Suicide Pact E-Book

John Monarch

• Herausgeber: John Monarch
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Coyote Black (not his real name) wants to die. And why not? His life has been a failure on every level. He’s hitting middle age, lives with his Alzheimer’s-addled mother, has achieved exactly nothing in his chosen career, and can count on one finger the number of romantic relationships he’s had. In an act of uncharacteristic sociability, he decides to commit group suicide with four equally pseudonymous people he met online: Twisted Rainbow, an insecure teenage girl with an emotionally abusive stepfather; The Eliminator, an ex-soldier whose short, brutal stint in Iraq left him a psychological wreck;  Niobe, a young African-American woman who in rapid succession lost her job, her mother, her boyfriend, and her baby daughter; and Mr. Y, a college-aged Japanese-American pop-culture geek whose wealthy Type-A parents can provide him with anything he wants except a sense of love and belonging.

But when this quintet meets up to do the deed, Coyote Black suddenly has a better idea: Since the doomed have nothing left to fear or lose, why not postpone their suicide one month and in that time do whatever the hell they want—such as deliver a righteous smackdown to Twisted Rainbow’s asshole stepdad, or blow up an abandoned chemical plant (because despite his traumatic experiences in Iraq, The Eliminator harbors an unhealthy obsession with blowing stuff up). As a bonus, this extra month will give Coyote Black plenty of time to “unexist” himself properly: that is, to say his various goodbyes, sell off his possessions, and destroy evidence of his hateful, pointless life.

Alas, he is, as said, a failure at everything—so is it any wonder that nothing quite goes as planned?

89,000 words.

Leseprobe

Suicide Pact

By John Monarch

Copyright 2012 John Monarch.

All rights reserved.

For Jodie and Stephanie

Contents/Countdown

20. Five Characters in Search of an Exit

19. Coyote Black Hole

18. Crisis on Impotent Earths

17. High Places

16. Battery & Assault

15. The Transformation of Twisted Rainbow

14. Chojo

13. The Other Side

12. False Starts

11. The Whydah Goes Down Again

10. The Last Password

9. The Monster Army

8. Today Is for Meetings

7. Boom

6. Sudden Moves

5. A Thousand Tiny Goodbyes

4. My Summer Vacation

3. Both Ends of the Line

2. Two

1. This Is How the Story Ends

20

Five Characters in Search of an Exit

I turned off Oaks Road and added my rusty green Toyota Echo to the line of vehicles parked front first against the long, low aluminum gate that read “No Trespassing! Authorized Personnel Only!” To my right was a gray Ford Focus (empty), then a blue Jeep Wrangler (empty), finally a white GMC Savana cargo van (cab empty; back unwindowed and thus unknown). Beyond the gate a weedy rutted path stretched away into the steadily darkening depths of the Holly Hills Metropark woods.

I sat there a moment staring into those depths, surprised by how calm I felt. I’d figured for sure my normally hyperactive, worry-wracked brain would be clogged with second, third, and fourth thoughts by now, but it seemed there really was nothing left to think about. Every last neuron now grasped that this was the only appropriate ending. The long, tiresome struggle was over. I could finally rest.

The white van wobbled a little as weight shifted inside it.

I opened the car door and stepped out. A warm summer wind tugged at my hair and clothes and made the trees around me rustle and sway. The air smelled of rain. Dark bruisy clouds filled the swath of sky visible above the winding, two-lane road from which the gated path diverged.

Said road was silent and empty, as expected. That was why we’d chosen this spot: Hardly anyone came this way except rangers and park maintenance crews, few of whom would still be on the clock at this late hour.

It was 8:46 p.m. to be anally exact, just a few minutes from sunset. We planned to fade out with the daylight.

The instant I shut the car door, the rain began to fall—only a drizzle but enough to slicken my hair and make the shoulders of my Jolly Roger T-shirt cling to my skin.

Typical. It was as if the rain had been waiting till I dared expose my loser face. I know a lot of people metaphorize rain as God’s tears falling on this fallen world, but I always thought of it as angel piss, imagining rows of angels standing on the clouds, perfect penises in hand, cocky fratboy grins on their flawless faces as they unleashed streams of holy urine on my head.

With a small sigh, I started toward the van’s back doors but hadn’t taken five steps when I heard a repetitive creaking sound growing louder behind me. I stopped and looked back.

Around a bend in the road came a girl on an old red Schwinn that had a crooked wire basket affixed to the front. From a distance I pegged the small, slim rider to be around twelve or thirteen, but as she drew closer I spied the swells of tits and hips and realized this girl had to be a high schooler, albeit a very petite one. She wore a white baby tee with a rainbow embroidered on the chest, tight pink shorts that displayed her skinny legs all the way to about an inch below her pussy, and a pair of yellow flip flops. Her blonde hair, now darkened a shade or two by the rain, was pulled taut in a pair of pigtails.

Pretty sure I knew who this was—demographically there was only one member of our group it could be, and who aside from one of us (or a ranger, which she clearly wasn’t) would be on this wet and lonely stretch of road at this hour?—I stood there and openly watched her approach. She watched me in turn, her gray eyes narrow and wary. She coasted to a halt a dozen paces in front of me, one foot on the pavement, the other on a pedal, the Schwinn tilted a bit toward the foot on the ground. She glanced over my shoulder at the white van, her safe haven, her finish line, then looked back at me, no doubt wondering whether I were co-traveler or impediment.

I held up my right hand, open palm facing her in a salute or wave.

“Coyote Black,” I said.

She slumped in relief, the bike briefly dipping farther groundward. Then she straightened up and tapped her breastbone with the fingertips of the hand not holding the bike.

“Twisted Rainbow,” she said.

I nodded. “Nice to finally meet you. In person, I mean.”

“Yeah.”

She heeled down her kickstand and swung one leg up and off her bike. I tried (and failed) not to ogle her slender young thighs in action or the way her short-shorts tightened across her crotch as she moved.

Pathetic. Even then, even there, with death’s noxious breath on the back of my neck, I couldn’t stop gawking and yearning stupidly.

Well, it wouldn’t be a problem much longer.

Together we approached the van. When we were about six feet away, the back doors clacked open and swung wide, and a bespectacled, college-age Asian guy peered out at us. I felt a twinge of envy when I saw his clothes: a purple-and-black paisley waistcoat over a black dress shirt with pearly gray buttons, black trousers, black leather Chelsea boots, and crowning it all, a black fedora with a purple band. He certainly knew how to meet the end with style. They wouldn’t even have to change him for the funeral.

“You guys must be Coyote Black and Twisted Rainbow,” he said, giving us a smile that did nothing to enliven his dead, dark eyes. “I’m Mr. Y.”

Again, that was pretty much what I’d figured, not simply because of his ethnicity (though admittedly that was a pretty big giveaway), but also because of the spiffiness of his duds. He’d revealed on Bus-stop.com’s message board that his family was super-rich, his dad being the owner of a chain of wildly successful Japanese restaurants and his mom a top-tier corporate lawyer. Alas, his parents’ busy, high-pressure jobs hadn’t left them a whole lot of time and energy for their only child, who’d essentially been raised by TV and the Internet, neither of which, it turned out, could make him feel loved or happy. Hence his presence here tonight.

He scooted to one side and gestured for us to enter the van.

“Come on in,” he said. “Let’s get this party ended.”

We climbed in. The van’s interior was blank and austere, with ribbed white metal sides that made me feel as if I’d just been gulped down whole by Moby Dick. A similar metal wall separated the cargo area from the cab. The floor was covered with a black rubber mat over which Mr. Y had lain a few Persian rugs. A battery-operated Coleman lamp stood burning in the corner by the back door. Next to it was a black attaché case adorned with a Half-Life sticker.

Against the passenger side wall sat the last two members of our doomed quintet. One was a big-boned, twentysomething black girl clad in a Navy-blue tennis shirt, blue jeans, and white New Balance sneakers. This had to be Niobe. She granted Twisted Rainbow and me a barely perceptible nod as we entered, then resumed gazing glumly at the floor. Her moroseness wasn’t too surprising, given her reasons for being here: In the last eight months, her boyfriend dumped her for another woman, her mom died of a stroke (her dad was already dead), she lost her job at an auto plant and was forced to flip burgers for a so-called living wage, and her baby daughter, her only child, the prize and pride of her existence, went to sleep one night surrounded by happy smiling Elmos and Cookie Monsters, and never woke up.

A few ass-lengths to Niobe’s right sat a muscular white guy in his early twenties who wore a Pittsburgh Steelers T-shirt, tan shorts, and brown sandals. This was The Eliminator. I thought he looked an awful lot like the big-fisted, square-jawed fuckwads who’d trashed my life in junior high school. And maybe that’s exactly what he’d been once upon a time. But as demonstrated by the twitchy, brittle smile he gave Twisted Rainbow and me, any and all fuckwaddiness was long gone, one more victim of his brutal stint in the Army, which had lasted all of seventeen days and ended when a truck bomb wiped out his entire squad but left him miraculously unscathed. At least physically. Mentally he was so wracked with post-traumatic stress disorder, panic attacks, and survivor guilt, he was given a mental health discharge, prescribed a pharmacy’s-worth of meds whose side effects were just as bad as the conditions they were meant to treat, and shipped back Stateside, where he felt lost and abandoned and about as out of place as a leper in a nursery.

(And right here let’s pause for a quick aside, since I’m sure you’re wondering about the strange names. As you might have guessed, they’re the names we used on Bus-stop.com’s message board. I’m using them instead of our “real” names because in my opinion these self-selected monikers expressed our true identities far better than whatever shit our parents scribbled on our birth certificates back when we were nothing more than generic squalling infants. In every way that mattered, these were our real names.)

Mr. Y shut the van’s back doors, cutting off the hiss of the wind in the trees, the smell of the rain, the faint hum of traffic on the highway half a mile south. The outside world was gone now. Now there was just us and these white walls and the Persian rugs and…

“What’re those?” Twisted Rainbow asked, squatting down to examine a trio of foot-tall light-brown cylindrical earthenware objects that stood in a line in the center of the van. They kind of reminded me of my mom’s ancient crock pot. Each one was a quarter full of charcoal briquettes.

“Those’re the shichirin,” Mr. Y said. “I told you online: They’re traditional Japanese charcoal burners.”

“Oh!” Twisted Rainbow said. “I thought you meant, like, big barbecue grills or something.”

I sat down against the driver’s side wall. When she was done inspecting the shichirin, Twisted Rainbow joined me, flashing me a small, tentative smile as she did so, as if she were half afraid I’d order her to move. I flashed her a small smile right back, trying to suppress my inevitable upsurge of nervous excitement that this cute girl had chosen to sit next to me when there was still plenty of room elsewhere. Not that her choice meant much; I figured she felt marginally more comfortable with me simply because she met me first. Just a random accident, in other words; hardly a sign of any inherent awesomeness or likeability on my part.

It occurred to me that she was the only one whose reasons for being here tonight I didn’t know. Unlike most teenagers, she’d been unusually reticent online, revealing only that “Everyone hates me, and everything sucks.” Part of me wanted to probe for further info, but that would have meant initiating a conversation, and that was something I just couldn’t bring my avoidant and socially awkward self to do. Besides, at this point the whys and wherefores didn’t matter very much anyway.

Mr. Y knelt before the attaché case, popped the latches, and looked up at us.

“Last call for…well, everything,” he said. “Does everyone who’s leaving a note have it in order? Anyone have to go to the bathroom? Anything like that?”

“I’m fine,” Niobe said. “Well, not fine, but you know…”

“Me too,” The Eliminator said. “I’m totally good to go.”

“Same here,” I said.

“I’m not leaving a note,” Twisted Rainbow said haughtily, as if her failure to do so was meant to be a great personal insult to someone.

“Are you guys absolutely sure?” Mr. Y said. “Remember: Once we start, we can’t stop. This is it. If anyone wants to back out or anything, now’s the time to say so.”

We all looked at each other, waiting to see if anyone would speak. No one did. No one was suddenly overwhelmed with a lust for life, a grand realization of the foolishness of throwing away this supposed gift of motor functions and neural activity we’d been given unasked. There was no last-minute revolt against oblivion.

No, because oblivion was preferable to the constant misery of being alive. Because when you’ve reached the point where your first response upon waking up in the morning is to feel like crying in despair at the thought of having to run the gauntlet of another awful day, the next logical step is to find a way to go to sleep and not wake up at all. The very idea was heaven.

That was why we’d all been drawn to Bus-stop.com, a suicide-themed website; that was why Mr. Y had posted there, asking if anyone wanted to die with him; that was why the rest of us said yes.

It made a lot of sense. We were all planning to kill ourselves anyway, and dying in a group would make the end less horribly lonely. And charcoal-burning asphyxiation, Mr. Y’s method of choice, a method that had become quite popular in his ancestral homeland of Japan, was supposed to be a relatively easy, painless way to go: As the burning charcoal gradually consumes all the oxygen in the room (or van, or wherever) and replaces it with carbon monoxide, you just pass out and die.

Mr. Y pulled a box of wooden matches from the open attaché case and knee-walked over to the nearest shichirin. He took a match from the box, pressed its bulbous red tip against the strike strip—a visual that made me think rather goofily of a cockhead prodding a hymen (then again, since we were about to penetrate the veil of death, I guess it kinda made sense on a metaphorical level)—and then looked up at us.

“Is everyone ready?” he asked.

We all nodded.

He nodded in reply, then took a deep breath and swiped the match across the strike strip. It sparked but didn’t catch. The rasp it made sounded abnormally loud in the sealed van, a fact that called my attention to how boxed-up we were, how isolated. We had sequestered ourselves from the rest of reality, from our everyday lives, from our pasts and our futures, and now huddled here like conspirators in solemn conclave to commit one final unforgivable crime against the world: to ditch it forever.

That, I think, was what struck me and started the train of thought that would lead us all to such strange stations: the idea that we had already effectively separated ourselves from the world in some critical way, that we had defined ourselves as an entity distinct from everything else, that we were now a we.

Mr. Y tried the match again. Again it failed to catch. Grimacing, he glanced up at us as if expecting criticism or mockery. But we were all just watching him, patiently waiting to die.

He touched the match-head to the strike strip for his third attempt. Three strikes you’re out, or third time’s the charm? Time to find out. His muscles tensed.

“Wait,” I said.

Everyone looked at me, surprised. I’m sure I looked surprised too. I hadn’t planned to speak, but something had awakened in the depths of my mind, those inky subconscious sea-floor trenches where ideas and insanities arise, and this thing was making its way to consciousness like a sea monster surfacing. It wasn’t quite there yet, its precise shape and dimensions weren’t fully clear, but the surface was swollen and bubbling, and the word I’d blurted from my normally shut-tight mouth was the first claw or tentacle breaching.

“What?” Mr. Y said, sounding irritated. He assumed I was about to back out.

I cringed beneath the weight of their gazes, which ranged from blank (Twisted Rainbow) to pissy (Niobe). I wished I hadn’t said anything, just gone along to death with my usual seemingly stoic but really timid silence. “I—I just—I don’t know if this is the best thing…”

“Oh, don’t tell me you’re gonna try to talk us out of this,” Niobe said, her eyes slits. “Don’t you dare.”

“We all agreed—” Mr. Y began.

“I’m not planning to talk anyone out of anything,” I said. “It’s just…I’m having an idea.”

“You don’t get those very often, huh?” Niobe said. “Like givin’ birth to a boulder.”

Twisted Rainbow choked off a snicker, then shot me a guilty, apologetic wince. “Sorry.”

“You’re having an idea?” Mr. Y said. “This is a bad time for ideas. If you don’t want to do this anymore, then leave.” He jerked a thumb at the back doors.

“I do want to do this,” I said. “But…it’s just, I dunno, I was thinking…one of the reasons I wanted to die was because I feel alone. I don’t really connect with anyone. I don’t have any friends. I feel like the whole world’s against me. And, I mean, I’m guessing most of you feel something similar. But it’s, like, here we all are. Not really alone now.”

The Eliminator groaned and rolled his eyes. “Spare us the fucking Hallmark Moment crap. I mean, what, like, ‘Oh, we all got each other now, so everything’ll be all right’? Bullshit!”

“No! That’s not what I mean.” I scrubbed my palms on my pant legs. My heart was beating so hard and fast I wondered if it might not just seize up altogether. I didn’t handle conflict very well. Hell, I didn’t handle any kind of interpersonal interaction very well.

“Then what do you mean?” Mr. Y said with the weary sigh of one who wants to be done with trivialities so he can return to more important things.

“I mean…” Shit. I wasn’t entirely sure what I meant. It had something to do with us being a group, yes, but it wasn’t even in the same galaxy as group hugs and Care Bears crap. “I…I…”

And then that vast and terrible shape finally broke the surface, and in an instant I forgot all my tensions and troubles. I felt only the same sort of awestruck delight I used to feel whenever I came up with a particularly ingenious idea for a novel.

“I mean, I think we could do it better than this,” I said.

Mr. Y frowned in puzzlement. “Do what? Kill ourselves?”

“Yes.”

“I think this way’s just fine,” Niobe said. She shrugged. “It’s peaceful. Quiet.”

“No, I mean, we could do stuff. Us. As a group. We have a group now.” I was grinning at the idea behind all this even though I knew I wasn’t explaining it very well. The best ideas are like that: so raw and new it takes awhile to find the right words to convey them.

“Yeah,” Niobe said in the sort of duh tone reserved for particularly egregious obtusities. “We’re a group that’s a group just to die.”

“Why are you trying to mess this up, man?” The Eliminator said, his upper lip curling back in a sneer. “I mean—”

“We could be going out with a bang instead of…” I nodded at the shichirin. “Instead of a whimper.”

Silence. The van made a faint but complex creaking sound as the wind pushed against it.

“A whimper?” Mr. Y said, offended.

My face reddened. “I mean, it’s all right. It’s a good method. It works fine. But…we’re a group. We should…do stuff. Do more.”

Niobe squinted at me, then turned to The Eliminator. “What the fuck is he talkin’ about?”

He didn’t answer. He simply regarded me, face now thoughtful rather than angry. My comment about bangs and whimpers had gotten to him. On some level he, the man of action, agreed with me.

“I’m saying, why don’t we make our ends wondrous and amazing?” I told them, gesticulating broadly as if to prestidigitate an image from the increasingly stale air. It was getting warm in the closed-up van, and BO was becoming noticeable. According to Mr. Y’s timetable, such things shouldn’t have been an issue since we were supposed to be unconscious or dead by now. Which meant that because of my last-minute balk, we had traveled past our lives’ midnight and were well into hour twenty-five. “Why don’t we do cool things? Remarkable things? What the fuck have we got to lose? I mean, we can do whatever we want, right? We’re just gonna kill ourselves anyway.”

“We are?” Mr. Y said. “When? After we do these vaguely defined cool things?”

“Nothin’s cool anymore,” Niobe said quietly. “That’s kinda why we’re here, remember?”

I nodded, thinking. There was truth in what she’d said.

“Isn’t there anything you always wanted to do but never had the guts to do, or maybe just couldn’t do by yourself?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Sure.”

“So we do that stuff.”

She cocked her head. I thought maybe I’d gotten her to understand, but then her lips split into a huge grin and much to my mortification she exploded into derisive laughter.

“Is this some Bucket List shit?” Cackling, she let herself slump sideways down the wall for theatrical effect before righting herself again. “Tell me this ain’t Bucket List shit.”

“No, it’s not Bucket List shit. Not even close. The guys in that movie were just dying normally after relatively sane and satisfactory lives. But we’re not like that. We’re the folks life wipes its ass with. We’re the ones who can’t win, who don’t belong, who never get a fair shake or an even break. We’re the ones who’ve been fucked over so bad we can’t bear to wait around till we croak from cancer or a heart attack or whatever. We want out now so this torture won’t go on. But what I’m saying is, why don’t we grab whatever we want from this stupid fucking world before we flip it the bird and jump off?”

I could see I had one person on my side: The Eliminator. He was staring at me with a big dazed smile as if I’d just shown him Jesus. Which surprised the hell out of me, since he was the one I’d felt the least rapport with and sympathy for. Meanwhile, Mr. Y looked perturbed that I was deviating from the script, Niobe remained peevish and cynical, and Twisted Rainbow was regarding me with a small frown, as if I were an unfamiliar bug she found both fascinating and worrying, a crazy-looking thing beyond all entomological knowledge.

“Kinda like a suicide run on life,” The Eliminator said.

“Yeah, in a way, I guess,” I said.

“How much time are you proposing we devote to this?”

“Uh…I dunno. A month, maybe? That way—”

“No!” Twisted Rainbow spat, startling everyone. She’d veered from quiet and puzzled to anti-me in an eyeblink.

“Why not?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady. It was hard; not only was I still really stressy from all the contention, but my throat was starting to feel thick and sore. I wasn’t used to talking this much.

Twisted Rainbow stared at me with eyes so agonized I could barely bear to look at her. The idea of one more month was intolerable to her. She didn’t want to be alive for even another day.

“I can’t keep living there,” she said, her face contorting as she fought back tears. “They hate me so much. Especially my stepdad. He—he—”

“Does he beat you?” Niobe asked.

Twisted Rainbow shook her head. “He never lays a finger on me. But he doesn’t really need to. It’s just, the things he says. The way he treats me…”

“Well, then,” I said. “Your stepdad can be the first thing we take care of.”

Silence again. Then The Eliminator raised one hand, thumb and forefinger extended at right angles to each other in the sign of a gun and said, “You mean, like, take care of him?”

“Um, that’s not quite what I meant, no. I don’t know if violence is—”

“Why are we now talking about this as if it were a…an actual logical alternative?” Mr. Y said.

“I think it’s got legs,” The Eliminator said. He shrugged. “I think.”

Niobe was eyeing me closely. She sat hunched forward, elbows on thighs, big hands limp in the triangle formed by her Indian-style legs. I couldn’t read her expression at all. Instead of any hint of an identifiable thought or emotion, there was just this intense scrutiny that made me feel like a specimen on a slide. Though I wanted nothing more than to worm away, to flee far beyond any and all attention, I somehow met her gaze and held it, and we stared and stared like two hypnotists trying to mesmerize each other, while off to one side Mr. Y huffed and muttered, “This is ridiculous.”

“I told you about my girl Larissa,” Niobe said finally, eyes never leaving mine.

“Yeah,” I said.

“What I want more than anything is to be with my little girl again.” A pause. “But first, maybe if we all pool our abilities, we can, I dunno, maybe do some stuff that needs doin’.” She looked at Twisted Rainbow. “And first we start with your damn stepdad.”

For a moment Twisted Rainbow’s eyes glistened and her chin dimpled as if she were about to burst into tears, but then she fixed me with a sudden scowl and thrust a finger at my chest.

“But don’t think for a second that just cuz you help me out with my stepdad—don’t think that that means I’m gonna want to live or something. Cuz it’s not just my stepdad. It’s…it’s everything. It’s the kids in school, and boys, and life, and…and the whole dumb world. It’s all just pain and lies and stupidness!”

“I never said any of us shouldn’t kill ourselves,” I told her. “We still will.”

“We better!”

“I don’t know about this…” Mr. Y said. “I mean, this is…it’s…” He heaved a deep breath and stared down at the floor, lips pinched and pale. When he raised his head again, he looked solely at me, this whole thing having now come down to the two of us. “Look, I’m here because…because I’m not even sure what it feels like to be happy. Nothing’s even remotely enjoyable anymore. Life is just…it’s just…gray.”

“Hey, I’m not trying to make anybody do anything,” I said. “I just had an idea and I shared it. I thought it was cool. It’s like that movie Going in Style.”

And here I admit to being manipulative. Knowing Mr. Y was a huge pop culture geek who devoured movies, video games, and music by the terabyte, I thought that maybe where zeal and reason and even altruism had failed to reach him, a choice obscure movie reference might get through.

Unfortunately, my choice was too obscure, or maybe just too old.

“I’ve never heard of it,” he said.

“Oh. Well, it was this George Burns movie from around 1980. It’s about these three old men with boring, pointless lives who decide to commit a big bank robbery because they think it’ll be fun, and they figure they’ll be dead soon anyway, so why the hell not? They have absolutely nothing left to lose.”

“Why the hell not…” he muttered, staring off into space with a small frown. He sat there a moment, silent and still, a Rodinesque thinker.

And then he smiled the biggest, broadest, most delighted smile I’d seen all night.

He looked up at us, his expression enraptured, enrevelated. “We have nothing to lose!” He said it as if it were life’s secret answer, the single simple concept philosophers had been seeking for centuries.

“Yes!” I said with an excited nod, his giddy enthusiasm contagious. “Yes! That’s what I’m talking about! We’re all gonna be dead soon so no threats or fears mean anything to us now!”

Nobody spoke for a moment. We merely sat there digesting that thought, its meaning, its import, the awe of it all. We understood that some corner had been turned, or border crossed. Or crossed out perhaps.

We were doomed to die, yes, but we were going to live first. We were going to fall, but do so with breathtaking glory like Lucifer from Heaven, like Kong from Empire State, like the bigass goddamn Hindenberg crashing in flame and history.

I forget who started laughing first. It might have been Mr. Y, but I’m not positive. Anyway, first one of us, then the rest began cackling with delicious relief as lifetimes of pain unclenched. Because to all intents and purposes our lives were over. No more worries, no more expectancies, no more lines to toe. Now there was just our fall, and whatever the fuck happened on the way down.

We laughed for several minutes straight, our hilarity ebbing and flowing, at times on the verge of dying out only to be rekindled when one of us started howling again. We laughed: Niobe softly, quietly, her arms pressed tight across her belly and her head bowed low as if to hide her good humor; The Eliminator with his eyes squeezed shut and one hand repeatedly slapping his knee like a cowboy giddy-upping a horse; Twisted Rainbow crying and laughing at the same time and doing them far harder than the rest of us, her young unprocessed emotions spilling all over the place as she rolled about on the Persian rugs; Mr. Y with his head stretched back as if offering his throat to an executioner, his eyes on the white plastic roof light, his laughter being somehow the freshest, like a clear spring bursting from the dark basaltic rock that had constrained it for eons; and me laughing too, but watching them as I laughed, watching from a psychic distance, because even then, even in the midst of the relief and jollity, even though I with my crazy idea had welded this we together—how, I didn’t and still don’t know, all that talk and exhortation being totally against my nature—I still felt totally, unbridgeably apart from them on some basic level, alien, alone, unable to be, now or ever, anything other than an I.

Once the laughter died down, we agreed to get in touch the following day to work out our plans. We made sure we had each other’s emails and cell phone numbers, and those of us who lived locally shared our addresses. Since the Eliminator and Niobe had driven here from out of state, didn’t have a lot of money, and needed somewhere to stay, Mr. Y offered them the use of a small guest house above the garage on his parents’ estate.

“It’s cool,” he told them after their obligatory polite demurrals. “My folks are used to my friends crashing there. Never for a whole month before, admittedly, but I don’t think it’ll be a problem; no one else ever uses the place. Thing is, there’s only one bedroom, so somebody’s gonna have to sleep on the couch.”

“The lady gets the bed, of course,” The Eliminator said with a courtly bow at Niobe.

“Damn right she does,” Niobe said.

All details dealt with, we threw open the back doors and hopped out into the June night. The rain was long gone now, the sky cleared of clouds, countless stars twinkling. A cool, gentle breeze moved through the woods. The highway traffic murmured obliviously in the distance.

Everything felt different. Looking at the others, I saw the same feeling in their eyes, too, a feeling that the world we were seeing now was not the same one we’d left behind when we entered the van. But it wasn’t really the world that had changed. Nor was it us. It was our relationship to the world.

We headed off in or on our respective vehicles, grinning and glad, drunk on the crazed potential of our end, five bombs falling earthward, no telling where we’d land.

19

Coyote Black Hole

I was a mistake.

My mother told me that.

The condom broke, or they forgot the condom, or some damn thing. (It’s probably best if I don’t know the details.)

She told me she was planning to abort me, but then one day the obstetrician let her listen to the beating of my tiny heart, and in a fit of blind, unthinking love she changed her mind and bore me.

Oh, how I wished that stupid bitch had stuck with her first decision. How I wished she’d had me scraped out of her and tossed in a dumpster for the stray cats to tear apart. Better the bliss of nonexistence than a life of unending torment, a life where nothing I tried ever worked, where all I strove for turned to ashes in my grasp, where every human relation I engaged in got distorted and strange and ended in misery, where all I knew was pain and frustration and loneliness.

* * *

But here: Meet Mom.

I got back to my family home in Ferndale, Ohio, one of Exeter’s western suburbs, at around 9:30 p.m. As I pulled into the driveway, I glanced up at the green-shuttered, white-sided house (except the siding wasn’t really white anymore; it hadn’t been cleaned in a couple of years, so it was now dirty-gray except where things had brushed against it and rubbed the dirt off to expose the white again) and I saw the edge of the curtain in the living room window drop back into place as someone stepped away from it.

I climbed out of the car and stood there a moment gazing first at the house, then at the other, nearly identical houses that lined this side of French Street, then at the elementary school across the road. I thought I’d been seeing all of this for the last time when I left for the park earlier. Now here I was again. I felt as if I’d violated the order of things in some way. But that was fine; by now, I was used to screwing up.

Inside, Mom sat in her big beige recliner in the living room, her round face clumsily powdered and rouged and lipsticked as usual (and in complete disregard of the fact that she hardly ever went anywhere anymore), her hefty figure draped in a flowery dress whose front was specked with brown stains from this evening’s microwave dinner (probably Salisbury steak, judging by the shade of said stains), her plump feet encased in a pair of worn, stretched-out orthopedic shoes. She smiled at me over the top of the Exeter Sentinel's Entertainment section, pretending she hadn’t just been peeking out the picture window to confirm I’d returned but had instead been sitting there all the while, calmly doing the puzzles. In her case, doing the puzzles meant poring over them a while, then looking up the answers and penning them in. She’d been dealing with the slow, steady advance of Alzheimer’s for over a year.

And I can hear you now: “Oh, for the love of God, what a prick he is; his poor mother’s suffering from a mind-melting illness, and he’s selfishly offing himself, leaving her all alone to burn down the house when she forgets how to use the stove one day.”

Well, no. She wouldn’t be alone. I had an older brother, Ashforth. He didn’t actually live there—he and his wife Marilyn had an apartment in the next ‘burb over—but he had a job and money and stuff, which meant he was better equipped to see to her needs than loser me would ever be. I was extraneous. I was useless.

What about Dad? Where was he?

Glad you asked!

* * *

I’m about to commit what in literary circles is called an infodump. That’s where you unleash a crapload of backstory on the reader instead of working the information into the narrative in a clever, unobtrusive way. All those tedious handbooks of supposedly good writing that get pumped out faster than white-trash babies insist that infodumps are terrible, terrible things, one short step away from rape, murder, and music piracy.

Well, you know what? I’ve followed the rules for years and they’ve gotten me exactly nowhere, so fuck ‘em. Besides, at this point I simply don’t have time for clever and unobtrusive.

Anyway, I was about to tell you about Dad…

* * *

Dad’s dead. Dad died under mysterious circumstances when I was ten. He smashed the family Thunderbird into an oak tree at 80 mph in the middle of the night.

Why? No one knows. No one will ever know. But theories abound.

The most popular theory is that he was sleepwalking. Or sleepdriving, I guess. A few months earlier he’d been doing all sorts of nutty stuff in his sleep (including, most memorably, dousing himself with gasoline and nearly setting himself on fire in the stone fire ring in our backyard). The presumed cause of his somnambulism was the massive psychological stress of his mother’s death coming on top of a nasty dust-up with local Christian Fundamentalists who opposed Dad and another seventh-grade English teacher assigning a book called The Butterfly Revolution in their classes. Although the sleepwalking seemed to end shortly after the resolution of the book hullaballoo (the teachers won, for what it’s worth), it’s entirely possible there was one last, long-delayed episode that turned fatal.

Another theory held that he did it on purpose. He had been depressed ever since the aforementioned stresses, plus there was a family history of suicide: He’d had an older brother who offed himself decades earlier. (In fact, creepily enough, my parents named me after the guy (though in all fairness, they never told me about him; I found out the facts wholly on my lonesome). My uncle sounded like quite an interesting character, actually. He was a suave, intellectually provocative stage magician whose final performance ended with him drowning in one of those big glass-walled water boxes magicians always love to escape from. Except my uncle didn’t even try to escape; he just floated there smiling out at the audience and at his increasingly frantic assistants as they tried to open the box (alas, he’d tampered with the locks) until…glub glub glub.)

Anyway, whatever the reason, Dad was gone, and in the aftermath of his death Mom became an utter wreck who drank too much and took lots of little pills and once threw her handbag at me and screamed that I was a disgusting little piece of shit simply because I didn’t feel like running up to the grocery store to pick up a jar of spaghetti sauce. Thankfully she gave up the booze and pills and nastiness (mostly) when she remarried a few years later, Dad Number Two being an accountant instead of an English teacher, but still just as neurotic and parentally ineffectual as Dad Number One. (I have no illusions.)

By then, though, I was lost in a sea of other, much worse problems. See, in fifth grade I started hanging out with a couple of kids named Jake and Jacob (seriously). They were funny and creative and rebellious, if rather sophomoric at times. A lot like me, in other words. For a while we had a blast, watching horror movies on cable TV, swapping our meager stores of information about sex, prowling aimlessly around the neighborhood, and perpetrating sometimes-silly, sometimes-clever pranks.

But over the next couple of years things changed. Maybe it was the onset of puberty, or the rigors of middle school, or some other whatnot, but Jake and Jacob descended into bullidom. They started picking on weaker kids. Their pranks grew increasingly cruel. Their humor grew racist, sexist, homophobic. Though uncomfortable with these developments, I continued hanging out with them while trying (and sometimes failing) to distance myself from their more assholy endeavors.

It’s easy to say in retrospect I should have cut ties with them, but they were my friends. They’d helped me carry on in the wake of my father’s death, so I felt obliged to stand by them. Besides, I was only twelve, and at that age most folks aren’t smart enough or experienced enough to grasp just how bad certain things really are, especially if they have no one there to guide them. And with my dad dead, my mom interested only in getting stewed and finding a replacement for Dad Number One, and my decade-older brother off at college, I was pretty much on my own.

I was soon to become even more so: Halfway through junior high school, in a rather predictable twist of fate, Jake and Jacob—plus a couple of lesser assholes who’d joined the crew—decided to make me their latest victim. And we’re not talking about wedgies and name-calling here. No, these cretins waged a complex campaign of terror and ruination. They stalked me. They prank-called my house so often we had to get an unlisted number. They smeared our car with shit. They broke into my locker and destroyed everything inside. They spread stories about me at school and thereby ensured everyone saw me as a pathetic laughable nobody richly deserving of taunts and abuse.

Their crowning achievement was when they got a kid I didn’t know to come to my house, claiming to be a fellow comic-book enthusiast who was eager to show me his own prodigious collection. My mom was so excited that someone wanted to befriend her lonely (and always underfoot) boy she nearly shoved me out the door. I knew better. I knew this had to be a trick. I knew by then that no one would want to be my friend. But Mom insisted I go, so I went. The kid led me into the woods behind French Street Elementary School (a shortcut, he claimed), where Jake and Jacob and three other kids were waiting to beat me up.

The harassment was mostly over by the start of high school, but by then the damage was done. My self-esteem, my sense of trust, my capacity to feel safe and at home in the world, all of this had been destroyed. I had no friends, and though I ached for companionship or a girlfriend or something, someone, anyone, I lacked both the courage and the knowledge to do anything about it. After all, while my peers had been busy learning the ropes of dating and socialization, I’d been getting mocked and spat upon by both former friends and complete strangers. I’d been kind of a weird kid from the start, my thoughts and dreams always out of synch with those of my classmates in some fundamental way, and this interruption of normal development left me stranded far from any sane shore, too far to even think of swimming back.

During my senior year of high school I decided I’d had enough. The mountain of defeats and indignities had grown too heavy and my soul too weary. And I knew exactly what to do about it.

Dad Number One had kept a revolver in a tackle box in the basement, but it disappeared after his death. Certain my mom wouldn’t have thrown it out or sold it, I searched the house one night while she was out with Dad Number Two. It was easy to find. It was at the back of the top drawer of her dresser, with a box of ammo right alongside.

I took the gun into the woods across the street, the woods in which I’d played away much of my childhood, a happy time that was now so long gone it was like a glimpse of an alien world. I knelt in the small round clearing some childhood friends and I used to hang out in, a clearing we’d dubbed our HQ and tried to convince ourselves had been created when an alien spaceship landed in the woods. I loaded the gun. I cocked it. I slid the barrel into my mouth.

I sat there a long time, or maybe it only seemed like a long time, my tears trickling down my cheeks, down the gun barrel, onto my fingers, while an owl hooted somewhere overhead and an occasional car murmured down Dorchester Road at the end of the block.

Obviously I didn’t pull the trigger. I decided after some intense last-minute soul-searching (or perhaps just expertly disguised cowardice) that I hadn’t lived enough, that while my life currently sucked, things could get better, possibly at Adams State University, which I would be attending in less than a year. In other words, I decided to maintain hope.

It was a decision I would come to regret.

* * *

“So where did you get to all this time?” Mom asked me.

Though she was trying her hardest to hide it, I could tell my absence had worried her. It wasn’t like me to be out so late. Or at all. I wondered if she’d feared I’d wound up like Dad Number One, with my face and brains caked in the furrows of a tree trunk.

“Just doing some things,” I said.

“Ah,” she said. “Things.” She nodded as if it were a satisfactory answer.

“Yep.” I headed for the kitchen. Almost committing suicide engenders quite an appetite, I’d found.

The moment I opened the refrigerator and started rummaging therein, the recliner creaked as Mom’s great weight rose off it, and her footsteps came clumping across the living room toward the kitchen. The sounds of food preparation always attracted her. I don’t know why. Despite what her size suggested, she never came to partake. Maybe she just wanted to keep track of what to add to the shopping list.

Whatever the why, she came, saw me getting out the ham, the cheese, the bread, the mustard, and said, “Oh! A sandwich!”

“Yep,” I said.

She hovered, watching, a meaningless smile plastered on her face, while I slapped my sandwich together, poured a glass of water, and sat down at the table to eat. To my relief, she didn’t sit too.

“Did you have fun?” she asked.

“Um, I guess. Sure.” I pointedly kept my gaze on my steadily vanishing sandwich. Alas, Mom had gotten nearly as bad as me at grasping social nuances, so she held her ground, still smiling.

I did my best to hide my annoyance. It wasn’t her fault her brain was turning into Swiss cheese. Besides, I had to tread carefully since she was supporting me. Or, more accurately, the modest family trust that Dad Number Two had foresightedly set up before his death from cancer five years earlier was supporting both of us. If anyone controlled the purse strings right now it was Ashforth: When Mom’s condition got to the point where no one trusted her with money anymore, he had acquired power of attorney. Fortunately he hadn’t balked at my freeloading yet and was unlikely to do so in the month remaining to me. Not only was he a complaisant fellow with an aversion to confrontation, but my being here meant he didn’t have to check in on Mom more than once a week. Win/win. Yay.

“So…where were you?” Mom asked.

I realized she’d keep asking till I gave her a concrete answer, so I looked at her over my sandwich and said, “I was meeting up with some folks I met online. We’re going to work on a special project together.”

She just stood there blinking at me for a few seconds as she digested this information. I returned to my sandwich.

“Is it…” She hesitated, frowning slightly as she hunted for the right words. “Is it…a writing thing?”

“Not quite,” I said. “But it’s a somewhat reminiscent creative endeavor.”

I knew she wouldn’t understand half those words. I also knew she wouldn’t admit that.

“Ah,” she said, nodding with faux understanding. “That’s good.” She continued nodding a few seconds more, then gestured at the last few bites’ worth of sandwich I held. “Is it good?”

“It’s good.”

“Good.”

She nodded, smiling. I nodded, smiling. She turned and headed back to the living room.

Was I cruel, being so intolerant and dismissive of my poor addled mommy? Maybe so. But I didn’t care. I didn’t love her. I don’t think I could say I really loved anyone.

Which isn’t to say I’d never felt love. Or at least what I’d thought was love.

Cue infodump part two!