Moses
TAG DIDN’T LEAVE a note and his place was clean. More than clean. Boxed up, cleared out, a realtor’s sign in the window. Tag isn’t an especially tidy person, something he would have had to change if Millie moved in. Obviously his housekeeper had been and gone, but when I called her, she didn’t know anything. Nobody knows anything. Tag didn’t tell anyone he was going. His place is for sale, his truck is gone. He is gone. And he hasn’t left a forwarding address.
He’d left an envelope at the gym with Millie’s name on it. Inside were a set of keys—one to her front door, one to the training facility, one to the bar, one to a filing cabinet in his office at the gym. It took us a while to match the keys to their locks, but we had. It didn’t feel like Tag was taking us on a wild goose chase. That wasn’t his style either. He just didn’t want us to find him. And that scared the shit out of me.
In the very top drawer of the gray filing cabinet, was a shoebox filled with cassette tapes. They were labeled with Tag’s name, a number, and a bumpy sticker. A little tape recorder, the kind with the buttons on the end and the speaker along the long top, the kind that looks a little like a grand piano, was in the box too.
When I asked Millie if she knew anything about them, she’d run her fingers over them in surprise and then nodded.
“My brother, Henry, must have given them to him. He’s had this cassette player in his room forever. Henry used to pretend he was a sportscaster and create his own play-by-plays. He’d watch my dad’s games and speak into the recorder like he was Bob Costas or something. Before my mom died, she bought him a digital recorder. But Henry keeps everything. He must have given them to Tag.”
Tag likes the things he can touch. He and Millie have that in common. She needs to touch to see. He needs to touch to feel connected. I could picture him sticking the tapes in and talking away, taking forever to get to the point. Telling stories and laughing like this was all just a big joke. I tried to feel angry, but I knew the real reason he’d left them was because it was the only way he could leave a message for Millie. The only way to allow her the privacy of hearing whatever he had to say without an audience.
“You know how to use this, right?” I asked.
She nodded.
“I think these are for you, Millie,” I said.
“He’s labeled the tapes,” she whispered. “He’s labeled them so I would know which one to listen to first.”
“The sticker?”
She nodded again. “Yes. I have them on all my clothes and I keep a little box full of them in my bedroom. Numbers, letters, words. I guess he was paying attention when I showed him.”
“Tag always pays attention. You don’t think he does because he’s restless. He fidgets. But he doesn’t miss anything.”
Millie’s mouth started to tremble and tears leaked out beneath her lashes. I looked away, even though I didn’t need to.
I heard her fumbling with a tape, heard her slide it home and push the play button. I listened until Tag’s voice filled the silence, making me flinch and smile simultaneously, unable to decide whether I was pissed at him or scared for him. Regardless of which, I didn’t think Tag wanted me to hear what he had to say to Millie, and I opened the door of the office, preparing to leave her alone. The tape clicked off immediately, interrupting Tag as he told Millie about his bar. I knew all about his businesses and didn’t need to hear more. But Millie had other ideas.
“Moses? Please don’t leave. I want you to listen with me. You know him best. You know him the way I want to know him. And you love him too. I need you to listen with me, so that I don’t miss anything. And then I need you to help me find him.”
I MET DAVID Taggert in a psych ward when I was eighteen years old. Montlake Psychiatric Hospital. I’d met his gaze for the first time across a counseling circle, seen his dead sister hovering at his shoulder, and asked him if he knew who Molly was. That was her name. Molly. His dead sister. He’d flown into a rage, flying across the space and knocking me onto the floor. He had his hands wrapped around my throat, demanding answers, before the psych techs could pull him off of me.
Not an especially promising beginning to a friendship.
We were there for different reasons. I’d been committed by people who were afraid of me, and Tag had been committed by people who loved him. I saw dead people, and he wanted to die. We were young, we were lonely, we were lost, and I didn’t want to be found. I wanted to run to the ends of the earth and make the dead chase me.
Tag just wanted to figure the world out.
Maybe it was our youth. Maybe it was the fact that we were both in a psychiatric facility and neither of us especially wanted to leave. Or maybe it was just that Tag, with his exaggerated twang and his cowboy persona, was nothing like me. Whatever the reason, we fell into a sort of friendship. Maybe it was because he believed me. Without hesitation. Without reservation. Without judgment. He believed me. And he never stopped.
Tag and I had been put in isolation for three days due to the slug-fest in the counseling session, and neither of us were allowed out of our rooms. On the third day of isolation, Tag sprinted into my room and shut the door.
I’d stared at him balefully. I was kind of under the impression the door had been locked. I hadn’t even checked to see, and I felt stupid for sitting in a room for three days behind an unlocked door.
“They stroll the hall every few minutes. But that’s all. That was ridiculously easy. I should have come sooner,” he had said, and sat down on my bed. “I’m David Taggert, by the way. But you can call me Tag.” He didn’t apologize for choking me, and he didn’t act like he wanted to do it again, which was disappointing.
If he didn’t want to fight, I wanted him to leave. I immediately went back to the picture I was working on. I felt his sister there, just beyond my sight, her image flickering through my walls, and I sighed heavily. I was weary of Molly, and I didn’t like her brother. Both were incredibly stubborn and obnoxious.
“You’re a crazy son-of-a-bitch,” he stated without preamble.
I didn’t even raise my head from the picture I was drawing with the nub of a grease pencil. I was trying to make my supplies last. I was going through them too fast.
“That’s what people say, don’t they? They say you’re crazy. But I don’t buy it, man. Not anymore. You’re not crazy. You’ve got skills. Mad skills.”
“Mad. Crazy. Don’t they mean the same thing?” I murmured. Madness and genius were closely related. I wondered what skills he was talking about. He hadn’t seen me paint.
“Nah, man,” he said. “They aren’t. Crazy people need to be in places like this. You don’t belong here.”
“I think I probably do.”
He laughed, clearly surprised. “You think you’re crazy?”
“I think I’m cracked.”
Tag tilted his head quizzically, but when I didn’t continue, he nodded. “Okay. Maybe we’re all cracked. Or bent. I sure as hell am.”
“Why are you bent?” I found myself asking. Molly was hovering and I drew faster, helplessly filling the page with her face.
“My sister’s gone. And it’s my fault. And until I know what happened to her, I’m never gonna be able to get straight. I’ll be bent forever.” His voice was so soft I wasn’t sure he meant for me to hear the last part.
“Is this your sister?” I asked reluctantly. I held up my sketch pad.
Tag stared. Then he stood. Then he sat down again. And then he nodded.
“Yeah,” he choked. “That’s my sister.”
And he told me everything.
David Taggert’s father was a Texas oil man who’d always wanted to be a rancher. When Tag started getting in trouble and getting drunk every weekend, Tag’s father purchased a fifty acre ranch in Sanpete County, Utah and moved the family there. He was sure if he could get Tag and his older sister, Molly, away from their old scene, he would be able to straighten them up.
But the kids hadn’t thrived. They’d rebelled. Molly ran away and was never heard from again. Tag struggled to stay sober, but when he wasn’t drinking, he was drowning in guilt and eventually tried to kill himself. Several times. Which landed him in the psych ward with me.
I listened, letting him talk. I didn’t know how his sister had died any more than he did. That wasn’t what the dead wanted to share. They wanted to show me their lives. Not their deaths. Not ever. When Tag finished talking he had looked at me with sorrow-filled eyes.
“She’s dead, isn’t she? You can see her, so that means she’s dead.”
I nodded, and he nodded too, accepting my answer without argument, his head lowering, my esteem for him rising. So I showed him the things Molly showed me, drawing the images that flitted through my mind whenever she was near.
Then Tag told his father about me. And for whatever reason—desperation, despondency, or maybe just a desire to placate his adamant son—David Taggert Sr. hired a man and his dogs to cover the area I had described. The dogs caught her scent quickly, and they found her remains. Just like that. In a shallow grave piled high with rocks and debris, fifty yards from where I’d once painted her smiling face on a highway overpass, the remains of Molly Taggert were uncovered.
Tag had cried when he told me. Big, wracking sobs that made his shoulders shake and my stomach tighten painfully. It was the first time I’d ever done something like that. Helped someone. Found someone. It was the first time my abilities, if that’s what they were, made sense. But Tag just had more questions.
One night after lights out, he came and found me, creeping down the hall undetected, the way he always did, seeking answers that none of the staff could give him, answers he thought I had. Tag was usually quick to smile, quick to anger, quick to forgive, quick to pull the trigger. He didn’t do anything in half measures, and I wondered sometimes if the facility wasn’t the best place for him, just to keep him contained. But he had a maudlin side too.
“If I die, what will happen to me?” he’d asked me.
“Why do you think you’re going to die?” I’d responded, sounding like one of our doctors.
“I’m here because I tried to kill myself several times, Moses,” he confessed.
“Yeah. I know.” I pointed at the long scar on his arm. It hadn’t been a hard deduction. “And I’m here because I paint dead people and scare the livin’ shit out of everyone I come in contact with.”
He grinned. “Yeah. I know.” He’d figured me out too. But his smile faded immediately. “When I’m not drinking, life just grinds me down until I can’t see straight. It wasn’t always that way. But it is now. Life sucks pretty bad, Moses.”
“Do you still want to die?” I asked, changing the subject.
“Depends. What comes next?”
“More,” I answered simply. “There’s more. That’s all I can tell you. It doesn’t end.”
“And you can see what comes next?”
“What do you mean?” I couldn’t see the future, if that’s what he meant.
“Can you see the other side?”
“No. I only see what they want me to see,” I said.
“They? They who?”
“Whoever comes through.” I shrugged.
“Do they whisper to you? Do they talk?” Tag was whispering too, as if the subject were sacred.
“No. They never say anything at all. They just show me things.”
Tag shivered and rubbed the back of his neck, like he was trying to rub away the goose flesh that had crept up his back.
“Do you see everything? Their whole lives?”
“Sometimes it feels like that. It can be a flood of color and thought, and I can only pick up random things because it’s coming at me so fast. And I can only really see what I understand. I’m sure they would like me to see more. But it isn’t that easy. It’s subjective. I usually see pieces and parts. Never the whole picture. But I’ve gotten better at filtering, and as I’ve gotten better, it feels more like remembering and less like being possessed.” I smiled in spite of myself, and Tag shook his head in wonder.
“Moses?” Tag pulled me from my thoughts.
“Yeah?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way . . . but, if, you know, there’s more, and it’s not bad, it’s not scary, and it’s not the zombie apocalypse. If it’s not fire and brimstone . . . at least, not as far as you can tell, then why do you stay?” His voice was so quiet and filled with emotion, I wasn’t sure if anything I said would help him. I wasn’t sure I knew the answer. It took me a minute of thinking, but I finally had a response that felt true.
“Because I’ll still be me,” I answered. “And you’ll still be you.”
“What do you mean?”
“We can’t escape ourselves, Tag. Here, there, half-way across the world, or in a psych ward in Salt Lake City. I’m Moses and you’re Tag. And that part never changes. So either we figure it out here, or we figure it out there. But we still gotta deal. And death won’t change that.”
He’d nodded very slowly, staring at my hands as they created images neither of us really understood.
“That part never changes,” he whispered, as if it resonated. “You’re Moses and I’m Tag.”
I nodded. “Yeah. As much as that can suck sometimes, there’s comfort in it too. At least we know who we are.”
He never asked about his own mortality again, and in the weeks that followed, he’d donned a confidence that I suspected he’d once had in spades. He seemed to be making plans for what came next. I still didn’t have a clue.
“When you get out, where you gonna go?” Tag asked one night at dinner, his eyes on his food, his arms on the table. He could eat almost as much as I could, and I was pretty sure Montlake’s kitchen staff would enjoy a little reprieve when we left.
I didn’t want to talk about this with Tag. I really didn’t want to talk about it with anyone. So I fixed my gaze to the left of Tag’s head, out the window, letting him know I was ready for the conversation to end. But Tag persisted.
“You’re almost nineteen. You are officially out of the system. So where you gonna go, Mo?” I don’t know why he thought he could call me Mo. I hadn’t given him permission. But he was like that. Worming his way into my space.
My eyes flickered back to Tag briefly, and then I shrugged as if it wasn’t important.
I’d been here for months. Through Christmas, through New Year’s, and into February. Three months in a mental institution. And I wished I could stay.
“Come with me,” Tag said, tossing down his napkin and pushing his tray away.
I reared back, stunned. I remembered the sound of Tag crying, the wails that echoed down the hall as he was brought into the psych ward the night he was admitted. He’d arrived almost a month after I had. I had lain in bed and listened to the attempts to subdue him. At the time, I hadn’t realized it was him. I only put two and two together later when he told me about what brought him to Montlake. I thought about the way he’d come at me with his fists flying, rage in his eyes, almost out of his head with pain in the session where we’d met. Tag interrupted my train of thought when he continued speaking.
“My family has money. We don’t have much else, but we have tons of money. And you don’t have shit.”
I held myself stiffly, waiting. It was true. I didn’t have shit. Tag was my friend, the first real friend, other than Georgia, that I’d ever had. But I didn’t want Tag’s shit. The good or the bad, and Tag had plenty of both.
“I need someone to make sure I don’t kill myself. I need someone who’s big enough to restrain me if I decide I need to get smashed. I’ll hire you to spend every waking minute with me until I figure out how to stay clean without wanting to slit my wrists.”
I tipped my head to the side, confused. “You want me to restrain you?”
Tag laughed. “Yeah. Hit me in the face, throw me to the ground. Kick the crap out of me. Just make sure I stay clean and alive.”
I wondered for a moment if I could do that to Tag. Hit him. Throw him to the ground. Hold him down until the need for drink or death passed. I was big. Strong. But Tag wasn’t exactly small, not by a long shot. My doubt must have shown on my face because Tag was talking again.
“You need someone who believes you. I do. It’s got to get old always having people thinking you’re psychotic. I know you’re not. You need somewhere to go, and I need someone to come with me. It’s not a bad trade. You wanted to travel. And I’ve got nothing better to do. The only thing I’m good at is fighting, and I can fight anywhere.” He smiled and shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t trust myself to be alone just yet. And if I go back home to Dallas, I’ll drink. Or I’ll die. So I need you.”
He’d said that so easily. “I need you.” I’d wondered how it was possible that a tough kid like Tag, someone who fought for the fun of it, could admit that to anyone. Or believe it. I’d never needed anyone. Not really. And I’d never said those words to anyone. “I need you” felt like “I love you,” and it scared me. It felt like breaking one of my laws. But at that moment, with our release looming large, with freedom at my fingertips, I’d admitted it to myself. I had needed Tag too.
We made an odd pair. A mixed-race delinquent who couldn’t stop painting and a big Texan with too much attitude and shaggy hair. But Tag was right. We were both stuck. Lost. With nothing to hold us down and no direction. I just wanted my freedom, and Tag didn’t want to be alone. I needed his money, and he needed my company, sad as it usually was. And so we went. We ran. We didn’t look back.
“We’ll just keep running, Moses. It’s like you said. Here, there, on the other side of the world? We can’t escape ourselves. So we stick together until we find ourselves, all right? Until we figure out how to deal.” That’s what he’d said. That’s what we’d done. And Tag Taggert became my best friend. When I needed him most he held on to me, and he didn’t let me go.
So now I have to find him.
The thing that scares me the most, is maybe he’s found his answers. Maybe he knows exactly what he’s doing. Exactly who he is. Maybe he’s figured the world out. But we’d made a deal when we were eighteen. And as far as I’m concerned, a deal is a deal.
“I need someone to make sure I don’t kill myself. I need someone who’s big enough to restrain me if I decide I need to get shitfaced. Hit me in the face, throw me to the ground. Kick the shit out of me. Just make sure I stay clean and alive,” he’d said. He’d wanted me to keep him alive.
I just hoped it wasn’t too late.