I always wonder if people are afraid of me because they think I’ll do something: press my face up against them, or start making funny noises. I am always a little tempted to satisfy their fears. But I never do it; it would feel wrong; it would be wrong. I don’t need to make myself feel better by frightening people or making them squirm. When I was a child, I dreamed of powers like these, but I no longer have those dreams. I am free.
I said, “Sean Phillips last time I checked,” as clearly and lightly as I could, and I grabbed the pen from his outstretched hand. I heard him say “If you could just sign here,” but I was already ahead of him. I pictured the scene between us, how it couldn’t have been an easy combination: the door opening, me there, the loud, unpleasant music blaring away and forcing him to raise his voice for his one big line. So I signed quickly, and when he’d left, I read the summons. And then I read it again. That’s what you do when something like this starts to happen in your life: you check and recheck to see if it’s real. And you start talking out loud to yourself, trying to explain it, seeing if you really understand. You then get angry. I did, anyway; I wanted to knock something over. Old feelings, long pressed down to where they couldn’t do any more harm, shed weight and rose inside me like vapor. They felt, to me, the way ghosts are supposed to look. They came up through the center of my body until I felt them at the back of my throat, tendriling out onto my tongue from way down in there. But they did not escape. I pressed the nail of my right index finger into the pad of my thumb rhythmically and focused on the dull sharpness bearing down while waiting for the feeling to ease.
Dear Freak,
With the internet now we can find out all about you so we don’t have to write to your PO box. We know where you live. So don’t think you are safe because you aren’t safe from the people who loved Lance and Carrie and took their lifes SERIOUSLY and you will never be safe. Die in a hole, X.
There’d been bad news in the mail all week, but mixed in with it there’d been regular mail, plain maiclass="underline" Stray moves from early Trace denizens, subscription renewals. Insurance statements I didn’t usually read because they always said the same thing: Your coverage continues at the level of care from the preceding period; please advise us immediately of any change in status, etcetera. Month after month. A few bills. And junk mail. Vitamin catalogs. Supplements. None of it could numb the live wires I kept grabbing every other time I split an envelope open: Carrie dead. Lance sure to lose a foot, maybe both, maybe a hand, maybe both of those, too. Large sections of his face blackened by frostbite. His fever rendering him delirious. Fund-raisers at their parents’ churches, flyers for bake sales, clippings from Florida papers with names circled or underlined twice. And Lance and Carrie’s friends, writing to tell me either that they blamed me for what had happened, or else that they didn’t and wouldn’t no matter what anyone said; or just to tell me about what their friends were like, how they’d been in real life, how painful it was to know that all that was changed. And now this: a single page, a form, advising me in dry language that a hearing was to be held to determine where fault, if any, rested in the matter of, etcetera, wherefore my presence was required, and could be compelled if not given voluntarily, etcetera, wherefore the recipient should contact, at the following number without delay, etcetera.
My parents arranged all kinds of meetings with people back when they were running around looking for answers. I don’t remember them much, aside from a stray scene or two that stick with me like memorable sequences from otherwise forgotten films. These few short clips are interesting to me, and I can stand them now, but there was a time when I blocked them out. People trying to help you when you’re past help are raw and helpless. Nobody wins: you get nothing; they feel worse. I mainly remember the feeling among us when the hearings and meetings were finally all over: Dad growing distant, detached. Mom finding the quiet mask from which her face would never fully emerge again.
They held on to their anger until after they’d exhausted their leads; then it was gone. I don’t know what they replaced it with. Something, I figure. I feel guilt, and sympathy, and shame, and I share it with them in letters I don’t mail, because the people who need to read those letters are also gone. They vanished into a meeting room one day and were never seen again.
I stood in the kitchen by the window reading the summons; it was so boring. The facts that had brought it into being were the stuff of nightmares, vivid and awful and real, but the thing that came to speak of them was a lifeless sequence of instructions written in a language no one alive even spoke. Nobody talks like that. People only talk like that when they can’t stand to tell you what they mean. I lead a sane and quiet life: the sun shone on the grape-candy purple jacaranda in the breezeway outside, and the oleander and the bottlebrush were in bloom down the walkway, and I felt like I had been suddenly shot out into space, the world I’d left behind terrible and frightening, only now I couldn’t breathe at all. I felt my blood quickly becoming starved of oxygen and my cells beginning to swell, and the stars around me grew brighter and then faded, and then nothing happened at all, and I stood by the window a while longer with the summons in my hand, wanting to run back to the front door to watch the process server get back into his car but knowing I’d missed him already, feeling the instinct to run to the door emerge anyway as a genuine urgency in my thin, underdeveloped legs.
The noise can’t really be blocked, just bested. Music therapists play you droning synthesizer music or classical when you’re in physical rehab; music therapists are the sweetest people; of all the people who try to help you in the hospital, they’re the ones whose faith in their power to heal seems strongest. But it takes high-pitched sounds with a thick texture and a persistent rhythm to really make the whoosh go away. Bamboo flutes can’t touch it. Neither did the stuff my friends and I had all been listening to together ever since we’d started hanging out, the blues-rock stadium stuff. And that was how I got into blindly ordering strange music through the maiclass="underline" Spirit of Cimmeria always had one or two ads for music “inspired by the genius of Robert E. Howard,” for example — stuff made by guys living in distant backwaters with no hope of ever making their voices heard anywhere, writing songs about the books they spent all their free time reading just trying to escape, playacting in a vacuum. There were similar ads in comic books, in Omni. They were everywhere if you knew how to look, so I spent my allowance on this kind of thing. Mom still gave me an allowance, even after what I’d done.