Thirty-Seven

by Peter Stenson

  “Because we’re living in Honesty,” I say.

  “Because we’re all Gods, but we’re the only motherfuckers brave enough to shoulder this responsibility.”

  Two finally looks up. Her eyes are pure but broken. She smiles a smile that isn’t hers. She reaches out her hand and cups my face. Then the other hand. She leans forward. I ready myself for her forehead, but it’s her lips. We kiss awkwardly until we forget ourselves and then our tongues are furious and calm and those of serpents. I’ve never been with a woman. I feel nervous and insecure and like my penis isn’t big enough. My hands are arthritic. I worry this will ruin everything. Two moans like she’s drowning. She takes off my shirt and traces each of my ribs with her tongue. Her nipples are puffy in my mouth and then they harden. Our hips rub in a painful way. Her neck arches and it’s vulnerable and alive and her body is warm to the touch. My fingers are colonialists along the Amazon. Her vagina is wet and I realize it’s blood from the rape and I think about AIDS and this being immoral and she tells me to fill her. Her body tastes like sleep. She winces. She tells me to go slow. I do. She tells me she loves me and I believe her. She rides me and presses her forehead to mine and I tell her I love her more than anything and she looks into the whites of my eyes for Honesty and she finds it and tells me to fuck her. I think about Jerome and One and my father. I think of Dr. Turner and Five and my mother. I think about living a normal life and forgetting about all of this—sickness for the sake of Honesty, Honesty for the sake of change. Truth, fucking Truth, who cares about what is True and what is False because it doesn’t matter, and not in the sense of nothing mattering because we were Gods, but because it straight up doesn’t matter, as in isn’t our problem, them, anyone else, the world, as in it doesn’t make a single bit of difference if Truth is uncovered or closeted because I am still me, still human, still a boy with issues deeper than chemo can eradicate, still a shitting, breathing, wanting creature in desperate need of love.

  And I’ve found it, love, the type that doesn’t exist in the real world or even in movies, the kind born from the shattering of Self, and offering up those scraps to another person, the kind shrouded in temperance.

  My body flexes and Two stares into my eyes and I want them to be pure and Honest and they are because she’s crying and there are no accidents and we understand how everything works and we can foresee the future and we can change the world and Two says she loves me and I come into her and she collapses over my body and we breathe into one another’s ears and it’s our first loves and favorite memories and biggest regrets and we are free of everything that has ever happened or ever will and we are in love.

  36. ONE’S CONFESSIONS

  That night, we all gathered around the campfire. One hadn’t showered. His hands were stained red, but not bloody, just a different hue of pink. The fire reached higher than normal. Some of us cried and some of us got sick and some of us were steeled over from exhaustion and complicity at having dropped our quarter of a body down an abandoned mine shaft.

  One stood. He discarded his canvas jacket. He tossed his bloodied black scrub top into the flames. He walked while we sat. He looked into our eyes. Some of us met his gaze; some of us studied our cuticles.

  “There are no accidents,” One said.

  We nodded.

  One yelled it again, “There. Are. No. Fucking. Accidents.”

  The flames crackled. Some of us shivered. We all watched.

  “I have told you this. I have demonstrated this. I have seen this Truth play out time and time again. Everything—absolutely every single fucking thing—happens for a reason for those who seek Truth.”

  One’s back was to me. The flames danced across the nubs of his spine. He walked around the far side of the fire.

  “Today, they came for us. They came for us because they are afraid. Afraid of what we know. Afraid of how we live. Afraid of sickness. Of Honesty. Of change.”

  We nodded.

  “These two were only the first. They will keep coming. They will come with SWAT teams. Helicopters. Machine guns. They will not quit. Not until we are dead. They will keep coming until we have been extinguished, solved, eradicated. They will murder us because they fear change. They fear Truth. They fear anything that will cast a shadow of doubt on their bullshit lives.”

  One rounded the far side of the fire. His hairless chest was splattered in blood. He was beautiful and perfect and flawed beyond reason.

  “It’s over,” One said. “This life up here, this Utopia, this loving family of our own choosing—it’s over.”

  Somebody said it wasn’t. Somebody cried. One put his index to his lips. We were quiet. The logs crackled.

  “We have lived for three years in servitude to Honesty. We will not start engaging in selfish forms of denial at this point.”

  He looked down at me and this made my insides warm.

  “It’s over. That is the very nature of Truth. It is the most combustible entity in the world. It cannot be contained. It can’t be withheld. It arrives and it consumes and it is gone. We are vessels. We are the sacrificial conduits for Truth.”

  Our breathing quickened. Our fingers rubbed against any smooth surface. We believed.

  “But this does not mean we cannot enact change.”

  Our heads nodded, a few of us letting out murmurs of agreement.

  “We will give the Gift of Truth to the world. It will be the last thing we do. And it will be beautiful. It will be earth-shattering. It will be profane and profound and it will be sublime and it will be Honest.”

  We found our voices and we shouted and we felt called upon and we felt like heroes and we forgot selfish fears.

  One pointed to Five sitting next to me. He said, “Five, it wasn’t an accident your husband died of cancer.” One pointed to Twelve. He said, “Twelve, it wasn’t an accident your family was killed by a drunk driver.” He stepped closer to me and stared into the whites of my eyes and his were orange from the flames and he said, “Thirty-Seven, it was no accident your birth mother handed you over to a lecherous man who only housed you to fulfill his sexual perversions.”

  I nodded; we all nodded.

  “None of these things were accidents because they set us on a path of suffering, of sickness, of yearning. They led us to find one another. They led us here. They led us to bury our brothers and sisters. They led us to epiphanies. They led us to pray for death. They led us to Honesty. And then to Truth. They led us to fucking Truth. And we each possess it. It burns within us. Every time we’ve gotten sick and every time we’ve prayed to a God that doesn’t exist, we’ve come closer. And now it’s here. I see it in each of your eyes. We are ready. Honesty bears change. We are changed. We are no longer mortal. We are no longer meant for this earth. We have to spread this gift to those trapped in the daily bullshit of want. We have to open eyes. We have to change the fucking world.”

  We screamed because we knew he spoke Truth and because we felt it, this Truth, the transitory nature of everything, how consciousness was nothing but want and fear, how we were above this, how we were so close to death.

  “Tonight, we take our final Reprieve. We celebrate Fate. We toast Honesty. We embrace Truth. And tomorrow, we make good on our notes.”

  One threw baggies of DMT at us. We were children underneath a split piñata. One took off his pants. Somebody gave me tin foil. Five’s shirt was off. Others too—breasts and penises and hairless vaginas—and we yelled sounds that hadn’t been heard since Jesus cried on a cross. Smoke entered our lungs. Flames consumed our bodies. Hands groped flesh. Everything was red and beautiful and Honest. Somebody’s finger went inside of me. My mind was a metal saw grinding through tendons and bone. Elvis haunted my ears. We were going to die but it didn’t matter because we’d all begged for finality for years. We were a single body and we were bile and ribs and sick. We would change the world. We, we, we. We kept smoking and Reprieve was never going to end and I’d thought it was about fear and maybe it was and maybe it was about
family and maybe it was about companionship and maybe it was about change. I floated above us all. I floated above the mountains. I floated like a cloud laced with thorny rosebuds. I watched my family slither around trampled snow, nothing our own, nothing belonging to Self, orifices being filled because they needed to be filled. I stood off in the distance. I was naked. I touched myself to the images of those who both knew and didn’t know they were being watched. I wanted to be included, but I couldn’t bridge the gap. I masturbated to the thought of my father and of One and of Five holding my hand in the ocean and of people lying straight to my face and of being chosen and of being made up entirely of a combustible substance.

  Later, One brought me to the boulder. It was nearly morning. We would start leaving in an hour’s time. We shared a blanket. Our bare shoulders touched. He’d told me he wanted to gift me something. I waited. Finally, he spoke: “I want your Day of Gifts to be somebody specific.”

  “Huh?”

  “Not random, like the others.”

  “Okay.”

  “Consider it a gift with a perk.”

  I looked up. One smiled, so I did too.

  “I want you to give your gift to your mother.”

  I swallowed with no saliva.

  “Yes,” One said. “It’s time to kill your father.”

  I didn’t know what to say or what to think. One lowered his forehead to mine and we pressed. We stayed like that for millennia. Then he let up and I did too and he told me to stay in the same position. I felt his mouth on my ear. He breathed in and out and it was like a vacuum and like a lullaby.

  He said, “My first love was Patti. She was beautiful. Stunning. A smile like you wouldn’t believe. Zoe’s smile. She wouldn’t even talk to me. I pursued her for three years, pretty much the entirety of college. Finally, finally, she agreed to have coffee with me. We sat in the student union. I was so nervous. It was like she was doing me a favor. Hell, maybe she was. I was at a complete loss for anything to say. I ended up blurting out the first thing that crossed my mind. I said, ‘What’s your favorite memory?’ Something changed at that point.”

  One pressed harder with his mouth. His tongue flicked inside of my cavern.

  “My favorite memory occurred here. We’d just purchased this place as our second home. We were young, Zoe a toddler. But things were starting to happen. Our efforts were paying off. Work was going well, our marriage, our family. The first night we stayed here, we built a campfire. It was chilly, but we were cozy. Zoe and I looked everywhere for the perfect sticks to roast marshmallows. She’d never had a s’more, never roasted marshmallows. Her face…the sheer shock and awe and delight when she bit into it…it was the happiest face I’ve ever seen. Zoe looked at her mother and I, and didn’t say anything, but conveyed that she was grateful that we were her parents and this was her life.”

  One’s tears dripped down my bald head. Phlegm rattled in his throat.

  “My biggest regret is that it all turned out this way. That this is the Truth we arrived at.”

  37. THIRTY-SEVEN

  I was John Doe before I was Mason Hues before I was Thirty-Seven.

  One said you could never outrun your past, but you could destroy the person you’d been through sickness and Honesty.

  I left home when I was fifteen. I left home because my adopted parents loved me in an unsustainable fashion. One never talked about sustainability, which I think was a mistake. Sometimes I think everything is about sustainability. Everything is finite; everything can be exhausted. Maybe all the work we did to live in Honesty thrust us to a Truth normally reserved for the dying.

  Dr. Turner told me it was normal to want things. She told me every living creature experienced wants, that it was what kept us alive. I told her it was different when all of our essential needs were met and our wants turned material and cosmetic thus outreaching our ingrained desire to survive. She asked what I wanted. I told her a loving family of my own choosing. She told me that desire was neither material nor cosmetic. She told me that was natural, my right. She told me that want was right there with food and shelter. She told me pack animals couldn’t survive without it.

  This story isn’t about One. It’s not about Dr. James Shepard. It’s not about my father.

  A connecting thread throughout all of Dr. Sick: The Survivors and The Day of Gifts is the loss and search and establishment of family. He discusses how the founding members of The Survivors were all part of the same support group for people who’d lost family members to cancer. I didn’t know this until I read it. But it makes sense. They had lost children and lovers to an invisible disease. They wanted there to be a reason. They wanted to feel closer to their dead daughters. They wanted a doctrine to live by. They wanted to recreate what they’d taken for granted through complaints and neglect and affairs.

  Perhaps the only reason One told me I was more connected to Truth than any of the others was to inflate my ego so I didn’t tell the family about seeing Five slip out of his room. Perhaps I let this notion of superiority go straight to my head. Perhaps I experienced a sense of power for the first time in my life. And like God, I saw that it was good, and wanted more. I told One we needed to double our doses of Cytoxan. We all did. Perhaps this was unsustainable.

  Dr. Turner didn’t let me speak in the first person plural. Then she didn’t let me talk about what we’d experienced in the mountains of Colorado. She let me speak about One, but only in relation to my own father.

  Jerome had been popped for shooting a man in the chest. The man didn’t die, but Jerome was sentenced to forty-one months in juvie. He was fourteen. He told me the man was his stepfather. I asked why he’d shot him. We were naked in the bottom bunk. We’d just been intimate. Jerome’s skin connecting his ear tightened. He grabbed the back of my head and smashed it repeatedly against the concrete wall.

  Dr. Turner spoke about a hierarchy of needs. This concept made sense to me. It wasn’t Truth, but it was Honest.

  Every time I hear “Blue Moon,” I cry.

  One always said that people just want to belong. Dr. Turner said cults use a loose and broad narrative to allow those being brainwashed to feel included. O’Connor wrote about how The Survivors underwent the same near-death experiences, eliminating any differences between themselves, thus creating a cohesive grouping, a loving family of their own choosing.

  Dr. Turner disagreed with me about One’s three defining aspects of a person’s character. She told me we were so much more than our first love, favorite memory, and biggest regret. She told me genetics played a large role. She told me about the circumstances we were born into. She told me about how people change, constantly—the birth of children, the death of parents, the accomplishment of goals—and she told me I was too young to subscribe to the notion of my character already being set. I told her she was wrong. She looked amused. I said, “These moments are about Truth.” She told me that viewed in that context, everything was about Truth. I said, “Your first love is about the Truth of Others, your favorite memory is about the Truth of Time, and your biggest regret is about the Truth of Yourself.” She asked what that particular Truth was for me. I said, “That everything ends in a way you don’t want it to.”

  38. PROPHET

  We loaded into One’s Jeep and the DEA’s sedan. We took three trips into Glenwood Springs. We were given money for bus fare. People stared at our bald heads. They probably thought we were some chemo support group. We were past the point of caring. We hugged. Some of us hitchhiked out of town. There were tears. Some of us were scared. I waited with a few others at the Greyhound station. One told us he and Five were going to ditch the DEA car. One said they’d be back in thirty minutes, definitely before the last of our buses left.

  I looked up at Five.

  She gave me a smile I’d once taken as love.

  The skin connecting her ear wasn’t tight, but it wasn’t loose, and then I realized she was purposefully relaxing her jaw and setting her teeth.

  I was granted a Gi
ft of Understanding. It was the most intense vision I’d ever experienced, not only a movie, but a montage with Elvis singing and changing scenery and the passage of time, and it was One and Five leaving us to go participate in The Day of Gifts and it was them fleeing, them not enacting change, them driving south. It was the Johnsons from Durango, wigs and fake IDs, reaching the border and then disappearing into sun-bleached Mexico, and it was flashes of memory—the tickle of One’s upper lip as he confessed into my ear, that tickle being the hints of stubble, stubble being something that shouldn’t have existed in a man ingesting such high amounts of Cytoxan, and it was my hand running over Five’s bare belly, her stomach feeling hard and full, which I’d believed to be constipation, but it wasn’t, it was their chance at starting over again, amassing the things that had been ripped away by the world and cancer, a baby, a fucking baby—and it was them in Mexico and them sitting around a fire on the beach and them roasting marshmallows with their toddler and them a family, nuclear, happy, together.

  One looked at me. He knelt down. He pressed his forehead to mine. I studied the whites of his eyes for Truth and I studied them for deceit and I realized I had never been able to tell the difference. He said, “None of this could have been possible without you. Thirty-Seven, you are The One. You are a Prophet. You are a visionary. Never forget that.”

  Those were the last words One ever spoke to me.

  They walked out of the Greyhound station together, not holding hands, but close.

  39. QUESTIONING

  We’re at Talley’s Tatters and neither of us is sick because we’ve already been granted Truth. It’s the first week of January. Snow falls.

  The door opens.

  Two cops walk in, a man and a woman.

  My pulse is a double kick drum. Two greets them as they pretend to look around. I’m thinking about the DEA agents. I’m half expecting One to rush out from a hidden rack of clothes and take care of the complication. I tell myself nothing happens by accident. I tell myself I am above normal social interactions. I loosen my jaw and then set my teeth without clamping down.