The Fleshless Man - Norman Prentiss

by Norman Prentiss

  The conversation, he meant. Best to end the conversation.

  Her mouth was a tight line. She lifted her right arm from beneath the blanket and put her hand over her eyes. The nightgown sleeve was rolled up over her elbow, and several wraps of clear bandage-tape fastened the I-V tube to her thin forearm. A bruise like a rotten plum covered much of the visible skin, and dark dried blood clotted the adhesive near the needle. A fresher red blood filled the loop of tubing over the bandage site, and a few phlegm-colored gobs floated in the mix—some awful infection escaping her body, or fighting its way back in.

  “God, Mom. Is that how it’s supposed to look?”

  She waved her hand over her face, and the tube whipped at the air. “Glass,” she said. “Glass…ess.”

  She tilted her head to the side, continued waving her hand over her face. Curtis finally realized she was pointing at her eyes and also indicating the end table. “Oh, your glasses. Hold on a moment.” The frames lay on a the same tray as a plastic cup and a small pitcher of water. Nearby on the end table, multiple pill bottles stood in a tight row, obscuring the numbers on the digital alarm clock.

  Curtis opened the frames and brought the glasses toward his mother’s face. It was tricky getting them on, matching the hooks to her ears and lowering the pads to the bridge of her nose. The wasting disease had altered the shape of her head, and the frames no longer fit properly. He let his hands linger there, caressing her face.

  This brand of premium, light-weight frames felt brittle beneath his hands. If he squeezed, the frames would snap. His mother’s face was brittle, too.

  He was leaning close, hands around her head, her head pushed back into the propped pillows. Curtis realized he’d be in the same position if her head was on the other side of the pillow, while he smothered her.

  “Cur…tis.” Her voice was distant. Muffled.

  He dropped his hands from her face, but didn’t lean away. He was close enough to kiss her, though it was a long time since he’d shown his mother that kind of affection. He moved his lips closer to her ear, thought about whispering in a voice so quiet it would seem like it came from within her own head. “Stop fighting. Give in to the disease. You’re not needed here anymore.”

  No. He pulled back, straightening in the chair. His mother’s eyes stared wide through the lenses of her glasses, newly alert. A strange disappointment registered in her expression, as if she knew he’d fantasized about smothering her. As if she searched his mind, found those phrases that hoped to hasten her death.

  Or maybe he’d spoken them aloud, without realizing. Since coming home, dark thoughts swarmed beyond his conscious control; was it possible that his actions could do the same?

  “I’m so happy,” his mother said.

  Relief, then. She couldn’t read his mind. “That’s good,” he said.

  “…You’re here.” A long pause, summoning extra breath. “Tell me…about your…self.”

  A conversation starter. The exact conversation starter she’d used fifteen minutes earlier when he’d first entered the room.

  “We were talking about when I was in high school,” he reminded her. “How much fuss you made when I spent time with friends on weekends.”

  “Oh?”

  “And Lauren. We talked for a while about Lauren.”

  “Lauren?”

  His mother’s vacant expression infuriated him, as if Lauren didn’t even exist for her. He understood that memory loss was a likely side-effect of the drugs and illness at war in her system. But they had just been talking—for the first time in their lives, it seemed—and they’d made such progress.

  He was angry at himself for believing that. So angry that he wanted to grab her shoulders, her bony frail shoulders, and shake the memories back into her.

  His hands squeezed the chair’s wooden arms. He clenched and unclenched, a variation on his brother’s isometric compulsions. The wood was like aged bone, ready to snap beneath his grip.

  One arm of the chair split and splintered, and twigs of wood curled and scratched over the back of his hand.

  Four of his mother’s fingers over his wrist.

  He hadn’t damaged the chair at all—in fact, his grip had loosened, and his mother’s fingers were the strong ones. She had leaned forward in a burst of energy he hadn’t thought possible, her bruised arm stretching forth, grabbing at him, pinching him, pulling him closer to her. His mother’s mouth snapped open and shut, open and shut, as if she wanted to bite him.

  Then she said something horrible. Something she shouldn’t have known about.

  Yet she didn’t look at Curtis while she spoke. She stared, terrified, into the open doorway of the bedroom, where her other son now stood.

  -8-

  Glen walked casually to his mother’s room, expecting to find the nurse in her usual bedside chair. Instead, he caught Curtis alone with her. Mom sat up in bed as if she’d wakened from a nightmare, and her arms flailed at the air. The I-V tube twisted behind the headboard and lashed at the end table, knocking over her medicine bottles and sending the big-numbered phone to the floor. His brother sat still, as if in a trance.

  “Mom,” Glen yelled, rushing to the opposite side of the bed. “It’s okay. It’s me.” He let her hands batter uselessly at his shoulders and chest. He wondered whether she’d realize her mistake, or if she’d simply run out of energy.

  Curtis stood across the bed from him now, hands above her but not touching her.

  “Where’s Lillian?” Glen asked.

  “I was talking with Mom. I didn’t want her listening in.”

  Glen noticed the monitor was turned off. “Go get her,” he said. Their mother stopped flailing her arms, but she was still disoriented. She stared at Glen as if he was a stranger.

  “Where is she?” Curtis asked.

  “Out front smoking. Or in the TV room.” Glen knew other places to check for her, could have found her more quickly himself. But he didn’t want to leave Curtis alone with Mom.

  “Be right back.” Curtis nearly tripped over the chair as he hurried out.

  Mom was angry and upset and afraid. Glen pulled a tissue from the box and dabbed at the corners of her eyes. “Don’t worry, Mom. Everything’s fine.”

  The bruise on her arm looked worse, but that couldn’t be helped—Lillian said it was difficult to find a vein, so once the needle was in, it needed to stay. The bandage had been partially pulled away in thin strips, and the skin beneath was scraped raw. “Did you pick at this?” he asked her.

  “I don’t know.”

  He checked her left hand, wondering if he’d find flecks of tape or adhesive under her fingernails. They looked clean.

  “The nurse will be here soon. Are you okay? Are you in any pain?”

  “My sons… are home.”

  “We are.” He walked around the bed, untangling the I-V cord. He picked up the pill bottles that had fallen, and hoped he’d replaced them in the order Lillian wanted. He pressed his finger gently at the place where the needle entered his mother’s arm. There was some blood at the site, but as far as he could tell the saline flow was unobstructed. “Did you and Curtis talk? Did he upset you or hurt you in any way?”

  “You hurt me,” his mother said. “You hurt me, Glen.”

  “That’s a terrible thing to say. Don’t ever say that again.”

  Nurse Lillian hustled into the room, the smell of cigarettes still fresh in her clothes. Curtis followed, keeping a few steps behind.

  Glen pointed to his mother’s arm, the redness beneath the frayed adhesive.

  “I can fix that.” Lillian opened the drawer of the end table, where she stocked her medical supplies. She squeezed a line of ointment from a tube then spread it into his mother’s agitated skin. Then she pulled fresh bandage strips off a roll and wrapped them around Mom’s arm. “There you go.”

 
“I’m not sure how that happened.” Glen looked at his brother, expecting him to attempt an explanation.

  Instead, Curtis said: “I wish I could love you more.”

  Except his brother’s lips hadn’t moved. The words were an odd combination of Curtis’s voice and his own—their mother, slipping into another strange bout of mimicry.

  “Stop twitching.” Mom’s voice was still masculine. “For God’s sake. You set my teeth on edge.”

  Glen knew that he twitched sometimes. He noticed it more often from the sound of his sleeve or pants leg, rather than from the effort of movement. Did it really bother her the way it seemed to bother Curtis?

  “Here we go again,” the nurse said. She took a syringe from the drawer and inserted it through the lid of a glass vial. After filling the syringe, she jabbed its needle into the hanging I-V bag.

  “Time for more poison,” their mother said in Nurse Lillian’s voice.

  -9-

  “Hey, Lauren. Thought I’d catch you at home, but maybe I’ll try your cell later. It’s tricky with the time difference—throws me off and I don’t know when’s best to call.

  “Things are weird here. I know, nothing new about that, right? Some of it’s good, though. Had a nice conversation with Mom, and she sends her love. Really. Can you believe it?

  “I’ll check in later. You don’t have to call unless you want to. Miss you.

  “Bye.”

  -10-

  Glen found his brother outdoors, pacing near the nurse’s smoking chair. Curtis closed his cell phone and slipped it into his front pocket.

  “Talking to Lauren,” he explained. “To the machine, actually. I feel weird not hearing her voice, you know?”

  “She’s welcome here, anytime.”

  “Thanks.”

  The sun was bright, taking the edge off a brisk wind that blew dry leaves across the front lawn—most of them fallen from the thick-trunked maple that grew tall enough to shade the entire west half of the house. Curtis used to climb to the middle of the tree when they were younger, his arms strong and his feet light on the branches. Back then, Glen could flop awkwardly onto a low limb that was sturdy enough to hold him.

  “Will Lauren come up for…for…”

  “The funeral? I think so. We didn’t make any definite plans yet. Like it would be bad luck or something.” Curtis glanced at his watch. “Still early there, so she should be home. I wonder why she didn’t answer. Maybe she’s in the shower.”

  “Curtis…”

  “Or she stepped out to check the mail. I’m worried about her all of a sudden, if that makes sense.”

  “Curtis, what happened with Mom?”

  “Nothing.” He put his hands in his pockets, shrugged his shoulders. “I mean, we talked. And then she kind of forgot things.”

  “That can happen. But what about you? You seem a little confused, too.”

  “Well, sure. I mean, with Mom talking in different voices like that—who wouldn’t be confused?”

  Glen had to concede the point. He’d grown used to it, yet his mother’s newfound gift with mimicry still managed to unsettle him. He half smiled, thinking how much worse a shock it must have been for Curtis. “That male voice she does, sounds like mine or yours. Maybe it’s what Dad would have sounded like. But I’m too young to remember.”

  “It’s weird,” Curtis said. And he smiled, too, at the absurdity of it. “I wonder…”

  Glen knew exactly what his brother would say. How he also daydreamed about their Dad—considered the different paths their lives would have taken if their father hadn’t died so young; wondered what it would be like if he was here even now, helping his two sons come to terms with the unrelenting presence of their mother’s strange decline.

  “I wonder if something else is going on here,” Curtis said. The smile was gone, and his expression grew inquisitive.

  He’s searching for flaws, Glen thought. He will stare at me until he sees something I am trying to hide. Eventually I will break down. I will confess.

  “I don’t want to overstate this,” Curtis said, “but things don’t seem right.”

  My calf muscles tense as if I am backing away from him, but my feet are planted in the ground. Another voice—like my brother’s, like my own, like my father’s—whispers over my shoulder. “Curtis knows I’m here. He’s always known.”

  “How could things seem right?” Glen said. “Our mother is dying. I’m acting as normal as I can, given the circumstances.”

  “Yeah. Of course.” Curtis ran a hand along a scuffed arm of the plastic chair, as if he considered sitting in it, but decided the worn white plastic was too dirty. “Look, I had this nightmare last night. It was me, okay?—all my thoughts. But it was the worst of me. It’s like my dream wanted to convince me I was a bad person.”

  “You’re not. You shouldn’t think that.”

  “I don’t. Except here.” He pointed at the ground, then at the house. “That’s partly why I don’t like coming home. I’m always glad to see you—you know that, right? But I don’t like myself when I’m home—what this place does to me. I feel like I slip back into being an angry kid—all the resentment that I think I’ve grown out of, and it comes back like a kind of poison. And now Mom’s dying. What does a lingering, fatal illness do to the atmosphere of a place? If this house was already unhealthy—for me, I’m saying, for my state of mind…what must it be like now?”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Is it? There’s something else here. Can’t you feel it?”

  Glen shifted in place, and leaves crackled beneath his feet. They crackled behind him, too. “Mom’s sick. That’s what’s wrong. That’s enough, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, Glen.” His brother’s voice filled with pity. He tilted his head forward, a slight pout to his lip, and he looked as if he was scolding a puppy. Get rid of the salt-and-pepper beard, scale back about twenty-five years, and it was the same person who stood in this same yard, shameless in broad daylight, and told him: “You’ve got to stop eating so much. That’s why other kids make fun of you. I’m not being mean. I’m trying to help. How will you ever make friends? What kind of life do you think you’re going to have?”

  “This place is really getting to me,” his brother continued. “I’ve been here less than a day. But you’ve been here for weeks while Mom’s been sick. You’re not—”

  An accusation hung in the air between them, and Glen waited for his brother to speak. Here it comes, the voice whispered from behind him, and he could swear that Curtis heard it too, that a quick shock of recognition had come over him: they weren’t alone.

  “Oh, never mind,” Curtis said. “You’re right. I’m being crazy.”

  The sun went behind a cloud. A fresh breeze scattered leaves and sent a chill along his exposed arms. He rubbed at them with his hands, to little effect. For some reason, his body reacted strangely to sudden shifts in temperature. He’d been fine, but suddenly it felt like he’d never get warm again.

  “Speaking of crazy…” Curtis said. “Mom told me something really odd, right when you showed up. It’s actually like she knew what I’d dreamed about last night, which freaked me out more than a little. She said some ‘Fleshless Man’ wanted to kill her. Any idea why she’d say that?”

  -11-

  Curtis felt tremendous relief when Lauren finally answered her cell phone.

  More relief than he should have felt, certainly—another strange influence from his childhood home. He and Lauren had been apart only a brief time, but he needed the comfort of her familiar voice. They’d ended Thursday evening with a trivial fight, never quite resolved, so his most recent hours with her had been ruined by a chill civility. She was angry and couldn’t express it—it’s not usually a good idea to yell at a person whose mother is dying—so they settled into dishonest pleasantries: logistics about the flight
departure, cab fare, time zones. They’d been casual about who would call, and when, so he hadn’t cause to leave a flurry of messages, spaced at desperate half-hour intervals. The one message on their home phone was sufficient to let her know he’d arrived safely.

  His next message could say: Hey, it’s ten minutes later, call me, I need to know you don’t hate me—since I hate myself now, for lots of things, for thoughts I’ve had, for this crazy worry that we’ve broken up and I don’t know it yet, that you figured out I’m the kind of person who’d dream about suffocating his mother to end the inconvenience of her illness …and in that same dream, you’ll be happy to learn, I imagined killing you, too, and since I haven’t heard your voice I’ve got no proof it didn’t happen, like maybe you’re not answering the phone because I murdered you in our bedroom and then forgot I’d done it, or maybe just wished it, in a weak moment, which caused some other tragedy to occur later—since I didn’t hug you at the front door or didn’t look back with enough love as I scurried into the taxi and headed to the airport.

  No, that wouldn’t be a smart message to leave. Phone tag was a game, and you had to allow the other player time to take her turn.

  Well, there would be a reason to call Lauren repeatedly, but that particular event hadn’t happened yet. Again, he realized the awful turns of logic he would entertain: yes, by all means let his mother die right now, if only to give him a decent excuse to phone his girlfriend.

  Fortunately, he reached Lauren later that afternoon.

  “Your cell phone was turned off, I guess. Or the battery…”

  “Hmmm.” One of Lauren’s signature mannerisms: she’d nod her head, mumble a kind of skeptical assent. Their initial phone connection had been odd, a miss-click that shaved off the first syllable, took the “hell” out of “hello.” Although he hadn’t heard enough from the clipped greeting to identify her voice, this vague sound provided instant confirmation.

  “I wish I’d brought some books or magazines. I’m spending a lot of time alone. Glen is doing all this exercising.”