The Devoted (9 page)

And when Jed went like the traitor he is, guess who got promoted?

Last Day –
11:35AM

But I call Jed. Don’t even have to check the messages. All twelve are from him or my head’s made of rocks. Bricks, maybe – I’ll grant that – but not rocks, far as I know.

The chores, by now, should be relaxing. It’s getting near enough to Downtime, which goes from twelve to one. Which means we can do whatever we want (short, of course, of what I’m doing).

Same routine as before, in seamless facsimile:

Door locked. Faucet on. Phone out.

Only this time one added step:

Speed. Dial.

And if I thought the world was in my ear before, then Jed shows me how wrong I was. ‘Cause Jed is world and solar system and galaxy.

Jed is the universe, screaming with relief. Probably some pride as well, since he’s getting a call from the place the whole media and half the police are looking for:

“Matthew! Oh, thank God!”

He’s bald, he’s earnest, but he’s got that slant in his voice, still.

This is Jed.

No police around him, that I know. His record’s far too long for that.

“Don’t be loud,” I tell him. “Don’t be loud.”

“Are there people with you? There’s something I have to s--”

“I’m in the bathroom. There’s not much time. I have no charger.”

“Did you get my messages? I left like twenty.”

Urgent
: “I didn’t listen. There’s no time for anything. This is the last day.”

This news doesn’t land the way I’d thought. His momentum stays intact like he knew it or expected it or is onto something else--

“Are you – wheezing?”

And suddenly, you know, I feel so sad. The room tilts and the toilet comes up to accommodate my rear. Lid is up, so I’m drooping down. Comical in a way that fails to arrive at funny.

Edgar Pike’s Journal

March, 2008

I don’t like the word that talks about air expelling from the buttocks. I don’t like it and I hope others don’t like it, although I sense that everybody might. When I was born, and until the late 1980s or early 1990s, it was something in the direction of a curse word. Not quite like “fuck,” which I don’t mind, generally, but lower in a way. More disgusting and pitiful. Yet everyone says it. Children on sitcoms! From their little mouths!

I do confess to liking the feeling. In that regard I’m in the mainstream. RASP! Sometimes on my palm, then palm to face. Do we all do this?

It’s important, these things. To know what reality is really like. Otherwise, it’s a lie layer cake that just gets higher and higher.

Every day, I see my feces in the toilet. Every day, chunks on lines of floss. Thoughts about killing somebody who angers me. Dick getting hard when a fourteen-year-old walks by. Okay? Doesn’t mean I’ll kill, nor molest.

But to not say these things -- where’s that leave us?

Last Day –
11:37AM

Then I cry. If he can hear the wheezing, he can hear this, too.

“I’m not feeling good,” I say, although it does feel good to tell someone that. “I don’t know what to do. He has high expectations.”

“Matthew, listen to me: You don’t want this. Okay? You have to listen to me.”

“Lower your voice, please. Lower your voice.”

Is it possible that he’s being louder than me?

My nose is snotty. I snort it back gently and silently: an infant.

“I knew you. We all knew you. I remember how you talked about life.”

And those are certainly words I can do without. The bathroom gets cold enough to make me picture Pluto. I’ve split so far from the program, I may as well be in outer space. This bathroom an outpost, surrounded by dark and stars.

“I know,” I say. “I remember, too.”

Eyes on the door, but weak, now. Droopy, a little. The tears. My sinuses. The beating dished out from my chest: Non. Stop.

“Matthew, we’re prepared to intervene. I can bring a van. Everybody but him is welcome to come.”

And then, crisp and colorful, I have a head full of kings. Kings in robes, hundreds of years ago, toasting wine pooled in silver goblets.

Did those kings not have treachery within their castles?

Were there not always others who wished to overthrow them?

Often – admit it – seconds in command?

I have to really ask myself what this is about, ‘cause I’m swimming in waters where the sharks roam thick. And if it’s about power, then I’m a pathetic sell-out.

Even worse, it could be about the lack of food in my body.

Blood sugar low and delusions high.

The Leader once asked me, in the old house, what it’s called when you think you’ve seen your dead grandma still alive.

I shrugged and smiled.

“Delusions of Grandma,” He said, and we both laughed.

I could laugh now, too, if there wasn’t Jed to hear it.

I say to Jed, precise and fast: “He expects a lot from us. We have no time.”

And either Jed starts multiplying or he starts repeating himself: “You have time. You have time. You have time. You’re a young man. You could have years if you want.”

My teeth and my lip, seeing which will crack first.

“And you do want them,” he says. “You do want them. If you can listen to him, you can listen to me.”

And that was always the problem with fucking Jed. Put power anywhere near the guy’s head, and it’ll ignite till the whole universe gets charred.

“I have to go,” I say. “I can’t be talking.”

“Matthew!” He’s loud. If anyone is out in the room, they most certainly think I’ve got Jed in here. “Hear me now! You called because you wanted help. That is inside of you.
You called me back because you wanted help.”

“Have to go,” I say (truth). “You’re a very, very nice man, Jed.” (lie)

“And so are you. So are you. You belong in this world. You don’t belong with him. Do I have to mention all the plans you had? You were gonna do good things on this planet, Matthew.”

If what happens now isn’t hyperventilation, then I hope I never know what the real thing feels like. Only, come on: Did I ever have plans? We were in it for the gush, not for hard results. A guy like Jed was supposed to understand that.

“Yeah, well,” I say, so weak I could vanish, “the planet’s looking pretty dark, Jed.”

“Which is why we need y--”

“Please don’t call me anymore.”

“Listen to the voicemails!”

I breathe out a magic carpet of breath. Upon it ride the words “So long, Jed.”

“No, wait, Matthew--!”

Black button again.

Turn off the world.

Then the faucet, as well. Wanting nothing from out there to be in here.

****

The last time I saw Jed, we were in me and Jolie’s room in the old house. Jolie was in the bathroom, taking a bath. She’d been up all night crying about Victor’s passing. But after the detectives came, she switched from tears to a strange, strained calmness.

“We’ve got problems,” Jed told me, with his talent for front-loading the obvious.

“I don’t think so,” I said, resisting. “I think Mrs. Garcia has problems.”

We called her that ‘cause she was like in her forties. Twice as old as Jolie, if not more.

We looked at each other. Jed could have been a movie star. Most of us could have. Not Theodore; he always cramped our style.

I sometimes wondered if The Leader, also handsome, felt a certain competition with Jed. I’m confident in my looks, but any day of the week, I’ll tell you The Leader’s got more than I do. Jed, however: whole different level.

Jed could make Johnny Depp start slinging poses.

“She’ll be arrested, that much I can guarantee.” Jed with his smug ex-robber knowledge of the law. “But it’s going to cross-pollinate...”

And his smug overgrown vocabulary.

“...between the baby and the rape investigation. You have to wake up, Matthew. There are sixty of us living here. Chicks with four boyfriends who go to sleep with their girlfriends.”

I laughed. I liked it. The place was fun. Even the chores.

And I was certain that the fun would not end then.

Only Jed broke with protocol, and that night in my room, he warned me outright that he was going to. I had no rank – only he and The Leader did – but it was somewhat understood that I was something of a third in charge. Everybody liked and listened to me, and The Leader had a habit of lighting up every time I spoke.

“I’m gathering as many as possible to leave,” he said.

I had nothing to say to that. It was pure Jed drama. A grand, manic gesture. He probably pictured himself in a slow-motion exodus, leading them all down the street.

But half of these people didn’t have jobs. The other half hated the jobs they did have, and had one foot out the office door.

“You’re undermining what we’ve created here,” I said. “It’s utopic. Don’t force it to end just ‘cause you think utopias are supposed to.”

Jed’s eyes showed me that he consented to my depth of debate. From day one, he’d dropped lines about utopias being bound to fail. And given what we all understood about the Law of Attraction, he had to at least wonder if he wasn’t willing it to stop working.

“We had a dead infant carried out of here yesterday,” he said.

Call me a bastard. Call me insensitive. Call me whatever you want.

But I had to shrug.

It was beside the point. I viewed it as a test. If we could stay glorious beyond this point, I thought, then our entire system was worth preserving.

Last Day –
11:57AM

And here I am, now, in the bathroom. Checking the mirror to make sure the remains of my tears have blended into my cheeks.

Glorious.

“But come on, Jed,” I say in my mind, my reflection grinning softly as I do. “You can fuck lots of women. You can go cliff-diving. You can even rob stores and get all zonked on adrenaline.

“But you gotta admit, what we’re doing here pretty much annihilates everything else.”

Talk about adrenaline. And gush? Don’t even fucking pretend.

I exist now in a house full of warriors. Scared, yes. Fucking petrified? Of course.

But I’d rather exist amongst their bravery than be the turncoat who topples the kingdom.

I step outside. Here comes Jolie. Her calm, inspiring. We trade rare smiles.

“It’s noon,” she says, which means it’s Downtime. “Should we fuck each other?”

For this woman, I would – I will – lay down and die.

Edgar Pike’s Journal

July, 2009

To ejaculate is to remove eyeglasses. You’re in one world before the burst and another one after. Then the prior world grows back. When I was 13, it’d grow back in moments. I’d ejaculate and then want to again. Now, it takes hours to a day to recharge, to get the glasses back on.

At 13, my mother talked every day about how my armpits smelled. She said that when I was a child, I smelled fresh, but all that was ending. To her, it was as though everything was ending.

Last Day –
12:00PM: DOWNTIME

But fucking means motion, and motion means that I can’t get any goddamn air. In fact, when I unhook myself from her and roll over to the side, I’m surprised to find that my skin’s not cobalt.

The ceiling’s wrong. I need to eat. Need to fuck. To stop. Go.

“I think I’m having an asthma attack,” I say.

She sits up and regards me, but she’s only half-human. The other half is cat. She’s writhing; tongue’s not inside.

“No, no, you don’t have asthma, baby.”

Didn’t. Just like we didn’t have a phone. But I have a phone. It’s in my pants, on the dresser. Was I sure to turn it off?

“Since I woke up this morning,” I say, but that’s not gonna sell her. “Something’s wrong with me,” I go. “Inside my head.”

But you can’t say things like that in this house. ‘Cause your mind’s not in your body here. Your body’s probably in your mind. And it’s not even your mind, it’s the universal mind. Which doesn’t matter, anyway, ‘cause it probably doesn’t exist.

“You’re just excited. You’re fine. We’re almost out of here,” she tells me, and did I hear her throat catch on that last part?

I try to touch her with my eyes. Real contact, beyond any sense of murk.

When my next words come, they’re not from me (whoever that is). They’re from the collective consciousness. They go back all the way to ancient times.