NOVEL EXCERPT

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My name is Kurt Spencer, and I spent half a decade at Whyte’s Farm. I didn’t live there, I only managed to avoid dying there. Some people know the difference. I pity those who do. 

But regardless of my feelings about the exact location, on a day-to-day basis, of the philosophical line between life and the absence of death, the fact is that I have so far avoided dying in the usual way, and I give myself too little credit for it. After all, a burning building doesn’t stop burning just because you’re running away from it. It keeps going, because it’s the one in charge, not you. And you’d better hope you can run fast enough, or the noxious spirit will fill in for the fire itself. Instead of your flesh bent into the boxer stance, your lungs will be the part of your body that finally sucks the life out of you. Like Judas pointing a bony finger at the Savior. The burning building has options. It might not even have to try all that hard. So you better run like you mean it.

I don’t think I’ll ever stop running. But I do have this.

Under a full moon ten years ago I finally gave up on trying to please the gawkers. The onlookers. The journalists with faces like Venus flytraps. The politicians clawing for a snappy soundbite. The anonymous commenters on the interviews of me at seventeen, comparing notes on the fascinating and intricate signatures of trauma in my face. The Greek chorus of voices calling back from the farm, mocking me, gorging themselves on my trembling. 

I made a little snowman in my front yard. I told myself it was them. I closed my eyes, swayed in the wind for a little bit, gripped the handle of my snow shovel, and crushed the snowman like an ant under an army boot. I’ve never been happier. That doesn’t necessarily mean I’m happy. But at least these things are quantifiable, and not just qualitative. I’d be long gone if they weren’t.

None of this is for them. This is for Kurt. Me, and the future teeming masses of hungry eyes and ears, in the decades and centuries to come, who I haven’t yet purged from my consciousness. Who haven’t yet proven that I should. This is also for Apple. 

With the waves of history in mind, I should start with the Wikipedia entry for the farm. This way it will be preserved in formaldehyde no matter what happens to Wikipedia. 

Whyte’s Farm 

Whyte’s Farm was the large compound belonging to the white supremacist group the Warriors of Loki located outside Athol, Idaho (21 miles north of Coeur d’Alene). The Warriors of Loki were a breakaway group from the Atomwaffen Division, an international Neo-Nazi terrorist network, who espoused a “soft-touch” approach to Atomwaffen’s goals of ethnic cleansing and overthrow of the United States federal government, prominently recruiting online. The compound took its name from the farmhouse and stables sold to the group by local farmer James Whyte. It is believed to have included up to twelve more permanent and temporary structures by the time of its destruction in the Whyte’s Farm siege. 

All close enough. Dry, though, like Las Vegas, or the skin of a human hand forbidden at gunpoint from using lotion because that was what faggots did. 

Oh, you didn’t want to hear details like that? Pick up another book. Or just watch the 60 Minutes episode. They had a lot of nice bird’s-eye-view shots of the farm, and Sarah even got to deny she had any prior knowledge of the Pride Massacre. I still can’t believe that made it into their final cut. She’s still out there somewhere, probably looking more and more like Nosferatu with each sleepless, bloodless night. I do believe in karma. The funny part is, I would have offed myself years ago if I were her. Karma takes care of the people who are too chickenshit to do that. 

But every time I turn the lights off before I go to bed, my only companion the ever-metastasizing darkness around me since I’m once again the last one in for the night, I don’t get much out of that. I wish she were finally dead. So she could finally, blessedly leave me alone. I may never get what I want. 

I digress, though. It’s late. I am grateful for my ability to tell reality from fear. I am grateful for my sleep. 

**********

Twenty-two years later, the set of Good Morning America that day still appears to me as clearly as it did when I first laid eyes on it. It was the first time the show had ever been broadcast from Portland. Christine Miller, the journalists all speculated later, wanted to “immerse herself in the local context, where the political extremes were so visible and influential on the street.” I’m sure it was a nice safari from her limo with the blacked-out windows. 

I, for my part, walked to the studio that day. I passed through Couch Park on the way, before I knew to avoid it, and it is a particularly well-timed stroke of cosmic luck that none of the Nazis populating that rally knew my face yet. Also, that Jack, Sarah and the others didn’t happen to be there, at least not that day, or that time. 

When the lights went on for the cameras to start rolling, I imagined for a few flashes that I was in heaven. It was the high point of the whole experience. The overwhelming assault of the light all around me blocked out everything except the face in front of me. The face is tattooed to my soul. 

Christine Miller was perfectly airbrushed even in person. Narrow manicured eyes. A teal suit with tiny flecks of gold, and a silvery, lithe strand of pearls. I felt like I’d been summoned to see the queen. Not a hair displaced in the slightest. Not a hair forced to be anywhere it shouldn’t be. 

“Are you a Nazi?” 

The question hit me like a truck. But then what had I been expecting? A hug? A cup of tea? 

“No, and I abhor Nazis. My parents are Nazis. I have nothing to do with them or any other Nazi.”

“Your parents brought you to Whyte’s Farm, didn’t they?”

“Yes, they did.”

“How old were you?” Same expression. 

“Twelve.”

“How much do you blame them?”

“I blame them fully.” Nothing else to say. Honesty is the best policy, Molly had assured me that morning over toast and Red Bull. 

“What attracted them to the farm?”

The quiet that came over me felt gentle, like a butterfly landing in your palm. I was thinking. There’s no harm in that. As I would soon learn, I apparently would have been better off closing my fingers around the butterfly and feeling it crumple. 

“Are you still with me, Kurt?” She obviously had some suffering of her own she was working through at that moment. The interview of the decade, gone from her grasp in a pathetic millisecond, thanks to the pimpled idiot across the table from her. 

“Yeah, sorry.”

“I’ll repeat the question. What attracted your parents to Whyte’s Farm?” 

“My memory is fuzzy. I can’t fully answer.”

I was seventeen, and blinking weakly at the world through eyes that had just wrested themselves back from the brink of blindness. The world looked worth it, and my life had a lot more meaning, if I saw it in the hazy dreamland technicolor where I could get on national TV and give an answer like that and people would totally know what I meant. 

“What’s that supposed to mean? Are you close with your parents?” 

The haze self-immolated into a swarm of low-hanging wisps. I gave my head a jerky shake and sat up a little straighter. 

“I don’t have any relationship with them at all, I just told you that.”

“But, Kurt, you know these are the questions people are asking. A person could think you’re covering up for them.” 

“Before we got to the farm I hid in my room all day. I was depressed. Is this a deposition?”

“You know, kid, you’ve got a lot of nerve to come on this program with a tattoo of an iron cross on your neck and talk to me with an attitude like that. If you want society to accept you again, you should act like it. I’ll ask you again. Why did your parents end up at Whyte’s Farm?”

I knew my face wasn’t talking to my heart. Realizing it tied my guts up into a tourniquet. These people probably agreed with her. I looked like a Nazi. There I was, on national TV, drowning in the collective whirlpool of all the lights on the planet, looking like a Nazi. After everything I did to get out. I was an idiot, an irredeemable idiot, for not letting the crew member put that pudding-like concealer on my neck. Apple would certainly think so. 

Maybe I should have died there. Apple would have gotten out eventually regardless of what happened to me, I knew that. I escaped, for less than a second, onto a cloud floating close to the ceiling where I cried my eyes out right there on TV. It was how I felt. But she was mad at me, and maybe she would push the front of a rifle into my forehead as soon as I started. That was how the Farm dealt with boys who cried. And boys they were mad at. 

“I’m sorry. I think they were radicalized online. I can’t give you a lot of specifics. But it wasn’t my fault.”

“Nobody said it was your fault.” 

“Okay.”

“Let’s talk about the Boise Pride Massacre. Did you know about it ahead of time?”

My body went empty and cold. My spirit went somewhere else. Then the dance went on and they came back together, like two magnets getting weaker. 

“No.” And I didn’t. They knew about me ahead of time. That’s why they didn’t tell me. I used to love surprises. 

“So you were in the truck, but you didn’t know where you were going?” 

“No, Christine, I didn’t.”

“Why would they keep you in the dark? You’re a smart boy. Maybe they would have wanted your help.”

The juniper berries infesting my brain gave me a great idea. 

“Maybe you’d rather hear it from my diary. Let me get it for you.” 

I reached down into my messenger bag, left carelessly on the floor next to my chair instead of being slung from the back, and fell off like a stray bullet. The buttons on my jacket sleeve made a sickening kind of zingy sound against the tile. As the gasps from the audience made their way over the soundwaves to my ears, I felt vomit rise in my throat. I swallowed it, even when it kept coming. 

“Are you okay?” asked Christine Miller in a media professional’s dutiful lilt. When I watched the whole thing a few days later, I saw that she hadn’t even poked her head across the table to look. 

I pulled myself back into the chair. Back into the eye of the public hurricane. 

“I’m fine. Don’t know what that was about.” 

I let out a mechanical laugh that convinced precisely no one, and wouldn’t in any language. 

“Let me find the entry from that day. This is the most authentic answer I can give you.” 

She actually stopped to think about it for a beat, which fooled me into thinking I had the upper hand. 

“Sure, by all means.”

A couple seconds later.

“Kurt, are you drunk?”

“No, I’m perfectly healthy.” Followed by a surge of bile and gin immediately after the sentence escaped me. 

She flexed a mercilessly plucked eyebrow before I started to read. 

June 6. You’ll just have to believe me when I say I wasn’t prepared. If I’d been pre–pre-prepared, I wouldn’t be gasping for air on the inside right now. It’d be easier if my face would go all moldy blue, and then dark red rings started to enc-encircle my eyes like little nooses made of blood, because that’d give me a fighting chance at being able to forget this forever. But. That’s not where I find myself. 

If I weren’t such a car-cartoonish idiot, I might have figured somethin’ was up. No I take it back, I deserve the guilt. It’s the least I can do. They’re dead, least I can do is feel guilty. Everyone was so easy to SCAN, in retrospect. All I needed to do was turn my face-scanning function on. But I couldn’t even do that. 

“You say you deserve to feel guilty?” 

“Yes. I still do. The nightmares haven’t stopped for one night since. But I didn’t have anything to do with the premeditation, and I didn’t know what they were going to do that day.” 

“Who is ‘they’? You didn’t make that very clear.” 

“Jared Young, Jack Brown, and Colin Cluskey. They are responsible for the Pride Massacre.” 

“So you don’t accept any responsibility?” 

At that moment, I wasn’t looking at Christine Miller anymore. I was looking at Jared, baring his teeth at me in a murderer’s thirsty smile, eyes twinkling like a newly sharpened knife catching the light of the moon. He’d found me. He’d won. I was back in the cellar, choking, crying, being punched, kicked, spit on in an infinite feedback loop with no one to hear but the jars of pickled carrots. I wanted to shriek it all into her face. Shatter the table with my bare hands. Run around the studio swinging my fists into the expensive cameras. 

“I think I was a victim too. In a different kind of way. I hear those people’s screams every single night, Christine.” 

Christine Miller twitched her tight-lipped face, as some kind of punctuation. Whatever she really thought of me, it was time to get on to the next question. 

“I was brought on what they described to me as a field trip. I knew better than to ask any questions, because everybody had guns and I was sick of being held at gunpoint. When we ran into those people, I thought my life was over. I tried to end it, actually. I wish you could believe me.” 

Tears began to defy me. One made it all the way down to my jaw. And I’d even fucked up my own chronology. It was after the cellar, not the truck. I wanted to be underground breathing in black dirt. Being eaten by alien fish at the bottom of the ocean. Swaddled by frozen ammonia in the middle of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. 

“I believe you,” said Christine Miller with a tight portion of softness in her voice. 

I almost let out a high little sob. I caught it just in time. I sat there and let my mind slouch into a sick, languid, serpentine waltz, the movements of which involved me actually having allowed it to get out of my mouth and then sitting there staring helplessly at the faces of the audience, stretched into a fresco of horror, pity, disgust. None were sympathetic, because none would have been. I was a Nazi after all, and even I was starting to think I was. 

She moved on to the next question. She made sure the trains ran on time. 

“What was your relationship with Jared Young?” 

That, I hadn’t expected. That took the air out of me. I had done so many fire drills before the interview, so many tough, traumatizing questions in the bathroom mirror that she might ask me. I’d delivered them with an obvious, eye-scalding sneer. I’d prepared myself for what I thought would be drastically worse than anything in real life would be. And still here I was. I could have just gotten drunk. 

“I had none.” 

By that, in the precise moment, I meant no romantic relationship. That — pathetic, stupid boy — was still my first impulse when I heard his name, even if, day by day, it got weaker and more quickly pushed aside, like the wing of a dead bird that still moves with a vestigial twitch, just for the bird’s last few minutes.

“Did he take you under his wing?”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s what he told a TV station in Idaho over the weekend. He said you were one of his favorites. One of the ‘bright lights of the farm,’ to use his phrasing.” 

The unimaginable bastard. Spit up from hell like a mouthful of cum. I wanted to squeeze the life out of him with superhuman arms, to turn his face into a haunted blueberry and then slice his stomach open to pull his guts out with my bare hands and pile them high in heaps of bloody, throbbing confetti. It wasn’t enough to rape me, now he was going to use his own mass-grave trash heap of a reputation to ruin my life forever more. I should have gone through with the daydreams I had after the cellar. I was too good for my own good. 

“The asshole lies every five seconds, so I wouldn’t put much weight in anything he says,” I managed. 

Christine Miller flinched a bit, accompanied by a dusting of gasps from the audience. But only one commentator even noted it after the fact. 

I couldn’t keep it trapped inside me any longer. I was keeping it in prison. I was keeping me in prison. But I wasn’t in prison anymore. 

“Christine, what do you think? Am I a Nazi? Can you trust a thing I say? You don’t seem to. All I can tell you is that saying half the things I’ve said on your show today would have gotten me killed on that farm. I’d be buried behind the stables with that guy Patrick who hung himself. Do you wa—”

Christine Miller cut me off. 

“I don’t think you’re a Nazi. You said you abhorred them, and I’m not a sixth grader, so I know enough to know that’s a strong word. But I do think you’re a smart, grown-up person who lived hours away from civilization in rural Idaho with some very dangerous domestic terrorists until just three weeks ago, and you don’t have the most believable of stories. It’s my job to find out what the real story is.”

I didn’t care about the possible nuances of her statement anymore, or any of the positive intent I should ascribe to her questions. I just wanted to be somewhere dark, cool, and very, very quiet. If that meant dying, I would take it.

“You can always try to get in touch with my parents when they turn up. And they will, trust me.” 

“Aren’t your parents avowed Nazis?” 

“You got it. They’d give you a good interview, though. They really get into it.” 

“I don’t want a good interview, Kurt. I want the truth. And that’s what I still hope to get today. Coming up on Good Morning America—”

“I was gang raped in the root cellar. They did it to make me straight.” 

The audience finally let out the unified, horrified gasp I’d been bracing so hard for the entire time. My skin turned to the lifeless white of a starved polar bear.

Christine Miller swiveled back towards me and stared with all the weary dismissiveness one gives a preacher on the street. She turned back to the audience with a radical and rapid shift in demeanor. 

“Folks, I believe victims of sexual assault as much as anyone, but don’t you think there has to be a limit here? People can’t just level accusations out of convenience, I’m sure we can all agree.” 

The camera finally found other prey to drool over, swinging out of my face, and Christine Miller began to move out of her chair in some direction or another. I knew I couldn’t let myself get close to her. 

I started to run, just as fast as I ever had, off the set and through the dark rabbit-warrens of hallways, the sad, dusty, undertrafficked digestive system of the studio. The multimedia room, the offices, the bookshelf, the room with the copier and the printers. I heard footfalls behind me, but I had a nice head start. I pulled huge, ragged gulps of air into my lungs like a half-gutted fish thrown back into the water. 

I made it to the end of the street without slowing down. The sky was a dark, greasy, dead-skin gray. A homeless man in the doorway of the bank across the street stared at me with raw, plate-sized eyes that darted back and forth in a robotic rhythm. I was free, but I was in hell. 

That’s where my memory of the day ends. The rest was unworthy of holding on to, or so much worse that I’ll never be able to remember it again out of self-preservation. 

I wouldn’t bet on either. Even now.