Mysterious Skin

by Scott Heim

  I began by discussing stories I’d read about other UFO abductees, and I gave my voice as matter-of-fact a tone as I could muster. Then I spoke of myself. “The fact is,” I said, “that we still don’t know, we’ve never known, what happened to me when I was little. But that was so close in time to the night we saw the UFO. I’m wondering now, no, I’m certain, that those two nights are connected somehow. Connected also, maybe, to my blackout on the Halloween night a couple years after that.” I paused. “And watching that show about Avalyn made me realize how similar my story is to hers.”

  My mother nodded hesitantly. I wiped ice cream from my mouth and continued. “Don’t you think it might be true? I mean the whole alien bit?”

  We passed another fireworks stand. Two separate families gathered around it, leaning over the colored boxes. “Maybe,” my mother said. She spoke slowly, as if maybe were a foreign word she wasn’t certain how to pronounce. “Maybe.” She gripped the steering wheel, veins visible on her wrist.

  I started to speak again, but she cut me off. “Some memories,” she said, “take time to clarify.”

  I knew then that my mother had at least opened her mind to the possibility that my theory was true. I knew she would support whatever move I made next. She would stay beside me until I solved it. Even if to solve meant to lose another block of time, to slip into the unknown world where I was certain they’d taken me before.

  In a cabinet drawer at home, I found a package of stationery and envelopes my father had given my mother years ago. Lilacs and daisies garlanded each page. The stationery seemed like something Avalyn would cherish. I made sure the pen’s ink wouldn’t smudge; that my handwriting remained steady. Then I carefully wrote “Avalyn Friesen, Rural Route #2, Inman KS” on an envelope. I found her zip code in the telephone book.

  I selected a piece of the paper. I wouldn’t leave anything out—I wanted Avalyn to know about the crawl space, our UFO sighting that same summer, the strange blackout on that later Halloween. I wanted to confess everything to her.

  “Dear Avalyn,” I wrote. “You don’t know me, but….” In my mind, a spacey voice finished the sentence. You will, it said.

  eight

  ERIC PRESTON

  Neil McCormick was turning me into a criminal, and I loved it. Our new hobby: thrift store theft. In the month since graduation, we’d generated a wealth of secondhand books, housewares, and enough clothes for an army. School was over forever; crime seemed the only thing left to do.

  Our favorite target was the United Methodist Thrift on First Street. On that particular Friday in June, I eyed a barely worn pair of combat boots, but I wasn’t about to pay the twenty-dollar price. Neil distracted the clerk by complimenting her bleached flip, which even a two-year-old could have guessed was a wig. He also bullshitted about central Kansas’s recent rain and hailstorms. “I’ve begun to worry about flooding,” I heard the woman say. He had her in his spell. I shuffled toward the back of the store, removed the boots from the rack, and kicked off my ragged high-tops.

  One important shoplifting rule I’d learned from Neil was to simultaneously buy something else to erase all suspicion. I watched him drop a rubber snake on the clerk’s counter. “Ninety-nine cents,” she said. While he dug through his pockets for change, I saw my chance. I concentrated on the clerk’s face and telepathically transmitted Center all your attention on the cash register. It worked, and I moseyed out the door. “Stop back in, boys,” the clerk yelled.

  Neil and I got into his gas-guzzling Impala and tore from the parking lot to begin our daily cruise around the city. I’d only lived in Hutchinson four months, but I already knew enough to hate the place. How else could I feel about a city bordered by the following attractions: to the west, a meat-packing plant; the north, a boring space museum; the east, a maximum security prison; and the south, “The World’s Longest Grain Elevator”? In Modesto, I’d had a scattering of friends who shared the same interests in music and were queer like me. Here, I only had Neil.

  I spat on a finger to shine the boots. I untucked my shirt, revealing the wadded-up gloves and the belt I also stole. “I could get arrested,” I said.

  “Stealing’s the least of my evils.” His voice was thick with pride. I’d become a thief with him, but I knew I could never hustle. The idea of taking money from men for sex unnerved me; in addition, I didn’t have the looks, the irresistibility I knew Neil used to every advantage.

  “If you’re free tonight,” Neil said, “you can come to the ballpark with me.” Neil worked Friday nights and weekends as announcer and scorekeeper for tournaments at another of Hutchinson’s lamebrained attractions, Sun Center. KANSAS’S LARGEST HAVEN FOR SOFTBALL FUN, its glitzy signs screamed. I hated that place. On the previous weekend, I’d joined him in his press box. We got high, and I pierced his earlobe with a safety pin and a fistful of ice cubes. We practically ruptured our stomachs laughing at all the morons.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said, which meant yes.

  Neil’s elbow jutted from his open window, the full weight of the sun’s rays slamming into his skin. It was only June, but he had begun to turn as dark as milk chocolate. A fitting simile, since that was a staple of his diet. While he drove, Neil tore the foil from another half-melted Hershey’s. He bit a corner off. He held the bar toward my face: its shape was the spitting image of my new home state.

  I pointed to the center of the chocolate Kansas. “Here we are, stuck in the middle of hell.”

  “But not for long,” he said. “In my case, anyway.” Soon, in August, Neil would be moving, leaving the Midwest for New York. Now, he was biding his time, coasting until his life would begin again. He would abandon me in Hutchinson’s dust.

  Neil turned onto a shady avenue, his car winding its way toward my grandparents’ trailer park. When we got there, I spied Grandma and Grandpa in the yard, pruning a bush with flowers like red-skinned fists. “The grannies are home,” I said. “Let’s go to your house.”

  Neil made a U. He smiled at me and took a last bite from the chocolate bar. The look on his face suggested he’d never tasted anything so perfect.

  After my parents’ accident, I’d moved from Modesto to Hutchinson to live with my grandparents. I spent my first day in Kansas in my new school’s vice principal’s office, filling out forms, enrolling in classes that paralleled the ones I’d taken in California. American government, senior English, advanced art—everything seemed unnecessary. I scribbled my name on countless papers. On each page, someone had thoughtfully blacked out the spaces designated for parents’ signatures. “All done.” I handed a secretary the finished forms. Her eyes, which darted from my clothes to my expertly applied eyeliner to the dyed spikes of my haircut, couldn’t fathom how to feel sorry for such a freak. I trudged to the hall, dreading every moment.

  There he stood: Neil, jamming books into his locker. His looks were faultless. He had lips so pouty they might have been swollen; brown eyes; brows that met in his forehead’s center. His angular nose, chin, and cheekbones seemed sculpted by an ecstatic, mescaline-fueled god. His hair was the color of onyx. Everyone else seemed to be avoiding him. When he saw me watching, he smirked. That smirk delivered me from hopelessness.

  Later that week I learned his name; I also heard the word fag used in the same breath. We shared two classes. During discussion in American government, I stared at him instead of the Bill of Rights notes that Mr. Stein scribbled across the blackboard. After school, Neil would rush to his Impala, as if fleeing a burning building. He was sometimes accompanied by a shady-eyed kid named Christopher. They’d drive off, oblivious of me, and I’d walk home. Those first few nights, I fell asleep imagining what he looked like naked.

  It didn’t take long to discover that being a queer in a Kansas high school was a world of difference from being one in California. I learned to proceed with caution. After two weeks, I spied Neil hanging out with this “Christopher” in the park on the south side of town, a place I’d heard through various grape
vines was notorious as queer cruising ground. He wore sunglasses and a cantaloupe-colored windbreaker. As I later wrote in my journal, Neil would have “averted my eyes from an uncapped grenade.” I assumed that a young guy in Carey Park was strange, because I’d only seen the over-forty crowd there.

  I’ll never forget the smug expression on Neil’s face as I drove by in my grandparents’ powder blue Gremlin. It was as though Neil knew he’d wind up sleeping with me.

  Neil waved, and I blushed. I sped home.

  The next day, he turned toward me in American government. He briefly appeared as if he would spit or swear. Then he grinned. He pointed to my exam; held up his. We’d both gotten D pluses.

  “You forgot to answer the Brown v. Board of Education question,” I said. I injected my voice with all the cockiness I could muster. “At least I wrote something down.”

  “You stare at me a lot,” he said. “I’m Neil.”

  “I know.”

  His bangs fell in his eyes, and he angled his head to shake them away. “Is your mother aware of where you were yesterday?”

  “My mother’s dead,” I said.

  He didn’t flinch. I liked that.

  “That’s why I’m here,” I said. “I would have moved eventually anyway. Sooner or later they would have kicked me out of school. My friends and I started some fires, did some vandalism.”

  That was a slight exaggeration, but Neil seemed impressed. He told me I had guts for dressing like I did at such a backward high school. On that particular day, I was packed into tight black jeans. The usual cross dangled from my neck. My T-shirt, massacred with rips, featured Christ’s stigmataed hand reaching from a thunderhead toward an amazed crowd. Neil touched JC’s dripping nail hole. He winked. A girl in a cheerleader’s uniform rolled her eyes, as if she’d seen this process a billion times before.

  Neil and I skipped last hour. We headed for the parking lot, where Christopher was waiting. “See you later,” Neil yelled to him, not bothering to introduce us. He showed me his Impala, and I crawled in. Although it was a chilly March day, we bought tutti-frutti ices from the 7-Eleven. We whizzed toward my grandparents’ house, which by that time I was calling my house as well.

  No one was around. I shut the door to my room, and Neil stood there, staring heavenward. What could have been so engaging about a mobile home’s waterstained ceiling? Curious, I looked up too, and that’s when he pinned me against the wall. He kissed me. His mouth was extra cold and wet, as if his tongue were a chunk of pink ice. We took all of ten minutes to get our clothes off.

  It’s not the actual sex I remember best. It’s what he said to me after we’d finished. Neil toweled off, slipped his underwear back on, and sat at my bed’s edge. He asked when I would turn nineteen, and I answered December. Then he looked away, smiling. “That makes you younger than me,” he said. “What a novelty.”

  As it turned out, “novelty” wasn’t a bad word to describe our sex. We only fooled around a couple of times after that, but I soon discovered that Neil’s major focus was older men—preferably, ones with cash. Strangely though, he didn’t discard me; since his pal Wendy had moved to New York, he claimed, he only had Christopher and his mom to hang out with. “But Chris has serious problems,” he explained, “and my mom’s not around much.”

  What the hell, I thought: I didn’t have friends, either.

  The air in Neil’s neighborhood smelled like hamburgers and split hot dogs, like lighter fluid and barbecue sauce. It was an odor of permanence and familial bliss. After he parked the Impala, we jumped out and ran for his front door, if only to get away from that smell and into somewhere familiar and cool.

  Neil’s mom was at work. She had left the windows open, the door unlocked. “What this means,” he announced, “is we can watch porno on the VCR.” I followed him to his room. On the wall, a framed photo showed Wendy, the best friend I’d yet to meet. The sides of her head were shaved, the rest matted into worm-slender dreadlocks and pulled back into a ponytail. She’d autographed the photo’s bottom like a movie star. Beneath her was Neil’s nightstand, littered with small hills of pennies, a dead violet-winged butterfly, and two trophies he won in Little League years ago. MOST RBIS, SUMMER 1981, the gold plaque on one of them read. A towel was wadded on the floor. It reeked of sex, and I wondered if the dried sperm on its surface was Neil’s or the memento of some middle-aged trick he’d brought to this very room. I didn’t have the nerve to ask.

  Neil reached under his bed’s mattress and retrieved a key. He unlocked his bottom dresser drawer, his back blocking it. He closed the drawer and turned. He held a videotape in one hand, a bag of pot in the other. We shuffled to the front room.

  The movie, an old one, starred men with mustaches and an abundance of body hair. There was substantial fucking, but not a condom in sight. Neil and I sat at opposite ends of his sofa, not touching ourselves or each other. “Here’s my number one scene,” he said. A beefy ranch owner entered a barn, only to find a young ranch hand bound and gagged, pleading for mercy. The ranch owner untied, caressed, then seduced him. Their sex gradually transformed from tender to ferocious. At one point, the pale skin on the young guy’s ass grew streaked with red welts. The film ended with ranch owner once again holding ranch hand in his glistening, tanned arms.

  After the credits, I poured two glasses of lemonade from a pitcher in Neil’s refrigerator. His mother had left a cherry-colored lipstick trace on the pitcher’s rim. The air conditioner’s cool wasn’t enough, and Neil plugged the cord from a portable fan into a socket. My hair whipped back, and I smelled the black dye job from the previous day. The smell was identical to the antiseptic odor of the Modesto Funeral Home. I made a mental note to wash my hair again before I joined Neil at Sun Center.

  Neil ejected the tape and inserted a horror film called Suspiria. “I’ve seen this one hundreds of times. It’s great, but if I fall asleep it’s your job to wake me. I have to be at work by six.”

  I sat at an angle that offered a view of his face. In the opening segment, a hairy hand repeatedly stabbed a woman’s chest; the camera closed in on her heart as the knife torpedoed it. The hand tugged a noose around the woman’s throat; tossed her through stained glass. Neil stared at the screen. His expression was identical to the one he’d worn during Rawhide.

  “Defenestration,” I said. “‘The act of throwing someone through a window.’” I knew a lot of words like that.

  Neil stretched out, his foot brushing my hand. I wondered what he would do if I said, “I want to move to New York, too.” If I said, “I’m falling into uncontrollable love with you.” Save it for your journal, I told myself.

  We got stoned, and half an hour passed. More murders and mayhem. I glanced back at Neil and discovered he’d fallen asleep. A feeble red vein branched across his eyelid. Behind it, his eyeballs darted and wobbled, surveying the details of a dream I doubted would feature me. I concentrated, attempting to psychically drive a message into Neil’s brain: Hi. Although I’ve known you nearly four months, a large chunk of your life remains as strange and enigmatic as one of those unidentified people the authorities found in that circus fire I recently read about, their faces burned beyond recognition. The mystery that surrounds you only makes me love you more. Oh well, what can I do? I leaned over Neil’s ear, wanting to kiss it, but instead whispering against the skin, “Sweet dreams.”

  In the film, an hysterical woman crawled through an open window, only to drop headfirst into a roomful of twisted barbed wire. That’s precisely how I feel right now, I thought. When her screams grew too loud, I muted the volume and watched him sleep.

  I arrived at Sun Center to find Neil positioned in his press box. He wore white, his shirt wounded with gray sweat stains. On a table in front of him were pencils, a score pad, and a microphone, its mouthpiece covered with a red foam ball that made it look obscene. He listened to a portable stereo playing music from a tape I’d made him, one I’d labeled “Depressing Shit.” Genuine pain racked the singer’
s voice. “Ooh, you’re still standing in my shadow.”

  “Hello, hello,” Neil said. He revealed a bottle he’d been concealing beneath his chair. Vodka. I wondered if his mom would notice it missing, or if she would care. “Now shut that door behind you before someone spies this.”

  I sat beside him. From the press box vantage point, I could see nearly all of Sun Center. There was the gleaming white of the powdered chalk, its straight lines trailing to first and third base, its batter’s box rectangles and on-deck circles. The dugouts, each tagged with a sign displaying the team’s name, each with a mammoth orange cooler filled with water. The rubber of home plate and the pitcher’s mound, the base paths scarred by players’ cleats; the outfield that shone with a green so vibrant I wished I could view it on acid.

  The night’s opening game was about to start. The teams took their places on the diamond. The players’ wives and friends sat on the bleachers, most drinking from beer cans, shoving burgers or hot dogs into their mouths.

  Neil took a swig from the vodka bottle, then clicked on the microphone. He lowered his voice to sound “official,” “professional,” or some other adjective he assigned to his expected job performance. I, however, could see right through it: he thought it all a big joke. “Welcome to Sun Center,” he said. Some softball-adoring morons glanced up at us, and I scooted my seat back so I wouldn’t be seen. Neil continued. “The first game of the Men’s Class C Divisional Tournament features First National Bank, out of McPherson, against Auto-Electric, from Hutchinson.”

  The umpire, a man wearing a light blue shirt over his beer gut, turned and gave the okay signal. “Play ball,” said Neil.

  The first inning dragged by. In seconds I was bored. Neil and I passed the bottle between us, waiting for something hilarious to happen. “Watch this.” He clicked the mike. “Ward is the batter, with Knackstedt on deck,” he said, giving extra emphasis on the K in the latter name.