It’s clear from her expression that she thinks this is a sad story I’m telling her—a very sad story. I don’t know how to convey to her that it hasn’t all been sad.
“I’ve glimpsed things,” I say. Then I stop. I don’t know what’s next.
“Go on,” she tells me.
“It’s just—I know it sounds like an awful way to live, but I’ve seen so many things. It’s so hard when you’re in one body to get a sense of what life is really like. You’re so grounded in who you are. But when who you are changes every day—you get to touch the universal more. Even the most mundane details. You see how cherries taste different to different people. Blue looks different. You see all the strange rituals boys have to show affection without admitting it. You learn that if a parent reads to you at the end of the day, it’s a good sign that it’s a good parent, because you’ve seen so many other parents who don’t make the time. You learn how much a day is truly worth, because they’re all so different. If you ask most people what the difference was between Monday and Tuesday, they might tell you what they had for dinner each night. Not me. By seeing the world from so many angles, I get more of a sense of its dimensionality.”
“But you never get to see things over time, do you?” Rhiannon asks. “I don’t mean to cancel out what you just said. I think I understand that. But you’ve never had a friend that you’ve known day in and day out for ten years. You’ve never watched a pet grow older. You’ve never seen how messed up a parent’s love can be over time. And you’ve never been in a relationship for more than a day, not to mention for more than a year.”
I should have known it would come back to that. “But I’ve seen things,” I tell her. “I’ve observed. I know how it works.”
“From the outside? I don’t think you can know from the outside.”
“I think you underestimate how predictable some things can be in a relationship.”
“I love him,” she says. “I know you don’t understand, but I do.”
“You shouldn’t. I’ve seen him from the inside. I know.”
“For a day. You saw him for a day.”
“And for a day, you saw who he could be. You fell more in love with him when he was me.”
I reach out again for her hand, but this time she says, “No. Don’t.”
I freeze.
“I have a boyfriend,” she says. “I know you don’t like him, and I’m sure there are moments when I don’t like him, either. But that’s the reality. Now, I’ll admit, you have me actually thinking that you are, in fact, the same person who I’ve now met in five different bodies. All this means is that I’m probably as insane as you are. I know you say you love me, but you don’t really know me. You’ve known me a week. And I need a little more than that.”
“But didn’t you feel it that day? On the beach? Didn’t everything seem right?”
There it is again—the pull of the ocean, the song of the universe. A better liar would deny it. But some of us don’t want to live our lives as liars. She bites her lip and nods.
“Yes. But I don’t know who I was feeling that for. Even if I believe it was you, you have to understand that my history with Justin plays into it. I wouldn’t have felt that way with a stranger. It wouldn’t have been so perfect.”
“How do you know?”
“That’s my point. I don’t.”
She looks at her phone, and whether or not she truly needs to leave, I know this is the sign that she’s going to.
“I have to make it back for dinner,” she says.
“Thanks for driving all this way,” I tell her.
It’s awkward. So awkward.
“Will I see you again?” I ask.
She nods.
“I’m going to prove it to you,” I tell her. “I’m going to show you what it really means.”
“What?”
“Love.”
Is she scared by this? Embarrassed? Hopeful?
I don’t know. I’m not close enough to tell.
Tom gives me no small amount of grief when I get home—partly because I went to Starbucks, and partly because I then had to walk two miles to get back home, and was late for dinner, which our father roundly chewed me out over.
“I hope whoever she was, she was worth it,” Tom taunts.
I look at him blankly.
“Dude, don’t try to tell me you were just going for the coffee or the folk tunes they play on the speakers. I know you better than that.”
I remain silent.
I am assigned to wash all the dishes. While doing so, I turn on the radio, and when the local news comes on, Nathan Daldry comes with it.
“So tell us, Nathan, what you experienced last Saturday,” the interviewer says.
“I was possessed. There’s no other word for it. I wasn’t in control of my own body. I consider myself lucky to be alive. And I want to ask anyone else who’s ever been possessed like this, just for a day, to contact me. Because, I’ll be honest with you, Chuck, a lot of people think I’m crazy. Other kids at school are making fun of me constantly. But I know what happened. And I know I’m not the only one.”
I know I’m not the only one.
This is the sentence that haunts me. I wish I felt the same certainty.
I wish I weren’t the only one.
Day 6004
The next morning I wake up in the same room.
In the same body.
I can’t believe it. I don’t understand. After all these years.
I look at the wall. My hands. The sheets.
And then I look to my side and see James sleeping there in his bed.
James.
And I realize: I’m not in the same body. I’m not on the same side of the room.
No, this morning I’m his twin, Tom.
I have never had this chance before. I watch as James emerges from sleep, emerges from a day away from his old body. I am looking for the traces of that oblivion, the bafflement of that waking. But what I get is the familiar scene of a football player stretching himself into the day. If he feels at all strange, at all different, he’s not showing it.
“Dude, what are you staring at?”
This doesn’t come from James, but from our other brother, Paul.
“Just getting up,” I mumble.
But really, I don’t take my eyes off James. Not through the ride to school. Not at breakfast. He seems a little out of it now, but nothing that couldn’t be explained by a bad night’s sleep.
“How’re you doing?” I ask him.
He grunts. “Fine. Thanks for caring.”
I decide to play dumb. He expects me to be dumb, so it shouldn’t be much of a stretch.
“What did you do after practice yesterday?” I ask.
“I went to Starbucks.”
“Who with?”
He looks at me like I’ve just sung the question to him in falsetto.
“I just wanted coffee, okay? I wasn’t with anyone.”
I study him, to see if he’s trying to cover his conversation with Rhiannon. I don’t think, though, that such duplicity would be anything but obvious on him.
He really doesn’t remember seeing her. Talking to her. Being with her.
“Then why’d it take so long?” I ask him.
“What, were you timing it? I’m touched.”
“Well, who were you emailing at lunch?”
“I was just checking my email.”
“Your own email?”
“Who else’s email would I be checking? You’re asking seriously weird questions, dude. Isn’t he, Paul?”
Paul chews on some bacon. “I swear, whenever you two talk, I just tune it right out. I have no idea what you’re saying.”
Paradoxically, I wish I were still in James’s body, so I could see exactly what his memories of yesterday are. From where I sit, it appears that he recalls the places he was, but has somehow concocted an alternate version of events, one that fits closer to his life. Has his mind done this, some kind of a
daptation? Or did my mind, right before it left, leave behind this story line?
James does not feel like he was possessed by the devil.
He thinks yesterday was just another day.
Again, the morning becomes a search to find a few minutes’ worth of email access.
I should have given her my phone number, I think.
Then I stop myself. I stand there right in the middle of the hallway, shocked. It’s such a mundane, ordinary observation—but that’s what stops me. In the context of my life, it’s nonsensical. There was no way for me to give her a phone number. I know this. And yet, the ordinary thought crept in, made me trick myself for a moment into thinking that I, too, was ordinary.
I have no idea what this means, but I suspect it’s dangerous.
At lunch, I tell James I’m going to the library.
“Dude,” he says, “libraries are for girls.”
There aren’t any new messages from Rhiannon, so I write to her instead.
Rhiannon,
You’d actually recognize me today. I woke up as James’s twin. I thought this might help me figure things out, but so far, no luck.
I want to see you again.
A
There isn’t anything from Nathan, either. Once more I decide to type his name into a search engine, figuring there might be a few more articles about what he’s saying.
I find over two thousand results. All from the past three days.
Word is spreading. Mostly from evangelical Christian sites, which have bought Nathan’s devil claims wholesale. He is, for them, just another example of the world going to H-E-double-hockey-sticks.
From what I can recall, none of the many versions I heard as a child of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” spent that much time pondering the emotional state of the boy, especially after the wolf finally showed up. I want to know what Nathan is thinking, if he really believes what he’s saying. None of the articles and blogs are any help—he’s saying the same thing in all of them, and people are painting him as either a freak or an oracle. Nobody’s sitting him down and treating him like a sixteen-year-old boy. They are missing the real questions in order to ask the sensational ones. I open up his last email.
You can’t avoid my questions forever. I want to know who you are. I want to know why you do what you do.
Tell me.
But how can I respond without confirming at least part of the story he’s created? I feel that he’s right—in some way, I can’t avoid his questions forever. They will start to dig into me. They will follow me wherever I wake up. But to give him any answer will give him a reassurance I know I shouldn’t give. It will keep him on his path.
My best bet is for him to start feeling that he is, indeed, crazy. Which is an awful thing to wish upon someone. Especially when he’s not crazy.
I want to ask Rhiannon what to do. But I can imagine what she’d say. Or maybe I’m just projecting my better self onto her. Because I know the answer: Self-preservation isn’t worth it if you can’t live with the self you’re preserving.
I am responsible for his situation. So he’s become my responsibility.
I know this, even as I hate it.
I’m not going to write immediately. I need to give it some thought. I need to help him without confirming anything.
Finally, by last period, I think I have it.
I know who you are. I’ve seen your story on the news. It doesn’t have anything to do with me—you must have made a mistake.
Still, it appears to me that you’re not considering all the possibilities. I’m sure what happened to you was very stressful. But blaming the devil is not the answer.
I send it off quickly before football practice.
I also check for an email from Rhiannon.
Nothing.
The rest of the day is uneventful. And I find myself wondering once again when I started to think my days would contain actual events. Up until now, I have lived for uneventfulness, and have found smaller satisfaction in the art of getting by. I resent that the hours seem boring now, emptier. Going through the motions gives you plenty of time to examine the motions. I used to find this interesting. Now it has taken on the taint of meaninglessness.
I practice football. I get a ride home. I do some homework. I eat some dinner. I watch TV with my family.
This is the trap of having something to live for:
Everything else seems lifeless.
James and I go to bed first. Paul is in the kitchen, talking to our mother about his work schedule for the weekend. James and I don’t say anything as we change into our sleep clothes, as we parade to the bathroom and back.
I get in bed and he turns out the light. I expect to hear him getting into bed next, but instead he hovers in the middle of the room.
“Tom?”
“Yeah?”
“Why did you ask me about what I was up to yesterday?”
I sit up. “I don’t know. You just seemed a little … off.”
“I just thought it was strange. You asking, I mean.”
He heads to his bed now. I hear his weight fall on the mattress.
“So nothing seemed off to you?” I ask, hoping that there will be something—anything—that rises to the surface.
“Not that I can think of. I thought it was pretty funny that Snyder had to end practice so he could go, like, learn how to help his babymama breathe. But I think that was the highlight. It’s just … do I seem off today, too?”
The truth is that I haven’t been paying that much attention, not since breakfast.
“Why do you ask?”
“No reason. I feel fine. I just don’t, you know, want to look like there’s something wrong when there’s nothing wrong.”
“You seem fine,” I assure him.
“Good,” he says, shifting his body, getting into the right position with his pillow.
I want to say more, but don’t know what the words are supposed to be. I feel such a tenderness for these vulnerable nighttime conversations, the way words take a different shape in the air when there’s no light in the room. I think of the rare jackpot nights when I ended the day at a sleepover or sharing the room with a sibling or a friend I genuinely liked. Those conversations could trick me into believing I could say anything, even though there was so much I was holding back. Eventually the night would take its hold, but it would always feel like I was fading to sleep rather than falling.
“Good night,” I say to James. But what I really feel is goodbye. I am leaving here, leaving this family. It’s only been two days, but that’s twice what I’m used to. It’s just a hint—the smallest hint—of what it would be like to wake up in the same place every morning.
I have to let that go.
Day 6005
Some people think mental illness is a matter of mood, a matter of personality. They think depression is simply a form of being sad, that OCD is a form of being uptight. They think the soul is sick, not the body. It is, they believe, something that you have some choice over.
I know how wrong this is.
When I was a child, I didn’t understand. I would wake up in a new body and wouldn’t comprehend why things felt muted, dimmer. Or the opposite—I’d be supercharged, unfocused, like a radio at top volume flipping quickly from station to station. Since I didn’t have access to the body’s emotions, I assumed the ones I was feeling were my own. Eventually, though, I realized these inclinations, these compulsions, were as much a part of the body as its eye color or its voice. Yes, the feelings themselves were intangible, amorphous, but the cause of the feelings was a matter of chemistry, biology.
It is a hard cycle to conquer. The body is working against you. And because of this, you feel even more despair. Which only amplifies the imbalance. It takes uncommon strength to live with these things. But I have seen that strength over and over again. When I fall into the life of someone grappling, I have to mirror their strength, and sometimes surpass it, because I am less prepared.
I know th
e signs now. I know when to look for the pill bottles, when to let the body take its course. I have to keep reminding myself—this is not me. It is chemistry. It is biology. It is not who I am. It is not who any of them are.
Kelsea Cook’s mind is a dark place. Even before I open my eyes, I know this. Her mind is an unquiet one, words and thoughts and impulses constantly crashing into each other. My own thoughts try to assert themselves within this noise. The body responds by breaking into a sweat. I try to remain calm, but the body conspires against that, tries to drown me in distortion.
It is not usually this bad, first thing in the morning. If it’s this bad now, it must be pretty bad at all times.
Underneath the distortion is a desire for pain. I open my eyes and see the scars. Not just on the body, although those are there—the hairline fractures across the skin, the web you create to catch your own death. The scars are in the room as well, across the walls, along the floor. The person who lives here no longer cares about anything. Posters hang half-ripped. The mirror is cracked. Clothes lay abandoned. The shades are drawn. The books sit crooked on shelves, like rows of neglected teeth. At one point she must have broken open a pen and spun it around, because if you look closely, you can see small, dried drops of ink all over the walls and ceiling.
I access her history and am shocked to realize that she’s gotten this far without any notice, without any diagnosis. She has been left to her own devices, and those devices are broken.
It is five in the morning. I have woken up without any alarm. I have woken up because the thoughts are so loud, and none of them mean me well.
I struggle to get back to sleep, but the body won’t let me.
Two hours later, I get out of bed.
Depression has been likened to both a black cloud and a black dog. For someone like Kelsea, the black cloud is the right metaphor. She is surrounded by it, immersed within it, and there is no obvious way out. What she needs to do is try to contain it, get it into the form of the black dog. It will still follow her around wherever she goes; it will always be there. But at least it will be separate, and will follow her lead.