The Road to Amazing

by Brent Hartinger

Min and I were quiet, listening. It felt like she was as interested as I was.

  Walker eyed us. The fact that we seemed so genuinely interested was somehow making him take the mystery of Amazing more seriously too.

  "Mass suicide," he said at last. "At least that's what I always heard."

  Mass suicide? I thought. This wasn't a very cheery thought, especially on my wedding weekend. On the other hand, it made more sense than an alien abduction. And I had said I wanted to know the truth.

  Min nodded. "That's what the articles all said."

  I felt stupid. Min had mentioned that album of articles back at the house, but I hadn't even bothered to look at them. Some amateur sleuth I was.

  "But Christie said people disappeared without a trace," I said. "So what about the bodies?"

  He nodded toward the rocky promontory to the left of the cove, the one that looked out over the water. "They jumped. The water took them away."

  Min and I stared at that outcropping of land, breathless. The sky was even darker now, but I made out a vague trail up the hill. It was sort of impossible not to visualize a line of people standing there, winding their way up to the top of the rock, and then, one by one, jumping out into the water. I imagined an old man with a cane and fur hat, and a woman with fly-away hair and an apron still covered with flour from the kitchen. A strapping young father stopped to clean his spectacles on his shirt, and another woman held the hands of two small twin boys (somehow the fact that it was twins made it especially tragic). Behind them, down the hill, the line of townsfolk twisted like the tail of a snake.

  "But still," I said to Walker, "the bodies. Wouldn't they have washed up somewhere?"

  "Maybe so," he said. He nodded out to the water again. "But that's Puget Sound out there, one of the narrowest parts. It doesn't look like it, but that water flows fast. If the tides were right, they coulda been all the way up to the San Juan Islands within an hour. Maybe some of them did wash up, but it was so far away that no one put two 'n two together. Or maybe they'd been in the water so long by then that no one recognized 'em."

  I wasn't familiar enough with forensics, or Puget Sound, to know if what he was saying made any sense, but it didn't seem completely crazy. It was a century ago, when the whole area was still pretty remote, and communication was probably seriously lacking.

  Still, it was pretty damn depressing. Part of me wanted to go back to the theory about alien abduction — the idea that the descendants of Amazing were still alive in a space ship somewhere, living on, unbeknownst to them, in some perfect recreation of their town.

  "I guess the other question is why," I said. "Why would a whole town commit suicide? Was it some kind of—?" I looked at Min. "What was that famous cult back in the seventies, where everybody killed themselves by drinking poison Kool-Aid?"

  "Jonestown," she said.

  I looked at Walker, but he smiled.

  "Well, if we knew that," he said, "we'd have already solved the mystery, wouldn't we?"

  Fair enough, I thought.

  "I'm curious," I said. "Is anybody still trying to figure out what really happened? Seriously investigating it, I mean?"

  "Oh, you know how it is," Walker said. "Every few years someone comes out here and makes a big deal about starting up an investigation — some grad student or something. But it's all for show. After all these years, what is there left to find? Besides—" At this, he leaned in close. "Do we really want to solve it? Isn't it better that there's still a little mystery left in the world?"

  Min and I both chuckled.

  "Absolutely," I said.

  "Well," Walker said, shuffling his feet a little, "congratulations to you and your—"

  "Husband," I finished for him, and I felt a flash of pride. Just because it was awkward to come out to people I didn't know, that didn't mean I didn't ever do it.

  His craggy face broke into a grin. "That so? Well, good for you!"

  He gave us a final wave, then turned and headed off into the trees.

  After he was gone, Min looked at me.

  "What?" I said.

  "You're totally thinking about the two of us going all Scooby Doo and being the ones who finally figure out the mystery of Amazing, aren't you?"

  "No!" I said, seemingly outraged by the suggestion. I hesitated. "Actually, I was thinking Veronica Mars."

  She laughed.

  "I know we're not going to do it," I said. "But wouldn't it be great?"

  Min turned toward the rocky promontory — the place where the citizens of Amazing possibly jumped to their deaths. Then she looked back at me, a twinkle in her eye.

  "Really?" I said. "You really want to go up there?"

  "Don't you?"

  I wasn't sure what I wanted. But I didn't hesitate to follow when Min started down the trail, then up the promontory. It was steep enough for switchbacks, but there weren't any. Instead the trail just angled directly upward, over ferns and between rocks, and I used them as handholds. It wasn't rock-climbing exactly — or if it was, it was an easy grade — but it was a pretty steep hike. Because of the incline of the trail, our feet scraped away the leaves and even the top layer of the soil, revealing a wet, rich dirt that was a reddish brown color and smelled like some exotic spice.

  If people really had jumped to their deaths from the top of this hill — a huge if — was this the trail they'd used to get there?

  Min and I didn't say another word until we reached the top. Tufts of grass grew in a small patch, surrounded by trees and ferns and jagged boulders. From that spot, we could see that the drop-off was much steeper on the other side of the promontory — a ragged cliff that plunged sixty or seventy feet down to the water, which sloshed onto rocks below. There was no beach here.

  Is this where the people jumped?

  I stared out into the waters of Puget Sound, and it felt a little bit like I was standing in the frame of a movie. Walker had said that the current moved by fast here, and it's true that the water wasn't anything like it had been that morning — still and glistening. Now it roiled and churned. But I couldn't see a current either. Somehow it seemed like it was moving in all directions at once.

  I felt bad that I wasn't sad, standing in a place where lots of people could have died — a little like when I felt guilty about not being more upset about that dead whale. But I didn't feel sad. On the contrary, I was exhilarated. For one thing, we didn't know that people had committed suicide here — it was probably only a stupid story, not much more likely than an alien abduction.

  The wind blew in my hair, and a spray of cool mist washed over me, and suddenly it seemed so stupid, my worrying about getting married (not that I'd been that worried to begin with). Walker was right about Amazing — about the importance of mystery in the world. Marriage was another mystery, but then so was all of life. You couldn't predict the future about anything.

  Sometimes you just have to make a leap of faith and hope that things turn out for the best, I thought.

  We stood there watching the world a few minutes longer, breathing in the wind, neither of us saying a word.

  Finally, Min said, "Well?" She meant, "Ready to go?"

  I took a deep breath. Then I said, "Yeah, I'm ready."

  At that exact moment, the clouds broke, and it started to rain. I knew it had been clouding over, but it hadn't looked especially like rain.

  In less than a minute, the whole world collapsed into a downpour.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Min and I were drenched by the time we made it back to the house, even though it had only been a five-minute walk (and we'd been under the cover of trees the whole time).

  After we dried off, we joined the others in the main room.

  "It's really coming down," I said.

  "It is," Vernie said, sitting in a chair by the window with her Kindle.

  "D-four," Ruby said. She and Nate were playing Battleship at the dining room table.

  "Miss," Nate said.

  I looked around the room. I didn't know
if it was the rain outside or what, but everyone exuded calmness. Min joined them, taking a seat and starting to read her phone.

  Kevin stood watch by the glass door out to the deck, staring at the rain. I crossed over to him. Outside, the raindrops made little explosions against the wood.

  "H-eight," Nate said, over at the table.

  "Oh," Ruby said. "Hit."

  "Really?" he said.

  "Yeah."

  "Ripper, you little!"

  Ripper, you little? Nate's Australian slang made no sense whatsoever.

  To Kevin, I said, "I still say weather forecasts are mostly quackery, but I guess they were right this one time."

  He nodded, but didn't smile. He kept watching the rain.

  "It'll be okay," I said. "We'll just move everything inside tomorrow. That was the whole point of getting this big house, remember? Having a back-up plan."

  He nodded again, but still didn't look at me.

  I put my hand on Kevin's arm. "Seriously. It'll all be okay."

  He put on a bright face at last, but only for a second. Then he turned away, hypnotized by the rain.

  "E-three," Ruby said.

  "Miss," Nate said.

  I joined the others. I didn't want to harsh the mellow of the room, so I sat down to do a little reading of my own. I remembered what Min had talked about back in Amazing — that photo album somewhere in the house with article clippings about the whole mystery. I was about to ask her where it was when I noticed Otto off in a corner reading his phone.

  There was a strange expression on his face: totally engrossed, but also sad, like he was watching YouTube videos of kittens being kicked.

  I almost said something, but then I remembered what he'd muttered at the farmers' market about his being on social media — implying it was a bad thing. Out of curiosity, I fired up my own phone and did a quick search on his name.

  There were lots of great articles on him and his whole story: how he created a web series about his life as an actor with facial scars, and how it eventually got him cast on Hammered. There were also lots of photographs and videos of him attending premieres and charity events, always in designer clothes (he really did clean up well). That all made me smile.

  But as I kept scanning, I saw things I'd never seen before, things he'd never posted on Facebook or Tumblr.

  For one thing, there was sort of a backlash against the show. This surprised me at first. From my point of view, it seemed like the world couldn't ever get enough movies and TV shows about college kids getting drunk and having sex. But a lot of people didn't like Hammered, including a lot of critics, and of course they felt the need to trash it online. This exasperated me. My attitude about TV shows had always been that if you don't like something, don't watch it. (That said, a few shows, like Girls, were so ridiculously overrated that they might possibly deserve to be trashed.)

  Anyway, I kept reading, and I discovered that a lot of people were upset over Otto's character too. This surprised me even more. A positive character with facial scars in a major TV show? Who wouldn't think this was a good thing?

  Now I was annoyed. Were people just stupid or what?

  Weirdly, even some other burn survivors were upset. I found one post in a disability forum, "Otto Digmore Should Be Ashamed of Himself!"

  It read:

  There's a new show on the CW, Hammered, which includes a burn survivor character by the name of Dustin, played by an actual burn survivor actor, Otto Digmore.

  I guess I'm not surprised that Dustin is barely in the show at all. He's lucky if he has four lines per episode. I'm also not surprised the character is completely defined by his scars. At the same time, we don't really learn anything about him, about his treatment regimen, the pain he's in. He's always happy and cheerful. No scary emotions from the scarred guy! Naturally, he's completely asexual too, the one character in this whole stupid teen sexy comedy show who never gets laid.

  But be careful what you wish for. In the "No One Wears Tighty-Whities" episode, Dustin finally gets his own storyline. In this Very Special Episode, it turns out people are making fun of him for being scarred! Of course he's completely powerless to solve his own problem. That's a job for our hero, Mike Hammer, whose heart finally grows three sizes that day, and he steps in and tells the bullies to go to hell. Basically, Dustin only exists so Mike can learn an Important Lesson About Tolerance, and the show can show us what a great, decent guy Mike is, in between all his debauchery and casual sex.

  I'm not sure what pisses me off more about this show: the idea that it gives such a completely stereotypical view of burn survivors, or that the producers are making money off our pain.

  FUCK YOU, CW!

  And Otto Digmore, you should be ashamed of yourself!

  Now I was completely confused. This didn't make any sense at all. Was it like how some LGBT people wrote about gay and trans issues online? No matter what anyone did, it wasn't enough. They assumed the worst possible motives about everyone except themselves, thinking the entire rest of the world was one hundred percent evil, completely consumed by racism, sexism, and transphobia (even when, I'm sorry to say, things were sometimes a lot more complicated than that).

  I kept reading about Otto, and I saw things that downright shocked me, which is really saying something given that it was the Internet.

  Someone had even posted pictures that were supposedly of Otto naked, from some hook-up website. I was pretty sure the photos weren't of him, but so what if they were? Who hasn't taken pictures of themselves naked? And let's face it: Otto's scars gave him a unique dating challenge. I'd been out with him to bars and clubs, and people always stared, but no one — not one single person in all the time I'd been out with him — had ever asked him to dance, or asked him out, or even come up to talk to him.

  Not everything I read was bad. Some people wrote supportive stuff, and Otto had plenty of admiring fans: he was a good-looking guy, full stop, no qualifiers necessary, and his body seemed even better now than when we dated. At some point, Otto had posed for a series of sexy shirtless beefcake photos, which I thought was so incredibly cool, and probably the most subversive thing imaginable a guy like him could do. I was so proud that I lived in a time when a guy with a scar covering half his face and part of his body could be a sex symbol.

  But I couldn't get over what other people were saying online — about how he was a freak, how it looked like his face was melting, and on and on. There were even a whole bunch of evil hashtags: #OttoDigmoreSkinCare, #OttoDigmoreIsOnFire, #ScarierThanOttosFace.

  Seriously? I thought. Making fun of a guy who had scars on his face? Talk about punching down.

  At this point, I was outright livid. I honestly couldn't remember the last time I'd been so angry about anything.

  As I sat there stewing, Otto got up to use the bathroom. I followed him, waiting in the hallway outside until he was done.

  When he came out again, I said, "Fuck them!"

  He flinched. He hadn't expected me to be waiting for him.

  "What?" he said.

  "I did a search on you," I said. "I saw the kinds of things that people are writing."

  "Russel—"

  "No, seriously. Fuck them. Just fuck them."

  He sighed and slouched back against the wall. "It's not that easy," he said.

  "Sure it is! Fuck them! Fuck them, fuck them, fuck them!"

  Otto smiled, but it wasn't like he was really hearing me.

  "I mean it!" I said. "Just fuck them all to hell."

  He turned to look at me. "Did you see the Reddit stuff? Or the 'Otto Digmore' Halloween costumes?"

  I shook my head no. Apparently, I hadn't even seen the worst of it!

  "A year ago, I would have thought the same thing," he said, "that I could blow it all off, or even laugh about it. But it's different than you think. The hatred of the Internet is so strange. You can't imagine what it feels like until it's directed at you. It's like it has an actual substance, like it's a hurricane, dark and ug
ly and evil." He stopped and stood upright again. "Oh, God, listen to me. I'm sorry, Russel. I get a role on a sitcom, all my dreams come true, and here I am bitching about it to you."

  "Otto, knock it off. I asked you. Of course you can talk about this stuff. Just because things are going well, that doesn't mean your life is perfect. I totally get how in some ways, it might even be worse."

  He thought about it for a second, then he said, "Fame isn't what I thought it was going to be. I mean, some things are great — a lot of things are great. But still."

  The truth is, it was weird talking to Otto about this. I would've given anything to be able to say things like, "Fame isn't what I thought it was going to be." Still, this was Otto, who was the most deserving person of fame in the whole world. I was jealous, but only a very little bit.

  "So stop reading it," I said. "The stuff online. I know it's probably hard, but force yourself."

  "That's what everyone says, but it's so much easier said than done. Seriously, I saw Jennifer Lawrence at this thing a couple of weeks ago?"

  "You know Jennifer Lawrence?"

  At least he had the decency to blush. "Ah, Russel, I really am sorry. Really? I'm name-dropping? How pathetic is that?"

  "No! Are you kidding? You know Jennifer Lawrence! That's definitely okay to talk about!"

  "I don't know her. I've met her. Like, twice. Anyway, one of those times we had a conversation for a whole ten minutes, and we talked about this."

  "About how they stole her nude photos," I said, nodding. But I immediately felt like an idiot. Why in the world had I brought up nude photos?

  "Not only that," Otto said. "All of it. How she was so beloved, and then the whole backlash, and the Sony email thing, and yeah, the nude photos. And also about the Internet in general, the idea that everyone has an opinion about you, and a lot of people have a really, really strong negative opinion. Anyway, it doesn't really matter if you read it or not, somehow you know it's there. Publicists and executives and show-runners, they talk about it. And then reporters ask you about it — they Google the hell out of you, and they just assume you've heard it all."