Seven Deadly Pleasures

by Michael Aronovitz

  "'Mommie . . .'"

  Ben was dragging the imaginary rope, playing the part, eyes far off, mouth slightly ajar. Here was where the story always ended. He had never figured out a proper conclusion, and he normally broke character, smiled and said something like,

  "C'mon, guys. I was just kidding. You didn't believe that crap, did you?"

  He did not get the chance. The fire alarm went off. Loud. It was a buzzer that was so overwhelming down here it actually made his skin vibrate.

  Girls screamed. Boys jumped up from their desks as if there were snakes crawling on the floor. Three girls in the back row stood up, hands pressed to their mouths. They were hyperventilating. A tall girl with white stockings had rushed to the corner of the room, pulled out her blue sweater at the neck, and buried her face in the void as if she was going to puke into it.

  Ben was terrified. Surely, he would hear about this from Johnson.

  "Guys!" he shouted over the numbing buzz. "Out through the Cherry Street door! Go ahead, it's just an alarm! And I was only kidding about the ghost . . ."

  No one really heard. They scrambled for the door. A boy was crying and rubbing the base of his palm against his cheek in angry shame. A girl with thick glasses and blackheads clustered around her nose was furiously punching numbers into a cell phone. Oh, Ben was in a shitstorm now. He wondered if he would be fired. He hadn't looked at his résumé for years. This was bad. The last thing he wanted was to be thrown into the system and assigned to a regular Philadelphia public school. They doled out positions by seniority. Charter schools did not rack up points, and he would probably wind up at some ghetto middle school where the kids took apart your emergency phone on the first day, ran in and out of the classrooms like mental patients, and found out where your car was parked before it was time for recess. Ms. Johnson ran a tight ship here with this charter, and he was lucky to have the position he did. He had never really been in trouble with Johnson, but he heard she was merciless if she had a cause. He supposed he could beg. At least he had that.

  He walked out into the sunshine and crossed Cherry Street. It was tennis weather. Construction was going on down Broad Street and you could hear a dull pounding complemented by a slightly sharper ratcheting noise associated with cranes and oiled chains being rolled onto big pulley wheels. The kids were gathered in front of a row house with empty planters in front of the dark windows. There were faded white age stains shadowed up the brick. A couple of his tenth graders had migrated over and were sitting on the concrete steps one residence down. Ben waved to them absently and started working his way between children, pleading his case. It was lame and awkward and necessary. He had to do some kind of damage control no matter how slipshod it appeared.

  "I was only kidding, guys. You know that, right? . . . I made the whole thing up. I tell it to my tenth graders all the time. . . . It's a silly story, really. . . . Didn't you see that I had no ending for it? Yes. It was just a joke. No girl like that ever went here at all."

  Mr. Rollins got on a megaphone.

  "Drill's over. Move on to your last-period class."

  Ben had not worked the group in its entirety. He had gotten to the hyperventilators, joked it up, and earned a round of cautious, weak smiles. It turned out that the girl with the blackheads was simply supposed to call her mother at the end of seventh period every day and she had almost forgotten. Big relief there. Still, he hadn't made it to the crying boy or the tall girl who'd almost vomited into her sweater. There were a lot of loose ends here.

  Ben went back inside with his head hung down.

  This time he might have actually blown it.

  His homeroom was up next. The brown tables were folded up and pushed to the back left corner of the lunchroom. There were rows of chairs set up in front of the steam table and the student council had put up crêpe paper streamers. There were some new plants suspended from the drop ceiling, and old Jake had hooked up a sound system. Ms. Newman's homeroom had just completed an oldies thing featuring the Electric Slide that the students laughed at and Ms. Johnson obviously preferred. A guy pretty high up on the food chain at Temple University sat with her at the judge's table, along with a man wearing thin rectangular dark glasses, close-cropped sideburns, and a long black overcoat.

  Johnson had not called Ben in to the office today, thank God. He knew there was an unspoken code in the high school not to snitch about the wild stuff he pulled up there, but he had not expected the sixth graders to be so discreet. It had taken all his will power not to tell Kim about it like a confession when he got home yesterday, and he had woken in a cold sweat three times during the night. But he was pretty sure by now that everything was going to be all right. Ms. Johnson did not bide her time when she had to get something off her plate, so no news at this point in the day was certainly good news.

  Laquanna walked to the center of the space, and the other girls followed. There was a hush. The boys filtered in and took positions between. Malik walked to the front, and there was a rousing cheer speckled by only a few boos from the small crew of guys from the "C" section that he had beaten in a parking lot rap battle last week. He looked over at Jake, and the music blasted on. The kids exploded in movement, and Ben grooved a bit where he stood. He was going to miss this homeroom next year. They had been a lot of fun.

  Someone was pulling his sleeve. He looked down. It was a girl from the elementary school, short, probably fourth or fifth grade, long hair curled in sausage shapes and pulled back by a pink satin ribbon tied in a floppy bow. Her eyes were wide with terror.

  "What?" he said. "What's wrong?" He had to nearly shout to be heard over the music.

  The girl said something and he could not make it out. He leaned down, and her breath came hot in his ear.

  "It's the dead girl. She's in the bathroom."

  Ben pulled back a bit and raised his eyebrows.

  "What?"

  She made her lips frame the words in the deliberate manner one used when speaking to the slow or the deaf.

  "Our teacher went out to make copies on another floor. Help us. It's the dead girl. She's in one of the stalls moaning, Mommie."

  Ben pushed past her and marched out of the lunchroom. The music was cut to a haunt the minute he turned the corner, and he felt his face going hot. This was just what he needed. Some jackass sixth grader squatting up on the toilet seat so you couldn't see her feet, then groaning "Mommie" like a wounded doorbell when a younger kid tried to take a piss. Wasn't this always the way of things? He was so sure he had dodged a bullet, and now in this strange backlash, he was still going to get nailed. He could picture the meeting right now, the teachers all at their tables looking innocently at each other, Johnson up at the podium.

  "It has come to my attention that some middle school children have been frightening the elementary school students in the bathroom. Evidently, a story about an abducted third grader has been going around the school, and I would like to know where this started. From the bits and pieces I have heard, the story seems rather sophisticated for a student. I want to know what teacher was involved with this. I want that teacher to come forward and take responsibility for . . ."

  You know the drill.

  Ben reached the end of the hall and made the quick left. He paused, but only for a bare second. He had never been in the girl's bathroom. He walked through the archway (there were no doors for bathrooms at People First), and before passing the brown steel divider that blocked the sightline, he called out,

  "Teacher coming in! Excuse me! I apologize!"

  The bathroom was empty. Besides the strange lack of urinals to the left, it was the same as most institutional boys' rooms. Brown tiled floor, drain grate in the center surrounded by a shallow puddle of water in a shape that vaguely resembled Texas. There was a row of sinks and each basin had a mirror above it, the reflective material more like tin foil than glass so as to avoid cracking under the variety of incidents that were often far from delicate. The soap dispensers each had spots of blood-orange r
esidue pooled below on the sink tops where quick hands had missed, and only two had been converted to the newer white units that rationed out foam by palm activation. There was a Fort James paper towel dispenser by the entrance just above an industrial plastic yellow trash can surrounded by the damp, crumpled sheets that had been poorly tossed. There were four stalls, the first three standard issue, and the last sectioned off in its own private area that spanned the width of the space. All three of the doors on the regular stalls were open, but barely. It seemed the floor was pitched in a way that kept them resting an inch or two in off the lock plates. The handicapped door was half ajar.

  Ben pushed open the door of the first stall with the middle knuckle of his index finger. Vacant. The bowl was unflushed from what looked like nine or ten sittings, all number one thank God for small favors, and on the wall someone had written, "Shaneeka sucks monkey nuts." Stall number two was in the same relative condition, and number three, of course, was filled with a deposit Ben could not believe someone had the guts to leave out on the surface of this earth. He backed out, breathed in deep, held it, shouldered into the thin stall, and reached for the flusher with the sole of his shoe. When it whooshed down, he pulled back quickly. These institutional mechanisms were sometimes loaded with such strong jets that they kicked up a bit of backsplash off the suction.

  After the rush of the initial violent whirlpool, there was that hollow, pipe-like refilling sound, and just underneath it Ben heard a voice. From the handicapped stall. It sounded as if it was in tow just beneath the running water, an echo, a faint ringing. It sounded like a girl's voice. Before he could really make out words, it blended with the receding sounds and thinned out to silence.

  Ben walked into the handicapped stall. There was a runner bar along the wall, another behind the toilet, a private sink, and a separate towel dispenser. To the right there was also one of those tinfoil mirrors, and he saw something move in it. His breath caught in his throat. It was blue, and it had seemed to shoot through the mirror like liquid through a distorted syringe. He moved closer to investigate, and sighed. It was his shirt, picked up in the light and worked through the microscopic steel grooves in an hourglass effect. How did the girls adjust their makeup with these funhouse things? The boys had them too, but he thought the female breed would have demanded better. Personally, he always used the faculty lounge up front by Johnson's office. It was worth the walk.

  The hair on the back of his neck was up.

  He turned.

  There was a hand coming out of the toilet. The seat was up and there was a hand gripping the rim.

  Ben grit his teeth and smiled, despite the knocking his heart was still making up in his ears. It was one of those dollar store, plastic dead hands you could affix to door rims and bed edges. So here was the dead girl. Ha ha.

  He levered down a fistful of towels and approached. The artwork wasn't even good on this thing. The sores had red spots half covering the indentations and spilling over about a quarter of an inch. Probably a misaligned factory stamp. The nail polish on the scabby fingers had already flaked partly off, and at the edge of the wrist, the press that had molded the rubber most probably had a small void, since there were two renegade nodules sticking off that needed to be pruned. Ben reached down to pluck it off the rim and stopped.

  There was writing behind the toilet. It was written faintly on the wall tile in the spidery, uneven, block letter style of a young child,

  "Turn a promise to a lie, and you will be the next to die."

  "Fuck," he muttered. The written message had suddenly reminded him of a missed obligation. He grabbed the joke toy, held it off to the side a bit, and walked it out of the stall. His feet made hollow echoes across the floor. He had forgotten to put in a good word for the boy who had been looking at the dead frogs. It would have taken two seconds. He tossed the rubber toy into the yellow bin and sighed. His word was his bond.

  Something splashed in the handicapped toilet.

  Ben put his fists to his sides and stalked back to the stall. Enough already. He stopped when he turned the corner of the doorway.

  There were two hands gripping the rim of the bowl as if reaching up from deep within it, palms down, fingers over the edges. They were girl hands, rotten and burst at the knuckles with yellow-graying bone sticking through. The skin was mottled, water-shriveled, and blue. The fingers released, and the forearms slipped back into the water, the hands following, down to the fingertips. Gone. There was a faint gasp, like the exit of breath.

  Ben approached the toilet. "I did not just see that," he said to himself. His legs were numb, his mouth ajar. There was a brown ring at the surface edge of the water, and there was still the hint of faint ripples dancing above the submerged, funneled pipe orifice.

  Something from the drain-hole exploded.

  Ben saw a flash of dirty blue and white checkerboard just before it whipped across the bridge of his nose. The cold toilet water that sprayed him in the face was eclipsed by the sharp snap of pain. His glasses flew off to skid along the tile into the next stall. Ben's left eye had been struck bald and it was squeezed shut. The other was half open in a squint, and through the blur he saw the elongated jump rope whirling mad figure eights, its alleged wooden handles still buried in the depths of the drain. Dirty water snapped to the sides, spattering the dull yellow concrete block wall and the steel divider to the left. Ben put up his hands in a defensive posture, but the rope was quicker. It snaked out and hooked him at the back of the neck.

  It spun mad spaghetti twirls and peppered drain water up his nose. He clawed his hands at the front of his neck and couldn't get his fingers under. The taste in his mouth was hot copper. There was a yank, and he was brought a foot closer and a yard lower. He kept his feet, but he was losing this tug of war.

  Black spots danced in front of his eyes, and his lungs started screaming for air. He tried rearing back, but the pull was too great. He opened his eyes for the last time, and saw the toilet bowl rush at his face. And the last thought Ben had on the face of this earth was that the promise he had broken was far more fundamental than a forgotten bribe to a kid who was messing around with a dead frog in a jar.

  The Clever Mask

  I went downstairs for a cup of coffee and the Grim Reaper was sitting in my living room.

  "Good morning," he said. His voice was gravel. He had bald, red eyeballs set in exposed muscle. He had lips, but they were diseased pieces of blackened flesh that dangled over his skull teeth. I snatched a quick glance to the stairs.

  "Don't worry," he said. "She cannot hear us."

  Thank God for small favors. Still, I was not going to take any chances. I sat down slowly, so as to make as little sound as possible. I could hear Tina moving around up there from bureau to closet. He folded his bony hands together.

  "Still no talkie-talk? What a pity. I like a little conversation before I induce the coronary, or initiate the stove oil-fire that gets away, or cause the accident with the air conditioner that falls off the high shelf in the shed when you try to yank out the snow shovel jammed next to it." He sat forward. "For you, I was thinking of maybe an accident with glass! I was thinking about that picture window there, a fall, a shattering, and a decapitation. I could have Tina come down and find your body in spasm, hands still grabbing blindly at the jagged edges, your head, by God this is poetic, your head still held on by a single strand of neck tissue! What do you think?"

  Sweat burst a bit on my upper lip. Just before this thing took over my living room, I had been thinking about the white, wooden blinds covering the picture window. The thin, cylindrical bar that you twisted to open and shut the blinds never stayed on the S-hook anymore. The metal had worn outward a bit from the continuous use, and the bar kept popping off. On a whim, I had been thinking about grabbing the pliers Tina had left by the stereo, climbing onto the back of the sofa, and giving the S-hook a squeeze. Why hadn't I done it over the weekend, or the last, or the one before that? Why did I decide to do it twenty minutes bef
ore I had to leave for work? A little, personal mystery. I guess I had always been impulsive that way.

  "Impulsive guys die too, Joe," he said. "So, what will it be? Many of my clients like to have a say in their method of execution. It's in the contract that I ask and get some sort of response."

  How did he know I was just thinking about my own impulsiveness? I thought. Tina dropped something upstairs, and I heard a quaint, "Oh shit!" I stayed where I was. I didn't think I was going crazy, and I was not foolish enough to wonder if I was dreaming. While asleep, one's dream could be mistaken for reality, but I had enough common sense to know it didn't work the other way around. Was I hallucinating? If so, this was one hell of a detailed manifestation. The Reaper pointed across the marble table that sat between us.

  "I knew you were considering your own impulsiveness because I can hear everything you think the second you think it, Joe. Your little honey dropped the tweezers back into the bottom of the tin tangled up with the hairbrush, the two combs, the nail file, the clippers, and the three scissors that are too dull to keep in the kitchen drawer anymore. That's why she just swore. You're not crazy, you are not dreaming, and you are not hallucinating. That which is presently before you has too much vivid order for that, and you know it. Now stop thinking around me and think directly to me. It will help expedite things. I do have other calls to make."

  "So, you can read my thoughts," I said. Tina did not respond, and a brush of new fear whispered up my spine. She should have heard me. It was a small row house. The Reaper clapped his hands together.

  "Joy!" he said. "Actual discussion! My creation! The big lie! Go ahead, entertain me! Tell me you are too young to die even though you know deep down that when it is your time, it is simply your time! Say that you don't fear me when you are actually terrified!"