by Brock Clarke
171.
What do you do when the person you love most in the world—and my aunt was the person I loved most in the world—is feeling weak, vulnerable, defensive? You press your advantage.
“Are you going to steal anything else?” I asked. When she didn’t answer that question, I asked, more forcefully, “Do you even know where the Sociologist is?” And when my aunt didn’t answer that question, I demanded, “Where are we going? ”
“It’s best not to know everything, Calvin,” my aunt said calmly, brightly. She already seemed back to normal. And just like that, over the course of three sentences, my advantage had disappeared. We pulled onto the highway, picked up speed. The wind blew through the windows, and my aunt’s hair whipped around her face, and I bounced around without my seatbelt and began to think that this was going to be a perpetual way of being for me, and for us.
“Is it best to know nothing?” I shouted out of desperation and over the wind sounds.
“For some people, yes,” my aunt said, and before I could object, she quoted John Calvin and said, “There is no worse screen to block out the Spirit than confidence in our own intelligence.”
“That’s the third time you’ve called me stupid,” I pointed out.
“I didn’t call you anything, Calvin,” my aunt said. “I was only quoting John Calvin.”
After that, there didn’t seem to be much to say. I curled toward the door, away from my aunt, and took out my phone. There was the last message on my phone, from Caroline, wondering where I’d gone. I texted her back: Sorry! An emergency trip to Geneva. And then in another text I typed, I’m thinking of you. Almost immediately I received a text back from her: Me, too! Come meet me in Marseille! And then I turned to my aunt and said, “I’m going to travel on my own for a while.”
My aunt didn’t respond right away, and didn’t look at me either. She just faced forward and continued driving, fingers drumming against the steering wheel. The station wagon hit a bump, and John Calvin’s chair rattled around in the wayback and then settled again.
“Do you think that’s a good idea, Calvin?” Aunt Beatrice finally asked.
It was a parental question, one equipped with its own answer: “It is not a good idea.” And then it occurred to me, as it should have long before, that in order to grow up I would not only have to stop listening to my mother but to my aunt also.
“I do,” I said. “It is.”
“But why?”
“Because you won’t tell me the truth,” I said, telling her the truth because I wanted to. “And because I’m starting to hate you for that.”
My aunt’s fingers stopped drumming when I said that. With her left hand, she reached up, touched her sunglasses, and I thought she going to take them off, but she didn’t. She opened her mouth, and I thought she was going to speak, but she didn’t do that either. Aunt Beatrice seemed, suddenly, like someone who didn’t know what to do or say. But she didn’t do or say anything else to dissuade me from doing what I wanted to do either. Instead, she took the first exit to Lyon and dropped me off at the train station there. I got out of the station wagon, walked around to the driver’s side. My aunt had taken off her glasses, hooked them behind her ears and onto the top of her head. Her blue eyes looked shiny, wet, full of deep, tender feeling. “I hope I see you again, Calvin,” she said in the same wheedling, sad-sack way that she’d said that an old lady likes to be seen off at the airport or taken to the doctor. Which made me even more determined to get away from her.
“Of course you will,” I said. “Let’s talk in a few days.”
My aunt nodded, unhooked her sunglasses, placed them over her eyes again. “You’ll need my number,” she said, and in the next moment my phone started buzzing in my pants’ pocket. I took it out. It was a number I didn’t recognize, and I assumed (and still assume) that it was my aunt’s. I silenced my phone. By the time I looked back to my aunt, she was already driving away.
172.
According to the train schedule, I would be seeing Caroline in three hours and forty-two minutes. I texted Caroline my arrival time, and she texted me back immediately, saying that she’d meet me at the station. Then I boarded the train. I didn’t have a private compartment this time; the trip was too short to need one. And anyway, the train was mostly empty, and I had a whole row of seats to myself. I stretched out on the seats, feeling happy, feeling accomplished: because I’d finally said and got what I wanted, and as a result, I felt confident that I would continue to say and get what I wanted.
But in the meantime, I had three hours and forty-two minutes to kill. So, first, I checked Dawn’s blog. There were no new posts from the road, no new updates. Not that she needed to. Arson is its own kind of update. Out of all the things I’d felt for and about her during all our years together, I’d never once felt angry. Dawn had always been angry enough for the both of us. Well, I was angry now, too, and (and I suppose this is true of most angry people) I began entertaining lots of vague thoughts about how I’d express my anger if I ever saw her again.
173.
Next, I checked my own blog. Why, I don’t know: I hadn’t posted anything and so had given no one anything to respond to. Although it turned out I had, and they had.
It Was Good
Dear readers, I don’t know if you’ve ever had sex on a train, but I highly recommend it. A train doesn’t move so much as it chugs, sort of bucks, but smoothly, as it proceeds toward its next station. I hope my posse doesn’t mind my kissing and telling, but last night, I got fucked! The woman I was with—let’s call her C—said she wanted to fuck me, and I let her, and fucked back, too. There is no pellet stove in this blog post. There was no pellet stove in our train compartment either. There was just a forty-seven-year-old man and a who-knows-how-old woman, and the faint taste and smell of booze on our breaths, and sadness and hope and lust in our hearts, and the slow, relentless chugging of the train, and one hard cock and one wet pussy, and C chewed on my lip and I liked that, and I ran my tongue around her navel and up and down her inner thighs and she liked that, and time sort of passed, but frantically, and during our last time C was on top of me and she reached back and ran her index finger over my balls and it felt as though I’d been electrocuted and that the electrocution had saved me, religiously saved me, and I tried to explain that feeling to C, right there, while she was on top of me, moving with the train, until she asked me to please shut up and just fuck her and I did that, and in short there was a lot of fucking. And it was good, posse! You don’t exist, and my father is dead, and my mother is dead, and John Calvin is dead, and my house has been burned to the ground and I feel empty, but fuck it, the house, and fuck her, the woman who burned it down, and fuck them, my parents, and fuck him, John Calvin, and fuck you, dear readers, fuck you, posse. I just wanted to write to you all this one last time and tell you that I had sex, and was worthy of it, and it was good!
174.
There were two comments on this blog post.
The first was from the pellet stove industry. It read, in its entirety: You’re fired!!! #industrystandards #inappropriate #wordlimit.
Then the second comment. The pellet stove industry had never figured out a way to draw readers or responders to its blog posts, but it had figured out a way to identify the readers if they did respond and also to determine the location from which they were responding. The second comment was written by Dawn Probst (Probst was her last name), who was writing from the Charlotte Douglas International Airport. Dawn’s comment read, in its entirety, Who are you?!?
You know who I am. I’m Calvin Bledsoe, I’d responded. Although of course I hadn’t been the one who’d responded.
175.
John Calvin once described “that dread and amazement with which . . . holy men were struck and overwhelmed whenever they beheld the presence of God.”
Which is the way I felt when I beheld the presence of the blog post I hadn’t written.
I did a number of things in quick succession and the
n repeatedly over the course of the train trip to Marseille.
First, I tried to delete the post. But apparently, upon my firing, I’d been denied access to the blog. Although why the industry itself hadn’t deleted the blog, why it hadn’t just gotten rid of the whole thing, was a mystery to me.
Second, I tried to respond to the post, denying that I’d written it. But for the second time, I was denied access.
Third, I texted the industry, and in that text I denied having written the post. The industry texted back and pointed out that I was the only one who had access to the account. I texted back and pointed out that the industry had access to the account. And the industry texted back and asked, why would the industry write and publish such a post? And then I texted back and asked, why would I write and publish such a post? And then the industry texted back and said, who knows why, maybe I was a sick fuck. A sick fuck who had not only written a sick post but who had also somehow found a way to prevent the industry from taking the sick post down. And then before I could text back that no, I wasn’t a sick fuck, and no, I hadn’t figured out a way to do that, the industry texted again and said that it was blocking my texts, beginning immediately. And then I texted back and asked them not to do that. But then my text failed to send, and so clearly they’d done that.
Fourth, I asked myself, was I a sick fuck? Because after all, a few of those words were mine—I hadn’t posted them, but I had written them—and all those thoughts were mine, and if they weren’t the thoughts of a sick fuck, then what were they?
Fifth, I asked myself, who had access to my blog? Who had access to my thoughts, my feelings, my brain, my heart, my soul? And who had access to Caroline’s sleeper on the train between Hamburg and Paris? Because the blog was a pretty accurate representation of what Caroline and I had done, what we had said.
Sixth, I thought of Caroline. She could have written the blog post. But why would she have written the blog post? There wasn’t a reason for her to have done that. And there wouldn’t be a reason for her to believe me when I said that I wasn’t the one who’d written it either. And she would have read it, too. I’d told her what I did for a living. She would no doubt have checked up on me. This is what the internet was made for. People will tell you that the internet was made to facilitate the free flow of information. But that’s just another way of saying the internet was made for people to check up on other people.
Seventh, if it wasn’t Caroline, and it wasn’t me, then who had written the blog post?
Eighth, it had to have been my aunt. But how? And why? Why would she do that to me? What was so offensive about my life, my livelihood, that she felt compelled to ruin it? My house had been destroyed, that was bad enough, but I felt my life being destroyed now, too. Why did my aunt hate that life so much? What had been so wrong with it? What was so wrong with me? What was so wrong with her? It hurt my head to think about all this, and so I went back to the first thing on the list and tried again to delete my blog post.
And in this way I spent the three-hour-and-forty-two minute train trip from Lyon to Marseille.
176.
By the time I reached Marseille it was ten at night. I was in something of a panic. Caroline. Caroline. I felt this terrible urgent need to see her and also an even stronger sense that after seeing her I would end up feeling something even worse than the terrible urgent need. Terror. Shame. Denial. Resignation. Futility. These feelings weighed on me—on my heart and on my head, but especially on my bladder. I’d gone to the bathroom at least six times on the train, and each time I’d felt less relief than the time before. And only after I’d gotten off the train and gone to the bathroom again did I realize that my kidney stones had returned.
There was a men’s room on the way from the track to the Marseille station proper. I waddled into it. It was humid in there, oppressive, like a greenhouse without the vegetation. There were two urinals, both unused. I took the one on the left. Tried to conduct my business. I won’t bore or disgust you with the details, except to say that my abdomen felt like it was hosting a zeppelin and that the zeppelin was armed with arrowheads, made out of shards of glass, and that the zeppelin was firing them through my urethra. Even though I knew from experience that there was nothing a doctor could do for me, that the stones had to run their course, I said out loud to my sad self, “Oh, Doctor!” and in my voice, I heard my aunt’s voice, the unconvincingly pathetic one. And then I remembered that I’d never translated and then listened to the recording of what the Butcher had said to Aunt Beatrice before we’d left her office in Paris.
I finished at the urinal, zipped up, and took out my phone, but before I could listen to my recording of the Butcher, I heard the bathroom door open, then quick-approaching footsteps. The footsteps stopped at the other urinal, to my right. I looked in that direction, in clear violation of rules guiding urination in men’s rooms, and saw that there was a man standing there, and he was not using the urinal, and he was wearing a black ski mask. He also was holding what looked like a black pillowcase. Without saying anything, he put the pillowcase over my head. It smelled like something that had been in a closet for too long.
This might sound strange to you, but I didn’t scream or struggle—at least not right away. I didn’t say anything at all. A feeling of calm fell over me. As though I’d been waiting for this to happen. As though it were predestined. For as John Calvin himself said, “Nothing, including human suffering, happens by chance.”
But then the man—I assumed he was a man—removed my cell phone from my hand. Then: smashing sounds. And with those sounds I was jolted back into life. I screamed. I screamed for my phone and for all the people—my aunt, Caroline, the Unknown Caller—who wouldn’t know where I was without it. When I paused in my screaming, the man—it was a man’s voice, one I didn’t recognize—said, “Please don’t take this personally.” And then he propelled my head forward, bouncing it off the top of the urinal. And that’s the last thing I remember until I woke up who knows how many hours later on the SS Antonio.
Fourteen
177.
I didn’t know how many hours and days I spent on that ship. My phone, remember, had been taken from me, destroyed, and so I had no sense or proof of time. Until the very end of the journey, I was not allowed to leave my tiny room. The room had no windows. The walls were gray; the room itself was sparsely furnished: a cot, a sink, a toilet. The door was locked. There was no mirror in the room. I was glad about that. I was afraid to see my forehead, which pulsed like it was another living thing. Once, I made the mistake of touching it, and I felt a round opening there, like a mouth, and in fact when I touched it, it seemed as though it screamed, although it was probably just me screaming.
178.
I was fed seven times. Seven times someone—I assume the man in the ski mask—slid a tray of food under the door. I had no idea whether the meals were supposed to be breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Each meal was the same. A large piece of salted fish, a pile of peas. I refused to eat, out of principle, although I couldn’t tell you what I thought the principle was. I did drink, water directly out of the tap, using my cupped hands. As for my kidney stones, they compelled me to use the toilet often, which offered not relief but more torment and dread.
179.
When the second tray was slid under the door, I asked quickly if I could have something to write with. My voice was so weak and scratchy that I doubted if anyone besides me could have heard it. But when the third tray emerged under the door some time later, there, next to the fish and the peas, was a blue ballpoint pen.
I took it and began writing on the walls. I wrote columns, four of them. In the first column I wrote the names of the people who might have had me kidnapped:
The Sociologist
Aunt Beatrice
Dawn
Caroline
The Reverend John Lawrence
The Man in the Mask
The only name I crossed out was the Man in the Mask. Of course, I knew that he’d done the k
idnapping, but I had the sense that he was working for someone else, that he’d kidnapped me on someone else’s behalf. I wasn’t really interested in keeping anyone on the list who was doing something on somebody else’s behalf.
And I wondered: Had my mother ever felt this way, about God or about John Calvin? That she wasn’t really interested anymore in doing something on somebody else’s behalf?
Anyway, in the second column I wrote all the names of the people who I thought might be waiting for me when the ship got to where it was going. It was the same list. I didn’t cross anyone out.
In the third column I simply wrote: Aunt Beatrice. I looked at her name, looked at it. She was, of course, the key to all this, but as a fellow victim, a perpetrator, or both, I didn’t know.
And then my pen ran out of ink. That was just as well. I wasn’t really getting anywhere with my columns.
180.
Then, between the arrival of my fourth and fifth trays, something strange happened. I was asleep again. I shouldn’t say “again”: I was asleep, or in a state much like sleep, most of my time aboard that ship. It wasn’t as though I was tired. But my head wound and my hunger and my loneliness and my kidney stones made being awake seem like too much work and not enough reward.
“In order to see,” a man’s voice said, “you must open your eyes.”
I didn’t recognize the man’s voice. It wasn’t automated, like the Unknown Caller’s. It wasn’t the Man in the Mask’s voice either. It wasn’t a voice I had heard before. It was a calm, clear voice, and it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.