Angel Colón - No Happy Endings

I slid back under, coating more of my shirt in blood and urine, who knows what else. The door opened again just as I got under into my own stall. I stood, wiped sweat off my forehead with a wad of toilet paper, and pulled my jacket on over my bloodstained shirt.

I unlocked the stall door and almost forgot to flush. Gotta keep up the illusion.

I, too, left without washing my hands.

Outside I found Bricks waiting in a cab, as planned. I slid in next to her and it took her a second to realize all had not gone smoothly.

“What the—”

“Don’t ask,” I said.

Note:

All epigrams and extracts—as well as this book’s title—are taken from the Bureau of Education Circular of Information No. 4, Abnormal Man, Being Essays on Education and Crime and Related Subjects , by Arthur MacDonald, Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1893. In addition, the author is indebted to the Sub-Sub Programmer who kept dark hours alone with her loupe and logarithms to amass, correlate, scan, and furthermore write proprietary code to digitally capture le mots justes contained therein—the very phrases that would illume, limn, and inform the following narrative. She did this on the author’s behalf, requesting in return, only anonymity. Fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub.

For the convenience of those who are interested in questions concerning the abnormal classes—including their moral, intellectual, and physical education—the author presents in book form a number of his writings… In doing this the author has temporarily taken the point of view of the subject of each study, avoiding criticism, so that the reader may gain a clear insight…

The Moon.

You keep swallowing and you’re not sure why. You can feel your Adam’s apple bobbing up and down, up and down, over and over. Your eyes are closed, and there is a diffuse white glow bleeding through your eyelids. A pleasant, welcoming light. Not the sun. No, it is not the sun. It is the moon. Yes, the moon.

When you were still just a little kid, you believed— certain, you were absolutely certain —that the moon followed you. You can remember being in the backseat of your father’s restored Chevelle SS, driving home from a vacation in Gatlinburg, and watching the moon through the blue-green glass of the side window.

The moon stays with you. It follows you. No matter how fast the car speeds down the highway, that magnetic white disc keeps up with you, never lagging behind.

At first you think it might be some kind of optical illusion, some trick you aren’t yet old enough to understand, so you test the theory by looking away from it for a little while. Maybe it just seems like the moon is following you because you never take your eyes off it. A clock’s hands can only be seen to move if you take your eyes away from it for a little while. It’s only when you look back later that you can tell the hands have changed position. Maybe if you ignore the moon for a little while, maybe when you look back at it again, you will be able to tell it is really getting farther away. That it isn’t really following you after all.

So you look up front at the silver, rectangular radio buttons. They are the old-fashioned mechanical kind that you have to stab with your finger to make the dial physically turn to the preset station. The green radium-like glow of the dashboard instrument panel bathes the car’s interior, like being in a submarine. Sixty miles an hour. The car is moving at sixty miles an hour. Your daddy’s face does not look sinister in that green glow, but instead it looks warm and safe. You didn’t know it then, but he was your real daddy. Your true daddy. Not the son-of-a-bitch replacement. And your mama reaches back over the seat and scratches your knee with her long red fingernails and says your name real soft. “Billy? You awake, sweetie?” But you don’t answer her. Just let her think you’re asleep. And you watch her take her hand away and rest it high on Daddy’s leg, nestled in the crotch.

And it feels good seeing that. You feel good. Because you have no way of knowing that she will be dead in nine years.

And it has been long enough to test your theory. To see if it is real. You turn your head and look back out the side window, holding your breath in anticipation. And it’s true. The moon is still there. In the exact same place. This car is rolling down the road at sixty miles per hour, so the moon should be far, far behind you, but it has not slowed down one little bit. It’s following you. You .

For the rest of the trip, you continue to test the moon. When the car stops, the moon stops too. It waits right there in the sky. It waits for you to get moving again. And when the car turns, the moon turns with it. Sometimes it ends up following you from the other side of the car, but it never stops following.

It is following you.

Your name is Billy Smith and that is not a special name. It is common.

But the moon follows you.

And that makes you special.

You are special.

You haven’t seen the moon—or the sun—in more than three months. But still, all these years later, you know it is out there, waiting for you. You can feel it. Throbbing with gravity, pulling at you. Waiting for you.

There are no windows in this place, only fluorescent lights that stay on all day, all night. This place is not a prison, but really it is. The Grierson Holding and Processing Facility for Violent Offenders. Not a prison.

You ask yourself: How did it happen? Can you really be responsible for this? And you look around yourself and realize that every decision you have ever made in your life has brought you to this time, to this place. You are where you are supposed to be.

You are eighteen years old.

Was there a choice? Was there ever really a choice? Or was this all preordained? From the moment your head crowned from between your mother’s splayed legs, had all of this already been decided for you? Written down? Or was it chaos?

No. It was choice. Of course it was. Of course. A never-ending series of decisions. More choices than there are numbers. Every step was decided upon. Chosen. How could you have not realized that?

It was all a choice.

Swallowing. You keep swallowing. Why? Is it nerves? Anticipation? The light that surrounds you is too warm and intense to be the moon. The blunt white light that bleeds through your closed lids is implacable. Waiting patiently for you to open your eyes. And you do. You swallow one last time and open your eyes.

You are staring into the dead flat eye of a video camera. Static. It is waiting for you to speak. There are three softbox lights on tripods angled around you, lighting you for the camera.

The woman’s motorcycle helmet rests on the scratched and dirty table here in the not-a-prison interview room. The helmet is black, an impenetrable orb. And on the back, in red spray paint, the anarchy symbol. The letter A bursting through a ragged circle that can’t contain it.

The woman is staring at you. Her camera is staring at you. You can hear it humming, waiting. The fuzzy black boom mic is pointing at you, accusatory. You like the woman, and you have agreed to speak to her. To be in her movie. Her documentary. About you.

You want to tell her about how when you were just a little kid you used to think the moon followed you. In fact, you open your mouth and you are about to say that very thing, but you don’t. Because it would be a lie. The truth is that you still think that the moon follows you. And you always will.

You wonder why someone would name their baby girl Jaymes and then be upset when, years later, she announces that she’s a lesbian. It’s like they prearranged it. Jaymes. What kind of name is that to saddle a child with? It is the name you give your daughter when what you really wanted was a son.