Mysterious Skin

by Scott Heim

  I paused again, but Brian objected. “Keep going. Don’t stop again until you’ve finished.”

  “The routine was the same whenever Coach invited someone else over,” I said. “He used me as the prop to pull you in. I stretched out on his couch, which”—I patted the space between our seats—“was a hell of a lot more comfortable than this. And he took off my clothes. I wasn’t even conscious of being naked; it’s like God or whoever had created me to be that way. And I oohed and aahed to give the impression that what he was doing to me was the greatest thing I’d ever known.” In a way, I thought, it was. Or it had been, at one time, now only part of memory. “That way, you’d be there, on the other side of the room, hopefully wanting Coach to do to you what he was doing to me. He had planned it all.

  “In the game he played, I had to do things to you first, like a warm-up. I’d kiss you a little, preparing you, slipping my tongue inside to get your mouth all wet and shiny before he shoved his big soft lips and that thick mustache over your face and nearly ate you alive.”

  “I think I remember that part,” Brian said. His voice was a spider’s, hidden away in some far corner’s web. “It came to me with Avalyn. I knew it wasn’t the first time I’d been kissed.” I didn’t know what he meant, but when I started to ask he stopped me. “I’ll shut up. Go on.”

  “Coach and I got your clothes off, touched and massaged you all over. I guess you whimpered, made sounds a deaf-mute would make. Coach loved that. His favorite thing was laying his tongue inside a kid’s mouth, so I presume he sucked around at your tongue awhile. Then things progressed. There was this little game I loved, where Coach would open his mouth as wide as a fist and circle me with it. I mean my dick, my balls, everything.” I expected Brian to blush here, but if he did I couldn’t tell. I only saw his face, limned by the porch light’s deep blue. “He did that to me, and then I tried to do it to you. To show you everything was A-OK. But my mouth was nothing like his. I was just a boy. So he went down on you, sucked and sucked. I watched, amazed and jealous and ten thousand other emotions. You kept your eyes closed mostly, but when they fluttered open they were glassy, far away.”

  Brian moved closer to me. I could see his hands shaking, and he bunched them in his lap. Then he took a deep breath, and as he exhaled he made a soft moaning sound. I realized he was trying not to cry. If I had a spirit, I felt it fly out of me then. And if Brian had a spirit, it flew hand in hand with mine, lifting above the couch, passing through the roof, hovering in the black and measureless air that blanketed the house where Coach once lived.

  “Then the other game began. The five-dollar game.” The carolers stood next door now, their voices harmonizing in the December chill. Yet in the dark street shineth, the everlasting light. “Coach would make me do things, crazy sex things, and if I could do them I’d get a five-dollar bill. Usually I’d get it even if I couldn’t do them, just seeing my effort was enough for him. And he must have had an extra five bucks that night, because he wanted you in on things, too.”

  I waited. I could almost see Coach, standing over us, one hand on my shoulder, one on Brian’s. Go ahead, Neil.

  “We had to fist him. Do you know what that means?” Brian nodded, but by then his face seemed so dazed he would have made the necessary gesture at anyone. “I went first, of course. To show you. He stood over us, we looked up at him. That always got him off, I guess, seeing those surprised kid faces staring up like that. Or so I gathered, considering all the pictures in his photo album. On that night, the five-dollar bill was mine if I could reach inside him, ram my little fist inside his ass, then wring it all the way to the elbow. And goddamn, I did it. The way it felt—like plunging my arm into a tight, tight sleeve, its insides covered with wet sponges, and then the suction of his ass, squeezing my elbow—it was like his body wanted me inside it, it wanted to devour me whole. I can’t forget that.”

  “And then it was my turn,” Brian said. He snarled his words, his voice almost angry. “I did it, too. I know, because I felt the inside of the calf.” His hand—no, his entire body—was trembling.

  “Yes, you did it. Coach there, his ass jutting out, his face sort of erased and this blissed-out look replacing it. And you kneeling on the floor, your arm disappeared, gone, the fist and wrist and forearm swallowed up by his body.” I could remember Brian perfectly now, that lost look in his eyes, eight years old. And I’d been right beside him.

  And I could remember Coach, as well, perhaps better now than ever before. But something had changed. “Love”—that was what I’d always termed the emotion I carried for Coach. Now it was different, an emotion I had no adequate word for.

  I couldn’t go on. “And we put our clothes on, we got in the station wagon, drove you back to Little River, and dropped you off in your driveway. The end.”

  “And I had a nosebleed. Don’t forget the nosebleed. It wasn’t from aliens and their tracking devices. It was something else. I want to know how it happened.”

  I was sinking into the couch, it was suffocating me. I stood and stepped across the room to the window. “You were so dazed you couldn’t stand up straight. It was like he’d ripped something free from you, whatever controlled your balance, and when your arm pulled out of him you fell. Weird. You fell face first into my knee, and when we twisted you up onto the couch your nose was shooting this geyser of blood.”

  “Like this?” His voice lifted, excited, almost shrieking. “Like this?”

  I turned from the window. The blue still shone off Brian’s face, but he had removed his glasses, and his eyes had altered. They glittered and flashed like a puppy’s. And below them, dribbling from one nostril, a stream of blood. It glistened, almost black. As I stared, its flow grew heavier, trickling down Brian’s upper lip, his lower lip, his chin. “Like this?” he asked a third time, and he knocked his knuckle against his nose. The blood spurted then, a gush of it staining his jacket, his shirt, a lilac on the couch’s cushion.

  I bounded back to him. “Stop,” I said. I pulled his hand from his face and propped his head into my lap, his nose in the air. I had to stop the bleeding. I swiped my fingers across his face, and his blood made an inky flourish on my hand.

  Brian closed his eyes, blood trailing down his cheek and matting his hair. I felt it, damp and warm, seeping through my pant leg. It was Brian’s blood, and for some reason I knew it was pure. No other man I’d held in my arms—and now, not even I—had blood this pure.

  His eyes reopened, and he looked up at me. “Tell me, Neil,” he said. “Tell me more.”

  I could hear the carolers’ footsteps, their hushed giggles. They approached Coach’s house. We had to leave soon. “One more thing,” I said. “You were so erased that when Coach gave you the five bucks, you just let the bill drop to the floor. I saw the money lying there, and I picked it up. It was mine.” Brian tried to exhale from his nose, and a bubble of blood widened and popped. “So I owe you, Brian. I’ve owed you that, all these years.” I lifted his head a little, patted my ass for my wallet, found a five-dollar bill.

  The carolers clomped toward the porch, arguing over what carols they still hadn’t sung. “No one’s even home,” one said. “Let’s yell Trick or Treat,” said another. If I were in my regular mood, I’d stand at the door, smile through one or two songs, then hurl a fistful of dimes and nickels at them with all the strength I could muster. As I thought this, I heard a loud “Shhh.” Brian and I froze, waiting. “Someone’s home,” a boy insisted, and when I looked to the window I saw a face peering in at us, a head with a red-balled stocking cap, gaping mouth, spying eyes made blue by the never-ending porch light. I tried to picture the scene he saw: two boys in the dark, sprawled together on the couch, holding hands; one battered and bruised, the other bleeding from the nose.

  They began singing “Silent Night,” which had always been my favorite as a little boy. They finished the first line, and Brian sat up from the couch. The blood’s flow was subsiding. He pinched the five-dollar bill in both hands, lo
oked at me, and ripped it in half. Again. He began tearing it then, ripping the halves into more halves, until the bill was torn into hundreds of pieces. He cupped the pieces in his palm and threw them, green shreds of money showering across the floor.

  Brian leaned his head back into my lap. “It’s over,” he said.

  “Silent Night” paused, and a caroler giggled. I stroked Brian’s hair with my stained fingers. I wanted to tell him not to worry, that everything would be fine, but I couldn’t speak. I just kept holding him, touching his hair and his face, letting him know I was sorry.

  In the middle of that quiet I heard a soft clicking noise. At first the sound puzzled me; then I recognized it as that of a key in a lock. Brian panicked, standing from the couch, pulling me up with him as we attempted to make our break. But it was too late. The house’s door clattered open, and the room’s light flickered on.

  A woman gasped. Through the open door I could see a sliver of carolers, some faces peering inside at the scattered tatters of money, some faces turned to the sky and the snow, now beginning to fall. And there, in front of them, in the room with us, stood the family, their outlines barely visible within the weight of the room’s light. It was a light that shone over our faces, our wounds and scars. It was a light so brilliant and white it could have been beamed from heaven, and Brian and I could have been angels, basking in it. But it wasn’t, and we weren’t.

  About the Author

  SCOTT HEIM is the author of the novel In Awe (1997) as well as a book of poems, Saved from Drowning. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Village Voice, Nerve.com, The Advocate, Paper, and many Anthologies. He has previously lived in New York, London, and various towns in his home state of Kansas. He now lives and works in Boston, where he is finishing his third novel, We Disappear. For more details visit his official website at www.scottheim.com.

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  Praise for

  MYSTERIOUS SKIN

  “What Mr. Heim seems to want to do here is inhabit the mysterious skin of the anti-heroic and artlessly perverse. He does this less to flout convention and more because he seems hungry to explore extreme forms of experience.”

  —New York Times

  “The ending left me with tears in my eyes—which is about the highest praise I can make of a novel.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “He creates scenes of genuine beauty,…and handles his complicated characters and delicate subject matter with calm assurance.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Heim’s real achievement is his artful blend of Dennis Cooper-like ’bad boy’ fiction and the coming-of-age/coming-out story.”

  —10 Percent

  “[A] quietly affecting first novel…Mysterious Skin impresses.”

  —Swing

  “Perfectly capturing the essence of the 80s, Heim will take you back ten years and jolt your mind into today, all at the same time.”

  —Pitch Weekly

  “This book explores new frontiers of sexuality in unexpected areas—like western Kansas. Insightful and beautifully written.”

  —William S. Burroughs, writer, painter, recording artist

  “Eerie, precise, emotionally complex, quietly charismatic, and full of grace, Mysterious Skin is one of the most accomplished and mysteriously pleasurable first novels I’ve read in years.”

  —Dennis Cooper, author of Try and Frisk

  “With uncommon poetry and clarity, Scott Heim paints a devastating portrait of a new Lost Generation. Mysterious Skin will haunt and enrage you. I am awestruck by Heim’s courage. Read this book.”

  —Connie May Fowler, author of Sugar Cage and River of Hidden Dreams

  ALSO BY SCOTT HEIM

  FICTION

  In Awe

  POETRY

  Saved from Drowning

  Copyright

  MYSTERIOUS SKIN. Copyright © 1995 by Scott Heim. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  ePub edition March 2008 ISBN 9780061737190

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