The Devoted (14 page)

Some of the faces absorbed this line with unease, but I didn’t catch The Leader doing any heel-rocking, and I was positive that He’d come back strong.

“Not preference,” said The Leader. “Just utility.”

“OH!” This was Michael.

Lots of others grinned.

“You sure know how to hurt a guy,” said Jed, the muscles beneath his thin shirt indicating a man who could in no way – ever – be hurt.

The Leader barked laughter. “Come on, stop it. You’re good at your job. That’s all I’m saying. That needn’t mask some sickly hierarchy.”

“Are YOU not at the top of this hierarchy?”

Now things were getting ever-so-slightly tense.

“What hierarchy?” The Leader seemed lost.

“The one...” Jed’s finger aimed itself at the carpet and made circles like the Earth ‘round the sun. “...of which we’re all a part.”

“You want a hierarchy,” said The Leader, “go back to the world. All I am is a shaman orchestrating truth. You want it, you can have it. You don’t, you can ignore it. Correct?”

He looked at all of us. We nodded as fast as our heads allowed.

“So that says to me,” Jed said to The Leader, “that you’re on the side of ‘why not?’”

“Why?” asked The Leader, knowing full well that the inquiry was funny right at that moment. “Aside from the fact that position-holders always project their own values onto others.”

“You’re on the side of ‘why not,’” said Jed, ignoring the dig, “‘cause you just roll with things. You said so now. Hear me, don’t hear me. Stay, leave. Whatever. Why not?”

The Leader paused.

I saw Him thinking. I could not sense whether His thoughts were laced with anger.

Edgar Pike’s Journal

March, 2009

Sometimes I hate Jed.

The problem is, he’s intuitive. He’s not good with information, facts, or history. He writes with his left hand, which means his right brain is in control. That’s imagination, poetry, creativity. Good with words, like I, which is why we’re a fit.

I hate him, though, because his intuition comes on me like a rude palm. Lands and touches. “GROSS!” (I put quotes because Allison said that today, while cleaning hair from the drain.)

I’m standing there clean, and Jed will look at me too close. Then I feel unclean. Like his look has created a ripple.

It’s a good test, though. To withstand that. I must be clean.

Last Day
– Matthew Thinking Back

“If I had to choose...” said The Leader, and every eyeball at the party went wide. “And that’s a very big if...”

“I know,” said Jed, the fisherman with a tug tightening his line.

“...then I would actually have to side with Michael.”

Michael made a victorious sound, something between an “Oh!” and an “Ah!” and walked over to The Leader and gave Him five. The Leader, as one could expect, played along, the look on His face expressing that He deemed the gesture rather inane.

Jed’s beam of confidence was still wholly accounted for. He watched The Leader with glass-cutting reverence, waiting for Him to say His final piece.

“Reason being,” said The Leader, “that why? is open. Why is a door. Why not is an attitude. Why is what drives me being ‘whatever,’ as you say. Because I work to accept all extremes. I live with the perception that my essence is larger than I can possibly imagine. As is yours. And everyone’s. So that to me looks like a why.

“After all,” The Leader then said with a wink, “look what that why did to all the students. Got them all thinking and writing and expressing themselves. Sounds like a good professor, asking a question like that. But not a very good grader, if he’s to reward the one who gives back shallowness.”

At which point Jed went and toasted his beer (how and when it got into his hand, I don’t know), and gave up the whole thing like the gentleman that he is.

However, I didn’t give it up. I found myself sucked into an undertow of sadness. Jolie disappeared, went into a room somewhere, and I didn’t even want to find her.

I felt like The Leader had betrayed me. Not only by giving an actual answer, but by choosing the one liked by Michael. At that moment, I felt like every single thing I’d heard Him say and seen Him do had been misinterpreted.

The goddamn drum circle – had I misread that? I thought the gush and the flow were the thing. But now He was weighing in with a “Why?”

And frankly, I didn’t want to know why. I liked the kid from Jed’s epic story. If we’re bigger than we can imagine, how could we ever shake a good answer out of why? Don’t we instead have to roll with our lives, and essentially stick with why not?

Or maybe the truth is, as The Leader initially tried to say, that why is no different from why not. Both are inquiries. Both actually knock on doors. And both have shapes that are hard to see clearly.

Still, I didn’t like that He took that position. Given the fact that He took any at all, I would have preferred the opposite, or alternative, or what have you.

So I got drunk.

I wanted to unload my mind. Not unleash its contents, unload its presence. No mind for a night. Too much of it, anyway. Mind-mind-mind – where’s it get you, ever?

To the cooler, I kept returning for one beer after another. I’m reasonably certain that I drank more than most others. Hopefully nobody saw what I was up to. And certainly nobody related to my crisis, as everybody was having a pretty regular old party, collected in little groups to talk or smoke or drink or fuck.

I even saw The Leader and Jed laughing together.

Why?

‘Cause I guess that whole conversation had just been theater to them.

Why?

‘Cause I guess they figured it was a party and there was no need to get all uptight.

Why?

‘Cause weekdays were the time for getting uptight, and this was supposed to be a special break.

Why?

‘Cause we worked so hard during the goddamn week, and this week had been special, ‘cause we’d painted the house, and I didn’t know about everybody else but my ribs still felt crushed.

Why?

‘Cause my parents and I hadn’t talked in two years, and living amongst this beauty and meaning was a far better deal than searching garbage cans for pizza crust on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Why?

Have you not listened to a word I’ve said?

Why not?!

I spun. A pinball within the gears of the cabin. Half a conversation here, one-tenth of a garbled flirtation there.

Jolie, where?

I didn’t know/didn’t care.

Kept bouncing. Head in a cartwheel that had lost its hinges.

Why?

Fuck you.

That’s why. It’s my goddamn life.

****

And I don’t know what that night was made of. Beyond the debating, I don’t know what incidents and exchanges and revelations defined that night. I certainly gained nothing shy of confusion. For me, prime or otherwise, it was a lost event, and the whole sad time, Jolie was lost, too.

At times, I even thought we were about to break up.

I’d turn corners, stick my head into rooms, expecting/intuiting her to be there, but finding other faces staring back.

Last Day –
2:57PM

And today, as our hours fold themselves away for good, she’s here on the floor of our bedroom telling me

In plain words

That she’s pretty sure The Leader touched her that night.

Last Day –
2:58PM

Why?

Ask Him.

If He were as drunk as I was at the time, He’d probably be honest and say, “Why not?”

Last Day –
3PM: SECOND DOWNTIME (ECSTATIC DANCE INTERRUPTED; SECOND CHORES CANCELLED)

“He came into my room that night,” she says. “The only night when you weren’t with me.”

My hands leave my lap and turn into fists. They stay so when I plant them on the floor.

“He’s come into our room,” I say, being fair. “He likes to check on us.”

“Wasn’t that. He was there for a long time. I haven’t really thought about it. But he was there. I know that for a fact. I don’t have any idea for how long, because I was mostly asleep the whole time.”

“Mostly asleep?”

“Usually I’m on guard. But I smoked a lot that night. And Janice was still with us, then, and she made, like, cookies with weed, also. So I was deep asleep, but, like, waking up in little pieces. And I know he was there with me, and I know he was right near the bed. But I can’t say a hundred percent whether or not he touched me.”

“What percent can you say?”

She thinks. Her mouth moves. She then says, “Maybe fifty.”

The odds of a successful marriage.

“What’d he look like?” I want to know, switching from numerical data to visual.

“Just like himself.” She thinks me dumb.

“But, like...” Whatever calmness the meditation lent me has been retracted. “...what was the expression on his face? Did he seem...turned on or something?”

“Hmm...”

I see that this is hard for her. Not only mentally, in terms of remembering, but ethically, in terms of incriminating.

And I know He’s either downstairs or in His room, trusting that when we see Him next we’ll be more manageable.

I then recall the clank from hours ago.

“There was something still about him,” Jolie shares. “He wasn’t in a rush.”

Was the clank a gun?

She goes on, “I remember feeling safe for a minute, like I was happy to have him there. But then he got closer -- and I remember a question forming in my mind. Just now, in the shower, I was trying to figure out what the question was.”

“Did you?”

“I couldn’t nail it down completely. But it was something to do with, ‘How could my life have ended up here?’ Only that doesn’t really capture it, even. I just got lost in my head. I slept very deep. And I woke up late the next morning. You were all having pancakes.”

No, seriously – what was that clank? I’d opened the drawer and seen the phones.

But below that was another drawer.

Distracted though I am, I got her every word: pot beforehand, patchy sleep, deep sleep, late wake.

“I know you were stoned, but that wasn’t a new thing. Is it possible that he...slipped you something?” I venture.

“I don’t know for sure.”

“And you don’t remember anything else from that night?”

She shakes her head.

Hold on. Was there not a slim opening in the bottom of the cell phone drawer? A little line that made visible the drawer below?

Was there a box in that drawer? Cardboard?

Bullets?

I stand up, eyes toward the wall. It threatens to consume me. Turn back toward her, know that we’re both thinking the same thing, generally:

Out. Get out.

Yet we’re only doubters. We have no info. Particularly me, who could be getting a fiction here.

“I wouldn’t hate you for just one mistake, you know,” I tell her.

“I didn’t. I’m not making anything up.”

And she’s not. For she, unlike the others, speaks straight. Never tries to sound like Him.

I turn to the wall again: staleness. Back to her: anything but.

“It got in my mind ‘cause I talked to Jed,” I say.

Her expression changes. The sort of expression one gets when, say, a ceiling drops down on one.

“You talked to Jed?”

I nod. I feel better (as well as worse).

“But he took all the phones and computers,” she goes.

So I fish into my pocket and show what I took back. Dangle its redness, a bloody wound within her sight.

“I went in his room before,” I say.

And then I’m down on the floor again, facing her, trying to use my eyes as a magnet for hers. Her head’s not still, though. Its crowded thoughts zig it here and zag it there.

“Matthew. You shouldn’t have done that. Why--?” Her eyes away from mine.

“I didn’t think I’d use it. But Jed’s been calling. He knows we’re going through with the plan.”

A catch where her throat meets her mouth. “You told him?”

“He knew it was coming. He doesn’t know where we are.”

I put the phone in her lap, and though I don’t know quite how, it’s a way of telling her how much I love her.

The thickness of my face seems to double; it scrunches up and wrenches out tears.

“I’m looking at you, Jolie. And I don’t know if I can never see you again.”

“Oh, no.”