The Least of My Scars

by Stephen Graham Jones

  But thinking like that takes me slapback to that dream that never happened, to Dashboard Mary running her fingers through the dust of the apartment below me.

  She’ll never know me. Not like that.

  If the Number Ghosts aren’t Girl Scout fallout, though, then that can only mean that they’re early this month because of what Singer would probably call personnel problems. Somebody talking, that is. Making a face like they’re going to talk, anyway. Probably one of the bar hounds who pass the slips of paper with my address on them, they got pinched, are sweating it out under some hot lights in a cinderblock room with one mirror.

  Aside from Singer, I mean, those boarhounds, those girls with the unbreakable hearts, the grown-up boys still trying to live out the lives they planned when they were fifteen, they’re the only ones liable to ever whisper Chessire Arms down at the station. The only other people who know that address, they don’t have any teeth in their mouths. Or mouths, for that matter.

  Maybe one of the boarhounds got religion. Maybe one of them finally figured out that giving somebody that piece of paper with my address on it’s the same as pulling the handle on a guillotine (I’m the blade), the same as throwing a match on somebody soaked with gas (I’m the fire), the same as pinching some nursing home resident’s oxygen line (I’m the one who gets to be with that senior citizen for an hour before anybody gets there).

  But if some raid goes down, yeah, it’ll be me on the news, I know. Not my support staff, not all the ghosts that keep me going.

  Really, maybe the reason I’ll even be on the news is because they found me with a scythe, standing in a pile of people who used to feed me, house me, lick my boots.

  Or maybe it’ll be Dashboard Mary who turns me in.

  My chest goes cold again.

  I smile the smile I try to always smile when I’m in the game, when I’m in the glass apartment and know there’s a camera trained on my every move, and it’s supposed to be fake, my smile, but this time it’s faker than usual, fake enough that it wraps back around to the real.

  This isn’t a game.

  I look down at the ankle rig blipping its lime green eye and know she’s out there in the city right now, walking down some sidewalk, some mall, across some living room.

  Finally I have to cut a square of electric tape, push it down over the light. Because I can’t look away from it anymore. Because it’s bleeding me right down into the machinery. Turning me into a ghost.

  I could disable it if I wanted. I know that and Singer knows that. Most house-arrest flops—and this is the same model off those same police shelves—they try to pry into the works, or to soak it in enough carb-cleaner that it’ll kind of just fade off the radar, but there’s a reason their judge slammed that gavel down on them.

  With me, it’s different.

  If I wanted it disabled, if I needed that light to get all weak and thready for forty-five minutes or so, I’d use magnets and speaker wire and a microwave, and if I wanted it off I’d starve myself down almost to dehydration then get the cooking oil, see what I could slither out of, what I could cut my way out of, what I could creak my way through.

  If I wanted.

  But I don’t.

  The real reason it’s on is that Singer doesn’t want me coming for him some fine day.

  As for where I can go: all the way down to the elevator, and about halfway to the elevator on the floor below, and half that long on the next lower floor, with ten seconds of blinking yellow to give me time to come back to the menthol, baby, step into the green.

  What this means is that I’m walking the inside of a globe. My world, yeah. My rules. And the core of it, that central antenna, it’s most likely in one of the apartments across the hall that I’ve never been in. One of the apartments my cover people live in without knowing they’re cover.

  With all the metal holding the Chessire Arms up, I’d guess there’s boosters too.

  And—and somebody at Singer’s palace or mansion or estate or penthouse or whatever he has. Just watching the blinking green cursor I am.

  And you wonder why I play the game.

  Sometimes the way I see it, through the eyes of whatever puke has to watch that radar screen, is that I’m the green cursor, and whoever’s knocking is the red one. All I do, really, is smear the red one around some.

  It makes me laugh.

  I walk in perfect squares to the kitchen, skating my palm over Kid Hoodie’s hood, and come back to the window with a tomato and the salt shaker.

  It’s not in season, the tomato, but the salt makes up for that.

  Halfway through the last bite I cock my head back at the door, stare at it, finally nod to myself.

  “I didn’t order Chinese,” I say at last, in my most normal voice.

  Nobody knocks.

  “Magazines again?” I add, as if into the other room.

  Nothing.

  Once I’ve caught the Number Ghosts this way. Scared them off anyway.

  But not this time.

  “Mary?” I finally try, not really loud enough for anybody. Unless she’s already in my head.

  Controlling my steps, making them so, so normal, I cross to the door, rattle the chain more than I need to in opening it, then just stand there.

  Thin mints.

  Three boxes, lined up like soldiers, like green and white bricks.

  I swallow hard, look both ways—nothing, no one, empty—and try to taste the air. For one of Singer’s lackeys, leaving me a message here, about a job not well done. For Dashboard Mary, leaving me another kind of message.

  I can’t taste anything, though.

  Behind me, Kid Hoodie snickers.

  I tighten my lips but don’t turn around, don’t give him that satisfaction.

  And then a flutter down in the corner jerks my eyes over.

  From baseboard to ceiling is the line of duct tape I finally had to press there two years ago and then iron flat, the iron shooting me with steam the whole time (that iron’s gone now), the hot water scalding down the back of my hand (it runs different than blood), boiling the skin there (the least of my scars).

  It was better than the alternative.

  You’d think so too, had you been here then.

  What had been happening was that that corner of the wallpaper, when the super had slopped it on twenty years ago, he hadn’t used enough glue at the very bottom. What this meant was that over the years it had worked loose at the corner, enough to flutter a bit, exactly like a curtain, one trying to lift, to pull back. Starting to. In the worst way.

  But now that duct tape, it’s gone stiff, dried up.

  And that coldness behind that wallpaper, that emptiness, that chasm, that yawning fucking gulf of blackness, I can feel it in my cheekbones again, so that my eyes are marbles, slick and alien in my head.

  I close the door, set the chain, and the muscles in my hand are jerky, so that I have to use my other hand as a guide.

  Kid Hoodie doesn’t say anything about it.

  He’s learning.

  So, two years ago.

  Okay.

  I got it into my head that the Chessire Arms wasn’t the Chessire Arms at all.

  The idea was that when Singer cracked the door of the storage unit that day, what he did was just study me for a long time. Like a bug, one nobody’s seen for a long time. One everybody had kind of just thought was extinct. Except there I was, scuttling around on the concrete, sneering over my shoulder about this intrusion of light. This interruption.

  In this version, he nurses Belinda back somehow. Halfway back, anyway. Maybe just a quarter, because everybody needs somebody who’ll stay in one place like that. That they can go to and pet when they want. Her yoga helps the whole process—the kind of shape she was in already from it, I mean. It’s what she did that whole first night, even, when I was trying to sleep, think of something good this time, not just put her through the same old paces.

  But then it wormed its way into my head, the way she was breathing.
The way she was controlling her breath.

  Here she was, blood crusted on one side of her face already, one of her breasts cut into in a way she probably never planned—who knows though, right?—one of her lips bitten through more or less, and she was shutting all that out. Just hitting pose after pose, position after position, stance after stance, whatever they’re called. It made me think of people I’ve seen in the park before dawn, swimming through the dark like cartoon swans. Only, watching her, I got to thinking maybe it was only ever one person, and the rest were shadows, trying hard to do it good enough to be real.

  It got to where my breathing started to synch up with hers, just because hers was making more sense. I was one of those shadows, at least in my head. On accident.

  It’s a bad line to step over, that one.

  Well.

  Unless you’ve still got the mettle to do what has to be done.

  But she did try, I’ll give her that. With just her eyes, when she was holding whatever stance. It’s what finally made me put her tongue in that rubber, then take it out, use the rubber for its intended purpose, put the tongue back in, then use it again. I wanted her to shut up.

  Her last words?

  With her mouth, I mean, but with her eyes too I guess.

  She saluted me. Namaste. And her voice wasn’t flat or wavery or any of that. It was like she was talking to a part of me only she could see. A part she respected.

  It’s still the only time that’s ever happened.

  I stared at her a moment to be sure this wasn’t a trick then nodded back to her, found myself watching the wall, still nodding, then settled back on her again, touched the brim of the hat I always mean to be wearing, and we got down to the dirty business at hand.

  She came apart like a toy.

  I remember every gristle, every pop, every last, accidental whimper—hers and mine.

  But at the end of all that, sunlight pouring through the lifted door, making Singer and his goons fuzzy and bright like angels—

  What if they were, kind of? Or had been.

  It made as much sense as the other way, I mean. As much sense as Belinda being my job application.

  The dog that chews up your kid, say, you don’t take it home, buy it a little doggy bed and comb the knots out of its hair, do you?

  No, what you do is you follow that dog into the alley with a shovel, then call it close with the mustardy last bite of a hamburger, and hit it right on the point of the hips first, where the spine bottlenecks. That way it can’t run away. And then, man. Then you’ve got all night, brother. The rest of that particular dog’s life.

  It’s what I would do.

  Kid or no kid, yeah. Maybe the dog just looked at me wrong while I was driving by. Like it knew something. Could smell it on me.

  But Singer. Singer had a reason.

  What if he’d visited some of that kind of justice back onto me? What if he’d rolled that metal door down, pulled on a pair of long rubber gloves, and told his goons to watch and learn, boys.

  Then what’s this, then, the Chessire Arms?

  This is why the duct tape in the corner. And the superglue rubbed down over it. All the blue marker crosses traced on top of that.

  Vegetable Ghost, Number Ghost?

  What if they’re all ghosts, me included?

  What if this is how it turns out in the end, that you have to live in a room with every last sap you ever did in? Only, individuals like myself, yeah. One room’s not going to cut it, horsey boy. Not even one house. Try a run-down apartment building in the forgotten part of heaven. Everybody but me snickering behind their walls, about the big joke. Them all drawing straws to see who’s coming to see me next, keep the joke going.

  The shits.

  All the same, though.

  Say this is a joke, the Chessire Arms, the last joke. That what I’m grinding down the third sink is just being fed back through the faucet to me. That the kind of thing you really want to know? To have to know and then keep on living with?

  So what you write on the supply list next door, what you write over and over in the most perfect letters, it’s DUCT TAIP, DUCT TAIP, and then you stand there and close your eyes, listen for ghosts, laughing behind their hands.

  It’s no way to live.

  After a while of that, you’ll step outside the window one night between shows, just to prove to yourself that the concrete down there’s really real.

  It usually is.

  If the thin mints are poison, then I’m immune, I guess. Unless it’s a delayed thing.

  I couldn’t just let them sit there in the hall, though.

  They were a little green and white beacon.

  The ghosts across from me, who I only know from their footsteps—they could be goat-legged satyrs for all I know, ones that eat barbecued lamb chops every night then pick nits from each other’s beards by television light—the next time they step out, they would see those three boxes.

  The first packages ever left for me.

  Their chance to finally introduce themselves?

  Come on, dear. He’s so quiet, he’s got to be nice. Just put on your good—no, the other one. And do your belt—

  This is how accidents happen.

  There should be a series of public service announcements, really. Of Dick and Jane scooping up the unknown neighbor’s cookies, skipping to the door then standing there with their hats in their hands, waiting to make nice.

  And then, some boy peeking out his door down by the elevator, he sees it in silhouette: the bloody maw of this great chainsaw beast opening, sucking these two do-gooders down headfirst.

  Or, better: stepping aside, ushering them in, then checking left and right down the hall, catching the drained-white boy’s eye at the last possible instant, and smiling, winking.

  The kind of wink that means later, yeah.

  See you after dark, Scout.

  Don’t wait up.

  And maybe that’s what I should be doing, even. If nobody’s coming to my door, I could put out a little bait.

  Only, doing people too close to you, that can be bad news.

  You have to range out. Do all different kinds.

  I reel in the thin mints.

  They taste like plastic, make me feel like an android.

  Riley likes them, though.

  I have to soak the two she gets in milk first, so she can get them down. With my hand on her forehead, no light at all, I can feel the muscles in her jaw, how they’re pulling on her thin skull.

  Thank you, I say to me, in her voice, in my head.

  Because she would if she could.

  I don’t know what I’d do without her.

  Kids, shit. They turn the best of us soft, I guess.

  Later I do push ups to work the cookies off, and when my arms start to shake I do more, and more, biting fibers from the carpet on the way up, blowing them out on the way down.

  I should have taken longer with the guy and the dog, I know now.

  You’ve got to ration, got to make what you’ve got last.

  Next time, though. Next time we’ll go days, round and round. I’ll be the carnie leaning down from the carousel, his smile painted on, his gloved hand reaching down.

  Some rides never end.

  I collapse into my chair, naked as the day—well, naked as a lot of the days, really.

  When the sun comes, though, it’s for me.

  My pores open like mouths and drink the heat in and everything’s perfect again.

  It could be two weeks ago. The hours before Kid Hoodie slouched down my hall, his eyes in his hood like two dim lights, his mouth cutting this thin grin I already want to—

  Shit.

  What I’m staring at, just past the armrest, is the stupid little phone. The one I know inside-out, that I have no excuse not to be thumbing deeper into.

  No excuse except that I don’t want to know.

  That it’s easier not to.

  But I’m not duct-taping over this, either.

&nbs
p; I start doing that, and pretty soon the whole place’ll be grey. My own padded room. Might as well just do my eyes and have it done with already.

  No thanks.

  I’m not stupid either, though.

  To listen, I free up the wet-dry vac’s cord, put my hand at the base of its spine like a cop and roll it into the living room with me, its little casters so eager.

  Like they don’t know the hall, the living room. Every little crack.

  I check the front door once more, then end up checking the hall too—you never know—and touch the five usual things on the way back to my chair. Just another day.

  “Well then,” I say out loud, the father at dinner, in the moments after some domestic spat’s just died down, and he’s ready to go ahead and just eat the fucking meatloaf.

  The phone’s right there on top of its manual, just like it has been.

  I palm it over, turn it up to face me, ready for the Dashboard Mary figurine to be there all holy and evil, but instead, now that the phone’s got juice, and is connected, there’s a message.

  From—from when it was ringing before. Has to be. Because it hasn’t rang since.

  I stare at the notification like I can decipher it from arm’s length, I guess. Scare it back deeper into the screen.

  It’s just a phone, though.

  Nothing.

  I nod to make this even more true and pull the manual over. Not for the directions to listen to the voice mail—I know that—but for the four numbers written down into the four boxes provided. Kid Hoodie’s private code, for future reference. Should he get on a soap opera and catch amnesia or something.

  Like it was meant to be, then—and what isn’t, right?—I open right to that page. Probably because he had to cock it open to write in it. Cock it open far enough to break the spine over, so that the manual has a memory of him too.

  I’ll burn it later. Something special.

  But now.

  This has to be why Mary left it. If she left it on purpose, I mean, it was for this, so I could listen to the voice mail. I probably wasn’t even supposed to find the voice memo, Kid Hoodie trying to . . . what? Protect himself by recording me?