Mysterious Skin (17 page)

By the time I left the bathroom, the digital numbers on the bar’s clock read one-thirty. Saliva from Friar’s kisses covered my ear, which felt like a steamed mussel when I touched it. I heard him behind me, clearing his throat, zipping up. I slammed the door. Two men stood there, waiting. One applauded as I walked past. I didn’t turn around for Friar’s standard handshake or telephone number. “Whoa,” I heard Robin say. The bar’s perspectives were a hundred percent off-kilter. I stepped forward, leaving a trail in the cedar chips, and galloped out the door.

I did that out of boredom,
I thought.
New York will be better.
I took Main at fifty miles per hour. On the other side of the windshield, everything kaleidoscoped; streetlights slid together into white ribbons.

I stopped at the Quik-Trip and pumped five gallons into the gas tank. I wandered inside the store, pretended shopping, and managed to steal two boxes of Hot Tamales from under the clerk’s nose. Even that didn’t seem as exciting as it once had.

The Impala sputtered to life. I tore at the candy box, popped a handful of Tamales in my mouth, then shut off the stereo and listened as the motor’s rattle echoed through Main Street. I figured there would be some freaks prowling Main, drunken kids in the parking lot of Burger Chef. There was no one.

Carey Park had emptied as well. “No luck tonight.” I didn’t care; since I’d discovered Rudy’s, hustling the park was a thing of the past. Now the place seemed like an old carnival I’d once visited, its memories shrouded like spirits. The car coasted past a sign bragging Hutchinson’s history, its words still obliterated by the
FUCK AUTHORITY
and
NO FUTURE
graffiti Wendy and I had sprayed there years ago.

The moon looked like the tip of a fingernail. My headlights branched across crowds of skeletal oaks, cutting arcs in the humid and honeylike air. I eased the Impala into a gravel path that led to a playground. I switched dims to brights. They illuminated a swing set, two slippery slides, a rickety merry-go-round. For a second, I feared the acid would trick me, and I’d hallucinate the phantoms of murdered children. I got out and shook the thought from my head. The lights fell across the edge of a tiny jungle gym. I couldn’t believe my body had ever been small enough to fit inside its silver squares.

I shuffled through the Impala’s high beams toward the bathroom shed. The door wasn’t locked, and surprisingly, the lightbulbs hadn’t been smashed by vandals. I tugged at the dangling wire. Click-click. The walls had recently been painted orange, but when I squinted I could still see the ghost of my handwriting from months previous. I’d actually scribbled “FOR A GOOD TIME:” above the terms.

Back to the car. I lifted the neck of my shirt and buried my face inside it, smelling a sour fusion of breath and sweat and come. I left the park, running a red light, overwhelmed by the urge to speed home and ease into the world’s hottest bath.

By the time I reached Monroe Street, I remembered that Thursdays were Mom’s early mornings at work. I imagined Mom as I’d seen her so often whenever I came home late: snoozing on the couch, one arm fallen to the side, her fin
gers touching the carpet, her mouth open slightly, eyes trembling behind the lids as they surveyed the details of another dream.

I didn’t want to wake her, so I drove toward Eric’s trailer park. My mouth hurt, its soft parts throbbing, as if its layers of skin had been tweezered away. “
Blood Mania
wins Grand Jury prize at Cannes,” I spat out. “Best Actor Richard McCormick dedicates his award to his only son, Neil, whom he claims will follow in his footsteps and then some.”

A dog howled in the distance. I slid into Eric’s curb. He was home, because the Gremlin was there, its front fender still crushed from his “little accident.” I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the scene inside the house. This time, I pictured his grandpa and grandma, snug under their patchwork quilt in their brass bed, their spectacles or dentures or whatever else placed carefully on the nightstand beside them. Across the hall, Eric slept on half his futon. His face set into its permanently depressed frown. His heroes stared down from his walls’ posters.

Next I drove to the Petersons’. I could hear their air conditioner whirring, and they’d left their lawn sprinkler on. Inside were Wendy’s little brother Kurt; her mom and dad. In the year since she’d moved, I hadn’t set foot in there. No doubt her room was empty, its rug tattooed with burns from candles we’d dropped during sleep overs, its walls pocked from times we’d tacked up posters of favorite new-wave bands. Once, years ago, we’d written our initials on the wallpaper of purple irises. In one corner, near the floor, we etched “WJP” and “NSM” with the rusty point of a carpet knife. We had taken turns holding the knife, me spelling her letters, Wendy spelling mine. I wanted to break into the Peterson house, sneak to her room, and check to see if the initials remained.

I thought about the three houses, three distinct worlds
where I’d lived my life. The lawn sprinkler circled back to shower the Impala’s grill. It made little crunching sounds, as if dwarf hands were scrabbling to get in from under the car. It was oddly soothing. Eventually, my thoughts of Eric and Wendy and Mom merged to form a path that led toward one other place, one other person. I was coming down from the acid. I had no memory of starting the car again, or of driving back toward the side streets off Main. But by the time my thoughts clarified, I was there, idling in front of the house where Coach once lived.

I sat staring at the door and shuttered windows. I half expected Coach to come running out, his arms held open as if created solely to fit around my body. My Neil, he would say. He had moved from Hutchinson years ago. The house had since been painted, regaraged, reroofed. Yet I still could smell him there, could hear him breathing.
This is where it started,
I thought.

And then I heard sharp wails coming from the house: a baby, crying. I saw a light in one room’s window. It clicked back off, and another room’s light clicked on.

As I watched the window, I realized the sound emanated from Coach’s old bedroom. I imagined a young mother in a lacy nightgown, calming her infant in that same perfect square of world where Coach had stretched beside me in bed. In there, he would hold me for hours, my head on his massive chest as I balanced my ear against him, listening for his heartbeat.

After some time, the wailing subsided. Maybe, I thought, the mother would speak to her baby. Maybe she would start to sing, a secret and peaceful song to lull her child back to sleep. I closed my eyes and clutched the steering wheel, leaning my forehead against it, listening.

On the night of Avalyn’s scheduled visit, I helped my mother cook my favorite dinner: Caesar salad, asparagus, and pork chops surrounded by a moat of au gratin potatoes. I opened the stove’s door to peek. “You’ll ruin the food,” my mother said. Her apron showed a large fish preparing to devour a small fish, who in turn prepared to eat an even smaller one. She hadn’t worn it since the days of my father.

I went upstairs to wait for Avalyn. Under the bed, my eight-year-old eyes gazed out of the Little League photograph from the Chamber of Commerce. Only Avalyn knew I’d stolen it. By now my mother resided in a different realm, apart from Avalyn and I, beyond the boundaries of our experiences as UFO abductees.

It was the beginning of August, and my dream log was half full. In my sleep I still saw aliens, and I tried to forget the doubt that had entered my mind on the night I’d viewed Avalyn’s mutilated calf. I held firm to the belief that my dreams were all clues, pieces of my hidden past now revealing themselves. It was as though my brain had little rooms inside it, and I were entering a room that had been padlocked for years, the key sparkling in my fist.

I’d grown bored with skimming through the borrowed
pamphlets, so I bided my time staring at the boy at the end of the photograph’s top row. I truly believed he provided my most effortless way toward a solution, that he would reenter my dreams to tell me his name, where he lived, what he’d retained from our concurrent abduction and any similar experiences he’d since had. I needed him.

The presence of the coach still bothered me: his squared shoulders, his broad, sandy mustache, and the coyotelike gaze that speared through the picture as if he knew he’d be locking eyes with me, thousands of days in the future. Whenever I looked at the picture, I’d press my hand against the coach’s form to block him out. This queasiness was just another enigma I couldn’t solve. I hoped my teammate, whenever I would meet him, could explain it.

“Come down here,” my mother yelled from the bottom of the stairs. If I joined her, I could count on her to avoid the UFO subject, pushing it out of conversation to discuss instead my “upcoming college life” or “future career in the real world.” I wanted no part of that. I made certain my bedroom door was locked tight. I pretended I couldn’t hear her over the din of synthesizers and computerized drums. After a while, she walked away.

Avalyn arrived ten minutes early. When I heard her car in the driveway, I leaped downstairs. She stood at the door, holding six yellow carnations. She wore a dress, her wrists ornamented with silver bracelets, her face rouged and eye shadowed. She’d taken her hair from its usual bun, and it meandered down her back in a dark ponytail. I let her in, holding out my hand to shake. She waved my hand aside and hugged me instead.

“Avalyn,” I said, “this is my mother.” For a second I thought she would hug my mother too. Instead, she gave her the carnations. My mother took them as she might take a wriggling child.

It was the first time I’d invited a guest for dinner, so leading Avalyn from room to room seemed the apt thing to do. She lingered over my mother’s plants, caressing individual leaves and fronds with the tenderness a nurse might administer to a burn patient. “Someone’s watered this little guy too much,” she said. She arched a plucked eyebrow at the stack of gun manuals and NRA magazines on the couch.

Avalyn followed me to the kitchen and sat at the table. I put the carnations in a mayonnaise jar, filled it with water, and sat beside her. My knee brushed her leg. I thought first of her scar, and then of the way she had touched me that night in her field as I cried.

“Brian tells me you’re a fan of this Cosmosphere place as well,” my mother told Avalyn. “I don’t think he’s missed any of their programs since the place opened.”

“I haven’t either,” Avalyn said. “As I told him over the phone the other night, it’s a miracle we never bumped into each other there.” She unfolded the napkin I’d arranged beside her plate. “My favorite show was the one on unusual weather. I also loved the shows on volcanoes and roller coasters. The one on the history of railroads in America, on the other hand: boring.” My mother brought the food to the table, and Avalyn continued to explain how that particular night’s program concerned the history of flight. “I’ve a feeling Brian and I will enjoy this one.”

We ate. The conversation lagged, my mother and Avalyn its only participants. My mother seemed to be testing our guest, unraveling her layers to get at some kernel of truth, and I didn’t like it. “I’d enjoy hearing more about the whole process of hypnosis,” she said. “Since Brian is so interested in it, after all.”

Avalyn began relating stories I’d already heard. My mother hadn’t said much after she’d seen Avalyn’s feature on “World of Mystery.” But there, at the dinner table, in
front of the flesh-and-blood Avalyn, my mother wore the look of a hardened skeptic. She even clucked her tongue at one point.

“Now I’d like to ask you a question,” Avalyn said. “Brian tells me you were there when he sighted his first UFO, the one he remembers. It’s not uncommon for those who’ve seen one to see another.” She wriggled her fingers beside the frame of her glasses to indicate the flutter of memory. “Do you have any other sightings inside your head?”

“No,” my mother said. “I barely remember the one he’s told you about.” She paused and pressed her knife into what remained of her pork chop. “But I’m eager to find out what’s behind his suspicions about his missing time.”

“Oh, I’m convinced that Brian’s suspicions are true,” Avalyn said. “There’s no question in my mind;
something’s
happened to him.” My mother stared at Avalyn with the exact eyes I’d seen her center on the 7-UP bottles beside the house, the gun in her hand.

“No question in my mind at all,” Avalyn repeated.

My mother gripped the steering wheel, her eyes locked on the road. Avalyn lounged in the passenger’s seat as if it were the world’s coziest chair. I leaned forward from the back, my head inhabiting the uneasy air between them. Hutchinson’s skyline loomed closer, and Avalyn pointed toward the structure of white plaster in the distance. “The famous mile-long grain elevator,” she said.

We reached our destination as dusk was frosting the trees and rows of homes. The breeze smelled of honeysuckle and highway tar. The Cosmosphere building, a mammoth chocolate-colored octagon, sat near the community college. I scanned our surroundings. I was familiar with the college’s buildings and sidewalks and lawns, but the place now carried a growing sense of dread: I’d no doubt spend the next
two years of my life here, studying toward a degree I still wasn’t certain of.

Yellow flyers had been pasted to each of the parking lot’s light poles. I read one as we walked toward the building. They pictured a pigtailed little girl named Abigail Hofmeier. She had been missing since July twenty-first. “Please Help Us Find Our Baby,” her parents had written at the bottom. My mother, reading over my shoulder, said, “That’s heartbreaking.”

The three of us entered the sliding glass doors. Touristy-looking people shuffled through the lobby and the adjoining gift shop. The next show was scheduled in fifteen minutes, so Avalyn and I browsed through the absurd souvenirs we’d seen hundreds of times already. My mother took her seat on a bench and waited.

Posters of planets covered the gift shop’s walls, as well as astrological charts and informative lists about U.S. astronauts. Rocket mobiles and kites dangled from the ceiling, twirling in a counterclockwise ballet. Compasses, various key chains and pencils, miniature robots, and space-laser water guns crowded the shelves. One box was filled with dehydrated squares of food that resembled sections of brick.
IDENTICAL TO THE HAM-AND-EGGS BREAKFAST EATEN IN SPACE BY ASTRONAUT ALAN SHEPARD
! read a package’s glittery letters. Avalyn examined a dehydrated meat loaf, then kneeled to a shelf containing make-it-yourself model kits. In one, kids ages eight to eighteen could construct a model unidentified flying object. “They don’t know what they’re messing with,” she said.

We walked back to the lobby, where a maroon-coated man ushered people through the door. “Time to take our seats,” my mother said. We paid for our tickets and filed into a long hall leading to the Cosmosphere’s domed auditorium. The ceiling was blank and white. The room smelled
synthetic, almost sugary, as I half-remembered the interior of the blue room in my dream had smelled.

The auditorium filled in a matter of minutes. An older couple with identical shag haircuts sat on Avalyn’s left. The woman’s eyes were dazed and slightly unhinged, eyes that may have just seen her own house burn to the ground. She, like everyone else, watched the ceiling, waiting for the show to start.

Lights dimmed, and I heard music that sounded like the electronic tape we’d listened to in the car. What had been a white dome above us became a replica of the night sky. From the corner of my eye, I could see the couple beside us shift in their seats. Their identical digital watches gave off twin green auras. Gradually, on the “sky” above, pinpricks of twinkling light flickered on, one by one. This opening sky simulation was always my favorite part of the Cosmosphere trips—it reminded me of the past, when I’d climb to our roof at home and watch as the night’s stars gradually appeared, stars so familiar I almost possessed them. Avalyn must have sensed my excitement, because she whispered in my ear, identifying constellations. “Cassiopeia,” she said. “Ursa Major, with Leo right beside it.”

The moody music ceased, and the feature film began. The announcer’s voice was enthusiastic and sexless, its timbre like a game show host’s. “Welcome one and all to ‘The Boundless Blue: The History of Flight in America,’” he/she said.

The film, which proved to be nothing special, traced the discoveries of the Wright Brothers all the way to current developments in air and space. Nothing concerning extraterrestrial life materialized. At one point, my mother squeezed my right hand. Then, slowly, Avalyn took my left. I wondered if either of them knew where my other hand was.
I pretended to be uncomfortable in the seat and fidgeted, clasping my hands in my lap to empty them.

On the way home, we saw fires on the horizon, farmers burning skeletal stalks of corn after harvest. The orange glow at the sky’s edge made the world seem ready to crack open, and I watched until the fire fizzled to nothing more than a sparkle in the distance. By the time we arrived in Little River, sleepiness had filtered through my limbs. Avalyn helped me out of the Toyota and looked toward her pickup. “Don’t leave yet,” I said. “I need to finish the tour of the house. There are two important places you haven’t seen.”

My mother clicked the TV on, brushed aside her magazines, and sat on the couch to watch a weatherman trace the meanderings of a tropical storm in the Atlantic. Her mouth pinched into a pout. I walked to the basement door, switched on the light, and led Avalyn down.

At the bottom of the stairs, I stood on tiptoe, reaching to move the crawl space door aside. Once I had needed a chair; now I was tall enough to stretch my head into the opening as Deborah had done a decade ago. “Here’s where my sister found me,” I told Avalyn. She nodded, already familiar with the story.

I looked inside. The room appeared exactly as it had years before, the dust a little thicker, the cobwebs tangled and dense on the cement walls.
Here is where I chose to hide,
I thought.
Here is where I went to get away from them.

“Now, the top floor,” I said. “You still haven’t seen my room in all its splendor.”

My mother didn’t look as we passed her. I trudged up the steps, opened the door to my room, and stepped inside. When Avalyn followed me in, I remembered what she’d said
when I’d first visited her. “I cleaned just for you,” I mimicked, sweeping my hand over the books and tapes and clothes I’d ever-so-slightly tidied that morning.

Avalyn stood in the room’s center. I couldn’t remember anyone beyond my immediate family being there before. She surveyed my bookcase from top to bottom shelf, fingering titles, hmming or aahing occasionally. She ran her hand along the knobs of wood on my bedpost, then faced the wall. “I didn’t like that film,” she said, indicating my
Capricorn One
poster. She turned to
Angry Red Planet.
“And that, I never saw.”

I stretched out on one end of my bed; Avalyn took the other. “Your mother doesn’t care much for me,” she said. “We are very different people. She thinks I’m stealing you away, I can tell.”

“I don’t think that’s true.” I forced a smile, as if it were no big deal.

“I had a boyfriend in high school once,” Avalyn said. The sentence came out of nowhere, scaring me a little. “I wasn’t so fat then. On our second date he brought me home late, and while I was getting out of the car my father appeared from the darkness, clamped his hand on the boy’s arm, and told him if it happened again he’d personally blow his head clean off. So much for my love life.”

From where I sat, I could see out the open window. Wasps dipped and spun from their muddy roof nest, threatening to fly inside. Down the hill, random lights in Little River’s kitchens and porches and rec rooms flickered on and off. The ballpark’s lights created a halo over the entire town. I remembered times when Deborah and I watched the players running bases, catching fly balls, sliding into home. I wondered if the boy from Little League still played ball somewhere; if he lived close enough to contact.

I reached under my bed for the framed photograph.
“This is what I need to show you.” Avalyn scanned the fifteen Little Leaguers to find me; when she saw my face, she tapped her finger against the glass. “Oh, don’t look at him,” I said, and I swaddled her finger with my hand to guide it toward the top row. “Here he is: the one from sleep.”

Avalyn stared at him, glanced up at me, and stared at him again. “So he’s your man. Yes, he could well be one of us.” Minutes passed without a word, and I wondered what she’d say next. Then, without warning, Avalyn lifted the framed picture and slammed it, hard, against her knee. The glass splintered. She brought it down again, the frame’s corner striking the spot where the tracking device’s scar curled across her skin. Glass shards tumbled onto my mattress and fell to the floor.