Thirty-Seven

by Peter Stenson

  And then I was given a Gift of Understanding.

  Sometimes I wonder why I didn’t simply tell them all where the DEA agents were buried.

  I suppose it’s because that’s where I went after I burned the cabin down. I walked seven miles into the mountains. I climbed up to the abandoned quarry. I sat above the quartered bodies and I shivered and I cried and I prayed for death. I spoke to voices that echoed up fifty feet, the words muffled through two Hefty trash bags. They told me they loved me. They told me nothing was my fault. They told me One and Five had abandoned the Honest life months before. They told me my family members were changing the world the best way they knew how. They told me I was pretty. That someday I’d make somebody happy. They told me nothing happened by accident. They told me they’d always be there for me. They weren’t mad. They were happy I was born. They were proud of me.

  None of this is in the book.

  Instead, O’Connor paints a picture of me stumbling through the woods for three days. He engages in every sensationalized bit of bullshit he can muster. I know this is his attempt to paint me as sympathetic. To illustrate how I may have been involved in monstrous things, but I was fifteen; I was not a monster. He writes about hypothermia and starvation, a lonely boy in need of rescue. He writes, “After seventy hours, Thirty-Seven’s body failed him. He crumpled to the snow. He was two hundred yards from the cabin, close enough to feel its magnetism, far enough away to protect himself from its deadly grasp.”

  41. GHOSTS

  We have two notes to leave: one for Henry O’Connor, one for Dr. Turner.

  We drive across the flats of our country in eleven hours. In Nebraska, Two asks if I want to try driving and I tell her no and she tells me I’m the worst liar she’s ever met. We switch seats. I practice in a Walmart parking lot. I drive on the highway and even get the car up to seventy-five.

  Henry O’Connor is old so he lists his phone number and address in the white pages. He lives on Summit Avenue. We arrive in St. Paul, Minnesota, at eight in the morning. The town is cute in the way the Midwest is cute with snow and people bundled up and the notion of trudging. We stop in front of his house. It’s an old Victorian with three overgrown evergreens in the yard and ornate shingles in the shape of tears.

  It’s cold without the heater running. I hold Two’s hand. She says, “Now what?”

  “We get seen.”

  Henry O’Connor is fatter in person than on the back of Dr. Sick. He waddles out of his house after we’ve been waiting for an hour. He climbs into a black BMW. He backs down his fifty-foot driveway. He struggles to crane his neck around for oncoming traffic, then rights his car and starts down Summit. O’Connor turns as he passes our parked car. He looks at two people with no hair. We pull out and follow.

  He turns onto Grand Avenue. People walk into bakeries and people are happy even though it’s only fifteen degrees. Two tells me the roads are icy and I tell her she’s doing well. We follow O’Connor four blocks to a Starbucks. He pulls into the small lot. We drive up a little ways and park. O’Connor gets out. He looks around, probably for us. He goes inside. He comes out ten minutes later. He merges into the crawling traffic and then he is at our side and he sees us and we stare with Honesty and Truth. I’m granted a Gift of Understanding—O’Connor and his wife sitting around an oak dining table, his wife trying her best to show excitement while voicing her concern about the publication of a book about a murderous cult, O’Connor placing his meaty hand over his wife’s, telling her she has nothing to fear, every single member of The Survivors was either dead or in prison, and here he smiles, mostly for his wife’s benefit, but partially for his own reassurance.

  We follow the black BMW for another mile. The age of people tromping through the snow lowers. They wear skinnier jeans and longer coats. We see a sign for Macalester College, where O’Connor teaches. He pulls into a parking lot and we keep going and find street parking a block up. Before we get out of the car, Two puts her forehead to mine. She says, “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “Everything.”

  The air is freezing on my bald head. Little shards of ice blow. My lungs feel mentholated. We hold hands walking down the street. A middle-aged woman with a red turtleneck underneath a parka looks at us and then our heads and then us again and she smiles with empathy because she thinks we’re sick.

  We walk through the campus. It’s small, the buildings seventies style with concrete and darkened windows. The sky has a lot of gravity. We step inside of the student union. Artsy kids and Asians sit at tables with textbooks open. I think about being one of these kids. I think about college. Dr. Turner was always pushing me to go. She was always telling me I could be anything I wanted. I think it’s weird that One never told me that, only that I would change the world. I think about it no longer mattering, or maybe it never mattered. There are no accidents. I’d seen Dr. Turner’s Truth, which jolted me back to a life dedicated to Honesty.

  We make our way to the history building. We walk through the halls. We are a college couple in love and stressed with our heavy course loads. We find Henry O’Connor’s office. The door is closed. He has a Peanuts cartoon taped underneath his nameplate. We wait at the end of the hallway. Two is excited. She keeps glancing back to O’Connor’s office. I tell her I love her and she smiles. She asks me what I’m thinking about. I tell her going to college. She says it sucks unless you’re into date rape and student debt.

  “Besides,” she says, “who can teach you anything?”

  “Pretty much anyone.”

  “That’s why it had to be you,” she says.

  “Why what had to be me?”

  “The One who actually enacts change.”

  We hear the door open. A chubby coed dressed in too-tight leggings walks out. O’Connor follows. He glances in our direction and we don’t flinch or even blink. He stares. We’re holding our coats so our black scrubs are visible. He walks with the girl in the opposite direction. When he turns the corner, he sneaks a final peek back. I can’t see his pupils, but I know they’re dilated in his body’s preparation to flee.

  We wait for O’Connor’s class to end. All of the students file out. Two takes my hand and we walk into the lecture hall. It’s smaller than I’d seen in movies, four tiers of ten-person tables and a smart board. O’Connor stands at the podium. He seems like the type of man to lecture from a podium; I bet it comes across as preaching.

  O’Connor pushes his glasses in with his index finger. He looks around the room and then back at us. He clears his throat. He says, “May I help you?”

  We stare down at a man who has profited off of my life. A man who has taken my story and sensationalized it, spun it to be about Reprieve and sex, about murder, about Dr. James Shepard and Cytoxan and premeditation. He feared what we’d done in the mountains. He feared it because it was about change and he feared it because it lifted the veil of the One Truth every person knows but won’t allow themselves to feel. So he’d discredited everything. He’d packaged it for Hollywood. He’d dumbed it down for Middle American families who needed to believe in Good versus Evil.

  We don’t say anything.

  “I asked if I can help you,” O’Connor says. He starts fussing with a few papers. He stacks them against the podium and slips them in his leather briefcase. He takes a few steps, and then realizes he shouldn’t turn his gaze from us. His next steps are cautious.

  “These rooms have cameras,” he says. He points to the ceiling. We don’t look. He shakes his head like the whole thing is juvenile. “I don’t know who you two are, but I know you’ve been following me. I know this stunt is harassment. If it persists, I will have you two arrested.”

  He expects us to be scared.

  He pulls out a phone from his pocket. He waves it like a weapon. He walks to the far side of the room and then starts up the steps. He says, “Last chance.” We don’t move. He shakes his head and punches in a few numbers. He puts his phone to his ear. His breathing is an asthma
attack. He stands on our level. He tries so hard not to show fear. He speaks into his phone: “I’d like to report physical harassment. Two people have been following me and now have attempted to corner me in a classroom…Macalester College…Yes, they have threatened me.”

  He puts the phone against his lapel. He says, “They are dispatching units this instant.”

  I know he’s lying because he hasn’t told them which building he’s in and because the mere act of calling the police would make this experience real, and he’s not willing to go there, at least not yet.

  “Hope this stunt was worth it,” O’Connor says.

  He walks to the exit on the opposite side of the landing. He pushes open the door. His proximity to the exit gives him courage. “There is nothing more pathetic than a copycat.”

  We wait for night to fall, which comes early being this far north. We watch lights turn on throughout O’Connor’s house. We see shapes through curtain-drawn windows. We imagine them eating. We are hungry, so we split a Mr. Pibb. We don’t take our ipecac because we’ve already arrived at Truth.

  We shiver and hold hands.

  We watch the downstairs lights turn off. We trace bodies through walls. The bedroom lights turn on and then the bathroom. Twenty minutes later, the lights reverse their order. Two lamps, his and hers.

  At ten, one lamps turns off.

  Fifteen minutes later, the other lamp cuts.

  We wait a half hour and then get out of the car. The temperature has to be in the single digits. We walk up the driveway and then around the back of the house. A security system decal is plastered to the glass on the back door. This is expected. We’d written the note beforehand.

  Two looks at me and I nod but this isn’t what she wants. She presses her head to mine. I press back. She says, “I love you so fucking much.”

  “More than anything that will ever exist,” I say.

  Two smashes a rock through the glass. Sirens sound immediately. She reaches through and unlocks the door and she says shit and then fuck and she brings her arm back out of the broken window. Her hand bleeds. She opens the door. We walk inside. We walk across the kitchen. We stick our note on the refrigerator. We hear heavy footsteps coming down the stairs and then we are running outside and then down the driveway and we are in the car pulling away by the time the downstairs lights are on.

  We drive down Summit Avenue. We get on I-94 West. Two drives the speed limit. She holds her hand in her lap. Blood pools against her coat. I look at my own hand, the jagged slice from stabbing the Juggalo. I run my nail against the crusty scab. I’m bleeding. I reach over and take Two’s hand. She understands I want all of her inside of me. She smiles because we want to be the same deity. She starts laughing. I don’t need to ask what’s funny because I know everything is funny because it doesn’t matter and because we are blood brothers and because we are enacting change and because we are combusting with Truth and because we’re in love and then her laughs turn to ecstatic screams and she lets go of my hand and slams her bleeding hand on the steering wheel and I join in and there is nothing besides our screams and the ghosts of our pasts and that very moment.

  42. PUEBLO

  We drive back to Colorado, but we don’t stop in Denver because that part of our lives is over with. We head to Pueblo. It’s early afternoon. We find a Motel 6 for $59 a night. We unpack and lie on a bed with a box spring. We watch HBO until it gets dark and then we drive toward the south end of town.

  We approach the CMHIP. It’s smaller than I remember, a concrete block halfheartedly dressed up with Doric columns. The parking lot is dark and mostly empty. The front of the building is lit with spotlights. I count over three windows on the third floor. I imagine looking out of those locked windows and praying for something to change. Two backs into a parking spot that affords us a view of the entire lot. It’s Thursday, and Dr. Turner always worked the second shift on Thursdays. We’ll see her leave. We’ll follow her home. We’ll leave a note stating we could’ve killed her, but instead gave her a gift.

  Two asks what’s going on inside my beautiful head.

  I speak with Honesty because that’s all I know. “I want to go in.”

  “Like to visit?”

  “To live.”

  “Safety,” Two says.

  “I guess,” I say.

  “Makes sense,” Two says. “But that doctor…”

  “Is consumed with selfish wants.”

  Two says, “I was going to say is a fucking cunt, but, yeah.”

  I smile. I say, “It’s all so malleable.”

  “What is?”

  “The mind.”

  “Until you arrive at Truth.”

  “Even then,” I say. “Doubt, fear, need for love.”

  “You don’t see it,” Two says. “How fucking amazing you are.”

  “I’d given up on One inside of those walls. That’s the real Truth. Completely given up, believed everything in O’Connor’s book, everything Dr. Turner told me.”

  “Because they systematically broke you down,” Two says.

  “A loose and broad narrative.”

  “All those meds they had you on, locked rooms, revoked privileges…of course you believed what they told you.”

  “Cytoxan and Reprieve.”

  Two shakes her head. She says, “There are no accidents. None. You had to undergo both places to arrive here. To arrive at Truth. To meet me. To change the fucking world.”

  A woman walks out of the front doors. She’s thin. She pulls a knee-length parka tightly across her chest. I can’t see her face, but I don’t need to. Dr. Turner walks to her Land Rover. She climbs inside the car. Two doesn’t say anything, just puts the car in drive.

  We follow Dr. Turner for fifteen minutes. We climb foothills. Houses become nicer and more secluded. I hold Two’s hand, but we don’t press with any force. Dr. Turner turns into a driveway that looks more like a road. Her car disappears into trees and darkness. We park.

  We sit there. The car becomes cold. Our breaths remind us we’re alive because they steam the windows. Two says she misses getting sick and I tell her I know what she means. She asks if it was weird seeing Dr. Turner. I shake my head, but then say, “Kind of.”

  “I bet.”

  “The matriarch of that whole place. Part therapist, part ward mother.”

  “She have kids?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “It’s weird,” Two says.

  “What?”

  “How people in positions of power always betray.”

  “How’d your parents betray you?”

  “Gave me everything I wanted.”

  I nod. I respect her Honesty. I respect her insight.

  “This is it,” I say. “We leave this note…”

  “It’s already over,” Two says.

  “Do you think about what it’s like to die?”

  “Better than prison,” Two says.

  “No, I’m serious.”

  “So am I.”

  “To cease to exist. Nothing. One minute, you’re thinking, the next minute—”

  “You’re free,” Two says.

  “Of suffering?”

  “Of everything.”

  We wait for an hour and then get out of the car. We’re dressed in our scrubs. Our bare arms are littered with goose bumps. An owl calls. We walk down a twisty driveway. The house is big and expensive, modern with flat surfaces and oddly placed rectangular windows. I have the note tucked into the waistband of my pants. We are leaving notes and we are enacting change the way it needs to be enacted with people like O’Connor and Dr. Turner, who believe Truths can be printed in books and people’s worldviews can be systematically eradicated through talking about childhoods and sexual desires. We are giving them gifts. It will be different with my father—his chance for redemption has come and gone. That gift will go to my mother.

  The front door is orange. We walk around to the back. We test sliding-glass doors and then the garage and this door open
s. We walk inside. My heart pounds because I am nothing but Truth. I put my hand on the chrome handle leading inside of the house. It turns. We’re inside. There’s no alarm because people like Dr. Turner don’t believe in monsters.

  We step into her kitchen. It’s beautiful—white on white, quartz counters, everything planned and everything perfect—and I imagine Dr. Turner choosing these counters, poring over modern architecture magazines, dog-earing pages, so happy with herself, so happy with the notion of Perfect Home, so delusional to think this would cure a goddamn thing.

  I’m walking over to the stainless-steel refrigerator when I hear nails against hard wood. Then there’s a dog, a Husky, and it’s barking, loud barks that are rooted in fear and are more Honest than anything I’ve ever heard.

  The door we walked through closes behind Two. It isn’t loud, but the sound’s enough to set the dog off. It lunges from its stance, past me, toward Two. The dog jumps and then Two screams and they’re on the floor and the screaming escalates and I’m nothing but reaction, grabbing a sauté pan from the wrought-iron rack hanging above the island. I rush toward Two. The Husky has Two pinned. Its jaw is clamped around her arm. I raise the pan and I’m thinking about a poodle I was too scared to kill and about there being no accidents and about the certain failure of anyone attempting to recreate a past experience. I make contact with the dog’s head. It lets out a screeching cry. I hit it again and again and again.

  Two’s covered in blood. I don’t know if it’s her blood or the dog’s. I don’t know if it matters.

  “Don’t move.”

  I spin around. Dr. Turner stands there in panties and a cami and her arms are outstretched and they shake and they hold a revolver.