You gape at the meals, feel surprised at the quality of food for what looks like a chain outlet. You watch the food appear to disarm Olympia. So you rip through your lunch while seated at your red table. Shortly after, you breathe out and loosen up, as if you’re an Olympian readying to compete. You muster enough courage to start the interview again. You ask her what happened in court.
“I won,” Olympia says, speaking up while eating up. “Does that sound callous? I don’t mean to be that way. But that’s just what happened.”
Why does she think that lady was so upset?
“See, this is what happened,” she says. “We ask for fair market damages – like, rental damages – when we file these suits. Think of it like the rent that would be due if those people actually had a lease and were renting the property. Now, normally you’d need an expert there to testify as to what we call the ‘fair market rental value’ – somebody that knows the property, knows the area. That usually costs the client more money, and it’s an inconvenience to go all the way out to a place like John County. We usually just put down a rough number on the initial papers so we can get an expert later.” Olympia dips another tender into the house sauce and scarfs it down. “But what that lady did,” she says, before chomping and gulping, “what that lady did is that she admitted in her written response that our rough number was the correct number. Whether that’s a fair number or not, it doesn’t matter. She testified that everything she wrote in that response was true. So, if the parties agree on the number, there’s no issue. At that point, we don’t need an expert; those are the damages. We got that plus the possession we wanted in the first place.”
You notice how much she appears to enjoy this restaurant food, how she looks emboldened by eating. You wonder aloud whether she ever feels shame about what she does.
“What do you mean?”
Does she have a problem with kicking people out of their homes?
“I don’t take that lightly,” Olympia says. She gnarls her nose, as if annoyed. “I don’t. But you gotta understand, this is what happens. When people don’t pay their mortgage, this is what happens. Are there exceptions? Sure. But you can’t open up to everyone, and listen to everyone, and hear their stories and everything. Most of the time, they’re lying to you.”
You ask her how she knows.
“I’ve seen it happen too much,” she says. “Angry people, sad people, people with excuse after excuse. People that destroy these homes before they leave. I’ve seen it. Some of them, they tear these places up, taking lights and pipes and wet bars and everything. And these people try to bring you down for doing your job. It’s not my fault you didn’t pay up, y’know what I’m saying? It’s like, my client has a better right to this property than you do. My client paid for it. Did you?”
Has she always felt this way?
“About what? Evictions?”
You want her views on how often people lie.
“I may have been an outlier in my community,” Olympia says. “Meaning that I didn’t really go by the rules, y’know? I may have been raised a certain way, but I’d challenge what my church says. Women have to dress a certain way when you enter the church, or you got to do this, or that. I want to tell the truth. I want to tell the unfiltered, unadulterated – I want to tell the raw shit.”
Olympia has finished her meal, and so have you. You listen to the fading fizz of two sodas on the table, smell the satisfaction of greasy scraps and buttery crumbs. And you notice that Olympia looks pleased, too.
She brushes her mouth with her napkin. Olympia tells you that Anne’s River County is nearby and that the foreclosure auction is not for a little while. She says that you’re free to ask more questions. You do.
Does Elmo have the same history of being an outlier in his community?
“Well, I remember growing up in middle school, in high school,” she says. “And there weren’t a lot of people that looked like Elmo and I, that had the same morals and values and different things, so, y’know, we had a bit of a different perspective.”
You want her to elaborate.
“When we were younger, we were together,” Olympia says. “I took care of him. He and my father didn’t talk, he and my mother didn’t talk, and we had those differences with the community, so we had to stay together. And books were a big a part of that.”
Does she know what kind of books Elmo enjoyed when he was young?
“Oh, he liked lots of things,” she says. “He really liked fantasy and science fiction. I remember that he read Lord of the Rings when he was, like, eight or nine. He told me that he liked to bring it to school for reading time because the book was huge. It’s around twelve hundred pages, right? He had gotten a red leather-bound copy of the book from a family friend and he told me he’d plop it down on his desk in front of all the other classmates. He did that not because he thought he was smarter than everybody else, not like he was trying to say, ‘Look at this huge book and my huge brain.’ He did that because he thought it was funny. Let’s be honest: that book was as big as he was. But he loved reading that stuff. And he liked reading long works, y’know? Long works he could get lost in like, well, Lord of the Rings. Long series. He probably talked to his books more than he talked to me.”
You inquire as to whether she resented that.
“No, no,” Olympia says. “Not at all. That was just his world. And I could relate; I read a lot, too.”
Does she remember what she read?
“My favorite fiction writer was Octavia Butler,” she says. “Ms. Octavia Butler. She had a huge impact on me. Her books, like Dawn and Kindred, you’d read through them and just marvel at her imagination. She was just able to take you on a journey and an experience and make you feel something, too, and that’s something I admire so greatly.” She looks off, returns. “But I liked nonfiction mostly. I’d read Anne Frank. I’d read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I’d read Girl, Interrupted. I tried to learn about people and their experiences. I was trying to better myself by, like, tuning in with these odd or unfamiliar frequencies. You really feel it. It encourages you to keep going and keep learning. They all kinda talk to you even if they can’t really talk to you.”
You ask whether she talked to her brother often.
“I did,” Olympia says. “I’m nine years older than him, but we were pretty close. We talked often. I mean, we did before our parents divorced. I didn’t see him much after that.”
Why?
“I don’t really want to get into it.”
You prod further.
Olympia exhales. “Mo kinda retreated into himself after that,” she says. She appears to do the same. “He read more and more. He started writing, too.”
How would you describe your brother?
“He’d probably say he was average, that he was all-around normal,” Olympia says. “But he wasn’t. I mean that in…in a good way, y’know? Mo wasn’t a big guy, but he was very smart. He was never on any drugs, over-the-counter or otherwise. He was stable, very happy. Very friendly. He wouldn’t go out of his way to meet you, be cool with you, but he was a great listener. And he had interesting things to say. I got the feeling that he could really sympathize with people, y’know? With anyone.”
You ask whether that applied to their parents.
“What do you mean?”
Could he relate to them?
“Not really.”
You want to know why not.
“I don’t know.” She looks away.
Have you gone too far? Do you really want to press her more? Do you even know what to say next? Do you want this feature piece or not?
Olympia responds to your silence with her own.
So, does she remember how her family communicated with each other?
“I mean, we didn’t really ‘communicate,’ I don’t think,” she says, making eye contact. “Not in that classic way. We were more like a collective than a family.”
You ask her what she means.
“We were
a group, for sure,” she says. “But we weren’t warm like a family is supposed to be. Like, I remember going with a friend on their family vacation. We couldn’t afford to go on vacations, but I went with my girl and her family to Mexico, and I had a real family experience.” Olympia sips her soda. “We were all there, we got stung by jellyfish, we were swimming with manta rays, and we were helping each other out. Some of us weren’t as good swimmers as others, some of us had never felt what it felt like to get stung before, and we had to put each other on our backs and help carry each other to boats and to land. It was fun, y’know? It was family.”
And she doesn’t feel the same with her own family?
“No, not really,” Olympia says. “My father was distant; he wasn’t around much because of work. And my mother had problems with my father. Mo and I both loved books, but we both loved our own books, y’know what I mean? So, we weren’t family like that.”
You hear the door clang open, and the cold wind swoops away the savory aura at your table. You see a group of what look like undergrads burst in from outside. You lean back in your padded booth. You want to know what her father did for a living again.
“He was enlisted in the navy,” she says. “He was deployed a lot. He trains fighters now. He has this real tough-guy image.”
Does she see any of his traits in herself or her brother?
“My father was a real outdoorsman,” Olympia says. “He knew survival skills and all that. That stuff really got Mo’s attention, I think. He read books about camping. I remember that he joined the Scouts before I went to college. He told me later that he loved going out into the woods by himself when he was in high school.”
You ask if her father ever went with him.
“No,” she says. “He’d already left by then.”
So, does she know whether Elmo was always a loner?
“Back then, people didn’t think he was a loner,” she says. She presses her fingertips on the red table. “I mean, as a person, maybe he was, but I didn’t think it was odd or anything. Kids at that age are finding themselves, y’know? Evolution is important. Evolving is important. And kids that age are learning from their mistakes. They’re learning what they like. So it wasn’t weird to see a kid Mo’s age doing stuff by himself.”
You inquire about his high school years.
“He wasn’t the most popular kid, but he had friends,” she says. “He told me about his friends, and his girlfriends, and I was excited to hear it,” she says. “I was excited for him to fill me in.”
But she rarely remembers seeing him?
“I didn’t visit much.”
You wonder aloud whether she regrets it.
“Why are you asking me that?”
Your eyes catch Olympia’s cheek twitching. You feel as if everything stops, like every conversation and order and bite has ceased because of what you have said. You have gone too far. So you hold your breath.
“Is it because you think I could’ve done something?” she says. “Or said something to him? Sit down.” She doesn’t appear to care that you’re not standing up. “I’m not to blame here.”
Why does she say that?
“Because Mo did this kind of thing all the time,” Olympia says. She almost snarls. “I mean, he always went off to places by himself. He knew what he was doing. He tried hard to understand how to survive out there. He was smart. He went prepared. He knew what to do. And he loved it out there.” Her stare impales. “So don’t try and spin this as somehow being my fault – that I should’ve seen him more, that I should’ve said more and not been as silent. My silence didn’t kill my brother.”
Four
“Notice of Trustee’s Sale!” Olympia says. She stands on the brown brick walkway around the flat green courtyard in front of the Anne’s River County courthouse in the early afternoon. Underneath the high sun, she has started the foreclosure auction.
You hear an address, instrument numbers, legal identifiers, measurements, surveys, terms of sale, and cash requirements. You hear the lender’s opening bid from Olympia herself. But you see no one here except the two of you.
People mill about away from the courtyard. Some are walking to the parking lot. Deputies sit behind the windows in the courthouse, paying you little attention. You observe the flag of Virginia and the flag of the United States swaying high above you. And you see Olympia all alone, shouting to no one, like a madwoman in an attic.
Olympia hollers the bid once, twice, three times. She announces that the property has gone back to the lender and closes her folder. She is finished.
Back in her car, you ask Olympia if it’s always like that.
“What? Unattended?”
You nod.
“Not always,” she says. “But usually. A lot of times I’m just talking to the birds, really.”
You ride along again, pass through the historic district of Anne’s River County. The district’s boxy buildings and drab-colored general stores surround you. You feel the roll of the coiling roads underneath, and you think this place feels natural, homely, isolated. You ask Olympia what she’s thinking.
She turns her head toward you momentarily. “Now that my day’s over?” she says. “Or now that this interview’s almost over?”
You feel your heart dip. Your space in her car shrinks somehow, as if a bubble has deflated with you still inside. You want to know how she feels about her family, but you remember what happened at the restaurant. So you shrug.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I know why you’re here, and I agreed to do this. But I haven’t processed what happened to my brother. I mean, I don’t even know what killed him.” She rattles her head. Her voice weakens. “I…I don’t even know how he died.” Her eyes shimmer. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to get, y’know, emotional.”
You start to hate yourself, want to comfort her. But you need to continue. You hand her a tissue from your pocket, which she takes with her free hand. Your eyes watch her pat her own. You wonder aloud whether she has a happy memory of her brother that stands out.
Olympia pauses, sniffles. “I do, in fact,” she says. “I do. Sometime before I left for college, I took Mo to the midnight release for one of those YA books. I can’t remember which one, but he was just a young boy then. I remember…I remember Mo was so excited. We were in line with all the other kids, and he was…just…goin’ crazy. He wanted to dress up, but we couldn’t really afford an outfit. In the end, he was so excited that it didn’t matter. And when he got the book, he was shaking his body up and down and all that. But when we got outside, some asshole drives by and yells, like, a spoiler from the end of the book. They probably just pulled it off some site from somewhere that had already gotten it, y’know? And this guy spoils it in front of all these kids. And Mo, I remember, Mo didn’t get mad. Didn’t get angry. He just looked at me and asked, ‘That’s not true, is it?’ He looked at me and…he looked at me in a way I had never really seen him look at my parents. He wanted me to make it all better. He trusted me to make it all better. And, y’know, he was usually so independent that he didn’t need anything from anybody, but he needed me then.”
Does she recall what she told him?
“Of course,” Olympia says. “I lied.” She laughs. “I told him that there was no way that guy could know, that ‘it’s just past midnight, and it just came out, right?’ And I remember him smiling and bouncin’ up and down again. I made it all right.” She pauses once more. “And it makes me think, it makes me think that if there was anything…” She trails off.
You sit in her luxury car, note the time you’ve taken away. You stop asking questions.
She drives on.
By dark, you arrive at her apartment. You thank her, step out of her car, walk away into the night. You leave her alone.
But you don’t have your story yet. You need to know more; you need to dig deeper into Elmo’s recordings. So you do.
PART TWO
WATERFALLS
Five
It
was early morning, and what did I need? It was just me, Elmo, out here on The Trail, but there was so much to see. Here, I saw snow stay whiter than I had ever seen before. Its coldness skimmed my skin. I smelled the breakfast mix of low-growing pine and birch while small animals clicked and squawked and barked, as if speaking worried warnings to me. I was a small splotch on this wide canvas of early-morning wilderness, a wilderness filled with light and trees and creatures and streams and a river and a bawling waterfall, too. But I saw dragons in the distance, and I wasn’t where I needed to be.
Beneath a blue sky, I sat out here against a rough tree and faced two other pines – one fallen and rotting and reddish, the other upright and brown and firm looking. The fallen one’s branches appeared to reach up to its firm counterpart, like an elder longing for the health of youth. The two pines and I were at the edge of a clearing, my pack positioned on one side of me and my steel water bottle on the other.
I held only one item in my hand: a voice recorder, small and sleek and modern. The recorder stored my thoughts, and I had a lot of them. I knew why I was here: I wanted to reach The Mount, the farthest point from everything. And The Mount was everything. Atop The Mount, I would gain perspective. I would see myself for what I really was, or what I could really be. Maybe that was all bullshit, but I held a belief shared by many outdoor types, an almost-mystical belief that lengthy encounters with nature could change us. I wanted that from The Mount.
As I leaned back, I spotted a lone hummingbird buzzing and chirping near my pack beside me. Its head twitched and tilted and reset, pointing its black bill at me like a shaking syringe. I wanted to calm the bird down, so I decided to offer it a drink. I put down my voice recorder, opened my steel water bottle, removed its lid, poured some water into the upside-down cap, and steadied the cap in my open palm. This took some practice but, after several minutes, the hummingbird hovered over and landed on the edge of my hand. It felt so light there, its tiny feet more like pins than claws against my skin. The hummingbird bent its red-orange throat down, dipping its bill into the water-filled cap. It took a swig, stopped, and looked around, as if at a bar waiting for friends that would never show. But it relaxed, just like I did.
The Dragon Documentaries Page 2
