58,893.

My father died of an aneurysm, and there’s no proof it’s Zach’s fault, medically or otherwise, but I know it was.

Aneurysm is an eight-letter noun, pronounced ān'yə-rĭz'əm. It is defined by The American Heritage Science Dictionary as a localized, blood-filled dilation of a blood vessel or cardiac chamber caused by disease, such as arteriosclerosis, or weakening of the vessel or chamber wall. In other words, an aneurysm is a weak spot. Most of the time you never know it’s there, and then suddenly, one day, poof—too much strain. It breaks.

When an aneurysm breaks, blood rushes out into the rest of the body, right where the blood isn’t supposed to be. And that’s fatal. So Zach killed him.

I found out that Dad was dead because my aunt called. I answered the phone expecting to hear my mother, but it was my aunt, crying.

What’s wrong?

Honey—Jonah—

Aunt Carol? Are you alright?

Honey, you have to come home. It’s your Dad.

Sue, standing beside me, waited until I hung up. What happened?

Uh—I think it’s my father, I said, confused. That was my aunt. She—says he died. Wants me to come home.

And Sue, rather than giving me a hug or telling me things would be okay, because she knew they wouldn’t, took my hand and led me back to my room. You better start packing, she said.

Yeah. I nodded. Okay.

I caught a cab out to the suburbs. The driver sounded kind of suspicious when he saw who was waiting for him on the curb, which was understandable because who was waiting for him was a twenty-year-old male with a blindfold, a cane, and a suitcase, but he didn’t pass up the money. I sat in the backseat dry-eyed.

When we arrived, two hours later, he rolled down the glass and said, Hey. Buddy. We’re here.

Thanks. I felt around for my suitcase, which slid to the other side of the car during the drive, and opened the door.

You gonna pay me or what?

Oh yeah. Sorry. How much?

Twenty-eight bucks.

Even?

I’ll keep the change.

And just then I realized that I’d left my wallet at Delcroix. Damn. Uh, I said, half in and half out of the car, I have a little problem.

How little?

The guy sounded like he was getting angry.

Uh— I took a deep breath. Twenty-eight bucks little. See, I left my wallet at—

Fuck, the driver said emphatically. I knew when I saw you you were trouble. Why’d you hafta do this to me? I’m a nice guy. It’s midnight, for fuck’s sake.

Look, I’ve had a pretty bad day myself. If you’ll just let me go inside, I can get you the money. Okay?

Oh, forget it. Get out of my car and don’t come back.

Huh?

Like I said. It’s late. I guess you’re pretty damn tired too.

Uh—well—sure. I was standing on the curb in two seconds. He started the car, and as he drove off I called, Thanks.

But I don’t think he ever heard.

The door of my parents’ house was unlocked—I tried the knob and went right in. All my relatives were crying. They hugged me, patted my arms, said they were so, so sorry about everything that had happened—and you just knew they meant Zach, too. We never saw it coming, my uncle said, he was a good man. Always so nice to the children, said my aunt, who had no kids of her own. Sorry, terrible, disastrous.

I found my mother in their bedroom, sitting on the foot of the bed.

Hi, Jonah.

Hi, Mom. I slumped beside her. You alright?

No, sweetheart. But I will be.

I put my arm around her, and she snuggled close. I know, I said. I know.

He wasn’t here when it happened, Mom murmured. He was at work. They called my sister first, and she had to call me. Like we were kids playing Telephone.

I know.

You think I could’ve—

No.

But—

No.

She cried, and I held her, and after a little of that I began to forget who she was crying for—her husband, growing apart for two years thanks to his own pride, so they hardly knew each other any more? Her oldest son? Or her youngest son, who was maybe just worst of all?

59,630.

Dear Lizzie,

You don’t know me, but my name is Jonah, and I have something very important to tell you. It’s about Jonathan. He died last week.

I’m sorry I was so blunt just now. I don’t communicate well. I’m insane, actually. But they said Johnny was insane too, so there you are.

Anyway, he talked about you all the time, and I wanted to make sure you heard what happened. I think your asking him not to write again hurt his feelings. He read me the letter. I guess you had a good reason. You did, right? He remembered a lot of things, like the post office and how you loved the name Jonah.

I haven’t been having a good day—please understand.

Johnny got ahold of a shaving razor and killed himself. They wouldn’t tell me how, but if you write or call I’m sure you can ask.

The drugs were messing with his head, I think. He said he kept getting dumber. I know he’s sorry for what he did, Lizzie, and I hope—well, I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive him. I don’t know you, and really I hardly knew Johnny, but somehow I believe that would mean a lot.

Sincerely,

Jonah McDermott

59,847.

Strangers waiting

Up and down the boulevard

Their shadows searching

In the night—

Streetlights, people

Livin’ just to find emotion

Hidin’, somewhere in the night…

Rob. Hey, Rob.

Rob! You here or what?

I went by his house the next day and rang the doorbell incessantly until he answered. His neighbors were looking at me funny by then, like they didn’t know why I wasn’t getting the they-are-not-home message and going away, but I wouldn’t quit. He’d said to come back tomorrow, and I wanted to know what he meant—wanting to die and having been hit by a car—and he was going to tell me. Or—or—something bad would happen. To him. Not me.

What’s the secret word?

Huh? I just about screamed it.

Sorry, couldn’t hear you—

Rob, open the door.

My mommy told me not to speak to strangers. And my daddy told me not to have sex with them in their vans. So—

You trying to get rid of me? I said angrily.

You’re too good.

I laughed. No. I came back to hear you out, and I’m going to hear you out. Okay? So open the damn door.

Rob shrugged. I’d be willing to swear he shrugged. I nearly heard it. I can’t open it, he said.

And now I was annoyed. Okay. I’ll bite. Why?

Because I can’t see the lock.

I walked away.

The man across the street, mowing his lawn with a riding machine that he really didn’t need because his lawn was about the size of a postage stamp, glanced at me and smirked as I went down the driveway. Guess he thought I finally got the message. Maybe I did.

Unfortunately, Rob called again the next day. My mother answered the phone and hollered down the hall, Jonah, it’s for you. Some guy who says he had a good time last night?

When I took the receiver, I said, You know Rob, now I’m talking to you everyone thinks I’m gay. Or stupid.

They’re finally accepting what they’ve suspected all along.

I laughed. Sure.

Look, he said, after a few minutes, sorry.

Yeah, forget it. I shrugged, though he obviously couldn’t see. Heck, even if he hadn’t been talking to me on the phone he wouldn’t have seen it.

Okay. Rob paused and kind of sighed. So—thanks for not letting me die and all.

No problem.

Okay. Uh—see ya later.

Hey, Rob?

I don’t know why I stopped him just then, but something told me to speak up before he hung up. And I did.

Jonah?

You busy on Friday?

There was silence.

You really are gay, aren’t you? I guess there’s nothing wrong with—

Oh, come on.

Maybe I’m not. He paused. Why?

Thought we could hang out or something. Watch a movie. I haven’t seen Die Hard yet.

Rob laughed. Which one?

Uh—any of them, actually.

Damn, Jonah, you’re a geek. What do you do for fun?

Well, I—

Yeah, Friday’s cool. I’ll come by your place. Okay?

Sure.

Never seen Die Hard. Do you just not get out of the house?

60,369.

This place—the mental hospital where I’m staying—is pretty big. In fact, I’d call it huge. So far I’ve walked along the hall outside my room all the way to the end, and I found an elevator, but the buttons weren’t marked with Braille so I didn’t risk pushing one for fear of ending up on the roof. Or, worse, in the basement surrounded by monster rats. Maybe they do animal experimentation here. How would I know?

There are eighteen doors on my floor. If each door opens onto a patient’s rooms, that makes nineteen patients—counting me. I’m not going to knock, though. I don’t think any of them want to talk to me, and I don’t want to talk to them. I do wonder about them. The one in the room beside mine—who is that?

I wonder how many rapists are here. How many murderers.

How many of us are kindly old gentlemen who wandered outside naked and tap-danced in City Park?

How many of us are harmless?

60,543.

Yesterday I thought about people who are starving. In this country, in this city, in countries halfway across the world, someone’s dying from hunger. Someone’s feeling like his stomach is so empty it’s digesting itself. Someone would cut off his left arm for a bite to eat, and someone would eat his arm.

Millions of others have more food than they’ve ever wanted; thousands never have to feel a pang. At the slightest twinge, those people can head off to their kitchens for a Twinkie, or a Milky Way, or a bag of Lay’s salt-and-vinegar potato chips (which are excellent). On the way home from work, those people may pass dozens of fast-food joints, of supermarkets, of 7-11s and Dairy Queens.

And, you know, we’re all on the same planet.

But I don’t think those of us who buy banana splits at the place on the corner every weekend need to feel guilty.

People just aren’t built to care on a grand scale. You care about yourself, hopefully, and you might care about some close friends and family members, and probably your pets—and that’s great. You buy your groceries from a checker at the local SaveMart once, find out the next day that he died of a heart attack—yeah, you’re going to pause for a minute and say, Hey, what a shame, but you won’t really care. Not really.

Here’s a better example: Darfur. It’s horrific, isn’t it? The evening news is full of footage that makes us all want to envelop those dying kids in a big hug and give them more food than they could consume in a lifetime. In two lifetimes. I’m not going to say we shouldn’t react that way to such sad stories—just that we cannot care about them all.

If you go to those countries as a missionary, if you help them by devoting your time, I admire you, really I do. But I wouldn’t do it.

I think that, for survival’s sake—well, man may not be an island, but he is far from a planet.

Make any sense?

60,882.

Sue will be here to see you tomorrow, Jonah.

yes

Thank you very much.

Anything to help you, Jonah. I hope you know that I’ll do anything in my power to help you.

Why?

Well, there’s this thing called a paycheck I get at the end of the month—

Really. Why?

you’re still not funny.

I care about you like I care about all my patients.

How’s that?

i really am curious

for once

To be honest—I guess you can say I want everyone to have a happy ending.

60,985.

The year of the shooting, Sue was finally beginning to think things would work out. She planned for a spring wedding, a garden party where we’d stand in a shower of rose petals, watching them fall like snow—embrace beneath a white trellis as the vines, juniper-green, climbed ever higher. Family. Friends. Cake four tiers high, plastic couple on top, feeding each other gobs of frosting and laughing.

I wonder if she remembers.

61,058.

At my father’s funeral, only one person cried. I don’t know who he was. He stood in the back of the crowd, so far away from the gravesite that he might not have been attending, head bowed and face dripping with tears. From beside the coffin, with my arm around my mother, I heard him.

Mom didn’t cry—I think she was just empty. She didn’t say anything at all. And Dad’s friends said he wouldn’t have wanted them to get weepy, but they were lying. He would’ve. Then he would’ve laughed.

But the man in the back of the crowd, in a black suit that was two sizes too large, never said a word to Mom and I, or to any of the other guests.

After the ceremony, I walked around, asking about him—but he’d already left. Eventually, as I approached the street, I heard someone getting into a car parked by the side of the road. He sat behind the wheel for a few minutes and drove off, quickly like he was trying to escape the past.

To this day, I have no idea who that man was. I have no idea why he was there, or how he knew my father.

But I am forever grateful to him, because he grieved.

61,284.

Rob told me about wanting to die while Delphinium attacked various parts of my body and I fended her off as best I could, using anything from coffee table books to one of his grimy tennis shoes.

He was going to a football game with a friend. The friend drove, because Rob didn’t have his license yet. Traffic was heavy that day.

The light turned red and the friend, who’d been fiddling with his radio, kept driving.

Rob walked away. His friend, named Eddie, thought he was okay at first, even talked to him. Wow. Damn, that freaked me out. Sorry, man. But then Rob turned, and Eddie saw the thing protruding from his skull, and Rob opened his mouth as if about to say something and fell to the pavement and began to seize.

Now, Rob muttered, he wished he could remember what he’d wanted to say.

I shoved Delphinium away from me and she skidded across the floor, looking more indignant than she had a right to be.

This is no housecat, I said. This is a man-eating monster.

Yeah. Rob laughed. Just kick her.

They can call the SPCA on you for that you know.

Not if nobody tells.

I shrugged. I guess you can’t see bruises under fur.

You are one sick guy, Jonah.

Hey, so are you.

His sister walked into the room—we’d turned the television on, but neither of us was paying any attention to it—sprawled across the couch, and grabbed the remote. If you guys aren’t watching this I’m gonna watch America’s Top Model.

I turned to Rob. Wait. She actually watches that?

I think it’s every girl’s dream.

Let’s go.

He blinked, and that was disconcerting. I’d never been so close to someone who was blind before, and, while I knew I was being shallow, I thought it was odd—watching his eyes function normally, knowing he could blink for a thousand years and still see nothing at all.

Why?

I’m not going to sit here, getting killed by your cat and looking at a bunch of anorexics.

They’re not anorexic, said Rob’s sister, turning up the volume. You guys are so narrow-minded.

So we went to Starbucks, because it was within walking distance. I glanced at Rob whenever we had to cross a street. Just in case.

We sat at a table outside, and I stretched my legs out across the sidewalk, and an old woman, gray-haired, carrying a cane, gave me a dirty look. I ordered a white chocolate mocha frappuccino. Rob ordered a latte and asked me if I was always such a girl.

I guess it’s not easy. I mean the accident and all, I said.

You’re a bright one.

But people still care about you. It’s not the end of the world, right?

Neither of us said anything for a few minutes. Then he turned his head in my direction.

I just really don’t want to talk about it. Okay?

I nodded, waited for him to respond, and finally caught myself. Yeah, okay.

Our drinks came.

So what do you look like? he asked.

Huh?

Well, I could be talking to this babe with a deep voice and an identity problem.

You’re out of luck there.

So—

What do you think this is, a blind date?

Rob laughed. And laughed again. And kept laughing until the couple at the next table, who were sitting so close together they could’ve been a single entity, glanced over at us. And after a second, I joined him.

And—well, we were friends.

And that was the end of that.

61,871.

Sue walks in the door. I hear the knob turning. I imagine she’s watching me.

Jonah. It’s so good to see you again. So good. But why are you talking funny?

I point at the tape recorder and say, For posterity. You never know, right? Maybe one day I can sell this tape for a trillion bucks.

She stands there awkwardly. I get up and cross the room to her. I can tell she’s nervous. Maybe she thinks she might scare me away. I don’t know any more.

Oh, Jonah—

She is crying, I believe. But quietly.

I take her hand in mine and bring it to my lips. I know that’s stupid and romantic but she used to love romantic.

Jonah, I still do—

I wonder if she remembers me.

I could never forget.

Sue, I say, and I smile, I miss you. So much. I never stopped missing you.

And—very slowly—I reach up to the blindfold.

The End