Chapter Three
"Hörst du die Engel singen? Hörst du die Harfen klingen? Hat sich das Leiden nicht gelohnt? Spürst du die Wärme kommen? Hast du den Berg erklommen? Siehst du den Himmel nicht?"
If what Jay saw at the end of this white light really was Heaven, if he was really seeing it, he'd take the next flight to Hell. No Heaven, no matter how good it looked, would have the words "Don't you want to be a man, Jason?" floating out toward him. If that's what Heaven had waiting for him, no, the suffering hasn't been worthwhile.
Take the hands from his throat, Fate, because he didn't want to go anywhere near Heaven and that white light, the singing angels and the harps, he didn't ever want to climb that mountain. He didn't want to feel the warmth coming because there was no warmth coming. Coldness, yes, but no warmth.
In reality, if Jay concentrated hard enough, the white light he was staring at was the reflection of the sun bouncing off the chrome of an ice blue Harley Davidson motorcycle.
The demons in his head were merely messing with him, speaking in tongues to get a rise out of him.
They always did that, the monster on his back and the demons jam packed in his mind, spoke to him in either whispers or a language either real or fabricated. Jay never understood the words, not in the normal sense, but he had always been able to grasp on to what they were trying to tell him.
"Don't you want to be a man, Jason?"
That simple question, one that had been spoken with such a chill of voice and such hardness, reverberated through Jay's skull cavern. He woke up to that question and fell asleep to it, as if the person who had originally asked him that had leaned over him and whispered into his ear. Sometimes Jay could even feel the warm, moist breath against his skin, could smell the Dr. Pepper and honey roasted peanuts clinging onto the carbon dioxide molecules.
"Don't you want to be a man, Jason?"
No, Jason didn't want to be a man. Look at what being a man had gotten him: a stocking full of coal and no one to share it with, phantoms stalking him that he couldn't see, endless nightmares.
Maybe it would all be easier if Jay left, packed his meager belongings into his car and drove away. Drive until there was no road left, until there was no earth to put road on, until he outran his past and it moved on to suck the life from some other poor soul.
Who was he kidding? Jay couldn't do that. He was a coward and cowards don't flee. It didn't matter how feverishly he pretended his scars weren't there because they'd be there for all of eternity. Those scars weren't visible to anyone else, only to him, and that was the worse punishment.
In a way he was like the Cassandra of Greek mythology, but instead of warning unlistening people of their doom Jay was trying to show them his scars. They couldn't see them so of course they didn't believe him. He was playing a game with them, a sick game of which no one should take seriously. Well, when Jay's scars opened up and he bled to death then they would wish they hadn't taken his story with a grain of salt.
That day couldn't come quickly enough.
Maybe she could see his scars, if only he could will her to look at him. He'd be happy with a nanosecond as long as she proved his existence, showed the world he wasn't as broken as he thought he was.
He was watching from the hood of his car on the other side of the street from her. Second lunch. The students were allowed to go outside to eat their meals if they wanted to and that's just was Ilse Miller had chosen to do. Jay, from his usual lunch-time post, had seen Doll Face settle down on one of the steps with her lunch – a sandwich and a jar of Snapple – and a thick hardcover book with a banana yellow dust jacket.
Jay had long ago been convinced that avid readers didn't want to face reality, they just chose literature over drugs or alcohol. Ilse was caught up in that book of hers like a drunkard at Happy Hour. What kind of reality was she trying to escape?
Years ago Jay had given up on books, but when he still had a great love for them he had been into fantasy. The Chronicles of Narnia were his favorite, he had actually caused damage to many of his books of the series, he had read them so many times. The door to that world was closed now, locked and barred, but Jay could still remember how happy he had been in that land.
For hours he would be lost in those books, imagining himself as one of the lead characters so he could partake in the many fascinating adventures that took place in Narnia. At the time he didn't need to run through the magical doorway into a world other than his own. He had normal childhood problems, but nothing major enough to make him rely on books to help him escape by mind. But then his world burst into flames around him and when he did need those books, he was too big to fit through the doorway. They didn't want him in Narnia, they wouldn't help him leave his reality for another. Or maybe they tried, but he had been so broken nothing could help him anymore. Whichever it was, Jay had since set his once beloved books aside for their pages to yellow.
Pull up a picture of Jay back then – when he still looked forward to an adventure in Narnia with wide, glistening eyes – and Jay now, read the brief synopsis beside each image, and one would be shocked when told they were the same person. The boy had to still be in there, lost somewhere deep within the murky depths of a popped bubble, but it seemed unlikely.
The boy Jay was dead and gone, locked in a hidden room where no one would ever find its skeleton.
"Don't you want to be a man, Jason?"
There was no choice for him now, not with the boy gone for good and a passageway into another world closed off behind him. Jay was a man now, like it or not, and he had to suck it up. He had to bend over and pick up the tiny, charred pieces of the boy's life no matter how often or how loud he complained. From the effort, from time, Jay's back had fused into its stooped position – not that he ever wanted to look people in the eye anyway.
So the fact that he couldn't will Ilse to look at him didn't mean much at all, Jay wouldn't have been able to meet her gaze no matter how hard he tried. It wouldn't have done anything, if he was in fact able to straighten his back out and look into those caramel eyes, it wouldn't fix a single thing.
Some might say that Jay stewed too much in his own filth, but what else could he do? This is what he was used to, stewing, and he was damn good at it. If there was a contest held for people stewing in their own excrements – kind of like a hot dog eating contest or the Home Run Derby only not – Jason Hogart would win every single time. People would eventually stop showing up to the contest grounds because they knew they would never be able to match or beat Jay's awesome stewing abilities, the contest runners would simply mail to him the trophy every year.
Jay might legally change his middle name to Stewer just yet.
Okay, so he'll become Jason Stewer Hogart, but that didn't help the fact that Ilse couldn't lift her head long enough to glance at him for even one instant. She kept on being utterly engrossed in her book.
Ilse wore reading glasses. They looked foolish, turned the knob of her good looks down so far it was practically off, but they suited her in some strange way. Light pink horn rims that had so much gloss on them the frames looked like little mirrors with a million stars glowing faintly yet strongly on the surface.
It had amused Jay to see her wearing those things even when he first saw her put them on back in World Lit., like seeing a top hat and tap shoes on a frog. It looked awkward, but it still made one feel a smidgen happy or at least a little bit better than one was feeling before.
Doll Face laughed at a funny part in her book, her entire face lighting up from the smile. She was laughing in the way anyone would do during a depressing movie: absolutely thankful that some comedy relief came along, or maybe she had come across a genuinely funny line.
Though Ilse was pretty when she laughed, though she sounded rather nice while doing it, Jay still hated to see other people happy and at the moment he hated Ilse for it. If he had his way no one on any world or plane would be happy until Jay was happy. He witnessed Ilse read the amusing line of her book to the girl sitting next to her before turning his head away.
Sliding off the hood of his car Jay started toward the school again. Keeping his eyes on the ground as he walked, hands in his pockets, he tried to push the still echoing question out of his mind. Drugs and booze cleared a lot of things from his mind, dulled him to such an extent that he had no states of movie flashbacks, but they replaced all of that with the question once spoken to him.
Most of the time that sentence wasn't as loud as it was now, just a barely audible kind of hiss from the blackness of Jay's mind. For some reason, today it was up front in the daylight of his consciousness as if the question wasn't happy just being in all his dreams. Today those eight words wanted to be something much more than they used to be, wanted to take over every aspect of Jay's life moreso than they already had.
Ilse was still talking to her companion when Jay walked up the steps passed them. The topic must have switched to school when he couldn't hear them, for Ilse was asking her friend which teachers were the worst.
Jay could have answered "Mr. Simpson", but he stayed quiet and went into the school. He needed to go to his locker and get some of his text books for his last few classes, but he was frightened of what he might find there. Alex knew the combination to the lock, she could have stolen his stuff and filled the empty locker with bracelets to taunt him or shaving cream or something.
But when Alex was angry she did things worse than that. Maybe there was a dead cat in his locker or a blow up girl doll with a note pinned to her mouth, condoms that would cascade down on top of Jay when he opened the locker or forskins stolen from the hospital or maybe Alex herself to unleash the tirade she had finally lost the battle of keeping bottled down.
Everything looked all right when he got to his locker in the worst part of the school, nothing seemed out of place at the first glance, but then again Jay didn't have x-ray vision.
He wanted to laugh at himself as he turned the dial to the lock, pulled up the sequence of numbers that would open the device. Alex might have simply switched locks on him.
No dice, the lock opened like it was suppose to.
A part of Jay was expecting a voodoo devil to jump out of him when he opened the locker, the evil Ice Queen or some other villain from the history of Narnia, some kind of hound from the Underworld.
Well, that was just stupid. Jay was too high to be doing such mundane thing as opening a locker. The crème colored metal locker door swung outward and –
"Don't you want to be a man, Jason?"
Nothing. The voice was in his head, nowhere else.
In his locker everything was as it should be, nothing was misplaced or missing completely. Jay was able to exchange three books for three books without anything humiliating happening to him. When Alex said she didn't want anything to do with Jay, she meant it.
Jay shut his locker and put the lock back on, gave the dial a spin to a random number before leaving to vomit in the bathroom.
"A real man, Jason? Don't you want to be a real man?"