The History of Jane Doe

by Michael Belanger

  “Hi, Ray.”

  “Hi, Simon.”

  “So . . .”

  These awkward pauses haven’t always been there. The spaces Jane used to fill. We’re still adjusting, recalibrating, waiting for time to shrink or expand or whatever it does.

  Simon hits the light switch and automatically shields his eyes, a habit he picked up from reading too much vampire lit. “I can’t believe tomorrow’s the first day of senior year,” he says.

  “Don’t remind me,” I say. Another first day of school. Everyone’s favorite day to show off new sneakers, industrial-grade binders, and pens that write in more than one color of ink. But what people forget is what happens after first days: second days and third days and fourth days. And Jane won’t be there for any of them.

  “Remember those shoes that light up when you walk?” Simon asks. “Well, I found an outlet in Canada that sells them in adult sizes. The website says they’re coming back in style. You don’t think Canada has different fashion than America, do you?”

  “There are no borders when it comes to cool shoes,” I say.

  “That’s what I thought,” Simon says. He takes a seat on my bed and looks around the room, a barren landscape of my dirty laundry, plates riddled with crumbs, and open history books lying facedown on the ground, stuck on various episodes of Burgerville’s history.

  “Do you want me to pick you up tomorrow?” Simon asks, looking worried.

  “I guess.”

  “Ray?”

  “Simon?”

  “Are you sure everything’s okay?”

  This time, I decide to take a different approach: I close my eyes and begin to snore.

  “Okay, I know you don’t have that disease where you immediately fall asleep”—Simon pauses—“or do you? And you’ve just been keeping it a secret from me this whole time?”

  I open my eyes. “I don’t have narcolepsy.”

  “Good to look on the bright side,” Simon says. “That’s the worst disease. Body parts literally fall right off.”

  “Um, Simon, you’re thinking of leprosy,” I say. I laugh and let my head fall back onto the chair. It must be the first time I’ve laughed in days. My cheeks hurt. Chest heavy. Those muscles haven’t been getting much of a workout.

  We make small talk for a little while, topics ranging from a weird dream Simon had where he was eating a gigantic mango—“But then I realized, it was me. I was the mango”—to Mr. Parker’s recent pictures in the Burgerville Gazette dressed as Batman, then Simon stands up and tells me to get excited for the first day of senior year—mostly because we’ll now be occupying the lunch tables closest to the dessert line.

  “I’ll do my best,” I say.

  Simon walks over to me and grabs my shoulder.

  “I miss her too,” he says. After an awkward pause, the moment heavy with all of the things we wish we could say but don’t, Simon turns and walks away, almost tripping over a book about the colonial history of Burgerville as he makes his way out the door.

  To be honest, I’ve never been the type of person to get excited about the first day of school, but now it’s especially hard, even to fake it. Being around other people is difficult. Rich says I’m isolating myself, letting my “cognitive distortions” push people away. That’s when I usually start zoning out, nodding politely as I visualize my next meal.

  But still, it’s good to see Simon, even if it’s just to laugh for a little while. He’s always been really good at cheering me up. It’s a skill I credit to his family’s history, a long lineage of people who had no choice but to look on the bright side and cash in on their shortcomings.

  Simon’s great-grandfather, for example, served in World War I until he fell in the first battle fought by Americans. And when I say fell, I mean he literally fell straight onto his bayonet. But that didn’t stop him from becoming a war hero. No, sir. Because his impalement happened only a few seconds after the first shots were fired, he spent the rest of his life bragging to any reporter who would listen about his heroic exploits as the first American casualty of the Great War.

  Simon’s grandfather followed the war hero tradition and became a decorated Korean War veteran, famous for his heroic charge against a battalion of North Korean soldiers in the darkest days of the war. But it turns out most of his war stories weren’t exactly true. First, he charged a group of South Korean soldiers. Whoops! And although the press reported him saying, “We will never surrender!” he actually screamed, “We surrender!” After people found out the truth, the government stripped him of all his war medals and he wrote a book chronicling his journey to infamy. It’s called From Hero to Zero: America’s Most Hated Soldier and it topped the Burgerville bestseller list three years in a row—an accomplishment Simon is proud to point out paid for his braces.

  That’s probably why Simon can be excited about senior year. Why he can miss Jane and still talk about buying shoes. In the world of the Blackburns, misfortune is just an inevitable stumbling block on the road to fame and fortune.

  For some people, though, the past is too heavy; you can only move so far until you start to sink.

  Or, since Rich is always correcting my use of second person: I can only move so far until I start to sink.

  253 DAYS BEFORE

  ALTERNATIVE DIMENSIONS

  The first time I actually spoke to Jane was during class the day after she made her grand entrance. Mr. Parker was out sick, which wasn’t a surprise, considering his illnesses usually coincided with various comic book conventions. He’d lined up Mr. Coots as a substitute, a man who had perfected the art of taking naps in public places, with schools being his specialty. Coots lost his pinky finger in the Vietnam War and typically spoke as if he were yelling over a helicopter. He always appeared on edge, like he expected the class to rebel and take over. He would read the newspaper and eventually fall asleep, at which point the class would descend into chaos until the bell rang. Sometimes he’d wake up, look disoriented, as if still caught in a dream, then share the story about how he lost his finger. “You know what I was doing when I was your age?!” he’d bark at the class. Everyone would stop what they were doing and listen.

  “I was in ’Nam!” he’d yell.

  Blank stares.

  “Vietnam!” he’d yell again. “Fighting the North Vietnamese Army! That’s how I lost this!”

  He’d hold up the stub of his finger and make a biting motion. “Damn NVA soldier bit ’er right off!”

  Someone would work up the courage to ask him what happened to the soldier, and the story was different every time.

  The gratuitous: “I bit off his finger and cooked it in a stew!”

  The inexplicable: “We’re good friends now!”

  The simple: “He’s dead!”

  The mind-fuck: “There was no NVA soldier!”

  On this particular day, he was still asleep, reclining far back in his chair, eyes closed, lightly snoring. Spitballs littered his desk, the result of a five-dollar bounty for the first person able to hit him right between the eyes.

  I finished the worksheet—a comic strip of RNA rescuing DNA—and proceeded to zone out, imagining ways I could find an excuse to talk to the mysterious stranger who now sat next to me. Every so often, I’d glance at her, pretending to look at the clock. It made me feel daring, like I was stealing fire from the gods.

  She had on a huge pair of headphones that looked like earmuffs. Instead of doing the worksheet, she was drawing something in her notebook. She tapped her foot on the floor in a double-time rhythm, the nervous patter syncing up with the faint sound of acoustic guitar escaping her headphones.

  Then a miracle happened. She took off her headphones and placed a folded piece of paper on my desk. I opened it with the awe of a pirate receiving a treasure map. On it, there was a drawing of Coots peacefully napping at his desk, drool spilling out of his mouth, hair com
ing out of his ears, while outside the window what looked to be a nuclear explosion billowed into a mushroom cloud. On the bottom, Jane had written: Trade you this fine piece of art for the answers?

  I laughed and turned to look at her. She pointed at the worksheet, where Captain RNA and DNA Man were rambling on about mitochondria and alleles and all of their heroic exploits in the human body.

  I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I nodded and handed her the worksheet. She looked almost disappointed as she took the paper and began copying down the answers, like she was waiting for me to say something.

  With girls in Burgerville, I’d always operated under the assumption that the less I spoke, the better. When I got nervous, I tended to tell really long and depressing stories about history. (What? You don’t want to hear about another brutal form of torture from the Middle Ages?)

  But not Jane. She seemed like one girl who might actually be interested in learning about the Head Crusher or Pear of Anguish.

  It reminded me of this documentary I’d recently watched called Alternative Dimensions. They had a bunch of scientists and people in bow ties talking about how there are a million different universes out there with people just like us, only slightly different. After it ended, I had this sneaking suspicion that I was born in one of the bad dimensions—not nearly as bad as the one with giant insects, but still, not my first choice either. But when Jane entered the picture, it was like I suddenly found myself in the right dimension.

  That day in class, I decided that no matter what, I had to talk to her. Even if I could only grunt or make high-pitched squeals, I’d force sound to vibrate off my vocal cords. I owed it to the Ray in one of the other dimensions who was out sick that day for eating an expired pudding the night before.

  The clock ticked, her pencil moved furiously across the paper, and just when she was nearing the end of the worksheet, ready to scroll through her music and shut me out in a wall of sound, I asked the most idiotic question possible, muttered to new kids thousands of times every year, but still, at least it was English. “How do you like Burgerville so far?” The words stumbled over one another, vowels and consonants mixing into a gloppy soup.

  She stopped writing and handed me the paper.

  “I don’t like it,” she said.

  “Me neither.” I would’ve agreed with anything she’d said right then.

  Instead of saying something more—that would have been the normal thing to do—I reverted to my usual tactic with girls, a staring contest that only I knew about. It’s not like I didn’t have any questions to ask her, it’s just that none of them were related to anything going on in the moment. Like her favorite flavor of ice cream (strawberry, as I found out), her favorite book (The Bell Jar), whether she liked the Star Wars prequels (oddly enough, yes), the type of animal she’d most want to be (“A hedgehog, but a badass hedgehog, the kind that would attack you if you ever tried to put a hat on me”).

  “You know, Burgerville’s actually not all bad,” I found myself saying, almost as a reflex, a way to fill the empty space. And then a thought came to me as I scrolled through the history of Burgerville. “You said you liked conspiracy theories, right?”

  Her eyes narrowed.

  “Burgerville is home to one of the biggest conspiracies in the country. And no one outside of this town even knows about it.”

  I could tell Jane thought I was lying, but instead of calling me out or putting her headphones back on, she simply paused to think.

  By then Mr. Coots had woken up. He looked around the room, confused, on high alert for any signs of a communist sleeper cell. The class had stopped pretending to work and was involved in various forms of guerilla warfare against the system: Some kids were paying a boy named Peter Simmons to eat a moldy sandwich found in an abandoned lunchbox; others were recording videos of Coots to upload to the Facebook page entitled “Nap Time with Coots”; one kid was taking items out of Coots’s bag and hiding them in various places around the room, a sort of cruel scavenger hunt for the elderly.

  Coots rubbed his eyes. “What’s going on in here?! Do you know what I was doing when I was your age?!”

  After Coots finished telling us the story about his finger again, this one including an interesting twist about the NVA soldier immigrating to America and marrying Coots’s sister, Jane turned to me and said, “Who are you?”

  The way she said it I couldn’t tell if she meant my name or what made me tick, the person underneath the labels.

  “Raymond Green,” I said, and put out my hand to shake.

  She stared at my hand, then placed hers in mine.

  “Pleased to meet you, Raymond Green,” she said in a somewhat mocking tone. “I’m Jane Doe. So, are there a lot of weird places in this town?”

  “Oh yeah, Burgerville’s history will make you rethink everything you know about the past. And reality, for that matter.”

  Then, as my bravery began to leave me and I considered retreating, she said the most magical thing I’d ever heard: “Maybe you can show me?”

  The universe collapsed and I found myself in a place I knew very little about: the dimension where good things happened.

  98 DAYS AFTER

  THE CIVIL RIGHTS FITNESS MOVEMENT OF RICHARD DAWSON

  Twice a week I go to see Rich. When I first started seeing him, I looked him up on the internet to learn about his history, this guy who I’m supposed to be sharing all of my deepest, darkest secrets with. It turns out Rich was named after his grandfather Richard Dawson, a famous civil rights leader in the neighboring city of Centerville.

  Richard Dawson started his career as a weight loss guru in the early 1950s, pioneering an exercise regimen built around everyday household activities. According to him, everything was an opportunity for getting in shape: chopping vegetables, turning doorknobs, vacuuming, mowing the lawn, even chewing, if done properly. At first people laughed at him, but when his clients began to see dramatic results, he landed a TV show on Burgerville County Public Access Television and became the first black television host in America.

  During the Civil Rights Movement, he took his skills as a fitness motivator into the realm of race relations. He held marches like “Ten Miles for Equality” and organized a “Thirty-Day Challenge” where each day he urged people to do one thing to lessen racial inequality. His message was the same as his advice in fitness: Small steps matter, which is why he was such a big believer in marches and bus boycotts (though he disagreed with sit-ins for obvious reasons). And the cool thing is, even though some people criticized his simple approach, his strategies actually started to work. Centerville became the most integrated city in America. (And the fittest too.)

  Sometimes it feels like Rich’s therapy techniques come directly from his grandfather’s playbook.

  “Each day, I want you to do one thing that brings you and your mom closer,” he said at our last session.

  I rolled my eyes. I was sitting with my back to him at the time, in this big green leather rocking chair he must have bought at a tag sale. Pretty much everything in his office is old, which is probably why it smells like a cross between a gym locker and an old-age home. Faded motivational posters line the walls, a collection of cliché messages like Every Journey Begins with a Single Step and You are the Creator of Your Own Destiny.

  “You mean like ‘Ten Days to Be a Better Son’?” I asked.

  “However many days it takes,” Rich said.

  I turned around to face him. I expected to see him playing a game on his cellphone, but instead he was staring straight ahead, a yellow notebook in his lap covered in writing.

  “People are worried about you, Ray.”

  “I know.”

  “Should they be?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Rich leaned forward; an alarm had been set off.

  “I’m not gonna kill myself, if that’s what you
’re thinking.”

  “Have you had thoughts about it?”

  I sighed. “No. I didn’t mean people should worry about that. I just meant in general. Like will I pass math and that sort of thing.”

  “How can I trust that you’re telling me the truth?”

  I’d never seen Rich so serious before.

  “Relax,” I said. “Jeez. You know I’d never do that.”

  He kept looking at me.

  “I’ll call you if anything changes, okay?”

  “Day or night. And if not me, then your mom, your dad, Simon, anyone.” He rummaged through his bag and handed me a pamphlet with a bunch of phone numbers and facts about suicide.

  I folded it up and put it in my pocket. I just wanted the conversation to end.

  “Now let’s brainstorm some strategies to help you and your mom get along better,” Rich said.

  “How much time is left?” I asked. I could tell that kind of annoyed Rich, because he sat back and let his notepad fall to the floor.

  “I can’t do all the work,” he said.

  “But you’re the only one getting paid,” I said.

  252 DAYS BEFORE

  GREEN COW ACRES

  Amidst the chaos that ensued after Coots fell back asleep on that fateful day in class—spitballs flying, lunchmeat being thrown, people taking cover under desks—Jane and I set up our “date.” The plan was to meet at six o’clock in front of Earl Beddington’s statue, the man at the center of the conspiracy. After I told her about Beddington and the legend of the green cows, I’d bring her to the place where it all started: the vacant lot known as Green Cow Acres.

  Back in the 1950s, while the rest of America was wrapped up in Roswell hysteria, Burgerville experienced its own encounter with an alien species. One of the farmers went out of business during the Great Depression and his farm sat empty all throughout World War II. By the time the war ended, the land was overgrown and the animals that weren’t sold had escaped into the surrounding countryside. Rumor spread that the escaped cows had turned a shade of green to blend in with their environment. Worse, many of the farmers believed the cows had become carnivores and were feeding on their genetic cousins. Strange sounds were reported, something between a cow’s moo and a wolf’s howl.