“That guy sounds crazy. Counselors told me shit like that too. They always told me there was a God and he was watching and that if I only let Him in my asshole then I would shit properly.”
“One day, my guidance counselor told me that his dead son had been reincarnated as a rock, and that he sat down on his son one day and knew it.”
“What the fuck does that even mean?”
“I don’t know. That he is alone and is making shit up in his head to feel better about being trapped in a world where people die and nothing makes sense,” I say.
“I think if I believed in an afterlife, I would have become a Buddhist monk. I could have done that, sat all day and done nothing. I would have been silent. I would have sat, not spoken and alienated the other monks.”
“Sometimes I think that about myself too. I think I would have become a Franciscan friar. I could have done that. Went around being nice and reading the Good Book and everyone would have kissed my ass trying to get to heaven.”
“Yes, too bad we are fucked and don’t believe in anything.”
“We don’t, do we?”
“We believe that we can’t walk through walls,” Chang says.
“Yeah, and that taking television news as truth is a mistake.”
“Yeah, we believe in all kinds of things. We believe in the healing power of ice cream.”
“And having too many friends is a bad idea,” I say.
“Yeah, we are full of beliefs. We aren’t nihilists just because we don’t believe in God.”
“No, we are totally moral. Godless and moral in a 1990 Jetta.”
“Yes, life is good.”
2
We are in Nowhere, Illinois.
It reminds me of Youngstown but with more fields.
We pull into a shitty gravel driveway.
A small ranch house sits looking aged.
“This is Jimmy’s house?” Chang says.
“This is where Mapquest brought us.”
We go to the door.
I knock.
Chang and I are worried.
We’ve never met Jimmy before.
What if he tries to kill us?
What if he points a gun at our faces and ties us up.
Then rapes us for like twenty years.
Then we are found.
Then we will be in
Time Magazine
.
That would be horrible.
Having my picture on cable news.
A bunch of fucked Americans staring at my picture thinking about me being raped by Jimmy.
Then I realize I’m not rich and only when rich people get raped or kidnapped does cable news make a big deal out of it.
The door opens.
A large black woman stands in front of us.
She stands there looking at us like we are space aliens and says, “You here to see Jimmy?”
“Yes,” I say.
She motions for us to come in.
She seems tired, weary of life.
The house is normal-looking.
There are pictures of family, grandparents, kids, etc.
The furniture looks almost new and the place is very clean.
Just a house where people live.
We all sit at the kitchen table and the lady gets us some water and sits down and says, “I’m Jimmy’s mom. You can call me Tanisha.”
We shake hands with her and tell her our names.
Tanisha says, “Jimmy’s been having a rough time. He lives in the basement in a bedroom. He just sits down there. I don’t know what to do. I want to get him some help, but he won’t leave the house. And psychologists don’t make house calls. So I’m stuck with him. I feel so uncomfortable knowing he’s down there being nuts all day. I’m serious. He’s fucking nuts. Something happened to him over there.”
I say, “Does he often get visitors?”
“When he first got back, his old friends came over and tried to get him to go drinking and looking for girls. But he didn’t want to. He kept yelling at his friends, saying one crazy thing after another. And eventually they didn’t come over anymore. So now he writes on his blog and sits down there rotting like he’s already dead.”
Tanisha seems really sad.
Tanisha goes on: “I remember when he first joined the Marines. He left in the afternoon. His recruiter came to get him. And I was standing there looking at his young nineteen-year-old face. I remember being happy for him. It never occurred to me he would have to go to war. I thought he would go and see the world a little bit, maybe meet a wife somewhere, and learn some discipline. The boy was never good at making his bed and cleaning his room. I thought the Marines would fix that right up. Fuck, is all I got to say. Fuck.”
Tanisha pauses, takes a drink of water and says, “I guess, I’ll bring you down there now.”
We follow her down the stairs into an old basement. In the corner of the basement is the door that leads to Jimmy’s room.
Tanisha knocks and says, “Jimmy, you have visitors.”
Over thirty seconds pass and Jimmy yells, “Tell them to fucking come in.”
Tanisha looks at us like she is scared for us and turns back around and opens the door.
Tanisha doesn’t go in.
So we walk into the room.
We sit down in plastic lawn chairs.
We look at Jimmy.
He lies on his bed.
A strong young man.
He is kind of pretty in a way.
His eyes, though, are hard and intense.
He scans us with his eyes like he is trying to figure out if we are going to try to kill him or not.
After he realizes that we are not there to kill him, he looks away and doesn’t look us in the eyes again.
He stares at either his feet or the wall, but it is obvious he isn’t looking at what his eyes are seeing.
The world around him doesn’t seem important at all.
There is silence for at least two minutes before Chang breaks it. “How are you?”
Without deterring his hard gaze, Jimmy says, “My whole life has led to this moment.”
Chang and I do not know how to respond to that.
Jimmy continues, “Here I am. I’m in Illinois. I was over there. Now I am here. There was sand. So much sand and confusion, confusion and sand. I was shot. That’s why they sent me home. I was actually shot fifteen times in my bulletproof vest. But I got shot in my arm, and they sent me home. Shot fifteen times in my bulletproof vest. Each time I thought I was going to die.
“Confusion, confusion and sand, heat, unbearable heat. Road bombs, I was so confused. So paranoid, so scared, sweating, scared, paranoid. Alone. Each moment paranoid, each moment overcame me, each moment with its new thing to be paranoid about. I had never been so scared. No one knew. No sounds of fear came from me. I stood strong. The strong do not show their emotions. They shot me fifteen times and one eventually hit my arm. My arm, lay on ground, bleeding, wanting so bad to be somewhere else. Somewhere nice.
“I don’t like being shot at. It is not a good time. But I woke up and got shot at. No one even told me why. There is a silence that pervades reasons. No reasoning. No one who considered reasons would have found themselves in such a paranoid moment, despair, confusion. I am not human anymore.
“Hate, endless hate is my life now. I hate even my own toes. I hate my toes. I look at my toes and hate them. I hate my toenails. I hate the bed. I hate my mother and the car she drives. I killed people. At first it was easy. Then it got harder. And harder. And harder. I have so many sins now.