Book cover image for The White Noise Album
Heroinum/Dirt
Heart Pharmacy Press (2016)
by JØnathan Lyons
The White Noise Album (Pages 1-43)
Suffer
the Children
Included
in the Dirt Heart Pharmacy Press anthology The 8th Madness.
Now.1
Ne slumps sullenly in nir chair, the gag
firmly in place. I will have only a moment to escape the room before ne dooms
me with a word — even some small vocalization. But Sasha is my child, my own
flesh and blood, and I will not let nir starve. I change nir soiled diaper,
then set the plate of steaming food before nir and ready myself to flee.
And I think, My God, ne’s only nine.
I slip my key into the mechanism on the rear
of the gag, but hold the device itself in place.
Maybe I’ll get lucky. Maybe ne won’t try to
speak to me.
Remember, I whisper, trying to sound soothing, no words. Use the pen and pad.
I let go of the gag and sprint for the door.
Pa — ne gets out. The blow pounds me
into the wall. I cannot breathe; ne’s knocked the wind out of me. I struggle
through the door, shoving aside my shabby improvisational soundproofing: layers
of towels and blankets duct-taped to the door, inside and out. The
soundproofing was an impotent effort, though, like so many where my child is
concerned.
As my breath slowly begins to return, I wonder
what my child was trying to say to me.
Please?
No — Papa.
My heart, so crumpled from all of this, implodes further. I clutch to my heart
the locket Anna gave me at an earlier, happier time. Inside, anachronistically
enough, is a small lock of her hair.
My baby, my child; ne just wanted some small
comfort from me. Ne meant no harm, but, of course …
We could not seem to convince nir not to
speak. No modes of communication worked efficiently, as without the full range
of motion, nir hands could barely — and then, clumsily — use sign language, and
writing on a notepad was slow, tedious. I did not blame her. Nir situation, one
of rare communication, one of imprisonment, was inhumane. It was all we’d been
able to come up with.
I told myself we would only need to keep nir
bound and gagged until nir weaponized words faded. This, I hoped, would arrive
with adolescence and the radical alterations that brings.
Fracture
When ne was born, our
child turned out to be a rare creature: A fully hermaphroditic baby.
The delivery
physician told us that it was customary to select a sex for children born
between genders and for a surgical team to tailor a child to that decision. I
was all for this solution, but Anna would have none of it. A stalwart believer
in one’s right to self-determination, she demanded that our firstborn be allowed
to choose whatever path s/he wanted. But I’d wanted a son, and she was keeping
me from having one, and in I resented her for that, and that resentment took
hold, and a fracture formed between us.
Anna took on the
tasks of choosing a gender-neutral pronoun set, which we integrated into our
vocabularies so that we might avoid awkward constructions such as s/he. According to ta go-to Web source
dedicated to the issue:
Ease of pronunciation: 4/5
Distinction from other pronouns: 4/5
Gender neutrality: 4.5/5
Although relatively obscure, this has
become my favorite contender. It follows the formats of existing pronouns while
staying more gender-neutral than any but Spivak – you could call it
gender-balanced. “Ne” is n+(he or she), “nem” is n+her+him, “nir” isn+him+her.
Because it has a different form for each declension, it doesn’t lean towards
following male or female patterns – patterns made very obvious when you read
works about obviously male characters with female-patterned pronoun forms. The
letter “n” itself can stand for “neutral” – a property we are searching for. A
reader may be uncertain how to pronounce “ne” at first glance, but
pronunciation of the other forms is relatively obvious. One problem when
reading aloud is that the “n” sometimes blends with words ending in “n” or “m,”
but it didn’t occur as often and wasn’t as problematic as “zir” with words
ending in an “s” or “z” sound.
Anna decides to name nir Sasha, a German name for males, but one
that’s often assigned to female babies in the West.
Before.1
Sasha and I will head
to the park. Anna, who has been noticeably distant from me these past weeks, is
booked in a meeting for another hour and a half.
We are fortunate to have a company that
specializes in playground equipment calling our tiny town its home: Our parks
are exquisitely decked out.
The day is cool, but
not cold. The leaves scrape white noise across the pavement, electric in the
unforgiving autumn glare. Before this day, I never suspected that the sun might
have a mean streak.
Sasha and I chase
across the collage of slides and ladders and gangways that our benefactor
corporation has designed to resemble a pirate ship. We’ve brought along a bag
of our own, as well, bearing a soccer ball, wiffle ball and bat, even a spongy
football. As we head down a high, bumpy slide, ne sprints to our sack and
retrieves the soccer ball.
“Catch!” ne yells,
beaming. Ne drops the ball and gives it a hell of a kick. It sails over my head
and across the park, toward the borough’s Main Street. Sasha decides to make it
a race. We tear across the grass, and I let my pace flag a bit so ne can beat
me to it, when I notice, in the front window of the coffee shop across the way,
Anna.
She is not alone. She
has an expression of delight on her face that I have not witnessed in ages; her
posture is relaxed. Sitting across from her at the small table, a fit, and
younger-looking man smiles charmingly and holds her gaze. Their hands touch,
then surreptitiously flit apart. Underneath the table, their feet and legs caress
one another. I touch the locket again, almost a reflex, as the organs within my
chest hammer. The lock of her hair comes from a happier time, a time when an
extramarital relationship would have been unthinkable. Realizing who he is
sinks my heart like a stone.
These are pleasures missing from my life these
long months, and she is gifting them to another man. And not just any other
man. All at once, I realize that my Sasha sees all of this, as well — sees nir
mother clearly enjoying a romantic moment with nir uncle, my twin brother,
Owen. My parents named me, phonetically, the opposite: I am called Noah.
Perhaps he reminds Anna of who and what I used
to be. He is more in-shape than I am, and the effect does render him seemingly
younger than me. I cannot deny that I’ve put on a few pounds, and that working
out has never been my thing. I’ve let myself slide. I’m a lump.
My child stares for a
time at nir mother and nir uncle, nir face burning with fury at Anna. Then nir
gaze turns to me. Ne is imploring me to interrupt, to acknowledge what we are
witnessing, to do something. But I
find myself immobile, terrified of what I am seeing, completely bereft of the
will to act.
I pick up the ball and tell my child that it
is time to go home.
Nir expression of
fury and alarm, that look of desperation for me to do something to set things right before our world breaks, undergoes
a slow transmogrification. My child cannot accept nir ineffectual, impotent
father, nor his failure to take even a single, minimal step to preserve their
family, their world. Everything is about to shatter.
Now.2
When the first reports of this began to
appear, we regarded it as a hoax, or possibly some sort of group hysteria. Words? How could words kill?
Sasha loved to sing. Like any tween, ne spoke
endlessly on nir phone with riends. Lately, I’d noticed the sudden frequent
dropping of F-bombs in those conversations. Thinking about it now, it would
have been impossible not to; ne meant for us to hear nir new, taboo lexicon.
It was obnoxious — the sort behavior that
manifests when the hippest thing a child can come up with is being
unnecessarily rude. I leaned around the corner and gave a disapproving look,
which ne answered with an expression I can only interpret as saying, Fuck off.
Then, as Anna was
preparing dinner one evening, I noticed her beauty, present even with her curls
tied back and a sheen of steam and sweat glossing her face. I came near,
hugging her from behind. My lovely Anna clamped my hands and shoved them away.
I’m cooking, she said. But her tone was clear. I was losing her. As
nearly as I could tell, the only reason she did not either leave or kick me out
was for Sasha’s benefit.
In sprang our child. Hey-hey, I cheered. How’s
Papa’s little favorite?
Sasha’s retaliation
was swift. With an expression of blazing contempt, nir eyes burned into mine. I
yielded. I looked away. I was no good at this with nir at all, anymore, and nir
talent for staring so fiercely that I backed down had manifested suddenly, out
of nowhere.
An uncomfortable
realization began to set in. In school, ne learned mathematical processes that
I — and, indeed, most people my age — could no longer recall. Ne was learning
things that those of my generation had already forgotten and had no day-to-day
use for, and ne was being tested on nir grasp of them, all while being denied
society’s permission to even operate a simple motor vehicle. These realizations
led nir to regard nirself as more intelligent than me, and more so than the
vast majority of adults she met. Nir contempt for nir circumstances swelled.
Had my Papa’s child disappeared completely
into this scathing, caustic tween?
Anna bent down, away
from the considerable white-noise racket of her stir-fry, went eye-to-eye with
Sasha. Anaise beamed at nir mother.
What do you hear? Anna asked nir. It was simple, a vocabulary
game we played. Sasha grinned, their faces not 10 inches apart.
Sizzle! Ne belted the word out at the top of nir lungs.
That word, Sizzle
— so sibilant, all hissing and edges. A word like a blade, it sliced through
Anna’s beauty like a shattering windshield. It was the first manifestation, not
yet at its full force, and I think that that is why Anna survived, though
Sasha’s word took a heavy toll: That sibilance slashed at Anna, a hurricane of
razor blades, gashing open wounds and, ultimately, leaving her
wheelchair-bound.
Where Anna’s blood spilled, the kitchen
transformed: Before I could even begin to wipe up the blood, the puddle, a deep
cerise in color, began to grow. At first a handful of separate pools formed.
Then those pools reached out to one another, slowly widening.Since that day it
has slowly grown wider. I have tried lowering things in search of its bottom,
but we can come by nothing as easily as before all of this, and when I upended
a broom and dipped its handle in, I could not reach the bottom, and the slipped
from my grasp and sank. The pool ranges from cobalt to robin’s-egg blue, and
shimmers subtlely, a vivid palette that contrasts with ours. The palette of our
world seems to have drained to colorless shades of gray. I can see nothing
through the surface of the pool. A freshwater scent wafts now from the room.
I cautiously navigate its edges to prepare
what food I can forage from the abandoned stores. The laws that hold world
together have come unmoored.
Before.2
No one knows what this is. It began around the
time that the Voyager 1 spacecraft crossed the heliopause and left our solar
system behind. Some saw connections in the timing. Parents around the world
struggled to cope and adapt as their children’s voices, without warning,
suddenly became weaponized.
Some succumbed to religious speculations. Some
new, or perhaps renewed, Curse of Babel. The gaunt, haunted, grubby man at the
corner marked its coming by trading his large, homemade sign’s slogan from “The
End Is Nigh!” to:
“No More Launches!
G-D Don’t Want Us
Up There In
HAEVIN!”
Perhaps, they postulated, in crossing the
heliosphere, humankind had gone too far for His liking. Perhaps this was
punishment He was visiting upon us. He had a reputation for that sort of thing.
They struck out in desperate supposition, laboring to make sense of the vile
new normal that pitted parents’ survival against their children’s most meager
utterances.
After Anna’s injury, I had to keep Sasha
hidden. It quickly became clear that the streets were no longer safe for
children. Roving packs of vigilantes, people who had avoided having offspring
and who now felt besieged by them, would gun down a child on-sight, rather than
risk being destroyed by a stray syllable. Often, the words felled them before
they could get off a single shot.
Adults were never afflicted, never found that
their speech had suddenly turned deadly. Not as far as we know, anyway. The
change arrived so suddenly and with such devastating effect that civilization
imploded. No communications, no television, no water or electricity. Children
accidentally slaughtered their parents, teachers, any adults who were in the
wrong place at the wrong time. Babies’ nonsensical chatter chipped away at
parents’ defenses, driving them out of their minds or into retreat. The body
count is unknowable, but it has been devastating.
Now.3
Anna abides, though with no spark, no
enthusiasm for life, her former beauty now an intricate cicatrix and her flesh
a papery, ashen gray. I do my best to balance helping her onto the toilet,
wiping away the shit afterward, and keeping us fed. Outside, the world rages
with the savagery that comes when such panic takes hold of a population that
society shatters.
Looters have taken nearly all of the food from
the Kwik-E Mart, the nearest convenience store. I find a couple of cans of
creamed corn. Before all this I wouldn’t have touched this stuff, but today, as
I load them into my pack, the thought of it makes my stomach growl.
All of the stuff that’s perishable rotted long
ago, and other looters have taken most of the food that never rots.
Back at home, I put another log in the
fireplace and move Anna closer for the warmth, but she sits, unresponsive. I
hear no sound coming from Sasha’s room, but to be as sure as I can, I wait a
solid hour, listening, before I dare enter and replace nir gag. The arrangement
isn’t ideal. I do not dare let nir speak, lest nir words make short work of us.
I keep nir hands and feet secured to a chair. I leave enough length on the
ropes that ne can feed nirself, but not so much that ne can reach nir gag. We
can barely communicate. I left a book on sign language on the table before nir
months ago, but tied down as ne is, imprisoned by nir own father, ne sits,
vacant-eyed and crestfallen. This time ne hasn’t eaten a bite of the food I
left with nir. I lock nir gag back in place.
In the kitchen, the pool in the floor’s center
has grown to a width of about five feet, a reflective, shimmering azure mirror.
I can still make my way around it, but that won’t be the case if it keeps
widening. If our house had a basement, I would be able to examine it in more
detail. But the place is built on swampy Florida land; the house stands on a
concrete slab. The source of the pool, apart from its sanguinary beginning, is
a mystery.
I struggle to open the cans of creamed corn
with our dull, rusting can opener, then empty both cans into a saucepan. This I rest on our grill in the
fireplace. It’s not much, but it’s food.
When I bring a hot bowl of the corn to Sasha,
I see tears flowing from eyes blazing with fury.
If I un-gag you now, I whisper,
you’ll say something so loud and so sibilant it will shred the flesh from my
bones.
But the rage in nir expression does not waver.
Ne takes the pen in nir hand, hovers it over the notepad for a moment, then
slashes out the word: MONSTER.
Fine, I tell nir. You can eat it
cold, later, when you’re in a mood I can trust.
I rejoin Anna before the fire. A questioning
expression forms on heruined face.
Tough love, I’m afraid, I say. But my wife turns away. She hasn’t a
word for me — not a one.
Flow.1
The next morning, it is time to forage again.
Our nearest neighbor was a professor emeritus of English, an immense man with
thinning, wavy white hair who used to have dinner at our neighborhood pub every
night. He has introduced himself to me a dozen times, with no recollection of
the previous exchanges. I’ve been watching his house and, not having seen any
activity there in more than a week, am contemplating pillaging there for
whatever supplies he might have laid in.
Our days seem broken. I use terms such as day and night, but it is as though the planet has stopped its rotation; all
day and all night, the sky and the air are an overcast, sullen gray.
I traverse the yard, entering the no-man’s
land between ours and his. This I do with care, because this retiree may, in
fact, still remain within his home, and he may well be armed, and he’ll
certainly not find me familiar. The retiree’s name is Morrow.
As I approach his home, I see and hear no
signs of life. In fact, as I move nearer, I can see that one of his windows has
shattered and gone unrepaired. I risk a glance into the place, but find no
trace of Morrow. All is quiet inside, and the fireplace, though it was lit at
some point in the past, shows signs that it burnt out long ago, and it has gone
untended.
I find the front door closed, but unlocked.
Inside, after a slow, wary reconnaissance, I decide that the old man must have
fled. I find a few canned goods in his kitchen and load them into a bag —
canned vegetables, a few soups, nothing much, though I cannot help but notice
that Morrow’s book shelves overflow with Atlases of rivers, streams, brooks,
all manner of waterway. And it is a globe-spanning collection. As I try a final
door, I am surprised to find stairs leading down: a basement! How unusual here,
with our soggy soil. I brandish a fireplace lighter for what little light it
can provide, and make my way down. The basement is musty and damp, with a plain
concrete floor. Against the far wall, I spot sets of shelves that turn out to
be Morrow's emergency supplies — a flashlight, a camping lantern, a gallon jug
of water, and enough food to last us a few days. As I load what I can into my
bag, the shelf I’m emptying wobbles a bit. I notice that the shelves each have a set of wheels
attached at the bottom. In fact, now that I’m looking down here, near the
floor, I see a set of arcs in the dust on the floor, growing out from beneath
the shelves. I take hold of the shelf before me and, with an effort, roll it
aside.
I find myself staring into the darkness of what
is clearly some sort of tunnel. Its sides, ceiling, and floor all resemble the
unfinished rock- and concrete-face of an abandoned sewage system, though these
are clearly meant for human passage. Closer inspection with my meager flame
reveals walls a claustrophobic four feet apart, along with a low, rough
ceiling.
Over the next while, I explore the tunnel and
find it labyrinthine. Why, I puzzle, would daft old Morrow's unlikely basement
have a hidden door leading into a labyrinth? I spot a faint sapphire glow ahead
of me, a blue light of some sort, and I decided to investigate. Reaching it
means a long, uncertain walk.
Abruptly, the cramped tunnel opens into a
yawning chamber, an aqua brilliance radiating from overhead. The ceiling
appears to be ice, but as I watch, I notice that its surface is ungulating,
stirred by some force. Somehow, I am standing submerged in a pond, its surface
a ceiling moving slowly, more like cold molasses than water. A passage branches
away from it to my right, another to my left. The one on my left seems to be
flowing into the pond, and the snail-paced current of the one to the right
flows away. I can feel the current’s gentle pull. The floor of the passage is
strewn with pebbles and silt, some of which glitter in the cobalt glow. Tiny
debris drifts unhurriedly past, sparkling like tiny chunks of diamonds and ice.
Peering up through the shifting surface, I can
make out the distorted façade of playground equipment, long fallen into
disrepair, rusted and crumbling like everything else. The labyrinth — it is,
somehow, a route decided by the flow of water through bodies and tributaries,
ponds and creeks. That is enough for me to dub it the Flow, for shorthand.
I extinguish and pack my fireplace lighter.
The Flow provides plenty of light. This space, somehow, seems to join the
collective ebbs and tides, the current, the very flow of the waterways. And
yet, I am walking normally, my feet on a floor of a million glimmering
particles. I find things along the floor that seem out-of-place: A corroded
piece of a ship bearing the identification “USS OKLAHOMA”; a mug and saucer,
heavily encrusted with barnacles and shells, with “RMS Titanic” etched upon
each; and shells, nacreous, phosphorous wonders from fresh- and saltwater
creatures alike — all saturated in such color that they cast the washed-out
world outside the Flow in a flat spectrum indeed.
I follow the passage whose current leads away,
and after walking for more than an hour, my creek-passage opens into what has
to be the river that runs alongside our town. I follow the stream’s path,
retracing my steps, and decide to investigate a branch I’d passed along my way
out. The water of the aqua ceiling, here, does not seem to be in as much
motion. I approach another pond-chamber. The floor of this one is much the same
as the others, though a familiar broom rests in the silt at the bottom of this
one. And, peering up through a small pool, I slowly come to recognize a room. I
am staring up, through the watery ceiling, and into the kitchen of my own home.
Suddenly, Morrow’s collection of waterway
atlases makes a strange sort of sense to me. To follow the Flow, and to know
where he was going, those maps would be useful.
Through the luminous ceiling I see cans and
containers left open on the counter, and realize that Anna is the only one at
home who could have gotten into the kitchen to get something to eat.
My heart soars: My wife will swoon with the
news of my discovery, at all of its chromaticity and luminescence and wonder! I
collect stones and shells, all glowing like gems. I will win her back. I begin
stacking the stones, arranging them into geometrical patterns, making certain
each placement is just so. I build a bower for my beloved — a wonder
constructed of iridescent stones and glowing nacre. I can hardly wait to share
my discovery of the labyrinth with her; so little new and exciting happens in
our gray, cloistered world. I want to impress her, perhaps even delight her
into some small conversation with my impossible find.
Then I realize that the discovery of this
aquamarine labyrinth has immersed me in my curiosity so firmly that I’ve lost
track of time. I’ve been stupid. I let the time get away from me. I have a
seriously injured wife to care for and a reproachful, intemperate, and probably
very hungry child to clean and feed.
This transmarine ceiling is far too high for me to reach up and through.
I hurriedly retrace my path to Morrow's basement and swing the shelving back
into place.
I heave open the door to our home, brimming
with excitement.
Anna! I call out, dropping my bag of filched foodstuffs in the entryway. No
response comes.
Anna?
How long have I been gone? A terrifying notion
strikes: What if the food I’d seen on our kitchen counter wasn’t for Anna? What
if I’ve been gone long enough that Anna felt it necessary to attempt to feed
our child? The last time I’d laid eyes upon Sasha, the child had been in a
vicious mood.
In a panic, I scramble down the hall toward
Sasha’s room. A chill wind pushes back my hair. When I reach nir room, the door
is open. The scene on the other side is one of explosive, glistening scarlet
and dull gray light from outside. The wall has been blown away.
Anna
died here, shredded by our child’s deadly lexicon.
There, sitting on the bed ne no longer uses,
sits Sasha, weeping silently.
I weigh the risk to myself, then search out
the notepad and pen.
Sasha, I write, what happened?
Sasha, with a trembling hand, takes the pen
and pad.
Mama told me she loved me, ne writes.
In this bizarre moment, I cannot process
Anna’s demise; it does not seem either real or possible. I take back the pen
and pad and write, What then?
Clearly reluctant to respond, my child regards
the pad warily. After a long wait, ne reaches for the pen and pad. Ne protects
me by allowing nirself neither to vocalize nir weeping nor to speak.
She brought me some food, ne writes.
She took off the gag and untied me. Then she told me she loves me. I started to
sign “I love you,” but then she told me it was ok — she hesitates — to say it out loud.
Already, the room has begun to take on a
cerulean glimmer. I suspect an actual blueshift may be beginning — that time
may behave differently within the flow of the waterways and the areas
immediately surrounding them.
We sit silently together as I turn the
hand-cranked generator on our emergency radio and strain to hear a signal.
Sasha has voluntarily blocked nir urge to speak by cutting cardboard down into
a shape ne can squeeze between nir teeth and lips — a trick ne learned from a
schoolmate who suffered Tourette Syndrome.
There’s hardly ever anything to hear, but once
in a while we catch a stray broadcast from someone with an emergency generator
and a shortwave radio. The information that arrives is sometimes too outlandish
to be believed. A survivalist hunkered down in the Hill Country outside Austin
sometimes signs on. He calls himself the Minuteman. He is convinced that this
is a zombie apocalypse. He does not leave his bunker. Every transmission from
him sounds little more disconnected from the outside world than the previous
one.
But his paranoia saved his life; laying in
canned supplies, drinkable water, an emergency generator, and who knew what
else, gave him and his wife a safe place to retreat to when the world as we
knew it came crashing down.
I roll along the dial, searching ...
With my worn atlas, I open to the maps of
Florida. I could find a path to Cape Canaveral easily enough, but the open
road? That’s just asking for trouble. But Morrow’s trove of waterway atlases?
I’m going to forage, I tell my child. Ne sits in a chair near the
window, reading by the colorless light from outside. Ne does not look up.
I return to Morrow’s basement. I haven’t told
Sasha about the transmarine labyrinth yet. I don’t know whether ne’ll believe
me when I do. But I want to see what more I can find among its watery branches.
Above the fluid ceiling, I see what I can of the world. Everything moves in
slow motion, as though it’s all swimming in syrup. I follow the branch that
leads to the pool in our kitchen, and happen across a new passage. Through the
surface, I watch as Sasha’s room comes into focus overhead. The blood spilled
in Anna’s death has created a reflecting pool like the one in my kitchen.
I am thinking, now, of the canned foods I’m
going to look for, when the current strengthens, the Flow lifting me from the
floor. I reach for the wall, but only scrape up my hand in the effort. Tendrils
of my blood swirl into my wake. My pulse quickens. This hasn’t happened in my
earlier visits to the labyrinth, and I do not know where this rush of the Flow
is heading.
Abruptly, the current ebbs and the water
becomes — well — water again. It happens so suddenly that water rushes into my
nose and throat. My clothes suddenly soaked and heavy, the Flow vomits me
forth, and I land in the grass beside a storm-sewer ditch. The tiny trickle of
man-made stream that runs through here could not possibly have been deep enough
for me to submerge.
I’ve gulped so much water into my lungs that I
spend the next few minutes vomiting it back up. When I’ve righted myself
reasonably, I look to the shore. Just up from the ditch is a building that used
to be a grocery. I plod a muddy trudge up and away from the sewer.
I negotiate my way around, checking for
others. When I’m reasonably certain the coast is clear, I force open a locked
rear door. The gut-wrenching stench of rotted meat and vegetables makes me
wretch, but I have nothing left to expel.
I wring water from my bag, and it splatters to
the floor. There are obviously no lights to turn on, so I make my way in what
bland, flat daylight seeps in through the place’s translucent ceiling. I find
rows and rows of foodstuffs in cans and jars. The produce and meat sections of
the store were clearly left to rot when the world broke and the power failed. I
load my bag, planning to carry as much preserved food as possible out, then
figure out how to get it home from wherever I am.
Back at home, as I roll the tuning dial,
searching, I hear a faint voice — so faint that I almost don’t catch it. I’ve been
cranking the radio’s manual power and listening long enough that I’ve let
myself space off; I’d stopped paying attention.
The signal is faint, but after rolling back
over the frequencies a few times, I find it again. It’s another survivor. The sky is radiant, she reports. To anyone who can hear me — and I don’t know
if anyone can — it is an eerie blue, sort of faint when I first noticed it, but
I ventured out earlier today and witnessed the glow growing stronger. It seemed
to be flowing toward a specific, single location. I had pepper spray, in case I
found any trouble, but the streets here in Cape Canaveral were dead. This place
is a ghost town.
The brightest concentration of the glow was
almost neon. It converges from all directions at the bottom of Launch Platform
41, then shoots up and away, a line of light going straight up.
Canaveral LC-41?, I say. Sasha raises nir eyebrows, forming a
curious expression. Ne lifts nir hands and shrugs nir shoulders. It’s faster
than writing or signing.
Voyager 1 launched from LC-41, I tell her.
Ne rolls nir eyes at me and slashes out a
message with nir pen and pad: WHY THE
FUCK DOES THAT MATTER?!?
I feel foolish. Stupid. She has me. I don’t
know.
The voice from the shortwave continues. Time is behaving oddly at the platform. The
closer I got, the more things around me slowed down. I watched a bird hang
standstill in midflight about a block ahead of me. I think it might stop
altogether at the LC. It might even flow backwards.
The signal fades.
Cape Canaveral, I say. I can feel its pull, a current
flowing toward LC-41.
Sasha regards me warily. We’ve settled into a
necessarily tacit truce, but nir showing any sign of being impressed by me or
my actions is rare. I can’t blame nir. If I were a dependent child and my lone
surviving parent showed signs that he was losing his mind, I’d be worried.
But the Flow — why is it flowing toward the
LC?
I think we need to go on a roadtrip, I tell Sasha.
Ne raises nir eyebrows dubiously at me. I open
one of Morrow’s atlases to a map showing Cape Canaveral.
Come on, I say, I have something to
show you. Something I’ve found.
I lead my silent child across the way to
Morrow’s house, then through the door and down to the basement.
Stand back, I tell nir, and ne listens. I swing the shelving aside, unveiling
the labyrinth and the bower I built to lure Anna.
I call it the Flow, I tell nir. Come on. I hold out my hand and, thankfully, ne takes it.
I don’t quite know how, but the flow seems to
unite every river, stream, creek, whatever sort of waterway — the circulatory
system of the planet — even blood, as it travels the labyrinth of the body. And
the flow of time.
Now Sasha wears an expression of fear. I try
to soothe nir, keeping my voice calm, authoritative. I don’t know what happened, but that woman on the shortwave? What she
reported has me thinking that the old launchpads at Cape Canaveral are
important, somehow. Come on. I’ll show you.
I lead my child along the passage and into the
first chamber of the Flow.
I hug nir, pull nir close; ne stiffens a bit,
but relaxes after a few seconds.
Hold on.
I hold the map of Cape Canaveral before me and
concentrate on its location.
A moment later, the Flow’s current gathers us
up from the floor and hurtles us along a vortex of the liquid that we can,
inexplicably, breathe.
When the flow ejects us in a crashing wave, we
find ourselves gasping, spitting water, just outside the Launch Complex. Sasha
tugs excitedly at my shirt sleeve, and points up.
The sky overhead, the ground beneath us,
everything radiates a neon blue hue, all of it flowing toward the one I
recognize as LC-41. There, the Flow gathers at the base of the platform,
turning upward in a bolt of brilliance, into the sky. And I know what is at the
other end of that beam of light: It’s Voyager 1, stationary out there,
somewhere, anchored by the Flow to our broken world. Voyager, the flow of time,
the impossible physics that made the children’s words lethal, all of it is part
of the Flow, somehow.
Without thinking about it, I close a hand around
my locket. But if time is behaving
strangely at the LC — I say. Come on.
I lift my child to nir feet and we set off for
the center of the Flow: LC-41.
At the base of the Launch Complex, I can see
everything slowing more and more, the closer we come. Sasha pulls on my sleeve
again, shaking nir head.
I need to try something, I tell nir. Ne swallows, then nods
uncertainly.
We approach a bird, stationary in flight in
the air before us, shining like a jeweled sculpture in brilliant sunshine.
I fumble for my locket and open it, extracting
the lock of Anna’s hair. This I plunge forward, ahead of the bird, to where the
effect might be even stronger. And with a quiver, the lock of hair begins to
lengthen. Sasha shakes my sleeve, pointing at the hair. It’s growing.
I know, I say.
And as we watch, the hair grows. The gray
begins to disappear from it. And it begins to take on the shape of a woman, the
radiant cobalt glow becoming blinding.
Noah? she says.
In the heart of the glow stands Anna, younger
than she was when Sasha’s loving, deadly words struck nir down. Younger, in
fact, than she had been when she began to become distant toward me.
It’s me, I tell her. It’s us.
I release the lock and place a hand on my
wife’s shoulder, leading nher out, toward us.
Sasha weeps, but here, in the heart of the
Flow, the sound does not transform into an attack on the flesh. Mama! she says, I am so, so sorry.
For what? Anna asks.
Nevermind, I say. She does not remember the events leading to nir death, nor,
apparently, the distance that had grown between us before the world as we knew
it collapsed. I place a hand on Sasha’s shoulder now, and we shared a long,
heartfelt hug.
In the distance, I see a young man, immobile
mid-leap, one who is somehow familiar. After some time, if there is such a
thing in this place, I recognize Morrow, returned to youth and health,
stationary in the Flow.
I don’t know how this works, I tell them. Present and past seem to have collapsed into this moment. We might not
be able to leave the Flow. We might have to stay right here, at the heart of
the Flow and the fracture, where Anna can be gone, yet alive, and Sasha can be
both male and female, or neither.
Minnows
“Minnows," first appeared in
Writing that Risks: New Work from Beyond the Mainstream, Red Bridge Press, July
2013, and was nominated for a Pushcart Award
fishie 1.1 "Fed your fish yet?" our mother
asks. I say I will. Blue follows after me like a stink I can't scrub off. I
pick up the little container full of flakes and Blue says, "How much do we
give 'em?"
"A pinch," I
say.
"How much is that?”
"What? It's a
pinch."
"A big pinch or a
little pinch?'
"Jeez, Blue, I don't
know."
Blue is quiet for a few
seconds, so I pinch a pinch of fish food and throw it on the top of the water.
"What's fish food taste
like?" he asks.
2.1 We're family, and
families solve their own problems.
0.11 Our mother is awake, but her eyes are dark
all around and the skin there wrinkles dry in a web of wrinkles. I tell her
I'll make mac and cheese for dinner later and she tells us to sit down.
minnows 1.1 Pop-Pop comes home from work with two
smallish goldfish in a baggie full of cloudy water. "Pets for my
boys!" he yells, "My little men! You two get to name 'em."
Pop-Pop goes to the back porch and fishes out a glass tank I always knew was
there but didn't know was for fish. He takes it out the back door and hoses it
out out back, then brings it back in and sets it on the little table in the
dining room. He gives my brother and me each a pan and says, "Fill 'er up!"
5.1 Later, I make our
last box of mac and cheese and some powdered milk. There's still a little
powdered milk left after. July is burning out from under us and our Pop-Pop is
gone and I can't make our mother listen. I leave a bowl of mac and cheese
outside her door, but know that in the morning it will be un-ate.
In the morning, the bowl
of mac and cheese is right where I left it. Our mother hasn't touched it and
she still isn't getting out of bed.
1.1a In the
night, I dream of Pop-Pop attacking the house, smashing in all of the
ground-floor windows and yelling our mother's name.
4.1 In the morning I wake up to someone knocking
on the front door. Outside is my Uncle
Jim. He smiles and says "Mornin'. Your Pop-Pop here?"
"No,"
I tell him. "My mother says he might not come back."
"Where's
your phone?"
"We
don't have to tell anyone," I say.
3.1 In the morning I wake
up to someone knocking on the front door. Outside, Gwen-Doe-Lyne and a cop car
have pulled up.
Our mother is shaking.
"What'd you do to
our mother?" I say.
She says, "I didn't
do nothing. Your pop happened to her."
Our mother is silent and
shaking. The cop is actually helping her up the front steps.
2.2 We're family, and
families solve their own problems. We
police our own. It's no one else's business.
0.10 Our mother is awake, but her eyes are dark
all around and the skin there wrinkles dry in a web of wrinkles. I tell her
I'll make mac and cheese for dinner later and she tells us to sit down. "Your Pop-Pop isn't probably coming
back," she tells us.
I say, "What?"
"Your Pop-Pop," she says,
and she shakes when she breathes, "isn't probably coming back."
minnows 1.2 Pop-Pop comes home from work with two
smallish goldfish in a baggie full of cloudy water. "Pets for my
boys!" he yells, "My little men! You two get to name 'em."
Pop-Pop goes to the back porch and fishes out a glass tank I always knew was
there but didn't know was for fish. He takes it out the back door and hoses it
out out back, then brings it back in and sets it on the little table in the
dining room. He gives my brother and me each a pan and says,
"Fill 'er up!"
We do. Pop-Pop puts some
drops in the tank and we float the baggie in there a while, then let out the
fish. "Goldfish?" I say. "Dime feeders," he says to me
Interstitial
1.1 It's even hotter today, and getting
worse and the air heavier.
Hotter
and hotter, it's getting late in June and our mother and Pop-Pop fight harder
and drink harder against the heat. They go to bed yelling and wake up in sweat.
Our
mother tries to run a good house, keep a good home, she tells us that and she
makes us dust and do dishes and pick up to show us how it's done right. Dinner,
our mother always tells us, is a sit-down meal at the table at 5:30 sharp. Last
time I stayed out of sight behind her garden and pretended I didn't hear her
calling, she put me in bed — hungry!
— at seven o'clock! I just laid there, bored and hungry.
1.1b In the
night, I dream of Pop-Pop attacking the house, smashing in all of the
ground-floor windows and yelling our mother's name. Gwen-Doe-Lyne is Our Mother’s
friend. She’s still around, and that seems to make him angrier, 'cause she's an
outsider. She don't understand.
0.9 Our mother is awake, but her eyes are dark
all around and the skin there wrinkles dry in a web of wrinkles. I tell her
I'll make mac and cheese for dinner later and she tells us to sit down. "Your
Pop-Pop isn't probably coming back," she tells us.
I
don't know what I hear, but that's what she sounded like she said.
I say, "What?"
"Your Pop-Pop,"
she says, and she shakes when she breathes, "isn't probably coming
back."
Blue sobs next to me.
minnows 2.1 My brother and me cross the empty field
that's growing where it looks like a house should be there but it isn't, past
the house that's haunted and its broke-out windows, and grab super-sour
gooseberries from the gooseberry bush on our dirt path. The dirt path goes back
into the woods here, and down at the end of it is the sewer grate and the big
concrete pipe that pours into it. It's warm enough I'm sure I'm getting more
pets today. The minnows will be swimming around in the sewer-pond, where
concrete spills onto rocks and mud. Minnows maybe. Frogs even, maybe.
A
Friday and hotter and the musty-wet air all over us, and
our mother is in the kitchen making pork cutlets and hamburger helper and cut
canned corn. She runs a good house and she keeps a good home. And dinner is at
5:30. And when it's 102 degrees out and the blacktop melts between your toes
until your feet are too hot to stay standing on it, and the hot comes up in
waves that make the air move like water, and Pop-Pop hasn't made it home by
5:15 to get cleaned up for a sit-down meal at the table, her anger hangs in the
air, thick with sweat. And at 5:20, the whole house has got hotter, like it's
gonna blow apart. And at 5:45, when Pop-Pop pulls in the old white car, she's
just waiting. She served the rest of us at 5:30, but she's just waiting.
In
the tank, the goldfish chase and the water is getting hazy. Pop-Pop is a smog
of Pabst Blue Ribbon and cigarettes and our mother's patience with him ran out
long before he got his last ones for the road.The woods are thicker
here than back in the neighborhood, by the houses. But the pond is our secret.
We can be pirates here, or Indians. We like pirates more, so we named it
Pirate's Cove. I catch tadpoles and put pond water in my jar for them, then
close the lid tight.
1.1c In the
night, I dream of Pop-Pop attacking the house, smashing in all of the
ground-floor windows and yelling our mother's name. Gwen-Doe-Lyne is Our Mother’s friend. She’s still around, and that
seems to make him angrier, 'cause she's an outsider. She don't understand.
Our mother tries to leave
us. She's's stuck as we are. I wake to Gwen-Doe-Lyne and my mother smoking in
the kitchen. "Careful there junior," she says, "Lotta glass
broke here last night."
5.2 Later, I make
our last box of mac and cheese and some powdered milk. There's still a
little powdered milk left after. July is burning out from under us and o Our Pop-Pop is gone and I can't make
our mother listen. I leave a bowl of mac and cheese outside her door, but know
that in the morning it will be un-ate.
In the morning, the bowl
of mac and cheese is right where I left it. Our mother hasn't touched it and
she still isn't getting out of bed, and
our Pop-Pop still isn't around.
4.2 In the morning I wake up to someone
knocking on the front door. Outside is mMy Uncle Jim. He smiles and says "Mornin'. Your Pop-Pop
here?"
"No," I tell
him. "My mother says he might not come back."
"Dinner
at 5:30 means dinner at 5:30 in this house!" she shrieks. My ears ring.
Blue starts to put his fingers in his ears, but I shake my head and make
an I'm serious face and he stops.And Pop-Pop is pleading with her, telling her he's sorry, he had car trouble, and she says bullshit, I smell the bar on you, and I have to admit she's right, already I noticed that, but I'm not no way gonna say it. And it explodes. They explode. They yell and she throws hot food and a skillet at him and Blue and I know we can't be around in the middle of one of these and we run for it.
Uncle
Jim looks afraid, real afraid for a second, then wipes it off his face.
"Where's she?" I point into the house.
Inside,
the dishes have piled high and crusty and stuff is all over the carpets and
floors.
"My
God," says Uncle Jim. "Have you been eating?"
"Yeah!"
I say. "I'm the man of the house now. I've been cooking."
Jim
looks around at the dishes and the mess. "You're the man?"
"Yeah,"
I say, "Pop-Pop told me so before he left. It's family business, no one
else's. We don't have to tell anyone. Especially not those pigs."
"Where's your
phone?"
"We don't have to
tell anyone," I say.
"Show
me."
1.2 In the
night, I dream of Pop-Pop attacking the house, smashing in all of the
ground-floor windows and yelling our mother's name. Gwen-Doe-Lyne is Our Mother’s friend. She’s still around, and
that seems to make him angrier, 'cause she's an outsider. She don't
understand.
Our mother tries to leave
us. Our mother, though, will not leave us, not while that lid is held down
tight. She's's stuck as we are. I wake to Gwen-Doe-Lyne and my
mother smoking in the kitchen. "Careful there junior," she says,
"Lotta glass broke here last night."
"Where's
Pop-Pop?" I say.
"Where
he belongs," says Gwen-Doe-Lyne. Our mother's eyes are unfocussed,
reflecting.
0.8 Our mother is awake,
but her eyes are dark all around and the skin there wrinkles dry in a web of
wrinkles. "Your Pop-Pop isn't probably coming back," she tells us.
I don't know what I hear,
but that's what she sounded like she said. I say,
"What?"
"Your Pop-Pop,"
she says, and she shakes when she breathes, "isn't probably coming
back."
Blue sobs next to me, and then the words are just shooting out of
me. "Let him come back," I say.
minnows 2.2 When our mother sees us, her eyes are puffy
even though it's lunch time. The hit one isn't much more puffy than the not-hit
one. But sitting there, in the kitchen, in rollers and a cloud of smoke from
her smokes, she looks tired. Then her eyes find us through the clouds, and they
get wide.
I hold up my jar and
holler, "Tadpoles!" The tadpoles make me so happy I know they'll have
to make her happy too. In the tank, one fish runs, the other chases.
Our mother pinches the
cigarette between two fingers and points to the back porch. "Not in my
house," she says, shaking her big, roller-lumpy head. "I keep a good
home." She grinds out the butt, that's what my Pop-Pop calls it, her butt,
in the too-full ashtray. She sneezes and ash swirls in the air, real slow, the
sun through it like a giant sword.
I turn for the porch, but
the jar slips and smashes on the floor, dumping sewer-pond water and breaking
glass and flapping tadpoles in a big, slow crash.
3.2 In the morning I wake up to someone knocking
on the front door. Outside, Gwen-Doe-Lyne and a cop car have pulled up.
Our mother is silent and shaking. She has long scratches on her hands and her
feet and her arms and her legs with black string like bugs' legs sticking out
down both sides. Stitches. I've had stitches.
"What'd you do to
our mother?" I say.
She says, "I didn't
do nothing. Your pop happened to her."
The cop is actually
helping her up the front steps.
0.8a “I want him back. I want things back the way
they were.”
2.3 We're family, and
families solve their own problems. None
of the other kids talk about their pops hitting their moms — that's not how we
do it. We police our own, no cops, Pop-Pop said to us. Even Uncle Jim beats
up Pop-Pop in private. It's no one else's business.
4.3 My Uncle Jim smiles and says "Mornin'. Your
Pop-Pop here?"
"No," I tell him. "My
mother says he might not come back."
Uncle Jim looks afraid, real afraid for a second, then wipes it
off his face. "Where's she?" I point int and stuff is all over the
carpets and floors.
"My God," says Uncle Jim. "Have you
been eating?"
"Yeah!" I say. "I'm the man of the
house now. I've been cooking."
Jim looks around at the dishes and the mess.
"You're the man?"
"Yeah," I say,
"Pop-Pop told me so before he left. It's family business, no one else's.
We don't have to tell anyone. Especially not those pigs." Uncle Jim jumps a bit at my words. He
knocks on our mother's door, says her name. Then he comes back to me.
"Where's your
phone?"
"We don't have to
tell anyone," I say.
"Show me."
I
lead him into the kitchen and show him the phone on the wall. He picks it up,
then gives it a funny look and hits the
button a few times. Then he puts it back, shaking his head.
"Do
you have any friends who live close?" he says.
0.7 Our mother is awake, but her eyes are dark
all around and the skin there wrinkles dry in a web of wrinkles. "Your
Pop-Pop isn't probably coming back," she tells us.
I say, "What?"
"Your Pop-Pop,"
she says, and she shakes when she breathes, "isn't probably coming
back."
Blue sobs next to me, and
then t The words
are just shooting out of me. "Let him come back," I say. She says, "I don't want to."
minnows 2.3 When o Our mother sees us, her eyes are puffy even though it's lunch
time. The hit one isn't much more puffy than the not-hit one. But sitting
there, in the kitchen, in rollers and a cloud of smoke from her smokes, she
looks tired. Then her eyes find us through the clouds, and they get wide.
"How the hell did
you boys get so filthy? It's not even lunchtime!" she says. I look down at my shirt and see the dirt and
mud. Blue is worse, though, he's got mud in his ears somehow.
I turn for the porch, but
the jar slips and smashes on the floor, dumping sewer-pond water and breaking
glass and flapping tadpoles in a big, slow crash. Our mother hits the roof,
screaming at us to look at the mess we made and clean up the mess we made. Blue
bolts out the front door and I scramble out the screen window with no screen in
it, onto the thing that's supposed to hold up an air conditioner, and away. I
sneak a big canning jar from Pop-Pop’s rusty lawnmower shed. I catch more
tadpoles at Pirate's Cove and chase minnows. Blue finds me there after a while,
tells me he wants to go home. "Not yet," I say. "Let her cool
off. You see how she goes after Pop-Pop. We'll go later."
0.7a “I want him back. I want things back
way they were!”
“.were they way the back things want I”
0.6 Our mother is awake, but her eyes are dark
all around and the skin there wrinkles dry in a web of wrinkles. "Your
Pop-Pop isn't probably coming back," she tells us.
I say, "What?"
"Your Pop-Pop,"
she says, and she shakes when she breathes, "isn't probably coming
back."
The words are just
shooting out of me. "Let him come back," I say. She says, "I
don't want to."
This is insane. We're a family.
I make each word weigh the same.
"Let. Him. Come. Back."
"I don't want to," she
says, and her voice is sad, so sad.
"Why are you so sad? All you
have to do is let him come back," I say.
Later,
I make our last box of mac and cheese and some powdered milk. There's still a
little powdered milk left after. July is burning out from under us and our
Pop-Pop is gone and I can't make our mother listen. I leave a bowl of mac and
cheese outside her door, but know that in the morning it will be un-ate.
1.3 In the
night, I dream of Pop-Pop attacking the house, smashing in all of the
ground-floor windows and yelling our mother's name. Gwen-Doe-Lyne is Our Mother’s friend. She’s
still around, and that seems to make him angrier, 'cause she's an outsider. She
don't understand. the
four of us are on a beach at Lake Okoboji. We're swimming in Lake Okoboji,
water that's clear like glass. The rocks on the bottom are exactly the shape
and size of turtles, and I can barely pick one up to swim with it to the top to
prove to everyone it's a turtle, and when I get there, it has turned into a
rock to fool me. I try and try, but the turtles keep turning into rocks until finally
my Pop-Pop, shaking his head, tells me to knock it off.
Then we're all four, our
mother, Blue, me, and my Pop-Pop in the lead, swimming, but the water is
dirtier than Okoboji, because it's Pirate's Cove, and we're minnows, and
gigantic people appear right over top of us and try to catch us. Pop-Pop and
our mother chase all wild, one thumping into the other, both hurting both, till
one, Pop-Pop leaves through the roof of the pond and swims up, out, and away.
In the commotion the water has gotten swirled up and hard to see through, but a
big blade of sun cuts down through the swirl. My lungs burn and a net scrapes
across my face and body and sploosh, I'm in a fish tank. With a thunk, a rock
the size and shape of a turtle lands on the lid — a rock bigger than any of us.
Our mother tries to leave
us. Our mother, though, will not leave
us, not while that lid is held down tight. She's's stuck as we are. Gwen-Doe-Lyne
says, "Lotta glass broke here last night."
"Where's
Pop-Pop?" I say.
"Where he
belongs," says Gwen-Doe-Lyne. Our mother's eyes are
unfocussed, reflecting. Like a fish’s.
0.6a “I want things back way they were!”
0.5 The words are just shooting out of me.
"Let him come back," I say. She says, "I don't want to."
This is insane. We're a
family.
I make each word weigh
the same. "Let. Him. Come. Back."
"I don't want
to," she says, and her voice is sad, so sad.
"Why are you so sad?
All you have to do is let him come back," I say.
"It
isn't that easy," she says. I look around, and I want it all to make sense
and it doesn't. The fish tank is thick with algae and swirled-up stuff. Our
Mother drifts, her eyes dull like a deep-sea fish's, one that doesn't use its
eyes much. It still doesn't make sense.
"I'll
make us mac and cheese," I say. In my head I can hear Pop-Pop, my Pop-Pop,
telling Blue to listen to me, telling me to take care of our mother, telling me
I'm the man of the house. "It'll be okay. I'm the man of the house." Don't take too much shit from'er, but take
care of'er, he'd said.
Interstitial
1.2 In the woods along our path, Boy-O
Sparks and the other older boys swing and jump through the trees, hooting like
chimps. When he's around the older boys, Boy-O doesn't want much to do with us.
We know to stay out later still when we see the red lights flashing from our
place. We catch lightning bugs and smear their glowing stuff on our faces for war paint, until the lightning bugs aren't out anymore and the glowing stuff doesn't glow anymore. We get back late to no one at home. Broken dishes and food exploded all over. I dig around in the kitchen and find us peanut butter and jelly and make us one-slice Wonderbread sandwiches and wild berry Kool-Aid. Blue seems real, real sad, but he gets a red Kool-Aid mustache, and when I show him in the mirror, he laughsThe
phone rings but I don't pick it up. No one told me what we're supposed to tell
anyone who asks. And like Pop-Pop said, we're a family. We fix our own
problems. They're no one else's business.Blue and I got lots of bug bites outside tonight. I find the pink lotion our mother uses for those and paint them all pink.
minnows 2.4 We don't dare
go back for lunch. I let Blue drop minnows he catches in my jar with my
tadpoles. The tadpoles won't mind. It keeps him too busy to worry about going
back yet.
When we get back, we go
in through the back door and I put this jar on a shelf on the back porch real,
real careful. Blue says to me something about fish needing air, and that's
stupid, fish breathe water, so I tell him to shut up.
Our mother is in bed
again, and Pop-Pop is still. In the
kitchen I find Wonderbread and steak sauce and make us no-steak steak
sandwiches. I mix an envelope of Kool-Aid in a plastic pitcher in the sink and
stir with my hand in almost to the elbow to reach the bottom. The one goldfish
hits the lid so hard it flips a little open, then claps back closed.
minnows 3.1 When our mother wakes for the afternoon she
takes a long, long time showering. There's sticky red on the counter where I
spilled pouring us Kool-Aid, and ashy mud near the ashtray. Our mother steps
from her room, calls us gross little monsters, and orders us to the back yard.
She hoses the mud off of us and says our clothes are done for.
In the night, I hear the
goldfish chasing, chasing, and once in a while, the thump of the one or the
other one hitting the lid.
0.5a “I want
things back way they were!”
0.4 Our mother is awake, but her eyes are dark
all around and the skin there wrinkles dry in a web of wrinkles. "Your
Pop-Pop isn't probably coming back," she tells us.
I say, "What?"
"Your Pop-Pop,"
she says, and she shakes when she breathes, "isn't probably coming
back."
The words are just
shooting out of me. "Let him come back," I say. She says, "I
don't want to."
This is insane. We're a family.
I make each word weigh the same.
"Let. Him. Come. Back."
"I don't want to," she
says, and her voice is sad, so sad.
"Why are you so sad? All you
have to do is let him come back," I say.
Later, I make our
last box of mac and cheese and some powdered milk. There's still a little
powdered milk left after. July is burning out from under us and our Pop-Pop is
gone and I can't make our mother listen. I leave a bowl of mac and cheese
outside her door, but know that in the morning it will be un-ate.
Everything zeroes
here.
minnows 3.2 In the morning, on the back porch, the
tadpoles and the minnows float at the top of the closed-lidded jar. In the
dining room the goldfish pester each other.
0.4a I make each word weigh the same. "Let.
Him. Come. Back."
"I don't want
to," she says, and her voice is sad, so sad.
"Why are you so sad?
All you have to do is let him come back," I say.
"It isn't that
easy," she says. I look around, and I want it all to make sense and it
doesn't. The fish tank is thick with algae and swirled-up
stuff. Our Mother drifts, her eyes dull like a deep-sea fish's, one that
doesn't use its eyes much. It still doesn't make sense.
Everything
zeroes here.
in four …
fishie 1.2 What's
fish food taste like?! This I had not thought of asking. "It smells
like Pirate's Cove mud," I say.
"Yeah, but what does
it taste like?"
"It's good. Like
catfish. Here, stick out your tongue."
Blue smiles and out comes
his tongue. I smear it with a really, really big pinch, and Blue's smile
disappears in a burst of barf that covers his chin, but doesn't go anywhere
else. It won't be good if our mother sees it. I drag him into my brother's and
me's bedroom and our bathroom and washcloth him off.
0.3 Our Mother drifts, her eyes dull like a
deep-sea fish's, one that doesn't use its eyes much. It still doesn't make
sense.
"I'll make us mac
and cheese," I say. In my head I can hear Pop-Pop, my Pop-Pop, telling
Blue to listen to me, telling me to take care of our mother, telling me I'm the
man of the house. "It'll be okay. I'm the man of the house." Don't take too much shit from'er, but
take care of'er, he'd said.
Our mother says my name,
Pop-Pop's name, and I explode, looking for weakness.
Everything zeroes here.
in four
three …
4.4 "We don't have to tell anyone," I
say.
I lead him into the
kitchen and show him the phone on the wall. He picks it up, then gives it a funny look and hits the button a
few times. Then he puts it back, shaking his head.
"Do you have any
friends who live close?" he says.
I
nod. "Boy-O and his family the Sparkses are only a mile and a half or so
down."
Uncle
Jim thumbs through the phone book and writes out a number on our notepad and
hands it to me. "I need you to go to Boy-O's house and tell his pop you
have an emergency, and to get an ambulance here."
0.2 Our Mother drifts, her eyes dull like a
deep-sea fish's
"I'll make us mac
and cheese," I say. In my head I can hear Pop-Pop, my Pop-Pop, telling
Blue to listen to me, telling me to take care of our mother, telling me I'm the
man of the house. Don't take too much
shit from'er he'd said.
Our mother says my name,
Pop-Pop's name, and I explode, looking for weakness.
three two …
0.1 Our mother says my name, Pop-Pop's name, and
I’m explode, looking for
weakness in her. I point to her cuts
from the flying glass.
"You
let him come back or I'll hit you in the stitches!"
Our mother's mouth opens big and round for a
second, then closes, and her eyes glaze over, dead like a carp's. Her mouth
opens again, big and round, but I can't hear any air going in or out. She
stands, wobbly, and drifts into her room, closing the door. Then we hear the
click of the lock locking.
two one …
minnows 3.3 In the dining
room the goldfish pester each other. They're
going crazy in that tank.
0.0 I point to her
Our Mother’s cuts from the flying
glass.
"You let him come
back or I'll hit you in the stitches!"
Our
mother's mouth opens big and round for a second, then closes, and her eyes
glaze over, dead like a carp's. Her mouth opens again, big and round, but I
can't hear any air going in or out. She stands, wobbly, and drifts into her
room, closing the door. Then we hear the click of the lock locking.
3.3 In the morning I wake up to someone
knocking on the front door. Outside, Gwen-Doe-Lyne and a cop car have pulled
up.
The cop is actually
helping her up the front steps.
"You
the man of the house?" says the cop. He seems friendly. That's not right.
I nod, wary.
"Your
pop gave her quite a scare tonight," says the cop.
I
nod. We police our own, I think.
"Know
where he's keeping himself?" says the cop. I knew it. He wants us to break
ranks, rat each other out. "Nope," I say, then realize it's true.
Pop-Pop was never happy to see the cops visit. Why should I be any different?
4.5 "We don't have to tell anyone,"
I say.
I lead him into the
kitchen and show him the phone on the wall. He picks it up, then gives it a funny look and hits the button a
few times. Then he puts it back, shaking his head.
"Do you have any
friends who live close?" he says.
I nod. "Boy-O and his family the Sparkses
are only a mile and a half or so down."
Uncle Jim thumbs through
the phone book and writes out a number on our notepad and hands it to me. "I need you to go to Boy-O's house and
tell his pop you have an emergency, and to get an ambulance here."
"Aye-aye,
cap'n," I say and salute him. It’s a game: I'll be a spy behind Nazi German
lines on a mission.
He watches me for a second, then returns my salute.
"Go
now," he says.
The Good Life
"The Good Life" first
appeared in Phoebe – A Journal of Literature and Arts, Vol 36, Issue 1, Spring
2007.
We'd
been laying low, trying to fly below the radar, dodging the landlord we owed
nearly a year of back rent. We opted to live the good life, staying in a Days
Inn with a pool. We guarded what little actual cash we had. I didn't have any
money in the account, but I still had checks.
That
year had gone by so fast, with me in and out of work and mostly out. I slept
off a hangover, missing my first shift at a Burger King, and that made my eyes
tear up. It was dark in the bedroom, that kind of lifeless gray you get when
the light of a cloudy day reflects off the snow. We'd had a snowstorm
overnight, and the house was fucking freezing.
"Jesus
Christ," I said, feeling about as much self-worth as I thought the
voluntarily homeless must, "I can't even keep a job at Burger King."
I had $37 to my name and no paycheck on the horizon. It was winter, and in
Iowa, they can't cut your utilities while it's still freezing out, so I could
let that bill slide a while.
The
whole thing pushed me to the edge; I was ready to lose it, promise to clean up
and take the straight and narrow right there on the spot. But there she was to
keep me from any hasty decisions. Lee Ann. The housemate who came to the
dilapidated dive on Dodge and decided to stay. She'd just come walking up the
walk one day late in the summer. Shitty, my bartender over at a place called
the Fox Head, had hired her to wait tables. When she'd mentioned that she was
looking for an apartment, he'd sent her my way. I didn't remember telling
Shitty that I needed roommates, but I was perched at his bar a lot in those
days, and didn't always recall absolutely everything I told him.
So
anyway, right, Shitty sent her strolling down the cracked sidewalk out front of
my place one painfully sunny late-summer morning as I sat with Larry. We were
wincing our way through a Maxwell House, post-acid hangover. I was trying to
read a week-old newspaper, but you know that post-acid funk, all greasy and
skin-crawly, your insides feeling all squeezed. Your brain just doesn't work
right. I was mostly just spacing off.
She
grinned at us, told us her name. She took one look at the place and decided
that the $100 rent was right for her. Larry seemed a little uncomfortable with
the idea of a girl roommate even then, thinking back on it.
A
prodigious flow of Old Style across the bar from Shitty that first night, and
we closed out the bar for a two a.m. walk to the place we all three now called
home. Though I suspect the beer had something to do with it, she decided that
first night it was time to fuck me.
Like
I said, that was late in the summer. I was a night janitor part time. I cleaned
a building that belonged to Kirkwood College. During the day, people who wanted
to stay in school after high school came to the small brick satellite on Maiden
Lane; at night, loaded up on whatever I could afford, I came through and
cleaned up after them. I emptied their garbage cans, bleached their toilets and
urinals, swept and mopped their floors. I wondered if they ever thought about
where the garbage and stains went. No one from the school was ever around when
I showed up for work.
My
boss, Danno, came by unannounced sometimes to show me where I'd missed a
cobweb, things like that. Guess it made him feel smart, necessary, like no one
but him could see a cobweb and have that light bulb come on in their head,
telling them that it should come down. I didn't keep that job long. With a
meager drinking budget from the job, I needed to cut back somewhere. Lee Ann
and me decided to room together and sublet the extra. The idea was, that would
drop the rent to $50 each, except that we never found anyone to take my old
room, so it just stayed empty.
So,
the Burger King morning, I was about to make some barrel-chested proclamation
that enough was enough or something and go out and try to save my new job. I
had a splitting hangover headache and bruises on my chest and shoulders where
Lee Ann had punched me the night before in a fight over something. I don't
remember what. But then, like a champ, she came through.
"Wait,"
she said, smiling. She had a little dried blood on her lower lip. I didn't see
it until she smiled, and I didn't remember hitting her. Lee Ann disappeared
downstairs, returning with eight bottles of Rheinlander, the cheapest beer
available in the state, as far as I know. After a struggle, she managed to get
the bedroom window open; she pushed the storm window open, lined up six beers
in the windowsill, and closed the inside window. Instant bedside beer fridge.
She
opened a bottle for me, the lid dropping to the floor and rolling under the
bed. "To your last day of work flipping burgers," she said.
"Cheers!"
Lee
Ann could brighten up your day like that. I was back from the brink. She'd
taken a cold, gray winter day and let me see the beauty of the newfallen snow.
Traffic hadn't even blackened it yet.
"Cheers,"
I agreed.
"I
think we still have some acid in the fridge," she said. "Wanna get
lost today?"
I
shrugged, happy. "Doesn't look like I'm going to work."
She
said, "Not in weather like this." We clinked our bottles together.
Things were looking up.
Lee Ann
Lee
Ann was not a small girl. She wasn't real, real fat, not really. She just had
some extra. Big hips — birthin' hips, my old man would have called them, but I
hadn't seen him in seven years, so him seeing her to call her hips birthin'
hips didn't seem very likely. Good-size tits. She smoked Marlboro Reds to spite
her folks and keep the weight off, said she gained 15 pounds the last time she
tried to quit. A weird little nob of a nose. She was the kind of girl people
call "almost pretty."
Tough
times. I couldn't make enough to both get loaded and pay the bills, so I did
what I could to game the system: juggled bills, waited for winter to come so I
could stop paying the utilities, turned off the stereo and kept quiet when the
landlord came knocking. But Shitty always slipped us a few freebies among the
beers we ordered. That helped us stretch the dollars.
Now
I remember what the fight was about. Lee Ann hated rubbers. Said neither of us
could feel anything with one on. So she'd taken to demanding a few lunges
without one. She started out cautious — "Come on, just one," then
"only a couple," and so on. But the count had gotten high and I was
telling her to get off me, pushing her away, and she just kept holding on. She
finally started hitting me. It was like she was possessed. Or maybe I hit her.
Yeah, I think that might be how it went — I think maybe I hit her first. I'm
pretty sure I came while we were fighting. Man, I wasn't happy about that. A
shadow from our little game of Russian Roullette and its consequent fight was
still with me that next morning, but like I told you, Lee Ann just had a way of
making things look up.
We dropped a dose to fuel the new day and
toasted the new coat of snow over breakfast.
Rat
Man,
we loved breakfast. When things were booming along at bar close, the party
usually came with us, back to Dodge Street. With the most sincere apologies,
Shitty would send us out into the night with promises to catch up. The Fox
Head's 20 minute bar-time lead let us stumble into Dity John's Grocery, just
across the street, and grab the supplies we'd need to keep the bash alive. Then
a drunken trudge home, through the snow. The cold didn't matter to us — we were
impervious by that time of night.
Shitty
would find his way to our place, a case of beer and any other intoxicants he
might want to sell in tow. Shitty had a funny habit: He'd dose, crack open a
beer, and — and you could almost set your watch by this — 45 minutes in, he'd
suddenly experience the grave need to wear my steel-toed combat boots.
"Hey
man, can I wear your boots man? Just tell me where they are," he'd say,
the look in his eye anxious, worried that I might say "no," or that I
might have lost them. I'd never told him "no," but you know how
urgent things can seem when you're like that. Once he had on the boots,
everything was smooth sailing and clear skies with shitty. He'd have a grand,
drunken trip with us, a glittering voyage through late-night infomercials. We
had a favorite: The vacuum-pack guy, this chubby guy who sold a machine for
bagging things in custom-size plastic bags, then vacuum-sealing them. Shitty
always snuck off to our room and fell asleep on our bed, wearing the boots.
Ah,
those nights with Shitty and Lee Ann and Larry at the Fox Head! I feel like I
could live inside such great times forever — just crawl back into one of them
and lock the door behind me.
Or
maybe that was the night Larry exploded out of the kitchen in a shrieking
gallop, barely keeping himself upright and yelling, "Rat! There's a
fucking rat in the kitchen!"
It
was mid-December. Larry's prematurely gray-brown, shoulder-length hair was all
over the place. I don't think any of us believed him. I certainly didn't. But
you know what psychotropics can do to your judgment.
We
decided to mount an expedition, Shitty, Lee Ann, and I. Larry stated
emphatically that he was not venturing down the hall until we'd got the rat
out. We advanced slowly, wary of our enemy, each of us now sunk deep into the
LSD. Shitty brandished a heavy ceramic ashtray. I wielded a copy of Hustler
from Larry's stash, rolled up into what I thought of as a weapon. Lee Ann
clutched the back of my shirt in both hands. Who knows how long it took us to
reach the kitchen? Not I.
The
long and the short of it is that we found no rat. We did, however, find rat
shit in the box that held an unfinished Paul Revere pizza no one could remember
ordering. It had been out for a few days, and a couple of discarded syringes
nearby gave me a pretty good idea why no one recalled the pizza episode at all.
Lee Ann had left Shitty's place of employment before bar close earlier that
week. I thought nothing of it — I'd just decided it wasn't time for me to turn
in yet. So I went through the motions: drinking with Shitty at one end of the
bar; picking up more on the way home; trudging through the snow to the dive on
Dodge, passing Lee Ann's '72 Lincoln in the front drive. I don't remember
seeing the Paul Revere's box then, but the lit candles and lack of electric
light on in the place as I came in confused me. Then I spotted Larry and Lee
Ann going at it face to face on a dining chair in the kitchen, needles
discarded with belts nearby. They'd been shooting heroin.
I
think I should have been angry. I think a guy's supposed to be when he finds
something like this. But I wasn't. It was just a smack fuck, I knew that.
Didn't mean a thing. It was just the kind of thing you did on smack. They'd
probably turned off the lights to minimize the glare; I'd seen the light from
the usual electrical bulbs go all streaks and haloes on smack, but mostly it
did the opposite, just left your pupils scrunched down into tiny little
pinpricks. The effect on heroin is so strong, Larry and Lee Ann might have
thought they were hiding in the dark with the lights low like that. As I recall,
I took the drinks upstairs with me to give the two of them a little privacy. I
didn't want to embarrass anyone. They just hadn't noticed how late it was, is
all. But would it have killed them to have saved me a taste?
Anyway,
back to the rat. Larry, hands clutched in his long, knotty hair, demanded that
we destroy the beast. None of the rest of us particularly wanted to kill the
poor creature. I for one could think of no other solution. Then something
clicked for Shitty. He was on board.
"I'll
need my .22," he said, and with considerable authority. He suddenly
sounded like a big game hunter, a man's man on a sport-killing safari. Like he
was looking to tangle with the world's most dangerous predators right here in
our kitchen.
Firing
a gun in the kitchen while we were all dosed to the nines did not seem
altogether wise to me.
"Come
on, Shitty," I said, "it's all the way across town."
Shitty
stared at me in defiant incomprehension for a second or two or whatever, then
deflated a touch. "Poison," he said.
I
shrugged, raising my hands and shoulders. We didn't have any rat poison. Why
the hell would we keep rat poison around?
"We
must venture to Econofoods," Shitty intoned. "They'll have the
poison. They're open 24 hours. They're the place." Shitty would take the
reins of this trip and guide us to our goal. We would have our kill.
Shivering
from the drugs and with Larry whimpering quietly to himself, we decided, two
hours into our trip, to strike out into the cold, snowy night for Econofoods. I
kept thinking to myself, "Focus — focus!
If we're going to drive on LSD, one of us has got to focus!"
Only
I must have been saying it out loud; I noticed the others looking over at me,
alarmed.
"Nothing,"
I said quickly, "nothing at all. Don't worry. We're doomed if we worry …
"
And
so on.
Larry's
little powder blue car, a weathered '76 Nova, would be our chariot. Our chariot
with frozen locks, as it happened. But Lee Ann had lock de-icer. We were still
in business.
We
were hallucinating great wobbling ripples crashing over the road, all of us
were. We decided to put our heads together, all of us but Larry, who seemed to
have gotten one of his hands tangled in his hair, now. He really did not seem
able to free it. Lee Ann stared, wide-eyed at him for a long stretch, then
burst out laughing.
"What?"
he asked. "What?"
Shitty
and I looked questioningly her way, but she was laughing too hard to speak.
In
huffing, heaving bursts, she said, finally, "His hair! His hair — it's a rat's nest. Get it? Where'd the rat go?
I think I know where that rat went."
I
understood. Acid logic. Or acid humor. Whatever. I smiled and nodded at her in
what I hoped was not a condescending way. Larry, his slight gut over his belt
as he sat staring at her, said nothing. He was wearing a stained white
button-up with faint vertical lines of tiny roses. I never could get a handle
on Larry's style. But that didn't matter. He was a good friend.
My
license was expired, but I was the only one of us who had one at all. So I sat
behind the wheel. My cohorts decided to help me navigate. They told me they'd
try to arrive at a consensus on which way I should steer to avoid the really
big waves. Their pupils dilated and eyes open wide, they would be the extra
sets of eyes I needed to make the journey.
It
was a little hairy. The snow was fresh, and hid sheets of ice in unpredictable
places on the road. We hit one (I think) and spun Larry's Nova into a snow bank
sideways; then another put us into someone's front yard a few feet. But between
the car and our pushing, we were able to get it back onto the road and soldier
on.
"The
rat," Shitty kept repeating. "The rat!" I think he was making
some kind of mantra with all that repetition.
Things
went on like that, pretty much, until we slid into the nearly empty parking
lot. I think we were going about seven miles an hour. The night shelf-stockers
were out recovering shopping carts. That looked like hard work; the shopping
carts weren't really designed to handle snow of any depth, and there were a few
inches out there. The night stockers stopped to watch in wonder as Lee Ann told
me to head one way, then Shitty the other. I think we drove around out there
very slowly for a while. Not that it seemed slow to us. But the way the
stockers stopped everything and gawked, they could see that something was
amiss.
We
almost lost the Nova when we finally agreed on a suitable parking spot; I
forgot to put it into park, and as we stopped to get out, the car started to
roll. A heroic dive from the back seat, and Larry's free palm was on the brake,
his legs awkwardly up over the seatback.
"For
God's sake, put it in park," he was yelling. He kept repeating himself
while we tried to figure out how to reach around him and hit the gearshift. But
between us, we got the job done.
Big Box
I
don't know if you've ever been inside one of those big-box groceries at a
quarter to four in the morning, but we had. Only we weren't tabbed that time
last summer. At least, the last time I'd made the trek at this time of night, I
was merely stoned. With maybe a snort of speed to keep me sharp. Then a couple
of shots of Kentucky whisky to take the edge off that. During the summer,
they'd keep their big entry doors wide open, and birds would sometimes fly in
and kind of get stuck in there. Lee Ann and I had come in search of eggs and
potatoes and cheese and sausage, that sort of thing, breakfast stuff, and you
know how stoned people shop; our cart was filling up with stuff we had no use
for. The Econofoods was like an airplane
hangar, huge and hollow, its ceiling lined with fluorescent tube lighting. The
electronic buzz the lights made was awful, and the light deeply unnatural.
Lee
Ann noticed the sparrow flitting around overhead, pointed it out with a gasp of
wonder.
With
a loud crack from a few aisles over, the sparrow exploded, its body bloodied
into a new shape by buckshot. We could see that as it fell, with a thump, next
to a cooler with rows of bloody ground chuck, the really low-grade stuff. We
heard a sound like hard rain coming down around us. The little steel pellets
were shooting down on us in the meat section. I covered up and ducked down, but
Lee Ann, not understanding what was going on, stood, gawking, until one caught
her left eye on the rebound.
I
think maybe the people working overnight in the place thought there weren't any
customers around. Otherwise, why would they be shooting guns indoors? Someone
could get hurt. Watery red trickled from where the little pellets punctured the
ground chuck. It was like some kind of canned hunt, in its way. That chuck
didn't stand a chance.
Lee
Ann had closed her eyes for a second to clear them. The pellet that nailed her
struck just beneath the brow of her eye socket. Man alive, could that girl
scream. I loved to hear that shriek of hers. The night manager came running
over with a look like he'd been caught spying on a junior high school shower
room.
"Oh
my god, oh my God," he kept saying.
Lee
Ann was shrieking at him, "I'm gonna be blind, you dumb motherfucker, I'll
blind you, you stupid cunt, see how you like being blind," helpful things
like that. She was kicking and clawing at him. It took the other four night
stockers on duty, pale, sleepless guys who shunned the daylight, to wrestle her
away from him. The night manager told us then that we could get what we needed
and go, the store would cover it.
There
it was again: Lee Ann's weird ability to get a bad thing looking good.
We
combed the aisles then, genuinely chipper, Lee Ann holding a cloth with some
ice cubes wrapped in it to her eye, grumbling obscenities. But the grumbling
was just for show. She'd flash me a smile, sneak one at me when she knew they
weren't watching. With $13 between us, we loaded down the cart, then retrieved
a second and filled it to overflowing, too. We stocked up months' worth of
food. Too bad it was so late; you can't buy alcohol in Iowa after two.
Rat, more
Lee
Ann's eye puffed up black and blue, and people gave me dirty looks on the
street when we walked around together, but she was fine.
But
that was another time, before. This time was the time with the rat.
The
four of us trudged past the night stockers in the parking lot. They were having
a hell of a hard time getting the carts to roll through the snow. But they'd
gotten back to work; must've seen enough of our show. I bet you see lots of
weird shit on the night shift at a big box grocery.
The
electric buzz and awful pallor of the light struck us, but we steeled
ourselves.
"We
are on a mission," Shitty declared, "to make your house free of rats
and thus safe for Larry."
All
eyes ogled over to Larry, whose hand was now clearly inseparable from his
knotted nest of hair. You could see the light go on in Lee Ann's head. The
thought balloon over her head read loud and clear: Rat's nest!
She
giggled. "Come on," she said, taking Larry by his good hand and
leading him away. Shitty and I followed.
Lee
Ann went aisle by aisle until we found a suitable pair of scissors. When she
was sure the coast was clear, she popped the staples holding the paperboard
sheaf together.
"Oh
no," said Larry. "No, no, no, you are not cutting my hair in the
fucking Econofoods at four in the morning."
I
checked my watch. "Three forty-seven," I said. Larry glared at me.
"It's just in the name of accuracy," I said. He returned to Lee Ann.
"Look,"
she said, a nurturing, maternal tone appearing magically, "your hand's
stuck. We have to get it free. Looks like there's a bunch tangled up in your
rings, everything."
The
slow shift in his expression told me Larry was being won over by something
about what Lee Ann was doing or saying, and while my mind went off on its own,
trying to discover what it might be that was winning him over to her, she
started cutting. Big tumbleweeds, snags, and whorls fell at our feet, and
Larry's hand slowly came free, the wings of the bats on his three enormous
heavy metal rings snarled in sandy gray-brown coils.
He
looked pretty bad. Lee Ann took off her ski cap and pulled it down onto Larry's
head.
"Poison,"
said Shitty. He was not going to let the purpose of our visit drift away on us.
We combed the aisles until we ran across what looked to be a suitably deadly
bottle. I couldn't really read the dancing letters, but the skull and
crossbones seemed enormous. With drug-impaired difficulty, we found our way
back to the front of the store and bought our prize. How would we ever find our
way home if we couldn't find our way out of the store?
Homeward Bound
On
the way home I suddenly saw too many springing headlights in the windshield. We
swerved across the center line. I remember the blur of an oncoming station
wagon. Time turned to molasses on me, molasses in which every detail seemed
crystal clear, no matter how tiny; I had time enough even to analyze it. The
inertia must have been incredible. I felt my neck pop, then pop again as it
jammed to the side and was held in place with the force of the spin. After what
seemed like hours, the force eased up on my neck and we came to a rest and I
realized that my face had smashed into the steering wheel. My nose and brow
were numb, but I could taste the copper and feel the wet warmth running off my
chin. We got out to look the Nova over, see if she was still roadworthy. Shitty
got a look at me and pulled a handkerchief from his coat pocket, handing it to
me. He showed me where to press. Larry, poor Larry, was knocked out, but
breathing in the back seat. Shitty and Lee Ann seemed unharmed. The front end
was bashed in pretty good, but I thought we could make it before the police got
there.
Then
I noticed Lee Ann staring, pointing down the road. Four people were sprayed out
glistening across the road, bodies I thought probably, pretty well skinned on
the pavement. The wagon was in the ditch at the side of the road, its
headlights cockeyed.
"I
didn't even see them," I said. She reached over to grab onto my arm and
suddenly I was screaming, my vision whited out by the pain.
"I
think it's broken," she said.
I
glared at her. No shit it was broken.
The
headlights of another car appeared at the curve. I could see the curve, now,
that the wagon had come around. The oncoming car wouldn't see the other people.
"Come
on," I said, urging the others toward the Nova. But I couldn't seem to
will myself to move. We could all see that the oncoming car would not see the
people on the road, that that would end any question of their death, and not
one of us could look away.
The
oncomer was a Chevy Conversion-style van which, truth be told, was going a bit
too fast to be safe. Its driver locked up the brakes after destroying the first
victim, but still managed to plow into the others. They never had a chance.
"Holy
shit," said Larry, rubbing at his eyes. "What the fuck just
happened?"
We
limped homeward with our rat poison and our injuries, the Nova randomly,
flickeringly lit no matter what we tried to turn out the lights. I couldn't
drive with my arm like that; Larry had to.
"Back
there," said Shitty pointing past the end of the drive, into the secluded
back yard. "Way, way back." Larry went along with the order, though
he didn't seem happy to be leaving his car snowbound. Lee Ann let herself into
the basement we could only access from outside, like the one at Dorothy's farm
in "Wizard of Oz." When she climbed back up and out, she was carrying
a tarp.
Inside,
Shitty produced a vial of clear fluid from his coat pocket. "I was saving
this for a rainy day," he said.
"What've
you got?" I said.
"Morphine.
You're going to shoot up. Then I'm going to set your nose. I've been in enough
bar fights to handle that. But the arm — the arm worries me."
"Dude,
I cannot handle this, I cannot watch this," said Larry. With a fumbling
grasp, he picked up the rat poison and headed for the kitchen. Lee Ann, her
face ashen, sat motionless.
"You
should go with him," said Shitty. "You don't want to see this."
The
funny thing about morphine is this: It does not dull your pain so much as dull
your capacity to care about it. It's a lot like clinical depression that way,
I'm told. A dose of morphine and you don't care what's on TV, as long as the TV
is on. The nose hurt like hell, especially when Shitty had to try it a second
time. But the arm. Thank God for the morphine.
I
was laid out on the floor by now. Shitty stood over me. He folded a washcloth
over on itself until there were lots of layers. "Open your mouth," he
said. He carefully placed it between my molars, as far back as he could wedge
it.
He
took my wrist in his hands, braced a foot under my arm. "Guerilla
medicine," he said with a screwy smile. There was a limb-tearing jerk on
my arm, and my world became only the sound of my own muffled scream and the
gunshot-wound pain of my arm. I flickered out.
When
I came to, I could hear the others talking strategy. Well, OK, it was more of a
reinforcement of the collective decision to never, ever mention the crash to
anyone. Lee Ann had taken out my hair clippers and was leveling what was left
of Larry's hair into a flattop.
I
closed my eyes and submerged into narcotic darkness.
