Will it surprise you to know that I found the cabin empty and silent when I arrived there for the last time, the lights extinguished (of course there was no one to tend the generator after the gas ran out), and the savage smell of decay seeping from under the rubber seal on the lid of the chest freezer? I didn’t open it. If I’d rather go to my grave ignorant of certain details, no one could fault me. Not for that at least. Besides, someone will look inside eventually, and then the newspapers will compete to print the gruesome details for everyone to read. Except not me. When I get where I’m going I hope not to see a newspaper for a very long time.
Even without recent events as background, being in the cabin was an odd and unpleasant experience. Is there anything more unfamiliar than the familiar place you’ve chosen to abandon? Of course there was nothing there to tell me what has become of Jeremy. I don’t know what I expected to find—nothing as simple as a note, certainly. He couldn’t have known for certain that I’d be the one to find it, and he wouldn’t have wanted to compromise me. Besides, what could he possibly have written that would be adequate under the circumstances? Still, I wanted … something. A sign of some sort, a clue only I would recognize. Not some secret signal that told me how to reach him—I didn’t want that—but some acknowledgement, something to tell me at least that he knew I knew, and that he understood what my knowing meant. Instead, he’s just vanished. I haven’t seen him in more than two months.
Of course I realize, in the end, that silence is the more rational choice, even if it is, in ways, the more unsettling one. Stupid people wouldn’t understand that someone like Jeremy could be supremely rational, that his logic turns out to be more shocking than his violence.
The police contacted me as soon as the story broke, wanting to know what I could tell them about Jeremy and his “appetites.” One of them actually used that word. They were back again three nights later, and for a few weeks they continued to show up with a certain random frequency. They were convinced that Jeremy must have been in contact with me since he disappeared, though they couldn’t imagine how he was slipping messages past them. The answer is that there simply aren’t any messages.
The first time they came they brought their search warrant and took our computer, along with other things that made less sense (every last article of Jeremy’s clothing, for one thing, though I suppose I should thank them for sparing me that). I’m sure they tapped the phone and they must have followed me whenever I went out, at least at the start. That’s certainly what I would have done. Even if I felt inclined to help them, I’m quite sure I know even less than they do at this point about the only question that really matters—where Jeremy is—so my vague and unhelpful answers were, in their own way, painfully sincere.
Their interest in Jeremy is as great as it is only because he humiliates them. Yes, also because he targets them, but mostly because he makes them look like fools. With all their equipment and their computers and their weapons, which they wave at you like phalli, they were never able to foresee what he would do or whom he would hunt or when or, more to the point, stop him.
No question: a few of them knew almost instantly what it was that connected the men Jeremy targeted, but he counted on their silence and their guilt. He knew he could use it against them, and he was right. Still, it wouldn’t have taken a brilliant police mind to understand that Jeremy’s project was revenge—pure and vicious—even if no one could admit in public the reason for the revenge, the jus ad bellum so to speak.
For Jeremy, this town meant torture and had done since before he was out of his teens, so I’m sure there’s been no shortage of worried consciences. I hope some of those bastards go on suffering in terror. I don’t wish Jeremy’s literal vengeance on them (no one could wish that) but the fear that he might still be out there somewhere—their Moloch, their Monster of Montmarte—might redeem their diseased souls.
Anyway, it should be they who explain Jeremy to the rest of us. They created Jeremy in their hellhole of a small-town jail, in their airless, soundproof interrogation rooms stinking of cigarettes and piss. I wanted to say something like that, but I suddenly felt so deeply, deeply weary, and I sat like a good child responded quietly to their questions—responded to them, but never really answered them.
The police knew that Jeremy and I were together, of course—not that we’d have been able to keep that a secret for all this time in a place like this, not that we ever tried—and they had a hundred pointless questions about that. They naturally think the sexual aspect is explanatory, that it was just a short step from one perversion to another. I didn’t bother to suggest to them that it was Jeremy’s love for me that kept him in check as long as it did. I let them fumble through their questions, my enjoyment of their discomfort only partially diluting the chill that comes over you when you’re being scrutinized by someone in the capacity to make his disapproval count. Someone able to disapprove on behalf of an entire government, I mean. Like that line from “Prufrock”: “The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase.”
They wanted to formulate me and they hope to formulate Jeremy; they’d like us sprawling on a pin, but they didn’t get that satisfaction from me. I was impassive, straightforward. I admit to some pleasure in shoving it in their faces. They asked me if Jeremy had ever written me any letters, and I showed them the love letters, which are rather graphic. You’ll recall that Jeremy was quite inexperienced when we met, and he got some delight out of cataloguing our private moments together. I find the letters charming for his enthusiasm and his naiveté. So precocious, he even quoted to me those ambiguous lines of Whitman’s:
If they expected me to be embarrassed by the letters, they were disappointed. The one who led the interrogation snorted as he read Jeremy’s descriptions of our sex life, but in the end, he didn’t take the letters as I’d expected. In fact, I’d prepared for that contingency and had already hidden a set of photocopies, but I didn’t need them after all. I knew there was nothing in the letters that would help, and they were, after all, written nearly ten years ago, long before any of this, but I didn’t dare hope they’d see it that way. It’s the obsession of police agencies to collect information after all, even if they have no idea what it means or how it connects with anything else they think they know.
I tried to comprehend that they were men with families and loved ones, with children who sat in their laps and laid small blonde heads against their chests, with wives they turned toward for solace in the night. It was enough to soften them for me, but not enough. I felt the hate nudging me, seductive and so persistent, like a horse after the lumps of sugar it can smell in your pocket. It would have been no effort at all to give up trying to stanch the hate and let myself submerge in the red baptism of it. I could taste the intoxication of it at the back of my throat, a milder version, I suppose, of what Jeremy experiences when he is in full rut. I will need to be forgiven for that.
In any case, I got up to the cabin and finished what I needed to do, evidently without their knowing. If I hadn’t been so nerve-wracking, I might almost have enjoyed the cloak-and-dagger of it. You know how I love my detective novels. I drove south for a couple of hours and spent the night in a town I hadn’t even known existed. I left the truck parked on a quiet back street and took a bus west to another town on the banks of the river, spent the night there as well, and finally caught a second bus back to pick up the truck. Two nights in godforsaken motels that take cash and don’t ask for credit cards; two nights of free HBO and revolting, watered-down coffee in the morning, jumping out of my skin every time I heard footsteps outside my room. And after that the long drive to the cabin.
I don’t know whether all of that was really necessary. It’s not as though I’ve done this sort of thing before. But I couldn’t risk leading them straight to the cabin before I’d had a chance to see it first, and I didn’t know another way to find out how closely they were following me. If the truck was still there when I got back to it, I figured, I could go ahead with as much of a plan as I’d been able to work out. Before I left town I bought five gas cans at the Wal*Mart and filled them at the self-service pump so I wouldn’t have to stop again until I was done. Turns out all that extra gas came in handy for other reasons.
When they connect the dots and realize I own the cabin, or did until yesterday morning, when I completed my business at the real estate office and caused everyone consternation by insisting on taking my proceeds in cash, I shall certainly be labeled an accomplice and be in some serious trouble on account of it, though they’ll have to find Jeremy first or I don’t suppose there will be anything for me to be an accomplice to.
Well, that isn’t exactly true anymore. Up until I got to the cabin, the only thing giving me a bad conscience was knowing that I’d harbored some vague suspicions that something wasn’t right with Jeremy. There’s no denying that I stopped suggesting quite some time ago that we come up to spend weekends at the cabin. Naturally I had registered Jeremy’s sudden lack of interest—odd because he did so love the forest near there—and in some part of my being I must have understood that it was because he was using it. Perhaps all I thought was that he was bringing tricks there—after ten years, I could hardly have minded that. But the train of thought doesn’t really bear much inspection. If it was just for a little fun, why take someone all the way up there? Four hours’ drive. Almost as much, given the price of gas, as renting a motel room. I can’t defend myself. I sensed I mustn’t press the issue with him, and I didn’t. Who knows what might have happened if I had insisted, but I’ve never for a moment worried that Jeremy would harm me, even to save himself. Perhaps he would just have disappeared sooner.
The police made the same connection, of course, and the interrogator asked why I didn’t seem to be afraid that Jeremy would come after me.
“The thought never entered my mind,” I said.
The interrogator pounced. “And why is that?”
I answered bluntly: “Because Jeremy’s interest is in people who hurt and abused him. I’ve done neither.”
But now I truly am an accomplice. I’ve destroyed evidence, though I’d like to think that it’s not evidence that could ever make any real difference.
That’s part of the reason for my leaving, too, of course.
By separate mail, I’ll be sending the authorities a list of additional names and disposal sites they may not know about. Jeremy kept meticulous and detailed logs in one of those spiral notebooks you can buy anywhere, right down to the scientific names of bones, so many of which (phalanges, fibula, manubrium) sound like the kinds of exotic plants only a professional landscaper would recognize. I found the notebook as I was cleaning out the cabin, just slipped in among the books on one of the shelves in the main room. The fact that I didn’t miss it is pure randomness. I worried that it was disloyal to turn the notebook over—a foolish concern, but that was my first reaction. Ultimately, logic prevailed: They already know more than enough to hang Jeremy ten times over, literally as well as figuratively, and the families of the men named in the list will appreciate, in time, the opportunity to know for certain what they now only dread. “Appreciate” is the wrong word. They would choose to know, if the choice were between knowing and not knowing, though of course what they would wish most of all is to have an entirely different set of choices. We have that in common.
I took Jeremy’s notebook to the Kinko’s three towns over and copied it on a Xerox machine the size of a Volkswagen. I also used one of their rent-by-the-hour computers to type out a separate list of names and locations culled from the notebook, and I printed out a copy without saving the file. I asked them at Kinko’s to FedEx the copy of the diary to The Star for me, and I’ll put the list for the police in the regular mail along with this letter to you. Even without a return address on the envelope, it’ll take them two minutes to figure out where it came from, but I’m not trying to be mysterious. I suppose I took such pains with the notebook out of some surviving loyalty to Jeremy. I wanted them to have the names and other details but nothing that Jeremy had actually held in his own hands. Yes, I still love him and feel protective of him, after everything, though I hope never to see him again. Does that shock you? It shocks me.
The negotiation with The Star was surprisingly quick. I faxed a page from the original notebook, and they offered me $100,000 for the complete diary. By now the cashier’s check will be in the hands of Father DeSiard, along with instructions for distributing it to the families of the men Jeremy killed. You know I don’t normally have much to do with the papists, but DeSiard is decent enough. Besides, he’s a politician, like all of them, and his ego is so huge that the publicity he can get from this will keep him honest. I realize that the money doesn’t break down to much for any one of the families, but it’s neither absolution nor mitigation and it isn’t meant to be. I don’t relish the idea that somebody’s children may end up reading exactly what happened to their father while they’re standing in the checkout line at Kroger’s, but there are no unmixed blessings in this story. It’s what I could do to get Jeremy’s story out, and I feel I owed him that.
Which is as much as to say that there aren’t any unmixed motives, either, and I’m not convinced there are even any innocent victims. That’s not to defend Jeremy, but to say that no one would ever have believed what happened to him otherwise. In fact, for all of his adult life, I’m the only one who ever did, and even I didn’t know many of the details. In the diaries, he tells everything: what happened to him when he was seventeen and spent four nights in the town jail before they decided he hadn’t stolen somebody’s car. He didn’t have anybody to come get him out, and I suppose they were counting on that, the bastards. They knew what he was, that’s for sure, and they used him for every one of those four days, the sheriff, his deputies, the buddies they phoned to come join the party. Some of those are among the dead now, but I’m not sure it isn’t fair for their families to know what they did to a boy. What Jeremy did isn’t for weak stomachs, either, but his sense of justice is Biblical.
In any case, once I found the notebook, I had to do something to discharge the obligation that had suddenly been handed to me, and now I have. I burned Jeremy’s notebook at the cabin along with his love letters and threw the ashes in the lake. It all felt very East Indian and funerary, as if I were ritually releasing these unknown souls. No less, of course, than my own.
I feel a twinge for what the couple who bought the cabin will face once they get there, but I made it clear that the place was a wreck and I gave them a ridiculously low price to take it sight unseen. I got about half what the land alone was worth, never mind the buildings on it or the machinery. Anyway, that ought to salve their outrage somewhat. Nothing too ghastly, now that the freezer’s gone, but there are stains on the rug, and the mattress on the guest bed was a ruin. I put that in the back yard, soaked it with gasoline, and set it on fire along with the other things. Trash fires are common enough out here, so I doubted anyone would investigate. Later, the new owners might recall seeing signs of a recent fire when they first arrived, and they might tell the police, and the police might find all of that very suspicious. But they won’t be able to prove that I did it and, anyway, I can’t worry about that now. In any case, I’m depending upon my intuition that my eager yuppie buyers are fussy enough to tear out and burn everything that isn’t nailed down and repaint everything that is. I told them the mantlepiece and some of the moldings were original oak, if they wanted to spend the time stripping them down, and they seemed to light up. By the time the police get around to searching the cabin, nothing of use to them will be left. More protection of Jeremy, I suppose, but also of myself. My life was in that cabin, too, in the years I lived in it alone before I moved to the city and in the three summers Jeremy and I had there together after we met. We couldn’t get enough of each other.
It’s terrifying how much you cannot foresee about your life. As Jeremy and I lay there in the night, naked on top of the sheets because the heat was fierce that first summer, even at midnight, I thought I was world-wise and pragmatic because, battle-scarred veteran of other love affairs, I dared to allow my mind to experiment with the idea that I might not always love Jeremy or him me, or that someday we might have to give up the cabin. That was my acknowledgment of the vicissitudes of fate, my idea of acknowledging the worst that might happen. Such arrogance, to imagine I could guess all the alternative outcomes, could name and contend with them. I had no idea.
In any case, I felt I didn’t dare make more than one trip back and forth to the cabin, and I couldn’t manage both the freezer and the mattresses at one go; so I chose to dispose of the former as the more egregious item. I left it at the dump, but someone will notice that the door is still attached, which I believe is against the law, and that will be that. As I’ve told you, I don’t know what’s inside, but perhaps it’s something someone might want to bury. After plane crashes and so forth you read that relatives are desperate for some physical object and are relieved to sit through a funeral service with a shoe or a swizzle stick or a kneecap resting on the satin cushion inside the coffin at the front of the church. I would find it bizarre and macabre, but grief is always obscene and I can’t judge anyone for how he makes it through.
I’ve lost Jeremy, of course, and I grieve for him, though I also grieve for myself. He’s dead to me, but so is what I had of a life, which I must now cleanly amputate if I care to go on with any vestige of autonomy left intact. I can’t judge if I’m doing the right or the wrong thing. I know I have adopted a single-mindedness about myself that I wear like someone else’s clothes. It’s an odd sensation to operate in the world as though one’s actions existed in true isolation. Of course, it’s never exactly like that: On the freeway you slow down so as not to run into the idiot who has suddenly changed lanes in front of you; you can’t pretend you don’t see the other cars. If I want this letter to reach you, I shall have to drop it into a box and depend upon strangers to carry it to its destination. In that way, we are helplessly tied to one another.
But those are small matters, comparatively. By making my disappearance, I’ve divorced myself from the questions of what others will think of me, what they would expect from me, whether they will have feelings or needs that I might, under other circumstances, bend my actions around. I’ve become my own moral compass; I’m the only judge, and perhaps more to the point, both defense attorney and prosecutor. In the process, I’ve come close to what must have guided Jeremy, which is to say sociopathy. It’s exhilarating and yet terrifying to cut the rope and push out across the water on your own. There is always the danger that you’ll entirely forget the need for the shore.
I don’t pretend not to be curious, but for the most part I don’t find myself sorry not to know more. I admit I’d prefer not to live out my days wondering if I’ll open the door one day and find him standing there. But as I say, I don’t think he’ll turn up where I’m going, and I can’t even be sure he’s alive. If he went into the deep woods to end himself, no one may ever know of it. If I’m angry about anything, I suppose it’s that—and my reasons are completely selfish. Things would go easier for me if there were some way to be certain that Jeremy was gone for good. They’d lose interest in me then, or they might. I’ve read that it’s difficult these days for any living person to truly disappear, but then I suppose everything depends upon how tenaciously someone else cares to look.
Even without recent events as background, being in the cabin was an odd and unpleasant experience. Is there anything more unfamiliar than the familiar place you’ve chosen to abandon? Of course there was nothing there to tell me what has become of Jeremy. I don’t know what I expected to find—nothing as simple as a note, certainly. He couldn’t have known for certain that I’d be the one to find it, and he wouldn’t have wanted to compromise me. Besides, what could he possibly have written that would be adequate under the circumstances? Still, I wanted … something. A sign of some sort, a clue only I would recognize. Not some secret signal that told me how to reach him—I didn’t want that—but some acknowledgement, something to tell me at least that he knew I knew, and that he understood what my knowing meant. Instead, he’s just vanished. I haven’t seen him in more than two months.
Of course I realize, in the end, that silence is the more rational choice, even if it is, in ways, the more unsettling one. Stupid people wouldn’t understand that someone like Jeremy could be supremely rational, that his logic turns out to be more shocking than his violence.
The police contacted me as soon as the story broke, wanting to know what I could tell them about Jeremy and his “appetites.” One of them actually used that word. They were back again three nights later, and for a few weeks they continued to show up with a certain random frequency. They were convinced that Jeremy must have been in contact with me since he disappeared, though they couldn’t imagine how he was slipping messages past them. The answer is that there simply aren’t any messages.
The first time they came they brought their search warrant and took our computer, along with other things that made less sense (every last article of Jeremy’s clothing, for one thing, though I suppose I should thank them for sparing me that). I’m sure they tapped the phone and they must have followed me whenever I went out, at least at the start. That’s certainly what I would have done. Even if I felt inclined to help them, I’m quite sure I know even less than they do at this point about the only question that really matters—where Jeremy is—so my vague and unhelpful answers were, in their own way, painfully sincere.
Their interest in Jeremy is as great as it is only because he humiliates them. Yes, also because he targets them, but mostly because he makes them look like fools. With all their equipment and their computers and their weapons, which they wave at you like phalli, they were never able to foresee what he would do or whom he would hunt or when or, more to the point, stop him.
No question: a few of them knew almost instantly what it was that connected the men Jeremy targeted, but he counted on their silence and their guilt. He knew he could use it against them, and he was right. Still, it wouldn’t have taken a brilliant police mind to understand that Jeremy’s project was revenge—pure and vicious—even if no one could admit in public the reason for the revenge, the jus ad bellum so to speak.
For Jeremy, this town meant torture and had done since before he was out of his teens, so I’m sure there’s been no shortage of worried consciences. I hope some of those bastards go on suffering in terror. I don’t wish Jeremy’s literal vengeance on them (no one could wish that) but the fear that he might still be out there somewhere—their Moloch, their Monster of Montmarte—might redeem their diseased souls.
Anyway, it should be they who explain Jeremy to the rest of us. They created Jeremy in their hellhole of a small-town jail, in their airless, soundproof interrogation rooms stinking of cigarettes and piss. I wanted to say something like that, but I suddenly felt so deeply, deeply weary, and I sat like a good child responded quietly to their questions—responded to them, but never really answered them.
The police knew that Jeremy and I were together, of course—not that we’d have been able to keep that a secret for all this time in a place like this, not that we ever tried—and they had a hundred pointless questions about that. They naturally think the sexual aspect is explanatory, that it was just a short step from one perversion to another. I didn’t bother to suggest to them that it was Jeremy’s love for me that kept him in check as long as it did. I let them fumble through their questions, my enjoyment of their discomfort only partially diluting the chill that comes over you when you’re being scrutinized by someone in the capacity to make his disapproval count. Someone able to disapprove on behalf of an entire government, I mean. Like that line from “Prufrock”: “The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase.”
They wanted to formulate me and they hope to formulate Jeremy; they’d like us sprawling on a pin, but they didn’t get that satisfaction from me. I was impassive, straightforward. I admit to some pleasure in shoving it in their faces. They asked me if Jeremy had ever written me any letters, and I showed them the love letters, which are rather graphic. You’ll recall that Jeremy was quite inexperienced when we met, and he got some delight out of cataloguing our private moments together. I find the letters charming for his enthusiasm and his naiveté. So precocious, he even quoted to me those ambiguous lines of Whitman’s:
Give me now libidinous joys only,I had forgotten about that.
Give me the drench of my passions, give me life coarse and rank.
If they expected me to be embarrassed by the letters, they were disappointed. The one who led the interrogation snorted as he read Jeremy’s descriptions of our sex life, but in the end, he didn’t take the letters as I’d expected. In fact, I’d prepared for that contingency and had already hidden a set of photocopies, but I didn’t need them after all. I knew there was nothing in the letters that would help, and they were, after all, written nearly ten years ago, long before any of this, but I didn’t dare hope they’d see it that way. It’s the obsession of police agencies to collect information after all, even if they have no idea what it means or how it connects with anything else they think they know.
I tried to comprehend that they were men with families and loved ones, with children who sat in their laps and laid small blonde heads against their chests, with wives they turned toward for solace in the night. It was enough to soften them for me, but not enough. I felt the hate nudging me, seductive and so persistent, like a horse after the lumps of sugar it can smell in your pocket. It would have been no effort at all to give up trying to stanch the hate and let myself submerge in the red baptism of it. I could taste the intoxication of it at the back of my throat, a milder version, I suppose, of what Jeremy experiences when he is in full rut. I will need to be forgiven for that.
In any case, I got up to the cabin and finished what I needed to do, evidently without their knowing. If I hadn’t been so nerve-wracking, I might almost have enjoyed the cloak-and-dagger of it. You know how I love my detective novels. I drove south for a couple of hours and spent the night in a town I hadn’t even known existed. I left the truck parked on a quiet back street and took a bus west to another town on the banks of the river, spent the night there as well, and finally caught a second bus back to pick up the truck. Two nights in godforsaken motels that take cash and don’t ask for credit cards; two nights of free HBO and revolting, watered-down coffee in the morning, jumping out of my skin every time I heard footsteps outside my room. And after that the long drive to the cabin.
I don’t know whether all of that was really necessary. It’s not as though I’ve done this sort of thing before. But I couldn’t risk leading them straight to the cabin before I’d had a chance to see it first, and I didn’t know another way to find out how closely they were following me. If the truck was still there when I got back to it, I figured, I could go ahead with as much of a plan as I’d been able to work out. Before I left town I bought five gas cans at the Wal*Mart and filled them at the self-service pump so I wouldn’t have to stop again until I was done. Turns out all that extra gas came in handy for other reasons.
When they connect the dots and realize I own the cabin, or did until yesterday morning, when I completed my business at the real estate office and caused everyone consternation by insisting on taking my proceeds in cash, I shall certainly be labeled an accomplice and be in some serious trouble on account of it, though they’ll have to find Jeremy first or I don’t suppose there will be anything for me to be an accomplice to.
Well, that isn’t exactly true anymore. Up until I got to the cabin, the only thing giving me a bad conscience was knowing that I’d harbored some vague suspicions that something wasn’t right with Jeremy. There’s no denying that I stopped suggesting quite some time ago that we come up to spend weekends at the cabin. Naturally I had registered Jeremy’s sudden lack of interest—odd because he did so love the forest near there—and in some part of my being I must have understood that it was because he was using it. Perhaps all I thought was that he was bringing tricks there—after ten years, I could hardly have minded that. But the train of thought doesn’t really bear much inspection. If it was just for a little fun, why take someone all the way up there? Four hours’ drive. Almost as much, given the price of gas, as renting a motel room. I can’t defend myself. I sensed I mustn’t press the issue with him, and I didn’t. Who knows what might have happened if I had insisted, but I’ve never for a moment worried that Jeremy would harm me, even to save himself. Perhaps he would just have disappeared sooner.
The police made the same connection, of course, and the interrogator asked why I didn’t seem to be afraid that Jeremy would come after me.
“The thought never entered my mind,” I said.
The interrogator pounced. “And why is that?”
I answered bluntly: “Because Jeremy’s interest is in people who hurt and abused him. I’ve done neither.”
But now I truly am an accomplice. I’ve destroyed evidence, though I’d like to think that it’s not evidence that could ever make any real difference.
That’s part of the reason for my leaving, too, of course.
By separate mail, I’ll be sending the authorities a list of additional names and disposal sites they may not know about. Jeremy kept meticulous and detailed logs in one of those spiral notebooks you can buy anywhere, right down to the scientific names of bones, so many of which (phalanges, fibula, manubrium) sound like the kinds of exotic plants only a professional landscaper would recognize. I found the notebook as I was cleaning out the cabin, just slipped in among the books on one of the shelves in the main room. The fact that I didn’t miss it is pure randomness. I worried that it was disloyal to turn the notebook over—a foolish concern, but that was my first reaction. Ultimately, logic prevailed: They already know more than enough to hang Jeremy ten times over, literally as well as figuratively, and the families of the men named in the list will appreciate, in time, the opportunity to know for certain what they now only dread. “Appreciate” is the wrong word. They would choose to know, if the choice were between knowing and not knowing, though of course what they would wish most of all is to have an entirely different set of choices. We have that in common.
I took Jeremy’s notebook to the Kinko’s three towns over and copied it on a Xerox machine the size of a Volkswagen. I also used one of their rent-by-the-hour computers to type out a separate list of names and locations culled from the notebook, and I printed out a copy without saving the file. I asked them at Kinko’s to FedEx the copy of the diary to The Star for me, and I’ll put the list for the police in the regular mail along with this letter to you. Even without a return address on the envelope, it’ll take them two minutes to figure out where it came from, but I’m not trying to be mysterious. I suppose I took such pains with the notebook out of some surviving loyalty to Jeremy. I wanted them to have the names and other details but nothing that Jeremy had actually held in his own hands. Yes, I still love him and feel protective of him, after everything, though I hope never to see him again. Does that shock you? It shocks me.
The negotiation with The Star was surprisingly quick. I faxed a page from the original notebook, and they offered me $100,000 for the complete diary. By now the cashier’s check will be in the hands of Father DeSiard, along with instructions for distributing it to the families of the men Jeremy killed. You know I don’t normally have much to do with the papists, but DeSiard is decent enough. Besides, he’s a politician, like all of them, and his ego is so huge that the publicity he can get from this will keep him honest. I realize that the money doesn’t break down to much for any one of the families, but it’s neither absolution nor mitigation and it isn’t meant to be. I don’t relish the idea that somebody’s children may end up reading exactly what happened to their father while they’re standing in the checkout line at Kroger’s, but there are no unmixed blessings in this story. It’s what I could do to get Jeremy’s story out, and I feel I owed him that.
Which is as much as to say that there aren’t any unmixed motives, either, and I’m not convinced there are even any innocent victims. That’s not to defend Jeremy, but to say that no one would ever have believed what happened to him otherwise. In fact, for all of his adult life, I’m the only one who ever did, and even I didn’t know many of the details. In the diaries, he tells everything: what happened to him when he was seventeen and spent four nights in the town jail before they decided he hadn’t stolen somebody’s car. He didn’t have anybody to come get him out, and I suppose they were counting on that, the bastards. They knew what he was, that’s for sure, and they used him for every one of those four days, the sheriff, his deputies, the buddies they phoned to come join the party. Some of those are among the dead now, but I’m not sure it isn’t fair for their families to know what they did to a boy. What Jeremy did isn’t for weak stomachs, either, but his sense of justice is Biblical.
In any case, once I found the notebook, I had to do something to discharge the obligation that had suddenly been handed to me, and now I have. I burned Jeremy’s notebook at the cabin along with his love letters and threw the ashes in the lake. It all felt very East Indian and funerary, as if I were ritually releasing these unknown souls. No less, of course, than my own.
I feel a twinge for what the couple who bought the cabin will face once they get there, but I made it clear that the place was a wreck and I gave them a ridiculously low price to take it sight unseen. I got about half what the land alone was worth, never mind the buildings on it or the machinery. Anyway, that ought to salve their outrage somewhat. Nothing too ghastly, now that the freezer’s gone, but there are stains on the rug, and the mattress on the guest bed was a ruin. I put that in the back yard, soaked it with gasoline, and set it on fire along with the other things. Trash fires are common enough out here, so I doubted anyone would investigate. Later, the new owners might recall seeing signs of a recent fire when they first arrived, and they might tell the police, and the police might find all of that very suspicious. But they won’t be able to prove that I did it and, anyway, I can’t worry about that now. In any case, I’m depending upon my intuition that my eager yuppie buyers are fussy enough to tear out and burn everything that isn’t nailed down and repaint everything that is. I told them the mantlepiece and some of the moldings were original oak, if they wanted to spend the time stripping them down, and they seemed to light up. By the time the police get around to searching the cabin, nothing of use to them will be left. More protection of Jeremy, I suppose, but also of myself. My life was in that cabin, too, in the years I lived in it alone before I moved to the city and in the three summers Jeremy and I had there together after we met. We couldn’t get enough of each other.
It’s terrifying how much you cannot foresee about your life. As Jeremy and I lay there in the night, naked on top of the sheets because the heat was fierce that first summer, even at midnight, I thought I was world-wise and pragmatic because, battle-scarred veteran of other love affairs, I dared to allow my mind to experiment with the idea that I might not always love Jeremy or him me, or that someday we might have to give up the cabin. That was my acknowledgment of the vicissitudes of fate, my idea of acknowledging the worst that might happen. Such arrogance, to imagine I could guess all the alternative outcomes, could name and contend with them. I had no idea.
In any case, I felt I didn’t dare make more than one trip back and forth to the cabin, and I couldn’t manage both the freezer and the mattresses at one go; so I chose to dispose of the former as the more egregious item. I left it at the dump, but someone will notice that the door is still attached, which I believe is against the law, and that will be that. As I’ve told you, I don’t know what’s inside, but perhaps it’s something someone might want to bury. After plane crashes and so forth you read that relatives are desperate for some physical object and are relieved to sit through a funeral service with a shoe or a swizzle stick or a kneecap resting on the satin cushion inside the coffin at the front of the church. I would find it bizarre and macabre, but grief is always obscene and I can’t judge anyone for how he makes it through.
I’ve lost Jeremy, of course, and I grieve for him, though I also grieve for myself. He’s dead to me, but so is what I had of a life, which I must now cleanly amputate if I care to go on with any vestige of autonomy left intact. I can’t judge if I’m doing the right or the wrong thing. I know I have adopted a single-mindedness about myself that I wear like someone else’s clothes. It’s an odd sensation to operate in the world as though one’s actions existed in true isolation. Of course, it’s never exactly like that: On the freeway you slow down so as not to run into the idiot who has suddenly changed lanes in front of you; you can’t pretend you don’t see the other cars. If I want this letter to reach you, I shall have to drop it into a box and depend upon strangers to carry it to its destination. In that way, we are helplessly tied to one another.
But those are small matters, comparatively. By making my disappearance, I’ve divorced myself from the questions of what others will think of me, what they would expect from me, whether they will have feelings or needs that I might, under other circumstances, bend my actions around. I’ve become my own moral compass; I’m the only judge, and perhaps more to the point, both defense attorney and prosecutor. In the process, I’ve come close to what must have guided Jeremy, which is to say sociopathy. It’s exhilarating and yet terrifying to cut the rope and push out across the water on your own. There is always the danger that you’ll entirely forget the need for the shore.
I don’t pretend not to be curious, but for the most part I don’t find myself sorry not to know more. I admit I’d prefer not to live out my days wondering if I’ll open the door one day and find him standing there. But as I say, I don’t think he’ll turn up where I’m going, and I can’t even be sure he’s alive. If he went into the deep woods to end himself, no one may ever know of it. If I’m angry about anything, I suppose it’s that—and my reasons are completely selfish. Things would go easier for me if there were some way to be certain that Jeremy was gone for good. They’d lose interest in me then, or they might. I’ve read that it’s difficult these days for any living person to truly disappear, but then I suppose everything depends upon how tenaciously someone else cares to look.
Which brings me to my reason for writing: Please do your best to forgive me for winking out like this, my old friend. In a few years, if it seems I can, I may let you and a few others—if there’s anyone who still cares—know my whereabouts, but you’ll have to leave that up to me. You can’t try to find me, and I won’t make contact unless I decide it’s safe for both of us. I apologize for the harshness of my insistence on this point and for what perhaps seems like melodrama. I have my reasons.
I know you have also grasped by now that you cannot keep this letter. I’ve already over-exposed you, perhaps, but on balance I decided that the greater kindness would be to make things clear rather than allow you to imagine some more distressing scenario. The police are welcome to believe that Jeremy came for me at last, despite my assurances that he wouldn’t. Surely it’s what some of them are hoping. Yet I couldn’t bear it if you wondered the same thing. I don’t know whether you will find it helpful or merely pathetic to know this, but I have realized something. Even if I had lost Jeremy under entirely mundane circumstances, I am convinced, I would have felt this same urge to drift away, the very one I am obeying now. True, the actual facts of the matter have served to weigh the anchor good and for all, but in the end, what I can most honestly say is that I finally came for myself.
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