The Least of My Scars

by Stephen Graham Jones

  That’s a long way off for me, though.

  Discipline, discipline.

  To prove it, I make myself sit on the stool by the corner of the kitchen counter again. The skull, the clay.

  Instead of trying to make my fingers take orders from my eyes anymore, I pull the hood down to my nose, study the floor, and let my fingers remember the soft spots in Kid Hoodie’s face. That look his mom probably called sweet when he was a kid, and guilty as hell. The way he’d flare his eyes at somebody, just after they’d turned around on him. How he’d hold his lips in an exaggerated pucker that, to anybody who knew him, meant he wasn’t stoned, he hadn’t been smoking, no, don’t they trust him? Ever heard of a thing called forgiveness?

  Yeah. Let’s see Henry Lee do this.

  After a while, kneading the clay even warms it up, so that it feels right, like Kid Hoodie’s bleeding again. Like I’m shaping real flesh here. Molding a real person. I half-expect him to whisper something to me. That he was asking for it, yeah. And that it’s better this way, really. That I have no idea the shit he was having to deal with, before he walked down my hall, sat down at my table.

  I want to adjust myself, but don’t need the clay turning to grey dirt on the crotch of my pants over the course of the day.

  Time for adjusting later.

  Maybe I will put that G back on the list in the lefthand apartment. YG, even. A whole string of them, like scissor dolls, pinned to the wall.

  And—yeah. Maybe I’ll save some of the clay, get the girl to let me put it on her face. So that the whole time, I can reach out with the side of my finger, change her to somebody else like flicking a switch.

  Shit yeah.

  And then I open my eyes.

  My fingers are deep in Kid Hoodie’s face.

  Except it’s not him. And it’s not anybody else either. It’s not even what somebody looks like after two or three years in the ground.

  It makes me breathe hard, have to control it.

  Twenty seconds later I’m standing where the stool was, that dusty little hatchet in both hands.

  The whole time since he sat down at my table, all the days between, they’re blipped away, gone, erased. The oily tendrils are feeling up the inside of my neck, cradling my thoughts, blacking them out, singling them down to a single sneer, focused right in front of me.

  “Couldn’t just play along, could you?” I say down to Kid Hoodie.

  He just stares out at me.

  I turn him around so he’s facing away, thinking his tough guy thoughts, what a hood he’s going to be when he grows up, what a pushover this old shut-in is, just wanting to play some bullshit ancient board game, how he’s never going to be like that, man. Never.

  “Got that right,” I tell him, lower than before, and wind the hatchet up, backhand style.

  And then there’s a knock at the door.

  Because standing there with a hatchet, my hands slick grey, my breath too deep for anything honest, because that’s no way to greet somebody—nevermind that lumpy old skull on the kitchen counter, just a little project I’m working on in my spare time—I just stand there coiled up. Waiting for the next knock.

  It comes about twenty seconds later. Maybe twenty-five.

  Sometimes this is what I do. If the follow-up knock’s half a minute later, which is polite, then I make it quick, with piano wire or a hammer or thumbs deep through the eyes. Like mercy. Ten seconds, though, well. Then we’re in for a day or two of fun times, I’d say. Bring out the toys, let’s make some noise. And twenty, that’s kind of a no man’s land there. It’s saying to me that they understand I may not have heard the first, but they don’t have all day here either, okay? Depends on what mood I’m in, really. If I’ve had my sun yet or not.

  And then there’s always the possibility of just one knock, one shave and a haircut and then somebody out there shrugging, giving up, slogging all the way back down the stairs, trudging the five blocks back to their car before the meter waves its flag.

  That’s unlikely, though. Not because of anything complicated about human nature, but because they know that they have to see me, in order to do or get to whatever’s next. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been given this specific address.

  And yeah, I’ve considered the possibility of that one-knocker being telepathic, maybe. Of, the moment their knuckles rap that last time, them remembering some dream they had four (five) nights ago, then stopping with their skin to the wood, staring into the grain of the door, and making the good decision for once. Walking away, into some other life.

  So far that’s only happened twice. In three years.

  That’s not bad numbers, not at all.

  And hell, for all I know, they walked down, their hands in their pockets so they wouldn’t be tempted to knock on any more doors, and, with their shoulders up by their face like that, ducked into the street, got mown down by a bus.

  May as well have stayed and had some fun.

  Could be I’d baked a cake, I mean.

  Or something.

  And then I’m not breathing so hard anymore. I uncoil the hatchet, let it just hang.

  That last knock, maybe the first one too, here’s how it went: knock, wait; knock, wait; knock, wait; knock, wait; knock, wait.

  Five of them, perfectly spaced.

  It dinged a delicate little bell in my head, left it trembling with anticipation.

  What I wanted to do, what I had to stop myself from doing, really, was tapping the back of the little hatchet on the counter five times, to balance. Like I was this hopeful lonely rabbit, slapping my foot to the forest floor then listening with my whole body.

  Instead, though it didn’t really count, I clacked my hind teeth five times. It’s cheating, because that’s so close to my ear that it sounds louder than it is, gets me more credit. But if you don’t at least try to balance things out, then who knows what can happen.

  Right now, I mean, the person out there knocking so evenly, it could just be a standing blob of fleshy jello, the only thing hard about it at all the knuckled grip of bones it’s knocking with.

  What it’s waiting for is to see if all those even fives are going to build up out there, wash down over it, melt it into a homicide detective, or into my father.

  If I can balance it out, though, counteract it with perfect symmetry, then those fives’ll wash down and it’ll just be another refugee from the world, looking for that gate to Hell.

  Right here, I’ll say, and step aside, usher him in, my eyes flashing like pennies.

  And I have no rules for a third series of knocks.

  It’s never happened.

  Unable to let go of the hatchet, I pad across to the door, stand at it.

  Somebody’s breathing out there. Shuffling.

  No turning back.

  For knocking so perfectly, though, for making me flash on a giant metronome out there, the round fist of its brass-handed arm reaching out barely enough to tap into the wood of my door, I promise to make this quick: swing the door open with my left hand, which is backwards, but then what the door’ll swing open on will be the little hatchet, its notch just made for the bridge of the human nose. Never mind who might be standing down the hall, their keys hovering near their own door, their key a lifetime away from the lock.

  Scurry in, children. Daddy’s working.

  Except.

  Right when the web of my left hand sparks into the brass knob, my feet braced to pull the door back all at once, there’s a sound behind me.

  On the table.

  Kid Hoodie’s phone.

  And the ring tone, it’s all different now. It makes me pull my lips away from my teeth, like an animal.

  Instead of the digital chirping it’s done those three times, this is something custom, something plundered right from my fifth grade afternoons, that I haven’t heard for years and years, not even in my head.

  A television song.

  Come and knock on my door, we’ve been waiting for you.

  I don�
��t pull the knob, can’t now. Can hardly stand, even. The cell signal’s passing right through me, from the hall to the table, the sound going back along that same path, from the table to the hall.

  It doesn’t ring again. I don’t know what I would have done.

  After the footsteps out there are gone I edge to the window, part the curtains on the right side.

  Crossing the street, pursing her phone without breaking stride, is a white-skinned woman with black flames of hair. Boots with clacky heels, tight jeans, ruffled collar on a wispy shirt. Looking both ways but there’s nothing coming.

  Dashboard Mary.

  Hello.

  I don’t write anything on the list in the lefthand apartment.

  Instead, I wait for the sun to come.

  Maybe that’s why I’ve been thinking wrong. Not enough Vitamin D.

  It takes forever, though.

  But patience. I know waiting.

  To pass the day, I retreat to the game.

  Not Trouble or Sorry or any of the others in the cabinet, that would just remind me there’s nobody here, but the other one. The one where I’m the main player.

  What it involves is nodding myself into the belief that I’ve been recruited by the television networks. Just one at first, but then they all want a piece, and are willing to pay. It’s not about the money for me, though. All I need is one glass-walled apartment far under the streets, suspended in a giant and secret old Cold War bunker, with no lights anywhere, so that when I look out, through my walls, there’s just a blackness. And I have no idea how deep it goes, how long the trash I dump out the door falls before hitting anything. What happens when I flush the toilet.

  I’m alone. Except for the remote, and the television.

  Per my contract, I can never watch any show to completion, but have to digest fifteen minute increments, so as to give each network its shake. They’re paying for all this, after all.

  And here’s how I got to where I am: on the third strike (that they knew about) of my aggravated pederasty career, when I was all ready to smile cheese for the booking camera, bend over into Population for a few decades, this lawyer stood up, intervened. Without ever talking directly to me, but so professional all the same, he bailed me out, got me a reprieve of some sort, a delay in the prosecution that’s turned out to be pretty permanent. Or else the bail went forfeit, was really my price tag.

  Waiting for my trial then, for what I thought was going to be my trial, he trundled in some lackey from the network. Somebody they could burn if they needed to. Somebody who hardly even existed, except for the offer he had for me.

  Deal was, they needed somebody with my particular tastes, with a palate refined by years of concentration, and hands-on kind of experiments.

  We both knew what he was talking about here.

  I smiled, leaned back in my chair, did my eyebrows for him.

  My hands, of course, were cuffed. Because I might, at any moment, think of some perfect little girl, start jacking off.

  You can’t stop a guy who’s committed, though.

  I was Houdini to their cuffs.

  But the offer.

  The flunky’s eyes were dead as a snake’s, just watching me. I wondered if he was maybe a robot, even. If a boardroom of network executives were actually here with me, behind those controls. But he didn’t really have to be a robot for that to be the case, either.

  I tried to look deeper and the flunky’s mouth twitched into a cute little smile for an instant.

  “Well?” he said.

  My expensive lawyer—the flunky’s really, I suppose—was pacing by the door. The less he heard, all that.

  Like he wasn’t getting paid too. I wasn’t going to be the only one going to hell, I mean. Not by a long shot.

  Before that, though, I still had some time to kill.

  As it turned out, years and years and years.

  The problem the network had been having, see, was FCC fines. Not for obscenity or vulgarity or even indecency, but for suggestion.

  So, to get it straight from the start, it wasn’t about them being upstanding citizens, it was about them saving their bottom line. Them covering their ass.

  Spending a little on me to keep the rest from the FCC.

  What had happened was that some task force or neighborhood watch group or someshit had done a study on the viewing habits of all the so-called pedophiles arrested over the last two years.

  The results they got were well-publicized, enough to wake the lumbering fine machine of public decency, the Federal Communications Commission: a solid two-thirds of those misprosecuted gentleman, their show of choice had been this one with a ten-year-old girl in it (the actress was actually twelve, but fuck it, right?). In interviews, they’d huddle forward and whisper something about her hips, the way she moved when the camera was at about desk level, and she was kind of aware of being watched, but not really making that big a deal of it either. That killed them, went right to their grubby little souls, made them forget themselves, explode into nothing.

  At least that’s how the report phrased it.

  However, the studies eventually done on that show, and the rest, could find no single thing to avoid next time, in whatever show got the greenlight.

  Enter me, connoisseur of all things young.

  All you needed, really, was the right kind of eyes. The right predilections, the right tastes, honed over a lifetime.

  For my part, I just needed my suspended glass apartment, the bunker all around.

  For their part, they needed a single, ‘low-resolution’ (but I know better) camera fixed on my television chair.

  And my cable box, it only feeds me kiddie shows, fifteen minutes at a time. Or any shows with any kids in them at all.

  On the table beside me, under the lamp, is a backup remote, some paper towels (I hate tissues; they break all apart afterwards), and the Corn Husker lotion I cut my teeth on. The grit in it is like . . . well. It’s necessary. Big meaty platelets.

  So, what the network—the networks, now—do is hire somebody, maybe that same original flunky, to watch the feed. To watch me.

  Anytime I start to get too interested in the show on my box, he’s to mark it in his logbook. If it’s even a he up there, I mean. Most times, I want it to be bring-your-daughter-to-work day, and for the dad to be on a coffee break, the girl to have been about to change the channel, but—?

  I can put on a real show, I mean.

  And, they think they’re in charge, the networks, that I’m in some glass prison down there, serving the safe sentence I would have been doing topside, but they don’t know anything.

  Half the time, the lotion and the box fan going at once, I’m not even focused on the screen, but have ramped through that living room the sitcom family uses, are back in their bedroom, so like other bedrooms I’ve been in.

  It jacks their data, alters careers, makes them change their whole programming schedule.

  I change it, I mean. And that changes everything, at every level of society. Just me at the center of it all, hunched over in my chair, squinting with concentration, reality creaking into place around me with each individual stroke.

  And still, every day there’s food, whatever I want, and I can monitor my bank account on the computer (and not only that—they say I need regular outlets for my irregular interests, and have dedicated a line, one they say can’t be traced), and the only trade-off is that I have to sit here at least eight hours a day, glued to the set. Connected to it by these long white strings, anyway.

  Ha.

  The only thing that brings me out of this, my thumb frantic on the remote every fifteen minutes, is that the sun finally slants through the window of the Chessire Arms, warms my left shin.

  I look away from the screen, from the comfort of the game. But I bring those same eyes over with me. That feeling.

  I’m in control again.

  For two hours I let the world warm me, infuse me, the chatter from the television dying away, the sound of
Dashboard Mary’s heels—that I couldn’t even hear from up here, but were all the louder for it—dying away too.

  When it’s over I stand, wait for the walls around me to shimmer into place. They’re not glass. But the show that’s on now, it’s one I would have wanted.

  So there’s that.

  I smile, flick it off anyway. Can call it back when I want.

  “So,” I say to Dashboard Mary, wherever she is by now. “You’re my age, I take it.”

  How else would she know Three’s Company.

  I nod to myself, slip next door to spoon Riley some soup, clean her table, and then am back to my front door.

  Not allowing myself to pause, and just to prove to myself that I can, I swing it open, can see from overhead, like this is a blueprint, the tight little sweep the architect designed for it to follow.

  Everything according to plan.

  Except.

  There on the carpet, where Dashboard Mary had to be standing, is a thick little oblong book of sorts.

  I get a flashlight, train it on the thin white cover, my thoughts so unpolluted right now.

  The user’s manual for Kid Hoodie’s cute little phone.

  I look away, close the door and pace from room to room slapping the walls, thinking, then going back, slapping each slap four more times, so it’s really two claps leaving one slap over, which you can only fix by making sure you’ve done even sets of half-claps, so they all add up right, no singles left hanging to cup your face later, before you even realize it’s happening.

  And then I do it.

  With gloves and sunglasses and a hat, and hanging onto the sleeve of one jacket that’s tied to another that’s tied to another that’s tied to a squat little leg of the couch, wedged against the counter now.

  I lean out into the hall, nudge this gift with the leathery back of my index finger.

  When it doesn’t do anything, I collect it.