by Scott Heim
Robin hummed the chorus off key. “Work’s been hectic since I last saw you,” he said. I couldn’t recall any specifics about his life. I vaguely remembered a brown-paneled studio apartment on the city’s south side, next to the railroad tracks. I must have been really stoned that night.
I clunked my empty bottle on the bar between their elbows. “Need another?” Friar asked. He was already reaching for his wallet, a gesture I’d grown familiar with in men his age.
After three beers, I’d heard enough bits and pieces about Robin to remember he was a lawyer, owned a poodle named Ralph, had celebrated his thirty-ninth on the night before we’d screwed. Friar was his “business associate,” in from Wichita for the night. “You guys should get to know each other better,” Robin said, his eyes darting between our faces. I loved that sort of blatancy.
The acid was beginning to affect me, and I closed my fist, pressing my fingers into the ball of my palm. The heavy pulse in my hand thrummed against the weaker pulse in my fingertips, blood eddying beneath the flesh. My skin felt elastic. Right then I wanted to knead it against someone else to get that amazing sensation of two skins pulsing together, that pliability and friction. I held out my hand and placed it squarely against Friar Tuck’s cheek. He smiled. His muscles tensed, and I felt the line of his gums, the ridge of each individual tooth.
“I need to take a piss,” he said, but the words were a code for something entirely different.
Friar clomped to the bathroom, looking over his shoulder once, twice. “He wants you,” I heard Robin whisper beside me, but the voice seemed fathoms away, as if coming from a secret cavern beneath the bar’s floor. “Go get him,” the voice said. Friar paused before he opened the bathroom door. I followed his path.
A ring-nosed bull had been drawn in the center of the bathroom door. I shut and locked the door behind us. At that instant, the remainder of the acid soothed into me, and my body felt delicate, glistening, a figurine on a shelf. “Hey,” I said, and I smiled. Tuck repeated the word and the smile. I said it again, because I knew it was the stupidest possible thing I could say, and he’d love that. This time I reached up to touch his hair. “Heeeyyy.” The word lingered in the air, not really my voice at all. It sounded like it had blown in on a wind.
The faucet dripped. The water in the toilet bowl glowed sapphire blue, a wad of TP blooming in its center like an immaculate lily. I looked up; saw a crown-shaped gray stain on the ceiling.
The meat of my forearm met his. Hundreds of his hairs brushed against me, tickling like insect legs. “My little actor,” he said. That did it. I shoved him against the wall, slapped a hand on his butt and kept it there. I stood tiptoe and maneuvered my chin into his open mouth.
He raised his arms above his head and crossed his wrists. I was in control. I held him pinioned, my hand a clamp over his wrists, pushing him against the cold tiles as if the wall were a barrier I had to break with his body. He kissed at my ear, still sore from when Eric had pierced it. I moved away. He struggled a little, and I pushed harder, immobilizing him. “You’re one strong kid,” he said. “I bet you could do some damage.” I nodded, but inside I was thinking shit: what he said hit the bull’s-eye, but the way he said it wasn’t right, his voice high and tinny. I remembered something Christopher Ortega had said once about a guy he’d screwed: Looks like Tarzan, sounds like Jane. Friar started to speak again. I crammed my tongue between his teeth, stretching it far into his mouth to shut him up.
My free hand tore at his shirt. It seemed as though I were moving in fast motion, and he in slow. His ivory shirt buttons popped open to reveal his chest. There, the tattoo of a whale skimmed across waves, a geyser of water shooting from the top of its head. I bent and bit it. He made a sound like “yeah.” He wriggled so his nipple met my mouth. I took it between my teeth and nibbled, grinding my teeth on its tough gristle.
I wasn’t hard—typical when I’m tripping—and I nudged his leg away when he tried to maneuver it up my thigh. I thought how this wasn’t sex, really, just another experience. Yet it was what I wanted: the heavy contact, the two bodies shoving and slamming together, the stuff that could be proved the next day by bruises. I also wanted the thrill of knowing I made him happy. I wanted him to return to Wichita and tell his buddies about it. “Guess what, I made it with an eighteen-year-old tonight.”
I stopped biting his nipple and returned to his mouth, sucking his bottom lip as if extracting poison. This was something I excelled at, something I’d learned long ago. Friar tried to say a few words, but they garbled without the use of the lip.
In ten minutes I’d ascended over him. I could take him like a vampire. The words “at mercy” flashed on and off in my head, and I wanted to do something neither of us would forget: scratch my initials into his shoulder, plunge my dick into his ass without a condom, bite the lobe from his ear. He knew nothing about me, nothing but a first name, four measly letters that could have been another lie. He didn’t know a single truth about my life. He didn’t even know my face, a face that wouldn’t be the same tomorrow, in the mundane light of day.
I jerked my tongue from his mouth, leaned my head against his shoulder, and in that second I saw myself, a flash of tanned skin in the bathroom mirror. His body blocked mine, and my head hovered above his back like a swollen trophy. I realized he was naked, although I couldn’t remember stripping him. For some reason, that struck me as uproarious. I smiled at my face. The reflected expression didn’t seem anywhere near a smile. It must have been the acid.
By the time I left the bathroom, the digital numbers on the bar’s clock read one-thirty. Saliva from Friar’s kisses covered my ear, which felt like a steamed mussel when I touched it. I heard him behind me, clearing his throat, zipping up. I slammed the door. Two men stood there, waiting. One applauded as I walked past. I didn’t turn around for Friar’s standard handshake or telephone number. “Whoa,” I heard Robin say. The bar’s perspectives were a hundred percent off-kilter. I stepped forward, leaving a trail in the cedar chips, and galloped out the door.
I did that out of boredom, I thought. New York will be better. I took Main at fifty miles per hour. On the other side of the windshield, everything kaleidoscoped; streetlights slid together into white ribbons.
I stopped at the Quik-Trip and pumped five gallons into the gas tank. I wandered inside the store, pretended shopping, and managed to steal two boxes of Hot Tamales from under the clerk’s nose. Even that didn’t seem as exciting as it once had.
The Impala sputtered to life. I tore at the candy box, popped a handful of Tamales in my mouth, then shut off the stereo and listened as the motor’s rattle echoed through Main Street. I figured there would be some freaks prowling Main, drunken kids in the parking lot of Burger Chef. There was no one.
Carey Park had emptied as well. “No luck tonight.” I didn’t care; since I’d discovered Rudy’s, hustling the park was a thing of the past. Now the place seemed like an old carnival I’d once visited, its memories shrouded like spirits. The car coasted past a sign bragging Hutchinson’s history, its words still obliterated by the FUCK AUTHORITY and NO FUTURE graffiti Wendy and I had sprayed there years ago.
The moon looked like the tip of a fingernail. My headlights branched across crowds of skeletal oaks, cutting arcs in the humid and honeylike air. I eased the Impala into a gravel path that led to a playground. I switched dims to brights. They illuminated a swing set, two slippery slides, a rickety merry-go-round. For a second, I feared the acid would trick me, and I’d hallucinate the phantoms of murdered children. I got out and shook the thought from my head. The lights fell across the edge of a tiny jungle gym. I couldn’t believe my body had ever been small enough to fit inside its silver squares.
I shuffled through the Impala’s high beams toward the bathroom shed. The door wasn’t locked, and surprisingly, the lightbulbs hadn’t been smashed by vandals. I tugged at the dangling wire. Click-click. The walls had recently been painted orange, but when I squinted I could still see the ghos
t of my handwriting from months previous. I’d actually scribbled “FOR A GOOD TIME:” above the terms.
Back to the car. I lifted the neck of my shirt and buried my face inside it, smelling a sour fusion of breath and sweat and come. I left the park, running a red light, overwhelmed by the urge to speed home and ease into the world’s hottest bath.
By the time I reached Monroe Street, I remembered that Thursdays were Mom’s early mornings at work. I imagined Mom as I’d seen her so often whenever I came home late: snoozing on the couch, one arm fallen to the side, her fingers touching the carpet, her mouth open slightly, eyes trembling behind the lids as they surveyed the details of another dream.
I didn’t want to wake her, so I drove toward Eric’s trailer park. My mouth hurt, its soft parts throbbing, as if its layers of skin had been tweezered away. “Blood Mania wins Grand Jury prize at Cannes,” I spat out. “Best Actor Richard McCormick dedicates his award to his only son, Neil, whom he claims will follow in his footsteps and then some.”
A dog howled in the distance. I slid into Eric’s curb. He was home, because the Gremlin was there, its front fender still crushed from his “little accident.” I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the scene inside the house. This time, I pictured his grandpa and grandma, snug under their patchwork quilt in their brass bed, their spectacles or dentures or whatever else placed carefully on the nightstand beside them. Across the hall, Eric slept on half his futon. His face set into its permanently depressed frown. His heroes stared down from his walls’ posters.
Next I drove to the Petersons’. I could hear their air conditioner whirring, and they’d left their lawn sprinkler on. Inside were Wendy’s little brother Kurt; her mom and dad. In the year since she’d moved, I hadn’t set foot in there. No doubt her room was empty, its rug tattooed with burns from candles we’d dropped during sleep overs, its walls pocked from times we’d tacked up posters of favorite new-wave bands. Once, years ago, we’d written our initials on the wallpaper of purple irises. In one corner, near the floor, we etched “WJP” and “NSM” with the rusty point of a carpet knife. We had taken turns holding the knife, me spelling her letters, Wendy spelling mine. I wanted to break into the Peterson house, sneak to her room, and check to see if the initials remained.
I thought about the three houses, three distinct worlds where I’d lived my life. The lawn sprinkler circled back to shower the Impala’s grill. It made little crunching sounds, as if dwarf hands were scrabbling to get in from under the car. It was oddly soothing. Eventually, my thoughts of Eric and Wendy and Mom merged to form a path that led toward one other place, one other person. I was coming down from the acid. I had no memory of starting the car again, or of driving back toward the side streets off Main. But by the time my thoughts clarified, I was there, idling in front of the house where Coach once lived.
I sat staring at the door and shuttered windows. I half expected Coach to come running out, his arms held open as if created solely to fit around my body. My Neil, he would say. He had moved from Hutchinson years ago. The house had since been painted, regaraged, reroofed. Yet I still could smell him there, could hear him breathing. This is where it started, I thought.
And then I heard sharp wails coming from the house: a baby, crying. I saw a light in one room’s window. It clicked back off, and another room’s light clicked on.
As I watched the window, I realized the sound emanated from Coach’s old bedroom. I imagined a young mother in a lacy nightgown, calming her infant in that same perfect square of world where Coach had stretched beside me in bed. In there, he would hold me for hours, my head on his massive chest as I balanced my ear against him, listening for his heartbeat.
After some time, the wailing subsided. Maybe, I thought, the mother would speak to her baby. Maybe she would start to sing, a secret and peaceful song to lull her child back to sleep. I closed my eyes and clutched the steering wheel, leaning my forehead against it, listening.
eleven
BRIAN LACKEY
On the night of Avalyn’s scheduled visit, I helped my mother cook my favorite dinner: Caesar salad, asparagus, and pork chops surrounded by a moat of au gratin potatoes. I opened the stove’s door to peek. “You’ll ruin the food,” my mother said. Her apron showed a large fish preparing to devour a small fish, who in turn prepared to eat an even smaller one. She hadn’t worn it since the days of my father.
I went upstairs to wait for Avalyn. Under the bed, my eight-year-old eyes gazed out of the Little League photograph from the Chamber of Commerce. Only Avalyn knew I’d stolen it. By now my mother resided in a different realm, apart from Avalyn and I, beyond the boundaries of our experiences as UFO abductees.
It was the beginning of August, and my dream log was half full. In my sleep I still saw aliens, and I tried to forget the doubt that had entered my mind on the night I’d viewed Avalyn’s mutilated calf. I held firm to the belief that my dreams were all clues, pieces of my hidden past now revealing themselves. It was as though my brain had little rooms inside it, and I were entering a room that had been padlocked for years, the key sparkling in my fist.
I’d grown bored with skimming through the borrowed pamphlets, so I bided my time staring at the boy at the end of the photograph’s top row. I truly believed he provided my most effortless way toward a solution, that he would reenter my dreams to tell me his name, where he lived, what he’d retained from our concurrent abduction and any similar experiences he’d since had. I needed him.
The presence of the coach still bothered me: his squared shoulders, his broad, sandy mustache, and the coyotelike gaze that speared through the picture as if he knew he’d be locking eyes with me, thousands of days in the future. Whenever I looked at the picture, I’d press my hand against the coach’s form to block him out. This queasiness was just another enigma I couldn’t solve. I hoped my teammate, whenever I would meet him, could explain it.
“Come down here,” my mother yelled from the bottom of the stairs. If I joined her, I could count on her to avoid the UFO subject, pushing it out of conversation to discuss instead my “upcoming college life” or “future career in the real world.” I wanted no part of that. I made certain my bedroom door was locked tight. I pretended I couldn’t hear her over the din of synthesizers and computerized drums. After a while, she walked away.
Avalyn arrived ten minutes early. When I heard her car in the driveway, I leaped downstairs. She stood at the door, holding six yellow carnations. She wore a dress, her wrists ornamented with silver bracelets, her face rouged and eye shadowed. She’d taken her hair from its usual bun, and it meandered down her back in a dark ponytail. I let her in, holding out my hand to shake. She waved my hand aside and hugged me instead.
“Avalyn,” I said, “this is my mother.” For a second I thought she would hug my mother too. Instead, she gave her the carnations. My mother took them as she might take a wriggling child.
It was the first time I’d invited a guest for dinner, so leading Avalyn from room to room seemed the apt thing to do. She lingered over my mother’s plants, caressing individual leaves and fronds with the tenderness a nurse might administer to a burn patient. “Someone’s watered this little guy too much,” she said. She arched a plucked eyebrow at the stack of gun manuals and NRA magazines on the couch.
Avalyn followed me to the kitchen and sat at the table. I put the carnations in a mayonnaise jar, filled it with water, and sat beside her. My knee brushed her leg. I thought first of her scar, and then of the way she had touched me that night in her field as I cried.
“Brian tells me you’re a fan of this Cosmosphere place as well,” my mother told Avalyn. “I don’t think he’s missed any of their programs since the place opened.”
“I haven’t either,” Avalyn said. “As I told him over the phone the other night, it’s a miracle we never bumped into each other there.” She unfolded the napkin I’d arranged beside her plate. “My favorite show was the one on unusual weather. I also loved the shows on volcanoes and roller
coasters. The one on the history of railroads in America, on the other hand: boring.” My mother brought the food to the table, and Avalyn continued to explain how that particular night’s program concerned the history of flight. “I’ve a feeling Brian and I will enjoy this one.”
We ate. The conversation lagged, my mother and Avalyn its only participants. My mother seemed to be testing our guest, unraveling her layers to get at some kernel of truth, and I didn’t like it. “I’d enjoy hearing more about the whole process of hypnosis,” she said. “Since Brian is so interested in it, after all.”
Avalyn began relating stories I’d already heard. My mother hadn’t said much after she’d seen Avalyn’s feature on “World of Mystery.” But there, at the dinner table, in front of the flesh-and-blood Avalyn, my mother wore the look of a hardened skeptic. She even clucked her tongue at one point.
“Now I’d like to ask you a question,” Avalyn said. “Brian tells me you were there when he sighted his first UFO, the one he remembers. It’s not uncommon for those who’ve seen one to see another.” She wriggled her fingers beside the frame of her glasses to indicate the flutter of memory. “Do you have any other sightings inside your head?”
“No,” my mother said. “I barely remember the one he’s told you about.” She paused and pressed her knife into what remained of her pork chop. “But I’m eager to find out what’s behind his suspicions about his missing time.”
“Oh, I’m convinced that Brian’s suspicions are true,” Avalyn said. “There’s no question in my mind; something’s happened to him.” My mother stared at Avalyn with the exact eyes I’d seen her center on the 7-UP bottles beside the house, the gun in her hand.
“No question in my mind at all,” Avalyn repeated.
My mother gripped the steering wheel, her eyes locked on the road. Avalyn lounged in the passenger’s seat as if it were the world’s coziest chair. I leaned forward from the back, my head inhabiting the uneasy air between them. Hutchinson’s skyline loomed closer, and Avalyn pointed toward the structure of white plaster in the distance. “The famous mile-long grain elevator,” she said.