INTO IT (a novel) Chapters 37-40
Chapter 37: John
I had been a fucked-up sicko, but I got better. I couldn’t think anything different, as if thinking you’re badly-off is what keeps you together and what makes you break is any feeling of security. I saw in Adam’s eyes and in his behavior suspicion of my progress, a flinching away from me. This guy whom I’d known as the fattest, most desperate person I’d ever met should have known better.
Meredith should have known what she was getting herself into. She didn’t heed the warning signs. But that's not entirely true: the warning signs had led her to me, and so I thought that they, the warning signs, were evidence I was getting better and she was trending sicker.
Adam stopped reading her essay and said, The end.
He said she didn’t know which one of us to be afraid of. This was a self-deluding lie. It twisted his words back in on himself and made him believe what he was saying, but he was only acting sick. No one could be sick all the time. There had to be calm moments when what’s sick seems sad, but Adam didn’t think so. He thought it was fun. He always wanted in on my little roller-coaster ride.
I looked at the Dead Pond, dead tree, dead fish, dead pig from years ago, or the detritus, what’s the difference. A piece of our history that laid out there, always present, whether it was garbage or the real thing. I didn’t feel like I was ever going to leave it behind. I thought that it would be in my life forever, like Meredith’s dress.
Now she’s really afraid of me, I said.
Obvious, Adam said, always agreeing with me even after he’d said the opposite.
I needed him to go away. I needed to be alone. I tore up blades of brittle grass and threw them into the breeze, and Adam copied that, too. Seeing this, I told myself that I am alone.
I took the first page of her essay from him, the page with her name printed on the upper left corner, crumpled it up and put the ball of paper in my mouth and chewed three times, turned, and spat it out on the grass.
I want to hate her, I said.
Then hate her, Adam said.
Chapter 38: Adam
I am going to Meredith’s house. I tell myself this several times Saturday morning, the morning after my spell in the hospital. I am recuperating on the couch in my favorite spot and watching Steven Segal movies. I am replenishing myself with Gatorade and beef jerky, doctor’s orders. But telling myself that I am going to Meredith’s house doesn’t stop the sweating that began yesterday on the field and has continued throughout the night. It is still there, under my armpits, this flop sweat, a sign that something inside me is going haywire. John gets the shakes, I sweat. Which is not the same as having the jeebs.
In fifth grade, the thing we found by the dead pond brought us together in a way that went beyond the drawings because, really what kind of friendship could we have made from those twisted sketches? We were in the dark about each other until the little dead thing’s body came along. This was one recess during our fifth-grade winter, and John had run up to me to let me know that there was something by the pond near the high school, and that if I wanted to see it I’d better go look at it before the custodians took it away. Although I’d been friendless because of my fat, there was still the weird and also fat Marcy Rich hanging around me with her obsessive qualities, like her intense interest in boys’ robot toys, and she decided to follow the two of us away from the lower school recess grounds and across the faculty parking lot to the dead pond. We called it dead then because a spindly old tree hung over it, ready to drop, its roots lifting and parting from the soil. There were no ducks or gold carp or lily pads, just a pond that looked like an accident, a ruined area full of runoff, and winter grey.
John was vibrating in his excitement to show us. He’d been out of the hospital for about two weeks. This was a few days after he’d drawn the crazy picture of me. A period when he was still wearing all white. We still had not yet spoken to each other, until I said yeah to his question, “Do you want to see a dead baby?”
This was our recess break, and although someone was supposed to be watching over us, it was nothing to walk away from our own zone in our puffy coats, our white breath clouding the air, John leading the way in a white parka, white jeans, and bright white tennis shoes. But when we reached the pond, tall pale grasses skirting the bank, Marcy and I froze. The pond was one thing seen from the lower school grounds, a pale blob, sometimes some tiny figures of high-school kids smoking around its perimeter. But it was different up close, something completely out of bounds.
“It’s inside there,” he said, pointing to a thicket of reeds and grasses. I couldn’t see anything where I was standing, ten paces away from John, who was just near the edge of the pond, hopping, in my memory of all this, from one foot to another in his excitement.
“Inside,” John said. He pointed again to a small parting in the grass.
Marcy made a huh sound, as if there was nothing interesting to her here. But she stayed.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Look,” John said.
I’d forgotten my gloves that day and my cold stiff hands were jammed in my coat pockets. I leaned forward, peered into the parting of the grass, but saw nothing more than a grey shadow.
“I can’t see anything,” I said. “I’m going back.”
“I don’t know,” said Marcy.
“No, no, no,” John said.
It was the quiet around the pond that was getting to us, Marcy and me, plus the fact that it was only partially frozen over, thin sheets of snow-littered ice trapping the green water below, whitish and grey forms visible through the ice. Everything there had the quality of the dare: the wandering through the tall grass, the thin ice, this strange kid John. I had always hated dares, dreaded them. I dare you, Fatty. I looked back at Marcy. She was worriedly looking back at the lower school, small in the distance beyond the faculty parking lot, a couple of fraidy cats hoping for a way out.
John said, “This is going to be sick.”
A key tumbled inside a lock’s mechanism. John smiled like he knew me now, and in a way I guess he did, because those words opened up my world just wide enough, and for just long enough, for the idea of going down into the reeds to look for something sick to slip in and sound like a good idea, a sick experience in every meaning I knew sick to have at the time, gross, but also mental and cool. But I could tell John was not the type to use sick to mean something merely cool. His word had a slant I didn’t fully understand at the time, but I wanted this feeling for myself, I wanted to feel sick. Being sick seemed like a pretty good thing to me, ten years old and not showing any signs that I was headed in any particular direction. To find some form of a calling right there at the dead pond, grey winter recess—this totally surprised me, and the world around me tightened and became stabbed with meaning. It was a rapture. I went down into the reeds on the dead pond’s edge, cracking through the thin ice and splashing up to my ankles in freezing water.
It was curled up, matted brown and grey, a few inches long. A human-fish form. It looked like its neck had been broken. Without thinking, or because I was ten and thinking of the most magical reasons anything may happen, I wondered whether John had done it, had taken a living fetus and twisted its head around its body. I was so young and gullible and he seemed so proud of his find that I flashed on this bizarre explanation and haven’t been able to shake it from my thoughts about John. He’d found an aborted baby near the pond, or had killed one.
“Did you do it?” I said.
“Do what?” Marcy said from the bank beyond the reeds.
“No,” John said. “I found it.”
“Do what?” asked Marcy.
“Did he kill it,” I told her.
“Kill what? Sick,” she said.
But she didn’t get the inflection right.
“An unborn baby,” I said.
“Fuck! Sick,” Marcy said. “I don’t know.”
Maybe that’s all the word really meant to anyone else. A dead baby, sick. But to me, standing in the freezing water that afternoon, it was a calling. I wanted to be sick like John. Maybe not disappear into the hospital, and not bark out in class to the giggles of the other kids, but to be alive to something, to have a kind of intensity of focus. What the abortion baby or whatever it was doing there was beside the point.
Marcy said, “We should give it a funeral.”
I picked it up, the frozen little drop-shaped bone cage and skin, and brought it out of the reeds to the edge of the water. Now my feet were stinging and my whole body shivered, but I didn’t care. John was excited by the idea of a funeral. We arranged ourselves into a little semi-circle around it, and I began to pray out loud.
“Dear the one true God,” I said.
My mother had never taken me to church, so I had to go by what I’d seen on TV and in the movies. “This child gave its life for reasons only You know, for some reason, and You aren’t telling anyone why, ever, in history.”
“Yeah,” John said.
“You always get what You want.”
We were staring down at the twisted thing, getting a little bit serious, I think, each for our own reasons. Marcy because she was fascinated with what sick boys did with their time. I remember John leaning on me, gripping my shoulder. He had finally gotten some other kids to pay him a little attention. And then me. I was praying because I was waking up to some new way of being. Fat, shy, already a little pathetic in my own eyes, I could be brought out of all this by John. I would become amazing. I was on this dividing line between the high school and junior high. I could jihad my former self now. First John would help me understand the meaning of sick, and then help me become sick myself.
“Sorry. God wanted you dead,” I said.
Chapter 39: John
The silver gun in my father’s sock drawer. I didn’t know its name. It was small, a Glock, I guessed, because my father was trendy and flashy. A translucent, red box of bullets hidden further back in the drawer, under more socks. He had never shown me the gun. I found it while looking for money my parents might have stashed or had lost and forgotten. I sometimes found a twenty or a ten somewhere in my dad’s nightstand, along with a half-squeezed tube of K-Y jelly, looking medicinal and sad.
I had never picked the gun up before, but I grabbed it then, after school on Friday. Just gripped it, but didn’t pull it out of the drawer. Got my fingerprints on it. I wanted to be a part of whoever shot it next, and thought that if it was used in a crime, my father would know when they dusted it for fingerprints that I knew he had a gun and had played with it. I wanted to get caught, but I didn’t want to at the same time, not right away. I wanted to finish the school year, then disappear when Adam became a senior. I didn’t want his last year to be my junior year at Lincoln, with his looming existential crisis of what to do outside the school, real life, totally alone among new people, college or otherwise, time passing me by.
I heard my father at the garage door and closed the drawer, was back in my room and online before he reached me.
It’s grass time again, he said from the periphery.
He meant it was time for me to cut the grass. I remained focused on my laptop and pretended to read the Texas kid’s posts about white-hat shooters.
This is the last one, he said. It’s getting to the end of the season.
Getting to it, I said.
Open or closed?
Closed.
He shut my door and went off to do whatever he did when he was home from wherever he went.
They thought it would improve me somehow, pushing around the mower with my headphones turned all the way up, blasting Slayer. I’d done it once a week all summer and September, and the thought of doing it again over the dying grass made me want to snuff myself. Still, it gave me some structure in the summer, and the sick times slowed down on mowing day, as though doing some bullshit and uncomfortable chore chased away the jeebs. I felt weak after mowing, and I liked to sit and stare and just enjoy a moment without having to listen to the soundtrack of the movie playing in my head. On mowing days, the people talking about me changed the subject and babbled about nothing, so I didn’t have to pay attention.
I knew when my father told me the season was ending that it would be the very last time I mowed the yard. No more summer. I didn’t think there was much time left after the Meredith afternoon. The DuPliss kid wrote that there should always be a white hat in every classroom, to take care of the black hats. He thought he was a white hat, but he got the video girl, who couldn’t have been a black-hat, so he wasn’t protecting anyone in the school with what he did. Maybe he understood that on his getaway sprint from the school, and that was why he killed himself. He did it, Meredith must have been thinking, because her fifth-grade self hadn’t been there to stop him. But now that I’d shown her what shooters look like, she would not keep the secret.
The great dream of the future. Maybe the cloverleaf would not do—too close to town and obvious. I should be out in the forest, sleeping on the ground, getting grimy and dirt-smudged homeless. And then the old dream of living in the nook of the brick building, should I decide on downtown, practicing my mindfulness exercises. With no one looking at homeless people, I’d become invisible. I’d see my parents walk by on their way to a restaurant, then I’d get up and look through the restaurant’s window, pathetic movie-style, and watch them eat dinner without me.
Chapter 40: Adam
I don’t have the jeebs, but I am sitting on the couch, sweating as I think about finding that thing in the reeds. I’m nostalgic for that day, as if my own life is over, and I will never again meet another person like John. I’m sure I won’t.
He never speaks about the hospital visits. That’s something my mother had to learn from his mother, a cold and distant vision of a woman whom my mom had trouble talking to over the phone. We’d become friends, so I guess she assumed she should be friends with John’s mother. But my mom could only ever get the barest bones from John’s mom on the disappearances. She was a ghost, too.
The first came a few weeks before the baby burial, the next came later, in April, just as we were beginning our production of skits and other springtime projects. I remember I was in charge of the planting of a tree and John, because he sat in the cubicle next to me, was supposed to help me carry the sapling out to the dead pond and put it in the hole the school’s custodian had dug for us. But that day he was gone again, and this time, because I’d come home talking about it, my mom got interested. She wanted to know how it was that a boy could take so much time off from our school and just waltz back in as if nothing had happened, while if I missed an assignment I would get a letter sent home. She was still bitter that I’d been hauled out of my regular class and put in this regimented one, this class of cubicles and shortened recess times. This class for the maladjusted, I heard a teacher say in the hall in the regulars’ building. So, my mom called John’s mom, got an answering machine, and left her question. Where’s John, because my son wants to come out to play.
I knew where John was. Everyone knew where John was, so I let her in on it after she ended the call.
“Why are they letting crazy kids in this class, too?” my mom said.
I wasn’t sure what other kinds of kids she was talking about. Maybe kids like me, I thought, the slow and the fat, the ones who hadn’t picked up on any string to lead them forward in life, and just sort of stayed in place. But I knew, deep down, what my class, with its cubicles and lunch times separate from the other fifth graders, was all about. Some of us were disabled in our heads, some were just unable to cope with a normal class. John, I think, fit inside every one of their boxes. I had been told that I was there because I was different in a good way, special, but that’s my mom’s expression. My experience in that class over the first few months—the instabilities of the other kids, the outbursts and crazy talk and weird bursts of tears—led me to believe otherwise. I wasn’t moved there because I was special.
“John doesn’t seem crazy to me,” I said.
“You said he’s going to a mental hospital.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say to that. I was barely wrapping my head around the situation but felt I should be defending John against my mom’s instincts. John and I lived far apart, and I needed her to keep driving me to his house to play.
Tonight, six years later, is the party at Meredith’s. Although it goes against everything I feel, I’m going to go, and I’m going to try to act like I’m into it, try to look sick for her. I am sitting on my mother’s side of the couch in the living room, the place where she watches TV late into the night, and I’m watching movies and drinking Gatorade, and I’m thinking about John. The fact that his jeebs have gotten worse seems to have brought him closer to Meredith, to the point where she is writing about him. Her essay couldn’t be better than mine, but Mr. Lardner will most likely hold it out to us as a shining example of what the power of words paired with actions can do.
I turn off the DVD, and the screen reverts to CNN, where they’re talking about the Texas kid again, after a few days’ absence. I feel like I’m friends with DuPliss, and it’s good to see his photos on TV again. Psychologists have been called in like war correspondents to report from the victims’ families who are finally talking to reporters. The emphasis seems to be on how no one expected this to happen, how DuPliss seemed like a model student, even too model for a fifth grader, quiet, calm, reserved, polite. But there was the anxiety over his internet presence, all that shit he’d posted on a site devoted to mayhem, with accident photos, beheadings, and atrocity-discussion forums. He ran it all through someplace in Sweden, and no one could trace anything to him directly until after the shootings, when FBI agents went into his laptop and did whatever it is they do to reconstruct someone’s life for their purposes.
I have my own laptop open. I go to one of the DuPliss appreciation sites, where I find his yearbook photo repeated and arranged in the shape of a cross over a black background, with links to his drawings below. Background Nazi stuff, naturally. I click on one of them and pull up his school map. It wasn’t bad for a fifth grader. I doubt I could have done any better at that age, because I wasn’t yet in the habit of counting people and looking for exits. The map proved that he had a plan beyond just the morning of and the getting of the gun and the rampage. It wasn’t impulsive, the whoever psychologist on CNN was saying, as I flipped through his map images, blow-ups of the areas where he did his damage. Someone on TV had photoshopped two red X’s onto the map—plagiarism, but who doesn’t expect that from them—to show where laid the teacher and girl gunned down.