by Aaron Dries
Michael wanted what the other guys had—sculptured bodies. For the longest time he mistook attraction for admiration. Eventually he realized he liked looking at the bodies because he liked the bodies. He was gay. Something had to change.
So Michael started to walk. His walks turned into jogs. The pounds fell away with surprising speed and people noticed. He liked that they looked, especially guys, even though he felt dirty for enjoying the attention.
He halved his meals, sometimes purged. Instant lightness equaled instant heaven. But he broke himself of that addiction when he read that continuous, self-induced vomiting increased the chance of throat cancer, teeth rot and bad breath. Cancer. He knew the word meant death, but even that word “death” was alien to him. In all honesty, it was the concept of his teeth falling out that made him pull his bile-coated fingers from his throat and stop.
The last of the fat disappeared over the course of one six-week Christmas break. When he went back for his final year of school, people didn’t recognize him. He was a new person. His parents sent him to the doctor, fearing some terminal disease, but he was not dying.
Now Michael was skinny but he had built no muscle. His breasts were empty sacks covered in stretch marks, just another something to hate and be embarrassed by.
On the twelfth of November, 1995, he stood outside a house in James Bridge.
The house.
Inside he had decided there would be no more lying in his life. He made the decision the night before, under the covers. The house belonged to Clive, a man who as far as Michael knew had no last name. He found this as sad and depressing as anything else he had experienced so far in his life—that so much could hinge on the warrant of a man he did not even know.
Michael exhaled, the stink of Old Spice and engine grease on his skin. It was Clive’s smell. Michael wanted to be back in the house, with him. He wanted to slip his tongue in Clive’s ear and taste the bitterness of his lonely thoughts.
Trapped inside the house was the life he had left behind.
No more lies, or sadness. He liked last night (and this morning). He loved it. He outran fat but he could not outrun this.
Gay. Fag. Poofter.
He knew he would suffer. His parents didn’t know and they would hate him when they found out. Everything would be different.
In the window he could see Clive, half-obscured by shadow and curtain.
The first wind of the day sent the trees into shivers. A thick cowlick fell over his eyes. In the window there was now only his reflection, turning away. He walked at first and soon ran. The blood flowing through his veins was new blood.
Alive.
Michael ran to the bus stop. He had the exact change for the 243 back to Maitland. He looked up the street and saw the vehicle approaching. It grew larger and larger.
The bus rolled to a stop before him, blocking out the sun. In its shadow he felt a chill run up his spine.
The door hissed as it opened, unnerving him.
Behind them a flock of crows shot into the sky. Their flapping wings sounded like distant laughter. But Michael didn’t get the joke.
His feet climbed the steps into the dark mouth of the bus. He stopped and waited for his eyes to adjust. Out of the dim swam the face of the driver, pale and sweaty. He offered her his palm—the sunlight caught the coins and turned them into burning embers.
“The ride’s free today,” the driver told him.
Michael was shocked by the sadness in her eyes—and shocked too by how easy he had identified it, as though he were almost her kindred. “Excuse me?” he asked as the doors slammed shut behind him.
Liz Frost turned away from the boy and shifted the bus into gear.
Part Two: On the Bus
“…there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen.”
-William S. Burroughs
Ninety-Six
The trees along the highway were like the skeletons of contortionists hired to distract commuters from the rising temperature outside. Bushfires had devastated coastal New South Wales earlier in the year, resulting in the death of four people. Over three hundred houses were lost. Many thought it nothing but blind luck that James Bridge had escaped damage. Families sat drinking beer on front lawns and watched the skies turn brown as others less fortunate burned to death.
The airwaves still carried news of Anna Wood, the Sydney girl who had died in October from water intoxication after taking ecstasy. There was a sense that something bad was seething in the cities and it had yet to touch country suburbs.
Jed Frost, Liz’s brother, begged to differ. Anna’s death had given ecstasy some press and as a result, his business was booming.
On television there were ongoing memorials for New South Wales State MP John Newman, who had been shot outside his home in Cabramatta. It had been the first political assassination in Australian history since the late seventies. People changed the channel and watched Full House instead.
Ninety-Five: The Gun
7:40 am, November 12th, 1995
She held the gun to her mouth with hands so sweaty the handle was slick. Liz gagged and fought the need to vomit. Throat aflame, she swallowed. Her teeth clattered against the Kel-Tec P11 9 mm pistol. That sound told her brain, I’m not dead yet. Somewhere, there was the sound of a television, its white noise stabbing at her brain. She tried to blink the noise away but every time her eyes closed her vision worsened.
Outside, her father, Wes, was in the garden.
Her brother was in the shed plowing away at the punching bag strung from the rafters on a chain. Jed's knuckles were bleeding.
Downstairs her mother, Reggie, sat in the living room, half-finished crocheting in a bundle at her feet.
On the other side of James Bridge, ten-year-old Suzie Marten was waking to the sounds of her mother coming home after her dogwatch shift at the hospital.
I’m going to die. I’m going to be meat, Liz told herself.
Liz’s head was a television set, the wiring wrong and flashes of reason fighting against the dark-like ghosts fighting to be heard. If I could only just…disappear, I could win. No, don’t give in. Don’t. She had been doing this her entire life, closing her eyes, blocking her ears. Walking through the clearings behind the house on winter mornings.
This was not the first time she had attempted to kill herself.
Four years ago it had been a knife. She wanted to kill It. The Beast. Even if it killed her in the effort. The Beast both fed and fueled her loneliness. She had known unhappiness for so long it felt a part of her. She put the knife away. Later that night her mother had used it to chop vegetables for the family dinner.
Her second suicide attempt was less than two years earlier. Again the temptation of the blade, but she was terrified by the thought of pain. Death was not orgasmic; she didn’t fool herself. It would hurt. It was the ultimate snap, pain so extreme it undid you. She did not want to bleed into oblivion, and put the knife away.
It was not often that Liz went out to the shed, put off by its humid sweatbox nature. Tools hung from the walls and there was the ugly, half-finished car. But this visit had been worth the discomfort; she took her father’s gun down off the rack and slipped back inside the house.
Putting the gun in her mouth and fingering the trigger had become a sport for her. There was no better way to appreciate what little she had than by looking down the barrel of the pistol. The release of the trigger set off a release in her that was next to none, amplified by the PCP in her veins.
When she was high, she felt death was something she could assimilate herself into.
Pull the trigger.
(pain)
Do it now.
(peace)
Now.
(pain!)
Today she pulled the weapon out of her mouth. Her jaw ached. She threw herself against the wall, dropping the gun. There was a window and through it morning light came in.
Coward.
Liz scrambled to the window
and threw it open. Two storeys below her father looked up at her from the garden.
Wes Frost took in his daughter’s pallid looks. Her messy, shoulder-length hair dangled about her face. It was lifeless hair. He noticed the sweat dripping off her nose. Her sick eyes. He had seen that look in cattle soon to be slaughtered. She moved her lips, saying something he barely caught. One word. It sounded like “today”, but he could have been wrong.
“You okay up there, Liz?” he asked. Wes knew something was wrong. There was no answer and the awkwardness of the moment forced him to speak again. “Shaping up to be another horror of a day. Who knows, day like this might even boil itself up into a storm.” Leaves blew about his ankles. “You just can’t tell.”
Liz closed her eyes and breathed clean oxygen into her body. She was alive. It confirmed her cowardice. “Bye-bye, Dad.”
Liz relit the joint and pulled smoke into her lungs. Sound drifted away, numbness settled in. In her wardrobe there was a small lunchbox; within were two vials of powdered PCP.
She was in her work uniform: short-sleeved blue shirt, ironed collar and crested front pocket, knee-length navy shorts with the creases down the front. An oversized hat perched on her head.
“Today.”
I’m gonna do it, she told herself. I’m beyond caring. Past help. I don’t know when but it’ll be today. My god, the relief. I really can’t wait.
Liz left her room and walked down the steps to the kitchen. She couldn’t feel her feet. She kept on catching flickers of shapes in her peripheral vision, making her head twitch every so often. It felt like floating. Her motions dictated by the drug, everything flowed smoother. She transitioned from one place to another, one role to the next.
A step and then another. Repeat.
As far as Liz knew she would be on Route 243 today. She would drive to work and step onto her bus and accelerate when needed and brake when the time came, and this would go on and on and on for as long as it needed to.
Ninety-Four: Reggie and Jed
Reggie Frost was a large, unkempt woman. Heavy bones wrapped in fifty-five years worth of worrying. She clutched at her nightgown, startled. “Shit, Liz! Do you have to sneak around like that? You scared a good five years off my life.”
She smiled and stepped past Liz into the kitchen. “You’re a bit blurry,” she said to her daughter. “I just put my eye drops in.” She stopped at the sink, looked down and watched the mess come into focus. “That bloody father of yours! He never washes his dishes.” A sausage finger scratched at the plates. “He knows I hate having to scrub itty-bitty pieces of cornflakes off with the steel wool!”
Reggie threw a dishtowel over the edge of the sink and turned, intercepted by her daughter who had crossed the room to kiss her on the cheek. A surge of warmth on Reggie's skin, gone as quick as it had come.
“Bye, Mom,” Liz said, her voice soft.
A smile played at the corners of Reggie’s mouth as she watched her daughter stop near the open window and look outside. The family dog, a large, black Rottweiler named Dog, yapped at the end of its chain, eager to be fed.
Liz hated Dog and his muscular hind legs and dark, slobbering jowls. Dog bit her once years before and she had never forgotten it.
“We have got to do something about those Christmas decorations,” Reggie said. “I know it’s going on close to the Season now, but those damn things have been up since last year. It's embarrassing. The lights are still in the trees—God only knows how many of the bulbs have busted.” There was vague hope in Reggie’s eyes. “Want to help me with them when you knock off?”
Liz stood still, silhouetted against the window. She held her breath so she wouldn’t scream and drop to her knees, begging her mother for help. Somewhere there was the ticking of a clock, the gurgle of dirty water running down the sink.
“Well the damn things aren’t going to take themselves down!” Reggie snapped.
Gray.
Liz was embarrassed when she saw that her father was troweling the flowerbed near the porch, the burial ground of all of her unloved Barbies and Kens so many years ago. Her cheeks burned and whatever words she had wanted to say to him turned to sand in her mouth. She felt icy hands clutch at her bowels. Under her father’s kneecap were the ancient remains of dolls, their hair eaten away and eye sockets full of grit. Liz turned and walked away.
Wes looked up and wiped sweat from his brow, giving himself a war-paint streak of dirt. Were those tears he had seen? He wanted to stand and reach out for her but she was already halfway across the front yard, having passed her car and Jed’s battered pickup truck. The knapsack looked heavy on her shoulder. He sighed, stabbed the trowel into the earth and turned his head to the trees. “Damn,” he said. His girl had a way of breaking him in a special way only daughters could.
Dry blades of grass crunched underfoot. Liz's backpack swung on her shoulder. It had extra weight today, though she couldn’t remember why.
She slipped through the shed door. Her shadow fell over her brother Jed’s tattooed back—an ornate eagle imprinted on his skin spread from shoulder to shoulder.
Eagles had always fascinated Jed. They had escaped extinction because of their tenacity and could carry four times their own weight. He admired the eagle’s speed and loyalty to its young. He got the tattoo two years ago when he was twenty-three in a cheap Melbourne parlor. His father hated it, said it made him look like a thug. The eagle was Jed’s baby; the needle, the pain, had sewn them together forever.
He breathed deeply. Sweat fell from the eagle’s wings. He turned to face his sister. Their eyes locked together, shared the same look.
The punching bag was strung from the moaning rafters. It swung on its chain like a corpse at the end of a noose.
Jed moved to the unfinished Volkswagen in the corner of the room and sat on the hood. The car had been their father’s pet project for years. Jed tinkered with it every now and then, a passing hobby. It kept the grease under his fingernails, an issue of pride between father and son.
Tools covered one wall, and on the opposite were guns on racks crafted from the antlers and tusks of dead game. Underneath the twisted rack of metal and tooth, there was a titanium chest of drawers full of nails, bullets and beetles.
Liz stepped forward and watched her brother raise his hand. Even in the dim she could see the awkward alignment of his knuckles, the blood.
“I caned my hand something shocking, Sis.”
Sis. She loved the word because it was hers and hers alone. Special to them both. This little twinge of familiarity stabbed deep. She knew he would miss her the most.
“You off to work then?” His face was shiny. There was dust in his buzz cut. He twitched, clenched his jaw. His long arms flexed and his muscles rolled into prominence.
“Maybe,” Liz began, her voice cracking, “you should see a doctor or something.” She felt the urge to tell him everything, about The Beast and how much she just wanted to run away with him and find new lives. “Y-y-you should come with me, and I, well I can drop you off at the depot and you can leg it in from there and I’ll spot you enough money to catch a bus back and Mom and Dad aren’t working so they can pick you up from The Bridge—” She said anything that came to mind so long as it wasn’t the truth.
Jed laughed. “It’s not that bad.”
Silence fell. His comment forced her back into uselessness.
“Well…” Liz tapered off.
“Yeah?”
“Well I just came in to say—” She searched for the right word. There was only one thing to say. “Goodbye.”
He looked at her and snorted again, shook his head.
“Ah, Sis, you’re—” He was going to say “weird” and stopped, jumped off the hood and bounded over to her, radiating energy and heat.
“You want me to get you more stuff?”
“What?”
“You know, stuff.” That’s what he called the powder in the white vials. Phencyclidine, “angel dust”, PCP. Jed bought it in a
powder form and cut it with ether. He would roll himself a joint, cut fifty-twenty hash and tobacco and dip it in the solution. He called it “getting wet.” PCP numbed the senses, punctuated with fireworks of high-energy bouts. Some users, but not all, were known to get violent while high on the drug.
“No.” She almost laughed. “I’m okay for now.”
“All right, but just don’t say I didn’t try.”
“You’re sure about not going to the doctor? I don’t mind, I got the time—”
“Really, let it go.” Jed stepped closer. He realized how little there was to her, how absurd she looked in her oversized uniform. “I may have busted my knuckles but it’s okay. I’ve got brother bones. They grow back strong. When they need to.”
Their gazes latched together again, twin sets of stars—at once both dead and alive.
Jed was nine years old and his hands were covered in blood. He stood at the bottom of the stairs in the shadow of the man who had cut him. Each gash was a drooling, puckered mouth. He was too shocked to cry. Liz saw Jed’s vacant expression from the living room floor where she lay covered in bruises, the left buckle of her suspenders broken at her side. Rage ripped through her.
“You hurt him,” she screeched, pulling herself up. “You hurt my brother.”
The man turned in time to see the girl launch at him and snatch the knife from his grip. She dropped it and the tip of the blade impaled the carpet. Liz looked through the shadow and saw the man. His tears terrified her.
Jed never forgot his sister’s defiance. Like the scars, his love and respect for her would never fade.
Liz’s ’89 Mitsubishi Colt pulled into the bus depot parking lot in Maitland. She had only a vague recollection of the twenty-five minute trip from James Bridge to work. Flashes of images—passing trees and memories. A worm had eaten its way through her morning.