Family
Page 14
he looks small, disoriented. confused.
“what time is it?” he asks. “was i—?”
then he stops. takes in junior:
six feet tall, clad in shadow, cheek spattered, caked with mud.
junior, bearing down on him.
“who are you?” the man on the sofa asks.
he is still uncertain. still not quite concerned, not too terribly worried about the turn that this evening has taken.
he should be.
42.
“Henry has a message for you,” junior says.
“Henry wants you to know:
you’re late.
you were s’posed to come by weeks ago.”
he smirks.
“you were s’posed to come hear him. to listen.
“you made a mistake, disrespecting Henry that way.
but it’s all right,
we can fix this.
make it right.
we got a message that you’ll hear
loud and
clear.”
43.
i breathe.
reel.
realize:
this is the blank,
important man.
this is his house.
this is where the man who rejected Henry lives.
that
—that—
is why we are
here.
that is the spark
that spurred helter-skelter.
i reel.
and the undertow threatens
to overtake me
yet again.
44.
junior draws himself farther, higher,
until he is tall as a tree,
a tower,
a tornado.
he slides his pistol from his waistband,
cocks it.
the cold, empty clang
of metal against metal.
and i feel
my self
begin to break
the surface of the water.
45.
click.
i hear a moan: shelly, or possibly the singer,
possibly contemplating what has become of her now.
the singer, who is bound.
the man on the couch, confused, semiconscious,
still struggling to pierce the eggshell-thin veil
between sleep and wake.
still trying to rise.
my stomach clenches, a swarm of hornets struggle from deep within, fluttering wings locked in beat.
the ocean swells beneath me.
46.
the man on the couch seems to realize.
his eyes dart from junior’s face to leila’s,
then to shelly’s, and finally, to
mine.
i look away.
paddle furiously, inside my mind’s eye.
try to stay afloat.
i have been chosen for this,
after all.
cast away.
nearly drowned
swept up
and into
the
current.
this—
the now—
helter-skelter—
this is what it means to be a
messenger.
this is what it means
to spread
Henry’s
word.
47.
another wave.
i waver.
i am a cipher.
i am a whisper.
i am diaphanous, negative
space.
i am the opposite of solid.
i am antimatter. a black hole.
a chasm.
a network of fault lines,
fractured beyond repair.
i am a member of this family:
sister, wife,
daughter.
i am the undertow, the tide at midnight.
i am adrift, awash, pulled in every direction.
choking on swallows of seaweed and salt water.
floating toward the edges of the horizon.
i am:
a message
a spark,
a groundswell of
trash and
terror.
and
i cannot help this man
any more than i can
quench the fever
dim the fire
douse the flame
that we have—
that my family has—
set
to
burn.
48.
the man on the couch purses his lips, tries to contain his fear.
“who are you?” he asks again.
i think:
we
are the high tide.
and you
are going
to
drown.
49.
“i’m the devil,” junior says.
“and i’m here to do the devil’s business.”
50.
then:
then:
a shriek
a shudder
a plea.
“i don’t—”
the man begins:
“why—?”
i am rooted to the ground,
rotting from the inside.
bloodstream, brain,
poisoned.
i am an outline,
a suggestion of some former self,
some long-ago daughter,
some solid,
sturdy girl
who once knew
how
to
swim.
i have been carried to this place,
this now,
on a current
treading water
furiously
foolishly.
and i
am
sinking.
51.
the man’s eyes widen, sharpen, focus on the afterlife as it bears down.
“no,” he starts, holding out an arm, then changing course to bury his face
in the crook of his elbow.
the singer thrashes, convulses,
twists and contorts as horror dawns
with gruesome certainty.
junior nods. smiles.
aims the gun.
“yes,”
he says.
“yes.”
he pulls the trigger.
52.
junior pulls the trigger.
the room ignites.
i am pulled into a vortex, the relentless, unyielding pressure of death.
a meteor shower unfolds, angry chunks of blazing, boiling rock, raining nuclear fire,
rocketing through the atmosphere and crushing down.
singeing us, scorching us, flaying the flesh from our charred, stripped-down bones.
burying us alive.
53.
sounds.
they are inescapable.
they come to me, unbidden.
a gunshot, clapping like a sonic boom.
a muffled cry through the oily cloth of the singer’s gag.
the deep, desperate drowning of the man on the couch as blood seeps down his shirtfront.
leila’s laughter.
from somewhere deep, someplace far, buried within the fault lines of the house,
a scream, a shriek, pierces the air, punctuates the explosion, the bottomless blast, the burst of death, blood
it howls,
stirs,
strains
formlessly,
wordlessly,
against the
spark
that junior has
ignited.
it takes a beat,
a breath,
a split-second,
razor’s-edge moment
before i realize:
the sound
the shriek
the scream
the unfathomable,
infinite
terror
is
mine.
54.
i wait.
i waver.
i collect myself again,
curl inward.
glance toward shelly,
toward my sister.
her eyes are a vacant mask.
but her lips—
her lips—
are upturned.
and she does not meet my gaze.
i wait.
i waver.
i collect myself again.
curl inward.
fight against the
thick, sour tangle
of seaweed,
sand
of sunken spoils
rising,
crawling,
clawing their way up my throat
drowning me
choking me
off.
55.
i want to go away
again.
want to
and be less than
nothing,
a trace element of
a long-ago landmass.
i want to be empty.
to be absence.
to be a yawning, gaping
vortex.
i want to be the evening
tide.
i want to be carried out
by the
undertow.
56.
the smoky stench of gunpowder,
the blooms of life that spread beneath the man on the couch,
the sound of aftermath,
of half-life, of
terror—
they ring, vibrate,
radiate.
the shrieks, the screams, the splintering cries, they
envelop me.
clutch me.
cloak me
like a hangman’s hood.
leila laughs.
shelly grins.
and junior cocks the trigger on his pistol once again.
i swoon.
57.
shelly gestures to junior,
whispers a secret code,
somehow persuades him to set aside the gun
for now.
she steps beside me, places a firm hand on the narrow curve at the small of my back.
steadies me. turns her grin in my direction, as a loved one would.
she knows, of course.
my sister.
knows. just what i need.
her eyes are round.
open.
i reel.
i realize:
she glows.
she shines.
joyful tears trace footpaths
down her cheeks,
a baptism
amidst a bloodbath.
she runs a pink tongue along the fragile skin of her upper lip
hungry.
58.
she leans forward, reaches out a steady arm. pokes at the man on the couch
<—the dying man; that is what he is, right now, dying —>
so that his body shifts.
i buckle.
she pulls her hand back, considers it. takes in the bright patch of blood—rich, rust colored, and thick—now tattooed into the fat, fleshy point of her fingertip. licks her lips again.
i sway.
she grabs at my wrist. i feel the sticky underside of her finger, know that when we pull apart, she will have left a smudgy red imprint in her wake.
“let’s go,” she says, eyebrows aloft. she juts her chin toward junior, toward his dangling gun. raises her knife, gleaming deadly, her meaning starkly clear.
“let’s go.
we still have to do the other one.”
59.
shelly turns to leila, who smiles.
behind her darting, downcast eyes,
leila smiles.
leila knows, has always known,
how best to make a person bleed.
leila is a coil,
a live wire,
a potent cache of
wicked intent.
leila is love
and terror.
whereas shelly is
—suddenly—
chaos.
shelly is
charged
and churning.
she is a black hole,
a bottomless pit.
she is sinister,
she is danger.
she is so much.
shelly.
is.
all of her fractures—
her fault lines—
they have split.
her damage—
her past-life—
it collapses,
rushes through the
open spaces of her
pores.
leila is quiet cunning.
junior is a dark foot soldier.
but shelly is
damage.
her eyes dance,
her skin thrums,
the corners of her mouth
twitch.
the
man’s blood stains her face,
her forehead,
her cheeks
so that she is alive,
even more
than before.
so that she blossoms from his pain,
feeds from it,
as she scurries
back and forth
through the shrieking space,
testing knots,
turning chairs and tables over,
frenzied.
clearing a space
for death,
for darkness,
for pain.
for the call of
helter-skelter.
she is
more.
alive.
but.
she is not
my sister.
not
now.
not
anymore.
60.
shelly is impatient.
she wants to fill her hollow spaces in sharp, swift order.
wants to spread Henry’s word. wants to make dangerous music.
she writhes and wriggles, alive with the anticipation.
her knife waves.
“let’s go,” she repeats, her voice more urgent, more insistent, this time.
“let’s go. there’s still another one.
we still have to do the other one.
junior saved her for us.”
the other one.
the singer.
a life-size barbie,
a living doll.
a whole and perfect creature.
shuddering in the corner of the living room,
shivering in her thin nightgown.
pleading with us, at us—
pleading with her swollen, sea-glass eyes.
doomed.
61.
shelly stops, tips her head back, listens for sounds.
the air outside—
the air beyond—
is calm, quiet,
smooth as the surfac
e of a lake,
betraying none of the chaos of our
mission.
she regards me, shelly,
seems to
understand
how i suddenly
waver.
but.
i have quieted,
finally,
for now—
swallowed the echoes of my
bottomless scream.
for now.
this seems to satisfy her.
my sister.
“let’s go,” she says.
“let’s spread the message.
the word.
the terror.
for Henry.”
before
when i was six years old,
i drowned.
since then, there has only been always:
fault lines, fragments,
well-deep tide pools.
a pull, guiding me.
pushing, stretching.
applying pressure in every direction
but home.
since then, there has been only
the undertow.
at night, i dream.
at night, the afterlife washes over me,
stiff and bright.
probing.
i know it is the afterlife—
not me, not i, and certainly not, never now—
i know that it is merely some formless half-life,
a premise,
a promise
of a maybe-infinity.
i know this
from the slow, measured sound,
the metered mantra of mirror-mel:
mirror-mel has tips, tricks,
techniques.
she knows special secrets,
ways of squirming out,
of disentangling,
of secreting herself
away.
she has methods of extricating herself from
thick, heavy hands.
she tucks herself up,
folds herself inward,
collapses in on herself.
she slides easily out from under crushing warmth,
from smothering, suffocating weight.
from beneath. from the underneath.
mirror-mel has never known the smell of whiskey.
mirror-mel has no uncle jack, nor any
blank, empty mother.
but.
mirror-mel is not me.
she is the opposite of me.
she is an outline,
a suggestion of my shape.
and at night,
when uncle jack comes,
i am alone.
when i was six years old, i drowned.
i was drowned. i was
covered, stifled, smothered.
it was the first time.
it was:
terror,
sharp and bright.
it was:
whiskey breath,
roaming hands.
it was:
waves. swells. tidal shifts.
swift.
imperceptible.
but unmistakable.
it was:
infinity.
a moment without beginning or
end.
a moment of bloodlust.
of chaos.
a moment that swallowed me