“They’re saying it hurt a lot.”
“Well, yeah. Dying tends to do that.”
“But this wasn’t, like, a typical death.” Four people sit at the table next to mine—two men and two women. One woman is blonde; the other is brunette. The guy talking has black hair gelled straight backwards. The diner loudspeakers blare some decade-old Taylor Swift tune.
“Dumb Teenager Dies in Car Crash,” the blonde says, making flashing motions with her hands to signify BREAKING NEWS. “More at eight.”
“Are we sure it was a car crash?”—the other guy. His face is that of someone who takes steroids but doesn’t work out. “They’re saying he got hit by a train.”
The brunette pulls up something on her phone and says, “You’re both wrong. ‘Body found in compacted car at junkyard identified as eighteen-year-old Hayden Mitchell.’”
Steroid Face says, “Oof.”
A bit of tea drips down my beard and onto the cover of the book next to me—William James’s The Principles of Psychology.
“I heard he was Catholic”—Hair Gel.
“Shame”—the blonde. “Would stink to burn in Hell after all that.”
They chuckle in unison.
I hail a waiter; he tells me, “Nice beard.”
“Thanks.” The thing sure is itchy.
“How long’d it take you to grow a beard like that?” The waiter looks about my age but has the acne pattern of someone just entering puberty.
I stroke it contemplatively, the way fictional wizards are always stroking their fictional beards contemplatively. “A year.”
“That all?”
“Give or take.”
He thumbs my book. “This any good?”
“Oh, yeah; it’s all the rage.”
Neither of us says anything for a few seconds. Then the waiter asks, “Hey, have I seen you somewhere?”
“I was in a documentary,” I reply, “about white guys who can’t stop getting randomly selected for additional TSA screening.”
“How about that check,” I ask.
I pay in cash.
The air outside is thick with both impending rain and that trademark manure stench that’s always hanging around when you live in Iowa. For a while, I stand under the diner awning, smoking and reading and trying not to set my book alight and wondering where the hell I should go. I decide to drive across town to Sara’s place. It doesn’t take long to cross a town of ten thousand, and there usually aren’t more than three other cars on the road. When my sister first taught me to drive, she stressed that this isn’t the norm—that once you leave Greenleaf, Iowa and have highway traffic to contend with, everything gets a lot more complicated.
On the way to Sara’s house, you’ll pass through Town Square, with its train tracks and its tiny, eroded, vaguely Dutch shopfronts—I used to joke that Town Square looks like if Amsterdam got abandoned for two centuries and then re-colonized by accountants. Next, you’ll pass a Walmart—the only place to grocery-shop, unless you wanna drive all the way to Des Moines—then a Culvers, which people here talk about the way people in real places talk about real restaurants, and then a windmill—the third largest functional windmill in all of North America, allegedly. Dispersed among these other landmarks are either thirty-one or thirty-two Christian churches, depending on whether the Mormons count.
Sara lives just a block or two from the Catholic one. Her house is tucked away behind her street’s other properties so that you have to climb through her crazy old neighbor’s unkempt, tick-infested yard while he watches you sinisterly through the window to get there.
I’ve replaced my fake beard with a ski mask, and it takes me right up until I’ve rung Sara’s doorbell to realize that this probably makes me look like an armed robber or serial killer, a realization that’s confirmed when she holds up her hands and squeals.
“Are your parents home?” I ask.
“No! Take whatever; just please don’t…wait. Who…are you?”
I remove the hood, and she smacks me, but it’s not a normal smack—it feels like she’s trying to stick her hand straight through me.
“Ghost!” she screams.
“I’m not a—ow—”
“So you’re alive?”, maintaining her earsplitting pitch and volume. “This whole time you’ve been alive? What the heck, Hayden?” (Sara doesn’t say “heck” unless she’s really peeved.)
“Just calm down; I can explain.”
And I do, more or less—I explain how I’d been driving with Ronan Malley, and we’d been way out of town, surrounded by rows of corn—
“Hold up”—Sara. “Why were you hanging out with Ronan Malley? Isn’t he on drugs?”
“I was trying to investigate him. Find out why he stopped coming to Mass, and all.”
“I’ve heard it’s because he’s a homosexual.”
“Case in point. So the two of us are driving down the road, and we pass this old junkyard filled with shitty cars, and we’re both so excited by the prospect of seeing something besides corn that we park in a nearby lot and jump the fence, after which point Ronan bolts and hides in one of the vehicles. It takes me an hour to find him, and when I do, he’s like…passed out in the backseat.”
“So did you pull him out?”
“I tried, but the doors wouldn’t open. All I could do was watch in horror as a crane lifted his car and he went up and up and up and then got compacted.” I make a squishing, fartlike sound with my mouth.
Sara winces. I really wish she’d invite me inside. This hot wind feels the way it must feel to get roasted over a firepit.
“So there I was,” I go on, “alone with a recently compacted junk car containing a pulverized dead body—like, pulverized beyond all recognition—and all I could think to do—and here’s where I’m worried I might be a psychopath—was to leave my ID on the ground for the cops to discover when they found the body. And I guess, what with Ronan being otherwise unidentifiable and all, they naturally assumed he was me. So now he’s officially missing, and I’m officially dead.”
Sara takes a moment or two to process all this, which I admit is kind of a lot. “Now why,” she says slowly, “the heck would you do all that?”
A tractor rattles in the distance.
“Do you ever wish you could witness your own death?” I ask. “Find out how people talk about you now that you’re gone?”
“Well, sure,” she says, “but it’s not gonna last. Maybe this would’ve worked fifty years ago, but they’ve got DNA testing now. What exactly do you plan on doing when they find out you’re alive?”
Truth be told, I haven’t even thought about that. Perhaps I’ll just disappear—start a new life in a new place with a new name, like Saul Goodman does after the harrowing events of the AMC classic Breaking Bad.
“Because you were supposed to marry me,” Sara reminds me. “When you graduate from…that college in California—”
“You mean Stanford?”
“Yeah. When you graduate from Stanford and I graduate from Centerwood, you’re gonna come back here.” (Centerwood’s the local community college. Sara starts classes next week.) “That was the plan, right?”
It’s been the plan since we were kids—maybe since before we were born. Our families are the sort of tight-knit that in some cultures leads to arranged marriage, and my romantic entanglement with Sara was arranged in all but the most technical sense—sure, we weren’t forced together, but our parents made clear that they’d disapprove if we ended up with anyone else.
And I love Sara—I’m not denying that. I just never got the chance to evaluate what form that love takes.
I say, “Of course I’ll still marry you when I get back from Stanford.”
Except I’m not going to Stanford, is the thing. But as the late, great Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” and when I read Witt’s Tractatus (in middle school, mainly because I thought it would impress this football player I wanted to befriend—this was back when I still thought football guys could read), it hit me that I could shape my life’s reality through the way I talked about it. Identify the limits of your language and you’ve identified the limits of your world; make your language limitless and so will be your world. That’s the logical conclusion I drew, anyway, even if it wasn’t what Witt intended.
And I identified the limits of my language early. When I was in the second or third grade, this Chinese kid moved here—Bobby Yang, his name was. His family was pretty well off, I remember, but they sent Bobby to public school with us because the only private school in town was a Christian one, and the Yangs weren’t religious.
Bobby got bullied pretty relentlessly, though. It wasn’t over the fact that he didn’t know English (because he did) but that he also knew another language, and whenever our classmates caught him speaking that language, usually after school when his parents picked him up, they’d come up behind him the next day and do gibberish imitations. It was all pretty awful, I guess, and I never even bothered standing up for him. I wish I could say I had a good reason for this. I did, however, go out of my way to befriend Bobby, because I wanted to learn Mandarin, and I figured if I spent enough time at his house, the language would eventually click.
This plan worked. After a few months of sitting silently at the Yangs’ dinner table fumbling with chopsticks, I began contributing to their conversations. Once I attained verbal fluency, Bobby’s dad taught me to read and write Chinese characters, and the Yangs began loaning me books—first the Chinese translations of Harry Potter and Percy Jackson and juvenile shit like that, which I’d pore over with the English copies open at my side, then Chinese literature like Dream of the Red Chamber and the poetry of Li Bai. I remember his mom once saying that I was really di dao, which means authentic. My own parents knew nothing of any of this—I kept the literature hidden under my bed in the same inconspicuous tote where I’d later hide my weed, and whenever I went to Bobby’s, I told my parents I was going to Sara’s or Trevor’s (my best friend at the time, now headed for the ROTC) instead.
Which is all to say: learning Mandarin was my first encounter with the reality that not all languages function like English. The entire English grammar system, for example, is based around a set of chronology-markers called “tense,” and Mandarin doesn’t have that. What it does have is this other thing called “aspect,” which deals with changes of state, and learning Chinese forced me to contend with it the way English speakers are always contending with the times at which things had occurred or have occurred or are occurring or will occur or will have occurred. Take a simple sentence like “I’m tired”—in Mandarin, this has to be conjugated differently depending on whether your tiredness is a continuous state—as in, maybe you’ve been sleeping poorly for a long time—or a new state: what roughly translates to “I’ve become tired.” Come to think of it, the only way to say, “I’m dead” in Mandarin is “I’ve become dead,” because for someone to be dead, he must have at some point been alive. I’m probably not explaining this well. But figuring this stuff out at an early age felt like unlocking a hidden linguistic dimension other kids simply didn’t have access to.
My Mandarin studies came to an abrupt end, however, when Bobby Yang’s family disappeared. One day he was at school, and the next he was gone, and his desk was all cleaned out, and none of us ever heard from him again.
But we at Greenleaf Elementary soon discovered that we could become quite popular if we pretended we had heard from him—bonus points if the circumstances of his disappearance were particularly detailed/salacious. Many awful unfounded theories were presented to me in the days after he vanished, mainly because folks had by that point gleaned that Bobby and I had been friends, or at least friendly acquaintances. I never invented any theories of my own, but I do recall “confirming” a few of the more creative ones.
The working consensus regarding what had happened to him grew more outlandish as time went on. First it was that the Yangs had been deported, then it was that they’d been deported because Bobby’s father was a Chinese spy, then it was that they’d been deported because Bobby’s father was a Chinese spy who’d been involved in the assassination of a British-American CIA member named either Geoffrey Wilkinson or Sir Herman Lancaster, and when Mr. Yang had been caught—as spies tend to be, at least in films—the U.S. government had discovered that not only was he a spy but the whole family had been here illegally from the start.
None of that was true, of course. What had really happened was that Mr. Yang had gotten a promotion, and Bobby’s family had moved to Chicago, and Bobby had transferred to a private, nonreligious school, and is probably headed for Harvard or Stanford or someplace for real now. He’d escaped, in other words, and the reason he hadn’t told anyone besides me is that he hadn’t had any friends besides me, and in the weeks following his departure, while my classmates resented Bobby for nonsense, invented reasons, I resented him for the truth.
***
The next necessary stop on my tour is, of course, my own house. I’m really itching to hear how my family talks about me now that I’m gone—differently from how random strangers talk about me, I hope.
As long as I’ve known my father, he’s kept our house’s thermostat set at exactly sixty-eight degrees, and while a comforting chill certainly greets me upon entry (through the back door, whose passcode I’ve kept with me even in “death”), I now wonder whether maybe the house has become even…colder(?) in my absence?
Just kidding—shit feels the same as it always has. And my family are sitting in the living room talking the way they always have—my parents on the couch, my older sister Emily next to them, my younger brother Neil on the ottoman, bouncing up and down with nervous pubescent energy. (I usually sat on the floor, in this arrangement.)
I stand behind them for a beat, looking at my tiny, barely perceptible reflection in the fireplace’s polish and delighting in the abject riskiness of my whole endeavor.
Mom says, “He would have wanted a small funeral.” Emily gazes depressedly at her beaded bracelet. Dad blows his nose. Mom blows her nose even harder—hard enough to give me cover while I hide in the broom closet.
“Father Michael has already agreed to officiate”—Dad.
“But it’s just so ridiculous, the story they gave us”—Emily. “A trash compactor? I mean, what in the Star Wars is that?”
“It’s stupid, is what it is”—Dad.
“It’s not stupid; it’s suicidal”—Mom.
“But that’s what I’m saying”—Emily. “For this to be true, Hayden would’ve needed a death wish. You’re sure he never—?”
“Never”—Dad.
“It’s you he would have talked to, Emily”—Mom.
“I’ve heard about people who have some sort of genetic predisposition”—Neil—“who are perfectly fine, but then something triggers a switch in their brains and bam. They go on homicidal rampages. Or like…suicidal rampages, I guess. I saw it in a documentary.”
An uncomfortable silence, which tends to follow utterances made by Neil. Right now, I’m balanced on one foot with my hand against the closet wall, trying not to knock over a mop.
“I think it’s time we start considering the possibility that drugs were involved”—Dad.
“Absolutely not”—Mom.
“Face it, honey—Hayden was mixed up with some bad people. You know it; I know it. Emily knows it, at the very least.”
“I know no such thing”—Emily.
“Think of it this way:”—Dad—“If it turned out there were someone else responsible for this—like that kid—wouldn’t you want him punished? Don’t you want to bring our son justice?”
“By telling the whole world he was a junkie?”—Mom. “That’s not justice; that’s character assassination. Can you imagine what would happen if that got out? We’d be shunned—not just by the town but by the parish. The Catholic Bridge Club would never invite me to another luncheon.” There’s the sound of crying and of something being wiped on something else. “I’ve already lost my son; I can’t lose the Catholic Bridge Club too.”
Which is about as much of their yapping as I can take. I almost wish they’d spent longer on the suicide idea—maybe then, they’d have talked themselves into believing I was not in fact a drug-addict delinquent but a “tortured genius” whose “youthful spirit” was “crushed” and “stifled” by the cruel confines of a narrow-minded and foolish town.
But I dunno. Maybe stuff like that only happens in stories.
Mom is blowing her nose again, and I’m about to head out, but I really do need to talk to someone about this, for real, and the only person who makes any sense is Emily. She has a way of bringing out the truth in me.
Like take this one instance when we were kids, and it was a Snow Day (aka, a day on which the nebulous “it” had snowed so much that school had been cancelled), and Emily and I had been building a snowman in the backyard, my gloved hands numb with a familiar achy chill, and I really had to pee, but I didn’t feel like going inside and dusting myself off and freeing myself from my snow pants, which are an annoying affair to deal with, as any Midwesterner knows, so I just sort of nudged my unit over to the left and let the piss trickle down my leg. Gross, I know; in my defense, I was ten. But when Emily saw the piss spot in the snow, she just turned to me and said, real ironic-like, “I didn’t know we had a dog.” And I almost lied and said there had been a dog who’d passed through, done his business, and run off—hadn’t she seen him?—but something in her face told me it was useless.
I’m hoping there’ll be something similar in her face today, as I tiptoe upstairs to hide under her bed.
Emily’s bedroom is classy and understated—the only decorations are a small desk, a matte faux-wood bookshelf containing her college literature and some records (she listens to god-awful post-grunge from the early 2000s), and some photos of herself and her boyfriend Craig. The prospect of a college kid named “Craig” has always seemed pretty outlandish to me—“Craig” is more the name of a middle-aged banker in a loveless marriage who’s addicted to cocaine in a really lowkey way and needs to give himself a cliché mental pep talk to get out of bed and drag himself to work each morning. I’ve raised these concerns with Emily as well.
I lie under here for what could be a whole hour, waiting for her to come upstairs and blast Seether or Creed or some other such bullshit. I’ve left a note on her desk that reads, Look under the bed, and don’t scream.
But sure enough, when she makes her way up here and reads the note and looks under her bed, she screams.
“What did you…?”
I hear footsteps I recognize as my dad’s.
“Don’t tell him,” I plead in a whisper. “I’ll explain everything—I swear—but—”
Her door swings open, and there he stands. Given my vantage point and the way the light’s hitting him, he looks Anointed by Heaven. “What on Earth is going on?”
“I saw a bug,” Emily improvises. She’s almost crying a bit.
“A bug?”
“A really, really big bug.”
“Well, where is it?”
“I killed it,” quickly. “It’s dead now. I mean, I thought it was dead the first time I whacked it, but it turned out it was still alive, squirming around.” She shudders. I want to kick her. “But then I killed it for real.”
“Well, if you’re sure it’s dead.”
“Uh-huh,” closing the door. “Bye, Dad.” Once he’s gone, she bends back down to address me. “I don’t understand. They said—they had—they said they’ve got a corpse.”
So I tell her the story, a different version from the one I told Sara. “I was hanging out with Ronan Malley, and we got a bit high—not on anything hard, just weed,” noting Emily’s expression, “and wound up camping out together in one of the junk cars at a car junkyard.”
“You thought it a good idea to drive out of Greenleaf, Iowa and into Bumfuck, Nowhereland…while high?”
“It was thrilling, Emily, to sit in there. To watch other cars get crushed and think That could be us. To consider how close we all are to death, all the time. But then the crane came for our car, and I realized we might actually die, so I jumped.”
“And he stayed in?”
“He tried to jump out too, I think, but he was pretty intoxicated. So he got smooshed, and I didn’t, but I left my ID there so they’d think I’d been smooshed, and…that was that.”
Emily drops into her desk chair. “That was that, huh?”
“More or less.”
“You watched a man get junked?”
“I watched a friend get junked. And I’m really fucking bummed, if I’m being honest.”
“Are you being honest?”
“About being bummed?”
“About everything.”
I climb out from my shelter and take a careful seat on her meticulously-made bed.
“Mom and Dad are talking about whether they should investigate this as a drug-related incident, you know.”
“I heard. Thanks for not blabbing, by the way.”
“Of course. But Hayden, it’s obvious. The evasiveness, the insistence that you’re a rare herb collector, the repeated claims that you’ve been quote ‘sprayed by skunks’—”
“That I’ve been in the vicinity of skunks while they’ve sprayed. Saying I got sprayed directly would be a dead giveaway.”
“Whatever. Mom and Dad aren’t the morons you think they are. They know everything I do. They just don’t want to admit it.”
“Don’t want to admit what? That I’m a loser they’d prefer to disown?”
“Is that why you’re pretending to be dead? So you don’t have to be disowned?”
“No.”
A short pause.
“Then what is it?”
“I dunno. Maybe I just wanted to get out.”
“You’re in your childhood home.”
“Maybe I wanted to be dead for the same reason I applied to Stanford, even though we couldn’t afford it.”
“Oh, Hayden, you were never going to go to Stanford.”
“But I got in, is my point. I’m hypothetically dead, just like I’m hypothetically going to Stanford, because I got in.”
“Did you?”
“You saw the acceptance letter.”
“Did I? Look, I hate to kill your attempt at a clever and…admittedly quite attention-getting charade, but I really think you’re gonna have to confess.”
“No way. You know I can’t stand the way those priests look at me—”
“Not to a priest. To Ronan’s family. They deserve the truth. Not whatever bullshit story you just fed me,” giving me the look. “The truth.” She shakes her head and chortles. “A priest. What a joke. I know you haven’t been to confession in years.”
Which isn’t quite accurate. I hadn’t been in years, right up until a few months ago, but some things happened on this one particular day at the start of the summer that seemed an awful lot like mortal sins, and I had a persistent gnawing sense that I’d really go to Hell if all this Catholic shit turned out to be true. So I drove to the church on a Monday afternoon and told no one (not even my parents—I didn’t want my sudden change of character to raise any alarm bells). Took a seat at a pew across from the first priest I happened upon and confessed the sins as quickly as they’d happened. As I’d done them, I mean.
THE FIRST SIN
It was the Thursday after graduation, and my parents were at work, and Neil was at school, and Emily was at college, and Ronan Malley was at my place. He’d brought some LSD, so I tried some LSD, which I’d never tried before, but my dad usually pulled long shifts at the factory, and my mom’s nursing job was subject to the volatile whims of doctors’ schedules, and though Neil always got home by four, he spent most afternoons playing video games in his room with his headphones on, so I thought what better time than now?
We took the tabs and lay on my bed, his laptop growing hot against our quads, watching Pink Floyd’s The Wall, which is meant to be watched on acid (Ronan averred), but (Ronan did not aver until much later) the primary goal of watching The Wall on acid is to make the acid-tripper totally anxious and paranoid and overwhelmed by all the fucked-up looking shapes and creatures and overall fascistic themes of the movie and by extension the tripper’s entire life and perhaps even society and the universe as a whole, thus causing (or “permitting,” according to some) the tripper to explore dark and untreaded parts of his brain. To have what’s colloquially known as a Bad Trip. (At this juncture, the priest gave a polite nod to signify that he was listening but that he’d prefer I get on with the meat of my story if possible.) Point being, I went into my first acid trip expecting daisies and sunshine and ended up feeling like the government was after me.
THE SECOND SIN
And if that weren’t enough, my parents got home early—both of them, because there was some kind of freak town-wide power outage (here, the priest nodded as if to say, “Ah, yes, the Great Greenleaf Power Outage of May 2025”), and I shivered and cried as the garage door squealed open, thinking here They are—the Feds—and Ronan put his arm around me and said, “No, no, it’s just your parents,” whom I feared, in that moment, even more than the Feds, and the priest furrowed his brows like he was calling upon God to provide him a bit of additional support with this particular Absolution.
My mom made the trek upstairs, probably to say “Hi” and “Isn’t it great we got home so early and have the whole evening to do Fun Family Stuff together?” and burst into my bedroom, her smile almost clownish under the glare of her phone’s flashlight and the hallucinogenic distortion of my vision, but that smile faded when she looked upon her poor pitiful son and his bad influence friend, the two of us probably drooling all over the place—clearly wigged out on hard drugs.
She asked me something along the lines of “Are you and your bad influence friend wigged out on hard drugs?” and I said, “No—never!” and she said, “Then why are you staring at your laptop like you’re wigged out on hard drugs?” and I said, “We’re looking at optical illusions as part of Ronan’s AP psych assignment,” and she seemed to almost buy it, though when I told the priest she seemed to almost buy it, he struggled to hide his skepticism.
THE THIRD SIN
This one requires a bit of background. One of Ronan’s most intense and enduring obsessions was this novel called either The Bricklayer’s Guild or The Bricklayers’ Guild, depending on the distribution of ownership within the Guild—I never read it or even looked it up. Apparently the book itself is quite a “brick,” clocking in at nearly a thousand pages, which renders the act of reading it a metaphorical “initiation” into the titular “Guild.” But according to Ronan, the in-universe initiation process is far more deranged than any cheap meta-joke—the real process involves a ritual wherein a senior member and a new recruit hold white-hot, recently extinguished matches to each other’s biceps until someone pulls away (a ritual not unlike the juvenile car-collision game “Chicken”).
Many months before the acid trip, Ronan had suggested we do the ritual, or as he called it, “play the Game.” For a while, we played it quite frequently. I really don’t know why. It hurt a lot. I almost always pulled away first. The best explanation I can give (and the one I gave the priest, who by now was doing that fidgety ankle thing people do when they want to escape annoying social situations) is that something about the Game conferred a weird electric thrill unrivalled by that of any drug—that whatever I enjoyed about the Game is the same thing Russian Roulette players enjoy about Russian Roulette and skydivers enjoy about skydiving and professional wild animal antagonizers enjoy about antagonizing wild animals.
And while I never got any good at the Game, I did get quite good at faking Ronan out—making facial expressions that suggested I was closer to Chickening than I actually was. But then he got good at reading those fake outs, and we ultimately agreed that the only way to keep the integrity of the Game intact was to close our eyes, which (he pointed out) came with an additional element of trust because either one of us could open them at any moment, and the other wouldn’t know unless he too was opening his.
But on the day of the acid trip, Ronan made an additional suggestion: How about we not only close our eyes but burn ourselves instead of each other? Let’s take the themes of trust and integrity implied by the eye-closing rule to their natural endpoint.
So we did. The matches looked even gnarlier under the influence of LSD—bulged and glowed and spurted threateningly. Ronan closed his eyes and set his match in place. I followed suit. The priest checked his watch. My arm burned more aggressively than usual. I immediately knew I wouldn’t last long. The priest adjusted his shirt cuff. I lost.
But (and here’s the actual sin part, finally, I assured the priest) I didn’t tell Ronan I lost. Instead, I just watched him—his eyes closed, his mouth curled into a grimace of sheer pain but also of strange peace—and thought about how he seemed to enjoy not just the Game but the pain, which relatively banal revelation presented itself as just the sort of earthshattering discovery that on acid makes you feel like you’ll never see yourself or the world around you the same way again. That you’ve experienced a permanent aspectual change of state.
As I considered all this and more, I found myself almost staring—at Ronan’s cheekbones, which jutted out sharply, and his nose, which was both striking and dainty. I wish I could say how long it took him to finally Chicken. But when I sensed that he’d reached his breaking point, I placed my match back on my arm and closed my eyes, and Ronan said, “Looks like you’re a real bricklayer after all,” and I won, but I felt bad, mainly because I’d lied to him, and up until then he’d been the one person I’d never lied to.
THE FOURTH SIN
Then I kissed him. It wasn’t quite premeditated, but the moments preceding it had the same tense vibe as the moments that precede kisses in movies. And it felt good, the kiss, which terrified me—perhaps the Bad Trip really had unlocked some weird repressed recess of my brain. But it only lasted a second or two before he pushed me off.
I said, “Did I totally misread that?”
He said, “Yeah, man. I’m not gay.”
“I’m not either. Just…really high…I guess.”
He clasped his hands together and made a few farting noises.
“And I’ve never…done that before, y’know?” I confessed (to Ronan, not the priest). “With anyone.”
“Don’t you have a girlfriend?”
“Yeah, but we’re waiting ‘til marriage.”
“To kiss?”
“She’s very devout.” An awful panic was rising inside me—some self-directed mutant version of the way it feels to read something devastating about someone you admire. “Are we still cool, man?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, sure, I guess.”
THE FIFTH SIN
I didn’t tell the priest about the fourth sin. It’s hard to explain why, but I think I sensed, somehow, that including this crucial detail would be the dealbreaker. That upon hearing about the sin, the priest would stand up and raise his hands to the Heavens and say, “Sorry, but the Lord cannot forgive you,” which I’m sure no priest in history has ever said, but I felt so sure in that moment that this one would.
***
Emily helps me sneak out the back door under the condition that I’ll go straight to Ronan’s house. But I don’t go straight to Ronan’s house—instead, I drive way out of town, back toward that junkyard, while the late sun casts a dim glow over the distant horizon. Iowa’s got one of the most distant horizons of all time, limited only by the curve of the earth itself. Sometimes I look at that horizon and get overwhelmed by the reality that this is only a fraction of the world that exists, and I’ve never even left that fraction. The Empire State, the Statue of Liberty, the Golden Gate—all these classically “American” landmarks—are mere photographic abstractions to me. Everything I know about life outside Iowa is from films and TV and books.
And as I sit here in this run-down empty lot, with its stacked and scattered cars in various stages of erosion, I wonder how I’ll ever tell Ronan’s parents about us cramming ourselves into the backseat of one of those cars and Ronan pointing to the crane and saying, “New bricklayer initiation ritual. Hope you’re not claustrophobic” and me thinking back to the pained/peaceful expression his face had displayed months earlier and how I’d watched him burn and done nothing to stop it.
But maybe I won’t have to tell them the truth; maybe, when they see me, the truth will become obvious.
That’s what I’m hoping for, at least, as my hometown peeks over the flat horizon and comes into view—first its giant windmill, then its many churches, their roofs’ crosses forming a skyline as familiar to me as New York City’s is to everyone else. Greenleaf is almost beautiful from far away. Maybe everything is.
I pull into Ronan’s driveway and approach his rickety wooden front door, and for the thirty seconds that pass between my knock and his mother’s answer, I feel suspended on the thin tightrope that separates life from death.
“Hayden!” she exclaims, opening her arms in what seems to be a request for a hug. “Come on in.”
I do, but I’m pretty dumbfounded—an Elephant that’s just been heartily invited into a Room. Ronan’s dad is there too, Windexing the walls.
“Bill’s a nervous cleaner,” Ronan’s mom tells me. “He cleans when he’s nervous.”
I close their door behind me; it makes a nauseous squeak. “Have you guys by any chance…seen today’s local news?”
“We don’t watch the news”—his mom.
“Too depressing”—his dad.
“Want some tea, Hayden?”
“Er, no,” scanning the Malleys’ cramped, spotless living room for a reasonable place to sit. I ultimately decide on the arm of their couch.
“We know why you’re here,” his mom says, slouching into the lounge chair next to me.
“You do?”
“Of course. You’re here to help.”
“Um.”
“We knew we could count on you,” his dad calls from the other room. His inability to stop cleaning for even a second is making me itch.
“He’s been missing for oh…about two days now”—his mom. “Have you seen him?”
“See, that’s the thing…”
“He’s done this before,” his dad puts in, poking his head into the living room, wet rag in hand.
“Done what before?”
“Run away.”
Which Ronan had never mentioned to me. “But he came back?”
“Not exactly”—his mom. “Bill found him lying across the train tracks in Town Square.”
“And what did you do?” I ask Mr. Malley.
“Brought him home, of course. Made it clear he was loved. Convinced him to start going to Mass again—he hadn’t been going for a while. It’s hard, being a Catholic in a Protestant town. I think you were his only real friend.”
“Ronan didn’t want to die,” his mom maintains. “He just wanted to get as close to death as possible.”
“And he got better”—his dad. “He told us he’d found God again, and, well, we believed him. This was about six months ago,” which was around the time Ronan first proposed the Game.
“We didn’t think he’d lie to us about something as serious as God”—his mom.
“But then he stopped going to Mass again, and, well, now he’s run away again.”
“He’s out there, though,” shooting a resolute glance at her husband. “Maybe not on the train tracks, but somewhere. The police’ll find him; I’m sure of it.” She stands up. “I’m gonna go make some tea.”
While she’s in the kitchen, I pick up the framed photo she’s got on her coffee table, which features Ronan and me during last fall’s senior fishing trip, both of us wearing baseball hats and tank tops and holding fish. His fish is about twice the size of mine, and he’s looking down at mine with mock-disdain.
On a split-second impulse, I pull out my phone and google “the bricklayers guild.” The first result is a British website entitled “Guild of Bricklayers” whose “About” page discusses their mission of “promoting and maintaining the highest standards of craftmanship in brickwork.” I scroll hastily down the list of results, but there’s no sign of any thousand-page novel anywhere on them.
Mrs. Malley returns with two mugs. Places one on the coffee table. “He’s always been quite fond of you,” pointing to the photo. And then, “Something wrong? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Uh, nope,” trying to re-compose myself.
“Mind the tea; it’s hot.”
I test it with my lip; she didn’t lie. They’re both looking at me as if to say, It’s your move.
So I ask, “What would you have done if he hadn’t gone back the first time? If he’d have stayed on those tracks, and you couldn’t have said or done anything to get him off?”
They stop to think. “I would’ve lain right there with him,” Mr. Malley finally decides.
“Yeah.” I lift my sleeve to scratch my shoulder. “Me too.”
Mrs. Malley’s whole body stiffens. “What’s that?”
I lower it as quickly as I can manage.
“Those marks, on your arm,” she presses. “Ronan has the same ones.”
Mr. Malley says, “Is there something you’re not telling us?”
Mrs. Malley says, “Do you know what happened to him?”
The priest had said, “Is there anything else you’d like to confess?”
The Principles of Psychology author William James had said, “A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.”
The Chinese poet Li Bai had said, “相看兩不厭 / 只有敬亭山.”
Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters had sung, “All in all, you’re just another brick in the wall,” while schoolchildren with melted faces had marched single file into a meatgrinder.
Ludwig Wittgenstein had said, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” My world feels limited by a lot more than that, right about now.
Ronan Malley said, “I know you cheated.”
“Huh?” I asked as the crane lifted the car in front of ours.
“At the Game. I know you cheated. It was a trick.”
I said, “What was?”
He said, “Burning ourselves instead of each other. It was a trick to test whether you’d do it for real. When you outlasted me, I knew you’d cheated, and I knew you’d never do it.”
“Do what?”
The crane creaked.
“So go ahead,” he proposed.
I’m crying into my tea, and his mom is dabbing my eyes with her blouse, and his dad is offering his dirty Windex rag, and I’m trying to get my mouth around the truth, but I’ve become mute, and I’ve become tired, and I’ve become claustrophobic, and some part of me’s become dead.
Ronan’s mom says, “Take your time. You’ll tell us when you’re ready; I know you will.”
Ronan said, “Prove me wrong.”