Stories From the Plague Years

by Michael Marano

  “I’m not going to make it,” she says, her voice like cracking stone.

  “What?”

  Catherine shakes my arm, the way someone kicks another person under the table who’s making a terrible faux pas.

  “I’m not going to make it to the shelter. They close the doors at 10:30.” The woman turned her head about, as if trying to gauge by sound which alley nearby would be most sheltered from the wind. I wonder how old she really is. Living on the street ages people. She might not yet be forty. Worry and sorrow have slackened her face. Her hair is clean. Her clothes are clean. She’s trying to live with dignity.

  I free my arm from Catherine’s grip, and hear a small gasp from her.

  I reach into my pocket and pull out twenty dollars.

  “Take a cab,” I say to the woman, and hand her the money. “There’s a taxi stand around the corner.”

  I don’t hear what the woman says. It could be “Thank you.” All I’m aware of is her eyes, because they’re suddenly empty of despair. The change in her eyes makes me feel warm and human as she turns and walks away.

  When I meet Catherine’s eyes, they brim with fury I’ve never seen before.

  Our bus comes, stinking of soot, the brakes making an asthmatic grunt as it pulls to the curb. She boards without paying, takes a seat in the rear. I pay for us both and join her.

  Her gaze is fixed on the inky view of the window. I look at the back of her head as the bus pulls out and the other couple at the stop is left behind, fading to shadow.

  “You want an Oscar, or something?” she says to the glass, her words misting the window with each syllable.

  I say nothing.

  “For your theatrics.”

  “I wasn’t being theatrical.”

  “Don’t you be condescending to me . . . don’t you dare!”

  She turns to me. The soft blues of her mascara run in streaks down her face.

  “You did that to embarrass me. Did you enjoy embarrassing me? I hope it was worth it.”

  “No.”

  “Then why did you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Give that woman money for a cab? While we take the bus? Was it because of what I’d said about your cynicism? You had to do something nice and humane to show me wrong, didn’t you? Well that’s the most cynical fucking thing you could have ever done, you fucking misanthrope!”

  In her apartment, in the prison of her possessions, in the Victorian four-poster bed that had been a graduation gift from her grandmother, to the tune of the sound machine mimicking the fauna of an endangered rainforest, we lie naked and distant from each other, invisible barriers raised against each other’s touch.

  I feel awful, and wonder what I can do to make amends.

  —Catherine had a victim in you, but you’ve had victims yourself.

  With the sudden absence of the dusk-world I’d been defining with hard and shadowed words, the room seemed naked as I felt. Our stage hollowed itself to the brutally minimalist.

  —I’ve taken eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth.

  The echo of my voice returned from a greater, emptier distance than it had before, a distance void of props. My hypocrite twin, sheltered by his curtain of silvered glass, felt further away as well. He was our audience, who himself had yet to be cast in the role I now played.

  —You’ve victimized people to feel better about yourself. You and Catherine are the same.

  To deny what he says would lead to a too-deep and detailed reiteration of the chess games of our First Act. I needed to push forward our drama, and so surrendered a pawn to him. I had no interest in his insights to make me well. How was there any possibility for the years of therapy it would take to make me well by his standards? Why bother? Life’s too short.

  —How they victimized me was more insidious than what I’ve done. They each betrayed a trust, abused power I’d given them. I just killed them.

  Doctor Johansson leaned back. I envied his ability to move that way, to make leather cushions creak and groan. His eyes narrowed. He was drawing something into focus, as would a good actor playing Sherlock Holmes, weaving strands into a solution for the crime. Was this a new role he played? Or a new layer to the role he’d been playing?

  —Dean, I have to be direct. Everyone deals with abuses of power and trust. But not everyone does what you have. I need specifics. Contexts. The D.A. wants a preliminary hearing in the next two weeks. So I have to ask, were you an abused child?

  His asking this long-expected question was invasive, despite his decorum and the shift in his demeanour that told me he was about to ask that very question. Of course I’d been abused. Even if I hadn’t been, the enchanted cloak in which I’d mantled myself would require me to say I was. Parthenogenesis of monsters without human fault diminishes their power. Doctor Johansson held the question of my abuse over me as he would the crown at my coronation as an archetype.

  Yet I didn’t want to split open the old and bone-deep scars, and in so taking the crown, feel the stigmata of my past bead through my skin. I’ve been afraid of this question, of its potency. But I decided to answer for the sake of my epitaph, the wizard’s glyph that will free me from my self-devouring body, and for the sake of my twin’s craft.

  —I . . . I was a neglected child. My parents didn’t want me, so they didn’t acknowledge me as a living thing.

  —Neglect is a form of abuse.

  —Then I was abused.

  —Do you want to tell me about it?

  How do you articulate a void? How do you speak absence?

  —My parents wanted a baby, but not a child of school age or older. Then a kid isn’t cute and helpless, like a pet. It’s a responsibility. I was only wanted as a plaything. So I became an object they grew to hate, because it wouldn’t be owned the way they wanted it to be. Despite the neglect, they prodded me, to keep me in line. And they punished me, too, for things I was expected to know, but was never told. At any moment, I was punished for doing something I wasn’t allowed to do . . . something simple as making a cup of hot chocolate. Fear of being punished kept me . . . paralyzed. I didn’t dare do anything.

  I’d never mentioned this to anyone before. Nor consciously articulated it to myself in thought, though I’ve known it to be true. I’ve held this Truth close, keeping it as a secret engine I could harness to become what I have. The grammar of what I’d just said was a string of incantations too potent to utter before this moment, like the revelation of a secret Name. The mythic killer needs a mythically wretched childhood, just as surely as Tricksters must be youngest sons. Loki is my brother; cloaked, we inflict mischief on the worlds our parents made.

  —Did they hit you?

  —I hope no more than most kids are hit.

  —Did they lock you up?

  —They ignored me. Put me in a figurative closet, I guess.

  —That made you angry?

  —Only later. Back then, I’d rot in my room wondering why I was such a horrible kid that my parents hated me. They knew I wanted their approval, and they used it as a weapon to make me follow their unspoken laws and not be a problem.

  . . . And in not being a problem, in not being anything, I lived in a dead world from which I resurrected myself. So many tales of childhood tell of kids who wander through portals to other worlds of magic and wonder. I found magic and wonder, but not the kind of Nursery Magic that would whisk me to Narnia, or bring stuffed animals to life. I trod an undiscovered country in which I found the strength to make metaphor real, to give poetry flesh I could twist and hurt, so that later, I could twist and hurt flesh through the poetry of Justice.

  —Did you avoid your parents?

  —As much as I could.

  —Did you leave the house, to get away?

  A pressure clenched my throat. The room was now so clear in its glassy translucency, my eyes hurt, as they do just before they brim.

  —I couldn’t leave the house, or the yard. It wa
s a prison for most of my life. For all their impatience with me, they were over-protective. If they gave me independence, they’d have to worry about me skinning my knee, or just being a kid. They locked me in their realm to minimize their responsibility for me. They hated unknown quantities, and by keeping me mousey and afraid of the outside world, they controlled me as a variable, compensated for me not being an . . . not being an infant.

  My voice cracked. My eyes pooled their first betraying hint of blurring, and a cold grey cloud turned in my chest. The spectre of the child I’d been was folded within that cloud, speaking its un-fleshed rage and hurt.

  Please, God. Don’t let me cry. Not now, while the videotape runs and my hands are shackled and I can’t wipe the tears. Please spare me that humiliation.

  I swallowed down my grief, quieted the child I’d been through suppressive will. The twin inside me fell still, while my future twin, who will take up my standard in his role, answered my plea for strength as a saint would answer the plea of a black-shrouded grandmother.

  —Did you understand all this about your parents at the time?

  —No. Later. I was a teenager. I was walking with a girl I liked when we ran into her mother on the street. Her mother was happy to see her and walked up to her and kissed her. They smiled at each other. I was shocked. Parents could love their children? It wasn’t TV myth? It was like meeting a blue fairy or a troll on the street.

  I paused, tasting the silence unbroken by the gnawing and scratching I expected. Though my eyes still hurt, they welcomed the absence of the red dusk that heralded those sounds.

  —And later in college, I saw a film in Education class about the plight of the neglected child. What teachers can do to spot one and report the neglect. That fifteen-minute movie could have been taken from my life. It showed a kid of about six waking up in a dirty room and putting on dirty clothes lying by his bed. The kid had no toothbrush, and didn’t wash before going to school. He had a glass of Coke for breakfast, because there was no food in the house. And that was . . . me, God-damnit! That was my life as a kid. The realization . . .

  I couldn’t say any more of this canted Truth, that I’d learned of while netted within an audience, beholding the performance of a child who played what I’d been. My first hypocrite twin. The strength granted by my saint faltered, became bitter as the air of a church thick with the cigars-and-old-lady-perfume stink of its dying parishioners.

  —And you became angry with your parents then.

  —Bitterly.

  —Why didn’t you kill them?

  —They were honest when I confronted them. They offered no apologies. No crocodile tears. I let them live.

  —How would you have killed them?

  —Air pushed into their hearts with a hypo. I liked the idea of a hollowness in their hearts stopping them from beating.

  Doctor Johansson struck a pose like Rodin’s The Thinker, still holding his pipe. Over his hand, he asked, —How did you feel when your father died?

  The ghost of the clean smell of the newsprint as my court-appointed lawyer set the paper detailing my father’s death before me rose up. The smell was more visceral and real than the sight of the paper, and what was printed on it.

  —I pitied him. His son, such as he understood the term, being a monster was too much of a variable in his life. I was shocked he had the gumption to off himself. Maybe he was mortally insulted by my being individuated from him.

  Exhaustion flooded me, as if I were an urn submerged in a cold pool. The emotions I rode on this small stage were taking their toll. My illness was part of that exhaustion. There have been times recently that I’ve walked to the corner shop, and my ruined stamina would fold when I got home, and I’d sleep for two hours. How long had it been since this Second Act began? It had been around ten when I was ushered in here, my chains clanking like some Victorian apparition’s. To judge by the gilded October glow leaking through the small windows, it was now mid-afternoon. Despite the sword-sharp danger of the theatre we enacted, I felt safe in his office, away from the gibbering lunatics, the sewer smells, the shrieks and cold bars of the rest of the facility, which seemed as cruel in its Bedlam-legacy as I had been powerful as the embodiment of a myth. This office was an island of sanity, maybe made safe by the incongruity of the grand wooden desk separating me from my Confessor.

  A look walked through Doctor Johansson’s eyes, like that of a watch-maker restoring an antique.

  —Does it bother you that you can’t resolve things with your father? By killing him, or talking to him?

  —I knew after I confronted my parents I’d never see or speak to them again. I’d get killed or caught. They’d never visit their son in a place like this.

  —Can your resentment toward them ever be resolved?

  A pressure on my shackled feet, a living weight. As if something heavy rested on them, with flesh like the brow of a feverish child. The thing squirmed as if to get comfortable. The hairs on my legs rose, and chills coursed under my skin like spilled mercury. My heart felt full of spun glass, and my genitals drew up inside me. The thing across my feet breathed with a shifting of its weight, as if its lungs didn’t draw air, but thick fluid.

  —What’s wrong, Dean?

  —Just a bad feeling, like someone walking over my grave.

  A little laugh. Like a bark. (Can’t he hear it?) And the weight heaved itself off my feet. I can relax now. But it has never touched me before; it has never been real to me, save in the blood-lit world that had retreated from our stage.

  Doctor Johansson frowned, sensing, because he’s no fool, I lied to him.

  —How did you deal with your anger when you were young?

  —Before I started killing people?

  —Yes.

  —I killed things.

  In his furrowed brow, I read where his thoughts traveled. I was angry with myself for goading him by accident, for letting that which had dared to touch me fluster me so that I set his clinical alarms ringing.

  —I killed insects, Doctor. Just bugs. I never hurt anything higher on the evolutionary scale than a spider.

  The glassy-clear reality that had burned away the dusk-red shadows . . . I sensed now what it was: the hard light of my fellow actor’s clinical training imposing itself on the poetry that had given me strength, power, and the will to use them. I spoke, as if to crack that reality, to free myself from its oppression, lest it take all trace of that power from me.

  —I never killed vertebrates. And I didn’t wet the bed or start fires, as the literature says all serial killers must. I could never enjoy killing animals.

  Oh, but I did taste rapture killing insects. I enjoyed compensating for powerlessness. And hopelessness. I still savour the child’s thrill of hurling a black beetle atop a hill of red ants, watching them churn like angry breakers over the larger beast, rending past the thing’s armour. Its huge jaws clamped, unable to close on the small foes that so efficiently killed it. And there were the centipedes I poured hot candle wax over, entombing them, force-feeding them the paralysis and claustrophobia that had been life in my parents’ house.

  But what I loved to kill most were the great, black carpenter ants. They were tough bastards, true warriors. It pleased me that despite their strength and fury, I could kill them without a thought.

  Though I did think about killing them, always writing new scenarios, new premises, with which to punish them for being so insolently strong and pure. I thought of needles to drive through their heads (there was such pleasure when the point pressed against their chitinous shells, and the shells yielded with a faint pop as the metal shaft went through . . . they lived through that, for a while). I thought of matches, vivisections to be done with the scissors of my pocketknife, and drops of fine motor oil that suffocated them so very quickly.

  What I especially loved were the Games, the gladiatorial contests I arranged that so beautifully expressed the feelings that defined my little life. The Games were
fictions for which I was creator and audience, a semi-divine reaper of lives who found peace in witnessing death. I took up Godlike power, because God didn’t bother to do the job, having abandoned the world in which I’d been abandoned.

  Behind my house near the rear porch, I’d draw a chalk circle on the summer-hot concrete. Two carpenter ants from different colonies would be thrown into this ring. If they did not notice each other, I grabbed one in each hand, their powerful jaws would snap in silent rage, dripping formic acid that smelled so slightly of maple. Then I’d bring them together in an awful embrace, their jaws clamping down on each other.

  Then I’d set them in the chalk arena, with the Rule in mind that if either one disengaged and left the Circle, I would crush it with my thumb. If their struggle took them out of the Circle, I’d knock them back in. The battles could last hours. And it pleased me no end that they fought and were in pain for reasons they couldn’t understand, under laws they couldn’t understand. Sometimes, when the struggle went too long, I’d change the odds by ripping off a leg or snipping an antenna.

  And if one ant proved itself worthy, if one ant followed my unknowable laws and killed the other, I crushed it anyway, happy to make another entity suffer as I’d known helplessness, following the oppressive rules of my parents, and receiving for it no love or acceptance or freedom or power.

  It was good to kill the victor. I’d walk away from the chalk circle feeling wonderfully clean, and no longer angry.

  Doctor Johansson packed his pipe with another bowlful of tobacco as fictional as the dreams I’d used as weapons.

  —Would you describe yourself a serial killer if it would help your defense? To cop an insanity plea?

  No, I am an avatar.

  —I wouldn’t. Besides, I’m not going to see the inside of a courthouse. I’ll see the inside of a cheap coffin, first.

  He began puffing, and my mind saw the bowl glow red. A blue-grey fog formed around him like a halo.

  —There must have been times when killing insects wasn’t enough. What did you do then? Or when there were no bugs around, in the winter?