Thirty-Seven Page 21

  Two’s teeth chatter.

  She’s going to die. She won’t be strong enough to trek into Canada. She needs antibiotics and she needs stiches and she needs someone to tell her no. That was her problem, her parents giving her everything, thus everything becoming worthless, yes, yes, yes. I realize this is a gift I can give. I can give her boundaries. I can save her life. I can take the rap because it was my urging. I can face Truth.

  And maybe this is the first Honest thing I’ve ever done, the first selfless act I’ve ever committed. And maybe this is unconditional love. And maybe that’s the only Truth there is.

  I start driving to Florence.

  I listen to “Blue Moon.”

  I drive up to the hospital’s doors.

  I press my forehead to Talley’s. I tell her I love her more than anything and that I’m sorry and that I don’t know what’s True and that I want her to be happy, that’s it, happy and loved, fulfilled, content, human.

  I get out of the car.

  I open the passenger’s side door. I heave a passed-out Talley up against my body. I drag her to the curb. I am so gentle as I lay her head against the concrete. I am so gentle as I kiss her forehead, so fucking gentle.

  47. DR. JAMES SHEPARD

  I know One is imprisoned at the Florence ADX in Florence, Colorado. I know this because I wrote him a letter, addressed it and everything. Dr. Turner and I decided not to send it. She’d taken this act as progress.

  It takes under two hours to get there.

  I stop at Walmart and get civilian clothes. I change in the bathroom. I throw away my scrubs. I wash my face. I look like a memory. I won’t meet my eyes in the mirror.

  I need to know.

  It’s as simple as that.

  I need to know the Truth. I need to know if I’ve made it all up, if everything I told Talley was bullshit, if I stabbed my father repeatedly, if I was more steeped in protective denial than any other American I’d been trying to change.

  I drive to the prison. Everything around the compound is dead. The front building looks like a rec center to a semi-prosperous subdivision. There are fences fifteen feet high with razor wire and guard towers and barracks. I park the car. The sun beats down and things feel dry even though it’s the middle of winter. I’m scared. I’m alone. I miss Talley and I miss my life and I miss my family and I miss Dr. Turner. I know that I will not walk out of this building. They will put two and two together, run a check on my name, pull me aside for questioning that feels a lot like interrogation.

  But it doesn’t matter.

  I have nothing. I am nothing. I am Mason Hues. I am John Doe. I am One.

  I get out of the car. I try my hardest not to look at the cameras hanging from parking lot light posts. I wear jeans and a white T-shirt. I limp a little. I reach the doors. My body is not my own. I walk inside. The smell is coffee and orange disinfectant. A woman security guard sits behind a blue desk. I want her to smile, but she doesn’t. She stares at my baldness. It’s all she sees. She asks what she can help me with and I tell her I’m here for visiting hours. She pulls out a sheet of paper and tells me to write down my name. Mason Hues. She asks for a driver’s license. I tell her I don’t have one. She asks for a social security card. I give her mine from my wallet. She writes a few numbers down. She tells me to step to the side. She tells me to tilt my chin back. She takes my picture. She prints it out on a visitor’s nametag. She hands it to me. Our fingers touch, and I want this touch to mean something, but it’s just an accident.

  She asks the name of the prisoner I’m visiting.

  “Dr. James Shepard.”

  Here the woman stops what she’s doing. She looks at me, seeing me for the first time. The bald head suddenly makes sense. She’s read Dr. Sick. She imagines her own family being butchered in their sleep. She sees me as a fellow Survivor. She nods. I know she’ll inform those in the position to make people disappear when I leave her desk.

  She tells me to take my first right, walk to the end of the hall, and I’ll be admitted to the waiting room. I ask if it will take long. She glances at me from the corner of her eyes. The whites betray all of her intentions. I know it will take the rest of my life.

  The echo of my feet is the same as it was in CMHIP.

  Same with the electronic thunk of mechanized locks.

  I walk into a small waiting room. There are two security guards behind a built-in desk and office. They stare at me as I sit. A little black kid rifles through his mother’s purse. A TV hangs from the wall. It’s tuned to old reruns of The Andy Griffith Show. There’s no volume. The guards whisper and stare. I will invisibility. I will my body to disintegrate. I think about Talley being taken care of. I think about her feeling betrayed until she feels grateful. I will make it all go away. She will return to a life of normalcy. She’ll be something close to happy. She won’t talk about this portion of her life. It will be a piece of fabric in the quilt of her biggest regret, but it will be livable. I know the guards are looking at my record. They’re either coming across a sealed file or one that says I tried to kill my father or one that says I was an accessory to seventy-seven counts of murder in the first degree.

  “Hues.”

  I look up. A guard with the biggest dimple I’ve ever seen in a chin has opened the far door. He motions for me. I reach for a Gift of Understanding about where he’s taking me but nothing comes. I meet his eyes for a split second as I walk past, and they are angry and disgusted and they are fearful.

  We walk down a blue hallway. The walls are white. They feel as if they’re constricting. I don’t like having my back to the guard. I worry about billy clubs to the head or unzipped pants.

  Thunk.

  The door at the end of the hallway opens. He tells me to keep walking. I do. Then I’m in a long room, a corridor partitioned in two, stools and bulletproof glass and telephones, their twisted mirrored selves on the other side. The guard tells me to walk all the way to the end. I do. I can hardly breathe. I tell myself One will be happy to see me and that he’ll know me and that he won’t be mad about my snitching and that he’ll stare at me and wonder who the fuck I am and what I want. I approach the end. I see orange and then I see an attractive man with a shaved head. One stares at me. I’m remembering everything—our talks on the boulder, our trip to Mexico, our sawing of the DEA agents, our foreheads pressing, One pressing his mouth to my ear and telling me his biggest regret was arriving at our particular Truth—and then I’m standing there unsure what to do.

  I sit.

  One stares.

  I’m remembering countless nights in CMHIP where I stared at his picture in Dr. Sick. I’m remembering tracing my finger over the two-dimensional contours of his face. I’m remembering whispering to the pages, telling him my three, character-defining traits of Self.

  I reach up to the phone hanging on the wall. My hand shakes. One looks at the cut in my palm. He takes a second to move, but then takes his receiver.

  We don’t talk.

  I am terrified he won’t know me; I’m terrified he will.

  I don’t want Truth. I want the deceit of arriving at Truth. I want to feel secure with my understanding of the world and myself and what happens when I commit atrocities and I want things to fit in boxes and I want Gifts of Understanding to be real instead of projections of how I see people’s pasts and I want direction and rules and male love and to not have ever used a sharpened point to puncture skin.

  His breath echoing in my ear is that of my father’s, slightly labored, as if in pain, as he stands in my doorway.

  “Do you know me?”

  One stares at me. I want to shield the whites of my eyes and I want to be nothing but Truth.

  One says, “I know everyone who has ever lived or ever will live.”

  “But me?”

  “People who repeat questions know the Truth but want an answer that aids deceit.”

  I swallow.

  “Just tell me…was I there?”

  One says, “I ca
n see it.”

  “Was I?”

  “You have it.”

  “Have what?”

  “My God,” One says. He smiles. His left incisor is chipped. He seems to be in awe. “You possess Truth.”

  I shake my head.

  “Judas denied possessing Truth.”

  “Please, just tell me if I was with you in Marble.”

  “It changes you. That’s what people don’t understand, you see. Truth. Once you’ve been exposed to it, it overtakes every aspect of your being.”

  I tell myself not to cry, but I can’t help it.

  “You remind me of someone,” One says.

  I remind him of Thirty-Seven because I’ve fashioned myself after an anonymous boy, the antihero of a loose and broad narrative.

  “God,” One says. He smiles.

  “Do you know me? Please, just tell me if I was there in Marble. Tell me the Truth.”

  One looks over to his right. I turn to my left. The door at the end of the corridor opens and in walks another security guard, only he’s different, dressed all in brown, a state trooper. He whispers to the guy who let me in. They stare. I turn back to One. He says, “They won’t let you leave. That’s the thing about those who arrive at Truth: they have to be removed from the populace. They have to be imprisoned. They have to be institutionalized. Because they can see it. Even if they don’t understand what they’re seeing, they see it. It clouds this whole fucking system. It makes every propagated goal inconsequential. It makes every consequence obsolete. It reminds them that one day they will die without any of the fanfare they believe they deserve.”

  I’m crying harder. I’m thinking about his bare chest as he shot the agents and I’m feeling his gentle touch as he punctured my skin with a needle full of Cytoxan and I’m standing at the foot of my parents’ bed masturbating over my father and I’m alone in a locked cell with padded corners praying for any sort of companionship. I’m whispering please into the telephone.

  One presses his index finger to the glass. He says, “You’ve given the world a gift. It will take them a while to understand it, but they will. And others will follow. You are a murmur, a tectonic hiccup, necessary before the quake that will change everything.”

  The door opens again. Another state trooper enters. I know they’ve run my name and I know my picture was captured in St. Paul and then again in the parking lot of CMHIP and our names were on the motel register in Pueblo and they saw me drop Talley off at the hospital and my blood is probably everywhere across this nation and it’s over with and it’s real even if it’s not.

  “Was I there?”

  “You were everywhere,” One says.

  “I need to know.”

  “You already do.”

  The two troopers start down the corridor.

  My voice gets louder. I’m begging him to tell me. He’s smiling. They’re getting closer. My vision is the first inhale of Reprieve and I’m pounding on the glass and wishing to turn back time to be lying in my bed with Talley and us in love with ideals and betterment and one another.

  “There are no accidents,” One says.

  “Please.”

  “The only thing that’s real is love and the loss of love.”

  “Do you know me?”

  The troopers are at my side. They tell me to set the receiver down. I am granted a Gift of Understanding, and it’s the future I’ve inflicted upon the rest of my family when I called the police or it’s the future of strangers who’d murdered innocents.

  “Hey,” One says.

  A trooper puts his hand on my shoulder. He pulls and squeezes. I yank my arm away, and this incites action, both guys grabbing me, and I struggle and scream, the receiver falling from my hand, my right arm twisted behind my body. There’s a searing pain. All I hear is my father’s screams and the burning of logs as we sit around a campfire and Elvis begging for protection. They shove my face against the counter. I crane my eyes so they meet One’s, and there’s sickness there. Honesty, Truth, pride, change, love, and he smiles, hanging up the receiver, and then he speaks to me and his words are silent, trapped behind alienating glass—Welcome back, Thirty-Seven—and the pain falls away and so does my body and I am only my mind and I am only consciousness and I am nothing and I never was and I have changed the world and I know all and I am God.