We Are the Light(28)

“And, ironically, there are others whom we’ve all made into monsters as well. Innocents who have been targeted and shunned and who have been made to feel so low they’ve sequestered themselves. And I’d like to introduce you to one of these people tonight.” I pointed at the door to my right. “He’s in this very closet right now.”

The silence I let hang in the room was palpable.

I saw Jill put her face in her hands. Bess was chewing her bottom lip and Isaiah was tapping his right foot furiously. The rest of The Survivors were on the edges of their seats.

“This innocent has a dream, a vision for bringing the town back together again. A plan for healing! He invites you to be creative! To make a movie with him! To star in this movie, which will be about reclaiming and redeeming the monster within all of us. Reintegrating what has been cast off into shadow. Bringing that back to consciousness.” I sounded a lot like my Jungian analyst, aka you, Karl. “We’ve written the script and made the first costume, which is meant to symbolically represent the aftermath we’ve all been suffering through. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you the Majestic Prince of Monsters!”

The closet door swung open, but Eli very dramatically stayed hidden in the shadows within. When I looked around, every mouth in the room was wide open. Then—at an almost glacial pace—the monster lumbered out of the closet and into the meeting room. There was a great collective gasp. When the Majestic Prince of Monsters was front and center and on full display in all his feathered horror, I began to lay out the vision we had for making a feature-length monster movie and then screening it at the Majestic Theater as a way of reclaiming the site of the tragedy for the community, purifying—and maybe even re-sanctifying—the space. I was masterfully building up to the big reveal, at which point Eli would take off his mask and essentially dare The Survivors to accept him as a fellow sufferer, despite the fact that he was linked by blood to the killer of everyone’s loved ones.

But then Sandra Coyle stood. “How is this nonsense, this foolishness meant to help anyone? We need stricter gun control laws! We need politicians who aren’t taking kickbacks from the NRA! We need justice! We need—”

That’s when the feathered Majestic Prince of Monsters began to tilt backward—stiff as a freshly chopped tree—hitting the back of his head against a sharp metallic corner of the podium as he plummeted to the ground.

Isaiah was the first to reach Eli, and when he tore off the feathered monster mask everyone gasped again—although I couldn’t tell if the group was shocked by Eli’s identity or the fact that blood was gushing from the back of his neck and pooling on the floor, very much like what we had all witnessed in the Majestic Theater on that fateful December night.

I’m sad to admit that I froze.

“Call an ambulance!” Isaiah screamed as he removed his suit jacket and then pressed it into Eli’s wound, cradling the boy’s head and trying to stop the bleeding.

Then EMTs were wheeling Eli out of the library on a stretcher—as the newly applied, antiseptically white dressings slowly turned plum red—and Jill was pulling me by the hand to her truck. We followed the flashing lights of the ambulance to the hospital, where the emergency room staff stitched up Eli’s cut and declared him dehydrated and suffering from extreme heat exhaustion. Soon enough he was reclining in a bed with an IV drip inserted into his arm and a privacy curtain pulled around his resting body.

When they finally let us in to see him, Eli said, “You really sold the vision tonight, Mr. Goodgame. You were fantastic! But I think we’re going to have to make some adjustments to the monster suit.”

He went on to say it was ferociously hot in that closet and nerves had forced him to put the suit back on prematurely, so he was sorry that he had passed out and ruined everything, but he thought my speech was so motivating that he was willing to bet this little setback wouldn’t hurt us too much in the long run.

“Right?” he said when I didn’t respond.

The boy searched my eyes for reassurance, but I’d already spent what I had to give that evening.

Jill elbowed me several times, but I couldn’t bring any part of myself to level with Eli and explain that we had most definitely blown any shot whatsoever of enlisting the help of The Survivors and had also most likely retraumatized all of them in the process. Standing there in the emergency room, I believed our presentation couldn’t have gone any worse. And our dream of making a monster movie had died before it had even really been born. But I thought it best to gently break that reality to the boy once he was rehydrated and we had gotten him out of the hospital.

When it became apparent that I wasn’t going to reply, Jill said, “You just rest, Eli,” and then patted his arm maternally before pulling me out of the emergency room and into some dingy abandoned hallway.

“You’ve absolutely got to make this movie happen,” Jill whispered fiercely at me. “After giving a speech like you did tonight, the boy in there is practically exploding with hope. You can’t take that away from him now.”

“I thought you were against the movie,” I countered.

“I’m for finishing what you started,” Jill said. “Especially when there’s a wounded boy involved. You have the kid’s future in your hands now, Lucas. You’re all he’s got. And he’s pinned everything on this silly dream of making a monster movie and, well, your words tonight moved me—to be honest—and now I, too, am a little emotionally invested.”