SUMMER OF THE FALL

BY KEVIN VACHNA

I

 They say that there’s a quiet before the storm; but that’s a lie.   They say a lot of things that you shouldn’t believe.   You can not take every thing you’re told to be the truth and believe it.

Anyone can tell you a story.  

Anyone can lie and twist the facts.

It was dark as I lay on my back on the floor in the center of my room.   Slivers of stale light cast the shadow of prison bars through the few broken blinds that hung before the window.   I could taste the dank air as it loomed in through the opened window.   I could hear the pitter-patter of the raindrops falling rhythmically and repeatedly along with the sounds of muffled and murmured sirens outside that window.   I could feel the moist sprinkles of rain as the wind blew them into the room, through the window, and onto my face.   All of this was happening, but I didn’t care.   The darkness brought back the familiar memories of awakening to the phone calls when Jake wrecked his car or when Ashley jumped….   I shook the thoughts from my head and hit the light switch.   The two florescent lights in the ceiling brought a kind of false sunlight to the room.   One came on fully, while the other just flickered helplessly.   I had never changed that bulb, I didn’t ever really see a need to; all it did was light up a room that I was indifferent at seeing.   The carpet was soggy and my bare feet slowly sank into it.   It had never fully dried from when one of the pipes from the upstairs bathroom burst last winter.   The air stood still and stagnant all around me.   I was in that room, but I wasn’t really…. there.   My mind was contemplating my life, my choices, my successes, and my failures.   My memories were like bad dreams, only this time, I wasn’t asleep and I couldn’t run a way from them.   No matter how hard I tried to tell myself that these dark memories weren’t mine or weren’t even real, they wouldn’t go away.   Every night for many years now, I have relived the same horrific events over and over again.   It is an endless cycle that has been slowly gnawing away at my sanity, my patience, and the very essence of my being.

People will spend all their lives trying to convince you that one thing is really something else.   With the right words, people can make you believe whatever they want.   If you hear something enough times, you can eventually be tricked into believing anything.    It’s called brainwashing and they just tell you the same thing, repeating it over and over again until you believe it to be the total, undeniable, and dead to rights truth.   If you hear something every day for five years, you can eventually be tricked into believing you’re the Queen of Spain.   But you’re not the Queen, now are you?

Suddenly, my eyes snap open wide.   My pupils dilate and adjust to the darkness around me.   I take a deep breath and let out the same sigh I have let out every night for years….   It isn’t a dream, but then again, it isn’t really a reality any more.   Everything in my life has gone numb and adapted to co-exist with my vicious nightmares.   I really can’t be sure that some things are real and some things aren’t.   I have lost all sense of feeling in my life.

My eyes danced back and forth across the room for a while.   Then, a sudden chill runs up my spine that puts a sense of terror into the back of my mind.   I climb to my feet and gaze around my dark, half empty room.   It looks as though it hadn’t been lived in for years.   The contents of my life are stored in this room and upon its shelves.   But this stuff isn’t really me…. not anymore.   It all seems so meaningless, so trivial.  At my right stood a dresser which rose from the damp floor to my waist.   It was here when we bought the house and if it had been taken better care of, it might have been one of those priceless antiques you see in really fancy places.   On top of the dresser, spare change and little torn pieces of paper with scribbled writing clung to it.   The coins were more or less laminated to the surface, protecting an untouchable small fortune.   There was also the screw driver I had to use in order to open two of the three draws.   The handles were missing in action.   Perhaps they had originally been removed to keep burglars from reaching valuables and priceless secrets.   I stuck out my hand as if I was going to move the things on the dresser around to look for it, but I knew it wasn’t there.    I sighed again.   I walked over to one of the shelves that are home to my many trophies.   The countless brass figurines stare blankly back at me.   I reach out for one and examine it.   It is my Senior Division Little League Baseball trophy.     It read: CHRIS DAVIS- MOST VALUABLE PLAYER.

A bitter smile appears on my face as I let the trophy slip from my fingers.   It hits the floor with a –thud– and the brass figure snaps off.   I hold my left arm, because at that moment it begins to hurt again, just as it has done every night for most of my life;   especially when it’s a cold night like tonight.   As I slowly remove my other hand from over it, I notice the horrible scar, purple and red with pain, that stretches out from the bottom of my shoulder, across my bicep, to almost where my forearm begins.   I know that this scar is proof to my self that my memories are real and not just the hallucinations of a boarder-line insomniac.

I look back at the trophies and think to my self:

-Not any more, this isn’t you, never again…-

They say that both before and after a storm rips through your life and destroys everything you love, leaving you homeless and poor, there is a silence.   A stillness.   A calm.   But what do they know?   These people, the one’s who say this, they are the people who have never had to live through the storm.   They see the dark day rushing towards us via satellite and weather reports.   They are miles away, in their research labs, sitting behind a computer, looking at numbers.   Statistics.   Graphs.   Pie-charts.

I close my eyes and start to relive the horrible moments that have brought about the turning point in my life, but I shake my head and fight my way back into reality.   I turn to the other side of my room, where stands a beat up old desk and a broken chair.   On my desk lay various papers of meaningless importance, but in the center of them all rests a photo album.   My mom had been keeping this, but the last entries are from years ago.   I guess she stopped caring, too.   I open the album to the last photos.   It is our last real family portrait.   There’s my dad, my mom, my two sisters, Susan and Jess, and me.   We are all dressed up and smiling.   It looks so unnatural, so fake.   The only person who looks real is my father.   He was always smiling, always happy.   There we are: one big happy family.

-What a joke-

The quiet before the storm isn’t really quiet.   No, not at all.   Trust me, I know this.   It’s full of the tiniest little things.   The build-up and the break-down.   In a sense, they are more important than the storm, itself.   Alone, the storm is nothing.   Just chaos without cause or effect.   Every event has a rising action and a falling one.   They alone shape the climax.

People just don’t pay attention.   After all, where you’ve been and where you’re going are much more important than where you are at.

I close my eyes and fight back the tears of rage that were forming.   Sure, now I could cry, now I could show some kind of emotion.   But back then, I couldn’t shed one tear.   Not for anyone.   It just didn’t seem real.   One thought kept coming to my mind.

-Where is he when you need him?-

I sigh again.   The photo album is full of only the good memories, not the bad ones.   Maybe that’s why none of it seems real.   I peer out the open window hoping to see some sign of hope, something to tell me that everything is going to be okay.   There is none…. only the darkness of the night and the sound of distant police sirens.

So please, keep quiet and pay attention.   For what I am about to tell you, I’ve said many times before.   You just weren’t listening.

And there’s a difference between hearing something and actually listening.   Most people will forget that.   This time, I want your attention.   I’ve never begged before, but there’s something you need to know.   There isn’t much time.

Thinking back on that summer, I come to the conclusion that every event that occurred can be traced back to one cause.   The “Summer-time Strangler”, Playland, my job, the funerals, and the sudden realization that I am not “Superman” can all be traced back to one person, one girl: Tracy Matthews.

She was the good and the evil; the best and the worst part of that summer.   It was all her fault, really, if you think about it.   People can change you… even if you’re never fully aware of it.   They destroy what you once were, breaking you, melting you down, and then rebuilding you into something new; something different; something so ugly that you can’t bear to bring yourself to gaze upon your own reflection in the mirror.  

I am completely without blame.   I’ve washed my hands of this.   None of it, not even a single piece, is or was my fault.   You see, I was just a… bystander; yes that’s it, a bystander in these events.   It’s like watching a car crash and knowing that you can’t do anything about it.   Perhaps I was the real victim.  

Anyone can tell you a story.   But I am not going to tell you one.  

If you hear something enough times, you can be made to believe anything.   But forget all that.   Forget what you’ve been told.   Forget when you’ve read in the paper.   Or seen on T.V.

I’m not going to show you the storm.   That would be cheating.  

Are you even listening?    Have you heard a word I’ve said?  

So keep quiet and pay attention, then.   For what I’ve told you before, I’ll tell you again.   You don’t have to hear my words, but you must listen to them.  

The Before and the After are what’s important.   The Now is so trivial.   After all, the present is only instances away from becoming the past.  

So listen now.   This is the last time I’m going to tell you.

This is my testament to the truth and this is my testament to Tracy, wherever she is now.   I really, really hate her.   It’s all her fault…

II

 Tracy was the embodiment of everything I hated, as well as everything I loved.   She was like a drug.   When I wasn’t with her, all I could do was think about her.   I literally craved her.   I needed her.   My body went through serious withdrawal when she wasn’t around.   She was the only thing that kept me sane, but she drove me crazy.   Do you know that saying, “If you love something, set it free”?   Well, I have come to think of it as, “If you set something free, you’ll live to regret it.”   And you’ll soon see that this is a constant theme in my life.

Tracy was my complete opposite, maybe that’s what attracted me to her in the first place.   But I really don’t know.   I’m not sure I could tell you if you were to ask me.   Tracy was a complete surprise.   I just wanted to help her.   She needed my help.   She caught me off guard and slowly, without her even knowing it, she destroyed me.   If I was Superman, then Tracy was my Kryptonite.

It all started in late June of my junior year of high school.   I was a star athlete; starting pitcher for varsity, and I got good grades.   I had a lot of friends and was very popular.   But… something didn’t feel right.   Something in my life was … missing.   I was the kid everyone turned to for help.   I guess you could say I was dependable.   Whenever someone needed money, I gave it to them, even if I really couldn’t afford to spare it.   Whenever someone was in trouble, I felt an urge to help them.   I was always sticking up for the little guy.   I was the one breaking up fights between people I didn’t even know.   Swear to God, it got to the point that it began to feel like I was put on this earth to save them.   I guess you could say, I had developed something of a Messiah Complex, and was on a path to eventual self-destruction.   That may have been true, but I just didn’t know it at the time.   It was my desire to save people that would seal the fates of everyone close to me; everyone I cared about.   It would lead me to a sudden rude awakening that you can’t save everyone and when you try, you end up not being able to save anyone, not even your self.  

Thinking back, I can remember exactly how it all started…

It was the first day of my summer job, school had just ended and I was looking forward to a good and memorable summer.   I was working in a kitchen at some “new-rich yuppie” camp upstate.   Ok, I’ll admit it, it was truly a really crappy job, but it was going to give me some much-needed money.   It was way upstate in the sticks.   You know, those quiet little country towns where there were more cows than people there.

It was a long and awkward car ride.   I sat in the passenger seat of my father’s lime green 1992 Nissan Altama.   I stared hopelessly out the window.   My dad sat next to me, driving, looking straight ahead and not saying a word.   My dad and I hadn’t spoken in almost a year.   He was a hardened United States Marine General who was taught to always be tough and always be in control.   Emotion was a weakness, as he had always said.   When he was diagnosed with leukemia he was forced into retirement.   He shut down and shut out the rest of the world, and most importantly, me.   When the leukemia went into remission, my father opened up to everyone else, everyone, except me.   Our relationship was never the same.

But our bad blood was partially my fault.   You see, because my dad barely finished high school, I guess I always treated him like I was smarter than he was.   I really didn’t do it on purpose and by the time I noticed, it was too late and the damage had been done.   But because I thought that he was always wrong and could never say anything that could possibly be right, I stopped listening long before he stopped talking.                 

Maybe, I pushed him away.

After two grueling hours in complete silence, my father made some kind of noise and the car slowed down and veered to the side of the road until its movement came to a halt.   “Are we finally there?” I thought to my self.   But I was wrong; we weren’t there.   In the middle of this almost savage, rural road, resided a rusted old pick-up truck.   The front of the car had been smashed in and beyond it laid a huge black and white cow moaning in pain.   The truck had hit the cow.   My father got out of the car and walked over towards the truck.   The owner of the truck stood there watching the poor beast, speechless and not sure what to do.   He wore these tired, faded, old blue over-alls and shook his head solemnly at the creature.   The man turned and saw my dad coming.   He greeted him and they exchanged words.   I couldn’t make out what they were saying but the first man kept pointed at the cow and shaking his head.   My father stood there for a second and then slowly reached towards his back and under his shirt.   “What’s he doing now?” I kept asking myself.   From his back, he pulled out his old, silver Beretta.   With one swift and casual motion he shot the cow.

-Poor cow…-

It jerked as it left out a demonic wail, as chunks of its skull were propelled into the air, and then … it was dead.   Just like that, it was dead; its life was over; gone, and that cow would never live again, no matter how hard you tried to force feed yourself the notion of reincarnation.   Blood formed a pool beneath its skull.   My dad returned his gun to its home and then he and the man moved the cow off to the side of the road.  Its final resting would be a ditch along a dusty road where most people carelessly dumped their trash.   I couldn’t believe that he had just shot the cow.   It was as though my father was indifferent to the fact that he had just exposed himself as a killer.   It might have lived, who was he to decide whether the cow lived or died.   I finally could hear some of what he was saying to the man…. In broken fragments and a harsh voice he said, “Can’t save everything…. Didn’t have a chance…. Got to know when it isn’t worth fighting anymore… stupid cow…thing just walked in the road… sometimes the only way to make it better is to end it … stupid cow..”

My dad came back to the car and got in.   He put his seatbelt on and then turned to me as if to explain his actions, but he just kind of looked at me and then, he too, shook his head.   He started the engine and we were on our way again.   After some more of that familiar silence, the car finally reached its destination: Camp Blue Ridge.   I reluctantly climbed out of the car.    I caught a quick glimpse of my father’s stern, emotionless face and then I grabbed my bags and with out saying good-bye, I walked away from the car.

“Hey!” a deep voice bellowed at me.   I turned to see my father looking at me.   That was the most he had said to me all week.   “Just don’t do anything stupid.”   That was the kind of pointless advice he would always give me.   If only I had listened.

“Yeah…” was the only thing I could say.   I sighed and continued my march towards the crowd of other people who were waiting for their further instructions.  

It was a tiring day that coughed and moaned and gasped for breath as it went on.   The clouds were smothering the remaining sunlight; choking away its warmth and comfort as they crept up all around the sun.   The darkness was coming, this even I could tell.   The day was progressively growing darker and with the coming darkness came a foreboding sense of dread in my heart.   Before I submerged myself in the crowd of strangers, I stopped, weary and with a need to regain both my nerve and composure.   I was told to go to the main mess hall and wait for everyone else to arrive.   I went in dropped my bags on the creaky, old, wooden floor, and slumped down onto a bench.   Everyone was already there.   They all stared at me.

At one table were two guys.   One was really tall and gauntly skinny, with a hungry look in his eyes.   The other one was a short, geeky-looking kid who wore huge thick glasses over his blood shot eyes and had on a pair of headphones with the sound of some loud music blasting.   At the next table sat two girls.   One was short with her hair pulled back into two little pigtails and the other was just some seemingly unaware blond as she stared off into space, appearing not to care about anything around her.   The second girl glanced casually at me and then looked away, unimpressed.   Seated at another table sat a girl and a guy.   The guy was on the chubby side, but wasn’t chubby enough to be fat, just kind of round in the face area.   It looked like he was trying to grow a beard or something by the looks of the few scraggily facial hairs protruding from his chin.   The girl had bleached blond hair but her dark roots were quickly growing in.   She rolled her eyes at me.

-Nice to see you too-

In opposite corners was a significantly large guy with a dumb-founded look on his face and a quiet-looking girl, shrunk up into her corner. It was quite the crowd of misfits.   “Oh god…” I thought, “This is going to be one hell of a long summer…” I rolled my eyes and began to stare up at the ceiling.   I was trying to avoid human contact.   It was too soon; I didn’t want to deal with these people just yet.   But the awkward silence was killing me.   I took a deep breath and began the conversation the only way I knew how.

I said generally and to everyone in the room, “Hey, I’m Chris.”

There was an explosion of voices that followed.   At first, it was just loud chaos, but slowly I began to piece together what they were saying.   The tall skinny kid was Bob.   His best friend was the short kid with the glasses and the loud music, Rudy.   The boy who was trying to grow a beard was named Mike and the bleached blond girl was his long time girlfriend, Katie.   The fat one bellowed that his name was Brian.   The quiet girl whispered that she was Erica but it was such a whisper that no one heard her.   The short girl with the pigtails was Alison, but we could call her Ally.   The girl who was sitting next to Ally was vaguely aware that people were talking and I could tell that if she was, then she didn’t care.   She was the only one who remained silent.   She just sat there with a slight smile on her face and her eyes fixed off in a random direction.   In spite of the awkward gaze, I couldn’t help but stare into her icy, cold, blue eyes.

After about a minute of chaotic noise, the entrance of the lady who ran the kitchen suddenly hushed the room.   She was a stern elderly woman, whose eyes looked very tired.   Her neck was thick and it pulsated and bulged with her every breath.   Her hair had had lost its youthful vibrancy from years of stress and she was as pale as a ghost.  

-Guess you don’t get much sun trapped working in this kitchen all summer-

         “Okay, everyone shut up!   My name is Mary and you all will be working for me this summer, so, you know, deal with it.” She began.   I could tell right there that she wasn’t a conversationalist.   She began to point, “You two take the back dinning room.   You, you, and you, take the Far East one.  You and you take the one facing west.”

I suddenly realized that the only ones left in the room were me, Mary, and the girl who couldn’t careless.   Mary turned to us, “And… you two take this one.   These will be your assigned rooms for the rest of your stay here.   So get used to it.   The roof leaks, the hot water heater is shot, and we have a serious rodent problem (which we shall not ever mention in case a health inspector is around), but on the bright side there will be a complementary mint on your pillows in the morning.   If you have any complaints, you can file them in our suggestion box, which is located...” she broke off into a cynical laughter as she exited the room.

Another awkward silence crept over the room.   I began to lean back, when the bench I was sitting on, came out from under me, sending me in a downward spiral towards the hard oak floor.   I let out a wail of pain, but in an instant, quickly recomposed myself when I realized that I wasn’t alone in the room.   But it was too late; she was squatting near me, laughing.   It wasn’t a quiet little giggle either, it was full whole hearted and almost mean, laughter.   “Are you okay there, slick?    That was quite a little fall.”

My self-esteem had plummeted when I fell off the bench, “I’m fine, just fine.”   I climbed to my feet and stood the bench were it once resided.   I sat back down on the bench, and began to consider suicide as a means to end the growing embarrassment.

She sat down next to me and turned her head kind of crookedly and gave me a look.   A vague smile appeared on her face and she stuck out her hand, “Hey, I’m Tracy.”   Those were the words that, in a sense, started it all.   Those three little words still haunt me to this day.   They started me on a path downward, in which I would never be able to return from.

III

Perhaps I was being punished.   Maybe I still am.   I could be wrong in saying this, but the feeling that this was a job that not even child pornographers deserved as punishment frequently came to mind.   The crap we had to take was eye-numbingly unbearable.   The campers seemed to hold contests to see who could forcefully regurgitate more of their lunch upon their completion of it.   If the health inspector were to wander into my lunchroom between the second and third periods, he’d probably think the kids were exploding and that their child-like remains were splattered and draped, dripping along the walls.  

-Prison food isn’t this bad-

I couldn’t carry the trays of food.   It was impossible enough, without twenty kids running through my legs.   The water from the tap retained a sickly brow tint that even the dimmed lighting couldn’t hide.   The stove was rusted and the surrounding air reeked of gas.   Time, being of the essence, forced us to spackle together peanut butter and jelly sandwiches every morning on bread without gloves, over the grim green speckles of mold.  

         On the first day alone, an open container of Windex split over into the oil wadding in the deep fryer.   It’s no wonder why the campers couldn’t seem to keep this poor excuse for food down.   Each day they unknowingly ingested small amounts of toxins.  

20,000 people will die of food poisoning every year.

On the up side, in the event of a biological holocaust, they would have probably built up an immunity and end up surviving to repopulate the earth.   There’s a scary thought.

         That first night, after work, my co-workers and I were just slowly adjusting to the static shock of the working world.   I sat at an empty table and picked at dirt embedded under my fingernails.   Mike and Katie were sneaking a cigarette near an open window in deep, long, religious drags.    Brian was face down in a small plastic tub of some crappy instant pudding, and Bob was berating him for not offering it to anyone else.   Tracy and Ally were fitfully trying to use a cell phone, but the lead paint in the walls and the decrepit, hundred-year old trees around the building seemed to be mocking them as they blocked out their signal. 

“This is fucking ridiculous!” Tracy ranted as her pacing became more erratic.

I laughed.   She seemed out of her element as she fidgeted with the buttons on the phone.   “Well, what did you expect?” I inquired with a smirk.

“Civilization!” she said as she hurled her phone in frustration at an open window.   “I expected civilization.”

“Welcome to Bumble-Fuck,” Mike stated coolly with a half craned smile, from behind his glowing cigarette, “the seventh circle of Hell.”

I worked along side of Tracy all that day.   I could tell you, we got really close and bonded right from the very beginning, but in truth, she didn’t say two words more to me.   Nevertheless, there was this strange vibe I got from her that caught my interest.

Now then, Tracy Matthews is a very complicated individual.   She is the type of spontaneous girl who would do things at the proverbial spur of the moment and with out stopping to think of the consequences.   Her mother died when she was only six years old and she had to grow up with out the presence of a female role model.   Her father barely paid any attention to her and this left her starving for it, from any one that was willing to give it to her.    Tracy was also the biggest flirt in the world.   She discovered that it allowed her to manipulate men and provided her with anything she wanted.   Every move she made and every syllable that passed from her lips was some form of flirtation.   Being an optimist, I truthfully believe that she couldn’t help it.   It was her inability to stop flirting that always got her in trouble.   The only flaw with her method of manipulation was her lack of control whenever the situation moved on forward from flirting.   It was then that she couldn’t control herself.  

The next day, I had to work in a different dinning room away from Tracy because Rudy had caught a slight cold and the nurse ordered him not to work that day.   There was some rumor floating around that he was drinking lots of cough syrup the night before and then for some odd reason went skinny dipping in the lake.   But on that matter, I can neither confirm nor deny.  

Bob was put in the dinning room with Tracy.   After lunch I was casually walking through their dinning room when I over heard Bob’s rising voice.   His tone quickly turned to screaming, and as I stood out of sight in the background, I became tense and on edge.   Tracy was shrunk up against the wall, slowly backing herself into a corner.   Bob had his left arm extended to the wall right near her head as he loomed in front of her, blocking her exit.  

“No, Bob… leave me alone…” was the only statement that she could weakly utter.   She looked scared; her eyes were wide and frozen, like a deer stuck in the front of an oncoming truck.

“What’s wrong with you?” as Bob screamed, his voice shook violently and capillaries burst in his eyes.   He exploded with rage.  

Now, Bob: there was a kid with problems.   It wouldn’t be until later that I would find out that when he was younger, his stepfather used to force him to wear a dress and then proceed to insult and poke fun at the boy, telling him that this was his future and he would never amount to anything.   Bob’s birth-father had been a cross dresser and his stepfather taunted him saying that “the drag queen never fell far from the tree”.   Bob had lived a troubled life, and its no wonder he ended up so emotionally unstable.   His violent temper was only the tip of the dysfunctional ice burg.

In the United States, a woman is battered every 15 seconds.

I couldn’t wait any longer; something drew me towards them, in a need to help Tracy.   “Hey Bobby-boy, knock it out!” I stated firmly as I shoved him away from the fear-frozen Tracy. “Chill out, man.”   The cross dresser’s kid snapped right then and there.   I could see something change in his eyes as he let out some kind of animal-like growl as he hurled his right arm at me.   My eyes widened, I stepped out of the way and with my left arm, in one swift motion, guided his punch off target.   It all happened in an instant and as if with some inborn reflex, I pummeled my right fist into the center of his face.   I only hit him once, but that was all that was really needed.   It came with such force that it shattered his nose and he slammed back up against the wall.   He slowly slumped down along the wall on to the floor.   He held his face as a slow trickle of blood began to engulf his hands and from beneath them, I could hear his hysterical sobs.   My stern look disappeared to my very own damsel in distress, “Are you okay?”   She didn’t say a word; she couldn’t say one, she just rushed over to me, hugged me and in a spur of emotion, began to cry too.

-Yeah, you’re welcome-

Suddenly there was a loud commotion all around me.   As if they appeared out of no where, I was surrounded by the rest of my co-workers.   Then a loud voice boomed, “Chris, what the hell happened here?”   And there stood Mary, like my angle of death on judgment day, the rain on my parade.   I realized at that moment that I was going to lose my job and in a silent panic, I froze.   I couldn’t think of anything to say.

-Good job Chris, only the second day. What did Dad say about stupid things?-

Tracy released me from her clutches and slowly turned to Mary.   “Bob attacked me.   I was so scared, and Chris, all he did was protect me.   Bob threatened to kill me….”   She had become an actress, right before my eyes.   While her tears, now, were fake, it still seemed like Mary believed her.   The room hushed in silence and Bob was removed from the dining room sobbing and escorted off the camp grounds.   Mary proclaimed that I was, in fact, a hero and gave Tracy and myself the rest of the day off to calm down.  

Upon exiting the dining rooms, I went and sat on a rock near the lake.   The water was full of life and echoed the beautiful color of the world around it.   Children were scurrying across its surface in canoes and others were penetrating its waters with fishing lines.   Tracy sat down across from me and all I could do was stare blankly at her.   I couldn’t believe what had just happened.   She had made Bob out to be some kind of villain; some kind of monster.   She lied right to Mary’s face, Bob didn’t threaten to kill her; Tracy had made that up.   And yet she didn’t seem to care.   Then again, if she hadn’t said anything, I probably would have been fired along with Bob since fighting was strongly frowned upon.  

She must have realized what I was thinking about because Tracy had a guilty look on her face as she said, “What?”

I snapped out of my trance and all I could say was: “You lied,”   Honesty was something that was very important to me.   I couldn’t stand liars.   Trust was something I placed in everyone I met and I couldn’t trust liars.   Tracy, technically, hadn’t lied to me, but I asserted that it would only be a matter of time before she did.   Here’s the thing about liars: they become so used to lying, that they begin to lie to everyone.   Eventually lying becomes so entrenched in a person that they begin not to realize that they are lying.    Liars become numb to the guilt that is associated with lies.   You end up building whole relationships on lies, and you’re not sure why.  

If you tell the same lie long enough, does it ever become the truth?

Before I end up sounding like some After School Special, let me just clarify in that if I were to tell you I never lie, it would be a lie.   I had come to the conclusion that Tracy was and always would be a liar.

“Hey, chill out.   It wasn’t a lie as so much as it was the truth, you know?   I mean, hey, survival of the fittest.  Darwin and all that stuff.   Bob was weak and, as you could see, a real asshole.   I didn’t need him around here any more.   He’s just lucky that you stepped in and hit him before I did, because, then, he’d been in trouble.   But look at it this way, you saved me.   You’re the big hero of the camp now.   Thanks.”   She looked really sincere as she said her thank you.   All that flatter wasn’t healthy for my ego.   But I could tell that when she said the word “hero”, she had no idea that I thought there was any truth behind it.   “You got to take chances, Kid.   You only live your life once, twice if you’re really lucky, so you got to live that life to the fullest.   Bob’s gone, big deal, don’t worry about it.”  She quickly leaned in and kissed me.   Then as she walked away, she kind of laughed, “Hey, the summer’s just beginning.”

At dinner that night, the whole camp was fluttering with rumors of what happened.   The story, however, had changed and became distorted as different people adapted it to fit in with what they thought happened.   I sat down at an empty table to distance myself from the madness.  Next thing I knew, Tracy was seated opposite me, “Hey, home-slice,” she said with a smirk, “what’s shaking?”

I stared blankly at the absurdity of the word.   “Home-slice?” I retorted.  She smiled and nodded her head as she bit down upon an apple.   About fifty of the camp staff soon flocked over to us.   A red-haired girl with freckles was the first to enquire about the events of the day.

“Is it true that this kid, Bob, came from a battered home and pulled a knife on you?”

The shock hit all of a sudden with great force.   “What?” I said as I chocked on my dinner.

Another person chimed in, “Whoa, dude, you can fight!   I heard you wrestled the knife from him and then drop-kicked him, like Jackie Chan style!”

“Wait.   Didn’t you knock him through the window, because he was stealing her money?”

“Hey. I heard….”

“What about when ….”

“Didn’t…”

“Oh!  And then...”

I sat there stunned.   It was so ridiculous.   Everything had become blurred together into this kind of inaudible noise.   I scratched my head and blinked.

-Nice job-

Tracy squeezed my hand and led me away from the table, “Come on, let’s get out of here.”   We ended up sitting near the lake again.   I got this weird feeling like something was very wrong, all of a sudden.   I remembered how she could lie so easily.   I got an urge to escape; to get a way from her.   Subconsciously, I could sense it, and I was afraid of something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

         She must have sensed it too, because she held on to me and wouldn’t let me move.   “Don’t go,” she whispered as she pressed her head up against me, “just...stay...”   And so, I did.   I think I ended up staying there the whole night.  I couldn’t leave, she had me trapped.   I couldn’t be happy and I sure couldn’t relax, because of the foreboding feeling that crept upon me from the back of my mind.

-You’re just being paranoid-

If only that had been true.   If only I had gotten out then, or had been fired with Bob.   Then, maybe it all wouldn’t have fallen apart.   Maybe I could have saved Tracy, the others, or even myself.

IV 

The sun reluctantly rose the next morning, and I went to work.      Tracy and I barely said a word to each other that day.   She was gone by the time I woke up.   I had to try to straighten out the many rumors that had been circulating since yesterday.   Upon my entrance into the kitchen, Mary exploded in anger at me.   Too early for my mind to function properly, I couldn’t understand what she was saying.   I figured that she was going to castrate me for sleeping down by the lake.   The veins in her neck grew large and began to pulsate.   Slowly her words began to seep through and I could understand her.

“What the hell are you doing?” she exploded at me.

“Huh? Wh- what do you mean?” I fumbled with my words in confusion.   Authority figures like Mary always seemed to make me nervous.

“Look at my floor!   You tracked mud all over my spotless floor.”

Sure enough, I had left a little trail of mud coming in from the door.   “Oh, I’m sorry.” was all I could say.

“You’re damn right you’re sorry.   Now go clean it up.”

I hate mopping.  

Between two of the lunches, I came across Brian sitting in a corner, eating about six powdered donuts and reading the news paper.

“Hey,” I said, “What’cha doing?”

Brian looked up at me and said in a muffled voice as the powder puffed from his mouth as he spoke, “Some girl got killed last night.   Strangled to death and left in a parking lot.”   Brian was the kind of kid who found things like this interesting.   His next stop would probably be the obituaries.   He always found humor in those.   He pointed down to the news paper.   I looked over.   The headline read in big, bold letters: STRANGLER!

“Gee… that sucks,” was the only thing I could say.   It felt like it should matter to me, but I just didn’t care.

Brian kind of laughed to himself, “yeah…” and took another bite of his donut.   A smearing of white powder had taken claim to his face, underneath his nose.   He smiled as he sniffed at it, “Hey man, you want to hear a joke?”  I shrugged indifferently, knowing I wouldn’t be able to stop him any way.   “What’s worse than eating almost half of an apple, before you realized its infested with maggots?”   I didn’t answer.   Brian’s face was dead-pan, “The Holocaust.”

I blinked, “That’s fucking morbid, man.”   In utter disbelief, I left him there to finish his donuts.

The rest of the day dragged on like a fat old guy carrying a sack full of coal.   The next few days, in fact, became a numbed routine.   The same things happened over and over again for about a week.  

Then the letter came.

About a week into my job, life had gone back to some shape and color that closely resembled normal.   The rumors and excitement about my encounter with Bob died down.   People were starting not to be afraid that I was going to punch them and I had finally gotten the hang of carrying six trays of food all at once.   Mary kept yelling at me for my habit of tracking mud into the kitchen, but aside from that life was good, calm, and normal.   Maybe not good, but at least the other two.

Then I received a letter from home.   It was from my family, well not actually my whole family, just my mom and two sisters.   My father didn’t make an effort to speak to me, let alone write me a letter.   The first part of the letter was written by my sisters.   It was meaningless babble about stupid things.   They confessed to things like, “We forgot to feed your fish, and now he’s dead.”   I was fully aware that upon my departure from home that I would be signing Freddy Fishy-fish’s own death sentence.   My sisters just couldn’t keep pets alive.   Despite their best intentions, our back yard was a growing pet cemetery.   I barely paid any attention to what they wrote.   However the second part of the letter, which had been written by my mother, I took time to read.   My mother was a quiet woman.   She was very passive and often faded into the background.    As I held the letter in my hands, a chill ran down my spine.   It went a little something like this:

“Chris, we are all so proud of you and miss you very, very much.   You’re really growing up and maturing.   This is probably the first steady job that you’ve been able to hold down for more than a couple of days.   Soon you’ll be leaving us and going off to college, and then on to do great things, and maybe someday, change the world.   Don’t feel too bad about Freddy, you know your sister’s mean well.    We hope you are doing well and look forward to seeing you soon…”

-Well…this isn’t as bad as you thought-

I thought there would be bad news, and just like usual, I was right.   There was more on the back of the page.   “Son, I don’t know how to tell this to you and I hate to have to tell you like this, but it just can’t wait until you come home…   It’s your father, Chris… They have detected an increase in the number of his erroneous white blood cells.   He’s had what the doctor is calling, a relapse –––”

My heart sank.   It hit the floor and bounced.   I dropped the letter and stumbled to a nearby bench.   I couldn’t read the rest, the words blurred into strange ancient symbols, lost in translation.   As much as my father and I didn’t get along, I would never want him to go through treatment for leukemia, again.   But for a split second, a darker side of myself saw the irony in the sick way that the act of killing the cow in the road could have come back to haunt him in the form of this relapse.  

-Karma’s a bitch-

I shook the thought from my mind.   Anger and sadness muffled my urge to scream.   I wanted to shout and yell and storm through the lunch rooms kicking benches and over turning tables, but I just sat there expressionless as I stared at the floor.   I was breathing heavily and fighting off a looming panic attack.   

-Too much for you?-

Suddenly, I rose from my seat, picked up the letter, crumpled it into my pocket and went back to work.   I didn’t say anything to anyone about my letter from home, I just tried to pretend like nothing had happened, nothing had changed.    That’s how I deal with things like that.   Out of sight, out of mind.   If I wasn’t there to see that my dad was sick, then it wasn’t real, not only to me, but to the rest of the world as far as I was concerned.  

If you ignore something long enough, it goes away.   If you don’t know you’ve been cut, you’re never really bleeding.

Later I was walking from the mess hall to the ice box on the other side of the nurse’s station, when something caught my eye.   It was the front page of some random newspaper.   Usually, I wouldn’t pay any attention to things like litter and I would leave the trash where it was.   But that letter had put things into perspective for me.

-Somebody call 4H-

I picked up the wrinkled page.  It was from that day’s edition of The New York News and the headline read: SERIAL STRANGLER SLAYS SIXTH!   Though it seemed to me that only a week ago the body count had been at one, I didn’t think twice about the paper as I disposed of it in the green trashcan along with my letter from home.   After all, I was miles away from where the victim was found.   I had this false feeling of safety.   This security blanket of ignorance kept me from caring and I went on my way and got the ice.  

After my shift, I walked back to the staff bunks and found Rudy hunched over a table in the corner.   His head phones were on and I could audibly hear music playing.   He was working vigorously trying to construct something out of a soda can, a bunch of straws, and other various house-hold objects.   The music blasts and I heard a line of it.  Clear as day the lead singer was screaming, “Hero, Hero, this word you'll never know!”

 Rudy’s eyes met mine.  

“What are you listening to?” I inquired vaguely, drawing myself closer to the table.

There was a sparkle in his blood-shot eyes.   “And the Hero Will Drown,” he said.   “It’s by this band called Story of the Year.”

“Lovely title,” I replied sarcastically and disturbed.

“Hey, man,” Rudy said as though he was beginning a new conversation, “what’s going on?”

My eyes searched around the room.   Perplexed, I said, “Nothing much, um… hey, have you seen Tracy?”

I could tell that my lack of interest in his life made him feel insignificant by the fading of the smile on his face.   “Oh… I think she went to talk to Ally or someone about something.”

I was disappointed, and just as I was about to leave when I noticed a suspicious odor looming in the thick air.   My eye twitched and all I could do was laugh, “Is the Grass really greener on the other side?”

He looked back at me with a renewed enthusiasm, “Hell yeah, man!” he said as he started to laugh, also.  “Want me to make you one too?” he asked as he waved his smoking can.   I smiled as I exited the room, “Nah, that’s ok.   I’ll get back to you on that one.”    I kept laughing to my self.

-Oh, what wonderful stories you’ll have to tell the folks back home-

If only these rich parents knew what kind of professionals were taking care of their beloved children.   I was walking vicariously through the west lunch room, when Ally ran head-first into me.  She kind of knocked me down and fell on top of me with her legs still moving, as if she was running, still.   She was always clumsy like this.   She never looked where she is going, dropped pitchers of water and people’s food, and lost her balance whenever she tried to stand still.   It was really fun to watch her because she was so hyper and could never stay in one place.   She would trip, fall, and quite often, wasn’t able to stand back up.   I won’t even get started on how she went down stairs.   Ally was always rushing to go somewhere but never got there.  I climbed back to my feet and helped her up, too.   “What’s the rush, Al?” I asked.

She looked at me cross-eyed before she recognized me, “Oh!  Talk to Tracy, I think, she wants to tell you.   I’ll go tell the others.”

Ally rushed out of the room in a blur.   I walked cautiously into the next room, careful not to be knocked down again.   I found Tracy in the next dinning room.   She lit up when she spotted me. “Chris! Guess what.”   Her eyes were wide with excitement.

“You’re pregnant?” I asked, not overly interested and teasing.

“Ha! You wish, Chris, my boy.  You know how its, oh, so boring around here?”

“Yeah….” I smiled because I had learned to spot a ridiculous scheme coming a mile away.

“Well, after lights out, tonight, we’re all going to sneak out, take a bus, and go to Playland!”

“Oh,” I wasn’t impressed, “that’s what this is about?”

“Oh, come on.   It’ll be fun.”

“But…eh…Trace, you know if Mary catches us, that’s it, we’re gone, right?   And plus it’s all the way down in Rye.”

She raised her index finger as a sign to indicate that she had already considered this, “No, you see, she can’t fire all of us, and plus she wont find out.”

I couldn’t kill her enthusiasm, so I reluctantly gave in, “Sure.   Sounds like fun.” I lied.

Tracy beamed, “Alright let’s go tell everyone else.”

Suddenly remembering my meeting with the looming smoke earlier, I said, “I think Rudy’s still upstairs, if you want to tell him.”

As we entered the residence, my eyes began to burn.   There was a thick mist in the air and the smoke loomed about.   “Come on, Rudy!   Open a damn window.   Mary will kill you if she finds this.”   He wasn’t where I had left him before and I decided that he must have departed.   I was about to give up and leave, when Tracy let out this blood turning scream.   I spun around; she was my regular damsel in distress.   Rushing into the room where the scream had escaped, I found Tracy standing in the doorway, staring horrified at Rudy.   He lay hunched upon the floor, his head was gushing blood.   There was a torn belt hanging from the rafter of the ceiling, and a red mark around his neck.   His home-made bong lay spilt on the oak floor boards.   It took me half a second to figure out what had taken place.   Rudy must have fastened the idea to hang himself and jumped off the bed with a belt around his neck.   The loop of the belt tore and he fell after jumping and cracked his skull on the corner of the bed-stand.   Blood was everywhere.

“Jesus Christ, Rudy!” I started to yell, “Help! Help! He’s hurt, he’s hurt!”   Tracy ran to get help.  I cradled Rudy and tried to talk to him and keep him conscious.   “Don’t die, man… don’t die… Rudy, stay with me… don’t die.”   My pleas were frantic as I kept mumbling to myself.   His horrible eyes were wide with fear, looking up at me.   They held pain and confusion; not blinking.   I decided that it was taking Tracy too long, so I left him and ran to get help.   Yeah, that’s right, I ran away when Rudy needed me, but I just couldn’t bear to watch him die.

By the time the ambulance came Rudy had slipped into a comma, and the paramedic whispered to his partner that it didn’t look good for the boy.   The rest of the staff sat in shock the whole night.   We didn’t go to Play Land.   No one even mentioned it.   Things were no longer calm and certainly not boring.   It was like we were all brought back to reality by this tragedy.   We couldn’t think about anything besides Rudy.   I couldn’t sleep at all that night.   I kept reliving what happened to Rudy.   What was going through his head?   My god, he tried to kill himself.   He might have succeeded.  I came upon a sudden grim realization.   If I hadn’t left Rudy to go find Tracy, he wouldn’t have attempted suicide or at least I could have been there to stop him.   I remembered not wanting to stay and talk to him.   I was only concerned about Tracy.    My selfishness might have driven him to kill himself.   Was he reaching out to me?   Crying for help?   I could have saved him, but I was blinded by this stupid girl.  I was only thinking about her.   In a half-sleep nightmare, I envisioned myself attacking Rudy.   I grabbed him and bust his head against the bed stand.   My eyes shot open, and my heart stood still.   It was a terrible thought, but that’s how responsible I felt.  

The enemy of my enemy is myself.

We were going to lose Rudy.   He wasn’t going to last the night.   Rudy was a good kid, a little bit of a stoner, but nevertheless, a good kid.   What the hell could have driven him to suicide?   I’d never know the real answer to this.   Maybe, for some reason, his life was too hard to deal with.   Maybe he was carrying too heavy a burden that he kept hidden from the world.   I didn’t agree with what Rudy did, but soon enough, I would understand how and why suicide could become the only answer.   I couldn’t save Rudy.   Some hero I was turning out to be.

V

Rudy was dead, Bob was fired, my Dad had a relapse, and according to the news paper that day: SEVENTH STRUCK BY STRANGLER.   Still it seemed that none of it was real.   If we could no longer see it, it was like it never existed.   Mary held an important meeting the day after Rudy’s suicide.   As she addressed us, her voice shook like she was fighting back tears and a nervous breakdown.   She was in a cold sweat and stuttering as she talked.   Her eyes looked tired and almost afraid.   As she spoke, they seemed to almost glaze over, as though spider webs had grown over them.   It might have been the lighting in the room, but Mary seemed even older than before.   She looked almost ancient, like an Egyptian mummy or something.   The night had aged her.   Wrinkles had cast themselves upon her face.   Her hair had stopped living and turned the color of dust.   She was worn, and she looked bitter and well… just old.

She called for our attention, “Everyone, please.”   The room was hushed and she had the gaze of everyone, even though we already knew what she was going to say.   “Last night, as you all know… there was… an incident with Rudolph Campbell.   Our hearts and thoughts are with Rudy and his family now in this time of deep sadness after this horrible tragedy.   These are the years when you change and grow into the adults you’ll be the rest of your life, and during this time you’ll be faced with many new challenges and pressures…”

I turned and whispered to Tracy, “If she starts giving us the sex talk, I swear, I’m leaving.”   But she just shhhhh’ed me.

“At times, it may seem like it is too much for you… to handle.”   Mary’s voice trailed off as she fought back her tears.   I couldn’t help wondering if she was sad because Rudy died or because the incident made the camp look bad and put it in jeopardy.   I could tell that in all her years running this place, she never had to deal with something quite so big.    It was killing her on the inside, nevertheless, she recomposed herself and continued, “If ever you feel like your life is too hard… please come and talk to me.   I am always here to listen to your problems and I can help.   You know, I was your ages once, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.”   She tried to laugh but her attempt at humor failed miserably, “and I know and can relate with your problems.”  She looked as though she was talking only to me.   “Don’t try to do it alone… Let someone help you…please…” Her voice trailed off again and the whole meeting fell to pieces.

It wasn’t real, none of it.   That’s what I kept telling myself.  

If you ignore something long enough, it goes away.   If you don’t know you have cancer, you’re never really dying.

It rained the rest of the day and our lack of spirit made it pointless working.   The kitchen was shut down and my self and my remaining co-workers retreated upstairs.   We were all seated and the flowing silence was reminiscent of our first meeting.

         That was before the Bob incident.

That was before the suicide thing.

I was biting my nails.   It was a nervous habit I couldn’t seem to kick.   My father used to say that no one would ever hire a person who bit their nails.   He said it reeked of fear and self doubt.

 Never in my life had the future looked so bleak.   Rudy was dead.   The whole thing was a concept that was a bit too heavy to grasp.   Tracy was uncharacteristically quiet.  Then again, we all were.   She sat upon a table and fiddled with a tiny gold cross that hung from a chain around her beautiful, slender neck.   It was she who broke the silence.  

“I just can’t believe this is happening.” She said in an almost liquid voice.   Her nails were painted black as a sign of mourning, but the chips had become apparent.  

“People die, Tracy.   Yeah, it’s this crazy new thing they’ve been trying.   But look on the bright side.   With Bob and now Rudy out of the picture, you should be looking at making some good tips by the end of the summer.”   The reply had caught her off guard and we all were surprised to see that it was Mike who had spoken those words.   He stood in the back, leaning against a weary wall.   A cigarette sat trapped between his index and middle fingers.   Its tip was a crimson red beckon in the failing daylight.   He slowly inhaled between a pair of cold white lips.   “Nice cross.   Was Mother Theresa having a yard sale?” he asked as he licked his lips.   “I suppose we can all be thankful to God for what happened to Rudy.”

Tracy’s blue eyes narrowed till only tiny slits remained.   “You can’t blame God for this.”

“Oh and why not?   If something good had happened, people would say that it was God’s doing, right?”   Mike seemed to be in the mood to crush something.   It seemed that Tracy’s faith was his target.  

I guess we all deal with grief in different ways.   

“God doesn’t cause bad things.”   

The rain could be seen pouring down outside, through the window beside him.   A gripping smile bled through Mike’s face, “And do you want to know why?   It’s because there is no God.”

“That’s fucked up, man.”   This time Brian was the one to chime in.

“Rudy is dead.   If you’re so smart, why didn’t God save him?”   There was silence.   He took another pull of his cigarette.    His eyes rolled back as a gray thunder cloud loomed slowly from his open mouth.   “Because there is no such thing, kids.   Believing in God is like believing in fucking Santa Claus.   In this day and age, the real god is your amount of wealth and power and women.   God’s the boogeyman, something made up to keep the world in check.   The Bible is a collection of ghost stories, designed to scare little children into following rules and not becoming mass murderers.   Isn’t it typical how all vicious killers and nut-jobs seem to be these religious fanatics?   Shit, it’s just so childish!”   He coughed and ran his hand through his damp hair.   “First of all, God’s a fucking schitzo!   He’s the angry God; the boogeyman; the tyrant, who’ll punish you if you’re a bad little boy or girl.   He floods the world and kills all the first born in Egypt.   Then there’s that pansy, passive aggressive, loving God.   He wears sandals and tie-died tee shirts, feeds the hungry and plays with children.   The lovey-duby hippie bullshit.”

Tracey’s eyes were blank, but at the same time, seemed to reflect despair.   She choked out, “…you’re wrong…” like a stubborn child, unwilling to believe that her grandmother had died or a European in the Middles Ages unwilling to believe the Earth was flat.  

Mike shrugged and he began to exit the room.   His body shook with the fervor of a television evangelist.   Mike stopped as he passed Tracy, flicking an unused cigarette in her lap.   “Life is shit, Trace… Life is shit.”  

Then he was gone.  

VI

 It was Katie who came to me later that night.   In fading blonde glory, her dark roots spread out from the top of her skull the way a pool of blood would form.  

The divisions among the staff must have been dissolving, for her to take the risk to talk to me.   Either that or Mike was asleep or passed out; take your pick.   With Mike not around her, Katie could be a completely different person.  

She either needed to talk to someone, or she wanted my help in stealing peroxide from the supply room; again, take your pick.

I was in one of the dinning rooms, doing some late night mopping.   When something’s bothering me, I find it best if I keep myself busy.   I must have mopped that same floor fives that night.    The wet sploosh of the water from the bucket kept soaking my sneakers.   Katie just stood in the entryway, waiting, staring, silently.   I looked up at her, as the head of the mop dunked back into the bucket, sending more water overflowing.

Her pale eyes met mine and the night stood still.  Through the smear of her mouth she said, “I’m sorry about Mike.   He can be a real asshole, sometimes.”

-Sometimes?-

“It happens,” I said.   The cloth tendrils of the mop glided across the wooden floor like the residing tide on some far off beach. 

Her brows furrowed with concentration, “You got to understand where we come from.  Mike grew up in this quiet rural town called Station’s Cross.”   The name of the place seemed familiar.   It was pretty much the land time forgot.   The way Katie explained it the people there were only a few steps up from being Amish.   “The only school in town was Catholic Elementary/High School and twelve years of catholic schooling is enough to drive anyone to atheism.”

You go to Biology and they teach you about Darwin and sex, and then the bell rings, you go to Theology class and they tell you that everything you just learned is wrong.

One step forward, one step back.   We’re all just standing still.

         These kinds of schools are run by skinny soldiers, clad in black costumes with white collars.  Those men of the cloth, ordained pre-Vatican II, were fluent in Latin and educational Nazis.  

“Do you know what it’s like to be beaten with rulers by nuns who are just pissed, because they couldn’t get laid when they were younger and now they take it out on everyone else?  Your knuckles bleed and your skin’s blue-black with pain.   It’s just not fair, but it’s allowed,”   Katie said.   These kids looked for every chance to rebel; every opinion to question.   “Mike and I, kids with this so called deviant spark, we found ways around their theocracy.”

The boys would sneak cigarettes before class and the girls would roll the waist bands of their skirts two times over, raising the bottom a good six or seven inches.   “I must have said over a million Hail Mary’s and Our Father’s as punishment just for my wardrobe alone.”   There was a faint smile over Katie’s face, “That’s how I first met Mike: in Detention.”   Needless to say, Katie had spent quiet a bit of time down on her knees.

These priests were Jesuits, founded by Ignatius Loyola in the sixteenth century.   One of the main reasons this order had been founded was to push back and eliminate the blasphemy of the Protestant Reformation.  

-So much for that one-

Katie was still talking, “Chris, they force-fed us bullshit for too many years:  Church doctrine, dogma, vices, virtues, hypocrisy, hypocrisy, hypocrisy.   Something had been building in us over all those years.   Something terrible.”

It’s about what everything is about.   That quiet rebellion:   One of both inward and outward revolt.  

She had the foreshadowing of tears in her vacant eyes, “We were being excommunicated for our illicit per-marital affairs.   They said fornication was the Devil’s playground.”   And here came the tears, “They publicly said we were sinners.”    Her voice shook for breath, “Sinners who were, without a doubt, going to Hell.   My parents threw me out.   Shit, no one would even talk to me.”

I started to say, “I’m sorry” but she wasn’t finished talking.   It would seem that there was a point to this story.  

Her mascara running, bleeding, even, “It was Mike’s idea: our little rebellion.   One night, right before we ran away and left home, we burnt the entire school down.”

I stared dumb-founded at her, caught off guard.   I had been mopping the same spot for the last twenty minutes as she had been telling me her story.   That’s why I recognized the name of the town.   I remember reading the paper, a little over a month ago, the community there was devastated when almost fifty people attending a PTA meeting were killed in an enormous fire.    “Forty-nine people died, Chris.   I swear I didn’t know that anyone was in the building.   Mike told me it was empty.   I swear…”

By this point, I was numb to her sobs.   I asked, “Katie, why are you telling me this?”

She looked up at me, her eyes big as pools.   The tears had stopped and with a hysterical outburst she said, “Because I think Mike knew!   I think he knew that those people were in the building.”

VII

 It wasn’t real , none of it.   That’s what I kept telling myself.  

If you ignore something long enough, it goes away.   If you don’t know you have cancer, you’re never really dying.

Half the enrollment of the camp dropped out.   Fewer employees were needed then, so they let Erica go.   It wasn’t a great loss, I didn’t miss her.   Erica had said maybe two words to me since the summer began.   There were times where I didn’t even notice or remember that she worked there to begin with.   Erica was just those creepy eyes that stare out at you from the darkness.   Slowly things returned to “normal” and within a week, we had pretty much forgotten about Rudy.   Humans are heartless, dealing with hardships by eventually forgetting that they ever happened.   I know, I know, it’s mean and cruel to say we moved on after less than a week, but the days in this place now seemed like eternities.   We hid Rudy’s weed when the authorities came and several members of the staff were down using it “strictly for religious reasons, of course.”   Ally was running around like crazy because there wasn’t enough work for her to do and worst of all, she was given an office job.   Her task was to sit at a desk and talk to parents who have questions.   Ally talks just as fast as she moves, so the parents didn’t know if their kids were swimming in the lake or learning to bake a cake.

I was trying to do everything in my power to distance myself from Tracy.   Don’t get me wrong, I liked her, but I still felt like I let Rudy die because I was too concerned about her.   Truthfully, it scared the crap out of me.   I had no control over anything when I was with her.   I felt paralyzed.   I just didn’t know what to do. 

 Tracy was wasting away here.   She was the dim candle flickering helplessly, trapped in a clay pot.   She was no longer that deer in front of the oncoming truck.   Between Bob, Rudy, and Mike, the truck had already came and gone, hitting her at top speed.   Tracy was the road-kill no one bothered to pick up.

         I cared, so I had to scoop her up.  

The daylight was chocking away one afternoon, when I found her in the bunks.   She sat in a ball on what used to be Rudy’s squeaky twin mattress.   Her knees were tucked into her chest.   Her dirty blonde hair was pulled back, revealing the face she often kept hidden from the world.    And there was her neck, beautiful, delicate, and slender.   Tracy’s lips were badly chapped and she bit down lightly on the bottom one.

-I did that-  

Watching Tracy was like watching a heavily sedated psych-patient.   I stood in the doorway gazing at her like you’d watch a car-crash victim on life-support.   I’d been watching her for what felt like forever.   Voyeurs must be extremely patient.   She looked towards the window and the setting sun as she finally spoke, “Tell Mary I’m sorry about missing work.”

Her eyes were empty and sad.   Her head turned towards me to reveal a cold, blue stare.   “Don’t worry about it.” I said.   I shifted my body uncomfortably and then sat on the far end of the bed, distancing myself from her.   “What’s going on Trace?”

-Like you don’t know-

Her lips parted a little to allude to speech, but only air escaped.   With residual restraint, I placed my hand on her knee, “It’s not your fault.”

Her eyes narrowed at me.   “My fault?” She snapped, but her attitude melted away as she squeezed down on my hand with her’s.   “I’m sorry.   It’s just that none of this makes sense.”

         Just when you think the pieces fit, someone sets your puzzle on fire.   Daylight was fading fast, and there we were, sitting on Rudy’s bed.  

“Chris, would you catch me if I was falling?”  

That’s what this is about.   Tracy was afraid that if she ever ended up like Rudy, no one would be there for here.   A life full of abandonment had done that.

         “Before you slip, Trace.   I’d have your hand before you even slipped.”

         And as if she had even heard what I was saying, she began to kiss my face.   She kissed my forehead, my nose, my eyelids, my cheeks, and even my neck, but she didn’t kiss my mouth, she wouldn’t.   Suddenly between her light kisses, she was sobbing.    I stopped her and held her face gently in my two hands.   “It’s okay.   You don’t have to do this.”  

She backed a little away from me, wiping the tears off her cheeks, and just kind of stared.   Her gaze was like ice and I felt my heart hold its breath.   Looking away, her eyes found the dresser Rudy had caught his head on.  

“Catch me,” Tracy said when she turned back to me.  

Her eyes were still empty as she faked a smile.   She fidgeted with her fingers as she kissed me again.   She hooked those fingers under her shirt and pulled it off, over her head.   Again it wasn’t me; I was outside myself, watching, frozen, and stunned.   With my heart in my ears, she was upon me.  

         “You don’t have to…” I repeated in vain, when she was at my pants.

         Tracy Matthews’ cold, blue eyes pierced me.   This time, I was the deer in the headlights.   Perhaps her smile was real then.  

“Life is shit, Chris…   Life is shit.”

         The sun had completed its descent and night was the only thing that could follow.

VIII

Things, they happen and people change you.   They can do this even if you’re never fully aware of it.   They destroy what you once were, breaking you, melting you down, and then rebuilding you into something new, something different, something so ugly that you can’t bring yourself to gaze upon your reflection in the mirror.

         When you can’t remember working, you know it’s been a bad day.

My muscles burned and my arms felt weak.   All I wanted to do was sleep, but something fretfully urged me not to, as if I wouldn’t ever wake up.    In the afternoon, sometime between lunch and dinner, mediocrity began boring an entrenched tomb through my skull.   The forceful fingertips of apathy poked and prodded between my eyes.

Maybe I was the one with cancer, not my father.   Sitting on a lone bench in the north lunch room, I could feel my blood growing feeble and weak.   My heart now coughed intrepidly and struggled to push the blood around inside.   These were the effects of my Kryptonite, I realized.   Tracy was near.

Sure enough, she stood in the door way with an expression of emptiness.   Mouth closed, her lips lay taunt across her teeth.   Tracy let out a scream of frustration, as she plowed her right fist into the old plastered wall of the lunch room.   I looked up at her, but we both were lulled silent.

Tracy had on these dark navy-blue, almost black, mesh shorts.   The elastic band of the waist had been rolled downward as if to not leave marks on her pale skin.   They barely qualified as clothing, beginning halfway down her hip bones and ending, barley covering her ass.   For a top, she wore a bright blue, child size, camp T-shirt.   The words “Camp Blue Ridge” printed on her chest, jumped out at me.   Looking inappropriately at her, there was a good four inches of the white skin of her stomach to be savored.   Tracy’s hair was down, straight, and blond, the way you would picture a goddess being.  

I bit the nail on my index finger as I watched her.   Tracy planted her little bottom down on a table and sat hunched over, with her feet sharing the bench I was on.   With her fist clenched, the knuckle of her middle finger was gently wedged between the pearls of her teeth.   There was a fluster about her, I couldn’t pin-point.

         “Chris.”   Her eyes were sunken, as mine met hers.   There was a flavor of despair on her voice.   “When was the last time you were happy?”

         Wheels turned and gears cranked, all inside my head.   My lips parted hesitantly, “I am h—”

“Really.   Truly.   Happy.”   She cut me off in a persistently monotone voice.

The moment froze and I didn’t breathe, because I couldn’t.   I forced out and uncomfortable laugh, and then as my brows constricted with concern, I asked, “What’s the matter, Trace?”

She sighed, “Second period, lunch.   There’s this head counselor from the Archers, a real asshole, a real creep.   So, he’s flirting with me, and okay I’m uncomfortable, but whatever, I’m used to his creepy shit.   All my life, I just fake a smile and bat my eyes.   Thing is, this guy, he’s got a wife and kids, and then he grabs my ass.”

I say, “Shit,” but looking at the way she is dressed today, I can hardly fake looking surprised.

Tracy’s face is expressionless as she shrugs.   “I had enough.   So I took a swing at the sleaze.   Right there in front of everyone, and it felt fucking good.”   Listening, I wondered where I had been that I didn’t witness any of this.   I always miss the good stuff.   “So Mary had me in her office, and sitting there in all her 1920’s glory, Mary tells me that fighting is strongly frowned upon.   No shit.   They’re threatening to fire me and all this Archer’s ass gets is a slap on the wrist.   So I bury my pride in the sand, break into a rehearsed hysteric, and apologize.   I tell her I don’t have anywhere to go, that this is all I have, and she buys it.   I’m on probation, and she says I should dress more appropriate.   The thing is: I wasn’t lying.   Chris, I meant it.   I’ve got no where to go.   I mean, I could drop dead and my father wouldn’t even notice.   He never even wanted me in the first place, and when my mom died, he was stuck with me.   You know, I haven’t lived with him since winter, and I’m sure he’s better off.   I mean, Rudy’s parents, when they came by after the … accident, they actually looked upset.   Chris, I can’t remember the last time I was really, truly, happy.   Or cared for.   Or even cared about.”

Back at home, when Tracy was living with her father, she would sleep with the remote for the family car clutched in her delicate hands.   That way, if someone were to stumble into her room in a drunken blur, she could press the button and the blasting of the car alarm would frighten the intruder away or, at least, out of that tequila-trance.   Tracy would sleep all the way on the far edge of her mattress, pressed and shrunken up with her back against the cold bedroom wall.    It was then she felt safe.   It was then she felt invisible.   But it’s an overstatement to say she slept like this.   Tracy almost never slept.   In the darkness, her eyes were always open.

Tracy was dead to her father, and mine wasn’t far from it, either.   Small world.

IX

 Ally stood in an upstairs bathroom, door open, leaning over the slightly dirty sink as she squinted into the mirror, plucking at her eye brows.   It was night time so she was dressed for bed.   Ally had on these tiny shorts barely plastered across her butt and one of those wife-beater undershirts that usually guys wear.   The bra, it was black or a dark color close to black, because it shown clearly through her white top.   The night stagnated with heat and without a working air conditioner, it can be said that she was not under dressed for the occasion.

I hadn’t been staring at her for too long, I tried to reassure myself, but truthfully I couldn’t be sure.   Looking slender and tight, I had to admit to myself that Ally did in fact have a nice body.   She must have just recently gotten out of the shower because her skin retained a sexy glisten.   Ally’s slightly damp hair was pulled back into a firm little ponytail so that her view may be unobstructed as she plucked away at the few stray hairs in her brows.

Funny thing is: I think she knew that I was watching her.   Even more than that, I’m almost sure that she liked it.   There’s something about girls, women, whatever:   They can subconsciously sense when they are being stared at, if the gaze lasts any longer than nine seconds.   Females just know.   Men, on the other hand, are utterly and completely oblivious to it when they are being stared at.   It’s one of those double standards, I guess.

Ally knew and she liked this secret attention.   Little, hyper, bounces-off-walls Ally was attractive to me for the first time and, believe me, she knew it.

I don’t know how long I’d been there.   I mean this in both a narrow and wider prospective.   Not only didn’t I remember how long my eyes had been transfixed upon Ally, but also I could not seem to recall how long I’d been at this camp, working there.   It could have been weeks, months, days, or even years; I didn’t know.

“Where’s Tracy?” she finally said, casually breaking the ice, while still looking at her reflection on the wall.

“Asleep,” I replied coolly, before adding, “I’m worried about her.”

Ally stopped, put the tweezers down on the sink, and looked at me.   I suddenly found myself embarrassed to be caught watching her, and almost couldn’t make eye contact with her at first, but I did.  

“She’s just going through the motions,” Ally said and then continued seriously, but with a smile, “I think she’s on the rag this week.”

I laughed.   So did Ally, as she moved closer, coming towards me.  

“So how’s the office?” I asked, feeling it a necessity.

         Her hard eyes still on me, “You don’t have to make conversation, you know?   You don’t have to feel like you always have to be polite.”

-Tell that to Rudy.-

“Tracy will be fine,” Ally continued.   “I’ve known her since kindergarten and she gets like this.   It’s probably because of her mom.   Tracy’s had it rough all her life.”

         Another step and then Ally’s really close, right in front of me.   She was so close, her sweet-smelling, shampooed hair flickered in the air I took in as breath.  

“She’s tough, yeah, she’s a survivor,” she said and then finally, in our most honest instance, “Who am I kidding?   Tracy is a fucking leach.   She’s a parasite.”  

Ally’s remark, it came unexpected to the both of us, but once she admitted this, there was no going back for her. “I mean, I love her dearly, but the girl, she just uses people.   She uses them as if they were a condom or something.  When she’s gotten her rocks off, she throws them away and unwraps a new one.   She’s a tick who jumps from person to person, infecting each victim with her sickness.”

-Girls are mean.-

I must have had this look of total and distinct horror on my face, because it made Ally laugh.   “So yeah, it isn’t Tracy who you should be worried about,” Ally finished, then almost too close for comfort, with our noses only maybe two or three inches apart and her breath smelling slightly minty, “It’s you.”

And then there was a kiss.   Ally not being light or gentle, instead kissed me hard and forcefully.   With her front teeth, Ally slightly bit my bottom lip as she pulled away.   I’m not sure whether I liked it, but I think I did.

And we both tasted blood.

X 

It was hot, the kind where your shirt sticks to the skin.   Uncomfortable to move, even indoors, the ninety-degree norm hindered both thought and action.   Between the third and fourth lunch periods, my palms retained a moisture of the summer.   With my forearm pressed against a vacant table, I left water marks mirroring my limbs on its surface.

I should be working.   The room needed to be cleaned and I needed to be getting ready for the inevitable rush of children that will soon follow, but I wasn’t.

My mind was elsewhere.

Something was wrong, this I knew.   I’m not talking about Rudy’s death or Tracy’s seemingly bottomless depression or even Ally’s oddities.

No, there was something else.

         It wasn’t my brawl with Bob or the fugitive arsonists, Mike and Katie.   It’s not even my father’s leukemia. 

Hell, just look at my mess of a life, there was not one thing of constancy.   I am Sanity’s insane puppet, I told myself.

I felt a single droplet of sweat slowly tumbling down my chest.   The floor needed to be swept.   There were pitchers begging to be refilled.   A bright yellow bucket sat soaking with Clorox that would be needed to clean the floors later.   It had been mixed, watered down for almost an hour, so the solution had lost its suds, by then.  It looks unmistakingly like water, clear and flawless.

And I hated this job.   It was a hassle I didn’t need.   I didn’t know why I was even there anymore.  My purpose had lost all meaning.   It all seemed so stupid and pointless.   I wasn’t learning skills that would help me later in life.   This was busy work, slave labor.   I was almost certain we were being paid less than minimum wage but even that was just a guess, seeing as how I wouldn’t receive a paycheck until having completed my last day there.   Think of it as a parting gift.   We had no motivation what-so-ever.   We’d go through our days, getting by on some dwindling sense of hope.

So why were we here?   We had no real expenses or debts.  No financial obligations we needed to compensate for.   At least, not yet.   Then why were we there?

All of us were running from something.

Tracy was running from her father.   But more than that she ran from all men, in general.   She was running from double standards and sexual innuendos.

         Ally was running from rules and order.   She was running from those silently understood agreements between friends.   She was running from flaws and desires.   She was running from the shadows of blissful ignorance.

Mike and Katie, well they were running from the police.   But more than that, they were running from a God they didn’t understand.   They ran from blind faith and Latin and detention.   They were running from the persecution of the early Christians.

Bob, he was running from his family history.   He was running from apples falling far from tress.   He was running from years of built of anger and unspoken rage.

My best guess is that Brian was running from fat camp.

Rudy was running from a hell on earth and a whole lot of other things.   From the looks of things, he was running from reality and life.

         Then, there was me, the hero and the helping hand, the savior and the saint, the boy next-door.

What was I running from?

         I swept and picked up the trash off the floor.   I came across a chicken nugget that had a striking resemblance to former President Richard Nixon.  

Somehow this task seemed so fitting: me always cleaning up someone else’s mess.

All that remained for me was to refill the pitchers with water and ice.   Alone in a room with the pitchers and a faucet, that obnoxiously yellow bucket caught my eye.

“Chris, hurry up!” Mary’s voice wailed from another room like steam escaping from a hot kettle.

And I hated this job.  So into the mop bucket all the water pitchers went, like drawing pails from a well.   Then the realization occurred that I could not simply serve this solution straight, the tampering would be noticed too quickly.   Instead, I made the pitchers ninety-five percent water.   Breathing in through my nose, I was proud that the bleach’s aroma seemed undetectable then.

But then, what was I doing?   This felt sickening.   This was food poisoning.   This was aquatic terrorism.   I motioned towards the sink to dump my creation when Mary’s shrill voice sliced through the air again, “One minute!”

It was too late and I’m afraid that I was far too bored to stop.   The pitchers went out to the tables in the dinning room.    The soapy film on the water’s surface was diminished by the addition of ice to the mix.

Before I could ask myself what I had done, the chaos began again with the war cry of a hundred screaming, spoiled, snobby, rich brats pouring into the room.   Food flew and the noise all meshed into a heart-beat kind of sound.

-Bottoms up-

I couldn’t help but smile.   I told myself that the pitchers were harmless and it made me feel better.   Finding an open window in the back of the seeming shrinking room, the breeze felt soothing against my cooked skin.   Exhaling, I realized how tense I had been feeling.   Sleep and, more importantly, any rest eluded me.   At night, I felt restless and lied awake, silently counting down to sunrise and when I had to get up for work.

Running on fumes, all the days blurred.    Secretly, everyday, I hoped I’d be severely burned by the stove.   I prayed that I would slip on the wet floors or trip down the stairs.   Each morning, I found myself whishing, hoping, and even begging that the sun didn’t rise and that the following day never came.

Deep down, I died a little with each passing moment there.   Getting trough the day was such a struggle, then.   I felt empty and alone.   Looking out the window, there was the sparkle of sunlight, the songs of birds, and laughter.   None of it felt real.

This wasn’t what I was supposed to be doing with my life.   I should have been doing something where I could help people.   Who was there for me to help at Camp Blue Ridge?

-Tracy-

There was Tracy and maybe that’s why I was there.   Maybe she was the reason I came, in the first place.   Maybe everything happens for some purpose.   She was depressed.   She was backsliding.

-She’s perfect-

Tracy: my bruised butterfly, my wilted rose, my double-edged sword.   Ally warned me not to get too close.   Then again, this was right before she practically threw herself all over me.   Tracy the leach, Ally the whore, Katie the criminal: these were the women in my life.

Then again, it was only Tracy that seemed to matter to me.   I couldn’t seem to stop thinking about her.   Her eyes, that slightly sad smile.   I might have been fixating.   This could have been boarder-line obsession.  

It was lunch-time and I should have been working, but desperately, I wanted to see her.   I craved her and, for some reason, I could kill for a cigarette right then.   It was such a strange urge but I actually considered attempting to bum one off Mike.

         It was Tracy I wanted.   Hell, it was Tracy I needed.   I left my post in the dinning room, while the kids drank bleach.   One burped a bubble but no one else saw it.   I went to her.   In her dinning room, Tracy sat slumped against a corner.   In a daze, she played with a strand of her golden hair, twirling it around her finger.   I let out a sharp-but-short whistle over the chaos of lunch.   It got her attention, drawing her towards me.

         Licking her lip, she said to me annoyed, “One of these stupid kids pelted my head with a nugget.”

Shrugging, I grabbed her hand, “It happens.”

Forcefully I had her wrist and led her to the big walk-in freezer.   In the middle of a meal, no one would bother or dare to be there.   The hulking, metal door closed behind us and the icy air felt good against my almost boiling skin.

I wanted her.   Tracy: my drug, my addiction.   With my hands at her waist, I pulled her into me and our mouths met hard.   Gently I shoved her, pressing her to the wall of the fridge and sliding my hands from her waist, up under her undersized, tight shirt.

The refrigerator was filled with cases of juice boxes, bins of fruit chunks, pudding packs, and ice cream.   Tracy struggled to get in my pants but after having too much trouble with my belt, she gave up.

With her chin resting on my shoulder, I kissed her neck.   Her mouth only an inch from my ear, she whispered, “You know, we could asphyxiate in here.”

I didn’t even hear myself lightly reply, “Would that be so bad?”

Looking at me, her big eyes said, “I really need to talk to you.”

         Biting her ear lightly, I almost grunted, “Later.”  

         Tracy stiffened up.   She was seriously killing the moment.   “There’s something…” she started but the door of the freezer clicked open and Brain just stood in the entrance with an utterly ridiculous smile to his face.

         “What?” I barked at him.

         Still smiling he said, “Pudding.   I wanted some pudding.”   He grabbed some packs while Tracy and I recomposed ourselves.   The moment was gone.   Brian was almost gone when he slightly stopped, as if he had just remembered something.   Turning to me, he casually said, “Oh yeah and your dinning room is on fire.”

         Shit.

XI

In my defense, it was only a small fire.

One of the kids, he must have been twelve, somehow got his hands on matches.   It was a trash can fire and luckily for my own sake, no one had noticed it besides Brian.   I grabbed a pitcher off an empty table in the back of the room and tried to douse the flames.   The bleach in the pitcher caused the blaze to spurt and lash out before being strangled by the water.

Breathing heavy, I saw Brian propped up in a door way.  

“Why didn’t you do something before you got me?” I asked in a fluster.

Licking the chocolate off the back lid of his pudding pack, Brian said, “You win some, you lose some.”

 With the catastrophe averted, my skull began to pound like the intercourse in a cheap porno: quick and hard.   Rubbing my chin, I wanted to beat the crap out of Brian, the little prick, but he was too fat and jolly, and it would be like hitting Humpty Dumpty or something.  

Later that night, I found the whole kitchen staff congregating in an upstairs room.   Mike had swindled a bottle of vodka onto the premises.   At the table, I sat down, not saying anything to anyone.   Tracy, Ally, and even Katie, all glanced at me longingly.   After the day I had, I needed to get shit-faced.   No joke, I didn’t want to remember working there in the morning.  

Various beverage bottles stood circling around Mike and I asked, “Hey man, what are you making?”

He had an unlit Parliament Light between his lips out of habit, I guess.   Without looking at me he said, “Sex on the Beach.”

“Groovy.” I said as I rubbed my temples, fighting back a headache I no longer had.  

Mike was mixing drinks.   I heard the metallic flick of a Zippo and soon smelt smoke.   “The way I make it,” Mike said with this impish smile, “you don’t even taste the alcohol.  The key is this,” he pointed at a slightly sexy, clear bottle, “Satan’s Piss 160 proof vodka.”   He poured it into a red party cup, filling it an eighth of the way.   I silently debated whether or not I seriously wanted to put anything called Satan’s Piss into my mouth.   “This stuff is so fucking strong.   Look at all the warning labels.”   DANGER: MUST BE MIXED. CAUTION: EXTREMLY FLAMABLE.   “Two cups of this and you’ll be fucked up beyond belief, man.”

“Less talk man.   Pour the Piss.   Give me a drink.”   I said, realizing that I was in a especially bad mood.   Sitting next to me, Tracy’s hand squeezed my thigh playfully.   Everyone else was at least one cup ahead of me.  

Mike smiled again and took a pull of his Parliament.   I started to worry that he would ash his cigarette in my drink out of spite and malice.   “It’s your funeral.” He continued.  

Taking a bottle of peach snoops, he poured in another eighth of the cup.   Flipping off the top of an orange juice container with his thumb, while still holding the cigarette between his index and middle fingers of that same hand, he poured in another two fourths.   “Now, the cranberry juice is just for color,” he said and the cup was full.   Mike stirred his concoction with a straw, before sliding it across the table to me.

I drank.   “Not bad man,” I said not wanting to admit that I liked it.   Fruit Punch came to mind.  

Ally was seated on my other side, giggling as she ran her finger slightly up and down my back.   With both Tracy and then Ally all over me and neither of them knowing about the other one, a part of me thought, “three-some” but I kept quiet.  

On my second cup, I found myself feeling extremely good.   Katie was talking, while Mike made out with the side of her neck, “Half the camp got sick tonight.   Must be bad chicken.    The big bosses are going to have Mary’s head for this.”

         I couldn’t help but laugh.   I let out this obnoxious, half-drunk laughter and everyone else joined in.   “It happens.” I said and then realizing that someone was missing, continued, “Hey, where’s Brian?”

         “Over-eaters Anonymous,” Tracy blurted out and blushed, quickly realizing she was drunk.

More laughter cracks the rooms.   Ally, getting extremely fidgety, pointed out, “Smoking causes cancer and cancer kills.”

Mike, too drunk to take this seriously, laughed, “Not quick enough, baby.”

On my third cup, I couldn’t seem to remember any of my day’s problems.   Ally, passed out in my lap, had both her arms wrapped tightly around my waist like some preying mantis.   Tracy was either too drunk to be jealous or notice, or both maybe.

Katie snorted through her nose, “And I don’t know why but I just don’t like Asians.”

The moon was high and the air felt cool.   This was our rebellion, our escape.

Someone mentioned college and found myself admitting, “I just don’t see myself having a future.”   I had never had a more honest moment with anyone, including myself.   Through the drunken cackles, everyone else pretty much agreed with me.  

“We’ve been raised to fear the future, so we’ll do anything to try and prevent it.”   Mike preached, starting another cigarette.   “Our pasts haunt us and our presents are chaotic.   I mean, what is there but for us to fear the future?”

-Who is this guy-

“Hey, boy scout,”   Mike yelled at me in his drunkenness, “me and you, we are different but the same, you know.   The same side of different coins.”

A part of me had this urge to rip out his eyes, so he could see how stupid he looked at that moment.  

“That’s not right,” I started to correct him, but waved it off.   Too drunk to realize what I was saying, I casually offered, “At least I didn’t burn down my high school.”

         A second went by with Mike looking down at the table, laughing as he slowly shook his head.   Then, there was a pounding noise and the table went flying.   Mike was on his feet, “You fucking little thunder-cunt!” 

It was all slow motion.   The cups and the liquor inside of them were still suspended mid-air.   Jumping to my feet as well, all the alcohol that was sitting in my stomach poured out to the rest of my body like a kill-switch and my legs went weak beneath me.  I had never been this drunk before.

Mike looked tense.   “You ass-fisting ninja,” he muttered slowly, under his breath.   His fists were clenched, revealing the pulsating veins pumping blood through his arms.    “What you just drank,” he snickered calmly, “has more alcohol by volume than a jug of straight rubbing stuff.”    The anger in his face melted away as the liquor hit him and he stumbled over to me.   He laughed, snorted, and then giggled.   Mikes turned and plants himself on the ground next to me.    “We’re the same, man.”

The enemy of my enemy is myself.

Mike and I, slumped up against a wall, were passing the bottle between us.   The girls were all passed out, or asleep, or whatever, disappeared.   He patted me on the back and I only vaguely felt it.  

“The risk is half the fun,” Mike said, pointing at the bottle with an unlit cigarette.    “When we’re twenty-one, this won’t give us the same thrill.   The best part of anything is the risk of being caught.”   He held out a cigarette, offering it, “Life is shit.”

“Mary could walk in,” I mumbled, taking the cigarette, “my parents could come out of the woodwork.   Hell, the sky could open up and God, Himself, could descend upon us.”

There was the metallic ping of Mike’s Zippo and he lit them.   The room spun, but as I inhaled this darkness, I could almost find my bearings.   Mike slurred his words, “God’s just some fagoty fairy-tale.   I’m more afraid of the Feds or something.”

Smoke in my lungs, I felt my heart slow and I pretend it stopped.    Looking around the room, I saw a wasteland of doomed youth.   We had nothing to look forward to; all of us were too buried in the past.   We were all running.   And we were losing speed.

Katie started to lightly snore.   A more human side of Mike offered her a slight smile.   “She told you that it was me who burned down the school, didn’t she?”

All I could do was shrug.   Even my shoulders felt heavy.   The things we run from can usually run faster.

“It was her.   It was Katie’s idea.”   The ashes from Mike’s cigarette fell silently into his lap like black snowflakes.   “She wanted a fresh start, a new beginning.”

I put the bottle to my lips, but it was empty.   Disillusioned, I let it roll across the floor.   We were all there for the same reason.   We all sought escape.

“Did she tell you that we were both expelled?   Or how about why we put a flame to the building?”   Mike slowly worked himself up.   “She’s fucking pregnant.   That’s why we were expelled.   She’s a month and a half late.”

“Shit…” I found myself mumbling quietly.

“I even think she might have known those people were there.”   Angrily, Mike took another drag, “Everybody always wants to assume I’m the villain; I’m the bad guy.   Life’s just not that simple.”

We were all running from something.   Everyday, it got harder to differentiate between the light and the dark sides of people.   I couldn’t separate the good from the bad.   It seemed that nobody was picking sides anymore.   Everyone was a shade of gray.

Every day, people did terrible things to each other with out feeling the slightest tinge of remorse or even guilt.   They were all so indifferent to the lives of any one else’s that weren’t their own.   Everyone was morally a shade of gray.

Only in loss and tragedy do people care about others.   It’s disaster that binds us. It’s calamity that solidifies some kind of bond between mankind.

Back in school, freshman year, I threw out my arm pitching two games into the play-offs and ended up needing Tommy John surgery.   From the ashes of my pain, suddenly everyone knew my name.   Everyone would stop me in the hallway in the morning or between classes.   Seeing my arm in a sling, each person would stress their concern, asking if I was alright, in any pain, or if I needed anything at all.   The world was suddenly my life-long friend.   People would act like they had known me for years and tell other people about my accident.   And I hated it.   They all were pretending to be something that they weren’t.   People carried my books to class and my tray during lunch.   They literally tried to take my pain and make it their own.    

Perhaps we all do this as a way of trying to understand each other better.   Of course, as I healed, I slowly faded from people’s minds.   I went from being everyone’s best friend and receiving greetings with a wave and a warm smile, to just a wave, and then only a slight nod of recognition, to being invisible.

We are all morally corrupt and for some reason we get some sick self satisfaction from other people’s pain.

Every day, it got harder and harder to fight and do the right thing.   Everyone else was concerned only with themselves, leaving me stumbling, trying to pick up the slack.   Each day grew longer and with the passing moments, the battle got more difficult.

People are not born heroes.   You aren’t a hero first and then do something great.   Instead, heroes are ordinary people who struggle each and every day to do what is right and good.   They work to make even the tiniest of a difference in someone’s life.   The journey is long and the road is narrow.   It’s never-ending, in fact.

After carrying Tracy upstairs to her bed, I laid her there and couldn’t help but marvel.   Lost in her, I smiled.   I stooped down, gently kissing her forehead.

“We are all doomed…”

XII

They said I didn’t have a chance.   They said that the world was too far gone to be redeemed, to be saved.    They say a lot of things.

I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I had been told, you can’t save everyone.   You win some, you lose some.   But maybe that was the point.  

Just because you cannot save them all, doesn’t mean I sure as hell couldn’t try.   I’d succeed where the others failed.  

It happened on some other day.   At this point, I had lost track of them all.    I found the tiny hairs on my arm standing on edge.   From somewhere above me I heard the sound of glass breaking.   The crisp crack that only glass could create.  

Tracy: I was drawn to her. 

Upstairs, her room was locked.   From behind the door, I could hear Oasis’s Wonderwall blasting through its chorus.

“Tracy?” I asked rapping at the door with my knuckles.   “Hey, are you in there?”   With no answer, I felt my heart being swallowed up in panic.   And quietly, I heard sobs.

I thought back to the last time I talked to her.   It was earlier that day.   She was silent, but gloomier than usual.   I remembered her eyes being bloodshot and swollen from what I guessed were secret, silent tears she’d been shedding.   Something just didn’t feel right.   Tracy didn’t speak with anyone all morning.   I kept trying to talk to her but she just wouldn’t reply.  

Finally, before she departed to go upstairs, Tracy turned, when we were alone and looked at me.   “This story’s old, but it’ll never, ever end.   It will just keep going on and on, until we all forget and fade away.”   Her lip trembled as she faked a smile.

I shouldn’t have let her go up there alone.   How could I chance making the same mistake again?   I wasn’t going to let this one slip away.

“Tracy?” I was getting rather frantic as I thrusted my shoulder into the center of her door.   It rattled but refused to give.

I bit down on my lower lip, while I tried to think of what to do.

I could have been over reacting.   Tracy might have been fine.   Perhaps she was just napping and had fallen asleep with a pair of headphones playing music.   Maybe she wasn’t even in there.

But then again, just look at Rudy and the fact that the doors only lock from the inside.

I backed up, staring down the door, willing it to open with my mind.  Then, after a running start, I leapt into the air and planted my foot through the door.   Like a thin fabric or a trapdoor, I disappeared into the room as the wood splintered and shattered.  

The sound of breaking glass I had heard earlier was the breaking of the window in   Tracy’s room.   She sat on her bed, propped up in the corner.   In a clenched fist, my fallen angel hooked her talons around a rather large sliver of glass.   The transparency was stained red.

Her other arm looked as though she’s been keeping a tally on it.    None of them were deep.   This was one of those cry for help things.   The cuts on her arm were what are called stagger marks.   I stood there stunned.

Tracy smiled, looking up at me.   Blood slowly soaked the sheets on the bed.   She said, “I just want to remember what’s happened here.   Before I forget.”   And then she added, “I wasn’t trying to kill myself, like he did.   I just wanted to feel ....”

Her eyes rolling back, I rushed and scooped her into my arms.   I had to get her help.  

I couldn’t fail again.  

Take my strength.  

Feed off my life.  

Just hold on.

With my own shirt, I applied pressure as I whisked her in a hurried blur to the Nurse’s office.   I didn’t even have to bother saying anything.  

We all saw this coming.

Later, after she was stabilized, the Nurse would tell me that Tracy cut herself 49 times.   Albeit, they weren’t too deep, but the amount of times she cut herself was a frightening amount.   I sat in the office with my fist clenched over my mouth.  

She had lost blood, but they had bandaged her up and she seemed to be doing better.    Physically, at least.

It was just me and Mary in the office, and the old woman was pacing.   “Why is she still here?” I asked her, “Why haven’t we sent Tracy to the hospital?”

Mary stopped and glared at me. “Chris,” she started but had to pause when the nurse rushed through the room.   Once the nurse left, Mary continued, “Do you realize what another suicide attempt would…. Never mind.   Listen: between you and me, I don’t even think she was trying to kill herself.   She just wanted attention, right?”  

I grit my teeth.   I knew where this was headed.   The business at the camp had been hurt so badly from Rudy’s suicide, that it was basically put on life support as the lawsuits flew.   Mary was barely surviving.   If news broke of this new incident, Mary would be finished.  

But I didn’t care about Mary, I cared only for Tracy.  “No!” I interjected. “We both know that’s not w—”

She cut me off, “Chris, do you know what will happen to Tracy if we involve the authorities?   They’ll lock her up.   She’ll be put on suicide watch.   Medication.   Padded walls.   Tracy will be utterly destroyed.    Do you honestly want to do that to her, Chris?”

I faltered.

-That smart bitch-

Mary had me trapped.   My anger turned to despair.   “Well, do you, Chris?” she repeated with the ugliest smile I’d ever seen.   Jack-o-lanterns smile better.

I sighed.   I cared too much about Tracy to do that to her.   I could watch over her there.   “She slipped and fell.   Her arm went through the window.”  I said in monotone.   Mary knew she had won.   “It was all an accident.”

I slumped down in my chair, defeated.   Mary patted my back and I actually shuttered at her touch.   Her smile was still there and she radiated in her victory, “Very good, Chris.   There’s hope for you yet.”   I was still staring at my sneakers, the floor, and  the Hell that surely lay beneath it.   “And it’ll be as it never even happened.   No one even has to know.”

As she made her exit, I could have sworn I heard some kind of laughter.

And I hate myself.   Not to drown in my own self-loathing, I went into the back room where Tracy and the nurse were.

On the cot, Tracy looked like a corpse.   She seemed dead.   I was almost tempted to check her for a toe-tag, but by the movement of her eyes, behind their closed lids, I could tell she was just asleep.

-Sweet dreams-

Whistling, in the chair beside the bed, the nurse winked at me.   “She owes you a lot, you know.”

“You have no idea,” I started drenched in sarcasm but stopped due to concern.   “How is she?”

         “Well,” the Nurse had the same smile Mary did, only moments earlier, “she had quite a little fall, but she’ll be back on her feet, serving food, and cleaning tables in no time.”

         I swallowed hard.   At that moment, it all became too clear.   In this, I was completely and totally alone.   And some where, some one was laughing quietly.

XIII

If you stand still long enough, you’ll be able to watch everything fade.   Everything you believe in.   Everyone you ever loved.   Photos will slowly weather until they become unclear.   But more than that, the people in them, you’ll lose all recognition of who they are and what they meant to you.   Friends lose touch.   Tombstones become overgrown and covered with weeds.  

Even Tracy’s scars will eventually disappear.  

We’re taught to hold on, to keep things close to us.   Names and faces.   But for the life of us, we always remember to forget.

The things I’ve seen, all I’ve learned.   It’s all meaningless.   I will forget.   I already have.   Bliss is ignorance.   That’s what we’re all craving for, striving for: Bliss, ignorance.   So we all will remember to forget.   We already have.  

So Tracy fell.  She slipped.   She tripped.   Hell, the story might as well say I pushed her.    I slit her writs.     But I didn’t.    I just felt that way.

Tracy went back to work after two days of bed rest, like nothing happened.   She ignored me when she caught me burning a hole in her with my eyes. 

Ally, Mike, Katie, Brian, they all were so concerned when she walked into the kitchen.   

After Tracy light-heartedly explained how she came about her accident and her slipping and the broken glass, I faintly heard Ally mumble, “Dumb bitch”, under her breath.   She flashed me a fake smile, all teeth. 

-With friends like her…-

No one could see Tracy’s arm under the bandages, so they couldn’t even begin to imagine.   “It’s just a few little scratches” I heard Tracy say while she talked to the mother-to-be, Katie, who actually looked genuinely concerned.  

I saw the cuts.   I was there.   There was a shirt in my hamper upstairs stained with her blood.   The 49 gashes upon her arm, like she was keeping score.  

Tracy was tip-toeing across her tight-rope.   A thousand feet above the pavement.   A match burning at both ends.  

I won’t lose her, I swore.   I couldn’t let her fall.   It was just not an option.   Mary quietly slithered into the room, cracking a glance at me.   I’m a prisoner; I’m a puppet.

Lunch time and off we went.   As he’s leaving, Mike casually passed me.   Turning and with a smile, he said, “So what really happened?”  

It’s the death of a dream and I was batting a thousand.   You can not win if everyone is out to get you, against you, aiming at your head.

And I don’t know how it started.   And I didn’t know when it would end.

At dusk, following the completion of the final dinner shift, I had to get away.   The beach I was thinking, but I don’t know why.   Outside, I found Ally perched upon the hood of the camp jeep.   I didn’t even know we had a camp jeep until I saw her on it.   I draw myself closer; a cigarette jutted out from between the pink worms of her lips.   The pack rested beside her on the hood.

“Since when do you smoke?” I asked, feeling nosy.

Ally’s gaze was focused at the darkening woods around the camp, but her eyes slowly rolled to me.   “I don’t” she said, annoyed, exhaling in my face.

I clutched the pack off the hood playfully, pretending to hide it from her.   Smiling, I was trying to be friendly.  

“So Tracy cut herself again, huh?” Ally asked, deadpan, taking a drag.

My smile instantly faded.   I fished a cigarette from Ally’s pack into my mouth, “This has happened before?”  

Ally flicked the lighter on and lit my cigarette for me.   “Since when do you smoke?” she mimicked.

Taking a drag, smiling, but only vaguely, “I don’t.”

She scooted over on the hood, making room for me.   Patting the hood, gesturing to sit, she said, “When she was thirteen.”   Then, after thinking for a second, she added, “And fat.”

I ran my hand through my hair.   The night was upon us and the air grew cooler.   I needed a hair cut.  

“Should we be worried?” I asked, only half-heartedly.  

Ally lied back against the glass, like a giant bug on the windshield.   “It’s really not our problem,” she said, looking up at the stars.   A dog howled far off some where.

I couldn’t take it any longer.   “What kind of friend are you?” I asked angrily.

Through flared nostrils, Ally barked, “The best kind.”

I was about to rebuke her, but then I saw her silent tears.  

-And the Oscar goes to…-

An electronic bug-zapper crackled from the porch.   The air smelt like electricity and I wondered if it would rain.   Ally was staring at me, unashamed of her tiny tears.  

“You always want what you can’t have.”   She wanted to kiss me.   I could feel the tension, her pulling me towards her.

Unbending, like cold steel, I said, “It happens.”

Faking a laugh, she looked away.   With her closest hand, she pats my leg, “Oh Chris, you kill me.”

You will always go for the one that your friend is interested in.   It’s some unwritten law.   They’re safe.   They’re off limits.  

“I’m trying very hard to be a good person.” I wasn’t sure why I said this.

Narrowing, her eyes spoke to me, “And you want her?   The wrist-slitter?”

“Al,” the smoke filled my lungs, “nobody’s perfect.”

“Except for you, right?” She asked, leaning over me.

I coughed a little.   “That’s not true.”  

Ally shifted her body and gracefully positioned herself on top of me.  The shocks of the car contracted from the weight in one place and we were closer to the ground.

She flicked her cigarette into a bush and smiled.   “So Chris, what are you hiding?    What’s your tragic flaw?” Ally’s face must have been one of a devil’s as she kissed me.   But I wouldn’t know my eyes were closed.   

This is so wrong, I thought.  

I am such a fraud.  

Chris forcefully pushed her, the little bitch, from on top of him.   Disgusted in himself, he started mumbling.   Spitting, even.   He crumpled the lit cigarette in his bare hand.   It burned him and the girl laughed.   She’s a monster, but so is he.   Frauds and fakes.   They’re all doomed.   I could see them.   All of them.

“Ally, listen…” I started, “we can’t do this.”

She was blowing on the cigarette burn in the center of my palm.   Ally bent and kissed it.   “Yes, we can.”   She looked up at me, all bright-eyed.   Then there was that ugly smile every one seems so fond of, “I mean, it would be a shame if Tracy were to find out about… us.”

What had I gotten myself into?   I made all the wrong choices at all of the right times.  

The enemy of my enemy is myself.

Everyone was blackmailing me.  Everyone walked all over me.   What did I ever do to them?

I really needed to be some where else.   There were people who need me.   People who wanted me, too.   I couldn’t keep this from happening.   Some thing had to give.

I could not stop this.  

I needed to check on Tracy.

XIV

It’s times like that when being hit by a train seemed like not such a bad idea.

After hooking up with Tracy, it was quiet.   She seemed withdrawn, sad, even.   But for some one who attempted suicide only a few days earlier, these things were understandable.   She was buttoning up her jeans.   I could not help but stare.   The white bandages on her arm were slightly discolored with a tint of rusted crimson.  

And too many things were going on.   I felt I had way too much on my plate.    It was only the first course.   I’m forgetting.   I was forgetting about Rudy, about my father, and about what happens after the sun goes down.   I’ve forgotten.   Hell had frozen over.

Tracy was staring off some where when she said, “Ally.   What do you think of Ally?”   She bit down on her lower lip.

Everything slowed to a stand still.   Was she calling my bluff?   Did she know what may or may not have been happening?   Could Ally have said something to her?   Did any one else know?   How would this complicate my objective?   Was this the worst thing that could have happened and at the worst time?  

I had been silent for too long, I realized, so I spewed out, “Eh… whatever.”   Then quickly, before she could process the pause, I added, “Why?”

Tracy wiped at her nose, still not looking at me.   “She just seems so distant some times.   I’m kind of worried that something is wrong.” She said.

Sort of laughing to myself, I asked, “How’d you guys get together any way?”

Her hair was a mess: down and in her face.   Tracy ran her hand through the yellowish blur and perhaps there was a faint smile, but only for a second, if even.   “Well,” she flashed back to some time lost in memory, “we were always friends for as long as I can remember.   Just not really good friends.   Then in middle school, some one put Nair in the bottle of shampoo I was using after gym class.   My hair fell out in clumps.   I had these gross patches of scalp in like random places in my hair.   No one would talk to me.”   She giggled, “I looked like some cancer patient.   I was a freak.”   Putting my shirt back on, I pulled it down around my head.    “Ally was the only one who stuck with me through it all.   From then on, we were inseparable.”   Tracy ran her fingertips along the bandage on her arm.   She shivered.  

I noticed her touching it, but pretended that I didn’t.   Approaching her I wiped the hair away from her face.  I took her hand in mine and bringing it up to my face; I kissed the back of it.   Tracy smiled a genuine smile, before she pulled her hand away.  

“Kids can be mean,” I said trying to condole her.    I had been debating whether or not to bring it up, but I finally got brave, “Tracy, I think we need to talk about this.”  I motioned towards her wound.  

She closed her eyes and laughed, “Funny thing is: it was Ally who put the Nair in my shampoo in the first place.”

Sitting down next to her, “Tracy…”

“She never really ever admitted it, but I knew.”   I put my arms around her, pulling her in.   She shook violently against me.   “Chris, what’s wrong with me?   I’m so scared.”

I couldn’t bear this. I try to sooth her, calm her, anything, “I know, I know.   There is nothing wrong with you.   I’m here.”

Looking up at me, she said, “Don’t leave.”

Sincerely, I replied with a, “Never.”

Wiping at her tears, she kissed me.   “I think we just need to get drunk.”  That was probably not the best idea she’s ever had, but it came close.   Things were just too serious,   too heavy to bear, at this point.  

None of us had a future, at least none I could see.   Everything was spiraling into the ground.   The only consolation was that it all happened very slowly.   We had years, maybe even more, I hoped.   I thought we had time before our life belly-flopped, nose-dived, train-wrecked.

It was still night, but I felt like I wasn’t really there.   The whole summer was turning out to be such an undeniable waste of my time.   People can change you.   These people, specifically the ones there, can change you.   But I told myself I wouldn’t let them change me.

Mike and Brian came in laughing about something.   I could hear Katie puking her brains out in a nearby bathroom.   I didn’t know what was happened to Ally and frankly, I did not care, either.

Protect and serve.

Where was I going with this?   Did I have a point?

“We all make stupid mistakes,” I heard Mike tell Brian, while they were sitting on the bed across the room.  “Te audire no possum.  Musa sapientum fixa est in aure.”   He said with a laugh. 

Confused, Brian inquired, “Huh, what’s that?” 

“Latin,” Mike smiled, “it means:   I can’t hear you.  I have a banana in my ear.”

They laughed.   It’s the simple things, I guess. 

“That’s profound, man.”   I said sarcastically.   Station’s Cross must have taught him something.   Apparently, before torching his school, he picked up a little Latin from those Jesuits. 

“Sometimes it just sort of slips out,” Mike offered with a smile. 

XV

Just like All the other nights in Hell, it rained.   Outside vision was obstructed at three feet.   Hurricanes have calmer rage.   Spreading like a virus, water consumed all.   The volume of a million infinite raindrops sounded like the ocean as they drilled at the surface of the earth.   It had been a long day and I possessed almost no desire to do anything at all, that night.   I had this unnerving sense that I wouldn’t be able to take much more of this.   I wanted to lay in my bed and sleep, Rip Van Winkle style.   Everything was numb, by then.   Nothing fazed me.   I went with the motions.  

Sleep, that’s all I wanted.   Never ending rest seemed like a good idea.   It just was not going to happen, though.  

-No rest for the wicked-

That night, Mary was gone.   She was off meeting with her lawyers and had been doing so every night that week.   Rudy’s parents were suing Camp Blue Ridge’s administration for negligence.   I knew this because I over-heard her speaking on the phone, the other day.   No one else had a clue, especial Tracy.   Mary was afraid that if anyone found out about what happened with Tracy, then in her own words, she’d be “royally fucked”.  

Mary was gone for entire nights when she disappeared like this.   Mike’s got a running joke going, saying, “Maybe she’s fighting crime.”   Personally, I wouldn’t have been to upset about a car crash in that weather.   I pictured her sinking slowly in fire and mud.

These unannounced departures had only given Mike another reason to fish into his own seemingly never-ending supply of alcohol.   Hearing a noise, I was drawn from my slumber.   Journeying down stairs into a dinning room after a nap I didn’t remember taking, the lights were dim.   Various articles of clothing scattered across the floor.   On the closest table, I saw a familiar glass bottle standing erect like a light house in the dusk.   Satan’s Piss Vodka, the label mocked me.   I felt its taste in my mouth from memory and my lips quivered with cold.   With the bottle half empty, it looked like I was late for a party.   I took a shallow swig and swallow.  

Heading back upstairs, I saw that the door to Mike’s room closed over.   From behind the door, there was some low kind of mumbled noise repeating itself over and over.   Tracy’s room was open and I found her and Ally sitting in there.   Ally smoked a cigarette out the window, eyeing me suspiciously as I entered.   Tracy was on a bed with her right leg out stretched as she painted her toe nails some kind of pinkish color.

“Where is everyone tonight?” I asked, focusing on the tsunami occurring behind Ally and the window.

Tracy barely acknowledged my existence.   Her eyes locked on her big toe, she said, “Mary took Brian with her to go some where.”   Tracy sighed weakly as a strand of hair fell down into her face, “Mike and Katie are in the room fucking.”

I had this urge to reach out and gently move the lock of hair out of her face, lightly touching her, caressing her delicately, but I restrained myself by burying my hands deep into the pockets of my cargo shorts.   Not thinking what I was saying, I mumbled, “Can you still have sex if you’re pregnant?”

Unfazed, Ally shot back, “I don’t see why not.   The damage is already done by that point, anyway.”   She lit another cigarette and Tracy gave her a dirty look.   “Why do you ask?”

“No reason,” I said evasively.  

Thunder cracked the sky and the lights dimmed slightly, almost on cue.  

Tracy missed her toe nail and smeared the glossy pink paint on her skin.   “Fucking rain!   I can’t see a thing.” Tracy said, giving up.   She put the cap back on the little bottle of nail polish.   Looking up at me with her deep eyes, she said, “Let’s get drunk.”

I accepted her proposal, as though I really had a choice, and Tracy dashed past me, out of the door, heading for the stairs.   I was half way out the door before I noticed Ally hadn’t moved.   “Aren’t you coming?” I asked her.

Ally upturned a smile bitterly.   She stubbed out her cigarette on the window sill.   Shaking her head, she said, “No.   You kids have fun.   Neither of you really need me there anyway.”   Ally moved over to Tracy’s bed and laid down on it, stretching out her arms and legs.   She opened her legs in a provocative fashion.   “I’ll just see if Mike wants a quickie after he’s finished with Katie.”   Ally blew me a kiss, hoping to raise some jealousy out of me.

I smiled back.   “Well, you kids be safe, okay?” I was saying as I left the room, “Make sure Mike uses protection.   He doesn’t know where you’ve been.”

I slammed the door and before I got to the stairs, the lock clicked into place.

In the dinning room, the door to the outside swung violently in the wind.   A hungry puddle spread inwards from the entrance in all directions towards the tables.   Cold air spun around Tracy and me, blanketing us.   She sipped at a small cup as I downed mine.   Warmth, like small flames, burned in my chest.   Tracy was lightly kissing my neck when the lights flickered again.   The front door slammed with the wind and she jumped, biting me.  

“Chris,” she whispered sweetly, nibbling at the lobe of my ear, “I think I love you.”

Everything stopped: my heart, the rain, the summer, the night.   I pulled back, not sure of what or how to respond.   Looking at her hard, swimming against the current of her blue eyes I asked, “What?”

Tracy just wanted to be loved.  She wanted to feel protected.   She wanted to feel safe.   You always fall in love with the person who saves your life.  

“I love you,” she said again.

These words, they’re only words, yet deep inside I was tossed suddenly into the thralls of an ambiguous pain.   Like tiny nails being slowly hammered up my nose, my head spun and ached.  

I must have just been staring, dumfounded.

“I love you?” she asked, now confused with me.

As much as I would have liked to say anything else, what escaped my mouth, rolling off my tongue, was, “You’re drunk.”

There was hurt splashed across Tracy’s pale face.   She whispered, “No,” with a defeated rasp.

I rationalized with myself.   She simply could not be in love.   She was too young; we were too young, I told myself.   Tracy barely even knew me.   We were only steps above strangers.   She was in love with an idea.   She wasn’t in love with me.   She couldn’t be.   She had no idea who I really am.

“That's really touching,” A voice startled us, like waves breaking against the rocks close to shore, “too bad it’s all a lie.”   I could see the outline of a person standing in the doorway, soaked and dripping from the rain.   The voice was familiar.   “Isn’t it, Chris?” he asked slowly stepping towards me.  

The lights flickered.   I saw his face.   “Bob,” I sputtered as I climbed to my feet.

“Uh-uh,” Bob slowly waved something back and forth in front of his face the way a metronome keeps count, keeps a beat.   It was shiny and reflected a glisten of light.  

Tracy, still sitting, had been stunned silent.   The only thing I heard her say was the obvious, “He’s got a knife.”

“Sit down, Chris,” he calmly ordered, tightening his grip around the handle of the hunting knife that must have had at least a four-inch blade.   I heard his knuckles crack.   He motioned with it towards the bench Tracy was sitting on.  

In my mouth, I could taste only dread.   “Okay, Bob.  Let’s take it easy, now,” I found myself pleading.

“How about you just sit the fuck down!” his temper verged upon reaching its breaking point.

I imagined the ground shaking.   Trembling, I sat down, obediently.   “Just relax, man.” I lulled, “Everything’s cool.  Everything’s cool, man.”

         Bob’s eyes were transfixed, while veins in his neck pulsated and throbbed.   This isn’t happening, I kept thinking.   I ran through all of my options, trying desperately not to fall victim to my own fear.   He was approaching, still, ever slowly.   Puddles forming beneath him spread out the way pools of blood would.

The knife-wielding, emotionally unstable, cross-dresser’s kid’s face contorted with a twitch.   “I talked to him, Chris,” the words flew from between Bob’s parted lips at a volume barely above a whisper, “He told me everything.”

“Bob…” I didn’t know how to deal with this.   I didn’t know where to begin.

“You’ve got them all fooled, don’t you?”    His heavy boots smeared mud in globs on the hard-wood floor.   “I’m afraid I can’t let you go on continuing what you are doing.”

Bob’s delusions danced all around him.   He stunk of alcohol.   Tracy sat, still frozen at my side.   Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her tears.  On the other side of the table from where we were seated, Bob kicked the bench away.   He stood there, shaking with cold.   His lips were blue.

         “You don’t need the knife, man,” I was forming a plan, “You’re right.   You got me.   Let’s just talk.”   I raised my hands slightly, facing my open palms towards him as a sign of defenselessness.  

         “N-no,” Bob viciously shook his head, trying to keep himself convinced of something, “I’ve been watching you.   We’ve seen it all.   You, you have to die.   It’s… the only way.”

Tracy whimpered.

I swallowed, hard.   “You don’t want to kill someone, Bob.   You’re not the bad guy, here.”   My face itched, “Take a life and you can never go back.”

         Bob was thinking.   With his eyes at the floor, Bob licked his lips.  My muscles tightened up.   I held my breath.   I waited.

         “Anyone seen my pants?” Mike asked from the stairwell.  

Without even looking at Mike, I could tell by the expression on Bob’s face, the exact moment their eyes met.  

“Bob?”   Confusion flooded Mike’s bloodstream.  Surprise flashed in Bob’s eyes.   “What the fuck are you doing here?”

-What are you waiting for?-

         “RUN!” I shouted, exploding from my seat, grabbing the table in my arms, and forcing it up into the unsuspecting Bob.  

         Pressed up against the table, I drove it towards the wall, pinning my aggressor.   I heard the knife fall and land below us.   Bob and I were inches apart, only separated by the thin wood, acting like the meat in some twisted sandwich.

         Bob pushed back and I lost my footing, slipping on one of the puddles he had made.   Like a cockroach caught when the lights come on, he scurried for the door, towards the rain and the darkness that awaited him outside.

Tracy was screaming when I went after him.   I failed to make out what exactly she was saying, but I heard the shrieks.  

I was not quite sure as to why I chased after Bob.   All I knew was that I had to.

The water was coming down in ribbons, outside.    I could only vaguely hear Tracy wailing as I raced out into the numerous tears, falling from a hidden moon.    Barely, I distinguished a shape of a person disappearing into the dense thicket of forestry on the edge of the camp grounds.   The mud made my legs feel heavy.   Arms pumping at my sides, I sprinted forward, not sure exactly what it was I would do to Bob when, not if, I caught him.  

Branches scratched at my face as I blurred past them.   His panting, heavy breath grew increasingly more and more audible.   I jumped over a fallen tree-trunk, slightly underestimated its height in the darkness, and tumbled face-first into the swamp below me.   Mud and slime shot up my nostrils and down my throat.   For a second, I coughed and gagged.   Blind, I wiped at my face with great vulnerability.   Bob must have seen my temporary weakness, because he kicked me square in the face.   There was a snap of bright red in my eyes.

They say that you never have the upper hand in a fair fight.  

“Welcome to Limbo, Davis,” Bob taunted me, “Because of you, my fucking step-father threw me out.”

Climbing to my feet unsteadily, I took a swing at him, missing.   A mock laughter entranced me, dancing in circles somewhere behind the trees, just out of sight.  

With an upper-cut, he caught me in the ribs and I felt the air propel itself from my lungs.   “You little cock-wrinkle.   I’ll fucking kill you.   Ass pirate,” Bob was gargling as he threw a round-house, but this time I ducked.   “Carved you your very own box.   We can bury you in some muddy, little hole.   Been waiting for this,” his words skated on ice, erratically. 

Dodging another potential blow from him, I finally landed a jab center-stage on his face.   “You know, Bobby-boy,” I coughed, whipping his skull to the side with a hook, “there is such a thing as obsession.”

Bob tumbled over, spitting what might have beeen blood or possibly even mud.   “We’re not that different,” he rambled.

A part of me was annoyed that everyone kept saying that to me.   No one was like me.   I was different.   One of a kind.   I wiped the water from my eyes.   The raindrops pounded me relentlessly.  

Bob swept out my feet with his legs.   He jumped up and landed on top of me.   Blood dripping onto my face and in my eyes, for a second, I saw crimson.   “It’s not about you and me, Chris,” Bob’s breath smelt like rotting death, “I have a higher purpose.   I have to end your existence.”

With failing strength, I managed to flip my attacker off, over me.   We both lied on our backs.   When I closed my fist, there was something in it.  A broken tree limb, about the length and weight of a baseball bat, looked up at me from my hand.   Wobbly and unsure at first, I charged him.   After the initial first steps, I found my movements stealthy and swift.   Rushing upon Bob’s being, I relinquished a winding swing.

-For the fucking fences-

The bulky branch met the side of Bob’s face, spinning him like a wound-up top.   He landed on all fours.   The black, soulless holes of his eyes opened wide, consuming me.   My legs felt heavy and the lungs in my chest heaved with short bursts.  

Bob was laughing.   “No one said it would be easy,” he said this and a chill crawled along the surface of my skin.  

I hit him again, this time, in the side.   Then, again.   I heard a rib crackle and snap.   Bob was still struggling to stand.   I wound up and planted the branch in his face, tearing his nose slightly.   I swore I could hear him giggle.

“This is how it ends, Bob,” I said, feeling I was supposed to.   

As though he was reading off a cheap script, blood dripping off his lips, Bob lisped out, “No Chris, this is how it begins.”   I hit him again.   “Even in the face of failure, this is only the beginning.”

The last strike caused him to make some kind of surprised gesture, snapping his face upwards.   He mumbled something with his head jerked back, showing teeth.   “He told me you were going to be a handful.   G-guess he was… rrright.”  

Bob’s whole body gave out, going limp.   His face met the thick mud of a ground below.   Large bubbles formed and disappeared around Bob’s skull as he slowly sank.   I flipped him over, peering down at my foe.   Bob’s face, lathered with mud, looked as though he received one of those mud-masks from a spa or on a vacation.   The rain splattered at it, slowly dissolving the slime.  

I raised the branch again.   Someone, something was edging me on.  The wind whispered “Do it. Do it. Do it.”

But another cry broke the point.   I saw Tracy standing on the other side of Bob’s fallen body.   Her mouth hung open and tears ravaged her sweet face.  

What am I doing, I asked myself.   Is there some line not to be crossed?  

Suddenly I was caught very unnerved.   My hands, knuckles white, trembled.  

Indifferently, I tossed the make-shift club to the side.   With one hand, I reached and touched my face.   My cheeks were contracted and tense.   My face hurt because I had been smiling for some time now.  

The enemy of my enemy is myself.

I could not help but shutter with cold fright.   Crouching, I brought my lips to Bob’s ear.   He was sobbing.  

I was wiping the hair and mud away from his face, when I said, “I don’t ever want see you again.”   It came out as a hiss, serpent-like.   My thumb touched his shaking lips.   Bob looked like a small infant weeping in his basinet.     

         He was crying blood when Tracy pulled my arm, leading me back out of the darkness.    The last thing I heard from Bob, was in a very calm and slightly eerie tone.   “Don’t worry,” he said, “You won’t.”

XVI 

When Boredom set in again, Tracy and Ally resurrected the idea of trying to go to the amusement park.   Although my guts had begun to ache with apprehension, I went along with it anyway.   I figured that if something bad did happen, I could be the hero and save the day, making up for what happened with Rudy, or with Bob, or Ally, or even Tracy.   After the lights went out one night, Tracy, Ally, Brian, Mike, Katie, and myself snuck out.   We caught a bus to Rye.  A voice in my  head said, “History tends to repeat itself, you know that.”   It asked, “Why won’t you warn them?”

Remember, I never said that I worked with the smartest people.   In fact, my co-workers were run-a-ways, wanted criminals, and mothers-to-be.   Mike and Katie withdrew some excerpts from the Rudy Collection and started smoking.   Tracy was sitting next to me, the bandages still on her arm, and when they offered some to her, she jumped at the opportunity.  I yelled at her, not because I'm against it in principle, but because of the fact that its owner had killed himself while in its company and Tracy wasn’t to far from death herself.   It could have been laced with something.   I was sure he didn’t buy it from the Girl Scouts, or anything.  

There was this pause.  It was like Tracy was trying to think of something really good to say to that but all she could come up with was, “Fuck you.”   Sweet and simple.    “Who do you think you are?   Like you haven’t been sneaking hits of this stuff all week.   Do you think you’re trying to help me out or something?   Like you helped Rudy?”  

Tracy got up and sat with Mike and Katie, our very own murdering arsonists.   I just sat there, stunned.   “Like you helped Rudy?”   The question stung at my eyes.   Tracy had revealed her true self to be a cold-hearted bitch.   The feeling of for Rudy’s death was only amplified by the salt she was rubbing in the wound.   It was worse than salt, she was rubbing shards of glass in the wound.   Whatever we had, I knew it was over.   I felt something shrivel up and die inside of me.  

It’s not her fault.   It really isn’t.

And maybe that’s the problem.

It’s not her fault, it’s not my fault, and hey, it isn’t even your fault, either.   It’s no one’s fault.

And maybe that’s the problem.

It’s no one’s fault.   Not any more.   That’s just how it is.   It’s always someone else’s fault.    You screw up, its not your fault.   Not any more.   Everyone wants to blame everyone else.  

My freshman year, I read in the newspaper about some kid named Thomas Gallagher, who walked into his high school one Tuesday morning in late May.   Spring was fading out and the early warmth of Summer was fast upon him.   You didn’t have to wear a coat anymore, but Tommy had one, long and flowing.   The swishing slam of the front doors caused uninviting glances and awkward stares to be shot at him.   Tommy’s wincing smirk was his only reply.   Three minutes till the first period bell and Tommy pulled out the gun.   What followed was the kind of silence that only death can make, interrupted slightly by the rippling of the shells as they danced along the cheap marble floor.   Fifteen were dead.   Tommy killed fifteen people on that late Spring day, and Tommy still got off.   Tommy Gallagher got off scot-free.   You see, it wasn’t Tommy’s fault.   No, the media stressed.   He was teased and tortured all through out high school and that’s why he pulled the trigger.   It’s never people like Tommy’s fault.   It’s always someone else’s.   Fifteen innocent lives were poked full of gunshot holes, and little Tommy still got to be valedictorian that June, while the people who sold him the gun faced a law suit and the victims’ families never got to watch their children throw tasseled caps through the air.   And Tommy got revenge.

Maybe revenge.

Sort of.   Kind of.   Revenge.

Chuck Grantly coached me in Little League one year, some time ago.   Everyone envied this outspoken, family-man’s seemingly perfect life.   One night, he sat in O’Dell’s Bar drinking shot followed by shot till two in the morning.   Southern Comfort stung on his breath.   After five minutes of leaving the bar, he could only find the black, twisted metal of his car interwoven with a lipstick red mini-van, killing a mother of four.   A mother of four, who had only been on the road so late to pick up formula for her new born at the all-night convenience store down the street.  

-Some convenience that turned out to be-

“But it wasn’t Chuck’s fault,” his lawyer explained to the dead woman’s grief-stricken husband.   Coach Grantly’s wife had just left him for her yoga instructor, a beautiful and limber blond named Becky.   Chuck was grieving.   That’s why he had that tequila, and the seven shots of cheap whiskey, and the 151 proof rum.   His emotional baggage poured it all down his involuntary throat.   Coach got to go back to baseball and alcohol, while the woman’s husband had a funeral to attend.   It wasn’t his fault.  Chuck was grieving, and now he could grieve with the husband of the woman he inadvertently killed.

Maybe killed.

Sort of.   Kind of.   Killed.

Jared Mackey was in one of my English classes and played the bass in my school’s jazz band.   He suspected that his girlfriend was secretly knocking boots with some other guy, so he paid his friend to follow her around for a month and watch her every move.   At the end of the month, his friend reported back with news saying Jared’s girlfriend was not cheating, or even flirting with anyone, for that matter.   Jared, however, wasn’t convinced and asked his friend to continue following her.   In 48 states, this is called stalking.

Maybe stalking.

Sort of.   Kind of.   Stalking.

The friend said that he just couldn’t do it, because in the last month he had secretly fallen in love with her and didn’t feel right following her any longer.   It wasn’t Jared’s fault he was a jealous, overbearing boyfriend, we were told in a subsequent school assembly that followed.   His heart had been broken by lying, cheating women too many times to recall.   It wasn’t his friend’s fault that he was in love; after all, Jared was the one who made him stalk her.   You always want what you can not have.   And surely it wasn’t Jared’s girlfriend’s fault she was secretly performing sexual favors on a dealer named Tank, in exchange for heroin, because an uncle once touched her inappropriately when she was younger.   Long story short, they all ended up dead like in some Shakespearian tragedy.   And, of course, it was no one’s fault.  

Drugs made me do it…

Society made me do it…

The media made me do it…

Bio-terrorists made me do it…

Pain made me do it…

Pride made me do it…

The guy who fixes my cable made me do it…

Anger made me do it…

Jealousy made me do it...

My medication made me do it…

Revenge made me do it…

The past made me do it…

The Devil made me do it…

But all this shifting of blame has to end up somewhere.   In the end, someone has to take responsibility for it all.   What good is free will, if we are not in control?

Staring at her across the bus, Tracy rolled her head back with insensitive laughter.   And on my lips, I could still taste her.    I was trying to count all the reasons for me to hate her.   And hate her, I did indeed.

XVII

       When we got to Playland, I wanted to just go back to Blue Ridge so I could sleep, but the next bus didn’t leave for an hour.   The park was depression personified.   Lights sparkled and music popped in bright melodies.   In the warm summer’s night air, I watched a single red balloon slither from the grasp of a boy who might have been five and clutched at his mother with the other hand.   I smiled and repressed the urge to tell him, “Life is shit.”

Left with no one, I hung out with Brian and tried to keep my mind off of what had occurred during the bus ride.   I didn’t spend time with Brian the whole summer and I could see why.   Brian was a weird kid, there’s no other way of putting it.   He stole cotton candy from the concession stands and kicked bathroom stalls while they were occupied, hoping the occupants would leave with stained pants.   While standing in a crowd, he would shout out random and often, vulgar things.   Brian was the classic fat kid.   Because he was over weight, he had been tortured as a young child.   When he got older and entered high school, he discovered that fat was funny and he could be the life of the party.   Problem was: he was over the top and grew annoying, fast.  

Surprisingly, he did not bring up anything about Tracy.   I thought it would have been like Christmas for him.   Brian loved the misery of others because it distracted him from his own.  

I had a pounding head-ache and just wanted to die.   Something called the Dragon Coaster roared as its carts flew by, overhead.   Looking up, I could no longer see the little boy’s balloon.   For a second, this made me happy.

Brian tried to cheer me up, while I kept eying a huge clock that stood in the center of the park, surrounded by a roller coaster that twisted in on itself and a mill filled with people my age and younger making out desperately in the dark.

He said, “Why did the little boy cry himself to sleep?”

“Brian,” I warned dryly, “just don’t.”

“Because he had AIDS,” Brain answered himself and smiled.  

“You fat mother fucker,” I explained to him calmly. 

Just when I was starting to get my mind off of Tracy, she walked by and to make things worse, she was all over some guy.  The guy looked to be almost thirty and had this crafty look in his eyes.   Suddenly, I realized there was no way that he was up to anything closely resembling good.   I had an impulse to protect her.   It moved like a spider, growing inside me.   I felt like I had to save her from that guy and herself.  

“Come on, Trace,” I pleaded with her.   “What are you doing?   The last bus is leaving soon.   Come on, let’s go.”   I honestly felt like I needed to save her.  

She looked at me and kind of laughed, “José is going to take care of me.   He’ll give me a ride back later.”   She smiled at him, showing the points of her teeth, “Besides, he doesn’t get all up on my case and tell me what I can and can’t smoke.   We’re going to go have some fun down on the beach.   It could have been us, Chris, if you weren’t so God damn insane!”

I was growing angry again, “Tracy, look.   I only said that because I wanted to protect you.   And by the looks of it, you needed it.   Look at you!   This isn’t you!   Come back with me, please.”   I couldn’t believe this, I was practically whining.

“And like you would have any idea of who I really am,” Tracy snarled in a mock question.

“Tracy, look around.   If you could just be honest about everything, then –” I started but she cut me off.

“So, you have always been completely honest with me, then?”   It was a weird question.  

I wasn’t the liar here.

“Of course, I have.   Tracy, I –” she cut me off, again.   She cuts me down.

Her eyes were cold, “Well, then, Mr. Hero, tell me where you go in the middle of the night.”

She had no idea what she was saying.   Her words were erratic.   She was talking crazily.   

“Tracy, what are you talking about?”  I asked.    “I don’t go any where.  You don’t even know what’s going on, come with me.”

She shook her head, “I hate liars.”

That’s when her thirty year old Spanish friend, José, stepped in.   “Hey, man.   Let her be… you ain’t her daddy.”   He spoke like he had something in his teeth.   Standing before me, he was all shaved head and a dirty white undershirt beneath a dark, hooded, zip-up, covering long muscular arms.   “She can do what she wants and she don’t want to go with you.”

-If you love something, set it free-  

José swung his arm and an attached fist hammered me in the temple.  

Anyone from doctors to professional boxers will tell you that the best defense against a punch is learning how to take one.   A hook, a kick, an uppercut, anything thrown at you, directed for your body, is best defended against by accepting the inevitability of its arrival.   You can’t block them all, so the easiest solution is to tightened your stomach muscles and absorb the blow.   With an upward hook, sucker punch, or jab to the head, you want to move into its path, instead of backing away from it.   Moving away can cause your face to catch the blow with full force.   This is bad.   The force can cause your brain to bounce around against your skull.   Its ironic, in this situation, the skull, which was designed to protect your brain, becomes the brick wall it collides with.   It’s a mini car-accident, inside your head.   It’s like dropping an egg onto pavement from the top of a three story building.  

Of course, I doubt that your average neural surgeon was ever in a situation like this.   Boxers on the other hand may know what they are talking about.   Still, to me its sounded crazy: moving towards the punch.   Being punched in the head hurts, don’t they know that?

But none of that mattered, any more.   In a fight, you don’t think.   It’s all reflexes.   You either do the right thing, or you do the wrong thing.  

Either that, or you freeze.   You freeze like me.

His punch had steam-rolled into my temple.   I spun completely around and before I could even throw a retaliatory punch out, he suckered me with his left.   I hunched over from the blow, the wind knocked out of me.   It was all happening so fast, but at the same time, it was happening so slowly that I was outside my self watching it all happen, and I just couldn’t react.   He upper-cutted me under my chin and I went up over my back and then down.   I prayed for the end, but it wasn’t over.  

This must be how Bob felt.

The average person has 5.6 liters of blood in their body.   Two million red blood cells die every second.   José was just speeding up the process.

Seriously pissed off, he continued to kick me in the side over and over again.   It wasn’t until I coughed up red-black blood, that he finally stopped.   He spit at me and turned to Tracy.   “Let’s go, babe.”

-If you love something, set it free-

They were walking away when I gathered what little strength was left and pushed myself up to my feet and coughed out, “Tracy…wait…”   I never said that I’d take this lying down.   I couldn’t stop caring about her, she needed me.

Tracy, whatever she was, stopped and walked back to me.   The glimmer of hope.   I could only see out of one eye and the dizziness danced all around me.  

“Look Chris, let me go.”   Her voice was sweet but mean.   “I’ll be ok.   Butt out.   This doesn’t concern you.”  

I couldn’t reply.  

“You’re always up in every one’s business,” she told me.   “You’re such a boy scout, but you couldn’t help Rudy and you sure as hell can’t help me.  

She turned and walked away in the arms of José.   I heard her finally say, “Goodbye, Chris.”  

The blood ran down my face as I watched her disappear.  

-If you set something free, you’ll live to regret it-

It was over, I told myself.  

But really, it was just the beginning of a really long night, a night that would haunt me forever.

XVIII

 I think that if more people had the crap beaten out of them, they’d realize that violence isn’t the answer.   My ass had just been handed to me on a silver platter, and it really felt like it.   As I limped towards the bus stop, my hands trembled and my chest heaved with every breath I took.   The taste of blood, sticky and sloppy, lingered in my mouth as my head pounded.   I found the bench in the darkness of the summer night and fell down onto it.   Panting like some animal in heat, I tried to calm myself, taking in the cool air in deep breaths.   I sat up and looked down at my hands.   They were smeared with blood.   My blood?   My shirt, shorts, and even sneakers were stained with the blood I had spilt trying to protect someone else.   My self-sacrifice.

Why had I decided to try to save Tracy and keep her safe?   I felt an obligation to the people around me in life.   There was an unspoken contract between me and the rest of the world.   I was appointed to save them.   It was my gift, but also, my burden.   What did I have to show for it?   Nothing.   Sacrificing for the safety of others.   What was the point of helping people?   I never received recognition or even thanks when I defended the weak and less fortunate.   I shouldn’t have cared so much about their well being.  

It just wasn’t worth it anymore.   All I ever got was pain and suffering.   Agony.

It was there, sitting upon that bench, waiting for a bus which would never come, I made up my mind.   I decided that I was done with it all, the whole hero thing.   No one was important enough to need my help.   They could all make it on their own and fend for themselves.   They didn’t need me.  They didn’t even want me.  

-You can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.-

At that moment, it seemed the world around me changed.   No longer did the truth lay hidden beneath a mask of happiness.   It was a sad and dangerous existence.   My surroundings rushed towards me.   Disgusting.   I had never seen this world before, but I could tell just by looking at it.   Disgusting.

The amusement park was a strange dark shape cowering in shame behind the ten-foot blue fence, encircling it.   As I gazed upon its continence, I began to cough, a strange feeling of utter and undeniable despair crept over me like the clouds that were slowly creeping over the moon.   Ugly and old, the world provided its perceived humbleness as a lie.

This visage, this false front, masked a cesspool of pain, evil, and ugliness, whitewashing over them to create the veneer of a happy place in order to maintain its business and recreational value.   The whitewash had slowly faded over the years, now wearing a tired shade of gray.   The bricks, which held up everything I’d ever known, had grown weary and began to slowly crack, crumbling.   With brittle cement, I barely held together.

If you ignore something long enough, it goes away.   But sooner or later, you have to open your eyes.   This world has cancer and, I’m afraid, it’s spreading.

       Life is a game.   It’s truly as trivial as that.   That’s all it really can ever be, when you think about it.   Does my life matter in the end of it all?   Does yours?   Does anyone’s?   You can only affect a small number of other lives in the short time you have, and then, after you are gone, it’s only a matter of time until they forget you.   Just look at what happened to Rudy:   No one even cares any more that he’s gone.   Time heals all, it’s a natural thing.   The more days and weeks and years that pass, the more you will forget something, someone, everything.   Life is a pointless, meaningless, waste of time.   No one lives forever.   No one’s memory will live forever either.   Sooner or later, everything, no matter what it is, is forgotten.  

You spend all your life waiting for Death, only to realize that you've never truly lived.

Sighing again, I took a few steps closer towards the obscure mass, trying to fully access the nature of the object that lay before me.   This world was not a happy place.   I was sure that gunshots had echoed here last night, and would be audible every night till the last wall crumbled and came down upon it self.   I saw people busing in and out of the parks gates with vague smiles residing upon their faces.   Behind their masks of happiness, this world’s inhabitants were cheats and liars, miserable people.

The amusement park was now a cesspool of scum and drug dealers.   Now that I really saw the world for what it was, I realized that there was nothing I could do to change it.   I was only one person. 

 The hopelessness and despair tightened around me.   I wondered how many husbands were cheating on their wives, how many people were senselessly attacked, beaten, and robbed every night here of one thing or another, how many children were going hungry back home because their parents were liars who were engulfed in miserable-ness and sin.  

-25 percent of people who use personal ads for dating are already married-

They were all pretenders, each and every one of them.   No one in this world was innocent, I concluded, seemingly they were all guilty of one crime or another, this crime or that crime.

I scratched my aching head.   This world personified evil and consisted of the very essence of how meaningless life could be to some people.  

“Fools…” I muttered in disgust.  

It was a waste of what could have been a perfectly, promising, parking lot.   The utter ugliness of things inside made the park moan with pain as its shadowy shape bled away.   The magnitude of those evil acts fed the darkness, causing it to grow and tower over all else in the night sky.   The darkness was everywhere, an imposing sight, looming over the rest of the neighborhood. 

When left standing there in it’s presence for any length of time, a person’s morality and virtues were stripped away and immediately replaced with a gloomy, sunken attitude of grief and dread.   The more I stared at its presence, the more profound effect it began to have on me.   I felt its anger, its pain, its loss and I found myself being urged to snuff out the meaningless lives of everyone around, including my own.   Greed, lust, envy, pride, wrath, and so many other dark emotions had filled my own blood as I had been standing there.   And I yelled.

Maybe this is the real me.

Maybe this is the me, I keep locked up inside.

Maybe this is the me, I hide from the world.

Maybe this is the me, who will stare at you on the bus, litter in front of your house.

Maybe this is the me, who just doesn’t give a fuck.

Maybe this is the me, who only pretends to care.   Only pretends to be happy.   Only pretends to be loved.

Maybe this is the me, who hates helping people.

Maybe this is the me, who is trapped inside somebody else’s shadow.

Maybe this is the me, who is only looking for a thank-you.

Maybe this is the me, who is happy with his bad habits.

Maybe this is the me, who is only happy when others are sad.

Maybe this is the me, who is cold.

Maybe this is the me, who is calculating.

Maybe this is the me, who was picked on in school.

Maybe this is the me, who has way too much free time.

Maybe this is the me, who won’t talk to you if he sees you later.

Maybe this is the me, who will kick you when you’re down.

Maybe this is the me, who you won’t miss when he’s gone.

Maybe this is the me, who has no expectations.   No goals.   No future.

Maybe this is the me, who let Rudy die.

Maybe this is me.

I gasped and turned my view from the foreboding horror, myself reflected darkly.   I couldn’t bear to look at it anymore for fear that the monster of the night would leave an lasting impression upon me that might have caused me to do something unspeakable.   Near the blue fence, hoodlums were dealing drugs, corrupting and destroying more “innocent” lives and spreading the dark influence of the evil represented here throughout the neighborhood, throughout the world.

After sitting on that bench for at least half an hour, I remembered that the last bus back to work had left while José was doing the Mexican Hat Dance with my face.   Now I had to find a different way to get out of there, to escape.   I stood up again and my surroundings swirled around me.   It was hard for me to walk without stumbling over.   Slowly, I made my way from the bus stop back into the grimness of the park.   I decided to look for Brian, or Mike, or even Katie.   The last two were probably starting forest fires.   I wondered where Ally had been this whole time.   I was hoping that one of them might have also missed the bus.   If I could find someone, then at least, I wouldn’t be so alone.  

I looked, searching, but I couldn’t find anyone I knew.   They might have still been there, but in the state that I was in then, I could have passed right by several times and not even known it.   Nothing made sense, it was just loud noise and blurred images.   I wandered aimlessly for what seemed to be an eternity.   I was really messed up.  

Just then, someone walking in the opposite direction bumped into me with almost a feeling of purpose.   A short kid, big glasses, brushed by me.   As he passed, my eyes locked with his own bloodshot pair hiding behind prescription lenses.   I could hear music blare from the headphones placed over his ears.

-And the hero will drown-

“Rudy?” I asked, spinning around towards the passer-by, but there was no one there.

I began to look for Rudy among the crowd.   Music muffled my screams.   I yelled his name frantically.   I ran to him in no apparent direction, but when I got there, each time, he was gone.   I ran faster and faster, but I kept falling down and with every fall, Rudy moved farther away.   And the carousel went round and round.   Like a beacon fading in the storm, he was gone, completely disappearing.   At this realization, I began to scream as loud as I could.   I begged him to come back, or wait, or just let me know where he was going and that he was all right.   I received no answers, just awkward and frightened stares from people as they passed by.  

It wasn’t really Rudy, it couldn’t have been.   Thinking back, I knew that then.   It was all in my mind.   Rudy was dead and despite the blistering headache, I knew this.   Yet I chased after him as if I really might catch him.   I didn’t want to accept the fact that he was gone.   I didn’t want the proof.  

There’s no such thing as ghosts.   They’re just projections of a memory triggered by strong emotion.  

Sadness.  

Anger.  

Guilt.

A person’s mind is their greatest enemy.   The enemy of my enemy is myself.   Rudy was dead.

Suddenly, two big, hulking security guards grabbed the sleeves of my t-shirt and dragged me out of the amusement park.   It was late, really late.   I concluded that after tonight, I wouldn’t be able to go back to work.   I would have to call someone and find a place to stay.   Locating the nearest pay phone, I found myself standing there thinking.   I couldn’t think of anyone to call, let alone their phone numbers.  

-In a year, the average person makes 1,160 phone calls-

Out of all my friends, all the people who’ve I helped, all the people who could owe me favors, I couldn’t recall a single person.   I drew a blank.   I had only one number in my mind, but was hesitant and fearful.   A voice in my mind told me, Repent, prodigal son.   I reached into my pant’s pocket and took out a lone quarter.   My hand trembled violently.   This was what was supposed to happen.   It had all been written before.

Even George Washington, this country’s first hero, showed me no sympathy.   From the coin, his face was turned away from, refusing to look at me.   Finally, I punched in the numbers and the phone began to ring.   It rang for a long time, but eventually a gruff and sleepy voice picked up.   I froze for a couple of seconds and couldn’t say anything.   Slowly, however, I forced out the words.   They came out horse and tired, like blood from a scab.   

“Hi, Dad?   ….Can you come pick me up?”

XIX

His name was Joseph Davis and he was my cousin.   Five extra years of life had given him a wisdom and patience I would never understand.   Joey was like the older brother I never had, and in a house full of women, I struggled to latch on to a male role model.   I wanted to be just like him; he had a glow I could never explain.   Joey was kind and selfless, and just always there when people needed him.   He never let anyone down.   While he was in high school, we were inseparable.   He always included me in his whirlwind adventures, but looking back I was probably more of a burden than a friend.   I was the baby who wanted to play with the big kids.   Joey never let that seem to bother him.   We were inseparable.   Five extra years of life had given him saint-hood.

I remember nothing after him leaving for college.   Nothing.   We just lost touch.   About a year later, he was dead.   I had to go and stand at his funeral, full of stupid ignorance and hope, as I swore to myself that Joey wasn’t really dead.   As the snow was falling that winter morning, I knew, he couldn’t be dead.  

Heroes never die.  

If you don’t know that your dreams are dead, then you are never really empty inside.

The police said they found him dead, holding a pistol to his chest.   They would later call it a suicide.   He was shot twice, once through the heart.   Regardless of whether or not he was holding the gun, it was murder, not suicide.   Like a stupid kid, shaking with vindication and spilling snot from my nose, I vowed over his grave not to let anything bad ever happen to the people I cared about.   I pledged to protect them.  

But maybe I’m not a protector.   Maybe I’m a plague.  

When my father arrived to pick me up, he didn’t say one word to me.   I got in the car cautiously, put my seat belt on, waiting for the yelling to begin.   But he didn’t yell, he didn’t say anything at first.   There was dead silence in the car like the kind of cold emptiness in space and my father had a stern, unforgiving look upon his face.

Finally, he turned to me, but his actions were very out of character.   “That looks pretty bad. I’m taking you to the hospital.   You might have a concussion,” he said as he examined my head, his eyes softening.   “I have a friend in the ER who owes me a favor.   He’ll look at you and just make sure everything’s alright.”

I sat there patiently waiting, “Oh…okay.”   My head nodded dumbly.

A long pause eventually gave way to a broken sigh, “Well, let’s hear it.   It was a girl right?”  

I wondered how he could have known, but my head was pounding too much to think allow further questioning on my part.   I told him the whole story.   I told him about work, Tracy, and her lies, Bob, and the encounter, Rudy, and the drugs, and his suicide, PlayLand, sneaking out, and Tracy freaking out and hooking up with some guy, and the fight, and everything else in between.   As I relived the events of the summer to my father, it felt as though a great burden was being lifted from me.   At times in my story, the words flowed eloquently and at other moments all my words became jumbled together.   But in the end, I got my message across.   I felt free.

My father sat there in deep meditation for a moment, fingers to his temple.   He rubbed at a chin crowded with stubble and began, his voice slowly becoming a hum, vibrating through the night.  

“From what you’ve told me, I can see that this girl is no good for you,” he paused, swallowing, “but I don’t think that you can see that.   I know that type.   I’ve known girls like her.   When you’re with her, she has a way of making you unaware of what’s happening around you.   Its like, did you ever see the blinders on a race horse?   They put them there so the horse can’t be distracted.   It only sees what’s right in front of it.   It’s as though you are in a tunnel when you’re with this girl.   You have tunnel vision.”   My father had just compared me to a horse.

“All you can see is the thing at the end of the tunnel.   This tunnel vision keeps you in the dark.   You don’t see what she’s really doing to you and everyone else in your life.   You can’t let that tunnel vision control you.   You have to come out of the tunnel and take control of your own life, son.   I know it may seem hard now, but you have to let this girl go.   You have to get rid of her before it’s too late, before she destroys the good, honest, hard-working person that you are.   You can’t let her change you.   She’s not worth losing yourself.”  

My father ran a hand through his hair, thinking before he continued.   “You can’t save everyone, Chris.   It’s impossible.   You have to understand that no matter how hard you try to help and protect people, someone will always get hurt.   That’s just the way life is.    You can’t have the good without the bad.   All I’m saying is don’t bear the weight of the world on your shoulders.   It’s too heavy and will surely crush you beneath it.   It’ll kill you, Chris.   We all have to try to make a difference with our lives, just don’t go kill yourself over it, he said.   “Most times, it is the little things that make all the difference.   It’s the things you do without knowing, that people remember the most.”  

I wasn’t looking at him.   All I could see was what blurred outside the window.

“You weren’t put on this earth to save them.   You’re setting yourself up for a big disappointment.   There are times when life is going to get bad, but you can’t despair.   You have to hope that it will get better, and believe me, it always does.   You have to be strong.”

I was finally looking at him then, through my swelling eye lids, unable to say a word.  

“It’s those bad times in life that define us as a person.   Don’t look at a man’s successes.   Look at how he handles his failures.   They show his true courage.” 

This wasn’t my father.   It just couldn’t be.  My father used to beat me.   He’d use props.   He’d hit me with belts, thin pieces of wood, and even sometimes one of those big, metal serving spoons.

-Let’s not forget that time with the mop-

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not because he was a bad parent or even a bad person.   They were strictly disciplinary beatings.    When you’re on the verge of adolescence, you think you know everything, but if you don’t know how to avoid a beating from your dad, then you don’t know enough.   I thought I was so smart.   My father taught me that everything I thought was wrong.

What doesn’t kill you, forces you to become stronger.

Courageous by necessity.  

For most people, fear is a method of control.   Within fear, lies power.   I really feared my father.   When I was younger, the whole military toughness could bring tears to my eyes with just a look.   But he got old and weak before my eyes.   By the time he had lost the strength to hit me, I had already lost fear of God.  

When the leukemia set in, all he had the strength to hit was the bottle and he hit it hard.   I guess he figured his blood was going to kill him either way, so he might as well fill it with as much alcohol as humanly possible.   He experienced a false sense of enlightenment when he drank.   With vodka coursing through his veins, daddy dearest got off on sermons of saviors and sin, peaks and valleys, rises and falls.  

My father was a completely different person everyday of his life.   The liquor did this.   He had too many faces for anyone to keep track of.   Tonight, he seemed like a good, caring person, but tomorrow would be different.

Tomorrow would be different for everyone.

We pulled into the hospital parking lot and the car slowly came to a halt.   “Hey, stop bleeding on my seats and get out of the car.   Let’s go.”   His face held the traces of both concern and annoyance.

Next thing I knew, I found myself in a little examination room inside the hospital.   I must have blacked out, because I couldn’t remember how I got from the car to where I was.   My head pounded like a drum and my hands trembled as I wiped the cold beads of sweat from my forehead.   The room was tiny and so brightly white that it hurt my eyes to the familiar extent where I had to look a way.   

My father stood in a corner, leaning against the wall.   He was fixed in my direction with a searching eye.  “What?   Were you down on the beach, tonight?”

I hadn’t been on the beach.   “No, why?”  

His eyes narrowed at my sneakers as he pointed and said, “What’s with all the sand?   Your sneakers are a mess.”  

I looked down to discover that it was indeed true.   Under the occasional smatterings of blood, my sneakers were thickly coated with muddy grains of sand from a beach.  

“I don’t know, whatever,” I said, rolling my eyes, vaguely annoyed.

Of course my dad would inquire about my dirty sneakers.   He was a person who always dressed to please people.   He made sure he always looked nice, because he always had people to impress.   Who did I have to impress?  

-No one-  

The doctor came into the room, interrupting whatever train of thought might had been building.   He was a short, balding man in his early to mid fifties.   His tired, beady eyes squinted out from behind thick coke-bottle glasses.   When he spoke, it was hard to tell whether his lips were moving under a bushy mustache.  

He looked at me, but spoke to my father.   “Well Dave, what do we have here?   A fight, huh?   Well I hate to see the other guy.   It’s this generation of kids these days, all they do is fight.   I bet this was over a girl.   A hot little number, am I right?   Of course I am, that’s how it always is.”   Finally, he took a breath and talked to me.   “Chris, can you tell me what happened?   Do you remember much?”

I sat and tried to think, but the pounding in my head had become an incompressible and utterly unbearable pain.   “No, not much.”

“Well, that can be expected.   Your MRI,” he showed me something on a screen as he pointed and spoke, but I was too caught up in the fact that I didn’t remember taking an MRI, to really listen, “it shows swelling here, between your skull and this part of your brain.   See?   Right here.   What this means is:   you may experience slight to moderate memory loss for a couple of days if not weeks.   If you have trouble remembering things, don’t panic.   It’s perfectly normal and your full memory will eventually return.”   The doctor talked and talked, but I found that his words were making less and less sense.   He became an adult from the Peanuts cartoon, when he spoke, all I heard was low mumbles.

Fazing in and out of coherence, the doctor seemed to lose interest in my own well being.  

As if he’d suddenly realized the cure for cancer, the doctor exclaimed, “Oh, Dave! That reminds me.”   He rubbed the bristles of his mustache, “I’ve got something I’ve been meaning to show you.”

My father pressed his cheeriness and chimed with false interest, “What’s that?”

The doctor, waddling over to a cabinet, mumbled to my father.   “Another friend of mine, he’s a …erm… he’s a special kind of doctor,” he said, his eyes quickly darted at me while my father was nodding.   “The other day, he was cleaning out his old office and he found this.”

From the white cabinet, the doctor withdrew a glass jar.   It was one of the jars you would use to store homemade jam in.   My father ran his hand along the stubble that had been growing on his face, as he stepped closer, now interested. 

I was trying to see what was in the jar.   Inside: a round shaped object about the size of a very small orange.   It was yellowish and brittle looking.   Like a dried up orange peel.

“Well, what do you know,” my father said.

I moved over to it.   The room was trembling.   The jar looked ancient, coated in dirt and strange colored dust.   There was more in the jar.   It looked like twigs.   Dried-up things, all held together.   My head hurt.   There was a label made out of old, brittle masking tape wrapped around the lid of the jar.   It said, what looked like: Samael.   Under that, scribbled: Brooklyn, April 9, 1919.  

“What is it?” I asked.   Regret flooded over me as soon as the words left my mouth.   I knew exactly what it was that I was staring at.

The doctor laughed.   There was an awful smile growing beneath his mustache when he said, “It’s a fetus.”

I felt my stomach twist itself tight, pulling my outstretched hand back quickly.   It wasn’t a medical display, its something you would see in a freak show.   Brown and red, I see the tiny bones, so intricate and small.   The blackness of death wrapped itself between and around the bones.   The fetus lied at the bottom of the jar, wrapped and mangled in itself.   I shivered when I felt my hand open over my mouth in order to hide what must be a look of horror on my face.   The tiny little head ws crushed, caved in.   The face looked down at a concave chest.   Eyes and mouth look sealed, as though they were never meant to be opened.  

“That’s amazing,” my father said.  

I could only turn and look at him to make sure that he really said it.  

“Isn’t it?” the doctor asked, pleased with himself greatly.  

They heard me whisper, “My god…”

“What’s the matter,” the doctor joked, “no strong stomach?”

The hair on my arms was standing upright.   My guts contracted harder in spastic pains, as though someone was squeezing them with bare hands.   The jar even smelt like death.   

“That’s so fucked up...” I mumbled, feeling increasingly dizzy.  

“Watch your language, young man,” my father scolded.   His eyebrows were furrowed intensely.  

Everything spun.   I saw the little death-face, cold and empty, staring at me, crying if it could.   I must have lost consciousness, because everything goes dark.   When I closed my eyes, the 90 year-old dead baby’s face was burned there.   My mouth tasted like vomit.

“The label says that his name was … Samuel or something like that,” I could hear the doctor saying in the darkness.   “Sammy or something.”

“Why would you name a dead baby?” My father was asking.

Somehow, I ended up back home for the first time in months, to find myself greeted by only the familiar darkness.   I crept through it to find my room standing static and still where I had left it.   Greatly disturbed, I stood in the center for a second.   The door closed.   My bed was gone, the parental-units gave it to one of my sisters.   Someone had done some cleaning.   The nothingness seemed all in its place.   I collapsed onto the floor and found my limbs to be heavy and without the ability to move.   In the background, I could hear the murmurs of my parents talking.   The exhaustion had caught up with me and with a heaving sigh, I slept.   In the moments immediately between asleep and awake, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t all that different from the baby in the jar.   Lying in the fetal position on the cold, hard floor, I could not help but think that this was the jar and I, that baby.  

My face felt cold and empty.  

XX

It was on that night that I dreamt.   Sometimes in life, you know that you are dreaming, but you won’t accept that fact.   Other times, you don’t know that you’re dreaming and you can’t wake yourself up.  

Scientists say that a lot can be learned about a person by studying their dreams.   They reveal what is truly going on inside someone’s head.   Every dream has a meaning, a purpose.   They are never random.   In truth, some radical new thinkers to the field say that dreams are a closer reality than the one we live in when we are awake.   Dreams allow us to see life more clearly and without all the distractions and noise of our consciousness.   They give us that one pivotal moment of clarity, the one we’ve all been searching for, but it is only a moment, in which, they make sense.   After that moment, the clarity becomes clouded with static as they rapidly crumble and deteriorate into strange images with mumbled sounds and blurry sub-titles.

If you have a dream, in which, you can remember every aspect afterwards, it is something very important, that your sub consciousness is trying to relay to your consciousness.   Dreams, to this extent, are usually premonitions of foreboding personal apocalypses, which if caught in time, can hopefully be adverted.   There’s only one bad thing about dreaming.   When the dream is over, how do you know that it has really ended?   How are we certain that what we wake up to is reality?    What’s keeping us from being trapped in our dreams?   Who’s to say that when we wake up from a dream, we’re not just waking up into another one?   How are we sure that they are our dreams, and not somebody else’s?   And when one person wakes up from the dream, how do you know that the dream is just not continuing somewhere else, with out them?   Whose dream is it?  

Is it yours?

Or is it mine?

This night, I had one such dream.   You can be the judge of whether it was a premonition of a terrible fall or just the concussion taking affect.

Hot and about mid-day, I stood in a vast desert.   The sun was high in the sky and beat down upon me in skin-blistering heat for as far as the horizon stretched.   I surveyed the hills only for my eyes to be met by more sand.   Tired, hungry, and most of all, dying of a seemingly unquenchable thirst, I was lost, utterly and totally, lost.  

Suddenly, a cloaked man rode towards me on a jet black horse.   He stopped in front of me and dismounted his stead.  

I tried to see his face, but the hood which loomed over his head, prevented me.  

“Would you like some water, young man?” the cloaked man asked.   “You certainly look mighty thirsty.”   As I reached out, he pulled back and continued.   “All you have to do is to let me take you away from here.   Let me save you from this madness.   After all, look around.   You’re in a forsaken dessert, for his sakes.   Can anywhere else be worse?   Come with me and you’ll never be thirsty again.”

I thought about his offer for only seconds.   This guy was giving me the serious creeps.   “N-no…   That’s ok.   My mom always told me not to take things from strangers and to...um…fear Trojans bearing gifts,” I tongued the words dryly.

Nothing in the stranger changed.   “Anything about not looking a gift horse in the mouth, then?   Sure, okay.   I was just trying to be helpful.   That’s all I wanted to do: help.   I’ll just follow along behind you for a little ways and then I’ll take my leave of you.”  

He followed me closely from behind as I wandered aimlessly through the desert.   I grew tired and lost my footing, falling face-first into the sand.   As I climbed up again, the man was squatting in front of me.   “You sure look tired, my boy.   Let me rejuvenate you, so you may have the strength to continue.”

“No,” I said more assertively than before.   “I don’t want nor need your help!   Get the hell away from me,” I yelled, swingling wildly.   He departed gruffly and I continued my journey through the dessert.   After taking only a few steps forward, I fell again.   Only this time, pain shot through out my entire body.   I knew it is a dream but the pain was real.   I fought through the growing agony and continued to walk forward.   Laughter cracked the sky all around me, but as I looked, I could not find the source.   Hours later, I realized then that I was back where I had begun and that I was traveling in one big circle.  

Frustrated and tired, I screamed, “I give up.   You hear me?   I give up!   I can’t do this any more!   Fuck,” and threw myself down into the hot sand, letting it shoot into my mouth.   I was pinned and couldn’t move.  

The mocking laughter increased all around me as the hot, mid-day sun vanished from the sky.   I found my self sitting in a chair in a dark office room.   The huge red curtains flew in front of the window and cast a rose-colored glow upon everything.   The air was thick and moist.   The walls, themselves, were twisted tapestries of pain, sorrow, and human flesh.   The ceiling whispered secrets and lies.   The floor told of suffering, betrayal, and unkempt promises.   In front of me, an ominous desk, the solid oak was sketched in skulls, stood before an arm chair which seemed to be fifty feet high.   The fabric was a deep crimson and it reminded me of humanity’s fallibility.   I had been here before, I was certain.   In the chair, sat the cloaked stranger from the dessert.   He was the one laughing and laughing.  

“Well, well, well. Are you ready to accept my help?”   On the front of the stranger’s desk was a seal of a man with two faces.   It was the seal of the Roman god, Janus.   I remember thinking that I thought my knowledge of Roman and Greek mythology would never come in handy in the real world.   But I guess dreams don’t count as being the real world, do they?

“No, sorry.   You see I’m already out of the dessert,” I replied smugly, “but nice place you got here.”

He laughed again, “Yes out of one dessert and right into another.   Shall I read from the Book of Chris and examine your life lately?”   From one of the desk drawers, he pulled a black book.   Upon its cover, I could clearly read the title: CHRIS DAVIS.   “Hmm…let’s see.   Just recently, you punched out a co-worker, lusted for this Tracy girl… among others, let poor little Rudy die, been insensitive to your father’s illness, he’s dying, by the way, snuck out of work, a job which as of this morning, you will no longer have, and you had to call out your sickly father in the middle of the night.   Let’s not even get started on your late-night, what shall we call them, jogs? Oh, and there’s a lot more you haven’t even begun to realize …yet.   Ah! And your girly friend, Tracy; she went off with this guy, José, who literally kicked your ass.   It hurt in so many ways, you can’t even begin to imagine.   Well, Christopher Davis, it looks to me that all these things are just about to catch up with you.   There’s no more places left to run to.   Therefore you can both face all these troubles and live with their consequences, or you can let me make it all better.   You don’t want your girl to be with that guy?   Done.   You don’t want to remember all the painful details of this whole summer?   Okay, consider them forgotten.   You don’t want the leukemia to kill your father?   Fine.   See, I can make it all so much better.   Well, what do you say?”

Everything sunk in finally.   My future looked bleak and dismal.   I couldn’t fight any longer; I was just too tired of it.   I slowly gave in to the hooded man.   “But what do you want in return, for all this kindness?”

 “Do we have a deal, Chris, my boy?”   He stretched out his shadowy hand.   I reluctantly shook it.

-It’s only a dream-

“Deal.”   His hand was cold and just the touch sent chills down my arm.

“Then, welcome to the first day of the rest of your life.”   The room melted away around me and I found my self soaring in the sky.   The wind in my face felt good as all my worries vanished.   I happily smiled and upon the completion of the up-turning of my lips, I woke up on the floor of my room drenched in sweat.   Breathlessly, I climbed to my feet and looked out my window.   That was a crazy dream, I thought, and already its memory was fading.   Outside looked bright and sunny and it was that placidness that filled me with a feeling of safety.  

I could tell it was going to be a good day, a happy day.   As I started to leave my room I caught a glimpse of my self in the mirror.   It shocked me, upon the revealing of my own reflection, a reflection which I hadn’t seen all summer.   The person staring back at me was indeed not I.   He looked completely different and strange.   He had straggly, long, dark locks of hair which reeked of the unclean.   His face was white and skinny.   It was the reflection’s eyes that bothered me the most.   There was something troubling in their stare.  

After a minute or so, I could no longer let it eat at me.   I left my room without a care in the world.   I entered the kitchen where my mom was making her famous pancakes and my father and sisters were seated at the table, already embarking upon the first batch.   We made clittle conversation as I poured myself a cup of coffee.   It had been ages since I had tasted a decent cup.   I reached for the morning news paper, which was still in the yellow plastic bag it was delivered in.  

“Chris,” my dad began as I unrolled the paper and moved towards a seat at the table.  

“I really don’t want to talk about it right now,” I said, headache converging.

My mother shot him a look from across the table.   “Actually, I wanted to talk to you about what your mother found in there last week while she was cleaning your room,” my father said hesitantly.

My eyes skimmed over the front page, not really listening to my dad, and then stopped.   The coffee mug slipped from my fingers, shattering upon the hardwood floor.   My eyes were widened and filled with an inexplicable terror as my heart shattered along with that coffee mug.   On the front page of the paper was the latest report on the newest strangler victim.   It was the picture that had my attention.   It was the familiar face that haunts me whenever I close my eyes.   That sad and empty girl from the paper froze the blood in my veins.   Below the grim photo, it read:   Tracy Matthews, local girl, latest strangling victim.

XXI

It was like a bad dream.   Was it a dream?   Everything became a blur;   a rush of color and sound.

-What’s happened?-

I couldn’t fully grasp the reality of the matter at hand.  

Wait.   How did I get here?    I was home…shouldn’t I have been at work?   Why was I home?   What was going on?  

I couldn’t seem to remember much of the previous day.   It was as though, for some strange reason, my memory had been erased.   I gasped for air as I felt a sense of panic sweep over me, paralyzing every last nerve ending in my body.   What did it all mean?   The last vivid memory I could recall…was…the day before and agreeing to go somewhere.   Somewhere?   PlayLand?   Why did that seem familiar?    My memory went foggy after that morning.   It was static.   White noise.   That’s all it was, right up until the dream I had the night before.   It was a jumbled mess between those two mornings.  

And…Tracy?   Oh, god.   Tracy, what had happened?  

I noticed the protruding bump throbbing from the side of my head.   How’d I get that?   Did I know what was going to happen to Tracy and did I try to save her?    Did I get knocked out while I tried to save her?   Save her…did I try to save her?  

I knew that I would never let anyone hurt Tracy.   But then, how did this happen?   The room spun all around me and in my ears rang the sound of malignant laughter.   I told my parents that I couldn’t remember and I shouted it franticly.   The walls were closing in on me and the air around me was growing thin.   Blood trickled down out of my left nostril, and was caught up in the rim of my upper lip.   My dad tried to fill in the blanks.   Extending a handkerchief, he told me all the things that I had previously told him the night before.   He tried to explain to me that I got into a fight over a girl, had to go to the hospital, and that the doctor told him that it would be natural to experience some memory loss.   But that was all he could fill me in on.   There was still a null and voided gap in my memory.  

As for how I felt: strangely I felt absolutely nothing.   No pain, anger, sadness, nothing.   I cared about Tracy, but for some reason I couldn’t feel anything.  

My feelings for Tracy were meaningless.   I was taught to always be strong and tough and brave.   When something bad happens, you shut down and shut out.   Don’t get me wrong, now.   I’m not brave.   My childhood was consumed with fear.   Bravery was never something that I had, it was something I had to have in order to survive.  

Courageous by necessity. 

It was Joey who saved me.   He made me have courage.   It wasn’t a choice.   His death forced me to be brave.

But as a kid, a sniveling, snot-nosed child, fear was my constant companion.   I got stuck in a parking garage elevator once for a half hour when I was five.   The lights went out and the elevator stopped.   The sickening smell of fear fills the air quickly in the dark.   In the darkness, you’re alone.   No matter how hard you try to tell yourself that your father is standing right beside you, it doesn’t work.   Your mind plays tricks and it’s not your father next to you, it’s a slumping green troll, with slime and grease and fangs.   The elevator hung there, like a worm on a hook.   And then you fall.   You fall and you die.   I’m afraid of falling.

-Little girls don’t scream this loud-

I had a number of childhood fears and none of them had any real rational basis.    But as a child, you tend to be lulled to sleep by stupidity and ignorance.   When I was a tiny toddler, still eating my own boogers, I was afraid of the floor.  I fell off the table onto it.   As for why I was standing on a table, I have no idea.   I would scream and cry unless I was held way up high on my dad's shoulders or placed on top of the refrigerator.    I liked the vibrating hum of the refrigerator.   Then apparently, I grew a brain stem and realized that the pain of hitting the floor was the result of falling from a high place, and became afraid of heights.

-Refer back to the fear of parking garage elevators-
         Then there was that terrible fear that Satan was going to drag me bodily into Hell via the toilet if I got up to use it in the middle of the night.   Okay, I’ll admit it, I did have a very vivid imagination as a child and had constant dreams about that.   But in all fairness, I was sitting on a rock in a garden and not on a toilet in the dream.  

With my father in the military, we moved around a lot when I was younger.   The only other place I really remember living in before New York was San Diego.   San Diego's Sea World had the shark walkthrough exhibit tunnel and I couldn't walk through it.   The movie Jaws had really messed with my head.    The walkthrough was a glass tube that was reinforced with thick plastic, and it was clear all the way around.  You got to see the sharks up close and personal.   I knew, shark attacks are the cause of 3,000 deaths a year in the United States. 

I don’t know what it is about sharks.   Perhaps it’s something about them being the oldest predators on the planet and not having evolved for millions of years.   That just freaks me out.   Think about it.   And what if they had evolved?   Into something with wings, maybe, that could breathe air out of water? Christ!

-You are more likely to be killed by a bee sting-

Everyone has fears.   The inventor of the light bulb was afraid of the dark.   Walt Disney was afraid of mice.   My childhood was infested with fear.   Bravery was never something that I had, it was something I had to have in order to survive.  

Courageous by necessity.   

It was Joey who saved me.   He made me have courage.   It wasn’t a choice.   His death forced me to be brave.   I had to forget all of my fears, when Joey died.   They weren’t important any more.   I had to carry on for Joey.   And to do that, I would have to be brave, and strong, and fearless.   I’d have to be something that I wasn’t.   I’d have to be Joey.  

The enemy of my enemy is myself.

Rudy was dead, and now so was Tracy.    My father had cancer and I wasn’t Joey.   Failure never looked this discouraging.   Like my neck in a noose, time was running out.

XXII

And now this long forgotten fear had returned.   I went to Tracy’s wake a few days later.   Despite a strong desire to submit myself to the severe reality check by proving that this was all real and actually happening, I couldn’t bring myself to enter the viewing room, where her body was.   If I entered in and saw her lying there, in the coffin, dead, it would have been proof that she really was gone and I refused to believe it.   My hands shook violently.   A great pain ate away at my insides, like knives being plunged into my back and its sharp agony brought me to the brink of tears, but I just could not cry.   I stumbled to the left and then to the right, not being able to catch my breath.   The panic attack hit me hard as I fell abruptly into an empty armchair in the hall.   My stomach ached, so I tuck my knees into my chest as I sat there.   Fetal position.   My head throbbed with flashes of images; fragments of memories in my mind.   I saw faces and hands and blurred movements, but still nothing made even the slightest slivers of sense.  

Christmas, the last one I could remember was years ago.   Even Joey was still alive then.   When my family came together under one roof for the holidays, it often resulted in adultery and fist fights, sometimes both at the same time. 

 My family was a patch-work quilt of dysfunctional.   My father was one of eight children, and each one was a different episode on a daytime talk show.  

My uncle Hank was a bounty hunter.   He carried a sawed-off shotgun with him at all times.   Uncle Kyle was a big time Wall Street broker who does jail time every so often for embezzlement.  He claims, his clients’ money loves him so much, it actually begs him to take it.   My uncle, Jeremy, used to be a man of the cloth.   He was an ex-bishop, who had resigned under a cloud of controversy.   Good Fr. Jeremy was rumored to have several relationships with female parishioners.   The common factor that unites these women is that they all had teenage children who resemble the clergyman quite eerily.   Uncle Benny was the professional computer hacker who holds the sole responsibility for releasing the Sasser virus on the world in 2004.  

Of course, all of this information was strictly rumors and gossip, side conversations at the dinner table, which never, ever left the family circle.  

This year, however was slightly different.   It was the Christmas before Joey left for college and it ended up being just another chance for him to show off.

Uncle Steve, the recovering coke-head and Joey’s own father, drove all night, only to sink his car in a snow mound off the side of the road.

-Too much egg nog-

Joey, on cue, rushed out of the house in a bolt of lightening to look for his lost little sheep, his father.   He dug Steve out of the snow and carried him back to the house.   The air was like ice and Uncle Steve’s savior got a smearing of frostbite on his left arm.   It was the price Joey would pay for glory.   Joey carried the black mark of that winter from then on.

Some hero.   Why would Joey kill himself then?   There were whispers, strictly rumors, barely audible murmurs that he’d been strung out on Special K when he pulled the trigger.   I refused to believe it.   I don’t even know what Special K is.

Heroes never die.

I refused to believe, I thought I knew Joey too well.   But you never really know people.   Everyone has secrets.   Everyone has things they hide in the darkness from the light of the rest of the world.   We all are ashamed of ourselves.   No one is as perfect as they pretend.  

Everyone wears a mask.  

Everyone wears a costume.

What was Joey hiding?

Still, my head was throbbing with flashes of images, fragments of memories in my mind.  

I could not bear to look.   Just imagine her lying there.   Tracy’s home would be a six-foot long box of cheap plastic made to look like polished wood.   Life’s just not fair.  Her face, powered to hide the bruises.  The embalmers caked on makeup to hide the cold complexion of death that clings to her face.   Her jaw was rigid and her mouth swollen, because strangling victims bite their tongues.       Behind the lips they used a hot glue gun to seal together, Tracy’s teeth were a rusty brown color.    That’s how I pictured her, at least.

As for clothes, they couldn’t lay her out in the ones she died in because: a) they were too slutty, b) they were too bloody, or c) what was left of her clothes was ripped and torn to shreds.    Tracy would have been dressed in one of those hand-me-downs left over from some elderly women they cremated last Tuesday.  

That’s the thing about the vultures who work at funeral homes, they raid the bodies.   They take watches, necklaces, and rings.   If only the top part of the casket was open during the wake, you can be certain that the dearly departed is missing their shoes and pants.

-Finders keepers-

I couldn’t bear to see her like that.   Even after all the trouble she had put me through.   She didn’t deserve to die.

And yet, Tracy’s slender, pretty face would retain a calm and satisfied smile.   Only in death did her life become simple.   No longer would she have to deal with the abuse of a drunk and unloving father.   No longer would she be degraded and objectified by greasy, grimy men.   No longer would trouble find her.   No longer would she need me to look out for her.  

-It might just be a closed coffin-

I couldn’t help wondering if this was in some way what Tracy ultimately always wanted.    This was a solution.   This was a way out.   When the going gets tough, the tough die.   I bet that her father wasn’t even there.

I saw her sweet smile.   I heard her laugh.  

Your mind is your greatest enemy.   Your mind can do more damage than you could ever imagine another person inflicting.  The enemy of my enemy is myself.

Tracy was dead, and I knew this.

My head throbbed.   The pain kept increasing steadily, till the point where once again my nose began to expel a thin stream of blood and my head was about to explode, shooting chunks of my skull out into the air and all over the room, just like the cow my father shot.   But suddenly, it just stopped.   I put my head between my knees and tried to catch my breath in huge gulps just in time for my father to walk in with two strange dark-suit wearing men.

“Chris,” he began, “these are Agents Johnson and McCormick.   They’re with the FBI and think you might be able to help them by answering a few questions.”

I looked up at them as I wiped the blood from my nose onto the sleeve of my dress shirt, “Is this really the place for this?”

       Minutes later, I went outside, waiting for the two federal agents and my father to pull a car around to the front of the funeral parlor.   They thought I had some story to tell them.  

What if they’re wrong?  

It was dark, just after sunset and the air held a slight chill.   I loosened my tie.   The blue-stripped pattern had been slowly choking me inside, like a snake coiling around my neck, squeezing, crushing, cold.  

Light rain sprinkled my face and in my mind, I was retracing my steps.  

Oh God, Tracy, how could you do this to me?  

My mind was a mess.   I ran my hand through my hair, pushing it back and out of my face.   I needed a hair cut, was all I could think about.  

A hacking cough cracked the rhythm of the drizzling rain.   The fact that I was not alone became then apparent.   Leaning against the wall to my right was a man sucking on a cigarette the way a child feeds from its mother.   He was a big man, almost hulking in stature, squeezed into a two-piece suit.   The muscles in his tree-trunk arms threatened to tear the seams of his jacket.  

His tie also was freed from the choking position at his neck and hung loosely.   The two top buttons of his silk shirt dangled unfastened.   Beads of sweat clung to his brow.   He looked at me with swollen eyes and something inside of me stirred.   For some reason, our passing glances united us in some secret suffering.  

“Nice night for a funeral,” his voice was rough and tired.   His speech, weak and hurt, rasped out from too many cigarettes.   Recent stubble riddled his face.

“Are you a friend of the family?” I inquired, studying his countenance.   It was flushed with scarlet and his eyes webbed and cracked with veins.  

“There is no family,” his breath reeked of the gin from a flask in his suit pocket.   He stared at the pavement, full of puddles of rain, his own tears.

I shivered.  

I understood, it was all too clear.   Death affects more than just the one who’s died.   It’s a virus, spreading outward and destroying everything it touches.   The deceased gets off easy.   Tracy was finally free.   It’s us left behind, who have to struggle with the pain.

-Rest in piece-

A car pulled up to the curb.   My father opened the back door on the passenger side.   His eyes were warm and inviting.  

“Let’s go, Chris.”

As my father said this, the man’s glance snapped back up at me, almost out of some kind of recognition.   I looked at him.   His mouth open, the cigarette hanging there on his lower lip.   The man’s eyes were wide with confusion.  

I could still see him standing there, staring into shocked space, after we’d pulled away and onto the main road.   I felt disturbed and for some reason I knew that the man shared this.

He’d swallow his own bullet that night, I knew this.

“Serial killers tend to be white, heterosexual males.   We think we are looking for someone in their twenties or thirties.” the first man begins, one we’ve reached some place to quiet to talk.   The things he didn’t tell me, I already knew.   These killers are usually sexually dysfunctional and have low self-esteem. Their killings are part of a lucid fantasy that builds to a climax at the moment of their murderous out lash, a lust for attention.   The FBI agent continued, “Do you remember much?”

“No… not much,” was the only answer I could give them.   What I did remember was that the term going postal originated from a number of repeated incidents in which mailmen, after having been fired, returned to the Postal Office in a fit of rage and killed as many of their former co-workers as they could before they turned their weapons upon themselves.  

“It’s our understanding, Mr. Davis, that you were the last person, besides that fucking Strangler, to see Miss Matthews alive last night.   Is this right?”

I scratched my head with my finger tips, “Yeah…I guess, but… I don’t remember.”

“Chris,” the man sat down at the table, across from me.   He introduced himself to me earlier as Agent John McCormick.   He continued, “We need you to try really hard to remember.   Your mind may hold a clue to help us catch this psycho.   Do you know where any of the kids you worked with are?”

Something was a little too ridiculous about this situation.   I mean the big, powerful FBI was asking me for help to catch a killer.

“No, they must have …abandoned me.”   The abandoned part stung as I said it.   Mike and Katie were probably torching a church somewhere.   Ally was probably putting Nair in someone’s shampoo bottle.   Maybe, Brian finally went to fat camp.

“Okay. Well, I ask because we haven’t been able to locate any of them.   Just thought maybe you would know,” he paused, going over something internally.    “More than forty teenage girls have been strangled in the course of the summer.   The official count, with the contribution of Miss Matthews, puts the death toll at 43. ”     

Serial killers generally murder strangers with cooling-off periods between each crime.   This many victims was a staggering amount.   There were no cooling-off periods for this guy.    He’s breaking the rules.

“This is the worst killing spree in over twenty-five years.   It’s the worst since Matt Thombs back in ‘87.   Their bodies are never found in the same place.   Not only are they strangled, but they’re mutilated, too.”  

My stomach turned over on itself and the feeling of sickness rushed upon me as he spoke.    Serial killers tend to prey on women and children.   Prostitutes, drifters, hitchhikers, and lonely teenage girls looking for a thrill have been known to be their victims of choice.

“This last girl, your friend, Tracy, she was the worst.   She was almost unrecognizable.   It was as though, this killer let out all his rage on her.   He always kills at night but no one knows why he kills, how he chooses victims, or when he’ll strike next.”

“He?” I interrupted.

“Excuse me,” McCormick asked, looking confused.

“How do you know it’s a guy?”

The other one, Agent Johnson, whose name I remembered thinking sounded really fake, straightened his tie, hesitating.   He replied, “Because all the victims were sexually assaulted after each murder.”

I gulped.

“Chris,” McCormick continued, “we’d appreciate any information you may be able to provide us.   This psycho has to be stopped.”   The man’s eyes study mine intensely.   John McCormick.

“Actually,” it was as though a different person was talking through me, “he isn’t technically a psycho.   Psychopaths don’t know what is right and wrong, because they are crazy; you know, mentally ill.   This guy knows the difference but in spite of that he chooses to do the wrong things anyway.   That wouldn’t make him a psychopath.   He’d be more like a sociopath, because, obviously, he has a conscious; that little voice in his head… He just doesn’t care.”   There’s such a thing as knowing too much for your own good.

Sociopaths have no remorse for their deeds.   Both Jack the Ripper and David Berkowitz claimed to have been doing God’s work and took it upon themselves to rid the world of some evil.   Their mental imbalance proves that there is a thin line between hero and villain.  

If you don’t know the truth, you’re never really lying.

-Even Adolph Hitler was Time's Man of the Year for 1938-

Mr. FBI sat there, stunned by my comment, “Uh… yeah.   That’s an interesting point.   So tell us, Chris, what do you remember?”

“Not much… it’s all a jumble.”

“You look pretty beat up,” the other one, Johnson, said, looking up from a pad he had been writing on.   “Your father tells us that there was some kind of fight last night.”

“I told you, I can’t remember,” I choked out, my breathing becoming erratic.

I tried to remember, I really did.   I remembered that criminology class they made me take in school the previous year.   Most serial killers grow up in violent homes, lacking a strong father figure.   As young children, they enjoyed torturing animals, setting fires and were serious bed-wetters.    As adolescents and adults, many have some type of brain damage such as rage black-outs and are addicted to alcohol and various types of drugs.  

I submited myself into deep meditation, slowly going over my memories.   One by one, looking for a face, a name, anything.   I sat and thought.  

“I remember… not being able to find anyone.   I remember arguing with Tracy over something.   I wanted to protect her… save her?”

I saw this crest with two faces looking away from each other, sharing one head.  

“I…”

All of a sudden, as if I unlocked a door I had never before been able to find, all these memories came rushing back like a wave breaking over a rocky shore.   I relived the night in fast forward inside my head.  

Suddenly, my instant replay paused on a certain Spanish guy who was taking Tracy down to “…the beach.”  

“The beach?”   McCormick’s head snapped up with alert.   “That’s where her body was found.”  

I saw his face.

-José-

“…Son of a bitch…”

“What? What is it, Chris?” one of them was asking.

It was time I finished what I had started, I told myself.   The only way I would ever have peace was if I confront this guy, one last time, and in one epic battle, take him down, making sure he could never hurt any one again.   That was the plan.   I had to do this alone.  

“Nothing,” I sighed before slamming my fist down, feigning frustration.   “I’m sorry,” I faked a long yawn of exhaustion, “but I’m really tired.   Can I go home now?”  

They don’t seem to believe me, but reluctantly, they let me go.   McCormick gave my father some business card and the two discussed something briefly.

I went home and as soon as night fell, I snuck out of the house through an open window and stole my mother’s car.  

He had to pay.  

I had to stop him.  

I couldn’t let him continue to hurt the innocent.   I vowed to stop him at any costs.

It was time to be the hero everyone wanted me to be.   It was time to finish what I had started.  

XXIII

In the darkness, there was a foreboding cold.  This was years ago, during my freshman year of high school.   This night was my catalyst.   It slowed the blood and ached the heart.  The streets were lonely and still.  The night was unforgiving as it taunted and teased its poor victims.  In the darkness, the faint feeling of warmth smoldered as a trashcan fire flickered to the strength of the December night.  The mercury in the thermometer hastily dropped and a group of strangers huddled together to fight off the frigid finger-tips of winter. 

Warmth and joy were only elusive memories on the corner of Somewhere and Nowhere.  The silence, except for an occasional wailing siren, was eerie.   New York City: if you can make it here, you’ll make it anywhere.   However, those who can’t make it are never heard from again.  They slip through the cracks and fade away as the darkness and the cold devour them. 

Somewhere, a small caravan of miss-matched vehicles snaked its way down the desolate streets.  The tiny glow from their headlights pierces through the curtains of darkness.  The vans and cars slowly came to a stop at that lonely corner, either to give in to the hopeless cold or donate to the night its latest victims.  The occupants emerged.  They were middle aged men, house-wives, maybe a priest, a balding man who was slightly over weight, a woman whose glasses hung too big for her face, and a fourteen year old boy.  They were nobody special.

And yet, perhaps this was why the people on that corner clung to some hope.  Something in the air changed and the people, whom the city forgot, emerged from the darkness and cold.  A bright light returned to their faces and faint smiles could be seen appearing.  Someone remembered the forgotten on that cold winter night.  They had come bearing gifts, not the toys and games you would give a small child on Christmas, but rather clothing, blankets, warm food, cups of coffee, toiletries, and a genuinely caring face.  A man whispered, “Have mercy,” while a woman found tears in her eyes.  Stories were told, and despite the crippling, cold wind and frigid frost that loomed around them in the numb blue-black of the night, there was a smile.  Suddenly it became clear:  here was the warmth, here was the joy, and this was their Christmas.

All these ordinary people had reached out and remembered the forgotten.  They cared and they listened.   And as they had an impact on those poor individuals, the poor individuals had changed a fourteen-year-old boy’s life that night.

Joey would be proud.

A boy, fourteen years old, followed as one of the bums slinked away.   He with him a steaming coffee and blanket.   The others were so proud at this concern, but the truth was he was just naive.   Secretly, the boy followed and then he saw it.   The bum was hunched in a corner, being attacked by someone who wanted his shoes.

Fear swept over the boy as it often did and the little brat turned to run.   A lack of luck and coordination caused that boy to trip, drawing attention to himself.   The bum’s attacker, black, over weight and stinking of whiskey, turned and drew towards the fallen boy, seeing a much nicer pair of shoes.   There was a knife and he was laughing.   Still processed with fear, the boy was barely able to blind the bum’s attacker with the burning java, sending the man limping away.   The bum was bleeding, badly stabbed, but he smiled warmly, thanking the boy.  

An ambulance arrived before long.   That next morning, the police found the attacker stabbed to death and buried beneath trash half a block from where the original exchange had taken place.   The streets were cruel.

That was my first Mid-Night Run.  I was that fourteen-year-old boy in the caravan of cars.  I was the boy from suburbia, the boy who attended a private school and whose life revolved around little less than homework, video games, and friends.  I was the boy who had never given much thought to the lives of theses people only thirty miles away.  I learned things that I will never forget.  I learned humility; I learned the stories of those homeless people.  But, most importantly I learned how fortunate I really was.  It just wasn’t fair.   Society and apathy had crushed these people and swept them underneath the rug.   “Out of sight, out of mind” didn’t apply here, it couldn’t.  I vowed that I wouldn’t let it.   These people were real, and so were their needs and misfortune.  All they wanted to know was that someone still cared whether they lived or died.  Now that I saw it, I could not ignore it.  These things change you, they changed me.  When I saw the smile on that elderly man’s face as I held his shaking hands waiting for the ambulance to pull into the alley, I knew I would never be able to look away.   

Joey would be proud.

Thinking back on that night, all those years ago, it was probably the biggest mistake of my life.   It was Joey’s fault, it was Tracy’s fault, it was even the homeless man’s fault.  

The ride was a blur.   I didn’t remember driving there, just getting there.   I made my way through the faceless crowd, down to the beach.   It was nasty and dirty.   There were trash and tiny needles everywhere.   The sand was lined with broken syringes and broken dreams.   I didn’t care though, all I could think about was finding José, the yin to my yang, the war to my peace, the evil to my good.   The next thing I knew, he was before me.  

It had to be him.  

He was wearing a black, hooded sweatshirt, but I knew it was him by the poor young red haired girl who struggled for life with what looked like a guitar string tightening around her neck.   I couldn’t let him do this again.   I had lost Rudy, I had lost Tracy, and I was not going to let myself lose anyone else.   I was ready to stop him once and for all.   He must have been too busy killing, because he was oblivious to my charge towards him across the sand.   It was then that the attacker was met with my adrenaline–induced vengeance.   In flashes, I smashed my right fist into the side of his skull. 

 A shot to the temple would leave a man stunned for as little as ten seconds, but I don’t allow him that much time.

   The hooded figure sprang back in surprise, releasing the red-head into the reseeding surf.   She crawled a few feet, gasping for air.   I followed José with a left hook to his temple.   Jab, jab, reverse, hook, uppercut.   He scrambled in confusion among the tiny waves.   I couldn’t think.   I was acting on some inborn reflex.   I elbowed him across the face and then recoil with another elbow on that same arm’s trip back.   He tripped when he was knocked backwards, and splashed upon his back.   I descended on top of him and continued to pummel him with my punches.

Then from under the waves, the Strangler was then the red-head.   There had been a metamorphosis.   I jumped back with confusion and pulled her up out of the water.   She was bruised, now badly.  

Had I been hitting her?  

I could have sworn I was fighting José.   She slowly opened a bruised eye.  

“Are you okay?” I asked her.   When she saw my face, she let out icy screams as she kicked and struggled to get away.   “No, no shhh.   It’s okay.   I’m here to save you.”  

In the United States, a woman is battered every 15 seconds.

She continued to scream and from behind me I could hear a familiar laughter.   It was the same laughter from my dream, it was the same laughter from when I found out Tracy died, and it was the same laughter I heard every time I had ever helped anyone in my entire life.   This laughter had always mocked and stalked me.   I turned to see the Strangler, now standing behind me.   

-Peek-a-Boo-

In the instant it took me to turn around, the Strangler hurled a right sucker punch.   It hit me and bent my nose sideways.   The blow didn’t matter; I was already numb to the pain.

“Give it up, José!”   I yelled fiercely as I coughed blood.    His sucker punch had planted me on my hands and knees in the cool sand.   A kick imbedded his steel toed boot into my brow.   Bleeding had never felt so painless.

“José?”   The figure retorted, “Nemo hic adest illius nominis.”   There was a pause.   “You still don’t remember, do you Chris?”   The Strangler removed his hood and a shadowy face with crimson eyes stared back at me.   Before my eyes, his face changed.   He was now José, the guy I remembered from that night.   But then again, his face changed.   He was Rudy.   “Hey, Chris.   Want me to show you how to make a bong out of a soda can and a bunch of straws?”   I was totally confused.   Then he was Tracy, and then Bob, then he flashed the faces of any one I had ever helped.   I was totally speechless.   He laughed.   And one final time, the Strangler’s face changed to reveal a final identity.

It was me.  

The enemy of my enemy is myself.

I shuddered uncontrollably.   Like seeing a reflection, the Strangler stood face to face with me.   He would have been my exact duplicate if it was not for his burning red eyes that seemed to spit flames as he stared.   “Do you get it now, Chris?   We made a deal remember?   I helped you out,” my doppelganger held out his hand, but I recoiled in terror.   “You…still don’t remember do you?   But if we both are here, then my work is almost done.   Remember the mud and sand on your shoes?   Those late-night strolls?   Do you remember what we really did to Tracy and those other girls?”

I shook my head, refusing to hear him.

“Come on, Chris.   Think!   That little voice inside your head, saying the things you would never dare to say.   You were pretending your whole life.   All those people you helped, all your friends, where were they when you needed them?   They abandoned you, Chris.   All the pressures of school, all the pains of being in a crumbling family.   You were sick of it, Chris!   You decided not to be their protector… their savior, any more.   People used you when they needed something and then they just forgot about you.   Sometimes in life, you get tired of always playing the hero, and you decide to play the villain instead. That’s exactly what you did, Chris, you became the villain…I’m nobody’s boy scout… and neither are you!”

I stood there, stunned and in awe as my double spoke his menacing words.   None of this made sense, I told myself.   He had to be lying.  

“Who are you?” I demanded fiercely.

A grim smile crept across his face.   “Oh…Chris, we are who we choose to be.   It is not our names that make us what we are, it is our actions, our thoughts, and our desires.”

“Who are you?”   My words echoed back.

“I have many names and many forms.   A long time ago, eons in fact, I possessed a name so terrible that its pronunciation would cause even the holiest of ears to bleed.   It was so blasphemous, they had to substitute the last three letters for two roman numerals that sounded like them.   And they pronounced the numbers instead of the letters.   I was called by the name, Sam49.   Do you know what it is to be reduced to a number?   Then again, I guess you might.”   He smiled, answering himself, “People in this world are all numbers, groups, and statistics.   I have many names and many faces.   Most recently, I am Chris Davis.   Brother of Susan and Jess.   Son of David and Christina.   I am you and you are me.”

“No,” my voice was weak.

“You sold your soul, Chris.   At the start of this summer, you sold it.   You liked it when you hurt Bob, didn’t you?   You took joy in Rudy’s… what do you want to call it…suicide?  

“Shut up, I yelled, feeling lost in the mounting hysterics.

“You liked the power you got from hurting people.   And push comes to shove, here we are, almost two months and 48 victims later, and you have to pay the piper.   You sold your soul, Chris, and now I’ve come for what’s mine.”

From underneath his sweatshirt, the Strangler drew a gun.   It looked familiar.   It was a military issue berretta, the gun I stole from my father when I left the house earlier.   Time slowed down.   Every second became a virtual stand-still.   The Strangler slowly raised the gun, extending his arm.   His smile was wide and bright as he pressed down upon the trigger.   An explosion burst forth from the barrel and I realized that I was going to be shot.   In an effort to save myself, I began to dive to the right and out of the way.   The bullet whizzed through the air.   In my drive to safety, my left arm flew upward, just catching the bullet in the middle of my arm.   I felt it penetrate the skin, slowly ripping through muscle and splintering bone, before it continued a path out the other side.   If I hadn’t tried to save myself and dive, the metal slug would have surely caught me in the chest, bringing an end to it all.

As I hit the sand, there was a second gunshot that followed the first almost immediately.   I laid upon the cool sand on my right side, grasping my arm in pain, as blood oozed from it, waiting for death from the second bullet.   I don’t know if you’ve ever been shot before, but it really does hurt.   I think if more people got shot and knew how much it hurts, then there’d be less shootings.   I grasped at my left arm in pain as the air stood still all around me.    My eyes were closed tightly, because I couldn’t bear to see the second bullet hit me.   It hurt so much that I wished for the end.   I just wanted it all to be over.   Life was crap, and against my nemesis, I could do nothing to save this world.   What kind of hero would the world remember me as?   

-You Lose-

You feel the darkness rush around you.   You’re warm and cold, all at the same time.   And you mutter, “This can’t be the end…”

I was only down for a couple of seconds, but slowly I realized that the second bullet wasn’t going to hit me.   It hadn’t.   I opened my eyes, one at a time.   The Strangler was gone.   He seemed to have disappeared and vanished.   I rolled over to the other side and saw a different figure with his arm extended holding a gun, the barrel still smoking.   It was my father.

-The unlikeliest of saviors-

The second bullet must have come from him.   He must have killed the Strangler.   But wait, something was wrong.   He looked hurt as he toppled over upon the beach.   A sense of fear rose up from in me.   For the first time, I was really afraid.   For the first time, it finally seemed real.   When I dove out of the path of the first bullet, it must have went through my arm and hit my father who was standing behind me.   He then shot the second bullet and hit the Strangler.   It was the bullet meant to kill me that had hit my father.   It was my fault.   My selfish desire to live caused the bullet to hit him.

-Whatever helps you sleep at night-

The pain in my arm became almost entirely forgotten as I sprang to my feet.   I looked down to see the Strangler’s gun, where I had fallen.   There wasn’t time for me to think about that, though as I sprinted down the beach to where my father laid.   I reached his slumped over body and dove upon my knees.   Sticky, sloppy blood matted the sand.   I turned him over and scooped him up into my arms.   As I cradled his body, sweat of blood ran down my face.   My father slowly opened his eyes.

“Chris…why?”

His words were like knives, still stabbing me with each syllable, even to this day.   “Shhh,” I lulled him, “Dad, it’ll be okay.   You got him, you stopped the Strangler.   I started to remember things and I felt I owed it to everyone to stop him.”

My father’s shrunken eyes reflected his pain, “You can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.”   He reached for my face.   “I couldn’t save you, but I couldn’t stop you either…Chris…”

With those last words, his eyes rolled back and his breathing slowed till it stopped.   There was a beeping noise.   It was the watch on his right wrist, that I had given him two Christmas’s ago.   It was 12 AM, midnight on the first day of autumn.   But as my father died, I realized that my fall was not beginning, but almost complete.

XXIV

That Summer is long over, now.   I’m back in my room, staring at a photo album of lies.   That’s it, there’s nothing more for me to tell.   Then again, this really isn’t my room.   The walls tremble, melting away to nothing.   Bright light washes over me.   This is the place I go inside my mind when I want to think and feel safe.   I haven’t been in my actual room since that night my father died.   So where am I?

The room I am really in is about 8 feet by 10 feet.   It’s brightly painted white and there are no windows.   The room is empty except for a chair and a bed.   It all reeks of a mixture of disinfectant and vomit.  

Have you seen the storm? Were you even listening?

The lock clicks and the looming door slowly opens.   A hulking orderly enters and props me up in the chair.   I don’t try to resist.   A thin woman comes in behind him.   She wears tiny glasses and looks to be in her early thirties.   Her name tag reads: Doctor Marge Doris.

The orderly crams several pills into my mouth and clasps my jaw tightly until I swallow them.   The woman goes and sits on the bed.   My body convulses slowly, and then relaxes.   Relief washes over me.

“Now, Chris, are you ready to talk today?”   I stare blankly at her.   “Do you remember why you are here?”   I give her no response.   “Okay, Chris, if you can recall, you were arrested five years ago, accused of being…” She pauses as she looks for the words, “a serial killer.”   My expression remains blank.   “You went to court and your lawyers plead derangement on your part, saying you were not in the right state of mind during the events in question.   You were sent here, Bridgewater Mental Institute, for evaluation and you haven’t said a single word since.”   She’s reading from a file,    “Your sister, Jess, ran away and became a stripper in Vegas.   Susan, another sister, was arrested on drug possession three years later in Minnesota and is serving a 6 year sentence.   Your mother, Christina… she overdosed on pain killers last May and as you might remember, your father, David, was shot and killed on a beach in Rye.   Chris… I need to know what you know.   I can see the excruciating pain in your eyes, the hurt little boy, trapped inside.   I know there is a story here.   What is your side of it?   It needs to be told.   Tell it to me. Chris.   Let me help you.”

If you don’t know that you are losing your mind, you’re never really crazy.

I sit motionless in the chair.   The events of the last five years sink in slowly.   If you hear the same thing every day for five years, you can be made to believe anything.   A single tear falls down my face.  Sure, now I could cry, now I could show some kind of emotion.  

“Okay, Chris.   We’ll try again tomorrow,” she said as she leaves the room.  The door slammed and the lock clicked behind her.  

And so this is what I have become: an empty shell of a man, a shadow of my former self, a body without a soul.   Maybe I really did sell that soul all those years ago.   Maybe there was some secret identity that emerged from within me.   I can’t really be sure.   My memories taunt and tease me.   I’m no longer confident in what is real and what is the medication working its magic.

There is one thing though, that I am sure of:   5 years ago, I went up against a force of great and surely pure evil, whether internal or external.   I find the scar on my left arm.   It’s a horrible scar, purple and red with pain, stretching out from the bottom of my shoulder, across my bicep, to almost where my forearm begins.   I know that this scar is proof to myself that my memories are real and not just the hallucinations of a boarder-line insomniac.   This scar is my proof.   It reminds me of how selfish people can really be, how selfish I can be.   I believe that everyone has the potential to be a hero.  But if there’s a hero in all of us, is there also a villain?   Every one has a test in their lives.   It takes different forms and occurs at different times for everyone.  

Like my father once said, “You don’t judge a man by his successes, you judge him by how he handles his failures.”  

This test, that we all must take, is the defining moment in our lives.   It is the choice between good and evil, right and wrong, salvation and damnation.   We have to take both the good and the bad parts of life in stride.   We can’t let them break us down.   We are tested by having our lives flipped upside down and handed back to us in chaos.   We are, in the end, tested on how we handle our own personal disasters.   I failed this test and am surely being punished for it.   I’m paying the price, for my selfishness.   The doctor is right, I have a story to tell.   Perhaps, we all do.   Even God forgives, so maybe there’s still hope, hope for us all.   But there’s no sense bringing God into this.   He won’t help me now. 

Bless me Father, for I have sinned.

Maybe one person was never meant to save the world.   I always thought I was destined to help people, to deliver them from evil, but instead I ruined so many lives in an incalculable way.  

Is it my fault?  

No, I believe there are forces that played checkers with my soul, good vs. evil.   And good lost.   But no, that would be too convenient.   Maybe it isn’t over yet.   Maybe its chess and not checkers.   Maybe there’s but one chance left for me.

But I can’t do anything from inside this nut house.   I have to get out.   I have to find the truth. 

But what then?   What happens after the fall?  

It has to be considered that, maybe, the truth is something that I will regret finding.  

Is it possible to be two people?   Is it possible to be a Janus?      Could I have really been the Strangler?   If I was, then I don’t really even know who I am anymore.   I’m sorry to Tracy, and to Rudy, and to everyone I have ever hurt instead of helped.   I didn’t know what I was doing, then.   Maybe I still don’t, now.     I wonder, is one person truly capable of that much evil?   In the Bible, Judas kills himself out of remorse for some terrible act he has committed.   Do you think God forgave him?   Did his sorrow and remorse for a sin really matter to God?   Who the hell is he to care?   In a sense, I am both Jesus and Judas; the betrayer and betrayed, the good and evil, the right and wrong.

The enemy of my enemy is myself.

I have a story.   It is of my battle with myself and the rest of the world.   Is it real?    That’s up to you.   I have my proof.   I have my scar.   They say God works in mysterious ways, so why can’t the Devil also?   Does he dabble with the lives of men, making bargains and pacts?   Did I make a deal with some devil, in which I lost my soul?  

Or… am I truly the Strangler… and the greatest liar of them all?

You decide.

-FIN-