The Leftovers (8 page)

His parents didn’t stay long after dropping him off. There was a big storm coming, and they wanted to get on the road before it hit. His mother handed him an envelope before leaving the dorm.

“It’s a bus ticket.” She hugged him with a tenacity that was almost alarming. “Just in case you change your mind.”

“I love you,” he whispered.

His father’s hug was quick, almost perfunctory, as if they’d be seeing each other again in a day or two.

“Have fun,” he said. “You only get one shot at college.”

*   *   *

DURING THE
Special Spring Session, Tom pledged Alpha Tau Omega. Joining a frat was something he’d wanted to do for so long—in his mind, it was synonymous with college itself—that the process was well under way before he was able to admit that it no longer mattered to him in the least. When he tried to project himself into the future, to envision the life that awaited him at ATO—the big house on Walnut Place, the wild parties and nutty pranks, the late-night bull sessions with brothers who would go on to be his lifelong friends and allies—it all seemed hazy and unreal to him, images from a movie he’d seen a long time ago and whose plot he could no longer remember.

He could’ve withdrawn, of course, maybe rushed again in the fall when he felt better, but he decided to tough it out. He told himself that he didn’t want to bail out on Tyler Rucci, his floormate and pledge brother, but in his heart he knew that the stakes were higher than that. He’d pretty much stopped going to classes by the end of February—he was finding it impossible to concentrate on academics—so the pledge process was all he had left, his only real link to normal college life. Without it, he would’ve become one of those lost souls you saw all over campus that winter, pale, vampiry kids who slept all day and drifted from the dorm to the student center to Marshall Street at night, habitually checking their phones for a message that never seemed to come.

Another benefit of pledging was that it gave him something to talk about with his parents, who called almost every day to check up on him. He wasn’t a particularly good liar, so it helped to be able to say,
We went on a scavenger hunt,
or
We had to cook breakfast in bed for the older brothers, and then serve it to them in flowery aprons,
and to have details at the ready to back up these claims. It was a lot harder when his mother grilled him about his schoolwork, and he was forced to improvise about essays and exams and the brutal problem sets in Statistics.

“What’d you get on that paper?” she’d ask.

“Which paper?”

“Poli Sci. The one we talked about.”

“Oh, that one. Another B+.”

“So he liked the thesis?”

“He didn’t really say.”

“Why don’t you e-mail me the essay? I’d like to read it.”

“You don’t need to read it, Mom.”

“I’d like to.” She paused. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah, everything’s fine.”

Tom always insisted everything was fine—he was busy, making friends, keeping up a solid B average. Even when discussing the frat, he made sure to emphasize the positive, focusing on things like the weekday study groups and the all-night intra-frat karaoke blowout, while avoiding any mention of Chip Gleason, the only active ATO brother who’d gone missing on October 14th.

Chip loomed large around the frat house. There was a framed portrait of him in the main party room, and a scholarship fund dedicated to his memory. The pledges had been required to memorize all sorts of personal information about him: his birthday, the names of his family members, his top-ten movies and bands, and the complete list of all the girls he’d hooked up with in his sadly abbreviated life. That was the hard part—there were thirty-seven girlfriends in all, starting with Tina Wong in junior high and ending with Stacy Greenglass, the buxom Alpha Chi who’d been in bed with him on October 14th—riding him reverse cowgirl-style, if legend were to be believed—and who had to be hospitalized for several days as a result of the severe emotional trauma brought on by his sudden midcoitus departure. Some of the brothers told this story as if it were a funny anecdote, a tribute to the studliness of their beloved friend, but all Tom could think of was how awful it must have been for Stacy, the kind of thing you’d never recover from.

One night at a Tri Delt mixer, though, Tyler Rucci pointed out a hot sorority girl on the dance floor, grinding with a varsity lacrosse player. She was tanned and wearing an incredibly tight dress, leaning forward as she moved her ass in slow circles against her partner’s crotch.

“You know who that is?”

“Who?”

“Stacy Greenglass.”

Tom watched her dance for a long time—she looked happy, running her hands over her breasts and then down over her hips and thighs, making porn star faces for the benefit of her friends—trying to figure out what she knew that he didn’t. He was willing to accept the possibility that Chip hadn’t meant much to her. Maybe he was just a one-time hookup, or a casual friend with benefits. But still, he was a real person, someone who played an active and reasonably important part in her life. And yet here she was, just a few months after he’d disappeared, dancing at a party as though he’d never even existed.

It wasn’t that Tom disapproved. Far from it. He just couldn’t figure out how it was possible that Stacy could get over Chip while he remained haunted by Verbecki, a kid he hadn’t seen for years and probably wouldn’t have even recognized if they’d bumped into each other on October 13th.

But that was how it was. He thought about Verbecki all the time. If anything, his obsession had deepened since he’d returned to school. He carried that stupid picture—Little Kid with Sparkler—everywhere he went and looked at it dozens of times a day, chanting his old friend’s name in his head as though it were some kind of mantra:
Verbecki, Verbecki, Verbecki.
It was the reason he was flunking out, the reason he was lying to his parents, the reason he no longer painted his face blue and orange and screamed his head off at the Dome, the reason he could no longer imagine his own future.

Where the hell did you go, Verbecki?

*   *   *

A BIG
part of the pledge process was getting to know the Older Brothers, convincing them that you were a good fit with ATO. There were poker nights and pizza lunches and marathon drinking games, a series of interviews masquerading as social events. Tom thought he was doing a decent job of hiding his obsession, impersonating a normal, well-adjusted freshman—the guy he should have been—until he was approached one night in the TV room by Trevor Hubbard, a.k.a. Hubbs, a junior who was the frat’s resident bohemian/intellectual. Tom was leaning against a wall, pretending to be interested in a Wii bowling match between two of his pledge brothers, when Hubbs suddenly appeared at his side.

“This is fucked,” he said in a low voice, nodding at the wide-screen Sony, the virtual ball knocking down the virtual pins, Josh Freidecker flipping a celebratory double bird at Mike Ishima. “All this fraternity bullshit. I don’t know how anybody stands it.”

Tom grunted ambiguously, not sure if this was a ploy designed to catch him in an act of disloyalty. Hubbs hardly seemed the type to play that sort of game, though.

“Come here,” he said. “I need to talk to you.”

Tom followed him into the empty hallway. It was a weeknight, still pretty early, not much going on in the house.

“You feeling okay?” Hubbs asked him.

“Me?” Tom said. “I’m fine.”

Hubbs regarded him with a certain skeptical amusement. He was a small, wiry guy—an accomplished rock climber—with scraggly facial hair and a sour expression that was more a default mode than a reflection of his actual mood.

“You’re not depressed?”

“I don’t know.” Tom gave an evasive shrug. “A little, maybe.”

“And you really want to join this frat, live here with all these douchebags?”

“I guess. I mean, I thought I did. Everything’s just kinda fucked up right now. It’s hard to know what I want.”

“I hear you.” Hubbs nodded appreciatively. “I used to be pretty happy here myself. Most of the brothers are pretty cool.” He glanced left and right, then lowered his voice to a near whisper. “The only one I didn’t like was Chip. He was the biggest asshole in the whole house.”

Tom nodded cautiously, trying not to look too surprised. He’d only ever heard people say nice things about Chip Gleason—great guy, good athlete, six-pack abs, ladies’ man, natural leader.

“He kept a hidden camera in his bedroom,” Hubbs said. “Used to tape the girls he fucked, then show the videos down in the TV room. One girl was so humiliated she had to leave school. Good old Chip didn’t care. Far as he was concerned, she was just a stupid whore who got what she deserved.”

“That sucks.” Tom was tempted to ask the girl’s name—it must have been among those he’d memorized—but decided to let it pass.

Hubbs stared at the ceiling for a few seconds. There was a smoke detector up there, red light glowing.

“Like I said, Chip was a dick. I should be happy he’s gone, you know?” Hubbs’s eyes locked on Tom’s. They were wide and frightened, full of a desperation Tom had no trouble recognizing, since he saw it all the time in the bathroom mirror. “But I dream about that fucker every night. I’m always trying to find him. I’ll be running through a maze, screaming his name, or tiptoeing through a forest, looking behind every tree. It’s got to the point I don’t even want to go to sleep anymore. Sometimes I write him letters, you know, just telling him what’s going on around here. Last weekend, I got so hammered, I tried to get his name tattooed on my forehead. The tattoo guy wouldn’t do it—that’s the only reason I’m not walking around with Chip Fucking Gleason written on my face.” Hubbs looked at Tom. It almost felt like he was pleading. “You know what I’m talking about, right?”

Tom nodded. “Yeah, I do.”

Hubbs’s face relaxed a little. “There’s this guy I’ve been reading about on the Web. He’s speaking at a church in Rochester on Saturday afternoon. I think he might be able to help us.”

“He’s a preacher?”

“Just a guy. He lost his son in October.”

Tom gave a sympathetic groan, but it didn’t mean anything. He was just being polite.

“We should go,” Hubbs said.

Tom was flattered by the invitation, but also a little scared. He had the feeling that Hubbs was a little unhinged.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Saturday’s the hot dog–eating contest. The pledges are supposed to cook.”

Hubbs looked at Tom in amazement.

“A hot dog–eating contest? Are you fucking kidding me?”

*   *   *

TOM STILL
marveled at the humble circumstances of his first encounter with Mr. Gilchrest. Later he would see the man speak in front of adoring crowds, but on that frigid March Saturday, no more than twenty people had gathered in an overheated church basement, small puddles of melted snow spreading out from each pair of shoes on the linoleum floor. Over time, the Holy Wayne movement would come to be associated primarily with young people, but that afternoon, the audience was mostly middle-aged or older. Tom felt out of place among them, as if he and Hubbs had wandered by mistake into a retirement planning seminar.

Of course, the man they’d come to see wasn’t famous yet. He was still, as Hubbs had said, “just a guy,” a grieving father who spoke to anyone who would listen, wherever they would have him—not just in houses of worship, but in senior centers, VFW halls, and private homes. Even the host of the event—a tall, slightly stooped, youngish man who introduced himself as Reverend Kaminsky—seemed a bit fuzzy about who Mr. Gilchrest was and what he was doing there.

“Good afternoon, and welcome to the fourth installment of our Saturday lecture series, ‘The Sudden Departure from a Christian Perspective.’ Our guest speaker today, Wayne Gilchrest, hails from just down the road in Brookdale and comes highly recommended by my esteemed colleague, Dr. Finch.” The Reverend paused, in case anyone wanted to applaud for his esteemed colleague. “When I asked Mr. Gilchrest to provide a title for his lecture so I could list it on our website, he told me it was a work in progress. So I’m just as curious as all of you to hear what he has to say.”

People who only knew Mr. Gilchrest in his later, more charismatic incarnation wouldn’t have recognized the man who rose from a chair in the front row and turned to face the meager crowd. Holy Wayne’s future uniform consisted of jeans and T-shirts and studded leather wristbands—one reporter dubbed him the “Bruce Springsteen of cult leaders”—but back then he favored more formal attire, on that day an ill-fitting funeral suit that seemed to have been borrowed from a smaller, less powerful man. It looked uncomfortably tight across the chest and shoulders.

“Thank you, Reverend. And thanks, everybody, for coming out.” Mr. Gilchrest spoke in a gruff voice that radiated masculine authority. Later, Tom would learn that he drove a delivery van for UPS, but if he’d had to guess that afternoon, he would’ve pegged him for a police officer or high school football coach. He glanced at his host, frowning an insincere apology. “I guess I didn’t realize that I was supposed to be speaking from a Christian perspective. I’m really not sure what my perspective is.”

He began by passing out a flyer, one of those missing person notices you saw all over the place after October 14th, on telephone poles and supermarket corkboards. This one featured a color photograph of a skinny kid standing on a diving board, hugging himself against the cold. Beneath his crossed arms, his ribs were clearly visible; his legs jutted like sticks from billowy trunks that looked like they would have fit a grown man. He was smiling but his eyes seemed troubled; you got the feeling he didn’t relish the prospect of plunging into the dark water.
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS BOY?
The caption identified him as Henry Gilchrest, age eight. It included an address and phone number, along with an urgent plea for anyone who may have seen a child resembling Henry to contact his parents immediately.
PLEASE!!! WE ARE DESPERATE FOR INFORMATION REGARDING HIS WHEREABOUTS.