Thirty-Seven Read online

  Five came over. She wrapped her arm around me. She smiled. Her teeth had become filed from acidic coating. She was still beautiful. She asked if I was okay and I told her I was good but she didn’t believe me. One came over and he put one arm around me, one around Five. We pressed foreheads. But it wasn’t the same. Nothing was being transmitted by the whites of our eyes because our intentions weren’t pure.

  “What’s wrong?” One asked.

  “This isn’t right,” I said.

  “Nothing happens by accident,” One said.

  “Then my understanding that we’ve veered off path isn’t an accident.”

  One and Five exchanged a look.

  “Reprieve is supposed to be a joyous time,” Five said.

  “Reprieve is supposed to be a tool to break down internal walls of Self,” I said.

  “Can’t this wait?” One said.

  “Sure,” I said. “Whatever you think is best.”

  I went downstairs and lay on the carpet and listened to an Elvis concert from when he was fat and dying. I had my eyes closed. I was alone. I was being a baby. I was the only member of my family still seeking. I heard footsteps. I kept my eyes closed. It was One, I could tell by his breathing—always a catch on his inhale before he broached a subject he didn’t want to—and I felt him staring at me, trying to access the right words.

  I didn’t wait for him to speak. I said, “We have lost our sickness. We have lost humility.”

  “I don’t think that’s entirely—”

  “No, of course you don’t.”

  One started to say something, but stopped.

  “We need to become sick,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  “Sicker than your daughter was at the very end.”

  32. NYE

  It’s New Year’s and we’re headed to a rave in an abandoned warehouse in the old meatpacking district of Denver. We know there will be people there in need of pardon and we know there will be supplies for Reprieve. Two tells me she has a present. She digs through her backpack and tosses me something soft and black. I unfold a set of black scrubs. I smile and so does she. We change in front of one another. Two’s pelvis is a dinosaur bone unearthed on a dried creek bed. She sees me watching her change and her face doesn’t flinch and neither does mine.

  The rave’s in an old warehouse, a single massive room. Everything’s concrete—floors, walls, poles reaching two stories upward—and there are probably two thousand people. Everything is muggy. A stage occupies the far end of the room. A DJ spins. Naked girls with glow-in-the-dark paint dance next to him. Lights shoot down from rafters. A disco ball the size of a car looms above oblivious heads. Kids suck pacifiers. A boy wears nothing but a set of angel wings and a girl walks around naked except for a Hello Kitty backpack. She holds a leash connected to a dildo on toy wheels.

  Two says she’s going to get our supplies for Reprieve. I don’t want to be alone. She becomes anonymous and then she’s gone. I bob my head to the music. I watch a sea of people move to their interpretations of a communal heartbeat. Some people dance to be seen. Some people dance with their eyes closed but still to be seen. Some people dance to escape and they aren’t themselves for song-long intervals and these are my people because our unsaid prayer is make it stop; please don’t let it end. I think about these kids having done the best they could at finding a loving family of their own choosing. Maybe the synergy of dancing and intoxication is enough to lift them from walls they’ve constructed around themselves. They forget about victimhood. They don’t stress about people who’ve died or things they can’t afford or men they let enter them. They are momentarily free of fear. They are free of Self. Their Truth isn’t Honesty, but it’s of their own choosing, and that counts for something.

  I know we possess something that can’t be gained through chemicals.

  We will give our people the gift of freedom.

  Two emerges from the crowd. She walks next to me. She puts her mouth to my ear. “So, I might have made a mistake.”

  I look at her from the corner of my eyes.

  “I mean, I got the DMT, but I also got…”

  “What?”

  “A little something else.”

  She smiles. I don’t.

  “It was stupid. I can throw it away.”

  “What part of you bought it?” I say.

  “Huh?”

  “Self or Honesty?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Honesty,” she says. The skin connecting her ear pulls tight. I nod. I tell her it’s all good. Two smiles. She’d lied straight to my face. This isn’t a good way to start Reprieve. She holds up a vial of chalky powder. I ask what it is and she tells me it’s a great mix. I ask her again. She tells me ketamine and crystal.

  There are no accidents.

  I snort two nostrils full off the back of her hand.

  We smoke DMT from a glass pipe that once contained a miniature paper rose.

  Everything is a slow erection.

  We press our heads together.

  Somebody slaps me on the back. I turn to see a spun kid smiling. He says, “So fucking rad. Your costumes. The Survivors. So cool.”

  Two takes my hands. She leads me into the middle of the dancing bodies or maybe body. A strobe hits. Everything is red and heavy and I’m sitting by a roaring fire three years before, ashamed to be associated with a group living so far from Honesty. Five lies to me. One lies to me. Two lies to me. Dr. Turner lies to me. My father lies to me. My mother lies to me. I lie to myself. Two holds me and we dance and my body isn’t my own so I don’t care. One tells me I possess a gift. One tells me I am more connected to Truth than anyone in the family. He tells me I would silently lead until I was ready. And that’s what I do. I lead us to double our regular doses of Cytoxan. I lead us to sickness so absolute we lose family members whose bodies give out before their spirits, or maybe it’s the other way around. Sickness bears two things: Honesty and death. I lead us head first into both. We die. We’re buried fifty yards from a cliff in the mountains of Marble. Two presses her lips to my ear and I wait for her words but all I feel is her tongue. The strobe is orange or maybe blue. It emits heat and it emits longing. The only Truth for these broken kids dancing around us is the pain of their first loves and the grainy clip of their favorite memories and the weight of the actions they’ve committed. But that can change. We can change it. Because there are no accidents. Because I led us to the Truth of Fear in Marble. But that isn’t a Truth, but rather a result of the One Truth. People fear the Sublime. People fear God. Two’s hands are under my shirt and I sweat and she rubs and we are exactly the same as every person and animal and plant and God who has ever existed. People had to die. The DEA agents. Family members. The civilians during The Day of Gifts. They had to die in order to get me locked up and paroled and needing a job and meeting Talley. One said I was going to change the world—it simply was going to happen with a family of my own choosing.

  We’re spun kids offering pardon to other spun kids and everything is moist. We’re pressing our foreheads to everyone. We’re looking for Honesty and we’re seeing chemicals and hurt and people trying so hard to have fun when the overriding emotion is escape. My teeth chatter. Two never lets go of my hand. I love everyone. A Mexican girl cries in Two’s arms. A guy has a seizure and I cradle his head and his eyes are nothing but the whites and nothing but Truth. The massive disco ball lowers. We’re chanting. We’re praying the New Year will be better and our parents will love us how we need and that we’ll stop shooting drugs and that we’ll get a scholarship and that our boyfriends will stop meeting housewives on Craigslist and that we’ll be famous for doing nothing and that there’s a God and that we don’t get sick and that we get sick enough to change. We scream into the night—six, five, four—and we scream into our pasts and this is the year we’re going to find love and this is the year we’re going to lose weight and this is the year we’re going to get over the death o
f our mothers and this is the year we’re going to jog and quit being whores and make amends to our ninth-grade girlfriends and we’re one mind and one voice—three, two, one— and I feel everything at once, every thought and history and want, every fear and insecurity and sexual desire masquerading as a joke, everything, all of it, because I possess the One Truth and because I am a once-in-a-millennium Seeker and because I am God in human form or at least a human who knows God is nothing but consciousness and logic and subtle body language tells.

  It’s the New Year.

  We’re surrounded by people who want what we have.

  We’re building a loving family of our own choosing.

  The rave’s still going, but Two and I are done. We walk into the winter air. We’re excited. We’re high. We are experiencing the pleasures of living in Honesty. Two’s given out her number to a bunch of kids who understood we were different. It’s all a matter of time.

  We walk on a sidewalk with chunks missing. A light snow falls. We shiver but don’t care. It’s dark and pretty and maybe perfect.

  I hear a bottle breaking behind us.

  I turn around to see a few kids. They are nothing but shapes of shadows. Two holds my hand tighter. We keep walking. We hear them calling out to us. Another bottle breaks, this time closer, ten feet away. I think about turning around and telling them to fuck off and then I think about running.

  A third bottle explodes at our feet.

  “Told you God faggots I’d find you.”

  I know it’s the Juggalo kid from the night we met Sarah.

  “I’m talking to you two.”

  We walk faster.

  There’s laughter and the echoes of shoes hitting pavement. A final bottle breaks at our feet. My pants are covered in cheap liquor. We stop because that’s our best option. Two squeezes my hand. It’s two kids, their faces painted white and black, skeletons or demons or people trying to enact change through fear.

  “Kind of rude,” the kid says. “Walking away when somebody’s talking to you.”

  We don’t respond.

  He’s three feet away. I smell alcohol. I am granted a Gift of Understanding about this substance’s effects on his life—abuse and neglect and stealing his mother’s wallet from her purse as she’s passed out on the couch at noon—and I know it grants him the freedom to be his father and to partake in violence and to pretend death isn’t imminent.

  “I’m just trying to talk to you,” he says. His smile is hideous poking through his painted mask. His friend laughs. He says, “I need forgiveness.”

  “You’re forgiven,” Two says.

  They both laugh.

  “You feel that?” he says. His friend keeps laughing. The kids says, “I’m a new man. A new fucking man. Thank you, thank you. I’m healed. I’m saved.”

  “See the light,” his friend says.

  They both laugh. We back up. My heart is the bass from the warehouse. I feel afraid.

  “Just one question,” the kid says. He puts out his hand for us to stop. He makes his skeleton face serious. “Can you give me forgiveness for something I haven’t done yet?”

  I register his movement a moment late, and then it’s a flashing of green and then everything is white armfuls of laundered sheets and then there’s pain and sound and maybe it’s me, a groan that sounds like an echo of a scream, glass shattering over my face, things darkening.

  I fall to the pavement.

  Two’s screams change from shock to fear.

  I can’t move and maybe I’m dying and I taste metal. I fight to keep my eyes open. I’m lying in bed begging for death. One is asking me if I really want to die. He’s asking if I want to live a life dedicated to Honesty. He’s asking if I want to be supported by a loving family of my own choosing. I’m a child face down in a kiddy pool. I’m nothing but fear. I can’t see because I’m buried fifty feet from a cliff with no teeth. But I know what they are doing to Two because he’d told us and these kids understand the fraction of Truth that nothing matters besides the moment.

  Two screams. She starts saying no. It’s the mantra we’d all given as the ball dropped; it’s the only mantra anyone ever really gives.

  My world is jagged shapes and fluid lines.

  I feel sharpness digging into my palm.

  Light creeps in through the corners of my eyes.

  I’m able to move.

  I’m holding a sliver of the bottle smashed over my head. I’m kneeling and I’m sick and I’m trying to find a bucket and I’m cold and my teeth ache and I’m hiking through Marble in search of something real. Two is face down against the sidewalk, her scrubs pulled down. One kid sits on her back. The kid who’d hit me kneels behind her. He masturbates in order to get hard. He spreads open her butt cheeks with his free hand. His face changes from a skeleton to a white trash kid who wants to spread his pain. I’m thinking about everything happening for a reason and dead federal agents and about the only woman I’d ever loved being raped and then about my father’s face in the same communion with God as he masturbated over my sleeping body.

  I slam the glass into the neck of the guy sitting on her.

  I look down.

  The other kid has his penis pressed into Two. He looks up at me. The whites of his eyes match his face paint. He’s granted a Gift of Understanding as I lunge toward him. He shows no remorse; I offer no forgiveness. I’m jamming the glass into his throat again and again and again and again and I’m hearing Elvis sing “Blue Moon” and then everything is calm and he bleeds and Two bleeds and I bleed.

  I’ve left notes promising the death of small children.

  I’ve pulled teeth from eight people.

  I’ve sawed off the feet of two DEA agents.

  But these are the first lives I’ve taken.

  Sickness bears Honesty; Honesty bears change; change results in death. I hadn’t been ready to accept this Truth in Marble. I’d left the day before The Day of Gifts.

  There are no accidents.

  We are Gods dressed in decaying flesh.

  Two pulls up her pants. She’s done crying. She spits on the faces of the dead. She takes my hand and helps me to my feet. I remember Five doing the same with One. Everything is really the search for love. I have the wherewithal to take the sliver of glass I’d used to enact change. Two presses her forehead to mine. She says, “I love you so fucking much.”

  I don’t tell people I love them because it normally isn’t True or maybe because they will eventually let me down or maybe because I’d never thought love was real. But this is different. Because I know it’s the most Honest thing I’ve ever uttered: “I love you too.”

  33. BURIED

  We got sick and some people complained and some people tried to leave and some people died. A respiratory infection swept through our home. Almost all of us had doubled both the regularity and amount of Cytoxan. One spoke for me. He said our senses of Self had become inflated after our enacted change from The Notes. He said he could see want and fear in the whites of all of our eyes.

  The first things to fall off were chores.

  We simply were too sick. All of us. At the same time. There weren’t the checks and balances of staggered stages of chemo. We all extended our arms on the same days. We all prayed for death on the same nights. We expelled poison from every orifice. A lot of us cried. We didn’t wash our sheets. We didn’t switch beds every night. We lay there and were lucky to not soil ourselves. Dishes piled up. Toilets were splattered with dark matter. We blamed one another until we quit caring.

  After two weeks of my new edict, I heard shouting. It was Twenty-Nine. He yelled because he didn’t want to be injected and because he was too sick and because he was scared he was going to die. One tried to calm him. He told Twenty-Nine it was selfish fear speaking, not Twenty-Nine. He said that sickness bore Honesty. He said we all loved him.

  “Fuck you. Fuck this place.”

  We were scared and we were sorry and we didn’t give a shit.

  One said that
he’d give Twenty-Nine a ride to town. Twenty-Nine told him not to bother, but One insisted.

  One came back three hours later. He looked at me. I wanted him to tell me how it went and I wanted him to tell me I hadn’t ruined our family. One’s boots were wet and muddy. And then I was granted a Gift of Understanding—Twenty-Nine’s final destination being buried by the cliffs instead of the Greyhound station—and I wasn’t scared or ashamed and the only word that crossed my mind was good.9

  9 According to Henry O’Connor, there were nine bodies, or nine different portions of bodies, buried 1.25 miles away from Dr. James Shepard’s Colorado estate. Six men, three women. Five of the bodies could be identified through forensic means. Of those five people, all of them had been reported missing sometime over the three-year period from 2011–2014. The causes of death were indeterminable, except for two of the bodies, which showed blunt force trauma to the cranium.

  I know at least one of the blunt force trauma bodies was Thirty-Eight’s.

  The other was probably Twenty-Nine’s.

  One had told me that his wife had left him after their daughter, Zoe, passed. I didn’t question this because I’d heard of couples disintegrating after dead children. But sitting in CMHIP, poring over the pages of Dr. Sick, I read the chapter “Graveyard” for the first time. O’Connor writes: “Only one of nine bodies buried in Shepard’s backyard contained its teeth. That body belonged to Patti Stein Shepard, Dr. James Shepard’s wife of two decades, who had been missing for six years, ever since a trip to France from which she never returned.”

  I talked about this with Dr. Turner.

  I was shaken up and told her it was bullshit, O’Connor’s book, the detail about One’s wife.

  “Facts are facts, Mason.”

  “Facts aren’t facts.”