by Dave Connis
Then I realize something about Mr. Cratcher. He changed the album so often because he wanted to forget the pain that came with it. That’s why he worked on it for forty years. He didn’t want to face the pain.
“You chose to face it in the end,” I say. “You knew you were dying and you didn’t want to leave the album unfinished or that hurt unresolved. Every day we worked on it, you hurt. That’s why you lied about having the album. That’s why you redid tracks an ungodly amount of times. That’s why you spent so long picking microphones. You were fighting to let it go. You wanted to face your last unexplored hurt head on, and you had me there because you didn’t want to face it alone.”
I am Mr. Cratcher.
I am Mark.
I am Dez.
I am Trey.
I am my dad.
I am Elliot.
I am Addy.
I am my mom.
I cry. I hurt. I really, really hurt.
I can’t face this alone.
—
I drive back to Mr. Cratcher’s house at two-thirty in the morning. I still have the key I “stole” from under his flower planter. I walk inside and see Trey and Elliot asleep on the living room floor and couch, just like I knew they would be.
Neither of them wanted to be alone, either.
I stand above them, petrified. I haven’t apologized to them for being an ass. I haven’t even tried talking to them.
“Adam?” Trey asks.
And just like that, I start bawling. He rushes over to me and hugs me, like I never pushed him away. Elliot doesn’t touch me, but I feel him there. He even says so after a little while. I let myself feel the failure of the road trip, my disappointment in myself, the hurt of my mom leaving me without a word and Addy following her. I let every hurt I’ve pushed away in an attempt to be safe roll through me. And, though it sucks, I don’t feel alone and that’s not nothing. When my tears calm down, I tell the guys the truth about me. That I repeatedly asked girls for sex at my school. That I’ve always wanted to be whole. They don’t do anything but listen, and after I finish, they just hug me. And I realize something.
I need these guys, and they need me. A person’s hurt can’t be divvied up, but it can be experienced together, and maybe that’s what I need to survive.
—
When Trey and Elliot fall asleep, I walk up to Mr. Cratcher’s study. It’s the first time I’ve been in here since Dez and I last worked on the album. I plug my phone into a charger on the top of his desk, sit down, and check all the drawers to distract myself from thinking for a minute. One drawer is filled with office supplies. Another’s packed with worn black spines of composition notebooks. The rest are filled with cords and recording equipment I’d do better eating than trying to figure out what they do.
Above the computer, the speckled corner of a notebook sticks out behind a pair of black studio monitors. The notebook he closed the morning I caught him sleeping. I slide a bible off of it, then pull it off the shelf and open it to the most recently filled page.
God, would you make me so utterly broken that I am beyond repair? It’s not my spirit I’m discussing here, it’s the cancer. I know the spirit that makes up Colin Cratcher is gloriously incomplete, but I don’t know why the physical thing that makes up Colin Cratcher can’t be the same. If it is the same, then I can’t see it. However, isn’t my inability to see light in the physical part of me what makes me gloriously incomplete? If so, how then do I live? Do I accept that both my spirit and flesh are one with you in the same way? When you said, ‘it is good,’ did you mean my flesh as well as my spirit? You must have, yet I don’t feel ‘good.’
God, I’m the only one to benefit from my death. I don’t feel ready to leave my students. Some have yet to grasp that ferrous metals have nothing to do with the Ferris wheel, and leaving them in such a pathetic state feels sinful.
I also mourn leaving the Knights of Vice. I have yet to get through to them that all humans are addicts because none of us want pain and will go to great lengths to get relief. Leaving them without this knowledge also feels sinful, yet I know that when you call a man to come, you call. David may have asked, ‘Death, where is your sting?’ but he didn’t know what it felt like to have your lungs drained of fluid. He only knew we all had to face it eventually and that you were on the other side. May I soon ask David’s question and mean it. I ask for enough time to finish my album. To let that pain go. I ask that Gabby and Elias greet me when I arrive, and possibly Beethoven, if it isn’t too much trouble.
Your servant,
Colin Cratcher
How could he believe that being human equals being an addict? If that were the case, wouldn’t Addiction Fighters have to take place in a baseball stadium? If we’re all addicts, how have there been successful marriages?
As I lean back in his chair, I realize Mr. Cratcher asked me “what are you?” not just to be mystical and drive me insane. He asked the question because it mattered. He knew that if I couldn’t answer it, I might spend a lifetime believing I’m something I wasn’t and that I’d never know what I’m truly capable of.
—
It’s four in the morning when my phone rings. I snap up in my chair and swivel toward my phone.
“Hello?”
“Check your email.”
“Dez?”
There’s loud music in the background. Her voice is washed out in all the noise.
I hear a bunch of ruffling, and then someone say, “Here.”
“Dez?”
“Oh, Adam,” she says, pain between every letter and space. She doesn’t sound like herself. “I’ve done it.”
I stand like it will help me hear her better.
“Dez, what are you talking about?”
“I can finally use this one.”
“You aren’t making sense. What’s going on?”
Someone laughs. More ruffling.
“Alasdair Grey, From Lanark: A Life in Four Books.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The last line.”
Click.
I call her over and over. And for every button I press to get Dez back, there’s an unanswered ring that’s greater than.
GOOD-BYE
My phone’s not connecting to Mr. Cratcher’s network, so I turn on his computer. Protools, the DAW, is the first thing that opens once the screen turns on. I minimize it and Google “Lanark: A Life in Four Books PDF.” At first I find nothing, but after putting “last line of” in front of my previous search phrase, it brings up a Google book copy. I scroll all the way to the bottom and see “pages 556 to 577 are not shown in this preview.”
I curse. I could buy it on my Dad’s e-reader, but that would mean I have to go home.
Home = seeing my dad.
I turn off my wifi, then sign into my dad’s Amazon account and buy the e-version.
While it’s downloading, I open my email. At the top of my inbox is “Fwd: What Are You, Elias?”
My breath catches. She found it.
Dez, I found Mr. Cratcher’s song. I had it digitized for you. I haven’t listened to it, so I apologize if the quality is sub-par. I hope you and your friends find what you are looking for.
Sincerely,
Mr. Crowell
I hover the mouse over the attachment at the bottom. I consider waking Elliot and Trey, or even texting Addy, but decide against it. I’ll share it with them later. Right now, I want this for me. I need this for me. I click on the attachment and a play button appears on the screen. Before I can prepare myself, the song bursts through the studio monitors with a vintage crackle.
They call you names. We call them lost.
They call me traitor; I count it as holy loss.
Traitors just another name for sinner
A name we could all be called.
The wind alone doesn’t make a windy day.
It needs trees to move, and a noise to make.
If we believe one man to be the greatest shame
The shared pain of the heart is life to forsake
What are you, Elias?
What am I, brother?
I’ve written a world’s worth of words
In the depths of man’s equal dark days
But there’s no one word to describe you
There’s just blood, flesh, and grace.
What are you, Elias?
What am I, brother?
We are a divine mathematician’s variables,
Formed human, in constant change.
We are a changing song of glory,
Made up of a holy and broken blaze.
I finally have the answer.
I’m a variable of broken and holy light, and now that I know, there’s only one thing about me that’s changed. I’ve gone from desperately looking for the answer, to desperately wishing I knew what it meant.
I walk past Trey and Elliot, rolling my steps heel to toe to make them extra silent. It’s five a.m. so I don’t have to be incredibly quiet. If there’s one thing I learned on our failure of a road trip, it’s that the two of them could sleep through the apocalypse.
I get in the car and pull up From Lanark. I see the last line and my stomach sinks. Dread hits me like a punch. I start Genevieve and speed my way to the Coulter mansion on I-405.
I-405 = Dez.
Dez = ?
? = worry. Lots of worry.
Strangely, worrying about her makes me feel lighter. That might mean we’ve erupted, and somehow, I still love her.
I pull up to the Coulter mansion gate at 5:37 and take a deep breath. I press the blank button at the top of the keypad at least ten times before a groggy hello comes out of the speaker.
“This is Adam Hawthorne. I need to speak with Mr. and Mrs. Coulter. It’s urgent.”
“I don’t think they are awake yet. Why don’t you come back around nine?”
“No, I need to talk to them now. Something might be wrong with Dez.”
The mysterious person—I’m guessing it’s Mrs. Coulter’s personal assistant—doesn’t respond. She just opens the gate.
I alternate between knocking and ringing the doorbell. I hate myself for coming here, but I can’t just sit around hoping Dez is okay. Since she called, I’ve felt like the world is on the verge of collapse. It may be dramatic, but I can’t describe it any other way.
A blur appears in the frosted windows on the doors. I have the brief thought that they might not even care, but they can’t just not care. They just might not care in the right places or at the right times. The door on the right pulls back slightly so that all I can see is the top half of Mr. Coulter’s face.
“Adam?” he asks.
“Hey, Mr. Coulter, I just … uh. I just wanted to know if you’ve heard from Dez?”
That’s all it takes for the door to swing all the way open.
“We’ve been trying to get in contact with her since she texted us last night,” he says, bringing me into the kitchen.
“She texted you? What time? What did she say?”
Mr. Coulter gets a glass and fills it with water then hands it to me. “It was jumbled, like she was drunk, but she said she was sorry and muttered some man’s name.”
Mrs. Coulter comes around the corner of living room. “Terry?”
She sees me in the kitchen and looks down at herself with horror, as though someone seeing her in her pajamas is on a list of extra dirty sins.
“I’ll be right back,” she says.
I pull out my phone to pull up From Lanark.
“You said she was fine when you left her, correct?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
Mr. and Mrs. Coulter know she stayed. Addy talked to them about it before we left. However, I’m not sure if they know why. Addy and Dez wouldn’t have told them about us breaking up, and I didn’t mention it when I returned the SUV.
I hand him my phone.
“Adam,” Mr. Coulter says, “what is it?”
“The man she quoted. This is his book. The last line’s just ‘Good-bye.’”
MELTDOWN
I’m speeding back to Mr. Cratcher’s house when I get a text from Mr. Coulter.
Nashville cops called. Tickets bought. Meet us at airport in thirty minutes.
I run into the house. “Elliot, Trey!”
They stir, but they don’t respond, which is good now that I’ve given it a little thought. I don’t know what waking them up would do. Mr. Coulter only bought three tickets, so if they woke up, they’d just freak out and probably keep me from getting to the airport on time. Besides, I don’t want to have to explain what I’ve done to Dez.
I go upstairs and run over to Mr. Cratcher’s computer where I left my overnight bag. I bend over to get it and accidentally put my hand on the keyboard. I must hit a keyboard shortcut, because Protools, which is minimized on the bottom of the screen, pops up to a “open file” screen. I go to close it, but I see a file called, “To The Knights of Vice.” I only ever open the files from their own folder on the desktop, never search in the program itself, so this is the first time I’ve seen this. I click on it. The screen opens to a song with five tracks. Each one named after a member of the Knights of Vice. The last track is called “Everyone.”
I un-mute the track called “Adam” and a line starts moving across the screen.
“Adam.”
Just the sound of his voice makes me feel hope.
“Today, you and Miss Coulter honored me with your company, and after you left, I felt led to leave you this message. I must warn you, it will be long-winded. When you are looking at the end of your life, everything you have aches to be shared more than before. This fact alone will give me the propensity to have more words than normal.”
He must have recorded this the day Dez and I came to record together. It also was the day he collapsed in his bathroom.
“It is not a typical adage to say that young love is true. Most cases of it are self-serving at best and purely physical at worst. However, you and Miss Coulter have a palpable connection. The same kind I felt with my dear Gabby. I say all this because your comments about why you are not dating put a deep fear in me. Therefore, since I am on my deathbed, I am making some last requests of you, which I expect you to honor.
“Adam, you and Miss Coulter are allowed to break up because you decide you are different people who do not work well as a couple. You are allowed to break up because one of you can’t see themselves marrying the other. In special cases, I’d even allow your breakup if you were simply being downright rotten to each other. However, I forbid you from breaking up because you assume addicts cannot purely love. Though that assumption is correct, it is not exclusive to addicts. The experience of an addict has its differences, all humans are both broken and holy, and we all have the opportunity to waste our lives looking for wholeness.
“In the search of something that makes sense, we make our lives incredibly complicated by expanding everything under the sun until it is more confusing than it actually is. Life can be much simpler if we just let the sun be the sun, the moon be the moon, the trees be the trees, because that’s simply what they are, what they were made to be. You’d be a fool if you looked at the sky and said it was a car. In the same way, you cannot say a human is perfect. You need to let humans be humans. Let the indefinable be indefinable.
“Adam, the thing about our sun is that, even though it is made of complex atoms and shares in our groan of un-wholeness, it is ever burning, casting light when it rises and when it sets. We are no different. We cannot be whole on earth, but we can be variables of broken and holy light. We might not be able to love wholly, but we can love truly if we face our pain together.
“Do not squirm through life believing you will only ever be an addict, I beg of you. You are only an addict if you believe yourself one. The addicts, I use this word cautiously, who find freedom are the ones who realize they were never addicts in the first place, just humans in dire need of rightness. Now, please distribute the other tracks acco
rdingly to the Knights of Vice. This will be good practice for you, considering you must do so with my entire estate. Be sure to listen to the track titled ‘Everyone’ together. Tell Dez every day that she’s stronger than she thinks. Love her and the Knights of Vice as best as you can, and know that will be good enough. I must go. It’s been an honor to have blazed on this earth with you.”
I listen to it again. I almost listen to it a third time, but instead, I just mail the track to myself and run down the stairs with a frick-ton of hope.
I call Addy. It rings over and over, and just when I think I’ll have to leave a message, she picks up.
Of course she picks up.
My Addy.
“Adam?”
“Dez is in trouble. I think she’s going to kill herself. I’m flying to Nashville with her parents to find her.”
“Oh my God, can I do anything?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“I should have never left her there,” she says. “I—”
“Addy, I’m sorry.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry for saying what I did. For arguing with you, for telling you that moving to Bothell did nothing.”
The thing is, Addy did everything. She showed me what it looked like to love by loving me in a way I couldn’t understand. She showed the answer to Mr. Cratcher’s question. She’s just as messed up by the divorce as I am, but she still chose to love me, everyone, in selfless ways. She was, and is, a variable of broken and holy light.
That’s what I am, Mr. Cratcher. That’s what we all are.
“You coming back here changed my life,” I say. “And that’s the truth. I want to be you when I grow up.”
“Papi,” she says, “you’re forgiven. I love you a lot. Now get off the phone and get to Dez. I’ll handle everything here.”
“I—I love you, too.”
I hang up the phone, and then drive 95 MPH down I-5 toward the girl I can love enough.
I park at the airport, and while running toward the gate with Mr. and Mrs. Coulter, I send Dez a text: