is. He is rolling up his sleeves to improve my life in the only way he knows how. But of course I guard my emotional disposition with my life. I refuse to give anyone that satisfaction of improving my state of mind. Even Ben.

  Before he goes up to bed, I explain about Martina and the parent-teacher conferences. He stares at me, mouth slack and open, breathing, processing. I want to tell him everything. I want to cry in his arms.

  He nods. Hugs me. And is gone.

  I raid the liquor cabinet. There is a half bottle of scotch with my name on it. It actually has Johnnie Walker’s name on it but he’s not around and possession is nine-tenths. I sit back on the couch and drink and flip through the channels, all one hundred and forty of them, the digital equivalent of tossing cards into a hat on the floor across the room. The whiskey helps to take a little of the edge off, deflating some of my anger.

  She probably meant well, I think. I pour another glass.

  The newspaper that has eluded me all day is lying on the table in front of me. I remove it from its blue plastic sheath and open it up. My attention jogs between the headlines and the local eyewitness news, which is now disgorging its obnoxiously self-serious introduction onto the living room floor. Trumpets and drums. Flashing police car lights. A lightning strike. A touchdown pass. The anchors are a pretty, animatronic man and an orangish, fifty-is-the-new-nineteen, woman on loan from Madam Toussad’s, all painted and stretched and ready to intone. The odds are just shy of spectacular that these two are fucking. I can tell by the way they glower at each other from their respective stools as they take turns conveying gravity.

  God, the hair on these people.

  The sports guy must hate them. He has to sit at the puce-colored semi-circle news desk like a teenager forced to eat dinner with his parents. Unlike mom and dad, the sports guy is apparently forbidden from glowering. He will be fired if he stops smiling, no matter what sort of grisly interstate pileup carnage they are showing. Weathergirl, meanwhile, has been sent to her room, Ohio’s Official Accu-Weather Center, which looks to be little more than a messy cubicle built around a large computer monitor. She can’t come out to the big-person desk until her Accu-Weather homework is done.

  I drink and read the paper and listen to the news simultaneously, swapping foreground and background as necessary, trying to build some distance from my toxic obsessions. As Anchor Dad ramps up into a story about Ohio’s anti-war movement, my attention is yanked down sharply to a bottom-of-the-fold micro-article with the catchy headline: Teenaged Girl Found Dead.

  I read the headline over and over at least six times before venturing further. There is a ringing in my ears. Time slogs through hot oil.

  The body of a girl, estimated age between 15 and 19, was discovered yesterday evening in a dumpster behind abandoned property near Johnstown. Members of the Johnstown Fire Department discovered the body in responding to calls reporting a large blaze behind the property. The callers expressed concern that the fire was so intense it might spread to surrounding trees and structures. Fire Department spokesperson Randy Moeshen stated that the dumpster had been full of highly combustible material and that several accelerant containers had been found at the scene. Moeshen explained his understanding that the body is too badly burned to identify the victim without DNA analysis. He said law enforcement authorities are actively involved but there is as yet no basis for knowing who may have started the blaze or whether the fire was the cause of death. Public records indicate that the registered owner of the property is Darnell K. Griffen, reportedly deceased in 2001.

  It cannot be. I know it cannot be. I know the horrified paralysis preventing me from breathing is simply my pessimism, my congenital lust for the worst-case scenario, working on overdrive to connect dots that need not be connected. It does not help that the dateline for the article is Johnstown, a place with which I have no particular connection except that it calls out my name, alleging an association that is not really there. I know nothing about the place except that in 1926 someone excavated a nearly complete skeleton of a mastodon that now graces the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. The Johnstown dead always get their fifteen minutes.

  But it is not a mastodon they have found. It’s a girl. A charred teenaged girl. It could be anybody. I know this. But it could also be her and I know that more than I know anything else.

  Voices finally penetrate my miasma. Not voices. Voice.

  And why, Mr. President? There must be a reason. Tell me again how all of this is necessary. Tell me again, the point. Why is this happening?

  I look up at the screen suddenly, like I have been electrocuted, sloshing whiskey out of the glass.

  Mom?

  CHAPTER 69 – Susan

  “My name … thank you. Thanks.

  “My name… wow, thanks.

  “My name is Susan Johns. You don’t know me. There is no reason you should know me. I am not a famous person. I am not a politician. I am not a professional public speaker. I… I can’t even begin to hold a candle to… to the eloquence… or the wisdom or the inspiration of the speakers that you have heard so far this afternoon.

  “Yes… haven’t they been just wonderful? Yes.

  “I am not the mother … or sister … or grandmother… or girlfriend of any soldier d
eployed in Iraq. I have no dead to bury.

  “But I am a mother of someone. Three precious someones, actually; two sons and a daughter. And I am a citizen of this country. I am a vitally interested member of our human species. And I inhabit this planet just like everyone else.

  “I am just a housewife. I raise my youngest son. I support my retired husband. I tend to dishes and laundry and groceries. And as I do all of that, as I manage the little things in my little life, I have been watching and listening. I have been paying attention. With new eyes and new ears, I have been paying attention.

  “And… I… am appalled … I tell all of you that I am appalled at what I see and what I have done. I tell the President of the United States, my president, a man for whom I have voted, that I am appalled at what I see and what I have done.

  “What do I see, Mr. President? I will tell you what I see.

  “I see carnage without reason. I see young American men and women shipped off to die in the desert. I see them on the television, on the local news, waving, leaving their proud parents, leaving their new families, their fresh brides, their new grooms, their own children, born and unborn, all of these bright young flames, these bundles of potential, children like my own, taking their first serious steps into adulthood along the hellish road of armed conflict. A road mined with explosives and paved with death.

  “What do I see, Mr. President? I will tell you what I see.

  “I see many tens of thousands of Iraqis – maybe well over 100,000 Iraqis – ground into bloody bits by violence in the streets of Baghdad and Falluja and Al Anbar. Civilians. Boys and girls and mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles and grandmothers and grandfathers all bleeding together in those streets littered with twisted metal and broken buildings and shattered glass. And I see many hundreds of thousands more drowning in sorrow and fear as their country burns.

  “What do I see?

  “I see this incredible country – this enduring beacon of democratic ideals – dimming in the eyes of the world. Dimming towards darkness, Mr. President, as we pursue a preemptively aggressive – shoot first, ask questions later, shoot first, worry about facts later, shoot first, justify later – foreign policy. A foreign policy laced with that self-righteous, overly-entitled, cowboy bravado that has come to characterize America and Americans in the eyes of so much of a world that wants desperately to believe better of us. A foreign policy that eschews international cooperation. A foreign policy that comes with a smirking disdain for diplomacy and any notion that violence and destruction is an option of last resort, an option that marks a profound failure and that signals desperation. Violence and destruction should mark the point at which everything else has been tried, and everything else has failed, and there are no other choices left to save a greater good.