Jaime Netzer | Fiction | How to Die via Black Warrior Review

Everybody knows this, but, die young. I look around at my fellow contestants and start to smirk. I’m only twenty, won’t even be drinking legal for months and months. I can see them peering at me, thinking thoughts they don’t realize are petty and unflattering, thinking, for example, why would little One-Eye want to win her own death?

But they’re here, too. We aren’t any different. Except I have a better story.

The casting call was expansive, expensive. Pop-up ads on all three of the singles websites I frequented, text messages sent to out weekly to contacts either stolen or bought from the country’s busiest therapists. I’d even seen a billboard. It read: Sad? Tired? Want to go out with a bang? Sign up for the biggest reality show yet. We guarantee: You will be missed.

I’d thought, yeah. As in, Yes, please.

The winner of Final Act, they say, will be awarded a show-assisted suicide, complete with live video coverage, and the post-mortem release of a thrilling biopic starring an important and sexy actor or actress. Though the winner won’t see it, the world will always remember. You will be missed.

I sent in a video, and two weeks later, received a call back and an invitation to the final round of casting in Kansas City. Now I’m sitting on the yard lines at Arrowhead Stadium with the ninety-nine other contestants who have made it this far, waiting in orderly rows for our names to be called. The stadium curves above us, blocking the sun, casting long shadows from its concrete lips. We’re here in Kansas, the producers say, because Arrowhead is in the precise center of the country—just click on Google Maps and hold down the zoom. So Midwesterners like me are getting a break. And, really, when else have we?

I sit cross-legged, earbuds in, listening to my own voice through the tinny speakers. My power song has always been “She’s Like the Wind,” so I recorded myself singing it. Laugh, but I have a very pleasant voice. In front of me sits a guy of indeterminate age wearing a suit, his hair thick and oily, bits of grass clinging to his wingtips. On the 30-yard line, off to my left, a woman with Albert Einstein hair and feathers hanging from her ears piles duffel bags around her like a fortress. The producers asked us to bring only the possessions we couldn’t live without. I’ve brought my warped homecoming crown. The feather woman has brought, apparently, the contents of her garage. No way you’re a winner, I’m thinking, when she looks my way. I shake my head at her. Sorry, lady.

The guy in front of me cranes his neck around; he’s pushing forty, easy. “What’s your name?” he asks, pretending not to take notice of my eye patch.

“Oh come on,” I say. “Who cares?”

Die sexy. When I was seventeen, I was something to behold. Not at sixteen, because back then I was still clamped beneath orthodontia, and not at eighteen, because that’s when I lost my right eye in the jet-ski accident. But that seventeenth year? A real beauty, tall and tan.

I’d been lucky with the height, but I worked at the bronze. To my mother’s chagrin, I spent five days a week at a tanning salon, sweating in a thong, 30-proof sunscreen on my ass and banana-scented lotion everywhere else, the fans pushing dry air over my head and between my toes. Sometimes I’d fall asleep, baking like a German chocolate cake. “You look spoiled,” Mother had said, pressing her lips together in languid judgment. “Too tropical.”

I won my homecoming crown at seventeen, too. I rode around the stadium in a convertible, alone, while my football-playing King huddled with his teammates. I tried to wave regally without looking too twee.

The King popped my proverbial cherry, too, after the dance. But he was a Christian, he knew better. Jesus had been there for him, cheering him on like a zealous sports fan for the opposing team: One, two, three, four, hope to Christ you do not score! Alas, he fucked me. All of that worldly fleshy lusty stuff was no good, the King explained after we’d finished, and he shivered a little, as if my insides made his skin crawl. To which I thought, but did not say: Dude. Your cum is still on my stomach.

So I used to be sexy. But now, post eyeball excision, I’ve got a new angle. I’m hoping the accident and the subsequent deformity might make me interesting enough to win. Like the girls who disappear in Aruba or Belize, only I’m still here. Half-mutilated. Even today, if I close my good eye, I can see King (who, seven months after the deflowering, was also the lucky fellow who broke my face) standing up on his jet-ski, laughing as he twists it in figure eights, the spray of green water glittering in the afternoon sun as he came closer to me. I waved, hoping he might sleep with me again, and stuck my chest out a little. I know, I know. Fool me once; fool me twice. I just wanted him to like me.

Whatever. I readjust my eye patch and run my fingers through my hair. Aim for interesting, I think. In my ears, I hear myself sing: “Just a fool to believe I have anything she needs.”

A man in a Final Act t-shirt taps my shoulder. His beard envelops his whole mouth, like a bear or a lion. I want to roar at him.

“Name?” he says.

“Lawrence,” I say. “Lawrence the lion-hearted.” I drum my fingers on my eye patch, and he swallows.

“Come with me,” he says. “You’ve been chosen for a qualifying interview.”

Make your death interesting. Enter: the competition. Sure, I can kill myself. But it’s the technique, the pizzazz of it that’s important—the props, the minutia, the parting letter. Final Act, terrible name aside, will take care of all that. Get through the interview process, then get to the house. Spend a month completing the contests under the scrutiny of cameras for all of the U.S. of A. to see. Win the contests. Earn your death, and a baker’s pinch of immortality.

“Lawrence,” the bearded man says, “I’m Blake, but everyone calls me Rocket. I’ll be interviewing you.”

“Fantastic,” I say, smiling.

He turns on the camera; I’m sitting in a director’s chair. Behind me is a dramatically lit backdrop. The show’s title is scrawled on a drawing of a film marker, to which I raise an approving eyebrow. Punny, I think. Cut!

“Should I undress now?” I say.

Rocket laughs, and I wink with my good eye.

‘Tell us why you should be on the show,” he says.

I inhale through my nose. I think of a thousand clichés:

All my life has been leading to it all comes down to my destiny is this moment of truth.

But, really, I’m just weary of being alive. Not depressed, not at all. Worn out. Frayed. Exfuckhausted. At first, after the accident, I’d been okay—been thrilled, even. I wasn’t dead! But Mother looked at me, pronounced me a sad turkey, and burst into tears. Turns out, that was just the beginning. Since then, every person I have known and all the new people I meet treat me, at least for a hollow moment or two, like I am irreparably and terribly broken. I have learned that the amount of pity people can squeeze into milliseconds is gaping, infinite.

“I’m young,” I say to Rocket, “I’m gorgeous, I can sing your pants off, I take a decent tan, and I have a mother who would honestly kill me if she knew I was competing to die.” I crack a smile. “Which, come to think of it, would make for good entertainment.”

“But our ads have been clear,” Rocket says, moving his head from behind the eyepiece and frowning at me. “We want serious contestants without any… hesitations.”

“Let me rephrase.” My heart pounds. I adjust my eye patch, provocatively, with my pinky. I am a death minx. “This is my destiny,” I say. “I want this more than anyone else you’ll talk to today. I’ll do anything. Bleep you. Name it.”

Rocket shoots me a thumbs up. “Keep talking. Tell us about the eye.”

As I give him the standard spiel, my minds ambles to the sideline, as it always has. When I was a kid, I once tripped over nothing on the sidewalk, just nothing. Skinned my knee. I remember sitting there, bawling, pulling gravel from the wound and thinking, that’s how it happens. Nothing goes to nothing. How could X have led to Y? And, seriously, where is my mother?

After the interview, Rocket leaves me alone in the room for a few minutes. I run my hands along the drop cloth behind me and look through the camera’s viewfinder. When he comes back, he says, “Hey, don’t do that. Also, you’re in.”

I do a little pogo-stick jig, nearly knocking his camera over. I kiss his beard, near his ear. His skin goes flush beneath the hair.

“You won’t regret it,” I whisper.

Be survived by important people. Truth is, number four is my weak spot.

Father: Dead, long ago, cirrhosis of the liver, barely knew him.
Siblings: None.
Rich-and-cruel-but-sexy or alternatively flat-broke-but-heart-of-precious-metal-and-also-sexy fiancée: No such luck.
Mother…

Mother is a lot of things, but important, no. When I eventually told her about the contest she murmured and cooed, as she always does over the phone. She’d moved to Florida, which had made her as floppy and soaked with humidity as the hats she pulled over her graying curls every day.

“Oh, my baby,” she said. “Why would you do such a thing?” She sounded distracted, unconcerned.

“Because, Mother,” I said. “I’m alone, I’m deformed, and you’ve always been sort of awful.”

“Oh, when have I been so bad?” she said. “Such a flair for drama, Lawrence. Here, Princess.” I pictured the little rat-dog crawling in her fat lap.

“How’s the eye, honey?” she said. “Any better?”

“Jesus Christ, Mother. It’s gone. It’s a hole. Not a pimple.”

“Sure,” she said. “I know that, honey. Now, listen, don’t try too hard on that silly show, okay? It’s fine if you want to get famous, but I’m still hoping you’ll move down here someday. I get lonely, you know. I am, generally speaking, a depressed person.”

I hung up.

Back to the trouble: Mom exhausts my list. I’m not in school, and my job as a cook in an upscale retirement home in Leawood isn’t exactly a breeding ground for superstars. I had planned to do something else after high school graduation, but then I lost the eye on Memorial Day, and by the time I’d recovered, I had trouble getting the kinds of jobs everyone else had—lifeguard, barista, waitress—and college seemed impossible. So I went to Maple Woods, where the customers are mostly half-blind, too.

Not-so-important people at Maple Woods:

Joe, my boss, who likes to put his hand on the small of my back after I’ve gotten sweaty on the line.
Ina, my favorite resident, who loves my banana cream pies.
Melvin, my least favorite resident, who drank decaf coffee incessantly until he died cup in hand one night, shitting himself in the process.

Speaking of: Die while you’re still sharp, smart, with it. Don’t let them pull one over on you. In a twist I should’ve seen coming, Rocket isn’t just a cameraman. He’s the show’s not-quite-pretty-boy host. A week after the interview, they pick me up, 5 a.m. sharp, at my apartment and drive me in an unmarked van to a McMansion neighborhood not far from Arrowhead Stadium—the Hallmark family home is close by. They’ve asked me to bring along my most prized possessions, and as we pull in the driveway, I hand over the bent homecoming crown, watching them seal it in a gallon plastic bag. Then Rocket offers me his hand and I hop down from the van, noticing as I do that two other vans are also parked in the vast driveway, and two other people also have cameras trained on them as they emerge. My rival Sleeping Beauties. We gather in a semicircle and Rocket introduces all of us to one another, and to America. There’s Mr. Zimmerman—bespectacled, leather jacket—who won’t give us his first name and insists we call him Z. And Raquel, a petite blonde with these terribly sad blue eyes, who I suspect is my only real competition. I start strategizing as Rocket explains that the live feed will be running all day, every day, for a calendar month. YouTube anticipates huge numbers. The contests will take place on Thursdays, when the show airs. Not live, but close—same-day airings. Three weeks of competition, then the grand finale.

“The first test,” Rocket says, “will be mental.” He’s swapped his t-shirt for a slick pinstripe suit. The beard crawls down his trunk neck, and, springing from his unbuttoned shirt, eager chest hair reaches to meet it. He’s not unhandsome, this bear. Between my legs, a tickle I haven’t felt in months comes and goes. Rocket stands in front of the door of the house I assume we’ll be staying in.

“America is watching everything,” he says. “There’s no right answer. We just want to choose the most perfect candidate.”

We nod. Raquel cracks her little knuckles. Rocket swings open the door and we step inside.

“Your first test,” he says, “is to choose a room.”

We spread out. There are numbers on four of the bedrooms. Three more are unmarked. I open one door after another: bunk beds, then a king-sized waterbed, and, behind an unmarked door, a room devoid of furniture and boasting a blue light bulb in its overhead fixture. Raquel and Z and I move swiftly, trying to avoid one another’s eyes. No use getting close. We’re not here to make friends. We think the same things, tell ourselves the same clichés.

I seize the empty room. I slip in, hold my breath, and assemble myself in a yoga-style child’s pose, facedown on the white carpet. Cameramen follow me. I don’t look up, but instead stretch my sinewy arms out in front of me, feeling a pull between my shoulder blades. One cameraman moves behind me, getting the money shot, I guess. I exhale and close my eye. Blackness.

Part of the test, turns out, is that they leave us alone with our choice for hours. They lock the door from the outside. There are cameras built into each wall. I do some more yoga, I examine my blue skin for scabs to pick, I nap. It’s not the worst way to spend a day. Rocket comes in eventually, flanked by a crew wielding boom mics. They shine a bright light in my face.

“Tell us,” he says. “What is it about the emptiness of this space that spoke to you?”

I smile. I’ve chosen correctly.

“It feels like a mirror,” I say. “I’m not comfortable in places people usually find reassuring. I like to be—” here I make a wild gesture with my arms, something like a breaststroke, “—unsurrounded.”

Rocket nods. “And why do you think that is?”

I shrug. “This room feels like my dead eye socket.” I try to look mournful.

The camera lights go off.

“Nice work, kid,” he says.

“Did I win?”

“It’s not that straightforward.” His beard looks oily today, more menacing.

“Don’t lead me on, Rocket,” I say. “Nobody likes a tease.” I stretch my arms up. “May I ask you something in private?”

He glances at me, then motions for the crew to leave. I slide my hands under his shirt, around his back, and before he can move, I grab hold of the microphone pack and pull.

“What’s your problem, Lawrence?” The wire is stuck somewhere in his armpit, and I get distracted wondering how hairy it is in there, how dank.

“I think I might like the way you stink,” I say. “Could we find out sometime?”

I come close to him and though his eyes are narrowed, he also has an erection.

“I’ve got a job to do,” he says.

“So fuck me on national television!” I say. “We can do it old-school Real World-style, under some big comforter, our sweet nothings transcribed and close-captioned.”

Finally, he smirks. “You’re strange,” he says.

“Thanks.” I mean it. He moves toward the door and I stay put, behaving. He’s just a distraction, anyway. I’m not here to make lovers, I think.

Die a monster. Time passes. Things go like this: talk to Z (avoid Raquel, of course), find out Z is a Vietnam vet, feel bad for him, ask Z about Raquel but without much response, except that she’s 25 (older!) and, in Z’s words, “had it really rough” (oh, please), eat the food they bring in, find the cameras in the house and show each and every one of them close-ups of my eye patch and/or cleavage, write lengthy monologues and recite them into the microphones dangling from the ceiling of my blue room, wonder if Mother is watching, wonder if the Eye-Popping Prom King is watching, wonder what Decaf Melvin would think of all this if he weren’t dead. Then Thursday comes around, and we’re tasked with killing a kitten. It is a call-to-arms: Who will do it? How will we do it? Who will break down? Will one of us refuse? Rocket hands the kitten over to Z, just a little ball of white fluff with eyes, and then resumes his usual posture, legs spread, hands on hips of same pinstripe suit. I change my mind about wanting to sleep with him again; he has the ass of a teenage cheerleader, all bubble and tone. It’s not natural.

“Remember,” he says, “We’re all watching.” Then he steps out of the frame.

Z hands the kitten to me immediately, and though I want to bury my face in it, I toss it off on Raquel, who holds the poor thing in her lap, stroking its spine.

“This is crazy,” she says, crying. “So entirely beside the point.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Z says. “Precious life. It’s a metaphor, sweetie.”

I roll my eye.

“Speaking of kittens,” Z says. “I think you both ought to get home to your mothers and let me do this. You’re just kids. Neither of you should be here.”

“I’m a legal adult,” I say. “And it’s none of your fucking business.”

“Lot of work for the editors with the cussing, Lawrence,” Rocket calls from over my shoulder. “It’s fine, you know, for color, but just FYI.”

“My mom’s dead,” Raquel says, tears welling up in those infinite eyes. Fuck, I think.

“Oh, sweetie,” Z says. “You never said.”

“Car crash,” she says, unleashing drug-dog tears that I can almost see lunging for the hearts and sympathies of our viewers. “She was on her way to my recital. I’ve always blamed myself.”

“Ballet?” I say, desperate for a change of subject. “Oboe?”

“Does it really matter, Lawrence?” She smiles ever so weakly. The bitch hasn’t even ruined her makeup.

“It would be most humane to strangle the thing,” Z says. He mimes it, which makes Raquel wince.

“What if all three of us jump on it?” I say. I can feel a camera or two adjust so that I’m in view.

“Lawrence,” Raquel says. “Seriously?”

“What?” I stand, making sure my patch is aimed at the camera. “That way no one gets the credit, or blame, whichever it is. And it’s out of its misery quickly.”

Z shakes his head. “You girls don’t have the balls,” he says. “No offense.”

Raquel keeps petting the damn thing. I want to throw up.

“We do,” I say, thinking maybe camaraderie is better. “Don’t we?” I smile back at her.

“But the physics aren’t right,” Z says.

“Irrelevant,” I say. “One of us will hit it, but we all will have made the choice.”

“But the one who hits it will feel worse,” Raquels says, as if she wants that pain.

“Or better,” I say, glaring at her.

There is considerable bickering and hair-splitting, but eventually the three of us put on our shoes and hold hands and step up on the sofa. The kitten lies beneath us, looking nowhere.

“Okay,” I say. “Geronimo?”

Then Raquel faints. She crumples down into the couch. I think of fainting goats. I think of Mother.

“Oh thank God,” Z whispers, as we try to revive her. “I didn’t want her to have to do that even one little bit.” He scoops up the kitten.

Out of the corner of my eye, Rocket steps from behind the camera and its blinking red light. I wonder, have recording lights always been red? Who was it that said, yes, the red light means we’re documenting? Was it Motown? Didn’t anyone say, wait, red means stop, not go?

“She needs medical attention, of course,” Rocket says. “You two will have to finish it off.”

Raquel comes to, wobbles a minute, then smiles a killer smile. “Let me do it,” she says. She stands on shaky legs. “Put the beast down.”

A medic appears. Rocket motions to him. “You’re not well, Raquel,” he says. “We can’t let you compete without checking the vitals. Can’t have you croaking early on us.”

“I’m fine,” she snaps. “I’m better than fine. Put it down.”

“Now hang on,” Z says. “I think we ought to share the credit, here.”

“Me too,” I say. But I’m picturing the kitten bounding through a field, curled up in a sunbeam, rolling on its back to expose its belly. Just because I want to die doesn’t mean I want everything to.

“I need this,” Raquel says. She grabs the kitten from Z, but he hangs on. I think to wrap my hands around it, too, as it stretches like a sagging clothesline. Did Mother use a clothesline? Am I swapping advertisement for memory? And did I name my childhood cat Rhoda, or Rhonda? The kitten yowls, and I have heard the sound before. Years ago, Mother backed the van over Rhonda, of course it was Rhonda, Help Me, the Beach Boys, of course, and as the wheels passed over her middle she released a pitiful popping sound, a kind of death fart, and Mother grounded me for weeks because of the guilt I’d caused her. Why hadn’t I said something?, she demanded. Help me, Rhonda.

Raquel jumps. She yodels, I believe. The kitten’s bones snap—a hundred wishbones and no one getting what they hoped for—and I get sick, flipping off the blinking red light of the camera aimed on me as I vomit into a houseplant. At least they’ll have to blur part of the shot. Monsters, I think. Aren’t we all?

Be rich, die penniless. Or be penniless, but die rich. Sure, I don’t have any actual money. But we all have our stuff. We hold close and count repeatedly whatever makes us feel smug. Nice teeth, a house, a gray leather jacket gifted to you in the heat of summer by the guy who took your eye out. Another week means another test. We still don’t know what America thinks of the last one, what the producers think. Raquel has taken to drawing pictures of the kitten and taping them up on the walls of her room. My room is still blue, and still free of adornment. After the kitten, Z dismantled his top bunk and fashioned himself a double bed, which apparently he now sleeps in sideways. “To reflect how things change,” he says. Horseshit, I think. Melodrama.

Rocket came to my room the night we’d killed it, no microphone, no expression on his face. We lay together on the bare floor, throwing marbles at the cameras until we’d busted them all, and he ran his fingers around the oval of my face over and over again.

“I want to see your face,” he said. “All of it.”

I shook my head, unbuttoning my shirt instead. My body wasn’t ready, but he kissed me on the mouth, cupped his palm over my eye patch and afterward, I slept well. When I woke in the morning, the cameras had already been replaced.

Now he walks in the house to start tonight’s show, striding with purpose, and I’m neither lusty nor repulsed. I inhale slowly, trying to find my own feelings. I picture them swimming in my gut like bright fish. I cannot catch them.

This week’s test is simple, Rocket explains: We have to burn what matters most. The crew brings out our prized possessions from the first week—which, now that I think about it, feels like months ago. How the sun was just beginning to rise and Rocket’s pinstripes just beginning to wiggle at the edges of my vision. The possibility of death, of never having to bake a pie again. How time stretches and bends at the mercy of our happiness, I think. Time stops when you’d rather die. I shake my head. We’re almost through. The crew hands us our goods, still in their plastic baggies. Then we move to the house’s mammoth, fenced-in backyard where they’ve built a bonfire so big it must be illegal.

“But what will the neighbors think?” I say, winking at Rocket. He won’t even look at me.

We stand before the blazing fire, and I think, no matter how large, it is still contained. This is how the fire and I are different. Z clutches a pair of dog tags tightly. Raquel worries a square of tattered blue fabric between her thumb and her forefinger. I pinch the fake stones of my crown, thrilled at myself for my foresight. The crown is useless, and I hate it. Watching it burn will be a delight. As I steal glances at Z and Raquel, I try to measure: Who will be most upset?

Z is up first. We are to explain what the item means to us, then let it go. He says, “These aren’t my dog tags. They’re one of my buddies.” He wells up. Until now, he hasn’t cried. “He has a daughter who really should have them. I’ve been meaning to get them to her for years. Are you sure I have to do this?”

Rocket nods. Z lingers, shifting his weight from one hip to the other. He drops them in.

“The physics of it, Z,” I whisper, squeezing his meaty forearm. “They might not melt.”

He nods, wiping tears.

“Raquel?” Rocket says.

She rubs the fabric against her cheek in circles. “It’s from one of my mother’s old dresses,” she says. “When I was a girl, I used to rub it on my nose while I sucked my thumb. I had a hard time breaking the habit…”

“Go on,” Rocket says. His eyes are wide, fearful or prying, I can’t tell which.

“…because Dad had a hard time breaking his,” she says. “My blue—that’s what I called it—was the only thing that made me feel any better after he’d hit me.”

“When you’re ready,” Rocket says.

Suddenly, as if it is just a Kleenex, Raquel tosses in the fabric. But then she leans into Z, burying her face in his broad chest. He puts his arms around her loosely, obligingly. The cameramen reposition, and I wait, feeling cocky.

“Lawrence,” Rocket says. “We’d like you to remove your patch.”

I expel a breath. “Excuse me?”

“It’s a possession,” Rocket says. He meets my eyes. “We’re not incorrect in guessing that you care about it more than the crown, are we? We’d like you to accept this challenge from us. Of course, you can say no.”

I’ve dived too deep. I think again of the spray of green water, of King’s forearm muscles taut as he holds down the gas on the jet-ski. But what he did was an accident, I think. Would the King have hurt me like this?

“Sure,” I say. I slip the patch from my head, trying to breathe normally. It’s warm, resting in my hand. I look into the camera and picture myself: threaded scar tissue like a topographical map, a nose pulled slightly to one side as if by a string, my right eyebrow disheveled, uneven.

“Okay,” Rocket says, his voice shaky. “That’s great.”

No one wants to see me—not really. I toss it in.

Leave behind a complicated legacy. Finale week, and the mood is mind-numbingly tense. Tonight’s show is live, so we’ve just been sitting around eyeing one another all day. None of us have said more than three words. I look back and forth between Raquel and Z, feeling less for them now than I ever did. Maybe the feeling-fish have left, I think, nevermore to catch the light with their scales. I feel emptied, and also like I am bound to win. This knowledge is an elephant resting on my chest. Perhaps a small elephant, Asian maybe, but still.

At eight, we assemble. Rocket surprises us with a fourth and final task. As he talks, I try to determine if he is feeling any pity. He slipped a blank piece of paper under my door last night. I think I know what he means.

“You’ve all weathered some painful emotional storms this month,” he says. “Your next task will be individual, and your toughest yet. All three of you are responsible for making pleas to your family. You must try to convince them not to call in to the number we’ll be flashing on the screen, because if they do, you lose. You live. You should try to alienate everyone in your life, so they do not rescue you.”

Here I think, done.

He goes on: “Whoever succeeds, whoever receives no phone calls, wins. In the event of a tie, we’ll have a tie-breaker.”

My stomach drops. Will my mother be watching, umbrella-adorned drink in hand? And what are the ratings like right now, anyway? How many people have seen me without my patch?

Z is up first. Raquel and I sit on the couch and watch him deliver his speech.

“Look,” he says. “I just never got around to making my life any better. I screwed it up a thousand ways, and I’m too old to do anything about it now. Jake, I never respected you. I slept with your wife a half a dozen times. Penny, sweetheart, I slept with Jake’s wife half a dozen times. Son, although I pretended otherwise, I could never stomach your gay-pride shit, that flouncy-ass walk of yours.” He shrugs. “Hell, I can’t even stand the sound of children crying anymore. Makes me homicidal, almost, except I’m too suicidal to kill anything but myself. I hate it here. I’m sorry. Please don’t call.”

My turn. My mouth is the Sahara. I put my hand over my scar tissue reflexively, but then force myself to drop it. “Look, Mom,” I say. “I wish I didn’t have to say this, but you’re a fool. You’re shallow, and I know you think the accident ruined me. But you’re wrong. You ruined me.” I nod.

“Anything else?” Rocket asks.

“No,” I say. “That should be enough.”

Raquel stands, shaking, while my brain pulses at my skull. Should I have been crueler, I wonder? More inclusive of all of the countless other people who have looked at me like I’m a broken, useless thing? Do they even hold me in their memories?

Raquel’s chest is heaving. “I’m really sorry, Daddy,” she says. “I’ve just been so hurt…” but she has dissolved into sobs. She cannot speak. The cameramen keep rolling, and when she finally looks up, eyes red, she cries out, “I said I’m sorry!” Snot is dripping from her nose. They turn the cameras away.

Forget the rules. Just forget them all. The producers open the phone lines. A few light up. Crew members take notation, record calls. They’ll be played back to us. I don’t know much time passes as I stand, running my fingers over my lumpy face, scratching along my hairline where my patch goes.

Rocket returns and lines us up.

“We have our results,” he says. “And I have to say, they’re disappointing. Raquel. You had nineteen people call in. Your father called twenty-five times. You’ve lost, but I think that’s what you wanted.”

She nods, her eyes still shining, but her chin tilted up in what looks like hope.

“Z,” he says. “Your brother was your only phone call—his five-second message will keep you alive. Let’s listen to it.”

Z hangs his head. His brother’s voice comes through the speakers: “It doesn’t matter man, I need you.”

Z sighs, bringing his palms to prayer at his lips. “Never could do anything right,” he says.

“So that leaves Lawrence,” Rocket says, grinning a little.

My chest twists up. Every part of my body hums. I’m a goddamned symphony, I think.

His smile broadens. “You lose, too,” he says. “You had two calls. We have no contestant. You all will live.”

“Who called?” I say. My eye socket buzzes from its own electrical field. I think about getting a cat from a local shelter. I think about slapping my mother good and hard. I think about my lonely apartment and my stupid job and my boring life.

“Let’s listen,” Rocket says.

First: “Honey, I’m sorry, but I need you to go on living so that you can take care of me once I’m stuck in diapers. I know you think I’m so bad, but Lawrence, I’m unhappy. It’s probably why you’re unhappy.” She pauses, sighs. “I need you, baby. Come down to Florida and take care of me.”

Why am I even surprised?

Second: “My name is Kip, and I was Lawrence’s, friend, sort of, in high school. I’m calling because it’s my fault. I was the one driving that jet-ski that did that to her. I think about it every day. I feel awful every day.”

My throat catches.

The King goes on: “I know she’s probably way over me and maybe even over what happened, she was always pretty, even after … but I could never forgive myself, and Jesus could never forgive me, if I didn’t do something to try and stop this. It’s not God’s way. Lawrence, if you hear this, I’m sorry.”

Now I burst into tears. Because hearing the voices feels good. It’s like feeling a lemur take a kernel of corn out of your palm with its perfect little hand. Like feeling every single sadness in you soften as your own body is able to break it down. And because Kip is wrong about me; I am ugly because I am vain, and yet, he thinks otherwise! Because there amidst everything, there is family, there is sex, there are as many ways to have your heart buoyed as broken. I open my eye and wipe at my tears. The cameras blink off and Rocket comes to me, resting both palms on my shoulders.

“Aren’t you glad you lost?” he says, squeezing, his eyes restless with happiness or lust or both.

I shake my head. “I wish I were dead,” I say. And I realize that I mean it. Not because Rocket betrayed me, not because of King or my mother or my own infinite, prosaic weaknesses, but because no one gets to save anyone, not really, and if that’s true, well, why can’t I die now, touching happiness, remembering it, feeling it brush my calf like something shining and elusive, something that shouldn’t be caught at all?

This story was originally published in Black Warrior Review and has been reprinted here with permission of the author.

Jaime Netzer is a fiction writer living in Austin, Texas. Her stories have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Parcel, Twelve Stories, and elsewhere. Also a nationally published journalist, she earned her MFA at Texas State University, where she served as the L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Writer in Residence from 2012-2013. Find her on .

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