The Reason You're Alive Read online

  Dedication

  For Uncle Pete

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  About the Author

  Also by Matthew Quick

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1.

  The doctors were giving me the mushroom treatment—keeping me in the dark and feeding me bullshit.

  I didn’t call them on the subterfuge because I just wanted out of the hospital ASAP, and that required making the people in charge think I was docile. I knew without a doubt that your current employer was still keeping tabs on me, almost five decades after my discharge.

  “Who is Clayton Fire Bear?” the doctors kept asking, only they used his real name, because I apparently kept saying it over and over when I first woke up postoperation. To protect the innocent, Clayton Fire Bear is the fake name I’ll be using in this report. I’m not gonna tell you his real name. I also wasn’t about to tell those civilian morons at the hospital what I’m finally telling you right here and now.

  Doctors are only ever one of three things: pill pushers, needle pokers, or people cutters. All of them love money. Needless to say, they get paid regardless of what messes they make of our bodies. Even if they kill us dead, the doctors’ paychecks remain healthy, and their bank accounts grow.

  The people cutter in charge of my brain surgery shit show said I absorbed a twin when I was in my late mother’s womb, back in 1944, which would make me a murderer before I was even born. You people would love for that to be true, because it would take the United States government off the hook for teaching me how.

  My dumbass neurosurgeon said part of that aforementioned alleged twin grew in my brain for almost seventy years, and the mass they removed from my skull had hair and three tiny teeth that looked like uncooked grains of rice. I was shown a specimen in a bottle of formaldehyde as proof, but you and I and everyone else with a working brain know they had a million and one of those exhibits before I even walked into the hospital, so that little bottle doesn’t prove shit. Furthermore, he said my condition was so rare, he was gonna write a story on what he calls “our surgery” and get paid again, and why wouldn’t he?

  If you believe that absorbed-twin horseshit, you deserve the dumb life you’re currently living. I know it was Agent Orange. The cover-up continues.

  I’m also one hundred percent certain that, at the request of the US government, my surgeon chopped out some of my memory when they were inside my skull, erasing the vital military intelligence I once possessed and even personal memories too, about my wife and my presurgery life, just to be sadistic. But no matter how many chemicals they spray on you, no matter how much of your memory they slice away, you never forget seeing an entire jungle disappear overnight. One day everything’s full and green and lush and breathing. The next day everything’s melted thin and black and stagnant—as if the world were a candle and the sun were a blowtorch. I remember death’s stench darting up my nostrils like an ice pick. You can never unexperience that. Never get entirely free of that chemical decay smell either.

  I have a visible souvenir too: seven little white spots on my left forearm. The doctors say it’s simply damage from the sun, but they don’t know shit, or else you people—aka the government—have paid them to lie. Seven drops of Agent Orange hit my left forearm when I was in the jungle. I’ve been wearing the unlucky constellation ever since.

  My son says if you connect the white dots with your mind, it looks like a map of Vietnam, but that’s bullshit too. Hank may be a hotshot art dealer now, but he still doesn’t know goddamn anything about my war or my life.

  I’m surprised you people didn’t pay my surgeon to saw off my entire fucking arm when they had me knocked out—just to get rid of all remaining evidence that incriminates your traitorous boss, Uncle Sam.

  But, ironically, at the end of this report, you’ll see I was most grateful that your surgeon’s scalpel tickled my memories of Clayton Fire Bear—that big motherfucking Indian—and got me thinking about righting my wrongs.

  But I can’t tell you everything about Fire Bear before I put it all in context. I want you to understand, and understanding is difficult. Takes time. Patience. Which I hope you will really have, like you’ve assured me so many times already.

  The aforementioned girly-man surgeon has never even fired a gun. I asked him. His nose wrinkled in disgust. I told him the great jihad was on, and that the Muslim suicide bombers would just keep coming if we don’t do something serious about it, and quickly, but he didn’t care enough about that to respond. Too much people-cutting to do. Too much money to make. Too much high living in the land of the free.

  When I pushed the issue with the people cutter, referencing the two scumbags who blew up the Boston Marathon, my surgeon said he didn’t want to speak about politics. And why would he, really? He’s on top here at the hospital. Big dog. Things are working out just fine for him right now. He probably has no family in the military, no blood on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan. My surgeon still has all his limbs and all his easy happy civilian memories. No thick red scar stapled shut on top of his head. No little white dots on his forearm either. No recurring nightmares for fifty fucking years. No daily horror show playing inside his skull.

  I obviously needed to buddy up with the guy, so he’d eventually release me once again to walk among the civilians. So I asked him what he liked to do for fun when he’s not working, and without making eye contact, he said he enjoyed “quaffing fine wines.”

  Dead end.

  I was a beer guy before all the brain troubles. American beer. Budweiser. Miller High Life. PBR. With the medication I was already on—a fucking arm’s length of orange pill bottles full of shit I can’t even pronounce—my drinking days were done. Turns out I liked breathing more than brewskies.

  I know what quaffing means, but I’d never use that word. Makes you sound like an elitist asshole. You can tell a lot about a man by the alcohol he drinks. “Quaffing fine wines” meant we were at an impasse.

  You can also judge the strength of a man’s character by the condition of his hands. My surgeon’s hands look like they’re made of the smoothest china. He wouldn’t have lasted ten seconds in the jungle. I might have put a bullet in the back of his head myself as a safety precaution. You don’t get out of the jungle alive with men who “quaff fine wines.”

  “Try not to think about upsetting things like politics and war,” my surgeon said to me. “Happy thoughts are your brain’s vitamins, so try to think happy thoughts with each breath in and happy thoughts with each breath out, okay?”

  He balanced on one foot, closed his eyes, put his left ankle on his right knee, and—pressing his hands together in front of his heart—he did some deep-breathing yoga bullshit. Then he said, “Can you do this for me, Mr. Granger?”

  I could not, and I told him I couldn’t even stand yet, let alone perform some stork posture like a goddamn ballerina in a little pink tutu.

  And respected medical professionals say this deep-breathing surgeon is one of the best in the entire world.

  “Who is Clayton Fire Bear?” he asked me once more, with a glint in his eye that suggested he knew I had a big secret.

  Men like him don’t deserve to know my secrets. I didn’t tell the people cutter any of what follows.

  2.

 
My mostly ignorant son, Hank, dropped by my hospital room just to scream at me.

  Doctors had sawed through my skull. They had cut out part of my brain. I was still freeballing it in a lime-green fairy gown. I was in a fucking hospital bed, for Christ’s sake, and Hank’s machine-gunning me with entire belts of words just because I didn’t tell him about the surgery until after it was over. I figured, why worry him? We hadn’t been speaking since summer anyway. Ever since we had a blowout at the Phillies game.

  Me, Hank, and my granddaughter, Ella, were waiting in line for hot dogs. We hadn’t yet eaten dinner because my son had worked late again, picking us up well into the second inning, and so we didn’t even enter Citizens Bank Park until the bottom of the fourth, by which time Ella and I were ready to start eating our own hands. The line was long. Hank had something up his ass, and even Ella felt the fuck-yous coming through his skin like sweat. I knew, because she kept grabbing my hand and squeezing it. Any idiot could tell that she was nervous.

  When we got to the front of the line, the cashier was wearing one of those scary—and sexist by anyone’s standards, but will my liberal son ever say that? Hell, no!—black headdresses that cover everything but the eyes. And in ninety-degree heat, no less. Her sweat was seeping through the fabric.

  That headdress looked like a torture device. If a conservative Republican candidate said women should cover their faces in public, he’d be assassinated by feminazis before the sun set. But those same liberals who hate conservative Christians will protect Muslim rights.

  What were they hiding under those black tents they made their women wear?

  I didn’t want to know.

  So I did the classiest thing this American patriot could think of—I shook my head, put my unwrapped hot dog down on the counter, and walked away in protest. No woman should be forced to cover her face in public. That’s bullshit. Un-American.

  The poor brainwashed Muslim lady started yelling at me through the black fabric, saying, “You never heard of the First Amendment? Freedom of religion?”

  I had fought for those things. Watched my buddies die so that she was free to wear that fucking Muslim torture device in my country. So I was damn well entitled to my opinion. She could wear it, but that didn’t mean I had to buy food from her. Freedom goes both ways.

  As I walked away, I heard Hank making a big production of apologizing on my behalf and then paying for the hot dogs—no doubt leaving a massive guilt-based tip, “acknowledging his privilege,” whatever the fuck that means—and then he came after me, dragging Ella by the arm. His face was the color of a ripe Jersey tomato. Hers was white as fresh milk.

  He started screaming at me in front of a growing crowd of strangers in red Phillies caps that matched ours, saying I was an embarrassment and that if I couldn’t “put a lid on” my “racism” he was gonna ban me from seeing Ella, who at this point was staring hard at her fancy sneakers that actually lit up when she walked.

  Lights in sneakers. Now that’s some spoiled rich-girl shit, right?

  But I like Ella, and she likes me. Her parents hadn’t fucked her up too much, which was a bit of a miracle.

  I asked Hank how my walking away made me a racist when the Muslim veil had prevented me from even seeing what race the woman was, which is when he switched to calling me a bigot, conceding the point.

  I told him he had better learn to know his enemy, because the great jihad was on and there’s a reason the Jews don’t let “peaceful, nonviolent” Germans wear swastikas in Israel—and that’s when Hank marched Ella and me out of the stadium and drove us home in silence.

  We never even went to our seats, which were right behind home plate. Kendrick was on the mound. One of Hank’s big-shot clients had provided the tickets for free. And yet we didn’t even see a single pitch. What a fucking waste. And all because the Muslims had invaded our national pastime.

  When Hank dropped me off, he said, “We will not speak to you again until you apologize for your abhorrent vile behavior. It’s 2013!”

  “Fine,” I said, and got out of the car.

  As he drove away, I saw Ella’s sad eyes looking out through the back window, and I thought, She’s doomed without me.

  Hank’s wife, Femke—yes, that is her real name, pronounced Fem-kah—no doubt took his side and fueled the fuck-your-apelike-father fire. Femke calls me Aap—pronounced ahhh-p—because that means “ape” in Dutch, her native tongue. Fuck her.

  Either way, months passed without a word from him, which I didn’t mind so much. But I missed Ella terribly. I thought about trying to break her out of school for a few hours, saying she needed to visit the dentist, but I knew my she-devil daughter-in-law would have me arrested, and I didn’t want to put Ella in a position where she’d have to lie to her parents, because the guilt would have eaten her up.

  She’s a great kid, Ella. I’m telling you. The spitting image of her American grandmother—my dead wife, Jessica.

  I’m a dangerous right-wing grandpa. And I own guns too. Lots of them. Some registered, some we don’t talk about. I’m an education full of truth and experience that contradicts the never-ending bullshit Professor Femke Turk teaches young people at her “sister school” university.

  My daughter-in-law’s parents emigrated from the Netherlands when she was a teenager, so she has “European sensibilities,” which is code for even fucking dumber than regular US liberals. She didn’t take our family name, that’s how much she hates me. And to make matters even worse, my granddaughter’s official name is hyphenated: Ella Turk-Granger. I thought only Mexicans hyphenated names, but apparently the Dutch do too. At least the one I know does. My son didn’t have the stones to put a stop to that, which broke my father’s heart.

  So I don’t think Hank and my Phillies-game disagreement was really about Jihad Jenny selling swine hot dogs and American beer—the consumption of which the Muslim religion forbids, which makes her a hypocrite anyway. The Taliban would stone her to death and cut off her head for a trophy, which is why she prefers America, and don’t you forget it.

  When my brain got all fucked up and I crashed my BMW and the doctors told me I needed to go under the knife, I kept the medical report to myself. I knew I wasn’t gonna die. Only the good die young, and I had lived nasty. I’ve done things you can’t even imagine.

  The postsurgery problem was this: the doctors wouldn’t release me from the hospital unless I was accompanied, and I didn’t want to put that on any of my good friends, hence the call to my only son. To be one hundred percent honest, one of my best friends ultimately pressured me into making that call when she finally figured out I hadn’t let my son know I was in the hospital, but I’m gonna talk about Sue—who just so happens to be genetically Vietnamese—later and not now.

  “You can’t live on your own anymore,” Hank said in my hospital room.

  “The fuck I can’t!” I said, holding onto my dog tags, which were rubber-banded together with my father’s and hung around my neck for good luck. I told my son it wasn’t my time to kick the bucket. I wasn’t buying the bullet just yet, so he was gonna have to deal with me for a little while longer. “Sorry for the inconvenience.”

  He kept saying, “What are we going to do with you?” like I wasn’t even there.

  I told him he could just drop me off at home. If he was feeling kind, he could get me a cheesesteak from Donkey’s Place in Camden, which he never would have done, because it’s in a rough black neighborhood. Despite being so-called liberals, my son and his wife don’t mix much with black people, especially blacks without at least two fancy degrees.

  Me, I’ve always got along with the brothers. I have no problems with them. Always tried to get them jobs whenever I could because it used to be hard for blacks to find steady employment here in America. They have been here a long time. Fought wars with us. Survived slavery even. You have to be a tough motherfucking race to survive slavery. I tip my hat to the Jews here too. But they got their own country already, and Egypt was a hell of
a long time ago. Blacks deserve more than recent modern immigrants who want to take over the country five seconds after they arrive, but try saying that to the likes of Hank and Femke. I even like legal Mexicans too, because they are hardworking. I always hire legal Mexicans to do my lawn work. You’d be a fool to hire a white man.

  The hospital food was inedible. Fucking Jell-O is not a meal. The snakes I killed and cooked in Vietnam just to stay alive tasted better than the shit they served there. They charge a small fortune for it too, whether you eat it or not. Robbery. I tell you. Might as well have held a gun to my head and taken my wallet while I was too sick to get out of bed. Bastards. They should shoot all hospital executives, along with every single politician.

  “So you admit you can’t get out of bed,” my son said triumphantly, like he had caught me in a lie.

  So I told him, at first, I couldn’t get out of bed. They chiseled and sawed my fucking skull open, for Christ’s sake. I wasn’t the goddamn man of steel. I admitted it. But I’d since recovered. And I had been able to get out of bed for days. Took a week and a bucket of stool softeners just to get me shitting again. But I made that happen too.

  He didn’t think I could walk, so I gave him a demonstration by taking a leak in the attached bathroom. When I returned, Hank looked at me like I was Jesus Fucking Christ walking around with holes through my wrists and ankles, but the expression on his face wasn’t a happy one, which was when I realized he was rooting for me to be put away somewhere or simply die.

  He said I needed to be monitored, and I said he was dead wrong, which was when he started crying about looking bad in front of the doctors and nurses, saying they had given him quite a guilt trip for not coming earlier. Apparently, he felt he had to explain to the entire fucking world the reasons that he and I weren’t speaking, which he said wasn’t “a fun conversation” for him.

  “And who is this Clayton Fire Bear?” he asked.

  Hank didn’t deserve to know the answer to that particular question just yet. Instead, I told him that doctors and nurses are paid good money, so you don’t have to explain shit to them, but he just kept crying about what the hospital staff thought of him as if they thought anything at all. Did he not realize that we’re all just meat, and that slabs of meat are run in and out of hospitals around the clock every day of the year?