Epiphany Jones

by Michael Grothaus

  I don’t.

  The police officer, he’s forced Epiphany into a bowing position – her knees under her chest, the left side of her face pressed hard against the pier. It’s the same position I had the clone in. When our eyes meet, I expect hers to be glaring at mine with hatred. Instead they’re empty. Lifeless. Like the shark’s from my dream.

  ‘You’re done here, perro,’ Nico repeats, surprised I’m not halfway to the bus station by now. ‘Leave before I change my mind.’

  I know I won’t get another warning. I don’t look at Epiphany again. I grasp the tape firmly in my hand and begin the long walk back down the pier. The sound of blood rushes through my head. I concentrate on the pain of my stab wound; on the feeling of the sopping rag stuffed into my grey flesh. I try to feel every millimetre of my body, soaking up every ounce of pain so I can focus on something other than what’s happening behind me.

  But then … do you remember that rat I fucked up killing? Remember how its body was broken before I dumped it out the window? How I pictured Epiphany’s head on it? How I wanted her just as broken?

  Be careful, sometimes you get what you wish for.

  And despite every voice in my head screaming, ‘Don’t!’ I turn back around.

  The police officer is sliding Epiphany’s blue dress over the top of her hips. He whips her across the spine with something that looks like a riding crop and, despite an effort not to, Epiphany cries in agony. And while she is being whipped again, Nico, he’s pulling a strip of black electrical tape from a roll in his hand like this is just some common weekend housework. ‘This is just the start,’ he tells her. ‘Enjoy it. It’s the nicest thing that’s going to happen to you.’

  And I can’t tell you why; I can only say that this is where I knowingly do the dumbest thing in my entire life. This is where I slip the tape into my pocket. This is where I pick up a lobster trap the size of a kitty carrier and hope my heart doesn’t explode, because it’s beating like a hummingbird. This is where I charge at Nico with the lobster trap and bring it crashing down on his head with all the force I can summon.

  And all the force I can summon isn’t much. Nico, he doesn’t even get knocked off his feet. Hell, he barely teeters. What he does do is spin around and grabs my wrist in one hand while his other chokes my throat.

  ‘Perro,’ he says through gritted teeth, ‘I liked you. I really did. You reminded me of myself – when I was a child.’ His grip tightens as he walks me backwards. I think he’s walking me backwards. I can’t really tell. I’m feeling pretty lightheaded. It’s hard to breath. ‘But this is business,’ he is saying. ‘And you just broke the terms of our arrangement.’

  And, still holding my throat, he grabs his little sock thing and whacks me in the head with it. And when he lets go, I have a falling feeling. Then I smack a surface, hard. And, as my view of Nico goes wavy, I sink into the cool Caribbean water.

  23

  This Is Your Life

  LaRouche, Roland, my father – I envy them. They have no suffering. They have no pain. They got living out of the way. They’ll never have heartbreak or loss again. They’ll never have to go to a job they hate. They’ll never fear anything else. When everything is said and done, the dead are the winners. You and me – we’re the saps. We still have to get through each day.

  Well, you do anyway.

  I’m just about done.

  They say before you die your life flashes before you in a split second. I guess this is my second.

  Jerry, this is your life:

  I was born in 1982 to Jonathan and Margaret Dresden. The birth was an emergency Caesarean section. And that little C-section should have been a big tip-off: life with this one isn’t going to be easy.

  But life for my family did move along uneventfully for the next three years. That’s when Emma was born.

  Emma, my beautiful little sister.

  When I started kindergarten at six, I was a shy and introverted boy. While the other children became friends, it was quickly evident that I was that one. You know what I’m talking about. Every class has one – the kid no one wants to talk to. It doesn’t matter why it’s you. Once it’s apparent that you are the one, everyone knows to stay away, lest they become that one through association.

  Kids don’t really bully you in kindergarten. They wait until first grade to do that. During break one fall day, Keith – a real alpha male, if you know what I mean – he snatched my GI Joe action figure from my hands. He twisted it at the torso until the little, black rubber band holding the Joe’s hips to his stomach snapped.

  ‘You,’ Keith said, pointing to the dismembered Joe, ‘unless…’

  That was the day Keith first taxed my lunch money.

  When I got home I ran straight to the backyard and cried. It wasn’t only because of Keith, either. I wondered, was it normal to feel as sad and lonely as I did every single day? Was something wrong with me?

  As I buried my broken GI Joe in the sandbox, Emma came scurrying around the fence with two Joe’s in her little hand. She knew I had been crying, but didn’t ask why. She just handed me one of the Joe’s and asked if she could play with me. Her smile told me it would be the thrill of her day. So she played with Scarlet and I played with Firefly in the sandbox until the sun went down.

  Being only three she could never realise how such a simple act had held me up that day, but I did.

  Over the next four years, when the kids at school picked on me it was bearable because I knew that at three o’clock I would be going home to that glowing smile of hers. Anything bad in my life became tolerable because I had Emma. She was my friend when no one else wanted to be. And I loved her how a brother should: by ignoring her sometimes; by teasing her; by not telling her just how much she meant to me.

  When I was sick she’d pick dandelions from the front yard and bring them to me. When I came home from school, crying on days the bullying was bad, she would run and hug me and ask me to play outside. And she never asked what was wrong. Not once. Even at that age she knew the bad shit should be left in the past so you could have room for the happy stuff in the present.

  Every winter I counted the days until the start of Christmas break. For other kids the holiday break meant toys and hanging out with friends. But for me, I loved it because I would have two weeks of doing nothing but hanging out with my one and only friend. My one true buddy. The only person who I ever felt really loved me for everything I was and everything I wasn’t.

  Jerry, this is your life:

  It’s 1992 and Mom tells me Emma is sick with leukaemia. I expect Emma to be coughing and all snuffles and stuff. When she’s not, I think it’s no big deal – especially when Mom promises that nothing bad will happen to her.

  Over the next year Emma tires easily. We stop playing outside. She asks me to stay in with her. She asks me to read to her while she lies in bed. And I do. Throughout that year, I read every book in the house to her. When we run out of kids’ books I read her the Bible. When that is done I read the books in Mom’s den. Imagine being an eleven-year-old and reading Nietzsche to your dying eight-year-old sister. After a while I don’t think Emma even hears my words make sentences. She just wants the sound of my voice by her. She wants not to be alone. She knows she is dying.

  Jerry, this is your life:

  It’s March 1994. I’m twelve, Emma is nine. Her bedroom has become the place where books go to die. They’re stacked by the dozens in every conceivable location. Every book in the house has been read. Some twice.

  Emma is white as a ghost tonight. I’m lying in bed with her, reading her one of Mom’s Joan of Arc books. It’s her favourite one. She has me reread a passage to her over and over and over again because, she says, ‘They’re the most beautiful words ever written.’

  Her lips are pale, but they mouth along as I read:

  ‘She was truthful when lying was the common speech of men; she was honest when honesty was become a lost virtue; she was a keeper of promises when the keeping of a promise
was expected of no one. She was full of pity when a merciless cruelty was the rule, and honourable in an age which had forgotten what honour was; she was unfailingly true in an age that was false to the core; she was of a dauntless courage when hope and courage had perished in the hearts of her nation – she was all these things in an age when crime was the common business of lords and princes. And for all reward, the French King, whom she had crowned, stood supine and indifferent while French priests took the noble child, the most innocent, the most lovely, the most adorable the ages have produced, and burned her alive at the stake.’

  Emma reaches for my hand. I stop reading. She looks at me with her pale face and says, ‘I wish I could be just like Joan of Arc.’

  And I look at her and say, ‘You are.’

  Jerry, this is your life:

  It’s September 1994. Emma has been in this hospital for four months now. Mom and Dad rarely speak without fighting anymore. They’re only civil when they’re in front of Emma. I’m waiting in the hall for Emma to get out of an MRI scan. The room she went into is sterile and white like Cloud City in Star Wars.

  Back in her room, I read. She’s got so many tubes in her now I can’t lie next to her anymore. I sit in the chair beside her bed and hold her hand with my left as my right one grasps tonight’s reading. The nurses know our routine and bring any books they can find. But tonight all they could manage is a pamphlet on resuscitating a drowning victim. ‘Optimal time to save a victim of drowning is in the first forty-five seconds,’ I read to Emma as a machine helps her breath.

  Outside the room, I hear my dad say, ‘We need a miracle.’

  Jerry, this is your life:

  It’s October 31st, 1994. I am that miracle. My parents tell me the doctors say I’m a perfect genetic match for something called a bone-marrow transplant. It’s what I have in me that will save my sister’s life.

  Jerry, this is your life:

  It’s November 1994. It’s been an unusually chilly fall. As the time to the operation approaches I get nervous.

  It’s two days before the transplant. Mom is at the hospital with Emma. I’m waiting at school for Dad to pick me up. He’s running late because he’s at a press conference for the foundation of a dead star named Audrey Hepburn. When my dad was my age, Audrey was his on-screen crush.

  The other kids waiting outside for their parents ask why the teachers say I won’t be in school for a while. I tell them. Then they tell me how some kid they knew had the same operation. They say how the doctors stick a straw in your legs and suck your bone blood out like it’s a strawberry shake. They say how kids who have it done walk all wobbly the rest of their lives; how the kids who have it done never stop crying from the pain, even when they are old men. And as they walk all wobbly around me, screaming, ‘It hurts! It hurts!’ I run. I run across the parking lot and into the woods. I run up into the Hollywood hills and I hide there, clutching my unwobbly legs.

  I wake up, shivering. I begin to walk. I come home at four a.m. I come home to police in our kitchen and my mom frantic. I come home with pneumonia.

  Jerry, this is your life:

  The doctors, they tell my parents the thing about sleeping in nature is you don’t want to sleep on the naked ground, even with a winter coat on. The ground is fifty-five degrees. You want to keep your body at ninety-eight point six. If you have to sleep outside, even if you have heavy clothing, put something between you and the ground – like a cut log, or even just prop your body up so there’s space between you and the earth. That extra buffer keeps the ground from sucking the heat from your body. That extra buffer will keep you from getting pneumonia.

  The doctors, they say I’m too sick now. My immune system is too weak. The operation would be too dangerous for me. They say, ‘We’ll have to postpone until the New Year.’

  Jerry, this is your life:

  Emma dies on December 24th, 1994. I stop reading after that.

  Jerry, this is your life:

  You never mention it to your mom or dad. You never talk to your family about how you killed your little sister. And they never blame you. Not to your face anyway. How can they? You were just a shit-scared, stupid kid. A cowardly little fuck. They can’t blame you, so they fight with each other. At work, Dad volunteers for more and more assignments out of the country. Sometimes he’s away for weeks. Mom, she loses herself in her lectures about a dead saint. She enrolls you at Sunday school because she’s been told it helps with grief. But you don’t show grief ever again. You turn to movies and TV. You veg out and slowly forget about everything one commercial break at a time.

  Jerry, this is your life:

  Your mother cheats on your father. Your father dies in a car accident. You become addicted to porn and television and go through life like a zombie. And it is an addiction – a cover for your misery – but you lie to yourself and call it a ‘hobby’. You take a job you couldn’t care less about. You lie to people about relationships you can’t have because you’re too apathetic to even try. You lie to them so they don’t silently judge you behind your back like your mom and dad did. Each day is just another perfect example of the spectacular nothing that is your existence.

  Jerry, this is your life:

  You see people who aren’t there. Until, one day, one of them is. And she frames you for murder and blackmails you into coming to Mexico. Then you’re on a pier watching two men beat this woman in the warm moonlight. And before you know it, you’re sinking in the water, waiting to drown.

  Jerry, this is your life. This is your sad, pathetic life. It’s so sad, it’s flashed before your eyes in just half a second. Real lives – good lives – take at least a whole second.

  My back gently hits the sandy bottom of the bay. The moonlight shines bright into the clear water, illuminating everything in a hazy blue flush. Shallow shadows ripple over the submerged masts of the pier; over the seaweed; over the fish as they slowly scatter from my faltering limbs. Down here, everything is calm. The madness is on the surface.

  I release my final breath and my lungs burn as they flood with salt water. This is where I think, ‘See you soon, Emma.’

  And this, this is where I see Emma standing over me on the sandy sea floor, shaking her head. Her arms crossed disapprovingly. ‘Optimal time to save a victim from drowning is in the first forty-five seconds,’ she says.

  ‘This is for you,’ I say to my figment of Emma. ‘So I can be with you again. It’s all for you.’

  Emma shakes her head. ‘No. This is all for you.’

  A splash echoes from the surface and my figment of Emma dissolves in the water as the lanky police officer’s body sinks, softly landing in her spot. Blood seeps from his neck in smoky plumes. They’re almost relaxing to watch, the plumes are. His body sways gently with the current on the sea floor. Then, without warning, the officer jerks to life. His eyes go wide and his hands reach around his neck. That’s when I see it: one of those big fishing hooks that are scattered around the pier has been pushed clean through his throat. And as he silently screams, he manages to rip the hook right from his neck. His mistake. Now the water has two holes to enter through.

  ‘Twenty seconds,’ Emma’s voice says.

  And me, I kick off the sea floor and aim for the wavy moon floating above me. My lungs are heavy and bloated. When I break the surface, I expect immediate relief, but I get nothing. There’s too much water in me. As I paddle to the pier’s ladder, black patches appear in my vision.

  ‘Fifteen seconds.’

  In the hospital room I read the pamphlet to Emma. ‘A person can expel water from their lungs by forcefully falling over an object just below the diaphragm.’

  ‘Ten seconds.’

  The water in my lungs makes my body dense as I struggle up the ladder. I stumble towards the closest mast and belly flop onto it. My insides shift. I vomit water. Collapsing to the ground, the rawest breath of air I’ve ever tasted shocks my lungs. It’s what a newborn must feel when the doctor rips him from the womb and slaps his
back. Lying on the pier, the moon above me, it’s never felt so good to simply breathe.

  Lying flat on my back on the pier, just behind me, just north of my head, I hear a struggle. When I tilt my head back I see everything upside down. The sky below, Epiphany pressed up against the ceiling of the pier with Nico between her legs. His fists are raised as if they’re pummelling the night stars.

  Suddenly a blinding light illuminates both of them. I totter to my feet as Nico shades his eyes from the light. Through my dizziness and black spots I manage to grab a heavy, rusted tackle box tucked between some crates. And as I approach Nico from behind I glimpse a long cut on the back of his neck. Epiphany must have tried to hook him, too.

  Raising the tackle box, I hammer Nico’s skull. On the second hit the box pops open, scattering lures and sinkers and bobbers everywhere. Then, silently, a steady stream of blood flows from underneath Nico’s black hair. It’s like I’ve struck red oil. Nico, in an instant his body stops moving. He just stands there and sort of sways. Then his body, it collapses to the pier like it’s suddenly discovered gravity. His body, it lands next to Epiphany’s, which hasn’t moved since I crawled out of the sea.

  And as the small tugboat moors to the pier, under a beautiful full moon on this warm Caribbean night, I stand over the lifeless bodies of two people I hardly knew.

  Jerry, this is your life.

  24

  God

  I’m in the hospital room with Emma. This is way before I acted like a stupid hero and tried to save Epiphany’s life on the pier. This is before I became a murderer. This is seventeen years earlier. This is before I’m cruising across the ocean in a freighter ship. This is before I find out the boat I’m on is full of electronics and toys and contraband. This is years ago when I’m in the hospital with my dying little sister.

  This is when I’m twelve. In the hospital room I’m reading Siddhartha to Emma. She falls asleep twenty pages before the end, but I read anyway. I don’t want her to wake and not hear my voice. When I finish the book I look around for another one, but the nurses haven’t brought us any in a while. So I pick up TV Guide and begin reading that. The next thing I know, Emma is shaking me.