Because what I remembered couldn’t possibly be true. There was no way Puny Matt murdered our whole town with an army of marauding swine.
The most likely explanation: I heard a whole lot of stories about a freak pig escape, and my mind filtered all of that through its own sickness and self-importance to produce a crazy story where I had supervillain abilities and used them to liberate a couple thousand pigs and then use them to burn the whole shitty town down, murdered our town with an army of marauding swine, and then summoned my sister up out of thin air, and she talked me into getting help.
Which would be worse? If it was all made up and I was merely crazy, or if it was true and I had been a monster?
The monster, definitely. Not because monsters are bad. But because I wasn’t one anymore.
And I couldn’t ask her. Not yet. Because if it was my damaged mind, I didn’t want her knowing how messed up I had really been.
“Can’t wait for you to see what a mob scene our stupid little town has become,” Maya said on a Monday morning when she visited me by herself. “Haven’t had this much excitement since that time when you were seven, and an allosaurus went tearing through downtown.”
“That was a blast,” I said.
I didn’t ask, Did you really appear beside me on an ice bridge I built to march my Swine Army across the Hudson River? Was any of that real? I couldn’t ask. For lots of reasons.
“This book is terrible,” Maya said, plucking On the Road from my hands.
“I love it,” I said, leaning forward to grab it back and feeling a sudden swoon. My old friends, the black stars, bloomed on the walls.
“Of course you do,” she said, blind to my sudden paleness. “It’s a book about male privilege.”
“It’s a book about men,” I said. “I’ll give you that much. But they don’t hurt women. They want to get away from the same nineteen fifties Ozzie and Harriet smiley, fake, evil male-dominated society that was oppressing women.”
“Abortions were illegal back then, you know. The pill hadn’t been invented. They ride around banging chicks, and those chicks get pregnant, and get stuck raising kids these irresponsible men will never help them with. Anyway, you only like the book because everybody knows these two guys were in love with each other, but too scared to ever admit it or do anything about it.”
“I guess,” I said. I did not say I like it because Dad liked Jack Kerouac or I liked it because Tariq gave it to me or I like it because Tariq likes it.
“Also?” she said. “Remember that this is the fifties. Jim Crow time. These guys couldn’t have gone driving around having wild adventures all over America if they were black. Lots of businesses wouldn’t serve them, lots of mechanics wouldn’t repair their cars, and they’d risk physical violence if they ended up in a whites-only ‘sundown town.’ So it’s a book about white privilege, too.” She handed me back the book.
“Maya,” I said. “Why did you choose him over us? Over me?”
She scooted closer to me. Her body felt tight and warm and strong. “Do you remember when we were little kids, how upset you used to get whenever I asked Mom about Dad?”
I didn’t.
“It was because you saw how upset she got. But as I got older, Mom and me started having more conversations about him. Who he was, what he was like, why they weren’t together.”
“She hardly ever said a word about him with me,” I said.
“That’s because you used to freak out.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“I do. Anyway, last summer Mom gave me his mother’s old mailing address, told me if I wanted to get in touch with him that was the only way that might work, and for all Mom knew the lady moved or died years ago. But she also told me that before I did that, I needed to know what really happened between them.” Maya looked at me, the hard, shrewd look that reminded me she was ten times stronger than me, and what on earth had I been thinking back when I thought I could save her? “Are you sure you want to know?”
“If you have to ask me that question, the answer is probably no,” I said. “But yes. I want to know.”
“He used to beat her. It was a terribly abusive relationship. She loved him, but he was horrible. And it took a long time for her to get up the courage to leave him forever and cut all ties with him.”
I was a drum. Empty inside. Echoing. Trying hard not to think about the words drumming into me.
“I know,” she said, and touched my wetted eyes. “That’s how I felt. I wanted to . . . I don’t know what. Tell him off? Kill him? Get revenge? It was dumb, but that’s what I thought.”
She took my hand and held it. I wondered if she knew how alike we were, in our hunger for justice, in our dangerous drive for revenge. Your sister takes things too far, her bandmate had said, and so, evidently, did I.
“So I reached out. Sent a letter. Said I wanted to meet. Used my bassist’s house as the mailing address. He wrote back right away. Said he’d always dreamed of getting this letter. Always felt angry that he was robbed of the chance to be a father. Said he wanted to meet. So we set it up. Arranged to meet at a diner on the thruway.
“I saw him before he saw me,” she said, and grabbed and then released a fistful of my hair. “I recognized him by the bright-red hair, the same as yours. And he was handsome like you, too.”
“I’m not handsome,” I muttered.
“Keep telling yourself that lie, kid,” she said. “Whatever makes you feel better. Anyway, I came in the door, and his back was to me. And I remembered what Mom said—about how much she loved him, how he had this weird charisma that kept her coming back even when she knew it was the wrong thing to do, that it was almost like magic—”
I thought of me controlling pigs with my smell, and wondered if maybe my father wasn’t a little bit of a hunger artist himself. If maybe everyone wasn’t. If maybe a certain amount of supernatural power lived inside us all.
“And I didn’t want to like this man. Not even a little. I thought, if I sit down and talk to him, even if it’s just to tell him off, I’ll listen to what he has to say. I’ll treat him with respect, because that’s the way I was raised. And what if he casts his spell on me? What if I let go of this anger, this hate? Are we going to just be . . . I don’t know, friends? Buddies? I didn’t want that. I didn’t want him to be in my life at all. But I couldn’t just walk away. Not after what he did to Mom. And got away with.”
“So what did you do?” I whispered.
“Had a bit of a nervous breakdown, I guess. I don’t remember my thought process at all. I didn’t think. I just . . . acted. He was sitting at the counter of this greasy-spoon restaurant, near the waitress’s station. A big glass pot of coffee was steaming on a Bunn burner, not three feet away. And I just—I . . .”
Here, my sister started crying. Really let loose. I put my arms around her. Held her so tight I felt it in my weakened, starved heart.