Unseaming (28 page)

He doesn’t have enough mind functioning rationally to wonder how Shaun is with him, under the car with him, somehow slid under to join him, bright green eyes boring right into his as he once again displays that maddening smirk.

You remember my niece, then, Shaun says. Turns out, she does remember you. Just barely.

Something balloons out. From Shaun’s neck. Like a sack. Except it’s also a face. A girl’s face. Bright things crawl from her eyes.

stitches

You were so lucky.

Your father never told you, No you can’t, never said anything was out of your grasp. Your mother never laughed at you when you talked about writing poetry for a living, starting a band, hitchhiking the country just to do it. They always told you that whatever you wanted most was the thing that was best for you.

You had to take things into your own hands to learn what a waste you are, what a repulsive excuse for a human being you turned out to be, even before you could no longer call yourself human.

At rare intervals, such as now, shuddering on your parents’ king-size bed, stifling your whimpers with the barrel of your father’s .357 magnum, you congeal in some rough approximation of your old self.

Most of the time you are not—you are a creature of unbridled longing, unstoppable hunger, lacking even the discerning predilection for the weak and unwanted that kept the monster you have now become hidden from the light for long ages.

You no longer know where you begin or when you began. You can crawl inside yourself like a silverfish skittering through the coils of a rolled-up tapestry but no matter how deep into the dark you crawl you will never find the other end.

You are every god that ever had the raw remains of a sacrifice stretched over its shoulders, every monster that ever wore its victims’ skins, stitched them into capes, coats and masks. The soul is a bright morsel sealed in an envelope of flesh, and you are the unbinder and the weaver, the one who adds new patches to the ever-growing quilt. You carry the motes that, when cast upon your prey, reveal the seams by which you unhook and unbutton, but never rip, never draw blood.

You are a nightmare from the grimmest of all fairy tales. Call your true name, and you’ll simply unhinge your jaw to swallow the shrieking princess and her squalling baby whole. You are a throat that can never be stoppered, a hole that can’t be sealed by sunlight or stake or bullet.

Sometimes the you who once was slides out from the folds to glimpse the surface, but that you is never is control. There is nothing in control.

The only thing you ever had control over, was Denise. Until she fled. Right into the arms of another monster, and led you right to it, led it to you.

She ran from your probing hands, from the sickening price you exacted for a false show of brotherly love, and to addiction, to alcohol, to sex, to Ecstasy, to the archdemons of crack and heroin and meth and finally into the grasp of something a million times worse.

When you tracked her down at that quaint little shop, innocuous front for a methadone empire, it was waiting for you. It had a name, Lenahan, and a sweet public face, and an awe-inspiring profile in the drug-running underworld. And an even older pedigree and an even more terrible purpose, a hunger it fed so carefully, so thoroughly.

And you thought you were so clever, when you bested it with its own button-hook magic. But as it died, it opened you up, it made you understand what you were, a pathetic, predatory scavenger, a belly-crawling degenerate, feeble clone of its own black-stitched glory.

You’re draped in its hunger, in its lust, in its skins, but not worthy of the mantle. You’re the will-o’-the-wisp struggling to steer the whirlwind.

You’re the fly swallowed alive, helpless, wriggling.

In the dead of night, blubbering on all fours on your parents’ bed, you press the tip of the brutal metal barrel hard against the back of your mouth and squeeze the trigger.

The bullet bores through your palate, out the back of your head, punches into the ceiling. You feel nothing but a hard tug.

You start screaming. The screams are in Denise’s voice, in your father’s voice, in the voice of an innocent little girl, in voices you don’t recognize and never will.

You push your mouth down on the barrel, jam it in your throat, you gag on it but shove it in deeper, you squeeze the trigger in your fist again, again, punching holes through your head, the entire clip, ten spent shell casings spit from the chamber one after the other. And you wail and you keen as each bullet does you no more harm than a needle shoved through a cloth sack.

Your cries leak through the spiral coils inside you and you can feel the responses in kind, a muffled chorus of despair croaking for release.

You’re just one more voice at the crest of this crypt, the thin-stretched shroud wound over and through a mass grave packed with thousands, pressed on each other in layer after layer.

Your father’s gun has gone impotent but you keep clicking the trigger, screaming into an empty chamber.

Still later in the night, when the cops come to the door, you calmly tell them nothing’s wrong. You let them search the house. They ask about the bullet holes in the bedroom ceiling. You say your son did that when he was drunk and alone in the house, before you had him taken to rehab, and right now you don’t know where he is.

They can see there’s no blood. Finally, they leave you. And you resist the urges. You leave them alone. You let them leave.

The crushed shell of your mind leaks with other urges, more pressing lusts to slake.

fourth square

Truth be told, Patsy gave no credence to Shaun’s strange, tear-stained speech of the previous day, expected nothing to come of it, which makes the knock on her door so early this morning that much more of a surprise.

Everyone promises to call on Patsy and her cats. No one ever does. And she makes sure they don’t need to. Every warm day, she makes sure they all have to see her bright-eyed, smiling face.

Most of her neighbors pretend to be kind to her, and she’s not blind to the pretense. They smile too long, won’t look her in the eye, say goodbye before she’s done talking. She’s always gracious about the subtle abuse—a compromise she offers to those who might be happiest if she gave into the disease slowly rendering her paralyzed, if she simply stayed in her home and withered away, died helpless and forgotten in her bed, a sacrifice to the flies.

One of the consequences of being inconsequential, a person looked past rather than seen—she has been cast as the neighborhood’s cheerful confessor, its motorized wheelchair-bound repository of secrets.

If she wanted to, she could make the whole neighborhood come apart at the seams. But, because she never breaches trust, never shares these sacred scraps, and because of the pity those with a glimmer of a conscience feel toward this woman with no friends, she is entrusted with so much. She knows so many things about people who care little to nothing about her.

She hears the elderly woman at the end of the street complaining about her tramp of a granddaughter. She hears Francene’s frettings about missing Denise, and her not-so-perfect son, and the suspicions about her husband that she doesn’t quite dare face head-on.

She hears Maria’s gripes about her many obnoxious boyfriends, enough that she can tell when someone’s about to get dumped. She hears about the fights with the ex, how he lords his custody of Davey over her, how he deprives Davey of things like comic books and field trips just to spite his mother, to show her how powerless she is.

Patsy even hears about the break-ups and reunions with Clive—Maria has never kept this secret, not from her.

And she hears from Barry the bulked-up, hunky weatherman about the annoying and adorable quirks of his latest boy toys. She hears the resentful whispers of the cop’s wife, and many, many more, even sometimes speaks to Lance’s withered and hateful mother, aged to twice her years, about what goes on in that hell of a household.

There is only one person with whom she shares these treasures. Withdrawn, crazy Benjamin, with his fenced-in house on the hill past the dead end. She talks to Benjamin because of all the ones she knows, he’s the one she pities. Because the rest of the neighborhood has forgotten him, the way they’d love to forget her. Because she has vowed to never be what he became, a thing so cut off from the world his blighted soul is barely recognizable as human, the way he eats the morsels of other lives that she feeds him the way a starved dog gobbles leftover fat.

Though he came to see her once in the mildew-blotted house she can’t keep up with, she has never been so naive as to mistake his alien fascination for kindness. Others have shown genuine kindness, Maria for one, Barry for another in his self-indulgent way, sometimes calling her to warn her about the weather when he thinks of it. Even distracted Francene has at times remembered her with tiny gestures, cheap porcelain kittens given at Christmas to match her octet of living ones. Patsy places Francene’s gifts in the living room, under the plastic Christmas tree that she never takes down, set up when she was more mobile.

When the knock comes again, she wonders if one of her occasional benefactors is making a rare house call. Maria, most likely, though she hardly stops by anymore, and she can’t keep from wrinkling her nose when she does. No one ever asks if she wants to live with this stink, no one ever offers to help. She can’t afford in-home care. They look at the stains on the carpet, the turds on the floor, and assume this is something she wants. And if she asks for help, that leads to the cold stares, to the questions, Why do you keep so many cats? Can’t you get rid of them? She doesn’t dare ask for help.

The knock again.

Who is it? she yells, commencing her struggle to get out of bed. Her crutches haven’t slipped out of reach, that’s a good start.

Muffled through the door, It’s me, Miss Hale.

Francene and Clive’s boy has kept his word. He’s really at the door. The depth of her shock can’t be sounded, especially after all that commotion last night, noises like firecrackers and police cars parked out front, their blue rollers bathing the street in submarine light.

She wonders what that was about. She wonders if it’s safe to have that boy on her doorstep. She wonders if Benjamin watched last night, what he saw.

He knocks again. I’m coming, she says, you’ll have to wait.

Okay.

Getting dressed is an ordeal that requires careful coordination. In forty-five minutes, she is clad in slacks, shoes, an oversized, faded floral-print blouse, and rolling her halting way to the door. She hasn’t heard a peep from Shaun, but when she peers through the spyhole, there he is, standing at the top of her ramp, those piercing green eyes gazing off into nowhere, a slight frown creasing his forehead.

Her voice quavers slightly as she unlocks the door. Bless you for being so patient.

Not a problem, Patsy. He slips inside, closing the door behind him, deftly maneuvering around her wheelchair. She rotates the machine to see where he goes but he just stands in the middle of the living room, doesn’t raise his eyebrows at the Christmas tree, doesn’t show any sign he notices the reek.

What a lovely house, he says.

Patsy starts. She could swear that when he spoke, the voice she heard was Francene’s. Yet the illusion breaks when he speaks again. I can get started if you show me where you keep your cleaning supplies.

They’re in the kitchen, beside the sink. You’ll see them right away.

He doesn’t move. Actually, before I get started, there’s something I want to talk to you about.

Now she understands. He wants what everyone wants: to make a confession. Yet still her unease grows, blood rushing in the parts of her that still have functioning nerves to feel. Well, anytime, Shaun.

This isn’t easy for me. He takes a deep breath. Maybe you can show me around the place, give me a little tour, so I can see what needs to be done. While I think about how to start. It’s a painful subject.

And raw pain wrenches in his voice. Patsy doesn’t know what to say other than, Okay, then.

Go ahead, I’ll follow you, he says.

Well, okay. There’s not much to see. I don’t use the basement much.

He doesn’t laugh at her joke. His red-rimmed eyes glisten.

Oh, Shaun, she says, what is it?

He just shakes his head. She finally pushes the lever to guide the chair toward the hall, and from there into the kitchen. Beneath her the floor creaks. Something is egregiously wrong about all this, his unprecedented frankness, his claims to want to make amends, his presence here so early, but she can’t deny that he’s genuinely upset over something. In fact, behind her, he’s starting to sob.