A Cosmology of Monsters

by Shaun Hamill

  Everyone in the room turned to look at Sarah. Eli, the kid with green hair, gave her a gentle, encouraging smile.

  “You all know the story,” she said, “but I’ll do my best to tell it like you don’t.” She cleared her throat, an oddly childlike sound. “My brother Stephen went missing when I was in ninth grade and he was in eleventh. He was a nice kid—popular, well liked. He didn’t play sports, but he did date cheerleaders. He was a reader. He wanted to teach history.” As she spoke, everyone in the circle took notes. Only I remained to witness the story undistracted, my hands folded in my lap.

  Stephen had been out on a date with a girl named Daisy the night of his disappearance. He had borrowed their father’s car, leaving the house around six. Sarah was watching TV in her bedroom when he left, so she didn’t say goodbye, and didn’t think about her brother again until the next morning, when Daisy returned in Sarah’s father’s car, alone. The car was fine, but Daisy looked a mess, hair full of forest debris, makeup smeared and tracked with tears. It took Sarah’s parents a few tries to get anything coherent from the girl, and Sarah lingered at the foot of the stairs, eavesdropping as Daisy told the story:

  Stephen had picked her up that night as intended. They’d gone out to dinner, but skipped the movie to make out in the parking lot at the park instead. After about twenty minutes, Stephen started acting distracted. He kept breaking off kisses to ask if Daisy heard anything strange. Daisy never did. Again and again he put his hands to his temples and grimaced. He described a sound like a dagger going through his mind, and, despite Daisy’s objections, he got out of the car to go investigate. He staggered across the parking lot and past the tree line into the park, hands clamped to the sides of his head.

  Daisy waited for the better part of an hour, but eventually got out and followed. She wandered the wooded paths in the dark, shouting for Stephen with no response. Even though she knew the park pretty well, she somehow got turned around in the dark, and it took her until dawn to find her way out of the woods and back to the car.

  The next part of the story sounded uncomfortably familiar. Sarah’s parents called the police, and there was a search, but despite scouring the park, they found no signs of the boy—not even of his passing through the woods, although there’d been ample evidence of Daisy stomping around. A full-scale investigation of Daisy, Sarah’s family, and the surrounding area yielded similarly disappointing results. Stephen was gone, but there was a chilling postscript to the story: two years later, his wallet turned up in a convenience store milk case in Topeka, Kansas. It still had his driver’s license, school ID, the receipt from his dinner with Daisy, twenty dollars in cash, and a scrap of paper with a single word scratched on it: HURTS.

  I was afraid to look at Megan, afraid of what anything on my face might confirm to her. Why had I been invited here?

  “Thank you, Sarah,” Josh murmured, as he finished writing something on his clipboard. “Was what you said, to the best of your knowledge, true?”

  “Yes,” Sarah said.

  “You didn’t embellish or change any details, to try and make us see the story in a particular way?”

  “No,” Sarah said, after a pause.

  Josh leaned back and gestured around the room. “Then we’ll open things up for questions.”

  “Did your brother have a history of migraines?” Hector said.

  “As a small boy, but they mostly cleared up by high school,” Sarah said.

  “What about Topeka?” Laura said. “Did he ever mention Topeka?”

  “Never,” Sarah said, sounding firmer on this point.

  A moment of silence passed, and Josh said, “Are there any more questions?”

  Sarah cast a hopeful look around, as though someone might be chewing on a question whose answer could solve the whole mystery. My heart broke a little at the openness on her face, the momentary willingness to hope. I forced my gaze to the floor, afraid all over again of what I might have revealed, what these strangers, uniquely situated by loss, might be able to infer about me.

  “Everyone think on this,” Josh said, “and if you have any thoughts or ideas, do let us know. Moving on, we should get to Megan’s guest.”

  The room’s collective regard landed on me, as I had known it would.

  “What about me?” I said.

  Josh turned the recorder toward me. “In your own words, why don’t you start by telling us about the night your sister disappeared, and then move on to the night you met James O’Neil?”

  I tried to catch Megan’s eye, but she stared at her journal as though it held some vital, hard-to-parse text.

  “Megan says you’re a little hesitant to talk about what happened that night,” Ellen said. “But believe me, this is a safe space.”

  “Tell me,” Josh said. “How does a shattered window take out a person’s eye?”

  I stood, pushed between Eli and Hector, and ran out the front door. Megan caught up with me halfway across the lawn and grabbed my arm.

  “Please don’t go,” she said.

  I jerked free. “My sister isn’t missing,” I said. “She was abducted and murdered by James O’Neil. So I’m not eligible for membership in your little club.” I got into my car. She stood at the curb as I drove away.

  9

  I went to see Leannon as soon as I got home, and we had frantic, back-scratching, hair-pulling sex. I tried to fuck out my embarrassment and frustration, and she seemed game, rising to meet my strokes with chafing, bruising intensity. When she pushed me past my edge and I lost myself, consciousness disintegrated like tissue paper in water. She held my head to her chest, stroking my hair.

  As my pulse settled and my breathing slowed, I squeezed her around her waist and kissed the top of one breast. She made a soft, happy sound.

  With my head clear, I wondered at my reaction to the Fellowship of the Missing’s questions. Why had I gotten so angry? Part of it was Josh’s condescending attitude, and the way they’d ambushed me. Part of it was embarrassment at my misinterpretation of Megan’s interest in me. But none of those things added up to the panic I felt at the beginning of the interrogation, the alarm and ache that started as soon as they mentioned Sydney’s disappearance. As though I’d been caught doing something wrong. As though I was somehow responsible for the pain in their lives, and owed them answers. Because I did know a few things. I knew that Leannon’s kind existed, and that one of them had been tied up somehow with James O’Neil. But—and I’m being honest—it had never occurred to me to ask Leannon just what that relationship looked like.

  “What are you thinking about?” Leannon asked.

  “How many of you are there?” I said. “Your people, I mean.”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “If you had to guess. More than a hundred?”

  “Sure.”

  “More than a billion?”

  “Good god, no,” she said, and laughed a little.

  “Do you have a name for yourselves?”

  “You’re full of questions tonight,” she said.

  “I want to know more about you,” I said.

  “You know the important things. You know where I live, what both of my faces look like, and that I love you.”

  “I don’t even know your real name.”

  “You gave it to me,” she said. She pushed me off, stood, and crossed to her easel. It held the painting I’d seen on my last visit, colorful robed figures huddled beneath a black sky and crescent moon, in poses of almost religious terror and supplication.

  I sat up against the wall. “I’ve upset you.”

  “No,” she said, but she kept her back to me. “I’m not hiding anything important, but there are things I’d rather not discuss.” She finally faced me again. “If I’m not telling you something, it’s because I’m protecting you. Wil
l you trust me?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and I was. Weird as it was, this relationship was the only functional one in my life. “I’m all tied up about Eunice’s wedding. I have to throw a bachelor party for her stupid fiancé, and pretend that I like him, and that I’m happy about this whole mess.” It might not have been the marquee player on my mind, but it still drew a respectable crowd of anxieties.

  She softened. “How is Eunice? I haven’t seen her in years.”

  And that quickly, my unease was back. “I didn’t know you’d ever seen her at all,” I said.

  “I slept in your bed most nights for ten years. Of course I’ve seen her.”

  “But she’s never seen you,” I said. “Or if she has, she never said anything to me about it.”

  “Not everyone can see me,” she said. “Not unless I want them to.”

  “So when I saw you for the first time, that was your choice?”

  She smiled a little. “No. You saw me right away. You’re unique.”

  “But Eunice—you never look in on her in secret? Or me, or my mom?”

  “Why would I?” she said. “You know where I live, and you visit often enough. I would only come looking if you went missing, or I thought you were in danger.”

  So she had no idea about Megan. Probably best to keep it that way.

  10

  A few nights later, Hubert was waiting on his front porch when Kyle and I arrived to pick him up for the bachelor party. He sat on the step like an overgrown child in khaki slacks and a button-down shirt. The shirt was covered in tiny squares like a sheet of graph paper.

  “There’s a man born to be a dad,” Kyle said.

  “Straight out of central casting,” I agreed.

  The man of the hour brought a special mix CD for us, entitled Farewell Freedom Jams, which he described as “sort of a concept mix,” charting the emotional journey of his romance with Eunice. During the ride to Fun Mountain, we listened to excruciating soft rock hits, culminating in Creed’s “Higher.” Kyle and I studiously avoided looking at one another, knowing that if we did we’d burst into sanity-shaking gales of laughter.

  A few of the invitees met us in the lobby of Fun Mountain’s arcade, a blue and purple cave full of kids pumping tokens into machines. Each of the guys looked older than Hubert, fellows with beer bellies and the genial good natures of men settling comfortably into roles as fathers, husbands, and office drones. Men with mono- and disyllabic names like Steve, Brian, and Jack, all with firm handshakes and barely distinguishable faces.

  I led them to the miniature golf course out back and kept score while they putted and talked shit. Kyle slipped into the flow of the conversation without apparent effort, and it occurred to me how little time I’d spent in the company of men. Although I shared the same basic biology, they felt like a foreign species. Boastful, loud, and rambunctious, even these fat, aging men remained proud and confident, as though they owned the world. Where did that confidence originate? Also, where did they find their innate sense of brotherhood?

  On the fourth hole, Hubert hung back to talk to me. “They can be a handful,” he said, as Steve bent to place his ball on the rubber tee mat. “But they’re good guys. Steve does volunteer work for the homeless with his church, and Jack adopted his daughter from Russia.”

  I focused on the garish purple and orange scorecard. “They’re your friends, Hubert. You don’t have to give me their résumés.”

  He put an arm around my shoulders. “I know. But Eunice told me you don’t have a lot of guy friends. If you give them a chance, I think this group will surprise you.”

  My skin crawled beneath his hand. “I’m sure you’re right,” I said.

  Still he didn’t let go. “It’s important to me that you and I get to be friends. Your sister—she’s everything to me.” He blinked, eyes swimming behind his glasses. He laughed and wiped his cheek. “Sorry. It’s an emotional time. See, I thought—I was getting used to the idea that I would be alone for the rest of my life, and so, to have Eunice come along and change everything—well—” He finally got too choked up to continue, and wiped his eyes with the back of one hand. I wanted to be disgusted, but I found myself moved against my will. Here was a man thinking about long-term plans. Compared to me, still living at home with a monster on booty call and a job that would disappear at the end of the month, he was a paragon of adult life.

  “You two gonna kiss?” called Jack. Everyone laughed, even Kyle and Hubert. At last he let go of my shoulder and headed for the next hole.

  “Noah?”

  The voice stopped me before I could join the group. Megan stood to my left, putter swung back over her shoulder like a rifle, red ball cupped in her right hand like a grenade. She looked like someone trying to make an impression, sort of embarrassed but giving it a go anyway. Actresses.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  “I didn’t like the way we left things the other night,” she said. “When I called the number on your card, I got your mom and she told me where you’d be.”

  “She gave me up to a stranger?” I said.

  “I told her it was an emergency,” she said. “She may think I’m pregnant.” Her cheeks pinkened. My face felt a little warm, too.

  “So you decided to crash a bachelor party,” I said.

  “I wanted to apologize,” she said. “I should never have ambushed you like that.”

  “You drove out here to apologize?” I said. “What about the putter?”

  “The girl behind the counter wouldn’t let me come look for you unless I paid for a game,” she said. “Six bucks and gas this apology has cost me so far.”

  “Noah!” Kyle called, hands cupped around his mouth. “You’re up!”

  “Gotta go,” I said to Megan.

  “Are you really walking away from me right now?” she said.

  “Noah!” Kyle shouted. “What the hell, man?”

  I jerked a thumb in his direction.

  “Okay, fine,” she said, sighing hard through flared nostrils. “Noah, please don’t go. Or if you do, at least give me your home number. I’m not in town for much longer, and I—I’d like to explain some things. And I really wouldn’t mind spending a little more time together. For waffles or whatever.”

  This girl. Turning her charm up to eleven and knowing it was working.

  “Wait here,” I said. I ran back to the group.

  “About time,” Steve said.

  “Bachelor party is no place for romance,” Jack said.

  “Bros before hoes, Noah,” Hubert said. The words sounded as though he were borrowing the cliché and trying it on for the first time. A couple of the men laughed.

  “Kyle, you keep score for a minute,” I said, passing him the card. “I’ll catch up.” Amid a chorus of boos, I grabbed Megan’s hand and led her to my car. When I started the engine, Night Ranger’s “Sister Christian” began to blare.

  She shut her eyes and grimaced. I snapped the radio off.

  “Not my music, if that makes a difference,” I said.

  Driving on autopilot, I took her to The Wandering Dark. It was closed for the night, but Mom had forgotten to lock the gate to the parking lot. My car drifted up to the front door, encased in its chipped and faded Styrofoam skull frame.

  “I hop into your car, put myself at your disposal, and of all the places we could go, you bring me here?” Megan said.

  I paused with my hand on the key, unsure whether to kill the engine. “We can go somewhere else,” I said, though I had no idea where. I spent all my time here, at home, or with Leannon. I worked, fucked, and slept. I had no favorite spots, nothing in the acceptable world to share except my work. Hubert really was better than me. He at least had friends and hobbies.

  “No, you had an instinct,” she s
aid. “Let’s see it through.”

  We got out and went inside, through the bare, dusty front office and into the warehouse proper. In the break room we grabbed water and granola bars, and then I gave her the tour. When we got to the dance hall, we hopped up on the edge of the stage to eat our snacks, feet dangling. After she finished her granola bar, she turned the foil wrapper over and over in her hands. The crinkling sound filled the still, empty space.

  “I promised you an explanation,” she said.

  “You did,” I said, although I was tempted to call it off now, seeing her discomfort and wanting to preserve the calm between us.

  “This is hard for me to talk about,” she said. “But you deserve to know.” She took a deep breath. “Everyone in the Fellowship of the Missing has lost someone they care about. Someone they love has vanished in a way that makes no sense. Except for me. I know exactly where my person is. He’s incarcerated at Polunsky Unit in West Livingston, on death row. His name is James O’Neil.”

  “You know him?”

  “He’s my father,” she said. I must have looked worried, because she put a hand on my knee. “Don’t worry, this isn’t some Dracula’s Daughter bit. I’m not out for revenge. I’m just trying to understand, like the rest of my friends.”

  I lifted my water bottle to drink. It was empty.

  “He was never normal,” Megan said. “He always struggled with mental illness. Mom left him when I was little, so I didn’t grow up around him. He sent cards on my birthday, when he remembered it, and came to visit a few times. He was always nice, but sad. He knew he wasn’t fit to be a full-time dad, but he missed me, I think. He never seemed dangerous to anyone but himself. So when he was arrested a few years ago, it didn’t make any sense, and when he was charged with three murders and convicted of two, it made even less sense. I went to visit him in lockup, but he kept saying he wanted a do-over.”