Thirty-Seven

by Peter Stenson

  I wore my civilian clothes, the ones I’d shown up in. The jeans were four inches too big around the waist. The bus was half full and I rested my head against the window and the vibrations made me sleepy. Across the aisle, a little girl played with her mother’s phone. She smiled at me and her teeth were a mess, but I thought she was cute and I hoped she’d have a good life.

  I fell asleep.

  I awoke when we stopped moving.

  I asked the little girl’s mom where we were and she told me Golden and I thanked her and got off the bus. It was dusk. My coat wasn’t warm enough. I stood in the Walmart parking. Part of me wanted to go inside and get gloves, but that seemed selfish. I headed up the hill, away from the quaint and artificial downtown. Rows of subdivisions stuck out against a hill that might have been a mountain.

  One hadn’t really given me instructions. He’d listened to my vision and told me to enact it. He said Honesty would guide me. He told me I’d know what to do.

  I walked about a half mile. I turned down a residential street. They had lamps, so I kept walking. Every house was mostly dark except for a bottom room with the epileptic flashing of television sets. I kept my hands in my jacket pockets. I ran my right hand over the plastic handle of the knife.

  I turned twice more—once left, once right.

  The houses were nice but maybe not as nice as they’d been before.

  There weren’t street lamps.

  I stopped in front of a house with Christmas decorations. An inflatable Frosty waved in the breeze. Red and blue and green lights dangled from the porch ceiling. An actual snowman stood next to Frosty. There were two plastic sleds next to the front door. I noticed some of the trampled snow was discolored.

  It was here where I was given my second Gift of Understanding.

  Like my first, it came with a sudden flash of a three-second movie clip: a family of four, a family ascending in tax brackets, a family who went to church and felt blessed with having a son before a daughter, a family who cherished the ritualization of the seasons and of the day and of bath time and story time and Eskimo kisses. It was a family who hadn’t been forced to question a single thing in their lives. Nothing. Hard work and God granting them their entitled slice of America.

  But it wasn’t enough.

  I knew this; I’d lived this.

  I knew the wife was already getting bored. I knew something nagged inside of her, told her she could’ve done more, and this feeling had attached itself to buying more accessories for her house, cemented itself in the notion of needing her children to be better than the others at their all-Caucasian elementary school. It would be affairs before long. The same with the husband. His itch would take the form of weeklong guys’ trips where other cuckolded dads would pretend they were blue collar and single and happy. The kids: they didn’t have a chance. They’d grow up seeing life as a checklist, one that needed to be completed but bore no fruit. They would follow a damned path because they believed themselves without options.

  The family, as a whole, was entombed in Self.

  They lived their entire existence based on first loves, favorite memories, and biggest regrets.

  Every single action they took was meant to fortify them from suffering, from Truth.

  The walkway was shoveled. I headed around the side of the house. I thought about traceable footprints but not really. I was a ghost to these people. The backyard was smaller and unused. I understood this was because it was where the dog went to the bathroom. I avoided mounds of brown. I walked to the back door. A black square covered the bottom third of the door. I walked along the edge of the two stairs so as to not make them creak. I felt like my father walking to my room. I knelt. I pulled the doggy door back with the tip of my buck knife. A gush of warm air blew past the heavy plastic flap. The opening was big, but not big enough for a dog I had to worry about.

  I was giving them a gift.

  I was enacting change.

  I bit down on the blade. I put my left arm through the opening, then my head, then my right. The only light on inside came from the plugged-in appliances. My ribs pressed against the opening. I was quiet. I kept pulling and then my torso lay against their wooden floor. I turned over onto my back, careful as I slid my legs through the doggy door.

  That was when I heard the pattering of nails.

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out a half-eaten package of Nutter Butters I’d purchased at the Greyhound station. I positioned myself on my knees. A white poodle rounded the corner of the kitchen island. It barked once upon seeing me. I was all smiles and whispered placations, my left hand outstretched, my treat an offering. The poodle stared. It sniffed. Its manicured tail wagged. This dog was the same as the family, it had been conditioned to be oblivious to threats. Its nose was cold against my palm. It ate the cookies. I petted its curly hair. I ran fingers behind its floppy ears. It licked the floor for remnants of peanut butter. I needed to act and it needed to be now and it was the right thing because it served the greater good of humanity, but also these people, and my body tingled and there were no accidents and I thought of how pleased One had been when I’d shared my plan and I brought my right hand to my mouth and took hold of the knife’s handle and the dog licked my arm and I took hold of the scruff of its neck and pulled its head back and saw the soft spot underneath its jaw and brought the blade to its throat and thought of seeing One and Five drunk in Las Vegas and how this wasn’t Honest and then about Five lying to me as we walked in the ocean and something deep inside of me told me change could be enacted without the finality of death.

  I stood.

  The poodle walked with me over to the refrigerator.

  They had a magnetized to-do list with a golf pencil attached to it.

  I pulled the list down and walked to the island. I petted the dog. I wrote: I could have killed every single one of you. You can’t fortify yourselves from TRUTH. Reading this note is my gift to you.

  I left the note on the granite countertop. I walked back to the door. I thought about opening it, but worried about an alarm. I crouched down and pushed the rubber flap. The dog barked. I spun around and told him he was a good boy and to be quiet. He barked again, three shrill yelps. I grabbed hold of his snout. I squeezed and told him no. He whimpered. I let go. He was quiet. But when I crouched back down, he barked once more, and in that instant, I acted without thinking, grabbing the scruff of his neck, lifting him off the floor. I undid the deadbolt and opened the door. There was no alarm, at least nothing audible. I shut the door and carried the dog across the backyard and into an alley. He whimpered. I set him down, still holding onto his neck. I undid my belt and wrapped it through his collar. Lights turned on in the house I’d just been in. I ran the dog down the alley. I looked back. The kitchen lights turned on. I knew the husband was searching for his dog. I knew he was now coming across the note I’d written. I knew his entire sense of the world had been demolished. I knew he was being forced up against the Truth that promotions and Christmas cards and weekend trips to the mountains weren’t enough to keep bad things at bay.

  I let the dog go without its collar a mile from the house and bought a Greyhound ticket to Glenwood Springs that left at seven in the morning. I found a truck stop diner and ordered toast and a Mr. Pibb. A few truckers eyed me like my father had when he walked into my room, pretending he hadn’t known I was changing. I kept my eyes down. I worked my nail file against Thirty-Eight’s and Fifteen’s teeth, alternating every five minutes. I debated if I should tell One what I’d really done or lie about having killed a dog. I wondered if he’d be able to tell if I were being Honest. I’d come too far to start engaging in selfish forms of communication. There were no accidents. I’d written that note for a reason, a reason I couldn’t quite understand, but maybe didn’t need to understand.

  But that was bullshit.

  I understood exactly why I’d written the note: fear breeds sickness.

  One had never said this, but it was the operational Truth everythin
g else he taught stemmed from.

  Therefore, fear bears change.

  And I’d just given the world something to fear.

  24. SICK (III)

  Two’s having trouble swallowing. She grimaces every few seconds. At night, she doesn’t bother trying to shield me from this sight, letting her saliva soak my pillows. I ask to see the inside of her throat. She opens her mouth. Her breath is a sour I know well. Her throat is angry and swollen with a pristine coating of freshly fallen snow around her tonsils. I tell her she needs to see a doctor and she tells me she’s fine.

  Two days later, I see her holding her throat as she swallows. It’s like she’s trying to make her esophagus larger by pulling her skin outward. I tell her enough is enough and she puts up a small protest but I insist.

  She goes to urgent care.

  She comes back five hours later with antibiotics and painkillers and some sort of numbing agent she’s to drink. She tells me she’s burnt all of the tender lining of her throat. The burns have become infected. She says the doctor gave her a lecture about bulimia.

  Two won’t stop with her doses of ipecac.

  I make sure she at least takes the antibiotics after she’s swallowed and expelled the poison.

  25. THE NOTES

  One wasn’t upset about the changing of my plan. He wasn’t mad I hadn’t killed the dog. He kept asking what I’d written. I told him again and again. He mulled over these words. The skin connecting his ear wasn’t tight but wasn’t loose either.

  That night, One gathered all of us downstairs.

  He said that those of us who’d enacted change had done very well. He said change had to start somewhere. He said people were living different lives than they were twenty-four hours before. Then One looked at me. He winked. He said, “An ingenious idea has been brought to my attention. This will further our goal while minimizing any potential risk. We will utterly shake the foundation of this nation’s false sense of security. It will be called The Notes.”

  One bought a laptop in Glenwood Springs. He didn’t pay for Internet at the house, but he’d go into town and sit at the coffee shop to use their Wi-Fi. He said he needed to keep tabs on our progress. This seemed reasonable.

  He’d come back to the house where we waited. He’d tell us about a small town in Idaho where a note showed up. He’d tell us a wife being interviewed in Spokane cried hysterically, told the reporter and the world that nobody was safe. A death threat in Madison, Wisconsin. Helena, Montana. Salt Lake City, Utah.

  After a month, CNN ran a ninety-second story about a series of ominous notes left in homes across the western United States. They showed one note from Lawrence, Kansas. I wasn’t sure whose handwriting it was. It read, “I could have killed every single one of you. You can’t fortify yourselves from TRUTH. Reading this note is my gift to you.” They speculated about the culprits, the causes, the probability of this being some sort of viral Internet hoax. They showed one family in Reno who sat on a couch, each of them touching some part of another. The father said, “It [the note] made us realize how precious life really is. In a strange way, it brought us closer together.”

  The farthest east we went was Toledo. The farthest south was El Paso. We wrote fifty-six notes. Most of us just wrote one, but those traveling long distances sometimes did two. One forbade me to take another trip. He told me I had done my part. He told me it was of more importance to focus on a rededication to sickness so as to stave off any grandiosity that may arrive from enacting change on such a large scale.

  I agreed.

  I started a new cycle of chemo.

  I cried into a plastic paint bucket.

  But it was different this time; the sicker I became, the closer to Honesty I felt. I was greedy to experience paralyzing pain because I knew the rewards awaiting me.7

  7 Henry O’Connor obviously has a chapter on The Notes. But the chapter doesn’t really get the essence of what the notes were meant to accomplish. Instead, O’Connor focuses on their sentiment, the breaking and entering, the dispersal of The Survivors across the country as individual “cells of terrorism”—as a precursor to The Day of Gifts. He writes, “Much like the heroin addict’s gateway drug being a loosely rolled joint, The Notes were The Survivors’ initial foray into the world of inflicting terror. They experienced a taste; they wanted more. Fear became their drug of choice. The only cure was an act inspiring greater amounts of it.”

  Maybe this is true.

  Maybe we felt the rush that came from enacting change.

  Maybe we understood what it meant to be feared.

  I don’t know. I really don’t.

  But I do know that The Notes were not merely a stepping stone to The Day of Gifts. They were an end in their own right. They were a tool to shatter the nation’s selfish walls of false security. They were meant to cause suffering. They were meant to have people turn toward Honesty. They were meant to accomplish exactly what the family in Reno professed.

  26. SICK (IV)

  Two and I are at Talley’s Tatters. It’s Wednesday afternoon. We’re sick, but not that sick, and we’re listening to a collection of Elvis covers. Two isn’t wearing a wig, as has become habit.

  The door opens.

  Derek walks in. He’s skinnier than I remember, but not like us. His is a form of his stature, ours a form of sickness. He looks at me and then Two and he does a double take at her bald head and he almost smiles but doesn’t.

  “Jesus, Talley, are you okay?”

  I watch Two. She has become nervous, her energy pulling inward, her right arm crossing her stomach. I know she’s thinking about her appearance and about being bald and about the love she’d believed to share with this man, the love she’d conjured in her childhood, the love that looked so much like passion yielding to suburban domestication.

  “What are…”

  “The hair?” Derek says.

  “…you doing here?”

  “I came to see…” Derek looks. He steps closer to Two. “Is there somewhere we can talk?”

  “Talk ?” Two says.

  “More privately?”

  “I don’t have anything to say to you.”

  “Baby, please.”

  They both turn in my direction. I put up my hands to indicate I understand they want me gone. I get off the stool behind the counter.

  “No, you’re good,” Two says. “Stay.”

  “Then can we step outside?” Derek says.

  “No.”

  “Baby.”

  “Not your baby.”

  “Please.”

  “Anything you have to say, you can say in front of…Mason.”

  “Are you two…” Derek looks at Two, then me. I don’t turn my gaze, but stare even harder. Derek’s mind is sex, like most every other person’s. That’s how the world makes sense to him. That’s how he understands his ex-girlfriend’s refusal to speak to him— the only possible cause being another man, not himself, a complete denial of culpability for his actions.

  Derek says, “You’ve got to be kidding me. Him? You’re fucking him?”

  “What if I am?” Two says.

  “Then you’re an even bigger slut than I thought.”

  Two smiles. She looks down, rubbing her hand over her scalp. She looks back at Derek, still grinning. “You’re so fucking pathetic.”

  Derek reaches forward and touches Two’s arm and she recoils and he frowns and says, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

  “There are no accidents.”

  “What? Baby, that’s what I came here to talk about. What happened…it was an accident. I was drunk and one thing led to another and—”

  “I pity you,” Two says.

  “Can we please just talk in private?”

  “Because you’re so full of shit and you have no idea.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “The whole I’m a rock star thing is so trite. So false. You live in Denver. You play venues where you know the booking agent. You’re nothing.”


  Derek makes another reach for Two’s arm. She slaps his hand. It’s Derek’s turn to laugh, to feign bewilderment. His body language becomes empathetic and he tries one more time. “People are worried. You’ve completely disappeared. Nobody’s seen you. Are you okay? Like health-wise and everything?”

  “Never felt better.”

  “Why don’t you come out tonight? No pressure with us or whatever, but just come hang out. Everyone misses you.”

  “Everyone who hasn’t called in over a month?”

  “What? Yeah. No. We’re worried,” he says. “I’m worried.”

  “There are no accidents.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I was supposed to see you with those girls.”

  “I was drunk, baby. Completely wasted. I’m so sorry. You have to believe me.”

  Two reaches out her hand. She strokes the side of Derek’s face. He smiles. She rubs his cheek. She says, “Right here.” She moves her hands to Derek’s eyes. He closes his lids. He’s a born-again awaiting holy water. “And right here.” She brings her hand back to her side. Derek opens up his eyes; there’s hope there. I understand what she is doing and I love her and am proud like a parent or maybe a little brother.

  “Those two places can’t lie.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Yes, yes you are. But that’s okay. I don’t fault you for this. You have no defense against deceit.”

  “Baby.”

  Two shakes her head. Derek understands this is a moment of finality. His energy builds. He rubs his nose with the back of his hand. He shakes his head, forces himself to smile.

  “This is a mistake,” he says. He nods in my direction. “This fucking creep…not your finest moment.”

  “It was great seeing you,” Two says.

  “Whenever you’re done playing identity crisis with that freak, come find me. No, strike that. You had your chance.”

  “And what a marvelous chance it was.”