Outview (2 page)

A harsh glance told me she was hurt but her
answer came softly sweet. “Yes.” She touched my hand. The innocence of her face
countered the knowing in her dark eyes. “It’s your fear making you lash out.”
Linh was intuitive that way. “Don’t worry, whatever it is, we’ll help you. I
promise.” She took two deep breaths as if coaxing me to do the same. I got one
done before Kyle called to us.

Kyle’s room was in the attic, or rather it
was
the attic. He and Linh’s dad had converted it into a spacious loft that
occupied the entire top floor of their old house. It was one of my favorite
places to hang out. Other than the dormer windows, all the available wall space
was lined and stacked with thousands of books. His computer lived on a glass
desk near one end, his bed at the other end. Three couches filled the middle of
the space, all facing each other with a large triangular coffee table in the
center. Giant posters of Hubble Space Telescope images covered the slanted ceiling
above the bookcases, along with some of his more intricate drawings. I walked
past his five thousand-piece all white jigsaw puzzle and the matching black one
next to it. He’d been working on them for years. “When are you going to give up
on these puzzles?” I asked. Each was a little more than half done. “It gives me
a headache to look at them.”

“It’s meditative. They help keep me
balanced, yin and yang.” As if he was telling me this for the first time.

I scoffed.

“You just don’t have the patience for it,” Kyle
said.

I laughed. “Neither do you, or they would
have been finished a couple of years ago.”

“You can help any time you want.”

As usual, Linh, Kyle and I each sat on our
own sofa.

There’d been almost no sleep in two nights
while I tried to avoid Outviews. My brain was hardly working so I avoided the
subject, scared of their reactions. I fell asleep in midsentence.

Saturday, September 13

Eleven hours later, I woke up. It was two
a.m. Linh was gone, and Kyle was crashed in his bed. I stretched and stood up;
a note fell to the floor. I read it by the light from his computer screen. Kyle
had sent a text to my mother from my phone telling her I was sleeping over. I
realized that I’d slept for all those hours without any Outviews. Sitting there
in the dark, the tears flowed like they hadn’t since I was a child. I used a
pillow to muffle the wails because for ten minutes I cried, curled up in a
fetal position until exhausted, sleep captured me again.

Some time later I awoke, still in darkness.
The familiar sick feeling came, my eyes got heavy, and the room blurred. Not
again, I begged, as the spiral and mist of an Outview started to take me back
to a place I didn’t know but knew I did not want to go.

The woods were thick with smoke and
gunpowder. My faded uniform was unmistakably Union, and off in the distance
canon fire boomed. Somehow I’d been separated from my company. I checked my
musket and bayonet and continued toward the battle. Halfway down into a ravine
I spotted a lone rebel soldier, filling his canteen in the stream, and trained
my rifle.

“Hands up, you filthy reb!”

He turned slowly around. “My God, Henry, is
that you?”

“Kent?” I said. We’d grown up together in
the mountains of Virginia but wound up on different sides. I looked around
again to be sure we were alone and then shuffled toward him. “Damn, Kent, I
hoped we wouldn’t meet again until after the war.”

“Is it ever gonna end?”

I shook my head. Suddenly there was noise
above us.

“Those are your troops,” he said,
panicking.

Through the grime and dirt were the eyes of
my friend, my childhood. “Go! Get on out of here.”

His eyes flashed silent thanks, then
instantly he turned and escaped down the creek. I reached the top of the ravine
and a captain’s boot kicked my face sending me rolling back down. Two fellow Union
soldiers quickly retrieved me.

“I just watched you let the enemy go. You some
kind of spy, private?” the captain asked.

“No sir.” I spit dirt, blood, a tooth.

“You’re lying!”

Before I could respond, a bayonet pierced
my groin. Blood gushed with my agonized scream. Another soldier set a pistol to
my head before the captain stopped him.

“We don’t waste bullets on traitors.” They
tied ropes around my legs and dragged me behind their horses. Underbrush, rocks
and fallen branches gorged and ripped at me.

I heard a familiar voice from somewhere
else.

“Nate, Nate, are you all right? What’s
going on?” Kyle was shaking my shoulders. He had saved me again. I pushed myself
up. The light was on.

“Oh God, Kyle, you brought me back. Thanks,
man,” I said, trying to find my bearings.

“Back from where? What are you talking
about?”

“I wish I knew.” Then I realized Kyle was
Henry. It didn’t make sense.

“You’re really worrying me. You’ve been
acting seriously strange,” he said, as if his stare could pull the answer out
of me.

“I need you to help me do something . . . it’s
probably illegal, maybe even dangerous.”

Kyle stood up and looked down at me, tossed
a fresh cigarette in.

“We’re friends. You know I’ll help but you
need to start talking. Illegal? Dangerous? You better talk a lot.” His look
showed what I already knew. He had an extreme fear of authorities. A siren
could make him hyperventilate, and seeing someone in uniform would send him
into cold sweats and near paralysis.

I didn’t want to mix Kyle up in my troubles
but couldn’t get out of them without him. It was all so fantastical. I was
scared that telling him might harm our friendship or worse, that speaking it
out loud would make the insanity real. Kyle was the smartest person I knew. He
was in every advanced class our school offered, even taking a few college
courses. If anyone could help me with my wild plan and figure out what was
causing me to lose my mind, it was Kyle--but only if he believed me.

4

Linh came in, carrying a large tray of
food. She was like out of a dream, breezy and glowing. The digital clock showed
it was just after six.

“Bà and I have been cooking since
five, so you better like it.”

“What did we do to deserve this?”

“I told her you’ve been sick and stressed.
She said good food would fix you up.”

“Is it safe to eat?” I teased.

“Nate, don’t be mean. Bà loves you.”

I took a few bites of Xoi Trung, sticky
rice with egg. “It’s so delicious I might actually start to believe that.”

“Talk, Nate.” Kyle grabbed a Bành
Bao, a Vietnamese cake.

The food and especially the perfect sleep
had momentarily improved my outlook. Although still reluctant to reveal too
much, I began with the question that had consumed me for months. “How do you
really know if you’re crazy or not? I mean, if you’re crazy, are you in any
kind of state to know you are?”

“What are you talking about?” Kyle squinted
his eyes.

“I think I might be going crazy, lock-me-up-because-I’m-insane
kind of crazy.”

“Why?”

“For at least a year I’ve had these
nightmares, and they’re not your regular wake-up-heart-pounding bad dreams.
They seem completely real like I’m different people all the time. It’s totally
schizophrenic. And I hear voices, too.”

“What do the voices say?”

“Mostly they say my name, like an echoing
whisper, but there’s a lot of other stuff like ‘listen’ and ‘remember.’ Usually
not more than a word or two at a time.”

“They aren’t telling you to kill anyone or
yourself or anything crazy?”

“No.”

“Nate, you’re stressed out. You think you
killed your dad. I mean hearing things, nightmares, not sleeping, and what
happened to Dustin . . . why don’t you go talk to someone, a counselor?”

“I don’t want to wind up like Dustin.”

“That’s what this is all about isn’t it?”
Kyle asked. “You think you’re turning into Dustin? Listen, Nate, that doesn’t
make
you
crazy. If you were crazy, I would know. You’re a little
strange, actually a lot of strange, but not crazy. Besides, you’re worse than
crazy: you’re a teenager.”

“Does your mom know what’s going on?” Linh
asked.

“She suspects, but I can’t trust her.”

“Why?”

“Mom’s the one who did it.”

“Wow. I thought it was a court-ordered thing,”
Linh said.

“Yeah, she got the court order.”

“That must have been so hard for her.”

“Hard. How does a mother even do that? All
I know is every time I’ve tried to bring it up she cries and refuses to talk.

“Why?” Linh asked.

“For the same reason she won’t let me see
my dad’s sister. Because she only cares about herself.” I paced the length of
the room. “I mean, she hears me waking up in the night screaming. Even in
daytime you know how I get, zoned out, freaked out. She’s gotta be thinking I’m
going crazy like Dustin did, but she pretends nothing is happening.”

“Your mom must be terrified it’s going to
happen to you,” Linh said.

“I am too. But she’s never even around. She
only cares about the restaurant.”

“Bad dreams and your subconscious mind
talking to you,” Kyle interrupted, “I think you need to start meditating.”
Although Kyle occasionally talked about how important meditation was, this was
the first time he suggested it. “I’ll show you how. It’s a challenge at first
but becomes easier. It’s is a beautiful thing, and it will help clear these
troubles, I promise.”

“Anything is worth a shot. But they’re not
just bad dreams.”

“What then?” Linh asked.

“It’s like Death is bullying me.”

“That’s just your guilt talking,” Linh
said. “Don’t you get that?”

“Sure I do. My dad is dead, it’s my fault,
and you’re the only two who don’t believe it.”

“Meditation is better than counseling. It
keeps me sane in this crazy world,” Kyle said.

The “troubles” I told them about were only
a sliver of the horror, but this wasn’t the time for full disclosure. If Kyle
and Linh became as overwhelmed as I was, there might be no way to escape the
madness.

5

Kyle raised his voice an octave and said,
“It’s a scandal.”

Linh rolled her eyes.

Starting in eighth grade, Kyle and I began
making fun of all the gossip in school by talking like two girls, in high
voices, “It’s a scandal. John broke up with Cathy, then went out with Carol,
but Cathy was kissing John’s friend Brad. It’s such a scandal . . . ” We’d
crack each other up.

We were both giggling when Linh said, “You
two should grow up! There’s nothing funny about this.” That of course sent us
into a fit, but eventually we calmed down.

“I told you my secret. Now you said you’d
help me.”

“Nate wants us to do something dangerous
and illegal,” Kyle told Linh.

“
Potentially
illegal and dangerous,”
I corrected.

“So I’m going to wind up in jail for
hanging out with a couple of nine-year-olds.”

“Tell us,” Kyle urged. I was sure he sensed
there was more going on, but he was patient--Zen patient. He knew the rest
would come in time.

“I want to go see Dustin.”

“That’s illegal?”

“I want to get him out.”

“Oh.”

Kyle looked at Linh.

“It’s understandable you want to see your
brother, but you’re sixteen. They aren’t going to let you take him home. Do you
actually want to break him out?” Linh asked.

“Yes. He doesn’t belong in an institution.”

“How do you know?” Kyle challenged. “Why’s
he in there?”

“Awhile after my dad died, Dustin started
getting paranoid. He was smoking a bunch of pot at the time, so I thought it
was all about that. But it got real bad, and my mother was very worried. He’d
have conversations with himself--more like arguments--and heard voices.” I
glanced at Linh and saw it register in her eyes. She knew where I was coming
from. “He stopped sleeping, started blurting things like ‘they won’t leave me
alone,’ and was always talking about coded messages and secret meanings in
everything.”

“How old was he when it started?” Kyle
asked.

“Fifteen.”

“And you started seeing things and hearing
voices at fifteen, too?”

“Yes.”

They both stared.

“I remember what he was like. And it’s been
increasing a lot since I turned sixteen.”

“But he smoked tons of weed and who knows
what else. You won’t even take aspirin.”