by Tim McBain
She crushed up the six Vicodin she had and snorted the powder off of the back of the toilet in three fat lines. It didn’t kill her pain. It just made it empty somehow, made all of her hollow for a little while. It didn’t stop her tears. Only sleep could do that, it seemed, and it came in fits and starts. She didn’t think she’d slept for more than 90 minutes straight through since it had happened.
Weeks went by, and it felt like she did nothing but cry and funnel crushed-up painkillers into her bloodstream by way of her nostrils. Anything she could get her hands on. Oxycontin. Percocet. Some muscle relaxer she couldn’t remember the name of. If she knew how to plunge it straight into her veins through the tip of a needle, she would’ve done it. She would have pricked the inside of her elbows with great gusto, some remote part of her truly believing it might make the hurt go away, that if you were willing to go that far, to take the needle into your skin, that surely you’d be carried away from whatever troubled you by sheer force of desperation.
And maybe in some tiny way, the pain faded. It didn’t leave her, but it felt a bit distant. Still present but no longer a smothering force.
She’d backed off a little as far as the pills, and she’d visited with her sister, staying a couple of nights at her house, eating home cooked meals. These things seemed to help. She still hurt most of the time, but it felt like something that could be endured, could be survived, could even end someday way down the road.
Today, however, she’d heard the news on the radio: some lady’s baby torn to bits near the woods outside of their apartment building. Shredded. A scene from a horror movie that played out just a couple of blocks from where she stood now. Maybe she could see it out there, the building, a set of lit windows shining in the dusk that she could identify if she knew which one to look for.
The story of the mutilated infant tore open her own wounds, brought the sharp edge back to the pain, twisted the blade in her heart. She could feel the empty place in her existence where her baby was supposed to be, a hole, a hole that would persist from now until the end of her life, a hole she could feel every waking second like a dry socket in the back of her mouth where a cracked molar had been wrenched out by the dentist’s pliers, a void she could never stop prodding with her tongue, no matter how raw and painful it got, no matter how much it bled.
It was windy up here on top of the building, and with that October chill descending upon the city as the evening hit, the wind cut straight through the nightgown she wore. It stung at first, the cold gripping around the skinniest parts of her – neck and wrist and ankles – and spreading from there, the chill sinking deeper and deeper into the meat, into her bones. She was mostly numb now, though. The cold was a dull thing creeping into her core, making her bottom lip tremble.
She watched the city for a time, looking down upon the moving headlights and flitting shapes down there. Her tears changed speeds throughout this process as though shifting gears, slowing at times but never stopping fully.
She knew now that a person was never more alone than they are in the cold and quiet, when they are wounded and exposed to the elements such as she was now. People stirred inside the building, just down one flight of stairs, no more than 50 or 100 feet on foot, but they may as well have been miles from here. She could not be more alone than this, more cold than this, more wounded and scared and inconsolable than this.
She climbed up onto the cement ledge, and the wind picked up just then so that her nightgown billowed around her. The cold seemed sharp again in that moment, the flash of pain blotting out her vision for a beat.
Her chest heaved with each breath, and she could picture the Earth rushing up at her, she could feel it, all things solid dropped out from under her and replaced with nothing – the plummet, the swan dive, the descent.
It was a long way down to the flat of the asphalt, the shining black surface, slicked with that little misting of rain they’d had earlier.
She closed her eyes, felt herself wobble a little as the air stirred around her. She tried to imagine what it would be like to hit the blacktop at full speed. She would break. Shatter. Crack open and spill her insides out like a beetle or some other insect with an exoskeleton.
Would she feel that, feel her skull fracture into little shards the size of fingernail clippings? For just a second, maybe, she thought, but the thought didn’t scare her, really. The pain may be awful, but it would be momentary. The relief would last forever, wouldn’t it?
She should try to land face down, she thought. It seemed that destruction was more certain that way. If she landed feet first, for example, she could merely snap her ankles and shatter her femurs, let those leg bones take the brunt of it and somehow live. That wouldn’t do. Better to land face down and be sure.
Again the wind blew, moaning a little where it whipped along the sides of the building, swishing the branches around in the woods just off to her left, the treetops all swaying in unison. And the full force of the cold hit again, goose bumps pulling all of her skin taut, like in some tangible way her flesh itself was shrinking back from the chill.
She thought of her baby boy then, could see that far away look he’d had on his face when they took him away. He didn’t cry, didn’t seem terribly concerned at all. He’d looked a little serious, his eyebrows furrowed in a way that seemed to convey concentration, she thought, but that was the extent of it.
He was still out there somewhere. Would he have a new family already? A foster family, perhaps? She wasn’t sure how it worked. The social workers had left stacks of paper, but she had been too upset to look at any of them.
He was out there, though. She knew that. He was safe.
Would news of this get to him? Not now, of course – he was just seven months old. But would he hear about this one day? That his biological mother was so distraught upon losing him that she jumped off of her apartment building and splatted in the parking lot?
Maybe. Maybe he would know about it.
She didn’t like that.
What would that say to him about the world? That his mother was a drug addict who killed herself? What kind of a message was that?
She fidgeted now in a different way, her feet tottering, edging her away from the place where the concrete sheared off into nothing.
And despite the cold, the frigid wind cutting through her skin to chill her insides, she felt her heart beat faster in her chest. Faster and faster. It pounded with violence, teetering toward getting out of control. She felt the blood glugging along in the side of her neck, the vein there quaking with every thrust of her pulse.
She stepped down from the ledge and took a deep breath, and great warmth enveloped her like a hug. She didn’t know where it came from, but it swelled in her torso, building to a tingle, and bolts of heat flared from there, shooting down the lengths of her arms and legs, smoothing out all of the goose bumps, withdrawing the numb from her fingers and toes.
The wind died just then, and the night got very still. It was all the way dark now and all the way quiet. Even as her heartbeat slowed, she could hear the thrum of her pulse in her ears.
She wouldn’t kill herself. Not now. Not ever. She knew the pain, knew it as well as anyone could, but she would fight on. She promised herself that, promised her baby that.
Still, she crept close enough to the edge to look down upon that slab of asphalt shining down there. She needed, somehow, to touch the ground, to feel the pocked surface of the blacktop against her skin before this episode could have a sense of closure.
She left the roof and climbed down the four sets of stairs. Her feet clattered out a steady rhythm, each slap echoing back from the plain white walls and beige tiled floors here in the stairwell, the reverberations all piling up and fighting each other, all of them trying their best to mess up the timing.
She realized about halfway down that she wasn’t crying. Not anymore. She wasn’t sure when that had happened, but she was glad for it. She’d sleep after this, she knew. She’d sleep long and well for th
e first time in many weeks.
At the bottom of the steps, it felt strange to be on flat ground once more, to take steps that didn’t lower her little by little. She padded across the landing and pushed through the big steel door, the bar handle cold against her palms. The swing of the door cut a rectangular hole into the building and she passed through it.
The chill hit her in the face as she moved through the threshold, but it was different down here than it had been up on top of the building. The wind was greatly diminished, and the air seemed heavier. Thicker. A motionless, dank density that swaddled all things.
She crossed the sidewalk and stepped down onto the blacktop. She’d done it.
She squatted to press both of her hands to the cold surface of the parking lot, feeling all of the swirls and dents and divots that comprised its rough texture. But that wasn’t enough somehow, so she lowered her cheek to feel them there as well. In some distant part of her mind, she compared to this a traveler kissing the ground after a long, treacherous journey at sea.
The goose bumps rippled into place, starting along her arms and swelling from there over all of her, washing over her like a wave, every hair standing up straight and tall, pulling a little pimple of skin up with it.
She stayed in that position, kneeling, her hands and cheek pressed to the blacktop, for a long reverent moment. It felt like she was exhaling the whole time, letting something go, even if she knew that wasn’t possible. In any case, her body seemed to share in her desire to hold onto this moment, to let it linger. The goose bumps puckered on her skin for more than five minutes, she thought, tingling and roiling the whole time, prickling, almost itching. They faded after a while, and when they had receded to nothing, she sat up.
Her chest expanded and contracted, a pair of deep breaths hissing in and out, and she felt light now. She felt a great tension eased some. The sadness was still there if she checked for it, but the pain associated with it wasn’t quite the same.
She stood, feeling just a little woozy as her legs straightened. A couple more deep breaths helped that go away.
And twigs snapped off to her left, out in the woods. She thought it might be an animal passing by, but the crunch advanced, seeming to multiply as it did so.
What the hell could that be?
This curiosity seemed at odds with another part of her, the voice deep down in her lizard brain telling her that now would be a great time to scurry some place and hide. Now. Now. Now.
She didn’t obey the voice, though. Standing. Listening. Watching the gloom off to her left where the trees began, just faintly visible at the edge of the streetlight’s glow.
The noises kept growing louder past the point of what seemed possible. Surely she should see whatever or whoever it was by now, but she didn’t. It continued creeping closer somehow.
Finally, the foliage stirred. The tall grass swayed. The tree branches trembled.
A figure took shape in the darkness. It looked comically tall and skinny, skin and bones stretched to ridiculous proportions like a real-life Jack Skellington.
She caught herself. Why had she thought of it as an “it?” It was clearly a man, perhaps one with Marfan Syndrome or some similar ailment that would explain its lankiness.
It – he – picked his feet up high with each step, knees bending and lifting one after the other. He didn’t seem in a particular hurry. It wasn’t until he took those last few steps before exiting the woods that she caught sight of his shoes. Oversized clown shoes tromping at the brush. Perhaps those explained the high steps.
Still. Clown shoes? In the woods? That didn’t make much sense. Her lizard brain raised its voice again: Run. Run. Run. Now.
She took a couple of steps back, reaching a hand out to touch the steel door that led back into the stairwell but staying in a position where she could still see the clown-shoed figure moving toward her. She had to see what was happening here, though it made her feel better to have a secured exit route at her fingertips.
As the figure trod over the grass field that led up to the parking lot, it stepped fully into the light. She could see the clown makeup decorating its face – black smudges around both eyes, an oval of red surrounding the mouth. It smiled along with the makeup, but its eyes were dead.
There she went again, thinking of the clown as an “it.” She considered this a moment as she looked into the dead eyes staring back into hers. No. She had been right in the first place. This thing wasn’t a man. It was an it.
She slid her hand over the steel door without looking, lacing her fingers around the handle, hesitating. The clown was close now, just fifteen feet from her and closing the gap slowly.
More crashing erupted from the woods, and there wasn’t so much buildup this time. Additional figures took shape in the darkness, clowns all of them, she thought, based on their silhouettes.
Yep. Time to go.
She yanked the door knob, and it clicked, not budging. She knew the sound – the spring bolt mashing into the strike plate. Locked. It automatically locked behind her. Part of her knew this, understood it, but the rest of her panicked, jiggling the handle, thrashing at the door as though that would unlock it, the steel door rattling in the frame.
She turned to run, but it was too late. A set of cold hands gripped her triceps, lifting her up onto her tiptoes with incredible strength. It ripped her around, swinging so she faced the opposite direction in a flash, and it moved a few paces in the direction of the woods, out toward the other clowns who now moved in the open area.
She kicked and flailed, and it slung her down to the hard surface of the parking lot, some wrestling throw that planted her hip in the blacktop, her temple crashing down onto the curb a fraction of a second later. Sight and sound cut out into silence and a bright white flash, and then her senses began a slow fade back in, all things muted and dulled at first, her brain seeming to reverberate inside of her cranium like a ringing bell, its vibrations somehow endless.
She squirmed over the asphalt, not sure which direction to move, not sure of anything other than that she needed to get away. Now. Now. Now. Her lizard brain was the only consciousness she had left, and she moved like a reptile for the moment, belly pressed to the ground, arms and legs scrabbling in a thoughtless retreat.
Her limbs still rotated as the hands plucked her from the ground, hands and legs clambering at the air, doing little digging motions, like a dog held above the water who falls into the doggie paddle pantomime out of instinct.
Two sets of cold hands grappled with her this time, dragging her out into the field just along the edge of the woods. The grass was all wet, slicked with condensation, and the soggy fabric of her nightgown clung to her body.
She blinked a few times and focused. The clowns stood over her like gloating linebackers who’d just concussed a slot receiver, hands on hips, feet just more than shoulder-width. They remained motionless for a moment. She was almost sure that they’d waited for her to see before they went through with it.
She was too numb to feel it when the first one, the skinny one, brought a blade to her midsection, and some part of her was thankful for the lack of feeling, for the strange detached way that she was experiencing all of this because of the head injury. The others began just after, clubbing and stabbing and opening her up.
She drifted in and out of consciousness as they dined upon the fleshy bits of her, some kind of shock removing her from the scene as often as it could and retracting her awareness fully into her mind, into the abstract. And she thought of her baby, and she was glad she hadn’t done it, hadn’t jumped. Even if it meant nothing, she was glad for the choice she made. He would know someday, and he would know the difference. She was sure of it.
The cold came upon her, much colder than she’d felt on the roof, cold enough that her bones ached throughout her body. And she was vaguely aware that the clowns had wandered off, returned to the woods, left her to die all alone.
The wounded places felt sticky, tacky with blood going gummy in t
he open air. And in some way it felt like a sweetness spread over her, the syrup hardening along the edges of the plate.
She felt no terror now that it was finally here. No pain. No existential worry about what it all meant, if it ever meant anything.
She drifted out into nothing. Her eyes glazed. Clouded. The muscles around them going limp, the skin sagging ever so faintly. There was a peace there in the final set of her eyes, even if a violent scene surrounded it.
She was gone, and all of her troubles and anxieties finally kept still along with her body.
Clouds flitted in front of the moon, and the field grew darker. She would no longer be visible from the apartment building windows, even as close as they were.
The night was so quiet. So empty.
After an extended stretch of motionlessness, the body convulsed a few times, ribcage expanding with jerks that seemed powerful enough to snap bones, arms shivering like sausage links on a skillet, and then the dead thing bent at the waist to sit up. It rocked a few times, diaphragm still flexing wildly to pop the chest in and out, the neck hunched down like that of a vulture, and then it began getting its legs around. It took a long while to get to its feet, its movements slow, lacking fine articulation and all sense of balance like someone who was terribly woozy. It wobbled for a moment, seeming to right itself some, and shambled off into the woods, giggling a little.
Chapter Fourteen
October 30th
7:06 PM
As they retraced their steps, Phillip felt the faintest sleepiness like sand in his eyes. It was dark now, he supposed, even if it wasn’t too late yet. Likewise, he figured having this clown thing hanging over him of late had been stressful, and now that they’d seemingly closed the case, he was ready to rest.
They didn’t talk much as they started back, the silence between them having grown much more comfortable than it would have been this afternoon. Phillip liked it, some sense of wordless companionship that reminded him of what he’d always imagined it’d be like to have a dog. His mom was allergic, and they probably couldn’t afford it anyway. He’d stopped asking for one years ago. In any case, he basked in the sensation now.