After the People Lights Have Gone Off

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “Jamie Boy?” I managed to say.

  My dad was the only one who did that.

  He just stared at me about that.

  “She was nice,” he said, falling back onto the couch like it was a throne, licking his lips in the most exaggerated way. “But little sisters are always nice, aren’t they?”

  “Who told you?”

  “You did, telescope eyes.”

  Meaning he’d followed her home. Thinking that’s where I was going to be. And then he’d made do with who was there.

  I stood, but it was just to fall across the coffee table, into the hall. Not for any window but for the bathroom, for the toilet. To throw the rest of the world I used to know up.

  In the shower, exploded, smeared all over the tile, was Dell’s ex.

  She had a bar of soap stuffed in what was left of her mouth.

  “Sorry for the mess,” the boyfriend said from the door, his leather pants somehow vulgar. “Got to clean up after you eat, though. If you don’t, they come back, all that. I’m sure you’ve heard.”

  He was bored with it, trailed off, looking down the hall like at something important.

  I knew where he was looking, though.

  Four miles over, into the Crane Meadow subdivision. Into what could no longer really be considered a living room, I was pretty sure.

  •

  So, monsters are real. Surprise.

  For some reason I’d never considered this.

  Or—I’m lying again: one monster’s real, anyway.

  And I get the sense that’s just how he likes it.

  When I was done emptying myself into the toilet, I zombied my way back to the living room, my peripheral vision just a smoky haze.

  Instead of killing me like I expected, like I wanted, like I deserved, he slapped a pair of blue nitrile gloves down on the coffee table, told me to rubber up, whirred my gun in his other hand.

  I looked down at myself to see what room was left for him to do his damage on.

  I had it backwards.

  Until thirty minutes before dawn, his left hand cupped around my balls the whole time—he’d crunched a metal thermos into tinfoil, to show what he could do—I worked on his face.

  Every tattoo artist has to be able to repair somebody else’s work. To cover up a name, fix a misspelling, fudge a date. Put a bikini top on that girl, make a pistol into a submarine, a submarine into a flying saucer, a flying saucer into a shadow, all that.

  What I was supposed to do was make those dashed-on X’s over his eyes into something presentable enough for the coming eternity. Something he wouldn’t have to hide behind a helmet, a helmet he could only explain if he had a motorcycle, and he hated motorcycles. Everything went by too fast.

  While I did my thing, holding his dead, cold skin tight—I’d had practice—he told me about 1976. How glorious it had been. No cell phone cameras, no bullshit DNA, no credit cards in the system, to track people with. Back then he never woke up in morgues, had to sneak out. Back then he was keeping the morgues stocked.

  In his raspy singsong voice he told me about concerts and brushes with fame, and about a milkmaid he’d known with blond hair that curled on the side like she was an orthodox Jew, and how that framed her face so perfect, even though, where and when she’d lived, she probably hadn’t even known Jews existed. How he never knew her name, only her insides. How she tasted.

  Because I didn’t have the barber patter down yet, and because this was my first time inking a face, I just worked, and kept light on my toes. It wasn’t on purpose, but his hand on my balls—going up on your toes is kind of a natural response.

  Still, even working fast enough to sweat, I was only able to get one eye done.

  I was being careful, I mean.

  I handed him the mirror, let him look, my balls still in his hand.

  He looked side-to-side at himself and squeezed gently, rolling me like marbles, my spine straightening from it, and then he looked me straight on.

  It wasn’t bad.

  That mime make-up trick, with a tapered, upside-down cross kind of coming through the eyebrow, leaking down onto the cheek? I’d taken some of that and mixed it with the diamond eyes harlequins in comic books have, and filled it all in solid, so that his right eyeball, looking out from all that black, it was seriously wicked. I’d gotten the idea…well, first from what I needed to cover that stupid X, but second from a facepaint band I’d seen one night—not KISS, please, and this wasn’t a juggalo night, and I’ve never seen Marilyn Manson live. Reading the show’s write-up the next day, though, the show-off reviewer was saying how the lead singer’s black-bagged eyes had been an insult to everything The Misfits had ever not stood for.

  I didn’t know Glenn Danzig’s make-up well enough to make the link like the reviewer was—I was always more of a Sex Pistols kind of punk, I guess—but the guy with my balls in his hands seemed to recognize something. “Sick like a dog,” he said, and held the mirror over to get a proper angle on his face. Run his other hand over the stubble he would probably never grow.

  He liked it.

  I breathed out for what felt like the first time in hours and he stood up into that one moment of relief I had, his lips right against mine, my balls tighter in his hand now, so that I was practically floating, my eyes watering whether I was telling them to or not.

  I turned to the side to let him do what he was going to do and caught the sun, just starting to warm the very top of my gauzy ancient hand-me-down drapes.

  “Hey,” I said about it.

  He hissed, brought his mouth down to my neck, his teeth grazing my skin there, and said, “We finish it tonight,” tapping his naked eye, and then him and his black helmet and his perfumed stench were gone, stalking out the back, leaving my kitchen door open behind him, his bike tearing the morning open.

  At first I just zoned out there after he was gone, staring at the pattern of the skirt tacked onto the bottom of my couch, pretending it was the curtain of a show I was waiting for. Pretending a tiny actor was about to prance out, ask how I’d liked the show, how I was liking this joke.

  I made my way to the bedroom, rang my dad’s phone.

  No answer.

  I shut my eyes, threw the phone into the wall.

  Gigi. Gretchen, really, but really Gigi, since she was little.

  I’d always felt like I was out here throwing my life one way so she could go the other way. Like I was sacrificing myself so she wouldn’t have to. Like this was the only way to save her, the only way to be a decent big brother.

  It’s stupid, I know. But I’m not smart.

  My dad could have told you that.

  Still, sometimes.

  •

  What I’ve done now, all day, it’s scrawl a rough X over each eye. And then over every free inch of space I’ve got left on my body, I’ve traced out scales, like I’m going to shade them in with color later. On my left side, kind of where I always imagined my heart to be, four of those scales have names on them. Like tombstones.

  Mom, Dad, Gigi. Me.

  This is the kind of art that would get me space at any parlor in town. The kind of imagery bleeding into meaning that makes real tattoo artists wince.

  But that’s all over now, I guess.

  It’s almost dark again.

  Soon the chainsaw sound will be dying in the air, the helmet on my couch. A monster kicked back in my easy chair, his right hand between my legs, keeping me honest.

  One last job, right?

  But it’s also my first.

  To prepare, and also because I can’t help it anymore, I feel my way down to the bathroom, lick what I can off the tile walls of the shower, scraping the rest in with my fingers. Pushing it deep inside.

  What’s left of Dell’s ex is black and dried, but that taste underneath, it’s to die for. To kill for. Milk could never be like this, not in a thousand years. Cows got nothing on people.

  I wore gloves when I was working on him, yeah, so I wouldn’t catch anyth
ing that was catching.

  But then I used the same needle on myself, and I went deeper than I had to for just the ink to set.

  His blood spiked up and down me. All through me, hungry.

  For two hours, between one and three, the sun right above the house instead of slashing in through the window, I’m pretty sure I was clinically dead.

  And I kind of still am.

  Will he be able to smell it on me right away, through the flannel shirt I’ve put on to cover my new ink, to cover the bluebonnet on my chest that’s now my chest cracking open to reveal the real me, crawling out tooth and claw, or will we wait to do this thing until I’ve driven the needles through his naked eye into what the centuries have left of his brain?

  It doesn’t matter.

  Either way I win.

  There always was a dragon curled up inside me, Dad.

  Tonight it’s going to stand up.

  to take their stupid little drama public (again), but that seemed to be part of what made them work the rest of the time, too, right? If the screamed accusations about last weekend’s unanswered voice mails and the apologies each of them promised never to give didn’t have an audience, then it would be like those promises weren’t even real, like the fight never happened.

  Meanwhile, this is a camping trip.

  Nevermind that they’re still forty miles from the park, and not in the same car anymore, and Jonathan isn’t crying, is not going to give that to Lucas, and the boy sitting in the little folded-out shelf of the pop-up camper parked longways by the curb, the soles of his shoes barely scraping the ground in a rhythm Jonathan is having problems looking away from, he’s just staring, like waiting for something to happen.

  Jonathan nods to the boy, gives him some of the fakest cheer ever in the history of roadside camaraderie—not the boy’s fault, any of this—and turns away, walks out to the farthest part of the pavement, where he can see the river.

  It’s high, rushing. From some impossible distance away, probably. From the mountains they’re supposed to be going to.

  And, out in the woods—looking back yet, to see if Jonathan’s following?—Lucas, still committed to the gesture of leaving, Jonathan knows, but already getting lost, too. Just to show Jonathan how serious he is about all this. Jonathan not going after him because he’s serious too. He’s committed, here.

  Their new tent and telescoping walking poles and thick socks are all organized in the trunk, even, waiting for them. Marks on the map to show the last places to fill their two five-gallon water jugs. A note on the dash about sunblock, for Jonathan’s nose. Written in Lucas’s scrawly hand.

  Jonathan closes his eyes tight. Throws a useless handful of gravel out towards the river. Most of it turns out to be dirt, grime, dust. It sticks to his face but that doesn’t matter, it can’t stick, because he’s not crying, he’s just going to look back to that boy sitting half in the pop-up and try to remember trips with his own family, back before everything, the six of them crawling across the map, taking pictures, mailing joke postcards to each other on the sly, so they’d be waiting at home when they got back.

  The boy’s not there to cue all this up for Jonathan, though. Like the camper just popped up and ate him, has him in its innards now, is going to deposit him in pieces on the road at seventy miles per hour, for the badgers and possums to lick up between headlights.

  No, though.

  No bad things.

  Jonathan taps his index finger against his thumb tip in quick succession, a private pattern, part of his secret conditioning, the big effort to start controlling his thinking, to not let it go directions he doesn’t want anymore. A drumbeat to keep the shadows away.

  Like always, it doesn’t work, just gives the darkness a rhythm.

  If he opens his eyes, though, then the boy has to be in the rumble seat of his family’s supercab Ford, doesn’t he?

  Yes. Yes yes yes.

  Enough that Jonathan really doesn’t even have to look.

  The world is a normal place, where normal things happen.

  The boy will still be looking back through the sliding glass, around a bumper sticker maybe, looking back and trying to shape the question in his mouth for his mom, about the strange men who had been yelling at each other, sputtering and spluttering their feelings, one of them holding his hands over his eyes, the other biting his upside-down thumb to try to focus the pain.

  Good luck explaining that, Mom, Jonathan says in his head, in farewell, and takes the most mournful posture he can on the picnic table, sitting up on the eating part, trying to cut the perfect spiteful silhouette, just looking out from under his eyebrows at the pop-up camper still just sitting there—this is how the photographer would pose the model, if this were a shoot (black and white, the river a torpid grey slate)—but then balls his hand and doesn’t hit anything.

  “Petty,” he says aloud. About himself. About this. And how he’s not going to be like that anymore. How it never helps anything, trying to stage the scene.

  To mess it up as best he can, he ducks into the foul, cinderblock, nearly-all-the-way-to-the-roof restroom, and unrolls a single paper towel, isn’t just real sure what he wants to do with it. All over the stalls are scratched-in names, imprecations, rhymes, pictures, worse.

  Jonathan folds the paper towel up into perfect quarters, leaves it on top of the holder—this is an apology—then breathes in, out, in, out, until he can control it.

  When he walks back into the glare of the sun, a few more of the families and their campers and RVs are gone, sucked into the future. Replaced by others just the same.

  Because he doesn’t deserve the river—it’s pretty, perfect, so blue—he sits with his back to it, sits on a picnic table, punishing himself with the jeans-model pose now, doesn’t even brush the crumbs and whatever off, sits long enough to see his shadow move across the pebbled walk, long enough that the chi-chi birds finally dart in close enough for him to reach if he wanted to. He doesn’t.

  The black birds, though, the ones Jonathan has always thought must smell bad, they don’t come that close. Maybe he knows what they are.

  Jonathan nods to them. Swallows.

  His shadow sundials around him and he’s got to pee but doesn’t.

  Fourteen carloads of family angle into their designated slots, back out again. Continue.

  Jonathan cries. Refuses to wipes his face. Can’t stop thinking about the thick socks in the trunk, for some reason. How he was looking forward to sleeping in them. And the plastic taste of the water from the tall green jug that looks like a gas can.

  He laughs at himself. Stupid, stupid.

  At dusk, at what Jonathan considers to be precisely dusk, Lucas returns.

  Not from the woods all around, but walking down the ramp from the interstate.

  He got lost, Jonathan knows, and zeroed in on the sound of radial tires, stumbled out into the ditch.

  Good for him.

  His shirt’s tied around his head like this is an adventure, his ridiculous shorts rolled up past his tan lines. And he’s Lucas.

  Jonathan steps down from the picnic table, the seat of his shorts adhering to something surely unmentionable—jelly?—because if Lucas has to walk the whole way over, this won’t work.

  They meet at the yellow part of the curb, only awkward eye contact.

  “We still have to get some sunblock,” Jonathan says, kind of biting his lower lip and hating himself for biting it.

  “And water,” Lucas says, his hand close enough, swinging enough, that Jonathan can catch it with the side of his hand, the world taking shape around that slight contact, that skin-on-skin.

  Now, the car. No hugs across the console yet, no pats on the thigh, no negotiated radio stations, just the click of the headlights, the wash of halogen before them like a spray of impossibly bright particles. Silence.

  It’s enough.

  At the next gas station, the sunblock on the counter, Lucas catches Jonathan’s eyes: his wallet.

  Jonatha
n takes Lucas by the shoulders, turns him around: no wallet. Just the tacky tattoo of a ruler on Lucas’s lower back, that Lucas admits he regrets.

  “You had your front pocket one, though,” Jonathan says. “Right?”

  What he’s not saying: The one I bought you. That you loved so much.

  “Wanted to go rugged for the trip,” Lucas shrugs back.

  The wallet’s Lucas’s dad’s old one, Jonathan knows, and will never understand. But he doesn’t have to, he tells himself.

  Jonathan buys the sunblock, stands in the parking lot looking back the way they came.

  “Do you remember where you took your shirt off?” he says to Lucas. “Was it on the road, at least?”

  Lucas doesn’t say anything, doesn’t have to. Something contrite about the way he’s standing there in front the ice machine.

  How could Jonathan not love him, how could he not want worse than anything to go sixty miles back, feel along the shoulder of the road with their headlights, trucks slamming by inches from them, their campsite going unclaimed, the pasta they’d planned drying out in the back seat?

  And, because of the way the exits are in this state, it turns out to be seventy-two miles, not sixty. Full dark.

  “It’s black, right?” Jonathan says, creeping along the shoulder, leaning over the wheel.

  “Dark green,” Lucas says, and then, after telling Lucas about car surfing and high school, proves it by spidering out his window without even checking the traffic. He lays bellydown on the roof, lowers his hand.

  Jonathan touches it with his lips, holds it there, then slides the flashlight into it. The highway patrol’s just going to love them, right?

  But still.

  They are who they are. What else could they be doing? And anyway, if this won’t make a good story in a month or two, then Jonathan doesn’t know what would. Who needs a campsite when you can be as stupid as this right on the highway.

  Every third or fourth truck blasts its air horn, too. Jonathan can only wince, thinking what Lucas must be doing to elicit this.

  At this rate, it’s going to be midnight by the time they make the rest stop again. Jonathan wonders if his paper towel is still folded on the top of the trashcan in the bathroom, and then, more tactile memory than anything, remembers the jelly he had maybe sat in on the picnic table.