“Who?”
“Six Million Dollar Man. That’s who I am. That’s who I become. A gorilla genius. I accept the handoff, it starts to slip, I understand how it’ll slip, I pivot some to get Leif and Mikey safe, but now, since I’m fighting gravity in about nine different contradictory ways just to even hold on to the slippery fucking bitch switch and also pivoting, I fall down, okay? Well, first I start falling down. I start falling down while still holding the bitch switch, which, it’s gonna come down, Billy, see—I see it’s gonna come down right on my face, and I won’t just be dead, but very, very ugly, it will cave in my face and I will die, and I do not want to die, and so what I do is…What I do is, while I’m falling: I throw it. I throw the bitch switch. I’m basically doing the splits, right? I’m doing the splits while turning to the left, and with every last bit of gorilla I got—the bitch switch weighs a hundred and twenty-three pounds—I hurl the fucking thing up, straight up, and right before it comes down, right when it’s at the height of its arc—which is not a high arc, but is definitely higher than you’d think—I kinda, while still doing the splits, mind you, I kinda throw myself somehow at Leif and Mikey. And I land at their feet, right? Bump my head on Leif’s insole. And the bitch switch, it lands, spike-down, six, maybe seven inches from my face. Sends pieces of concrete from the plant floor flying. I caught a shard in the cheek, a shard in my forehead, which instantly, right, starts gushing like a firehose—the forehead cut, I’m saying—and I’m lying, there, Billy, blood pouring into my eyes, shooting into my eyes, and, for a second…”
He chewed, parked, took a deep breath.
“For a second, I was a god. I swear. For a second, the bitch switch, which hasn’t settled yet, which is standing on its spike for just another split second, trying to like decide which direction to tip, I’m looking at it, lying in its shadow with blood in my eyes, realizing it can fall on my head, fall on my head or my neck, or my head and my neck, and, you know, still, after all I just did—which what I did was superhuman, I threw that fucking thing, right up in the air, son, you can ask Leif and Mikey, what I did should not have been possible—and I’m lying there in its crooked shadow now, and it’s about to tip, it’s about to fall, and even after all that I did to keep us safe, me and Leif and Mikey, I’m seeing how it could still kill me—but, I don’t have time to move, Billy, is the point, this is all like microseconds, the time this is taking to happen, and I don’t have time to move, and I know it, and I’m telling you, I had a moment, Billy, I had no time to move, and what I thought was, ‘No!’ Just like that. I thought, ‘No!’ and, the bitch switch, I swear, that ‘No!’ that I thought—it tipped the bitch switch away. Pushed it. Sent it falling away from me.
“And look, I know that didn’t happen, but I also know it did, that part about the ‘No!’ And I was lying there, safe, thinking, ‘Clyde you’re a god, you’re a god, you’re a god,’ and that’s when I felt all the pain in my body. My whole upper body. Chest, arms, neck, hands. Every muscle clamping tight, like I was turning to stone, and I thought, ‘This is it. It’s over. This is your major coronary event. You did it. You killed yourself. You stopped you and your friends from being crushed to death by doing something that made your heart explode. You’re dead. It’s over. You asshole. You did all you could and it wasn’t enough. You couldn’t take it. Now you will die. And maybe—maybe you already have.’
“I mean it, Billy. It was…something. I thought maybe I was dead, was sure that if I wasn’t, then I was about to be. And then I guess I passed out.
“They said I passed out, but I was thinking, you know? I was thinking the whole time. I was thinking, ‘This is shit. This is shit. How can this be such shit? What kind of shit is this? Where is Annie?*1 How can’t I see her? Why can’t I see her? All I got here is blackness and silence and me? All I got here is me? I don’t get to see her? I can’t tell her about Billy? That he wrote a book? She doesn’t get to know that our son wrote a book? I don’t even get to see her, but I gotta still exist?’
“This was the worst. Worst thing I could imagine. Unbelievable. I didn’t want to believe it. And I thought about that ‘No!’ you know? That push. And I thought, ‘If I can do that, if that is possible to do while alive, and now I am dead, still Clyde, not just worm food—why can’t I find my wife now I’m dead?’ And I thought, ‘Maybe I’m in hell. Those stupid fucking Christians, maybe they were right. Maybe this is hell, this nothing-but-me. I hope that it’s hell. If it’s hell,’ I was thinking, ‘and not just the place everyone goes when they die, then that would not be so bad as I originally thought. Because Annie wouldn’t be here. She wouldn’t be in hell. She didn’t believe in God, that’s true, but she was good, any God would understand that, so she of all people would not be in hell, and that’s a shit deal for me, yeah? It’s a shit deal for me but it’s better at least than a shit deal for the both of us, hell for the both of us, and she isn’t here, and if I’m here that means she’s somewhere else, probably knows everything about Billy and me already, she probably read Billy’s book before he even wrote it. And maybe,’ I thought, ‘maybe one day I’ll get out of hell, and then I’ll get to see her.’
“And I was trying to figure out if it was better, you know, to think about that—to think about how one day I’d maybe get out of hell—or if it was worse. If that only made it worse. Like maybe that was part of being in hell, was thinking you’ll get out one day but you never will. I mean, you know me, I don’t know fuck-all about Christianity. I wasn’t raised that way. But I knew that phrase, eternal damnation. Who doesn’t? You hear it all the time, right? And what I was thinking was, ‘If there’s eternal damnation—if they specify eternal damnation when they talk about hell—then that means there’s gotta be just temporary damnation, too.’ Makes sense, right? Because why be redundant?
“But then I thought of some reasons why, okay? I spent a lot of time, I guess, thinking about some reasons why, and they’re boring to think about, and hard to explain, I’ll skip them, but the best one was simple and easy to explain: People are fucking stupid. There’s no reason not to think they’d be redundant. So what I ended up thinking was, ‘It’s either one way or the other. Eternal or temporary. It’s one way or the other, but you are definitely in hell.’ And then the next thing I thought was, ‘If there’s hell, then maybe there’s ghosts, too. Maybe you could be one. See if you can be one. See if you can maybe try and haunt Billy. Talk to him a little. Just see if you can do it. And let him know about hell.’
“And I don’t mean I wanted to scare you or anything. It was nothing malicious. I was just feeling really alone, and desperate, and I thought that I could probably make you understand where I was coming from. I didn’t think you’d be scared of me, and I thought that if you did get scared of me, I’d be able to calm you down.