Thirty-Seven

by Peter Stenson

  “They’re playing tonight. You should come.”

  “Tonight isn’t—”

  “Shut the fuck up. You’re coming.”

  There is no reason I can’t go. There’s no reason not to do anything. She walks toward me. She kind of moves to the music and then she moves a little bit more. She takes the shirt I’m steaming off the rack and holds it to her chest, her left arm outstretched. She dances around with it in a circle and she looks back at me and I grin because she needs me to. She needs me to approve of Derek. She needs me to approve of her life. She needs me as a project and a father. I can give her these things. I really can.

  I meet Talley outside of A Fine Line at a quarter to ten that night. She wears the same red dress, but she’s altered it, cut out the middle, dissecting the garment into a skirt and matching crop. Her belly button is confused if it wants to hide or be seen and her stomach has abdominal definition and she smokes a cigarette. She wraps her arm around me. She smells like alcohol and incense.

  She pays my cover. The bouncer is a fat, bearded man who stares at me for too long as he marks both of my hands with giant black X’s. Most of the people are white and in their mid-twenties. A bar runs the length of one side of the building. A blonde who looks like she doesn’t know how not to be a bartender takes our orders. I ask for a Mr. Pibb. Talley giggles. The bartender tells me she could do a Coke with some grenadine and I tell her that sounds good. Talley has her hand on my back. I feel like an accessory. Somebody has body odor and I realize it’s Talley and this smell makes me think of love. She introduces me to a group of people. I don’t listen to their names because names don’t matter. More people crowd around the high-top. I feel badly for wanting Derek’s band to fail because that’s really about my own selfish fears. Old Cream plays from the speakers.

  Talley turns to me. She digs around in her vintage clutch. She looks over both shoulders. She tells me to stick out my hand. I do. She places two capsules and some sort of hard candy in my palm.

  It takes me a second to realize they’re drugs of some sort.

  “What’s wrong?” Talley says.

  “Nothing. I didn’t want anyone to see.”

  “All the narcs, you mean?”

  I nod

  She laughs. She leans forward, kind of yelling into my ear that I’m paranoid. I want to tell her that people who’ve spent thirty months in locked rooms have the right to be paranoid, but I stay silent.

  “Take them now. Derek will go on in like ten minutes. Timing will be perfect.”

  The only drugs I’ve ever done were with the family. Every full moon, we sat around a campfire. The only people excused were those in the first two weeks of their treatments. We’d sit around with blankets, all of us staring into the fire, our shoulders touching, sometimes holding onto one another. One called it Reprieve. He said it wasn’t a shirking of Self because DMT, above all else, forced somebody against Truth. We’d sit there and we’d be silent and then we’d take our tin foil and then One would give us a sign and then we’d light the foil and we’d breathe in smoke, both the chemical-tasting smoke of the DMT and the thick smoke of the fire, and then we would experience Reprieve.

  I ask Talley what the pills are.

  “Molly. And the candy is an edible.”

  I’ve never taken ecstasy and I’m not sure what it will do to me. At CMHIP, they preached the dangers of drugs with people who’ve experienced psychiatric trauma.

  “It’s totally safe,” Talley says. She puts her arm around my waist. My elbow brushes against her flat belly. She needs me to approve of her life. Her choices. She needs me to have fun.

  “I’ll help you through. Be at your side the whole time. You’ll love it, I swear.”

  I glance down at Talley. Her nose is dotted with blackheads. I love this about her.

  She says, “After all, I gave you a job…”

  “You’re going to hold that over my head forever, aren’t you?”

  “Until you realize the job sucks and quit, yes.”

  I laugh.

  Talley slips two pills into her mouth.

  I’ve ingested worse things.

  I swallow the pills and then eat the cherry candy.

  We stand and stare at an empty stage. Talley bounces around from person to person. She comes back ten minutes later. She stands on her tiptoes and presses her mouth to my ear. I’d done the same to One my first night in Marble. I’d told him my first love, my favorite memory, and my biggest regret.

  Talley says, “What about him?” She points across the bar. A skinny kid dressed in black stands next to a speaker. “I could totally see you together. Hot. It’d be a hot sight.”

  Talley thinks I’m gay.

  I guess this makes sense. It’s why she’d kept asking if I thought Derek was cute. It’s why she feels okay hanging all over me. It’s probably why she gave me a job at her shop. I’m about to correct her, when I stop myself, because it doesn’t matter. I am there to serve Tally and to give her what she needs from life because I have nothing and no one and everyone presents false Selves anyway.

  “Too skinny,” I say.

  “Really? Are you a chubby chaser?”

  “A what?”

  “A chubby chaser. You cruise for brutes?”

  “I’m picky.”

  “Top or bottom?”

  I’d been both in juvie. It wasn’t rape and it wasn’t even true homosexuality. It was the need for intimacy inside of a system designed to alienate the already alienated. The sex had lasted for five days. My cellmate, Jerome, said if I told anyone he’d slit my throat. He ended up smashing my head against the wall three times on the sixth night. Evidently, he believed a preemptive strike was the best course of action. He told everyone I’d tried to touch his junk and then I was simply referred to as Faggot and then I quit talking and then I was transferred to CMHIP.

  The truth is, I can be anyone Talley wants me to be. I can be any person anyone could ever want.

  The band walks out of a side door and onto the stage raised two feet off the floor. Talley screams. Some people clap. Derek has a red guitar around his neck. I wonder if this is why Talley wore the red dress. Derek steps front and center. He thanks us for coming out. He calls us a bunch of cocksuckers. People like this. Sometimes people like to be insulted because it’s a form of validation of how they really see themselves. One didn’t say that, but it’s something he might have thought.

  The music starts.

  It’s too loud, all symbols and mumbled vocals. Talley dances with her hands raised, her head shaking back and forth, the synthetic edges of her hair brushing her chin. The song ends and then they play one that sounds the same. I know I’ll have a headache. The third song is a little different, the tempo slower, the drums muted. Derek sings. I listen to his words, something about love and true love and eternal love, and I look over at Talley and she beams the smile of a cherished little girl and then I yawn a big yawn that might have lasted an hour and then everything is amazing. The music no longer is too loud. I want it louder. I want it to fill my capillaries. I want to be touched. I want to be surrounded by more pressing bodies. I want to be given a sponge bath. I want to confess all of these wants and I want to not chastise myself for having desires.

  I turn to Talley. She takes one look at me and giggles and then wraps her arms around me. My forehead is so close to pressing against hers.

  “How you doing there, Mr. Hues?”

  “I feel beautiful.”

  “You are.”

  We dance for a long while and my mind’s occupied with all the usual suspects of shame and sex and love, but there are new ones tossed in—seeing beauty for the first time in three years, believing myself capable of being something besides a sharer of secrets, the notion of friends who at least liked me—and I try the coping mechanisms they preached in CMHIP, the concentration on a particular color. Yellow, everything is yellow, lens flares and levity and new beginnings, the counting of my shallow breaths—in, two, three, four,
out, two three, four—the repetition of a single word, love, love, love, and maybe this isn’t the best choice because I’m back sitting around a campfire being held by Five and she’s telling me I’m the strongest person she knows and beautiful and capable of greatness.

  5. A LOOSE AND BROAD NARRATIVE

  Talley says I’m the little brother she never had. She says she feels more comfortable around me than any other person in her life. She pauses. “Well, maybe not more than Derek.”

  I smile because this is a correction of formality rather than Truth.

  We sit against the brick wall outside of A Fine Line. Derek’s band is on set break. I’m destroyed in a good way. I wonder why people don’t take drugs all of the time and then I realize they do and they’re addicts and they die. This is their own form of chemotherapy. My teeth chatter from deluges of dopamine. Talley has my hand in her lap. She strokes my fingers without noticing.

  “You dance so pretty,” Talley says.

  “You do.”

  “I feel like you were sent to me.”

  “Sent how?”

  “From the universe or God or something,” Talley says.

  “There’s no God.”

  “But there’s energy.”

  “Which can neither be created nor destroyed,” I say.

  “Exactly. That’s what I’m saying. My life was lacking something, and you came. It was lacking your exact energy and then you walked through with your cute little bag of applications.”

  “I got a haircut that day.”

  “Sexy as fuck.”

  “Creation myths.”

  “Fuck Creationists.”

  “Your dress has a rip in it.”

  “Do you like?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think I’m going to get married to Derek?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Because sickness bears Honesty and Honesty bears change.”

  “You think he’s not being honest with me?”

  “Nobody is honest with anybody.”

  “I’m honest with you.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “I swear to fucking God I have been. What haven’t I been honest with you about?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say.

  “No, serious, what have I lied to you about?”

  “To yourself,” I say.

  Talley quits stroking my hand. She shivers against me or maybe that’s me shivering against her.

  “Ask me anything, and I’ll tell you the truth,” Talley says. “That’s impossible.”

  “No, it’s not. Like the CIA or some shit used Molly like truth serum. Impossible to lie on this stuff.”

  “Who was the first person you loved?”

  “Jared Boykin.”

  I laugh at the last name. Talley hits me and then takes hold of my hand and brings my entire arm to her lap. She wraps her bent knees around my elbow.

  “What about him did you love?”

  “He was the sexiest guy in the tenth grade.”

  “How did it end?”

  “Missy Bowman blew him at a party my parents wouldn’t let me go to.”

  I nod. Talley turns. She says, “See, hundred percent honesty.”

  I shake my head, but I’m too high to press the subject. She tells me it’s my turn.

  “I’ve never been in love,” I say.

  “Bullshit.”

  “Not love like that.”

  “Then tell me something True. Anything.”

  “I’ve done bad things.”

  “We’ve all done bad things.”

  “I am steeped in want.”

  “We’re all steeped in want.”

  “I know more about people than probably ninety-nine percent of the population.”

  “Besides how to interact with them.”

  “None of what I’m saying is true. It’s true, but not really. It’s true, but it’s also warped with how I want you to view me.”

  “How do you want me to view you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You want to know how I see you?”

  I nod.

  “You’re sweet. You’re scared. You’re confused. You’re in need of something deeper than all this bullshit.”

  “A loose and broad narrative.”

  “How do you see me?”

  “Beautiful and broken and trying really hard.”

  “Ouch,” Talley says.

  “That was close to Honesty.”

  “Do you think Derek cheats on me?”

  “Yes.”

  Talley quits smiling. The thought of Derek loving another girl is evidently enough to puncture her chemical euphoria. She starts crying or maybe she’s simply sniffling from the sudden drop in temperature.

  We’re quiet.

  A girl in a miniskirt yells into her cellphone. A couple walks their husky mutt. A cab creeps by and the driver’s skin is invisible in the black night.

  “Why do guys cheat?”

  “Because they are scared of dying.”

  “That’s a bullshit response.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “What do they want?”

  “To break time through love.”

  “You’re a poet.”

  “I’m an actor.”

  “Is this conversation Honest?”

  “Closer than most.”

  “Why don’t you exist online?”

  “I don’t have a computer,” I say.

  “That’s not the real reason.”

  “But it’s a reason.”

  “Who are you really?”

  “Thirty-Seven.”

  “Thirty-seven what?”

  “Minutes we’ve been out here.”

  “We should go in.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you like the music?”

  “It’s growing on me.”

  “You never answered my question before. About your first love. Who’s the guy who broke that cute little heart of yours for the first time?”

  I stand. It’s freezing not pressed against Talley. She extends her hands. I take them and drape her arms around my neck. “I’ve never been in love,” I say.

  “Right, that’s what you say. Then tell me something else. Something true, as you keep calling it.”

  “Sometimes Truth is equivalent to want.”

  “Then what do you want? Right this minute. What do you want to do more than anything?”

  I speak with as much Honesty as I can. “To press my forehead against yours.”

  Talley doesn’t laugh. She doesn’t even smile. She stands on her tiptoes and leans forward and then she presses forward and I close my eyes and press back, and we push harder, push and push, sweat and grease and pressure, and I breathe in her body odor and feel lust and communion, and it’s One pushing back, One inviting me into his family and into his soul, One demonstrating we are equals because we are riddled with flaws. I open my eyes. Talley has hers open, too, like she knows that the whites of the eyes can’t lie.

  6. SELF TO OTHER

  I was scared when I arrived at One’s house. I was scared because I’d run away and because nobody went by actual names, just numbers, and because the whole scene struck me as rather cultish. But mostly, I was scared because everyone was sick.

  I’d never been around sick people. I had a friend whose younger brother died of cancer but that whole experience was kept at the sterile distance of get well cards and an uncomfortable suit standing in a cemetery in the autumn of my tenth year on this earth. I was scared of germs. I hated the flu. I didn’t even like being around old people, their bodies in the throes of rapid decay.

  Then why did I show up with only a backpack at One’s door?3

  Everyone was thin. So thin. The kind of thin that anorexia only made a feeble mockery of. Their eyes—Five’s and Twenty-Six’s and even One’s—were set so deep within their ashen tombs. The black scrubs hung off of their frames. Elbows were the prominent feature.
Bald heads. Stained teeth. Constant looks of exhaustion. Inhales with a wince; exhales with an excruciating closing of the eyes.

  One had his arm around my shoulder. He brought me through the main room with its couches and pillows and lounging sick. The ceiling was two stories high, three in the front. They tried to smile. They tried to hug me. They tried to tell me I was brave. The overwhelming smell was a lemony cleaner. I looked inside of paint buckets filled with bright yellow bile. Welcome, Thirty-Seven. I told myself it was better than home. I told myself these people weren’t contagious. I told myself I’d been led here by my father.

  The kitchen was beautiful, cedar logs and a marble island and stainless-steel appliances. One opened the refrigerator. There were rows and rows of grape Pedialyte. One brought me down a hallway. The walls were bare, but I saw the sun-stained outline of once-hung pictures. He opened a door to a bedroom with four sets of bunk beds. Bald people slept. The smell wasn’t citrus cleaner, but vomit. He showed me another room with more of the same. And then two more. One told me everyone moved a single bed upwards a day. This was to ensure none of us got too comfortable with the material, while also fostering a larger circle of trust.

  One brought me downstairs. The basement was finished and pretty with its logs and lush carpet. People lay around on pillows. A woman held a feather to a man’s face. She traced his closed eyes. He tried to smile or maybe tried not to.

  I needed to leave.

  This—whatever it was—wasn’t for me. I wasn’t a hippie and I didn’t believe in God and I wasn’t sick and didn’t want that to change. I was a kid. I was the youngest person by at least five years.

  “You’re looking a little pale, Thirty-Seven,” One said.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Let’s grab some fresh air.”

  “Okay.”

  I followed One up the stairs. I’d get outside and then leave. I’d tell him I’d made a mistake. I’d tell him I was sorry for wasting his time.

  We walked out the patio door. The mountains were big and black. I was finally able to breathe. One led me down some wooden stairs. We took a path that started out cobblestone but turned into dirt after a few minutes. I thought about running. One’s breathing was labored from the slight incline. I felt like Hansel.