Sick & Tragic Bastard Son

by Rowan Massey

  Chapter Seventeen

  Zander Age 18

  MY HEAD WAS in the clouds. Imagining following through on the plan during its most crucial point—being in his bed—had been no competition for reality. During the past few days, I’d had every emotion I’d thought was possible for me to pull through, and then some, sometimes all at once. I’d chained myself to the bathroom pipes twice in one day, missing a school day to do it. I’d been truly afraid that at any moment I would finally let myself snap—that I’d forget every reason to avoid the knife drawer in the kitchen and simply become calm…right before slicing my arms open. And I knew I would slice good and deep.

  Who knew what Mom was thinking. She was probably considering having me committed.

  Each stark moment of my sober waking hours was spent with reruns of every second I’d spent with Clay playing in my head. Some of the things he’d said kept going like a broken record until I literally pulled at my hair, or alternatively, got a huge grin on my face, which I couldn’t shut down, just like being high.

  I love you. I’ve always loved you…I love you. I’ve always loved you…I love you. I’ve always loved you… Why, oh god why, had I asked him to say that to me?

  But he’d told me his entire story and it had made me feel loved. I was really, truly loved all along, and I’d never known about it. My hatred for my father started shifting to my mom, and my priorities regarding Clay were changing utterly. I had been concerned with keeping up the lie, but only for as long as it took to have sex. After the act—after going home and freaking out a few days—I became determined to make the plan continue unfolding forever. Knowing that was impossible didn’t make any difference to me. It was what had to happen. Therefore, I went over my notes another ten times and wrote twice as many more pages. At one point, I went so far as to outline a few possible scenes in which, for instance, Lottie showed up. I needed to think through how it might play out. Should I be up front with her about being gay? If she caught me with Clay, I could play it all off as a wild coincidence, but it still made me nervous for the simple reason that she would associate my gayness with our dad’s gayness, and therefore be one step closer to the ugly truth.

  I’d told him I wanted to tell him my story, and I was still deciding which details to change when I did. Only things like Mom’s name or my full name qualified for a lie because I knew I was ending up with a lot of things to keep straight. I tried to imagine that everything was basically the same, except I’d reached age twenty. I’d take the lies from there.

  After having written on the front and back of every page in my notebook, which had been half full of homework to begin with, I took a photo of each page and resolved to only write things down in my phone from there on out because it would automatically be locked behind a PIN. I changed it to a random number, because it had been set to the year of my birth, and that seemed like a weak number to safeguard my lies behind. Typing things down with my thumbs was a pain but worth the peace of mind. I burned the notebook in the backyard while Mom was at work, then rubbed the ashes into the dirt until it disappeared.

  Clay and I had exchanged numbers and sent some text messages, but I didn’t suggest we should meet again quite yet, and neither did he. Unless he spilled his guts and cried with complete strangers regularly, he was overwhelmed too. I didn’t know him well but it seemed like he answered every message from me cautiously. The ellipses would linger on the screen for quite a while before he sent anything. A day hadn’t gone by when I didn’t get a “You doing okay today?” or “Nice day out. How’s it going?”. He was kind of dorky but I loved it. I already had a comfortable certainty that he would check in and have a few minutes casual conversation at least. I didn’t have to rev up the courage to be the first to text. He’d gotten nervous about my weirdness before I’d left his house, but I wasn’t worried he would decide against continuing to have a thing with me. He loved me, whether he knew it or not. That meant I didn’t have to worry about losing him. Sometimes, I was aware of how irrational that reasoning was, but most of the time, it made perfect sense to me.

  School started up again and I didn’t even mind returning to the lunch meat stench of the corridors. The constant drama of who’d fucked who, what immature feat of idiocy happened where, and why the latest teacher breakdown had transpired, simply didn’t penetrate the heavy glaze of wonder and fear I was experiencing.

  Someone started throwing wads of paper at me at my locker when I wasn’t looking. When I uncrumpled it, it had a crude drawing of a dick on it. Instead of being annoyed at the immaturity, I thought it was kind of funny. It happened three more times, and I spotted Greg and his stoner buddies pretending not to look my way, so I added tits and cum to the drawing and threw it back.

  Being goofy with people was not me. It was the opposite of me. But when I wasn’t trying to keep myself alive, sometimes with chains, I had a smile on my face. My mood shifts were sudden and dramatic, but when I wasn’t flipping out, I wanted to interact with people. Never could I have predicted such a change in myself. I thought about Lottie and Clay all the time. I wanted so badly to be in each of their lives, and that was only going to happen if I became a new person. I was downright enjoying becoming something else, turning wholesome, if only temporarily.

  Lottie was getting messages from me every day. It was similar to the dorky little conversations I had with Clay. We kept saying we should make plans, but we hadn’t yet.

  I was tossing my backpack into the car in the school parking lot, about to go home, when it struck me. There was a flash of white light so brief that it could barely have been said to have happened. My stomach was kicked, and I got that chilly, weak feeling of breaking out into a cold sweat. I’d had a thought…a confused thought that came from thinking about how Clay loved me. I’d thought to myself, We’re in love with each other.

  That meant I loved him. I was in love. With my father—one of the most loathed people in my existence. Could that make sense? Was it real?

  I got into the driver’s seat carefully, like an old man afraid of having a fall, and sat there, one leg out the door, for several minutes. Was it normal to think like that about someone I’d only met once, no matter who it was? No, but yes, but no. Swift changes in emotion rocked me. I didn’t want to ever be in love, did I? How could it be valid? I’d seen kids in school fall in love at the drop of a hat, many times over, always getting their hearts broken. But then, there were these rare types of couples that stayed together happily for years, seeming like any other happily married couple, only they were just high schoolers. Those couples had real love, not the infatuation and being-in-love-with-love stuff, not the thing some people had with getting too attached just because they’d had sex. Me and Clay definitely didn’t have those things going on. Maybe obsessing over him so constantly was just making me think I was in love. I realized I’d been subconsciously assuming everything I felt about Clay was mutual; that he loved me. And that, because I was aware of who I really was, he was also in some way aware and complacent, and that he loved me both as a son and a…a what? A boyfriend? No, maybe I was hoping to be his boyfriend, but…was that something I thought I could pull off?

  I never knew how much of what went through my mind was normal. If I worked off the assumption that any of my reactions were sane, which reactions were the sane ones, and which were the crazy ones? My thoughts kept going in weird circles of logic. Some part of me was aware of how irrational all of it was, but then I’d doubt myself again and end up at the beginning.

  I wanted to get drunk. I’d settle for high, but I was afraid I’d end up paranoid. Maybe Greg could get me more pills—pills of any kind. When I fished my phone out of my pocket, my arm would only move in floppy, weak motions. The phone ended up in the dirty footwell. Looking down at it, I had a memory of finding a bottle of wine in piles of junk in our car, back when we lived in it.

  It wasn’t okay. It wasn’t okay that I’d lived like that as a child. It wasn’t okay that I lived the way I did as a ne
w adult, knowing I had no future. What I was doing to Clay was somewhat justified. Yes, that was a sentiment I wanted to run with. Sure, I wanted to be in love the man, but I had to get over my baggage to do it. By taking advantage of his love, I was basically just taking what was mine.

  Renewed strength entered my limbs and I picked up the phone.

  Zandurr: I got a real need man. You gotta hook me upppp

  GeeGreg: parents are gunning for me no can do sry

  Fuck. Thinking about my options, I wandered through my acquaintances’ feeds, trying to think of anyone else who wouldn’t mind helping me out. There was that random goth girl who was into me, but I didn’t know if I wanted to risk encouraging her in any way. People could get crazy as soon as they got rejected.

  Who was I kidding? I knew what I really wanted. It wasn’t drinking or drugs that would make me better, saner, happier. Why shouldn’t I?

  Zander: You should quit work early. You deserve a break.

  Clay: I do? Here I thought I was a day behind.

  Zander: That day doesn’t count as a work day.

  Clay: How so?

  Zander: It’s our day.

  He typed a few times but didn’t answer for a while. Was it too much? Did saying “our day” sound too romantic, too soon? The things I felt for him had probably jumped way ahead of reality. My head started spinning while I tried to untangle the mess of truth and insanity, but his answer popped up and put me at ease again.

  Clay: Alright, Zander and Clay day it is. What do you have in mind?

  Jesus, I had a lot of things in mind. I considered saying something sexual, but I wanted to get to know him much more than I wanted to spend time…doing incest. My breath went in and out of my chest in two heavy sighs. What if I suggested going on a classic date? I’d never done that. I’d never sat at a restaurant across from somebody and had a conversation designed to get to know each other. It actually sounded kind of horrible. From the beginning of such activities, meeting strange men and having a quick roll in the hay had felt like the most natural thing I’d ever done. Dating had never seemed like something I’d ever have use for. But this was Clay. If I wanted to stay in his life, I had to be the new, undisturbed version of myself.

  Zander: What do you like to do for kicks besides jerking off to your personal library?

  Clay: The public library is usually an acceptable substitute.

  Zander: lol

  Zander: Doesn’t sound sexy.

  Clay: I’ll be downtown tonight to interview an author. It’s right across the street from a pub with good food. Interested?

  Zander: What time?

  After he gave me the place and time, we had a date. A fucking date. Who had I become? My mind kept sliding back and forth between being happy about it and his being the wrong person to get happy about. I just couldn’t care though. I kept going back to wanting to get more of him, and the soaring sensation I had when thinking about it was winning by a mile.

  I drove home and got a shower so I’d smell good for him. I’d only picked out the one good outfit to wear in front of him, not expecting to want to impress him more than once, so I spent quite a bit of time finding something that didn’t make me look like the ratty teenager I was. All I could come up with was a pair of khakis without stains and a shirt with a torn button hole. It had gotten damaged during one of my chained-up fits. It took me ten minutes of going through every over-stuffed junk drawer in the house to come up with both a needle and some white thread, which I used to painstakingly stitch it up. It was visible, but it looked better than it would have, so it would have to do.

  My hair took up pretty much all of my attention for two hours because it puffed up when it was drying and it freaked me out. I couldn’t show up with poofy hair. I was about ready to go shoplift some kind of hair goo, but after becoming completely dry, it smoothed out on its own.

  I never would have guessed anybody could make me worry about my hair. My entire life, I’d been utterly immune to any concerns over my looks. When I got old enough to start having sex, I’d started wanting to have good enough muscle tone to get the guys I wanted, but other than that, I’d never thought about what people saw when they looked at my hair, or got a whiff of my armpits, or saw the slightly weird thing going on with one of my big toe nails. I wanted Clay to think I was perfect.

  At nearly eight o’clock I found myself approaching the pub with a twist in my guts. It was as much excitement as nervousness. It was dark out and the big glass windows of the pub put all the people inside on display like living window dressing. Everyone was well dressed and smiling politely. They had probably come straight from their cushy office jobs to spend even more time with their coworkers. The place was decorated to look antique and warm with dim lighting and dark wood. It was absolutely not the kind of contrast I needed. I examined myself and considered tucking in my shirt, but I wasn’t wearing a belt. Clay was nowhere in sight and I was reconsidering everything.

  I turned tail and hid myself in the doorway of the boutique next door. Thank god I’d put all my notes on my phone. I took it out and started reading through all the stuff I’d thought I’d memorized well enough not to forget when I got nervous. But my brain was special. The letters swam on the screen a few times, then snapped back into their places when I put my frustrated focus on them. Some of the things I’d listed under the problem of looking older were: good posture, confidence, eye contact, less swearing, nice clothes, neat hair, no acne. I corrected my posture and ran a hand over my forehead and cheeks where I usually got breakouts. I’d checked for zits all over my body in the shower, but it was still reassuring to feel smooth, if damp skin. Running my hand over my shirt, I checked for wrinkles and stains for the tenth time.

  When I stood up straight, but relaxed, the way I’d practiced, I took notice of the large bookstore across the street. Out on the sidewalk was a folding blackboard that had been artfully decorated to say, “I’m Not Lying: Exploring Conversion Disorder by Monique Clarke. Book Signing 4PM-7PM”. He was probably still inside. I was seriously considering chickening out, but I also had a strong desire to at least lay eyes on him.

  I somehow remembered to look both ways and not get run over when I crossed the street. An image of a cartoon dog floating along in the air, nose following the scent of food, entered my mind. I knew Clay was close by, and I couldn’t resist.

  The windows of the store were blocked by displays, making it hard to see in, so I cautiously opened the old wooden door. A bell rang overhead. I cringed and hurried inside, afraid the sound would attract his attention. It had been a bad idea to come in. What if he didn’t like being interrupted when he was doing his job?

  He was nowhere to be seen. If he’d already stood me up, I was going to have a meltdown.

  “Looking for anything in particular?” I spun around and was faced with a friendly Asian girl in glasses.

  “Just browsing,” I mumbled. Turning away from her, my hip grazed a display full of get rich quick books. “Sorry.” I fixed the crooked stack and kept moving.

  Clay’s soft voice reached me from the back of the store. I cautiously went in that direction, pretending to look at whatever titles were in front of me in the isle. I didn’t think I was pretending very well. My fists were clenching and unclenching. I shook my hands out and took a slow breath. As I inched closer, I spotted him in a nook in the back corner. Two armchairs faced each other. The coffee table between them was crowded with bright red books with the title I’d seen outside. Clay was leaning forward, writing in a large notebook, and the author, a heavy-set woman in heels and an uncomfortable looking blue dress, sat relaxed into her chair.

  “How can someone become detached from their body to that extent? Can you explain how that feels for your patients?” he was saying.

  I backed up, keeping out of sight, and picked up a random book. The blurbs on the back danced together, but I ignored it and focused in on the conversation.

  “Well, it’s been described in many ways, but one of
my most memorable patients put it into words that I can’t forget. He’d developed a heavy speech impediment in just a matter of hours, and most of us couldn’t understand him. Since his hands were out of his control too, he couldn’t even write things down for us, not without a lot of focus.

  “He said his body had been possessed by a demon, and it had put him into a deep and extremely lonely place in his head. He was speaking metaphorically, but I still think about that description. He was very candid. He said everything was unfathomably far away, as if he were floating off into outer space like an astronaut without a tether, and that was why he couldn’t stop talking, or trying to talk. He was desperate to make a connection with the world. If he stopped talking, he would start getting scared that he’d never be able to reach out again. It reassured him when he got a response from someone.

  “He really did talk all day, about anything and everything. He spoke to his family members in ways he never had, told them things he’d never told them, all in an effort to reassure himself of his tangible existence.