He reached for her hand, thoughtlessly, carelessly, letting his own hand trail behind him so she could grab it, but she refused, remaining where she was.
He stopped, looked back at her in surprise, and she saw the confusion on his face. “What are we going to do?” he asked. “What are we going to put in here?”
She shook her head.
“Cindy?” His voice was quavering.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s up to you.”
WELCOME TO THE WORLD, MISTER SMILES
T. Fox Dunham
T. Fox Dunham resides outside of Philadelphia PA—author and historian. He’s published in nearly 200 international journals and anthologies. His first novel, The Street Martyr, will be published by Out of the Gutter Books, followed up by Searching for Andy Kaufman by PMMP in 2014. He’s a cancer survivor. His friends call him fox, being his totem animal, and his motto is: Wrecking civilization one story at a time. Site: www.tfoxdunham.com. Blog: http://tfoxdunham.blogspot.com/. http://www.facebook.com/tfoxdunham & Twitter: @TFoxDunham
A face patterned in swirling white dots, faded and inchoate, watched me from the monitor, gazing at me from collective motes of blood circulating in my body. The broad plate scanner read the transmission of neutrons flying off the radioactive gallium the tech had injected into my blood before the test. Doctor Helsinki searched for more tumors, more lymph nodes gone to pot and mutated, trying to live eternal and ever. I watched the face watching me—the clouds composed its jaw and two black caverns for eyes. The face perched in my chest, centered below my sternum. Its jaw moved in slow motions, like in a silent movie. Was it speaking to me? It dissipated, swirled into my body then reconstituted and through my two eye caverns watched.
“I heard it whispering to me in my sleep,” I told the technician. The young girl, fresh with a wedding band on her finger with which she fidgeted, paid half attention as she adjusted the resolution. My body shivered from the cold scanner pressed to my bare chest.
“Turn to your left just a little. That’s fine. Perfect.” I moved to her command, squeezing the tan skin on my chest.
“It whispers sugary things to me. Calls me boy-o or sometimes calls me sweetheart. I like the song. I have an old tin music box that plays it.”
“‘Let me call you sweetheart.
I’m in love with you.’”
“You’ve got a bug up your butt or something?” she asked.
“It’s grinning at me!”
The tech studied the screen, and furrowed her forehead. “Normal disruption of the dye. Don’t freak yourself out. It’s like looking at a cloud. The human mind plays tricks.”
“And the dreams?”
“You should talk to your doctor.”
It made sense. I plucked at my long dark locks, playing with my tail. I yanked it, ripping several strands. I focused on losing my hair, not on the high odds of my expiration. I brushed my hair with fifty strokes every morning and bought the finest shampoos and waxes to build body. Next week after my first treatment, it would fall away like autumn leaves. I’d weep for every hair.
“Put your hands down and stay still,” she admonished me.
The tech played the keyboard bones, typing notation to the images. She marked several white spots decorating my green organs. I witnessed my attacker, made visible through radioactive dye. The lymphoma appeared harmless, a couple of dandelion weeds gone to seed. I could reach in my chest and just pluck them out and return to my life, picking courses for my senior year of school at Drexel.
“You’re Jai Chopra?” she asked, finishing her notes.
“I was.” She ignored me.
“You’re all done.”
I put on my shirt and buttoned it to my neck then fetched my pack and phone. I let the battery charge run out on my phone, tired of listening to the consolations of friends and family—their pity and fears all manifested in cold and safe text. Oh so distant. I planned to throw it into the river.
“So young,” she said. I nearly slapped her. My anger twisted in my chest, stung like a wasp’s nest stirred in rage. The stingers pinched down my arm, and I folded my fingers into a fist.
Hit the flabby bitch.
I held my arm down and ran out of the dark lab, leaving the hospital and jumping on a Septa bus idling outside at the stop in the parking lot.
***
I sat down in the last seat on the bus. An old and decayed man sat a few seats ahead. He reeked of urine, burning my eyes. He turned his head and watched me, and I felt bugs crawling down my skin. The gallium dye circulated through my system, burning my organs with light radiation, dissipating. I put on my iPod and drove the buds into my ears, but I never started the playlist. I nodded my head, pretending to listen, letting myself fall into the songs.
I closed my eyes, and it spoke.
Let me out, sweetheart! It’s time to run about and play. I could eat a horse.
“You’re anxiety. Bad clams. I don’t get drunk. I should. Let me be.” I whispered to it. I don’t think the old man or driver heard me, but I couldn’t be certain. The old man never averted his eyes, just gazed through me. Maybe he could see it, being so close to the other side, to his expiration.
Yet you speak to me, boy-o. You feel me. Know me. Finally I have voice. I cry out. Seeding myself in thousands, never finding my way. My mouth is made now. I am whole. Release me and know my beauty. Let’s have some fun before the sun burns out.
“I shouldn’t have to fight with my disease.”
I am the disease. Purge me. Let your blood like doctors of old, and you will be free of it. You’ll live forever. I’ve made it so. I’ll drain your sickness. I’ll take your clock and smash it. Set me free on the world to feed.
I pressed the ear buds deep into the canal. Pain pierced through my head, pulsing into my neck. “You’ll hurt them,” I whispered. “You’ll kill.”
All things die. So long have I hungered.
The bus pulled up to the curb just outside my parents’ house in Yardley. I grabbed my bag and shot up from the seat. As I passed by, the old man grabbed one of the belt loops on my black jeans.
“Give Mister Smiles what it wants,” he grumbled, then he coughed up bloody phlegm and spat it on the aisle, missing my sandal. I pulled back, but he held tight to my pants.
“Freak!”
“I’ve always been alone in this world. Samson Reeves is my name. I will die alone and no one will come to my funeral. I wish the world to suffer. Be kind. Release it.”
I yanked free, ripping my jeans down the side. He still gripped the torn piece. I fled the bus, running home and got winded. I felt sicker, weaker. My decay started, the slow decline. Soon pain would rip through my body. I jogged faster up the sidewalk then finally collapsed under a mulberry tree. Death seemed a fantasy. I didn’t understand it, so I didn’t fear it. My eyes did tear up at the thought of the pain, the nausea from the chemo. I’d been born a weak man. I couldn’t help that. God made me weak.
I apologized for the pain I’d cause.
***
I gazed at myself in the mirror and studied my brown flesh in the sallow bathroom light. I could still see its visage—hollow eyes and white fuzzy morphology—staring at me from my chest. It materialized and watched, dissipated to circulate, then formed again. I sensed it sucking my life force, drinking my vitality, suckling on my soul like an infant. I could ignore it. I knew I’d die, but I’d take it with me.
“I don’t deserve this,” I whispered.
My poor lad. Listening closer, really listening as I sought sympathy, I recognized his tone and demeanor. It wore my thoughts and spoke with my voice. Did it have its own? A parasite. It felt ancient, and my chest weighed, full of lead and regret. I tasted metal on my tongue. Of course not. Not your fault. This isn’t blood on your soul. You’re just the carrier and never had any intention of this. Poor boy-o.
Pressure squeezed my chest, and my ribs popped. It wouldn’t stop talking. It would be fast. I could do this. I picked out my d
ad’s shaving kit from the cabinet and plucked out a straight razor. I pressed the blade to my naked chest, slicing through a few stray chest hairs.
A little lower. There it is. So close. Warmer. Warmer. Red hot! Lake of fire! Now slice true.
I closed my eyes and held the razor’s edge to my soft peach flesh. My hand petrified.
“It’ll hurt.”
Only briefly. Then it’ll be all over. Poor baby.
I closed my eyes and drove the razor into my body. My chest burned down into my stomach, and I felt the tissue rip beneath the pressure. I cried out deep in my throat and vomited a little in the sink. Mister Smiles pushed from under my skin, and I dropped the razor. With the hole cut, it took over, reveling in its freedom.
Weak little shit. Let me out!
It pushed its fluidic body against the wound, and I yelled into the empty house. It pressed its fluctuating weight, and my chest ripped to my stomach, tearing as the mass evacuated. A crimson mass, slithering and bearing the consistency of chewing gum, squeezed through the hole. It paused, gaining strength, and it pushed again, forcing its mass through crack. My chest burned, and the fire spilled down through my guts and up into my chest. One of my floating ribs snapped. My vision spun, and I nearly blacked out. I drove the razor down into the edge of the cut, and my flesh parted like zipper. With the extra room, the mass contracted like a spring than leaped out of my chest. The weight left me, and I collapsed onto the floor tiles and rolled on my side. Blood trickled from my chest, but not enough to worry about. I’d severed no artery, or I would have expired in moments.
My eyes wavered, and the light fluttered. I saw it briefly, a pulsing crimson and black mass. It slithered along the floor, staining the rug and ejected polyps up the wall. It climbed towards the sink then slid into the bowl then stretched into taffy strands and fed down the drain.
In those last moments before I blacked out, I held my chest, but not the wound. I cradled myself and lamented at the hollowness that filled my body. I missed Mister Smiles the way a mother misses the fetus growing inside of her. I had a responsibility to it, and I had unleashed it onto the world.
***
I stirred to consciousness sometime later, waking up in a hospital bed, though I wasn’t sure how long since you can’t keep time in that darkness. I didn’t give a damn, and the release felt euphoric. Such peace. The reek of rubber glove plastic and stale coffee gagged me. I heard my mother tittering as she wept and the click of my father’s shoes on the hard floor. The light stung my eyes, and I reached my hand to rub them; however, a cuff tethered them to the bed. My chest ached and itched, and when my eyes adjusted, I saw a bandage along my ribs through an opening in a hospital gown.
“What were you thinking, Jai?” Mumsy asked. “Don’t we give you everything? So you are sick. You will be fine.” Dad said nothing, just paced around the hospital bed, his face frowning with obvious annoyance at being called from work. “Why?”
“It wasn’t that, Mumsy,” I said. “I just had to cut it out. I’d be fine if I cut it out.”
“Your doctor says you have to stay here for three days for observation, and you are to see a therapist and start antidepressants.”
“I said I’m fine.”
“You didn’t get this from me. How could you shame your family like this?”
And I let her talk on and on, speaking of shame, about how I could never mention this to my cousins or friends. It reflected on my parents, and I’d been thoughtless and ungrateful. Finally she tired and went down with my father to the cafeteria for fresh coffee.
I managed to reach the bed remote and flipped the mounted television in my private room on. I’d slept through the night. Were they right? Was all this is an illusion, a phantom delusion? Fragile minds could crack so fast. The human psyche existed weak in a world of stimuli and electrical transmissions. The cancer could have spread to my brain and pulled on the neurons like puppet strings, creating a voice, a dialogue, demanding escape. I minored in psychology. I understood repressed subconscious desires and needs, the way they can push through to the surface and manifest madness. I had to escape, and I’d carved a hole in my chest to emancipate. The news reported a fire in Center City, killing seven people. The images brushed over my sore eyes, and I felt no remorse for the victims or their families. Then the anchor spewed something about a shooting on South Street at a strip club, portraying a transvestite on the stoop in pink underwear. They didn’t feel real on the television, just a fantasy, a bad dream that the box suffered.
Mumsy and Dad returned, carrying coffee. They brought me a hot chocolate, but I refused to ask them for help sipping it. I tugged against the cuffs.
“Lost in self-pity,” Mumsy said, scoffing. She poked at her silvery hair. “You think you’re the only one?”
“I only feel real to me.”
She scoffed again. “The poor girl that lives next to us. Only six. She was fine a week ago, and now her blood is sick like yours. I think her name was Susan. I know her younger brother is Timmy. Poor girl. Very advanced case too. It came so sudden. You don’t see her hurting herself.”
“Lay off, Mumsy.”
She sat quietly for a time while she sipped her coffee. Dad went downstairs to a smoking lounge to smoke a pack or two.
It couldn’t have been that thing. I had dreamed it, a delusion, a subconscious manifestation. Death didn’t come to children: only old people and the guilty. I had unleashed nothing in my mutilation.
Over the next few days, my doctors did blood work in preparation for my first round of chemo. I kept plucking my dark hair and wishing it away. Doctor Helsinki came in baffled. After another scan, he informed me my cancer had vanished:
“As if it just got up and walked away.”
***
My doctors called it a medical miracle, the marvel of an accelerated immune system. I had been blessed by complete remission, if it had even been cancer. My mother called it gross incompetence, and she planned a lawsuit to compensate for her pain and suffering.
I returned to the ignorant life of the delusional immortal, registering for my classes, working out. I hung out upstairs on my computer, playing Warcraft and lying to women in chat rooms about my appearance. I even cybered a few times, especially after I told them my story, how I’d beaten off cancer with the strength of my immune system. Chicks really dug that crap.
On Thursday night, twenty days after my miracle remission, my parents yelled at me to come downstairs and help make pasta and potato salad to take next door. This was their contribution for the reception after Susan’s funeral. I’d been chosen to live. Fate selected her to die. I boiled the pasta, stirred in half a bottle of dressing and threw it into the fridge, then I raced back up to my room and logged in to my character. Animated bosses and dungeons distracted me. I played until after midnight when finally nausea from motion sickness after watching the monitor all day forced me to bed. The room rocked like a ship at sea, and I buried my head under my pillows. I drifted into the hypnagogic state between consciousness and sleep and just rode the casting waves.
And in the darkness, it mocked me, and everything I’d forced from my mind whipped back in strands of barbed wire:
Hey shit-for-brains. Bob. Or Chuck. Or Nancy. Yeah. Nancy. Cause you’re such a pussy.
“You’re a nightmare. A bad dream. I woke up from you.”
Oh no waking up from little old me, Nancy. No sir. We are married, joined at the soul. Bonded through eternity. Isn’t it romantic? All flowers and candy.
“You’re not coming back, are you?”
Nah. I just want someone to talk to. I’m ever so lonely. Don’t you want a friend? I’ve got so much to tell you. Been so busy since you unleashed me onto the world.
I rolled onto my stomach and pushed my palms into my ears, as if they would mute Mister Smiles. It wore my voice, but the sound changed, the way a violin changes higher in pitch as you play closer to the bridge. At times, Mister Smiles spoke with the dandelion innocence and pitch o
f a young girl.
I wake and dance then to bed for rest,
I like eating girls and boys the best!
“You got into that little girl. Susan. You went down the drain and slithered from my house. Then you got inside her and killed her.”
I couldn’t have done it without you, boy-o! We’re a team, you and me. Family. Brothers. Father and son. But which is which?
I clawed at my pillows until I tore the fabric and ripped out a foam chunk. The nausea pulsed my stomach, and I swallowed back the vomit. Cold sweat soaked my body. Its voice pierced my head and burned like sparklers, the way the brilliant sparks pinch your skin if you catch some.
“I just want to get laid and drunk.”
Oh don’t fret. I’ll do you a real solid. That’s what mates do, isn’t it? Here’s the deal, and it’s a sweet ride, a pony for your birthday. I love to play with my dollies. Jeanine is my favorite.
“You really killed her.”
Forget her! She was nothing. So many children born each day to replace her. I do love the young ones. So full of dreams and life. They nourish me. I drink it all up, and it’s so tasty. I’m ever so hungry. Ravenous. I’ll have my ice cream first please.
“I don’t give a shit,” I yelled into my pillow. I lost control of my gag reflex, and I spit up a puddle of green bile into my sheets. I covered it up with my pillow and tried to ignore the sour reek of the vomit.
Oh but you should. And here’s my contribution to team Smiley: As long as I’m alive, you get to live too. And as long as I have the young to slurp, I’ll be supping until the stars go out. You’ll forever be young and have as many ripe women as you can lay, boy-o. And I’ll feast on the little ones. I can’t help it. I’m never slaked.
“Where are you?”
How sad it all was. Even I nearly wept, and I don’t have eyes. Quite a feat. The little brother, not more than two human years old was at his sister’s side in the hospital.
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