– I know your name, trucker fuckhead.
– I was forgiven by your friend's family.
– I forgave nothing.
The smell in the storage cell was a cold smell, cold wood, cold aluminum. I was on the ground, before I went out for good, and I thought an explanation would come. I was there, on the cold wood planks, already bleeding from the mouth and with my ribs throbbing, wondering if they'd punctured my skin, and I was thinking of an explanation. I was so curious. I had to have the answer. Was it something among his things they wanted? I had to know. I wanted to kill them and soak in their blood but first I wanted to know why.
– Why did this happen?
– We were there, you were there.
– Give me an answer.
Hand was gone, upstairs asleep. How could he be asleep in Senegal? I wanted to wake him but didn't. It was his fault. It was partly his fault. Everything was partly his fault. The world was partly his fault. I stood and found another blanket high in the closet and put it over me and closed my eyes again.
– Shit, Hand.
– Sleep, friend.
– Fuck. I want out of this fucking head.
– Have something to drink.
– What? Where?
– Relax. Breathe.
– Why didn't we kill those fuckers?
– We tried. We waited. We looked. Then you didn't want to go back. You didn't want to call the cops and then you didn't want us to go back.
– You weren't with me.
– Now don't do that. You said you wouldn't.
– Fine. I just don't want to believe this happened.
– You can live as if it didn't.
– Hand, I can't. Now I inhabit a life that includes these fuckers, these visions. They've taken one life and replaced it with another. They've changed the colors, the palette of my existence. And I picture their death three hundred times a day. My heart's been jumping since, fluttering up and sinking down – that's no goddamned way to exist.
– It isn't.
– Nothing cures it.
– Time will.
– I can't wait.
– Will, this happens. We are moved as often as we move.
– I don't want to live in this kind of life.
– Then start over.
– I already have a new face.
– Your face will heal.
– My head won't. I can't be alone with my head, Hand. I fear it. My own head! There was a time when I wanted and loved time alone with my mind. Now I dread it. I used to do gardening -
– I know. Mrs. Yorro. I worked for her, too. We were thirteen.
– When she left me to myself in the pakasandra I would sit on the mat she would give me – an old car floormat – and I would see the pakasandra and see the weeds among them and I would drift. My hands would reach for the neck of a weed and I would pull, slowly, feeling the base, taking the soil with it, the gentlest of pulls, causing the faint snipping sound of the roots breaking; then it would come completely, I would fall back the smallest amount, the weed would bring soil with it, and shower the pakasandra with black as I shook clean its roots. Then I'd toss it into the pile and move to the next weed. Some required two hands. Sometimes I could do two at once. I was being paid by the hour and wanted to be in the pakasandra indefinitely. I was more thorough than I needed to be. By the end I was spending five minutes hunting for weeds remaining. I parted the pakasandra leaves to see if there were weeds beginning underneath. The dirt was so black and moist. She watered it often. And all the while I was caressing every wall of my head. I was wandering around my head, teary with joy, wistful even, loving the surfaces, the many rooms, the old rooms and empty rooms.
– Listen, Will…
– But slowly these empty rooms are filled. Filled with things so wretched and brutal that you could not have conceived of them at thirteen. And soon you find there are too many rooms, too many occupied rooms, too few empty ones. I walk through my corridors and I open doors and now it's so hard to find a room unoccupied or not full of screaming clouds.
– Will, come on.
– I know faces that I want to but cannot destroy.
– They are already destroyed.
– They are not.
– They have never lived.
– They do live. They breathe and I live with them. We were reborn together.
– Oh cut the shit.
– They live in these rooms. They breathe there, I hear their laughter. I try to keep them in the rooms I don't enter, but they move, and I forget where they are, and when we're in a room together I vibrate, I have too much within me, I cannot contain my desire – death for them and even me, I will tie my blood to theirs, a line to anchor, whatever it takes, they make me want to end my brain.
– I can't listen.
– Don't you see that as we've traveled, nearly every minute, they have been with me, they have been with me always? I have given you a small insignificant indication of their presence with me. When you shake my hand you shake theirs. When I place my elbows on tables to eat, to look across a table and talk with you, they eat with me, they talk through me.
– I didn't know.
– The only times they are not with me are those times when speed overwhelms, when the action of moments supersedes and crowds out. When my movements stop they come. When my eyes are fixed they come.
– Will, stop.
– I let go of my reins and now I'm sorry.
– It's all right.
– And what are we doing? This is a betrayal of my mom. My mom wanted to travel, has always complained about never having seen Greece, South America, and here we are, blowing all the money she would use to see what she's never seen. This money could go to her. It could go so many places. I have an aunt with two kids and no husband. They live in a half-finished house.
– Will, you need to rest.
– Hand you will help me avenge and then I will rest.
– Who? Who are you after?
– The fuckers at Oconomowoc. Them first.
– There are others?
– Of course there are.
– Who?
– The trucker.
– Stop.
– The fucker at the funeral home, the one who did that to Jack.
– He did his job. And we closed the casket.
– You want it too. You want to throw that man around.
– No.
– You said you did!
Out my window and beyond the sprinklers, there was the sound of giggling, a small voice emitting tiny laughs. Then a door closed. I put my hands between my legs.
– I brought all this upon us, Hand.
– Don't start.
– We beat up kids. We pushed them down ravines. We ran by the retarded girl, Jenny Ferguson, and we tore her dress on purpose. Remember that, asshole? We did that and this is retribution. There is balance. Everything lives in perfect Newtonian opposition.
– You are fucked.
– I will have more coming. I acted too often with unprovoked aggression and now it is enacted upon me. I have done other things. Things you don't know about.
– Your father started this.
– Let's wipe these fuckers away.
– Who?
– These pigs. From Oconomowoc. They have eclipsed all my years. I've tried too long to grow again into the world and now I'm being sent back. I don't want to remove myself again. I spent so long away and finally rejoined the world and now I can't be here. It's too much to walk around with this skin and this blood – it all hisses at me. I sink into my blood and it hisses at me.
– Stop.
– You remember how I was.
– We called you Robotman. You withdrew. It didn't make sense. Your dad had left so long before.
– This was unrelated.
– This is when your heart went offbeat.
– Irregular. I'd been passing out, and at first the doctors called it something else, something common in teenagers – you stand up quickly, you black out, a byproduct of quick growth – but it was happening too often, I was finding myself on the laundry room floor with broken recyclables under my back, a shard of Schweppes stuck three inches into my shoulderblade.