How They Were Found

HOLD ON TO YOUR VACUUM

ACCORDING TO TEACHER, THERE IS ONLY ONE RULE, AND IT IS THIS: No matter what happens, hold on to your vacuum. We have each been given one, each a different shape and size according to our needs. My own vacuum is bright red and bulky, as heavy as a ten-year-old, its worn cord slipping through my fingers like the tail of a rodent, thick and rubbery and repugnant. I start to complain, but Teacher holds up a hand and silences me.

Teacher says, This is the vacuum that was assigned to you, and the only one you’ll be allowed to play with.

I don’t know this man’s actual name or title, whether he’s referee or judge or umpire, but he reminds me of the man who taught my eighth-grade science class. He has the same balding hair pulled into a ponytail, the same small gold crucifix earring, and when he smiles he shows the same small yellow teeth pocked by smoke and sweets. I only know he’s in charge because he’s the one standing on the stage of the auditorium while the rest of us wait in the front row below. Because he’s the only one of us without a vacuum of his own.

After my complaint, there are no other questions, and so Teacher says, I promise to count to at least one hundred before I come looking for you.

He says, I promise to look for you as long as you need me to, and then he says, Go.

As soon as Teacher finishes talking, the other players reach for their own vacuum cleaners and lug them up the aisle stairs, then out of the auditorium and into the lobby. From there, some move further into the building and some through the double glass doors into the world waiting outside, but why each person chooses one or the other is unclear to me. One girl is tall and thin and agile, her tiny hand vac fitting perfectly into her grip as she bounds out the door and across the parking lot. I follow her as far as the sidewalk, my hand resting on top of my own vacuum. Watching her run, I don’t know where I should go or what I should do. This is only the first turn, and although Teacher has explained that the game is like hide and seek, I don’t yet understand. I don’t know what the rewards are for success, or what the punishment for failure might be.

I blink once and then Teacher is behind me. Before I can move, his arm shoots around my neck and pulls me into a wrestler’s headlock, his grip strong and sure. His lips are beside my ear, the hairs of his moustache and beard tickling my face as he says, I thought I told you to run.

As he says, You’re too stupid to be brave, so why didn’t you run?

When his other hand comes into view, there is a cordless drill in its grip. The drill is matte black and dull yellow, loaded with a foot-long bit spinning at full speed. Teacher cocks my head and angles the drill downward into the crown of my skull. He pushes it in, past skin and bone, and then I scream and then I can’t remember why I’m screaming and then I’m gone.

I’m carrying the vacuum again, trudging across a farm field full of snow toward the other side, where several rows of dark trees clumped between the snow and the cloudy sky might hide my red vacuum from the exposure of the open field. My lungs burn and my arms ache but I never question the necessity of lugging the vacuum everywhere I go. It is the only rule and so I follow it.

Once beneath the trees, I drag the vacuum over the blanketing floor of pine needles. Heading deeper into the woods, I find a tight bunch of pines whose boughs create a natural shelter into which I tuck myself and my vacuum. I expect to be hidden, to be safe, but I am not alone.

On the ground at my feet is a wounded deer, surrounded by a bloody halo of snow originating from the bullet hole tunneled through its chest. Rather than let go of the vacuum, I transfer its handle to my right hand as I kneel beside the deer. There is a knife in the snow, and because I don’t know what else to do, I pick it up and hold it, looking over at the deer’s still form, at the steam still rising from its blood. I think I know what I am supposed to do, but I don’t know if I can do it.

I place the knife against the breastbone but can’t bring myself to make the cut. I try again and fail again. This is why I never went hunting with my father or my brothers, at least not after the first time. I turn away, leaving the deer and the knife where I found them. When I step out from the press of the tree branches, Teacher’s waiting for me, a thin smile on his face.

He says, You weren’t able to do it before either, so nothing to feel bad about.

Then there is the drill. Then there is the end of my turn.

A new turn begins, in a high school locker room where I’m surrounded by other players, three boys in nothing but boxer shorts with vacuums of their own, giant shop vacs, low and squat on squeaky wheels. I’m naked before them, one hand on my vacuum and one on my crotch.

The biggest of the boys says, Want to get to your locker, don’t you?

Probably pretty ashamed of that little prick. Needs to put his panties on.

Show us what you’ve got and I’ll let you pass. I promise.

This boy, his vacuum is bigger than the others, and also an unmistakable hue of pink.

I know he’s not telling the truth. Whatever happens, someone is definitely going to get hurt.

The boys continue to taunt me, and right before I know I’m about to give in, to just get it over with, the door to the locker room slams open, and in comes Teacher. He smiles, all his little crowded teeth gleaming victorious in the fluorescence.

We scatter, but he’s too fast, the scene too disorienting. The drill enters the bullies first, but eventually it comes for me too.

There is a turn where my father bails me out of jail and then there is the drill. Where my mother finds my slim pornography stash, the drill coming as she tells me who it was that molested her and how she’s afraid I’m going to grow up to be like him. I call a boy in the second grade a nigger even though I don’t know what the word means. The drill enters through my cheek so that I can feel it spinning inside my mouth before it angles upward toward my brain. These turns I never hear Teacher coming, never see him except as a hand holding a weapon.

The line between voyeur and participant blurs. I open a bathroom door and see my babysitter partially naked, squatting with her pants around her ankles, changing her tampon. This is years before I even know what that is. I back out quickly, yelling apologies, my vacuum clunking against the doorframe. Later I will reenact an early masturbation attempt, one hand on myself and the other on the vacuum’s handle as I picture the triangle of pubic hair between her legs. The drill bit finds me right before I orgasm. It is a long time before I see another player again, and when I do I can’t help wondering if I’m playing against them or beside them, if we are rivals or on the same team. It’s hard to know. My only companion comes via the one rule: Hold on to your vacuum. It goes everywhere with me, a conjoined twin or else a tumor made of Chinese plastic and rubber belts.

I grow calmer, more accepting of the drill, like a child who learns to take his medicine no matter how bad it tastes: I’m in a house, behind Teacher now, stalking him for once. A new kind of turn. Teacher climbs a staircase, seemingly unaware of my presence behind him. At the top of the stairs, he enters the first room on the left and closes the door behind him. I follow, dragging the red vacuum as quietly as possible. I don’t have the strength anymore to lift it over the stairs, but I do drag it as quietly as possible, easing it over the carpeted hump of each step. At the top, I remember an old trick I used to play on my younger siblings. I tie one end of my vacuum cord around the handle of the door Teacher’s behind, one to the closed door across the hall. When I open the door on the other side and lower its doorstop, it pulls the cord tight, making it impossible to move either door. I stand in the hallway and wait for Teacher to try to escape. Fifteen minutes pass and still I resolve to be patient. I sit on the floor, cradling my vacuum, rocking it in my arms. It is heavy, far heavier than it was before, and it stinks of burning rubber and fried dust. Impatient, I press my ear against Teacher’s door, listening, and by the time I hear the drill bit chewing through the door, it’s too late to move. Not that I would. I cry out as the bit clears the wood and hits my temple, but only in relief. My hippocampus must be shredded wheat by now and still I crave more, more, more.

Most turns I’m somewhere I don’t want to be, someplace I’ve been once and wouldn’t willingly revisit. I’m a child, making up a story about a man trying to abduct me just to make my mother feel bad for leaving me in the car alone while she paid for her gas. The vacuum’s on the floor of the car between my chubby little legs, Teacher’s in the back seat cleaning his glasses. I come to the worst lie I ever told my wife and it is one of the lowest moments of my life. Even though she never thought to doubt me, it is still terrible living through it again.

Once in a while, the turns bring me to rarer moments, like my college graduation or my wedding day. Moments where my parents or friends or my wife told me they loved me and were proud of me. Moments where a handshake or a hug or a kiss is interrupted by the drill bit battering down the doors of my skull. These are the times I scream the loudest, that I struggle against the bit’s insistence, but Teacher has the steady hand of a surgeon or else an assassin. Of all the players in the game, only he seems constantly sure of his role.

Now there is a turn that is fully recognizable as my own memory, turned into what I know is another game board, another level. I’m at a party when I’m eighteen or nineteen. Everyone is drunk, and everyone has their vacuum with them. I keep drinking, leaning against my vacuum for support, talking to a blonde girl in a miniskirt for hours. She tells me about her boyfriend who’s away at school and I keep pressing, trying too hard but still we end up in a bedroom upstairs, both of us barely conscious, our vacuums leaned against the bed, our bodies tangled in their cords.

I kiss her and she says, I don’t know about this.

I answer by kissing her again.

My hand moves under her skirt, the part of me that is playing the game mimicking the part of me that is a memory.

This is not something I think of often.

It is not something I’ve ever told anyone.

Here, in the game, I stop and pull my hand away. I say, I’m so sorry for what I did to you, and the girl doesn’t say anything back because she’s too far gone to talk.

I say, I promise I won’t do it again, and then I get out of the bed, untangle our cords, and cover her gently with a blanket. When I walk downstairs to find her friends, to tell them they need to look after her, I see that the party is deserted, its falsehood revealed. The only person left is Teacher, holding his big black drill in one hand, a red plastic cup of beer in the other. When he stands and starts walking toward me, I step back, raise my hands in protest.

I say, It’s over. There’s nothing for you here. I changed what happened all by myself.

He moves quickly then, carelessly whipping his beer away in an arc of foam as his other hand shoots up and forward, shoving the drill at my face, the bit already whirling threats. He shakes his head, says, As if one moment was all it took.

I say, I’m still ashamed, Teacher. I’m just not afraid of my shame anymore.

I wrap my arms around the vacuum and its bag full of my dirt. Teacher pulls the trigger, but it is meaningless and he knows it. There are other rules besides the first one, and despite the drill I have begun to discover them.

No new turn follows, only some sort of timeout, intermission. I’m sitting in the end zone of a high school football field while sweat drips from my face, my arms and legs shaking from exertion. Even my vacuum looks tired, its belt worn, its bag full to the point of bursting. Teacher walks across the field with his drill dangling loosely in his grip, and while there’s no malice in his movement, I can’t help jerking away when he comes to sit beside me. The armpits of his shirt are darkened with sweat like sulfur and cheap cologne, rotten eggs soaked in musk.

He says, Why be afraid? Why resist? The only thing I’m killing are the places you were most scared, the places you were caught, found out for what you are.

That’s not true, I say, thinking about the moments where I was proudest, where someone decided I was a good husband, a good son, a good friend. Memories rare enough before the drill.

Teacher smiles, more teeth than curved lips. He says, Good with the bad, sweet with the sour, sometimes you gotta amputate the heart to save the head.

And then there is the drill bit again, pressed against my forehead, already biting through.

I say, I don’t want to play anymore.

I say, It’s not fair to everyone I hurt if I can forget what I did to them.

The drill turns slowly, tearing the skin without piercing the bone beneath. The bit is both cold and hot at the same time. Half of my memories are gone, replaced with the dead nothingness of Teacher’s treatment. If Teacher wins, there will be no remainder left behind.

Through the pain, I say, You cheated. You never explained the rest of the rules. You never told us there was a chance we could win too.

And then I see it, the solution, how to turn the half-life left to play into a second chance, the possibility of being better. I smile too now, wider than I have in all these sad years, and even with the drill twisting through my face I can see that Teacher is for a moment as afraid of me as I am of him.

Teacher says, You’re the one who asked to play, and then he presses the red trigger the rest of the way. The drill bit slides through bone and brain all over again, but this time I don’t give in as quickly. I focus, desperate to hold out for even one more millisecond than I have before. Even that will be an improvement, the first play at the beginning of a big comeback.

Teacher says, Game on, and as my eyes shut, I think, Yes, yes, it is.