Darkheart

The Past: Good & Evil

The absolute last thing in the world that Jeremiah wanted to do was go to the marina that night. Well, that wasn't entirely true, or he would've stayed home. The last thing he wanted was the subsequent humiliation he'd face if whatever he'd done were leaked. The fact that he had no idea what images or video might reveal made everything so much more difficult to process. In his mind, Jeremiah had done deviant sexual things. Otherwise, why would he have been naked? And why would there have been all those marks around his lower half? He'd examined his pale shapeless body several times, totalled twenty-seven scratches and marks, big and small, mostly up on his legs and around his genitals. It was almost as if some animal had been set loose on him. Luckily, the lacerations were surface level, and none bled or needed more than the precautionary antibiotic ointment he used.

Time between that resort party and the fourth of August passed in thick clouds. Jeremiah had returned home, making his way after locating something to wear, and sequestered himself in his room. He'd not come out for several days except to use the bathroom, claiming illness, and his mother had believed him. Jeremiah was not a liar, and he was so rarely sick, that his family had no reason to doubt. The only person who checked in on him with the intention of securing the real story was Caroline; she knew her brother better than anyone and had understood something heavier than a virus loomed over him. But Jeremiah had been unwilling to speak even with her. (How could he? If his sister saw images of him from that night--whatever they were--what would she think of him?) He'd just curled his lanky body into his bed, pulled the covers over his distress, and, between moments spent reading and staring out the window, slept. His mother had called the resort about his inability to work, as Jeremiah hadn't been willing to do it himself, and he ignored the world for nearly a week as he attempted to wade through the deep and sudden self-loathing he'd never known he could feel.

Jeremiah wasn't quite a stranger to self-reproach. He didn't know his heart; he hardly knew his body. What they'd done to him--it'd touched a chord that'd already been strung within the depths of himself but never quite thrummed. Without the ability to comprehend let alone admit it, Jeremiah had a growing sense that something was, perhaps, not quite good about him. No one had questioned his disinterest in the opposite or even the same sex, but Jeremiah himself had considered it on occasion, particularly those occasions where he did notice a sort of physical stirring. And he'd begun to recognize that what seemed to cause that root-of-the-gut awakening below was, for lack of kinder terminology, something abnormal, perhaps even something his mother might call evil. He'd felt it when he'd watched horror movies with Crystal, those moments when actors were enduring the physical torment they'd hoped to avoid. He'd felt it when looking at images or reading stories of the tortured saints in his church books: Saint Sebastian with his arrows sticking out of him, gazing upward as if pleading for aid; Saint Agatha with her removed breasts on a platter in her hand; Saint Bartholomew lying prone while his skin was being peeled off. And he'd noticed--with so much shame he could hardly stand to recall--that when he'd watched the brutal attack on that counselor, the mixture of the man's powerlessness and pleasure and pain had given Jeremiah such a bewildering thrill that he'd thought of it over and over again in a mélange of fright and self-hatred and penitent, secret stimulation.

The nakedness, and the marks there--whatever the resorters had done to him that night, it was as if they'd known what would mortify him, exactly that combination of carnality and abuse. This was what disturbed him more than anything else, that they seemed to know the darkness of his heart, which he himself was only just attempting to understand.

So when the night of August fourth arrived, Jeremiah pulled himself together, dressed in shorts and tee and sandals, and made up an excuse about going out with Crystal. Caroline had looked at him with some degree of suspicion, and though he'd caught her doubt, he'd ignored the invitation to explain himself, to talk things over.