We Contain Multitudes

by Sarah Henstra

  I guess I must have been pretty drunk because I thought their voices were quieter too, through the glass. I kept experimenting—holding the bottle up to my face, to one side and then the other, to see whether the volume changed along with the image.

  So I more or less missed the entire argument, but Shayna started getting more and more upset. Whatever anger she’d started with sort of cartwheeled right over into sadness. She started sobbing, and soon she couldn’t get any more words through the tears. Bron tried to hug her but Shayna shoved her away.

  “You’re not my friend. You’re not my friend,” she kept saying, gasping and stuttering through all the crying.

  Other people at the party started to notice and hang around and ask if everything was okay. Finally Bron punched me and told me to please get off my ass and take Shayna upstairs, to see if I could calm her down.

  I had to pretty much carry Shayna upstairs. She wasn’t fighting me so much as just crying so hard she couldn’t move. Some freshmen were making out in Bron’s bed. They threw their clothes on when I came swaying in with Shayna, saying, “Sorry, man, sorry, it’s all yours.” It was the kind of thing Shayna would normally find hilarious, but I don’t think she even noticed them.

  She did calm down though. She lay on Bron’s bed taking long, shuddery breaths. Hiccuping. I lay there beside her and stroked her hair off her face, which was soaking wet with greasy black tears and probably snot. I just kept petting her hair like she was a cat.

  I was drifting in and out a bit. Once I looked at her and my hand was just lying there heavy on her ear. Her eyes were open, bloodshot and miserable in their black raccoon-circles, staring at me. The next time I woke up, both my hands were squashed under my cheek, and Shayna’s eyes were closed.

  And the next time I woke up she was on top of me. Kissing me. Half her clothes off, then all of them. Then my shirt.

  Why didn’t I stop her? Why didn’t I stop myself? I don’t know. I wish I could say I was too drunk. That I didn’t know what was going on. But the truth is, I knew. I knew. So why didn’t I stop?

  She unzipped my jeans or I did it myself. Pushed them down. There was a condom, and I rolled it on.

  I don’t know. Maybe I thought it would be easier this way. That everything would be easier.

  She sat up on me and slid down and up again. Rocked forward and back. I don’t know why I didn’t stop it. But I have to say that it was easy. It was easy and fast.

  Just like this, I was thinking, the whole time. Easy. Everything will be so much easier this way.

  Sincerely,

  AK

  Saturday, May 14 (continued)

  Dear Kurl,

  You’re the expert in pain. We’ve never really talked about it, but you must be intimately acquainted with every detail of how pain operates inside the human body.

  How many times must you have stumbled to the bathroom and run the water cold and cupped it for long, long minutes to your face, or put your back to the cold shower and bowed your head and waited for numbness? Waited, waited to feel something less, something else.

  And there’s no thought possible during that waiting, is there? The pain and the waiting for something other than the pain is all there’s room for. Nothing else.

  I don’t need to tell you about pain, do I, Kurl?

  I opened Bron’s bedroom door and saw you. You and Shayna. The two of you. My sister’s naked back arching. Her legs straddling you.

  I didn’t even look at your face. I didn’t need to see your face to recognize your bare thighs, the sole of your bare foot with its ruddy toe pads and the wide, pale stretch of your instep.

  I closed the door before I exhaled. Or I may not have exhaled at all. A lost breath.

  The pain was still centered in my ribs, stabbing through my chest. But now it radiated everywhere, the pain. It torqued my ribs on both sides from spine to sternum. It seized my hips and knees, so that I missed four or five steps on the stairs back down to the main floor.

  I spilled Lyle’s pills everywhere in the hall. A few people started picking them out of the carpet, but I hollered at them until they backed away and let me grope around and shove the tablets back into the bottle.

  One of Bron’s brothers’ friends poured me a few shots in the kitchen, and some time passed that way. After a while I went to the bathroom and vomited, and I saw some of Lyle’s pills floating in the vomit in the toilet bowl.

  So this time, when I went back to the kitchen, I crushed up a few more pills with the handle of a knife and bent over and licked them off the counter. I wanted to snort them—in that moment I very seriously wanted to be the kid at the party doing oxy on the kitchen counter—but I was too frightened by the specter of nosebleed, of overdose, of coma, or death.

  Oddly enough, I wasn’t thinking about Raphael at all when I crushed the pills. I wasn’t thinking about Lyle’s revelation. I’d forgotten it entirely, in fact. I wasn’t thinking about anything except the pain, ending the pain.

  Izzy and Ezra’s friends took a few of the pills for themselves and gave me a few more shots.

  I started joking around a bit. I folded paper towels into various birds. Someone pointed out that my scarf had puke on it, so I took it off and fed it into the garbage disposal, which got jammed and made a loud whining noise. One of the twins got upset about that and told me it cost $1,700 to repair that machine. For some reason this was the funniest thing I’d ever heard: Bron’s younger brother knowing the precise cost of repairing a garbage disposal unit.

  Someone put on Barry White, so I climbed up on the kitchen island next to the sink to do a strip tease. I took off my belt first and did a few lariat moves with it, then got to work on my shirt buttons, which proved quite difficult because my fingers had begun to feel like rubber bands.

  There was lots of laughter and jeering at my performance, but when I started to feed my belt into the garbage disposal alongside the scarf, the twins—Izzy and Ezra both, this time—decided enough was enough. They each grabbed one of my arms and hauled me down to the floor. They threw my shirt and belt at me and told me to get the hell out of their kitchen.

  Out by the pool was Dowell. He and the other butcherboys weren’t in the hot tub, just sprawling on the deck chairs watching the girls splash around. Maya was wearing a red bikini.

  Why were the butcherboys at Bron’s party? It didn’t make sense, but then suddenly it made perfect sense to me. Perfect that they should be there, right in the middle of all this pain.

  I dropped my shirt and belt on the end of Dowell’s lounge chair and sat down directly in his lap. I wrapped my arms around his neck. I don’t know exactly what I said to him—“I miss you,” or something—but he got to his feet so fast that his beer bottle shattered on the concrete.

  The butcherboys started shoving me around, but I kept managing to shimmy up against Dowell anyhow. I guess he was so used to me trying to put distance between us that he didn’t know how to defend himself when I was determined to close the distance instead.

  Maya was hopping around, all excited, back on her theme from earlier, in Cherry Valley: how I’d ratted them out and how they were going to kick my ass. “Hit him, already!” she yelled. She picked up my belt and shoved it into Dowell’s hands. “Here! Hit him, you moron.”

  Dowell obediently swatted me with the belt once, twice.

  I kept talking, I don’t know what—“What’s the matter, Christopher; we used to be such good friends”—something like that—and one of the butcherboys, Liam, I think, held me by the arms while Dowell started smacking me harder with the belt.

  I marveled each time it made contact with my back, my shoulders, my neck, how little it hurt. Lyle’s pills were marvelous. The adrenaline and fear coursing through me felt fresher and less poisonous than the pain I’d been feeling earlier, upstairs.

  Then the belt struck Liam’s fingers. He swore and dropped me, and my chest bounced off the edge of the deck chair right where my ribs hurt worst, and I heard myself let out a sc
ream.

  By now a whole circle of people had gathered around, and Dowell kept swinging with the belt but missing as often as he hit, saying, “You sick little perv; you dirty little faggot,” stuff like that, really gasping now, too, all out of breath with the effort and his fury.

  I turned to look at him and the belt caught me across the cheekbone and eyelid. I heard the scream again—mine, my scream. I couldn’t see, and I put up my hand to check because I thought he’d put my eye out.

  But there was less pain, Kurl. That was all I’d been waiting for, all I’d been working toward, since I saw you upstairs with my sister.

  Yours,

  Jo

  Saturday, May 14 (continued)

  Dear Little Jo,

  Shayna and I came downstairs to the empty den. We didn’t say much. I’d asked her a couple of times, as we put our clothes back on, if she was okay.

  She’d finally said, “Don’t be an idiot. Nothing is okay.”

  There wasn’t much to say after that. In the den a thread of smoke ran diagonally from a hole in the couch cushion to the open patio doors. A cigarette butt. I plucked it out of the hole and dropped it into an abandoned beer. I wondered how much time had passed, because the crowd had really thinned out.

  Then I heard you scream, Jo.

  I mean maybe any teenaged boy’s voice would break on a scream like that, but I knew it was you, and Shayna knew it too. She was out the doors ahead of me, shoving through the crowd by the pool.

  I didn’t see the butcherboys. I don’t think I even saw you, not really, not until afterward.

  I saw only one thing: the belt. The belt striking bare shoulders, the belt coming down and biting into bare flesh. That belt was the only thing in the universe.

  The report they asked me to sign stated that it was a short fistfight. I guess Shayna must have told the cops that, or maybe Bron. I remember those specific words from the report because of how much they looked like a lie. Fight was the wrong word. Short was wrong too. It went on forever. Like pulling a trigger again and again and waiting for the chamber to be empty and the chamber never emptying.

  I swung and hit and held on and hit more until my fists were pulped. Until my palms throbbed and my knuckles were numb. Then I got hold of the belt and swung it and struck with it until I felt the muscles burn in my elbow and shoulder. But even then, nothing had emptied out of me. Nothing lessened or eased even by the smallest amount.

  So what finally stopped me? Nothing. I could have kept going forever. I could have killed him. And I’m not saying that I eventually noticed I was overdoing it and chose to stop. I’m saying that I could easily have killed Christopher Dowell and not even known the difference.

  The thing about writing is that it depends on facts. It depends on knowing certain things: the meanings of words, for one. Like temper. As in, Adam Kurlansky has quite a temper. As in, Adam Kurlansky lost his temper.

  So which is it? Do I have a temper or did I lose it? Which is better? Is a temper a fever, as in running a temperature? Or is it a kind of madness, as in a distempered dog that attacks a baby and needs to be put down?

  In my case I guess it’s distemper. This rage. It’s like a sick old dog that someone left on my front doorstep, this hideous creature I never wanted to be in charge of. It stinks, this dog. It’s ugly and vicious. I leave it locked in the mudroom, and I keep guests in the other part of the house so they won’t hear the whining or smell the piss.

  But it is always there, this rage. It won’t die even though I starve it. It’s always there, just waiting for someone to open the door. It doesn’t care who happens to open the door either. It’s just waiting for someone to make a wrong turn in the house and reach out and turn the knob. It’s waiting for its chance to lunge and bite down and not let go no matter what.

  Sincerely,

  AK

  Saturday, May 14 (continued)

  Dear Kurl,

  All I really had in mind was keeping the pain at bay as long as possible, and the hot tub seemed like a pretty good bet. No one was in the tub anymore—they were all gathered around you and Dowell, or what was left of Dowell. Apparently I am the one who insisted Bron call the police—Shayna says I started yelling at her to call the police as soon as I saw you pick up my belt. I honestly have no memory of that, though.

  I just remember realizing, halfway into the hot tub, that I was still wearing my trousers and that the hot water and chlorine would almost certainly ruin the wool. And then my sock slipped on the wet vinyl and I went in up to my neck and felt the hot water against my back like knives slicing into every single one of the welts at once.

  By the time you guys figured out where I’d slunk off to, the cops were on their way and everyone had fled the party. You came over and tried to lift me out of the water by the armpits, but I slipped away from you. I ducked my head under the water and came up gasping at the pain in my eye.

  And that’s how the police found us: me stretched out in the hot tub with my wool trousers turning to felt around my legs, you crouched at the tub’s edge with your hands submerged in the foam, Bron and Shayna arguing in furious hushed voices a few feet away, and Dowell slumped all alone nearby, hands over his face.

  The paramedics took care of Dowell first, tipping him over like a side of beef and levering him expertly onto a stretcher. Professionals.

  Then one of the paramedics told me to get out of the hot tub. I tried my best to comply, but I was so dizzy that two of them had to help me. They propped me on the deck with a blanket wrapped around my shoulders and helped me to drink a glass of water.

  “They’ve been at him all year,” Shayna told the cops. “You can ask anyone.”

  “There was a big incident earlier today at school,” Bron said. “Look at the bruises on his chest. He’s a target, pure and simple.”

  “Look at his back. Just look at it!” Shayna started crying. The cops were trying to talk to you, Kurl, but Shayna wouldn’t let anyone get a word in. “Adam really cares about my brother. Enough was enough. Something had to be done.”

  “Adam is your boyfriend?” the one officer asked her, and Shayna didn’t answer.

  I saw your head turn to look at my sister.

  “Adam,” said the other cop, the female one. “Are you her boyfriend? Is that why you got involved?”

  “Is this a bullying scenario?” the male cop asked. “Your girlfriend’s little brother is gay, and he’s getting picked on?” He was writing it all down on his pad of paper.

  You didn’t say anything, and neither did Shayna. But Bron was nodding, now. “Can you blame Adam? It’s really hard to watch. Jonathan is a really sweet kid; he doesn’t deserve this abuse. Gay bashing. All this homophobia.”

  The cop wrote everything down. They hunted around the house for more witnesses, but everyone was gone, including, of course, the butcherboys.

  They consulted with the ambulance crew about Dowell and me and decided that I shouldn’t be forced to ride in the same ambulance as my assailant, so they called a second one for me. They needed to run an X-ray on my chest, they said.

  As we waited for the second ambulance to arrive, I volunteered the information about the painkillers and alcohol in my system. It took me a few tries to get the words clear enough for them to understand me. I was dizzy and getting sleepy in the blanket, and I was suddenly worried I might die. It felt like I might be dying.

  Meanwhile I could hear that the police kept threatening to take you into the station, Kurl, to get a proper statement if you wouldn’t tell them, in your own words, what had happened.

  But you wouldn’t say anything beyond your name. You just kept saying you were sorry, and your eyes were empty black hollows in your face. Your knuckles were bruised and scraped raw, so it was obvious that you’d done a lot of punching.

  And Bron—and eventually Shayna joined in, too—both of them kept saying that you had merely been defending me, that you’d had to intervene to defend me from the bullies. Me, meaning your girlfriend’
s little brother. The little brother of your girlfriend, Shayna.

  Yours,

  Jo

  Saturday, May 14 (continued)

  Dear Little Jo,

  The most important thing isn’t even that I’m sorry. I mean I am sorry. I’ve never been sorrier for anything in my life. I know it must feel like betrayal. It is betrayal. Not just with anyone but with your sister. The worst kind of betrayal probably. I’m so sorry.

  But that’s not the most important thing. What’s most important is that you’re done with me, Jo. It’s absolutely crucial. It’s not just that it’s easier for both of us. It’s safer too. It will be safer for you. Because there is one fact in all of this you can depend on. One fact that I have now proved to myself and everyone else without a doubt: I am totally out of control. It could have been anyone I was hitting on that pool deck. It could have been you, Jo. I mean I couldn’t even tell the difference.

  Sincerely,

  AK

  Saturday, May 14 (continued)

  Dear Kurl,

  The emergency room was teeming with emergencies. There was a wheezing toddler blue around the lips. There was a drunk man with a nail through the palm of his hand. There was an old woman lying across three seats crying and moaning and clutching her side while a younger woman spoke to her angrily.

  Shayna and I sat side by side in egg-shaped orange plastic chairs. She’d somehow found my shirt on the pool deck, so I was wearing that, but they’d peeled off my wet pants en route so I had just the ambulance blanket wrapped around me from the waist down. They’d talked about leaving me on the gurney, but then they needed the gurney for a man whose appendix had exploded.