Jeremy’s Spoken
by Bruce Stirling
364 days, 23 hours and 50 minutes. That’s how long Jeremy had locked himself in his bedroom. The internet had been his only contact with the outside world, that and the videos his mom had stuffed through the slit he’d hacked knee-high in his door. She’d given up trying to convince him to come out. He told her to “Fuck off!” whenever she peered in through the slit. He was making a statement. He was out to prove that there was more to life than playing the game.
Soon after Jeremy had locked himself in his room, the local press got wind of it and ran a front page story. They called him “The Shut-In.” Soon everybody at George Washington High was talking about him. He was a rebel. He was doing what all his friends wanted to do but didn’t have the guts to. His cause was their cause. The first week of his senior year, he’d told the world to “Fuck off!” and had locked himself in his bedroom, but not before he’d delivered his manifesto. Standing on a table in the cafeteria, he tore into the grade game. Grades, he said, were bullshit. He wasn’t going to college. Fuck it. He refused to be ground up and spit out by the corporate machine.
“Corporations control everything!” he shouted through a megaphone. “And I refuse to be controlled by anyone!”
With that, he handed out his manifesto and was good to his word: he went straight home and locked himself in his bedroom. He didn’t bathe or use the toilet down the hall. Instead, he pissed into empty bottles and shit into zip locks bag he’d throw out his window, screaming, “Fuck you!”
Mortified, his mom ran around cleaning it all up, fearing what the neighbors would think, especially when her only son urinated out the window in broad daylight. It was more than she could take. She begged him to come out, but Jeremy just told her to “Fuck off!” through the megaphone. She was a cog, he told her, a slave to the corporate machine, she and her stupid secretary job.
“Fuck it. Fuck all of it!” he roared behind the door. “I’m working here. I’m working here!”
Soon the smell leaking out of his room had invaded the hall. He could care less. He stunk because the world stunk. That’s what he told his little sister, Megan.
“It’s all in the manifesto,” he told her through the megaphone. “Read it, bitch.”
As far as Jeremy was concerned, personal hygiene was a none issue. Revolution was everything. For that he needed food, and his mom acquiesced to his every request. She never understood what he was doing. She’d never questioned anything in her life. But she loved her only son and helped him any way she could. Whatever he wanted, she ran and got it even in the middle of the night with him pounding on his door, demanding to be fed. Hot or cold, she slid it through the knee-high slit. He’d cut it low so he couldn’t see her face. All contact was out. That too was in the manifesto. Still, his mom brought him Hot Pockets and Pop Tarts and chips and cookies and box of juices, and anything else she could push through the slit. She’d even shoved clean underwear through, but he just bagged it up with his shit and sent it flying out his window, laughing as she ran around in her nightgown gathering it up. She loved him too much to give up. She bought everything on his lists: food, videos, magazines. She loved him. That’s what she told him, crying on her knees, hands reaching in through the slit, grasping nothing but air as she begged him not to be like his father, not to cut her off.
“Please, Jeremy,” she cried through the slit. “Don’t throw your life away. Go to college. I’ll pay. Do things I never could. Please, Jeremy. Please, come out.”
When she was through, he shoved the megaphone against the slit and told her to “Fuck off!”
Recently, Megan had been passing him food. She’d even bought him a Playboy and some Penthouse DVDs. When she tried talking to him through the slit, he told her to “Fuck off!”
He would’ve told his dad the same thing, but his dad was long gone. His parents got divorced when he was six. Jeremy never knew his father. For that matter, he didn’t even know his mother or his little sister. As far as he was concerned, they were just a couple of faces occupying space down the hall. A year locked up in his room had blanked out any remaining images or memories that might’ve lingered. All he saw was what was in front of him: his computer, a desk, a bed, and ankle-deep garbage smelling of piss and rotten milk. He didn’t have a mirror. He couldn’t see the stubble on his face or his body growing fat from all the sugary food and a lack of exercise. But he could see all the garbage and breathe in that foul milky smell.
“Just like a rat in a cage,” he thought.
It made him smile. That was the title of his manifesto: A Rat in a Cage. He once had a pile of manifestos lying about, but he’d used them all for asswipe. Lately, Megan had refused to bring him real TP. In fact, she hadn’t done him a damn thing all week, and he was starving. He grabbed the megaphone and yelled for her through the slit.
“Hey, bitch! I’m fuckin’ starvin’ in here! Hel-lo!”
When silence replied, he screamed, “Fuck you! I’ll go it alone. I’m a survivor. You hear me? A survivor!”
With that, he pissed out the slit. A dog howled in the distance. Jeremy howled back, then listened as silence reclaimed the house. It was a tomb, cold and empty, just the way he liked it.
But the house wasn’t empty. No. Megan was down the hall in the kitchen signing the contract. She’d heard everything and let it pass just like the last, each one on the hour, every hour.
At first she thought what her brother was doing was cool. A manifesto. He’d written a manifesto. Like a dutiful messenger, she’d relayed his every word to the kids at Washington High, then sent him all the latest gossip by email. She hated talking to his fat knobby knees and breathing in the stink wafting out of the slit. Whenever she’d tried to tell him family news, he told her to shut up through the megaphone.
“Jeremy,” she’d pleaded at the door three months before. “Uncle Bill died.”
“Never heard of him,” he megaphoned back.
“You loved his dogs. Jeremy?”
“Fuck ‘em,” was the reply. “Fuck ‘em all!”
When she persisted, when she told him he had to come out sooner or later, that the world wouldn’t just go away, he cranked the music till the walls shook.
That was last week. Since then, Megan had stopped sending him emails. She’d even stopped shoving food through the slit. The truth was nobody was sending Jeremy anything anymore, no emails, no beer, no weed, nothing. That first week of school, after he’d littered the halls of Washington High with his manifesto, his email box was always full. He was the talk of school. He’d even made a national newspaper. Suddenly, everybody was his friend. It was then that he’d started getting emails from Japanese guys called “hikikomori.” They’d locked themselves in their rooms too. Amazed, Jeremy wrote back. Soon he was chatting with fifty of them. Jeremy felt redeemed. Kids in Japan were going through the same shit. Like him, they refused to play the game. There were over a million hikikomori in Japan. As far as Jeremy knew, there was only one in America: him. And he’d been locked in his room for exactly 364 days, 23 hours and 55 minutes.
Jeremy checked the clock on his computer. Five minutes to go.
“T-minus five!” he cried through the megaphone. “T-minus five!”
He checked his email one last time. Yoshi, a hikikomori in Tokyo, had sent pictures of his toenail clippings. He said they contained a message. A secret message. But it was in English.
“Jeremy san, please can you translate?”
Yukiro, a hikikomori in Nagoya, wanted Jeremy to teach him English. All the dirty words. For free. He signed off the usual way.
“I love you cocksucker mama touchy-touchy me now pussy lips.”
Another had sent pictures of himself beating off on a Pam Anderson poster. The last was from Hiro. Hiro had kidnapped an eight-year-old girl and had locked her in his bedroom closet. He’d even sent photos to prove it. He was writing just to say she was crying. The attached MP3 proved it.
“I call her Madonna,” Hiro whispered into the mic. “Listen. She cry. Hear? You hear now? Sweet. So sweet.”
Jeremy heard a muffled wailing and was disgusted. Still, he kept it. He’d kept them all. Emails. Photos. MP3s. One day he was going to write a screenplay, a blockbuster that would tell the world the whole truth and nothing but.
He whipped off a final email and CC’d all the hikikomori. He thanked them for their support and said, “In exactly 30 seconds, I’m outta here. I been locked inside this shit hole for exactly 365 days. A whole fuckin’ year! Time to make a break. Good luck. Keep fighting. Fuck ‘em! Peace. Out.”
Jeremy looked at his digital alarm clock. Midnight. He turned his computer off. His journey was at an end. He unbolted the three inside locks, kicked the trash away, then eased the door open.
Outside, the hall was dark. Jeremy felt hurt. The silence seemed a slight. He found the switch. The hall light was dead. He listened. Nothing. No crowd on the lawn. No buzzing admirers. No peels of anticipation. Nothing. He headed down the hall into the kitchen. One glance told him nothing had changed. The dull yellow linoleum, the cat calendar, the greasy old toaster, the magnets on the fridge. Nothing.
Anger rode him hard as he turned to find Megan at the table, her legs crossed, one foot nervously kicking. She was wearing make-up. Lots of it. It made her look older. So did the cigarette she kept flicking. Dave Gordon sat across from her. Jeremy knew him only as Davey G the geek. He too looked older. Gone were his geeky glasses. Now he had a moustache and a black leather jacket. He and Megan shared the cigarette, their eyes locked on the ashtray between them.
“Ta-da!” Jeremy announced through the megaphone.
Megan and Dave ignored him.
Jeremy let the megaphone drop.
“Well?” he demanded.
“Well what?” Megan replied, avoiding his eyes.
“One year,” Jeremy proudly said. “A whole fuckin’ year.”
“Great,” Megan said.
“That’s it?” Jeremy replied. “That’s all I get for busting my ass?”
Megan ground the cigarette out.
“Where’s mom?” Jeremy asked, searching the fridge.
“Dead,” Megan said.
“Dead?” Jeremy sank into a chair. “What happened?”
“I told you.”
“You did not.”
“I did too.”
“When?”
“What do care?”
Megan lit another cigarette, her anger barely contained.
Dave stood and leaned against the counter. Even at that distance the smell was unbelievable.
“Megan?” Jeremy said.
She avoided his eyes. “Still here.”
“How did mom die?”
“She died of a broken heart.”
“Tell me the truth!” Jeremy yelled.
“I am. You told her to fuck off so many times, she finally did.”
“I’ll put these in the truck,” Dave said.
He grabbed the two suitcases door by the door and left.
“Where you going?” Jeremy asked Megan.
“Dave and I are getting married,” she said.
Jeremy scoffed. “Married? Don’t be fuckin’ stupid. You’re sixteen. A baby.”
“Eighteen,” Megan corrected.
She stood and pushed in the chair.
“By the way,” she said. “I sold the house. Mom left it to me. She figured you didn’t want it.”
Megan finally looked at him. “You have twenty-four hours to get out.”
“What?” Jeremy cried. “Excuse me. Hel-lo! This is my house too.”
“Not anymore,” Megan said. “I signed the contract. You want a piece? Fine. Sue me.”
She headed for the door. Jeremy grabbed her. She stared at his hand. Jeremy let go.
“What’s everybody, you know, doing?” he asked, following her down the driveway to Dave’s truck.
“Going to college,” Megan said. “Remember Billy Jones?”
“What about him?”
“You used to call him Fuck Nuts. Guess what? Fuck Nuts is going to Yale.”
“What about Susie?” Jeremy asked. “She never wrote me. Never.”
“Susie married Paul Carson,” she said. “Paul got a football scholarship to Notre Dame and Susie’s in pre-med at NYU.”
“Big fucking deal,” Jeremy replied.
“Yeah,” Megan said. “Big fucking deal.”
She handed him a plain white envelope. “This came for you,” she said.
Jeremy took it, then watched as Megan and Dave drove off into night.
Jeremy sank onto the step and looked around. The neighborhood was still the same. The only thing different was the SOLD sign hammered into the lawn.
He felt prying eyes. He looked up in time to see a curtain snapped shut across the street.
“Mrs. Abel,” he swore under his breath.
He raised the megaphone. “Bitch!”
He tore open the envelope and read the note inside. He’d failed to return a library book: America’s Best Colleges and Universities. He owed the library two bucks.
