Thirty-Seven Read online

  We lock eyes. I’m granted a Gift of Understanding. It’s Dr. Turner in her late teens and she’s in love with the world and with the notion of college and she’s walking to her car at the mall and there’s an attack and there’s penetration and there’s the smell of onions on the attacker’s breath and there’s promises of death and there’s him forcing her to open her mouth and then there’s his phlegm in her mouth. He has become a piece of her. She keeps good on her promise. She keeps her mouth shut. She quits walking alone at night. She becomes involved with Take Back the Night. She learns to shoot a gun from one of her graduate school friends. She holds people at distance, more men than women, but both. She wants to know why this man attacked her. She wants to know the kind of broken that forces itself inside of another. She wants to learn to fix him so she can fix herself. She’s had a gun for the majority of her adult life. She knows how to shoot it. She will feel no remorse, but rather a tremendous sense of relief, me dying the death of her attacker.

  I hold up my hands.

  “Mason?”

  “Dr. Turner.”

  “What… Jesus Christ.”

  She looks down at the black and white clump of dog on the floor. Tears start. Two pulls herself around the far side of the island counter.

  “What have you done?”

  I don’t answer because it’s obvious.

  “Mason, do you…what have…do you realize what they’ll… why?”

  “It attacked me.”

  Dr. Turner chokes out a sob. Her knees are skinny and they shake. She wipes the back of her hands against her nose and then trains the gun on me. My hands are still up. I feel the dog’s blood against my shoes. I will not beg for my life because it doesn’t matter or maybe I will not beg for my life because I can see the Honesty of Dr. Turner’s whites, and there isn’t death there, only regret.

  “Why?”

  “I was going to leave you a note.”

  She lets out another sob.

  “You’re not Thirty-Seven, Mason. You’re not that person. You’re past that. We got you past that. What the… Jesus, your hair.”

  Dr. Turner’s shaking; she’s afraid. But it’s pity she’s crying over. Pity for me. Pity for herself and her failures. Pity for the Truth that people don’t change; they learn to hide detestable traits until their sons are asleep and they can masturbate over sleeping bodies in peace. I see Two rising from the far side of the island. I stare at Dr. Turner. I say, “You said I could do anything I wanted. Be anyone I wanted.”

  Dr. Turner leans forward as if infused with physical pain. I think about family members doubling over paint buckets. The gun lowers. She stares at me and then her dead dog and then back at me. The skin connecting her ear fluctuates between taut and loose. Two is a shadow and she’s invisible and she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen and everything is a repetition of everything else and she raises her hand holding the metal pan and she’s One raising his gun to the DEA agents’ heads and the only thing I want to say is I love you more than you love me.

  Two swings the pan against Dr. Turner’s head.

  Dr. Turner drops.

  I want to tell her to stop, but I don’t because there are no accidents.

  Two bashes until there’s nothing left.

  I imagine One doing the same to Thirty-Eight. I imagine the loving family of my own choosing doing the same to seventy-seven innocent people. I imagine myself doing it to the piece of shit raping Two. I imagine doing it to my father. Everything ends in death—this is the One Truth—and Two stands over a dead body and she turns and her pale face is splattered with blood. She walks across the wooden floor. We press our heads together. Both are slick. Things taste metallic. We are so close to combusting and we are Truth and we are God and we are one.

  43. FAMILIES OF ORIGIN12

  12 Henry O’Connor has a chapter in Dr. Sick titled “Families of Origin.” It’s one of two told in mosaic form (the other being the chapter “The Day of Gifts”). It is twenty-two hundred words, thirty-eight sections long. These sections are snippets of biographic information of each of us. They read somewhat like lists and somewhat like obituaries. It’s the saddest chapter in the book.

  The thirty-seventh section of “Families of Origin” is about me. It’s obtuse because my identity is classified. O’Connor writes, “John Doe, aka Thirty-Seven, was fifteen years old when he joined The Survivors. The particulars of his upbringing are unknown, but one can safely assume his home life left much to be desired. He was too young for a driver’s license. He was a freshman in high school. He was eighty-nine pounds when apprehended.”

  O’Connor strikes similar emotional chords with each member of my family. His writing is flat. He uses very few adverbs. He gives facts that come across as the most human thing in the book.

  Vignette after vignette, we are chronicled.

  Each of us is different, but each of us is the same.

  We all lost someone or something or everyone or everything.

  Cancer took most of our loved ones.

  Abuse destroyed our psyches.

  Some died in car accidents.

  Some died because they put guns inside of their mouths.

  O’Connor doesn’t offer any insight in this particular chapter, which I applaud. It works better as an impression. The reader, even though he’s hell-bent on understanding in order to gain a sense of control in order to keep fear at bay in order to preserve the fantasy of immortality in order to blot out the Truth that he, in fact, is the God he prays to for protection and love and raises at work and healthy children, can still pause, reflect, see us as human. The reader can deduce that his own family of origin wasn’t as bad. Or if it was, he can feel good about the fact he didn’t subject himself to round after round of chemotherapy and then break into strangers’ houses and murder their families. The reader understands that we were looking for a new family. A new start. A new doctrine to live by. O’Connor uses the phrase “a loving family of his/her/ our choosing” twenty-seven times in Dr. Sick. Because that’s what we sought. That’s what we created. Really, it’s as simple as that.

  “Sasha Stein, aka Five, was born and raised in Fort Collins, Colorado. She was one of three children. She married when she was twenty. She became a nurse. She volunteered at her synagogue and she gave blood quarterly. A coworker, Shelly O’Rourke, described her as ‘the most giving human I’ve ever met.’ In 2009, her husband of eleven years died of prostate cancer. Both Sasha and her husband had lost their jobs the previous month. Sasha Stein was widowed and owed the hospital over two hundred thousand dollars.”

  I’d not known Five was Jewish.

  I’d not known Eleven was a Gulf War vet.

  I’d not known Twenty-Four had served five years in the penitentiary for possession with intent to distribute.

  I’d not known One had been raised in a two-million-dollar condo in Manhattan.

  One always said that we were not our pasts. He said we were not our differences. He said we were people dedicated to living Honestly among a loving family of our own choosing.

  I think about the million people who’ve read Dr. Sick: The Survivors and The Day of Gifts. I think about them having a morsel of empathy. I wonder if they do what their religions preach: see themselves in somebody else’s shoes. Dr. Turner was the first one to bring up this notion. We sat in her office. She asked me why I was crying. I didn’t know because I was far from Honesty. I told her it wasn’t supposed to be like that.

  “Be like what, Mason?”

  “Murder.”

  “What was it supposed to be like?”

  “Love. Community. Family.”

  She nodded. She crossed her legs and I thought about running my hand up her thigh and then about Jerome and then about my father.

  “But why are you sad?” she asked.

  “Because they had no choice.”

  “People always have a choice.”

  “Not when there are no accidents.”

  “It sounds
like you are speaking about powerlessness.”

  I nodded.

  “What, in your own life, do you feel powerless over?”

  “Everything.”

  “Like?”

  “When I eat and sleep and what I do and what I watch—” Dr. Turner held up her hand. She said, “What about before you arrived here?”

  I thought for a minute. I wanted to say anything but my father. “My father.”

  Dr. Turner smoothed out her skirt. The skin connecting her ear tightened, but not in an aggressive way, more like she had an idea. She said, “Could it be that you, like The Survivors, experienced a powerlessness so absolute that violence felt like the only option?”

  I conceded with a shrug.

  “And perhaps, you’re drawn to The Survivors because of this similarity?”

  “I was drawn to them because we created a loving family of our own choosing out of shit. Out of death. Out of betrayal. Out of—”

  “Abuse?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Acceptance,” Dr. Turner said. “It always comes back to acceptance. How to find it, where to find it, how to achieve it of our own actions.”

  “We had no choice,” I said.

  “You’re exercising empathy,” Dr. Turner said. “The ability to understand and share the feelings of another. This is good. This is really good.”

  I stared at Dr. Turner like she was an idiot. I said, “Isn’t everybody who reads this book able to do the same?”

  She shook her head. She said, “Not to the same levels, Mason.”

  44. HOME

  We drive the speed limit. It’s 11 a.m. and then it’s 12 a.m. and then it’s a new day. I haven’t been back to Boulder since the night I ran away. It’s grown. The Flatirons are like nestled clouds. I’m behind the wheel because Two bleeds from her hand and her arm and her chest. I think about my father teaching me to drive. I wonder if he’d have been patient. I wonder if he’d have told me I was doing a good job.

  We’re quiet. The adrenaline has subsided. We are alone in our thoughts of murder and what happens afterward. When we feel selfish want and fear creep back up, we squeeze one another’s hands.

  I drive through town.

  Everything is a memory, none of them horrible, none of them happy. I turn on Broadway. A homeless man stares at me and I know he’s a Seeker. I use the blinker. Two whimpers whenever she moves her right arm or really whenever she moves at all. I turn on Yale. I drive a block and then pull over. I bump the curb because the whole thing is new to me.

  “This it?”

  I don’t respond. I feel Two’s stare. She turns to her window. We look at a million-dollar bungalow with a porch swing. I stare into the attic window. I wonder if they’ve kept my room the same or made it into a study that’s never used. I feel physically sick. It’s not because of what we did to Dr. Turner and it’s not because of what I’m about to give. It’s because I am making good on an edict I abandoned. I’d lost Trust. I’d lost Truth. I’d lost Honesty. I’d betrayed everything I’d worked so hard to achieve because I was jealous and I was scared and I wanted to believe people were bad and selfish and capable of loving one another but not me. I think about it being different, The Day of Gifts, had I not phoned the police. I wonder if my family members would still be alive, or at least not incarcerated. Probably. I wonder if they would’ve dispersed and assimilated and become their dead loved ones, or if they’d have stayed dedicated to living an Honest life.

  Two reads my mind because her blood courses through my veins and because we are nothing but conduits. She says, “There are no accidents. You did what you did. This is a chance for redemption. You have the opportunity to deliver a gift that your mother—no, fuck that, the world—needs to receive.”

  I nod.

  “You have the opportunity that nobody else gets.” Two reaches out and takes hold of my chin so I meet the whites of her eyes. “To erase your biggest regret. And in doing so, you will erase who you were. You’ll erase Mason Hues. Thirty-Seven. All of it, gone. You will be One. You will no longer be tethered to this world. You will be free of Self.”

  I’ve never thought about this. I’m nodding. She leans forward. We press our foreheads. We kiss. My limbs find themselves with tingling pinpricks.

  We stop kissing. Two speaks into my mouth: “Are you ready for us to change the world?”

  I shake my head. “I’ll go.”

  Two’s whites search for Honesty. They find it. She nods and tells me she understands. I reach out and take the door handle. I pause. I ask if she has her phone.

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Do you have any Elvis?”

  Two smiles. She scrolls through her library. Her fingers leave bloody streaks. She shakes her head and tells me she has a cover of “Blue Moon,” but that’s it. I tell her that works. She finds a pair of earbuds in the glove box. She tells me to be careful and to be Honest and I say, “I love you so fucking much.”

  I get out of the car. It’s cold and windy and everything feels fake. I’m fifteen and I’m coming home from school and I’m hoping my father isn’t home and I’m hoping he is. I’m fifteen and I’m dressed in black scrubs and I’m doing my part in The Day of Gifts. I’m eighteen and I’m probably wanted for murder and I know I will die and part of me doesn’t want it to end because I have someone to share it with.

  I walk to the front door. I kick away snow, searching for the fake rock containing a key. I can’t find it. I walk around the side of the house. I run my hands over windows. I walk to the back. I stand in my childhood yard. I’m learning to cast a fly rod. I’m eating burgers. I’m sitting in a baby pool staring at people I think will never hurt me.

  I break the glass with a rock.

  I wait for sounds, for lights, for alarms.

  Nothing.

  I arrange the earbuds. I press play. A slow, country version of “Blue Moon” comes on. The woman’s voice sounds like sickness and beauty. My steps are silent. I am a ghost. I am a demon. I am a giver of gifts. I slide the largest knife out from the wooden block. I’m thinking about lying on carpet while vomiting and shitting my pants and I’m thinking about lying in bed pretending to be asleep and I’m thinking everything happens for a reason and Two came into my life to lead me to Truths I was too young and scared and broken to accept the first time around.

  The stairs don’t squeak because I know where to step.

  The pictures of me along the staircase have been removed. Instead, my parents smile like they are happy and did a good job with parenthood, or maybe those smiles are real and they feel blessed to be done with me.

  I’m my father walking down the hallway. I’m slightly drunk and certain the rest of the family is asleep. I feel like I’ve done well that day, been a good father, a good husband, even got in a bike ride. I feel like I deserve this. And who’s it even hurting? Mason should be thanking me I don’t enact the same things that were done to me by my father. I’m a saint to keep these urges to his doorway. A fucking saint.

  My mother and father are asleep. The cable’s off but the TV’s still on and things are electric gray. I am nothing. I have no weight or presence. Consciousness is a disconnect from God. We are God. Consciousness is a disconnect from ourselves. I stand at the foot of their bed. My mother faces the wall because even in her sleep, she knows the Truth about my father. My dad faces the ceiling. His mouth is open. I walk to his side. I stare at him. He looks older but still attractive, the lines of days-lived thicker, distinguished. The sides of his head have grayed. I watch his Adam’s apple chug up and down as he swallows. I reach underneath the waistband of my scrubs. It only takes the act to get hard. I watch my father. I wonder what he’s dreaming about. I wonder if he misses me. I wonder if he’s glad I’m gone and I wonder if he’s sad and I wonder if his biggest regret is what he did in the darkness of my room or if it’s that he didn’t do more. I go faster. I listen to a woman pay tribute to Elvis. Her voice is haunting. I think about my father waking up and him smiling, a d
ream come true. I wonder why my mother never did anything. She knew, just like anybody knows what goes on under the veil of suburban tranquility. I bite my lip. I don’t care if the slapping sound wakes them up. I don’t care about a single fucking thing and I’ve always cared about everything and I still do. I think about my birth mother. And I am granted a Gift of Understanding, my mother not a junkie or a thirteen-year-old victim of incest, but a housewife, mother of three, older, happy, just not wanting to do it all over again. I am the sacrificial lamb. I cry. I beg Jerome to hold me. I shiver on a boulder and whisper into One’s ear and the euphoria I feel is life without the weight of a soul.

  My eyes fall from my father’s throat to his chest. That’s when I see a thick red line dissecting his pectoral, the only bare patch on his chest. It’s a scar. It’s new. But not that new, the skin rounded and smooth. I see the tip of another scar at the base of his sternum. I use the tip of the knife to lower the silk sheets. His entire torso is covered in scars, easily ten, twelve, fifteen. Each one is around two inches in length. The knife hovers above his navel. I realize it’s the same size as the scars.

  I’m thinking about cancer and operations and car accidents. I’m masturbating over his sleeping body. I’m my father. I’m agreeing to adoption and I’m secretly excited about it being a boy. I’m terrified about when my son matures, adolescence shedding with the first definition of muscle. I want to watch him shower. I want to love him the way I was loved. I want to be immortal. I want to be loved. I want to be God.

  Everything goes black and my body is nothing but the release of energy. The lyrics beg to be kept from harm. I pull up my pants. I lean over and kiss my father’s forehead. I want this moment to last forever; I want this moment to be my happily ever after. I walk out of his life for a second time.

  I walk back to the car. Two sees me. The door opens. She’s crying and searching and I stare at her and then I lose it because I don’t understand what the fuck is going on and she thinks I’ve killed him and I close my eyes so she keeps this belief. We don’t press foreheads. We hug. We hug so hard. We cry. She tells me she’s proud and that she loves me and that there are no accidents. I just keep sobbing. She says, “Shh, baby, shh. Everything’s okay. You’re okay. You’re loved. You’re safe.”