Despite his efforts, he couldn’t unconvince himself that this was still a matter of life or death. He still believed, against his will, his sister’s prophecy. Even though he told Andy she was full of shit, he thought about it every night. In a little more than two years it was supposed to take him by surprise, and two years wasn’t a long enough life to make up for what he’d done.
Since he’d first picked the lock, early that spring, he’d done as little as possible to change the office. When he plucked a new notebook from the shelf, he moved the others a fraction of a centimeter until they stood together more loosely and you couldn’t tell anything was missing. It felt like a museum exhibit, a room preserved from an earlier time. “I bet we find some porn,” Andy said. He dug through the desk’s top drawer, shoving things forever out of place.
“Leave his stuff alone.”
“Come on, dude.” Andy slammed the drawer and opened the second one down. “I don’t wanna be rude or anything, but it’s not like he needs his porn anymore. Do you think he had DVDs or magazines?”
“Shut up. You’re such a fucking perv.” The notebook lay on the desk, unprotected if Andy decided to take it. The words Man can do violence called from inside.
“You’re just mad ’cause your dad wasn’t into gay stuff. You just want a movie with a couple of fat guys cornholing each other.”
Colin stepped in front of him and tried to look menacing, but Andy wasn’t paying attention. “You’re gonna make me throw up.” He reached over and pushed the notebook against the wall.
“You know you love it.” Andy dug through blister packs of pens, loose business cards, half-used pads of sticky notes. “Two guys blowing each other, or maybe some kind of orgy.” He laughed as he closed the second drawer and opened the third, and even without seeing what was inside Colin knew why his mouth fell open. “Jackpot,” Andy said. It wasn’t much more than a whisper.
From the beginning, Colin had known it was there. You couldn’t not know. Its being there was like a black hole that bent the room’s reality, or a chunk of some radioactive element that made you weak. You couldn’t not think about it, every few minutes, and say to yourself, It’s in here, and at the same time be too afraid to touch it, as though by taking it in his hands he would lose all control of himself, march upstairs, shoot his brother between the eyes, his sister in the back as she ran for help, and, when she walked through the door and produced a cigarette for him to light, the only person in the entire world he couldn’t live without.
“Dude, don’t touch that.” Colin reached for it but Andy fended him off. “Seriously.”
Andy picked it up and pushed the cylinder aside. Colin remembered their days as soldiers who saved each other’s lives. Andy clicked it back into place. “Don’t worry. It’s not loaded.” He aimed at Colin and closed one eye.
Just seeing the gun made him shake. He reached out but Andy leapt backward. “Just let me hold it,” he said, his voice more vulnerable than Colin had ever heard. “I’ve never held a real gun.” He pulled the trigger and Colin winced. He pretended to blow smoke from the barrel. “It’s heavy as fuck.”
Colin wanted to agree, but as far as Andy or anyone else knew, he’d never held a gun.
“My mom would kill you,” he said.
“She won’t be home for a while.” Andy had no way of knowing but he’d have said anything to get his way. He put the gun down the front of his shorts and tried to draw it quickly, like a cowboy, but lost his grip. The steel-on-concrete clatter echoed through the basement and, Colin was sure, all the way up the stairs, outside, across the city. Colin grabbed it from the floor. Its grip felt familiar. Instead of wanting to vomit he felt his heart come alive, his lungs full of something lighter than air. He aimed at Andy and said “Freeze!” like he’d cornered a murderer returning to the scene of the crime.
“Don’t shoot!” Andy grinned as he put his arms over his head.
“Turn around,” Colin said. “Don’t try anything funny or I’ll pistol-whip you.” He’d heard this on one of his grandmother’s police shows and liked the sound of it. The only thing that mattered was how Andy did turn around, how he faced the wall on Colin’s command.
He laughed—more of a breath of air than anything—and tapped Andy on the shoulder. “My turn,” he said. “Pretend you’re robbing me.”
The gun kept them busy until late afternoon. It was only when Andy asked for the bullets that Colin insisted they go upstairs. “She’ll be home any minute,” he said. He locked the door with his paper clips and blushed when Andy called him an evil genius. The house seemed quiet and fake, like the set from a movie, and they went outside where the freeway’s traffic and the rustle of leaves confirmed that life was still happening. They lay in the yard, ripping up handfuls of grass until Andy called him lame and boring and went home. Right away he sank back into the basement, picked the lock, and returned the room to its natural state. He put the notebook back in its place and reached for the next in line. He began to page through it, standing by the shelf.
His mother had described panic attacks to him, but he imagined what he felt right then as something far worse. Each breath felt like it came through a stirring straw and the handwriting in front of him split itself in two. Then he heard the garage door and stuffed the notebook down his shorts. After burying it under his mattress he came into the kitchen and tried to look bored. “Your turn to make dinner,” his mother said. As he rummaged through the refrigerator he repeated the words in his head, unable to unsee them. When she wasn’t looking he mouthed them to himself, just to prove they were real. They felt thick on his tongue, like a mouthful of custard. Things I’ve Seen in Hell.
He didn’t have a chance to read more until later that night. Dinner hadn’t gone well. “This looks good,” his mother had said, and then their plates were empty. Colin lit her a fresh cigarette and she leaned into her fist and smiled at the three of them. “So I thought we’d all watch a movie,” she said. For a second it felt like nothing at all had happened to them.
“Sure,” Colin said.
She nodded. “We haven’t done anything as a family in a while. A movie sounds perfect.”
Heather glanced at her phone, pulled halfway out of her pocket. “Sure.”
Diane scoffed. “Put that away.”
“I was just looking to see what time it was.”
“There’s a clock above the doorway.”
Heather looked. Colin could tell she was surprised. “Well, I’m used to using my phone. You don’t have to get all pissy about it.”
“Pissy? I’m pissy because I want to have a nice meal without my daughter talking to her friends?”
“Whatever.”
As soon as Heather said whatever you knew it would turn into a fight. It wasn’t long before their mother brought up college, which only led to the same shouted argument he’d heard for months. When Heather wrenched her plate and fork from the table she was glaring at all of them. Nobody flinched when they heard her plate shatter in the sink, and nobody knew if Heather looked remorseful or proud of herself.
He was thinking, now—as he put his head against the new notebook and listened for its heartbeat—that he could’ve done more. It’s just past seven, he could’ve said before Heather pulled out her phone and derailed the night. We could watch something long, he could’ve said, knowing the four of them would fall asleep together on the couch.
After dinner, he tried to clean the shards of ceramic from the sink. “Don’t cut yourself,” his mother said as she bused the remaining plates from the dining room. “I’ll take care of it.” After that, nobody spoke. It was as if they’d died and could no longer see one another, listening for each other’s footsteps so they knew when it was their turn to leave a room or pass through the hallway. Winter had come back, just for one night, and it made Colin want to cry into his brother’s shoulder. But he knew Paul would scream, or maybe blacken his other eye.
With a deep breath he propped himself on his elbows and op
ened the notebook. He couldn’t waste time reading through all the normal stuff—his father’s facts, stories, collections of words he didn’t know—and thumbed straight to the list he’d seen downstairs. But he’d remembered wrong. It wasn’t a list at all. Instead, his father had written in paragraphs, and after the first page Colin couldn’t tell whether his father had died once before and had come back to life, was dead and haunting their basement, or had been to hell while he was still alive. He’d even drawn pictures of things he couldn’t describe. In hell a demon kept him company, leading him through the parts you couldn’t navigate alone. The demon is kind, his father had written, and you could feel the sadness with which he’d noticed this. When Colin turned the page he saw the demon, sketched in faded pencil. How could you not stare? It wasn’t until he saw the burnt feathers tremble at the touch of his breath that he blinked. He looked again. Its feathers were still, cemented in grey strokes and shadings. He closed the notebook with a clap. Paul moaned at the noise and rolled over. Colin switched off the lamp. He didn’t want to read anymore.
In hell’s twilight he could see its gates, pearly as those in heaven but in hell reflecting the red rock and the red dirt and the flames. They began to close. In hell the ground gives like moss, and before long his legs were too tired to run. With each flutter of wings behind him he pushed himself harder, one more step, another, another. At the gate he’d fallen to a crawl, and when he reached for its rusted metal he felt hell’s hands on either side of his ribcage and he cried out in the bedroom’s silence. In the dark he looked around. Paul rolled over once more. The tree outside still cast its shadow on the wall and the shadow still bristled at the slightest breeze. The room hadn’t changed.
He’d forgotten about it by morning, when the sun forced its way into his eyes. It was like any other Monday: breakfast while he scoffed at his mother’s list of chores; setting out Paul’s clothes; starting the shower and masturbating to his reflection while the water grew hot. It wasn’t until he was in the shower that he remembered, that he felt again that monstrous grip. He saw again the words his father had written, the images he’d sketched. He considered hell and all its splendor, touching with his timid fingers the bruise just under his ribs.
In September 1848, construction crews near Cavendish, Vermont, broke ground for the Rutland & Burlington Railroad. For each blast, the men bored holes into the rock, poured a layer of blasting powder, threaded a fuse up to the surface, and covered the hole with sand. Afterward, they packed each charge with a tamping iron—a rod just over an inch in diameter and four feet from end to end. At approximately four thirty in the afternoon, a twenty-five-year-old foreman named Phineas Gage struck a spark and detonated a charge. The tamping iron, worn to a quarter-inch point on each end, passed through his left cheek and the roof of his mouth, up into his skull—just behind the left eye—and continued, just as cleanly, out of the top of his head, landing in the brush more than eighty feet away, “smeared,” his men said, “with blood and brain.” Within minutes, Gage spoke coherently, got to his feet without help, and was upright and conscious for the three-quarter-mile trek to Cavendish. Dr. Edward Williams, the first physician to lay hands on Gage’s skull, noted “the pulsations of the brain being very distinct” and observed how, at one point, “Mr. G got up and vomited; the effort of vomiting pressed out about half a teacupful of the brain, which fell upon the floor.”
Only a month after his accident, Gage was out of bed and venturing outside. By November, he swore the pain in his head had gone. Dr. John Harlow, who assumed care after Williams’s initial examination, reported in November of 1848 that Gage “appears to be in a way of recovering, if he can be controlled.” Though firsthand evidence is scant, Gage is remembered as the catalyst for studies in cerebral localization and advanced neurology; until his accident, it had never occurred to physicians that damaging specific regions of the brain—without considerable threats to one’s health—could alter personality. He died of cerebral convulsions in May of 1860.
Diane wished she’d read none of this. It was one of those stories that bubbled up whenever she was trapped alone with her thoughts. In Tim’s office she closed her eyes and tried to picture something else, tried to remember what movie she’d watched last night with Colin. There was a stream of air coming from a vent in the ceiling that wasn’t warm or cold, just dry, and she shifted to avoid it. The room was making its familiar noises: the fluorescent light, the clock, the strokes of Tim’s pen like small rocks tumbling down a hill. They were best together, but if she had to choose one sound over the others it would have been that of Tim writing. Even if it was disturbing—the thought of what he was writing, why she was there. She still asked herself what notes he kept. Trying to read them had become a game, eyeing the legal pad as he wrote, but his handwriting was too small and masculine; upside down it looked like ancient runes. Still, she tried to cheat and see herself through her therapist’s eyes. She wanted to know whether or not her revulsion and her disgust and her fear were justified, or if the Diane she thought she was, at heart, was just a grief-given illusion, and that it was time, once again, to become the Diane everyone wanted her to be. “If for no other reason than for the sake of your spine,” her mother called to say, “you have to stop sleeping on that couch. Have I told you about Cheryl?”
Yes, she’d heard about Cheryl at least twice since January—the point, apparently, at which her friends and remaining family had decided she should start behaving like the old Diane. That first month, they did everything they could. In November they were still dropping by with baked goods, mailing cards with hidden, unmentioned checks, and tidying up while she smoked at the kitchen table. “That drawer over there,” she’d have to say, or “Above the toaster,” as they unloaded her dishwasher. In December they delivered tins of store-bought cookies. “How are the kids?” they wanted to know, and it was everything she could do not to sigh and say, You tell me.
They didn’t know her. Shannon spoke like an office manager trained to deliver bad news. Every week she arrived with something printed from her computer—an article on how cows reproduce or a list of animals ranked by the length and intensity of their orgasms, pictures of hateful cats wearing sweaters—and for a half hour they’d laugh about this stupid thing that had nothing to do with them. Then Shannon would put the paper aside and say something an observer would call innocent—“I see you have an ice dam above your garage.” But Diane’s eye twitched as though it could look into the future and was wincing at the argument it saw.
It was the cigarettes people nagged about most, made worse because she never knew how to respond. To repeat what Tim had said about strangeness, about beauty, sounded gorgeous in her head, but as she began to recount that day in therapy, Shannon got lost in the details. “You’re saying he didn’t smell it on you? He didn’t say anything about patches, or gum?”
It was the cigarettes that convinced her to take the key from her purse and walk down to the basement. Even though it felt wrong to be moving around the house at two in the morning, tiptoeing down the stairs to read those notebooks by the desk lamp’s light—even though she knew they’d give her hell for this, too—it felt close to healing. Yes, she found horrible things like the story of a young man’s brain sloshing out onto the floor, but it felt like something she was supposed to know. When she connected it to her husband—when she imagined that he’d tried to replicate Phineas Gage’s luck, that with a surgical gunshot to the brain he could kill everything that was Alan but go on living—she tried to swallow it as wisdom, or at least pity. And what if he’d written something about her, about the woman he’d perceived her to be? Her skin felt covered in bugs when she thought of their final night, when she shrugged his hand away. “You stink,” she told him, and that was the end, the last thing she said to him. A vacuum opened up behind her as he rolled away, the sheets stretched between them as though it was only one more fight in their history of fights. Her back still broke out in goosebumps at the thought of his silence,
his acquiescence, no matter how tightly she wrapped herself in blankets on the couch.
How was she supposed to tell someone that? How was Tim supposed to write that?
Finally he clicked the pen closed and set it on the table. She was happy to have her thoughts interrupted. “How were the last few weeks?” he asked.
“Fine. The boys started eighth grade.”
“I thought Paul was older?”
She shook her head. “We kept them together. Remember?”
“That’s right. Sorry. Does either of them ever have a problem starting school?”
“No.”
He nodded and made a note. “Anything else with your kids? How’s Heather?”
She looked at the door. How about your kids, Diane? How about Heather the burnout, Colin the time bomb, Paul the complete fucking mystery? A part of her knew that Paul was a problem she was ignoring, that soon he’d get out of hand. Had she thought about special schools, her mother had asked over the phone. Had she thought about what the boy really needs? Had she thought about anything? “My kids are fine,” she whispered.
She knew Tim was testing her, like a doctor who prods your wrist and says Here? What about here? as he looks for the broken spot. “Diane.”
“Sorry.” She cleared her throat. “I’ve been feeling strange lately.”
“Strange how?”
“Strange I don’t know.” There was a piece of lint on her slacks and she picked it off and set it on the table in front of her. “I feel like everything’s slowing down or something.”
“It’s normal to feel that at this time of year. Autumn does that to people.”
“Is isn’t that. I mean it’s autumn, yeah, and it came by surprise, but—I don’t know.”
Tim picked up the pen. “Are you sure you don’t know?”
She pulled her bottom lip into her mouth and rolled it between her teeth. She did know, and it irritated her that he didn’t. With a sigh she reached for her purse. Her lipstick clacked against a compact mirror. The car keys jangled. She felt her way past half-empty packs of gum, receipts, a screw, and pulled from the bottom a wrinkled piece of notebook paper. The last addition was on the back—Oct 13 soon—in blue ink.
Some Hell Page 8
