“Hope, honey, where have you been?”
Hope couldn’t help it, but her voice went quiet. “I was at a friend’s.”
Her father stormed out of the living room. “Do you know what time it is? Your mother’s been worried out of her mind!” His face was all red. It made his eyes look like small swollen eggs. He was still in his work clothes.
Her mother mumbled, “David, it’s okay…,” but he wasn’t listening. He never listened.
He stomped down the hall, and Hope backed against the door. She knew what came next, and closed her eyes. She closed her eyes and found something nice to think about: Mike the tiger, gently pressing his forehead to hers, kissing her as cats do, purring hard enough to rattle her ribs, over…and over…and over again.
SIX
STARS
THE BOY SAT ON THE LAWN OUT IN FRONT OF HIS HOUSE, looking at the stars. There were so many stars out tonight. So quiet and still.
The boy felt impossibly old and very, very young.
Somewhere inside, in the oldest part of himself, he had a memory of two thousand years ago, when the sky seemed as silver as it was black. So many were the stars—some brighter and prouder than others—that looking into the sky was like gazing into a still, sparkling nighttime river, seeing just how far down you could see, all the while hoping you would, and hoping you would not, spy something looking back: a glimpse of something so horribly ancient that you never again presumed to consider yourself the center of any universe.
Walter hadn’t had that problem for some time.
It seemed to him that as time moved on there was less left of the world he had known; that for every human born another star winked out, another hundred species vanished, and another piece of the fantastical died.
He wondered when it would be his turn.
Sometimes, he thought, I’m not sure if I have memories of the monster, or if the monster has memories of me.
In earliest times he had lapped blood from the steps of a ziggurat, and people had made a god of him. He had danced black hoofprints across the ceilings of Puritans, and they had made a demon of him. It was the same old story, each time something like him met people like that. Never any questions, just call a priest and reach for a gun.
He hated having to speak to his sister this way, under a veil, never letting her completely understand what was happening. Soon she would no longer be a child, the world would have her, and she wouldn’t even remember him.
It had taken Walter and the monster years to understand how to coexist as the same person, with different memories, different wisdom, different drives, different needs. It was maddening, but Walter had learned. After all these years, he was learning that he needed to escape the doctor.
In stormy twilit days he had sung to galleons, and watched as men lashed themselves to masts and tillers and companionways and cleats.
As time moved on he could no longer drink from steps, or sing to sailors. He left no hoofprints on ceilings. He did not exist within man’s law for the world. But sometimes, when people forgot the law, he could still reach into their lives, their world, and remind them why they once feared the dark. Sometimes.
Clap if you believe in fairies.
The front door of the house opened and Walter’s father walked out. He was smoking his pipe, one hand tucked into the pocket of his woolen vest.
“My, but it’s a clear night tonight. Say, how would you like to go fishing tomorrow, son?”
Walter shrugged. “No thanks.”
His father hunkered down beside him. “See that group of stars up there? The ones that—”
“I know what the constellations are, Dad.”
They’re angels, and warriors, and windows, and balls of gas. They’re pinpricks in the black veil drawn over the world. They’re a river, a map. One of them is a marker to Neverland. Another is the morning star with whom seventy-two and one angels had fallen. They’re gods, they’re human souls. They grow duller as humanity grows colder.
“Right you are,” his father said.
“I don’t feel like being a son to you right now. Go inside.”
His father moved to stand up when the branches of the old pine tree rustled. He looked up, taking the pipe from his mouth. “Possums,” he said, knowledgeably.
Walter swallowed. He knew what it was, and it wasn’t possums.
A figure stepped out from behind the trunk like it was stepping through a doorway. The man’s coat was long and black and layered in ancient dust from extinct towns. He wore a black hat, which was just as dusty and just as old, and the face beneath it had weathered lifetimes. This figure hadn’t been a real person for over 150 years.
Walter’s father looked down from the tree to the peculiar figure standing sidelong before them, seemingly indifferent to their presence.
“Well then,” his father said. “What have we here?”
The figure turned and looked over from a haggard, skull-drawn face. Things glittered inside his great black coat.
“You’ve got to stop running away, Wally,” the doctor said. “There’s no point in it.”
Walter’s father put his pipe back into his mouth, the stem clacking between his polished teeth. “Is this man a friend of yours, son?”
The doctor looked from Walter to his father and back again. “He supposed to be me?” he said, stepping closer. “This your new daddy?” He leaned in, pinpoint eyes in skull-sockets narrowing. “Looks like a dandy.”
Walter’s head lowered. “You’re not my father, either.”
“Sure. When Satan goes skatin’.”
“I know what our father’s doing to her, right now,” Walter said, his voice going quiet in a way he couldn’t help, the way it had used to when he got scared. “And I can’t stop him.”
His father hurmed, pipe clacking between his teeth. He stood and straightened his vest. “Look, what’s all this about?” he demanded.
The doctor turned his head slightly, reaching out with one hand to touch Walter’s father between the eyes. There was a brief rustling and the man folded in on himself, over and over, until all that was left of him was the little paper doll from which he was made.
The doctor crouched and picked it up off the grass. “Not bad,” he said to Walter. “You’re getting there.”
Walter’s lip was trembling, tears beginning to well in his eyes. He reached out and took the paper doll, let it melt into his hand, become part of himself once more. Just like the bird, just like the house, just like the tiger. Illusions. Props. “Why won’t you just leave me alone!”
The doctor sighed, like wind over sand. “There are more important things in this world than what we want.”
“I won’t be like you!”
“There’s worse things to be,” he said, and meant it. “Wally, I’m just a man. I’m getting tired of living. There’s people I haven’t seen in too long. Why do you think I was given the instruments, and not something eternal like Felix, who actually wants them? He would never relinquish that power to the one who gave it.” He looked at Walter then. “You—or your sister—are right for this. Trust me, believe in what I say, and your sister will never even know I exist.”
Walter sniffed and rubbed a hand under his nose.
“This house, this daddy of yours,” the doctor said, glancing back at the picture-book house. “It’s not even your dream, son. It’s hers. This is what she wants.”
“I know that.”
“Then you’re already doing it. You take what’s inside people, letting them face it.”
Walter wasn’t listening. He had heard this kind of reasoning before. “She can still turn inside herself and lose the frightening things that chase her,” Walter said.
“What you have to understand, son,” the doctor said, “is that you are those frightening things.”
Walter shook his head. “I’m her monster!”
“That you are,” the doctor said, reasonably. “And if you weren’t here, right now, I’d use her. That’s all you
can protect her from now. Any problem she’s got with her father is something she’ll have to handle herself.”
“Her father is my father,” Walter spat. “I’m not you.” He wiped his eyes, looked at the stars, and wished for more power than he had.
The doctor said nothing.
“I am not you,” Walter repeated.
It was so quiet just then. Just the little dog breathing, nestled against his side.
“Maybe you’re not,” the doctor finally said with something that sounded like regret.
The doctor rose, like a collection of loose sticks assembling themselves into a man. Starlight made his face a black mask beneath the rim of his hat.
“I’m not coming back,” Walter told him.
“I know. And you know what I have to do.”
“I’m not letting you near her.”
The doctor didn’t move. “I can wait,” he said.
Walter wiped his nose with the back of his hand, sniffed. Making all of this had taken it out of him. Even now the house was coming undone behind him, slowly folding in on itself.
He wouldn’t be able to create like this again.
There was one, final thing to be done, and that would be that.
SEVEN
LOVELY
SOME NIGHTS DAVID WITHERSPOON DIDN’T MAKE IT TO bed, he just slept in his armchair. On other nights, like tonight, he couldn’t sleep at all. On such nights he found himself standing at the door of his son’s room, listening to him breathe.
Walter hadn’t moved in a little over ten years, but his body had grown on without him. The body was skin and bones now. Sometimes David would sit and imagine how Walter might look now if he’d lived those last ten years, if his face was fuller, if he’d put on some muscle from running around and getting into trouble. Every day the nurse came, monitored Walter, moved his arms and legs, changed the bag they strapped to him, checked the catheter, put drugs in him.
On nights like this David Witherspoon wondered why he tortured himself, working two nowhere jobs, spending all this money to keep a corpse alive.
Sometimes he got angry. When he got angry he did things that made a small, quiet part of himself ashamed. His own father had been a lot like him, and he hadn’t liked his father.
Feeling shame brought on the anger. The shame made him angry because the look on his Hope’s face when he beat her made him feel ashamed. And so it went…
He stepped into Hope’s room.
She was asleep now, a quiet mound in the center of her bed. Her room dim in the moonlight streaming through the window.
A delicate hand touched down on his left shoulder. He flinched. The hand did not let him move. “David,” a voice whispered, softly. “This is as close as you get.”
A slender woman stood by his left shoulder. Glitter traced her angular cheekbones. She wore a sequined leotard and had peacock feathers in her hair: a fan of eyes above her head, watching him.
“Who are you?” he asked, instinctively knowing she was nothing he could explain.
“I am an acrobat,” she said. “And that is the ringmaster.” He followed her gesture, and sure enough standing by Hope’s bed was a tall man in a red jacket and black top hat. A bullwhip unfurled from his hand, curling upon the carpet like a snake. “And those are clowns…” They waved and tittered from the shadows near the small bookshelf. “And this,” she said, “is Mike.”
David heard a rumbling sound, like a well-tuned engine, loud enough to rattle his ribs. Something white and black crouched at the foot of Hope’s bed, diamond eyes locked on his own sweating face. It had such white teeth.
“But,” the acrobat continued. “The question you should really be asking is: Who. Is. That?”
Standing by the tiger, at the foot of Hope’s bed, he saw a boy—a child, really—with eyes that were far from child-like. A smear of melted ice cream clouded his left cheek. It looked like there was some dirt there, too. It didn’t make any sense that David Witherspoon would see his own son like this, and yet all the elements combined to leave him utterly weakened. They were perhaps the smallest details of the time Walter had first said, Dad. It was the moment when two years of preparing to be parents, and nine months of fretting over the health of their unborn child had fallen away and something smiling was left standing in its place. He had cried then, but denied it later.
The boy’s voice was young, clear and unbroken by age.
“Hi, Dad,” Walter said.
David fumbled behind himself, found the doorjamb, and slid to the ground awkwardly.
Walter brought up his hand. He held a folded paper crane. “See?” he said. “I can do it now.”
David was looking the boy in the eye, even though he knew that same boy was asleep in the next room with a piece of clear silastic tubing inserted into his gut and a colostomy bag to keep him clean.
“I am sorry I never woke to meet her…”
Something twisted inside him, rubbed salt behind his eyes.
“…but you can’t keep doing this.”
How long had it been? “Wally?” he said.
“It’s me, Dad. Mostly.” Walter was stroking that big cat between its eyes. But the tiger never blinked, never looked away from David’s face. “Hope deserves better than this. So does Mum.”
He looked so sweet, so perfectly alive. “Wally…?”
The little boy looked at him, wiped the dirty ice cream from his cheek, looked at his hand, then away. “I’m ashamed of you. For all of this.”
David cried, like he was self-destructing.
Walter wiped the hand on his shorts. “Mike is a piece of me, and I’m leaving him here. Mike will always be here, with her. Behind her eyes.” The white cat stared at David Witherspoon, with only one thing in mind. “And I’ll be here, too. Everything you do you’ll do before me. Everything.”
Walter stroked the tiger one last time, his hand looking so small on the great cat’s head.
The room was empty. David Witherspoon stared at the patch of carpet at the foot of his daughter’s bed where his all-but-dead son, and a giant cat, had stood.
His daughter giggled sleepily and rolled over, mumbling something into her pillow.
It sounded like,
“He’s lovely.”
EIGHT
NABBER
OH, HE WAS REALLY GOING TO GET IT THIS TIME.
“What do you mean you ‘lost your homework’?”
Suni’s teacher never liked him anyway. It wasn’t his fault his things kept disappearing. “It’s true,” he said. “I d…d…duh-did it l…luh-luh-last night, l…luh-luh-left it on my desk, woke up this muh-morning and it was gone.”
The class laughed, and Suni didn’t blame them. He lost things all the time, and his excuses sounded stupid even to his own ears. It was what he was best known for, aside from the stutter—but that only came out when he got excited or nervous. It was like a blockage in his throat he had to push and push past to get the words out.
His teacher looked down her nose at him. Suni was a small black-haired, half-Japanese boy, and he hated wearing his glasses. “You will do the assigned work over the weekend,” she said. “As well as a two-hundred-word explanation of just where it is you think these missing things of yours go when you’re not looking. Perhaps that will teach you to be more careful—or perhaps do the work in future.”
Two hundred words? Was she serious?
Suni shuffled. “B-b-buh-but—”
“Sit down.”
“Yes, miss.”
The class was still getting a grin out of the show—except that Hope girl. She just looked at the rest of them and frowned to herself. Somehow it made him feel better. Behind Suni, his friend Kristian bopped him on the back of the head and chuckled, “Good one.”
Suni turned around. “It’s tuh-true. I did do the work. I put it on my desk last night.” Kristian didn’t believe him, either. “I’m sure I did,” Suni mumbled to himself.
“Sure, sure.”
“Mister
Buckingham!” That was the teacher’s name for Kristian. “Would you be so kind as to stand up and tell the rest of the class what was so important that you couldn’t wait until after class?”
Suni watched Kristian stand and face the room. He cleared his throat, placed one hand on his chest as if about to recite Shakespeare, and said: “What… was soooo important…that you could not wait…”
Teacher folded her arms, unimpressed. “Yes, thank you, Mr. Buckingham.”
“Until!”
The class was laughing, and Suni knew there was no stopping him now.
“Kristian, that is enough!”
“…after class,” Kristian said quickly and sat down.
Quiet returned, and the class waited expectantly to see what would happen next.
“You may join your friend, Mr. Buckingham, in penning for me a two-hundred-word opus on the nature of comedy.” She returned to the blackboard, satisfied. “Enlighten me.”
“So can I borrow it?”
Suni knew what the answer was going to be. “You’ll lose it,” Kristian said.
“No I won’t. Honest.”
“Remember those shin pads I loaned you?”
Suni shifted a little. He knew Kristian was going to bring those up. “It wuh-wasn’t my fault,” Suni said. “I brought them home from the game. I duh-did. I put them in the closet.”
Kristian leaned back against the wall. They had about five minutes left before lunch was over. Then it was Maths. “Suni, you lose things. That’s just the way it is.”
Suni folded his arms. “I’m not going to lose your puh-precious card. I just want to draw the guy off it.”
“It’s a rare card,” Kristian said. “I might want to sell it someday.”
Kristian had a gold-embossed platinum-foil limited-edition trading card that did something in a game he collected. Suni didn’t know anything about the game, only that the card had a really cool picture of a guy in armor with a cannon for a hand. Suni drew all the time. It was what he did. Right now his biggest project was working on a picture of a little boy, sort of like him only blond, with red eyes and sharp teeth. And a clockwork ballerina. Suni didn’t know where he got the idea from, he had just woken one morning and the picture was right there in his head. It must have been something he had dreamed. But he was having real trouble getting the boy’s hands right, and the delicate designs that made up the ballerina’s hollow legs. At least the guy with the gun-arm looked cool. “I juh-just want to duh-draw it,” Suni pleaded again. “I muh-muh-might even be able to get my dad to scan it at work, then I wouldn’t even nuh-nuh-need to use it.”
The Music of Razors Page 15