The Voices in Our Heads

by Michael Aronovitz

  “I wish to have a word with your father.”

  “Fine,” she said, “but I wouldn’t marry you even if you owned the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers!”

  She flounced to the stairs under the baleful glare of her parents, and Ezra Fletcher stepped forward. His eyes looked nervous, but his voice held steady.

  “I must tell you what I have seen,” he said quietly. “In private, with all due respect.”

  Mother took the baby away, and the two men had a whispered conversation before the cold fireplace. It intensified and almost turned to blows. After the door slammed shut on Ezra Fletcher’s exit, Mother came in to see what was wrong.

  “Bring my daughter to me,” were Papa’s words.

  He’d said them straight through his teeth.

  Adam Michael Rothman swore to himself that the second time would be slower, more meaningful, more for her pleasure if he could make himself last. He crossed the creek and retraced their steps from the night before, pine needles making soft melody beneath his boots, birches pressed close like lovers. He hoped he didn’t have to wait for her, since she’d be so lovely on his approach there in the high clearing, like a painting crafted in shadow and moon. There had been no ribbon left on the yard pump, their signal to abort, and he was not disappointed when he crested the rise.

  She was there by the well, hands folded before her, black hair loose and flowing in the night breeze.

  “Sweet Katie,” he said, and he approached, and she held her hands out to him, and he didn’t see the tears on her cheeks until it was too late, when the dark figures came from behind the trees at the edge of the clearing, her father stepping around the northwest corner of the demolished carriage house, club in one hand, burlap sack in the other.

  “Get her out of here,” he said softly, and just before Ezra Fletcher made to lead her away down the path, Adam croaked out to her,

  “No sign, my darling, no ribbon? But why?”

  She put her knuckles to her trembling lips and looked down at the ground, Fletcher regarding him darkly and turning her.

  Adam didn’t wait a moment longer. He sprung to the side suddenly and made to run off as fast as he was able, but there were more of them than he’d at first thought, and he was grabbed from behind and shoved over to the well. Someone clenched a fistful of his hair and pushed his face hard to the stone, breaking off a tooth that went half down his throat, cutting more and more inward each time he snuck a swallow, and through it all he only wished to be granted the moment he could cough it loose or choke it down. There was a rain of blows, and the yanking and ripping of his coat and shirt. Cold, gloved hands reached inside the slits in his back, and while a few backed off refusing to touch him, there were those who continued, muttering the name of “Holy Jesus” over and again.

  They snapped the left wing off at the base of the humerus, and the right halfway up the ulna, the point of the second digit piercing one of them through the palm, sending him shouting and cursing and shaking it as if a snake was attached. For poor Adam, it was a thick swirl of black and dark red, and there was a plea to end it quickly and a stronger argument that claimed murder was a sin before God. If he bled out, he bled out, but they were to steer clear of the brain, the heart, and the jugular. One oily voice protested that they would be caught and tried, and the more guttural tone Adam recognized as that of Mr. Claypool said they had to make it look like ritual, the way them zealots up in Coatesville did to them other Jews.

  Adam wanted to choke out that his mother was from Ireland and didn’t that count for something, and they turned him over. Someone put all his weight, palms down, upon his shoulders, and Mr. Claypool came into his vision on a slant with a pair of tin snips.

  “It was of her own free will she gave you up,” he said gently, “once I explained how aberrations like you can poison the mind.”

  There was nothing left between them but a thick kind of silence, and so Claypool took a breath through the nose and bent to it, the others helping him intermittently, and by the latter half of the rough surgery Adam Michael Rothman finally passed out. By the time they took his eyes, he lay dead.

  They were tired and sweat-drenched and blood-covered, and half down the path to the birches, a hand fell on Claypool’s shoulder.

  “Did you check his pulse, John?”

  He shoved the hand off and fought back a shiver.

  “It’s done.”

  “You sure?” They’d made a small ring now, blocking the way. John Claypool turned, pushed through them, and trudged back up to the clearing. And there lay scattered the results of their grisly work in the pale, cross-hatch spill of the moon: a farmer’s sack coat rumpled next to two broken wings, base bones angled, jutted up like fractured Chinese architecture, dark feathers soaked and flattened, a litter of digits, one boot laying on its side, blood stained down the side of the well in half-dried streams following the rough contours of the mortar lines between the field stones.

  And no corpse.

  Adam Michael Rothman had vanished.

  April 2011

  “And ever since then, these woods have been haunted.”

  “That’s it?” Kyle said. Brandon had been doing his best straight scary face, and he still tried to hold the sincerity.

  “Yes. And every twenty years or so, someone goes missing back here. Never any evidence left, just a witness or two that sees a figure dart between the trees, or a shadow pass overhead.”

  Everyone kind of shrugged, and he poked the fire with the knobby stick he’d found down by a short ravine choked with elderberry and pricker bushes. A burst of sparks twirled up toward the sky, which had gone all but dark between the pitch and cast of surrounding trees.

  “But what happened to the father?” Melanie said.

  “Yeah,” Krista added, “and how about the perverted old store owner?” Robbie leaned forward and gave that crafty, goofy grin he was known for.

  “I’ll bet he broke a hip fucking her on their wedding night!” He rolled back in peals of laughter that the boys joined in with and the girls did their best to show they didn’t appreciate.

  “Pig,” Valencia said. She adjusted the rubber band at the back of her braces and tried to turn her marshmallow. It slid off the stick and hissed into the fire.

  “He got them all,” Brandon said, even though his little audience really knew it was over at this point, the best part at least. Here he was just making up shit as he went. “He killed Ezra Fletcher that following year when the old geezer went out to the privy to take a dump, and he got John Claypool when he went hunting for deer the next winter. All the body parts they cut off Adam Michael Rothman grew back on him bigger, thicker, tougher, more akin to his ‘bird’ side. But even turned ninety-nine percent beast, he never went back after Katie Claypool for revenge.”

  Why not?” Melanie said.

  Brandon shrugged. “It was a backward curse. They’d made a promise to love each other forever, remember?”

  “That’s lame,” Robbie snorted.

  “Shut up,” two of the girls said simultaneously. Brandon dug in the fire for a moment, searching back for the creepier tone that had shaded most of his prior narration.

  “But you can bank on the fact that he never forgot how he died, the torture, the disfigurement, the idea that he was bound by the dark magic of the wood to pass over the one who betrayed him.”

  “Might have betrayed him,” Valencia interrupted. “The father could have grounded her, making it so she never had the chance to put her spirit ribbon on the pump in the first place.”

  “They didn’t have spirit ribbons back then,” Robbie said.

  “Whatever.”

  Brandon looked up, the reflection of the fire dancing in his eyes. “Doesn’t matter what the truth really was. It mattered what Adam Michael Rothman believed. Fact is that Katie Claypool was exempt, Rothman didn’t like it, and no one else was safe from there on in. No one. And she knew it when she got the general store, when she remarried, when all those long years ma
de her old and bitter, twisted up in guilt every time someone new went M.I.A. She lived until 1975, always rocking on her porch, warning anyone who would listen about the betrayed, angry spirit lurking around up here in the woods.”

  “It’s a good story,” Ashley said. She stood up and brushed off her butt. Her shirt had ridden up a bit, showing off the new dragon tattoo she’d gotten a few weeks ago, snaked there along her hip and the right side of her belly. The guys were all staring out the sides of their faces. She looked good at her middle; flat and hard, and she was a blonde.

  “Be right back,” she said. She had to “wee,” and she wasn’t going to do it too close to the campfire. Too easy for Brandon, or Dana, or especially Robbie to get it on a cell phone and post it on YouTube. They’d title it “Squatter’s Rights,” or something that would really make Daddy proud. She sidestepped down the short incline and walked a few paces along the path, almost tripping and taking a header when she bumped her toe against an overgrown root raised there like some corroded old vein. She found a thick bush, made her way behind it, dropped her drawers, and delivered there in the shadows.

  When she’d finished and pulled everything back together, she looked for a pile of leaves to hide the tissue under. Too dark. She got out her cell phone, aimed it at the forest floor, and hit the red button. The pale wash of light exposed dirt channeled and sloughed by past rains, twigs, patches of short weeds. She turned twice and spread her view, but saw nothing but a grainy flash of bare ground and foliation, and then it went dark. She hit it again and moved a bit south away from the path behind her, then a bit west, then a tad east; stands of intertwining elm, tufts of ragweed, snarls of thorn. There was a waist-high stone wall over run with hard vine and thistle, and the light went off once again.

  Hell with this. She dropped the damp tissue there on the ground and turned back the way she had come. She was glancing up in the general direction she thought would yield the glow of their fire up on the hill, but the afterimage kept her in a pale, temporary blindness.

  She bumped into something. Hard.

  “Ow!” she said, and her voice deadened in the stillness around her. She felt at her forehead, already knotting with the bruise, and hit the button on her cell phone.

  She had bumped into a birch tree, pressing close to its twin.

  “No way,” she whispered, turning the opposite direction, trying not to run in the mild state of panic that was rising in her. The light went off, and she hit it back on, and before her was the upper end of the creek and an old walking bridge. Ashley let out a short scream and ran in the opposite direction, her thoughts a collection of confused jolts and starts that came together in bright red to remind her that the order and chronology and logistics were wrong, that according to the story she’d just heard, dead opposite the leaning birches was the floor of pine needles, then the lower part of the creek with the dark polished stones and the path beyond that led out of the forest. She was climbing and moaning, and gaining footholds in nettles of roots, and she was lucky her cell phone didn’t go tumbling off in the darkness.

  She gained a crest of sorts, and she pressed on the light.

  Before her was a flat square covered with briar and milkweed, and the petrified remains of a hitching post. The northwest corner of the carriage house had eroded and crumbled down to the height of about four feet, and the well still had ancient trails of bloodstains ghosted and shadowed down through the crevices.

  Ashley about-faced immediately and tore down the path as fast as she was able. She slowed when the light cut off, and she hit it back on again, chest heaving.

  She was back at the well, two feet from it now. She was crying, moaning, and she looked at the phone so she could call her mother, and there was a red bar across the old-fashioned rotary graphic claiming, “No Service.”

  There was a sound, hollow and echoed, coming from deep inside the well. Ashley backed off a step, and the cell light cut off, and the sound before her grew there from within the bowels of the earth, and it was surfacing, and it was the furious sound of beating wings, and she hit the light button, and the stone structure erupted with a flood of barn swallows and sparrows, vomiting up into the air like hornets, and she fell back and struck her head upon the ground. Her last vision was one of inverted vertigo, the shapes above her fitting into the spaces between the branches and blotting out the night sky.

  When she woke, she wondered how much of it was a dream, an illusion put upon her at the brink of consciousness. She blinked. She was lying down on what still felt like outdoor terrain; dirt was in her hair, but above her was a perfect sort of darkness, like velvet. Her breathing was in her ears, and she wondered if there were actually enough barn swallows and sparrows to fill every nook and cranny of the forest canopy, and she pawed along the ground and found a small stone. She sat up slowly and then underhanded the projectile as hard as she could. It hit something up there and plunked back down beside her.

  She understood when the great eyes opened, straight above her, devil’s blood orange, coal furnaces slanted like oil drops, and then there was movement to the east and the west, and at the furthest periphery of her vision she saw stars cut off by the gradated edge of a wingspan that measured fifty feet at the least on both sides. The wings lifted, made gargantuan tent-shapes at the carpel joints, and then thrust down with a massive whooping sound as the Falcon of Penn Wood knifed in toward its prey.

  The Echo

  May

  J.F.K. is dead. Judy Garland, Osama bin Laden, King James, Chaucer, Hitler, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Nostradamus, all dead, like a trillion others. So am I, but don’t ask if I’ve seen your long-lost great uncle or anything. It’s not like that. There’s just foliage out here; vague images and dark outlines in the passing windows, a lot of roadway.

  I drive a ’95 Nissan Sentra, and it’s an absolute shitbox. Members of my family tease me about it; the pitted back bumper, the broken driver’s side door handle that makes you lower the window and claw out to flip up the exterior release, the lack of a floor mat on the passenger side, the worn felt seat cushions marbled like old dough.

  Oh, and don’t fret over the fact that I refer to my wife and kids in the present tense. I engage in this practice only because I think I am trapped in a moment that keeps being played out as if in live time, and my family is no more concerned about me than they were in terms of their “yesterday” or the day before that. And though I cannot be utterly sure in terms of hard proof, I am fairly certain that I am indeed deceased because I don’t get hungry anymore. Moreover, I can only recall universalities. I know that killing is wrong, that getting a girl pregnant before you marry her can put a real dent in your plans, that The Who were always better than the Beatles, if not in terms of cultural impact, then by a standard of showmanship and instrumentation, but I don’t remember what I had for dinner last night (if there is such a thing as an “evening” for me any longer). As I alluded to before, I know I have kids, but can’t recall how many. I know my wife is a pale brunette, but I can’t recollect her laugh. I know she has sun freckles dusted across her cleavage, a nondescript suburban ass, and Mediterranean cheekbones she accents with lavender blush, but I can’t remember her maiden name. My whole life, or past life if you will, has been reduced to wallet-sized black and whites, faded and out of order.

  Thing is, I don’t miss it. My life. Because even though it seems I am stuck for eternity in this shitty charcoal gray Nissan, there is also a feeling about me (or in me) that I am in transit to a destination. Now, please don’t interpret that as something spiritual, as if I am on some cosmic pilgrimage to meet the Almighty. I mean that the feeling about me (or maybe imposed on me) is one like I am on my way to work, or the Crate and Barrel, or the driving range for a quick bucket, or the Lord & Taylor because I forgot to get Mother’s Day garbage, and it doesn’t feel anything like eternity. The window is open with my elbow up on the rim, I’m squinting slightly, and the sky is that pale broad canopy of the lightest blue that fills us all with hop
e and longing: leisure images of sailboats inching along sun spangled waters, traveling carnivals, picnics, barbecues, graduations, promises.

  Here’s the thing. I can’t exit the vehicle without dire consequences.

  The first time it happened was quite by accident, pardon the pun, when I rear-ended a big dude in a black Dodge Ram, silver diamond grid contractor boxes bolted to both sides of the back bed. I’d been cruising along and had just passed an area where the roadside sound barriers flanked the near spread of woodland like the walls of some majestic fortress, and I had sort of realized in the back of my mind that I hadn’t seen a road sign in awhile. It was the first inkling I’d had that something was odd about this journey, and the first hint that maybe I’d been on this road for longer than what I might have considered “normal.” But just as I started to focus on the fact that I’d been driving without noticing the passage of time, a green sign flashed by, bolted to an overpass, and I realized I’d missed another one, and then traffic before me had come to one of those sudden standstills, and I hit the brakes and screeched the tires.

  I skidded, swerved a bit left, and plinked his back bumper. An insignificant little nudge, a Boston kiss.

  “Fucking moron,” I heard. Couldn’t see him. The back window was tinted jet black, but I saw his arm from out the driver’s side window, flannel cut on an angle high up at the shoulder in a makeshift short sleeve, bicep hair, beef-bull forearm. The arm went straight up, and then his index finger curved. He jabbed the affair toward the area up and over the roof, toward the breakdown lane. It was an order and he wasn’t kidding. The car in front of him moved forward a bit, and he pulled over, tires making chock ’n’ gravel sounds. I followed, stopped, put it in park, kept it running. My heart was thudding a bit and my face was ashen, or at least it felt that way. And I couldn’t find my information in the glove compartment. It was a mess of papers, envelopes, expired insurance cards, parking passes, old directions printed off Mapquest, dashboard flyers to identify me as a parent for summer camp pickup, and I couldn’t even remember what I was supposed to be searching for in the first place. Did he need my owner’s card? My license? My Social Security number?