by Jan Carson
‘Could these holes be a curse?’ Malcolm then asked himself, eyeing his own reflection suspiciously. ‘Could they be some kind of otherworldly punishment for all the times I’ve picked my nose and stuck it inside the seatbelt holder? Or, if not a curse, what about some kind of superhero power?’
This was a thought worth thinking and much more appealing than a nose-picking curse. He had read enough X-Men comics to understand the extreme, unholy coolness of a well-placed mutation. However, even Malcolm Orange, blessed as he was with the overleaping imagination of an Old Testament prophet, struggled to imagine the superhero potential in being eleven years old and perforated.
Though Malcolm was loath to consider it – and would most probably have preferred tropical diseases or even a curse – there was, of course, the distinct possibility of dreams. More likely than superpowers or the long-anticipated onset of puberty, bad dreams seemed the shiftiest-looking suspect in a long lineup of plausible causes.
Malcolm Orange did not trust dreams.
(For the very same reason he also distrusted hiccups, tropical storms, death and shopping tax, all of which had, on several occasions, been visited upon him unexpectedly and without permission at no small inconvenience to his normal routine.)
For the previous three years Malcolm had been sleeping with a wad of balled-up Kleenex wedged into each ear; a safeguard against the possibility of a particularly wily dream sneaking into his head whilst he slept. Balled-up Kleenex, it turned out, did not make for the best dream catchers and often had to be extricated over the breakfast table with eyebrow tweezers or chopsticks.
‘Malcolm,’ his mother would say, as she picked the sodden orange shards of the latest tissue plug from her son’s ears, ‘this is the absolute last time I am going to pull Kleenex out of your head. If you don’t want bad dreams count sheep like a normal kid.’
Having once read a most unsettling article in a woman’s magazine, Malcolm Orange had been waging war on dreams for almost five years.
It should be noted that Malcolm – averaging three to five schools per year and consequently deprived of the normal educational outlets – had gleaned most of his life skills from the back pages of the cheaper women’s magazines which congregated in the waiting areas of suburban beauty parlors and hairdressing salons. Beauty parlors remained the one immutable constant in Mrs Orange’s careering pilgrimage across North America and her firstborn son, even now at the almost adult age of eleven, played a non-negotiable part in this ritual.
Regardless of State or season, Malcolm Orange spent every Saturday morning of his young life waiting while his mother had her hair permed, her eyebrows waxed, her fingernails polished, painted and filed into Dracula points, her armpits mown and teeth bleached, or the hard skin on both heels sandpapered into bloody pulp and vanilla butter. Between the hours of nine thirty and twelve Malcolm worshipped reluctantly at the traveling temples of suburban beauty. A series of five-buck beauty parlors in a series of medium-sized American cities looked on with avid disinterest while Malcolm balanced his skinny butt on a series of identical orange plastic chairs (carefully avoiding the worst of the cigarette scars), and plowed his way through towering stacks of women’s magazines.
By the time Malcolm reached his tenth birthday he had absorbed enough secondhand peroxide to bleach his hair three shades lighter round the ears and had learned most everything he would ever need to know about hair removal, hot flushes and what to do when one’s lover runs off with a younger woman. The experimental remnants of last summer’s hot pink nail polish, still lingering round the cuticle of his big toe nail, bore witness to the fact that Malcolm Orange had spent an unhealthy amount of his childhood hanging out in beauty parlors.
When you’re six months shy of your eighth birthday mom and pop beauty parlors have their limits, and Malcolm Orange had quickly outgrown the thrill of eavesdropping on the birdy little chi-chats between hairdressers and their over-primped regulars. Overheard conversations of a sexual nature were a dime a dozen and no longer thrilled Malcolm as they had at five and six. Having no concept of anything more stable than the backseat of a Volvo he could not understand the appeal of gossip. ‘What’s the use,’ he wondered, ‘in knowing all this grubby stuff about people I’ll never see again?’
Looking for an alternative distraction he’d sucked his way through dozens of complimentary mints, examined the underside of coffee tables for rude words or salvageable gum and made countless pictures of the ocean from the swirling offcuts of recently trimmed hair. Eventually, bored with the walls and the inevitable dust-lined blinds, Malcolm’s attention had turned to the dog-eared stacks of Vogues and Cosmopolitans which balanced out either side of the coffee table.
To Malcolm Orange these magazines were like small doors opening suddenly into a world more bizarre and terrifying than anything ever experienced, conquered or annihilated by his beloved X-Men.
Over the years Malcolm found himself freshly surprised by the heights and depths of disgusting processes the female body was party to. He took to watching the door suspiciously every time his mother visited the bathroom, wondering what monsterish horrors might be playing out behind closed doors. He devoured the problem pages and true-life stories, marveling at the freakish dilemmas these women were capable of orchestrating, and thanked the Lord nightly for the simple fact that he had been blessed with both a penis and the possibility of body hair in all the proper places.
Malcolm Orange read furtively, holding his eyebrows at all times loose and sloped in a light arch of disinterest. He fully understood that these magazines were not suitable for preadolescent boys and that, by some incredible stroke of good fortune, he’d found himself privy to a wealth of top secret, womanly information; the sort of facts and fictions which could later be used as ammunition in his own defense. He was careful not to appear too enthusiastic lest his mother might suspect deviancy or, more terrifying by far, some slim-wristed Vietnamese waxer or massively armed Mexican hairdresser might catch him on, crossing the salon floor in three furious strides to address his impertinence in broken English and clip him round the ears with the sharp end of a hairdryer.
It was on one such Saturday morning pilgrimage, somewhere in the outer armpit of Chicago, that Malcolm Orange first became suspicious of dreams.
Flicking eagerly through a sizeable stack of magazines which had, in an act of overzealous artistry, been fanned across the laminated coffee table, his eye had alighted on one particular headline.
‘I Gave Birth to A Dinosaur Baby’
It was just the sort of article Malcolm most enjoyed and so he popped a complimentary mint and reached for the magazine. Both the article and the publication containing it had been almost eighteen months out of date but this gave Malcolm no cause to doubt the veracity of the story.
‘Tampa, Florida. June 1989. Woman Gives Birth To A Fully-Formed Dinosaur. Experts Baffled.
‘Katie Overlein-Locke, a twenty-five-year-old mother of three, last night gave birth to a fully formed, fire-breathing dinosaur baby. On first examination it appears to be a triceratops but it could well turn out to be a stegosaurus. Experts are baffled. This is the first recorded case of a woman giving birth to a dinosaur in almost two hundred and fifty years. Obstetrician Dr Hugo Martinez issued the following statement, “We’re baffled by this one. It’s so long since we’ve had a dinosaur baby in the United States I think we all thought we’d seen the last of this sort of thing. It’s a good-looking kid though and it breathes fire.”
‘Both mother and dinosaur are doing well and expect to leave the hospital in the next few days. When interviewed exclusively for Woman’s World Magazine, Mrs Overlein-Locke said, “I never thought this would happen to me. I mean, you read about this stuff happening in African places but not here in the United States. I guess I knew though. I dreamt about dinosaurs every night for the last nine months. I just want to warn other women to be very careful what they dream about when they’re pregnant.”’
The article was accompa
nied by a small, and somewhat blurry, photo of Mrs Overlein-Locke, propped up in her hospital bed, cradling what appeared to be a tiny green dinosaur dressed in a pair of men’s pajamas.
Upon reading this article Malcolm Orange was overcome by the need to have diarrhea, very suddenly in the beauty parlor bathroom. The thought of dreaming into being an actual dinosaur baby had scared the shit right out of his churning bowels.
Malcolm had never before acknowledged the faint suspicion that his dreams might have an actual, honest-to-God bearing on his wide-awake hours. It was the singular worst thought he could possibly think, for his dreams were full of curdling screams and planes crashing into volcanoes, leprosy and teenage girls tying him up in ribbons.
Malcolm Orange had once dreamt himself, in glorious Technicolor, being run over by a car whilst crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. Waking the next morning he’d discovered a bruise, exactly the size and shape of a mandarin orange, beginning to swell at the base of his skull. Having never been run over by a car or crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, Malcolm was unsure if the dream was consistent with his injuries but from this point on he’d suspected, yet never fully acknowledged, that dreams could not be trusted.
The grainy snapshot of the dinosaur baby had confirmed everything Malcolm Orange already knew to be true. He instantly determined to do his level-headed best never to dream again. It was simply too dangerous to leave himself open to the possibility of dreaming into existence a gruesome death or apocalyptic encounter with a teenage girl. And thus had begun the golden era of the Kleenex earplugs.
Having reached the believable limit of diarrhea, Malcolm flushed the toilet one final time, unbolted the bathroom door and stepped back into the living room. His mother was still seated on the living room sofa kissing the strap of Ross’s diaper bag while she watched her soap operas. Between kisses she swigged Diet Coke straight from a two liter bottle. She managed the bottle one handed like a professional shot-putter.
‘Better?’ she asked, turning to watch as Malcolm positioned himself, cross-legged on the floor.
‘Uh-huh,’ replied Malcolm, and wrapped one arm round his middle in a last-ditch attempt at attention to detail, ‘I feel much better now the diarrhea’s out. I think I probably ate something bad this afternoon but it’s all gone now. If it’s OK, I think I’ll just sit here and read for a while before bed.’
‘OK Hon, whatever you want. Just don’t make too much noise. I’m trying to learn my Spanish off the subtitles.’ His mother clicked the volume up a few notches and gave the remote a quick but deliberate kiss before positioning it on the arm of the sofa.
Malcolm Orange began to flick absentmindedly through the short stack of comics which had, of recent weeks, congregated against the coffee table leg, breeding there unnoticed, until the bigger part of the table was now supported by science fiction. Malcolm wasn’t reading. He was still thinking about his dreams.
Two things were looking increasingly likely; Malcolm Orange was beginning to disappear and the Kleenex earplugs had been a colossal waste of time and imagination.
Though frustrated to admit that bad dreams could not be caught and squished like garden bugs in a balled-up tissue, Malcolm took small hope in the unpredictable nature of these dreamings. If the holes were the result of some particularly pointed dream there was a distinct possibility, he reasoned, that they could be removed in a similar fashion, exorcised with some appropriate dream about cement or liquid skin.
Sitting on the living room carpet Malcolm tried not to panic.
Yes, he was disappearing. That much seemed obvious. In fact, examining his exposed parts in the limited glow from the TV screen, the holes in his wrists seemed larger now than earlier in the afternoon. Perhaps by the morning the perforations would have conspired to collide, leaving Malcolm almost entirely missing. Tomorrow evening, when the shock had finally settled into his stomach, Malcolm would have to devise some means of scientifically monitoring the progress of his holes.
Malcolm Orange was terribly good at measuring.
In the past he had faithfully recorded every Dairy Queen from the east to west coast, the changing tones of deep south sunsets and, most recently, the growing hysteria of his mother, plotted faithfully on a bar graph with his father’s absence running like constant loss all along the horizontal axis. Beginning tomorrow, after dinner and his unavoidable helping of household chores, Malcolm Orange would draft a chart to monitor the progress of his own disappearance.
In the meantime he decided not to panic. He coerced his mother into surrendering the Diet Coke bottle, poured himself a tall glass with ice and settled down on the carpet to catch up on his Mexican soap operas. As Malcolm watched the screen his lips instinctively followed his mother’s, invoking Spanish sentiments he would never quite understand nor pronounce correctly. Side by side, with their similar eyebrows, mother and son seemed glazed, like two penitent saints caught in the act of solemn confession.
Malcolm was miles away, settling into the sweet space between his ears where the Kleenex had filtered out all but the softest thoughts. He found himself frustratingly incapable of anything more anxious than a sideways glance.
‘I’m beginning to disappear,’ he reminded himself during the commercial breaks, ‘I’m beginning to disappear and my father’s not here to fix me.’ Unsettling as this realization was, Malcolm Orange remained incapable of panic.
Worse things had happened in Texas: dead grandparents, trailer parks and the never-again-mentioned incident with the borrowed shotgun. Dreadful as each occurrence had been, individually and collectively, all Oranges capable of mounting the Volvo and skipping town had rolled on to conquer the next small city scandal. It was the Orange way to cope; just keep rolling.
Only Malcolm’s mother – an Orange by marriage rather than blood – seemed incapable of getting off the sofa and trundling on to the next catastrophe.
Malcolm Orange took after his father in all matters other than eyebrows. Aged almost twelve and well-versed in the etiquette of the near disaster, he had arrived in Portland, Oregon with the belief that all things (even the enormously broken) could be fixed with just the right mix of Jesus and bravado. When all else failed and Jesus simply wasn’t working, the most complicated problems could be abandoned in the dust receding slowly in the rearview mirror as the Volvo cut a quick, sharp path for the next town over.
‘Mama,’ he said, draining the dregs of his Diet Coke glass, ‘I think I’m going to hit the sack now. I’ll see you in the morning.’
‘Sí,’ she replied, reaching absentmindedly to pat the space where Malcolm had been. Her fingers met with thin air and the empty glass. Standing just inside his bedroom door, Malcolm Orange watched as his mother ran her lips lightly around the smudged rim of his empty glass. It was clear that she would have nothing constructive to contribute to his problem.
In the bedroom Ross was breathing heavily, sucking the air in and out of the sock drawer. Malcolm’s mother had used parcel tape to keep him tied in, scared that his freshly stretched limbs would allow him to wriggle free of the socks and underpants, perhaps escaping forever like a liberated snake – scooching under the living room door, down the garden path and crawling south in the general direction of his absent father.
Malcolm Orange ignored Ross as he had been ignoring Ross for the last three months.
He could see himself roughly reflected in the dark sheen of the curtain-less window. The light from the living room was burrowing its way through his face and arms. He removed his shirt quickly, keeping the bedroom door open to allow the light in. The light was filtering right through Malcolm’s belly. He was glowing now, luminous as tissue paper stretched over a light bulb. He turned backwards and sideways, high on the thought of being iridescent. He looked really friggin’ cool – better than an X-Man by far, more like Jesus on the holy candles with hundreds of light rays coming out of his head.
Malcolm Orange removed his pants, crossed himself quickly and crawled under the bed sheets. ‘Jesus, G
od, Holy Spirit, can you stop me from disappearing please?’ he prayed, barely audible but solid enough to feel his own warm breath refracting damply off the bed sheets, ‘Jesus, God, Holy Spirit, you can leave the holes for a few days but don’t let me disappear entirely. In your name, Amen.’
Malcolm crossed himself again, this time in reverse, for he’d read somewhere that this was the correct way to end a prayer. Then he curled into a question mark and settled down with the very real intention of dreaming solid dreams: cement and concrete, liquid skin, the Grand Canyon, filled to the brim with asphalt and sand.
Malcolm Orange was going to imagine himself better.
– Chapter Two –
Idaho
Malcolm’s father was in tires.
The Oranges moved around a lot, all across America with a backseat full of grandparents.
Papa Orange died in New Jersey. Great Grandma never made it back across the Brooklyn Bridge. Malcolm’s Step Nana – a hulking blister of a woman who loved to fill the Volvo’s cramped backseat with the vomit-inducing stench of pipe smoke and eggy farts – quit this mortal coil twenty minutes into a Ghostbusters matinee.
(By the time the movie ended, rigor mortis had set in, making it all but impossible to remove a family-sized popcorn sack from its habitual spot, nestled into the crook of her right arm. Mr Orange reluctantly buried his grandmother fully prepared for the possibility of afterlife snacking.
‘It’s a definite first for me,’ remarked the local undertaker, viewing the corpse laid out in its enormous coffin, ‘never buried nobody with popping corn before. Sure does look a little odd to me. Maybe it’s one of them new-fangled ideas from China. I guess you live and learn in this business. You live and learn.’
‘What can I say?’ replied Mr Orange. ‘My grandmother was a tremendous lover of popcorn.’)
Step Nana’s untimely demise came just six short weeks after Malcolm’s maternal grandmother had left the dinner table to powder her nose and never returned. They’d left her propped against the bathroom wall in a downtown Dairy Queen. ‘She’d have wanted it this way,’ Malcolm’s father claimed, and bought each of the remaining Oranges a CheeseQuake Blizzard. ‘To take the edge off the grief,’ he’d said, plastic spoon already poised over his cup.