I Was Here (9 page)

16

After discovering the Final Solution boards, I spend every moment I can combing through
the archives.

Shitburg’s not a very wired place, so basically all my research is done at the library,
which, even with Meg’s intervention, is only open limited hours, most of which overlap
with my job. If we had an Internet connection at home, I could get a lot more done,
but when I raise the topic with Tricia, even offer to pay, she scoffs. “Why would
we get that?”

Once upon a time, I would’ve gone to the Garcias and used their computer. But I wouldn’t
feel comfortable doing that anymore, even if I weren’t digging into Meg’s suicide.
So, the library it is.

“How are you liking the Czechs?” Mrs. Banks asks me one afternoon. I’m confused for
a second, and then I remember the books I checked out. I haven’t cracked a single
spine.

“They’re interesting,” I lie. Normally, I read two or three books a week and have
very specific plot or character-related comments for her.

“Would you like me to renew them for you?”

“That would be great. Thank you.” I turn back to my computer.

“Still working on that research project?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Anything I can help you with?” She leans in to look at the screen.

“No!” I say a little too loudly as I quickly minimize the window.

Mrs. Banks looks taken aback. “Sorry. You’ve been so focused, I thought you might
need help.”

“Thanks. I’m okay. I guess I’m not sure what I’m looking for.”

This part is true. Every day more posts are added. There are the ones asking for encouragement
or advice on how to tie a noose, and the ones from people with terminally ill spouses
or friends who want to help them die with dignity. And then there are the completely
random rants about Israel or gas prices or who won
Idol
. There’s a whole language that’s used, shorthand for different methods, slang, like
catching the bus
, which is the way people here talk about offing themselves.

Mrs. Banks nods knowingly. “I used to be a research librarian. When you’re dealing
with an unwieldy topic, the trick is to home in on a target. You have to aim for something
specific rather than cast a wide net. So, maybe an element of the neo- Nazi movement?”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

After she walks away, I ponder what she said. There is a function to search the archives,
but when I used that to look for the kind of poison Meg took or the motel she went
to or University of the Cascades or anything else specific to her, nothing came up.

But then I go and look at the actual notes and see that everyone has to use some form
of user ID. Obviously, Meg wasn’t going to use Meg. So I try other things. Runtmeyer.
But nothing comes up. Luisa, her middle name. Nothing. I type in the names of her
favorite bands. The girl rock stars that she wanted to be. Nothing. I’m about ready
to give up when I try
Firefly
.

A whole screen of messages comes up. Some of them contain references to fireflies.
And there are at least a dozen usernames that are a variation of
Firefly
. It seems to be a popular name—maybe because fireflies have such brief lives.

And it’s while I’m contemplating the link between fireflies and suicidal people that
I see it: Firefly1021. 10/21. October 21. Scottie’s birthday. With trembling fingers,
I go to the oldest one, from earlier this year. The subject line reads
Baby Steps
.

I have been thinking of this for such a long time and I don’t know if I’m ready, but
I’m ready to admit to thinking about it. Much as I like to think of myself as a Buffy,
a kick-ass, fearless person, I don’t know if I’m fearless enough to do this. Is anyone?

This must be how archaeologists feel when they unearth hidden civilizations. Or how
that guy felt when he found the sunken
Titanic
. When you know something is gone, but you’ve found it too.

Because, here, this is Meg.

I scan the replies. There are more than a dozen of them. They are so warm, welcoming
her to the group, congratulating her on being brave enough to admit her feelings,
telling her that her life belongs to her and it’s hers to do with as she pleases.
And it’s the oddest thing, because even though I know what these people are congratulating
her for, my first reaction is pride. Because these people met my Meg; they’re seeing
how amazing she is.

I keep going. A lot of the missives read like they were written by sixth graders,
full of typos and grammatical mistakes. But there is one at the bottom from a user
called All_BS that stands out.

Baby steps? Is there such a thing? Lao-Tzu famously said: “A journey of a thousand
miles begins with a single step.” He also said this: “Life and death are one thread,
the same line viewed from different sides.” You have taken your first step, not toward
death but toward a different way of living your life. That itself is the definition
of fearless.

17

After I read that response to Meg’s email, I ran out of the library like the chicken
shit that I am, vowing never to go back on those boards. It takes two days to break
that vow. And I don’t do it out of any kind of bravery. I do it for the same reason
I gave in and slept on her sheets back in Tacoma. To be closer to her. Every time
I read one of her posts, even though she’s writing about death, she feels alive.

Firefly1021
Out of the Frying Pan

Here’s the thing that screws with my head. Afterlife. What if there is actually an
afterlife, and it’s just as bad as the current life? What if I escape the pain of
this life only to land somewhere worse? When I imagine death, it’s liberation, a release
from pain. But my family is Catholic, big believers in hell, and while I don’t believe
in that version of it, with devils and damnation and all that, what if there’s just
more of this? What if
that
is what hell is?

Flg_3:
Hell is a bullshit Christian construct to keep you in line. Don’t buy it. If your
in pain, you do what you do to end the pain. Animals bite of there own claws. Humans
are more enlitened and have different tools.

Sassafrants:
Hell is other people.

Trashtalker:
If the afterlife sux, kill yourself again.

All_BS:
Do you remember pain from before you were born? Do you remember the torment from
before you came into this world? Sometimes a pain is tolerable until it is touched,
a tender bruise jostled. So it is with the pain of this life; it is brought about
by this mortal coil. “It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear
of pain or death,” wrote Epictetus. Stop fearing. Stop dreading. The pain will go
away and you will be freed.

All_BS. The one who called her fearless before. The one who writes in complete sentences
and quotes dead philosophers. The one who, in a twisted sort of way, makes
sense
.

I read this latest message again, and a voice inside my head yells:
Stop talking to her. Leave her alone
.

As if this is still happening. As if it’s not already too late.

Firefly1021
To Medicate or Not to Medicate?

A friend told me to go to the campus health center to get some meds, so I talked to
a nurse there. I didn’t tell her everything that was going on, not about what we’ve
been talking about here. But the nurse started going on about the first years away
at school and the Northwest Effect and it sounded like standard boilerplate. She gave
me some pamphlets and samples and made me an appointment to come back in two weeks,
but I think I’ll blow it off. I’ve always said it’s better to be hated than it is
to be ignored. Maybe on the same lines, it’s better to feel this than to feel nothing.

It’s one thing to type messages into the ether, but it sounds like she was talking
to someone in the real world, too. Someone else other than me. The hot boil of jealousy
shames me. It’s so pathetic. I’m waging a tug of war, but no one else is holding the
other end of the rope.

I skim the responses. Some people warn Meg about SSRIs being a mind-control plot devised
by the pharmaceutical industry. Others say that taking them will numb her soul. Others
claim that humans have always used mind-altering substances, and antidepressants are
merely the latest incarnation.

And then there’s this response:

All_BS:
There is a difference between using a natural substance like peyote to engage in
a consciousness-expanding experience versus allowing a bunch of drones in lab coats
to manipulate brain chemistry to such a precise degree that thoughts and feelings
are controlled. Have you read
Brave New World
? These new miracle medications are nothing but Soma, a government-produced narcotic
to blot out individuality and dissent. Firefly, it is an act of bravery to feel your
feelings.

Oh, Meg would’ve loved that. It’s an act of bravery to feel your feelings, even if
your feelings are telling you to die.

And again, I wonder: Why didn’t she come to
me
? Why wasn’t
I
the one she asked for help?

Did I miss something in her emails? I open my webmail, checking to see what messages
she might have sent me in January, which is when she posted this one to the boards.
But there are no emails between us from January.

It wasn’t a fight, exactly. It was too quiet to be a fight. Meg was staying in Tacoma
for part of the winter break because of her work-study job, so she was only coming
home for the ten days around Christmas and New Year’s. I was so excited to see her,
but then at the last minute she said she had to go to southern Oregon to visit Joe’s
family, so she wouldn’t even be coming home. Normally, I would’ve been invited to
join them in Oregon. But I wasn’t. Well, not until the day before New Year’s Eve,
when Meg called and begged me to come down. “Rescue me from the holidays,” she said,
sounding frazzled. “My parents are driving me crazy.”

“Really?” I replied. “Because I spent Christmas Day eating an eight-dollar turkey
plate at the diner with Tricia, and that was
magical
.” Before, we might have laughed about this—as if the patheticness of my life with
Tricia belonged to someone else—but it didn’t and so it wasn’t funny.

“Oh,” Meg said. “I’m sorry.”

I’d been angling for pity, but now that I had it, it only made me angrier. I told
her I had to work, and we hung up. And when New Year’s came, we didn’t even call each
other. We didn’t communicate for a while after that. I wasn’t sure how to break the
ice because we hadn’t fought, exactly. When Mr. Purdue grabbed my ass—a piece of news,
at last—it gave me the opening, and I emailed her as if nothing had happened.

I scroll back to September, when she left for school. I read Meg’s initial emails,
the Meg-like rambling descriptions of her housemates, complete with scanned drawings.
I remember how I read those messages over and over, even though it physically hurt
to do so. I missed her so much, and wished I could’ve been there, could’ve gone through
with our plans. But I never told her that.

There’s a lot that I didn’t tell her. And even more that she didn’t tell me.

Firefly1021
Guilt

I keep thinking about my family, not so much my parents as my little brother. What
would this do to him?

All_BS:
James Baldwin wrote that “Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom
is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.” You have to
decide if you’re willing to grab your freedom, and if in doing so, you might inadvertently
set others free. Who knows what path your decision will lead your brother down? Perhaps
freed of your shadow, perhaps freed to be his own person, he will be able to fulfill
a potential he might not otherwise reach.

Firefly1021:
All_BS, You’re bizarrely insightful. I always feel like my brother is limited, by
me, by my mother. He’d be a different person if we weren’t around. But you can’t say
such things.

All_BS:
Except here we are saying them.

Firefly1021:
Here we are. It’s why I love this forum. Anything goes. Everything is said. Even
the things that are unspeakable.

All_BS:
Yes. So many taboos in our culture, starting with death. It’s not so in other cultures
that see it as part of a seamless cycle: birth, life, death. Similarly, other cultures
view suicide as a brave and honorable path to life. The samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo
wrote: “The way of the warrior is death. This means choosing death whenever there
is a choice between life and death. It means nothing more than this. It means to see
things through, being resolved.” I think you have the warrior in you, Firefly.

Firefly1021:
Warrior? Not so sure I can handle a sword.

All_BS:
It’s not about the sword. It’s about the spirit. You have to tap in to your strength.

Firefly1021:
How? How do I tap into it? How do you do something that brave?

All_BS:
You screw your courage to the sticking place.

Firefly1021:
Screw your courage to the sticking place. I like that! You always say the most inspiring
things. I could talk to you all day.

All_BS:
I can’t take credit for that. It’s Shakespeare. But there is a way for us to communicate
more immediately, and privately. Set up a new email account and post the address.
I’ll email you instructions and we can take it from there.

I taste the sour tang of envy again. I’m not sure if it’s because I can sense the
closeness between Meg and All_BS. Or if it’s because in her litany of people she worried
about leaving behind, she mentioned her parents, her brother, but she didn’t mention
me.

18

I get a new client. Mrs. Driggs. She takes me through the house and we both act like
I’ve never been here before. It’s funny how once you start pretending, you realize
how much everyone else is too.

The house isn’t big—it’s a three-bedroom ranch style—and it already seems pretty clean
because she lives there alone. Her husband is gone, dead or divorced or maybe never
there. When I was here last, it was just her and her son, Jeremy, and, as everyone
in town knows, he is doing three years at Coyote Ridge on drug charges. He got sent
away a year ago, but Mrs. Driggs shows me his room, asks me to change the sheets on
his bed each week, vacuum the rug.

Jeremy’s room looks a lot like it did the one time I came here with Meg in high school:
the reggae posters, the psychedelic wall tapestries. Meg had heard that Jeremy had
a snake and was fascinated by seeing it eat. So even though he was a senior and Meg
and I were freshmen, she got him to invite us over.

The big terrarium with its lush rainforest inside is now gone. As is the snake, Hendrix.
What happened to it? Did it die, or did Mrs. Driggs get rid of it when Jeremy was
convicted?

When Mrs. Driggs shows me to Jeremy’s room, my stomach lurches, just as it had done
four years ago when Jeremy had taken that mouse out of a bag and dumped it into Hendrix’s
cage. I hadn’t expected the mouse to be so petlike—so pink and white that it was almost
translucent. The way it stood so still, except for its little quivering nose, you
could tell it knew what fate was in store for it. The snake, coiled in the corner,
didn’t move either, didn’t let on that it noticed lunch had arrived. For a while,
they both just stayed like that. And then Hendrix sprang into action and, in one fluid
motion, strangled the mouse. Once it was dead, Hendrix lazily unhinged its jaws and
began to swallow it whole. I couldn’t watch anymore, so I went to wait in the kitchen.
Mrs. Driggs was there, paying the bills. “Dreadful business, isn’t it?” she asked.
At first I thought she was talking about the bills, but then I realized she meant
the snake.

Meg said you could see the lump of the mouse in the snake’s body, and when she went
back a day later, it was still there, although smaller. She was fascinated by the
whole thing and returned a few times to see Hendrix eat. I didn’t. Once was enough
for me.

x x x

About three weeks after that day together in Seattle, I get a call from Ben.

“You don’t write; you don’t call,” he says in a joking voice. “Don’t you care about
the kittens?”

“Are they okay?” I ask, worried he’s calling to tell me they got smashed by a truck
or something.

“They’re fine. My housemates are looking after them.”

“Why aren’t you?” In the background, I hear lots of noise, people, clinking glasses.
“Where are you?”

“Missoula,” he answers. “Bass player for Fifteen Seconds of Juliet broke her arm so
we got asked to be Shug’s opening band on a mini-tour. What are you up to?”

What am I up to? I’ve been cleaning other people’s houses and festering at my own,
reading and rereading the posts between Meg and All_BS, trying to figure out where
to go from here. After that last set of dispatches, their communication dwindles,
so it’s pretty clear they took their conversation off the boards. Only where? I couldn’t
find anything on Meg’s computer. I found the new email address All_BS instructed her
to set up on the boards, but when I emailed it, the message bounced. I asked Harry
to look into it. He said the account was activated and disabled within three days,
so Meg probably set it up solely for All_BS to instruct her how to contact him directly.
“Sounds like they were being careful,” he wrote. “And so should you.”

Careful
. Maybe that explains all the deleted sent emails. Meg covering her tracks, quietly
so.

I also can’t stop obsessing about this friend who told her to go on meds. Who was
it? Some sort of confidante? If so, did Meg also confide about the Final Solution
people?

I checked with Alice to see if
she’d
mentioned meds to Meg, but Alice said no, nor had she seen any evidence of Meg taking
prescription drugs. Alice asked Stoner Richard, who called me and said that he didn’t
know anything but that I should try some of Meg’s Seattle friends. I’d already thought
of Ben, and when Richard had said that, it made me think again that he might be the
confidant Meg referred to. But not enough to call him.

“Same old, same old,” I tell Ben.

“What are you doing tomorrow night?” he asks.

“Nothing. I don’t know. How come?”

“You live near Spokane, right?”

“Near is a relative term out here. About a hundred miles.”

“Oh. I thought it was closer.”

“Nope. Why?”

“We’re playing in Spokane tomorrow night. Last show before we truck back home. I thought
you might want to come.”

I open the file folder I have, containing printouts of Meg’s posts. I’ve been going
over and over them, and I’m no closer to finding out who All_BS is. I suspect he’s
a guy and that he’s older. But that’s just a gut feeling. Maybe Ben can connect me
with the mystery friend. Maybe he is the mystery friend.

I don’t want to see Ben. Or maybe I don’t
want
to want to see him. But I need to see him, so I say yes.

x x x

Getting to Spokane is expensive and a pain, because the last bus back is pretty early
and I don’t want to get stuck there for the night. I ask Tricia if I can use her car.

“Can’t. Gonna earn me some mad money.” She mimes a slot machine and makes a
ca-ching
sound. “Wanna come?”

Tricia loves to gamble, maybe because it’s the one area in her life where she actually
has decent luck. When I was younger, she dragged me with her to the Indian casino
in Wenatchee a few times.

“No, thanks,” I tell her.

I catch a bus to Spokane, figuring I can talk to Ben and skip out on his show if I
can’t get a lift back tonight. On the ride out, I alternate between nervous and nauseated,
but that’s pretty standard these days. Spending all this time trying to find Meg and
All_BS has put me in a perpetual state of anxiety. I’ve had trouble eating and sleeping,
and I’ve lost so much weight, Tricia says I look supermodely.

It’s a short walk from the downtown station to the taqueria where Ben told me to meet
him. It’s so hot and dry and dusty, winter having jumped right into summer without
ever passing spring this year, which seems fitting. All extremes, no time for gentle
transitions.

Ben is already at the near-empty restaurant, in a booth in the back. He jumps up when
I come in, and he looks both tired—probably from being on the road—and happy—maybe
also from being on the road.

When I get to the edge of the booth, we both just stand there for a second, unsure
of what to do. After a slightly awkward pause, I say: “Should we sit?”

He nods. “Yeah, sitting’s good.”

There’s a six-pack on the table. “It’s BYO,” Ben explains. “Do you want one?”

I take a beer. The waitress sets down a basket of chips and some salsa, and I scoop
some up, and find that I can actually eat it. Ben and I drink our beers and small-talk
for a bit. He tells me about the tour, about the floors they’ve slept on, about sharing
a toothbrush with the drummer because he lost his. I tell him that’s disgusting. That
you can buy toothbrushes at any 7-Eleven. But he says it wouldn’t make as good a story,
and I’m reminded that Ben McCallister is all about the artifice.

We talk about the cats, and he has pictures on his phone, a sort of ridiculous amount
of kitten pictures for a guy to have. Our food comes out, and we talk about other
bullshit stuff, and after a while it starts to become clear that I’m sidestepping
my way around the thing I should be talking about. The reason I’m here.

I take a deep breath. “So, I found some stuff.”

Ben looks at me. And those eyes. I have to look away. “What stuff?”

“On Meg’s computer. And then from there.” I start off by telling him about the documents
Harry decrypted. I’d planned to show him the posts Meg wrote to All_BS—I’ve brought
them with me—but I don’t get the chance, because he’s jumping down my throat.

“I thought you said you were going to tell me if you found anything,” he says.

“I’m telling you now.”

“Yeah, but only because I called you. What if I hadn’t?”

“Sorry. There didn’t seem much point.”

I don’t mean anything by it, but he leans back in the booth, and I can tell he’s pissed.

“Cowgirl Cody rides alone, huh?” he says with that growl.

“Didn’t used to,” I say. I push away my plate. My appetite has vanished again. “That’s
why I’m doing this.”

He’s silent for a moment. “I’m sorry. I know.”

I press my fingers against my eyes until everything goes black. “So, look. Meg talked
about confiding in someone who told her to go to her campus health center and get
antidepressants. I thought maybe she was talking about you.”

He snorts. “Yeah, right.”

“What do you mean, ‘Yeah, right’? She sent you all those emails.”

“There was nothing about antidepressants in them.” He pops open another can of beer.
“You read them. They were like stream of consciousness. She wasn’t writing to me so
much as at me.”

“Yeah, I guess. . . .”

“And I told her to piss off, Cody. Remember?” He fiddles with his pack of cigarettes.
“It wasn’t me. It was probably one of her housemates.”

“It wasn’t Alice or Richard, and according to them, not any of the people from Cascades.
Though maybe it was, I don’t know who she knew. But Richard thought it was more likely
one of her friends in Seattle.”

Ben shrugs. “Could be. Not me, though. But why does any of this matter now?”

Because if she confided in someone about the meds, maybe she also confided about All_BS
and the boards. But I don’t tell Ben about Final Solution. I’m worried he’ll get angry
again, even though he doesn’t have any right to.

“I need answers,” I say, keeping it vague.

“Can’t you just ask at the health center?”

I shake my head. “Can’t. There’s a patient-confidentiality thing.”

“Yeah, but the patient’s dead.” Ben stops, as if this is news to me.

“They still won’t tell. I tried.”

“Maybe her parents could try.”

I shake my head.

“Why not?”

“Because they don’t know about this.”

“You haven’t told them?”

No. I haven’t told them about any of this. The secret feels larger than before, almost
tumorous. There is no way I can tell the Garcias now. It would devastate them. But
I keep thinking that maybe if I find out more about All_BS, enough to do something
to actually help, then I can tell them. Then I can face them. I haven’t been around
their house in a few weeks. Sue keeps leaving me voice mails, asking me for dinner,
but the thought of being in a room with them . . .

“I just can’t,” I say, laying my head on the table.

Ben reaches out to touch my hand, a gesture that is both surprising and surprisingly
comforting. “Okay,” he says. “We can hit the clubs in Seattle. Find out if she talked
to anybody.”

“We?”
The word is a relief.

Ben nods. “We head home tomorrow morning. You ride back with us. We can go around
to the clubs. It’s Saturday night, so everyone will be out. We’ll ask around. We can
go through her emails again. We’ll find some answers.”

x x x

That night at the show, I watch Ben carefully. The band is good—not great, but good.
And Ben does his growly, throaty, thrusty trick, and I can see his charisma. I can
see the girls in the crowd responding to him, and I forgive Meg a little bit for this.
He would’ve been hard to resist.

At one point, Ben shields his eyes and peers out into the floodlights, just like he
did the first time I saw him play. Only this time, I get the distinct impression he
really is looking for me.