Evie of the Deepthorn

by André Babyn

  As I was walking down the hallway to leave school, two guys came rushing past me, yelling back and forth for reasons I couldn’t quite make out. The guy in front — Ross, from my grade — was laughing. It looked like he had something that belonged to the guy who was following behind. A hat or something equally stupid. I don’t know who the other guy was, I’d seen him before and thought he might have been in my grade but I’d never learned his name. Maybe “Sean.” Maybe “Steve.” It all happened so fast. They brushed past me, close enough that they almost knocked me over. I’d had my headphones on and I was listening to my CD player and I was in my own little world, and so I was still spinning when I saw Ross make a turn to the front doors and put his arm right through the little pane of glass right by the metal panel you’re supposed to push. There was a huge crashing sound and he staggered back from the door with the skin hanging off his arm like a tattered flag. His friend had somehow managed to stop himself before the puddle of dark red blood that was now forming at Ross’s feet.

  “Holy shit,” Ross said, over and over, looking down at himself.

  There was a hush and a silence that was deeper than any I’d ever experienced before.

  Someone ran to get a teacher or a janitor or to maybe call an ambulance.

  The glass had cut Ross deep. I thought I could see the white of bone peeking out from underneath the pile of mangled flesh hanging off of him. I am pretty sure it was bone because it was the whitest thing I’d ever seen. The whiteness of something normally wrapped in flesh.

  It seemed strange to me that things could change so quickly.

  Ross had his other hand cupped around his wrist, even though most of the damage was to his forearm, as if that could have stopped or slowed the flow of blood. But it was the only part of his arm down from the elbow that was coherent enough to touch. The only part that was still fully recognizable as an arm, even though the underlying structure held. Eventually a teacher came and took Ross with her somewhere — to the office, I guess, where there was a nurse’s station but probably no nurse on duty. To wrap him up with something more substantial while they waited for the ambulance to arrive.

  I was struck dumb by the slow puddle of blood spreading out on the floor.

  Part of me felt sick to my stomach and wished I’d never seen the accident. Felt rude to stare. The other part wished I could have looked for longer. The vision was so strange and fleeting. That same part of me was happy even to have seen and taken pleasure from it.

  That’s what messed me up.

  Ross was an asshole. There’s no other way to put it. I had been in a couple classes with him and he had never been kind to me. Not even a little bit. The best he treated me was with ambivalence. I was an easy target, especially last year when my acne was really bad.

  So, in one way, even though it’s terrible to wish anyone harm, if what I had seen had to happen to anyone I was glad that it had happened to him.

  But that wasn’t it. That wasn’t just it.

  That same part of me that was not only happy to see his injury … it wanted to see him injured. Because it wasn’t just pleasure from the injury in the abstract — which I can’t deny, that was it, too, to see harm, period — it was pleasure seeing the pain and shock and violence done to him.

  I stood there in the front hallway, for a long time, by myself, until a janitor came and started mopping up the blood. Then I snapped myself out of it and put my headphones back on and adjusted the straps of my backpack and walked home.

  On the walk home I kept thinking about the four or five seconds immediately after the accident, Ross looking down at his dripping arm, glass and blood puddling on the floor. I guess I wasn’t really thinking about it. It just kept replaying in my head, over and over. His look of shock. The ripped flesh. I imagined I could see glass sticking out of his arm, and probably there had been some, but I’m not sure that was something I had time to notice.

  Halfway home I realized that I was savouring the tableau. And that started to scare me. I thought I was a kind of monster. That only a monster could want to see another human being hurt in that way. I didn’t even know then if he was going to be okay. All I knew was that he’d wrecked his arm and lost a lot of blood.

  A lot of blood.

  Really wrecked his arm.

  That was more of a confirmation that something was wrecked in me than throwing a basket against a wall or fighting with my mom or dad. That was more than just feeling aloof from my friends.

  I was pretty sure I was a monster.

  That night I dreamed I was in school and that I had murdered someone. I couldn’t remember doing it. I only knew that I had, and I knew that at any minute my crime was going to be discovered. There was a dead body somewhere and I tried frantically to remember where, so I could conceal my crime, but with a feeling of resignation, like I knew it didn’t matter what I did, because I was going to be found out. I don’t remember how I’d killed them. Maybe strangulation. Maybe a knife. Whatever it was, it was a deeply personal manner of violence. In other words it wasn’t an accident, even though it might have happened accidentally. Or in an unguarded moment, I guess. When I woke up the next morning — a Saturday — it was only as I was eating breakfast that it gradually dawned on me that I was innocent.

  A kind of innocent.

  Then I sat out on the back porch with an old fantasy novel that my dad had given me when I was twelve. It was about eight hundred pages long and I’d tried to get through it multiple times, but something always stopped me before I even hit page one hundred. The characters seemed flat. Even at twelve I could see that. I wanted to read about their triumphs, I wanted to get involved in the world, but there was a perfection, a sheen to the male and female protagonists that made me feel almost sick to my stomach. You were meant to put yourself in their place and become them, I think. And live without flaws. An unearned perfection. It wasn’t what I read fantasy for. I wanted to make my dad happy and read it one day and talk to him about it. But I couldn’t. No matter how many times I tried.

  Eventually I gave up on that and called Jess, under the pretext of telling her what had happened to Ross. I told her about how they’d raced past me and almost knocked me over and how everything had seemed normal — shitty, but normal — and then a second later Ross had put his arm through the window and time had stopped. I told her about seeing the bone and the blood and how I didn’t know if he was okay or not but I didn’t tell her about the pleasure that I felt when I saw him get hurt.

  Then I took a bunch of deep breaths and crossed my eyes and stared into the sun.

  “I bet you liked it,” she said, when I had finished.

  My heart beat faster, up into my throat.

  “What?” I said.

  “You didn’t like it?”

  “No,” I said. Hesitant. “Why would I?”

  “Don’t you remember? In civics? Last year?”

  I did remember but I didn’t want to say it. Of course I remembered.

  “When he said that — you know. About your face?”

  “Oh, right,” I said, trying to keep her from going any further. “Yeah, that sucked.”

  It was one of the first times anyone had ever said anything. I mean, directly. I mean, the way that he’d said it. In a mean way.

  “So it must have felt good. To see him like that,” she said.

  I thought again about him standing there holding his wrist in shock. The pool of blood left after him. I thought about my dream and the murder I’d committed in it.

  “I guess,” I said. My eyes unfocused. Taking in the heat of the backyard. Staring into the sky or the sun.

  I made an excuse and got off the phone.

  * * *

  Thanks to the medication I’ve been prescribed, my acne is getting slightly better now. But it’s strange because it still seems like it’s there, almost like it’s sinking, like it’s happening farther from the surface rather than disappearing altogether. Like it’s being held closer to the bone rather th
an being totally expelled. My skin is smoother than it was before but there are red and pink continents lurking underneath. I’m told even these will go away with time.

  That seems impossible to me. But even this improvement seemed impossible before I went on the medication.

  I still get some on the surface, more than most people, but it’s nothing like it was before. It was over the summer before last year when I really started to break out, when I went from one or two occasional pimples to glaciers, moving in slow unison across my skin. They were so sensitive that it hurt to touch my face. There were so many that it sometimes hurt to smile, all of them backed up and cracking together in the creak of my muscles. But the worst part was, of course, the way it changed the way others looked at me. That hurt, too, but in a different way. I hated to turn the corner at school, to show my face in the cafeteria, to reintroduce myself to Jess and Tiff at the lunch table in September. To see my new self in their eyes.

  But even though over the summer I had received unsolicited advice or sympathy more than a few times, most people made a point of not acknowledging it, or at least referring to it in only the most oblique ways. They could tell I didn’t want them to address it. I wished no one would. It wasn’t like I hadn’t noticed it myself. I’d tried every kind of anti-pimple cream on the market. I washed my face twice as hard, three times as often, as anyone else I knew. I tried to cut out fried foods and sugar, for long stretches of time. But it didn’t matter. Nothing did.

  Once when I was waiting in line at a convenience store a middle-aged stranger told me to immerse my face in nettle tea, to do this nightly. That they would go away thereafter. He said this, clear-faced, standing with his wife, who looked I think as horrified as I felt. He said it had worked for him. That it had been as bad as mine was when he was my age. I thanked him without getting a good look, nodding with my eyes on the ground, then after a few seconds I put back the chocolate bar or bag of chips or magazine or toilet paper or whatever it was that I was going to buy, pretending like I had changed my mind.

  And ran home, as soon as I left the store. About as fast as I ever did.

  That was about the only thing, the nettle tea, that I hadn’t tried.

  I doubted sincerely that it would work.

  I didn’t know you could see a doctor for acne until after the summer when it flared up. Civics class, maybe the first week. Mrs. Baker put us into groups. I was with Ross. Jess was in my group, too. A couple others I don’t remember. I didn’t know what to say. He asked me why I didn’t go get it checked out, like it was the most obvious question in the world. I didn’t know you could. I just looked at him, I think, or tried not to look at him, or tried to look at him, because after all we were all supposed to do the assignment together, as a group.

  But it was hard because no one, up to that point, had ever called me disgusting.

  Eventually I managed to detach myself and I asked for permission to go to the bathroom. There I didn’t want to look in the mirror, because I knew I’d see what I’d gotten used to not seeing, even though I could never forget it was there. The blight and pain.

  Every morning when I woke up I thought to myself, “This can’t last until I’m twenty-five, can it?” But I knew that it would. That my whole life would be like that, oozing and painful, totally out of my control. I still feel that way, even though my acne’s getting treated now. It’s hard sometimes to realize that anything has changed. In the bathroom I felt angry, angry and embarrassed that no one had told me I could get help for it, that I had to find out from Ross.

  Probably it was from about that point that I started hating him. But even so I’m not sure that means he deserved what happened to him, or that I should feel as good as I did when he got hurt. No one should get hurt. Why should I want anyone to get hurt?

  What was wrong with me?

  Why did I like it?

  * * *

  After my phone call with Jess I went back upstairs and got back in bed. I’d gotten sort of weird on the phone and said a quick goodbye. It was two or three o’clock in the afternoon. I closed the curtains and buried my head in the pillows. I thought it would be easier not to live than to be the kind of person I imagined that I was. A bad person. A violent person. A broken person. Someone who’d never figure anything out.

  I wanted to die and I couldn’t see any other future for myself. I mean, if I didn’t die. I thought I would be fucked up and mean for the rest of my life, angry and unloved. Creaking into bitter and lonely adulthood. I imagined that my bones were corrupted, that they were filled with acid and poison, and that if I lay still long enough they would crack and consume my flesh. I imagined lying in a field, on the ground outside, lying down until the poison did its work and I was a shrivelled and blackened nothing.

  And it felt sort of good to imagine all of that, to imagine a way out, I mean, even if that way out was about the worst one I could think of. I thought I shouldn’t even imagine it, or that I should try not to, but it felt good and it was about the only thing I knew how to do.

  3

  Sometimes when I walk home from school it feels perfect. Timeless. Impossible. I don’t know how else to explain it. The trees are green and tall, the air light and crisp, or pure and hazy, even the weeds choking the sidewalk have a sort of ethereal quality that makes it seem like they belong, like they’re necessary, like they’ve always been there, like somehow I am part of them, reaching up from their cracks in the pavement and stilling themselves in eternity. Sometimes I stop and listen to the insects buzzing in the grass, listen for birds, or hear the wind blowing through the trees, and I feel like a part of something much, much larger than me. Like I don’t exist and I don’t need to. Like I’m just a minor detail in a painting — just a bystander standing far away on the acropolis, rendered in heavy oils by some top-hatted Romantic in the nineteenth century.

  I like that feeling — a kind of annihilation.

  Being emptied out, in the best way.

  I feel closest to Evie when I’m in that mood. I imagine she is so much nearer to the earth, to its rhythms and mysteries. Her problems are larger than mine, but they feel easier to solve.

  It’s stupid. I know it’s stupid.

  But it helps me to imagine that I could solve everything that’s wrong with me, feeling ugly and having parents who don’t like each other and spending too much time alone and thinking too hard, through a single thrust of a dagger. And not even my dagger — Evie’s. Evie’s dagger.

  It’s easier for me to believe that I could fix things with a tool of Evie’s than my own. Sometimes I let myself believe that everything would be better for me if I found the right guy. Like I could pour out my heart to him and he would fix me somehow. I’d feel whole, always. I know that’s wrong, but a much larger part of me than I’d like to admit believes it. Maybe I’m not even sure I know it’s wrong. Maybe it would be better — how could I know either way? I’ve never had a boyfriend. Not even close.

  It seems pretty good.

  But I’m also afraid that even if I did find the right person, I’d ruin it by being too honest with them. Like there’s a limit to how much you can share before you betray your true self. And I know my true self isn’t any good.

  No one would love it.

  That’s why, right now, it’s much easier to be interested in guys I never talk to. To watch them from afar. To imagine they are daggers, daggers I could use in my own hands, when the time is right, if that time ever comes. Mostly they are infatuations that I can comfortably nurse for months. Jess once told me that if I talked to them I wouldn’t find them as interesting, and maybe that’s true. She also said I should get a boyfriend and that it is easy to do that because guys are fucking stupid, and that’s the reason they’d be less interesting to me if we talked. Maybe that’s true, too.

  But if so, what’s the point?

  * * *

  In grade nine there was a boy in one of my classes whom I used to dream about regularly. I mean, all the time. I didn’t eve
n really want to, because I didn’t think the happiness that I felt in my dreams would ever come true. Maybe sometime, vaguely, in a future that, to be honest, I still have difficulty imagining. Not with him, in any case. But I couldn’t help it. Before I started dreaming about him, we’d spoken, really spoken, maybe one or two times. This was before my face broke out. In geography. He was in my gym class, too, but we never talked there.

  I don’t even remember our conversation — something about pickles. I’d said “pickles” was a funny word, I can’t remember why — though, yeah, it’s a funny word. Then, afterward, when he saw me in the hallway he’d say, “What’s up, pickles?” In a kind way, though it made me nervous. I thought he was probably confused about me, like he thought I was someone that I wasn’t. I knew I was going to disappoint him. I felt like I was disappointing him all the time, when I said my shy hello and disappeared into the crowded halls.

  Richard. He had an unusual name, too grown-up, like he was already an accountant or something. I still don’t know if he had a nickname or anything. Probably, though I’d never heard anyone call him “Rick” or “Dick” or “Ricky” or whatever. I might have even made fun of him for his first name, the way everyone I knew enunciated every syllable — eventually, if we ever got closer.

  In my dreams he was always waiting for me — at the entrance to rooms, underneath tables, somewhere far away where my dream would never reach. It was like fireworks going off when we touched, if we ever got there, fireworks and like something in me was turning something in him, or vice versa. We never had sex in my dreams — not really, even if it was probably a sexual feeling that I woke up with. It felt like it. But just entering his aura alone was a feeling of completeness, of satisfaction. It was so euphoric that when I woke up in the morning I was almost afraid to face the day, knowing that I would be without that feeling that I knew I couldn’t have on my own.

  Knowing I might run into the unwitting object of my love. Or whatever it was.