We Live Inside Your Eyes

by Kealan Patrick Burke

  He found himself in a narrow room with no windows and a ceiling so low he could touch it without fully extending his arm. Chaotic explosions of fungus gave the impression that the walls and ceiling were cushioned, or had been painted black, red, and gray. Broken chairs and tables had been stacked to the ceiling and back to the far wall so that there was little room to move. Liam had to skirt around them to reach the door in the far wall. When he did, he stopped, one hand on the ring, his heart in his throat.

  Going beyond this point meant reliving his previous nightmare. The door led outside to an open-air bathroom covered only by a faltering tin roof, beneath which a single ceramic trough served as the place for men to relieve themselves. There were no facilities for women, because women never came here. There were no stalls. It was little more than a back alley with access blocked from the street by an avalanche of empty gas canisters and pulverized furniture.

  Liam considered opening the door just a crack and calling his father’s name, but he knew the howl of the wind and snow would likely make it inaudible. He lingered on the threshold, heart ramming against his ribs, until yet another voice entered the fray, this one more comforting than any other: You can undo it. It will hurt at first like it always does, but you can take the pain. Later, when you’re all alone, you can revise it and make it yours. He had come to think of this soothing voice as echoes of his adult self, sent back through the mildewing pathways in his brain from some incomprehensible future, or a dream of one. And thus far, it had always steered him right.

  Bracing himself, he yanked open the door and immediately recoiled at the stench of piss the snow blasted into his face. Grimacing, he wiped his nose on his glove and stepped out into the alley.

  The single naked bulb suspended from the tin roof threw little light. The cobblestones out here were greasy and uneven and missing in places. With the warmth of the bar shut behind him, Liam wrapped his coat tighter around himself and squinted into the poor light. The trough where men did their business was empty of all but stains, discarded cigarette butts, and a half-inch of dark brown water, which bubbled and gurgled as if alive. Liam avoided looking too long at it as he made his way past the “toilet” and out into the area of yard unprotected by the sagging roof.

  The snow buffeted his face like gravel as he surveyed the dark expanse before him. He stood still for a moment beside the calamity of gas cans and furniture blocking the exit until he detected a sound to his right, from the area next to the old tin shed where the darkness was thickest.

  Last time he’d come here on such a mission, he had not needed to venture so far into the yard. On that occasion, he’d found his father sitting in the trough, pants around his ankles, face raised to the tin roof in ecstasy as the violin woman worked on him.

  Yes, no women came to McMahon’s Bar, but these visitors had been women in shape only. Nothing else about them suggested femininity. Nothing about them was remotely human. And of course, there wouldn’t be. The church had sent them.

  Liam dreaded coming upon such a scene again. It had taken him the better part of six months to recover from the last time, and only then because he had drawn sanity back into his head through his pictures. He knew he could do the same thing again now, no matter what he found, but he didn’t want to have to experience it again first.

  Unbidden, a small pulse of anger warmed the base of his throat and he frowned. Why had his mother made him come here again, knowing what he was likely to find? The answer, when it found him, was startling in its simplicity: they wanted him to see, wanted him to be driven mad, maybe in the hope that this time, it would take, and they’d finally be rid of him.

  Incensed now, the anger spreading downward, setting fires throughout his chest and down into the pit of his stomach, he forgot his fear and made his way over to that suffocating swatch of darkness beside the old tin shed in which McMahon kept the spare barrels of beer, the moonshine, and the mason jars full of animals he had never had the heart to let go.

  The sounds were louder here. Sounds he recognized despite being too young to know them. He stood there for some indeterminate amount of time until his eyes adjusted to the gloom and he could see the shapes, the nakedness, hear the passion as his father had his way with another one of them.

  The violin lady was suspended above her father via her broken, twisted arms, her long-fingered hands clamped to the roof of the shed on one side, the wall on the other. She had no legs to speak of. Instead, her ragged torso ended in violin strings that started somewhere in her throat. Made taut by the concrete block suspended at the other end of the strings where the rest of her body should have been, the wind played a haunting tune she controlled by moving her mouth and working her throat. His father knelt before her, her bare breasts clamped in his dirty hands, his mouth working feverishly over her erect nipples. When she moaned, it was music; when he gasped, it was an ugly, hungry, desperate sound. His manhood was erect, stabbing pitifully at the empty air beneath the concrete block as she weaved from side to side.

  The woman became aware of Liam first. She did not panic—they never did—instead she released one hand and then the other and dropped down into the darkness of the rubble until she was out of sight, the faint twanging of the violin strings the only indication that she was still there, hidden, as she alerted his father to their visitor.

  The old man still had his hands before his face where the violin woman’s breasts had been only a moment before. Slowly, as if surfacing from a dream, he dropped them and looked dazedly at the boy standing before him. The confusion quickly turned to rage as he rose like a wraith, tugging up his pants as he readied a hand to strike the boy.

  “I fucking told you, I told her not to bother me,” he said, a string of drool dangling from his lower lip. Even in the gloom, Liam could see the red glare in his eyes. He was drunk on more than just the beer.

  Liam braced himself for the blow, his head turned slightly to the side, eyes shut tight.

  It didn’t come.

  When next he opened his eyes, his father was staring uncertainly at him, something like fear on his long haggard face, both shivering from the cold.

  “I’m allowed to do whatever I want here,” his father said. “That’s how it is now.”

  Discordant music as the violin woman skittered away down through a rent in the rubble. The old man looked over his shoulder with something like sadness before turning his attention back to his son. “I’m not coming home. I don’t belong there anymore. But you know that already.”

  The snow whipped itself into a frenzy around them.

  “I’ll stay here and die with the rest of them. That’s what was going to happen anyway. We all knew it. We just didn’t expect it so soon. The gods can have us. I’m sure they won’t turn us away. But whatever happens, this place can’t last forever. Not like this. The city is dead.”

  Despite the anger, Liam shared his father’s sadness. It didn’t have to be this way. Revise, advised the voice he kept secret inside him, but he knew even if he did it would do nothing to erase the horror that lived on this side of things. All was darkness here, because it belonged here, and if it didn’t stay contained in places such as these, it would corrupt everything.

  “I’ll go then,” Liam said. “What should I tell Mother?”

  His father shrugged on his coat, tied up his shirt and looked grimly at his son. “Whatever you want. It hardly matters now. She’s lost, I’m lost. So are you.” Then he walked by his son and went back inside the bar.

  After a few moments of staring at the rubble and the life that was no longer hiding within the shadows, Liam turned and followed.

  When he went inside, the crowd of men had doubled. Everyone in the neighborhood seemed to be there, except for the women, of course, all of whom would be at home tending to their sons and waiting for the end.

  ✽✽✽

  His mother was still standing by the stove when he returned with the bad news, but when she failed to answer him, he realized the blackening o
f the bacon and eggs had spread up to her elbows.

  “I tried,” he told her through the tears. “I always try. Sometimes it’s just bigger than me and I can’t make it any better.”

  She turned to look at him and he saw the grease sizzling in her eye sockets. Her hair fell out in clumps and landed in the frying pan, where it shriveled and died. When she opened her mouth to respond, he saw that it was full of straw, and as he looked on, the tears coming freely now, she collapsed in a heap on the floor. A sheep skull skittered across the stone and bumped against the leg of his chair, making it shriek.

  Despondent at his failure, he went upstairs to his sanctuary and shut the door behind him.

  Then he withdrew his sketchpad from beneath the bed.

  His limited talents, which would not reach their full potential for years yet, perhaps ever, frustrated him as he erased and replaced and scratched and scribbled, but never got it right.

  ✽✽✽

  “Mr. Thompson, did you hear a word I said?”

  Groggily, Liam raised his head from the protective darkness of his arms. When the other children saw that he’d been sleeping, a fine thread of drool connecting his lips to his desk, they giggled nervously. Nobody would outright laugh at him. They knew his history, knew what he’d done, and that only the fact that he was so young had kept him from being stuck in a white room with rubber walls somewhere.

  Blinking away the confusion, Liam looked up at his teacher. Dressed bat-like in the professorial robes typical of teachers in Catholic boys’ schools, Mr. Wyman clucked his tongue and grabbed the sketchpad from the desk. “More of this macabre doodling? Mr. Thompson, I daresay if you put half as much effort into your language studies as you did these...these...” He gestured helplessly at the peculiar, morbid rendition of their church and the school and the myriad monsters his subconscious suggested could inhabit them and tossed the pad aside. It hit the desk with bang.

  “Focus, child,” the teacher said, and headed back to the top of the class.

  Bright autumn sunshine turned the windows to gold and flooded the room with light, illuminating the dust. At Wyman’s request, the other children gradually tore their attention away from Liam, from the weird kid, and returned their attention to the scrawl of French on the chalkboard.

  “Je m’appelle John,” Wyman instructed, his patrician smile aimed at every child in turn as he punctuated the air with a wizened finger as if it were a conductor’s baton. “Je m’appelle Rebecca.”

  Liam tried to return his focus to the classroom, to the fraudulent construct his mind had created to protect himself from the wrath of the gods. Even though Wyman had moved away and let him be, he knew there would be consequences. Lately he was falling asleep more often, found it almost impossible to concentrate. His grades were dropping and the few friends who didn’t hold his past against him had drifted away. He was stared at in the halls, mocked in gym, bullied in the bathroom. And then home, the most dreaded place of all, where his mother did her best to make it seem as if the divorce was not tearing her asunder. She too had quit the pretense of being a loving mother, confining him to his room with his books and his drawings. Sometimes late at night he could hear her weeping through the wall. Sometimes early in the morning he heard her talking on the phone and screaming about her “loser husband” and that “musician whore he shacked up with.”

  None of it meant anything to Liam. He was safe in his sanctuary where everything was under his control. He could exist between these two worlds, but not forever. Sooner or later he would have to find a way to tie them together so some kind of balance could be restored.

  He glanced out the window through the glorious fraudulent day and saw the church on the horizon. Pristine, uncorrupted, normal. Dead leaves fell silently through the amber haze as the trees began to reveal their true selves. The city was like a held breath. Soon it would be time again to fill the scarecrows.

  “Mr. Thompson?”

  He snapped to attention and looked at Mr. Wyman, with his sweeping gray hair and rosy cheeks. “Yes, sir?”

  “Eyes up here, please.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Comment tu t’appelles?”

  “Je m’appelle Liam.”

  “Très bon.” He began to pace, his focus moving to another child. “Alex? Comment t’allez vouz?”

  Liam went back to pretending, but not before checking the ceiling behind him where in the corner nearest the door, the mold was starting to spread.

  A WICKED THIRST

  I WAKE UP DROWNING IN A PUDDLE, my lungs filled with rainwater. Through the panic, only one thought is clear: I am going to die. This stark certainty is enhanced to a horrible degree when I attempt to raise my head and find resistance, something pushing back against my skull, keeping all but my eyes submerged. Someone is trying to kill me. In this moment, perhaps one of the few I have left, the nature of my enemy is irrelevant. It matters only that he is there standing over me, his boot against the back of my head pressing down, down, down, and that he will not relent until the life or the fight has left me.

  ✽✽✽

  “You like to drink, huh?”

  Melinda says it with no accusation in her voice. If anything, she looks amused, and that’s good. Too many of these dates have been wrecked by judgment.

  Over my glass of bourbon, I shrug and offer her what you might call a “wry smile”, though I only employ it to avoid opening my mouth and letting the world see my teeth. The few remaining people in my life who still call themselves friends claim this doesn’t matter, that anyone who cares enough about me would be willing to disregard this aesthetic flaw. But I know this world. I see the celebrities beaming their pristine, expensive smiles at us mere mortals, and I’ve thwarted many an incumbent lover by admitting upfront that my dental state is not pretty. Even long-term lovers (back when long-term was a logical assumption) used it as ammunition during arguments because they know I’m self-conscious about it. They know it hurts, so it’s an easy play. You’re a waste of space, a goddamn drunk, and don’t get me started on those fucking teeth. Ugh! I want to say that if I had the money, I’d get them fixed, but that’s not true. I’ve had the money plenty of times, and it was then, as it is now, much easier to drink away the need to care. That the alcohol and the cigarettes are what destroyed my teeth in the first place is a truth that doesn’t hinder me at all.

  “Sure, who doesn’t?” I say, in response to Melinda’s question. She plays with the swizzle stick in her own drink, a cocktail of some indeterminate origin. The glass is enormous and rimed with sugar, the liquid within the color of a sunrise. I’ve never understood pretty drinks. Lethality should come in a more obvious costume, don’t you think? The amount of alcohol in that rowboat-sized receptacle reinforces the hope that no lecture about abstinence is forthcoming, so I allow myself to relax a little.

  “My parents,” she tells me, with a sigh, and to this I can relate.

  “Yours too, huh. Religious?”

  “Catholic.”

  “Same.”

  “To the lapsed.”

  We raise our glasses and toast gently, with no real celebration, because the ugliness of the truth we just shared is something that deserves only to be buried, not commemorated. Then again, who I am these days is commemoration enough of that dark time in my life.

  We’re seated at a moderately well-lit booth in a bar-restaurant hybrid, better known these days as a gastropub, a name which never fails to make me think of beer farts. This whole area of town is trying hard to be upscale and failing gradually. If the demand isn’t there, it doesn’t matter how glossy your business looks or how high you hike the real estate prices. Now when you walk this neighborhood, it’s not difficult to imagine what the big glass and brass frontages will look like with shutters.

  At the bar, a line of businessmen and women flirt and talk shop much too loudly while spending too much money. Around them, as attendant as bees, harried looking waiters and bar staff with no money at all rush around t
hem trying not to look miserable and annoyed. All of them are slightly blurred, and not only because my focus is directed at Melinda, but also because it’s been a long day, and I’ve marked three quarters of the hours I’ve been awake with either a cheap beer or a midrange bourbon.

  I’m spending money I don’t have. Child support money I tell myself I can make back before it summons trouble. Sometimes this is even true.

  “Am I losing you already?” Melinda asks, and despite the permanent fixture of her amused smile, I suspect it won’t be long before the phone comes out and she gets a “surprise” text and with it, the apology that she must get going to attend to some sudden and unavoidable event.

  “No,” I tell her, and wonder if the dimming of the lights is actual or imagined. “Rough day, and I’m finding myself seduced by the ambience and the company.”

  Her smile widens just enough to let me know she appreciates the compliment but recognizes its fragility. “Nothing at all to do with the three bourbons you’ve sunk since we sat down?”

  Her math is wrong. I’ve been taking hits from my pocket flask in the men’s room. Part of it is whatever compels me to never get close enough to sobriety to feel the real tragedy of my existence. I know how pitiful that sounds, but it doesn’t change the reality of it. Another part of it is nerves, because the simple truth is this: I’ve had a lot of women. This is not a boast, just a fact. I’d make a list if I could recall half of them, but I can’t, so you’ll just have to take my word that we’re probably talking close to a hundred. Without drink, that number would be less than ten, because I’ve never known how to talk to women—or anyone else for that matter—unless I’m buzzed. Walk in on me in a bar halfway through the night and you’d think I was perfectly at ease, comfortable in my skin, and just the best damn company. Charming, if a little quiet, confident but not cocky, and you’d be right. Catch me in the morning and you’ll end up calling the suicide hotline on my behalf. Catch me in the company of women before I’ve had a shot and I look like a man afraid to address his own reflection. I don’t like that person. Truth to tell, I don’t much like either of them, but at least there’s something I can do about the lesser one. That confidence with women, forced or not, worked better back in the day, before my looks began to fade. That Melinda is sitting across from me now is nothing short of a miracle, though on such occasions I figure my idea of a miracle is closer to pity than I’d like to admit.