The Convulsion Factory

by Brian Hodge

  “Stability? How does stability figure in?” Rachel said, but sounded purely rhetorical, then she pulled Mae’s head down to her breast again, and Mae cuddled closer and reached back to drape one arm over my waist and pull me closer too. I watched the sky in the window like shades of pixel gray, rooting for the sun but it never came, another lesson in misplaced faith.

  *

  Rachel was a month from premature birth when my stepfamily was forced on me, two of them, a father and a son, who was called Thumper because of something to do with that Disney movie. He was four years shy of my six, and a few days before they were set to invade, my mother called me to the living room and there he was. My mother beamed as though he were the cutest thing since cartoon rabbits, and said, “Meet your new baby brother. I bet you didn’t know you had a baby brother, did you?” Thumper was carrying a toy hammer, and shortly after we were introduced he threw the hammer into my forehead so hard it knocked me down, and as soon as everyone had ascertained I wasn’t bleeding they said how funny it was, because anything a two-year-old does is adorable, especially when done to an over-the-hill six-year-old.

  He loved tools. Thumper loved tools and taking things apart, and when he was all of five he dismantled the air compressor of my aquarium while I was at summer camp, and all my fish died. Coming home was like finding one of those mysterious towns you’ll hear about, from years before telecommunications glued us all together, that were found empty but with uneaten meals still on the table, and no one knows what happened. I came home and looked in upon a tankful of still, cloudy water, and nobody was swimming around the castle and the lid to the treasure chest wasn’t slamming up and down in a gush of air bubbles. Only the skeleton looked at home.

  “I’m sure he’s sorry,” my mother told me. “But we shouldn’t discourage Thumper’s natural talents. How else will he learn?”

  Later, when I told Andre about it at the slaughterhouse, over experimental cigarettes, he just said, “Good thing you don’t live in an iron lung.”

  She stood up for Thumper a lot, I was noticing, a habit gotten into early and never broken, to prove to my stepfather that she wasn’t playing favorites. Of course Thumper caught on quick, and now it’s obvious to me why he’d set about trying to dismantle as much of my life as he could get his hands on, if not how he’d gotten the idea I’d even want to steal his father.

  “You’re not my father,” I used to tell the guy any chance I got, and he would look expectantly toward the nearest door, saying, “Of course not … I’m here,” until it had become a game and one of us had to wear the other down.

  I won, I suppose, one evening in preteen cockiness reminding him who he wasn’t, and he fixed on me with nullified eyes while chewing at the insides of his cheeks, then in a low voice I’d never heard before said, “You know why I’m nothing like your father was? You know what was different about him from me?”

  Whatever I’d forced out of him, it had to be big.

  “You ever hear the word ‘impotent’ before? Know what it means when a man’s impotent? What that can drive his wife to do?” He nodded with the conviction of natural law. “That was your father for you.” While I wasn’t sure what the word meant, I could read from his face that it was truly terrible, shameful beyond telling, and that the dictionary would back him up.

  Thumper watched, and even though he wouldn’t have known what the word meant either, still snickered into his hands. Later, after I’d consulted Webster, Rachel brought her stuffed panda into my room to leave it with me, so I let her stay too because I knew she was afraid of Thumper, and that he grew suspicious whenever we got together and looked as though we were talking about him.

  It felt weird, none of us a complete sibling to another, steps and halves stitched together into a Frankenstein’s family — how could the usual rules apply? Every time I saw a commercial on TV about needy orphans in faraway lands, I’d pretend that Thumper belonged with them, face streaked with mud and belly swollen from hunger as he stumbled along squalling to the village’s gods at the injustice of it all, wondering how he’d gotten there.

  I held onto that dream for years, until I outgrew it, finally able to take pleasure in subtler tortures, Thumper’s father now using me as a motivational weapon he could wield over a son whose brain was ill-motivated or ill-equipped to process math, science, the higher intricacies of his native tongue.

  “Why can’t you be more like Angus, why can’t you even try?” he’d challenge. “Those report cards you bring home, they’d shame a village idiot.” Thumper would glare at me with all the resentment his maturing face could muster, while Rachel made sure he didn’t miss her Mona Lisa smile, and knew whom she was siding with and always would.

  Came the day, then, fourteen months after he’d been driving, when a drunken Thumper rolled his car. A lumbar vertebra crunched like a hambone in a dog’s jaw, taking the spinal cord with it. After that, he confined his driving to a wheelchair, mostly around the house, but of course I was gone by then, having let Chicago swallow me, make me anonymous, reprogram me with its different rhythms, its harsher harmonies and jagged dissonances.

  I can still recall the look on my stepfather’s face in the hospital waiting room, after they’d given us the news on Thumper’s lower extremities, and while I was not without pity, a part of me felt responsible, too, because for over a decade I’d been wishing harm on him, and finally that muscle had flexed.

  I looked at my stepfather’s slack face, remembering what it had uttered about my real father, and wondering if I should remind him of that, since impotence had again become a fact of life close to home. But at least my dad could still walk — which, as I quickly realized, had been an option he’d exercised only too well, so I kept silent, my stepfather still holding the means with which to cut the legs from beneath me, too.

  *

  Days passed and Jamey never would go rank, not even when the city and the ‘burbs broke new sweat in the heat of Indian Summer, his decomposition arrested by a force beyond our reckoning, until it got to the point where I couldn’t think of him as Jamey any more.

  I’d make a trip out to the slaughterhouse every several days to check on his progress, or lack of it, and it was obvious that I wasn’t the only one, other recent visits annotated by gifts left in front of the bedsprings, below his cruddy bare feet. Coins and locks of hair and interesting chunks of scrap metal and sticks of incense and shredded audio tape and the odd piece or two of drug paraphernalia — offerings of these and more. He who was no longer Jamey hung above them all, bent-limbed and woven into the rusty springs like a 3-D portrait of a Hindu deity, no more or no less skeletal than he’d been in life, just incredibly resistant to change.

  I’d come home and tell Rachel and Mae about it, and it was always fun to try and figure out who’d left what.

  The signs went up during the third week, scrap lumber shoved horizontally into the springs, slash letters burned into the wood and chipped paint with a soldering iron. The sign at the bottom read Musica mundana; the one over his head, Deus ex nihilo. Given this further Latin I rightly figured it had to be Nathan’s doing.

  “Well, what do you think it means?” he asked me on the street the next day.

  “Is this from another private confab you had with him?”

  Nathan shook his head. “This one I made up for the occasion.”

  I resigned myself to puzzling it out since there was little else to do, Nathan and I sixth in line from a theater box office, waiting for tickets to an Andrew Lloyd Webber show to go on sale. It’s what Nathan does for money, making a surprisingly adequate living by standing in lines for people whose time is more valuable than his own and will gladly hire surrogates. Business was in fact good enough that he was ready to subcontract some lines out to me, so I was tagging along to learn the finer points of queuing. With my degree in communications, I felt confident and ready to solo.

  “Well, ‘Deus’ would be ‘God,’ obviously,” I said. “Past that I’m rusty when it
comes to dead languages.”

  “Deus ex nihilo means ‘God out of nothing,’” Nathan told me, then said, “Andre didn’t get it either.”

  God out of nothing. So that’s what we’d been doing out there.

  “Speaking of Andre, have you talked to him lately?”

  I shook my head. “Got his answering machine twice.”

  “He’s in a mood. You know how he gets: ‘What do I have to show for my life, it’s one-third gone already, I have so much more potential than this, I can’t sleep.’ Et cetera.”

  “I think the slaughterhouse thing’s gotten to him.”

  “Could be,” Nathan said. “But you kno-ow … Jamey being an incorruptible like he is, if the Catholic Church heard about it, they’d shit. All of the others, so far as they’re concerned, were these obedient types who traded a lifetime of orgasms for a corpse that wouldn’t rot. Now. My theory is, their perpetual freshness had nothing to do with holiness and everything to do with devotion in the people they left behind. The collective focus of a bunch of hysterics is an amazing thing.”

  “Get out.”

  “Quantum physics is on my side. Energy, that’s all anything is or will be. Waveforms on different frequencies, when you get to the subatomic level. The only difference between matter and energy is, matter’s congealed. So, with brain activity being electrical, thoughts and the physical world are made of the same stuff — we just don’t have all the cause and effect sorted out yet.”

  Which made me view Thumper’s wreck and my malicious fantasies in a new light. “You’re saying we’re keeping him the way he is?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. When’s the last time you had that kind of faith in anything? Except maybe for entropy, but that’s beside the point, since Jamey’s doing a good job of defying it.”

  “So how’s it happening, then?”

  Nathan looked ashamed. “I’m supposed to know everything?”

  Sometimes I took it for granted that he did, Nathan for as long as I’ve known him grasping for every fact he can to reaffirm his militant atheism, to the extent that he could probably debate most theologians to tears. He’d told me that his goal was to feel confident that, if he were only able to travel back in time, he could convince St. Thomas Aquinas that neither of them existed.

  I’d never known Nathan before he was like this, so I have a hard time imagining him growing up wanting to be a priest, but he did. Wanted it badly, so he tells it, laughing at the child he used to be as though it wasn’t him, and saying how fortunate he’d changed his mind, because “Father Nathan” sounds like some foreign phrase spoken with a lisp.

  His father died before Nathan could know him, so he did a lot of growing up around priests, as his mother felt they’d make the best role models. It was girls that ruined it for him, girls and then the recovered memory of a priest with clammy hands and where he’d put them, although three years after Nathan recalled this in therapy, his counselor was hit with a class-action civil suit for generating false memories, so now he doesn’t know what to think, beyond being convinced there’s no God.

  Although maybe he was willing to make an exception, as long as he retained enough control, and now that the right god had come along.

  “I’ve started calling him Nihil, thinking of him by that name instead,” Nathan said, then lowered his voice. “I was out there yesterday. I swear his eyes blinked once.”

  *

  Rachel was eighteen when they kicked her out at home, not as traumatic as it might’ve been since she had someplace to go.

  I’d been visiting that afternoon, knowing ahead of time that my mother and stepfather would be away, so Rachel and I had gone to the slaughterhouse to shoot some 35mm film. Lately I’d felt compelled to preserve the place, in case some calamity or zoning change erased it.

  When we returned to the house Thumper was still the only one around, with rarely two words to say to either of us anymore, just sitting in his wheelchair watching TV, so Rachel and I were pretty sure we wouldn’t be disturbed back in her room.

  We never even heard the squeak of his wheels.

  Later we wondered if Thumper hadn’t suspected awhile, picking up on a look or a touch we’d let slip in front of him because he’d gotten to be wallpaper as far as we were concerned. It was the last great snitch of a sterling career, maybe the best night of his life since the accident, kicked back surrounded by his stepmother’s tears and father’s apoplexy, seeing Rachel and me on the brunt of a disowning that would last nearly a year. The man aimed a gun at my head, then lowered it and sank to the floor and pissed his own pants, probably not the climax Thumper was hoping for, but for his sake I was still happy to leave him there with them, alone at last, what he’d always wanted.

  And as I drove her to my apartment, her new home, for miles I wondered if the magic would survive, because now we were no longer a secret, and because finally I’d seen on her father’s face the anguish that I had always known this would cause, reveling in it, close enough for him to read my thoughts, You drove my dad away, and now I’m taking your daughter, or at least read it in my eyes.

  “They’re not really so bad,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with them that an open mind wouldn’t cure.”

  She’d been crying, but started laughing, saying that at least she hadn’t been set on fire in her room, like Jamaal’s sister.

  “I used to have nightmares about that,” she admitted. “All the time, used to wake up thinking I was burning.”

  “You were only, what, six or seven when that happened?”

  “Yeah. But I don’t remember anybody ever telling me it couldn’t happen to me.”

  As I drove home the city grew around us, denser and taller, and we weren’t heading into it again so much as putting it back on, like armor or a hair-shirt, for protection or abrasion. I’m still not sure what I get out of it.

  “Do you think you’ll ever have kids?” she asked, and I could see patterns of light and shadow sliding across her face, and her teeth were chattering because my car’s heater was broken, and her question was so awful in its implications that I didn’t know how to answer, so it hung in the air while I pounded at the thermostat with my fist, thinking I’ve just got to get this thing fixed.

  *

  I liked the way it felt, coming home to the two of them, or Rachel coming home to me and Mae, or she to us, this entire new extradimensional dynamic generated by Mae’s moving in. I’d heard somewhere, Nathan probably, that the most stable structures in nature revolve around threes.

  On the sunnier days, late in the afternoon, if it wasn’t too chilly, Mae would come home from the music store and go up to the roof, near the edge, sitting on a crate turned on end to play her violin. Usually I’d go up after she’d started, sometimes listening from the doorway and sometimes beside her, and some days the notes were slow and mournful, and others lively, but I never knew if it was mood or just repertoire.

  This was eight floors up, with a far view of the cityscape, and she would sit in her leather jacket with her hair thrown back, her bowing arm in fluid motion as she swayed against the vistas of brick and steel and bare-branched trees. Most often she faced the west, playing into sunsets as though inviting them to set her on fire, her urban concertos carried away on the currents of traffic, riding them like a feather rides wind.

  “Maybe he can hear it, still, somehow,” she said one evening after lowering the violin from her chin. “Maybe it pleases him. Or soothes his torments, if he has any left.”

  She played for Nihil, in his dilapidated palace. Nihil in the springs, his mortal coils.

  I took it as a matter of course now that the body might be in a slightly different position from one visit to the next; come to expect it, even, Nihil trying to bring us signs and wonders. Not that there was any point to them, ultimately, because Nihil was after all a god about nothing.

  “He can hear it, if he wants to,” she said. “That’s the key to this all, I think. His ears were so sensitive maybe death
just couldn’t have them. If he was here right now? He could listen to rush hour, and pick out sounds from it like threads in a sweater.”

  “Yeah, it’s starting to make sense to me,” I said. “If dead saints could hear prayers, I don’t see why he can’t still hear the things he was most attuned to.”

  Mae smiled, that wide lovely mouth going wider. “Like the day in that scrapyard, when the three of us found that big industrial boiler and made a drum out of it? Wasn’t that great?”

  We laughed while miming the clumsy, brutal swings we’d taken at the thing with our two-handed cudgels, although I continued to keep to myself what Jamey and I had found inside that she’d never known about, and then Mae reached into the violin case for a soft cloth to wipe her instrument down.

  “You know what I like about you and Rachel?” she said. “You never make me practice. You let me find my own pace.”

  “Well…” I was demurring, because Rachel and I had talked about such things, and it was embarrassing to me to hear that we’d done something right. “We didn’t feel like imposing someone else’s standards of ambition on you.”

  “Jamey, he was always after me to practice more, said how was I going to get anywhere without practicing.”

  “Was this before or after he’d shoot up?”

  “That Jamey,” she said, not unkindly, “always big on theory, he just couldn’t quite pull the rest of it together. Would’ve made somebody a decent manager, though, maybe.”

  I said he might’ve at that, and watched as Mae set the violin in its case, and maybe it was the line of her jaw or the fall of her hair or the birdlike bones of her hand, but for a moment I was overcome with a sense of Mae’s fragility, hearing the collision of insanities and rush hour, and imagining all the things that could happen to her down there. Rape and murder and intimate arson. It was too much. Or just plain disappearance, like Andre now, his turn come around, because none of us had heard from him for days, and when for a moment I wondered what it would feel like to fling myself off the roof, I thought I might’ve understood some of the things that had guided that final needle into Jamey’s vein. You can’t protect anyone, really.