Thirty-Seven Read online

  She’s not referring to me being Thirty-Seven, only that I’d gained my wisdom from the book. I smile and shrug. I say, “What do you expect? It’s what I’m reading.”

  “Poser.”

  “Maybe.”

  “But that’s okay,” Talley says.

  “Thanks for your pardon.”

  “Ooh, did I strike a nerve? Was that a little flashing of your teeth?”

  “No. Yeah. Sorry.”

  “No, no, it’s cool. Kind of sexy.”

  I turn back to the rows of discarded shoes. I pick up a leather topsider and dust its inside.

  “It’s good,” Talley says. “The book, I mean.”

  I nod, still facing the wall.

  “I finished it in like two days. There’s something about the whole thing…”

  I don’t respond.

  “Cults, you know? Why is it people have such a fascination with them?”

  “Beats me.”

  “You know what I think it is?”

  I turn. I shake my head.

  “It’s kind of like how when people say that the real fear of standing on a cliff isn’t that you’ll fall, but that you’ll jump. You know what I mean? People are obsessed with cults because it’s so easy to see yourself falling into one. That, I think, is what really draws us to them.”

  “Or because they killed a bunch of people,” I say.

  “But that’s precisely my point: people can see themselves joining in a group like this, becoming brainwashed, and eventually becoming so delusional that they murder innocent families.”

  “There’s no such thing as brainwashing.”

  Talley holds up the book again. “I beg to differ.”

  “Those people showed up at his door. He didn’t recruit them. They were looking for something.”

  “They were looking for anything. Which this sick fuck provided them with. Which, I’m pretty sure, is the definition of brainwashing.”

  “Maybe,” I say.

  “Maybe? How is that maybe? Any time someone else’s thoughts are forced down your throat until they become your own, that’s brainwashing.”

  “But what if our own thoughts are the problem?”

  “The problem with what?”

  “Life.”

  Talley laughs. She squints her eyes. She tells me I can’t be serious. I know this moment can go one of two ways; I can be Honest, or I can lie. I have options. I have choices.

  I smile. I say, “Okay, you’re right: I’m a fraud. But it doesn’t mean I’m any less rad.”

  Talley and I hang out a few nights a week. It’s no coincidence these nights fall on evenings when Derek’s band has practice. We make a little routine of picking up food and walking to my apartment. We sit on my bed and talk and touch and eat. It’s weird to eat in bed. I fear a guard will burst through my door and write me up. I fear the loss of rec time. We watch movies I’ve never heard of on my laptop. Talley has a preference for coming-of-age films with a broken female lead. I can’t stop crying during Girl, Interrupted. Talley holds me. She strokes my face. One night she sleeps over, which is nice. She snores a little bit. I remember sleeping in bunk beds, trying to time my breathing to the seven others in the room, trying to make their snores my own.

  Talley tells me she has a special treat for us.

  I feel embarrassed because I think she’s going to give me another present. She sets up my computer. She puts on Helter Skelter. I’ve never seen it. I know who Charles Manson is; the comparisons the media made between The Survivors and The Family were false but everywhere. She gives me two Swedish Fish infused with THC. I eat them. The movie has all the seventies trappings of bad acting and too-loud music and scenes that could’ve been a sentence instead of a ten-minute conversation. I’m stoned watching a man I don’t find charismatic in the slightest give a bad name to groups of people living among loving families of their own choosing.

  At one point, Talley tells me she totally would’ve joined The Family.

  She gives a stoned laugh. I let it be. She says, “Serious. Sit around all day doing drugs and having sex…what’s not to like about that?”

  “It’s not real,” I say.

  “What’s real anyway?”

  “Love.”

  “Exactly. Like Manson said.”

  “He was selfish. He only wanted people to love him. Same with all the others. All of them preaching about being the Second Coming and all of that. That’s not real.”

  “Obviously.”

  “No, not that he actually wasn’t the Second Coming, but the entire premise. It’s false. Nothing good comes from worship. Nothing.”

  “You hate God.”

  “If there was one.”

  “What happened to you as a child?”

  “I’m just saying, any group set up to place a single person above all else is doomed to fail.”

  “But not your precious Survivors.”

  “They’re not—”

  “Why don’t you marry them?”

  “Oh my God you’re annoying when you’re high.”

  “Get a room.”

  “Let’s watch something else.”

  “Okay, okay, I’ll be quiet.” Talley rights herself so she sits against the wall. She pulls my head into her lap. She traces her index finger along the ridge of my ear.

  We watch a naked woman with blond hair smoke a joint. My heartbeat slows back down.

  “You know,” Talley says, “for a guy who’s all about Honesty, you sure as fuck are guarded.”

  “I’m shy.”

  “You’re not. You pretend to be, but you’re not.”

  “I’m an open book.”

  “Right. An open book who has no past.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Who hurt you?”

  I speak without guarding myself: “My father.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “The usual things fathers do.”

  “Hit you?”

  “I try not to live in victimhood.”

  “Right, because you’re practically a disciple of Dr. Sick. Don’t forget I read that shit, too.”

  “What good does it do?”

  “Guess so.”

  “No, really,” I say. “What good is thinking about all that? So I can feel wronged? Misunderstood? Righteous in my anger? What good does any of that do?”

  “It’s part of being human.”

  “Not a part I’m interested in.”

  “Then what are you interested in? That’s maybe what I’m asking. What, Mason Hues, gets you excited?”

  “This spectacular apartment.”

  Talley laughs. She hits my chest. She tells me she’s serious. “I don’t know.”

  She puts her hand to my face. She presses until I look up at her. A tiny flake of crust is suspended in her right nostril. I understand she wants me to tell her that she makes me excited. But then the skin connecting her ear loosens and I understand she’s moved on from selfish wants and genuinely wants to know something about me.

  I sit up. I press my back to the wall. I cross my legs. I tell her to do the same. She asks what I’m doing and I tell her I’m giving her a gift. She laughs. I say I am giving her a gift that was given to me. She tells me she’s not into anal, but appreciates the sentiment.

  “Okay,” she says.

  “I need you to respond with as much Honesty as you can possibly muster. Do not filter your answers. Respond with the first thing that comes to your mind. Let the words flow from you. Open yourself up to this experience.”

  Talley nods.

  Nothing about this practice is in Dr. Sick or anywhere else. Nobody spoke about what happened in Marble. The only information anyone had came from my testimonies, and I hadn’t mentioned this.

  “One last thing,” I say.

  “Yeah?”

  “I need you to speak directly into my ear.”

  “For real?”

  “For real.”

  I lean my head toward Talley. I feel the heat radiati
ng off of her face. Her lips don’t touch my ear, but they’re close. I ask her to describe her first love to me. She doesn’t say the boy she’d told me about outside of A Fine Line; she tells me about her father. She tells me about being a little girl and running to him after he got home from work. She was a dog, anxious every time he left the house, worried she’d never see him again. She tells me about sitting in his lap in the den. How he always wore button-down shirts with the top two left undone. How she’d wedge her ear between the cotton and press it against his hairy chest. How this tickled. How she could hear his heartbeat. How sometimes it seemed to skip a beat and she’d cry because she thought her father was going to die.

  I ask her about her favorite memory. Her mouth rolls moisture into my ear. She tells me about a trip they’d taken, her family, her two brothers and mom and dad. They drove from Illinois to Wyoming. She’d gotten sick, really sick. First her throat and then her stomach, vomiting and tears, strep. They’d rented a motel room in Cody. The pool had sharks painted on its bottom. They’d been tired after going to urgent care, so they bought dinner from a gas station. She’d eaten pretzels and cream cheese. They’d watched Twister. Her whole family sat in a small room on two beds with the lights low and they were together and quiet and safe. They’d been kind to Talley, loving. It felt like family.

  I ask about her biggest regret.

  Her lips press against my skin and she inhales with a catch and then I feel wetness from her tears. I fight to stay in the moment, to not filter this experience through my own. I am only partially successful. Talley tells me about her first serious boyfriend, Peter Daniels, a pretty boy who loved drugs and her with an equal desperation. She’d been older and went to college across the country while he finished his senior year. She tells me she hadn’t meant to become infatuated with Sean, a junior at DU, but it’d happened, innocently at first, parties and movies and conversations that seemed to hit upon a level she’d never been able to access with Peter. A stolen kiss. A drunken blowjob. Then it was constant and it was passionate and it felt wrong but it felt more right or maybe she simply didn’t care. Peter’s life was falling apart with his discovery of opiates. He was kicked out of school. He ran away, showed up in Denver, cried into her arms. He had no idea what to do. He told her he couldn’t stop thinking about killing himself. Talley tells me she watched a boy she’d loved shoot drugs and pass out. She slipped out of her dorm to go see Sean. She cried to him about not knowing what to do. The mirroring of the situations felt like a worse betrayal than the sex they had afterward.

  Talley quits speaking.

  Her breathing is the mucus-coated labors of the hysterical.

  I turn. I take the back of her head. I press my forehead to hers. Our whites accept one another. I know she’s experiencing what everybody does when they first recognize the cornerstones of their characters. I know she feels light, free, able to breathe for perhaps the first time in her life. I am giving her the gift that One gave me. And this excites me or makes me feel whole or at least like I’m once again living in Honesty.

  12. SICK (III)

  I’d wake up from fitful sleeps with the cotton sheets clinging to my body. I’d experience a sense of panic from the pressure and constriction, claustrophobia so acute I’d scream. Somebody would always be there. They would kneel beside me, helping free me from the soaked sheets. They’d tell me to take deep breaths. They’d rub my head. On my third week of treatment, this exact scenario was occurring, Twenty at my side, his emaciated face staring down at me, his right hand stroking. The moon shone through the blinds. His hand was furry, slick with my sweat, covered in my poisoned hair.

  13. MASON HUES

  One always said that trying to replicate a past experience was one of the most crushing endeavors a person can put himself through. He said the experience obviously could never be the same. He said the person trying to recreate this moment is struck by the fleeting notion of time’s great power, which, for most, results in feeling his own mortality.

  I’m thinking about this at A Fine Line.

  Derek’s band is back on stage and I’m not rolling or high so their music is just loud and annoying. I don’t feel much like dancing. Talley must be feeling the same thing. She tries to dance but doesn’t seem that into it and the whole night feels like a bummer.

  We outgrow experiences even before they are over.

  We are granted the curse of consciousness, once an asset in assessing danger, but now without actual threats, it has become a virus multiplying self-centered thoughts about things that shouldn’t matter. Everything becomes hypothetical. Everything is Prince Charming slipping on glass slippers to our different futures.

  Every religion and spiritual practice is designed to break this cycle. To grant us a single moment of being in the present.

  The band goes on set break. I think about leaving but Talley comes back from the bar with two drinks and we sit at a wooden high-top. She complains about the crowd being low energy. I agree. Whiskey burns my throat.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe it’s just me who’s low energy.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Or like over this whole scene.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt for them to add a new song or two.”

  Talley smiles even though I can tell she doesn’t want to. “You ever just get really fucking sick of your life?”

  I think about being incarcerated in one form or another for thirty months. I nod.

  “Need like an adventure or something.”

  “I’ll pretend not to take offense,” I say.

  “I’m not sick of you.”

  “What aren’t you getting?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just…same shit, same people, same scene. I’m over it.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “What am I not getting?”

  “Yeah.”

  Talley looks like she’s about to give a real answer, one aspiring to Honesty, when she smiles. “I’ll tell you what you’re not getting, but are about to.”

  “Huh?”

  “Laid.”

  “What?”

  “Because that dude over there is giving you the up-and-down-and-all-around.”

  I follow her gaze. That’s when I see a kid I know, Joshua Smith, a kid I’d grown up with in Boulder. He’s a little fatter than when I’d known him at fifteen. He has a lip ring and a mess of gelled hair. He stares at me and we make eye contact and then he smiles and starts in our direction. I don’t know what to do. I need to not have been seen and I need these worlds to stay separate and I need to get out of the bar and then he’s at the side of our table.

  “Mason?”

  “Hey, what’s up?”

  “Dude, what the fuck? Where…how are you?”

  “I’m good.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Here for the band.”

  “No, I mean, like what happened to you? Where have you been?”

  He obviously doesn’t know where I’d really gone at fifteen—my parents don’t even know—but he might have heard I’d been locked up. Boulder is small. Adults with money all talked about how great their kids were, but even more so, they talked about the kids who fucked everything up. He would’ve heard something. And he’s stupid enough to drag some version of it out in front of Talley.

  “Just hanging out,” I say.

  Joshua tilts his head. His lips part. There’s a moment where he seems to understand I want him to let it be, but the moment is fleeting. He says, “I heard you—”

  “Not true,” I say.

  “Were locked up,” he says.

  I glance across the table at Talley, who smiles with her mouth but not her eyes.

  I have to give a version of Honesty.

  I say, “Yeah, that happened. Was sweet, I assure you.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “Breaking and entering.”

  “What?”

  “Had a little habit going. Needed money to support
it. I was popped for a series of B and E’s. End of story.”

  “Dude, you straight up vanished. Gone. Nobody knew what happened.”

  “That’s what happened.”

  “But your parents didn’t even know what happened. I saw your mom like two months ago. She said she had no idea where you were.”

  I cringe. I can’t look at Talley.

  “Oh well,” I say.

  “Crazy. So crazy. Mason Hues. I can’t believe you’re…alive.”

  “I’m sorry,” Talley says. “We weren’t introduced.”

  Joshua turns to Talley. He sizes her up, then sticks out his hand. “Joshua. I went to school with Mason before he pulled a Houdini.”

  “Talley.”

  “Sally?”

  “With a T.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “You too.”

  She lets go of his hand. Joshua stands there like an idiot. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his phone. “Dude, you have to let me get a pic with you. Proof, man.”

  “Fuck off,” Talley says.

  Joshua looks at her like he’d just been spit on.

  “Serious. Get the fuck out of here,” she says.

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Fuck. Off.”

  Joshua looks at me and then back to Talley. He shakes his head and starts walking away. I stand. I am about to start apologizing, but no words come out. I walk toward the exit. I need to be alone and I need quiet. I’ve ruined everything. I’ve lied. I’ve predicated our relationship upon the death of my parents. I’ve never mentioned having disappeared. I’ve never mentioned being incarcerated. I’ve never mentioned anything real.

  I’m outside. I’m going to be alone. I can’t go back to isolation. I can’t stand not being touched.

  “Mason!”

  I keep walking. I hear footsteps behind me and then Talley grabs my arm and I stop and she looks more confused than angry.

  “What the fuck?” she says.

  “What?”

  “What? What do you mean what?”

  Cars inch by with bar traffic. I feel like a spectacle.

  “Say something. Anything. But just start talking.”

  I’ve gone eight months without saying a single word. Part of this was because I had nothing to say. Part of this was because the psych ward was better than being called a faggot in juvie. But perhaps the largest part of this silence was the guilt of having already talked too much. Talked to the wrong people. Talked to those with the power to make consequences disappear. I’d talked about One. I’d talked about Five. I’d talked about The Day of Gifts. I’d talked about everything in order to reduce my suffering. I’d put myself above my family.