Pin

by Andrew Neiderman

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  For my sister, “Zane”,

  who hears the same voices.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgment

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgment

  Heartfelt thanks to Anita Diamant and Humphrey Evans III for their faith. Gratitude, appreciation and respect to Ann Patty, a creative editor, a literary jewel.

  PIN

  PROLOGUE

  WE ARE HYPNOTIZED BY THE SILENCE, ESPECIALLY ON winter nights when there are no stars and the streetlights wash the skeleton-white snow in a sickly pale yellow. Beyond the reach of the streetlights, there is a deep blackness that soaks into my memory. I struggle to pull shapes and sounds out of the past, but I have little success. I know that the bodies and the voices are there. They torment me. Sometimes I hear a word or catch the glimpse of a familiar face. But in an instant, they are gone.

  I have the same dream every night. I’m asleep and I feel soft fingertips tracing the lines of my mouth, moving slowly up my cheeks and pressing softly on my eyes. I try desperately to open them, but I am unable to do it. I want to shout, but my lips won’t part. Finally I settle for hoping I can cry so a tear can escape my clamped eyelids, but even that never happens.

  Sometimes during the daytime, she will wheel me before a mirror and leave me there to stare at myself for hours. She even does it at night if the whim comes into her head. I don’t know what she expects this will do. I know she enjoys doing it. She laughs and says, “There.” She’ll stand behind me and look at both of us in the mirror. Sometimes she’s naked and presses her breasts against my head. I see them there and know that I should feel them and wonder why I don’t. It makes me think I’m watching two other people, that I’m looking through a window instead of into a mirror.

  There are times when I can hear the music she plays. It’s mostly music that we both enjoy. At times she will play music she’s not really fond of, but music she knows I enjoy. I know that I like the music; I remember that it gave me pleasure to listen to it, but I don’t have the same feelings now. I wonder about that, but I don’t try to understand any changes in myself.

  I suppose I don’t think very much, or at least not in the way most people think. I hear her words and see her move about, but I don’t react. I know when she’s laughing; I know when she’s crying. I sense when she is angry. She is always reciting names at me. Sometimes, she shouts them. I know they are names, but I can’t relate them to any faces. This enrages her and she storms about.

  There are times when she will sit quietly with me and not say a word for hours. It’s like we’re both waiting for something or maybe someone. It could very well be we’re waiting for someone to come home. I don’t know. I try to remember who it could be we’re waiting for, but I am unable to think of anyone. When she grows tired of this, she will get up, pace about a bit, and then sigh and leave the room.

  I never mind the silence. When there is a complete silence, I feel encased in it. It brings a warmth I would otherwise not have. Recently, however, I was terribly bothered by the sound of my own heartbeat. The thumping reverberated through every bone in my body, especially the bones of my skull. It began as a minor annoyance and then grew to be terrible. The first time it happened, it lasted for a short while. Then it lasted longer and longer. Yesterday, it lasted nearly all day.

  Of course I can’t control it. If I hold my breath, it just beats faster. I know what’s happening: parts of my body are revolting, going off on their own. I am literally falling apart. Someone else would panic, but I have always remained calm, steadfast in any crisis.

  She knows something is wrong. She looks at me differently.

  “You’re flushed,” she says. “I haven’t seen you flushed for a long time. Maybe you’re having a sexual thought. Are you having a sexual thought?”

  She feels my forehead. I know she’s feeling it because she’s standing right before me and her hand is extended down toward me and out of sight. I don’t feel her hand. I want to feel her hand; I even long to feel her hand, but it is as though she has no hand or I have no head.

  “Oh God,” she says, “you’re ice cold as usual.” She steps back and looks at me. “There’s ice in your eyes.”

  She sits across from me and stares at me for the longest time. Her face has little expression. I think she’s trying to reflect what she sees in me.

  “When I die,” she says, “I hope I die in this chair staring at you and I hope you stare at me until you die.”

  There is no hate in her voice. I remember the sound of hate and I would recognize it if I heard it. Her statement is more like a statement of fact. It’s a good statement and I feel myself almost considering it. But it dies quickly, disappearing like a streak of lightning, singeing the blackness in my mind.

  It works like an incision, though, and some thoughts seep through the darkness, oozing down to the threshold of where they could become words if I could still make words. I hear them clearly in my own mind and for a few moments I am terribly excited. I am like a man in solitary confinement for a lifetime finally hearing another human voice.

  I look at her and I think:

  “We were not always alone like this, you and I. There was someone else here sharing our solitude.”

  If she could hear me, she would say, “Yes, yes. Go on.”

  “I’m not talking about our mother and our father.”

  “No, no.”

  “But it’s someone who was with us for nearly our whole lives.”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t … see his face, but I can hear his voice. I know this voice.”

  “Go on, go on.”

  “He’s calling, calling.”

  She’s so happy; she’s so excited. She knows I’m going to pull him out of the darkness. He’s within my reach. I can feel his hand. It’s as cold as mine, but I do not let go. I pull harder and harder until he is brought back. Then I see his face.

  “It’s Pin,” I say. “Pin, Pin.”

  As soon as I am able to say it, it all begins again.

  Chapter 1

  I WAS SITTING BY THE WINDOW LOOKING OUT AT THE heavy snowfall and trying to follow the descent of just one flake at a time, just to see if I could do it. I couldn’t because the flakes kept whirling away in the wind. Pin sat back in his corner of the room and watched me. Although I didn’t turn around, I knew he was smirking the same way my father used to smirk whenever he thought I was doing something silly. Every once in a while, Pin would say, “Well, well?” in that same high nasal pitch my father used when he spoke to us or to other children through Pin. It was very annoying, but I ignored him for as long as I could. Finally, frustrated, I turned around.

  “I can’t do it,” I said. There was no longer a smirk on Pin’s face. His eyes glared with my father’s arrogance.

  “Did you really expect you could?” I could see he was satisfied. He loved being right. I remembere
d one time when I was with my father in the hospital corridor and he was telling this tiny, elderly woman that her husband was in the throes of a heart attack. She asked, “Are you sure? Are you sure? Maybe it’s just a chest cold.” She looked from him to me as though I could support her hope. I looked up at my father. He hated to be contradicted, especially by a patient or relatives of a patient. He would go into a rage if nurses ever did it. His eyes became small and intense, just the way Pin’s were now, and his jawbone tightened so hard the little nerves in the sides of his cheeks quivered and twitched. Because anyone could see right through Pin’s face, it was easy to know when he was upset.

  “Your husband, madam, is having a coronary. I would estimate that seventy percent of his heart muscle has been destroyed. Pretending it’s something else will not make it go away. I suggest you remain in the waiting room and call some of your closest relatives.” With that he walked away. I practically had to run to keep up with him. When I looked back at the little woman, I saw she was still standing there, holding her hands against her chest.

  “The idea of someone trying to follow one snowflake,” Pin said. He gave the equivalent of what had always been my father’s laugh: a short, guttural sound centered in the throat. I was really very disgusted with him and almost left him sitting there in the room alone. I’ve done that before. He’s always pretended that it doesn’t bother him. “Your father never minded solitude, why should I?” he said. But I know it bothers him because he told Ursula that it did and she told me. That was a long time ago when she was just a little girl.

  When we were young, each of us made out that he’d keep the strictest confidence about anything Pin said, but we didn’t. I used to tell her everything and she used to tell me everything. Now she rarely says anything about her conversations with Pin. Actually, I don’t think she talks to him much. At least, that’s the impression I get. I know she has developed this thing about dressing him and absolutely refuses to help keep him clean. It’s so important that he be kept clean. My father always made a point of that. Through Pin he would say, “Cleanliness is the foundation for good health.” And then when little kids would come into the office, he would have Pin say, “Do you wash your face and hands regularly and especially before eating? I do.” The kids would laugh and then look at my father, but his lips were tightly closed and he would always act as though he was interested in something else and had nothing to do with Pin’s voice.

  “Your father oughta be in show business,” people often told me and Ursula, but I didn’t think so. He wasn’t interested in performing for anyone but himself.

  “Did you really think you had the visual discrimination to follow one snowflake in this blizzard?” Pin said, pronouncing each word deliberately, just to ridicule my idea.

  “No,” I said. “Damnit.”

  “No reason to get emotional, Leon. You’re getting more and more high strung lately, jumping at everything I say; and you snap at Ursula before she completes a sentence, just like your father used to do to people. It’s not at all like you. Maybe you should pop a pill, hmm?”

  “Maybe you should shut up for a minute.”

  “See what I mean?”

  He was exasperating sometimes, sitting there in that wheelchair, bulldozing and manipulating me. I felt like going over to him, twisting off the top of his skull, and reaching in to pinch his rippled, rubbery brain. I’ve looked at it up close a number of times. He’s really amazing, every part of him. The brain even has the tiny veins running through it. You can see how all the nerve endings are attached and how the eyes are connected. He doesn’t like me doing that anymore—looking into him like that—and I haven’t really done it since my parents died.

  I turned my back on him and looked out the window again. Mr. Machinsky was trying to make a broken U-turn on the snowy street, and traffic was blocked up as far as I could see down the hill. They were all skiers, impatient to get up to Davos, the ski resort built at the top of the mountain. They started leaning on their horns. This made old Machinsky nervous and he pounded on his horn, rather than continuing his turn. It seemed to work. They all shut up and waited. Some leaned out of their windows and yelled at him as he drove down the road, but the old man ignored them. He was tough and stubborn and the only neighbor we had at this point on the hill. I always kept away from his property because I knew he hated kids and my mother had said, “Machinsky is so dirty he’s a host for all sorts of germs. I wouldn’t want to ever rub up against him.” She had actually shivered and embraced herself, squeezing her small but shapely breasts against each other. She wore her dark brown hair tied back in a bun because “it was the neatest and cleanest way to keep it.” Although she had a fine wardrobe, she mainly wore housecoats starched as clean as surgical gowns. I used to think that those tiny veins in her temples and on the tops of her hands were so visible because she scrubbed herself so vigorously. I remember asking my father about it.

  “Ridiculous,” he said without looking at me. He was reading one of his medical journals. “Her hygienic habits have nothing to do with her skin density.”

  “Are Pin’s veins as close to the surface as anyone else’s?”

  He put his magazine aside and looked at me as though he had just realized I was actually there.

  “Everything about Pin—his dimensions, his organs, even the irises in his eyes, everything—is representative. For his body size, that is.” He snapped his magazine before him again and I was quiet.

  My father wasn’t a large man, although his demeanor and his appearance always made him seem bigger than he was. People were genuinely surprised when they learned that he was barely five feet ten inches tall and weighed one hundred and sixty pounds. He wore his thin black hair cut short, like a marine drill instructor, and he shaved twice a day because his beard was so dark and heavy. I was always in awe of his hands, with their long, powerful fingers. Anyone who ever had it done said he could put stitches in so quickly it was practically a painless experience.

  Mr. Machinsky’s self-made traffic jam had been amusing, so I laughed. Pin was dying to ask me why I was laughing, but he didn’t. I knew he was keeping silent just for spite, so I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t really that talkative a person anyway. I suppose I inherited that from my father, who was always disdainful of small talk. He didn’t have the tolerance for it. My mother was forever too busy for idle chatter. She worked at the house with a nervous energy that consumed her every waking moment. It is a big house and although we could easily afford live-in servants, my mother insisted she had to do it all herself. If a maid cleaned up anything, she’d only go in after her, dissatisfied with the job. My father was by no means frugal, but he made no effort to get her any domestic help. If I asked him any questions about my mother, as I did about her veins, he would sluff it off when at home. If I asked him questions about my mother or about Ursula or even myself when he was at the office, he would answer through Pin. In fact, when I give it some deep thought, I realize he would very rarely speak directly to me. I know we never had what other guys would call a down-to-earth father-son discussion. He often gave me the feeling he resented me. I think he thought of me as his “offspring” rather than his son.

  When my father was in a halfway decent mood at the office, and there were no patients, he would let Pin give me a lecture on something medical. I would pull my little chair up in front of Pin and my father would stand off behind me, cleaning instruments or something, and suddenly Pin would speak with my father’s high-pitched nasal voice. In the beginning, I would turn around to ask a question, but after a while, I would just ask Pin the questions. Sometimes Ursula was there and would do the same, but she didn’t have the same patience or interest and often grew bored.

  As long as I can remember, both Ursula and I called him “doctor.” I think that stemmed from my mother always referring to him that way. “You’d better get your things together before the doctor comes home.” “Tell the doctor his supper’s ready.” So we called him “doctor” instea
d of dad or pop. Of course, Pin never referred to him directly as anything but “the doctor.”

  Bored with the falling snow and the continuous traffic of skiers, I turned away from the window again just as Ursula walked across the room, dressed only in her bra. Her ass bounced ripples down the backs of her legs. It was her way of seizing Pin’s complete attention. She was so jealous of our relationship lately, always trying to get me to cut down my discussions with Pin. I knew she was doing the same thing now, pretending to have come down to get a book. I watched her deliberately skim through a few, seemingly oblivious to our presence.

  Actually, my presence wouldn’t have mattered. Ursula and I have never thought anything about standing naked before each other. We did it as kids and we did it as we grew up. In a sense we participated in each other’s development. I remember staying awake one night with her, both of us staring at her naked chest to see if we could detect her breasts growing. She fell asleep before I did. I thought I saw something happen, but it was so quick and I was a little bleary-eyed by then, so I wouldn’t swear to it. I told her about it, though, just so she’d feel bad about falling asleep like that.

  I use to stare at her a lot, fascinated by our genetic and blood relationship. I wanted to see what of myself I could find in her.

  Ursula has worked in the local library ever since she graduated high school. It’s just a little hick-town library, nothing spectacular; but Ursula found a second home there. I used to make a great deal of fun of that, but I’ve learned to temper my jokes some. For the most part, she ignored them anyway or told me I was jealous. What a laugh. Jealous of that! Even when she said it, she said it with half a heart. She knew I could have had my choice of almost any profession I wanted. I was always a straight-A student in school. It was just that when father and mother died in the car accident and left us all that money, the house and father’s lucrative investments, well, I just didn’t see the sense in doing anything but what I always wanted to do. I’ve always wanted to write poetry, mainly a great modern epic poem, a kind of American “Beowulf.”