INTO IT (a novel) Chapter 7: John
Adam told me he had been paying attention to me. He’d heard about the Jesus incident even before our internment in the trailer. He said he was impressed. He said he would be better than anyone at saving my precious mind because he believed. So, maybe he was always there, fat.
He said, It’s amazing you went to a mental hospital.
He wanted to know everything about my time there. I told Adam about the segregated kids. He couldn’t get enough of them.
He said, What did they do to get put in there? Tell me from the beginning.
But I knew almost nothing about them. I hadn’t made any friends.
There were floors housing kids I never saw, the terrifying cases who might or might not break through. They were individually wrapped in meds. At night, I could hear them walking the floor above my bed. I fell asleep to the rhythm.
I knew only about the heavy currents of sadness moving through my floor.
I said, We laid on the floor and the couches. I said, We curled up in the chairs in positions of defeat, distance-gazing, eyes unfocused, hands and fingers trembling. We rearranged ourselves on the furniture, trying to get comfortable after sitting in a single pose for hours, circulation pinched, everything painful and unyielding.
This is what I knew about the hospital: It’s a scene with no story, a stage with no action.
Adam pulled out his phone to play me a video of people caught in parachute malfunctions, bull gores, hundreds of ways to end up dead. I’d seen it before. After my first time through, the four minutes of executions and torture scenes sent nausea from my stomach throughout my body.
But on the day Adam showed them to me, he checked my face to see if I was freaked out, and I wasn’t. Some parts I found funny now. The skinny Middle Eastern man with one arm tied to a post and the other to a truck’s trailer hitch brought a nervous laugh to the surface when the truck pulled away—I hadn’t noticed it was a Toyota—and then, dismemberment. I didn’t understand why people were so distressed by the videos. Hadn’t everyone already seen them? By that point in the history of all time, hadn’t every kid checked out at least one thing, or been emailed a link to a dark site that auto-played clips of torture and death? Hadn’t we all memorized the sound of the Texas children saying good-bye to their parents?
Adam said, There’s more where that came from. He’d picked up on the T-shirt I was wearing—Desert Eagles, Special Forces and bullets flying at you from one side, kind of like World War III, and a man falling out of the Twin Towers on the other. Adam wanted to be sick, crazy like he thought I was. Not killer-move-on-a-skateboard sick. Sick as in, you’re willing to do anything, and then you do it with a weird, inside darkness, picking only the degenerate acts out of our shallow pool of things to do. Set me on fire.
Adam taught me a way of walking down the hall. The posture placed the head held high and tilted back, eyes slitted. This way, Adam told me, I’d make it through the day and not have to go home with invisible wire bands squeezing my skull, or kick the lockers, or feel something coming on that only sitting at home online could draw me out of.
In tenth grade, I watched through the high-school’s rear windows as the special grade trailer was towed away. I felt a weight lifted and felt truly happy to see the semi-truck blowing black smoke from its stacks with every gearshift. I turned to my laptop and brought up the Lincoln school website. The new Mr. Mathis had been canceled.
Adam and I were standing near each other, and as we turned away from the window as the last evidence of the rig disappeared behind the sanitation building, Adam said, The jeebs. The tone of his voice led nowhere, into a void, and was just enough to reel me back into his world.
Adam saw it in me, he said. It was strange to hear this coming from anyone other than my mom or a nurse training for something. Adam said the word he invented, pleased with himself.
It’s the jeebs, Adam said. You’ve got the jeebs. Everything’s the movie now, Adam recited, like a monk. The end is on permanent nigh.
He dove into the vibe he was getting, the juice from the shootings. Adam told me to pay attention. Our town was disintegrating, he said. The abandoned cloverleaf would never hook up with the highway. People were moving out so fast they were leaving their pets behind. Wild animals were returning from the hills to feed on them.
It’s the new nuclear-war-slash-terrorist-slash-virus thing, he said. But it’s more real. They say we’re numb to violence. We’re not even close. TV, independently of whether you actually watch TV, will convince you that it’s going to happen to you or someone you know during your life. You or someone you know is going to get shot.
Adam was paying attention. But a year later, the stare Meredith McCandless gave me was different. Gave me is how I felt about it. She was trying to give me something. It was too much to take in, and it would not be enough.