Take One With You

by Oak Anderson

  JT’s only real solace came from his sporadic contact with his grandmother half a world away. She was almost literally keeping him alive.

  Soon he would no longer be able to work. His duties at the club had been reduced to opening the pool at five every morning, even though there was only the one old man who showed up to swim at that hour.

  He supposed Mister Tee was keeping him alive, too.

  Not long before his seizure, he had had a particularly rough night with the brothers. Iktomi, the elder, had taken the form of his mother, something he had never done before, and she had berated him for his unaccomplished existence, something she never would have done in life.

  JT arrived at the club twenty minutes late, something he had never done before.

  Mister Tee was waiting.

  “What’s the matter, boy?” he said, not unkindly.

  “I’m sorry, Mister Tee,” JT answered. “Rough night.”

  “Has llegado algún gatito!” he said, his eyes lighting up.

  JT had never once heard the old man speak Spanish, and laughed in spite of himself. The old man was congratulating him on getting some action, but in an oddly formal way.

  “No, nothing like that, Mister Tee,” he answered. “Just tired, I guess.”

  “Let me in,” the old man commanded, and JT unlocked the door, but once inside, Mister Tee was eager to ask him all about what he still assumed was his successful conquest.

  “No, really,” JT said, and then he explained the actual reason for his fatigue, which seemed to interest the old man even more. He insisted JT tell him more about the evil spirits, which led to his disease, which led to his grandmother. The old man seemed to really respond to JT’s troubles.

  “Why don’t you go see her?”

  “No money,” JT said. “And I’m not sure how she would react, with the Alzheimer’s.”

  From that point on, Mister Tee and the person whose final breath he would soon witness became fast friends. Eventually the older man even began to delay his morning swim just so he could hear updates from JT and his strange hallucinations.

  JT assumed what he and many others had always believed, that he was talking to a sweet old man who was genuinely interested because he was lonely, but nothing could have been further from the truth. El Culo de Arica had relied on such assumptions for many years and become very good at cultivating them, but he was still the same monster he’d been since he was a child, only wilier and slightly more patient with his prey.

  Like Iktomi, the shape-shifting spirit who tormented JT’s nights as different people but who always reverted to his original form, a spider, the old man remained, at his essence, a lover of suffering. He looked back on his younger days with fondness, his only regret that he wasn’t able to enjoy his sadistic hobbies more completely.

  Still, JT’s stories about his mother and their lives reminded him of his own family, who he’d abandoned when he left Peru. He cared nothing for his wife, an ugly woman who’d been unable to bear him a son, but there was a single daughter, with child when he left, and though he’d always planned to send for them, he had never been able to do so. It was the single soft spot in the heart of a devil, and Jesus Two Bears had managed to find it with his simple goodness.

  And so El Culo de Arica was careless.

  People who commit crimes against humanity are never really safe; there is always someone, somewhere, looking for them. The Asshole was no different. But El Culo had been able to avoid detection for so many years not just because of his facile ways and language skills, but also by never letting down his guard. Not once in the twenty some-odd years since he left Peru had he ever allowed a single photograph.

  Until a dying boy whose pain somehow reminded him of his daughter snapped a picture on his cell phone and sent it to his addled grandmother across the ocean.

  ***

  clairebear encounteredjtwobears not in a suicide forum, ironically enough, but completely by chance on a message board thread linked beneath a story on CNN.com about the complex legal systems for allocating water rights in various states.

  It was JT who messaged her, thinking she might be of Native origin because of her screen name and the fact that her post was the first intelligent and non-racist comment he’d come across.

  He had begun the last stage of his disease, not sleeping at all and drifting in and out of strange delusions. On his good days he went to the club, opened the pool room, then went home to surf the Internet and smoke pot to try and keep up an appetite. On his bad days he never got out of bed, staring at his visions across the ceiling.

  His bosses were understanding because Mister Tee was understanding; had he complained they would have had to hire someone to replace JT. But the old man just went back home if JT didn’t show by 5:30, and the club manager would open up when he arrived at seven.

  Melissa, in her way of drawing out others without revealing much about herself, was soon Facebook friends with the dying boy, who would give her the strength to do that which would both end her life and provide it meaning.

  JT told her his story from beginning to end over the course of one long, blessedly lucid night, describing in detail why he planned to kill himself and take Mister Tee with him.A concept inherited fromclairebear, by way of Charlie.

  ***

  JT had become such good friends with the old man that he told his grandmother all about him in long, rambling emails he wasn’t at all sure she would understand. Mister Tee, for his part, enjoyed their time together, finding JT the ultimate in safe associations. He was, quite literally, a friend who would self-destruct.

  That didn’t mean that the old man had lost his edge; to the contrary, he posited whether there might come a moment that would require him to slit the throat or bash in the skull of his new companion, and he knew he would not hesitate if it had to be. It had been a long time for him, but JT was becoming weaker by the day.

  Even the thought that he could still take a life if he needed to gave the old man a spring in his step; El Culo was feeling more and more like his old self as JT declined, like Dorian Gray and his painting or a vampire deriving strength from the life of his victims.

  Then came the picture.

  Mister Tee protested, of course, but not enough, and before he knew it his picture was on its way to the kid’s senile old grandmother in a little town in the Basque region of Spain near the French border, known mostly for its slaughter of supposed witches during the Inquisition.

  When she viewed the picture on the tiny hospital’s computer from her bed at the Consultorio Medico Zugarramurdi, the old woman recognized the face as clearly as she remembered most things from the distant past.

  As she looked into the eyes of El Culo de Arica, her blood ran cold, and she ordered the nurse to call the boy in America who claimed to know her daughter.

  ***

  JT explained it toclairebear as best as he could, but it boiled down to the fact that his grandmother had known the wife of one of El Culo’s survivors quite well, a woman who had lost her only son in a tiny village in the mountains above Lima in a particularly heinous fashion. The man responsible was well known in the city where her friend lived most of her life before she too ended up in Spain. She carried a faded picture of the man who later disappeared, which had been published in the newspaper during Fujimori’s bloody war against Shining Path.

  She gave the picture to JT’s grandmother on her deathbed, extracting no promise to search for him or take revenge, but simply to keep the memory of his crime against her son alive in some way.

  JT had not believed her at first, but something in the old man’s eyes changed the following day when he asked if he had ever lived in Peru, and then the questions started. JT told Mister Tee that his grandmother said he looked like an old friend she had known from Lima.

  It was at that moment that Mister Tee knew he would get to kill at least one more time.

  ***

  JT opened his eyes.

  Have I been…sleeping?
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  Mister Tee looked down at him. He was holding a shovel from the tool shed.

  “What happened?” JT asked.

  “You had a seizure,” the old man said cheerily. “Hit your head.”

  JT looked from his eyes to the shovel.

  “Have you been waiting long?”

  Mister Tee threw his head back and laughed at that one. He was really going to miss this boy. It had been exhilarating to let someone in again, and in spite of the danger, or maybe because of it, he felt twenty years younger.

  The old man helped JT up from the walkway and unlocked the pool room himself. JT noticed, but said nothing about the fact that Mister Tee had apparently rifled his pockets while he was out. He felt a little unsteady, and the old man allowed him to hold onto his arm as they walked inside.

  JT collapsed into a poolside chair. He felt like he was going to pass out. He looked up at the old man, who was standing over him with the shovel, smiling.

  Jesus Two Bears knew that the tables had turned, and in spite of his bold talk toclairebear the night before, he simply wasn’t capable of killing the old man. He believed he was an evil man, just as his grandmother had told him, but he just did not have the strength.

  “Do you want to say goodbye?” the old man asked, and JT knew exactly what he meant.

  “I don’t have her number here,” JT answered, and even if he did, he had never had very much luck getting her on the phone.

  “What time is it there?” the old man teased. JT could see a headless soldier standing behind him, but he knew that wasn’t real. His vision was getting blurry.

  “Hey!” Mister Tee shouted. “Are you still with us?” He threw down the shovel. There was not going to be any need for it again, which both relieved and disappointed him. He had planned to use the kid’s dementia as an excuse, to claim that he had to defend himself, which would have worked but drawn attention to him. This way was better. He could just watch JT die and then call for assistance.

  “Just barely,” JT whispered. The headless soldier had grown two heads now, which were in the process of eating each other.

  “I have her number,” the old man said, finally dropping all pretense. He still had people who could get information for him if he needed it. “Why don’t I call her for you?”

  JT just nodded. He could feel himself slipping into darkness.

  I’m sorry, Daddy.

  He jerked his head back from the old man, who was trying to drill into his head with a horned snakehead.

  “Talk to her, son,” the old man said softly, and JT saw that the old man was holding a phone to his ear.

  JT took the phone, but it was the voice of his father he heard.

  “Take your stand, boy,” he said. “Look it in the eye, and take your stand.”

  JT dropped the phone, which the old man caught with surprising speed and dexterity. He pocketed the cell and looked down at JT, waiting for a sign he knew what was to come, but JT was silent, his breathing more and more labored.

  The two-headed soldier, his faces now half-eaten, rose up into the air and hovered over the center of the pool, emanating a brilliant glow that shone like a spotlight in JT’s eyes. He moved his eyes into the shadow of the old man, the light from the soldier now ringed around his head like the halo of a dark angel.

  JT tried to speak, but couldn’t. The old man nodded, smiling sadly. He had almost wanted the boy to fight, to give him a taste of days past. JT closed his eyes and teetered on the edge of the chair.

  “I ‘spect the same from you, son.”

  He opened his eyes. It was the old man’s voice now, but his lips were unmoving. The two-headed soldier began to descend into the water, his mouths snapping at each other, newly roused.

  JT reached out as if asking for help to stand, and the old man took his hand. JT stood up slowly, then stumbled, and the old man wrapped his arms around him, holding him up.

  With his last bit of strength, JT hugged the old man and propelled them both into the pool.

  JT could feel the old man’s panic as they sank below the surface, and now it was he who derived strength from the weakening of the other. JT opened his mouth and allowed water to rush in, struggling against every human instinct to let go and break for the surface.

  He looked into the old man’s eyes and saw the evil he was meant to confront. For his ancestors, it had been the 7th Cavalry, for his grandfather, U.S. Marshals, for his father, the bottle.

  For Jesus Two Bears, it was El Culo de Arica.

  Just before they died together, JT saw Iya the younger float past, his older brother just behind. As the spirits watched him, his entire body relaxed and the struggles of the old man in his arms faded to nothingness. To JT and those who came before him, there was really no such thing as an evil spirit as others might imagine. Without the bad, there can be no good. Without suffering, there is no joy.

  All things must balance, and so all things serve their own unique purpose.

  The coroner was amazed at the two men found entwined at the bottom of the pool. It would have taken an almost superhuman effort not to struggle against the water and embrace death in the way it appeared the younger man had done. It was almost supernatural.

  As the coroner was examining the two men, a very old woman across the Atlantic was feeling particularly happy but didn’t know why, and across the country, a very young women felt much the same way, and did.

  2 MONTHS AFTER TOWY WEBSITE

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  Valerie Mosley 38,507 Views

  Two months after 16-year-old Monica Tinsley of Porterville posted her last message on Facebook and then slit both wrists halfway up her arm, police finally arrested three 17-year-old boys on rape and sexual battery charges. It was alleged the former straight A student was brutally assaulted by her fellow classmates while she lay naked, bleeding, and unconscious in the bed of a pick-up truck parked in the garage of one of the hockey players who savaged her. She cited in her final post the cruel texts and cellphone photos of the attack that had been passed around to many other students with whom she attended Turner Woods High School.

  .

  But the boys, whose parents all “lawyered up” immediately, were quickly released due to a lack of evidence and, in a sadly ironic twist of fate, the death of a living witness willing to testify against them.

  .

  If all this sounds heartbreakingly familiar, perhaps you’re thinking of the Seattle case, or the Toronto case, or any number of rapes and sexual assaults whose victims are increasingly wounded again and again by the cretinous use of technology and social media to shame and badger and harass them, this time with tragic and not unexpected results.

  .

  But now there appears to be an even greater backlash against such “re-raping”, going beyond the posting of the names and private information of the perpetrators to call attention to their oft-unpunished crimes.

  .

  A website, towy.la, has begun soliciting people with terminal illnesses and suicidal thoughts to “take one with you” on their way out the door, a kind of purpose-driven death for the Twitter generation, even going so far as to ferret out the names and locations of child molesters and other such vermin. The Turner Three were added just yesterday.

  .

  While it seems to me a rather scary concept, as most vigilantism is, I must admit there is a certain horrifyingly beautiful symmetry to the notion that the depressed and dying can feel good about their demise by leaving a better world behind them. ‘Taking out the trash’ is one of the clever euphemisms the site uses, probably to skirt the legal letter of solicitation laws.

  The problem I see is the same problem that afflicts anything when you throw it out into that great big expanse known as the world wide web.

  .

  To put it simply, there are an awful lot of crazy people out there. So mark my words: This “take one with you” idea will either fizzle quickl
y or fast outgrow its debatably reasonable goals.

  .

  That’s a mighty mean genie to try and coax back into the bottle.

  .

  Be slow, my friends.

  .

  VM

  .

  Chapter Ten

  It was the NSA that discovered Rodney Oscar Thomas was actually Rodrigo Umberto Espinosa, the man responsible for so many deaths and long assumed to have met his own years before.

  The FBI initially thought the murder so strange that it warranted a special investigation, particularly because the killer had familial ties to a known domestic terrorist, but it took a FISA court search warrant, a little old woman in Spain with Alzheimer’s, and a single newspaper clipping over two decades old to complete the final piece of the puzzle, and it made headlines all over the world.

  Later on, when the journals of Melissa Williamson were discovered some time after her death, proof of the connection was made to Jesus Two Bears, who became known publicly as the TOWY Pioneer.

  It would also be the NSA that eventually connected them all to Charlie and Sarah, but that information was also kept classified until it was leaked by a disgruntled employee who fancied himself an Edward Snowden but ended up more like a tabloid version of Dan Brown.

  The person who made all the connections before anyone, however, was Sarah.

  ***

  u did what?

  Sarah stared at the pm for a moment. She had to smile. Charlie never abbreviated unless he was really mad.

  its good to see u hvnt chngd, chikless

  She immediately regretted hitting send in light of what had happened and what she’d done, but there was no taking it back.

  sorry

  Sarah waited. No response. Fuck.

  “Come on, Charlie, I said I was sorry.”

  After the online disappearance ofclairebear, Sarah had hacked into her login information on one of the message boards, which had led to her email address. From there, Sarah retrieved her private information, address, Facebook, and the like, and that was how she foundout thatclairebear was the same girl who’d been killed in the horrific motorcycle accident with the man who’d killed her sister. It had been a local story, an oddity that had somehow gotten overlooked by national news sites due to a foiled homegrown terrorist bomb plot in Detroit the very same week.