Thirty-Seven

by Peter Stenson

  “Who the fuck are you?” Talley says.

  I stare at her. I understand that I’d had it wrong before; she does not need a project and she doesn’t need somebody to talk to and she doesn’t need somebody to validate her life. She needs Honesty.

  Maybe she’s one of the few who can actually shoulder its burden.

  Maybe there are no accidents.

  Maybe I’d received enough confidence from my new haircut to walk into Talley’s Tatters. Maybe I’d been led to somebody who searched with an open desperation for Truth. Maybe we’d become friends because our True Selves recognized this in one another. And maybe we’d run into Joshua Smith because lies could only take us so far. Maybe it was the universe’s way of breaking the shackles of deceit. Maybe we were supposed to have this moment, as I’d had when I put my face to the glass of a strange mansion in the woods and saw a man and woman with bald heads hold one another.

  “Thirty-Seven,” I say.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  My body thrums with energy. Tingles and heat, pressure, buoyancy. It’s like the gift One had given me the first night on the boulder, like the gift I had given Talley while sitting on my bed. It’s the initial sliver of bliss resulting from Honesty.

  “I am Thirty-Seven.”

  “Years old? What the fuck are you…” Talley’s voice trails off. Her hand goes to her mouth. Her eyes widen and headlights light them up and I think she looks beautiful in her vulnerability of understanding. “You’re such a fucking liar,” she says. But her words are soft, a question, a plea for me to be lying.

  One always said that if a person says he was sorry, he needed to be one hundred percent committed to never repeating the same action.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “About lying. About deceiving you.”

  Talley shakes her head. She steps back. The skin connecting her ear is tight. I extend my hand and touch her arm.

  “Stay the fuck away from me.”

  “Talley.”

  “No, fuck you.”

  A group of drunk frat boys walks by and laughs.

  “Talley.”

  She doesn’t respond. She walks away and then starts to jog. I feel like crying. I am alone. The drunk guys make fun of me. I worry she’ll tell somebody. I try to calm myself by thinking she won’t say anything because she isn’t that type of girl and because I know how people work. This feels true. I know it will take time, as it had with me. I know those who search for Truth eventually find it.

  14. SICK (IV)

  They worried about my weight loss. I couldn’t keep anything down, not even liquids. One lowered my dose of Cytoxan. I was grateful for this act of kindness. I’d originally been outfitted with medium-sized black scrubs. After three weeks, I was fitting into an extra small. Five spoon-fed me rice and when I couldn’t swallow solids, she switched to chicken broth. I wanted to leave the cabin. I wanted Monday mornings with their IV bags to die. I hated everything.

  That first month was the worst month of my life.

  I’d lie there all day, trying my hardest not to move. The nausea was an unrelenting hurricane, each pulse a nation-destroying wall of sick. People held cold cloths to my head. I had an accident while I vomited into a bucket. Twenty-Two gave me a sponge bath. I didn’t care that his soap-covered hands scrubbed my genitals. I slept all the time because it was easier. I never felt rested. Sometimes I would smell my breath against the pillow, which would immediately send a gag ricocheting through my throat.

  I could see every one of my ribs.

  My eyes were sunken, just like the others.

  One night One came into the largest of the dorms. I was curled in a ball on a bottom bunk. I was on day two of my week, so the sicks were strong. He knelt down. I couldn’t smile because the pressure would hurt my teeth. He placed his hand on my forehead.

  “You’re really warm,” he said.

  I stared at a man who was killing me.

  “You’ve done so well. You really have.” He stroked my bald head. “Your search will bear tremendous gifts.”

  “Kill me.”

  One didn’t move. He stroked my head and stared at me and I was pretty sure he’d heard me, pretty sure he understood I was willing to die, ready to die, ready to do anything to stop the suffering.

  “All you have to do is say stop.”

  “Stop.”

  “Does your True Self want this, or does Mason Hues?”

  “It’s the same thing.”

  “What is gained by stopping? What do you have? Where will you go? What is better than building a family who is and has gone through exactly what you have?”

  “I want to die.”

  One lowered a little so his butt rested against the backs of his legs. Elvis played from the main room. People laughed. Nobody was as sick as me. Nobody was as young and they probably had messed up the dose and I was going to die before I could drive a car.

  “I had a little girl,” One said. “She was your age, maybe a few years younger. She got sick. I sat by her for months at a time. I stroked her hairless head, just like I am doing to you. She was the sole thing in life that gave me joy.”

  I blinked. A tear fell; they were always falling without me knowing why.

  “One night, she told me she was ready. That was all she said. I asked her what she meant. She turned around and faced the wall. I got angry. I told her she was being selfish. That it was hell on our whole family. I told her she owed it to me to keep fighting. I said I would never forgive her if she gave up.”

  One wasn’t crying, but close.

  “My daughter died that night.”

  His rubbing of my head started back up.

  “That was my biggest regret. It cost me my marriage, my career, and nearly my life. I spent so many nights hating myself for letting my fear and selfishness force my actions into the ugliest sort.”

  “Wasn’t your fault.”

  “I was steeped in fear and want. I was a prisoner to my own mortal self. I couldn’t see Truth in anything. But through this work we’re doing here, I was finally able to see that moment for exactly what it was: my daughter had reached a level of Honesty that I will forever aspire to. At that moment she told me she was ready, she accepted the falsity of human desire to thwart mortality. She was giving me the gift of seeing an example of Perfect Honesty.”

  I didn’t know what to say and I hurt and I was crying and I wanted to rescue his daughter and I wanted to be rescued.

  “So I will ask you this question one time, and respect your wishes, as I did not do with my own daughter: Do you want to die?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want to leave?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want to live in Honesty amongst a loving family of your choosing?”

  “Yes.”5

  5 According to Dr. Sick: The Survivors and The Day of Gifts, Dr. James Shepard had been married for seventeen years. He and his wife, Patti, had a single daughter, Zoe. She developed lymphoma shortly after turning thirteen. She battled this cancer at Denver Medical Center, the hospital where her father worked as an oncologist. After nearly two years of battling, Zoe Rose Shepard passed away in the Shepards’ mountain home. Henry O’Connor writes, “The irony, of course, was devastating: the nationally renowned Dr. James Shepard—a man who saved countless others from the grips of cancer—could do nothing for his own daughter. It is no great assumption to see this as the moment when Shepard’s mental crack became something of a fissure. Soon, everything around him slipped off its crumbling surface. Down and down it went—his illustrious career, his marriage, his fragile relationship with morality—everything imploding into the vortex of anger at the injustices of life.”

  15. SICK (V)

  Two things happened during my second month:

  1) My treatments lessened to once every two weeks

  2) Thirty-Eight arrived

  I was finally able to have a series of days when I wasn’t vomiting. I was able to drink fluids and
even swallow small bits of rice. I was able to get up in the morning. I was able to sit on the deck with a wool blanket wrapped around my shoulders and talk with the others. I could almost see how beautiful everything around me was. And strangely, I liked how I looked. I liked the fact I was nothing but bones and I liked the fact my head was always cold and I liked the fact everything was too big. I felt pretty, or at least like I was no different from the others.

  Then Thirty-Eight showed up. He was an older man, probably close to fifty. He rang the doorbell. We all stopped. I sat on the couch with Five. She taught me Cat’s Cradle. We looked up to see Thirty-Eight’s shape. I was scared it was my father or the police or some other male authority figure who was bent on doing bad things. One walked through the living room. He opened the door a crack.

  “James.”

  “Bob? My God, it’s good to see you.” One stepped outside. I could see the old guy peering over One’s shoulder, a look of confused panic on his face.

  Five told me we should go downstairs. I followed. The rest of us gathered down there. A few of us were worried because One had obviously known this man, but the man sure hadn’t looked like he’d known what we were up to. Somebody said there was nothing to worry about; there were no accidents. Somebody else said that we could be arrested. For what? For the administration of controlled substances. For attempted murder. There are no accidents. One will know what to do. I’m scared. Don’t live in fear.

  One was gone for a long time.

  We sat there in the basement listening to Elvis, helping those who were struggling, pretending we weren’t terrified of what was occurring outside of our doors. It was close to eight o’clock when we heard the back door finally open. We all looked up the stairs. We waited. One walked down.

  He looked stern and he looked old and he maybe looked worried.

  But then he smiled.

  We let out a communal sigh.

  “Thirty-Eight is still searching. His search led him here. He was looking for the man I used to be, one he knew had experienced the loss of a loved one. But he found the man I now am. He will be back.”

  Three weeks went by, and then there was a knocking at our door. One answered. Thirty-Eight stood there with a small duffle bag. His eyes were rimmed red with tears. He stared at us and then One took hold of the back of Thirty-Eight’s head and pressed his forehead against his and I smiled because it was beautiful, the relief I could see washing over Thirty-Eight, his shoulders heaving with sobs, the gift of the first sliver of living in Honesty.

  I liked Thirty-Eight.

  He was kind and broken and quiet.

  Being the newest member of the family, I became his Big Brother. I showed him around. We hiked a half mile, at which point I got sick and nearly collapsed. He held me. He wanted to be of use. He wanted to be needed. I leaned against his old body on the walk back home. I allowed him to speak to me about his past, as One told me was allowed during his first two weeks. He’d been a partner at Denver Medical Center. He’d been a radiologist. His marriage fell apart when his youngest son became addicted to opiates, going through the revolving door of treatments and sober living facilities and relapses, and now was homeless, somewhere, anywhere, going on nine months, maybe dead. He said he hadn’t known what to do. He said he’d thought of James, the tragic loss he’d gone through, and had driven out here guided by the faintest memory of visiting the cabin some twenty years before.

  I fought the selfish need for Thirty-Eight to be my father.

  I pressed my forehead to his. We looked in the whites of one another’s eyes.

  After two weeks, we sat around a fire. The second snow of the season fell. I sat next to Thirty-Eight. I rubbed his back. One stood. He made eye contact with each and every one of us. Thirty-Eight stood. I helped Five undress him. She motioned for me to take hold of his arm. I cradled his elbow and wrist and snow fell and One inserted a needle and then I held the plastic bag above my head and we clapped and we were warm and happy or at least content.

  I nursed Thirty-Eight through his first month.

  I hardly ever left his side, always with a cup of Pedialyte and a cold washcloth. Always there to tell him I was proud. Always there to tell him he was doing well. Always there to say we all loved him.

  In his third week, he told me he wanted to die.

  I knelt by the bottom bunk. I stroked his paper-thin hair. I told him about growing up in a house with a father who pleasured himself in my doorway while he thought I was asleep. I told him I’d wanted nothing more than a father who loved me. I told him I was tortured with knowing my father’s actions were wrong, but wanting to take part in them, if only for the physical contact I could perceive as love. I told him I ran away. I told him I came here. I told him I’d never been happier. I’d never felt more loved. I’d never felt more capable of love. I said that each day I thought less and less about the loss in my life, less and less about myself.

  Thirty-Eight cried.

  I started stroking his head again.

  I told him each person had their own journey; some of them led to Honesty, some of them led to deceit. I said his own son was in the midst of this journey. Thirty-Eight blinked in the form of a nod. I told him I would have given anything to have such a loving man as my father. I told him I was grateful to have the chance to choose him as part of my loving family.

  We were silent.

  I said, “I’ll ask you this once, and only once, understood?”

  He nodded.

  “Do you want to die?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want to leave?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want to live in Honesty with a loving family of your choosing?”

  Thirty-Eight tried to smile. I knelt forward and kissed his forehead. He smelled like rotting cheese and grape-flavored drink. I didn’t care. He clasped his fingers through mine. He closed his eyes. I held his hand until he was granted the gift of sleep.

  16. REPRIEVE

  This story isn’t about drugs. Not Cytoxan or DMT.6

  6 Henry O’Connor writes extensively about the use of N,N-Dimethyltryptamine among The Survivors. He dedicates two chapters of Dr. Sick to this very topic. He makes outlandish claims about the drug’s importance in Dr. James Shepard’s teachings. He paints pictures that aren’t true by writing I imagine as a subtle preface. Of course he connects our use of DMT to sex, which is ridiculous to anyone who has actually taken the drug; for several infinite minutes, there is no reality outside of your mind’s eye.

  I imagine this fraction of our story has a certain flashy appeal. It gives a causal relationship to what happened later. It probably helped sell the pitch. I don’t blame Henry O’Connor because somewhere near the heart of his book is the search for Truth. He asks important questions. It’s not his fault he’s steeped in want of literary acclaim, which happens to be the subject his fallacies have rooted themselves in, propagating the notion of their arrival bringing happiness.

  Perhaps O’Connor’s real obsession with Reprieve is the paper trail it left of James and the rest of us. For a group operating in peaceful harmony for close to three years, a group living in a home with running utilities and paid taxes, a family which multiplied through happenstance and murmurs from sick mouths, there was hardly any information about what occurred inside of those angular glass-covered walls. Really, there was only the information from the DEA, and then my testimony. There was a paper trail connecting James to YYCIM Laboratories in Hoboken, New Jersey. And when YYCIM was raided—a single brick building left over from the American industry days of leather tanning, three employees total (a chemist, a shipper, and a bookkeeper)—and electronic ledgers were discovered, decoded, and pursued, Dr. James Shepard’s name became a very small blip on the DEA’s screen. Three different shipments of two ounces of DMT were sent to a Denver condo, one owned by Shepard, one none of us knew about. The DEA had much bigger concerns with other YYCIM clients; the amount shipped to Shepard was a laughable joke, one no
t worth the manpower of sending a single county deputy up the roads of Marble, Colorado, to investigate.

  But it was something.

  Something O’Connor could use his questionable journalistic skills to investigate. Something that gave causes. Something that formed the types of stereotypes both he and the public fostered regarding “cults.” Drugs and sex. Mind control. Felonies on top of felonies. Fire. Hedonism. Pedophilia. Polygamy. Why? Because this is the easier way. This is a way that keeps those reading safe. Their constructed walls of lies, wants, and fears are reinforced with this mental picture of drug-fueled orgies. They know they are not the type to experiment with heavy psychedelics. Heavy psychedelics are used in brainwashing; therefore, they are not the type to be brainwashed.

  Modus ponens.

  Everybody wants to infer Truth.

  This version is so much easier to understand than a group of people finding one another and building lives based on the search for Truth amongst a loving family of their own choosing.

  We don’t fear the cliff—we fear jumping.

  How much easier is it to tell your children to stay away from drugs than to stay away from people who question the reason over half of marriages end in divorce, who wonder why one in five girls and one in twenty boys are sexually abused, who can’t wrap their heads around the notion of buying bigger and more exclusive homes in order to isolate us even further when all we want is to be touched in nonsexual ways.

  O’Connor knew the name Dr. James Shepard gave to our monthly ingesting of DMT. He writes, “Reprieve: to cancel or postpone the punishment of (someone, someone especially condemned to death). It is hard to imagine a more apt naming for The Survivors’ hallucinogenic ceremonies. Here they were, literally being killed by a man who claimed to be their savior [Never once did One claim to be anything close to a savior], only to believe this moment of dissociation caused by DMT to be a gift, when in fact, it further cemented them into mental servitude to Shepard, further placing him on the pedestal of Celestial Other.”