by Harvey Click
“Surely the orphanage didn’t take us to church on Sunday?”
“No. I’m thinking I probably saw it through the windshield of the van when they were taking me there. I think maybe we’re getting close.”
“Then we should keep driving.”
“In a few minutes. I’m feeling some memories trying to come back. I want to relax for a little while and let them come.”
She pulled around to the weedy parking lot in back, where the car wouldn’t be seen from the road, and they both got out. Jack stood restlessly shifting his weight from one foot to another while she roamed around the rear of the building, peering in through holes in the windows.
“Look, this door’s been kicked open,” she said. “Some kids must have done it. Let’s go inside for a minute.”
“Let’s get back on the road.”
“Just for a minute,” she said, stepping inside. “It looks so peaceful in here. If I can sit quietly for a minute and let my memories come back, I think I’ll be able to find the orphanage.”
Jack was beginning to feel terrible. His nerves were jangling, and unpleasant emotions were coursing through him like strong eddies. He thought his own memories were trying to return, and he wasn’t sure he wanted them to. Some things are better forgotten. He didn’t want to be in a dark dilapidated church, but as she disappeared into the darkness he followed her.
They were in a small sacristy, and in the dim shadows he could just barely read the graffiti on the walls: “Gods a peeping tom he watches me pull my pud” and “Jesus died for your sins so enjoy them while you can!” They went through a door, walked past a tipped-over pulpit and an altar with a dead cat on it, and climbed down some step to the pews. Rachel sat on one of them and shut her eyes while Jack rocked anxiously on his heels and stared at a broken stained glass window.
“Did your parents take you to church when you were young?” she asked.
“No. Did yours?”
“Sometimes. I don’t think they were religious, but they probably thought it would be good for me.”
“We should get back on the road,” he said.
“In a minute. You’ll probably think I’m stupid, but I want to pray for a minute. I want to pray for my memories to come back and pray that we’ll find the orphanage. I mean, it can’t hurt.”
She got up, and he kept rocking restlessly on his heels while she knelt at the kneeling rail in front where the congregation had once received Communion. He had to clasp his hands together to keep them from shaking, and he kept seeing Dr. Good’s face in the strange dim light coming through the stained glass windows. He saw Dr. Good blinking a penlight on and off first in one of his eyes and then the other. He saw Dr. Good leaning down to whisper secrets in his ear.
“Doctor’s orders,” the doctor said.
Dark, deserted, and in the middle of nowhere, this seemed as good a place as any. Jack crept up behind her, pulled the knife from his pocket and opened it. He spoke her name quietly, and when she got up and turned to look at him, he slipped the blade deep into her abdomen. As she bent forward to clutch her belly, he slid the knife across her throat, slicing it open.
She crumpled to the floor and lay there twitching, staring up at him with a stunned expression. Now he remembered exactly what Dr. Good had whispered to him: “You should be able to find her at Schiller Park. She goes there most mornings. It’s possible she’ll recognize you…”
Jack stooped down just long enough to wipe the blade clean on her pink T-shirt, then hurried to his car and drove quickly away. He kept seeing her stunned expression and kept remembering the way her body had felt pressed against his. After a few minutes he stopped at the side of the road and took four pills. He felt better then, and when he was approaching the outskirts of the city he keyed a number into his cellphone. A familiar voice answered.
“It’s finished,” Jack said.
“Were there any problems?” Dr. Good asked.
“No. I gained her trust, and it went smoothly.”
“Very well,” Dr. Good said. “You may relax for a few days before you get started on your next job. Go home, take two aspirins, and get some rest.”
The Man in the Moon
The attic was his alchemist’s tower. A child prodigy, he learned the principles of sorcery from Mr. Nick Nock, an empty-eyed wizard who lived on the dark side of the moon and communicated his gnosis by think-talk to his favorite young apprentice.
By the age of nine, Philip Hushing could already cast horoscopes, prepare philters, hex playground bullies, and capture genies inside bottles. They had to be just the right bottles, and he picked them with discernment from the rusty drums of junk that his father hauled every few months to the landfill; then Phil would smuggle them to the attic and hide them in a dusty trunk full of dusty keepsakes. There they would lie more-or-less forgotten during his sunshinier days, but whenever his mother chose to lock him in the attic he would select by shape and color the proper bottle from his hoard, open it, and consecrate it with the words Mr. Nick Nock had taught him—occult words, I won’t repeat them here.
Then, kneeling with eyes shut he would whisper a secret into the bottle, a potent arcanum from the depths of his nine-year-old soul, tightly cork or cap it in, label the bottle with hermetic hieroglyphics only he could read, and bury it again in the trunk. That’s all there was to it. He believed that secrets locked inside bottles would incubate into powerful genies.
He was right.
***
Philip Hushing was an only child. His father was a farmer, a tall, mild Methodist with large pale hands, enormous ears, a carefully clipped Vandyke, and fog-gray eyes half lost behind a gray fog of pipe smoke—always sunk in thought, he seemed more a ghost than a man. Though he attended many horticultural meetings, he was oddly unable to raise a respectable crop of corn or oats, or even to keep burdock and thistles from devouring the grounds. Phil shuts his eyes and can see him dressed in baggy flannel trousers and a shabby tweed jacket, strolling through weeds up to his hips in the ancient fruit orchard, a pair of binoculars around his neck to magnify the birds in the ailing trees—and how spectral the birds sound in Phil’s memory, like chimes made of hollow bones clinking in the wind of the dead.
Phil’s mother—impossible to describe. Dark eyes that flashed with an inquisitor’s flames, a tongue like lightning, brain like a furnace smoldering with boredom and desire, she was fierier and more brilliant than a dozen of Phil’s fathers all flung on a pyre and ignited at once. Of her many methods for punishing Phil, the cruelest was not allowing him to touch her. He yearned to smother his horrors between her breasts. Sometimes after she bathed he would watch her through his secret spyhole while she stood in her bedroom in front of her dresser mirror wearing nothing but a towel wrapped around her black hair, perfuming herself with an atomizer. She had a third nipple, like a swollen mole a few inches beneath her left breast. His dark urges nursed on that witch’s tit. You’ve never tasted such milk.
His fear of her whetted his momma’s boy yearning into a desire so keen and pricking that he didn’t know the words to express it until Mr. Nick Nock taught him special words that sounded like nothing Phil had ever heard but reminded him of her plump body and the sticky moisture glistening between her plump lips, and he whispered these mean-nothing mean-everything words into one of her discarded perfume bottles, tiny, exquisitely shapely, which still carried the scent of Mother. These words incubated into the mightiest genie of all.
It was a mistake to choose such a fragile bottle for such a powerful secret. Bad magic.
What else? Oh yes—Phil’s only friend during his grade school years was Sammy. Sammy was a pitchfork.
***
Phil is thirty-three years old. He sits at a desk at one end of a large attic, its walls hidden by shelves holding books neatly alphabetized by author from Anonymous to Zola. He ought to go downstairs and do some cleaning, but here he sits.
In his left hand he holds a fat black fountain pen above a scrawled page
of a notebook. His fingers are long and slender, good for playing piano though they don’t, his arms are long and silent beneath a sweaty white shirt, his body tall, trim, and poised like a praying mantis ready to strike, his face pale and still youthful with a high forehead and luxuriant black hair combed straight back just touching his ears and his damp shirt collar.
His eyes, more silver than gray, almost iridescent in the cold light of the florescent desk lamp, stare straight ahead, not looking at the notebook but at the fat moon suspended in the rectangle of black sky seen through the tall narrow window a few feet in front of him. Motionless, he seems not so much lost in thought as thoughtless, blank, a wind-up toy waiting to be wound up.
He is trying to remember.
His life has been disappointing. A troubled childhood, his father remote and his mother ambivalent with her love. No friends, except the pitchfork and the man in the moon. The orphanage. Worked for a while as an orderly at a children’s hospital, lugging around tiny bodies bruised and broken by their parents and other calamities. A succession of brief romances, each one ending badly. Attended college on and off for several years, never earning enough credits for a bachelor’s in history.
History. What a laugh, given his memory.
Works now at a university library and lives still at the childhood farmhouse he inherited, fifteen miles from Akron, renting out the farmland but still tilling the garden, in imitation of his father. Grows wonderful tomatoes, keeps a few grapevines, and makes unappetizing wine.
His memory doesn’t work well. He retains only splinters of the past, slivers of a broken mirror. Moonlight touches on a sliver for an instant: a pitchfork’s tine.
***
When Phil was seven or so, he found a discarded manure fork poking out of one of his father’s drums of trash. Its two inner tines were broken off and its handle was cracked, so you might say theirs was a friendship based on damage. What a pair they made, this pale scrawny boy with his gloomy black eyebrows bouncing his metal and wood chum along beside him, hand coiled tenderly around the stick neck. The moment the door opened to free Phil from the hated school bus, he would hurry to the barn where Sammy waited, leaning sullenly against a stable wall.
“Look,” Phil said, showing Sammy his torn shirt, his skinned hand and purpled cheek, bruised and scraped where it had hit the playground gravel.
“Don’t come sniveling to me,” Sammy said. “I told ya a million times, quit your whining and learn to kick some ass.”
“They’re too big.” Phil named the usual bullies and said, “If I tried to fight ’em they’d break my neck.”
“Let’s get moving,” Sammy said. “I been stuck here in this firetrap all day.”
Phil grasped his friend by the stick neck and said, “Okay, let’s go to the woods.”
“Fuck the woods. Let’s go upstairs.”
“I don’t like it up there.”
“Upstairs,” Sammy said. “Let’s pretend we’re punishing all the sinners in hell.”
“Okay, but I get to be the devil this time. That’s fair ’cause the devil always carries a fork.”
“Nope, I’m the one who’s got the horns,” Sammy said.
Sammy was cleverer than Phil and always won their arguments. Staring at the fat moon through the attic window, Phil can see them climbing the ladder to the hayloft and tramping through the dusty heat to where a mouth yawned black in the hay, the opening to an elaborate tunnel they had built in the high-stacked bales.
“Into the darkness of hell,” Sammy said, and the two friends descended into the stifling tunnel, sealed the mouth behind them with a bale, and crawled on their bellies like snakes through the black labyrinth.
***
Hard to pinpoint the precise age Phil was when he gave Sammy a soul. Eight or nine probably, far too old to be playing with a pitchfork. It was during an especially long attic shut-in, nearly a week locked up there with just one plate of cold food a day and the slop bucket emptied infrequently. Daddy was away at one of his meetings. Couldn’t have been summer break because of the cold, but Phil wasn’t allowed to miss school: ergo Christmas break most likely. Phil slept on the dusty floor, shivering beneath a pile of stiff overcoats some great-grandparent must have worn so long ago the mind hurts to contemplate it.
He craved a bit of company. It occurred to him if the proper magic were performed his chum could come to visit him. What Sammy needed was a soul, so Phil followed Mr. Nick Nock’s instructions to the letter. But the spell seemed to have no effect—Sammy didn’t show up.
Not then, at least.
Below him, coming from Mother’s bedroom, all that moaning.
***
The hot tweezers, the steel-wool undershirt, the bathtub dunkings, the pliers on the little piggy that went to the market...she was frustrated and bored. Uprooted from the city and transplanted to this weedy Eden by an addled Adam, she can scarcely be blamed for wanting to prune and clip poor Phil, who had sprouted like a weed from the only fruitful seed ever planted by that inept gardener.
A religious fanatic driven to acts of cruelty by her grim faith she was not. Aside from its usefulness as proof she had married badly, her childhood Catholicism meant nothing to her. Her religious prostration was reserved for the minister of the Pentecostal church in the little town down by the river ten miles away. Though Phil’s father had the good sense to disappear to his weekend horticultural meetings, Phil was always underfoot. Into the attic with him, and then the minister’s bright red convertible would roar into the driveway and hide itself behind the barn. Divine services would commence: supplication, adoration, genuflection, laying on of hands, glossolalia, discipline, humiliation, total immersion.
Because the minister was black, bald, and so very big, Phil thought it was a genie that made Mother moan like that. Afterward, after the genie had left, she might smear a bit of Tabasco sauce into the boy’s nostrils, perhaps as an act of contrition.
***
Phil puts down his fountain pen and looks away from his notebook, not wanting to see what rubbish he’s written. The moon is no longer visible from where he sits. He goes to the window and finds its icy stillness half obscured by a cloud. He thinks of Mary’s face, already half submerged in the murk of his memory. Her long black hair rippled and billowed so artlessly that he was startled that one morning when he saw her sculpting it with a curling iron. Lunacy to look at her too long.
He feels trapped in the attic, wants to go downstairs, step out for a stroll, stretch his lanky legs. No. Dread of the bedroom and the mess therein. Stay upstairs.
Slim, slinky, nearly breastless, Mary moved like a ballet dancer. No—she moved like a ho peddling her sweet ass on a street corner. Her plump lips smiled, when they smiled, with a scant teasing twist at one corner, but more often they wore a coy pout no doubt perfected at the Catholic school she had attended. Her long-lashed black eyes were like jewels hidden deep in caverns of the moon.
This is vile dreck. Let’s try again. Her long-lashed black eyes were as bogus as philosopher’s stones; the day she started working at the library they transformed Phil’s leaden heart into a heavy malleable gray metal. Ha! That’s more like it. Had she been an ordinary woman, he could have behaved around her like a halfway ordinary man, despite his awkward nature, but given her flawless white skin, the delicate whorls of her ears, the hieratic gestures of those specious hands, and those bewitching black eyes, he had no choice but to make an utter ass of himself.
When he learned her car was at the shop, he offered to drive her home, and after many hour-long minutes of sweating at the wheel, delivering lop-sided half-sentences in a queer-sounding quaver, he asked if he could buy her a dink, I mean, um um, a drink. While she sipped her expensive concoction through a teasing millimeter of a smile he fluttered and twitched and spoke of books he’d never read and—
Enough. It seems she’d had her abracadabra eye on him all along, and after he’d sufficiently humiliated himself she allowed him to bed her. Leave them ther
e, wrapped in blissful sheets of sticky lust. Let’s talk about John Glenn.
***
Having no family or friends, Phil sometimes fills his holidays by taking road trips by himself, listening glumly to his CDs of classical music while trucks speed past him because he’s a slow and overly cautious driver. Was it only a month ago he drove to Washington, D.C.? At the National Air and Space Museum he was entranced by the tiny capsule John Glenn had ridden to the void and back, so small and cramped that if he had sneezed he could have bumped a dozen toggle switches and sent the thing careening into Neverland.
Phil had driven there primarily to see the spacecraft that took Neil Armstrong to the moon, but instead he stood staring at John Glenn’s tiny tin bottle, genies of claustrophobia whispering to him, telling him that he himself was hurtling through the void, from the black past that no longer exists to the black future that doesn’t yet exist, a chrononaut sealed inside the wee hull of Now. No way out, no choice but to streak through darkness, nothing real but this minute timecraft. One wrong move, he hits the wrong switches, and the craft veers into chaos like Sammy’s sharp prongs plunging into…
But how little he knows. There is no present, there’s only the eternal past, the sins of the fathers devouring their sons for breakfast. Shall I tell him this? No, I’m done with filling him in. It’s time to empty him out like a bottle, pour out his horrid past like blood. Drink of this rancid wine, Phil. It is you.
Below him, Mother moaned. It was a genie made her moan like that. Phil could see him through the hole he had drilled in the attic floor, a huge bald creature with fearsome muscles rippling beneath sweaty black skin.
Phil knew where this genie had come from. It had grown from the Mother-secret, the one Phil had whispered into a too-fragile perfume bottle. He searched in the trunk where he kept his genie-bottles, and yes, there were shards of perfumed glass everywhere, like bits of shell from a hatched egg. Bad magic, thrusting such a powerful secret into such a frail container.