Some Hell

by Patrick Nathan

  Her husband had written. Whether or not it was true, anymore, she couldn’t be sure.

  “Have you read about the wild horses, out west?”

  Tim said he had. He said how they were starving, how they kept reproducing, damaging fences. “They’re a menace, according to the Tribune.”

  “So they are real?”

  He frowned. He leaned back in the chair, his hand on his chin. “Of course they’re real. Is everything okay?”

  “As okay as it gets, I guess. I’ve just—you know me.” She put up her hands and shrugged. “I’ve been through some hell, is all.”

  “I understand. Believe me, I do.” With a deep breath he removed his glasses. His eyes were smaller than she expected, and she realized, as he squinted in her direction, he couldn’t see a foot in front of him. “Diane, I’ve been wanting to—”

  “I never told you about that dream.”

  Anger, she had read in one of those suicide survivor manuals, is a secondary emotion. That Tim pressed his lips together—it wasn’t only anger. But do you love me? she felt she should ask, just to see how it’d sting, because even an hour ago it would’ve stung for her, too. “No,” he said as he returned his glasses. “No, we haven’t discussed that yet.” He took up his instruments again—his instruments of listening, he’d once called them—but he couldn’t convince anyone, anymore, that he was merely her therapist.

  “It’s not an isolated dream. It’s not the only one I’ve had like it.” Her eyes traveled up to the ceiling, where the air vent, with a sound like a faraway cowbell, came to life. And what did it matter if it was only a dream? She could’ve written it in some notebook to be found in ten thousand years and no one would know. She could’ve called herself Eileen instead of Diane, or Jennifer, or—a name it always felt silly to love—Candace. To Tim, though, it was a dream, not part of this: the tissue box, the metal table and its cheap chairs, his posters, his bookcase with its bowed shelves, the bad paint job in an old building in a shitty part of town poisoning everyone with asbestos and lead and general despair. To him, the clouds catching fire were not real, nor the birds raining down like meteorites as they tried to flee the flames. How she’d stood with Colin on their front steps and watched it all happen—that, too, was just part of the brain’s garbage, no matter what meaning you tried to assign. “What I’m saying is I felt relieved,” she told Tim, smiling despite the tears in her eyes. “I wanted it. I was so, so glad it was all over. I’ve always felt that. I think I told you how I used to pray for cancer, leukemia, all that? When I dream, the world is never safe. I’m never safe. And so often it’s…” She sighed and sat up in her chair, pushing herself erect with her elbows. “You know, I welcome it.”

  On the wall where the window should’ve been, the clock was nearing half past four. Tim had nothing to say. She shrugged her shoulders, strangely happy to have laid it all out for him. Even if they were only a kind of armor, her dreams, she wore them like the gift of invulnerability. He was still speechless as she reached for her purse and rummaged for her cigarettes. The gun, nestled among her makeups and various attempts at lists, didn’t even faze her, nor its companion box she’d stuffed with cotton to stop the bullets from rattling. She’d take it with her, she decided, all the way to California. Out there, at the edge of the country, she’d go on dreaming of the earth cracking open, the sun going out like an old lightbulb, plagues that finished off all life in days. Every morning, she would wake up to life. She’d always awoken to life, and it seemed she always would. But she was prepared. And even if she wasn’t, she had this, right in her purse, like an astronaut’s cyanide pill. In case of emergency, she thought, and a smile trembled on her lips. When she left, she said she felt like they made a breakthrough, and she saw how it hurt him, how the mistake he made had uncovered itself and shown Tim how stupid he was to love a woman who’d been dead her whole life. “Yes,” he said, and she left.

  As she walked through the door, Colin savored the look of shock on his mother’s face when she found him huddled over the kitchen table, shoulder to shoulder with his sister. Heather had been waiting in the driveway after school, her car stereo annoying the entire neighborhood as she sat scrolling through her phone. The only thing Colin could think to do was show her their itinerary, tracing their route on the atlas with his finger. “I thought I’d stop in and say hi,” she told their mother as she set her purse on the counter. “I ordered us all pizza.”

  “Your car is blocking the garage,” Diane said. She smiled, but there was nothing kind in it and Colin wanted to hit her across the face with a chair. “Anyway! You look great!” She crossed the room and stood at the head of the table. His sister actually looked terrible, as though she’d slept for ten days straight.

  “Thanks,” Heather said. She looked down, at the atlas.

  “What are you wearing? You’re drowning in that sweatshirt.”

  “It’s Eric’s. And it keeps me warm. I don’t know. I like it.” Heather sank deeper into it and shrugged it up around her neck. Colin could feel how nervous his sister had become, like a rabbit newly aware of a predator.

  “And Eric is…”

  “My fiancé?”

  The doorbell rang before their mother could respond, as if Heather had planned it. “Pizza!” Colin shouted, desperate to change the mood, and he bounced up from his chair. His sister was slow to get to her feet as she followed with a handful of wrinkled cash.

  The story was that she met Eric at Kohl’s, where she worked, just after moving in with Anthony. His name, from her mouth, still had that girlish lilt. Anthony’s name came out like a sigh. She was careful not to say where she was living or where she’d gone to work after losing her job, or if she was working at all. “Is it weird I’m having so much fun decorating our apartment?” she asked. Colin noticed how her skin was lit up with a hot glow, like an electric coil. She dug her hands deep into the pockets of her sweatshirt. It wasn’t even cold in the kitchen.

  “I’m glad you stopped over,” their mother said. “Glad to hear about your apartment, your relationships. Glad to hear you’re alive, for Christ sakes. I’m…I guess I’m proud of you.”

  “You guess?”

  “I’m proud of you, Heather. I’m proud of both of you. All of you.” She was smiling. Colin imagined how, if they were a different kind of family, she would have pulled them both into a hug and convinced them, somehow, that life wasn’t so terrible after all. Instead she eyed them like pests who’d found their way into the house. He looked down at the pizza. There was still time to make things go right, to have the family he wanted to have.

  “Fight you for the last piece,” he said, jabbing Heather in the shoulder. Right away she snatched it from the box and licked the bottom crust.

  “You mean curl up in a ball while I take it? It’s all yours—I just warmed it up for you.” She tried to shove it in his face and he screamed and fell backward in his chair.

  “Never mind,” their mother said. “I’m not proud of you. In fact, I have no children.” She smirked and lit a cigarette, urging the smoke out the window above the sink. Colin scraped himself off the floor. “You know I’m kidding,” she was saying. “I don’t know what I’d do without my kids.” Her eyes were fixed on Heather like two tractor beams that held her in place. “Children are such a beautiful thing to happen to a woman. At any point in her life.”

  “Must be nice to have your own place,” Colin said, scooting his chair closer to hers. “Be able to do what you want. Eat what you want. Buy what you want and all that stuff.”

  “Well, that takes money, Colin,” their mother said. “You can be as independent as you want but it’s miserable if you can’t pay your bills. Or provide for your family.”

  “I’m not here for money, okay?” Heather gestured toward the pizza box, its lines of cheese and stray bits of pepperoni gone cold and colorless. “I mean, I bought you dinner—for the first time your stupid, poor, irresponsible daughter bought you, Queen Mother, Empress of the Uni
verse, a fucking meal. So give me a break, okay? I’m not here to jangle my cup of change and dance like some stupid-ass bear.”

  Colin was clenching the seat of his chair, the veins on his arms gone blue and bulging.

  “So why are you here, Heather?” Their mother’s voice had that old, invulnerable ice to it, and for the first time in years Colin wanted him and his sister to unite and overthrow this woman who’d tyrannized them for their entire lives.

  “You know what?” Heather stood up and kicked her chair back against the fridge. “I don’t know! No fucking clue. Guess I made a mistake, once again. Stupid, useless Heather makes another mistake. Don’t you have a list of them? What’s this…four million and six?”

  Their mother finished her cigarette and extinguished it under the tap. “Even if I did have money, I’d want you to earn it. To earn something, Heather. Just once?” She flicked the butt into the trash. “I came home to take a quiet bath. To think. To be at peace.” She put her face in her hands and Colin imagined that now, right now, was the time to attack, to knock her to the ground. “You know I love you both,” she was saying, “but I need a break once in a while. I need some slack. I need to put the world on pause, just like anyone else.”

  On her way out of the room she tried to hug them both and both refused. Her eye was twitching, and when she touched it to make it stop Colin saw a glint of liquid light latch onto her finger. The lacrimal canaliculi are situated just between each eye and the bridge of the nose, ferrying grief to where all can see. If she cried now, Colin thought—if Heather saw how they’d been living these last few months—they might as well go to Roselawn together and dig their own graves. But she left, and down the hall they heard the bathroom door click closed and the tub’s faucet groan open. “She’ll be in there for hours,” Colin whispered.

  “That’s fine with me,” Heather said. She’d put her own face in her hands and looked so much like their mother that Colin pried them loose and smoothed her hair away. It felt wrong to be so affectionate with Heather, as though she might pummel him into paste.

  “Do you want dessert?” he asked.

  Heather laughed and shook her head. “I’m already too fat,” she said, and gestured at herself. “But I guess that’s just what happens.”

  “When you move out?”

  She was looking at their mother’s purse, left on the counter across the room. “You really are clueless, aren’t you?” she asked, and he only stared back at her, his eyes as open as possible to remember this, to remember her. It felt so much like the end. “Hey—” She pointed. “Go get me her purse. Come on—she’ll be in the bath a while, right? Just go grab it for me.”

  In another life, Colin would’ve been the perfect slave. Yes ma’am, yes mistress, yes master, certainly sir, no problem sir, yes sir. He stood from the table without much hope and brought what she wanted, let it clunk heavily on the table with its terrible, unnatural weight. From her face he could tell she found the gun before she found the cash. “The fuck?” she whispered. Colin shrugged and shook his head—there was nothing to be done, nothing you could change. Suddenly, Heather had to go, she had things to do, Eric was waiting for her, she just had to leave. For the first time in months or maybe years she hugged her brother, who gasped as he finally understood. Children are such a beautiful thing to happen to a woman, he thought, his mother’s voice crisp and cruel in his head. What kind of uncle was he supposed to be, weak-willed and sick and perverted as he was? “You’re a good kid,” Heather lied, and she took herself away, out of their equation, out of whatever morbid game he and his mother were playing, out of their lives so she could live her own, off someplace with a future.

  During World War I, a German lieutenant named Stolle, who could no longer bear his Siberian internment without music, built out of scraps and garbage what he called a piano. No one could hear the music he’d gifted himself, his fingers gentle on the hissing, wooden keys; and—as Stolle himself was a mere note in a fellow prisoner’s diary—no one now knows if that music was enough.

  By the last week of school, Colin had packed for their trip. They were to leave that Saturday morning. “Nine days on the road,” his mother said as she dragged her finger across the calendar. While she was at work, he snuck down to his father’s office. There were four unread notebooks left on the shelf. Sometime over the spring they’d given up hiding each other’s evidence, and it was obvious his mother had been down the night before. She was only six notebooks behind him. Not that the sequence meant anything. None of the volumes were dated, and his father could’ve shuffled them into any order. Except the last one: still open and half-blank, waiting on his desk. The worst part was that he knew, already, that those last pages would answer nothing, explain nothing. It would only be more scraps. More noise.

  As he pulled the next notebook from the shelf he looked around the room. Despite everything they’d disturbed, it was still the same room in which his father had lived his last year of life. Over time, Colin had decided there were no accidents, and that he’d snuck downstairs that night with a mission. For that, despite his apologies, his prayers—his entreaties to a god he was no longer sure watched over him—he would suffer in hell. He was already suffering, in fact, and for months now he’d thought of his life on earth as hell. It made his dreams and only his dreams seem real, stripping away life’s veneer. What life was, underneath, felt honest and deserved: a plain of ice that stretched to the horizon and met only itself again, somewhere far; the hateful sound of sharp wind; a yellow sky full of wet, inky stars; and a boy restrained, tortured, humiliated for all eternity, whose punishment worsened with every sound of approval and acceptance he let whine from his throat. When he woke, in the morning, it was obvious that Victor had walked into his life merely to collect him, to bring him gently to his punishment. In San Francisco, he thought as he packed, he would spend his last days as a free human being.

  It was hell that kept him in love. Having his grandfather say it—This is your life—made it easier to admit. When he passed Andy in the halls, love was the word for the hurt flowering inside him. Naming it made it grow, and to go with his hell he now had a heaven where he and Andy had not parted but admitted to one another what they had, what they could be, and despite his shame he refused not to reimagine that night, not to rewrite it how he wanted. It felt even more real than his hell as it burst all over his chest and dried sweetly in a handful of Kleenex.

  But his grandfather was right about teenage boys. They were vicious monsters, and like all animal life seemed to have scented out the intruder. He’d begun to notice a stare here, a joke behind his back there. He tried to find the giveaway, watching his hips in the mirror, his wrists. He spoke out loud to test his voice. Somehow they’d found him out, and he was starting to panic.

  On the last day of school, Colin hoped everyone would forget. He smiled at girls when he passed them in the hallway. He kept his voice low, his words clipped. He should’ve kept Chelsea as his girlfriend. He should’ve made out with her in the library or on the steps out front. Summer was long, though, and by the time everyone was shipped off to high school, it was possible they’d forget about Colin. Everything about him was supposed to be invisible.

  He ate lunch alone, eavesdropping on the next table, where the boys who’d once been his friends laughed at Andy’s every joke and believed his every lie. On the way back to class, Colin passed him as he waited outside the restroom. It wasn’t rare for them to make eye contact, to remember each other, but for the first time in months, whether he was tired from all he’d been through or sick with hope, Colin gave the smallest, briefest smile he could manage. Andy returned it.

  They’d fought once before, when they were eleven. They went a month without speaking, shunning each other in the halls, trash-talking each other to mutual friends. Then, while they were waiting in line together outside the nurse’s office, it was over. They’d called themselves blood brothers right then, but instead of blood rubbed spit into each other’s palm
s while the nurse wasn’t looking. For the rest of the afternoon, after that smile, Colin thought it was over. Sometime during the summer, Andy—like every summer before—would walk the mile and a half from his house with a backpack full of movies and junk food. It felt wrong to want more than that, but before his last class was over he was shaking with a wish to be alone. As he walked to his bus he searched the halls for Andy. He walked slower, glancing up stairwells, peering into classrooms that weren’t yet empty. Even if he didn’t see him, he could wait. He could pretend. He could walk to the strip mall near Andy’s house and wait for him to go out for pizza or fast food. It was two fifty when he’d made it to the door, and before he slipped into the seething, body-hot vestibule he heard his name. In that second, all his stupid dreams were worth it. Andy hurried to catch him and they walked out together.

  Andy was awkward but Colin didn’t care. He scratched the back of his neck when he talked, staring down at the candy-wrappered, spat-on sidewalk. “About time it’s summer,” he said, and Colin was ashamed to feel like such a girl, swooning at this boy’s every stupid word. Why couldn’t they be like any other couple and embrace, right there? “So you have a good semester?” Andy asked. The buses would wait longer today, the drivers familiar with how teenagers said good-bye. Everyone on that sidewalk was hugging, playfighting, or shoulder to shoulder in their circles. Colin felt as if they were leaving for another country.