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Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve written in this thing.
Don’t get me wrong, I would’ve written if I knew where it ran off to, but I just found it under my bed with some of my old stuff. It’s kinda fun, if you want to know the truth, looking back on my writing, talking about all that crazy stuff that happened back in New York- should’ve been right after I got the boot from Pencey.
Damn. It’s been two years now, I guess. About two years sounds right. A lot’s changed. Probably shouldn’t talk about it too much if this can be used as evidence against me in a court of law or some bull like that. Well, whatever.
If you want to know the truth, the real truth, about the last two years, you’ve gotta at least understand where I’m coming from. I think I talked about this previously, back when I was writing from the damn psych ward or whatever, but I know I mentioned at some point that my kid brother, Allie, had died when he was just little.
But what hadn’t happened yet was my kid sister Phoebe dying too.
About a couple months after I had decided to stay in New York, braving my parent’s berating and everything, old Phoebe was rollerskating out at her favorite park on a Sunday, just like she always did. According to the police later, some sonuvabitch threw her in the back of a van and took off with her. They found her body in some back alley days later in some poor attempt to hide the evidence.
If my mother didn’t have anxiety after Allie died, she sure as hell did now. Jittery and constantly crying. Honestly, my father was almost worse, lashing out at everyone and everything, the sonuvabitch. D.W. became even more distant. He rarely even called. Aren’t things like this supposed to make your family stick together? Where they lose someone, so everyone gets together ‘cause they’re the only ones who understand each other’s pain and grief?
Like hell it is. See, that’s the stuff that they feed you from the movies. No, in real life all you get is a jittery mother, an angry father, and your only damn sibling left that won’t even talk to you.
As for me, if you want to know the truth, I wasn’t even depressed. I felt pretty numb, just standing around town with my breath all frozen, hanging up ‘missing kid’ posters. I had to put up a lot of ‘missing kid’ posters on the sides of buildings and all. For my own sister. The worst part of all of it, though, was how my parents raked together a sum of 30 bucks to anyone who could find her. That made my blood boil more than anything else had. The goddamn ‘reward’. I mean, who needs a reward to find a missing person? Is the ‘10 year old girl, beloved daughter and sister’ not enough? Do people really need a sum of 30 damned dollars to feel motivated enough to look for a little girl who was kidnapped and possibly murdered?
If I had had my complaints about phonies before, this is where I drew the line. I got pity calls from everyone I could think of. Anytime I dared make a call to old Jane or any friend, all I got was the whole spiel about how they were ‘there for’ me and my family. What a fake phrase. They didn’t mean it. Even old Jane said how she was there for us. She even came up and helped us search. Maybe she just wanted the 30 bucks.
I had pretty much given up on everything after old Phoebe went. I knew she could at least be reunited with Allie, and that made me kinda happy and all. But it never really hit me till then how much Phoebe gave me hope. Hope that I guess not everybody had to be such fake phonies. But now, with all the damn condolences and rewards on missing posters, I had just given up. Get this. I walked down to the park one day, the one Phoebe roller skated at, and there was a little memorial with her name on it next to the roller skating park. There were flowers on it, too. I almost felt like tearing it down. Lot of good some flowers do her now.
I really thought about old Phoebe, and something didn’t sit right with me. Phoebe didn’t get it, she didn’t get how phony adults were. Neither did Allie. Neither of them saw how there were 30 bucks put on their life, or the flowers on their memorial, or the fake sorries of people they barely even knew. I was jealous, I guess. They didn’t get it, they couldn’t yet. I really thought about it, while I was putting up posters or smoking in her empty room, or watching her be lowered into the ground at an old cemetery outside of town. I really thought about how no little kid really knows- I mean, really knows, how sick and twisted being an adult is. They can see it, sometimes, if they read between the lines, but kids don’t really do that stuff, and I don’t blame them.
Not only that, but I was thinking about something else, too. How I was talking to old Phoebe before, back when I was wandering around New York, and I snuck into our apartment and her room. I was telling her about that old poem, “if you meet a body coming up from the rye.” But how I changed it to “if you catch a body coming up from the rye.” I thought about that a lot. Catcher in the Rye. Where all you do all day is catch some little kids, falling over a cliff. The more I thought about it, the more the damned phrase stuck in my mind.
I guess that’s how I ended up how I did. So you can’t blame me, now. Maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re pitying me like Jane and everyone did. Maybe I’d rather have you blame me, but I still felt the need to tell you how it came to what it came to.
I was smoking a cigarette one night, right over by old Phoebe’s grave, right next to Allie’s. The flowers were just starting to wilt, like everyone had just up and forgotten about her like her death was a damn trend to ride on. I visited a couple different spots when I was thinking of her. Sometimes I’d go to the alley where they found her. Sometimes I’d come out to the graveyard. I’d go to the skate park sometimes, but not because of her little memorial. I just liked watching the kids roll around.
I had only wanted to come out to the graveyard that night because New York was giving me a damn headache. I was standing there for quite some time, thinking about the whole Catcher in the Rye phrase I had sorta made up for myself. Quite a title, and I was pretty proud of it if you want to know the truth. Even if I didn’t quite have it right, or even deserve it at the time.
I did deserve it, eventually. That night is when I first really earned that title.
There was a kid crying in the cemetery. I don’t know, it was kind of blurry. Some kid, talking about how his best friend died. It was all blurry, when I try to think about that night. But I remember telling this kid how I was the same, how I had lost my brother and my sister. Maybe I was just kind of feeling gray and numb, and maybe talking to some kid in a graveyard that had gone through something similar would help me feel a little more colorful. But he kept droning on and on about how she had died so long ago, and nobody cared anymore but him. That even his parents had moved on, and they had turned all cold and colorless, and that families were supposed to bond over stuff like this.
I think it was the conversation with this kid that I got, like really got, what I had meant by that phrase, now. Catcher in the Rye. What it really meant I should do.
I don’t remember that night, it’s all blurry when I try to think about it. The darkness, the coughing and screaming, my fingernails sinking into innocent flesh, but…
I think that night, I had caught- and saved- my first body coming through the rye.
I read up about it in the paper a couple days later. A boy had been murdered in a graveyard, strangled to death over his best friend’s grave.
But if you really want to know the truth, I didn’t feel bad. I smiled. I smiled when I read that. I swear I’m a madman sometimes, but I was more in my right mind then I had ever been before. Everything was clear.
Kids, for God’s sake, kids don’t get it. Phoebe and Allie kicked the damn bucket before they could. And God, how I’m thankful for that.
I realize it now, I realize that their deaths were the best thing to ever happen to me. Not the easiest, but I’ll be damned if they're not the best. I get it now, I really do, how the only way to save these kids from understanding how terrible the adult world is is to never let them see it. Nobody else would get it, not if you told them you murdered little kids. But that’s not what I do; I save them. I sound like a goddamn madman, but I save them from the monstrosities of being grown up. I save them from everything.
I stand in that rye field now, I know. I’m not the damn catcher, though. I’m a savior. I’ve been doing it ever since Phoebe died now, and they haven’t linked me to anything. But it’s not easy, sometimes, being the Savior in the Rye. It’s not any person’s job, stripping yourself of humanity and any faith you had left in it, finding yourself plummeting into depths you didn’t know existed, swinging a switchblade with such blunt force you didn’t know you could produce. It’s hard, sometimes, when nobody understands. When there’s more names in the paper and on the sides of milk cartons, when there’s more missing kid posters and more goddamn rewards. When there’s more broken families and more siblings just like me, and I know it’s me who did everything to cause that. But between everything I’ve seen, and everything I’ve heard, and everything I know, can you blame me? I mean, can you really blame me?
Something tells me, deep down somewhere, that it’s wrong, that this is all wrong, that I’m no better than the sonuvabitch that killed Phoebe. But I’m better than mom and dad, I’m better than D.W., I’m better than the memorial in the park, I’m better than Phoebe’s murderer, I’m better than Jane, I’m better than those pity calls, or the 30 dollar reward. And I’m better than I ever have been before, I’m doing more good than I ever have. It’s so hard to tell the kids that, for them to not see the same rye field that I’m standing in. They don’t even see that they’re wandering off the cliff, they don’t see what lies ahead, and they can’t see it even though I keep telling them, “I’m saving you, I’m saving you, God, can’t you see I’m saving you?!” as they go limp and lifeless under my stained hands, and I know it's all because of me. But I'm telling the truth, I’m doing it to save them.
I’m tired of phonies. Of all the fake condolences, of fake memorials in the park, of fake wilted flowers on a grave, of fake movies that don’t show you what grieving is really like, of fake people trying to strip some cash off of some family if they find their little kid.
You can’t catch a body coming up from the rye, about to wander over a cliff. But you can sure as hell kill it quickly to save it suffering the pain of falling.
And that’s what I do now.
Because I’m the only sane one left in the world.
I’m not a phony.
I’m not a catcher.
I’m not a killer.
I am Holden Caulfield, the Savior in the Rye.