After a while, Atchley started to question my aloofness.
“You mad at me or something?” she asked.
I jumped at her question. We were at lunch at the Wendy’s down the street, my thoughts elsewhere as I worked on my fries and read a three-month-old Sports Illustrated. It was the college football preview issue, and the Oklahoma Sooners had been a top-three team in the country in the preseason polls, but they lost their first game of the year to a Division I-AA school on a last-second field goal, and their entire season had been ruined right from the get-go.
“I’m sorry?”
“You mad at me or something? Seems like you’ve been avoiding me.”
“No,” I said.
She had a tray with her, and on it rested her lunch: a grilled chicken salad and a chocolate shake.
“Okay,” she said, sitting across from me. “What is it then? You don’t like me? You think I’m boring?”
“I hang out with you almost every night.”
“You hang out with Pinkett. You hardly even talk to me. Never look at me. Did I do something to piss you off?”
Yes, I thought. Yes. You chose him.
“No. Just been busy, that’s all. Trying to get number-one rep in the region.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Seriously.”
“Okay,” she said, stuffing her face with a bite of salad. A bit of ranch dressing stuck to her bottom lip. I licked my own, thinking she might get the hint, but she didn’t. “If that’s how you want to play it, that’s fine with me.”
That night, Pinkett, Kari, Atchley, and I did as we always did: we drank beers and chain-smoked cigarettes. The girls watched Pinkett and I play old video games and talk shit the way young men do, emasculating one another as we shot turtles out of our go-karts captained by a digital Donkey Kong. The girls took their turns playing, but mostly they just watched, passing the bong back and forth and discussing a freak fall thunderstorm that had produced lightning so bad it had struck an elementary school down the street, setting it on fire.
“Sounded like a bomb went off,” Kari said.
“Just think how fucked all those kids would’ve been if it had been during the day.”
“Crazy.”
Besides the four of us, a few other sales reps joined us. Pinkett only had a couple controllers for Mario Kart, so after a while the others got tired of watching and wanted to turn it to TV. We had, in one drunken hazy night, lost the remote, and so we changed the channel like it was the nineties again, pressing the button with a Dow rod we’d picked up at Lowe’s for eighty-five cents, and as Pinkett surfed the channels, there it was, a picture of my mother.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold up,” Barry, a new sales rep, said. “Go back.” And so Pinkett did; he pushed the channel up. “No, no, too far. Go back. Channel five.”
“The news?”
My stomach dropped like we’d hit a pocket of turbulence.
“Yeah.”
A collective groan washed over the group, and I begged silently, please, oh please. Please don’t turn it back.
“Come on, man. The fucking news?” Pinkett said.
“Seriously. Turn it back!”
Barry grabbed the Dow rod from Pinkett and changed the channel. My mother’s picture illuminated the screen as a woman’s voice narrated a news story, calling our community a cult, describing the violence that had erupted, the hoarding of arms, Scoot’s passing, the fire, the raid, the dozens dead.
“Yeah, man,” Barry said. “This is it. I remember when this shit went down. It was crazy.”
My mother looked terrible. The picture shown was a recent one, a still from an interview recently conducted regarding her incarceration, her unwavering faith, and her decision to cease the appeals process on her death sentence. In it she looked haggard, her hair having turned the color of a dirty ashtray, her flesh drooping like she was more sensitive to the effects of gravity than the rest of us. She was missing a tooth, one right incisor, and it made her look a little mad, like she might just try to bite you if you got too close. It was harrowing seeing her like this, so unlike the woman I had known, the woman who had raised me.
“This sick bitch right here,” Barry continued, “turned a gun on all these brainwashed sons a bitches. Just boom, boom, boom.” He made a gun with his hands and pointed it at Atchley, Pinkett, and Kari. “Fucking SWAT team busted down their doors, and the only ones left alive were this bitch and her son and the preacher. The preacher rolled, ended up testifying against the woman. Crazy, man. Just crazy.”
“Jesus Christ,” Pinkett said.
“That’s who she said told her to do it,” Barry said. “I ain’t guilty—God made me do it.”
“Let’s just play video games,” I said, trying to keep my voice from wavering.
“Hold on,” Barry said. “I want to see when this bitch is set to die.”
Turned out it was December 14th at ten p.m., just three months away. It was hard to hear the words being said, delivered in a somber, Midwestern timbre like a sports announcer delivering news a star player had been ejected from the game. With it came a certainty hard to deal with. There was no manual for how to react in such a situation. Anything could’ve been justified: denial, anger, depression. I could’ve upended the coffee table or broken the bong over Barry’s head. I could’ve taken a razor to my arm and like that stupid owl and his Tootsie Pop counted how many cuts it would take to reach bone. I could’ve just gotten up and walked away and gone back to my own place, acted like nothing had even happened. Instead, though, I just clasped Atchley’s hand and squeezed. I did it without thinking. I squeezed tightly. I squeezed until my hand hurt and, to my surprise, she squeezed back.
CHAPTER 4
HALLOWEEN THAT YEAR, I DRESSED UP AS DOC Brown from Back to the Future, the scene in particular when the 1950s Doc met Marty for the first time. In the movie Doc is wearing a helmet made of light bulbs attached to a geo-dimensional steel frame, and he uses this contraption to try to read Marty’s mind. I recreated this using twinkle lights, a battery-powered pocket generator, a bicycle helmet, cardboard, and duct tape. I looked good, I thought, and was anxious to show Atchley my outfit, having heard she was a fan of 1980s-era comedies like The Goonies, Say Anything, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Caddyshack, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and, of course, the Back to the Future trilogy. The first two, at least. The third, she claimed, nearly ruined the franchise.
It wasn’t a date. A neighbor of mine, Clay, was having a Halloween party, and I’d been invited—the entire apartment building had, actually—and I used it as an excuse to hang out with Atchley alone. Pinkett was out of town, visiting his parents down in Dallas, but to keep it from looking like a date, I invited Barry along as well, masquerading my invitation as a group outing, hoping it would conceal my ulterior motives. Which were, I admit, a bit of a mystery even to me. I knew I was attracted to Atchley, but being locked up for the majority of my hormonal teenage years, I was unsure how to act around girls, how to ask them out on a date or attempt something even more forward like kissing them. The thought petrified me, and so I did the only thing I could think of: I asked Atchley out to a party thrown by a guy I hardly even knew.
Atchley dressed as a zombie. When I showed up to her place, an apartment downtown overlooking the bombing memorial, she was applying her makeup, pancake powder and copious amounts of dried, deep-red blood caked around her mouth, jawline, and neck. She wore colored contact lenses to make her eyes look milky white, without iris or pupil. It was off-putting, and when she opened the door I actually flinched, but she didn’t make fun. She just invited me in and asked if I wanted something to drink.
“I have Fresca, I think. Or tap water. No beer or anything.”
“I’m fine.”
“It’s no problem,” she said. “The Fresca might be warm, but I think I have a clean glass somewhere.”
“No, really. I’m okay.”
“Okay,” she said like she was unconvinced. “I’ll just b
e a minute. I want to look as dead as possible.”
Her place wasn’t as I’d pictured at all. Although I had no idea what a twenty-year-old woman’s apartment should look like, never having been in one, I had the idea of pink and zebra prints and picture collages and single-word knickknacks demanding we live and laugh and love. Instead, though, there wasn’t much in the way of decorations. There was a wrought-iron TV stand and an old bulbous Magnavox. A glass coffee table. A worn checkered loveseat. Mismatched dining chairs and a circular table that wobbled. Everything looked secondhand, and all of it was dirty, covered in dust and mustard-covered plates.
“I don’t stay here much,” Atchley said when she returned, and there was something in her voice that unnerved me. She wasn’t just stating a fact; there was a deep sincerity in her voice as well, verging on the apologetic. “Actually,” she said, “I don’t like staying here at all.”
And so, we didn’t. We picked Barry up and headed back to my apartment complex, where we could hear the party had already started. House music blared, the bass vibrating my bone marrow. Fake smoke filled the apartment, and it was dark, the only light from crisscrossing lasers and a strobe. A scream soundtrack underlay the music, and fake blood caked the bathroom sink and walls and kitchen tile. Werewolves and goblins and sexy cats danced in the living room as Clay served punch from a large plastic trashcan. We got drinks and made our way to a couch where we sat by ourselves. I knew nobody there, and neither did my guests, and so we sat in silence and sipped the sugary punch and stared straight ahead to keep from having to talk to one another. I kept coming up with different conversation starters, an anecdote about a customer nearly cutting his thumb off during a service call, or this homeless guy across the street that kept throwing soup on passersby, but everything sounded so stupid in my head.
“I once ruptured my spleen,” Atchley said.
“I’m sorry?”
“My spleen. I ruptured it.”
I wasn’t sure if I heard her right.
“I was young and playing on a swing set, and these kids next to me kept swinging up as high as they could and then jumping off. They were a lot bigger than me, but still, I wanted to be like them, and so I swung as hard and as fast as I could, and when I started to get scared because I was higher than I’d ever been before, I let go. At first, I remember being exhilarated. All the fear evaporated, and for a moment all I felt was the most extreme joy, but that didn’t last long. I came down on the wooden rail surrounding the swings. The kids next to me got scared and ran off. I ended up passing out, and I wasn’t found until about twenty minutes later, bleeding from the mouth.”
I didn’t know what to say to this, so I decided not to say anything. And she didn’t say anything else, either, instead turning to face the dancers in front of us. I couldn’t tell why she stopped talking, if she might’ve been embarrassed for revealing such a story to someone who didn’t say a word in response, but she wore so much fake blood I couldn’t tell if she blushed or not. I would’ve been surprised, though, if she had—she didn’t seem to have the same filter the rest of us did, where we cared too deeply about what others thought of us.
“I got a scar,” I said as I pulled up my shirt. On my ribcage was a jagged, peach-colored scar running from my waistline up to my armpit. “Got jumped in the shower once.”
She ran her finger alongside it and smiled. It was hardly noticeable, just a sly upturn at the corner of her lip. “What’d you do?” she asked.
“What?”
“What’d you do to get jumped?”
“I was new.”
She nodded as though this made perfect sense.
“When I was sixteen,” she said, “I was driving out on Route 66, and it was late at night and I’d been drinking, and for some reason I kept going faster and faster and faster. To this day, I’m not sure why I did it, but I kept accelerating until I reached around ninety. It was just this impulse, an urge to do something dangerous. I felt compelled to do it. I lost control around a slight curve to the left, and the car spun out before slamming down on its side. I almost killed myself and my best friend.”
“I haven’t spoken to my brother or my father in years,” I said. “I don’t even know where they’re at. Or if they’re even alive still. The last time we spoke I was just so angry at them. I told them to leave and not to come back, and though they reached out a couple more times, eventually they stopped.”
“Looks like we’ve both made mistakes,” she said.
Later, as she was exiting the bathroom and I was entering, she pinned me against the wall and kissed me. It took me by surprise, and we butted teeth, but she didn’t stop. She exerted even more pressure, and I returned the kiss.
When she pulled away, she asked, “Want to get out of here?” and all I could say in return was, “Sure.”
“Good,” she said. “Good.”
“What about Barry?” I asked.
“Fuck Barry.”
We left him there and went to my apartment. We hadn’t even made it off the elevator before we were at each other, biting each other’s lips, throwing off our clothes, and clawing at each other as we made our way to my bedroom. Atchley pushed some dirty laundry off my bed, and we climbed aboard. She was on top, and it was such a strange sight, her mouth and neck drenched in red, her eyes lifeless and blank, but the rest of her body alive and well, rocking rhythmically on top of me. She grabbed ahold of my chest, and I tried to last as long as I could, counting one, two, three, four, five, six until I couldn’t hold back anymore. I came inside of her even though I didn’t mean to.
When done, she lay pressed up next to me, her head on my chest as she ran her fingertips around my nipple. I felt at ease, more so than I had in years, since I’d been a child, in fact, when I’d been convinced everything I was doing was right and good and divined by God himself. I was so at peace I could feel myself dozing off to sleep—good, hard, rejuvenating sleep—drifting seamlessly between dream and reality, but then Atchley spoke, jerking me awake.
“You’re Caleb Gunter,” she said. “Aren’t you?”
ATCHLEY DIDN’T TELL ANYONE MY secret. In exchange, I didn’t tell anyone about us. What “us” entailed, I wasn’t exactly sure. After work, I’d call her and wait outside her apartment building until she answered, sometimes forty or fifty minutes having passed, but finally she’d ring me up and I’d go inside and we’d have sex. When we were done, we’d watch old Full House episodes on TV Land, and then she’d kick me out before midnight. The next morning at work she’d act like nothing had happened, and she told me she wanted to keep it that way. “Don’t shit where you eat,” she called it, and I obliged—I certainly didn’t want the sex to stop.
The thing I liked most about Atchley was that she didn’t ask a lot of questions. Or any at all, really. She didn’t ask about the congregation or my belief in being the Second Coming of Christ or what it was like to have your house raided, to have your mother kill a dozen innocent people, to have been complicit, if at least in some way, in the death of a child because his father refused medical treatment. After she’d asked me if I was Caleb Gunter, the same false child prophet seen on the news, I prepared for her to bombard with me such questions. I formulated long, thoughtful responses wherein I would tell her I wasn’t brainwashed—it wasn’t like that, because in order to be brainwashed, the person convincing you must realize they’re telling you lies. In my case, it couldn’t be any different—my mother truly believed I was Jesus Christ reborn, and so why wouldn’t I believe her? She was, after all, my mother. She birthed me and raised me and fed me and taught me, and so why wouldn’t I trust her? My very life depended on her. But I think Atchley understood I wasn’t ready to talk about it yet, not bringing it up again after asking me if I was who she thought I was. The night she’d asked, I couldn’t lie to her, and so I simply nodded yes, and she dropped it after that.
The rest of the world, however, did not. For the first time in years, my family dominated the news. Local news, alte
rnative weeklies, radio pundits, and national TV personalities all had one thing running almost 24/7, the Gunter family and the Church of the Seven Seals. CNN replayed the footage of the night the FBI had raided the worship hall, the night sky illuminated by fluorescent tear gas and flares and the flash of an assault rifle’s muzzle. I always jumped when I watched the service hall erupt into flames, like I was reliving the moment again. To this day, I’m not sure who started the fire, whether it was the FBI or if it was my mother. I don’t think I’d be surprised either way—my mother would rather have died than give in to an authority she didn’t recognize, and the FBI had already proven they’d use any force necessary to bring us to justice. Alive, dead—didn’t make much difference to them. We’d killed one of their own.
Of course, along with the video of the raid and pictures of my mother and Sam, there were also pictures and videos of me, Caleb Gunter, with prognosticators speculating as to where I was living, by what name, and why. People called in from all over the country, claiming they’d spotted me at a Starbucks in Seattle or an REI Outfitters in Montreal, that I was living off the grid in North Dakota, plotting my revenge a là Unabomber. One even claimed I was a particularly well-known hedge-fund manager whiz kid out of Boston, beating the market by double-digit points, but, to my relief, nobody said I was still in Oklahoma, just three hours from where tragedy had befallen me and my family and my church, selling knives to middle-aged housewives and spending my nights drinking until I passed out, hoping I stayed awake long enough to sloppily grope a coworker. All of the pictures the media outlets showed, of course, were when I was several years younger, before puberty scarred my face with acne, before my cheeks thinned and my hair grew darker, my forehead more pronounced. The resemblance was there, of course, but it wasn’t so stark as to be immediate.
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