Mysterious Skin

by Scott Heim

  “Welcome,” I said. “And happy holidays. Xmas Eve greetings, all that.” My two-foot-by-two-foot window verified I’d snoozed too long, because dusk had begun to settle over the neighbors’ mobile home. I could hear a woman’s angry drawl: “Junior, move your ass right on in here for dinner.”

  Brian jangled his car keys. “Let’s go for a drive before the McCormicks’. And bundle up. I think it might snow.”

  I slipped on an extra pair of socks and beelined to the bathroom. Tonight’s the night, I told myself. Four months had passed since I’d met Brian, four months of listening to his obsessions and preoccupations alter and equivocate. Whether Brian referred to his memories of UFOs or, as he’d recently called it, “something altogether different, more real-life,” one variable didn’t change. And that was Neil. Neil had been the subject of the first sentence Brian spoke to me, and tonight Brian hoped Neil would provide the final piece to whatever puzzle he’d been linking together.

  I splashed my face with water, brushed my teeth, and gargled with my grandpa’s denture mouthwash. Grandma had taped a Christmas card to the bathroom mirror, on which a valiant reindeer led Santa through a starless night. I fingernailed the tape and pried open the card. “Dear Harry and Esther, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, and a much-belated Sympathy for what happened last year. Sincerely, The Johnsons.” I thought for a minute, couldn’t remember the Johnsons, didn’t care.

  I hadn’t seen Neil in months, and I wanted him to notice some smidgeon of change in my appearance. He’d expect my trademark “depressed,” so I opted for “spry” and “carefree.” I stripped off the black and shrugged myself into Grandpa’s white cardigan. Back to the mirror. Did I look good enough to kiss? Brian pounded the door, yelling to hurry up.

  We threw ourselves into Brian’s car. Slam, slam. He blasted the heater, then the stereo. The music was from a tape I’d loaned him, a tape I’d originally borrowed from Neil. In the space between our seats, Brian had sandwiched the photograph from his Little League days—to show Neil, I presumed—and, beside it, a spiral notebook that resembled my journal. I didn’t ask. Instead, I questioned him about our agenda prior to dessert at the McCormicks’. Brian answered with a brief “You’ll see.” I fantasized he’d gone off the deep end, stolen one of his mother’s guns, and would force me to sidekick on a Christmas Eve terrorist spree. Well, maybe not.

  Nearly every Hutchinson house had been done up for the holidays. Festive lights flashed from rooftops, windows, evergreens. A massive star strobed from the pinnacle of a water tower. An entire boulevard’s elm branches had been tied with thousands of ribbons. Brian seemed entranced by it all, and he paused at the Chamber of Commerce to inspect their lawn’s nativity scene. Electric candles illuminated the faces of Mary, Joseph, wise men, a donkey, a lamb, and a long-lashed heifer. Someone had stolen the baby Jesus. In its place was a red ceramic lobster, its claw hooking over the side of the manger to reach toward the world.

  The car yielded at Main. A teenage girl crossed, gripping leashes on which two Chihuahuas trotted. She peered at us through glasses shaped like the infinity symbol. Her mouth formed the word “faggots.” Brian didn’t seem to care. I sent the girl a message: May your dogs get carried off by owls.

  Low-hanging clouds had gathered, perching in tree branches and church steeples like chunks of meat on shish kebab skewers. “Not that weathermen are foolproof,” I said, “but the guy on channel ten predicted snow, and it appears he’s right.” Brian nodded and whistled softly to the music: a vain attempt to make me believe he wasn’t nervous. When he stopped whistling, I switched my attention from the clouds to the place he’d parked. The Toyota was idling behind the dugout of a small baseball diamond.

  The field looked as though players hadn’t competed on it in years. It was a far cry from Sun Center’s fanciness. The outfield’s brown grass had crept inward, a rash, to surround the spaces where bases should have been. Littering the infield was a flotsam of dead leaves, empty beer cans and tobacco pouches, Styrofoam cups, crumpled pages from the Hutchinson News. The field looked as conspicuous as a shipwreck. “Where are we?” I asked.

  “This is the Little League diamond,” Brian said. “It’s where the Panthers, where Neil and I, used to play.” At that, he left the car, stepped toward the dugout, and began climbing the fence. A sign beside him said REPORT ALL ACTS OF VANDALISM; the telephone number it gave was identical to the McCormicks’ except for one digit. As the wind blew, the sign shook, clicking like a Geiger counter.

  “I’m staying here,” I yelled. “Too cold.” Brian stood at the plate, staring forward, as if a spectral pitcher were preparing to lob him a home run ball. He began running the base paths; after second base, he seemed to lose himself in the amorphous border of the outfield, and he headed for the fence and its battered scoreboard.

  With Brian minutes away from the car, I saw my chance. I wriggled the spiral notebook free from the crevice between the seats. On the cover, in blue ink, were drawings of moons, stars, clouds, and a swarm of orbiting spaceships. Black ink had x-ed everything out. I didn’t want to snoop, really, but I reasoned it necessary. “I’ll feel guilty later.”

  At first I touched the notebook’s pages as tenderly as I’d touch a Ouija board after inquiring about my death. Then I plunged in. It didn’t take long to realize it was Brian’s dream log. Yes, I’d heard him mention this once or twice, during up-all-night blabathons when he’d expanded on his UFO stories. But that had been weeks ago. I skimmed through random entries, glancing up every few sentences to make certain Brian still paraded through the outfield. There he was, leaning against the far fence, head tilted upward. So I shuffled to the last pages. Perhaps he’s dreamed about me, I thought.

  As I came to the final dreams Brian had logged, I slowed my tempo. His handwriting was atrocious in spots, but I trudged through it. The dreams were dated over a month ago; I didn’t see my name, but I did notice Neil’s. I read.

  11/10/91—

  Last night, following my father’s disastrous phone call, the dream I suppose I’ve been dreading all these months. This time, I see Neil McCormick incredibly clearly—he’s there in the blue room, his rubber cleated shoes, pizza and panther on his shirt, black line of sunblock under his dark eyes—and then I see the shoes on the floor, the shirt, a white towel smudging away the sunblock. Neil’s lips, warm and fluttery against my ear—saying It’s okay, don’t worry. Then a door creaks open and the figure is there, four wide strides and he’s next to us, one hand on Neil’s shoulder, one hand on mine. “Neil, get his clothes off.” Neil’s pile of clothes thickens, the little hill grows as my Panthers shirt, my socks, my pants are thrown onto it. In the dream I can’t look into the figure’s face, I can only stare into his bare chest—and at first I see the mysterious blue-gray skin again, the same skin from other nightmares, and slowly, slowly, slowly it starts to change—the change takes forever, it goes from blue-gray to just gray, then from gray to grayish white, all the while sprouting little blond hairs. At last its color is white with a hint of pink, proof that it’s alive and blood is jetting beneath it, it’s no longer the skin of an alien, but the skin of a human being. A human arm, wide and hairy and freckled, and it wraps around me—and beside me Neil McCormick says here we go—

  11/22/91—

  Back among the trees, Halloween, and the figure’s there, his mouth spitting out I sure liked you Brian, I always hoped I would see you again—but this time the mouth isn’t the alien’s skinny slit, it’s a human mouth, full lips, blond mustache—the mouth moves toward me, nibbles at my own lips, just as they’d done two years before in the blue room with Neil—and I know who it is. It’s no alien, I’m thinking—my eyes are open and I’m not eight anymore, I’m not ten anymore, I’m nineteen, and now I know what’s happened to me, and I know they aren’t dreams. They’re memories.

  I looked up from the dream description. Just as they’d done two years before in the blue room with Neil. Inexplicably, the voices from the bizarre tape
I’d played in Neil’s room rang inside my head, the burping and swearing tenor of the little boy paired with the instigating bass of the adult. My mind’s warped lens focused back to a glossy spread I’d seen in Neil’s pedophilic porno magazine, but superimposed over the preteen’s head was first Neil’s face, then Brian’s. The effect was more abhorrent than hilarious. “Oh, Jesus,” I said, as if that would remedy something. Then I thought about the picture Brian had drawn from weeks back: the shoes, the number ninety-nine on the glove, the baseball scrawled with the word Coach. “Jesus,” I said again. I pulled out Brian’s Little League photograph and paused first at Brian, then Neil—his jersey, number ninety-nine—and, finally, their baseball coach.

  At last I understood. The clues had been here all the time. I should have known months ago.

  Brian was coming back, galloping toward the car, and somehow his face looked different. It wasn’t his clothes, not the clean skin and hair, not the makeup that covered each pimple. The change lurked somewhere inside him, simmered through his blood and bone, and only now could I see it.

  He scaled the fence and opened the driver’s side door. Wind vacuumed the car’s warm air, making me shiver. For a second Brian appeared happy, eager to meet Neil, no longer nervous. Then he turned his head, his gaze dropping from my face to my hands. I still held the dream journal in my left, the photograph in my right.

  I couldn’t fathom what to say first. “It’s not a secret anymore” is what came out. “Now there’s no more being cryptic with me.”

  Brian took his things; jammed them back between the seats. “I would have told you eventually,” he blurted. “I really would have.” His glasses gradually fogged, and he rubbed them on the knee of his jeans. I stared there, ashamed, as he continued. “Right now, not all of it’s come back to me. I still need Neil. He has to tell me what he knows.”

  We sat, silent. The fence’s sign banged and clattered. In a nearby house, a door slammed, shutting someone out. A gust of wind lifted a newspaper page into the air, and it sailed across the car’s windshield. I tried to read a headline; no luck.

  “You’re such a snoop,” Brian said. “I would have told you.” I wanted to apologize, but those words couldn’t blanket all the things I was sorry for. All this time, I’d longed to bring Brian and Neil together; instead, I felt like the subject of a conspiracy. “Sooner or later you would have figured it out anyway,” he said. “I’m surprised you hadn’t. Based on what you know about Neil, plus the clues I’ve probably given you here and there. You’re not stupid.” He started the car. “It’s amazing what people know. They just never say anything, they deny it because they don’t want to believe.” Yes, I thought, that was true. “Maybe Neil’s mother even knew what was going on, maybe she didn’t want to believe that whatever was happening was really happening. Maybe my father, maybe my mother.”

  Brian shoved the dream journal back into my lap. “Turn to the last pages.” I returned to the 11/22 entry. “No, snoop, the very end.”

  Flip, flip, flip. These pages stuck together, and when I pried them apart I saw reddish brown stains. “Your Rorschach test?”

  “No,” he said. “My blood.” Brian glanced at his watch and backed the car from the baseball field. “The past few weeks, ever since I’ve been figuring things out, I’ve been getting nosebleeds. Haven’t had them since I was a kid. Back then, the slightest pressure would burst capillaries.” He touched his nose.

  “I kept remembering something Avalyn said,” he continued. “She talked about proof, about leaving remnants of yourself to prove something happened.” At a red traffic light, he looked at me, and I placed my hand on the notebook’s brittle pages. “My nose bled that night, the night of the missing five hours. Now that I know what happened, it’s bleeding again. Strange, hmm? It’s like my body’s remembering, too.” Brian’s hand left the steering wheel. His fingers met mine on the dried smears and dots of blood. “This is my proof,” he said.

  I didn’t have to give Brian directions. After he parked in the driveway, he simply sat, letting the car settle, as darkness lowered its canopy over Hutchinson’s west side.

  We stepped to the porch. In the McCormicks’ bay window, blue and green lights winked from a tree garlanded with popcorn strings and candy canes. Tinsel speared from its branches like miniature javelins. A tin ornament was shaped like a gingerbread man, its eyes, smile, bow tie, and buttons chiseled into the surface by an amateur’s hand, quite possibly Neil’s as a child. I wondered if he’d made the ornament before or after that summer.

  When I’d visited Neil in the past, his mom’s excitement would overflow: the door would swing open, and she’d tug me inside as avidly as Hansel and Gretel’s witch. Tonight her movements had slowed. “Good to see you both again,” she said. “I apologize, though. Something happened. Neil’s not well. Perhaps that’s the best way to put it.” Her voice sounded biblical: tired, wounded, meaningful. “He’s had an accident. He’s asleep now.”

  Mrs. McCormick pointed. On the kitchen table, two pies lounged beneath a divinity snowman, its raisin eyes and cinnamon stick arms guarding them. “But you can still stay. I’ve baked a peanut butter-peach, and a good old-fashioned apple.”

  Brian seemed lost. He eased into a chair, I took another, and Mrs. McCormick searched a drawer for a knife. Her searching knocked a wine bottle cork to the floor, and it bounced into a corner. I hunted for something to say. My gaze was preoccupied with pie number one’s mosaic of peaches, peanut butter dollops, and crumbled graham crackers, and I didn’t notice when the shadowy figure shuffled into the room.

  “You’re awake,” his mom said.

  Neil stood in the kitchen’s doorway. His eyes looked drugged, slightly incongruous, and I saw that it wasn’t a shadow beneath his right eye, but the gray crescent of a developing bruise. Another bruise curled across his cheekbone. His mouth wore a raspberryish sore. His earring was missing, the lobe swollen, infected. Below it, a cut had been Mercurochromed so thickly it glowed orange.

  “Stop staring, Preston,” Neil said. Then he stepped toward Brian. “So you’re the man.” On “you’re,” his mouth widened to display his newly chipped tooth.

  “Little League teammates,” Mrs. McCormick said. She aimed the knife at a pie. “Neil never would have remembered a friend from that long ago. How neat that you managed to. How long since you two last saw each other?”

  Neil touched the cut on his neck. “Not as long as it seems, I guess.”

  “Ten years,” Brian said. “And five months, seven days.”

  I assisted Neil’s mom by ordering the table with a quartet of forks and plates. “I’ll have peanut butter-peach,” she said. “How about you guys?” I chose the same, and Brian picked apple.

  “One of both,” Neil said. The bruise made his eye appear locked in a perpetual wink. I still loved him.

  We ate, barely speaking beyond the standard “Mmm”s and “this is really great”s. Mrs. McCormick was the first to ease the tension. “This isn’t the way Neil normally looks, Brian. He’s a tough one, all right, but he’s learning the hard way not to assert that toughness in just any old place. Hutchinson is one thing, New York is another.” I saw him roll his eyes, mouth a silent, Oh, Mom. “By chance you ever go there, god forbid, take warning. If toughs on the street want something of yours, by all means give it to them, or else expect a scuffle.” Brian nodded, but I didn’t believe that’s what had happened to Neil. I doubted Mrs. McCormick believed it, either.

  After we finished, Neil gathered plates and forks, deposited them in the sink, and rubbed his mom’s shoulders. “We’re going to cruise around for a while,” he told her. “There’s something I need to show Brian.”

  “I imagine so,” she said. “I guess you have some catching up to do.” She saw us to the door; as we stepped out she gave us each a pat on the back. Then she stood there, waving.

  Brian drove. Neil stammered directions. I sat in the back, but by then I could have sat on another continent and it wouldn
’t have mattered. They had crossed to another place. I floated away, inessential.

  The Toyota turned onto Main. Ahead, beside the street, were the Kansas State Fairgrounds, the wreckage from the previous autumn’s twelve-day carnival still remaining. Briefly I thought Neil would steer Brian there, but he indicated the opposite way. Brian swerved to a narrow street. “This is it up here,” Neil said. “But you probably know that.” Brian parked alongside the curb, shut the ignition, and folded his arms.

  They got out, neither speaking. Brian fished the baseball photograph from between the seats. He stepped around the car and leaned against the passenger side door. Neil took his place beside him, wincing as he pushed himself onto the hood, and both he and Brian stared at the boxy, completely mundane house where we’d parked. When I joined them, the glassiness in their eyes looked foreign to me. I understood this as the place their coach had lived. The house sat back from a row of knee-high shrubs, a gravel path leading toward it. A two-door garage linked to the house’s east side, its doors closed, a green garden hose snaking from its wall to the shrubs. Neighbors’ homes were lit up, flashing their greetings and noels to the night street, but here, in this home from their memories, there was only darkness. No Christmas lights braceleted its exterior, no tree blinked its varicolored eyes from the front window. The only beacons were the illuminated doorbell’s tiny rectangular beam and the porch light, the globe of which shone a curious blue instead of white.

  “Blue,” Brian said, seeing it.

  Down the block, a group of carolers trudged through the cold, pausing before each house to warble their songs to neighborhood families. I listened awhile, not knowing what to do or say. No matter what the carolers sang about—the infant Jesus, enchanted snowmen, nightfall over an ancient village—their words seemed the same. A security underlied their voices, a knowledge that they’d soon be home in bed, a log snapping sparks in the fireplace, mom and dad snoozing in the next room.