Giving Up the Ghost (19 page)

“Okay,” Ben said while looking over at some of the other people gathered in the kitchen.

“You want to know what the problem is?!” I yelled, digging my hand through the top of the unopened box. “This shit … this shit that you eat? It looks like fucking macaroni and cheese.” I threw a handful of cereal on the kitchen table.

A few people stepped back, somebody groaned, and others
started whispering. They knew what was about to happen. I knew what was about to happen. Nobody could do anything to stop it. It was like some sad, terrible play.

“This shit … it isn’t food!” I screamed, banging the box against the table. “It is Yellow Number Five!”

I smacked the box against the table again, returning it to my face to read again from the label.

“It is thiamin mononitrate.”

With the next smack, cereal started to fly around the kitchen.

“Pyridoxine hydrochloride … mmm, sounds delicious!”

Cereal was spraying around the room.

“And reduced iron! What the fuck is reduced iron? And why are you eating this shit?!” I was now flailing the empty box against the tabletop.

“I fucking hate this motherfucker!”

“Man, you need to calm down,” Phil said.

I threw the box at his head. He started toward me; two guys put their hands on his shoulder to hold him back.

“I will cut out your fucking heart and eat it in front of you,” I said calmly, not moving an inch.

Everyone just stood staring. No one understood the point I was trying to make. I’m not even sure
I
understood the point I was trying to make. I just remember someone gently grabbing my arm and steering me toward the door.

“You should go,” I heard someone utter.

The next time Laura and I went to Lake O’Dea I told her about the Cap’n Crunch incident.

“What were you thinking?” Laura yelled at me.

“It didn’t mean anything,” I replied.

“What do you mean? You threatened him. Not cool.”

“I didn’t mean it.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“What do you care?” I added. “What difference does it make to you what I do?”

“It makes a difference.”

“How?” I asked. “You know, I just don’t get you.”

“What is there to get?”

“I mean, what is going on here?” I asked. “What are we?”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“I mean you and I. This, between us. What is this?”

“I don’t follow,” she said.

“Our relationship,” I answered. “Are we friends … or are we more than friends?”

“What difference does that make?”

“Because it does make a difference,” I answered.

“It is what it is.”

“That isn’t good enough,” I said. “We hang out together all the time. We talk all the time. Where is this going?”

“I don’t understand why it has to
go
anywhere,” she said. “Why do you have this sudden need for things to be defined?”

“How come whenever something is important to you, it is important. But when it’s important to me, I’m just boxing you in?”

“I didn’t say that,” she replied. “If you feel the need to define things, you’ll ruin them. I mean, aren’t you happy? What we have, doesn’t that make you happy?”

“Of course I’m happy,” I said immediately.

I don’t know why I said that. Even then I knew it wasn’t true. Or at least it wasn’t entirely true. Yes, being with her did make me happy, but my joy being with her was quickly overwhelmed by the emptiness I felt about everything else. My answer at the time was that I just needed more of her.

“You don’t need a permission slip to do something or be something,” she said. “Stop waiting for it; it isn’t coming. Just let it be what it is.”

“And what is that?”

“You and me,” she said. “Just this moment. Not the moment before, not the moment after.”

While we talked I was nervously rolling a lit cigarette around between my fingers, occasionally holding it close to the underside of my forearm.

“What are you doing?” she asked while I was brushing the burning end of the cigarette so close to my arm that you could see its reflection on my skin. “The cigarette,” she added.

“Nothing, I’m just—”

She thrust her forearm in front of me. “If you need to burn someone,” she said, “burn me.”

She reached out and grabbed my hand.

“What?”

“Burn me,” she said.

I broke away from her grasp, took the cigarette, and held it about an inch from her skin. I looked up and we stared at each other.

“Do it,” she said.

“This is so stupid,” I said.

“Burn me. I want you to do it.”

We kept matching each other’s stare; I could feel her arm tense up and brace for the pain.

“Put it on my arm,” she said softly and calmly.

I slowly dipped the cigarette down and ever so briefly and lightly grazed it against her skin.

She grimaced, then exhaled, turning her breath into a quick sigh of disappointment. Then she scrunched up her face.

“No!” she yelled, reaching her hand toward the cigarette. “If you are going to do it, do it like this.”

She was pulling at my fingers trying to get the cigarette away from me. I fought back. She pried it from my hand and jabbed it into her arm, twisting as she pushed down. Most of the ember had fallen off when she grabbed the cigarette from me.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I said, brushing bits of broken ember and ash away from her and the car seat. She was fine. A tiny little burn, but nothing like what she was trying for.

“Are you attempting to have some kind of fucking crazy contest with me?” I asked. “Because if you are, you will definitely lose.”

“You want answers,” she said. “There is your answer.”

She was staring out the window.

At the time, I just thought she was in a bad mood or something. But in the years since, I often revisit that night. She was in a lot of pain about … something. There was anger in her about … something. I didn’t—and still don’t—have any concrete idea what upset her so much. Perhaps she didn’t either. Maybe that was one reason why she was so evasive all the time. Perhaps she just wasn’t ready to—or couldn’t—face her own darkness. Both of us were obsessed with being different, yet it was obvious that being different caused her a bit of pain as well.

We rode in silence until we got to her house.

No good-night kiss.

I was sitting on the floor against the wall in my parents’ dining room.

“I will handle it!” I yelled. “Just let me take care of it.”

My parents were sitting in their chairs at the dining table. I drew my legs up to my chest and wrapped my arms around my knees, rocking back and forth. They told me they were concerned.
They’d noticed that I’d lost a lot of weight and my appearance and hygiene were getting worse.

I was constantly in motion—looking around, scratching, bobbing my head, moving my tongue—anything to keep from being still. They had no idea how bad things were, nor would they have had any idea what to do if they did.

“And your checking account is overdrawn by two hundred ten dollars,” my mother said.

“And a hundred sixty is one check,” my dad added. “Why were you writing checks for a hundred sixty dollars if you didn’t have the money to cover it?”

In truth, I had cashed checks to buy all those sleeping pills I was carrying around, which then had started a daisy chain of bad checks written to cover old bad checks, and they just piled up.

The week before I’d received a postcard from the R.E.M. fan club informing me of a string of tour dates through the Midwest. A few days after that I woke up and impulsively decided that I was going to attend as many as I could. I’d told no one, including Laura, that I was leaving. I hadn’t made any arrangements to be gone from work. By then I really didn’t attend classes anymore. When I took off for the shows and no one knew where I was for days, everyone feared the worst.

I didn’t care. I tried convincing myself that I was having the time of my life. In truth, I knew what I was doing, but that just caused my sense of failure and doom to feed upon itself. I was a fuck-up who was in the midst of fucking up, plain and simple. It felt as natural as breathing.

When I got home, I was honestly surprised that my parents were so upset with me or, frankly, had even noticed that I was gone. It wasn’t like we were really seeking out one another’s company much those days.

“On days when I get the mail, there’s always a returned check notice in there,” my father added. “And I know most days you are getting to the mail before we are.”

“There aren’t any more bad checks; those were the only ones,” I quickly offered, hoping the lie would stick.

“Eric, I can’t believe you,” said my dad, waving his hand across the bank statement he’d opened in that morning’s mail. “We don’t know where you are. You disappear or come in at all hours.”

“I work. I have school.”

“I don’t think Kent has classes at one
A.M.
,” he said.

“You didn’t answer the question,” my mother said. “Where is this money going?”

“I wrote bad checks to get money to buy pills.”

It spilled out of my mouth before I realized what I’d said. Everyone in my life knew that some bad things were going on, but no one, especially my parents, was allowed to see enough to know how fucked up things had become. I told them lies about my great progress in school. I told them about studying and working on class projects with classmates. I told them about working extra at T.J. Maxx. None of it was true. But this time I had told the truth.

My jacket was thrown over the chair in the corner. The vial was in the pocket. I wanted to run over there and shove the whole vial, still capped, down my throat.

“There was this guy I know,” I added quickly, not ready for any more truth just then. “He had a bag of pills. He told me he was going to sell them at high school basketball games.” I began to tear up. The tears were convenient but real.

“I just couldn’t let him do it,” I cried out. “I had to stop him. So I got out my own money and bought them all.”

“What did you do with them?” my mother asked.

“I flushed them!” I exclaimed.

“Bullshit,” my father said. “You bought them for yourself. This needs to be made right, and fast. If you plan to stay in this house, you need to get straightened out. What are you going to do about all this?”

“I don’t know!” I yelled, standing up to face him across the table.

“I asked a question!” he yelled back. “What are you going to do?”

“I have no fucking clue! Maybe I’ll just die and stop embarrassing you!” I screamed.

“Are you on drugs right now?” my dad asked.

I looked over at the jacket again. My dad seemed to notice my gaze. I jumped across the table and swooped it off the chair. I started to put it on and headed for the back door.

“Eric, come back here!” my mother called out. “Eric, we need to finish talking about this. Eric!” I heard her yell as I headed down the driveway to my car.

Picnic table. Path. Little Girl in a Blue Dress. Wet. Mumbling. Shaking her head. Screaming gibberish.

I wake up. I hear a bump through the wall.

It’s Her.

Earlier that evening I’d quietly snuck into the house after my family were all asleep. Following the dream, I spent the rest of the night trying to calm down after feeling Little Girl. I just sat in my bed and listened for more noises.

I heard the other members of my family get up and start their day. NPR on the radio downstairs. Showers running. One by one they all headed out to their normal lives. The house seemed silent.

Just as I was about to get up, I could sense something standing between my bed and the window.

I opened my eyes and saw my brother, Michael, standing over me. He was holding my old typewriter over his head. As soon as he saw my eyes were open, he threw the typewriter toward my head.

I raised my hands just in time to push the typewriter out of the way and jumped up out of the bed as it crashed to the bedroom floor.

“What the fuck was that about, you fucking troll?” I screamed.

Michael ran out of the room into the hallway and turned back, half hiding behind the door frame.

“You are destroying our family,” he said before dashing down the stairs. “Why don’t you just go away!”

A few years ago I was visiting my parents and decided to pull out some of our dozens of photo albums from growing up. If nothing else, my family was excellent at documenting everything in photographs: every birthday party, Halloween costume, family trip, home-renovation project, and special occasion. But after I got to the few photos I’d allowed to be taken at my high school graduation, I saw there was not another family photo until Christmas a year and a half later. Given my resistance to being photographed, it would make sense that there were none of me. But there were none, period. Of anyone. Of any event. Nothing, for eighteen months. It’s clear now that my problems weren’t just hard on me.

I hurried downstairs and got into my car as my brother ran past me on his way to school. I needed to get to Kent Stark that morning to try to beg my way into taking an exam I’d missed two days earlier, for a class that I hadn’t attended in three weeks.

I pulled down the driveway and stopped at the bottom to switch gears, but then I just sat there in the car and stared at the pavement in front of me.

I didn’t want to go. It wasn’t worth the effort to maintain the façade anymore. I was getting close to done.

Without really putting much more thought into it, I put the car in drive, straightened the wheel toward the house, gunned the gas pedal, and tensed my arms as I felt the car lurch forward.

“You get anything?” a sweaty, lanky guy asks us while momentarily looking up from the display of his camera.

He is so excited he’s almost out of breath. He doesn’t even wait for our answer before running behind another boulder and taking another picture. In the dimness of our flashlight, I can see him look at his display, shake his head, then start to head off in a different direction.

The hillside is pitch-black, yet we can hear voices coming from almost every direction, accompanied by random flashes of light.