He sits quietly in the stark fluorescent light. The room is painted a bright asylum white, making everything look bleak, washed out. He strokes his boy moustache. To me it looks like down on a duckling.
‘Not a big deal,’ says the boy. ‘Like I said when I asked for the interview, it’s for a college paper. Freshman year.’
‘You wanted to speak to a nutjob,’ I say, spitefully, because I enjoy his obvious discomfort. I’m messed up that way. We’re sitting on cheap plastic chairs, across from each other over a chipboard table. Very much an institutional vibe. I don’t think he expected to be this close to me. Probably expected a glass partition. Or bars. For all appearances we’re alone, but there’s a camera, and of course they’re watching, and of course they’re near, in case I try something. I scrape my handcuffs against the rim of the table. For effect. ‘Hence the asylum,’ I say. ‘It’s where people come when they want to speak to nutjobs.’
‘We don’t use such words,’ he says, blushing. He seems like a sweet boy. Well-meaning. He reminds me of Paul when Paul was that age. I can’t figure out whether I find that endearing or whether it makes me want to smash his head in. A little of both, maybe.
‘I’m not sure I’ll be much use,’ I say. ‘I’ve been here a long time. This is not a good place for a mind. I may confuse things. Or forget.’
He ignores this statement. Maybe the more non compos mentis I am, the better for his purposes. ‘Your record says you’re sixty,’ is what he comes up with. Sort of left-field.
‘I’m sure I am, then.’
‘You look the same than your photo when you came here twenty-eight years ago,’ he says.
‘I’m flattered,’ I say.
‘I mean...’ he sputters, probably because flattery was not the point, but he doesn’t say what he means. ‘Mind if I record this,’ he asks instead.
I shrug. ‘Whatever blows your sails,’ I say. He puts his cell phone on the table. His hands are trembling. It makes me think I should cut him a break. If only to make him stay. Fact is, it would be nice to have some company. Coherent company, I mean.
‘You’re a handsome boy, aren’t you?’ I say, flirting. Christ knows why. ‘Why would a boy like you want to hear the story of some crazy?’ I ask. ‘That’s why I’m here. You know that. I don’t know the difference between fact and fiction. That’s what the doctors say. What’s the point of talking to someone like me?’
‘I’m interested in your side of it,’ he says. A bald-faced lie. Crazies don’t have sides. Not legitimate ones. If we had, we’d be in prison. I’m a curiosity to him. A project. He pities me. He looks at me like I’m a dog with wheels where it should have hind legs.
‘Voyeurism, I reckon.’
It looks like he’s gotten stuck in his head. He opens his mouth to say something, closes it again. With a wary look, he pushes away from the table. Like he thinks this is not going the way he’d hoped, and maybe it would be better if he gets another subject. Maybe a less articulate one. There are plenty to choose from. I mean, if you’re going to drive all the way out here for a crazy, might as well get a proper drooling screeching one.
‘What do you want to know?’ I ask. Because I don’t want him to leave. I don’t give a flying fuck whether he believes me or what he thinks of me when we’re done. I don’t think I can be certified any more than I am already.
It takes him a while. Eventually, he leans forward, asks: ‘Is it still with you?’ and I can see he’s wondering whether it’s the right question or whether he should have waited a while. Build rapport first.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It’s part of me now. First it was the I and the other. Now we’re one.’
He nods. He’s trying to be discreet, but a flush of his cheeks tells me he’s pleased with my answer. Maybe I’m crazy enough, after all. I can see him thinking, eyes shifting like he’s looking for something in his head, coming up short. Not very smart. Good thing he’s pretty.
‘You want to know how it started,’ I ask, and he nods gratefully.
‘It started with the meteorite,’ I say. ‘I didn’t know it then, and didn’t know for a long time, but now I know it started with the meteorite.’
He checks his cell. To make sure it’s recording. Probably hoping I give him a good show. An A-plus on whatever he’s working on.
And I just might.
‘I was about thirty,’ I start. ‘It was soon after the miscarriage. I’m sure you know about the miscarriage. Everyone made a big song and dance of that. About how I dealt with it. Or failed to. Its impact on my mental health, and so on.
‘We were living in Davies Park, my husband and I, and I think we were pretty happy. Very happy, even. Except for losing the baby. Which was obviously bad. Very hard on us. We had tried for a long time, and after we’d lost Agatha, we felt like never trying again. Later, of course, when things started falling apart, and I went to hospital and then came here, we never got the chance to try again. After the divorce.
‘But it all started with the meteorite. It was the weirdest thing. Afterward, there were news vans and tabloids and even some people from some or other space agency. I remember it was summer and hot, two or three months after we’d lost Agatha. I was still very much in my head, mourning. Thinking about the little one that had almost been. Feeling alone and like I’d done something wrong that had made her die.
‘I know it was weekend because Paul was home watching sports on the TV, and I was in the kitchen making something nice for lunch, like I liked to do when he was home. Probably toasted cheese. He loved toasted cheese. I suppose he still does.
‘Anyhow, I was in the kitchen and there was a rumble I thought was a plane flying over, and then the rumble became a roar and all hell broke loose.
‘Big explosion. Made the whole house shake. Windows blew in, glass everywhere, gave us little nicks all over our bodies. I remember Paul shrieking like a little girl, which is funny if you know how big he is. I went to him in the sitting room. He sat with his hands over his face. He had a pretty bad cut over his forehead. His hands and face were full of blood, but it wasn’t as bad as it looked. Later, when I tried to tie my hair back, I found a piece of glass pretty deep in the nape of my neck.
‘Once we figured out we’re not going to die, we went to the kitchen and looked out the window. Or where the window used to be, I mean. There was this huge steamy crater in the backyard. The neighbours were all ogling out their windows. I didn’t think so at the time, but now it seems quite comical. They later said they thought it was a gas explosion, that Paul and I were done for.
‘Anyway, we went out, and looked for some sort of debris, because I thought it was a plane crash and Paul thought it might have been a satellite, or maybe, he said, a missile that went wrong from the air force base. But there wasn’t any debris. Just the crater. And then I figured it was probably a meteorite, which was later confirmed.
‘Like I said, there were a lot of newspaper people around. And they asked questions we couldn’t answer. And then there were the space agency people walking about in suits that looked like they got it from the ET movie set, scraping around, putting little shards of things into little plastic bags and carting it away.
‘But, as these things go, everything got quiet quickly, and everyone moved on with their lives, thank God, and we were left with a nice big crater in our backyard.
‘Paul wanted to even it back out or make it into a swimming pool, but I said he must leave it. Who else has a meteorite crater in their backyard, I said. But I already knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to plant a garden. For Agatha. Agatha’s garden. Because on some level I felt the meteorite was a sign. Of what, I couldn’t say. Still can’t. But you can ask the doctors who evaluated me. They’ve got all kinds of ideas.
‘And that’s what I did. Planted cabbage and string beans and lettuce and lots of tomatoes and chilies and potatoes. Even flowers. Just because they looked pretty. And everything grew. I don’t know what was in that meteorite, but everything grew. Made us nearly self-sufficient. Saved a lot of money. Never eaten better.
‘I spent half my time there, I guess. And I suppose that was when Paul started getting worried. Started asking whether I’m alright all the time. Like I was some fragile fledgling thing. I loved that garden. I put out a cabana and hammock so I could nap there during the day. Sometimes, when it was warm, I slept out there at night.
‘And of course I wasn’t alright. Neither of us were. Paul, too, wasn’t alright. Not after we’d lost Agatha. But us not being alright was normal, if you know what I mean. We were not alright in the way of people that had lost a baby and had to deal with that. We were sad. We were looking for distractions. Believe me, Paul had his distractions. I never pestered him about it. I had the garden. But Paul said it was too much. Said I was obsessed.
‘It’s simple. The garden made me happy. I loved it. It made me feel closer to Agatha. The labour that went into it distracted me from my despair. It simplified the world. Soil, sun and water. At night my body was tired and my mind felt quiet.
‘I didn’t think there was anything wrong with that. I still don’t. It was a hobby, a coping mechanism. And a pretty healthy one, I think.
‘But,’ I say, and eye the boy closely, since I’m curious to see how he’ll react, ‘I saw some weird bugs on the plants in that garden,’ I say. ‘And even though I didn’t know it then, I think that’s how it found its way into my body.’
He’s not very tactful. His eyes light up. Like he can’t believe I would speak about it so readily. To his credit, he’s not like the doctors at all. I hope he never becomes like the doctors. The doctors have bucket loads of tact. They make you think they get you, that it’s alright to spill your guts, then lock you away.
‘It?’ he asks.
I laugh. ‘Don’t play around,’ I say. ‘You know what I’m talking about. That’s why you’re here. You read my file. You know what I mean.’
‘You mean the parasite,’ he concedes, stumbling on that word, like he’s not sure it’s the right one. ‘The parasite from the meteorite. Yes,’ he says, ‘your file’s got a lot to say about that.’
I nod. I grin. Encouragingly, I hope. Hopefully not in a crazy-looking way. In my position one always tries not to look crazy, not to confirm suspicions. I can see him holding his tongue. He looks like a boy sitting on his hands to keep from fidgeting. Carefully, he rakes about for what he considers a good follow-up.
‘But the doctors didn’t find anything,’ he says. ‘They did all the blood work, samples, swaps, name it. Nothing unusual, they said.’
‘We’ll get to that,’ I say, because this is my story and I’ll tell it as I please, and I need to lay some groundwork before we get to that part. ‘I’ll tell you why they didn’t find anything,’ I say. ‘Later.’
He leans back. It seems like his way of showing me he’ll give me the space I need. He folds his arms, reconsiders, unfolds them again. Quite fidgety.
‘Do I make you nervous?’ I ask.
‘No.’
‘You know, except for the burger joint thing, I’ve never been known to be violent,’ I say.
‘I know,’ he says. ‘You don’t make me nervous. You can go ahead,’ he says.
And so I do.
‘It was subtle in the beginning,’ I say. ‘Like a stomach bug. Paul said I got it from the garden. At the time, he jumped at every opportunity to diss the garden. He was right, though, ironically. He said he saw me eating tomatoes right off the stem. Which was true. He didn’t see all the other things I also ate off the stem or straight from the soil. Like peas and raw watery potatoes.
‘I wasn’t ill. Not exactly. For days, I went to the loo more often than was typical for me, and my stomach cramped all the time, and I was very gassy, and everything came out messy and unwholesome-looking. Then afterward, I’d be all blocked up. From one extreme to the other. It was messed up. It was like my gut had forgotten its job. Like it was reprogramming itself, not getting it right, overcompensating, under-compensating.
‘Point is, it didn’t go away as one might have expected, and after a couple of weeks it got me worried, and so I went to have it checked out. And you’re right. They didn’t find anything. They prodded and scraped and syphoned and took what felt like litres of blood. They did a colonoscopy, took samples of my intestinal bacteria, asked me to put some shit in a petri dish, to piss in a vial. Told me everything looked normal. Actually, that everything looked pretty good. That I was in good shape.
‘Anyway, except for all that intestinal nonsense, two strange things happened in those early days, before things got really intense.
‘First thing, like overnight, soon after I went to get all those tests done, I could no longer stomach meat. Anything animal, in fact. Nothing that once had a nervous system. Nothing that came out of or from anything that had a nervous system. It was not like I didn’t want to eat that. I’d always eaten meat. I’d grown up eating meat. It had never crossed my mind not to eat meat. Paul and I had eaten meat least once a day.
‘But, all of a sudden, I couldn’t keep any of that down. And if that had made me the most grudging vegan ever, I’m sure you can imagine how Paul felt about it. Never mind that I couldn’t eat any of that, I couldn’t bring myself to make any of that! Even the sight of something animal made me gag. Once, I fainted at the sight of minced beef, if you can believe that.
‘One day, after this had been going on a couple of weeks, Paul waited for me to go to the store, and made himself a steak that he’d bought somewhere and had hidden away in his bar fridge in the garage. He washed the dishes and put it away. So not to upset me. But when I got home, I caught a whiff of that lingering fatty grilled-animal fragrance, and I vomited all over the kitchen floor.
‘Knowing he’d eaten meat made me sick. For days, I could smell it on his body, on his breath. I couldn’t stand it. I slept outside. Made him feel like he’d done something abominable. I couldn’t help it. I felt bad about it because he was a good guy and did nothing wrong and I loved him. But I couldn’t help it.
‘After that, I stripped the kitchen of everything animal-related. And there was a lot. I even threw away our George Foreman and those plastic things I used to poach eggs. I didn’t want any of that anymore. How’s that for crazy?
‘And the second strange thing is probably the one you’d be most interested in since it points right at my condition. Or whatever you consider my condition to be.
‘It started as a murmur. Like a light breeze in my head. Like the static on a radio that’s out of tune. But softer. At first I thought it was like that ringing people get in their ears that usually goes away after a while. But even when it had just started, I suspected I may hear something like words, if I could manage to turn it up a little.
‘And I was right. As you know. Eventually it got turned up. Eventually the radio got tuned. I could hear it through my own voice with my own ears. But I don’t hear it anymore,’ I say. ‘Because now we’re one, and my thoughts and its thoughts is one and the same.
‘So, you see, I’m crazy, right?’ and I give a nice loud cackle to underscore the point, to see whether he’ll get up and run away. Because this story gets worse. If this is too much for him, he better leave now.
And then he disappoints, makes a mistake, asks something that grates on me. ‘And how did that make you feel?’ he asks, after a long impotent pause, in that condescending, watery way I’ve heard so many times. I laugh, slap my thighs, spittle flying. Not a good look for one ostensibly in pursuit of non-nut status.
‘Don’t ask me that,’ I say, trying to keep my voice level, but hearing its bitter edge.
He turns the most amazing lobster pink, exhales slowly, says, ‘OK,’ pushes his chair back a couple of inches, a small indiscreet disassociation.
‘So you picked something up in the garden,’ he tries in substitution.
It’s a gargantuan understatement, but, ‘Yes,’ I say.
‘Like a parasite,’ he says, and I nod.
‘I’m not sure what to call it,’ I say. ‘I’m not a scientist. Saying it’s a parasite seems about right. Maybe symbiote is more apt,’ I say.
He nods thoughtfully. There’s something in it that makes me feel he’s emulating someone. Like he’s been taught to nod like that when someone says something bizarre.
‘And it grew inside you, and spoke to you,’ he says.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘First it was the two of us together in this body, but now we’re one.’
He pouts. It’s cute. He’s confused but trying to hide it. He checks his phone again, probably looking forward to sharing this with his buddies back at college, so they can have a good laugh over a couple of beers.
‘How do you explain the doctors not finding anything?’ he asks.
‘I don’t,’ I say. ‘I can’t. All I know is what the other knows,’ I say. ‘But I don’t fully understand it.’
‘But,’ he says smartly, like he’d set a trap and is pleased to see me step into it. ‘If the two of you are one, surely you understand everything it understands,’ he says. Which is an argument I’ve heard before. And not a bad one.
‘We’re still stuck with my brain,’ I say, which has always been the only way I could think of answering that question. ‘It’s a hardware issue,’ I say.
‘And what does your brain understand, then?’ he asks.
‘It understands,’ I say, picking my words carefully, ‘that it probably got inside me like any parasite. I probably ate a spore or an egg or bug or something. But in essence,’ I say, ‘I think the other’s like a data script that had slowly overlapped with my genome. That’s as close as I can get to understanding it.’
‘Or maybe,’ he says, like this is an entirely novel concept, ‘that’s something you made up to explain why they couldn’t find anything. Maybe there’s no parasite at all,’ he says.
I can see he’s anxious. Waiting for me to go full blown psycho at this suggestion. But the question is brave. I like it. I don’t mind. Worst thing about a place like this is that people stop talking to you like you’re a thinking human being.
‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘I’m telling you what I know or think I know,’ I say. ‘Make of it what you want.’
He furrows his brow. He seems disappointed by my answer. Not nutty enough, maybe. He leans back and looks at the ceiling like he might find some answers there.
‘And how do you explain the whole vegan thing?’ he asks.
Trick question. This is the part where my psychiatrist had leaned over his desk, scribbled up two frantic pages of notes, all of which, I suppose, came to down to, crazy, crazy, dear God! so crazy...
But the answer hasn’t changed, and so I tell the boy what I’d told the psychiatrist.
‘If you think about it,’ I say, ‘it makes perfect sense. The other is a symbiote. Where it comes from it creates consciousness in the bodies of animals with sufficiently high neural complexity. Without the other there would be no self-awareness on its world. It lives in other organisms. It becomes part of them. To eat their bodies would be like eating itself,’ I say.
The boy squirms, presses his lips like he’s tasting something tart. I see derisive amusement in his eyes, but I continue.
‘When it sees blood and meat,’ I say, ‘it sees the world it lives in. It knows that, on this world, it’s alone, and there are no others like it. But it cannot escape its own instincts, its disgust, in exactly the same way we cannot escape our horror of the idea of cannibalism, no matter how many movies we watch of planes crashing and people eating things that’s probably quite reasonable under the circumstances.’
The boy smiles. It’s a charming smile. I wish it wasn’t. ‘That’s very creative,’ he says.
‘It’s only creative if I made it up,’ I say.
He wants to say something, stops himself, stares for a while. Then, ‘If it’s like a parasite, a symbiote,’ he says, ‘why hasn’t it spread? Why only you,’ he asks. Which is more cunning than I expected from him. I know what he means. He means, what makes you so special? He means, are you so hard up to be different to others that you’ll make up all this bullshit?
But, God help me! there is an answer. One that makes sense to me, for what it’s worth.
‘Because humans are already self-aware,’ I say. ‘It spread to me because it had to. There was nothing else around. Otherwise, in time, sitting there in the soil, it would have died. But it never intended to interfere with an existing consciousness,’ I say. ‘It’s not how it evolved. To have me is enough for its survival,’ I say. ‘It doesn’t want anyone else to go through what I had gone through.’
‘So, not contagious, then,’ says the boy. ‘It seems like a pretty conscientious parasite,’ he says. And, yes, I know he’s being sarcastic. But let him have his fun. It’s nice to talk.
‘I suppose,’ I say.
‘Except for the bombing,’ says the boy, sounding a bit like a lawyer now. ‘And the people that had died. It didn’t seem to care much about them,’ he says.
‘We’ll get to that,’ I say. ‘But you’re getting ahead of yourself.’
‘I am?’
‘You are,’ I say, knowing I got him hooked. Crazy or not, he definitely wants to hear more.
He shrugs. ‘Fine, fill me in,’ he says.
And so I do.
‘In time it became like a war in my head,’ I say. ‘Between the I and the other. There were two minds in there, jostling for space, neither of them used to sharing. At first, the other sounded like nothing more than a fly caught in a closed room. A mild annoyance. But its presence grew till I felt I was losing myself. Like I was drowning. The buzz became a drone. The drone wanted to be rid of me.
‘Think what you want, I’m not crazy and I’ve never been. But in those days it felt like I could lose my mind. There was no off-switch. No getting away. The other also struggled. We didn’t know how to coexist. My head hammered with never-ending migraines. We danced around each other like that for a long time, till we finally realised we were both in the same head and there was no way out.
‘And I think that was when things started changing. When we stopped fighting. Sometimes I could feel it quiet down, withdraw, to give me some space. And I did the same. I wasn’t catatonic then, like everyone thought. Just took a break. And later we started talking and found we liked each other.
‘But Paul was cracking up. The better I got, the worse it got for him. And, in retrospect, I get it. I admit we were not doing a good job accommodating Paul. Not because we didn’t want to, but because it was so difficult for both of us to find space in the same body, and we didn’t have the energy to look after Paul as well. I mean, in the beginning, when the I and the other finally learned to speak to each other, we spoke out loud. There was no other way. Unlike now, our thoughts were still separate. We had to use the same voice to speak and the same ears to hear.
‘And of course that must have seemed very weird to Paul. Even scary. Me sitting somewhere having what would have seemed to him like entire conversations with myself. About things like where the other had come from. About how we could integrate.
‘But I still didn’t expect Paul to hospitalise me. That came as a big surprise. Maybe I was too distracted to notice how bad things had gotten. I thought he would give me some time. I mean, I told him about the other, and asked him to be patient, and told him the other and I will figure it out, that everything will be fine. But it became too much for Paul, and I don’t think I can blame him.
‘Paul had his own ideas, of course. Kitchen psychology stuff. Even though, turns out, kitchen psychology is not that different from real psychology. Paul told me once, very gently, like one would speak to a person of unsound mind, that maybe I had made up the other. Because of the child in me that had died. And he said maybe this was my way to recreate that life inside me, to have the relationship that the miscarriage had taken from me.
‘And, granted, it was an eloquent idea. Later on, the doctors were also taken by it. Sure, it was a good working theory. Under the circumstances. If one’s unwilling to accept the existence of the other. But, eloquent or not, it was not, in fact, what happened.
‘The hospital and the doctors were no good. The more I said, the stranger the looks I got, until I ended up in a single occupancy with straps around my ankles and wrists.
‘But we figured it out. The I and the other. We shut up for a couple of weeks. Even though it wasn’t easy. Even though it delayed our integration and we were very much at odds.
‘But eventually they released me. Sent me back to Paul with a long to-do list and a suitcase full of drugs. I knew he didn’t want me back. I knew he’d have preferred for me to stay at the hospital. I knew he was done with me.
‘I didn’t take any of the drugs, but I got better. The I and the other started moving toward what we are today. A single consciousness in a single mind. But I’d broken Paul. He was scared of me. He left. I woke one morning and saw he was gone together with a single duffel bag. We had only one car, and he left it. He took a bus. He called to say he’s fine, but he’s not coming back. He never told me where he’d gone. He left me all our savings. I suppose he still cared about me.
‘It broke my heart. Really did. I still miss him. Even now. After all these many years.’
The boy seems lost in thought, his gaze distant. He’s sitting closer now, arms on the table, a bit slumped, much more relaxed. Like he’s forgotten to be wary of me.
I feel vented. It’s been a long time since I’ve told my story. It doesn’t matter what he makes of it. What matters is the telling, the sharing, not keeping things locked up in one’s head.
‘What happened at the restaurant?’ he asks. The dread question.
‘I regret that,’ I say. ‘I regret it very much.’
‘You mean you regret that, or that both of you, now merged, regret that,’ he asks.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Both. I regret it, we regret it,’ I say.
‘What happened at the restaurant,’ he asks again. He sits upright and fixes me with a puzzling gaze that seems to have very little to do with mere academic interest.
‘Did you know any of those people,’ I ask, thinking maybe this is not my story alone.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ says the boy. ‘I want to know what happened. The story’s not done till you tell me,’ he says.
‘It’s all on the file, in the newspapers, in the court transcript,’ I say.
‘Tell me,’ he says. ‘It’s different hearing it like this. From you.’
I do not like this part of the story. It’s the part where I tend to agree with the condemnation I sense when I tell it. It’s the part that makes me think I deserve to be locked up, crazy or not.
I don’t want to tell the boy. But we’ve gotten this far. No copping out now.
‘We were just merged,’ I say. ‘I think that knew I was vulnerable then. I think my human way of seeing the world and its alien eyes misunderstood some of our shared perspectives. It was like being a teenager again. I had thoughts and feelings that seemed way out of proportion. I don’t feel that way now, but I did back then, and I suppose the part of me that was made up of the other had the same problem.
‘I made the bomb based on some basic shit I got off the internet. I never thought it would work. I expected it to fizzle out or blow with an impotent little puff.
‘I was wrong. We know that now. It was actually a pretty good bomb. Especially, it turned out, with all the gas and oil they had in the kitchen.
‘All I wanted to do was stop the meat machine. The whole world seemed like a meat machine. A place full of killing and blood. I didn’t know where to start. All that death seemed like a horrid, unconscionable thing. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was meant as an act of sabotage. I never thought anyone would die. It was meant as a protest. To make people stop and think.
‘It was an insignificant little place. The burger joint. Tired-looking, worn out, probably on the verge of bankruptcy. Just this small local drive through, some sit-in tables, pretty dismal food, run of the mill. I chose it because it was close to home and I was too scared to try anything more ambitious. I’d never thought of doing anything like that before. Looking back now, I’m not even sure what I thought I would achieve in the greater scheme of things. My head was muddled. I just wanted to hurt the meat machine. I wanted to stop the murder.
‘When I got there, it was about midnight. And I knew the place closed at ten. I must have driven past there a million times. I knew there would be no one there. That’s why I went so late. Because I didn’t want to hurt anyone.
‘Thinking back I didn’t even have the smarts to think they might have cameras there. And they did, of course. I took my car and drove it right up to the drive-in order window and left the bomb there on the sill, thinking it should be close to the kitchen, and maybe the explosion will at least mess the kitchen up. I didn’t even have the guts to get out of my car to find a way to put it inside.
‘And that’s all I know. The rest I heard of or read later on. I probably know no more than you do. The bomb had a timer set for five minutes. A simple wind-up alarm clock. I drove away because I was shit scared and literally shaking with nerves, but the wind was a howler that night, and when I didn’t hear anything I thought I was probably too far away and that the noise had been covered over by the wind or that the bomb had simply fizzled.
‘Anyway, it didn’t blow. I’d put it in a shoe box that I’d covered with gift wrap and one of the ladies there found it the next morning and thought it was from her boyfriend and she took it inside and as far as the police could tell she dropped it and it exploded.
‘I didn’t mean for it to look like a gift,’ I say. ‘But I didn’t want it to look like a bomb, either. I never meant to hurt anyone. I swear to God.’
I always feel I should weep when I tell this part of the story. Because I weep about it all the time when I’m alone with my thoughts. It’s a wound that never heals. I no longer weep for Paul or the baby I’d lost or the life I’d thrown away. But I weep for those people. People I’d never met. People who had gone to work like they’d done every morning, never thinking the world will end for them that day, blink of an eye. And I weep especially for that woman. The one who’d found the box and was happy to see it and couldn’t wait to open it.
I didn’t know her. But she’s always with me.
But I never weep when I tell the story, and I don’t weep now, and I know the boy is wondering why my voice is so level and my face so straight, and I honestly don’t know.
The boy doesn’t speak. He leans forward and toggles off his cell, puts it away. Inscrutably, he looks at me for a long time. There’s something hard in his face. And something sad. But I can’t make sense of the expression.
I yearn for him to say something. To condemn me. To laugh. To holler or weep. To say I’m a bullshitter, a liar, a fucking killer. To spit on me. To say he hates me. Anything.
But he gets up and leaves and the door slams sharply in his wake, sounding exactly like a gavel struck in judgment.
