Thirty-Seven Read online

  21. GIFT OF UNDERSTANDING

  I was chosen to be part of a nuclear family, the Johnsons from Durango. We had fake passports and wigs made of real hair, a rented Suburban, and went on a family vacation over winter break. One was my father; Five was my mother. She looked pretty with raven-black hair and One looked handsome with his salt-and-pepper curls and I felt silly in my pompadour poof. We were to drive to Tijuana to procure more Cytoxan. It was to be simple, a treat really.

  We spent the night in Las Vegas. My eyes hurt from the strobes of neon. The scads of people freighted me. I’d never been to Vegas. It had an energy, a pulsating red that was alluring. We stayed at the MGM Grand. I wasn’t sure why we chose to stay at a fancy place on the Strip, but then One and Five said they were going out to gamble as not to raise suspicion, and I understood this was a form of Reprieve for them. I watched a movie on HBO about a cop whose family was murdered. I thought about pleasuring myself during a sex scene but felt embarrassed for some reason.

  Two hours passed.

  I started to worry. We didn’t have phones. There was no way I could get ahold of One or Five, save for going to the front desk and asking for a page over the PA. But One would be angry with the drawing of attention. He’d tell me it was my selfish fear of abandonment that caused all eyes to turn on our family.

  I watched a sitcom my father had loved. I wondered if he was watching the same thing. I wanted to feel connected to him. I wondered if they still were together. Probably. I’m sure he made something up or maybe he denied the whole thing, wouldn’t talk about it, refused to acknowledge what my mother had walked in on, so that night became anonymous like all the others, their minds shifting to the possible reasons I may have run away.

  Three hours.

  I thought about police having recognized One. I thought about the two of them tied up in some forgotten cellar being beaten with phone books. I told myself I was being stupid and they were probably having fun and then I felt immature because I was almost sixteen and hadn’t stepped foot off of One’s property in over five months, and here I was in Vegas for the first time in my life.

  I took the room key and headed to the elevator. This was the first time I had disobeyed One. I walked through the casino. Everyone smoked and drank and was fat. Nobody looked happy, not even the high rollers with pretty women on their arms. I made my way outside. People shuffled down the streets as if on invisible conveyer belts. Everyone looked out of place. A black woman in five-inch heels handed me her card with her exposed breasts on the front and she told me I was cute as hell, she’d cut her rate in half, and I smiled because I’d never spoken with a hooker. I watched a grouping of college-aged pricks try to pick up some Midwestern housewives. The women laughed and then touched the gym-constructed shoulders of the kids and then they left as a group. A homeless man in a wheelchair rolled by, a Puerto Rican flag taped to his armrest. He’d written LIAR in black Sharpie across the flag’s fabric.

  I leaned against the wall and then I crouched. I felt homeless. I felt invisible. People came here looking for something that wasn’t real. Or maybe it all was real and their lives in Ohio weren’t. A man in a button-down short-sleeved shirt approached me. His thinning hair was combed at a severe rightward angle. He asked if I was okay. I nodded. He asked if I was alone. I told him I was meeting people. He asked if I had repented in time for the Rapture. It was in this moment when I received my first Gift of Understanding. One had told me about these moments. He said it was a natural byproduct of living in Honesty. He said the world’s falsities would fall off like so many rusted shackles. Insights would initially come as a strengthened gut reaction, but would, over time and hard work and the destruction of Self, arrive with brilliant flashes of color, a still photograph or a short montage of movie clips that depicted a person’s true motivations. He said this gift would set me apart from my fellows. He said it was a trait that the rest of the world would call psychic because it was easier for them to believe in the supernatural and occult than to believe somebody could be that in harmony with Truth.

  My first Gift of Understanding arrived like an exploded light bulb. I saw this evangelical’s apartment, everything brown but getting lighter as the sun shone through drawn blinds. I saw a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with a bite missing next to a half-drunk glass of lemonade. And then I saw myself in a brown recliner with worn armrests. I saw myself with fluttering eyes, me eventually losing the fight, my eyes closing, my mouth ajar. I saw this man’s smile as he snapped his fingers in front of my face. I felt his trembling hands against my waist as he fumbled with my buckle. And then I saw him commit acts my father only fantasied about.

  I looked up at the man standing above me in the dry Vegas night. I told him I wasn’t interested.

  “You’re not interested in Eternal Salvation?”

  “I’m not interested in going to your disgusting apartment and being drugged through a sandwich and lemonade and being raped repeatedly.”

  The man’s face went from feigned care to utter shock. He wanted to protest but couldn’t. He stepped backward. He stared at me and then turned and walked double-time in the opposite direction and he didn’t look back even once.

  I straightened up.

  I’d been given a Gift of Understanding. It’d been amazing, ethereal, God-like. But more importantly, it meant I was doing the work in earnest. It meant I was firmly rooted in the Path of Honesty. It meant I was glimpsing small Truths.

  I headed back to the MGM.

  I was half a block away when I saw One and Five. It took a second to recognize them with the wigs and clothes bought at Walmart. They didn’t see me. I merged to my right so I was surrounded by taller people. One and Five held hands and they laughed and they stumbled and I realized they were drunk and were in love. I talked myself out of them being in love through a series of rationalizations I could almost believe. They looked happy. They looked like everyone else. Five fell over. One couldn’t stop laughing. This felt like betrayal and like middle school and like an accident, both on their part, and on my behalf as a witness. There were no accidents. A homeless man with LIAR scribbled across a Puerto Rican Flag. A preacher pedophile. A glimpse of One and Five being drunken idiots.

  I made my way back up to the room.

  I felt alone and bad about everything.

  I told myself they were granting themselves Reprieve in a different form. I told myself we were a loving family of our own choosing. I told myself everyone faltered, that it was our nature. I told myself I was on a path to being granted the Gifts of Truth. I told myself every religion aimed at this same Holy Grail. I told myself nobody had ever found it. I told myself I was close or at least headed in the right direction.

  One and Five were hungover the next morning. The car ride was quiet. Alcohol sweated through their skin. We drove across Southern California. We approached the border. One went over our story: we were Douglass, Rebecca, and Timothy Johnson; we were from Durango, Colorado. Douglass was in oil and gas, Rebecca was in elementary education, and Timothy excelled in theater. We were vacationing for winter break in San Diego, and they wanted to show the boy some culture, so they decided to take a day trip to Mexico.

  I understood small falsities were necessary when searching for larger Truths.

  The line wasn’t that long because evidently nobody gave a shit who went into Mexico. One handed over our passports and the border patrol looked at them and then us and when he peered in the window to see me, I felt like an imposter and I smiled. He waved us through.

  Every mile, things became less familiar. There were so many people. Men wore cowboy boots. Things were bleached by the sun. I smelled the ocean and I smelled diesel gas. Traffic was bad. We inched along. One looked nervous, which I’d never seen. Tourists stuck out like flashing beacons. We parked in a lot. One paid a man and then gave him extra to look after the car. We got out.

  One told us we had to kill a couple of hours. We walked down a section of the city that was a little nicer with
trashcans that didn’t overflow. We made our way to the beach. Kids played soccer and older kids played volleyball and a fat woman in a red shirt walked around selling burritos and bottles of water. Five told me to take off my shoes. I did. We both rolled up our jeans. One told us he’d watch our stuff. Five took my hand and we walked across the sand and it felt good between my toes. The water looked too dark. I thought about pollution and then I thought about being in Mexico to buy Cytoxan and realized it didn’t matter. A small wave washed against my ankles.

  “Sorry again about last night,” Five said.

  “Stop,” I said. “I was asleep by ten. Had no idea you guys were even still out.”

  Five let go of my head. She brought her index finger to my face. She rubbed just inside of my ear. She said, “This.”

  “Huh?”

  “This part of the body has a hell of a time being dishonest.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the jaw is the scapegoat of a person’s tension. It is the last to be instructed to lower its guard.”

  “Like a tell?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Just for lying?”

  “For everything. You need to watch for changes in tension. It can tell more than the whites of eyes.”

  “Oh.”

  “Likewise, if you’re ever in a situation where dishonesty is needed to serve Truth, the first thing you need to do is separate your jaw, still with your mouth closed. Then bring your teeth together, but gently, so they are barely touching.”

  “Okay.”

  Five took her hand off my face but still looked at me. I squinted because the sun was her halo. She said, “So, once again, I’m sorry about last night.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Were you worried?”

  “Yes.”

  “That was selfish of us.”

  “Are you two in love?”

  Five took my hand. We started walking along the edge of the surf. When she didn’t respond for a few seconds, I looked over. I noticed then that the front of her jaw jutted forward ever so slightly, then retracted. The skin connecting her ear was loose. I realized she’d just unclenched her jaw and realigned her teeth, as she’d instructed me to do. She glanced down with a smile. She said, “No, at least no more than I’m in love with all the rest of you.”

  We went to two different pharmacies, buying the maximum amount of Cytoxan allowed in each. One hid the white rectangular boxes inside of a rolling suitcase. I wanted to tell him this wasn’t a very good hiding spot but he didn’t seem to worry and neither did Five and then it was time to head back to California. The border took forever going the other direction. Mexicans sold cheap souvenirs between our idling cars. Dogs walked around on taut leashes sniffing for drugs or bombs or maybe people. We inched forward. We had passports and a narrative for being in Mexico.

  After an hour, we were about to speak with the US Customs Agents. Except they weren’t like normal agents because they had machine guns strapped across their chests. I felt ill. Five’s neck sweated. One spoke to me, his eyes meeting mine through the rearview mirror: “We don’t talk. Nobody living in Honesty says a word.”

  He rolled down the window with a big fake smile plastered on his face. He handed over our passports. The patrolman checked our names and then our faces. He asked our reason for being in Mexico. I watched the skin connecting One’s ear and it was the same as Five—jaw forward, realigning of teeth, then response—and he told them to get some culture and the man didn’t smile even though we all did.

  I watched the border patrolman. He sensed something wasn’t right. He sensed he was being lied to. And it made sense because he faced this a thousand times a day, people presenting their best selves in order to gain admittance to what he guarded, people lying, people engaged in every form of deceit. But he didn’t understand what, exactly, he was searching for. He had intuition but not enough to motion us to pull over to be searched. Because we knew something he didn’t: we knew how people worked.

  He waved us through.

  I understood we navigated the world with something close to a superpower. I understood this was a gift from the work we were doing. I understood that One had nearly blown it, not because the patrolman had the same powers as us, but because One’s weren’t as strong as they needed to be. He was slacking. He was letting Self creep back into his life—Five, too. They were faltering. I pushed this thought aside, as was my habit. But I let it come back. I let it come back because it was Truth, and that, above all else—any person or group or loving family of my own choosing—was what I served.

  22. SICK (II)

  Monday through Wednesday we take stool softeners and laxatives. We are at Talley’s Tatters sitting behind the counter and we don’t listen to the music or pretend to work, just hold our stomachs, our bodies chambers of constriction. We sweat. We take turns in the bathroom. At first we’re embarrassed about our smells. One afternoon, Two can’t hold it while I’m in the restroom and then I hear her whimper and I know she’s had an accident. There are no accidents. I help change her clothes. I use wet paper towels to clean her legs. She stops crying as I clean her. She doesn’t make any self-deprecating comments because we are past that.

  23. FEAR

  Fifteen got some sort of infection and it moved from his sinuses to his lungs in no time. His breathing was like dragged metal chains. He died by the next morning.

  I was chosen to pry a tooth from his mouth.

  We buried him next to Thirty-Eight.

  I took a second Reprieve because it was offered.

  Snow fell.

  Christmas arrived. We listened to an Elvis record where he sang holiday classics. One gave us a treat: Mr. Pibb. The carbonation burned the insides of my ears and the sugar attacked my enamel-less teeth. We ate our rice and things were good with the lights turned low. We took turns saying one thing we were grateful for. We all said one another.

  One stood. He made sure to make eyes at each and every one of us. He told us that he’d originally planned on waiting until the summer solstice to discuss this matter, but knew in his heart that the time was right.

  I shifted my weight. Five’s elbow dug into my ribs and I liked this feeling. One stood in his black scrubs. His eyes were sunken but bright. He said, “As a whole, our level of Honesty is higher than it has ever been. This is good. This is the purpose of our lives. Or rather, it has been the purpose of our lives here thus far. But as you all know, Honesty is only the first step.”

  Some of us smiled.

  “Sickness bears Honesty; Honesty bears change.”

  We agreed.

  “But what change have we accomplished?”

  Our smiles faded.

  “We have created a loving family of our own choosing. We could continue with what we are doing, and this would be fine. We could continue believing we are following the Path, that we are in communion with Truth. But to what avail? What good would this do a single person, other than ourselves? And if we serve no other people, then isn’t all of this work a way of bolstering our own selfish ends?”

  Three started to say something, but One shot him a look, and then Three was quiet.

  “We are vessels of Honesty. We are disciples of Truth. We need to enact change.”

  One paced around the living room. All of us looked up at him and some of us were starting to understand this was a call to arms of sorts, something we needed, something we’d been waiting for without even realizing it.

  “Tonight, we will take Reprieve. But we will do it alone. Each of you will find a solitary place outside to take your Reprieve, which will be double the amount normally ingested. You must force yourself against the outer limits of the safe enclosure we’ve created. You need to meditate upon this question: How does each one of you, personally, enact change upon the greater world?”

  We split up.

  I walked outside and up the path. One by one, we dropped off from the group. I kept walking. Snow filled my shoes. I walked to the
base of the cliff. I sat in the snow. I shivered and told myself to quit being weak. I poured the DMT onto the foil. I told myself I was living in Honesty because I’d been given a Gift of Understanding and had completed two rounds of chemo and because I felt ready to breach our bubble and force others against Truth.

  I took Reprieve.

  Things got real dark. I understood I was alone. Not just in the present, but always. This wasn’t a bad feeling; it merely was. I navigated my way through every conceivable shade of red of my mind’s eye. And then my vision cleared a bit, shapes taking form, a middle-aged woman with the trappings of the wealthy walking a Shih Tzu. This woman loved the dog. It was all she had, this dog a stand-in for family and for God and for a reason to keep on living. I envisioned the dog breaking free from the leash. I imagined it running into a street. I saw the dog vanish underneath the hood of a truck. I didn’t see the woman’s face, but I knew she’d just experienced a loss that would shatter her world. I knew this was a form of suffering she’d never even allowed herself to fathom. I knew the root of sickness is suffering. I knew the death of her dog was a gift, a catalyst for her to start a journey toward Honesty.

  I talked with One later that night. I told him what I’d seen. He put his hand on the back of my head. He pressed his forehead to mine. He didn’t need to say anything. I knew I had made him proud.

  Seven of us were chosen to carry out the plans to enact change. We were forbidden to speak of them with anyone else. The following morning, we packed inside of One’s Jeep. He drove us to the Greyhound station in Glenwood Springs. I expected all of us to get out, but it was only me. He told me to get a ticket to Golden and carry out my plan and then get a ticket back. He gave me three hundred dollars. I didn’t want to be alone. The others said they loved me. I believed them.