Us Kids Know

by JJ Strong

  We made three caskets, in the end. The first one started badly, but I kept thinking we could salvage it right up until we carved out a lid and tried to fix it on the base and the result was like something made by two blind preschoolers with hooves for hands—unmet edges, gobs of wood glue everywhere, bent nails poking through. And the second one began just as pathetically. The only improvement this time was that we knew to scrap it rather than push on.

  We were standing one day in the middle of all this old woodworking machinery that for the life of us we could not figure out how to operate with, like, even the most microscopic level of effectiveness. We were drenched with sweat, and sawdust was pasted to our arms, necks, and foreheads. By that point, I was ready to quit the whole damn thing.

  “Fuck it,” I said. “New plan.”

  “No way,” Ray said. “It feels like we’re on a treadmill, but we’re not. We’re moving forward. We’re getting better.”

  I motioned to the misshapen monstrosity on the floor that was meant to be a rectangular box.

  “We’re getting there!” he said.

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “I don’t know, but—”

  “We’re oh for two.”

  “Yeah.”

  “With not one shred of evidence that would lead us to believe we’re figuring this thing out.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So? I’ll ask again. What makes you so sure?”

  “I don’t know,” he said again. But then he stared off to the corner of the room, gathering his thoughts. “It’s like when you have a shitty day but you’re sure that tomorrow will be better. You know? Nothing makes you sure about something like that. You just are or you aren’t.”

  “Sorry. When have you ever thought tomorrow will be better?”

  I said it lightly. An innocent joke at his expense. But in an instant, he turned dark and angry.

  “Before I met you,” he said.

  The work, much like our training leading up to the robbery, tended to free Ray from himself. And that freedom, over and over again, would take us pretty close, even in these astoundingly sad circumstances, to sharing a decently enjoyable moment. But as soon as Ray realized I’d caught him being a real person for half a second, he’d cower back into his own shadow and disappear, like he had to remind himself he wasn’t supposed to be happy.

  The next casket was better. Not perfect, but better. We’d be able to nail it shut, at least. It’d sustain the pressure of a few feet of dirt without collapsing. Against his assurances that he wouldn’t need it, I went ahead with constructing a bailout mechanism. We drilled a hole near where Ray’s head would be and jammed a length of PVC piping into it. Then we dropped a string through the pipe, glued a rubber washer to the aboveground end, threaded the string through the washer, and tied the string to a bell. So whenever Ray was ready to admit to himself that he didn’t want to be buried alive—which I was sure he’d do after pondering a few gently dropped but all-important pieces of information from myself at his supposed gravesite—all he had to do was pull the string and I’d deliver him back to the whole freaking rest of his life.

  * * *

  On a Sunday, in the early afternoon, Ray and I loaded up Roman’s pickup truck with the following: the empty, homemade, slightly off-kilter coffin, the last-minute-change-of-tune-get-me-outta-here apparatus, two pickaxes, two shovels, one hammer, eight bundles of firewood, one stack of kindling, four bags of charcoal, one can of lighter fluid, one pair of jumper cables, six gallons of gasoline, four flashlights, two work lights with clamps, one generator, two gallons of water, one cooler with ice, six sodas, four turkey sandwiches, three bags of beef jerky, and one box of Oreo cookies.

  Ray was quiet on the drive. Classic rock played on the radio: Billy Joel, Springsteen, Zeppelin. The Parkway was wide-open; we cruised south. Exits for shore towns clicked by: Belmar, Point Pleasant, Toms River, Manahawkin. The gear, hidden beneath a canvas top, rattled in the truck bed. At one point, Ray reached down for the suicide-prevention pamphlet I’d planted near his feet. He read, unfolding it and, I hoped, looking carefully through those warning signs.

  We followed the same route into the Pine Barrens that we used for our target-practice excursion, with only a few wrong turns within the maze of pitted, sandy roads. When we arrived at the clearing by the pond—only half-frozen now, thanks to a week of warm late-winter days—we unloaded the truck and sparked two fires with the kindling we’d gathered at home. As the fires grew, we built them toward each other so they connected in the middle. We spread charcoal around the edges, allowing the heat to spread across the frigid ground.

  There was a lot of waiting for the flames to catch and spread. We drank the sodas and ate the sandwiches and cookies. We didn’t say anything beyond what was necessary—which for the time being consisted of guessing when and where to place logs most strategically so the ground would be sufficiently softened by the heat.

  We shoveled one corner of the fire toward the center and then took pickaxes to the dirt. It broke up easily; the fire had done the trick. But as we dug, the ground became hard and frozen again, so we scooped some burning coals into the ditch and started with the pickaxes on another corner.

  In three hours we had the hole dug and were dead tired.

  “How about dinner?” I said.

  Ray agreed. We retreated to the truck’s cabin, where we each scarfed a second sandwich, gulped down a soda, and immediately fell asleep. I woke with a shiver to find the cabin light on and Ray awake, silent, head in a book.

  I started the car with painfully cold fingers, sticking my hands down my pants while waiting for the heat to kick in. It was night now. Fully dark. Damn cold.

  “How long you been up?” I asked.

  “Not long.”

  “Didn’t feel like waking me?”

  “Figured you needed the rest. Your job’s not done.”

  The pants weren’t working, so I blew warm breath into my hands and then put on my gloves. I yawned and rubbed my face. “Man,” I said quietly, as though to myself. “Hope the next one’s easier.”

  I ran a hand through my hair and stretched my shoulders back.

  “Huh?” Ray said.

  “What?”

  “What next one?”

  “Next one?”

  “You said something about the next one being easier.”

  “Oh yeah. I just meant . . . you know. The next stunt or whatever. You ready?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Ray?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You ready?”

  “Just a minute.”

  I nodded. He read his book.

  Put it together, I thought. Your sister, Ray. Your sister. Your sister.

  He seemed somehow unlike the Ray I knew, but I couldn’t tell if this was a good sign or not. He was quiet like always, but his usual everything-sucks-and-most-of-all-I-suck silence had morphed into this stoic kind of . . . confidence. Like he didn’t give a shit anymore what anyone thought of him. And this had me thinking, on the one hand, that maybe he’d hardened himself against a choice as dumb and pathetic as suicide, but on the other hand that maybe it was easy to be stoic—or cool, or arrogant, or whatever this was—when you had nothing left to lose. Not even your own life.

  “What’re you reading?” I asked.

  He showed me the beat-up cover: The Confessions of St. Augustine.

  “Good?”

  He flipped back a few pages and, finding what he was looking for, read: “Behold with what companions I walked the streets of Babylon, and wallowed in the mire thereof, as if in a bed of spices and precious ointments. And that I might cleave the faster to its very centre, the invisible enemy trod me down, and seduced me, for that I was easy to be seduced.”

  The car hummed, and the heat whistled. The New Ray held his stare on m
e—a hard stare.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  Ray

  CULLEN HAD HOOKED UP yellow work lights to a generator, which buzzed and growled near the truck, and then he hung the lights from some trees. The casket—my casket—was in the ground, waiting for me. I wasn’t afraid, exactly. But something wasn’t right.

  “Change your mind?” Cullen asked.

  I squinted into the lights. It felt like we were two highway workers adding a carpool lane in the middle of the night. “Do we really need all this?”

  “I thought . . . you know, to see.”

  “What’s there to see?”

  He motioned to the casket, out of which rose a long, white pipe with my safety bell attached to the top.

  “What if you’re trying to ring the bell but it malfunctions or something? Maybe I’ll see the string moving.”

  “I’m not going to pull the string.”

  “You say that now.”

  “Can we turn the lights off?”

  “Hey,” he said. “It’s your funeral.” He walked to the truck, shovel in hand, leaping over the mound of dirt we’d removed from what was now my grave, and flicked a switch on the generator. All at once the world went quiet and dark.

  “Okay?” Cullen called over.

  “Better.”

  I climbed into the casket and was lying with my arms across my chest by the time he returned. I didn’t want him to mistake my complaints about the lights as hesitation. I’d tried to remain quiet and businesslike all day, hoping to avoid what I believed was the inevitable moment when he would, I was positive, lay the “you have so much to live for” speech on me.

  Cullen stood above me. Way above him trees swayed, black against the hazy, grayish night sky. It definitely wasn’t an ordinary Sunday night, but I got an ordinary-Sunday-night kind of feeling anyway, looking at the winter trees and thinking about how dark and sad Sunday nights are. Sunday’s always the day when you wonder how you’ll ever make it through the rest of them.

  “That’s it?” Cullen said. “No fanfare?”

  “I’ve been ready for a long time now.”

  He disappeared from view, then returned carrying the lid and a hammer.

  “What about you?” I asked. “Not gonna talk me out of it?”

  “You think I did all this work for my health? When someone asks me to help them kill themselves, I take that shit seriously.”

  This comment—like the one he’d dropped about “the next one” being easier—caught my attention, but not enough for me to do anything about it. They were two puzzle pieces that didn’t yet form a coherent image. So, for the time being, I let them go.

  “Last words?” he asked.

  I shook my head. No more words. The fewer words, the more he’d take me seriously. The more he’d be left with only his own thoughts about what was actually, truly, no-bullshit happening right now.

  I watched the safety string dangle briefly beside my head as the lid came down, and then it, along with everything else, disappeared in the darkness.

  The hammering was more efficient and less excruciating than I thought it would be. Three strikes per nail, four at the most. And then the dirt—early trickles followed by a tsunami. Then the claustrophobia. The sides of the coffin seemed to shrink, pinning my legs together and squeezing me at the elbows. The wood creaked and, a few terrifying times, cracked as the mounds of dirt piled on. Probably there was still plenty of air in the box, but I felt my lungs go tight and my heart speed up. How long? I thought. Oh God. How long can I last?

  A blackness beyond black. Beyond dark. Like the blackness had invaded my body and turned me inside out so that I became the blackness itself.

  I tried to meditate. I’d been trying all day but failing. On the car ride south, for example, I’d closed my eyes and focused on my breathing, trying to think about nothing. But I couldn’t do it anymore. Amir was always in there, and I couldn’t remember how I used to let unwanted thoughts pass by before they did their damage. There was suddenly no more blood and fire to call up. When Amir floated by, he always stayed for a long time.

  I pushed those same thoughts away now, and Bri came flooding in, and then a sudden realization about Cullen’s puzzle pieces.

  Earlier that week, Bri had knocked on my bedroom door after dinner. My room was a mess because of a weird thing that had happened the previous night. At three in the morning, I’d woken up in a panic and ripped a bunch of pages out of my books—the Gospel according to Thomas, Kant, St. Augustine, Aquinas, the Bible, the Tolstoy book. I went through the texts, overheated and sweating, tearing pages out, ripping them into pieces, and spreading the pieces across the floor. Then I got dressed for school—khakis, undershirt, button-down. I even wrapped a tie around my neck, though I didn’t manage to fix it under my collar nor tie it. It was like sleepwalking, except I was more conscious than not. In the morning, I had woken with the fabric of the tie scratching my throat, looked over the floor of shredded pages, and remembered the whole thing.

  Bri had knocked again, saying, “Ray? I know you’re in there.”

  I sat at the desk and didn’t say anything.

  She opened the door. “Can I come in?”

  “Oh . . .” I looked over my shoulder to see her poking her head in. Her hair was purple. She’d dyed it two days earlier. “Sure,” I said. “I guess.”

  She tiptoed between the pages to the bed and gave me a look like I was crazy. “What are you doing in here?”

  I told her about the previous night.

  “You were sleepwalking?”

  “Sort of, but I remember doing it. I don’t remember what the reason was, though. I woke up all panicked and knew I had to get dressed and rip all these pages to shreds. And then I went back to sleep in my clothes.”

  She laughed. “That’s pretty weird.”

  We were silent for a while. I tried not to stare at her eyebrow—the swollen, slightly bruised one with the two red beads peeking out. The one that dared you not to look at it. The one that, when combined with her hair, made you want to ask why she would do something like that to herself.

  “Anyway,” she said. “Oh hey, you know how to do Lincoln’s food, right?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You do one scoop of the dry food from the big tin and then spoon a can of the wet stuff on top of it.”

  “Okay . . . ?”

  “He needs it every day after school.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  She shrugged. “Just in case you’re around and I’m not.”

  I nodded, still not understanding.

  “After school, I mean. In case you’re around after school and I’m not. Can you do that? Lincoln can’t wait until Dad gets home from work. And God knows Mom can’t be bothered.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Sure.”

  “Okay!” she said. “That was all!” She smiled big—too big—and hopped off the bed with a peppy sort of flair.

  She motioned to a poster on the wall as she went. “What is that, anyway?”

  It was a haunted-looking painting showing a hilly landscape and medieval city backed by a stormy sky. “El Greco,” I told her. “We learned about it in Spanish. It’s where John of the Cross was taken when he was arrested.”

  “St. John like your school?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “They tortured him there.”

  “Huh.” She studied the painting for another moment. “The cans are in the garage, by the way.”

  “Okay.”

  “Cans of food, I mean. For Lincoln.”

  “Yeah. I got it.”

  “Great. So long, little brother.”

  And it was only now, lying under the dirt, trembling with the horror of being trapped in this much-too-small box, that it all made sense. The pamphlet in Cullen’s car. The
top ten warning signs:

  Sudden, jarring changes to appearance

  Saying goodbye, settling affairs, or giving away possessions

  Suddenly happier; unusually or unnaturally perky

  I focused on my heart, trying to slow it down. Honed in on my muscles—arms, legs, stomach, face—trying to completely relax them. So that was Cullen’s big plan. That once I put the pieces together about Bri supposedly wanting to kill herself, I would pull the string and race off to save her.

  But here was the funny part: This time, I had a plan too.

  This time, I was one step ahead of Cullen.

  * * *

  Two days before I climbed into the casket, I decided I didn’t want to die. That line of thinking started, oddly enough, with my first deciding that I did want to kill myself. My life as a ghost unstuck me from the day-to-day world that once seemed so unbearable. I wasn’t afraid anymore. I wasn’t so guilty. I was free to open my eyes, and what I saw when I did . . . well, I had to admit it wasn’t all that bad. I joked around with Roman. I learned how to use a buzz saw and a hammer. I laughed. I sweated. I even started doing my homework after school instead of poring over those religious books that only made things worse. Moment to moment, I was becoming a real person again. I’ve never called a suicide hotline or anything like that, but I swear if I could talk to the people who run those things I would tell them that the best thing you can tell someone who’s thinking about maybe possibly offing themselves at some point in the undecided, distant future is this: Pick a date. Mark it on the calendar and exist as a ghost until that date. You will come to believe things you never thought possible.

  All this work was almost undone one day when I saw Amir’s brother. I was walking from school to the market on the corner for an after-school snack, and I saw Malik pull up to a traffic light. On his way to work, probably. It was an uneventful enough moment. We stared at each other. Said nothing. The light changed. He drove off. But then, in the next instant, the full extent of Amir’s death hit me again. And all my guilt came rushing back.