The Ultimate Undead

by Anne Rice

  But now that I knew about Stephen, and his terrible, messy, unethical birth, I almost understood the man’s frantic desire to appear as loose and unconcerned as possible. He probably prayed that someday Stephen would be able to write anything, even “Dad sucks the big one” on the wall with his own excrement. Yet, even as I neared my house, I kept wondering, What did all of this do to Nancy? Wouldn’t it be more fair to her to ship Stephen off to a children’s home? Talk about ethics … what kind of situation is that for a child to endure? She can’t even go to sleep without hearing him hoot his life away in the next bed … no wonder she calls his brain “dead” … as far as the whole family’s concerned, it might as well be.

  “And the rest of him along with it,” I couldn’t help but say aloud, just to savor the wonderful—yet sad—rightness of the thought.

  Whatever Nancy had been doing with the worms that early afternoon recess period, Mrs. Day Care deemed it cause for the little girl to stay indoors while the other children played outside—Stephen included. My stomach did a flip-flop every time the old bat made a show of picking up the adorable, nearly uncomprehending boy and baby-talked, “Stevie’s sure a good little boy, isn’t him? What a perfect little dumpling,” while Nancy just took it; no tears, no pouting, just that resigned, defeated manner. She didn’t even bother whispering “Shut up, Stephen” during naptime anymore, which was perhaps the worst sign of all, as if she’d at long-last discovered that protests, wishes and prayers were ultimately useless. I was the one who was nearly in tears every day in the Toddler Pit; it’s bad enough to reach your late teens or early twenties and realize that life usually is nothing more than a bowl of crap, but to be four or so and have that truth rubbed in your face … God, that sucked.

  Since Ruth had little time for Nancy before Mrs. Day Care’s ultimatum that the girl remain indoors (some future day-care teacher she was going to be!), I was elected to baby-sit the girl during playtime. Ruth had cot-folding down to an art form anyhow.

  I quickly learned that the little girl had little patience with bristle blocks, or Play-Doh, or even those lift-out wooden tray puzzles her erstwhile playmates enjoyed so much. She’d merely mimic whatever it was I did with the toys, all the while staring up at me with those clear dark eyes set in that milky-fine skin. If she had only cried, it would’ve been easier; while I wasn’t actually much for cuddling, I could have understood her need to vent her undeniable rage at the whole crazy situation she was enduring—preworm incident and after. But to simply accept it….

  Putting away the much-kneaded lumps of Play-Doh in their respective cans, I asked the little girl sitting across from me, “Are you looking forward to school? It’ll be fun there … you’ll learn how to read and write, and lots of other neat stuff—”

  “Not with Stephen there,” she mumbled, tracing the pattern of a flower on the worn plastic stick-on covering adhering to the battered tabletop. Unsure whether or not Stephen ever would be placed in any formal school—I doubted that even kindergarten was an option, not with him being in diapers—I decided to let that remark go by. I wasn’t sure exactly how much she knew about his condition, aside from that “dead brain” remark. And besides, I had no idea whether I might have to take another course with her father. Or heretofore unseen mother.

  Nancy kept on tracing the various flowers on the table before her, oblivious to me. Glancing up at the counter near the sink, I saw some squares of roughly rectangular butcher paper—the tossaway “place mats” used for early morning snack-time. I never knew—and never asked—why Mrs. Day Care banned crayons from the day care (probably would’ve caused her a little honest work), but I did carry a pouch of colored markers in my purse, for underline and accenting work on my notes come exam time. Not bothering to break the child’s concentration, I got up, got my purse out of the tiny crib room off to the back of the Toddler Pit, and hurried back to the kitchen section before Ruth noticed that I’d left Nancy sitting alone. The girl didn’t look up when I wiggled back into my chair and whispered, “I’ve got a surprise for you.”

  No response. Still putting on a cheerful front, I ceremoniously lifted the flap on my purse, then slowly unzipped the hidden closure inside. Nothing. Just doodling on the plastic table covering. I pulled the yellow pouch of pens out of my purse, and slid them across the table, until they were within reach of her tracing forefinger. Nancy paused in midarc of her finger across a huge orange blossom, then looked up at me, head tilted and eyes blank.

  Oh c’mon, kid, don’t you know what crayons are? Are your folks too cheap to buy ’em … or too loopy? Maybe they expect you to use your—

  It wasn’t until I got down a couple of sheets of paper that Nancy seemed to put two and two together; with one hand she reached for the top sheet of paper, and with the other she selected a black felt-tip pen. Biting down on one pale pink lip with her front baby teeth, she began to draw something on the paper—not merely scribble, like I’d half expected her to do. Leaning back in my chair, I watched her create some sort of elaborate drawing full of lopsided figures and out-of-kilter structures; fairly typical work for a girl her age, maybe even a little more advanced than usual, since she was including all the limbs and facial features on the (as I saw them) upside-down people. I wasn’t an art major, but I had to take art history, and the professor (a young bearded guy whose own artistic output included white plaster cartoonlike penises with propellers and wheels attached to them—at least he gave decent lectures) once told the class about the various stages of artistic development in children. According to the little I remembered of Professor Hupple’s lectures (he’d lost me after I’d seen his sculptures at a faculty art show), Nancy’s work was probably typical of a five- to six-year-old, which wasn’t too strange, given how old her father and mother were. I didn’t think they could communicate with Stephen on any significant level, so Nancy probably was a little more mature … even if she did have some sort of understanding with worms.

  “That’s really pretty, Nancy,” I offered, trying to get a response from her, but her reaction threw me. Putting down her pen (a red one, now) she asked me flatly, “You think so?”

  “Why sure, hon,” I continued to lie, as I bent over the table to look at her masterpiece in progress—albeit still upsidedown. There were obviously four figures in the picture now, two big (and one sporting an unmistakable beard), and two small—and identical, in a reversed manner. One tiny stick person was all black head, with no features, no hair, no discernible identity … save for the unmistakable striped rugby shirt, while the other smaller figure was black-bodied, and as bloated as a runny gingerbread man, but topped with a recognizable face consisting of dot eyes, slash nose, and a perfectly horizontal mouth. And all the features were black, even the mouth. And surrounding these four figures were sharply angled rectangles and squares, each containing wild squiggles—although contained within the lines—of green, black and blue. There were no triangles topping the boxy shapes, so they probably weren’t houses … but the three “structures” were so uniform in their contents that they had to have some purpose in Nancy’s eyes.

  Pointing casually at the nearest shape, I asked, “What’s that?” not fully expecting an answer, but the child replied, “Where the stuff goes for them,” and pointed at the figures in the picture.

  “Oh … ‘stuff,’ for the people here?”

  “Uh-huh.” Nancy picked up the blue pen and added some more wavy lines to the smallest of the black-bordered boxes, before going on, “It has to be held in the boxes, so light don’t hit it. Then it’s no good for them. It’s gotta be kept mushy and dark.”

  “ ‘Mushy and dark’ … otherwise the people can’t use it?”

  “Not ‘use’ … I mean, they don’t do nothing with it. It’s just … there for the people,” Nancy said with great difficulty, and greater maturity, leaving me unable to reply. I think I looked at my watch; somehow, it’s in my memory that I didn’t have too much more time before Mrs. Daffy Day Care returned with the other ch
ildren, yet there was so much Nancy seemed to want to say.

  Turning the picture around so I could see it, Nancy leaned over the table, almost stretching across it until her sweater rode up above the waistband of her pants, exposing a patch of pale back.

  “See? Here’s the little one, for this one—” she pointed first to the box at the left of the picture, then at the black-headed small figure, “—and here’s the bigger one, for this one.” Now she matched the black-bodied, small-headed figure with the medium sized box. “—and the big one’s for them,” finishing her explanation with a linking-up of the largest rectangle and the two adult figures.

  Peering down at her creation, Nancy suddenly frowned, then slid back across the table to her seat, where she then picked up the black pen and neatly bisected each of the boxes with a single vertical slash down the middle. Then she drew the dots, parallel to the central line and centered in the middle of each box, as she said, “Almost forgot … they use these to get inside.”

  “Inside,” I echoed softly; Nancy nodded her head emphatically, and as she did so, I noticed something … grotesque. Even as her head moved, her hair didn’t. The bangs instead rode up and down her forehead, or, rather, they stayed in place while her scalp moved underneath. Not wanting to stare at her, I glanced down at the silhouette-bodied small figure on the butcher paper. It was hairless.

  Oh shit, I remember thinking, the poor kid’s sick … probably went through chemo or something. Ye gods, what did her folks do to deserve this? One kid’s damaged, and the other’s—

  “Here,” Nancy was saying softly yet urgently, as she pushed the pens—all replaced in their pouch—across the table to me. As I reached out to take them, I heard what had caused her visible state of alarm. Stephen’s unmistakable “wwwwhoooop!” as Mrs. Day Care escorted him into the building….

  Luckily, I’d hidden Nancy’s drawing in a pile of flat wooden puzzles before Mrs. Day Care had a chance to pounce on it. For the next five days, while the other children played outdoors, and Ruth hummed tunelessly to herself as she straightened up the nap area, I’d ceremoniously hand Nancy my pens (I’d bought a fresh set at the campus bookstore, just so none of them would run out on her) and a few sheets of butcher paper … and then let her make me distinctly uneasy for the next half hour.

  In all of her drawings, there were two constants. The yin and yang pair of small figures, Black-face and Black-body, always close to each other on the page. As for what surrounded them … hell, even after I don’t know how many centuries, nobody can really understand the canvases Bosch or Dali created, can they? And those men were trained artists, with consummate knowledge of anatomy, of line, of perspective….

  But Nancy was there, and she explained some of the images, those she felt compelled to share with me, while others remained unexplained, unguessable. I didn’t ask her anything; the ethics of leading a child were all too plain to me. I didn’t want anyone coming back at me, accusing me of some wild perversion, some lewd suggestion. I never asked Nancy to do a single thing—not after I saw the first picture, that first afternoon.

  “That’s nice, Nancy—”

  “This is the place where the mushy stuff starts out … it’s got to be real low, under other stuff so that it’s good—”

  The little girl was pointing to a vague semicircle, obviously under a floor comprised of several parallel lines slanting toward me. Inside the circle … the mass of writhing red, black, green, and brown blobs, squiggles and almost-defined shapes was enigmatic, even if its purpose was almost clear from the child’s cryptic explanation:

  “First all this is other stuff, from all over—mostly that one’s clear house—” she pointed to a representation of a larger beardless figure, of indeterminate gender, “—plus some squishy stuff I don’t like, and then that one mixes it all up, and lets it set for a long, long time, until the bubbles come up and pop … and they smell,” Nancy confided in a lower, almost giggling voice, before adding, “and then it’s all ready for the boxes. Then it’s good. For all of them.”

  Then there would be a lull, always that short time while Nancy drew quickly, and my mind slowed to a deliberate near-stop, as if to delay comprehension of what she’d just told me, and then Nancy would stop her frantic scribbling and we’d start the ritual once again:

  “That’s real pretty—”

  “This is what’s inside the boxes, when the doors are down. It’s real quiet … they just float and when they close their eyes, the stuff trickles inside, like crying only from outside, not in. And it … goes in and in them, and then the doors open and it’s time to get up. That’s when it’s time to dress,” and she points at a couple of red and blue striped blobs near the bottom of the page, which I now recognized as crumpled little shirts, a detail almost lost in the looping, dark-smeared haze of blue, green, and black surrounding the ubiquitous black-headed/black-bodied figures.

  I found myself looking at the other pictures she’d done over the past week; the “stuff” was becoming a stock element in her drawings, be it in the boxes, around the tiny figures, or (worst of all) seeping out of various orifices on their bodies.

  Why in the world did you people have to tell her about what happened to Stephen … what the hell kind of ethical behavior is that? You dress them alike, so the poor kid thinks she has to go through what he did—

  “—go potty,” Nancy was whispering in my ear, as she leaned over the table, trying to capture my wandering attention. From the pained look on her face, I realized she’s been repeating the comment for a few seconds.

  “Uh-huh, kiddo,” I mumbled, before yelling to Ruth, “I’ll be right back with her, okay?” The curly-headed woman cheerfully nodded, and I took off with Nancy, gently steering her by the shoulders.

  When we reached the women’s room, Nancy broke free of my guiding touch and burst through the door on her own, and ran into one of the open stalls, barely shutting the door before quite loudly beginning to do her “duty” behind the closed pink door. I wondered if whatever made her lose her hair was affecting her bowels; the smell was terrible. I hoped no one else would come into the room; even the plastic air freshener cone perched on top of the tampon machines was no help. I did find myself backing away from her, until I was almost at the door, before I heard Nancy’s plaintive, “Teacher … it won’t flush….”

  “You jiggle the handle?” Come on, kid, just push the handle—

  A few seconds of metallic fiddling sounds, then: “Yeah … it don’t go.”

  “Oh … shit,” I mumbled, before telling Nancy, “Well … pull up your clothes and come on out of there—”

  “My Momma says not to do that … I gotta—”

  “Come on, Nancy,” I said a little too forcefully for my own liking; whatever she heard in my tone of voice made the girl quickly open the door and scoot out of the stall, her head bowed, her eyes almost hidden under her thick lashes. I patted her on the head as she passed me, giving her a quick smile even as I felt her wig shift on her head slightly under my fingertips, and then hurried over—my eyes averted, my breath held—to the vacated stall.

  I jiggled the handle while keeping an eye on Nancy, who stood with her own hands folded before her, mumbling, “Mommy’ll be mad.” But the damn toilet wouldn’t flush. “Oh shit!” Louder this time.

  I’d have to get the janitor … but I don’t know if it was just the look in Nancy’s eyes that stopped me, or an inner voice spurred on by the memory of what Nancy had been telling me those past few afternoons. No matter what it was that made me pause, and then take a real look at that bowl, I never called for anyone to help me that day. No one would have … understood.

  Not that I even really understood.

  Nancy hadn’t had a loose bowel movement, or any kind of movement associated with digestion or elimination. She’d just … seeped. And after seeing page after page of her handiwork the last few afternoons, I knew—at least vaguely, in that not-fully-explained way—what had happened … what had been happenin
g.

  It was the “stuff” Nancy kept speaking of, and patiently drawing for me. Organic, mostly, or it had been at some long ago time, before spending God-knew-how-long in that pit or vat or whatever her mother kept it in, before infusing it into her children—or into Nancy, at least. The “stuff” that was good for her … that probably kept her going—

  Standing there in that foul-smelling stall, it all became clear and not clear for me. Marta DeGrooten taught biology … living matter, and the study of it. Her “clear house” was probably a green house … and the boxes were probably immersion tanks, like they used in those sensory deprivation experiments—

  “Mommy’ll be real mad.” Nancy’s voice was starting to choke with tears. Suddenly afraid of what might come out of her sad little eyes, I hurried over to her and murmured, “No, no, hon, we’ll fix it so nobody will know. Your secret, my secret. Okay?”

  Thank God, if there ever was one, the girl began to smile. Maybe the word “secret” did it. I picked her up and sat her in one of the sink bowls, telling her to stay there and not jump down, while I went and did something. Once I left the women’s room, I took some flack from a few of my jock classmates when they saw me filling the janitor’s galvanized steel bucket—the ten-gallon jobbie—with water. “Hey, Anya, you got new work-study here?” but I forced myself to laugh it off before wheeling the heavy bucket into the women’s room. I strained a muscle in my arm hefting the bucket, and my shirt and jeans were soaked, but I managed to flush the “stuff” down the toilet. The janitor just stared at me when I wheeled his bucket back to his “office” near the men’s room, but grunted in agreement when I told him I didn’t want him to have to bother with a clogged toilet when he was busy elsewhere. I didn’t leave his sight until he started making an “Out of Order” sign for that door, though.