Everything in his life could be brought back to the number two. Some nights he lay awake in bed, dividing and adding and subtracting, and always it came down to the number two. For example:
Eight years before his mom died (two times two times two, or two cubed), his father had packed his suitcases into the family car, leaving his two sons home alone. He had never seen his dad again, although he heard his mother on the phone with him two nights after. "How am I supposed to get to work without a car?" she yelled. "Fucking bastard!" He had been six years old then (two times three), and in second grade. He had skipped kindergarten, but had to repeat second grade. His father left during his first time through. The second time through was much worse, the beginning of being an outcast among his peers.
Another example: he tried to kill himself for the first time two weeks after his mom died. He used sleeping pills from the CVS down the street from his brother’s apartment, exactly 32 of them (two to the eighth power). That was two years ago, and he had spent a grand total of two days in the hospital, one for the stomach pump and one for psychiatric observation.
His second attempt would either work or not work, and whether it did or not would decide a lot of things. Two had always been that number for him. He’d gotten so paranoid about it that he always skipped his second period class, English. Once was enough. He didn’t need to go a second time, on the second day of school, to find out that his teacher thought he was some pothead loser who would barely pass the class. He didn’t have to go to the school counselor every day during fifth period (which began at 12:02) to know he had problems.
"Adjustment issues" was how the guy had termed his problems, the second time he went.
Today, the second day of the second month, today was the day all of his troubles, problems, adjustment issues, whatever, would come to an end. If the attempt didn’t work, then it meant he was supposed to live this crappy life, and he didn’t have to try to make meaning out of it anymore. He hoped it would work. He longed for that sweet oblivion before the stomach pump had shocked him back to reality.
It was almost two o’clock when he started the walk home from school, his hands shoved in the front pocket of the hooded sweatshirt he wore in place of a winter coat. The cold sometimes made him feel alive, a pain outside of himself to focus on.
The concrete beneath his feet sprouted dry brown weeds between the frost-heaves. He knew those sections by heart; he had carefully stepped over the cracks every day for the past two years on his walk home from school. He’d had to change schools after his mom died. He remembered his old school, Middlesex High, as non-threatening: a small town school where the biggest scares came from self-important jocks. This school, this schooling complex (it wasn’t pretty enough to be a called a campus—no lawns anywhere and the buildings bland rectangles of concrete) barricaded behind a chain link fence where various shady sorts of people clung looking in, watching. Child molesters, drug dealers, he didn’t know. He didn’t deal with those people, even though he sometimes smoked; he got the pot from his brother. But he hated walking home past the basketball court cages, the feet of the black and Hispanic players evading the cracked lips of pavement. They jeered at people passing by, if they even glanced in that direction. And so, he stared at the sidewalk and the sidewalk became his companion.
Water Street ended in an empty lot where an apartment building had been demolished before he had moved in with his brother. He thought the demolished apartments must have looked a lot like the two-tiered, two-family building he now lived in, a tired green with the wood rotting under the paint and trash bags on the porches because they couldn’t hold up anything heavier. Up two flights of stairs, he entered apartment number two.
The closed blinds attempted to conceal the apartment’s smoky interior. His brother’s kid was in a playpen in the living room, crying with the TV on. Cigarettes smoldered in an ashtray on the milk crates that stood for a coffee table and a footstool. The smoke would probably kill the kid with lung cancer some day, forty years (two times twenty) down the road. Moaning from behind a closed door revealed the location of his brother and his brother’s girlfriend.
He stopped in the archway to the living room, considering the kid, who was wearing a drooping diaper and a food-stained sweatshirt. It was two years old. The kid’s wailing escalated when it noticed him standing there. The kid always cried, no matter what his brother’s girlfriend did. Sometimes it cried all night long, leading him to believe his brother and that girl wore earplugs to bed. The kid made it pretty hard to sleep at night.
The constant wailing erased his consideration of helping the child. He went into his room and shook the books out of his backpack. They landed in a haphazard heap, chunks of pages folded up. For a moment he stared at this. Some part of him wanted to put the books in a neat stack. But, he decided, that was pointless. He wouldn’t be returning.
He put his notebook in his backpack, and on his way out stopped at the refrigerator to stick a few beers in there, too. The kid continued to cry.
"Shut the fuck up!" came his brother’s voice from the bedroom.
He left, running down the two flights of stairs and across the empty lot and up the grassy embankment, until the guardrail stopped him.
Interstate highway 495 spanned his vision, six lanes counting both north and southbound lanes. The road ate up acres of space, flat space unobstructed by ugly buildings. This world now consisted of two snake-like stretches of pavement, which spawned asymmetrical curls at distant intervals, off-ramps leading somewhere else. Four plus nine plus five equaled 18, two times nine. Nine pairs of twos marched through his head.
A patch of flattened grass evidenced his frequent visits to the highway overlook. He did his best writing here. It was the only place where he wasn’t reminded that he lived in Lowell now, and his mom was dead, and he lived with his brother because his dad was gone, too. Even now, in the winter, he had to come here to write. His English teacher would probably never know how much he liked to write, or needed to write. Some nights only writing could help drown out the sound of the kid screaming, but that writing had never attained the brilliance he had achieved by the highway.
Probably no one would ever read his stories—who would want to publish stories offering no hope, no resolution? He kept his notebook hidden from everyone. Maybe once he was dead someone would want to read it. Then all of his stories would be interpreted to form a theory on why he took that final step.
Today he started writing about the girl who sat beside him in Algebra, the girl with the dead eyes and stringy brown hair. Her sadness exuded beauty for him and he didn’t understand it. He’d seen guys bark at her in the hallways, and heard popular girls snicker when her name was mentioned. And always during Algebra class she was writing and drawing, each day one full page and only one page. A few weeks ago he had peeked at the page, and at the top she had written the salutation, "To whom it may concern, to be read after my suicide."
"What are you writing?"
He’d whispered the question, because even though the teacher hadn’t started the class, he was worried about getting in trouble, because if he got in trouble his brother would be mad. His brother wasn’t a good parent, either to his kid or his kid brother. His brother only got mad if he had to meet with the principal, because that took away his time. "Fucking waste of time," his brother said last time. "Can’t you fucking stay out of trouble? Fuck!"
The girl had looked up, her eyes wandering to the place where he sat, apparently until that moment invisible. The dead eyes flickered. "A twenty-volume suicide note," she said, and closed the cover of the notebook so he could read the words written on the front in black marker: "Volume Two."
Then today during his study hall he found the poem in his unused English textbook titled "Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note," by LeRoi Jones. He had never heard of the author but he liked the poem, or more he identified with how everything felt strange and disconnected and the narrator could feel the insanity setting in. The poem made him feel his own insanity. There were only about two stars visible each night in the polluted skies of Lowell, so he knew if he counted the stars each night he would get the same number. Two. His number.
He took a break and popped open one of the beers he’d stolen from the refrigerator, watched the cars fly past. A big truck rumbled by, its boxy trailer shuddering. The little cars swarmed around it. The beer tasted bitter and numb.
The girl’s ambitious suicide note preyed on his thoughts. His mind filled with questions he wanted to ask her but never had. Like would she ever fill up twenty (two times two times five) notebooks about why she wanted to kill herself? And if she did, say five years from now, would she still want to kill herself? How long had it taken her to fill up the first notebook? Did she have any friends, and what was her family like?
In his own notebook he created answers for some of his questions. Maybe she had a life like his, no parents, being raised by an older brother or sister who didn’t really care what she did, as long as she didn’t get in trouble. Maybe someone had abused her, but probably not. No one had abused him. Sometimes he wished someone had, so he could focus on that outside pain. No, both he and the girl had an emptiness inside. He knew his was created by loss. He didn’t know about hers.
The second beer chilled his hand, but it didn’t seem to matter, because he could feel heat burning in his chest. His lips felt numb. His fingers fumbled opening the top, and when it finally popped open there were two pops, and he stared at the round hole in the can before even thinking to look around him and see what the other pop was.
On the far, northbound side of the highway, a silver sedan veered into the breakdown lane with its warning flashers on and a flapping noise accompanying the rotation of the tires. He watched as the driver, a dark-haired man dressed in a tuxedo, stepped out of the car and walked around to the passenger side. The man kicked the car and swore loud enough for him to hear above the two lanes of traffic. Over the next few minutes, the man made a call on his cell phone (pacing and kicking the car every time he passed the flat tire), then opened the trunk and took out a jack and tire iron. Cars continued to fly by.
About ten minutes after the man began to change his tire, a police car pulled up behind him, its lights flashing silently. A succession of red tail lights flared up around the silver sedan and police car.
Hours of watching the highway had taught him that only a few things caused people to slow down. One was a police car, because people were afraid of getting a ticket. Another was an accident, because people felt better when they saw horrible things happen to other people. People were stupid, and he hated all of them. The only person he couldn’t bring himself to hate was the girl in his Algebra class.
Inexplicably, he wanted to help her out of her misery. He didn’t want to date her, especially if she became happy and lost that sad beauty which had attracted him to begin with. He didn’t know anything about her life. Probably they had nothing in common.
He drank another beer while the man finished changing his tire with the aid of the police officer. The man then took off in his car at a rate much too fast for a spare tire. Must be late for his own wedding, he thought.
Despite the early February chill, he felt pleasantly alive and warm. His usual desperation left him. He wrote about the beauty of bare-branched trees, of the gray-washed highway landscape. He wrote of the sky that canopied everything and held the world together. He wrote a poem for his dead mother so she could know how beautiful she was in his memory and he didn’t blame her for his father leaving.
Finally his fingers began to feel numb and he decided it was time to get to work on his suicide note.
He wrote about all the nameless people in the world who didn’t care, people who drove slowly by accidents, people who crowded around fights in the school hallways, people who walked wide around the homeless guy near the 7-Eleven, people who had gone to school with him until high school who never called or wrote to him, people who left their families behind for some affair, people who couldn’t look him in the eye at his mother’s funeral, people who ignored their kids.
By the time he finished, the sky had faded into gray. Headlights through the guardrail created stripes which swept over his notebook. Down on the southbound side of the highway, maybe fifty feet away, a trailer truck was pulled over with its warning flashers on. The trailer was a dirty yellow with black letters spelling out "G.O.D." He knew it was some kind of company, not God, although he couldn’t think of what the company did. But he had seen G.O.D. trucks on the highway before, and usually they stirred up a slew of cynical thoughts. What had religion come to in the age of commercialism, where the name of the supposed creator of the universe graced the side of a trailer truck?
The truck blocked the streetlamps that sprouted from the center strip of the highway from illuminating the side closest to him, but he could make out that the passenger side door was open. The little light in the cab was on, throwing out a sparse sliver of light on the ground. He couldn’t see anyone near the truck.
Motion caught the corner of his eye and his head turned toward the small patch of forest that sprouted up beside the highway and obscured his neighborhood from the view of passing cars.
A man carrying a girl, he could make out that much through the trees and dark. The girl had dark hair that swung from a head tilted back. He couldn’t make out the girl’s face. For a minute he thought the girl was the same girl he had been writing about in his notebook. But this girl’s hair was longer.
There was something romantic about the man carrying the girl. Maybe because she wore some long flowing garment, like a dress. The scene brought to mind images from one of his English textbooks, illustrations for the poem "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." He didn’t consider himself romantic, but he often stared at the paintings in his textbook and daydreamed. The women wore long flowing dresses, and the knights were the sort to carry around damsels in distress.
Then the man dropped the girl onto the ground.
He couldn’t see where the girl went, because there was some dark object in the way, a tree or rock or something. She hadn’t made a sound when she hit the ground, other than the thud of her body against the frozen dirt. She was unconscious—or dead, he thought. He squinted his eyes against the twilight and the alcohol. The man walked back to the G.O.D. truck, took out what the boy could see clearly as an axe and a shovel, and walked back to where he had dropped the girl.
In the forest the man’s movements were barely visible. But a scenario entered the boy’s head, and in response to this scenario his hand went to his pockets and found the pocket knife waiting there, the one he’d been ready to use on his wrists, or maybe his neck if he were able to summon the courage. His fingers wrapped around the unopened pocket knife like belief around a protective talisman. As if a little knife would be effective should this man be armed with a gun. And according to the scenario his poetic mind had concocted, this man would be armed with a gun, or a serrated hunting knife, or a set of surgical tools, not to mention the axe.
The man grasped the axe with both hands and lifted it over his head. The boy’s stomach steeled against the inevitable: the man brought it down with a pulpy thwack. Even over the highway traffic the boy heard that noise, that awful noise. The man repeated the motion, which was accompanied by another thwack. The man then bent over and picked something up off the ground and wrapped it in a piece of the cloth the girl was wearing.
Squinting didn’t help much to overcome his near-sightedness—the impending twilight didn’t help either. Yet the more he watched, the more he became convinced that he knew what he was watching. His hand sweated around the pocket knife.
The scene felt surreal. Could this man truly be a murderer, dumping a girl’s body on the side of the highway, and cutting off a piece of her body? Would this murderer leave a dead body, practically in his backyard, in sight of any police car that happened past?
He glanced back along the road to check for the blue and red flashing lights he’d seen earlier on the southbound side. They were gone. The trailer truck—the murderer’s truck—winked its warning lights monotonously as cars flew past. Probably the bulk of the truck and the weak evening light had hidden the man carrying the girl, until the forest hid him.
He looked toward the slummy jumble of washed out apartments. No one was out. Why would they be? The wind cut cold through his layers of clothes. His hands had reddened raw from repeated visits here in this kind of cold. With windows shut tight against the weather, probably no one had heard anything, or even saw anything.
That fleshy hacking sound echoed in his head—one whack, then two… Two…
The minutes crawled by, marked only by the passage of cars and the lighting of the streetlamps on Water Street. Though evidence of human presence zoomed by and lived about fifty yards away in either direction, he and the man and the girl seemed the only people existing in the world. Only he couldn’t see the girl anymore, and he didn’t think the girl was alive anymore, if she had been when he’d first seen her. And when the man started walking back to his car, his dark shape sliding through the trees, the girl wasn’t with him.
The boy shifted his legs, which had fallen asleep sometime in the long hours he’d spent sitting by the highway. And that was when the man stopped, at the edge of the forest, at the edge of the light which illuminated the outline of the man’s face. The man stopped, and looked up the embankment at him.
He ducked, but not soon enough—he felt the man’s gaze catch him and freeze him there. His face close to the ground, he stared at the blades of grass dead in a patch of snow, listening and waiting. And as he waited, he heard in his head the two whacks.
Thwack.
Thwack.
Two.
The moments passed, and he heard the big motor of the trailer truck rumble into gear, then fade away. Though he was sure the danger had passed, he pulled his hand out of his pocket and waited for the second hand to pass the number two twice. The sweat on his palm, exposed to the wind, turned cold, but he waited through the long seconds, and only after the hand swept past the numeral two again did he sit upright.
The truck was gone.
He didn’t much feel like killing himself anymore.
He left the beer cans by the highway amid the other trash. For a moment he stood looking down into the thicket of trees. He thought maybe he should go down and see if the girl was still alive. He knew she wasn’t. She hadn’t screamed when that axe came down and separated some piece of her from the rest. He didn’t want to look at a dead, dismembered body. He felt his body shaking yet his thoughts moved in a perfectly linear pattern.
His feet carried him home. The girl’s family would notice she was missing and then it would be on the news and he could call the police then. Someone’s dog would find the body, or some delinquent kids sneaking a smoke in the woods.
Unless he was supposed to be the delinquent kid.
He wondered what the girl’s name was.
"Where the fuck you been?" Joe demanded when he walked into the apartment. He and Michelle sat at the kitchen table smoking. Johnny’s cries invaded from the other room.
"Out," he said.
"Principal called again," Joe said. "I hafta go in for a teacher conference. With your English teacher."
"Sorry," he said, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
"Can’t you just go to class?" Michelle chipped in. "We don’t have time for this crap."
His eyes moved away from Joe and Michelle sitting there half-dressed—Joe in low-slung jeans with four inches of boxer shorts showing and a sweat-stained wifebeater, Michelle in plaid pajama pants with a lacy nightgown tucked into them under a peach-colored silky robe—to the entrance of the living room. He walked into the living room and picked up his nephew. Johnny continued to scream and clawed at his hair.
"He never stops crying," Michelle called from the kitchen. "I don’t even bother anymore."
Did you ever bother? he thought. He changed Johnny’s diaper on the floor, fumbling through his first time ever changing one. The kid quieted somewhat. Then he carried Johnny into his closet of a bedroom and closed the door.
Away from his parents, Johnny stopped crying and sat upright on the bed. His two two-year-old eyes gazed wetly up at his young uncle, who felt like he was seeing his nephew for the first time. Maybe that was all Johnny needed to stop crying, he thought: someone who didn’t look past him, like he was invisible.
He let Johnny wander around his little room. He watched him pull everything out of his backpack, then toddle into the closet. Maybe in two years, when he turned eighteen and moved out, Johnny would have this room as his bedroom. He thought tomorrow in Algebra class he would ask Angela what he should do about what he saw. She was the only person he could imagine talking to.
