by Lee Thomas
Daddy is in the shadows staining my ceiling, and Toby is there, too. They are strangers to me.
I leave the bed and cross to the window and look down on the workshop, and I know Toby is there, and I decide I deserve to know what is happening. So, I walk out of the room, down the stairs, and out the front door, and I cross the walk to the dirt drive and I stare at the workshop door. Toby has done an excellent job and the windows are impenetrably black, but there is a narrow crack beneath the door and I see it is filled with gray light. The light remains for twenty seconds and then goes out, only to reignite after a single beat of my heart. I reach out for the doorknob and pause. The light goes out again; it returns.
Holding my breath, I turn the knob and push the door open. Initially a glaring disc beaming from across the room blinds me. The odors of the place—oil, sawdust, and sour sweat—burrow into my nostrils. A dull hum fills my ears. I lift my hand to shield my eyes from the light and it goes out, but a fog of green covers my vision the way it does after a camera’s flash. I close my eyes and the swirling murk remains. The lamp ignites again and before I open my eyes, I turn away.
I am aware of the shelves on the right side of the workshop and that something—One of Mama’s sheets?—hangs against the nearest wall. But my gaze lands on my brother and fills with the sight of him.
Toby lies on his cot. He has pushed his hands through leather straps affixed to the metal frame, and they are knotted into fists. His eyes are wide and he’s shaking his head frantically. There is something on his head. It is a small cap with metal arms that reach out to press against his temples. Rubber tubing hangs from these shiny appendages and drape the sides of his face where they connect to a wooden dowel wrapped in gauze. Toby clamps the dowel between his teeth like a horse bit. He struggles to get his hands free of the leather straps when the light goes out again.
It comes back on with a click, and the dull hum returns. Toby’s back arches and his body goes rigid. His eyes are rolled back and white, and lines of tendon and vein appear on his neck as if he’s swallowed a vine plant that is trying to push its way through his skin.
I scream. It does nothing to lessen my dread. I shout my brother’s name but he is paralyzed. I step forward and then back up and then forward again. The light dies, and the humming stops, and I turn toward the bench at the back of the room. When the light comes back on, the apparatus atop the wooden surface comes clear. A plug juts from the wall socket; a white cord runs to a junction box, topped by the black knob of the rheostat; two wires, one black and one blue, run like tentacles from the metal box to the cap on my brother’s head; another cord, this one yellow, snakes to the slide projector. I can only think of the display as a torture device, imagined and built by my father. But what was it meant to accomplish? I spin toward the image projected on the wall of the workshop and my breath lodges against the stone in my throat. A young woman stands naked in a field, holding a flower to her nose. Her hair, the color of corn silk, frames her beautiful face. She smiles softly. Sweetly. My gaze traces down her throat to her small round breasts and then over her belly to the mound of golden blonde hair between her legs, and then back up again. The room goes black. The picture of the young woman is replaced by that of a muscled man with a dense pelt of hair covering his chest. Beneath his thick mustache his mouth is twisted into a smirk. He is also naked and his hand grasps the shaft of his penis like the hilt of a knife.
The hum has returned to the workshop. Toby is again arched and rigid. And my confusion is momentarily erased as if I understand this perverse experiment, though I’m certain I do not. It seems that Toby is relaxed when pictures of women cover my mama’s bed sheet, but voltage and pain accompanies the images of men. I don’t know what this is meant to achieve, but I know it has to stop.
I reach across the workbench. Doing so, I lean over the rheostat and notice the switches and the dial on top. Dashes and numbers run in an arc to accommodate the round black knob. Someone, either Daddy or Toby, has run a strip of black electrical tape like a comic eyebrow, blocking out the lines and numbers on the downside of the arc, and above this, written in red ink, is the word, “Danger.” I yank the plug from the wall. Despite the pitch darkness I find my way to the light switch on the other side of the shop and flick it on, and then I turn to my brother, who has managed to get one of his hands loose. He frees his other hand, reaches for the bit in his mouth and pulls it away all the while glaring at me.
“Y-you c-can’t be in here, Petey,” he says. His voice is dry, and he growls savagely to clear his throat.
Only when I try to answer do I realize that I’m crying, and I can’t find my voice. Toby removes the device from his head and I see the red marks at his temples, and I know they’re the reason he wears his baseball cap in the house, and the sight of them makes me cry harder.
“It’s okay,” he says. With a tremendous effort, he sits up on the cot and swings his legs off the side. “I’m okay.”
“No. No. No.” I blubber.
“You’re too young to understand,” Toby says, wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand. “I wasn’t right, Petey. I felt things and did things…” His voice trails away. A mask of confusion falls over his face like the darkness between the projector’s light. When it passes he says, “Daddy read all about it. He found books in Dallas. He found out what was wrong with me and how to fix it. He had to do something or else he’d have to send me away to an asylum and people would know about me, and they can’t know about me. They just can’t. Do you want me to go to an asylum, Petey?”
“It’s not right,” I say between sobs. “It’s hurting you.”
“It has to,” Toby says. His head dips and he observes the floor for a moment. When he looks back at me, the spark I’ve missed in his eyes has returned, except the light there is hard and cold. A hint of a smile touches the corners of his lips. His expression is hopeful but it’s also frightening, because, to me, Toby looks crazy. And when he speaks again I feel certain his mind has come loose, because he says, “It’s working, Petey. I’m getting better. Really I am.”
I pulled into the drive of Toby’s house. My car’s headlights swept across the front of the shed like a lighthouse beacon. Black paint still covered the windows. A grey light showed beneath the door and then extinguished. Remaining in the parked car, I peered at the shed with trepidation. I’d thought the machine was gone, dismantled, torn apart, and thrown in the trash. That’s what Toby had told me; he’d said it was the first thing to go when he moved in after our mother’s death. His lie shouldn’t have come as a surprise.
Over the years bits of information came my way. I learned that Toby had made a sexual advance toward his buddy, Duke, which had triggered the fight and the call from Richard Manheim. Of course I’d already figured that out, but Duke himself confirmed it years later. We ran into each other at a bar in Austin, and we got to talking about Toby. He felt bad for my brother.
Such a shame, he’d said. Such a waste.
The grey light flashed and I counted to twenty and then it went dark. Leaving the car, I breathed deeply to calm my sparking nerves. The scene inside the shed would be familiar, I knew, but that didn’t make it any more palatable.
In the years before leaving home, Toby had used our father’s device regularly. Some days he was the golden hero of my early youth, and other days he appeared crazy, eyes wild and mouth shimmering with spittle as he recounted one moral outrage or another. On those days, he went to the shed and wired himself to the apparatus, as if it were a meditative aid. He marched through the broiling gut of hell all the while insisting he was fine in the fire. I’m getting better. Really I am. I begged him to stop. My mother never said a word. My father never looked so proud.
It’s easy to blame the old man, but he thought he was helping. In college, I did some research of my own, investigating accepted “cures” of the day, and I found a number of references to electro-shock and aversion therapy. I’m sure this was the kind of information he came acr
oss during his trip to Dallas. His life was machines, and each part had to work in a particular way to keep the machine running. It would never occur to him that he didn’t understand a part or its function. Its value. My father wasn’t a villain; he was just a hick who wanted to save his son from a lifetime of sadness and shame—the only future he could imagine for a broken part in the social machine.
At the door to the shed, I lifted my fist and knocked. The gray light poured from beneath the door and then went out. When my second rap went unanswered I pushed open the door. Toby lay on the cot. He was dead. He’d been gone for a while, maybe since hanging up after leaving me his last message.
The sight of him coiled in my throat along with the odors of urine, burned skin, and singed hair. Deep lines carved in around his mouth and brow; he hadn’t even bothered inserting the bit between his teeth. His eyes had poached in the sockets; blood and viscous tears clotted at this temples. He appeared to be smiling, but I had to believe it was the strained rictus of his final shock. For a moment, I thought I could see the golden boy beneath the layers of weight and folds of skin, but it was only my mind playing tricks, an evanescent denial with no more weight than projected light. I choked on a sob and fought an urge to race to the cot, but a loud voice in the back of my head, reason or dread, warned me away from the coursing voltage. Instead of running to Toby’s side, I crossed the shed to disconnect the machine.
As I had done on the first night I’d witnessed my father’s therapy, I leaned over the rheostat to reach the wall plug. Toby had turned the rheostat to full power. The white dash on the black dial pointed at a peeling corner of tape and the letter E in the word “Danger,” written in red ink. The ink had faded.
The light went out and then returned with a shoosh and a click. A deadly hum filled the room. Foolishly, I glanced back at the screen. The image projected there froze me. It was of Toby and our father. The man, younger than I ever remembered him being, stood on a tractor in the parking lot of the John Deere facility. In one hand he held a rag and in the other he held a monstrous wrench. With one foot on the running board and the other on the tractor seat, he looked like a big game hunter, gloating over the carcass of an unfortunate trophy. Toby as a toddler stood on the pavement grinning up at his daddy, clapping his tiny hands together in a display of ecstatic joy.
The House
by the Park
Dedicated in deference to the Italian Masters.
The man stood from the concrete bench in his garden and looked at the sky. He saw neither star nor moon, but rather a swirling void. A maelstrom above. Deepest black and steel gray currents shot through with violet and crimson. He breathed deeply, taking in the scent of rose, sage, and freshly mown grass, and then he walked into the house, sat on the floor, and slit his throat with a razor.
It was a chance meeting in a grocery store.
Denis had been at home, gazing into his freezer. There he saw the familiar sight of stacked boxes, an assortment of prepared meals: frozen lasagnas; frozen pizzas; home-style meatloaf with mashed potatoes; batter fried chicken fingers; some Asian thing; and a lonely Lean Cuisine, a constant reminder of the diet he’d never started. On the nights his friends didn’t force him to go out, Denis invariably uncrated one of the plastic trays and listened to the empty hum of the microwave, droning like a monastic chorus—a serenade for the lonely. A requiem. Ever since Benjamin had died—from a congenital heart defect he hadn’t thought to share with his partner of six years—Denis had endured the pitiful whirring dirge before most of his evening meals, and he was sick of it.
He wanted a real dinner, and he intended to fix it himself, so he pulled on a t-shirt and stepped into his sandals, and left the house.
He first caught sight of Fred at the end of the produce aisle, turning a green pepper in his hand, studying it as if some mystery were etched into its emerald skin. Fred was dressed in a blue work shirt with a rust-colored tie cinched at his neck. The fabric of the shirt stretched over his barrel chest and belly, but it didn’t pinch; it simply looked fitted to the burly form, highlighting the bulk of Fred’s chest and the roundness of his shoulders. In many ways, Denis and Fred looked alike. Neither was particularly tall, both were thickly built, both wore full, trimmed beards, but they were not mirror images. Denis had never admired the face his mirror reflected as much as he found himself admiring Fred’s. The full cheeks. Smooth, tanned skin. He seemed to be the same type as Denis, only better at it. Denis perfected.
They crossed paths in the meat department—a ribeye for Denis, a cut of salmon for Fred. This time Denis caught Fred’s eye. They looked away and then back. Then Fred took a misstep because of his distraction, stumbling a bit. Denis smiled and moved on.
Only later did they actually speak. Denis stood in the frozen foods aisle holding open a glass door as he tried to decide between double mocha fudge and cookies and cream. Another freezer door opened beside him and he checked over his shoulder to find Fred, reaching in for a carton of Rocky Road. He held the cardboard container and seemed to be reading the nutritional information, when his face scrunched.
“Oh fuck this,” Fred said, replacing the carton of ice cream on the shelf. He let the freezer door close and leaned against it. “Hey,” he said to Dennis. “Do you want to have dinner with me?”
The restaurant was an overpriced joint that pushed soul food to the hipster flock. Later both would agree the place was awful, but the lousy food and atmosphere did not dampen their evening noticeably. If anything, it provided a point of familiarity—something they could share and laugh about.
Over dinner, Denis learned that Fred was the IT manager for a software outfit on the Northside. He liked lifting at Gold’s Gym, 70s and 80s rock, low budget horror films, science fiction novels, and long drives in the country. He was, “sorta, kinda, maybe,” dating a twink named Eric, but the kid was, “an arrogant little prick, who listens to too much Gaga, and can’t fuck.”
“Kind of harsh,” Denis said.
“I’m being generous,” Fred assured him. “He just lies there and poses and coos like he’s looking at kittens in a pet shop window.”
“Why are you with him?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” Fred said, “I’m an idiot. My ex had a hard on for the kid, but Eric wanted me, so…”
“Spite fuck.”
“I’m not usually like that. Really, I know how it sounds. If you knew my ex it would clear things up, like, a lot. What about you?”
“Single.”
And then Denis told Fred about his late partner and the heart condition he’d kept secret, and Fred reached out and put his hand on Denis’s. He squeezed. He stroked the back of the hand with his thumb.
After dinner Denis suggested they continue their conversation over coffee. Fred said, “I’ll make you coffee.”
Three houses separated Fred’s modern single story home from the park. Denis loved the sleek façade and upon stepping inside, he found himself further impressed. With its open floor plan, French Doors, pale blue walls, and shocking white moldings, the house looked as if it belonged on The Cape or on a Long Island beach. Denis expected to smell salt air or find wayward grains of sand caught between the polished oak floorboards.
He followed Fred into the kitchen, where his host opened a glass cabinet door and retrieved coffee mugs. These were set on the counter and he turned his attention toward a high-tech brewing system. He hit a button, turned a knob and told Denis it would take a minute for the machine to warm up. Making an obvious joke about heat, Fred leaned forward and kissed him.
In response, Denis wrapped his arms around the man and pushed in close. He felt warmth pouring through Fred’s shirt and he wanted it against his skin. He moved his hands to the knot of the tie and pulled it away before working his fingers over the buttons of the blue shirt. His lips only left Fred’s for the three seconds it took to pull his own shirt over his head. He dropped it on the floor and then pressed his weight against Fred’s torso, feeling the tickle of hair, the dens
ity of flesh. They pushed closer. Chest to chest. Belly to belly. Two edges of a wound needing to heal.
Fred led an awkward dance to the sofa, guiding Denis all but blindly around the dining table and a white leather club chair as their mouths remained pressed together. When Fred pulled his lips away, Denis lunged forward for them but Fred put a hand on his chest. He pushed lightly, and bent and lifted the edge of the coffee table, moving it away from the sofa. Then Fred was on his knees. Denis looked down at the rounded shelf of Fred’s chest, covered in a carpet of brown hair and then into the clear, green eyes. Their eyes remained locked as Denis’s cock disappeared into the beard-framed mouth.
On the sofa, they rubbed and kissed and tasted each other thoroughly before Denis climbed on top of Fred and ground his crotch against the man. Fred locked his legs around Denis’s hips. Through it all, Denis’s thoughts slid and melted like hot wax, but he always came back to the same words: that chest, those hands, those lips.
Fred directed him to the top drawer of the coffee table, where Denis found a bottle of lube and a haphazard pile of condoms. As he unrolled the condom over his cock, his eyes returned to Fred on the sofa. He had crawled onto all fours, ass out, hands gripping the back of the furniture in preparation. And then he was in the man, and Fred eased back on him. Denis gripped the round cheeks and stroked the light fuzz that covered them. He slid his thumbs up Fred’s spine, his fingers appearing pale against the deeply tanned skin. When he reached the thick wings of muscle over Fred’s shoulder blades, he drove his hips forward and found his rhythm.