Stephan Clark - Sweetness #9

When I got up from the table and led Ernst into his room, I felt strangely calm, but then I was only thinking of myself; now, years later, as I spend yet another day in this work shed banging away at the keys of my old IBM Selectric, I can see how my mentor’s story must have shaken my family. I had warned them about Sweetness #9, however belatedly, but even that had not prepared them for this. Who was to say what would come next? They must have walked away from the table as if from a terrible car crash. After marveling at their escape from danger, they must have felt as fearless as those who’ve survived a near-death experience. I say this because like those who have escaped death, they soon decided there was no reason to hold back.

AFTER PUTTING ERNST TO BED that night, I went upstairs and joined Betty in the great room, where she was mindlessly flipping through the channels. She got up and walked out almost as soon as I arrived, then went down and wrote a check on the kitchen table. I watched from the top of the stairs as she left through the front door with it, knowing where she was going and what she was going to do. After hearing the truth about Sweetness #9, she needed to believe she could have control over her body again, even if that meant paying the exorbitant fee demanded by the fat man next door.

When I got down to the table, I picked up her checkbook and confirmed my suspicions by reading the carbon. Pay to the order of: Neal Sunderland. $10,000. For: A new life!

Betty stayed away for several hours, long enough for me to wonder if she was planning an affair as well. When I finally did hear the front door open, and then her keying in the security code to lock up for the night, I was already in bed. She came in quietly, as if not to disturb me. I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep.

I had no right to question her use of the money. She earned plenty of it herself, and if she believed that the fat man’s teachings might reverse what Sweetness #9 had or had not done to her all these years, I wasn’t going to stand in her way. But that didn’t mean I didn’t want to know what she had learned, so the next morning at breakfast I found myself studying her actions before work. There was nothing to see. She grabbed a breakfast bar from the pantry as always and some pre-cut honeydew from the fridge, and then she corralled our son and went out through the utility room to her car.

Dinner promised to be no different, as she came in from work and suggested we finish up the leftovers from the previous night. I didn’t know what to make of it. I had expected to see her eat a new animal, mineral, or vegetable product, or to have her refuse one she had heretofore regularly consumed. So finally I asked, “What’s the secret?”

She had set her purse down on the island counter-top and was now reaching into it for a small white bag.

“If you’re talking about last night,” she said, “I can’t tell you.”

“Are you worried about a lawsuit? Did you sign a non-disclosure form?”

“I can’t tell you,” she repeated, pulling first a medicine dropper out of the white bag and then a red bottle with a white cap.

“Is it like a mantra?” I said, still not understanding what she was about to do. “Did he give you a mantra?”

“Ernest!” she called, uncapping the bottle. “Time for your medicine!”

He had been in the living room, watching television alongside his uncle and his namesake and his sister, but here he sprang up, ready and eager, as if they had discussed this on the drive in to school that morning.

“What’s going on?” Priscilla said, following her brother over.

Ernest stood before his mother and opened his mouth like a baby bird. Betty fed him with the medicine dropper, one drop, two drops, three, and then, as she turned to the fridge to put the bottle away, Ernest smacked his lips, the delight clear in his eyes. “Wild cherry,” he said.

Though I had never known Priscilla to need such motivation, I couldn’t help but think her mother’s decision played a part in her actions the following morning. It was then that Priscilla and Sarin led a protest against Station Zero, a private broadcast network whose owners had donated a fleet of new computers and televisions to the district in exchange for the right to broadcast thirty minutes of educational programming each day. Many viewed this as a boon to area tax-payers, but the girls did not, if only because the programming included three minutes of commercial advertising. The first time she was subjected to a spot promoting genetically modified foods, Priscilla asked to be excused to the bathroom. But the teacher didn’t allow her to leave; she said students were contractually bound to watch.

So on the morning after Ernest was first medicated, Priscilla and Sarin waited for the commercial break, and then they and twelve other students across four classrooms raised their hands and asked to go to the bathroom. The response was just as expected: “School’s about more than learning how to read and write; you’ll just have to wait.” But they refused to do as they’d been told. One after the other, to the shock and delight of their classmates and the horror of their teachers, the students relieved themselves in their chairs.

The principal responded like a general roused from sleep with news of a sneak attack. He had the school security guards pull all the suspects out into the hallway, and then (and you may have read about this in the papers) he had them strip down to their underwear — he said so that they could be searched for illicit narcotics. One sandwich bag filled with a dusting of marijuana was found, but not on the person of my daughter or Sarin. Something else was discovered there, if only by Priscilla. As my daughter stood beside her friend, she saw that while Sarin was wearing panties like her, she was also wearing a pair of control-top panties beneath them, cut down to the thigh. Nothing else could be seen; Sarin went to great pains each morning to make sure no bulge was visible. But once they were dressed and able to speak freely together outside, the truth emerged. Sitting in her car, Sarin confessed to being a boy who believed herself a girl. If there had been one good thing about her mother’s death, she said, it had been the chance to move to a new town where no one knew the “truth.”

Priscilla told her mother and me just like that: by making quotation marks in the air with her hands. Then she refused to talk about it anymore, telling us not to let Sarin in when she knocked on the door about an hour later. It didn’t matter that Sarin had been meaning to tell her, I suppose; teenagers have a hard enough time arriving at their own identity without having to also question whether their incipient homosexuality is confirmed or denied by such a muddled same-sex crush.

I supposed it was just too much for her in the end. After learning the true history of Sweetness #9 and seeing her father charged with depraved indifference, Priscilla crept out of her window in the middle of the night. A runaway. Taking only a toothbrush and all of the money in her mother’s purse, and leaving behind nothing but blowing curtains for a note.

“I don’t know,” Sarin said, when we called to ask if she knew where she might have gone. “Maybe some organic farm out west?”

At my preliminary hearing, I went against the advice of my attorney and read from a prepared statement. I told the judge that while I was deeply saddened by the death of Charles Hithenbottom, and certainly regretted my involvement in those events that preceded his suicide, I was a victim of circumstance. Yes, I had quarreled with him at Costco “like a knight of old” (to use the prosecuting attorney’s words), but this was more a symptom of our nation’s sickness than any evidence of a “long-standing blood feud going back to [our] days at Goldstein, Olivetti, and Dark” (again, not my words).