40. TALKING

I made my first telephone call in close to a year.¹¹

11 In Dr. Sick: The Survivors and The Day of Gifts, O’Connor reprints the entirety of my 911 call.

“911, what is your emergency?”

“People are going to die.”

“Excuse me?”

“Dr. James Shepard is behind it.”

“Sir, are you in danger?”

“We’re all in danger.”

“Where is your current location?”

“Truth.”

“Sir, I need your name.”

“Thirty-Seven.”

“Your address? Thirty-seven what?” “Gifts.”

O’Connor breaks down the phone call. He dips into my head. He takes the liberties of presuming he knows what I was thinking. He writes, “Thirty-Seven, known simply as John Doe, the youngest member of The Survivors, experienced a moment of clarity. On some fundamental level, he understood what was about to transpire. He resisted Shepard’s brainwashing. A germinating doubt blossomed into an attack of conscience…Thirty-Seven attempted to give his own form of gift on February tenth, and that gift was a warning.”

O’Connor thinks this because I said as much when I was picked up three days later. I didn’t talk and then I did and I told them whatever they wanted to know or maybe what I was willing to tell them.

They pushed and pushed and pushed for the whereabouts of the DEA agents.

I told them I had no idea what they were talking about.

I was held captive. I wasn’t offered a lawyer, because of Homeland Security. I didn’t care. I knew how to look people in the eye and project what they wanted to believe. I had no allegiances to One or Five because they’d sold us out for selfish wants.

And that was the real reason for the phone call. I wasn’t thinking about sleeping families being awoken to puncture wounds. I wasn’t thinking about accent walls being splattered with blood. I was thinking about One and Five in Mexico and them being happy and alone and with their new child that I wanted to be me. I was lamenting the fact we’d ever come back from Mexico. I was imagining that moment in the ocean as something permanent, something that didn’t crush me. I was picturing the three of us—we’d grow hair and we’d live a simple life, and I’d learn to surf and I’d meet someone, a local girl with dark hair on her arms, and things would be quiet and we’d eat fruit and I’d speak various dialects of Truth and Romantic languages and it’d be a loving family of all of our choosing.

All of that, juxtaposed to the image of them leaving us at the Greyhound station, their hands so close to touching, magnetism.

Five was arrested in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. A family had been butchered seven hours before her incarceration. She was picked up walking along the highway. She wore her black scrubs even though it was only seventeen degrees. She was covered in blood. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t resist.

One was arrested in Oklahoma City. He was pulled over because he drove two missing DEA agents’ car. He wore black scrubs. The previous night, the OKCPD had received four different calls, each parent hysteric, words failing, their children killed in the dark hours.

I didn’t know this at the time, so I talked and I talked with varying levels of Honesty.

I acted out of jealousy.

I acted out of fear of being abandoned.

I acted out of my need for love.

Dr. Turner said everything stemmed from being given up for adoption. She said everything stemmed from my father pleasuring himself in my doorway. One said everything stemmed from our consciousness disconnect from God. He said that God wasn’t real. He said everything came from humans knowing this Truth, but doing everything in their power—consuming and fucking and drinking and creating art and kneeling in mass and fighting wars and masturbating over our sleeping sons—to blot out this understanding, to live a life based in deceit. Two said that One’s Truth was only a partial truth. She said that the One Truth is that we are Gods. Each of us. Everyone who has so much as screamed outside of his mother’s womb. She said that armed with this knowledge, we can enact change through whatever tool we want.

I don’t know, maybe they’re all right.

O’Connor writes, “Thirty-Seven retreated from Glenwood Springs back up to Marble. He was in search of safety. He craved sanctuary. But upon arriving at Shepard’s cabin, seeing it was still deserted, save for the ghosts of his fellow Survivors, who at that moment were in the process of murdering innocent people, he understood that this cabin, once a refuge, was now nothing more than a reminder of the atrocities he was complicit in…At that point, the only thing for a fifteen-year-old who’d been forced to undergo chemotherapy, forced to ingest highly disruptive hallucinogens, forced to offer up his body for any Survivor who felt a taste for youth, to do was to burn the house down. He had to destroy the physical representation of the mental hell he’d been enslaved to.”

In CMHIP, I thought a lot about my willingness to abandon faith in One. I couldn’t help but feel like Judas. I’d gotten scared, everything a Reprieve-like jumble of hurt. I’d allowed my sense of others, my intuition, my Gifts of Understanding, to skew. I’d seen what I wanted to see. I sold them out. I told things that shouldn’t have been told. I agreed to deals. I craved intimacy. I became a mute. I became Mason Hues. I steeled my resolve in Dr. Turner’s office, highlighting a book I practically wrote, seeing inconsistencies as facts, telling myself that One and Five might have participated in The Day of Gifts, but they were still running away together as the Johnsons from Durango. I did this and I became happier or at least not suicidal. I didn’t think about Truth. I didn’t think about Honesty. I masturbated to fantasies other than One or my father. I played four square in the rec room. I never used the first person plural. I was given small rewards: extra pudding, promises to not go back to juvie, the ability to keep Dr. Sick in my room. I blotted out everything I’d learned and I talked about being a victim and I wrote letters we burned and I believed Dr. Turner when she said I could be anything I wanted to.

And then I was given a Gift of Understanding.

Sometimes I wonder why I didn’t simply tell them all where the DEA agents were buried.

I suppose it’s because that’s where I went after I burned the cabin down. I walked seven miles into the mountains. I climbed up to the abandoned quarry. I sat above the quartered bodies and I shivered and I cried and I prayed for death. I spoke to voices that echoed up fifty feet, the words muffled through two Hefty trash bags. They told me they loved me. They told me nothing was my fault. They told me One and Five had abandoned the Honest life months before. They told me my family members were changing the world the best way they knew how. They told me I was pretty. That someday I’d make somebody happy. They told me nothing happened by accident. They told me they’d always be there for me. They weren’t mad. They were happy I was born. They were proud of me.

None of this is in the book.

Instead, O’Connor paints a picture of me stumbling through the woods for three days. He engages in every sensationalized bit of bullshit he can muster. I know this is his attempt to paint me as sympathetic. To illustrate how I may have been involved in monstrous things, but I was fifteen; I was not a monster. He writes about hypothermia and starvation, a lonely boy in need of rescue. He writes, “After seventy hours, Thirty-Seven’s body failed him. He crumpled to the snow. He was two hundred yards from the cabin, close enough to feel its magnetism, far enough away to protect himself from its deadly grasp.”