The Least of My Scars

by Stephen Graham Jones

  I don’t know.

  Last night I took the wet-dry vac apart again, just usual maintenance. The whole thing disassembled there on the carpet, the television light flickering over it.

  I don’t have to put it back together each time. I put it back together because I want to.

  But this time. It’s like a joke.

  This time, all the usual parts in their usual places, wiped down with alcohol pads and then a light solution of bleach, there was still a rattle from the canister.

  It made me think of roulette, and thinking of roulette made me push away fast, all the way to the wall.

  The sound of roulette is the sound of a marble.

  Sure enough.

  With another closet rod I tipped the canister over, apologizing the whole time for the disrespect, then tapped on the undercarriage until the world had to show itself a little.

  A single cat-eye marble, flashing down into the carpet.

  Staring at me.

  I shrugged, looked around, Kid Hoodie snickering under his table, then reached down, touched the carpet in front of the marble with the middle finger of my right hand then with my index finger, then with my ring finger, galloping so that I cycle all at once to five, in a perfect swirl the world can’t counter, and wind up back in the middle.

  And then I take it, swallow it.

  It’s a pearl now. It’s mine. All it can see is me.

  It’s made me stronger, I mean.

  Strong enough that I don’t even have to go to the blinking voice mail first. That would be doing what she wants.

  I might as well just start answering when it rings, then.

  Maybe I should start calling in tips on myself, even.

  Word is there’s this guy, see, he’s up in a—you’ve heard of him? Yeah, well, know where he lives?

  They’d line up at my door, stack up in the lefthand apartment. Head-to-toe, I mean. I’d give them the real scoop, yeah. The down and dirty, the inside story.

  But it would cost them.

  Everything.

  That’s probably what she wants me to do, though. What she’s goading me towards. The happy ending for her, for what I did to Kid Hoodie, is for me to be out in the street, blood steaming off one of my arms, a hostage under the other arm, spotlights baking thousands of kilowatts into my skin, my chest dancing with little red bugs.

  She’d be there then, I know. Just watching the show. Eating a piece of cheese pizza, maybe, like everything’s right in her world now.

  But no.

  It’d be a meat lover’s pizza.

  She’s not like me, I mean.

  Nobody is.

  And the way I know that’s what she wants is that, right now, wherever she is, she knows that her boyfriend’s not coming back. And she knows the door to my apartment, whatever number’s on it today.

  Instead of calling the law, though, she’s trying to handle this one herself.

  Because it’s personal to her.

  Her first mistake.

  If it ever gets personal, then you can’t tell when to step away. You’re always thinking just a little more time, that you can stay in this for a minute or two longer, nothing bad’s going to happen, it’s all going to work out.

  It’s not personal to me, though, babe.

  You’ll wish you’d known that earlier, trust me.

  Look away even for a moment and I’ll take you by the chin, wrench your face around, make you see the way the world really is. The way I see it.

  Like I’m even going to listen to any of her voice mail bullshit.

  Let other people play games. What I do, it’s dead serious.

  I go back to the voice memos. For nostalgia. To hear Kid Hoodie, when he thought he was going to live forever.

  It makes me hard on accident.

  I look over to him under the table and smile my best leery smile, put my hand in my pants some.

  It’s one thing I’ve never tried, getting off to the voice of the recently departed while that recently departed watches.

  I hit play again, again, until it’s a frenzy, until I’m almost there, but then stab down too deep into the button, access some older voice memo but pause it just as fast.

  I pull my hand up, cradle the little phone.

  The date is weeks before he ever came to see me.

  Weeks.

  It’s a note, from Kid Hoodie to himself. The way reporters do, I guess.

  Just this, whispered while he’s walking in some crowded place: “She says a nurse.”

  She says a nurse.

  I’m not hard anymore.

  I can feel the marble growing in me, now.

  What’ll happen is that I’ll open my eyes in my bed one night, and my irises’ll flicker and waver, stand up into the blue cat-eye flame.

  And then I don’t know who I might be.

  But I can’t cut it out of my gut, either.

  I sit on the counter, lean on the refrigerator. Stare across the dining room table.

  A nurse, she said.

  This is what she wants me to think: that the Chessire Arms isn’t an apartment building at all. That it’s Chessire Arms Mental Facilities. Chessire Arms Asylum. Chessire Arms Home for the Criminally Insane.

  That—that it’s not a place I came to voluntarily. That my apartment, it’s just the one assigned to me, and that I’ve wrapped up so deep inside myself that all I can hear is snatches of her conversation filtering down.

  To my mother, coming on a Sunday to visit: I don’t know why he’s not responding.

  To me, when I’m conked: there there, all better.

  She doesn’t want to kill me, to do to me some version of what I did to Kid Hoodie. That’s not it at all.

  She either wants to pull back the curtain, show me who I really am, make me acknowledge it, or she wants to trick me into thinking that’s who I really am. That I maybe killed somebody once in a motel room, sure. Maybe even a couple one week. But that I got locked up for that, started hiding inside my head, where the spree could go epic. Never have to stop.

  Could there really be somebody like me? Living in a room where the punks just come knocking?

  I wouldn’t buy it. If I can’t, though, the next question’s worse: Do they wheel me around, or just leave me in my room?

  Whatever she wants, I suppose.

  Whatever she wants me to think.

  And the only way I can prove her wrong, or right, is to leave. To go down to the street, be sure it’s the street, not just more mental real estate. See whether that was me wearing scrubs the other day. Walking away from myself.

  But that can’t be.

  I remember it all so well, the shit I’ve done. The taste, the grit, the shudders. The way that, even if you take a voice box apart and blow gently across the little curtains of muscle, that still, you can’t make it make the meaty sound you want.

  And I knew it was wrong when I was doing it, even. I just did it anyway. But I wouldn’t know it was wrong if I had gone off the deep end, would I? The wrong of it’s half the fun.

  And—and I’m careful each time, anyway. Too careful, smarter than I need to be. They never would have caught me, would they?

  Until Belinda, yeah. The unnatural brunette. Downward Facing Dog Woman.

  I laugh a bit, so that my shoulders shake with it.

  It’s so fake.

  Says a kid on visiting day, tugging his mom’s sleeve: “Who’s that guy over there in his chair, crying?”

  He’s not crying, honey. Don’t stare. That’s a chuckle, see? He’s probably thinking about something good, from before.

  That’s not me.

  I don’t care what she says.

  But.

  She says a nurse.

  I close my eyes as tight as I can, push the heels of my hands over them too.

  This means they had me, the story of me, in their sights for months already. They had time, time to—

  She says a nurse.

  She says that a nurse. She says that a nur
se would . . . what? Work?

  That has to be what Kid Hoodie meant, talking to himself as he walked through whatever lobby.

  That a nurse would work on me.

  That that’s the kind of trick that would give them the advantage they needed. The kind that would reduce me not just to their level, but to lying there in a bed all day, staring, the past not the past anymore, but a stolen thing. Something ripped away from me. Along with everything that is me.

  It’s not about Kid Hoodie for her. Kid Hoodie was just collateral damage, a pawn she had to sacrifice to get in my head, a human bridge between us.

  It was never about the story for her, never about going public. That’s just what she told Kid Hoodie, when she found him wherever she found him, and got him to believe that something like this could make his career, make him famous.

  Word about me isn’t on the streets at all.

  Singer’d never let that happen.

  But she knew. She knows.

  I’ve been what she’s after the whole time.

  Revenge.

  Unless her shift goes over at eleven, yeah. Unless she has a closet full of sterile white hose.

  Shit.

  I pull my hands down my face, lean forward to a sound not like casters.

  It’s drier, somehow.

  Fingertips, reaching up around the corner edge of the wallpaper by the door. Nails not painted at all, the skin bloodless.

  I breathe in sharp, plant my hand behind me to keep from falling, and hit the disposal switch. The whole countertop shakes under me.

  I grub back, turn it off, my eyes only leaving the corner by the door for a flash.

  It’s enough.

  The hand’s gone.

  This time I pack the wallpaper down with molding clay, and then spray lighter fluid on it, and then light it, cook it into a doughy stone.

  As punishment, I breathe in as much of the green smoke as my lungs’ll let, and then when the smoke alarm in the hall starts to scream I pull the door open before I can remember not to.

  There’s the sound of footsteps in both directions, people rushing around, I don’t know.

  Just the sound, though. Because I’m not looking.

  All I can see is the square package I’m standing over.

  I turn my head to the side and grab it with both hands, slide it in. Pour a whole pitcher of lemonade over the smoldering clay. Slide the chain on the door back and forth, back and forth, waiting for the footsteps outside to die down.

  They finally do.

  From the window I watch the rest of the drama: a fireman talking to a mom, the mom’s fingers clamped onto the upper arm of some skater punk.

  What they do is take his cigarettes out. The fireman grinds the whole pack between his gloved fingers, then kisses the flakes away.

  After that I draw the curtain.

  They’re not coming up here.

  That’s all that matters.

  That and the package.

  It’s from nobody, to nobody.

  But I know.

  I balance it on the middle rack of the oven and open it with tongs and a coat hanger.

  It’s a Girl Scout uniform. The Girl Scout uniform.

  Her name was Alissa.

  I leave it in the oven.

  In a haze the next morning, trying to blink away the sunlight I usually just drink, I make my way through the short door and into the lefthand apartment.

  As for any dreams I might have had, they were from the marble swimming through my veins, so hardly count.

  What I’m wearing doesn’t matter. Some old slacks, no shirt, two-day socks.

  The reason it doesn’t matter—I only remember as I’m letting a quick five flutter on the wall outside the closet I duck through, the wall I have to use to pull myself forward into the lefthand apartment—is that there isn’t a Vegetable Ghost. Or, there is, but he’s tamped down into a barrel ass-first, the way you’d store a doll, maybe. If you really wanted to just be throwing it away.

  And there’s no smell, because of the plastic wrap on the barrel.

  Some grey matter on the floor, sure, but brains don’t ever smell like real meat. The bugs’ll get into them, but they’re not particular either, can’t be trusted. The thing with brains probably has something to do with what they say about each animal having just enough to tan their own hide. I don’t know, haven’t tried that one yet.

  But it’s not just brains, either. You have to pee into that mix too. Some right amount.

  It’s not the best day so far, I mean.

  I lean back, arc a line of bright yellow down onto the grey stain on the carpet, and am just getting worried about it mixing somehow with the other pee on the floor—I don’t want to be like them—when a flashbulb pops all around me and time slams to a stop long enough for me to appreciate steam rising suddenly from my line of pee, exactly like the pee’s breathing out, relaxing. Or like it’s a warm river in the early morning, the fog clinging to it, riding it.

  Then things start moving again.

  I’m arching my back as far forward as I can, as far as anybody ever has.

  No time to scream yet, but it’s coming.

  There’s somebody behind me, with something dull and hot.

  A cattle prod. I recognize the smell, the sound, the punch.

  Before I’m even down, there’s another one up at the back of my neck.

  Another flashbulb pop, followed by the sizzle.

  I waver, my hands still aiming my dick, and fall forward into the mess.

  This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen, I want to tell them, Singer’s goons.

  This isn’t how it goes.

  But. One of them is standing on my left hand, grinding. The other’s got his instep of his prettyboy loafer around the arch of my neck, pushing my face down into the stink.

  Because I can’t hear anything yet, they wait.

  Finally my body heaves and a line of puke peters out. I swallow some of it back down and it makes me puke again, so that it’s coming out my nose, even.

  “You’re dead,” I finally tell them, when I can.

  It’s a joke. They laugh.

  On the kitchen floor, unfolded, staring along the floor at me, is the Dead Vegetable Ghost.

  They came to see why he wasn’t finishing his rounds. Maybe there really is a restaurant grease racket.

  “You’re making things difficult for yourself,” the one with his foot on my neck rumbles. It’s a prepared script, I can tell. “There’s no need to bite the hand that feeds you,” the other chimes in.

  “Dead,” I say again, the word making bubbles in the carpet.

  “Just don’t let it happen again,” the first one says, pushing harder as he steps away.

  I don’t move, won’t give them that.

  “Or we’ll be back,” the second one says.

  “Promise?” I manage.

  The muscles in my back are still twitchy, misfiring.

  “Guaranteed,” he says, and comes gently off my hand.

  It’s the mistake people always make. When you’ve got somebody down, you cripple them at the very least. Make it so they can’t stand.

  My throbbing hand comes up like a snake, to drive through what, if he were a woman, would be his birthing canal. To reach into his belly, pull his guts out all at once, wrap them around the other sap’s neck, bring him to his knees and make him beg.

  Except that first one already has his cattle prod to my lower back.

  It fires, curls me up, leaves me smoking.

  They stand over me talking about I don’t know what. One of them strikes a cigarette up just for a single pull then grinds it out slow on the back of my head.

  I’m there enough to know it’s happening, not there enough to feel it yet.

  And then they’re just black-slacked legs standing in the kitchen, with orders to get my next list, give it to the New Vegetable Ghost.

  “Dead,” I try to say again, but don’t know if it makes it past my lips.
r />   And then I’m gone.

  That afternoon, still stumbly, I accidentally call Riley by the Girl Scout name. She moans about it, maybe even moves her leg. I close my eyes, apologize. Let her run her hand over my head, just shaved. Not to hide who I am, or who I was to let them get the drop on me like that, but to get away from the smell of burnt hair.

  I am going to kill those two.

  Anybody with black slacks, really.

  At least the marble finally passes, a little tink against the porcelain, like I’ve been eating teeth again. I don’t save it, just let it swirl away.

  The muscles in my shoulders are still jumpy.

  I’ve checked the rattletrap connected to the lefthand front door probably thirty times already, and managed to run a ground wire from it to my kitchen light, as backup, the kitchen light’s usual ground just hanging.

  Now if somebody opens the door in the lefthand apartment, my light’ll go dark.

  Every time it zapped me, too, I just bared my teeth back at it.

  It was nothing. Neither were those punks. Just lucky is all.

  Except I know it’s her fault, Dashboard Mary’s.

  Finally, halfway through boiling some squash Singer probably had to fly in from Mexico, I take the phone, highlight the last call and hit the green button.

  It rings five perfect times, dumps me to her message box.

  Another trap, I know: since Kid Hoodie’s recording of my voice is still here with me, she’s trying to get another.

  But she needs to know this, too.

  “You’re no nurse,” I hiss, just a pushed-through whisper that could be anybody anywhere, judge. Not even my phone.

  I’m onto her stupid game.

  Those weren’t orderlies next door. Those weren’t syringes they were poking into my back. And if it was institutionalized electroshock, I would have at least had something to bite down on, I’m pretty sure.

  After the call’s over and done with I stare at the little screen, daring her to call back. Daring her to call ever again at all.

  Instead, just the same blinking from yesterday.

  The last voice mail she left.

  I shake my head, stir my squash. Stand in the steam and listen.

  It makes the message I just left stupid.

  She’s not pretending to be a nurse anymore. End of that charade.

  What she’s doing now is warning me.