“Some things you have to take on faith, Richard. You humans put such stock in your faith.”
My head throbbed, as if a bucket of hot ball bearings had been dumped in the veins of my temple and rolled through my cerebral cortex. Or like cold dice in a cup. Or—fuck, I wish this book would sell so I wouldn’t have to keep coming up with this stuff.
“Richard?” said Mister Milktoast.
“Is that you, Mister Milktoast? What’s happening? Is it true?”
“I tried to warn you, Richard. I tried, but it’s so strong. And it knows how to hurt us.”
My hand was on the lid handle, its cold hard plastic miles away beneath my fingers. Whose hand, whose meat mitten, whose raggedy-man phalanges?
“Then it’s no joke,” I said, and the last scraps of hope fell away like rotted cloth, as if I were extending the scarecrow metaphor. I was naked in the deepest night, staked in a field of fallow earth.
“It hurts us, Richard. In here, while you’re away. The Insider has little punishments for each of us.”
“Don’t cry, Mister Milktoast. Remember, we’re survivors. We can get through anything—”
“—b-but the boots, Richard. The Insider wears the boots. It knows about Father, it knows about those bad memories. It finds them in here and makes me watch, over and over. It makes me feel the boots again. And all the fear that came with them.”
“Fear,” said the Insider. “I am what you feed me.”
Mister Milktoast was gone, pushed away inside.
“And I’d like to share my dinner,” it said. “Just like a polite host should.”
Damn. Here comes another flashback.
I look over Shelley’s shoulder as we embrace, I press my nose into the meadow of her hair, I inhale the vapor off her clean skin. My eyes are far away, watching the angelfish’s corpse as it circles and circles the top of the tank like a dead moon chained to a lost planet. No hope of escape. It has been too long, too many years.
Shelley’s lips are on my cheek, her hands in my hair, then down lower. I loom over Shelley, impatient, urgent, hungry. I reach under the sofa and pull out the long kitchen knife, I grip its wooden handle and I shudder with pleasure. At long last I live again.
“Lift the lid, Richard,” it commanded, and I trembled with tears stinging the corners of my eyes.
“Yessssss,” it whispered, voice low and dark and ecstatic and sounding so much like me. “Knowledge is power.”
I raised the lid and the Insider made me look, smell, hear. I vomited and collapsed onto the cold hard floor.
I should do laundry more often.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The telephone rang, its electronic gargle breaking the night. I had been almost asleep, or as close as I dared get to dreams. I fumbled for the receiver on the nightstand, and my hand brushed against soft nylon.
Shelley’s tights.
Once filled with warm, moving flesh. Now lying shed like a snakeskin. Awareness rushed in on a red tide.
I picked up the phone and pressed it to my ear. The night sky outside the window was clear and studded with starlight, little dots of hope in a black abyss. The room smelled of soapy steam from the shower I had taken, hoping to wash the self-loathing from my skin.
“Hello?”
“Richard?”
A female voice, slightly slurred, as if the speaker’s tongue were swathed in cotton. Cracked like an old cup. Or maybe like a Jesus plate.
“Mother, why are you calling at this time of night?”
As if I had to ask. In Iowa, her private pity party was probably not yet at the midway point. She was probably still on her first pint, because she could still punch the big buttons on the phone.
“Just wanted to talk to my only son,” she said, breathing heavily in the mouthpiece. The last word came out as “shun.”
“How are you, Mother?” I felt as stretched and empty as the tights I gripped in my left hand.
“Okay, I guess. I got your letter.”
“Letter?”
“Yeah. Telling me about this new girl, Shelley. You really think it might get serious?”
Who had written that letter?
“Uh. . . sure, Mother. But who knows?”
“Sounds like she’s really something special.”
“She’s okay.”
“She must be more than okay, since you took the trouble of sending me a lock of her hair.”
No.
That couldn’t have been me. Never me.
“I miss you, Richard.”
I miss you, too. I almost said it without thinking, the way you do when you’re supposed to love someone but don’t. I swallowed the words. They burned like miniature suns. I couldn’t lie to my own mother, could I? Or was it Loverboy who wanted to blurt out that needy confession.
“What’s going on back home?” I asked, hoping, praying that she wouldn’t mention Father, wondering if the letter the Insider had sent was stained. Or, worse, sealed with a kiss.
“They’re tearing down the garage next door. Been hauling off them old junk cars. Gonna put in a row of shops, I hear.” Her voice fell, wistful. “Remember when you used to play back there?”
The past. She should have known better. Neither of us wanted that, but the past was like genital rash. Even though we knew that handling it would only slow the healing, our fingers couldn’t stay away.
“How’s the weather there?” I asked. “Had a frost yet?”
“It’s been laying on the corn, I hear. But by the time I get up of a morning, it’s melted away. I used to like that, looking over them sparkly green fields. Like magic, it was.”
“Any luck finding a job?”
She coughed, an empty rattling sound. “Who wants an old woman without a high school diploma? Especially the way they talk about me. I still hear them, even after all these years, whispering behind their hands at the Gas-N-Go. Got quite a reputation. You’d think people would forget after a while, that they’d let bygones be bygones.”
I could apologize. But every time I had tried, the words set in my mind like wet cement. I sighed, the air of my resignation reaching across the miles, filling the pink ear of the woman who had given me life. The statute of limitations on forgery and uttering never expired.
“I mean, the Lord teaches forgiveness, doesn’t He?” She said. “You’re supposed to hate the sin but love the sinner.”
I heard a glass click against her teeth, then she swallowed twice. She waited.
“Why don’t you move away?” I asked, clipping off the silence as carefully as if it were an ingrown toenail.
“Where would I go? Got no people left that would have me. Except maybe you.”
Maybe me.
A vision flashed in my mind. Mother as part of my daily routine. Mother asking about Beth. Mother filling the cabinets with her bourbon bottles. Mother across the hall at night, terribly close, only a couple of doors between us. Mother coming out of the bathroom after a shower, a towel around her bony chest.
And Loverboy’s uncontrollable urges.
And the Insider’s constant craving for pain.
I didn’t know if I still loved Mother. But I didn’t hate her, at least not enough to expose her to the real me. All of me.
“It wouldn’t work, Mother. There’s still so much—”
“I know. It was just a thought. I may be an old drunk, but I’m not stupid.”
I found myself squeezing Shelley’s tights in my hand. “Well, listen, Mother. I’ve got to go now.”
“Richard—”
“I’ll call you back. Or write.”
A pause, as swollen as beached whale. “I love you, Richard.”
I gulped, a greasy glacier sliding down my throat. I opened my mouth.
It would be easy to say, here in a dark room. No one to hear but my eavesdropping little friends. No one to witness but the all-knowing Insider. No one to please but my mother. A little white lie that any god would forgive.
It would be easy to mak
e a mother happy, to pay back just a little on an insurmountable debt. Three little words that might bring the tiniest spark of joy to a withered heart. Three little words that are all a mother asks in return for the greatest of all pains, for the greatest of all sacrifices, for the greatest of all gifts.
Three little words that I could never say.
“Goodnight, Mother.” I softly hung up the phone.
A tear rolled down my cheek. The stars outside my window blurred. Night bled darkness. Beth’s scent lingered faintly on my pillow.
The child never existed.
“Yes, he did,” said Mister Milktoast. “We did. And Mother loved us.”
“Was that really love?” I asked the one inside my head.
“Yes.”
“How can you be sure? She’s like a cavity in my soul.”
“Abscess makes the heart grow fonder.”
“So it’s a love that only exists at a safe distance.”
“That was real. Compare it to everything you’ve known since. Sally. Beth. Virginia.”
“No one forgets Virginia,” I said, wiping the tears from my cheeks.
The world outside the window was scrubbed clean by the autumn breeze. A tall maple swayed in the yard. Its arms spread, majestic and gnarled, like a newly dead grandmother paying a visit in dreams. Wanting a last hug.
“No one forgets Virginia,” Mister Milktoast repeated.
“Especially not me, Roachrash,” said Loverboy, stepping from the psychic shadows. “Almost got me some that time, till you dicked it up with your numbnut feelings.”
“A miss is as good as a smile,” Mister Milktoast cut in with a smirk. “Or as good as a mistress.”
“Hey, I could get a lot luckier if I didn’t have you guys drag-assing around. Every time I get close to a score, one of you comes out and queers the deal.”
“And whose fault is that?”
“Always quick with the blame, Dickwheat. First it was me. Then Little Hitler. Now you got this otherfucker to heap shit on the pile.”
Loverboy fell quiet, afraid of that smoldering crater that bubbled like a hot tar pit in the center of my Bone House. The backed-up septic system in an odiferous water closet. The swampy morass of icky horribleness.
Little Hitler cackled with the stark raving laughter of a hyena whose jaws dripped red cotton candy. “We each have our idea of what love is,” he said. “Yours is wrapped up in the meat, Loverboy. And so is mine, only in a different way. And I, for one, am head-over-shitless that the Insider has taken a room here.”
“You only love pain,” I said. “And yourself. Or, better, both at the same time. No wonder you lick the Insider’s boots. It gives you everything you don’t have the nerve to take for yourself.”
“Sure, Richard. And it was me that did in dear old Daddy.”
“Of course it was.”
“And what kind of love was that?”
“The scared kind. The kind that wore boots,” said Mister Milktoast.
“What kind of love do you expect? My kind of love was brave enough to free Mother from the beatings. You ought to be worshipping me, Richard. After all, I made it so there was nothing standing in the way of you two.”
Little Hitler was enjoying my pain. Maybe he really was the Insider, wearing the Hitler mask. But that was too unbelievable. You couldn’t make this kind of stuff up and expect anybody to take you seriously. Unless you made a lot of money from it, in which case people called you a genius, though they still crossed the street to avoid you.
“Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” Mister Milktoast said.
Little Hitler and Loverboy’s laughter rattled inside my head like gravel in a hubcap. But what did they know about love?
Love stomped. Love slashed. Love gouged. Love disemboweled. Love drove its lessons deep. And, at its worst, love mattered.
Bookworm came out on the ashes of my depression, like the ghost of a virgin sacrifice thrown into a volcano to appease a god that was vacationing in Hawaii. “Love is why we have the Insider,” he said with the simplicity of one who might meet a pieman and ask for a slice.
I was silent, they were all silent, as we contemplated that cold truth. Fear squirmed like maggots in an open wound, an anthropomorphic metaphor that grew wings and flew away, looking for fresh shit.
“Love is what attracted it,” Bookworm said. “Pain, perhaps, as well. But what causes the pain?”
“Looking for love,” I said. “The Buddhists say, ‘Desire is the cause of all suffering.’ And the Taoists say nothing, and they say it a lot. But the Insider says just enough to screw up my autobiography.”
I caressed the tights and imagined the lingering waft of her perfume. I thought of Shelley as she might have been. Curled up beside me at that moment, spooning for warmth, snoring gently.
But I never even knew her. What were her fears, her secrets, her favorite candy? What colors did she wear in the spring, when the world begged yellow and sky blue and primary green? What would she have become, if given the chance? What was her purpose besides feeding the Insider?
I threw the tights into the dark corner of the room. Shelley hadn’t fed the Insider. I had fed it. I had tossed the scraps to my devil dog. It was fat on my grief and weakness and pathetic need to be published.
I was its meatbag, its Jeeves, its Igor, its Boswell.
“Bookworm knows something,” I said to Mister Milktoast. “Maybe there’s a way out of this.”
“Not out,” said Bookworm. “In.”
In, where the Insider slept, full and content, waiting for me to dream.
In, where my Little People holed up in their rooms, haunting the Bone House of my head.
In, where my memories were laid out like a bad hand of Tarot cards.
In, where monsters dwelled under beds and in closets.
In, where typewriter keys clattered in the wee hours.
The first rejection slip arrived the next day.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I waited outside Redmon Hall, the building where Beth had her art classes. Black glass squares were set in the stone front of the building. The morning sun reflected off the windows, the silver linings of the clouds dulled by the tint. October was everywhere, as pungent and sweet as a corpse. Oaks shed their brown leaves, blades of high grass bowed under the weight of dewy seed, wind sneaked low through the portico.
Students smoked cigarettes between classes. I studied the clean faces with interest. I was looking at the shape and plane of cheekbones, comparing the fullness of lips, critically analyzing hairstyles. I shuddered with repulsion as I realized what I was doing.
I was hunting. The Insider was hungry again.
I hadn’t called Beth in a week. Ever since the blackout, I was afraid to see her. I knew I was fading, and the Insider was growing stronger. Beth would give it the pain it needed. A perfect recipe, doled out in exacting measurements.
I stood there in my corduroy jacket with my hands in my pockets, humming The Beatles’ “Helter Skelter.” It was Mister Milktoast’s choice of music, or maybe Little Hitler’s. At that moment I saw her, just as the clouds fell away and the sun threw its carpet at her feet. Her hair shimmered. She was wearing the brown hat she had worn when we’d first met.
She was talking to a tall guy with a beard. When he smiled at her, his broad horse teeth exuded steam. I stepped forward.
“Hi, Beth,” I said, with practiced ease. Far too practiced. She blinked.
“Richard,” she said, off guard for only a moment.
“How have you been? I haven’t seen you in a while.”
“Same old,” I said.
She glanced around, as if looking for some alien starship to whisk me away. “This is Ted,” she said finally. “Ted, this is Richard. He works at the Paper Paradise.”
I nodded at him. What did Loverboy care? One walking dish of clam dip was pretty much the same as another. Every slice came from the same loaf.
Ted gave his equine smile and tugged a
t his beard.
“Ted’s a graduate assistant,” Beth said. “He teaches etching and woodprinting.”
“Physical stuff,” I said in mock admiration. “Digging out the truth, right, Ted? Cutting down to the essence. Grooving and moving.”
Ted dropped his smile and looked confused.
“He’s just kidding, Ted,” Beth said. “He’s an amateur art critic.”
“Taught her everything she knows,” Little Hitler said. “Which isn’t much.”
Beth crossed her arms and glowered from under her blond eyebrows. She looked at Ted and said, “Meet you for lunch, usual place?”
Ted opened his mouth to speak. His teeth flashed like tombstones set in wet, red mud. Then he thought better of saying anything and walked away after studying me for a moment.
Go ahead and study, you brush-sucking artiste. As if you’d ever be able to understand what’s going on inside this negative space. Hell, I can’t even keep up with it myself. There are details buried in here that even a hundred acid baths couldn’t bring out. But I’ll put your ass in my book and make sure you come off as an arrogant, navel-gazing jerkoff with goofy teeth.
Yeah, Ted, in my autobiography, I’ll look much better than you. I can type you in and erase your ass.
I looked at Beth with Bookworm’s curious and slightly amused eyes.
“Why are you being such a jerk, Richard?”
“You haven’t called.”
“Well, you haven’t either.”
“But, you said... that morning...”
People brushed past us on both sides as classes changed, rolling like meat products on a slaughterhouse conveyor belt. Beth gripped my arm and led me to a stone bench. We sat beneath a rusting, jagged sculpture that bore welding scars across its joints. It looked like a sky plow. A brass plate was attached to its base.
“Sky plow,” I said aloud.
“What?”
“What ye sew, so shall ye rope,” Mister Milktoast said. “And leave the audience in stitches. So don’t string me along.”
“Richard, don’t play games with me. Why were you waiting for me here?”
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