Page 89 of Saint
“Hello,” it said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
* * *
At first,knowing it felt like a secret, like the kind of secret that made you wiser and more interesting than the people around you. I finished high school and started college that way, thinking I understood songs on the radio and poems in class better than any of these other carefree kids, thinking that I alone was marked, like a romantic Cain, to wander with it stamped on my forehead for the people who knew how to see.
As college went on, however, it began to feel less like a secret and more like a...like a witness. A witness to the worst things I did, the worst thoughts I had, and then it started whispering its surveillances back to me. It would remind me at odd hours, during long car drives or long college lectures, of everything bad I’d done. It would make little cuts in me and then lick up whatever oozed out.
And by the time I graduated college, it no longer felt deep or romantic. Instead, I felt like it was my only real friend.
My other friends thought they liked me, but they liked a lie—a bright, laughing guy always in search of the next party, the next drink, the next bump of coke. They were friendly, flattering; they had no idea who I really was, because they didn’t know me likeitknew me, and they would never be honest with me like it was honest with me. It told me the truth always; it told me how empty I was, how pointless, how I wasted air and time and food. And whenever I tried to escape it and the un-feeling it brought—with drugs, with alcohol, with sex—it would always be waiting for me at the end, inexorable and inevitable.
There was death, taxes, andit, always it.
And it was so patient, so very patient. Sometimes it would melt away for months at a time, a mere memory of itself, and I would think:it’s gone. I told it to go and it went, just like a demon into a herd of swine, and I was free forever now.
But it always came back, and when it came back, I would realize it had never left, for it had continued to witness everything I’d done in its absence, and it would begin again its sinister litany. The people I’d hurt or annoyed, the conversations I’d ruined or unfairly dominated, the harms great and small that I sowed being Aiden Bell, eternal fuck-up.
Better off...it would remind me, seductively.
When my mother died, a year before That Night, it told me all sorts of things, all sorts of awful, unrepeatable things. But the thing it told me the most often was that no one would miss me like people missed my mother. My brothers were wrecked, my dad was wrecked, all of her big circle of friends and coworkers were wrecked with the death of Carolyn Bell, but if I died...?
And I missed Mom. I’d missed Lizzy too, as much as my young heart was capable, but I missed my mother like an adult, with an adult’s heart, and even though I’d always weathered its whispers alone, when she died, I suddenly felt stranded and solitary in a way I’d never felt before. As if a secret part of me had always thought if it grew too loud, if I was in too much danger of doing what it wanted me to do, I could go to my mom and she would make it better. She’d make me not alone, she would make it go away. Maybe we all think that, deep down, about our mothers, that they will make the monsters under our bed go away. But Carolyn Bell took that sense of safety with her when she died, and now, I was truly alone in its grip.
Elijah was the brightness, of course. The sweetness, the sex, the comfort. A gift I didn’t deserve. I think without him That Night would have come faster, although it eventually weaponized him too.
This good man, what are you doing with him? Embarrassing him at events, at dinners with his parents? You know they only tolerate you because they like Sean, right? You know he’s going to break up with you, right? Why would he stay? Why should he stay?
Anything good or right I did was never enough to weigh against the sagging scales of my selfishness, and the more power it had to paralyze me, the more selfish I would feel, as if the paralyses were my fault. Those times when I couldn’t make my body move to leave the house...it would ask me in tones of deep concern if I knew how much I was letting my boyfriend down? How much worse I was making his life with every disappointment?
Better off...
For fifteen years, I’d been its pet, its unhappy companion. Perhaps it was surprising that I’d lasted as long as I did—for that I can only credit my family and Elijah. But after years and years of it, I was tired. I agreed with it now, with whatever it said. Why wouldn’t I, when it spoke with my voice and wore my face?
And then That Night—when I came home and found dinner in the trash and Elijah sitting in the living room—it didn’t even have to speak. As Elijah and I fought, and I realized how much my carelessness had hurt him—how much more this time had hurt him than the others—and by the time he’d pulled away as we were changing for bed and muttered,we’ll talk about it in the morning, I already knew what it would say.
I didn’t deserve to talk about the fight in the morning. I didn’t deserve forgiveness, because I’d just need it again and again and again, and who has the energy to forgive someone that many times? Who can give someone that many fresh starts? And even if someone could, why on earthshouldthey?
I didn’t follow Elijah to bed. I should have, maybe. Because maybe if I’d climbed into bed, Elijah would have sighed and rolled over and let his foot touch my foot under the blankets. Maybe he would have let me press my face into his arm. Maybe we would have fucked and the un-feeling it always brought with it would have disappeared for a while.
But none of that happened. I went downstairs, first sitting on the couch and staring at the wall, and then somehow ending up on the floor, looking out of the farmhouse window to the moonless night beyond.
It joined me there, on the floor, and it congratulated me on my self-awareness, on my unflinching honesty.
“Shall we do the litany together?” it asked.
“Yes,” I said, and I let it begin, an unending spool of reasons why I should listen to its kindly meant suggestions. It only cared about the people I loved, just like I did. It only wanted to make the world a better place—didn’t I want that too?
After fifteen years, I was familiar with its greatest hits, its favorite horrors to dredge out of my memories and torment me with, its temptations and its judgements and its soft, ingratiating malice. Perhaps there shouldn’t have been anything different enough about That Night to make itthenight, but maybe in the end, that was exactly the reason why it became thenight.
Because I’d lived through so many years of it being in my mind, and when I stared out the window, I could see all the years of it yet to live through, and it was suddenly too exhausting to contemplate.
It would never stop, it would never end. This would always be my life, and what was I even fighting for? The right to keep letting people down? The capacity to prey on their energy and patience until I’d bled them dry?
In Brendan Fraser’s 1998 filmThe Mummy—which is the number one mummy-based action movie of all time—there is a holy city called Hamunaptra, and in that city is a temple, and in that temple is where the ragtag team finally defeats the mummy, who by that stage is very hunky and bald. (The hunky part isn’t important to the story, but I just thought you should know about it.) Anyway, after the mummy is fatally wounded, he staggers back into what looks like a stone bathtub full of the souls of the dead. The water is slick and black and rippling, and as the mummy sinks into its depths, the darkness climbs up his legs and torso and then up to his face, and I remember watching that even as a kid and thinking that darkness could do that, it could cling to your skin and crawl up your body. It could reach and search and wither anything it touched. It would never stay where it should. Not when it knew your name and was waiting for you.
And so I watched as the darkness spilled in through my window and slicked toward my outstretched feet, understanding how that hunky mummy must have felt, knowing that death was coming, death was here. Maybe the mummy was afraid, but strangely enough, I wasn’t. I felt nothing at all.
“I’ll help you,” it said kindly. “Just listen to me, and I’ll help you.”
