I close my eyes. I remember Chuckie’s fourth birthday. The night before, I went into his room. He was smiling in his sleep. I thought, This is it. I remember the next day, telling the doctor, Lo gasping, Why didn’t you say anything to me? And I told her it was my present to her, this good news, that I wanted it to be a surprise. I remember the force of her arms around me, love is hands, holding you.
But then we saw the doctor. She wasn’t as excited. She said she’d make a note in his report, said it was interesting. I sat in his room every night for a week but I didn’t see his lips curl up again. And by the next checkup I wasn’t sure that I’d ever seen my boy smile. You see what you want to see, especially in the dark, especially with your kid.
In the men’s room, I lock the door. There’s a urinal that needs to be cleaned and a standard toilet, seat up, piss all over it. Kids. But not my kid. Not the Beard either. I missed. I followed my gut and my gut was wrong and of course it was wrong. It’s wrong all the time. It’s right sometimes, yes, but all this time I blocked out all those moments when it was wrong. Chuckie’s birthday. That time when Stacey had to be rushed to the hospital and I was sure that she was losing the baby, wouldn’t wish that on anyone, but I felt so sure that she was gonna have her first brush with hell. But her baby was fine. Some people, things are fine. That’s just how it is.
I have failed. My gut didn’t fail me. My gut did what it does. It whispered to me, gnawed at me. But it’s my job to know when it’s onto something, as opposed to when it’s just me stretching, reaching, pleading with the universe to throw me a bone.
The Beard is gone. And there is no way to find him. There never was.
I unzip. I unbuckle. I am undone, wrong and open, flapping in the wind, but there is no wind. There’s only dank sweet air mixing with the urine. My gut creeps up on me as I exhale, as I try to piss. Come on. It stings. It fights me. My gut falls on top of me, plunk. My dick burns. I look down into the urinal and I see what I expected to see, what my gut said I would see, unreliable evil gut, just as loud when it’s lying as when it’s telling the truth. My gut is right this time and something is wrong. I see blood and it’s mine, all mine.
JON
I think I wanted to do this the day I moved in here, just destroy every fucking thing, every piece of this life, this life I never wanted, this life I was stuck with, this half-life, non-life, poison-life.
The futon with the goddamn sheets that came in the mail from Target, the sheets that were never as soft as I wanted them to be because I misread the description online, I shred these fucking sheets until I am drenched in sweat, in Dunwich stench. Fuck you, sheets. Fuck you, life. Fuck you, Roger and fuck you, Magnus.
I pick up the blender I ordered from Best Buy, a night I thought I was being funny, when I ordered a blender and a DVD of Blended. I thought of it as a joke present for Chloe, as if she was ever gonna be in my life, as if she needed these things, as if she would have wanted them. I throw my blender at the wall, the whole of it, the glass jug, the heavy bottom. It doesn’t break. Fuck you, blender.
My microwave, the source of so many pathetic little meals, all the Hot Pockets, all the leftovers, all the things that came out of the freezer and into this little box, the things that kept me alive as if it was worth it, as if I was ever gonna have a life. Being alive is nothing without being able to live.
I pull the microwave off the counter. I let it go. Crash.
Fuck you, T-shirts from UrbanOutfitters.com because I can’t relax in a brick-and-mortar. Fuck you, painting I got from Etsy, blue and white and black brushstrokes that meant something to me, the same color palette as a jar of fluff. I gut the canvas with a knife. Fuck you, art. In the end, you only made me think of her even more. Chloe.
The more I destroy, the more aware I am of the fire in me, the rage I’ve been quieting for so long. I kill all this stuff because it’s all his, in the end. He made me this way, a hermit with a never-ending stream of packages at the top of the stairs. I break these things because I can’t break Roger.
You’re welcome, he said.
I’ve held so much in for so long, ever since I tucked The Dunwich Horror into my back pocket. I played the part of Basement Boy for my mother, for TV. I let everyone think I’m proof that there’s a silver lining, that something good came out of all this, that Roger Blair didn’t win because I’m fine, a picture of health! But it ends today. Today, I’m done waiting. Today I find Meeney.
I grab my keys, I have never made it up the stairs this fast, ever.
Meeney isn’t home, but I see his wife, Sadie, she’s plopped on a cushy sofa in their den. Mother’s Day is muted on their giant TV. Sadie’s eyes are glued to her phone. She’s mom-soft in her plush robe with her readers perched on the tip of her broad pink nose. She’s home alone but she’s surrounded by people; there are framed pictures on the walls of her kids, their vacations to Fiji, their little grandbaby, their great big life, the kind of life I can’t have. There’s an open bottle of wine breathing on her coffee table. She has white fuzzy slippers and the left one is missing a little bow.
I take a picture of her. I take another, a close-up on her slippers.
I log in to my Peter Feder email and I attach the pictures, that one of the missing bow should do it. I know it’s risky. Meeney could forward my threat to the police. But I’ve watched him enough to know that he does love his wife. And I know what I would do in this situation, if someone threatened to hurt Chloe, I would do whatever I could to save her. My words are cold, direct:
You have ten minutes or your wife is a dead woman. Call this number now, or she goes the way of the bow.
My phone rings. I finally have Meeney on the phone and now he’s cold, direct.
“Who are you and what do you want?”
I don’t answer right away.
He is rattled, whispering and walking. “I can hear you breathing, God damn it.”
“Dr. Meeney, it’s very simple. I need you to tell me where I can find Roger Blair.”
“Well,” he says. “It’s very simple. I don’t know. Now who the hell is this?”
“Yes, you do. And if you don’t tell me, I’m going to murder your wife.”
“Bullshit,” he snarls. “Roger, I know it’s you. You’re using a machine to deepen your voice but only you would do this to me.”
I send him a picture of the movie, Julia Roberts in her funny wig, the last thing your sweet Sadie will ever see. He is fuming now, if you are in cahoots with Roger Blair.
We did good work down here, Jon. We are not in cahoots, not now, not ever, and I will not lose my cool. I go again: “Where is Roger?”
He says no, he says I don’t want to find Roger, the man is a sick person.
I huff. “That’s quite a way to talk about your best friend.”
There’s a long pause. And then he says it. My name. “Jon?”
I screwed up. I don’t know how, but he knows. My skin crawls. I try not to tremble. “Tell me where he is or I will kill her.”
“Jon,” he says. “I know you’ve been through hell, but I was not in on this, now let’s calm down a minute. I’m on your side here. I tried to warn people, I just…let’s talk about this.”
I don’t like his voice. I don’t like him. He’s patronizing. I tell him Sadie looks sleepy and that gets to him and he snarls, What do you fucking want? It’s weird when a teacher swears, any teacher. I tell him I want to know what Roger did to me. He says he has no idea.
And now it’s easy. “I’ve seen you on TV. You always have an idea.”
He sighs. “Have you ever heard of something called apical dominance?”
“No.”
“A tree doesn’t just randomly grow tall, with one central branch. The central branch fights the others to become what it is. Nothing is arbitrary about power. The branch with apical dominance grows more strongly than the others,
which in turn establishes them as weak. The dominant branch is stronger because the others are weak.”
And then he starts lecturing me, it’s a long-winded story, a lot of science. He says plants have brains, that they make choices. I already know from the videos that the dodder vine is Roger’s favorite. Meeney says it’s the Dracula of the food world. It has seventy-two hours to find food or it dies. The dodder literally sucks the light out of the tomato plant. It’s murder. It’s practical. Meeney says there is no emotion in the plant world. There is only survival.
I jot down a few words, energy transfer, dodder vine. He tells me about other plants that release toxins when they’re under attack. He tells me about Roger’s idea that humans might be able to do this sort of thing. He says the whole notion of people transferring energy, vampiric communication, is categorically absurd because we are not plants. We can’t do that.
And inside I think, But we did. We do. I do.
He can’t help me because he doesn’t think it worked. I have no use for him. I need Roger. Magnus. I see Mrs. Meeney on the sofa, her new glass of wine, a picture of his kids by the TV.
“Tell me where I can find Roger.”
“I can’t make you any promises,” Meeney says. “But there is a house in Lynn.”
JON
Chloe and I were in Lynn once, almost. It was a school field trip and Chloe was fighting with Noelle and Marlene, which meant that she wanted to sit with me on the bus. I can still see her flowery dress. I can hear Mrs. Reardon, her voice going up a hundred octaves, A Lilly Pulitzer at your age. Wow. Must be nice. We passed a sign for Lynn and all the windows were open and everyone on the bus was chanting, Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin, you never come out the way you went in. I remember Chloe’s eyes when she looked at me.
“I wish they would stop,” she said. “This is where our fluff comes from.”
It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever said to me. Our fluff. I wanted us to float off the bus and go in there together, but kids aren’t allowed inside the fluff factory. It’s too dangerous. Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin.
So far it doesn’t feel so full of sin here. This part of Lynn is cushy. He lives out by the Breakheart Reservation. Technically, his house is in Saugus. On the map, you can see the hiking trails nearby, places to go fishing. I live in hell and Roger Blair goes hiking. I turn onto his street and for the first time in my life I worry my heart is so hot it could kill me. It’s so damn nice here. His house is offensively cheery with blue shingles and white shutters. There’s a sign on the front door.
Life’s a Beach!
I don’t look both ways when I cross his empty street. It isn’t fair that he gets to live like this. I don’t use the little brick walkway that leads to his front door. I march across his lawn, his freshly mowed grass. Bastard. I yank the storm door open. I almost take it off the hinges. I breathe. Cool your jets, Jon, cool your jets. I don’t want him dead. I need his help. I fix my eyes on a blue lantern he put on the porch. The man who bashed me over the head and put me to sleep, this same man went to Target or Home Depot and saw this lantern and thought, Hey, that would look nice on my porch. I close the storm door. Thankfully it’s not a screen door. It’s the perfect barrier. He must know what I can do. He won’t open the storm door. We can have a conversation without my heart attacking him, at least not right away.
I knock twice, like a mailman, like a neighbor. In the distance I hear an ice cream truck and a siren, the sounds overlapping. I knock again. But no one comes, and no neighbors step out to ask if they can help me because this neighborhood is the kind where people live in their backyards, not on their front porches.
* * *
—
An hour later I wake up in my car.
There’s a fight at a house down the street, an uneven battle between a man and a woman. The man kicks the lady and she tumbles out of the front door, spinning like a child. He throws a little plastic bag of dope at her and she’s flailing, running after the bag. He kicks her again from behind. She falls hard, grabs the little bag before slipping into a car. And then she’s gone and he slips back into his house. I can see his teeth from here, his smile. He’s laughing.
It happened fast and I can’t let go of it, I’ve never seen anything like that in real life. To think of how I felt so sorry for myself when Carrig teased me, but to compare it to this, a man against a woman. The guy I just saw, that guy is a real monster. I remember asking Dr. Woo if you could turn Wilbur human, if you could make the human part of the person overtake the monster part. I think about the guy in this house, in there now, not feeling remorseful, not regretting what he did.
I slam the car door and I’m walking over there knowing what I’m about to do and the little-kid Telegraph-reading part of me is tugging at my shirtsleeve, Are you sure? You know most people are good. But I am done forgiving people.
I ring the fucking bell. Can I do this? The monster cracks the door; he’s holding a gun. I can do this. I kick through the door. The strength in me, I’ve never been like this because the other times I was trying so hard to stop it. Who knew that it would feel good to have this power surge and fly out of me, like a drop on a roller coaster, swoosh. This is for goodness, for justice.
He only has time to look at me and then the monster is dead. His ice-blue eyes are lifeless.
This is so different from all the other times. There is no crying, no pulling out my hair. There is peace. I turn off his horrible music. I notice his sweating can of beer. He won’t sip it again, won’t beat another woman, and that’s because of me. Because of what I can do. Because of the way I can help.
This drug-dealing abuser has a Thanksgiving feast spread out all over his dining room table—phones, empty bags, scales, and baggies. I carry the bricks like newborn babies into the bathroom. There’s a satisfying sound when the bags pop, snap. The dope falls into the toilet. It’s hard to believe this stuff can kill you. I think of all the kids who won’t be overdosing, and I know I’ve done something good here.
I remember my mom when she got home from her first day at T.J.Maxx. It feels so good to have a purpose, she said. She was right. It does.
* * *
—
A couple days later there’s an obituary for Warren “Double U” Schmidt in the Boston Herald. He was twenty-two. His record included forty-one arrests. He had drug dens all over the city and he had been accused of rape three times. There was no previous heart condition but his death was due to a massive coronary.
It’s not like I’m happy. I came here to find Roger but he hasn’t stepped foot in or out of that little blue-shuttered house. I can’t be with Chloe, I may never get to have that kind of life, the love kind. But it never occurred to me that I might be able to do something with my life. And I never felt it like I did today, how different it was to be at the wheel, like a captain instead of cowering in fear, in the basement. I can kill people, but I can also save them.
JON
After Kody Kardashian died, when I was first starting to wonder about myself, I would sneak downstairs every night to read the paper. That’s where my parents kept the big plastic boxes of Telegraphs. Heavy-duty bins, jammed with four years of newspapers, four years of waiting. It was overwhelming to think of my parents, up and down the stairs every day, pulling the lid off a box, adding every daily edition, reclosing the box. Reading those papers changed everything for me. It was a daunting task. Almost fifteen hundred newspapers. Fifteen hundred days. You can read all the articles online, but you understand time when you walk into the basement and turn on the lights and see those boxes, realize there were trips to Home Depot to get those boxes, trips up and down the stairs. It’s hard to miss someone. Me, I was just sleeping.
At first it was so exciting to see my picture on the front page of the paper. There I was, the lead story. But soon I was below the fold. Sooner than I expected. They were looking for me, but th
ey weren’t hunting. The crowds at the vigils were thin. I saw Mom and my dad and Chloe in grainy pictures, trying to get people to miss me, and I had the overwhelming sense that I had ruined the lives of the people I loved.
Every time I thanked Chloe for drawing pictures of me, she deflected, she said the paper made a bigger deal of it than it was, I drew a lot of things, Jon.
But every day when I wake up here in Lynn, I turn on my light, I see all her pictures. First thing I did when I moved in was cover the walls with her art. She is everywhere you look, her eyes, her monsters. It’s like I’m inside of her. I look from one picture to another, I see her, I see me, I imagine her beside me, the miracle of her waking, rolling over, linking her arm through mine.
But even though I can’t stop thinking about Chloe, I can’t drag her into this. It really is time to let go, let her be, and this means I don’t call her anymore. It’s one thing to cover the walls with her art; she put that into the world. But I don’t get to have her friendship, much as I can still remember it so vividly, I have to cut it out.
This is fate. And some good came out of it. Because of what happened to me, she put all this beauty into the world. And now it’s my turn to do the same, my own version of that. I go outside and get my papers, the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald. I live in real Lynn, in the bottom half of a two-family in Curwin Circle. There’s a lot of affordable housing around here, Honey Dew Donuts where you wish there would be Dunkin’.
I shaved my beard. I’m not moping around anymore. I’m doing a good thing, using my poisonous muscle to help the kids in this neighborhood have a shot in life, so that they can grow up to be whatever they want to be, artists, moms, dads. I don’t work anymore, but I’ll be okay for a while. It’s amazing how much money you save when you don’t have a social life, when you don’t have to go see your friends for the game, when you don’t have friends.
Providence Page 19
