Us Kids Know

by JJ Strong

  He was so excited about it. He really wanted me to get it.

  “So it’s a metaphor,” I said.

  He laughed. “Sure. A metaphor. For what?”

  I shrugged. “Beats me, it’s your metaphor.”

  He caught me glancing at the clock. Three minutes to four. Time to catch the late bus.

  “Go,” he said. “But think about it, Ray. Okay? Will you think about it?”

  * * *

  The next day during theology, I was paged to the headmaster’s office by a man’s muffled voice over the PA system. For a moment I didn’t move, thinking maybe I’d imagined it. But soon the desks creaked as everyone turned to see me, and at the front of the class Father Joe motioned silently at me, like That’s your cue, Ray. So I grabbed my things and hurried toward the door while a series of amused mumblings moved through the room and Father Joe continued with his lesson, working up to some breakthrough about the meaning of John, chapter 20—the part where Thomas sticks his hand into the gash in Jesus’s side.

  There was a small room outside Monsignor Murphy’s office where his secretary, Mrs. Carlyle, sat. Her door was always open, and behind her, Monsignor Murphy’s door was always closed. Only now she wasn’t there. And Monsignor Murphy’s door was cracked open. I sat in one of the waiting chairs by the door but soon rose, daring to approach the monsignor’s door and knock.

  “Come in, Raymond.”

  It was a weird, murmuring voice. Not the headmaster’s voice, yet somehow familiar. The same voice from the PA announcement.

  At the far end of the room, across a plush, velvet carpet, and on the other side of a coffee-colored desk the size of a small house, in the monsignor’s big leather rotating chair, sat Cullen.

  I hadn’t seen him since that day in the detective’s office. Now he had a hand cupped over his mouth and spoke in that muffled voice. “Close the door, son.”

  I whispered furiously, “What are you doing?”

  He grinned and motioned for me to step all the way in the room. “Shut the door before someone sees you.”

  I did so and stood with my back against the door. “Are you crazy?”

  “Did you get my gift?”

  “What? In my locker?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Where’s my Caravaggio?”

  “I got it. Don’t worry. What did you think about the idea?”

  “What idea?”

  “Empire State Building!”

  I felt light-headed. I reached for the door handle—just for balance, not to make a run for it. Cullen leaped out of the big chair.

  “We can do it!” he said. “I’ve been looking into it. It’s not easy, obviously. But it’s not impossible.”

  “How did you even get in here? Where’s Mrs. Carlyle?”

  “I’m still the same guy, Ray. I can get us in and out of anywhere.”

  I shut my eyes and tried to stop hearing him. It was happening all over again. Cullen the Unmoved Mover.

  “No,” I said.

  “Just think about it—”

  “No!” I shouted, and then went back to a whisper. “I won’t think about it. I don’t have to think about it. Jumping off the Empire fucking State Building isn’t at all what I’m interested in. That’s not . . . something like that just misses the point completely.”

  “What is the point then? Tell me.”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “Okay.”

  “This is my thing.”

  “Okay. You’re right. I’m sorry. But look, Ray, can I ask you one question? And then I’ll let you go and never bother you again?”

  I shook my head no and closed my eyes to what was about to happen, because I knew he was going to ask anyway. And I knew he wasn’t serious about never bothering me again. That was the whole problem. As long as you were alive, somebody would always be bothering you about something.

  “If you’re so sure you can handle this,” he said. “If you know exactly what you want and how you want to do it . . . I have to ask . . . why haven’t you done it yet?”

  Cullen

  I WAS PICTURING ’roided-up SWAT-team guys rappelling like human spiders down the sides of Nana’s house, bursting through windows, smashing through drywall to catch me as I fled down the driveway, pinning my neck to the asphalt with their M-16s . . . all for missing my court date.

  I put into motion a plan to abandon the house. Packed up the Buick with some nonperishables from the kitchen and a pile of blankets and sleeping bags for freezing winter nights spent huddled in the car, which I planned to stash in some abandoned parking lot somewhere over on Route 10. I was going to call Cousin Sal to tell him that someone needed to come take care of Nana because I was just a kid, after all. Right before I did this, though, I called Roman. Just to talk to someone. Workshop the plan. Ro laughed and told me that his cousin once missed a court date for dealing and went through the same panic until his lawyer told him he had thirty days to surrender. I looked it up online to confirm: He was right. Thirty days. But in the meantime, I had to be invisible. I stayed away from school. I wasn’t sure if the dean of men could somehow force me to turn myself in, or actually do the turning in himself, but I’d been on the guy’s radar for the past three and a half years, so I wasn’t about to take any chances.

  There was only one good scare during this time. One night, around ten P.M., I spied a car parked across the street with a man planted in the driver’s seat. I watched the guy sit there for a good thirty minutes before he finally stepped out, and I saw it was Officer Esposito.

  Come on, man, I thought. Give me a break, would you?

  He ambled across the street in his slow-as-hell cop walk, and just as he was looking over the ruined yard, I bolted through the house and out the back door, toward Brielle’s.

  It was a Monday night. I did the porch climb again, hearing the dog scratching at the living room’s sliding door, thanking God for those cut vocal cords, not wanting to deal with more admonishing from Brielle’s dad. It was real cold, and the roof was icy. I tapped on Brielle’s window. Waited. Tapped again. So cold.

  She came to the window, squinting, and when I saw her I thought, I love you. I love you, and I’m sorry for everything, and I’m going to fix it, I swear.

  She let me in. She wore flannel pants and a T-shirt, hair in a ponytail. While she shut the window I explained why I’d come.

  “I can’t go back home.”

  “Okay . . . ?”

  I glanced at her bed.

  “What? You mean, stay here? No!”

  “Just for a few hours,” I said.

  “Cullen! No!”

  “I don’t snore. Nobody will ever know.”

  She rubbed a finger into one of her eyes. “Not a good idea.”

  “I’ll go back out the window before anyone wakes up. They’ll never hear me.”

  She sighed and looked at the clock.

  “Well, look,” she said. “We’re not going to . . . do anything.”

  “No,” I said. “That’s fine. It’s not about that.”

  “Oh God. Take your shoes off.”

  I kicked them off, and Bri climbed into bed and stared at me while I stood there, stuck in place.

  “What?” she said.

  “You’re going to bed now?”

  “So?”

  “It’s ten thirty,” I said, laughing.

  “I’m tired. And unlike you, I have school tomorrow.”

  I smiled and shook my head at her.

  “Just get in, will you?”

  She shifted to make room for me. I climbed under the blankets with all my clothes on. Me on my back. Her head near my shoulder. Crisp sheets. Her toothpaste breath.

  “Cullen,” she whispered.

  “Yeah?”

  “Ray tried to turn
himself in, didn’t he?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yeah.”

  “And it worked? Your plan?”

  “Yeah. Seems like it.”

  Her hand on my stomach, under my shirt, not moving, not exploring, just resting there. A sleepy sigh.

  “Thank you.”

  The room so warm. Schoolbooks piled on the desk.

  “You’re welcome.”

  But there’s more, I thought. There’s still more to come.

  Glow-in-the-dark star stickers on the ceiling. Her bed as soft as a dream. Just before dropping into sleep, I thought: You’ll be okay here, Brielle. When this is over. Without me.

  * * *

  I managed to slip onto school grounds one day to find Ray. Later that afternoon, he and I rode to the Livingston Mall, found an unoccupied computer in the back corner of an Internet café by the food court, and scoured the web for some all-time brilliant suicide ideas.

  I showed him the research I’d done on the big leap off the observation deck at the Empire State Building, not because I thought he’d go for it—I’d miscalculated in thinking that would be Ray’s kind of thing—but because I still had some work to do to convince him I was the man for this job. We also scrolled through images of a monk who lit himself on fire in Saigon in 1963. Dude sat there peaceful and cross-legged in the middle of the road while a colossal flame ate him alive. We read about a news journalist who said, on air, “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts, and in living color, you are going to see another first: attempted suicide,” and then pulled out a pistol and blasted her skull wide open. A janitor in a Singapore zoo jumped into the tiger cage. A prisoner in a Florida prison choked himself with toilet paper. This guy Cato in ancient Rome knew that Caesar was going to kill him so he stabbed himself before Caesar could get the chance. And then, when he saw a doctor rushing over to save him, Cato reached into the hole in his stomach, grabbed his own bowels, and ripped them out.

  I had set all this up beforehand—the links scribbled on a torn piece of notebook paper in my pocket. When I’d shown Ray everything, he shook his head, staring off. The corner of the store was poorly lit, and the light of the screen shone on his face. Two seats away from us, a group of middle school boys huddled together, pointing at the screen, giggling.

  “Obviously we’re not going to reenact any of these outright,” I assured Ray. “This is purely for inspiration.”

  He stood, stretched, and yawned. Like he was bored, and it was my fault.

  “Thanks anyway,” he said.

  “Ray, wait—”

  He moved to stand, but I snatched his wrist and pulled him back into the seat. The store clerk—a college-aged girl with bored eyes, walked over toward the kids on our left, who were cackling even more loudly at whatever porn sites they were no doubt surveying. I closed our own browser window and logged out. Ray tried to stand again, and again I grabbed for him, but this time he twisted out of my grip.

  “Ray, listen . . .”

  He spun around to face me. “Have you ever wanted to kill yourself?” He said it loudly. The clerk paused her uninterested march toward the horny adolescents. The kids stopped laughing and looked at us. Ray registered them gaping at him.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. Whatever. I’m leaving.”

  I chased him out of the store. “Ray.”

  “I mean, have you ever even thought about it?” he said, pacing through the mall. “Like, not seriously, but just a moment maybe. A fantasy.”

  “Sure,” I told him. “Who hasn’t?”

  “And what do you think about?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, in that little moment when you’re thinking about killing yourself, what do you picture?”

  “I picture . . . I don’t know. I guess I picture my funeral.”

  “And all the people there.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who are they?”

  “The people?”

  “Yeah. Who’s there? Am I there? Bri?”

  “No.”

  “So who?”

  “I guess it’s . . . guys from school,” I said.

  “The whole school.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And what are they doing?”

  “Uh, they’re sad, I guess. They’re really sad.”

  “Yeah,” he said, reaching for the door. “Exactly.”

  “So I get it! I understand what you’re going through!”

  He wheeled around again, shouting at me. “You know what I picture when I think about it?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Just . . . total, empty, quiet blackness. So, no, you don’t get it. I don’t care about the funeral. I don’t care who will be there or how sad they’ll be. I’m not doing this for anyone else. I don’t want to send a message. I only want to disappear. Completely. Forever.”

  Ray

  I SAW THE KEY the night I took the money from Dad’s closet. It hung from a nail in the wall just inside the door. Dad—ever the pragmatist—had labeled it: Hill spare. Hill as in Hill Avenue, the street of Dad’s office.

  It was a small building, one of those offices that used to be a house, or at least looked like a house. Dad split the space with a dentist. Every Tuesday, Dad commuted to New York for his volunteer work, and one Tuesday after school I walked from the bus stop to his office. The secretary from the dentist’s office saw me through the blinds of their office. I offered a friendly wave, and she waved back. Perfectly normal, I thought. Nothing weird about a son using a key to enter his father’s office.

  I was there to find out about dying. Who had seen it? Who was haunted by it? What did they say about it? Had one of his patients ever killed him- or herself? If so, how had they done it? I was conflicted because, on the one hand, I knew that if I was serious about my war on vanity, I would just choose an ordinary suicide like anyone else. Taking a bunch of pills or jumping off a bridge would fit just fine with my thinking that I wasn’t special and didn’t deserve anything other than a normal, forgettable-enough death. But at the same time I couldn’t shake the idea that how I chose to kill myself was my last chance to get something right. I wanted a method that would mean something—not to anyone else who would be left behind, but to myself. I had no idea what that meaning would be, but I knew I’d recognize it when I saw it. Maybe there was a clue somewhere in Dad’s records.

  I sat at his desk in an enormous, swiveling leather chair. I tried to imagine him sitting here, listening to his clients, nodding his head. “Yes, yes. I understand completely. Tell me more. Here, have a tissue.” Or maybe it was nothing like that. All I knew about therapists, I realized, came from TV and movies.

  I started up the computer and guessed four or five login passwords—names, birthdays, anniversaries—before giving up and digging through Dad’s drawers. Taped into the back of a datebook from 1999 was a torn piece of yellow paper with maybe ten passwords listed on it. The first one did the trick. I poked around the computer files until I found a bunch of folders, each titled “Progress Notes,” with different codes attached to them. I tried to open “Progress Notes_FGH_99,” but these were also protected by a password, so I went back to the list until I found the right one. I clicked on a document: “TinReach.” I scrolled through it, reading quickly, catching key words and phrases: “Tina Reacher,” “Compulsive,” “Body image,” “Purging.”

  What I needed, I realized, were the guys who were there that day. The policemen. The firefighters. The random do-gooders. The ones who’d seen people go the same way I’d seen Amir go.

  I searched for an hour, plugging in passwords, clicking through one document after another, glimpsing the secret worlds that all these random people had revealed to my father. At one point I thought, If God has any interest in saving me, now would be a pretty good tim
e to chime in.

  I found what I needed within the folder “Progress Notes_ABC_02” in the document “JosBenit.”

  Here is what I learned: Jose Benitez was an NYFD dispatcher. He was answering phones that morning. At eight forty-seven—he remembered the time exactly—he got a call informing him a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. He sent every fireman he could—every company available—to the towers. “Pretty much all those guys I sent in there are dead now,” he told my dad.

  He got calls all morning from people trapped in the buildings.

  He told my dad, “This one guy just kept shouting at me: ‘I’m trapped! I’m trapped!’ And I told him help was on the way. I thought it was. I really, really thought it was.”

  He told my dad: “I would have rather been there myself than in that stupid office on the phone.”

  He told my dad: “I’d rather be dead than have to live with hearing their voices.”

  Jose Benitez had PTSD. He had anger-management issues. He had insomnia. He was experiencing what my dad called “hypervigilance.” He was addicted to painkillers, which he took for sleep. He had nightmares.

  My chest went tight while I read. I thought about Amir. I’m so sorry, I thought. I’m so sorry I let you do all that stupid stuff with me. For thinking there was Something Else out there. And for letting you believe you could help me find it.

  “I’m so fucking sorry,” I said out loud.

  Jose Benitez told my dad: “I’m in there with them. The rubble crashes down on me. My mouth fills with dirt. I’m choking. Choking. Choking. I’m trapped. I can’t move my legs, my arms, even a finger. I can’t open my eyes. I want to explode my body just so I don’t have to die under all that heavy shit.”

  I wiped away tears. I tried to keep more from coming, but they wouldn’t stop.

  I closed my eyes, slowed my breathing, and brought back that old image of the lake: Bloodfire. Bloodfire.

  Calmer now, focused, pushing away the sadness and finding something else—something much worse—I read Jose Benitez’s dream again:

  “My mouth fills with dirt.”