Part One
A 5-year-old boy named Christopher Haze disappeared from a shopping center in a suburb of the Midwest on December 17th of last year. He was missing for four days but was found after what the local media subsequently deemed a "miraculous" chain of events. The following is the true story of the role I played in his recovery. It is being published under a pseudonym, as I am currently wanted by the police.
I first heard about Christopher on the news, shortly after my father was buried. My mother had passed away the previous Christmas Eve (tumor, brain), and a year of mourning had done nothing to let any light or lightness through to my father's hardened heart. Without his wife, he was a sore sight. A sour soul. She was gone forever, and he had no one with whom to share his inexhaustible melancholy. I had gone off to college, which he'd adamantly demanded of me, and he was alone in the house.
There he faced the daily torture of the unraveling years of his life weighted down by irrepressible memories of his love.
On the Friday morning after Thanksgiving, he drove out to my mother's gravesite, placed two-dozen roses on her headstone -- one for every year they were together, according to the scribbled note -- put his old serviceman's pistol in his mouth, and collapsed into the white blanket of snow that had accumulated on the crest of the hill where they are both now buried.
The night my mother died, I cried so hard I lost consciousness. I beat my fists against an old park bench she would sit in every summer while she would watch me and my friends play in the park on family outings. And I kept beating my fists against that bench, wailing on it until my knuckles were swollen and red, until the snow on the bench was a deep, spreading crimson, and I guess because of all the heaving and bleeding, I just passed out right there. I was discovered by the police, who woke me up and drove me to the hospital.
The night my father died, it was just the opposite. I was called down to the police station to identify his body, which I did. But there was nothing there. No remorse. No emotional explosions. No feeling whatsoever. I was a white wall that had been drenched in white paint. Cancer had taken my mother, and my mother had taken my father. The two had created me, and here I was. The only child.
I was 19 at the time.
Our family lawyer walked me through the business of my parents' affairs. The will, the house, the money, the bills. He streamlined most of the difficult stuff and left me to sign and initial some heavy documents. He explained what each meant and was kind and matter-of-fact about it all. I believe it was his way of expressing condolences. By not being a shyster prick.
My parents didn't have the kind of money that would allow me to finish paying off the house, so the house had to be sold, but for the meantime I could live there. So I did. I had nowhere else to go. I'd just completed my first semester at a private university on the East coast, which our lawyer told me I could no longer afford to attend, and my extended family was just that, extended across the wide horizon of America -- none of whom came to my father's funeral (a 24-year grudge without a lip to wedge -- even his death passed over their faces like a fog leaning against a wall). So I had no family and no school of which to speak.
But the school thing was fine with me: I wasn't learning anything in college, anyway. Elementary school is an education in the cognitive basics. High school is an education in life that can be very painful and useful. College is an education in getting off. And it's not cheap. Nor is it something in which I needed training.
My parents had left me a moderate sum. The accumulation of two middle-class workers' lifetime savings. Mom's brain tumor hadn't cost the family too much. It was discovered late and was inoperable. My father had always been a spendthrift, and in the last year of his life I think the only new things he bought were food items, and even those purchases were pitiful. He'd buy bread and peanut butter and milk, and the bread would mold and the milk would sour long before he'd ever finish it.
I had been able to put myself into a relative state of normalcy due to having been displaced to college. But my father had only the home where they'd grown together, and the fast approach of the season he lost his love.
Imagine if the person you love most in the world were to pass away on Valentine's Day. That would become an awful day to you. For the rest of your life you'd have the bittersweet visit of that holiday to remind you that your true love was gone forever. Now just imagine the unusual torture of having to face the good tidings of a billion smiling strangers every Christmas season. That was he: the shadowy frown in a sea of applecheeked cheer.
I still can't listen to Christmas carols.
He was buried in a military funeral. I was given the folded flag. Snow fell. I gave the eulogy. ("Theirs was a love like that between clergy and God, sailor and sea, sinner and sin. One dependent upon the other.")
I first heard about Christopher going missing a few days after the burial. I was sitting in my father's old recliner, watching the news and getting high. (I'd developed a beneficial hophead habit earlier that year at school.)
The story of Christopher Haze's disappearance stuck with me that day not because it was the report of a missing child, but because it was the report of a missing black child. My whole life I've been a mediaphile, and one of the predominant complaints against the media (by other parts of the media, typically) is that they tend to shit out of their nuts over cases involving missing white girls, and hardly ever give mention to missing black children -- particularly missing black boys. So the story stuck with me. Five-year-old boy missing from local mall. Mom was Christmas shopping and the boy had run off somewhere else in the store. He'd been prone to lone wanderings, and his mother called his full name dutifully -- unconcerned until she called it the third time, this time shouting.
Gone.
There weren't too many other details I remember. Nobody had seen the boy with anyone else. Nobody'd seen him leave, period. He just disappeared. The other thing I remember vividly was his face. He had these wide, amazing eyes, the color of roasted chestnuts. Otherwise he looked like any other black 5-year-old. Short, Negro hair, charmingly puffy cheeks, an effortless smile. His school picture was at the top right of the screen throughout the many reports.
Bear in mind that this was during a week of outright self-mutilation. My father obviously had a self-destructive streak, which had apparently come uncoiled in me with his death. I spent all day and night during that week drinking and smoking, getting, as I called it back at school, Absolutely Kablooey. The legal shit had passed, and the future was, well, it was there, and I was here. And I was Absolutely Kablooey.
My friends were at school. And besides, I didn't want to see them. I didn't want to see anyone. What I wanted to do, I was doing. As the lonely poet said, "Let the world spin as I drown my wretched din."
But some people just don't understand that sometimes a person wants to be alone, bless them. When loneliness has been thrust by the cause-and-effect unlucky roulette of cancer-death-mourning-suicide, the last thing he or she wants is to spring to two feet and beat a hasty retreat through the snow-stacked streets and jingle and jangle with the jovial bells of the vast, haunting, stupid Christmas season.
So when Erick showed up, the first thing I did was put on some clothes -- as someone in the depths of a melancholy binge alone in a suburban hut has all the private modesty you'd expect someone like that to have -- then I answered the door, squinting harshly as my eyes tried to adjust to the tameless white light exploding off of the brilliant snow behind him.
"Christ, you look like shit," a silhouette said to me as it stepped into the house and became my friend Erick.
Erick and I were great friends when we were younger. Unfortunately, as the years went by, the Stand By Me principle of drifting friendships had taken effect. We'd always shared a similar wavelength, and it really shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did when he showed up at my house that afternoon. I hadn't seen him since my mother's funeral the year before.
But beyond that, even more surprising to me was that following closely behind Erick was a girl who wasn't Erick's life-long girlfriend.
She was a little shorter than I, with a smooth, symmetrical face, waves of brownish-red hair swooping over thin shoulders, which traced down to two magnificent breasts, an obnoxious Crab Cannon reindeer pattern on her sweater, and a well-worn pair of jeans that glided over the flowing curve of her strong, liquid form.
"Shannon, this is my cousin Vanessa," Erick said. "She's up from Florida. When I told her your story, she insisted on coming with me. So howya holding up, man?"
"Come in," I said, stealing a quick glance at Vanessa's shy face and gesturing for both of them to remove their snowy shoes at the door and join me in the living room. She was beautiful. And oddly familiar.
"Close the door."
I collapsed into my father's old recliner and picked up where I left off with the blunt I'd been nursing. Though we'd never smoked together before, I offered it over to Erick. To my surprise, he pinched it from me and took two competent puffs. He tried to hand it back to me.
"Does Vanessa not smoke?" I inquired.
"I don't know," smiled Erick, looking over at his cousin, "Does Vanessa smoke?"
I took the blunt from him and offered it to Vanessa, the knock-kneed 18-year-old blessing. To Erick's surprise, she reached out, pinched it from me, and took two tokes too. She started to cough and laugh.
"First time?" I asked.
"Sort of," she said between coughs and fits and smiles.
"Be gentle," I said and chuckled. Then I took a huge mouthful of the finest vodka in my parents' collection, which wasn't very fine at all. I offered some to Erick, but he had driven there. Vanessa took a small sip, more courteous than anything.
"In answer to your question, Erick" I said and stole another glance at Vanessa, "I'm holding up."
"I think it would be a lot worse if it weren't so goddam... well, like, everything," I said. "When mom died, that was as bad as it will ever get, you know? But my dad... I mean, he was just so fucking sad. He was always sad, you know, but not like that."
"Yeah," Erick said. "I saw him when I came back last Spring Break. He was sitting out front here reading a book. I pulled into the driveway and said hello. He shook my hand and asked how I was doing and everything, but he still had that thousand-yard stare. It was awful. I told him the yard looked great, but he just looked around like he'd never even noticed there was a yard there."
Vanessa's face had glazed over with what looked like a combination intoxicants and compassion. Like she would have started crying if she could remember what she should be crying about. Which was pretty much where I was at, too.
"Vanessa," I said, no longer able to ignore the beautiful gorilla jumping around my living room, "What would make you want to come here? Even I don't want to be here, and I live here."
Adding, "For the next couple weeks at least."
"I told you Shannon wouldn't remember me," Vanessa said to Erick.
"Uhhhhmmmmm..." I said, trying to place her, happy with an excuse to scrutinize the field of her face.
"We went on vacation together," Erick said. "You spent a week with our family like eight years ago in southern Ohio."
Then I remembered Vanessa, who had been a rail-thin, psychotic tom-boy back then, with none of the budding wonderful womanly apparitions she was now at the end of the awkward stages of accepting. She smiled at me bashfully and quickly looked away -- up at a picture of our family on the wall, which she quickly turned away from, too.
A gentle, general memory of adolescent vacation-love supplemented my Kablooey thoughts on Vanessa. But for as much as I could have been charmed by her (and my memories of her were smiles one by one), I couldn't. I couldn't feel anything. I don't know how else to say it. And even the glorious sight of a nymphet dying and a work of art being born could not splash rose or red into the bottomless blank of whatever the hell I was then.
In a book I read back at school called The Fountainhead, one of the main characters is holding a gun and contemplating suicide, but he can't bring himself to do it because he doesn't feel anything at all. Pain or happiness, vindication or regret. "Let me feel a spasm of dread and I'll pull the trigger. He felt nothing."
That was hauntingly close to what I was going through. Fittingly, I had finished reading that book -- a legendary tome about individualism -- a few weeks before I came home for Thanksgiving and embarked on this relentlessly individual life.
I think I would have killed myself if I could have felt something. But without some final insight or faceless terror to act as an impetus, I couldn't bring myself to do it. It would have been an empty gesture, and an ignorant defeat at the hands of a series of questions I'd wholly given up on answering.
And I couldn't have that. I was only 19. Since then, I've been living under the idea that the best reason not to kill yourself is the possibility that at some point in the future you'll have a better reason not to kill yourself.
"I do remember you, Vanessa," I said. "I'm sorry that I didn't recognize you. Thank you for coming. And you too, Erick."
"No problem," Erick said. "And I'm really sorry I missed your dad's funeral. I just couldn't get back in time. Pepperdine, you know?"
"It's okay," I said.
After a moment of silence, Erick continued. "We were both at a family Christmas party and I was telling my aunt about your story and Vanessa overheard and really wanted to come check on you."
"Sometimes even Power Child needs a little help from Kitchen Girl," Vanessa said to me quietly.
Power Child and Kitchen Girl. Goddamn. I hadn't thought about that in years. They were two alter egos of ours we used for when we were going to prank people. Whenever we were bored on that trip (and Erick was off elsewhere), we'd assume our new identities and head off towards the nearest adult and devise devious plans for their just undoing. And Vanessa would always bring a kitchen utensil.
I let out a half-breath laugh with a smirk. "I guess so," I said. "So what should we do? Who's our target?"
"You got a lot of folks around here with Christmas lights, I noticed," she said to me. "Just imagine what some late-night wire-cutting could do for those jerks."
"Or maybe I could burn down a prison like I always wanted," I said with another half-breath laugh. Erick chuckled.
"I'm being serious," she said. "Do you know how much work it takes to put up Christmas lights?"
I smiled. "Yeah, I guess so," I said, thinking. "That's actually a pretty good idea."
Just then another report concerning Christopher Haze shrieked onto the television in the form of an Amber Alert. The maddening caterwaul of public broadcast emergencies captured our attention.
"Kidnapped at Christmas," Vanessa offered. "Can you imagine how awful that must be for that poor kid and his family?"
"Sort of," I said unironically.
"I suppose you can," Erick said. We sat in an awkward silence broken only by the closing alarm of the Amber Alert system.
No matter how bad my situation was, though, at least I got to have a childhood with my family. For as much as I wanted to think I was withstanding the tortures of the damned, the idea of being kidnapped or going missing during the heart of "the most wonderful time of the year" was awful. And besides, I deserve the tortures of the damned; what are unbearable are the tortures of the innocent.
When I was younger, my biggest fear was of being kidnapped. Before I would go to sleep at night I'd offer prayers for the protection of my family, forgiveness for my sins, and safety from kidnappers. Parents are a child's only means of defense besides prayer and luck.
Outside of murder outright, it's about the worst thing a person can do. To take a child away from its parents, and then to... to do awful things with it, either because you intended to originally or because you'd "gone this far already." There's no limit to my loathing of such unconscionable swine.
"I just hope they find him alive," Vanessa said, and stared into the carpet. My hand brushed her hand as I offered over the blunt. She took two more rips and handed it to Erick, who declined. When she handed it back to me, she let her fingers fumble with mine. I couldn't be sure if she was flirting or fucked up. I was okay with it either way. I liked Vanessa.
Kitchen Girl.
But I didn't feel anything. I didn't want anyone around. Not until I could sort some shit out. So I guess it was fortunate when...
"Well, Shannon, we've really got to get going. We were only stopping by between family functions. Some of our family is headed to my parents' place for dessert and coffee."
"And your family goes thumonuclearly catty if you don't show up somewhere you're invited," I added, all my memories of Erick's family flooding back to me.
I stood up. "I really can't thank you guys enough for coming. I'm being for totally seriously. I didn't want to see anyone today, but I'm glad you came. You and Vanessa. It's good to see good faces."
"Do you think it would be weird for us to show up with Shannon?" Vanessa asked, exhaling a jet of smoke as she stubbed the blunt into my father's blue-green glass ashtray.
"I don't think that's a great idea," I said, opening the front door. "I'm pretty totally fucked right now, and I don't think your family needs a suicidal time-bomb stinkin' up the seasonal fun. Thanks for the thought, though."
Vanessa looked disappointed. Erick understood.
A handshake with Erick turned into a hug, which turned into a hug with Vanessa, who clutched close and firm. She smelled like peppermint and chronic, and her skin up close displayed that rare and perfect combination of smoothness and warm pigment. Her neck a delicate vase for her face and flowery hair.
The two of them carefully glided over the sheet of ice that was the driveway. The sun was in its mad rush to winter darkness and the Eastern skyline over the trees across the street was already purple-gray. A few houses, decorated with Christmas lights automatically set up to go on at dusk, lit up warmly. Vanessa turned around, pointed at one of the houses, scrunched her mouth together, squinted her eyes and waved her index finger at me three times. It was a Kitchen Girl gesture that meant trouble was a-brewin'.
I smirked sadly and gently clicked the large wooden door shut.
Across the bottom of the television screen a ticker rode by: "If you have any information regarding the whereabouts..."
I went upstairs to my room and collapsed on the bed.
Part Two
