Mysterious Skin

by Scott Heim

  We reached our destination as dusk was frosting the trees and rows of homes. The breeze smelled of honeysuckle and highway tar. The Cosmosphere building, a mammoth chocolate-colored octagon, sat near the community college. I scanned our surroundings. I was familiar with the college’s buildings and sidewalks and lawns, but the place now carried a growing sense of dread: I’d no doubt spend the next two years of my life here, studying toward a degree I still wasn’t certain of.

  Yellow flyers had been pasted to each of the parking lot’s light poles. I read one as we walked toward the building. They pictured a pigtailed little girl named Abigail Hofmeier. She had been missing since July twenty-first. “Please Help Us Find Our Baby,” her parents had written at the bottom. My mother, reading over my shoulder, said, “That’s heartbreaking.”

  The three of us entered the sliding glass doors. Touristy-looking people shuffled through the lobby and the adjoining gift shop. The next show was scheduled in fifteen minutes, so Avalyn and I browsed through the absurd souvenirs we’d seen hundreds of times already. My mother took her seat on a bench and waited.

  Posters of planets covered the gift shop’s walls, as well as astrological charts and informative lists about U.S. astronauts. Rocket mobiles and kites dangled from the ceiling, twirling in a counterclockwise ballet. Compasses, various key chains and pencils, miniature robots, and space-laser water guns crowded the shelves. One box was filled with dehydrated squares of food that resembled sections of brick. IDENTICAL TO THE HAM-AND-EGGS BREAKFAST EATEN IN SPACE BY ASTRONAUT ALAN SHEPARD! read a package’s glittery letters. Avalyn examined a dehydrated meat loaf, then kneeled to a shelf containing make-it-yourself model kits. In one, kids ages eight to eighteen could construct a model unidentified flying object. “They don’t know what they’re messing with,” she said.

  We walked back to the lobby, where a maroon-coated man ushered people through the door. “Time to take our seats,” my mother said. We paid for our tickets and filed into a long hall leading to the Cosmosphere’s domed auditorium. The ceiling was blank and white. The room smelled synthetic, almost sugary, as I half-remembered the interior of the blue room in my dream had smelled.

  The auditorium filled in a matter of minutes. An older couple with identical shag haircuts sat on Avalyn’s left. The woman’s eyes were dazed and slightly unhinged, eyes that may have just seen her own house burn to the ground. She, like everyone else, watched the ceiling, waiting for the show to start.

  Lights dimmed, and I heard music that sounded like the electronic tape we’d listened to in the car. What had been a white dome above us became a replica of the night sky. From the corner of my eye, I could see the couple beside us shift in their seats. Their identical digital watches gave off twin green auras. Gradually, on the “sky” above, pinpricks of twinkling light flickered on, one by one. This opening sky simulation was always my favorite part of the Cosmosphere trips—it reminded me of the past, when I’d climb to our roof at home and watch as the night’s stars gradually appeared, stars so familiar I almost possessed them. Avalyn must have sensed my excitement, because she whispered in my ear, identifying constellations. “Cassiopeia,” she said. “Ursa Major, with Leo right beside it.”

  The moody music ceased, and the feature film began. The announcer’s voice was enthusiastic and sexless, its timbre like a game show host’s. “Welcome one and all to ‘The Boundless Blue: The History of Flight in America,’” he/she said.

  The film, which proved to be nothing special, traced the discoveries of the Wright Brothers all the way to current developments in air and space. Nothing concerning extraterrestrial life materialized. At one point, my mother squeezed my right hand. Then, slowly, Avalyn took my left. I wondered if either of them knew where my other hand was. I pretended to be uncomfortable in the seat and fidgeted, clasping my hands in my lap to empty them.

  On the way home, we saw fires on the horizon, farmers burning skeletal stalks of corn after harvest. The orange glow at the sky’s edge made the world seem ready to crack open, and I watched until the fire fizzled to nothing more than a sparkle in the distance. By the time we arrived in Little River, sleepiness had filtered through my limbs. Avalyn helped me out of the Toyota and looked toward her pickup. “Don’t leave yet,” I said. “I need to finish the tour of the house. There are two important places you haven’t seen.”

  My mother clicked the TV on, brushed aside her magazines, and sat on the couch to watch a weatherman trace the meanderings of a tropical storm in the Atlantic. Her mouth pinched into a pout. I walked to the basement door, switched on the light, and led Avalyn down.

  At the bottom of the stairs, I stood on tiptoe, reaching to move the crawl space door aside. Once I had needed a chair; now I was tall enough to stretch my head into the opening as Deborah had done a decade ago. “Here’s where my sister found me,” I told Avalyn. She nodded, already familiar with the story.

  I looked inside. The room appeared exactly as it had years before, the dust a little thicker, the cobwebs tangled and dense on the cement walls. Here is where I chose to hide, I thought. Here is where I went to get away from them.

  “Now, the top floor,” I said. “You still haven’t seen my room in all its splendor.”

  My mother didn’t look as we passed her. I trudged up the steps, opened the door to my room, and stepped inside. When Avalyn followed me in, I remembered what she’d said when I’d first visited her. “I cleaned just for you,” I mimicked, sweeping my hand over the books and tapes and clothes I’d ever-so-slightly tidied that morning.

  Avalyn stood in the room’s center. I couldn’t remember anyone beyond my immediate family being there before. She surveyed my bookcase from top to bottom shelf, fingering titles, hmming or aahing occasionally. She ran her hand along the knobs of wood on my bedpost, then faced the wall. “I didn’t like that film,” she said, indicating my Capricorn One poster. She turned to Angry Red Planet. “And that, I never saw.”

  I stretched out on one end of my bed; Avalyn took the other. “Your mother doesn’t care much for me,” she said. “We are very different people. She thinks I’m stealing you away, I can tell.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.” I forced a smile, as if it were no big deal.

  “I had a boyfriend in high school once,” Avalyn said. The sentence came out of nowhere, scaring me a little. “I wasn’t so fat then. On our second date he brought me home late, and while I was getting out of the car my father appeared from the darkness, clamped his hand on the boy’s arm, and told him if it happened again he’d personally blow his head clean off. So much for my love life.”

  From where I sat, I could see out the open window. Wasps dipped and spun from their muddy roof nest, threatening to fly inside. Down the hill, random lights in Little River’s kitchens and porches and rec rooms flickered on and off. The ballpark’s lights created a halo over the entire town. I remembered times when Deborah and I watched the players running bases, catching fly balls, sliding into home. I wondered if the boy from Little League still played ball somewhere; if he lived close enough to contact.

  I reached under my bed for the framed photograph. “This is what I need to show you.” Avalyn scanned the fifteen Little Leaguers to find me; when she saw my face, she tapped her finger against the glass. “Oh, don’t look at him,” I said, and I swaddled her finger with my hand to guide it toward the top row. “Here he is: the one from sleep.”

  Avalyn stared at him, glanced up at me, and stared at him again. “So he’s your man. Yes, he could well be one of us.” Minutes passed without a word, and I wondered what she’d say next. Then, without warning, Avalyn lifted the framed picture and slammed it, hard, against her knee. The glass splintered. She brought it down again, the frame’s corner striking the spot where the tracking device’s scar curled across her skin. Glass shards tumbled onto my mattress and fell to the floor.

  “What—” I began. “Why?”

  “Shush.” Avalyn brushed the glass away with her hand, unconcerned wit
h cuts. She extracted the photograph from its frame, shook off excess splinters and glass dust, and held it to her face. “Oh, Brian,” she said. “It’s just as I thought.”

  She handed me the eight-by-ten, back side facing up. Printed there, in blue ink across the white, was a list of names:

  (Top row, l to r): C. Bailey, M. Wright, O. Schrag, M. Varney, D. Porter, J. Ensminger, G. Hodgson, N. McCormick, Coach J. Heider. (Bottom row, l to r): V. Martin, J. Thieszen, B. Lackey, B. Connery, E. Ellison, T. Ellison, S. Berg.

  Our names. My name, “B. Lackey.” And the kid’s name. “I can’t believe this,” I said. “I should have thought of this.” I didn’t care about the others; my mind had speedily linked the boy at the end of the top row with “N. McCormick.” I said the name aloud; said it again. It was the one the aliens kept secure in their confidential files, the one they’d logged alongside “B. Lackey.”

  “And now we have to find him,” Avalyn said, reading my mind.

  She reached into her dress pocket. “By the way, I almost forgot.” She centered something in my open palm. It was the hair ball from that night on her farm, the red and white and black fur she’d pulled from the barbed wire fence. “I wanted you to have this,” she said. “Whether it’s the little calf’s fur or not, it’s proof that he was alive, that he was a living, breathing thing before they came for him.” Avalyn closed my fingers into a fist around the hair ball and moved closer to me. “We always need proof. To remember something’s happened.”

  She began unbuttoning her dress then, fiddling with one after the other until she’d reached her waistline and the dress had bunched around her stomach. She wore a T-shirt underneath, a shirt that had once been black but had faded to a dark gray. The front sported a cracked and flaky iron-on transfer of her favorite band, their caricatured faces pouting and snarling.

  “Kiss,” I said, and before the word had fallen from my lips she pressed against me, leaning into my body, my head twisting against the pillow. She muttered something like, “I thought you’d never ask,” and as she spoke she jammed her mouth against mine. Our teeth clacked together. She thrust her tongue inside my open mouth, and somehow I recognized it, as if her tongue had dwelled there before, long ago. But I didn’t know how to kiss back. I kept my mouth as still as possible, waiting for her to stop.

  She pulled away and winced. “Ouch.” The muscle of her palm had snagged on a stray glass shard. I leaned toward her to examine it, but she pushed me back, untucking my shirt to maneuver her hand inside. She touched my chest, feeling the tiny blond hairs around my belly button, moving up to tickle the scattering of hair between my ribs. Her hand leaked a residue of blood, and it left a dark red grin beneath my right nipple. Her finger erased the smudge; flicked the nipple. “I really want to make you feel good, Brian.” When she said my name, my face went hot.

  Avalyn slid the shirt from her shoulders. Her body’s top half exposed, she lay down on me, her head on my chest, her breasts brushing my stomach. Something was horrifying about it: Avalyn, cowering against me, suddenly pitiful in the way her weight bunched together, the white flesh folding into itself, the skin terraced and scalloped and ridged. But even more horrifying was the body she lay upon: my scrawny arms, the uneven tan from the days I’d spent mowing lawns, the zits in a scarlet constellation on my chest.

  I tried to concentrate on something else—the new name I’d learned, the upcoming days that would be filled in pursuit of N. McCormick—but, as desperately as I tried, I couldn’t detach myself from what was happening. I was hard. Avalyn snaked her bleeding hand into my jeans, not bothering to unbuckle or unzip.

  Before she even touched me, I realized what would happen. It was as if I’d known this for years, that I knew the secret to the reason I’d never approached anything remotely resembling sex: it would take me back to something I didn’t want, a memory that had hovered for years, hidden, in my head. Her hand clamped around me, one finger gingerly tracing a line up my penis, stopping at the tip. I felt as though a part of me were vanishing. I felt the same trapped feeling I’d felt only days before, that night in her pasture.

  “I can’t,” I said. “Don’t.”

  “Brian,” Avalyn said, and although her lips moved, I heard another voice entirely.

  It will feel good, the voice said. The kid’s voice. Yes, the voice of N. McCormick.

  Open your eyes, it will feel good.

  Something was spinning. My head had become a confused Ferris wheel, winding and twirling out of control. I had cried in Avalyn’s pasture, but I would not cry again. Out the window, the wasps still buzzed and dipped from their nest, peering in at us with their rainbowy eyes. B. Lackey, they murmured. N. McCormick. I gripped Avalyn’s wrist and pulled her arm from my jeans.

  She went limp. “I’m sorry.” This time, the voice was hers, not the kid’s. I wanted to tell her no, don’t be sorry, it’s not you, it’s me. But I couldn’t speak. She rose from the bed, wriggling into the arms of her dress. I could see the red trickle forming a line from her palm to her wrist. One of the wasps had flown into the open window; it twirled in intoxicated circles against the ceiling. “I’m so sorry,” Avalyn said.

  After Avalyn left, I waited forty minutes. Then I called her from the downstairs telephone. I began by thanking her for discovering the names on the photograph’s flip side; gradually, I led into my apology for the evening’s uncomfortable culmination. “Forget about what happened just now. There’s something in this head, something they did to me. I can’t shake it.”

  “I understand,” Avalyn said. In the front room, my mother lounged on the couch, the TV’s light fireflying across her face, her head cocked as if straining to hear me. “And don’t worry, you’ll get over this. It just takes time.”

  After I hung up, I joined my mother. It had been years since we’d had an honest-to-goodness fight, but I could still remember the precise curl of her lip, her jawline’s rigid architecture as she had scolded and yelled. That look was identical to the shape her features took now.

  She held the remote control at eye level, switched off the set, and stared me down. “You need to explain something to me,” she said. I thought of Avalyn, her top half exposed, lying across my bed, her hand inside my pants. Did my mother know? Then my mother’s voice raised into a question. She almost screamed. “Why are you shutting me out of your life?”

  She was angrier than I’d anticipated. “She understands things,” I said. “You don’t.”

  My mother mocked me. “‘She understands things.’ That’s just it, Brian. I want to understand things. But it’s hard. Soon you’ll be in school, you’ll be so preoccupied. I want this time to be ours. You’re shutting me out.” She was yelling, her voice a hammer, nailing me in place. The remote control leaped from her hand. I watched it bounce under the coffee table, resting at last beside the folded entertainment section of yesterday’s newspaper. ACTOR DIES AT 32, a headline read.

  My mother continued. “It’s not that I don’t want to believe you. I watched that silly program with you, I bought you the notebook to record your dreams in. But you’re not foolish. I mean, think about it.” Although she wasn’t saying it directly, I knew she meant this: the idea of you, Brian Lackey, being abducted by a UFO and examined by space aliens, is completely preposterous. If she had said those words, something inside me would have ignited.

  “I just want more time with you,” my mother said. “Time that isn’t spent talking about what the interior of that damned ship looked like, how you think their fingers felt when they reached out and grabbed you. Please. I know you need to sort those things out.” Her expression melted slightly. “We should have brought this up earlier. If you want to see someone for help on this, really, there’s nothing wrong with it, they even offer it free at the prison. A lot of people I know—”

  In all honesty, the idea of psychiatric help for what I truly believed had happened to me didn’t make me all that angry. At the time, however, a tantrum seemed the proper response. I allow
ed my eyes to widen, to reach cartoon proportions. There was nothing near me to grab and throw, so I simply stomped from the room. She didn’t follow. I strode outside, toward the car, and as I walked I remembered the night my father had left—how Deborah and I had listened from the staircase as he had stormed through the house, slammed the door, and departed our lives forever.

  I drove and drove. I was nothing like my father; I would eventually return. But at the time, I wanted to be alone, wanted to plan my next move. The car careened down dirt roads, tires spinning. I crossed rickety bridges; the steel ribs of cattle guards that sent wicked vibrations through my body. I drove past acres of stubbled cornstalks. My headlights revealed a shadowy scarecrow, hunched and emaciated on his cross. Ahead, Hutchinson’s feeble lights beckoned.

  Open your eyes, it will feel good. I had to know what that meant.

  When I got to Hutchinson, I crisscrossed random streets. The majority of the city was safe behind closed doors. I puttered here and there for nearly two hours, pausing before each individual house. I scrutinized mailboxes, searching out his name. “McCormick,” I said, hopeful. “Come on, just one McCormick.”

  By three o’clock, I’d found one McLean, one McCracken, and two McAllisters, but not a single McCormick. Soon it would be morning. My mother would be worried. I looked at my glazed eyes in the mirror, made a U-turn in the center of the street, and headed home.

  twelve

  ERIC PRESTON

  The morning of Neil’s scheduled move to New York began like any other. It was a day of stalled air conditioners and rapidly melting ice cubes, a day when the sky was so cloudless and gorged with sun it granted no one the privilege of shade. I had a stomachache and a fever blister the size of a dime. The latter didn’t bother me; I wasn’t expecting a good-bye kiss anyway.