“Morrie, that’s...”
“Blacks, white trash, maybe a few Hispanics thrown in for variety, Sarah. That’s who Asshole America wants to see in their living rooms. Look at our audience polls: Asian doesn’t fly in syndication.”
“Morrie…” Chang said, white-knuckling her pen.
“Christ, Sarah, I thought I'd stumbled into one of those goofy Jackie Chan pictures, only no funny black guy and no chop-chop!”
Chang threw her pad down and stood up.
I was dying to get out of there. All I could think of was the damaged nobility I’d seen in Susan Jefferson’s eyes.
And Morrie was making a complete jackass of himself.
“Morrie, that’s the biggest load of corporate media racist bullshit I’ve ever heard,” Chang said.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Morrie said.
Chang removed her glasses and shoved them into the pocket of her denim shirt.
“You, Morrie,” Chang snapped. “You’re a racist.”
“I am not a racist!”
“Morrie, in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m Asian. You can’t make racially chauvinistic statements like that when I’m in the fucking room! You’re a Jew, for God’s sake. I’d expect you to know better.”
“Hey! Now hold on here, Sarah.”
“What have you got against Asians then, Morrie?”
“Oh please, girlfriend,” Morrie snorted. “You’re from Pomona, for God’s sake. You’re as Asian as I am.”
“Jesus, Morrie!”
“Look at Marcus: He’s black and you don’t see him complaining.”
Chang looked over at me.
“Yes, Marcus,” she said. “How do you put up with Morrie’s racist bullshit?”
Chang and I had spent many late nights fantasizing about ways to kill Morrie off the show, but when you have a winning horse you don’t jump off mid-race. Not if you want to stay afloat in television.
I repeated that to myself as I recalled the previous week’s ratings: Top Ten with all the right demographics. That meant a big Christmas bonus for me, plus a decent piece of the syndication pie.
“Son-of-a-bitch,” Chang sighed. “Try not to drool on the carpet, Marcus.”
***
You never forget the sound a fist makes when it strikes flesh. My father used his fists on my sister and me for years before he died of heart failure one Christmas Eve. The following Christmas morning was the happiest either one of us could remember in a long time.
But you never forget the sound.
I heard it as I was walking back to my car after the show: bone wrapped in meat punishing softer meat, followed by the muffled whimper and the dull thud of a head striking concrete.
Something in that cry held me rooted to the spot. The meat sound repeated, and this time the cry of pain was loud enough for me to locate its source. It was coming from behind a busted down Nissan idling a few feet to my left.
Leaning down, I could see two figures struggling on the concrete. I heard the terrible sound again, and before I knew what I was doing, I had run around to the other side of the Nissan.
The attacker knelt above the woman’s chest, pinning her to the ground beneath his bulk. As I watched he lifted a heavy arm and struck her across the face.
I was so stunned that I couldn’t move.
But my mouth still worked.
“Hey!” I shouted.
The attacker looked up, mid-blow, and the world lurched beneath my feet. It was Chun King Jefferson.
The fat toddler was sitting, not kneeling as I had thought before; he was sitting on his mother’s chest.
As I watched, Chun King turned, wrapped his hands around his mother’s throat and banged her head against the concrete, hard.
I grabbed him by the collar and hauled him off of her, revulsion making me rougher than I intended. I flung him away from her with such force that he hit the ground with a loud thud. He started to cry, a loud, squawking bark, more roar than whimper.
“Don’t hurt him!” the mother cried.
And for a fleeting instant, I was sure she was speaking to Chun King, not to me.
“He…he was attacking you,” I stammered stupidly. Then I knelt to help her up.
Susan Jefferson sat with her back against the passenger side front door of the little Nissan. She held her head in her hands and began to cry.
“Are you alright?” I asked.
“You think I’m stupid, like the rest of them,” she said.
“Jesus,” I said. “What the hell’s going on here?”
“I’m not stupid,” she whispered. “I’m not like the other people on your show. Neither is Mohammed.”
She got to her feet and retrieved her wailing five-year old. He’d gone limp, allowing her to pick him up as if he hadn’t just tried to fracture her skull. Remarkably, she was able to heft him into the back seat of their car. He was too big to fit into a standard car seat.
“Listen,” I said. “I don’t know what...”
“We need help,” she interrupted. “I can’t control what he eats anymore.”
She said this last so quietly that I almost missed it. Once again I was struck by the quality of desperation that shone from her.
It’s called honesty, asshole, I thought. You remember that, don’t you?
“You promised us some help,” she said. “I’m at the end of my rope.”
The flutter in my stomach that began when I saw her on the monitors kicked up a notch.
“Have you tried family counseling?” I volunteered.
It’s the standard line used by all producers when confronted by a distraught guest. This time, however, I meant it. After what I’d just seen I would have made the calls myself. “I can refer you to someone…”
“We’ve done that,” she said. “We’ve been to so many therapists, so many clinics...” She paused, as if searching for the correct words. Then she looked me in the eye and said, “He won’t stop eating.”
Her eyes returned to the cement between her feet.
“And there are other things…”
She was interrupted by a wail from inside the car. Her eyes widened; then squeezed shut.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
The windows of her car were all closed, but I could see Chun King sitting inside, staring out at us. His mouth was hinged open like a trapdoor, that high-pitched whine cycling up and out of him like the shriek of an air raid siren.
“He’s hungry,” the mother said.
“What?” I asked, disbelieving. “He can’t be hungry. Not after all the...”
I was about to say, Not after all the garbage we let him hammer down his throat.
“I have to go,” the mother whispered. “If I don’t get him something he’ll get upset.”
“Wait a minute,” I said.
If she heard me she gave no sign. Susan Jefferson turned and bolted for her car.
“Hey! Wait!” I yelled. “Mrs. Jefferson!”
As she reached for the driver’s door, the mother stumbled. I caught her just as her knees buckled. During the taping, I noticed that she was thin. We’d joked about it in the booth, Skinny Mom Says: Help! My Child is Obese!!! We’d seen it a million times on the MORRIE show.
But as my hands brushed the sides of her ribcage, I felt the jut of bone beneath her blouse. She felt as fragile as porcelain, as flimsy as a child’s doll cobbled together from dried twigs. I gasped, animal reflex robbing me of social graces for a moment.
I could hear the kid screaming.
“I’m sorry,” Susan whispered.
I heard the grief in her voice, and the sheer exhaustion, as she threw open the door and flung herself into the car. I bent down and looked into the car. Chun King screamed louder. From where I stood his open mouth looked enormous, his features contorted in a grimace of need and…
Hate
The scream went on and on, seemingly without benefit of breath. He turned toward me, and when he did, his expression…changed.
He lunged across the seat and smashed his fist into the window, inches from my face.
I fell backward and landed flat on my ass amid the tinkling chime of broken glass. The scream of burning rubber momentarily drowned out the boy’s shrieks as the Nissan screeched away. I could only stare as the little car slammed over a speed bump, slewed onto the street and shot away into the darkness.
I sat there, immobilized by the memory of the boy’s eyes, the unmistakable message they bore just before he smashed the window. Stay away from us. Don’t interfere.
I’m in control.
It took me a moment to convince my lungs to contract but I finally won the argument. As that first breath hitched in my chest, I put my face in my hands and wept.
I believe I knew, even then, that Chun King Jefferson was going to be the death of me.
The next morning, I broke two cardinal rules: I drove into my office on Saturday, sifted through the contact list for the last show, and located the Jeffersons’ phone number.
I told myself that I was being ridiculous. This was a five year old boy after all. How much damage could he be capable of?
There are...other things.
I ignored the gooseflesh marching up and down my arms and dialed the number, unable to forget Susan Jefferson’s eyes, her apparent inability to save herself.
Save herself from what? I thought.
“Hello?”
It was a kid’s voice.
It’s Chun King and he’s going to kill you.
“Is...is your mommy there?” I said, hating the fear in my own voice.
“I can’t talk to you,” the kid on the other end of the connection said. “I’ll get in trouble.”
“Can I talk to your mommy?” I said. “It’s very important that I speak with her.”
“She’s gone.”
Something cold unfurled itself in the pit of my stomach.
“I’ll get in trouble,” the kid repeated listlessly.
There was something about the kid’s voice, a buzzing asexual monotone that set my teeth on edge.
“I have to go now.”
The line went dead.
I sat at my desk for a long time, staring at the contact list. I had the Jeffersons’ address. I could have just driven out there.
“Tell ‘em they’ve won an all expenses paid trip to Hawaii courtesy of the Morrie Stapler Show,” I said to no one in particular. “1st Place for America’s Most Fucked Up Family!””
Any excuse would have been sufficient.
“You need a vacation, pal,” I said finally.
I crumpled up the contact sheet and tossed it into the trash bin. Then I stood up, walked to my door and turned out the lights.
“Too much time in the fucking freak show.”
I went home.
***
“She claims that she spoke with you a few weeks ago,” my assistant Gina, said. “Something about her son’s condition?”
Gina handed me the note and walked out of the director’s booth. I’d spent the weeks since the incident in the parking lot trying not to think about Susan Jefferson. As time and toil pulled me further away from that strange episode, a welcome sense of normalcy had crept back into my life.
But I couldn’t sleep.
I’d tried pills, prescription and otherwise, booze, sometimes all three simultaneously. Whenever I neared the edges of sleep, however, the memory of her eyes barred my way. I became adept at faking my way through the days. No one knew I was falling apart.
The show that day was called “UFO PROSTITUTES! ARE YOU A HO’ FOR E.T?” We were on a commercial break while the security guards broke up a fight between a woman who claimed to be “a willing sexual recruiter for the “Venusians who secretly rule the Earth” and a teenaged girl who claimed she’d contracted “Space Herpes” from her alien boyfriend, a stand-up individual with a spotty mustache named “Prince Remulex.”
While the combatants were led off the set, I read the note.
Please help us. You promised.
***
I found the small house easily enough. It sat on a nondescript street near a decommissioned Air Force base, two hours east of LA. The house was in terrible disrepair. Two cars sat up on cinderblocks in the barren front yard.
The front door was wide open.
A child stood in the darkened entry hall, just beyond the open door. A single bare light bulb burned over the child’s head. In the ugly yellow light I could make out the same black curly hair I remembered, the same wide, up-tilted eyes and full lips.
Help me. He won’t stop eating.
But it wasn’t Chun King. It was a girl, taller, older by three or four years and thinner by thirty or forty pounds. Black bruises encircled her eyes. Her lips and chin were stained with something that looked like dried blood.
“My mommy’s sick,” the little girl said.
She stepped back, out of the light. I stepped over the threshold and out of the dry desert wind. The girl closed the door behind me.
The first thing I noticed was the heat.
It was too warm inside the little house. Tepid pulses of stale air gusted over me where I stood in the center of the hall. Despite the fact that it was at least eighty degrees outside, someone had turned up the thermostat.
The house was a mess. Empty fast food cartons lay all over the floor. The sofa and lounge chair in the corner were covered with open containers of half-eaten TV dinners and empty potato chip bags.
“Where’s your mommy?” I said.
“My mommy’s sick.”
The girl’s eyes shone as she looked up at me. She was nearly as thin as the woman I’d met in the parking lot. Her light brown complexion had gone the sallow color of moldy cheese. Her skin glistened with a sheen of sweat that plastered her thin black hair across her skull.
She turned and walked into the guts of the house.
I set my briefcase down on the floor and followed her into the kitchen. I wiped my sleeve along my forehead, trying to stop droplets of sweat from running down into my eyes. Moving through the house was like walking through a dry sauna.
Pots and pans covered with old food sat piled in the sink. An odor like rotten milk and ancient cat litter hung, so thick it was almost visible, in the warm air.
“She said you would come,” the girl said, as she led me into the rear of the house toward one of the back bedrooms. “She said you would keep your promise.”
“What’s happened?” I asked. “Does your mommy need a doctor? What’s wrong?”
But as we turned the corner into the master bedroom, I saw what was wrong inside that house.
Susan Jefferson was lying in bed, half propped up against the headboard. Her face was drawn, her cheeks hollowed out from deprivation. Her dull brown eyes stared out from deep black sockets.
Everyone has seen the Sad Children, the ones in faraway places like Ethiopia, El Salvador or the Philippines - the children who lie dying in their own filth, too exhausted to brush away the flies that crawl across their too-wide eyes. That’s what she looked like, lying there on a filthy mattress in a two bedroom house on the edge of the Mojave Desert.
That room felt like the inside of a sweat lodge, but she was too dehydrated to sweat. A filthy sheet half-covered her, her naked shoulders jutting like jagged coral reefs from beneath. One of her legs hung over the side of the bed, a broomstick with a small foot attached at the end - the toenails too long
- more like claws.
“Oh my God,” I said into the alien atmosphere of the small bedroom.
I took a step backward and something crunched beneath my foot. I looked down to see that I was standing in a half empty box of ENGLEMAN’S FAT FREE POWDERED DONUTS.
“What’s wrong with her?” I stammered.
“He takes,” the pale little girl whispered. “He takes.”
That’s when I realized that something was moving under the sheet.
I thought it was a pile of dirty clothes: mounds of discarded clothing lay everyw
here. Every open surface in the room was covered with halfeaten food and trash. I could smell the sour tang of stale nacho chips and rotten milk beneath the odor of sweat.
Whatever was under the sheet moved again.
“What the hell is that?” I said.
The girl remained silent as she walked around to the side of the bed and stood at her mother’s side. Susan Jefferson reached up and hooked her fingers into the front of the t-shirt the girl wore.
The girl’s eyes never left mine as she reached down and removed the limp hand from her shoulder. Then she pulled back the sheet and showed me what was under it.
I stood rooted to the spot - unable to move - unable to think. Something obscene was crawling on top of Susan Jefferson.
Mohammed Jefferson lay there, bloated and enormous, like a leech that battens onto its prey and drains it of all vitality. He was wearing the remnants of an adult diaper that had long since burst from containing his bulk. Even now he wasn’t much taller than the average six year old, but this only accentuated his inhuman girth.
As I watched, he suckled at his mother’s shriveled breast as peacefully as a newborn baby.
Chun King’s sister was watching me with eyes far too wise, a strange and distant smile dancing across her lips. When she spoke, it was with the passion of an apostle.
“It’s my brother,” she said. “Today’s his birthday.”
At the sound of her voice, the child-thing on the bed turned its eye upon me, pierced me with the malevolent gaze I remembered from before. There was a fire burning behind those eyes, a blistering acuity that scorched its way to the very core of who I believed myself to be.
The thing gazed at me, mother’s milk and blood soaking his chins, and I was frozen.
It spoke to me, or at least it tried to. What came out of the open wound where its mouth should have been was little more than a strangled sob, a wet groan that trickled like rotten honey into my inner ear.
“You’re the First,” the girl said. “Bring them to us.”
The sister extended her left arm toward the creature. That was when I noticed the scars. Her arm was covered with scabs, some old, some more recent. It took me a second to recognize them for what they were.
Bite marks.
The thing on the bed reared up and fastened its teeth into the girl’s arm. A rivulet of blood dripped down onto the mattress, and pattered across the mother’s stomach as Chun King sucked and nibbled at the girl’s flesh.
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