FIFTY-TWO: WE, THE ANIMAL FOUR

I WALKED THROUGH THE DOOR, under the “Nakwatuk” sign. All we could do was wait.

The camp felt different—like every single person there had the same thought process going on. Like everyone was part of the same shitty dream. When Matty looked up and saw me, the same sort of delayed, faraway recognition from the bus fell over her face. “Moses,” she said. She was sitting on the stage; her face was puffy and Michael was holding her hand. Faisal walked out of the kitchen holding Styrofoam cups of coffee for them and his eyes were pink.

“Hi, guys.”

The cold wind outside ushered me in. Matty strode over to me, her gleaming eyes pinned to the floor, pulling Michael with her, and hugged me. Faisal set the coffees down and came over.

“Hey, man.” He didn’t ask if I was okay or how I was doing. “Water’s still hot in there; you want some coffee?”

I nodded and went into the depths of the kitchen to make a drink.

All of the rest of the campers had been rounded up and brought to the cafeteria, where the adults would explain to them what had happened. They’d told us that the Buddies would be brought in later but that, in the interim, they wanted to minimize the overwhelming nature of the situation. We waited in the rec hall.

The four of us were sitting on the stage with our backs against the dirty curtain backdrop. My phone was plugged in next to me in case the cab company called, sucking in life from the current behind the wall.

“She didn’t have her coat on. Lump, I mean. It was wrapped around the deer. Deer’s fine.”

“She gave her coat to the deer?” Matty asked.

I answered her the only way I knew how: “They were burrowed up in this nook under a tree. Hypothermia’ll do that. It’s called paradoxical undressing. When hypothermia starts to set in, a lot of people get confused and start taking layers off. Either because of the hypothalamus failing or because after the muscles get exhausted they relax and release bursts of blood into all the extremities. The person thinks they’re overheating. But, then again, it was Lump. Maybe she’s just the kind of kid that would give her coat to a fawn. And hiding in the nook, that’s terminal burrowing. Sometimes it’s called hide-and-die syndrome.” I told myself to stop short of listing statistics for exposure deaths.

Michael squeezed Matty against his side and started chewing on the inside of his cheek. Faisal stared into his coffee.

“Do you know why I thought you recognized me?” I asked Matty. She leaned forward and looked past the wedge of curtain that had climbed up between us.

My hands were shaking and my pupils were huge.

“What?”

“On the bus. I thought you recognized me from somewhere else.”

“Oh.”

“Do you guys remember about a year ago when a couple of kids back home burned down a bowling alley?”

They looked at each other. They were tired and they were hurting but I needed them to listen just a few minutes longer. I needed my friends to listen.

“Okay. Do you remember when a couple of kids burned down a bowling alley with a bunch of gods on top of it?”

Something clicked with Michael. He pointed, bobbing his finger up and down in thought. “Yeah, I remember something about that. Happened a few suburbs south of the city. Something about burning nativity scenes or Mohammed or Buddha. Something. I remember my aunt being pissed about it.”

“Mine too,” Faisal said, staring into his coffee while the memories articulated themselves in his head. “Yeah, my aunt and uncle called the house and said that they were burning Jesus over in Guthrie.”

“It wasn’t just any Jesus,” I said. “It was Rock ’n’ Roll Jesus. Bought on special order. We stole him from a prie … sorry, minister’s yard.”

“That was you?” Michael asked.

“And my cousin, Charlie. They televised the whole courtroom drama on and off for about six months after. They called it a hate crime at first.”

“Shit,” Matty said. “I do remember something about that. But I never watched the courtroom stuff. I don’t remember hearing about your cousin though.”

“Yeah—yeah yeah yeah, there were two, I remember that,” Michael said, still scanning his archived memories. “But the other one got shot. He died— Shit, sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“He didn’t die,” I said.

“Wait, no, I remember watching some of the coverage when I was in the waiting room. When I was getting stitches,” Faisal said to his friends, as if to verify the story. “There was the cop that … did it. And was giving his testimony. I remember him saying that he ‘pulled his service revolver and fired a single shot, hitting the suspect in the head.’”

“Why do you remember that?” Michael asked him.

“Because it was fucked up. I remember thinking how fucked up it was that this guy shot an unarmed kid in the head. I kept watching and waiting for them to say the kid had a weapon or something but they never did. He didn’t die?”

“You didn’t see him in court because he was still at St. Anne’s.” I raked my hand through my hair. “That was before they moved him to Golden Hills. A long-term care facility. He’s in a coma.”

It didn’t take long for the news to get bored with our story. By the time the facts had come out they’d lost their shine and luster and people’d stopped watching. They didn’t want to watch my Aunt Mar cry about her son. People were a lot less interested in seeing Charlie laid up in a hospital bed with half of his hair shaved off and a ragged, zipper-shaped line of thick stitches along the side of his head. Not after the facts came out. Not after they stopped calling it a hate crime.

They especially didn’t want to watch after it came out that it was a prank.

It’s not that I didn’t try to make them see us. They just wouldn’t. And they didn’t see a lot of things and they certainly never saw his eyes. I know because I tried to get them to film it and show it, but they didn’t want to and neither did Aunt Mar. I just wanted one shot—one shot that showed the scar and the tubes and Charlie’s eyes that you could only see if you pulled his eyelids up. His right eye is a milked-over, foggy placeholder; an eye not of a storm but in it. But his other eye, his left eye, is still so goddamn clear like it sees miles further than any other eye in the world.

I took another searing mouthful of the beverage. For a campground out in the middle of Nowheresville, Michigan, they had good coffee and blisteringly intense hot sauce.

“I didn’t know the whole thing was supposed to burn. Charlie did. Charlie set it up. We had different ideas about what it meant to bring people together.”

“Your cousin tried to burn a bowling alley down?”

“No. Not the bowling alley. That part was an accident, I think.”

“And you didn’t know?” Michael asked.

I felt that familiar twisting in my guts. The feeling that was equal parts hurt pride and fruitless, pathetic anger. “No, I didn’t know. He even asked me if it smelled funny when we were on the roof that night. Wanted to see if I could smell the lighter fluid he was spraying on the pallets. Other than that, though, I think it was an accident. This is more of a community service situation for me than a team-building weekend.”

“That’s fucked up,” Faisal said. “Why didn’t he tell you?” he asked, knowing my story and asking about Charlie instead of saying he would pray for me.

“Because that was how he was. That was how we were.”

“But the Jesus thing, that was on purpose?” Matty asked.

I answered the question I had the answer to: “It wasn’t just Jesus. It was Jesus, Buddha, Vishnu, Lou Reed, and a Pakistani flag. Everyone always thinks it was just Jesus.”

“Wait,” Matty said. “If it was an accident and he was the one who rigged it, why are you here?” She asked the question I always thought she would, and instead of venom, there was only honest curiosity.

“I was still trespassing and I was the one driving the car. Test made it pretty clear that they wouldn’t have let me around kids if I was a felon.”

“The cop shouldn’t have shot him,” Matty said, angry for me.

“Officer Alan Powell,” I said. Faisal snapped a look at me like he recognized the name. I cleared my throat. “I don’t think he meant to. Charlie stood up when he was supposed to be on the ground.”

“That’s bullshit. That’s what they always say.”

“Nah, he did. He had his gun on me. And, honestly, I’m pretty sure he was about to shoot me. So Charlie stood up. I think he was just scared. I think the situation got way worse than he’d planned it to.”

“He still shouldn’t have shot him,” Matty said.

It was hard not to smile when I said the outlandish sentence: “We were standing in front of a bowling alley engulfed in flames with a bunch of religious idols melting behind us to Guns ’n’ Roses,” but the words still came out shaky. “And the guy that shot him … he’s ruined.”

“They fired him?” Michael said.

“No, not at all. The department was very supportive. Lots of other officers saying, ‘You did what you had to do’ and ‘It was an impossible choice.’”

“Wait. What was his name again?”

“Alan Powell.”

“Al Powell? Like R—”

“Like in Die Hard. Trust me, Charlie’d laugh too. Not that this Officer Powell looked anything like Reginald VelJohnson.”

“I mean, hey, a coma’s not so bad, right?” Michael said. Matty bored holes through him with her look. “I mean, considering the—” He swallowed. “Sorry.”

“It’s not that kind of coma,” I said. “He’s a three on the Glasgow scale—he’s not going to wake up, and eventually his parents’ll have to make a decision about life support.”

“I’m really sorry,” Michael said.

And I said, “I’m not.” And I said, “The worst part of it was when they told me that he wasn’t going to wake up, there was a part of me that felt numb and there was part of me that was happy.” And I said the word again, from the deep hot center of my chest: “Happy. How fucked up is that? Part of me was happy. And ever since, I haven’t been sure I’m a human being with a beating heart because how could I be happy that my cousin was never going to wake up?” The words flew out of me like scattered black birds against a brilliant sky. “That’s what fucked me up the most. But this? Lump? This hurts so much.”

Whether it was the drink or the honesty or the night catching up to me or the new ghosts I’d be carrying with me, I felt my drums beating and I knew they weren’t mechanical. In the middle of my chest, the muscle kept hammering away, loud and constant and human.

Like maybe the machine wasn’t a machine at all.

Like maybe the mechanism to hurt and feel wasn’t broken and never was.

Another sip and the door opened. Test stepped in. Despite the cold weather and his huge coat, he was still wearing shorts.

“Anyway. Matty: you asked about my life story. That’s it—that’s the one.” I stood up as Test got closer.

“Moses,” he said as he walked over to us.

We’re always in the aftermath of the storm. We’re always staggering from one disaster to the next. And at the same time, we are the storms in other people’s lives. We are the disasters that lay waste to cities and anticipated apocalypses.

But we are also so much more.

I used to think that happy endings were just prologues for tragedy; that if you kept your eyes open for long enough, you’d see the tapered line where the shining moment ended and the grimy, black downfall began. And it’s true: happy endings always precede tragedy.

But tragedy inevitably precedes hope. That’s just gravity. The same way the fall always follows the float. What comes up will inevitably come down; the big secret is that what falls will always rise again. It’s all a spiral.

Charlie ended my life when I was eight, but he started it too.

Someday, I will be new again. I’ll be new until I’m not.

And then I’ll fall.

And I’ll rise.

Then fall.

Then rise again.

Faisal’s face contorted when the crosswind wafted over my cup. “What the hell are you drinking?”

“Home recipe. Nothing you’d want to drink. I’ll see you guys. Let’s meet up in the city when we’re all back.”

They nodded back at me like that was the most obvious thing in the world.

I stepped out into the lamp-lit night. A world that kept on existing beyond every angle of your pain’s perimeter.

“Taxi’s GPS was acting up—they called asking for last-minute directions. They’ll be here in fifteen,” Test said. “Might be a good time to get your bags.”