“I’m afraid I’m not following.”
I wasn’t either. My head hurt or maybe felt congested. There had to be a mistake; there had to be a reason.
“It doesn’t mean One killed her.”
“Please, let us refer to One as Dr. Shepard.”
“This doesn’t prove that One killed her. She could’ve…”
“Yes?”
I was at a loss for words; I was at a loss for self-preserving rationale. It was at this moment when things started to crack. Or maybe they were long-since fractured, and this was when other voices filled those fissures with mold-producing half-truths.
Looking back, I’m not sure why I found it so hard to believe One would’ve killed his wife. I know he killed Thirty-Eight and Twenty-Nine. I saw him kill two DEA agents. I was instructed by him to partake in The Day of Gifts. But that’s not even it. No, I now know how easily life can be taken. I know that small things happen and circumstances warrant reactions and reactions can cost lives. I know because I’ve done it. I was trying to change the world through giving those in need freedom from shame. I was trying to give Two a different life, one with meaning, one that lead to Truth instead of consumerism and the cannibalization of others. And I acted out of Honesty—primal, very-base-of-the-brain-stem Honesty— when I killed those Juggalos, who would’ve done the same to us.
There are no accidents.
Or maybe everything is an accident and life is nothing but creating narratives that force these accidents into meaning.
Dr. Turner always spoke about a loose and broad narrative.
I countered her arguments by saying the only reason a person listens to another person’s story is to see how it relates to him, or at the most to see how he would’ve reacted under the same circumstances.
“You’re a very bright young man, Mason.”
“Thank you.”
“You will be able to do anything you want with your life.”
“Okay.”
“Why hold yourself back with these worldviews? Why continue to be a victim? Why give Dr. Shepard that much power over you, after all that has come forth, after all the damage and heartache he has caused?”
I didn’t have an answer for her. Maybe I still don’t.
Dr. Turner used the momentum of “Graveyard” to systematically attack my view of One through character assassination. She made me highlight every incongruence between what Dr. Shepard had told me and what the “facts” of his life really were. She made me write down the moments when I’d felt certain Dr. Shepard’s actions didn’t match up with what he preached. One afternoon, she thought herself clever, and asked what Dr. Shepard had said about preachers.
“Don’t trust a single word that comes out of their mouths.”
“And what was Dr. Shepard doing?”
“Preaching.”
Dr. Turner asked me how I knew if anything Dr. Shepard had preached was True. I knew the answer, but it wasn’t coming to me because I was ruined with antipsychotics. I shrugged.
“Can you honestly sit here and tell me what you learned in that cult makes sense?”
“No.”
“Let me try it your way,” Dr. Turner said. “Dr. James Shepard said sickness bears Honesty, yet, as we all know, at the time of his apprehension, there wasn’t even a trace of Cytoxan in his system. So we know he wasn’t sick. Therefore, what he said couldn’t be Honest, correct?”
“I don’t know.”
“How can somebody profess the Truth if he isn’t Honest?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
“He can’t.”
I went through months of soul searching or maybe trying to forget or maybe listening to other people’s views, trying them on as my own. I didn’t feel as bad about having talked to the Feds because my thirty months were almost up and One was a liar anyway. I started to smile a little more. I even laughed on Friday nights when we were allowed to vote on a movie to watch in the rec room. Dr. Turner promised me that I’d be able to serve the remainder of my sentence in CMHIP. I composed letters to my mother about why I’d run away. I wrote letters to my father about how his actions had devalued my life. I read these to Dr. Turner. We didn’t send them, but she promised it was therapeutic. My hair grew. Dr. Turner asked if maybe I’d read Dr. Sick enough times. I told her it helped me see Dr. Shepard for who he really was. Months passed. I was getting better and I was getting older and I was glad to gain weight and to not throw up and to not hear Elvis.
Two months before my eighteenth birthday, Dr. Turner and I were talking outside. This was a rare privilege. The sun was out. Birds chirped. I noticed these things because I’d been deprived of them for so long. We discussed closure. I was telling her that I was feeling some sense of closure with the events I’d experienced in Marble. She smiled. I wanted her to be my mother or lover or father.
She said, “It’s an amazing feeling, closure.”
“For sure.”
“Everyone deserves it.”
I nodded.
“You’re so close. Right at the precipice.” She paused, as if struck by a thought. She said, “Where are the others buried?”
“What others?”
“The DEA agents Dr. Shepard killed?”
I looked into Dr. Turner’s eyes. They weren’t Honest. The skin connecting her ear was tight with anticipation. I was granted a Gift of Understanding—my first in over two years—and it was her selfishly wanting my recovery for herself, a career case, publication in journals and then a book, and I knew she’d made this her capstone moment, both in real life and in her future book, the moment her reformed Survivor opened up, confessed to murders and locations of federal agents, thus providing closure to the cult, her hard work and brilliance getting me to overcome my past atrocities. I knew nothing over the past year had been Honest. I knew I’d swallowed her bullshit because it was easier than feeling alienated from Truth. I knew I’d embraced selfish wants to crowd out selfish fears.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.
“We’re past that, Mason.”
“Don’t call me Mason.”
“Why not?”
“Because that’s what my father called me.”
Dr. Turner nodded. She said, “Then what shall I call you?”
“Thirty-Seven.”
“Why can’t you tell me where the DEA agents are buried?”
“Because I don’t know what you’re talking about?”
“Why? You were there, weren’t you?”
“Yes. But not that day.”
“Why?”
“I was sick. The whole day.”
“Mason—”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Does it strike you as odd that you were never around in times of violence?”
“There are no accidents.”
“What happened the night you ran away?”
“I found a loving family dedicated to changing the world. I embraced sickness. I started living in Hon—”
“Enough!” Dr. Turner yelled.
Birds flew away. I shook. Dr. Turner closed her eyes. She knew she’d ruined everything. I thought about there being no accidents, only actions revealing hidden, detestable traits. She started to apologize, but I put up my hand. I shook my head. I got off the bench and walked inside.
Three days later, I was transferred back to juvie. I looked for Dr. Turner, but she was nowhere to be found. I wasn’t upset about being transferred, because it confirmed my beliefs about Dr. Turner. It confirmed the notion that a life spent dedicated to Honesty comes with gifts. It confirmed that everything I’d learned in Marble was True.
34. QUARTERED
One morning, I heard an old-fashioned doorbell. I was sick in bed. I hadn’t showered in close to a week. My sheets had my outline in sick. I closed my eyes, willing the sound to go away. But then I heard commotion, bodies moving, voices.
I crawled out from bed. I stumbled down the hallway. My fa
mily members rushed past me. The doorbell kept ringing. The family room was vacant. I looked around for One; he was nowhere to be seen. Everything hurt. My hearing was nothing but the thrashing of nausea. I made my way to the door. I peeked outside and saw two people, a man and a woman, both dressed in suits, the man’s hair slicked, the woman manly but pretty or maybe pretty because she was manly. They wore black windbreakers.
I opened the door.
They stared at me. I felt small and in need of protection
The woman’s skin by her ear was pulled tight. She reached to her hip. Something wasn’t right. The man’s energy pushed forward, or maybe he simply rocked on the balls of his feet. He asked for Dr. James Shepard.
I looked behind me to the empty living room. I turned back to the two people. My mind wouldn’t work. I wasn’t granted any Gifts of Understanding because I was dying and wanted to be asleep in my childhood bed with my father watching over me. I sensed something bad was about to happen, but these were the dulled observations of the soulless: the windbreakers, the woman’s hand resting on her hip, the man waving some sort of open wallet in my face. I heard “DEA” but this acronym meant nothing to me.
Then the woman had a pistol pointed at me.
Part of me welcomed the sight.
But then I saw a vision, a Gift of Understanding.
I saw One walking from the left. He was shirtless in the snow. He held a pistol. He looked beautiful against the gray sky. I understood he was protecting us, and this felt like love. He crept until the woman noticed and then she dropped to the ground and then I heard a deafening pop and then everything was red and there were more explosions of sound and then the man in the suit was down and One stood over both of them and I was covered in blood and I realized it hadn’t been a vision, but a form of reality where One had just murdered two Drug Enforcement Agents on our doorstep. Their blood soaked into our welcome mat. I’d stood in the exact same spot and peered at Five stroking a dying man. I’d wanted everything they had. I’d wanted to be part of a family. I’d wanted a father.
One was as calm as I’d ever see him. He chambered his pistol. His hairless body was covered in blood. He looked down at me. He grabbed the back of my neck. He pressed his forehead to mine. He told me it had started. He told me it was only going to get more Honest. He told me they’d keep coming and they wouldn’t stop. He told me the only True Enemies were those who didn’t believe as others did. He told me there were no accidents. He told me we had been given Truth, and we were now changed, and there was no going back.
“What Truth?” I said.
“That nothing matters.”
I looked down at the bleeding agents. The woman’s eyes were open and they were blue and pretty and dull.
One said, “Consciousness. It’s not real. It’s our attempt to connect to God. God isn’t real. Therefore, consciousness isn’t real. None of this matters. Not a single fucking thing.”
All I had wanted was to be away from my father’s silent abuse.
Or maybe I’d wanted love.
Or maybe I’d wanted meaning.
Or maybe I’d wanted a loving family of my own choosing.
Or maybe I’d simply been looking for a surrogate father who would have the courage to touch me.
One said, “You led me to this Truth. You did, Thirty-Seven, with your dedication to the Honest Life.”
I nodded against his bloody forehead.
He said, “None of this is real. Nothing matters. Nothing. We are nothing. There is nothing. Don’t you see? Everything you’ve done, everything we’ve gone through, it all led us to this very moment. To this Truth: Nothing we do matters. And it is our duty to bring this Truth to the masses.”10
I sat on the steps for hours. I didn’t say much and neither did One. Everyone else was inside, where Five tried to calm them. One quartered each agent with a hacksaw. The foot of snow at our doorstep had melted from the warm blood. One asked if I could help with the teeth. I took needle-nose pliers and pried and pried and pried. The woman’s molars were stubborn. One wrapped each quarter of body in cellophane and then two black trash bags. The sun fell behind the mountains. The bags were lined up in a neat row.
One recruited six others.
We climbed inside of his Jeep and drove seven miles up the canyon. From there, we got out, our quarter of a person in backpacks made of packing tape. We walked through the snow on a trail that wasn’t really a trail, but a game path with elk droppings dotting the snow. We hiked for four hours. We got sick. Eleven fainted. We pushed on. There was no light that night. We kept going and then we were at a cliff and we had to use our hands to climb and everything ached.
We reached a cave. One told us it was an abandoned mine where they’d searched for slabs of marble. The cave was probably fifteen feet deep. We walked to the back. There was a rusted metal gate covering a hole. We lifted the gate. One told us the hole was at least fifty feet. He pointed to me. I dropped the pelvis of the male agent down. We listened for a thud, which came later than any of us expected. We disposed of the bodies. We arranged the gate. We sat on the cave’s lip and stared at nothing and everything and we didn’t cry because we weren’t selfish. An owl hooted. We were a single mind. One put his arm around my shoulder. He didn’t tell me he was proud, but I knew. He’d told me it was my dedication to Honesty that led him to his Gift of Understanding about consciousness being our attempt to connect to God and God not being real, so therefore consciousness wasn’t real. Which meant nothing was real. Or maybe everything was real, but nothing mattered.
One spoke to the seven of us up on that ledge: “We’re going to change the world.”
We nodded.
I couldn’t help but smile.
I said, “We’re going to give them an invaluable gift.”
“I like that,” One said. “The Day of Gifts.”
10 O’Connor spends a goodly amount of page space in Dr. Sick on Agent Samantha Grimes and Agent Stanley Wolfe. He circles back to the investigation and raid of YYCIM Laboratories in Hoboken, New Jersey. He discusses loose ends being tied up, one of those being a loft in downtown Denver where inconsequential shipments of DMT had been sent. He talks about paper trails leading Agent Grimes and Agent Wolfe to Marble, Colorado. Here O’Connor takes certain journalistic liberties, dipping into the agents’ mindsets on their trip to the mountains. He imagines their conversation. He paints a picture of nonchalance—annoyance even—at having to cross t’s and dot i’s. I suppose there’s some truth to that, because why else would the DEA ever show up with only two agents?
Nothing has ever been proven, so O’Connor makes it clear their murder scene is conjecture. But nobody reading a nonfiction book makes those distinctions. They believe what O’Connor writes. They think it was all premeditated. Like we knew they were coming. Like we lured them there. Like Dr. James Shepard was that much of a genius to drop a trail of bread crumbs. O’Connor writes, “The Myth of Persecution came to fruition on February third. The unseen enemies of The Survivors literally showed up at their doorstep, guns drawn. Everything Shepard had prophesized became a reality in that moment. Any doubts The Survivors may have silently harbored were dispelled. Their Savior had foreseen the future. In turn, the brainwashed had a single option: defend themselves.”
The bodies still haven’t been found. During my arraignment, they grilled me incessantly about the agents’ deaths. I suppose it’s a code, looking out for their own. I told them I had no idea; I’d been sick—really sick, sick-like-almost-dead sick—and hadn’t known about any of it. They didn’t believe me, but then they did because I stared at them and took their verbal threats without blinking.
After The Day of Gifts, after everything was over and the cabin was smoldering, they combed the grounds. They found two teeth, one incisor and one molar. His and hers. I’m not sure why I’d thrown them in the fire. Part of me might have thought they’d burn, but that’s probably bullshit. Maybe I simply wanted the Truth to come out.
35. VIRGINI
TY
I‘m telling Two that there are no accidents and we did what we had to do and we acted in self-defense and we are blameless, which doesn’t even matter because blame is rooted in the Judeo-Christian bullshit of shame.
Two doesn’t respond.
We’re in our apartment. We’re on my mattress with no box spring.
I reach out and hold her hand. She won’t meet my gaze. I tell her we could go to the police this very moment, and it’d be hard, but we’d come out okay because what we said was True.
Two speaks to her lap: “I had a Gift of Understanding.”
“What? When?”
“While that motherfucker…”
“It’s over with.”
“I saw you kill him.”
“It was self-defense. Any jury would believe that. Some homeless Juggalo raping you, after trying to kill me with a bottle?” “Before you did it.”
“Before what? What are you talking about?”
“When he thrust himself into me, I saw you rising from the ground. I saw you slit his throat. But my eyes were closed. Then the next thing I know, they’re both dead.”
I reach out and try to comfort Two. She’s rigid in my arms so I let go. I tell her that was what happened and the mind has a way of making fiction out of trauma and I tell her I’m sorry for everything.
“I saw the future,” she says.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does.”
“Why?”
“Because we really are Gods.”
“We already knew that,” I say.
“Maybe. I mean, I said it, but I didn’t believe it believe it. But it’s True.”
“We didn’t do anything wrong.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Right, it’s behind us. No proof. Not like we have any connection to—”
“ That’s not what I mean,” Two says.
“Then what?”
“I mean we can do whatever the fuck we want.”
I’m thinking about One saying the same thing. I’m thinking about murder provoking the same mindset. I’m thinking about our rationales for doing unspeakable actions and I’m thinking about how One was so close to arriving at the One Truth and how I needed to see his failures to be open to it with Two.
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