The Sarah Book

by Scott McClanahan

  I walked to the kitchen and opened up the fridge. Then I saw something on the table like Sarah was working on a project or something. It looked like she was putting something in a giant frame. I went over to the frame and turned it over and there it was. It was a diploma for a Dr. Jones. I knew he was a doctor she worked with at the hospital. What the fuck was his diploma doing in our house? So I called Sarah up and said, “What the fuck? You already have your boyfriend’s shit in the house before I even move out.” Sarah said, “First off, he’s not my boyfriend and you know this. Second, I thought you promised me that you weren’t going to go up the stairs. I knew you’d act crazy.”

  I asked her, “Well, if someone asks you not to come up the stairs what the fuck are you going to do?”

  We shouted for fifteen minutes. Then I tried to recite a poem for her, but we started fighting again. She told me she was just doing something nice for someone and I told her I didn’t give a shit. Being nice was overrated. I was going to drink beer that evening. I said Eddie told me he was sad to see me go and then I told her that Eddie likes me and gets me. He always did. Sarah said, “That’s because he’s six years old, Scott.”

  I asked Sarah if she gave a shit about what she was doing to people like Eddie. Sarah said he’d get over it. We shouted for another fifteen minutes until I slammed the house phone down and went back to the basement.

  I moved some more boxes and then Eddie came back and said, “Are you okay Mr. Scott? I heard you shouting upstairs a few minutes ago.” I told him I didn’t know if I was ever going to be okay again and I didn’t know if any of us ever would. I told him I wished this for the rest of the world.

  I moved the last box of books and slid it in the back of the truck. Then I came back and looked at the basement. I looked at the dead plant outside that I always peed on behind the back porch. It was always dead and Sarah never knew why. I walked around the basement and it was so empty. And everything was gone. And then in the corner I saw the dust. I saw some of the dog’s hair and then I saw one of Sarah’s hair scrunchies she always used to put her hair up in a ponytail with. I thought about Sarah and I thought about pony tails and I felt like I was going to cry. I whispered, “Sarah.”

  I told Eddie he wouldn’t be seeing me anymore. I asked him to look over Iris and Sam when they played in the front yard and I asked him to help look out for our dog Bertie when she ran away. Eddie said, “Don’t be sad, Mr. Scott.” Then he said, “At least you can go to the restaurant now.” I shook my head “Yes” because Eddie was right. Even though he read the Bible he was absolutely goddamn right.

  I drove the moving truck towards the restaurant so I could order beer and be the king of my underworld. The truck bounced and shook and I decided on the way there to get a steak. I passed the fast food restaurant and the fast food restaurant signs were sticking up like monuments. I saw the fat people and the skinny people and the big people and the little people go inside and I felt like one of them. I wanted to call Sarah again and recite a poem for her. She told me she never could understand what I was saying anyway because my accent was so thick. So I drove beside the people, but we weren’t afraid. I saw the fast food signs stretch in front of me and I knew that if I met a person from the future who returned to here I would say this is who we are and this is what we were.

  I drove on and the steering wheel felt like I was driving a truck made of air. I could have stopped at the fast food places except they didn’t serve beer. So I drove to Applebee’s and parked the moving truck and went inside past the pictures of people they had in every restaurant. I felt like I was different and I felt like I was more alive because I could enjoy this. I knew how wonderful the world was and I knew there was someone somewhere who would be eating the same steak I ate and drinking the same beer I drank and it was this that made us one. “Welcome to Applebees,” the hostess said in the same uniform that someone else was wearing somewhere else. And I saw her wearing clothes that someone else had made and make-up that someone else was wearing somewhere too. A woman named Michelle handed me a menu and she had a name like the name of a million different Michelles but she was her own Michelle. When she asked what I wanted to drink I said I’d have a beer. Then she smiled and said, “Of course.” She said, “May I see your ID?” I smiled and said, “Thank you for asking” and I opened up my wallet. I was sweating from the moving and my face felt like it was slimy and shining a greasy shine. I looked for my license and it wasn’t there. I looked in between the cards in my wallet and it wasn’t there. I felt inside my pockets and felt nothing. Then I remembered I took it out when I went to the bank. I told her I didn’t have my ID and she said she was sorry. She told me she was being watched because the state was cracking down and someone lost their job just last week serving alcohol to a minor.

  And then she told me that I looked so young and I told her it was the devil’s confusion. He let me look good as long as I felt bad. And so I should have begged and told her about my day but I didn’t. Instead, I tried not to cry. I ordered a salad and a steak and a diet coke. I finished the diet coke. And when they brought me the food, I ordered another diet coke. Then I ordered another one after that. And then I drank that one and ordered another. I thought about how there were things in the soda that were slowly killing me and I drank it down and said,

  “Delicious.” Then I finished the steak and I thought about all the dead animals I killed and I said, “Delicious.” I ate my salad and I knew that even the tomatoes felt pain, and we just didn’t know how yet. I heard the carrots crunch and cry and plead for their lives and I said, “Your death tastes delicious, carrots.” I told the salad it could only grow because of the bones of the dead and the skin of rot. And so I said, “You taste delicious too.”

  And so I killed everything I could kill and it felt like fun. Then I paid for the dinner and I left.

  When I got back to the apartment I didn’t even start unpacking the boxes. I just simply parked the moving truck and went inside. I walked to the kitchen and reached beneath the sink where I put the bottle. I pulled out a gallon sized jug of gin and then I went upstairs and sat down on my air mattress and I drank. I drank from the bottle and then I drank from the Gatorade. I thought, “Remember to stay hydrated.” The sun was setting behind the apartment and I looked out over the lot and the locust trees and parking lot stuff. I could see the back of the stores and I knew I was different because I could say it looked beautiful. I could mean it too.

  I drank some more and then the bottle began to disappear and I sat in my bed and passed out and then I woke up and drank some more. I drank until everything was fuzzy and fun. And then the whole room got drunk. I fell asleep and I felt something between my legs and on the sheets beneath me. I looked down at the bed and there was a circle of wetness and the wetness was brown. It was shaped like a halo. I touched it and then I realized it was shit. I’d shit the bed. I felt the wetness on my butt and smelled my shit stench. My name was Scott McClanahan and I’d just shit the bed. I wasn’t what people said I was. I was Scott McClanahan and I was celebrating life.

  After Sarah and I moved in together and fell in love, I used to do this thing I called the day of debauchery. I woke up one morning and thought, “I feel like having a day of debauchery today.” I picked up my wallet and all of my wadded up dollars and sticky nickels and then I drove to the store and I bought a case of beer. I bought a couple of bags of potato chips and I bought cheese. When I got back, Sarah asked me what I was doing. I made a little trumpet sound with my mouth bumpety bump bah bah and announced, “Today is an official day of debauchery.” I asked Sarah if she felt like doing it with me.

  Sarah said, “No.”

  I said, “O come on. Why don’t you?”

  But Sarah kept watching murder shows on TV. They were usually about husbands or wives who snapped, but this one was about serial killers. Sarah said, “I’d totally let Richard Ramirez murder me.” Then we saw them talking about Richard Speck and how later in prison Speck grew female breas
ts with the help of hormones. He grew them in order to survive. “Man, Richard Speck has some nice titties,” Sarah said. And he did.

  They looked like this:

  I wondered if this was the same impulse. To kill and love: to possess and consume and destroy something like a child. So I two fisted some beer. But then I started getting upset because Sarah wasn’t doing the day of debauchery with me.

  “O come on. Please?” I asked, but Sarah just kept watching her TV show. So I went into the bathroom and shut the door behind me. I jerked off and then I had an idea.

  I wanted beef jerky. Bad. I walked out the door and she asked me where I was going. I told her I was walking to the store to get some beef jerky. I thought, “She doesn’t understand my love of beef jerky. She doesn’t even know me.” Sarah laughed and kept flipping back and forth between a History Channel documentary and the serial killer shows on the TV.

  “It’s 9:30 in the morning, Scott,” she said. “I know it’s the day of debauchery but I don’t want you complaining about how you ate too much beef jerky later.”

  So I tried to open the front door of the house, but it wouldn’t open. Fucking door. It finally opened and I was on the porch except there was a broken brick on the porch that always fell off if you stepped on it wrong. So I hopped the broken brick which no one ever fixed. “Fucking brick, “ I said and I walked up the yard and around the hole where we had a big ass stump removed a month or so before.

  I walked around the edge of the hole but I kept looking in the hole. Then I felt myself losing my balance and then I was falling. FUCK. I was falling in the hole. Stupid fucking hole. I stood up and tried to look cool but there was nothing to cover it up. I’d fallen in a hole.

  Sarah opened the door and said, “Did you just fall in a hole?” I picked the leaves off my poofy sweater and I tried to wipe the mud off the knees of my pants.

  I said, “No.” And then I started drunk crying.

  Sarah said, “Well, why are you crying?” I walked back to the house and I told her it was true. I’d fallen in a hole and I’d lied about it. I kept crying. Sarah asked what she could do.

  I said, “You could do the day of debauchery with me.”

  Sarah smiled.

  A few minutes later I passed out in the back bedroom, but when I woke up I smelled pizza. Sarah had just gotten back from the store. She had two pizzas and a whole order of chicken wings. And there were cheesy breadsticks and there was beef jerky. There were two cartons of ice cream and some cookie dough and she was eating the cookie dough. She was eating the ice cream too and watching the television shows about murder. Then she went back to the kitchen and got a couple of pieces of pizza and some breadsticks and some wings. She ate the pizza and then she ate the wings and then she ate the bread sticks. Then she drank a big glass of milk and then she drank another big glass of milk and then she went to the bathroom. I didn’t know what was going on. She told me she wanted to be the best day of debauchery buddy in the world and then she shut the door behind her. The water was running and then she was in the bathroom for a little while and then I heard the toilet flushing. Sarah came back and her eyes were watering. I didn’t know what was going on, but I sort of did.

  She started eating the ice cream. She didn’t even put it in a bowl but just started spooning it out of the containers and eating it up. She ate big bites and the ice cream dribbled down her chin. She ate the whole thing of ice cream and then she went back to the kitchen and got another slice of pizza. Then she ate that too. She went to the bathroom and turned the water on. Then I heard flushing and she came back and I asked her if she was okay. She just smiled and asked if binging and purging was an acceptable day of debauchery activity.

  And so I knew what I should have done.

  I should have said no.

  I knew I should have said this wasn’t okay and she had taken it too far. But instead I just smiled. Instead I said inside my head, “I accept you. I accept you forever.”

  And by accepting her, I said this, “Will you accept me?”

  So we sat together and accepted one another.

  She started telling me about her eating and I told her about my pain. She told me she’d been doing it since she was a girl. She told me that the only thing she feared was the dentist because the dentist always knew. Dentists knew everything. Then she told me about all of the horrible things. She told me there were horrible things like a college boy who took her to the liquor store when she was 13 years old. He was so heavy and she couldn’t get out of the front seat. She saw him a few years later in her brother’s yearbook from college and the guy was smiling. She told me about her secrets and I told her about my secrets too. We shared our secrets together.

  She ran into the kitchen and picked up a knife. She started laughing and said we should kill ourselves together. I couldn’t tell if she was joking or not and so I started eating too. I ate pizza and I ate cookie dough. And then we started making plans. We talked about what murders we would make, and we talked about what banks we would rob. I felt my belly fill full and then I went to the bathroom and I was purging. I put my hand down my throat and I tried to breathe. I felt myself gagging and then the vomit baby that lived inside my belly started to push its way into my mouth. Then it was gone and I listened to the toilet water trickle and splash. I felt my stomach grow empty and rumbling and ready to be filled full again. I pushed the toilet handle and I watched the throw up islands disappear down the toilet in a cyclone surge of water. I wiped my mouth from throwing up the whole world and when I came back we talked about hijacking planes and we laughed. We talked about our revolution and the toppling of governments and the History Channel docs they would make about us one day. And we would do it together. We talked about the assassination of presidents and we smiled. We would start our revolution together and execute our enemies. We talked about taking over the world and how there would only be us. And so I shouted it now, “There is only us, Sarah. There is only fucking us.”

  It was around this time that Sarah got a job working as a nurse in the ICU. She used to come home in the evenings and tell me about working at the hospital. She told me about a young man with cancer whose bowels were impacted and how he was probably going to die. She told me that he’d developed an Anorectal Fistula.

  I said, “What the fuck’s that?”

  Sarah told me that’s where the body essentially creates a new asshole for you. The acid burns right through the skin and leaks shit.

  I said, “The body can make a new asshole for you?”

  Sarah told me that the body can do anything. So I imagined my body making new assholes. I imagined myself covered in assholes.

  * * *

  Sarah told me about another guy who was in need of a fecal transplant. She told me about his wife and how she cried and looked afraid.

  I said, “What? Wait. A fecal transplant?”

  She told me about how when the body has been through so much chemo it no longer reacts to antibiotics. Therefore, the doctors will transplant feces back into the body of a patient. There is bacteria in feces that will fight against infection.

  I said, “Does it have to be your own personal feces, or will it come from like a feces donor? If so, does the feces donor have to be related to you?”

  Sarah told me to shut up. I asked, “What about accepting feces from another species? Would monkey feces have the same impact?” Sarah told me to shut up.

  The next night she told me about the schizophrenic. He was 6 foot 5 and there were tattoos on his neck and tattoos on his eyelids and there were tattoos on the top of his shaved head. There was a note on the door that the nurses in psych made for him, “Please be careful around me. I suffer from delusional thoughts and hear voices that tell me to hurt friendly people like you. Please don’t help me hurt you.”

  Sarah heard about how he’d broken a nurse’s nose the week before. He thought she was the devil and he was god. Sarah wondered why everyone thought they were either a god or the devil. Sarah wondere
d, “Why doesn’t anyone hallucinate about how they work at a grocery store?”

  So Sarah sat down and washed his feet and started communicating with him. She noticed he had a devil’s face tattooed on his forearm and a nurse from the psych ward came in and told Sarah to make sure she kept her back to the door. Sarah said, “Don’t worry. I won’t let him get out.” The psych nurse just laughed and said, “No, honey. We’re not worried about him escaping. We’re just worried about him getting you stuck in the corner and beating you to death.” Then Sarah took care of the schizophrenic and looked at the tattoos on his arms.

  She said, “O that’s so pretty. You have so many of them on your arms too.”

  The schizophrenic guy looked at her like “Ah fuck. Here I am in the middle of a complete psychotic break with fucking Susie Sunshine.”

  So Sarah kept looking at his tattoos and there was one with a star and a date inside the star.

  “Is that your birthday?” Sarah asked.

  The schizophrenic guy didn’t answer. Sarah thought about his birthday and tried remembering what his sign was.

  She said, “Are you a Pisces? No.”

  “Are you a Sagittarius? No.”

  “Are you a Libra? No.”

  The guy finally had enough. He said, “I’m a fucking schizophrenic.”