The Book of Michael Read online

  ***

  No happy endings for the Russians. Later, I would turn to those psychology books on suicide and learn that men were more successful at it than women and they preferred violent means to an effective end. Men, I suppose, like to get the job done.Women like to change their mind along the way. The shrinks had two categories: “attempters” and “completers.” Guys, you know which team you’re on. Pills were for girls, guns for guys. Hot baths and slit wrists for the ladies, a good leap from a tall building and a splat for the gents.

  Dr. Kaufman had once asked me some questions that were supposed to determine if I was headed down this path and rightfully concluded I was not. Guess he got one thing right.

  I learned about the myths surrounding suicide. People who talk about it rarely do it. Not true. People who do it are definite death is for them. Apparently, like the girl in Anna K, most people think life still seems like an option when sucking a barrel of a gun. Suicide is the result of depression. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Could just be that TV keeps getting worse and worse. Nothing more, nothing less. Folks who commit suicide are crazy. This would be a personal favorite. Many people who are crazy–let’s call this “out of touch with reality”–are corporation CEOs and presidents. The rest of us only wish there was a connection. And then some people think it has to do with sun spots, phases of the moon, or the position of planets in the solar system. A good solar flare could get you down and it is a bummer when Jupiter is hiding behind Mars. But for most, a six–pack of beer or a good toke would get you past that.

  Two main motivators, however, the real things that make people want to do it and, for some, actually do it are these. Numero uno. You want out; you want it all to stop, to go away. And number two.You want to manipulate the world; that is, you want revenge, you want to hurt or you want someone to recognize, after your death, the way it really was.

  I had both of those feelings many times after Lisa’s death. I continued to have them in my own dark days after my release. Up until the time Phyllis called me and gave me permission to hide out from the world, to retreat, I wanted out and I wanted revenge.

  But I’d not even moved anywhere near the “attempter” category, let alone join the masculine “completer” camp. Reasons? I couldn’t do it to my parents. To Phyllis. And the gnawing, stomach churning feeling that I was supposed to do something. There was something that Lisa would have wanted me to do.

  I just didn’t have a clue as to what that something was.

  Chapter 15

  No. My suicide riff was not a cry for help. Humanity’s cry for help began with the first words ever uttered.We want

  someone or something to save us.We want to be protected. We want to be in a safe place. And we want to be loved. Even now, these five years later, even now, knowing what I know, this is all I want. If you are like me, you have already realized these things are unachievable.You are born, you suffer, and you die.

  But somewhere in there, you want one great thing to happen.You want something of significance.You want it all to mean something.

  ***

  So after another two days of my “retreat,” of my parents’ furtive hallway–whispering of their worries about my mental health, my depression and my despair, I woke up and it was raining. Raining hard.

  And all I could think about was getting the hell out of the house.

  I walked downstairs and ate cornflakes at eight a.m. I checked my messages. Hawker had called. Screw him. Kaufman had called. Ditto. Mr. Tyson, my principal, had called and spoken with my parents about a “reintegration plan.” At least he had the stones to call my parents. After what he’d said about me to the media. “Not yet,” I said. “I’m not ready yet.”

  “But if you want to graduate…” my mom began. She looked so sad. And I felt sorry for her. She wanted it all to be like normal. Her son graduating from high school. Like everybody else.

  “These things take time,” I said. Her own words for me so many times growing up. But I was being cruel.

  “I know,” she said.

  “We just want what’s best for you,” my father added, a tired and familiar expression of his own hopelessness.

  “I’m going out to walk around for a while.”

  “It’s raining.”

  “I’ll put on rain gear.You still have my coat?”

  “Of course.We wouldn’t throw anything away,” my dad said. But as soon as he said it, it implied something that reminded us all of prison, of the possibility that I may not have ever needed my rain jacket again.

  My mother produced jacket from the kitchen closet. Nothing had been sequestered away to the attic. Nothing.

  “Where are you going?” my mom asked.

  “I’m not sure. I just want to walk.” I was standing now, trying to hide some small thrill coupled with a fear that I was actually about to go out again into the streets of my town on my own. Free and without restraints.

  “Take the cell phone,” my dad said. “Call us if you want me to pick you up or anything. Anything.”

  “Don’t you have to go to work?”

  “Not today,” he said. And I didn’t ask why. But I understood.

  “See you guys later.”

  Sudsy was backing his car out of the driveway when I walked out into the slackening rain. His window was half rolled down and I caught that look again before he quickly rolled it back up.

  After retreat, the I Ching may or may not have said—since I’m making this up—after retreat, one waits for the elements to be favorable and then one ventures cautiously out into the light of day. Or the damp gloom of a morning in the hometown, if need be.

  I would be lying to you if I said that it did not feel good. The voices in my head were a dulled background conversation. Once Sudsy’s Toyota had pulled away, there was no one watching me.With my raincoat hood up, no one recognizing me. The sidewalks were empty. Cars hissed by on the wet street.

  I saw a school bus and I stopped dead in my tracks. It was my bus. My old bus. A couple of kids from the neighborhood were getting on. Pen Walker and Graeme. Nicole. Nicole who had once been a friend of Lisa’s. I had a sudden impulse to run for the bus at the stop. Get on. Take a seat in the back and see what happened. Pen Walker, I think, would talk to me. But not Nicole or Graeme.

  But it was too early. I remained frozen in my tracks. I was not yet part of the world.A world that had moved on. I was still an outsider. That’s what had become so clear to me that day I had ventured out to see my grandmother. From then on, I would always be an outsider.

  The door of the bus closed and it moved forward.The rain began to come down harder but I didn’t mind.There was a strange metallic taste in my mouth and I wondered why. It was the taste of rainwater, I realized, trickling down my cheek into my mouth. It reminded me of summer. And Lisa. Lisa and I emerging from the tent in the woods on a rainy day. The taste of her in my mouth mingled with rainwater.

  Suddenly I knew that everything that would happen to me day after day, possibly for the rest of my life,would remind me of her. Lisa’s friend, Nicole.The rain.The bus. Pick anything. I had discovered that each memory of Lisa, no matter how fine, was followed by a feeling of panic.The panic I felt now. I would have to get over this. I would learn how to cope. Otherwise, I would not be able to go out into the world. I would curl up in my bed into a fetal position and stay that way forever.

  The rain eased again, I walked on. I was tracing the public bus route to my grandmother’s. I don’t think I was really headed there. I just needed a path that was familiar. I put my hand around the cell phone in my pocket. If I really came unglued, if the panic set in and I could not put it at bay, I would call my father, who had taken off from work just in case his son needed him.

  The orderliness of the front yards seemed like a strange thing to me. Close–cropped grass, paved driveways, flowerbeds, trimmed hedges. I found it hard to imagine a life where these things took priority. A world full of pain and suffering and injustice, and a person still has time or
money to keep the lawn well–trimmed? What an odd thing.

  ***

  I was headed towards a busy part of town. Strip malls with convenience stores, dry cleaners, coffee shops.

  Coffee. Suddenly I wanted a cup of coffee more than anything in the world. Not the pathetic Severton coffee—so weak and bitter it was almost like a tease, not anything worth even attempting. But the sadness of sitting alone in a coffee shop on a rainy morning seemed too great to bear.

  I recognized the corner and remembered the black man who had talked to me on the bus. This is where he got off. Over there was where he worked. Mighty Man Muffler. I walked in that direction, went in, and heard a buzzer go off. It was the exact same sound as the buzzer that sounded whenever the door to my “unit” opened.A chill went down my spine.

  A slick–haired white man behind the counter looked at me. I pulled the hood down and tasted rainwater again, the taste of Lisa in my mouth.“What can I do for you?”

  I looked at the tool calendars on the wall, the ones with scantily clad women with large breasts standing beside hot rods. Pictures from some other planet.

  “Louis,” I said, remembering his name. “I wonder if I could speak to Louis.”

  “Sure,” the counter man said. “I’ll call him.You take a seat.”

  I sat by a bored man in a business suit who was watching CNN on a small waiting room TV.There was footage of a house fire with a woman in a window holding onto a baby.Then a story about a flood somewhere out west, then a hostage taking. Each item was thirty seconds long.TV for the short attention span. It occurred to me that the footage of me leaving the courthouse the day of my conviction had probably flashed on this and millions of other TV screens.

  The bored man reacted to what he saw. “Those poor folks,” he said. But I didn’t know if he meant the lady with the baby, the flood victims, or the hostages. The camera lingered a few more seconds on the hostage takers—terrorists in muddy military garb caught on someone’s video cell phone as they abducted a bank manager.“People like that don’t deserve to live,” the man said, looking at me, waiting for a response.

  But I was thinking about me on that screen. He would have said the same thing. Doesn’t deserve to live. Judgment would have been rendered by all the CNN viewers. Justice denied. Verdict delivered. Punishment instant. If they had their way. I said nothing and nodded.

  Louis arrived in dirty overalls, wiping his hands on a rag. He looked at me for a second, said the same “What can I do for you?” But then paused.

  I didn’t really know what to say but “Hi, I was in the neighborhood.”

  Louis recognized me now.“Looks like you’re on your way to go fishing,” he said. And smiled.

  I smiled back.“No. Just going for a coffee. Wondered if you could join me.”

  Louis kept wiping the grease off his hands, turned to the man at the counter. “What’s the lineup look like?”

  The slicked–back guy took a look at a clipboard. “Pretty well under control now. Gets busy around eleven. If you’re gonna take a break, now’s the time.”

  “Smooth,” Louis said and unzipped the overalls. Underneath he just had a flannel shirt and jeans. He grabbed a heavy raincoat from a rack. “I’ll be over at the coffee shop if you need me.”

  We walked silently across the wet street, got two coffees and a pair of jelly–filled doughnuts, and sat down by the window.

  “I’m glad you came,” Louis said.

  “I’m not sure why I did. This is a little weird.”

  “Tell me about it. ‘Little weird’ is putting it lightly. I knew almost right away who you were on the bus. My first instinct was to do you a favor and not stare like those others.Then I said to myself: Louis, you been there, or somewhere like it. What would you want? And what would Jesus do?”

  “Jesus?” I was almost afraid he was going to get preachy. But he didn’t.

  “Oh, hell. Jesus or Martin Luther King or my old Uncle Arthur.” He paused to sip coffee and take a bite of doughnut, allowing some of the jelly to squeeze out and fall onto the table. “Or Malcolm X.”

  “You read Malcolm X?”

  “Of course I did.Anyone who goes inside and doesn’t read Malcolm X is a fool.”

  “Severton?”

  “Three years. Armed robbery. I was a fool but I read Malcolm X.”

  “Bones. Mr. Bones?”

  “Who? Oh yeah, that’s what they called him. Skullbones, I called him. I told him I hated books and he put Malcolm’s book in my hand. That and the Bible. I read ’em both. My granddaddy had been telling me to read the damn Bible all my life. I kept saying I never had time. Well, sir, suddenly I didn’t have any excuse.”

  “I was in six months,” I said.

  “I know. I read about you in the papers.You know what I thought the first time I read about you, during the trial?”

  “I can imagine.You thought I was guilty.”

  “No. I knew you were guilty. Not that I trusted the courts. It’s just that I saw you on TV. Read about you in the news. It was crystal clear. Spoiled young white boy who has too much of everything. Never learned an ounce of self–control. Has everything a guy could dream of and he destroys it and he destroys himself.”

  “And he deserves to die?”

  “Maybe that’s what I was thinking.”

  “And now?”

  “Look, Michael—see, I even remember your name—Michael, I don’t really know you at all. I just know a little of where you are at. I believe now you didn’t do it but I could be wrong even about that. I just know some of what you went through.”

  “So why did I come here to talk to you?” I asked.

  Louis asked. “You gotta talk to someone. I just gave you the option.”

  “Louis, were you guilty?”

  “Damn straight. I tried to weasel out of it but they had me on video. I’d have lied and done anything. But there it was.”

  “Were you angry when you got out?”

  “Yes. Even though I got what I deserved. I was angry about being caught.”

  “Doesn’t sound all that noble.”

  “Noble? Not much noble about me. But all that time inside was good for me—like some kind of bad tasting medicine your mother gives you when you’re a kid.”

  “Do you think I’m supposed to feel something like that? Swallowed the awful medicine, learned a few lessons, now get on with it?”

  “What, muffler repair? No, son. I don’t know what you take from the experience. I just know where you’ve been and where you are at. More or less.”

  “But what the hell do I do?” My voice was a little too loud. I was confused as to why I came to Louis, someone I didn’t know, and exactly what he was offering.

  Louis took a big gulp of coffee, crammed the rest of his doughnut in his mouth and before he swallowed said,“Just what you’re doing right now. Call it what you want. I call it reaching out. What you do next is up to you.”

  His voice was also a little too loud now. People were looking at us. But Louis was smiling. “Let ’em stare, son. You’ll get used to it. My motto has always been, ‘Don’t let the bastards get you down.’ C’mon, let’s go. I gotta get back to work.”

  Chapter 16

  School. Every time I thought about it, I started to sweat. I’d been home for three weeks.Winter was starting to fade and spring was on its way. My parents were low–key about everything.“Just get through the day, Michael,”my mother would say. “The more distance you put behind you, the easier it will be.” I guess I understood what she meant about distance. It’s just that I still carried around so much hurt and loss.

  I never actually came out and said no to Josh Hawker so he was persistent—though he was starting to take the hint. “The clock is ticking,” he said to me on the phone. “The longer you let this go, the more difficult it may be for us to get a proper settlement.” Proper settlement meant lots of money. And I thought about it sometimes. What would it be like to have a lot of money? Would I be happier? Would
my parents? The answer seemed to be no. But I knew that my father was still paying off the legal bills from the trial. I just didn’t have the guts to face up to any of it. Not with Hawker and not with a legal system that worked so badly.

  But the clock was ticking on a lot of fronts. The principal’s offer to try to reintegrate me and fast–track me to graduation (with the make–up summer courses to follow) wouldn’t last forever. If I waited too long, the school year would be nearly over.

  What exactly was I afraid of? Don’t let the bastards get you down. The wisdom of Louis. Who exactly were the bastards he referred to, you might wonder. Or maybe you already know.

  The bastards are the ones who want to see you hurting. They are the ones who believe they are better than you. The ones who hate to see you get a break or have good luck or a shot at anything good. Oh, I knew who the bastards were. Men and women. Boys and girls. Sudsy next door with his familiar glare through the car window. And some of the ones from school who had believed I got what I deserved.The ones who had sent me e–mails during my trial, the ones who had talked about me in chat rooms.They’d still be there in school,waiting for me to fall on my face or fail or screw up somehow.

  And it was for them that I would return to school, I finally declared to myself. I wasn’t going to let them win. If I could pull it off, they’d have to suffer through me walking up and receiving my high school diploma with them.

  So this is how it went. I had been staying in my room for several days in a row. Reading Heart of Darkness, one of Skullbones’ recommendations. “Skip the light stuff,” he said.“I prefer the serious writers.” He was referring to Conrad, Faulkner, Marquez. A Hundred Years of Solitude. Now there’s a cheery title.

  But it was on my third day of self–imposed reading isolation with the Conrad and Marquez (Love in the Time of Cholera) that the strange librarian’s advice made something click in my head. It was almost like a vision. I could almost see the words presented in neon beyond the pool of the reading lamp light. It was that real. What do you have to lose?