THE SECRET LIVES OF DENTISTS
The second one comes about a month later.
This time, though, it’s not me who sees it - the silver medal goes to Justin Gorhammer, who despite the brutal surname has the look of a teenager whose future is in suburban dentistry and just hasn’t realised it yet. I’ve only ever seen him in slacks, and he’s the one who calls them ‘slacks’. Poor guy never had a chance.
I read somewhere that suicide statistics among dentists are curiously high. Maybe it’s true. Maybe they have some peculiar insight into the dark chaos of existence. Something about the effect of gazing into mouths all day long. All those wet, lumpen landscapes prompting a creeping realisation that we’re little more than meat and teeth. That’s enough to send anyone careening over the edge.
Certainly Justin seems to be cutting a determined path towards the less stable end of his future career, because - to circle back to my earlier drop - Gorhammer Junior is apparently on intimate terms with the demonic forces of the world. However, since everyone knows demons don’t exist, he’s either lying or he’s insane, right? And don’t you immediately want to find out which one it is?
Well, you do if you’re me.
The video - now at a hundred thousand views and change - starts innocuously enough. A young, sleepy-eyed and pale-skinned Justin lanks lankily around a cluttered, rather sweetly primary coloured bedroom. The camera is evidently set up next to his computer, because soon he sits down with his face in close up, sporting a sleek headset that brings to mind adverts for call-centre jobs filled with suspiciously happy looking workers, or a heyday Britney Spears.
There is much fiddling and clicking. Then Justin begins droning on in an exceptionally monotonous tone in some archaic dialect. For one excitable moment I assume he’s speaking in tongues, before realising he is in fact narrating the minutiae of playing an inscrutable video game to us, the viewer.
This is what Justin does as a side-hustle to help pay off his college tuition money debt - records himself playing video games and uploads unfathomable numbers of them to the internet, accruing ad revenue as he goes. My basic research suggests he makes a decent amount from this fabulously anal pastime, too, so frankly All the Points to his entrepreneurial spirit.
Have you ever watched a gamer walkthrough video? These things are long - they average out at around one lifetime/two hours per video - so I’m just about getting ready to nod off to Justin’s meticulous, soporific stop-start descriptions of his avatar’s every move when something changes.
It takes me a second to figure out what has alerted me, and then I have it - his breathing. I can hear it through the tiny microphone hovering around his chin, and it’s gotten faster. Pantier.
His eyes cut off to the side, then they flick back to the game screen. Side, then back.
Slowly, haltingly, his voice trembling, Justin starts to sing.
‘You gotta’
-pause-
‘aaaa-ccent-u-ate the positive’
-pause-
‘eeeeee-lim-in-ate the negative’
-pause-
‘latch on-to thee-affirmative, don’t care for mister in-between - ’
He’s no barbershop quartet hopeful, is Justin, but it might be his voice is coming out that way because he’s very, very scared. I can see it all over him. His eyes flicker side/back, side/back, and his face has that watery melt of someone close to tears. With a sudden, violent fumble his hands reach towards the screen, unhooking the camera from his computer. The view swims drunkenly as the camera gets turned around to point toward the far corner of his room.
‘You see it, right?’ I hear Justin whisper from behind the camera. ‘You fucking see that? There’s a demon in my bedroom, right? This can’t be happening. Oh god. Oh god. Oh no. Oh don’t come closer, don’t come - ’
The camera tips and rolls and shudders as it is dropped to the floor. In the now right-angled frame I can just see Justin dancing towards his wardrobe, shrieking incoherently. He opens up the door and pushes himself bodily inwards. The door half closes behind him.
From the wardrobe’s depths comes a mindless, bone-chilling moaning.
It goes on for a minute or two more before it is interrupted by a knocking at his bedroom door and a muffled ‘Justin? Justin? Is everything okay?’
‘Mummy!’ screeches the wardrobe. ‘Mummy help me please help it’s in here again, it’s here the demon’s here.’
There is some more of this before the video cuts out.
I drag on the video’s timer with my finger, back to the moment just before Justin turned the camera to the corner of his room to show us a demon. I play the video back over, then back and over, again and again, hungrily searching each frame.
The corner of Justin’s room is brightly lit by a standing lamp. No mistakable shadows. No stuffed toys that could conceivably turn menacing on a bad mushroom trip. There’s just… nothing.
Oh, Justin.
This video is all over social. He must have posted it himself. A humiliatingly regrettable attempt to prove the existence of the supernatural or something - fine. But why hasn’t anyone with even a silver of heart taken it down? Did his parents leave it up as a warning? "As a child, our Justin didn’t eat his greens, and now look what’s happened. Please, children, avoid his fate by trying for your five a day.”
Poor guy. Seems like he’s in a bad way.
Obviously I immediately need to go to his house and interrogate him.
PLEASANTVILLE
I heard that the Gorhammers’ neighbour, two doors down - Keith something or other, unctuous owner of Curl Up and Dye, the trendiest hairdresser on what passes for a high street here - well, he once called the police on Justin for “hosting a rave”.
Alas for our eager best and brightest, for when they arrived in furious splendour with sirens a-whirling, all they found was a small knot of sixteen year-old kids having a Back to the Future marathon with a few illicit beers and a party size bag of twiglets. Justin lives in the kind of neighbourhood that doesn’t brook a raised voice.
As soon as I hit his street, riding my old rickety bike like a precocious innocent from a Spielberg film, I notice that I’m starting to cringe at the clicking and clacking noises I’m making, as if I’m vandalising the quiet. Goldie, my bike, whirrs and groans up the Gorhammer’s garden path, passing neatly shaped fuchsia bushes, their lurid My-Little-Pony pink and purple coloured flowers shimmying in the breeze. There are two clean steps up to the door, and roman style pillars on either side. I lean Goldie against one pillar and ring the bell.
It takes a while, making me feel furtive and out of place.
Eventually a woman answers the door. She has a neat blonde bob tucked behind her ears, a billowing art teacher-style shirt and tired, guarded eyes.
‘Mrs. Gorhammer?’ I ask.
The guardedness briefly lifts.
‘One of you girls again,’ she says.
Not quite the greeting I was hoping for.
Maybe she doesn’t like my haircut. I was aiming for Angelina Jolie in Hackers but since, unlike Angelina, I don’t posses the natural beauty more usually found on [e.g.] an elven huntress forced to depart Rivendell and share oxygen with the rest of us average mouthbreathers for transgressions unknown, I’ve likely bypassed ‘sexy pixie cut hacker’ and landed square in ‘tufty madwoman’.
Or maybe it’s the tattoos. My mother would have an aneurysm if they were real so they’re only temps, but they are rather confrontationally all over my arms. There’s a giant upside-down cross on the underneath of one forearm, because there’s nothing a childhood catholic runs to faster than showboat satanism as soon as she hits pubescence. Then again the cross is only upside down to me, so I suppose to everyone else it looks like I have a girl hard-on for Jesus.
This is the kind of thing I find funny, just so you know what you’re getting into here.
‘How can I help you,’ says Mrs. Gorhammer, with the clear downward inflection that means ‘I don’t really want to help you’.
‘I just came to visit Justin,’ I offer. ‘You know, see how he’s doing.’
Mrs Gorhammer frowns. ‘I had no idea you and Justin were such friends.’
Her surprise is forgivable. We grew up in different circles. Justin went to the kind of school with a PTA that threatened to withhold term fees until the board consented to getting a roof for the Olympic-sized open-air swimming pool. I went to the kind of school where the only way we’d get a swimming pool is if we dug a hole out the back lot and lined it with bin bags.
‘We’re not friends, exactly,’ I say, cursing my natural obsession with the truth. ‘But I just wanted to check on him, after all the hullabaloo over the demon video thing. Offer the old emotional support.’
Charming rarely comes up on the list of Alec describers. Smooth, that’s another non-appearer. Mrs. Gorhammer hesitates.
‘That’s very nice of you,’ she says, ‘but Justin has all the support he needs right now. Perhaps you could send him a message through his social media.’
This woman has the careful grace of a politician’s publicist, but also - Justin is still on his social media? That’s brave. I stopped checking all mine six months ago, just after it happened. Couldn’t deal with the sheer volume of horror that digital strangers like to inflict on other digital strangers. If people want to be nice to me, they can jolly well do it to my face, where it means more. Also, rarely will people make the special effort to say the awful things in person that they say on social without a second’s thought, so it cuts out a lot of the nasty.
Speaking of nasty, I play the bad card. The one I’m not supposed to play. My mouth opens and out it comes.
‘My name is Alec Landry,’ I say. ‘Maybe you heard about what happened to my brother, Lucas? And then this thing with Justin pops up on my radar, and, in the words of Alicia Silverstone, I’m totally buggin’. It’s been a really hard few months, Mrs Gorhammer. Maybe Justin could offer me some insight?’
I see it - the softening, like fridged butter left out in the sun. A tip from me to you: plucking the guilt string works better than a microwave.
Usually.
‘I’m sorry,’ says Justin’s mother. ‘I am. It was terrible, what happened with your brother. But what Justin needs right now to get better is peace and quiet. He doesn’t need any more… upsets. Keep well, won’t you?’
Then she shuts the door in my face.
I am an upset, I think.
I feel oddly flattered.
Steering my bike in front of me like a weapon, I make a beeline for the row of pretty pale pink cherry blossoms lining the street and take shelter behind a slender trunk.
Then I deliberately shake out a pre-rolled cigarette from the crumpled packet in my bag and light it. A small, meaningless rebellion, but I’m still waiting for some kind of sky alarm, triggered by my curling cigarette smoke, alerting the neighbourhood to my horrifying transgression.
This burb. This town.
‘Can I get some of that?’
The high voice startles me, and I swing around to discover a skinny, coltish girl of maybe fifteen, so at least two years younger than me, possibly more.
‘Greetings, young rapscallion,’ I say. ‘Your name?’
She cocks her head like a robin, her bright black eyes daring but unsure.
‘You were just at my house,’ she says.
Ah. Justin’s little sister.
‘Amelia, I presume?’ I say.
Amelia shrugs.
I withdraw another cigarette, twirling its liquorice-dark length between my fingers.
‘What is it?’ asks Amelia.
‘Don’t worry, it won’t get you high,’ I say.
She eyes it nervously as she takes it. I offer her the lighter. She sparks up and inhales.
(Alright, alright, wait a second before you judge me.)
Then she makes a face and sticks out her tongue in comical horror. ‘What is this stuff?’
‘Dried non-toxic, non mind-altering herbal matter wrapped in clove paper,’ I say. ‘I don’t rumba with nicotine. I told you, it won’t get you high, it’s mostly affectation.’
(See? I’m not that bad.)
‘Regular cigarettes don’t get you high,’ she says, holding the cigarette cupped to her chest with her back to her house.
‘Nicotine? ’Fraid so. It’s a a stimulant. One of the most addictive on the planet, might I add. It’s no fentanyl, but it holds its own.’
‘What are you, like a health nut?’
‘No, honey, just a life nut.’
Amelia rolls her eyes and takes another drag, and all without even the merest suggestion of hacking up a lung. She’s definitely smoked before. Looks like Purgatory Lane boasts a little more rebellion than twiglet vomitariums.
‘Tut tut,’ I tell her.
‘Who’s gonna believe you?’ she mocks.
Gutsy little git. Suddenly I like her.
‘Touché,’ I comment. ‘My town stock has indeed taken a tumble in recent times.’
She squints at me through smoke curls. ‘Why do you talk like you’re Sam Spade crossed with Oscar Wilde?’
‘You know who Sam Spade is?’ I ask, impressed.
‘My granddad’s the biggest Humphrey Bogart fan. He’s always got one of his films on whenever we go over for Sunday roast.’
Granddad. Damn, Alec, you’re old.
‘Nice,’ I comment. ‘Bogart was hot.’
‘He was tiny,’ she mocks.
I am four foot ten.
‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Tiny people are hot.’
‘So you saw the video of my brother, then,’ she says, switching back fast. Likes to keep people on their toes, this one.
‘I saw it,’ I say, more kindly.
Judging by the viewing numbers, I and half the world.
Amelia hunches, notices, corrects herself. ‘What do you think?’
‘What do I think?’ I echo.
‘He’s crazy, right? Just like your brother?’
Right for the jugular, as only fifteen year olds know how to do.
‘What do you know about Lucas?’ I ask her directly.
She shrinks a little, and then rallies. A challenge. Fine.
‘Lucas Landry,’ she invokes his name like a curse. ‘I mean. It’s all anyone around here’s talked about for like the last six months. Nothing ever happens in this town, right?’
Seems like even the right side of the tracks heard about my brother. Popular in life, but nowhere near as famous as he is in death.
‘And what,’ I smile, ‘have,’ my smile widens, ‘you,’ the top half of my head threatens to slice right off, ‘heard?’
Amelia has the nervous-defiant look of the type who suddenly realises they might have gone too far but will just keep doubling down until someone or something explodes.
‘He started going crazy and seeing demons everywhere and then he died by suicide out in the woods,’ she says, very fast.
I shrug. ‘That’s about the size of it.’
Amelia relaxes very slightly. ‘Did he always have a mental illness?’
‘I don’t even know what that means,’ I throw back - a habit of contrariness. ‘No, I guess. He was just… normal. He was just Lucas. Until a few months ago, that is, and then he wasn’t any more.’ I sigh. The kid needs honesty. Everyone needs honesty, even if they don’t want it.
‘The answer is I don’t know,’ I tell her. ‘I don’t know what was wrong with my brother.’
‘Well you have to know, you’ve already been through it,’ she insists. ‘Didn’t he get like an official diagnosis or anything? They could have fixed it, with the right drugs and therapy or whatever, right?’
What should I say to this wounded girl? Yes, I’ve already been through it, but it hasn’t ended? Can’t she see that my sniffing around her own poor brother means I’m still going through it? That maybe I always will be? That we mostly still have precious little idea how the human brain functions, or even reality itself, so trying to figure out what might be wrong with someone is a little bit like throwing spears into an indifferent ocean so vast and unknowable it might as well be another planet, and hoping one of our desperately puny weapons eventually hits a fish? That since we first made the terrible mistake of cogito ergo sum all those thousands of years ago, the greatest minds in each generation take on the question of how and why we work and we’re still no closer to a good answer?
No, you’re right. I shouldn’t say any of that.
‘Maybe they could have,’ I tell her, ‘given more time.’
She flicks away the remains of my bequeathed clove beauty and, with trembling fingers, gets out her phone.
‘I mean,’ she says, bringing up the Justin video with one thumb tap - hoo boy, she must live with it all queued up and ready to go - ‘there’s nothing there. There’s no demon, no nothing. Did you ever see anything? Anything at all? With your… with Lucas?’
She holds out the phone like a weapon, or a defence. Showing me the video herself is telling. Wearing it like a badge. Watching me watch it.
This girl already likes to scratch up her wounds. Someone oughta nip that tendency in the bud before it gets to being the only way she knows how to do life. Precociousness with a dash of trauma - it’s like looking in a mirror, except mortifyingly she has a better dress sense than me.
‘No,’ I tell her. ‘I never saw a damn thing that he did.’
She stares at me, then snatches the phone back.
‘Lucas lost his grip,’ I say simply, ‘and then we lost him. But you - you still have time, okay? Just… love your brother, and support him. That’s what he needs from you. He’s a human being, and all human beings need love. No matter what he says or does. Okay?’
Amelia shrugs. Nods. Walks away with the world weighing down her shoulders.
At the time, I really did think this was the best thing to say to her.
No matter what he says or does.
Ah, the desperate lies we tell ourselves.