Deserts of Fire

by Douglas Lain

  “sealed”

  ROBERT MORGAN FISHER

  i was smoking on the stairs, which was something I did because I was an actor and needed to “practice.” This kid, Alejandro, lived in my building and was about ten, eleven at most. He had a small mouth and flat black eyes. He started a monologue about his father, the soldier. The kid had a need. That was something I learned about monologues in college: you gotta need to tell it.

  Hinojosa came up the stairs and gave me the look. I remembered Hinojosa telling me about some guy in our building that came back from Afghanistan. He gassed himself down on the street in his own car, duct-taped an AC hose to his tailpipe. That was Alejandro’s father. But Alejandro hadn’t quite accepted reality. He thought his father was a SEAL.

  I thought about Alejandro’s mother a lot. She wasn’t unattractive. I was lonely. As usual, Alejandro peppered his monologue with: LPOD, On my six, OBNOB. I lighted another cigarette. Did his mother put up with this stuff? Or did she slap him and say, “Stop it! You know Papi’s never coming back. You know what he did, right?”

  I watched her reach for Mint Milanos, then change her mind. When she got further down the aisle, I lobbed the bag of Milanos over her head and it landed in her cart. She froze, slowly turned.

  “Explain yourself,” she said.

  “A treat,” I said. Then I told her I was friends with Alejandro. This did not relax her.

  “You’re the smoking guy.”

  “I’m an actor, I have to practice.”

  “Actor,” she nodded her head like she knew those actor-types. This was a theater town.

  “I’m in a play.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m just an understudy.”

  “You got an agent?”

  “Sort of.” I did have an agent, a Russian woman who never returned my calls.

  She said, “I acted in a play in high school.”

  “Let me guess: Our Town.”

  “Anne Frank.”

  “What happened?”

  “She died.”

  “Ha-ha.”

  “What happened was I got married.”

  It was tricky. I didn’t want to say what I knew about Alejandro’s father.

  “What’s your name?” she said.

  “Mike.”

  “Mike or Miguel?”

  “Either way.”

  “Esme.” I accepted her hand. It was cool and clean, like a chilled tomato. She put groceries on the belt. I stuck a plastic divider in there, a gentlemanly gesture. She asked for a pack of cigs, and I could picture us smoking together, having a beer.

  I said, “I started out just for practice, but now I gotta smoke every day.”

  “That’s how they get you.”

  “That’s right.”

  She said, “Alejandro says I should quit.”

  “I used to beg my mother to quit—but now here I am.”

  “Yes, here we are.” She said, and walked out. I thought I’d blown it. She was waiting outside. I only had one bag, so I took hers. We didn’t say anything for half a block.

  “What did you play in Anne Frank?”

  “Peter van Daan,” she said. “Catholic girls’ school.”

  Esme looked like she could have played the lead. All-girls school—that must have been a trip. Maybe she chose to play Peter? That’s what a real actor would have done. Where else was a girl going to get to play a guy besides that particular situation or Peter Pan? Scary play, Anne Frank.

  Alejandro continued to unburden himself. I prompted him with names: Kandahar, Basra, Fallujah, Operation Anaconda.

  Talking like his father was still alive.

  Hinojosa said Alejandro’s mama was too fine.

  I got Esme to invite me over for dinner. I didn’t know what to expect. It just seemed necessary.

  I arrived a half-hour late. She opened the door and I handed her a twelve-pack of Modelo. She wore a little lipstick, makeup, hoop earrings. Nice.

  I stepped inside, Alejandro sat on the couch, TV on. He was leaning forward, not really paying attention, maybe a little uptight. I sat down next to him. Esme went back to the stove. He stared straight ahead.

  “Smells good,” I said. He nodded.

  Their place was way nicer than my crib. Esme had fixed up the walls with framed posters and shit. The cooking odors made my stomach groan. I got up and grabbed a beer. She was already sipping one.

  “What’s cookin’?”

  “Arroz y quesadilla,” she said. “And cerveza.” We clinked bottles and chugged. “Can you set the table? That drawer.”

  I took flatware and three napkins over to the table. There was a little vase of flowers, picked from the front of the building. I looked around, poked my head inside Alejandro’s room. The walls were covered with posters of jets, choppers, soldiers. There were plastic models of tanks and cannons—even a SEAL figurine next to a framed picture of Alejandro’s dead Papi in uniform. Before pivoting back to the kitchen, I looked in the other room at the neatly-made bed. On a dresser were over a dozen pictures of Alejandro crowding out a single wedding shot with a much younger, hopeful-looking Esme next to Papi. He didn’t look much older than Alejandro was now. He was certainly no Navy SEAL.

  After dinner, I washed the dishes, Esme dried and put away. Alejandro took a bath and Esme put him to bed while I sat on the couch and channel surfed with the volume down. I heard her talking to Alejandro. I switched off the TV, leaned back my head with eyes closed. I imagined what it might be like to be part of this family, to live and sleep here; raise up Alejandro right and keep him on the good path.

  “Hey.”

  I opened my eyes to an upside-down image of Esme.

  “Wake up, sleepyhead.”

  “Not used to such a big meal.”

  “And three beers.” She sat next to me.

  This exchange had a vibe of resentment. Esme saw something familiar in me. I reminded her of him, I guess. I sat up.

  “So,” I said, reaching for her pack of cigs. “Tell me about you.”

  “I was married, my husband died.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I’m sure you know he killed himself.”

  “Yeah.”

  We smoked.

  “That must have been hard.”

  “It was.”

  “Was he Navy?”

  “Army. Corporal.”

  She got up, returned with the bag of Mint Milanos.

  “I want to ask you something about Alejandro,” I said. “Does he know?”

  “Yeah,” she said, going for the remote. “Alejandro found him in the car.”

  She had a bottle of Patrón. We started doing shots and whatnot. I kissed her, as if my mouth could suck all the sadness right out of her. When we were sure Alejandro was asleep, we went to bed.

  I didn’t tell Esme about Alejandro’s stories and, in any case, she dumped me for an older guy with better prospects.

  The landlord complained and I moved my smoking to the park. This must have changed my luck, because my until-then-worthless-agent booked me on a Hollywood movie shooting locally. The big-name director took a shine to me, I was moving to LA. Alejandro found me the day before I left town.

  “Where you been?” he said.

  “I got tired of the stairs, needed some fresh air.”

  “Fresh air you can stink up?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “You’re a smart kid.”

  “You’re leaving.”

  “Word gets around.”

  He seemed taller, though it had only been a few weeks. I smoked.

  “Tell me a story,” I said.

  He shook his head. A bat winged silently overhead. The sun had set, wind coming in off the water. Clouds were red, swollen.

  “Come on,” I said, “Gimme some Tora Bora.”

  “I dunno.”

  “Run it down, bro.”

  He drew himself up and told it, slouching. Alejandro surpassed reality. His Tora Bora was a labyrinthine cave complex with tens of tho
usands of enemy fighters; a vast subterranean city of evil intent. As soon as the Navy SEALs thought they’d reached the caves’ end—they found yet another cavern filled with homicidal Imams, ingenious booby traps and Taliban warlords. We stumbled across grottos of depravity, caches of C-4, box cutters and dirty bombs. Even as bunker buster missiles tortured the earth’s crust, causing grains of sand to fall into the commandos’ eyes and hair, they courageously pushed on. It got hotter the farther we went, the enemy more zombie than human, pools of lava in our path. Alejandro’s eyes were dots of hot, black oil, his hands whipped the story forward. I leaned in. “Deeper,” I said. “Keep going.” Something wasn’t quite right, I couldn’t put my finger on it. He wasn’t really in the moment. He was indicating.

  Alejandro stopped. I waited.

  Something telegraphed what came next—actor’s intuition, I don’t know—but I caught the fist as it came around and stopped it cold, inches from my nose. I caught it cleanly, like paper defeating rock. I was stronger than I looked, able to hold his right fist with perfect pressure, keeping him off-balance. He brought the left around and I got that one too. I stood, still gripping his fists, cigarette dangling from my lips, and kept him away so he couldn’t kick me. His pressure was steady, unyielding. He leaned in, close as he could get, and just roared. When the epic roar was done, he did it again with full-on hatred. Then I pushed him hard and he fell on his ass. He got up, glared, and ran away, out of my life forever. I didn’t call out or chase. I was thinking about his story. I realized: this was the first one ever that didn’t include his father. I couldn’t decide if that was bad or good.

  Steven J. Dines’s horror, science fiction, and dark fantasy has appeared in magazines such as GUD, Black Static, Dark Tales, Word Riot, and Interzone along with many others. His debut short story collection, Bring Your Own Light, will be coming out from TTA Press in 2016.

  Dines’s story “Unzipped” was originally published in Underground Voices in 2005.

  “unzipped”

  STEVEN J. DINES

  We could have died from a blink in that godawful desert heat. So we did not blink, or we blinked in our tents with nobody to watch. I thought it was a ball. You came along and spotted it lying in the hot sand. You pointed at it, giggling. You did that funny crablike run all kids your age do when their legs are new, rushing over to it, scooping it up, grinning and looking around for grown-up approval. You shook it, held it to your ear, listened to its innards. Maybe you had a sister with a pull-string doll. Maybe she went out to play with her friends and you sneaked into her room to hear it talk. Maybe you were sad and no one talked to you the way her doll did. The ball had something to pull, too, didn’t it? You pulled it because you wanted to hear it talk. And it talked, all right—it fucking sang: to you, to me, to the other nurses and doctors roaring, rushing, reaching toward you. I can’t get over it, kid. Can’t steer my mind around the fact that I saw it lying there in the Iraqi dust and sand a few minutes before you picked it up. I blinked.

  Back in Chicago, I avoid driving by playparks on my way to darkened rooms that creak and crack to swings and nine-tails. I don’t think about you as seven-inch spiked heels needle my balls; I think about the pain. But Mistress Shade only walks all over me until my time is up, and then I walk out. I always walk out. There has to be a way to lock that door forever.

  Tonight, it’s on to the mall, where it takes me an hour, sometimes longer, to buy a carton of milk. I like standing in front of the convex security mirrors; I like how they make me look different … flexible.

  When I arrive back at our two-bedroom apartment, Laura is in our room talking to her girlfriend Angel on the phone. Angel is a nurse, too. But the closest thing Angel has ever seen to a war zone is chronic diarrhea in a seventy-two-year-old patient who cared not where he shat. BFD. Big Fucking Deal.

  Laura sees me then bye-byes Angel until she finally hangs up. She sits on the edge of our bed and sighs heavily as she watches me step out of my clothes.

  “I need a shower.”

  “How many is that today?”

  “As many as it takes.”

  The rushing water feels like a hundred cold baby-fingers drumming against my head, neck, shoulders, and … balls; my balls ache. The water’s touch there, instead of soothing, feels strange, making a choppy sea in my stomach. When I step onto the bathmat and Laura asks if I’m feeling refreshed, I hear myself say, “Go hump yourself,” a moment before our five-year-old son, Darren, appears in the doorway.

  He is clutching a ball in his left hand. Suddenly I’m measuring the distance to the toilet.

  “Give me that,” I say.

  His smile melts. “Mommy?”

  “Give it to me. Right now. Hand it over.” I’m trying to sound calm, trying not to rush him or yank his arm off as I confiscate the thing in his hand on my careening path through the bedroom, into the living room, and onto the sofa, pursued by shocked and inquiring looks. I don’t need to turn around to see; I know them well; I know this well. They’re holding their breath like they’re afraid I’ll take that too.

  “Richard … it’s okay.”

  That pause, that tone. I won’t let this happen, it says.

  “Mommy … is Daddy okay?”

  Now that pause, that tone—the feeling I’m no longer in the room with them but somewhere else, someone else. I can’t stand it.

  “Richard, it’s for you anyway,” Laura says, pulling at her fingers as she steps closer to me. “Darren was bringing it to you. Take a look. I bought it today. I, uh … I thought it might help.”

  I look at the thing in my hand. It’s not a ball, it is a ball, it’s not a ball. It’s a foam stress toy the size of my fist, with the words We Love You stencilled on it.

  We Love You.

  What it feels like is your kidney, the one I found two days after I let you pick up that thing that wasn’t a ball. It was shrunken and dried by the sun. Only this thing has a message on it. In a way, I guess, so did yours.

  I thank both of them then excuse myself to the bedroom, where I open a drawer under the bed to a cornucopia of squishy foams—a baseball, a hockey puck, a tire, a lobster, an apple, a sheep, a pumpkin, a snowman, a toilet, a globe of the world, two burgers, an onion, several dice, and a blowfish. But no body parts: she knows that much. What she doesn’t know is the texture of your kidney after forty-eight hours in the heat. But she tries her best, like the doctors and the get-you-through-the-days they prescribe.

  As I close the drawer, I notice Laura standing in the doorway.

  “I’m going to Angel’s tonight,” she says. “Can you look after Darren?”

  “I don’t know, can I?”

  “Don’t you like your gift?”

  It ought to be funny. Laura’s ducked more bullets since I got back than I ever did in my time over there. It ought to be funny, all right, but it’s not.

  I stand and step back from the bed, the drawer. “What time are you leaving?”

  “Seven. But I’ll cook you both something to eat before I go. Honey, try to see tonight as an opportunity. You haven’t spent much time together recently. I’m sure he’d like to. Is chicken all right?”

  I’ve dropped bomb-blasted amputated limbs into air-sealed bags as one might do with a half-eaten drumstick to be saved for later. “No, not chicken,” I say. “It tastes like surgery.”

  “Then I’ll find something else. Spend time with him, Richard. I mean it.”

  That tone again. I won’t let this happen.

  Then she is gone.

  I’ve left the boy in the living room with the TV on and a comic book to look at. When I hear his screams, I think he’s ventured around the back of the TV again, like when he was four and opened it up using a screwdriver I’d left lying around. “Want to see how it works,” he’d said. But it isn’t electrocution; he’s opened his thumb turning a page of Batman, or Badman as he’ll likely call him from this point. Now he’s screaming and running, running, screaming, doing laps around the sofa
to outdistance the pain. It won’t work, kid. It won’t work.

  Part of me yearns for the shredded limbs, shattered bones, and cracked chests of the desert. I’ve massaged fighting men’s hearts. I’ve talked to a private as I helped take his foot. That shit makes for closeness, a oneness I cannot achieve with a crying five-year-old and his fucking paper-cut thumb.

  In the bathroom, I disinfect and then Band-Aid the cut, more for his comfort than anything else. Then I lead him back through to the sofa. He sits eyeing the comic on the floor as I select a DVD for him to watch. Bambi. At least there’s some amount of truth to the part where his mother gets blown away. Once the boy is settled, I slip into the bedroom.

  First, I close the door. Maybe I should invest in a lock. Then I boot up the computer. Type the password. Cut off the Start Windows fanfare by killing the speakers. Hearing it is worse somehow. Desert wallpaper appears. No man is a desert—or is it an island? No matter, because I am. Double-click Internet Connection. Click Dial … dialling … verifying username and password. Check the door. Check there’s no sound. Open a browser window. Type the web address. Check the door. There it is. Right mouse button. Save Target As … And somewhere in the recesses of the hard disk, hidden in an innocuously named folder, a file appears.

  Check the door.

  Check the speakers.

  Open …

  Laura returns home to find Darren and me on the sofa watching something—I don’t know what—on TV. I can move fast when I need to. Not always fast enough though. But then you know that.

  Seeing Laura after what I’ve just seen is what it must have been like as the sun rose over Hiroshima the morning after. She emphasizes my ugliness with her Mia Farrowesque face, draws attention to my vulgarity by standing before me thin and curveless in jeans and a flat blouse, though she’s sexless to me now because you’re with me, always, like a shadow scorched onto a stone step.

  Laura shines down on us from behind the sofa, and something in me knows she’ll set later than usual tonight. It’s those minutes I have been dreading, when the sweating starts and a man’s imagination runs free and out of control. Suddenly I want to stay with my son, but she’s telling him it’s time for bed and there’s only four more sleeps until he turns six and I didn’t know or I forgot and Daddy’s going to read you a bedtime story … I am? I am, while Mommy slips off to our bedroom and waits for a different kind of story to begin.