“Pay? What are you trying to tell me here, Edmond? Because that sounds like a threat to me. Should I feel threatened here?”
“I knew you wouldn’t listen to me. No one listens to me.”
“I’m here, Edmond. And I’m all ears.”
He stood up and put on his backpack very slowly.
Then he looked at his sneakers and giggled like an elementary-school kid who had farted loudly in the middle of class. “I’m sorry, Mr. Vernon. I’m really sorry. I’m just messing with you. You’re the best. High five.”
He raised his hand in the air.
I did not raise mine.
“Are you okay, Edmond?”
“Aces, teach. No five? Okay. I’ll just go then. Off to be extraordinary. I won’t let you down.”
I let him go mostly because I was feeling exhausted that day, and then I forgot about Edmond Atherton as I taught the rest of my classes, went to meetings in the afternoon, and then helped settle a fight between the leads in the school play, who had apparently “hooked up,” which didn’t work out all that well, making their onstage chemistry dodgy at best—and there were tears, which took a lot of energy.
I thought about Edmond as I drove home that night and decided I would ask to speak with him again at the end of class the next day. Maybe he was looking for some extra attention and was attacking as a way to alert me to the fact that he had needs that weren’t being met. I had seen this approach before, and Edmond Atherton was not the first teen to challenge me.
When Edmond arrived in my classroom the next day, I asked if he would stay after class so we might talk, and he said, “Sure, sure, sure. Sure thing,” and then started giggling again.
“Something funny?” I asked.
“Nah,” he said and took his seat.
We were discussing Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, debating whether there really was a universal language, and whether each of us had a personal legend, when Edmond raised his hand again.
“What if the universe tells you to do something the rest of the world would condemn?”
“Many people have asked this question before. Think about our founding fathers writing the Declaration of Independence. England sure condemned that,” I said. “And that’s only one example.”
“And it’s good to do things that others don’t do, right?” he said. “That’s what you’re always going on and on about in here. The importance of being different?”
Before I could answer, he pulled an aluminum baseball bat from his backpack and charged me.
I remember hearing these awful noises like tree branches breaking and then high-pitched screaming.
He’d hit me half a dozen times before my mind even registered what was happening—elbows, kneecaps, shins, forearms—and all before I hit the floor and lost consciousness.
Later in court, a straight-faced and utterly remorseless Edmond Atherton said he never aimed for my head because he wanted me “to remember” that what he had done was the punishment for my being “wrong.”
They locked Edmond away in an institution for disturbed boys, covered my medical bills—which were astronomical—and gave me a settlement large enough to let me retire and move far away to the woods of Vermont, a place I had never been before in my life. After all the media coverage—not to mention all of the time spent in the hospital recovering from multiple surgeries and then the painful rehab, during which I couldn’t even walk, so I was an easy target for any reporter who was heartless enough to stick a microphone in my face as I wheeled, crutched, and then caned my way through parking lots—I just wanted to be alone, far, far away, where no one would know my name or face. Vermont sounded like such a place.
And that’s how I ended up in this two-story cabin in the middle of the woods, where I’ve rubbed my aching joints, downed Advil at an alarming rate, and served out my time in this ruined body where no one can see me.
“I never thanked the students who stopped Edmond before he killed me,” I say to my wineglass as I light up another cigarette. “Was it because I secretly wanted to die all along? Was it because Edmond was right? He may have been my most extraordinary student ever. That’s the truth, isn’t it? It’s almost funny, when you think about the word extraordinary and how many times I used it—like I was Robin Williams playing Mr. Keating.”
I open another bottle of wine.
I also open a second pack of cigarettes and cough up a tremendous amount of phlegm before I resume smoking, wondering how long it will take for a strict diet of cigarettes and wine to kill me.
When I am drunk enough, I retrieve Albert Camus’s body from the ruined truck.
On my deck, sitting in the wooden Adirondack chair, I lay him across my lap and stroke his stiff back, hoping that I can pet him back to life.
“I’m sorry, buddy,” I say. “I shouldn’t have talked so much about suicide. But a pact is a pact, right? And maybe we will be reincarnated, find each other again—just as soon as I manage to hold up my end of the bargain.”
I’m very drunk, but I still realize it’s morbid to be petting and talking to a dead dog, and so—through snot and tears and cigarette smoke—I put some wood into the clay chimenea, lay Albert Camus on top, retrieve the gasoline can from the shed, soak my friend, and then toss in a match.
Flames shoot up through the little chimney, followed by a steady thick black plume that is slightly less nauseating than the hissing and bubbling and crackling noises Albert Camus’s carcass is making.
“I’m sorry,” I say over and over as the cold bites my face and hands, while tears burn my cheeks.
When the fire goes out, I know I am truly alone.
I contemplate methods of suicide.
Jumping from the roof seems risky. I may not die immediately, and I don’t want to be eaten alive by coyotes as I rot on the deck in a human nest of broken limbs.
The chain saw in the shed seems too extreme.
Kurt Vonnegut style is an option—I have pills and alcohol and cigarettes.
But I settle on starvation, as it will be a horrific penance for having caused my dog’s suicide.
This is the death sentence I give myself: You will consume nothing but wine until you die, and you will die alone, because you deserve it.
I forgo the artifice of the glass and drink directly from the bottle as the sun sets, puffing defiantly on my Parliament Lights, which have long ago ceased to offer any sense of comfort or pleasure. The smoke now assaults my esophagus and lungs, and yet I puff and puff like a magic dragon who has slipped into his cave after losing the one little boy who believed in his existence.
My vision is blurry, but I believe I count four bottles by my feet.
“Albert Camus!” I scream up at the sky. “Albert Camus! Where are you, little buddy? Is there a heaven for dogs? Are you already reincarnated? I miss you! I’m sorry! I am a shit for brains! I am selfish! I am foolish! I should not be alive! I never should have been born! I am truly and utterly sorry!”
I listen to the word sorry echo over the bare maples and oaks that cover the downward slope of land behind my deck and race toward the base of the small mountains in the distance.
“Beautiful view,” the Realtor said when he showed me this place.
“Perfect view for ending it all,” I say now, and laugh. “A good place to die. This will be a happy death, and I will now play Zagreus, the old cripple.
“Albert Camus!” I scream up at the sky. “Edmond Atherton was right! My class was all bullshit! Everyone can’t be extraordinary! It defies the very definition of the word! It’s absurd! And there is no meaning! No meaning at all! It’s just a cruel joke! That’s the answer to the first question! Just a joke! So why not kill yourself?”
I swig more wine, feel red rivers burst from the corners of my mouth and run down my neck before being absorbed into my sweater. I swallow down my need to vomit, and the
n I’m crying again.
I must be even drunker than I thought, because—before I know what I’m doing—I start to pray.
My estranged mother is a religious woman—she actually became a nun after she was done raising me. Had a “vision” shortly after I graduated from high school. Told me that both Mother Mary and Jesus visited her. They apparently told her she was meant to join a religious community. I thought she had gone insane. The Catholic Church took her in. She raised me Catholic, and I had already unequivocally renounced my faith. I’ve since renounced my mother, mostly because I hate her. But we fall back on what we know when we are weak—and especially when we are drunk.
“What the fuck, God?” I scream up at the sky. “Can it get any worse? I’m not a praying man, but I’m going to ask you just once for help. If you’re up there, give me a sign. If you don’t, I’m going to end it, once and for all. And who could blame me? Help me please, if you exist. Fuck you, if you don’t!”
God doesn’t speak to me as I finish my fourth (or fifth?) bottle of wine and the sun dips down below yonder mountain.
I don’t remember when it happened, but I must have fallen out of the chair, because my left cheek is pressed firmly against the wood deck now, and I don’t seem to be able to get up.
It gets colder.
When my right eye gazes up, it sees that the stars have come out and are shining particularly hard and bright.
“Need to do a little better than that, God,” I mumble.
I shiver in the fetal position, too drunk, too apathetic, to roll inside where there are blankets and heat.
Maybe I will freeze to death, I hope, and then I somehow manage to light up another cigarette, which I let dangle hands-free in my mouth as I lie there on the deck.
I’m on my back now, but I have no idea where my lit cigarette went.
Vision is blurry at best.
I blink several times.
I think I see a shooting star rip through the sky at one point, but I’m too drunk to know what the hell I’m seeing anymore.
And then—once again—everything goes black.
CHAPTER 9
“Mr. Vernon?”
I blink, and a woman is slapping my face.
“Mr. Vernon? Wake up. Are you okay?”
I close my eyes and try to disappear again into sleep.
I’m spinning.
I’m being rolled over onto my side.
“You’re going to choke to death on your own vomit,” the woman’s voice says, and I wonder if she is an angel.
I remember angels coming to save people in the biblical stories my mother told me when I was a child—and I also vaguely remember praying before I passed out.
I’m still drunk enough to believe in such things.
But then I’m vomiting onto my deck—all wine and bile tinged with cigarette tar.
“You have a little party?” she says. “What happened here?”
“Albert Camus,” I whisper. “He’s dead.”
“Um, yeah. For half a century now.”
“You don’t understand,” I say, feeling the damage I’ve done to my throat. It burns like someone sandpapered my entire respiratory system. “I killed him.”
“What the hell have you been drinking?”
I blink and try to look at her face.
The floodlight is right behind her head now, so all I see is her silhouette outlined in white.
“Are you an angel?” I say. “Did God send you?”
She laughs. “Um, I’m not really religious, Mr. Vernon.”
“So you’re not an angel?”
“I believe you may be intoxicated.”
“I’m Zagreus, the old cripple. You have to kill me. Like in the book A Happy Death. By Camus.”
“I don’t want to brag, but I may have just saved your life. Never pass out on your back, Mr. Vernon. They teach you this in health class. You can choke and suffocate on your own vomit when you’re passed out, which was what you were doing when I found you here.”
“I was supposed to die. I made a suicide pact with Albert Camus.”
“Okay,” she says. “Let’s get you inside. Maybe put on some coffee. Get some water in you. Change your shirt.”
“You won’t kill me? What if I give you my money—all I have? Would you be my Patrice Mersault? Like in A Happy Death.”
“Isn’t Meursault the protagonist of The Stranger?”
“There are two u’s in Meursault from The Stranger,” I whisper. “Only one u in Patrice Mersault. Just let me die out here. Because I killed Albert Camus. I’m sorry, but I have to pay with my life.”
“Okay, drunk man. Let’s sit up.”
She’s behind me now, forcing me to do a sit-up, pushing my shoulder blades with her palms.
“Here’s your cane. Use it, because I don’t think I can carry you. Let’s just make it inside. Three feet, we have to travel. Just thirty-six tiny inches.”
“I can’t stand,” I say. “Too drunk. Legs won’t work.”
“Then you’ll crawl, because it’s too cold out here.”
“No,” I say. “Let me freeze to death. I don’t deserve to live.”
“Get your ass inside that house now,” she says and then kicks my thigh.
“Ouch!”
“Move!”
Mostly because I am now terrified of this woman angel, I fall forward and crawl toward the sliding door, which is open. My head is pounding, and it takes a long time, but I manage to drag my body inside. She slides the door shut behind us and locks it.
“What happened to you?” she says. “My god. You’re a mess.”
“I killed Albert Camus.”
“Have you lost your fucking mind?” she says, and then she starts to cry, which alarms me.
Do angels cry?
She seems vaguely familiar. I wonder if I have run into her, shopping at Harper’s. Maybe she frequents my favorite pizza shop, Wicked Good Pie, or perhaps the local gas station—but I can’t place her in my drunken state, let alone figure out why she would come to my home. She’s beautiful though, in her late thirties, I would guess. Long brown hair. Slim figure. Although she seems to be wearing outdated clothes—a white jean jacket with rock-star pins on it. I haven’t seen people wearing rock-star pins on jean jackets for decades.
“Why are you crying?” I say.
“I didn’t think you’d be this fucked up.”
I feel guilty for disappointing her, even though I didn’t even know she was coming, let alone who she might be. It all adds to the sense of responsibility I feel for Albert Camus’s death, and I instantly remember why I have sequestered myself.
“Why are you here?” I ask.
“I came to save you.”
“How did you know I needed saving?” I say, uncomfortably remembering my prayer.
She covers her eyes with her hand and sighs deeply.
“Are you really an angel?” I say.
“Would you stop fucking saying that please?”
“Angels don’t use profanity, do they?”
“You need to hydrate,” she says, and then she’s opening cabinets and turning on the tap and thrusting the rim of a glass at my teeth.
I sip just to be nice.
I wonder if I might be hallucinating, or maybe I have died and gone to some sort of hell or purgatory where attractive women force you to crawl and drink excessive amounts of water.
“What’s going on here?” I say, still sitting on the floor just inside the sliding glass door.
“Drink.” She lifts the bottom of the glass up, so that water fills my mouth.
Suddenly, I realize that I am very thirsty—also my throat is screaming from so many cigarettes—and so I gulp the water down until the glass is empty.
“Good,” she says. “Let’s do one
more.”
I watch her fill the glass a second time, and when she approaches me, I say, “Who are you?”
She doesn’t answer, but pours water down my throat again, and I do my best to consume it, but immediately feel as though I might vomit again. The woman must have read my face. “Try to keep it down,” she says, and then she’s in the kitchen again, rifling through my supplies.
“Heavily buttered toast,” she says as she sticks two slices of rye bread into the toaster. “That’s what you need now. Get some grease in you.”
Before long she’s sitting next to me on the floor, holding warm bread up to my lips.
Even though I just vowed to starve myself to death, I take small bites—hearing the crunch of my teeth breaking through crispy nooks and crannies—and feel the warm velvety melted butter on my tongue. My nausea dissipates with every swallow, which seems miraculous.
Once the toast has been consumed, she cleans my face and neck with towels soaked in warm water, and it feels so good that I close my eyes and try to forget that I have a strange woman in my home, making me do things against my will.
Maybe because I’m drunk, I pretend I am an infant again, and my mother is taking care of me.
You are a baby.
You have no control.
You also have no responsibilities.
Nothing can be your fault.
Then I’m on the couch, she’s covering me with blankets, and I’m mumbling, “I didn’t mean to kill Albert Camus. I really didn’t. I’m so sorry. Won’t you kill me in my sleep? Please. Just kill me. End this.”
“Sleep it off,” she says. “We start saving you tomorrow.”
“You already saved me—whoever you are. Even though I didn’t want to be saved.”
“No,” she says. “We’ve only just begun.”
I hear anger in her voice, but—even though the warm butter is working its way through my system—I still feel drunk and tell myself that four bottles of wine is enough to make anyone hallucinate.
“I wish you were real,” I say. “I’m sorry you’re not real.”