Thirty-Seven Read online

  “Elizabeth Smoltz?” one of the cops says.

  Two nods. “Is there something I can help you with?”

  “Oh, probably not,” he says. “Slow day out there.”

  Two smiles. She rubs her bald head. The female cop walks toward me. I understand they will talk to us separately, but at the same time. I understand this is an initial feeling-out process. They will try to be our friends. They will wait for us to incriminate ourselves. I understand all of this because I am God.

  “How’s business?” she asks. She’s the type of woman whose father loved her with all his heart but would’ve loved her more if she’d been a man.

  “Slow season,” I say.

  “Nobody has any money left after Christmas,” she says.

  I smile and nod, but not too much as to appear desperate. The male cop speaks with Two. I can’t hear what they’re saying. I ask if she’s looking for anything in particular.

  “Oh, I don’t think so. Just poking around.”

  She thinks she’s clever. I know it’s served her well over the years, her cleverness, her distrust, her eye for detail. It looks a lot like a life lived in Honesty, but she uses her intuitive powers to shield herself from Truth.

  “Great,” I say.

  “Well, there is one thing,” she says.

  She looks at me. She says, “I’m sure it’s nothing, but we’re actually…” She leans forward like she’s letting me in on a secret. I know this is to build a sense of trust. “We’re actually following up on a homicide that occurred the other day.”

  “Around here?”

  “Yeah, not too far.”

  “I’m not sure what I can do to help, but I’m all yours.”

  The cop stares at me. Her nostrils are wider than most Caucasians. She smiles. “Good. That’s good. I’m glad you said that. Because I just have a few questions, then I’ll be on my way.”

  “Of course.”

  “You see, there were a few people who saw some people around the scene of the crime who…well…matched your descriptions.”

  “Our descriptions?”

  “Elizabeth Smoltz and Mason Hues. That’s you, right?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Again,” she said, leaning against the purple counter, “I’m sure it’s nothing. Bald heads. Probably more common than they were in my day.”

  “Probably.”

  “But the crazy thing is, I was running the descriptions through our database, and your picture popped up. And there’s a brand-new photo of you with that shiny noggin. I spoke with Officer Mack, and he informed me where you worked. We’re probably grasping at straws, but you got to fill the day somehow, right?”

  I nod.

  I know it’s not going to end.

  This is the first.

  They will send more.

  They will keep coming because we’re different and we’re living a life dedicated to Honesty and they can sense this and it produces fear.

  “Now, tell me, Mason, what was it you were incarcerated for as a juvenile?”

  “I don’t have to tell you that.”

  “No, no you don’t. But I thought you said you wanted to help.”

  “I do. But I’ve given my adolescence to you, and my record is sealed in return. Now, if there’s anything about this homicide I can help with…”

  The cop smiles. She nods. She’s going through the thought process of putting me in the category of suspect to prime suspect, a guilty boy who understands his basic rights.

  “Of course,” she says. “Fair is fair.”

  I look over her shoulder. Two’s all smiles with the male cop. The female cop follows my gaze, turning around, then back to me.

  “Just as a formality, can you tell me where you were on the morning of January first?”

  I don’t give her the satisfaction of pretending to think. I stare at her nostrils and then her skin connecting her ear and then her eyes. I tell her I was in our apartment.

  “Oh, you two are a…”

  “A what?”

  “An item?”

  “We don’t put labels on things.”

  “Right. How uncool of me.”

  “No worries,” I say.

  “The whole night?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “That whole night, you were in the apartment?”

  “More or less.”

  “Tell me about the less.”

  “We went out.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “To help the homeless.”

  The cop’s eyebrows rise. She nods like she’s impressed. “That’s mighty noble of you. Around here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you happen to venture down to the RINO district at all?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “That’s what I just said.”

  The cop grins and taps the counter. She looks at my hand and then she looks back up to me and her cheekbones are more prominent than before and I know she’s trying to contain excitement at her cleverness.

  “What’d you do to your hand there?”

  “Cut it.”

  “Looks pretty nasty. You get stiches?”

  “Just hydrogen peroxide.” I show her my palm and then I bring my hand to my side.

  “How’d you get that cut?”

  “A bottle.”

  “You know what they say,” she says. “In the fight between man and bottle, the bottle always wins.”

  I stare through her. I smile. I think about my DNA being all over that Juggalo, and probably Two’s as well from the ripping of her anus. I’m thinking about consequences being man-made and not real and I’m thinking of Truth being combustible, those in possession of it being consumed by its power. I know it’s happening, has happened, will happen.

  “Well, Mason, I really do appreciate your time.”

  “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help.”

  She pauses. It’s a dramatic effect learned from TV. She steps back to the counter. She says, “There’s one last thing.”

  “Yup?”

  “Why the shaved heads?”

  “We like the look.”

  She nods. She says, “Yeah, you two don’t really strike me as the skinhead type.” “Nope.”

  “Or even crazier, some Survivors wannabes.”

  “No, not that either.”

  I tell Two about the night One killed the DEA agents. I tell her everything because there are no secrets. I tell her how One gave a speech that night. How he told us it was over. How Truth couldn’t be contained. How it consumed the vessels it traveled through. She asks what I’m saying. I tell her our lives in Denver have run their course. She nods. She presses against my chest. We’re in our apartment and we’re naked and we’re covered in one another’s fluids.

  “You never talk about it,” she says.

  “What?”

  “The Day of Gifts.”

  “What is there to say?”

  “Who’d you kill?”

  “I didn’t.”

  Two props herself up on her elbow. Her small breasts brush against my chest. “You didn’t?”

  “I was supposed to, but I was too sick. I could hardly stand.”

  Two stares into my eyes. She’s searching. We’re all searching. She purses her lips, about to say something, but lies back down.

  “Don’t do that ever again,” she says.

  “Do what?”

  “Lie to my face.”

  I feel like a failure and a phony. I take Two’s hand. I tell her I’m sorry. She tells me to only apologize if I have no intention of ever repeating the same action. I apologize again.

  “One gave me specific instructions. Everyone else’s people were random, just cities and towns. But he told me who I was supposed to give my gift to.”

  “Who?”

  “My mother.”

  “Like you were supposed to kill your father?”

  “Yes.”
<
br />   “Jesus.”

  “Yeah.”

  We’re quiet. Semen dries on my leg and itches. We know this will be the last night we spend on the mattress.

  “And you couldn’t do it?”

  “I couldn’t do it.”

  “He deserved it.”

  “We all deserve to die.”

  “But especially him.”

  “I let selfish fear overtake me.”

  “There are no accidents.”

  “Everything is an accident,” I say.

  “They will come back,” Two says. “The cops. They won’t stop until they pin it on us.” “I know.”

  “Do you ever think about it?”

  “Huh?”

  “If you’d killed your father?”

  “Yes.”

  “I feel afraid.” “That’s normal.”

  “I haven’t felt this way in forever. Like not even when that motherfucker was raping me. Not like this.”

  “I thought it was all about fear,” I say. “The One Truth.” “I fucking love you.”

  “We killed seventy-seven people. Nothing changed.” “Everything changed.”

  “You ask if I ever think about it, and I do. But you know the messed-up thing?”

  “Huh?”

  “I play the tape in my mind, and it always turns into me lying in bed with my dad in the doorway.”

  “Protection.”

  “Love.”

  “You’re the most amazing person I’ve ever met,” Two says.

  “It wasn’t supposed to end this quickly,” I say.

  “Nothing ever ends.”

  “Everything ends.”

  “Not for Gods.”

  “Especially for Gods.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Two says. “Everything you’ve ever done has affected somebody. Everything. Like those guys we gave forgiveness to. All the family members in the mountains. The Notes. And those are just the big things. Like really fucking big. Like bigger than anyone can dream of. And me…I mean, fuck, man, you gave me life.”

  “We’re going to be fugitives.”

  “I don’t give a fuck. You hear me? You gave me the very thing every human has ever searched for. You gave me God.”

  “I love you,” I say.

  “And love, baby, you gave me love.”

  “It’s all the same.”

  “Because each of us is God. We can enact change through whatever tool we want. We can give love or we can give fear or we can give hope. I mean, that’s what you all didn’t grasp in Marble. Each of us who possesses the One Truth can change the world however the fuck he wants.”

  “I love listening to your Honesty.”

  Two straddles me. The lips of her vagina wrap around my penis’s underbelly. She slowly rocks. She asks me about my first love. I tell her about an amazing woman I met who offered me a job. I tell her I was immediately drawn to her, both her sexy looks and her seeking aura. Two grinds her pelvis. I tell her how I was all messed up when I met this girl and wanted her to like me and was scared of who I was because I had no idea. I tell her things changed with forced Honesty. I say, “She forced me to quit living in selfish fear.” I’m hard again. I tell her that we built a loving family of our own choosing. That we became sick together. That we saw our worst and most vulnerable selves. That we loved with such ferocity we didn’t need to touch. I tell her we started changing the world. And then we took a life because it was Honest. Two inches off of me, sliding my penis inside of her. I tell her this girl took my virginity and she was the most beautiful person in the world and that she was a prophet and a goddess and that she accomplished the impossible: enacting change through happiness.

  Two rides me. Her eyes are soft orbs of vulnerability. She asks my favorite memory. I say, “This very second.”

  Two goes faster. She slams down on my hips. We are vessels of Truth. We are combustible. We know this and we race against our immolation and we want to consume one another and I love her so fucking much.

  She pants, asking me my biggest regret.

  I’m about to come and I buck and squeeze Two’s flesh and she moans and bites her lip to the point of rupture and I tell her my biggest regret is that I didn’t kill my father and then she comes and I come and we are nothing and everything and we understand what we’re going to do without saying anything because we are a single mind.

  40. TALKING

  I made my first telephone call in close to a year.11

  11 In Dr. Sick: The Survivors and The Day of Gifts, O’Connor reprints the entirety of my 911 call.

  “911, what is your emergency?”

  “People are going to die.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Dr. James Shepard is behind it.”

  “Sir, are you in danger?”

  “We’re all in danger.”

  “Where is your current location?”

  “Truth.”

  “Sir, I need your name.”

  “Thirty-Seven.”

  “Your address? Thirty-seven what?” “Gifts.”

  O’Connor breaks down the phone call. He dips into my head. He takes the liberties of presuming he knows what I was thinking. He writes, “Thirty-Seven, known simply as John Doe, the youngest member of The Survivors, experienced a moment of clarity. On some fundamental level, he understood what was about to transpire. He resisted Shepard’s brainwashing. A germinating doubt blossomed into an attack of conscience…Thirty-Seven attempted to give his own form of gift on February tenth, and that gift was a warning.”

  O’Connor thinks this because I said as much when I was picked up three days later. I didn’t talk and then I did and I told them whatever they wanted to know or maybe what I was willing to tell them.

  They pushed and pushed and pushed for the whereabouts of the DEA agents.

  I told them I had no idea what they were talking about.

  I was held captive. I wasn’t offered a lawyer, because of Homeland Security. I didn’t care. I knew how to look people in the eye and project what they wanted to believe. I had no allegiances to One or Five because they’d sold us out for selfish wants.

  And that was the real reason for the phone call. I wasn’t thinking about sleeping families being awoken to puncture wounds. I wasn’t thinking about accent walls being splattered with blood. I was thinking about One and Five in Mexico and them being happy and alone and with their new child that I wanted to be me. I was lamenting the fact we’d ever come back from Mexico. I was imagining that moment in the ocean as something permanent, something that didn’t crush me. I was picturing the three of us—we’d grow hair and we’d live a simple life, and I’d learn to surf and I’d meet someone, a local girl with dark hair on her arms, and things would be quiet and we’d eat fruit and I’d speak various dialects of Truth and Romantic languages and it’d be a loving family of all of our choosing.

  All of that, juxtaposed to the image of them leaving us at the Greyhound station, their hands so close to touching, magnetism.

  Five was arrested in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. A family had been butchered seven hours before her incarceration. She was picked up walking along the highway. She wore her black scrubs even though it was only seventeen degrees. She was covered in blood. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t resist.

  One was arrested in Oklahoma City. He was pulled over because he drove two missing DEA agents’ car. He wore black scrubs. The previous night, the OKCPD had received four different calls, each parent hysteric, words failing, their children killed in the dark hours.

  I didn’t know this at the time, so I talked and I talked with varying levels of Honesty.

  I acted out of jealousy.

  I acted out of fear of being abandoned.

  I acted out of my need for love.

  Dr. Turner said everything stemmed from being given up for adoption. She said everything stemmed from my father pleasuring himself in my doorway. One said everything stemmed from our consciousness disconnect from God. He said that God wasn’t re
al. He said everything came from humans knowing this Truth, but doing everything in their power—consuming and fucking and drinking and creating art and kneeling in mass and fighting wars and masturbating over our sleeping sons—to blot out this understanding, to live a life based in deceit. Two said that One’s Truth was only a partial truth. She said that the One Truth is that we are Gods. Each of us. Everyone who has so much as screamed outside of his mother’s womb. She said that armed with this knowledge, we can enact change through whatever tool we want.

  I don’t know, maybe they’re all right.

  O’Connor writes, “Thirty-Seven retreated from Glenwood Springs back up to Marble. He was in search of safety. He craved sanctuary. But upon arriving at Shepard’s cabin, seeing it was still deserted, save for the ghosts of his fellow Survivors, who at that moment were in the process of murdering innocent people, he understood that this cabin, once a refuge, was now nothing more than a reminder of the atrocities he was complicit in…At that point, the only thing for a fifteen-year-old who’d been forced to undergo chemotherapy, forced to ingest highly disruptive hallucinogens, forced to offer up his body for any Survivor who felt a taste for youth, to do was to burn the house down. He had to destroy the physical representation of the mental hell he’d been enslaved to.”

  In CMHIP, I thought a lot about my willingness to abandon faith in One. I couldn’t help but feel like Judas. I’d gotten scared, everything a Reprieve-like jumble of hurt. I’d allowed my sense of others, my intuition, my Gifts of Understanding, to skew. I’d seen what I wanted to see. I sold them out. I told things that shouldn’t have been told. I agreed to deals. I craved intimacy. I became a mute. I became Mason Hues. I steeled my resolve in Dr. Turner’s office, highlighting a book I practically wrote, seeing inconsistencies as facts, telling myself that One and Five might have participated in The Day of Gifts, but they were still running away together as the Johnsons from Durango. I did this and I became happier or at least not suicidal. I didn’t think about Truth. I didn’t think about Honesty. I masturbated to fantasies other than One or my father. I played four square in the rec room. I never used the first person plural. I was given small rewards: extra pudding, promises to not go back to juvie, the ability to keep Dr. Sick in my room. I blotted out everything I’d learned and I talked about being a victim and I wrote letters we burned and I believed Dr. Turner when she said I could be anything I wanted to.