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Jay Heath

From what I’ve been able to piece together, his early childhood was normal. Nothing strange, nothing that stood out. None of those red flags popped up in any of the interviews I’ve conducted since his death. None of those should-have-knowns or not-so-surprisings. Everyone I talked to said he was like any other normal, average, American boy growing up. He loved baseball, apple pie, his parents, and his dog.

I can’t shake the image of his body, curled up. Sleep escapes me.

We got the call one afternoon. Through this whole ordeal, you’d think I would have memorized the date by now, forever burned it into my memory, and maybe I have, but at this moment, it escapes me. I can’t remember anything about that day…the temperature, whether it was raining or not. Nothing. My first memory of that day was upon entering the room.

His name was Jonathan Spellman, age 27. We received the call from his landlord who attempted to enter the premise after Spellman was weeks overdue on the rent. When the landlord, a man named Andrei Orlovsky, tried to enter using a master key, the door met resistance. He attempted to force the door open, but was unsuccessful. He was, however, able to peer into the apartment and noticed the room appeared to be in disarray. Upon this discovery, he placed a call to the police department. A patrolman arrived and, after finding the body, I was summoned to the scene.

Though Orlovsky claimed the room was in disarray when he looked inside, the furniture and other items were organized and placed as they should be. The sheets of paper littering the floor were probably what he identified as the clutter.

I replay these moments constantly. My mind arranges images and memories like slideshows, fragmented and out of order, moving along at a varying pace, oblivious to my wants. I just swallowed a handful of sleeping pills but I know they won’t do the trick.

The paper, after I opened it and flattened it out, contained a simple yet detailed drawing.

A sketch of a human hand.

As I sifted through the other pages, I saw they all contained the same subject matter, though each one was slightly different. Puzzlement and wonder were now taking hold.

“STOP!” I yell to myself, hoping my voice can pass through the void of time from now to me back then. I want to tell myself to just exit the room before it’s too late.

In these recollections, I never listen. I pass patrolmen who shuffle toward the door, mouth slightly open, eyes vacant.

Stop.

His name was Jonathan Spellman, and as far as I could tell, he was a loner. Subsequent searches of his apartment revealed no addresses, phone numbers, or email addresses of any friends or family. An attempt to log onto his computer was unsuccessful due to the prompting for a password. Alone in his apartment, he was disconnected from the world. Fingerprints confirmed he was indeed Mr. Spellman. His prints were already in the system due to a few run-ins with the law a few years back. Mostly minor drug charges. Nothing too severe.

His fifth grade yearbook photo is a far cry from the scene I found in his room. He’s smiling, and it’s not one of those usual fake, yearbook smiles. He is genuinely happy to be alive, and his fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Pearl Young, confirms this assessment.

“Johnny was always so happy,” she says, looking fondly at the picture. “He wasn’t the brightest kid I’ve ever taught, but he definitely wasn’t the slowest. But he always tried hard. He always put forth his best effort and wanted to succeed. I could tell he was going to go places.”

I don’t have the heart to tell her how he ended up. Lying there, on his bedroom floor, knees pulled to his chest, hugging himself into the smallest ball possible.

“I could tell he was going to go places,” she repeats.

Right now, he occupies a place six feet below the surface. I wonder how long it takes until the worms find their way into the box. Something moves and crawls under my skin.

Mrs. Young isn’t much help. She paints a picture of Every Boy, USA. He had fallen far from that state when I first met him. I need to find something more recent, but I keep finding dead ends. How do you learn about someone who, for all intents and purposes, has completely cut himself off from society? Occasionally, a story comes along in the media of a man who was once thought to be lost suddenly appears in town, showing up after being missing for eight years. His family has given him up for dead, and when he’s questioned, he simply says that he wanted quiet, so he traveled out into the forest to live an isolated life.

It’s not very common, but it does happen.

But how does one go about disappearing in a city of close to a million people?

The financial records provided the first clues.

Spellman had no form of employment. Yet his rent was paid, on time, except of course for the last month. Tardiness was unlike him, which is why the landlord was suspicious. Searching back, I found that he inherited a substantial sum of money when his parents died. This was the next piece of the puzzle.

It’s been days and my eyes have felt every hour. I beg my eyelids to give up this futile fight, to submit to gravity and finally close. I languish in some personalized purgatory, somewhere between reality and dreams, where both come and go and blend until I can’t tell the difference between the two. I want to convince myself that my mind is wrong, and that none of this ever happened. But I’m not that strong.

I turn on the computer.

Based on information from the computer at work, I find Jonathan’s brother, Douglas Spellman. His voice is immediately alert when I tell him who I am.

“Is my wife okay?”

“Yes,” I reply. “I’m calling about Jonathan Spellman.”

“Oh.” A lengthy pause.

“Your brother.”

“Yes. I know. It’s just been so long. He’s been away for such a long time that sometimes I forget I have a brother. I haven’t heard anyone speak his name in years. It just caught me off guard.”

“Your brother is dead.”

“He is? Oh, God. How?”

I don’t know how to tell him. Instead, I ask about their parents.

“My parents, our parents, have been dead for almost eight years now.”

“Did they die at the same time?”

”Yes, sir.”

“Then I take it wasn’t natural causes.”

“Not at all. They died in a plane crash. It hit Johnny especially hard. His fiancée was on the plane as well. They were planning to go to Las Vegas for vacation. Johnny was supposed to be on the flight, but something happened at work. Instead of canceling the trip, our parents and Stacy, his fiancée, went ahead and flew out. Johnny said the problem at work wouldn’t take long to fix and he’d fly out that night to meet them. He was on his way to the airport when he heard the news.”

“I bet it was hard on him.”

“You have no idea. From what we gathered, many of the people survived the crash. Some kind of engine failure occurred. The plane went down in a field in the middle of nowhere in the Midwest. The local emergency crews were totally overwhelmed by the scene. Wreckage littering the area, the fires, the carnage. They said you could hear the screams from inside the plane as the survivors were burned alive by the burning jet fuel.”

“Jesus…”

“Yes. Johnny’s mind broke, fractured beyond repair. I stayed with him a few days, as long as I could. He woke up every night, screaming until his throat was raw. One day, after I left, he described his dream to me. In the dream, he is traveling through rows and rows of corn, and even though he knows it is night, the sky still burned orange and red as if it were day. As he travels through the corn, the air around him begins to warm. Then, the corn ends and he’s standing in an open area. Just before him, a plane sits, belly on the ground, fire pouring from the windows and reaching to the stars. Johnny said he could hear Stacy calling his name, but every time he tried to save her, the heat pushed him back. He had this dream nightly, and it always lasted just long enough to take a bit more of his sanity.”

“How long has it been since you’ve talked to him?”

“About 6 months after the funerals. The last time I ever talked to him, he sounded out of it. He kept babbling, talking too fast, mumbling something about arms.”

My thoughts immediately flash to Jonathan’s floor. The drawings. The arms.

“What about arms?” I ask.

“He said, “Dougie, I miss her. I miss mom and dad. Mostly I miss her arms. They were the only place I felt safe, Dougie.” He kept repeating that, that he missed her arms and that he couldn’t sleep and that he’d never be at peace, that he would never be home again. Then he hung up. Then he was gone.”

We talked a few more minutes then hung up. I looked over at the wall where a picture of an arm hung, stapled to the wall.

I see my hand reaching out, pushing the door back. A few policemen stand in the room, gawking or trying to avoid looking. It doesn’t make sense, the medical examiner says, shaking his head. The body looks small, all curled up, all skin and bones. I squat down to get a better look under the computer desk.

“Did you find him this way?” I ask the patrolman by the door, the one who initially found him.

“No,” he replies. “He was wearing that thing.”

He points and I follow the direction of his finger to a small, hat like object a few feet away.

“What is it?” I asked.

The pieces come together slowly. With every piece that slides into place, I find myself slipping away a little bit more.

“Some kind of hat. It was on his head.”

It looks like no hat I’ve ever seen, a tangled mob of wires and circuits. A long cord extended from the mess. My eyes slowly followed its path, moving from the hat to the computer, where I take a glance at the walls for the first time.

From top to bottom, the entire wall is covered with numbers and figures, so small that at first they appeared to be a random pattern of wallpaper. The numbers swirl and this must be what vertigo feels like, falling forward into the vast expanse of equations.

“Sir?”

A voice snatches me from the void. I turn slowly to the medical examiner.

“Does he appear to be smiling?” he asks.

I look at the body.

The medical examiner calls me and says he’s done examining the body and it appears Jonathan Spellman died due to starvation.

“Does anyone really die from that anymore? I mean someone with money and such?” he asks.

I don’t have an answer.

I go back to Spellman’s house, breaking the police seal on the door. Two things are bothering me.

First to the kitchen. The cabinets reflect my horror.

Cans of vegetables. Boxes of noodles. Soup. All still fresh.

How does someone die of starvation in a house full of food?

Now…to my last question…

The hat holds the clue. I go into the room and pause, recalling Spellman’s lifeless body, curled up, skin barely holding his bones together. Yet that smile, the smile of a thousand joys. That smile haunted me as I walked, distant from everyone else. I began to identify with Spellman. The hat holds the clue.

I take the hat and computer. I do not mark them as evidence. I do not plan to take them to the station. Instead, I place them in my car and drive home.

I search for understanding, but it’s always just out of my grasp.

Upon booting up his computer at home, a box pops up and asks me for a password. I try many different passwords, each guess driving me farther and farther off course.

Spellman.

Jonathan.

Johnny.

Stacy.

Mom.

Arm.

Dougie.

Combinations of numbers, including his birthday and Stacy’s. Each press of the enter key causes a message to flash. Incorrect Password.

The answer to all my questions lies in this computer. The answer to what Jonathan Spellman had been doing for seven years is just a password away.

So close, but yet, so far.

Those numbers and figures come running back. Awareness hits me with enough force that I almost fall backwards out of my chair. I sift through photographs from the scene until I find the one I was looking for. A close up picture of the numbers on the wall. I stare again, feeling that familiar falling sensation when I notice it, a message hidden in the numbers.

I turn back into the computer and type in another password.

Home.

This time, the incorrect password message does not flash. Instead, the computer’s desktop appears, where a single icon sits in the middle of the screen. The file is named Home. I plug the hat-like object into the computer and place it onto my head.

I double click the file.

I lie on the floor.

For a few moments, nothing happens.

Then, a million fireflies light up in my head and all goes white.

Though I am alone in the room, I am not alone.

Though no one is there, I feel a tingling feeling as if someone else brushes against me.

My skin sparks in response, warmth flashing.

Then…

Everything I’ve ever worried about, all those thoughts that weighed heavy on my mind like lead, they leave me.

As those arms wrap around me, I am pure.

My mind fights this information, knowing that it’s impossible, knowing that still, I am alone, that no one could be holding me.

But what my body feels overrides my mind.

And now I know what Spellman had been doing.

In his last conversation with his brother, Jonathan said that he missed Stacy’s arms and the peace and warmth they provided.

Somehow, he found a way to bring those arms back.

Involuntarily, my knees drew themselves to my stomach and my arms wrapped around them, the feeling of her arms so intense that I was reduced to nothing but clay, ready to be molded.

I lost track of time.

I forgot where I was.

I forgot who I was.

I smile.

All I know…is that I am home.