The Withdrawal Method

by Pasha Malla

  No no no, yelled Shayna, wriggling away. No!

  Alex loosened his grip, and the second he did Shayna bucked and flipped him, pinning him there. Her fingernails dug sharply into his wrists. From the shadows in the back of the closet, Heather gasped.

  What are you doing? said Alex.

  This, you pervert, said Shayna, and she balled her fists and rained blows at Alex's face, his shoulders, his chest. No no no, she said. Stop, moaned Alex, turtling. Please, stop, please.

  Shayna pulled away. Alex relaxed, thankful it was over, but then Shayna screamed, No! again and came down hard with a knee to his crotch. For a moment the closet blazed white, as though a flashbulb had gone off in the dark. Alex wilted. Then the door opened wider and Shayna was pushing through and gone.

  I got away, she was telling the other girls, as a dull ache spread from Alex's groin to his stomach. There's a rapist in that alleyway! I think he killed Heather!

  Heather crawled out from the back of the closet and climbed over Alex. She stood in the hallway looking unsure where to go.

  Let's call the police! Alex heard someone cry, possibly Karen. There was a weird bristly fish in his guts and now it was swimming up his throat. Was he dying? He shut his eyes.

  WHEN THE POLICE came Alex had to go to jail. Jail was his room upstairs. The girls collected in the hallway behind Ginny, the tallest, the only one who could reach the lock. In his sister's eyes was a resigned look as she stood there. Put the pervert away, said Shayna. Ginny paused. Sorry Dirk, she mouthed, and then closed the door. The deadbolt rattled into place and the girls' footsteps faded downstairs. No one besides his father had ever locked Alex in his room. Ginny was forbidden to do it. Even his mom had never done it before.

  Alex sat on the bed. His balls ached very much. After a few minutes he pulled his Detroit Pistons wastebasket over and barfed a sour peanut-buttery paste into it. He covered the barf with handfuls of Kleenex, then sat back on the bed and stayed there very quietly for a very long time, trying to hear what was going on.

  Maybe they were still playing the game, he thought. Maybe his part was to sit here and wait, maybe it wasn't over, maybe there would be a trial. But what was the game? Alex tried to find words for it. He couldn't.

  There was no sound of the girls though - nothing from downstairs, just the faint faraway chatter of the TV in his mom's room down the hall. He imagined her in there lying on her bed and lay down then too, on top of his Star Wars sheets.

  Staring up at the bars of sunlight that played through the blinds onto the ceiling, Alex thought about the moment when he had felt those bumps on Shayna's chest, how softly he had touched them. He hated her. She was mean, a bitch, and she had squared him and then he had puked. And what sort of sister was Ginny? He punched his pillow hard and then punched it again. His pillow was Shayna's face, it was Ginny's face. Alex hit it, he bit it, he screamed into it, he screamed and roared and screamed.

  But then Alex pulled away, hot and itchy. He lay there on his bed until the light fanning through the blinds began to go coppery and slow. Soon his mom would head downstairs to start fixing supper. Soon his father would be home and finding Alex locked into his room. There would be hell to pay, and Alex would be the one to pay it. Soon the day would be over, and soon it would be night.

  Alex got up and went to his window. He pulled the cord, the blinds went clattering up. Outside the clouds were gone. The sky was clear and the sun was dipping below the treeline of the woods; golden bands filtered through the empty branches. The tops of the trees were frosted with ice, glimmering silver in the dusky light, and the shadows of the trees were long purple scraggles on the snow. But the trees themselves were black. The trees were the woods and the woods were a cave out there past the fence. The woods were a dark, grinning mouth.

  Why had the girl Althea gone in there? Those first few weeks in the fall Alex was sure one day he'd be playing in the yard and she'd come wandering out of the trees and across the field and stand at the fence, confused and lost. But she would like him - they were both Als. She would feel safe with Alex and he would take her inside his house and make her hot chocolate. He would call her family and tell them she was okay - or an ambulance, or the cops. But Alex didn't think those thoughts now. He thought instead of Althea's body, frozen and blue, appearing under a snowbank when everything thawed in the spring.

  Alex's eyes followed the shadows of the trees, stretching now in the red cleft of sun all the way back across the field, toward the house, past the fence to the square patch that was his family's yard. And then he looked down, directly down, to the space behind the house where the snow fort now lay in ruins. Beside it were the girls.

  With the light deepening they seemed too defined, too real, as though someone had cut their pictures from a magazine and laid them down there, one by one, side by side. Their faces were turned up toward the house although they couldn't see Alex, he knew, framed in his bedroom window. It was still too light outside and too dark in his room. So Alex stood there watching them, unseen: four girls on their backs in a line, making angels in the snow.

  THE FILM WE MADE

  ABOUT DADS

  IN THE FIRST scene of the film we made about dads, we caught them as children, well before they became dads themselves, when their own dads were full-on capital-D Dads-withmoustaches who had been in the war. We got some great shots of the dads at age eight swinging from the monkey bars in the schoolyard playground. Afterwards, we interviewed them about their goals. The answers: astronaut, fireman, psychiatrist, florist, psycho killer, Oscar Robertson. We asked them, "Describe your dad in one word." The unanimous response was: "Mean."

  NEXT WE FOUND the dads at sixteen, getting hand jobs on the couch. The cameras were rolling. The dads were oblivious and said nothing, just rolled over on top of their lovers and, fully clothed, humped away until something damp oozed through their jeans. "Can you edit that so I look better?" wondered the dads, wiping themselves down in the bathroom. We smiled, keeping our distance, and told them we'd see what we could do.

  IN COLLEGE THE dads grew beards. They bought cars and one night tried acid. We had run out of funding and couldn't shoot. "Remember this," we encouraged the dads, who were giggling at rain.

  A FEW YEARS LATER, we received a grant and resumed filming. By then the dads were done college and had found wives to marry. At the altars, the dads said, "I do," and the wives said, "I do," and the dads kissed their new wives and the wives kissed back and then they ran out of the church while people threw rice at them and cheered. The dads and their wives went to Niagara Falls, where they stared silently into all that water and thought, Hmm, and later fell asleep with their shoes on. "Maybe edit in some love," we told the post-production crew. "Okay," they said.

  THE DADS AND wives bought houses. The wives taught grade school and brought home children's drawings that they pinned to their fridges with magnetic fruit. The wives looked at the drawings and said, "Aw," in a pointed way. The dads were stuck in middle management; they built workshops in their garages. "That's my workshop in there," they told the wives. "That's my space." We went out into the garages and panned over the workshops, over the workbenches in the workshops, and the tools that would rarely get used. "This is golden stuff," we said to one another. We were making a film about dads.

  THERE WERE MOMENTS we didn't get. The dads told us about nights of laughter with their wives; they told us about moments of tenderness, shared joy, or sorrow, a walk in the park and ducks. But the cinematographers' union allowed us a cameraman only for a certain number of hours. We would show up in the morning and the dads would say, "You should have seen us last night," but we could only shrug and say, "Sorry."

  THEN THE WIVES got pregnant. The dads inseminated the wives with their sperm, which shot out of a dad's penis and into the corresponding wife's vagina, etc., and nine months later a baby plopped out like a prize. We had to find some stock footage for the delivery, because the doctors wouldn't let the crew into the delivery room. The resu
lt was a beautiful montage with flowers blooming and shots of the universe and the emergence into the world of living things, hippos and such, all set to a specially commissioned soundtrack of synthesized brass and drum machine. At the hospital, the dads stood in the hallway with unlit cigars wagging from their mouths, talking to anyone who would listen. "My wife is having a baby!" they hollered, thrusting a cigar in whoever's direction. The person, usually no one the dads knew, would decline the cigar and back away nervously, as if from a bear.

  WHEN THE DADS saw the babies, shrivelled and purple in their wives' arms, they declared, "That's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life," and then cupped the babies' skulls in their hands as though they were testing fruit. The babies cooed and gurgled and so did the dads; it was unclear who was imitating whom.

  TWO YEARS LATER there was a plan for another baby, and the process repeated itself: the sperm, the vagina, the cigars, the unintelligible exchange of sounds. We used different stock footage this time, crosscut with scenes of the first child, confused and alone in a field of lavender (this we staged using a blue screen).

  NOW, WITH Two kids, the dads were really cooking. Along with the children, they had gas barbecues, station wagons, digital cable. They were no longer stuck in middle management; they were somewhere better. The kids got older, and the dads coached their soccer teams. The dads drank beer on Sunday afternoons and watched football. But the dads might add something incongruous. "I also have season's tickets to the opera," they might say. Or: "It's fine if one of the kids turns out gay." These things, we decided, would best be snipped right out of the film.

  WHEN IT WAS time for the children to move away from home, the dads were strong. The wives wept in the driveways as the children pulled away in cars with couches strapped to the roofs, and the dads held the wives and stroked their hair. It would later be easy for us to erase the tears that ran down the dads' faces. We have computer programs for that sort of business.

  THEN THE DADS became granddads. Their sons were now dads. In minivans the sons brought grandchildren, and the dads crouched in front of the babies among them and produced noises as they had at babies they themselves had once sired. For older grandchildren small change was produced from unlikely places, behind the grandchildren's ears or the couch, and then displayed magically. "Grandpa!" the grandchildren said. When it was time to go, the dads hugged their sons and their grandchildren and marvelled in the driveway that the boys among them, although they had their shoes on the wrong feet, would one day also, somehow, be dads.

  AFTER SOME TIME, it became difficult for the dads to sit down, nearly impossible to urinate. The dads' pee came in a dribble. There was some putting off and some more putting off, but at the wives' insistence a medical examination confirmed it: the dads had very advanced-stage cancer of the prostate. There was no hope, the cancer was everywhere, they would be dead in six months, said the doctors, with their hands on the dads' shoulders and a look of caring in their eyes. We scored this segment of the film with a single cello sawing away, sad and lonely. Back at home, we took long, long takes of the dads standing at the window, watching cars pass by on the street. The wives hovered nearby and drank sherry.

  WHEN THE DADS DIED, no one knew quite what to say. At the funerals, former co-workers made speeches about dedication that left everyone feeling empty. This we recognized would be impossible to convey in our film, unless we resorted to voiceover. But we shot what we could: the mourners and flowers and the open coffins with the dads lying inside, silent and still. People walked by, peering in, some of them sniffling back tears. "It was time," declared the wives, sensibly. They left and went back home to stand in the parlours of their houses, where they nibbled triangular sandwiches and accepted the condolences of family and strangers with polite nods, whispering, "Thank you, thank you. Thank you, everyone."

  WHEN IT WAS ALL over, when the wives were left alone in their houses, when even their children had driven away in minivans, we rushed back to the studio to put together a rough cut of our film about dads. We had spent years making a film about dads, and now the dads were gone, and our financial backers had expectations. Our crew had been there for all the critical moments: we had captured everything in the dads' lives, from the formative years to the golden, deformative years. Now it was time to make some art. And there were reels and reels of film piled around us in the studio, but we just sat there, looking around - at the computers, at the rushes, at one another - not quite knowing where to begin.

  PUSHING OCEANS IN AND

  PULLING OCEANS OUT

  IT'S APRIL AND the world is opening up like a hand with something secret in it. The world is all, Hey I've got something to show you, so you lean in and go, What? You go, Show me! And you look and the fingers peel back and then whammo there it is, green and muddy and fresh and dripping wet with rain.

  The world is melting but it's almost all water anyway. The world is like 75 percent water. It's a ball made of water and some mountains and other stuff, some trees and hills and deserts. Buildings and roads. People walk around on it and we're like 75 percent water too. My dad Greg is 236 pounds, which makes him 177 pounds of water, like a hundred thousand glasses of water, maybe more. He's a bathtub full of water - bigger than a bathtub, a kiddie pool. Anyway, my dad Greg is a whole lot of water. And Mom is the moon.

  You learn all this water stuff in grade five science. The units are called The Earth and The Human Body. And in The Human Body we learned about vaginas and wangs. Big whoop though, right? Vaginas and wangs, big whoop.

  It's springtime and you've got to make sure that Brian wears his rubber boots because of all the mud. Like Granny says, Brian's slow and only seven, and my dad Greg'11 forget if I don't do it. But my dad Greg calls me Big Gal or BG for short because I'm responsible and mature for my age (nine).

  Brian crapped his pants four times in class already this year so one of his teachers called home to see if maybe he needs diapers and my dad Greg said no so they said well okay make sure he wears pants with elastics around the ankles. Get it?

  But one time he came home with a diaper on anyway and my dad lost it. He called them up at Brian's school and said fuck and everything, I heard him. He said, Are you telling me how to raise my fucking kid? And then after, he went and sat on his bike in the garage for like thirty hours or something.

  My dad Greg won't let us talk about Mom. He took all the pictures of her that were around the house away and hid them somewhere. One time we were having lasagna for dinner and I tried asking him if he could remember if Mom's favourite food was lasagna because mine is but my dad's is burgers. I had to get it from somewhere! But he didn't say anything, just kept eating. And when I asked again he gave me a long quiet look that I could tell meant: stop.

  TODAY'S WEDNESDAY, April 8. That's the first thing you do when you get to school, write the date in your workbook at the top of the page. You're supposed to do cursive but I print because cursive looks messy and in my printing all the letters are the same size, it looks like a typewriter if I do say so myself. Then I sit for a bit and start to pinch my eyelashes and pull away, and sometimes you get a few little curls of eyelash and you sprinkle those down onto your book. You keep doing that and eventually you have a little pile of black eyelashes, and you organize that into a perfect square on the empty page. But I hide it with my hand when Mrs. Mills comes walking by.

  There are some things you just have to keep secret. Like for my birthday last year my dad Greg bought me a diary with a lock and everything, and he told me I could write whatever I wanted in it, about my day or if I was mad or whatever, and I could lock it up and they would be my secrets. But you write things down and they can get found. People can read it and know everything. It's better to keep your thoughts in your own head, you have them there for a second and then they're gone and you're the only person who will ever know what they were. You think things to yourself and they're safe.

  So anyway it's the last day before Easter weekend. Because it's the las
t day I haven't done too much work, just wrote the date in each of my workbooks (le 8 Avril en francais) and did the eyelash stuff and then didn't do anything else because this year I'm going to help hide the eggs. I've been planning all day where I'm going to hide them - places that are easy for Brian but not too easy. This year it's me in charge of the egg hunt because last year SOMEBODY forgot where he put them and then like a month later all this chocolate melted into our TV.

  Easter's about Jesus or something? We don't do religion at my school.

  Oh - anyone calls Brian a retard, I'll kick their ass.

  Another thing we learned in The Human Body was about periods. Girls get their period and blood comes out of their vagina. Not me though, even though it can happen as young as ten. I've been making sure to keep my legs tight together or cross them so nothing's getting out. If I have to pee I hold it to make the muscles stronger so my vagina will never let out any blood. It'll be the toughest vagina in town, not like all those other wimpy vaginas, dripping all over the place like one of Jared Wein's nosebleeds.

  You get your period and you also get boobs. Some of the girls in grade six have boobs. Like Kelly Sanchez (she's already twelve, though). They stick out of her shirt, she looks like she's hiding Easter eggs, ha ha ha.

  What I remember most about Mom was when she came back from the hospital and only had one boob. They cut off the other one and gave her a special bra to make it look like she had two boobs, but sometimes around the house she didn't wear it and her shirt just sagged on the one side. But that's just what I remember, I was only four. She was tired and they'd shaved her hair off. She just lay in bed and my dad Greg made me be quiet around the house, all the time, right until she went back to the hospital and then it was the end.