There was a construction site right next to my apartment and I went thereupon at night feeling torrents of blood beating in my heart and dug the grave way in the back where they were not building yet. It took me 3 nights but fineally I was ready and with slight quivering I went down to the deli and there he was! Giving me the evil eye like always and I looked upon that hideous bent finger of his and my blood ran cold and I had a bottel of chloroform and a rag with me but there was a customer a woman buying laundery detergent so I went into the back near the frozen food and my nerves were very unstrung and I waited and he could not see me but I could see him and his finger!
I waited a customary duration for the woman to leave then I seezed upon a package of Oreos and delivered them to the counter and I could see the guy was vexed to see me because he made a little grunt which I heard because my hearing is acute and like I told you I am sensitive. For a moment I did not think I would be able to do it but then his hideous finger brushed against my hand and I shivered all the way to my soul and I got the rag over his nose and he fought me but he was not very strong and even when he made a low mowning cry I had an impetuous fury that kept me going and I did not stop until he grew tremulous and slumped down and fell on the floor.
I felt intense paroxysms and went back upstairs in haste to bring the trunk down and closed the deli door behind me and put the closed sign in the window and endeavored to get the guy into the trunk. Not easy! I had to be careful not to touch that gruesome hideous finger! It took like an eternal period but I fineally got him in and then the top would not close! I was vexed and inflamed but found some duck tape which worked to keep it shut tight in case he tried to get out.
It was all blackness and absolute night when I dragged the trunk outside and my heart was vacillating and no doubt I grew very pale but I had made solem promises to do what I was doing so I dragged the trunk around the corner and into the construction sight and back to the grave I had dug and pushed the trunk in vehemently and piled dirt over it so it was very entombed. Then I found formidable rocks and put them on top the whole time sweating and my heart pounding but it was thrilling!
After that I went back to the deli and my limbs were trembeling but I fetched two bags of potato chips and a six-pack of beer and another Snickers and went upstairs to my apartment where I was consumed by a burning thirst and drank the beer and devoured the chips and Snickers and my heart stopped pounding and I was feeling less vexed and I counted off the hours because I needed to know how long the guy was entombed. My plan was to keep him buried over night. I did not wish him any ill harm! I wanted him to live! I had good intentions! It was not a crime! It was an experament!
But then I realized with trepidation that I could not unentomb him in the morning because there would be a throng of construction workers and all my cunning and resolve would be ruined!
The next thing I knew it had dawned morning. I had fallen into a deep slumber from the beer and hard work and I was feeling unwell because all I had eaten was the 2 bags of chips and the Snickers bar but when I pictured the guy encoffined in the trunk and how by now the chloroform must be worn off and he could be awake and filled with a terrible dread I felt better and I read my favourite story again the one that inspired me to such fancy and I made a methodical decizion to wait another day and night because one night was not much of a test for a premature burial and so I resolved that he should stay buried for 2 nights!
I was again filed with a hunger so I went down to the deli which still had the closed sign in the window to keep people out and got some Kraft American cheese and Wonder bread and mayo and a giant-size bag of chips and 2 bottels of Yoo-Hoo and went back upstairs and made cheese sanwiches and watched TV til I fell asleep and the next day dawned. Then I watched DVDs of old movies to pass the duration even though I could hardly sit still thinking about the man and what must be going thru his mind in that underground box and that kept me stirring until I started thinking that if my experament worked and the guy lived it would be no good if I was the only one who knew about it and I got tumultuous and started pacing and I did not know how many hours passed but it was starting to darken again and then it came to me who I could tell and it made perfect sense so I raced downstairs in haste and ran 5 blocks feeling like I was in a gossamer dream and went right in and saw all the books and decorations that reminded me it was Xmas and the English lady was there and she looked surprized and discordant to see me and I asked if the white-haired guy was around and she said you must mean Otto and I said yes if that is his name and she went to fetch him and he came out of the back room and I told them both how they must hasten to come with me that I had something awesome to show them and I guess they could see how aroused I was because Otto told the young guy with all the tatoos who was at the desk near the door to watch the store and then they followed me into the gloomy night.
Otto kept telling me to calm down but I could not and when we got to the construction site Otto said to the English lady Sally to wait on the street but I said no she had to come to see what I had done and she said ok and Otto held her hand because the ground had much irregularity and depression from all the construction.
Then we were there and my heart was thumping in my chest and I took the rocks off and started scrapping the dirt away with my shaking hands and Otto asked what are you doing? but I just kept going and then you could see the trunk and I got really aroused and had to rip the tape asunder to get it off but once I did I stopped because it was a rapturous moment and I remembered the line I had memorized and bespoke it—
Arise! Did I not bid they arise?
Otto and Sally stared at me with discordant looks and then I did it! I took the top off! and there was the wretched guy! Groaning and filed with agony! and whiter than the sheet of paper upon which I write these words but alive!
Otto and Sally looked truly vexed and impetuous but Otto helped the Korean man out of the box. He was trembeling and pitiful looking and Otto tried to calm him down and I saw Sally was getting her cel phone out but it was ok because I had made a discovery! A man could be entombed for 2 nights and live so the world should know and praize my endeavor and when the police came I did not put up a fight I just went into the car with them.
The End
I sent my story to the one person I was sure would like it, the white-haired guy Otto and he wrote back asking if he could publish it in this book he did every year about true crime. He said he was going to use the magazine article written by the guy who interviewed me and would publish my story along with it, which was awesome because that way people would get to hear my side. Otto said there would be about twenty stories in the book and I’d have my name on mine but he couldn’t pay me because it was illegal to make money from a crime, though I still say it wasn’t like a real crime but that was okay because the idea of having my tale in a book with twenty others was awesome and Otto promised I could have ten copies to give my friends though the only person I could think of was Larry and maybe the man from the deli so that he would understand what I was trying to do. It gets pretty boring in here so I’m looking forward to the book and reading my tale and the others too. I hope there will be some good ones that will appeal to my sensitive nature and maybe even inspire me.
THE UNINNOCENT
Bradford Morrow
AS A MAJOR FIGURE IN THE WORLD OF LITERARY FICTION, Bradford Morrow has received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and many other honors. He is the founding editor of the prestigious literary journal Conjunctions and the author of many acclaimed works of fiction, including The Diviner’s Tale (2011), Giovanni’s Gift (1997), and Trinity Fields (1995). “The Uninnocent” was first published in The Village Voice Literary Supplement and was collected in The Uninnocent (New York, Pegasus, 2011).
The Uninnocent
BRADFORD MORROW
IN OUR INNOCENCE, WE BURNED candles. We got them from a nearby church, and because my sister believed what we were doing was holy, she
said it was fair to take them. Churches, Sister said, were not in the business of making money off children. “Alms for the poor,” said she. “Suffer the little ones to come before me and unto them I shall make many gifts.” My sister enjoyed creating scripture. She had an impressive collection of hymnals, though neither of us could sing. And, as I say, many candles. I worried about her logic and thefts sometimes, but made it a point never to contradict her. She was older than I, and anyway, what was a hymnal but paper and ink? What was a candle but so much wax and string?
The yellow tongues at the ends of their tapers would flutter when the wind flowed off the lake, and we’d look at each other, down there in the old boathouse, our eyes wide, our mouths agape. And yes, when the flames made shadows all over the rustic wooden walls, where the canoes lay on their shelves and oars were lined up like rifles in a gun case, we would know that he was there. We weren’t, to say the least, objective in these exercises, these private séances. It didn’t occur to either my sister or me that the flickering of the candle flames might have been caused by our own expectant breath. The wind, we knew, could have nothing to do with it. No, it was him. He had come back. He never failed us. After all, he was our Christmas brother.
He never spoke. Our task was to decide what his signs meant. Everything had deep meaning. If the smoke of the candles drifted in a certain direction, it was up to us to deduce what such a thing portended. If a bat flew out of the boathouse, if a flock of chorusing birds lit in a tree overhead, if a mouse danced along the length of the wall, by our reckoning there were valuable ramifications. We took it upon ourselves to determine what the signs were, and interpret. This must, I know, sound indiscriminate and childish.
An instance. Down by the lake. Blind old dear Bob Coconut, the dog, stiffened in the legs, lying in the long grass. The air blue. Autumn. The water was cold, and red and brown leaves clotted the surface of the lake near the shore, like an oil slick. Angela and I had a sign that day. We’d found a dead ovenbird that’d flown into the kitchen window, and we knew what that meant. Out in the boat, we got our friend Butter calmed down enough so that he would let us tie him up like we always liked to do, and tickled him, and warned him if he laughed we would throw him overboard. The blue air was turning toward purple as the sun moved down into the trees and evening was on us. We’d been so hard at our game we hadn’t noticed how quickly the hours passed.
Butter wasn’t having a very good time. Nice boy with his round face and wide-open pale-gray eyes. He couldn’t complain, of course, because those were the rules, and because my sister had wrapped her muffler around his mouth. “Don’t worry, little guy,” Angela told him. “We’re taking you home now.” And he squirmed a bit before falling back into the bottom of the boat to breathe. “Don’t you cry,” she finished, “or Angie will have to hurt.”
I was slowly rowing us in. Butter’s parents would soon be worried. The evening star was up, a tiny eye of foil, winking. And then I saw him, our brother. He was standing on the lake. He was a milky swirl. His feet were in the mist that had come up out of the water into the warm and cool atmosphere. My sister put her palms over Butter’s eyes so that he couldn’t see. She thought he had been through enough, and she didn’t want him to be so scared that he’d never come out to play with us again. Moreover, she felt that nobody deserved to see our brother but us. Butter sobbed in the bottom of the boat. Angela and I cried too, while the evening star got brighter and brighter.
Butter was drawn into all this because one of the candles went out at just the moment he walked into the boathouse when we were praying for the ovenbird’s soul. Too bad for Butter, my sister told me later. And true, it was too bad, because from that moment on, all Butter’s problems became a matter of fate. Nothing we did, said Angela, was because we decided to do it. Our Christmas brother—who was one with fate—told us what to do and we did as we were told.
Looking back, I must admit to some surprise at how unparented we were. My father’s persistent absences were difficult to fathom, and what I’ve since been able to fathom is difficult to articulate, for the shame of what I think I understand. He worked hard to support us. He had a long daily commute from our rural home into the city. He was a tall, meek, square-headed, decent sort of man. And I’ve become unshakable in my conviction that he was a dedicated philanderer. I have no proof, and I never confronted him. My deduction is the nasty product of all those days and nights of fatherlessness coupled with my sure memory of his wandering, unprincipled eyes.
As for Mother, she was transformed into a cipher, a drifting and listless creature, by the Christmas brother’s death. We never knew her any other way, though Father told us she used to be a happy girl. She took it all to be her fault. She was the one who slipped on the ice. No one pushed her. The miscarriage that followed her accident was quite probably the end of her life, too, along with that of the blackened holiday fetus. Angela and I—who came along later—were unexpected, were not even afterthoughts. Mother carried us, birthed us, but gave us to understand we would never be our brother. Nothing would ever replace him. Much as I loved him, sometimes he made me want to do bad things.
In our innocence, sometimes we were compelled to go to extremes to get our brother to come to us. We felt forced to do things we weren’t proud of, yet never lost our faith in him even when, in our mad desire to tempt him home, we hurt things that didn’t deserve hurt.
We always feared Christmas. We couldn’t understand that other world, that parallel world where he resided, we couldn’t see why Christmas made him so reluctant a guest. Here, we thought, was the one time of year when families should celebrate together, reunite and rejoice.
Angela was the one who decided to hurt Bob Coconut. I didn’t make the connection between the dog and our brother, but Angela told me to trust her and I did. This was during Christmas, of course. My father and I had brought in the tree we’d sawed down at the tree farm. A prickly, nasty blue spruce. Ornaments, twinkling lights, cookies, the train set, cards hung over pendant string from end to end on the mantel. Bob Coconut lay on a rug before the fire, and twitched pleasantly under the influence of his dreams.
“You think Coco remembers when he could see?” Angela asked me.
I didn’t know, but I thought so.
“Coco?” she whispered in his old ear. “Oh, Co-co.”
“Let him sleep,” I said.
“I bet Coco could see him if he wanted to. Dogs have those abilities, you know. They can hear things we can’t hear. And they can smell better than we can. I bet he can see right into that other world, can’t you, Coco dear?”
“Doubt it,” I said.
“Hey, I’ve got an idea,” she said.
I don’t want to write down what my sister did to him. I wasn’t surprised, though, that it failed to work. Our brother was farther away from us than ever, after that. From then on, I decided to trust nothing my sister said or did. Instead, I began to observe her.
Two Angela stories.
First Angela story. There was a period when she thought she was our brother, after he stopped appearing to us. “He’s in me now,” she announced one night. She liked possessing him, liked being possessed. On occasion, she allowed me to pose questions. “What is it like being dead?” I asked. “You’ll know soon enough,” he answered through his medium. “Do you love me?” I asked. “I love you fine, but I love Angela better,” she said, her eyelids closing to narrow slits, the corners of her mouth lifted into a satisfied smile.
Then she found out one day that she wasn’t our brother. Something mysterious happened to her, and Mother told her she was a woman. And so it was time for her to start wearing dresses. I got to shave her legs. My sister even photographed me while I shaved them, telling me it was good for both of us, a sacrifice. She wouldn’t let me shave the hair under her arms, though. She said this was because she couldn’t take a picture of me doing it. I would be too close to her. That is what she said. The real reason she wouldn’t let me do it, I think, was that part of
her still believed she was our brother. She could walk around with her glistening and smooth white legs in the sun beneath the pleat of her billowy skirt, a young woman with strong calves and hard thighs, and we could admire her lush femininity, but we could never release her from her masculine possessiveness.
Second Angela story. Once there was a parade in the little upstate town where we lived. I don’t remember what holiday it was. There were a couple of makeshift floats. There were marching bands from county schools. I remember because it was the day my sister ran away from home. She was eighteen. She managed to vanish—“like a ghost,” said our mother—and was not heard from for many years. She was a missing person. Some people thought she was dead. I knew better; I knew she was truly missing.
In our innocence, we grew up. Tonight is his birthday, or would have been. He’ll always seem older than me, no matter how many years I keep on going. Angela is married and lives in New Hampshire now, her personal cold complementing its heavy winters. She has been married twice. She’s been around, as she likes to phrase it. She has three children—she may be cold, but she’s not frigid—and mentioned in a recent letter that she wants another.
I never understood this marrying business, and I can’t imagine what it must be like to raise children. The dog I own here in the city reminds me of old Bob Coconut. He’s far too lively and large for this apartment, but he is an amiable companion. When he curls up by the fireplace—the landlord won’t let me burn a fire in the hearth, so I make do with a gouache painting of flames I made on cardboard—I think of those times, of the complexities and strangeness of a child’s world. We were isolated. We didn’t know what we were doing; we didn’t realize how splendidly we were able to do what we wanted. All that is gone now. Is it schizophrenic of me to say that I regret the loss and couldn’t care less?
The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries Page 66