The Truth About Keeping Secrets(17)
I was afraid, afraid, afraid.
One night I crept back into Dad’s office and took out all the folders from the cabinet.
I just wanted to face them. To feel them, to drag a finger along the outside and coax out the knowledge through touch.
I spread them all out on the floor like playing cards, like some magic trick where I’d scoop one up, flick it open: is this your murderer?
I raged without any idea of where to aim it, nursed blame without any idea of how to allocate it. I get it, Dad. It was confidentiality. For my sake. For their sake. I understood. But if he had just told me, maybe there would’ve been some hint, some clue, something to tell me that one particular person was at the end of their rope.
My eyes flicked to June’s file.
Even her. There was something unsettling about Dad having seen someone who went to my school, about the fact that she’d been here, spilled her guts, and I never would have even known. Not only was Dad overseeing the collective world of Pleasant Hills, but my world too. He should have told me. I should have known. I should have known June had been here.
This was his fault, said my brain, for underestimating me; did he think I couldn’t handle it? Hiding all this darkness underneath his nonchalance, his secrecy, when maybe telling me could have saved his life. If he had told me, this might not have even happened at all.
No one even looked into it. No one even cared.
That doesn’t happen in Pleasant Hills, they said. Of course it didn’t. Nothing happened in Pleasant Hills. Everything was great in Pleasant Hills.
I couldn’t open the files. I couldn’t.
I knew that if I began I wouldn’t stop. Dad would have disowned me. He wouldn’t have wanted it.
And I also knew that even if I did open them, I couldn’t be objective. Innocuous things would look like intent. You can’t see clearly when everything is death.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Dad, the folders, the swerve, smash, gone, and barely anything helped except for the baths. I’d run them so hot I could barely stand it, then lower my head until just my ears were fully submerged, and stay there like that. Just me and the interminable lulling of the water. Then I’d dip again, except now it was all of me, and I’d shut my eyes and hold my breath until I felt moments away from passing out, thought maybe that must be what dying feels like, and I’d do that over and over again until I felt sufficiently nauseous and stupid.
Or I’d go to the ToD. It practically became a staple of my daily routine. Mainly, I was struck by the sheer quantity of videos. I figured the probability of actually catching someone’s death on tape was pretty low, which meant the amount of death that had to be occurring to account for all the footage was incomprehensible. God, it was so easy. Humans were fragile. Soft and fleshy. A single slip was enough to kill one. Oh, it’s a little icy out today, better walk slow, whoops, smack, dead. I’m late, better hurry without looking both ways, whoops, smash, dead. All the hopes and dreams and loving and longing snuffed out in a flash like it had never meant anything at all.
I knew it wasn’t ethical. These people I was watching die had families. Kids. People who wouldn’t watch these videos themselves, let alone be at peace with the knowledge that thousands of death-voyeurs were doing it. Not just watching them – leaving comments. Trying to be funny, to one-up each other, like it was all fake, like these people were actors, like they were never really human.
Barox90, on a video of a guy getting hit by a bus: he got busted :(
Warrenwelder, on a particularly shaky video of a car crash: Goddamn, just keep the fucking camera on the subject. It’s NOT hard.
GetMeRich, on a video of war combat: ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: Headshot Honcho.
Want to know what’s worse? I laughed at some of them. A lot of them.
Because if I didn’t, I would have gone fucking insane.
But what if, I thought, somehow, someone had a video of Dad? Camera positioned on the ceiling of the hospital room, looking down at him with his limbs outstretched like a mounted beetle, gasping for his last breath? Comment from Bender989: If you turn up the volume at 38 seconds you can hear him gurgle.
Well, I wouldn’t like that at all, I decided.
So I didn’t think about it any more.
It was the first week of November, and I was sitting in Dad’s office.
I had worked through most of the ToD’s backlog and now had to sort the posts by ‘most recent’; a digital vulture, circling and licking my lips at the thought of any scrap of rot. Starved and brave, I settled on one that the comments promised was particularly disturbing – a freak accident, a couple driving along when some cargo from the truck up ahead comes loose and crashes through the windshield. Weirdly, the screaming made me feel barely anything at all.
And with my headphones on and my back to the door, I had no way of knowing that Mom had come into the office.
I instinctively slammed my laptop shut when I finally felt her there, but it was too late. She saw. And her eyes glazed over, wide and unnatural as a recently stuffed bit of taxidermy, said nothing as she moved towards Dad’s desk.
Mom and Dad both had the emotional recklessness of a napkin, which had its pros and cons. Dad was sometimes so rational that he came across as unfeeling, and Mom just figured that everything left unacknowledged might just go away. I’d never been shouted at or grounded in a fit of anger. I almost wanted them to do it. Come on. Give me something to work with. A little melodrama for once, drenched in feeling and passion and rage. Rage!