Dear Kurl,
You’re the expert in pain. We’ve never really talked about it, but you must be intimately acquainted with every detail of how pain operates inside the human body.
How many times must you have stumbled to the bathroom and run the water cold and cupped it for long, long minutes to your face, or put your back to the cold shower and bowed your head and waited for numbness? Waited, waited to feel something less, something else.
And there’s no thought possible during that waiting, is there? The pain and the waiting for something other than the pain is all there’s room for. Nothing else.
I don’t need to tell you about pain, do I, Kurl?
I opened Bron’s bedroom door and saw you. You and Shayna. The two of you. My sister’s naked back arching. Her legs straddling you.
I didn’t even look at your face. I didn’t need to see your face to recognize your bare thighs, the sole of your bare foot with its ruddy toe pads and the wide, pale stretch of your instep.
I closed the door before I exhaled. Or I may not have exhaled at all. A lost breath.
The pain was still centered in my ribs, stabbing through my chest. But now it radiated everywhere, the pain. It torqued my ribs on both sides from spine to sternum. It seized my hips and knees, so that I missed four or five steps on the stairs back down to the main floor.
I spilled Lyle’s pills everywhere in the hall. A few people started picking them out of the carpet, but I hollered at them until they backed away and let me grope around and shove the tablets back into the bottle.
One of Bron’s brothers’ friends poured me a few shots in the kitchen, and some time passed that way. After a while I went to the bathroom and vomited, and I saw some of Lyle’s pills floating in the vomit in the toilet bowl.
So this time, when I went back to the kitchen, I crushed up a few more pills with the handle of a knife and bent over and licked them off the counter. I wanted to snort them—in that moment I very seriously wanted to be the kid at the party doing oxy on the kitchen counter—but I was too frightened by the specter of nosebleed, of overdose, of coma, or death.
Oddly enough, I wasn’t thinking about Raphael at all when I crushed the pills. I wasn’t thinking about Lyle’s revelation. I’d forgotten it entirely, in fact. I wasn’t thinking about anything except the pain, ending the pain.
Izzy and Ezra’s friends took a few of the pills for themselves and gave me a few more shots.
I started joking around a bit. I folded paper towels into various birds. Someone pointed out that my scarf had puke on it, so I took it off and fed it into the garbage disposal, which got jammed and made a loud whining noise. One of the twins got upset about that and told me it cost $1,700 to repair that machine. For some reason this was the funniest thing I’d ever heard: Bron’s younger brother knowing the precise cost of repairing a garbage disposal unit.
Someone put on Barry White, so I climbed up on the kitchen island next to the sink to do a strip tease. I took off my belt first and did a few lariat moves with it, then got to work on my shirt buttons, which proved quite difficult because my fingers had begun to feel like rubber bands.
There was lots of laughter and jeering at my performance, but when I started to feed my belt into the garbage disposal alongside the scarf, the twins—Izzy and Ezra both, this time—decided enough was enough. They each grabbed one of my arms and hauled me down to the floor. They threw my shirt and belt at me and told me to get the hell out of their kitchen.
Out by the pool was Dowell. He and the other butcherboys weren’t in the hot tub, just sprawling on the deck chairs watching the girls splash around. Maya was wearing a red bikini.
Why were the butcherboys at Bron’s party? It didn’t make sense, but then suddenly it made perfect sense to me. Perfect that they should be there, right in the middle of all this pain.
I dropped my shirt and belt on the end of Dowell’s lounge chair and sat down directly in his lap. I wrapped my arms around his neck. I don’t know exactly what I said to him—“I miss you,” or something—but he got to his feet so fast that his beer bottle shattered on the concrete.
The butcherboys started shoving me around, but I kept managing to shimmy up against Dowell anyhow. I guess he was so used to me trying to put distance between us that he didn’t know how to defend himself when I was determined to close the distance instead.
Maya was hopping around, all excited, back on her theme from earlier, in Cherry Valley: how I’d ratted them out and how they were going to kick my ass. “Hit him, already!” she yelled. She picked up my belt and shoved it into Dowell’s hands. “Here! Hit him, you moron.”
Dowell obediently swatted me with the belt once, twice.
I kept talking, I don’t know what—“What’s the matter, Christopher; we used to be such good friends”—something like that—and one of the butcherboys, Liam, I think, held me by the arms while Dowell started smacking me harder with the belt.
I marveled each time it made contact with my back, my shoulders, my neck, how little it hurt. Lyle’s pills were marvelous. The adrenaline and fear coursing through me felt fresher and less poisonous than the pain I’d been feeling earlier, upstairs.
Then the belt struck Liam’s fingers. He swore and dropped me, and my chest bounced off the edge of the deck chair right where my ribs hurt worst, and I heard myself let out a scream.
By now a whole circle of people had gathered around, and Dowell kept swinging with the belt but missing as often as he hit, saying, “You sick little perv; you dirty little faggot,” stuff like that, really gasping now, too, all out of breath with the effort and his fury.
I turned to look at him and the belt caught me across the cheekbone and eyelid. I heard the scream again—mine, my scream. I couldn’t see, and I put up my hand to check because I thought he’d put my eye out.
But there was less pain, Kurl. That was all I’d been waiting for, all I’d been working toward, since I saw you upstairs with my sister.
Yours,
Jo