“Does this belong to your son?” Detective Haeny asked, and you put your hand over your mouth and screamed through your fingers, and felt, in that moment, like the best possibility available to you would be to just keep screaming and never stop, to produce a scream so great that it enveloped and consumed the evidence bag, and the officer holding it out to you, and the land, and the sea, and the sky, to scream and scream until the screaming somehow killed you; because, if you stopped, worse things than any of these would be waiting out there in the quiet, the rapidly gathering quiet that palpably stood ready to open up for you like a dark, endless cave from which you would never be free.
7.
A CAVE I will never, ever get out of, you said: your exact words. A cave that probably has other people in it, maybe a lot of them, and sometimes you think you can hear them around you or behind you or ahead of you, talking, crying, pounding on the walls, but you can’t be sure because the pain is making you crazy, and to be crazy is to have more noises in your head than usual. A cave that can disguise itself as a morgue, or a coroner’s office, or a courtroom, or a bedroom, or the bathroom, you said: a cave you carry around with you like a chair you have to sit in wherever you go, and, to everybody else, it just looks like a normal chair, but to you it’s the top of a slide, and every time you sit down on it you head down into the depths.
It’s stupid to talk about which part of anything could really be the worst part when the thing you’re talking about is that somebody murdered your son, stabbed him thirty-seven times with an oyster-shucking knife, stabbed him in his face and in his throat and in his chest and in his arms and in his stomach and on his hands, which he was probably using to try to protect his face, his beautiful face, but she got him there, too, nine times there, they said. And you were lucky, you wrote, they hadn’t said “lucky” but it was only obvious that was what they meant, that she hadn’t been able to finish cutting both of them apart, otherwise they might not have been able to find all the pieces, the remaining pieces of your son Jesse and his friend Gene, Gene who was always nice to you no matter what people said about him, nobody ever gave him a chance, they talked about him like he was trash but how could he help it, and now he was dead, pieces of him all mixed up in the same garbage bag with Jesse, and you were supposed to feel lucky that they’d even been able to get together enough body parts to make an identification; and that was the first worst part, the part that made you begin to apprehend the dimensions of the cave: the details.
Because they were trying to spare you the worst of the details, they said; but it was also their job to tell you, for the investigation. What investigation? What did anybody need to investigate? The world is so full of people who see what’s going on right in front of their faces, you wrote, but they don’t do anything, police, teachers, your own family, they see and maybe they give you a sad look, but you can take that sad look down to hell with you if you’re ever lucky enough to get there, to get out of this awful place and at least be free, but that was all fairy tales anyway as far as you were concerned, there was no way any of it was true, you hated to say it, on good days you didn’t feel this way at all anymore but today you did, and you wanted me to hear it, to see, to know what it was like except that I would never actually know, because for me all the details were just part of my stupid story, something I did for money, or to show people how smart I was, or who really knows why, but for you the details were like markings on a blueprint, each of them indicating just how much there was to know about the space where you would have to live for the rest of your life, how many things there were to learn that nobody would ever want to learn and which would never leave you once you’d learned them, things which would give you nightmares, and headaches, and would train you to respond to stressful situations in ways that never helped, only hurt, learned responses that made everything worse and made you feel like your mind was your own worst enemy, and who could you turn to if not yourself when all you had ever had was yourself, yourself and Jesse, the one person in this world you’d been able to look at for seventeen years and say, That is a sweet person, he deserves better than what this world has given me, but instead he was lost in the cave now, and you knew you would never find him.
You would never find him: because there was no cave, it only felt like one, you weren’t crazy, you said, you just felt crazy because it was too much to take, too much, you said. You screamed when the officer showed you his necklace and they brought you a blanket, that’s what they do when people are in shock, they give them a blanket, do they think we are babies, but you remembered the blanket, and a paper cup of cold water, and sitting in a wooden chair sipping it while the officers bore witness to your rapidly numbing affect, too much, what next, they had already asked their questions because they knew this would happen, how were you going to tell Michael, what would he do.