The Voices in Our Heads

by Michael Aronovitz

  I reached out through the open window, flipped up the handle, and got out of the car.

  Everything changed. I wasn’t on 476 or 95 or the Northeast Extension anymore, and it wasn’t spring. It wasn’t daytime either. It was late fall, you could tell because there was that smokehouse tang in the air as if someone had been burning leaves, and the trees all around me were bare, crooked, and spidery, making criss-cross shapes before a low moon. We were on a dirt road cutting through the forest, and the pickup had its blinkers on, leaning slightly right because he’d pulled into a bit of a ditch.

  There was a rather brisk wind on my face, and I had not brought out anything from my glove compartment. I walked forward, sure I was going to get a lecture, or maybe even a punch in the eye. I was sweeping apologies together in my head, trying for the right flavor, and couldn’t decide between the half-jest “Sorry about that,” or the sincere “Hey friend, my fault, what can I do?” kind of thing.

  His door opened, and a leg thrust itself out, work boot clapping down to the dirt, jeans with cuff-frays coming behind the heel. He pushed out, gripping the upper door rim, and he had to duck to get out because he was that big, and he was muttering,

  “. . . learn to drive in a fucking girl’s room . . .”

  and he stood and he was turning toward me, and he pulled at his crotch to move the underwear a bit and he had a chain going from his wallet to his belt, and a chest like a grizzly, and he was shaking his head as if he was going to teach this little bastard a lesson, and then he looked up and he saw me and his mouth dropped open. He slumped a bit, shoulders curling in and withering, knees knocking in toward each other as if he’d just been whacked in the nuts.

  “Uhh . . .” he said. He fumbled back for the open doorway and almost missed, still staring at me, measuring my approach, scrambling sort of sideways for the sanctuary of the truck.

  Then I saw it, what scared him. It was only for a split second, and then it was gone, there in his back window, jet black and kicking up gleam from the moon, and I only saw it out of the corner of my eye because I was so focused on his odd retreat, and it was only a flicker because it changed when he broke eye contact. For that one second, it was a creature from some haunted lagoon or lake or swamp, dead, damp vegetation draped over its skull as if dragged up from the bottom of dark waters, fingers long and pointed, water-rotted skin hanging off the bones in tatters and shreds.

  It was my silhouette in his back window, and I know it was me because it was mimicking my advance, I could see it at the periphery of my vision, both hands extended out like “what the heck” in response to his cowardly crawl back into the cab, and he broke eye-lock, and I looked at the black outline directly, and it was just me in there now, short hair, pudgy face, I could even see my glasses with the moon reflected in the bottom rim of each lens.

  I somehow knew that the rotted figure in the glass had been an image he’d picked up from some TV special he saw when he was six, after he snagged his sister Melinda’s Ranch Doritos and tiptoed down the basement even though it was past his bedtime and if Daddy caught him he’d warm up his behind something good. I saw the original horrific images washing over his face in pale lines and shadows just as clearly as I saw the flash forward to his wetting the bed for a year, lying in his own sour dampness with the comforter pulled over his head, breathing all cut and shallow through the little porthole he’d made for his mouth.

  The pickup pulled off in a roar, kicking up dirt and road-grit.

  I blinked, and it was spring again. I was doing a lazy 63 miles per hour and the sky opened before me in that panorama of oceanic crystallized blue. There was sloping acreage to the right, wheat or rye moving with the pattern of the breeze, and on the left there was a long meadow with antenna towers in the background. There were cars around me, but the occupants were forms, vague outlines, shapes.

  And no road signs. When I concentrated, focused, and bore down, the way my Dad used to tell me to do in Little League when I couldn’t find the strike zone, I’d see something ahead, that familiar rectangular green with the white outline and the white block letters, and then I’d get distracted at the last minute by a deer crossing sign, or a plane flying low overhead, or a truck passing too close.

  After some indeterminable amount of time, I pulled into a Howard Johnson’s to get directions, to get a handle on this, to convince myself that what happened with the contractor was illusory, and that I wasn’t the creature from the black lagoon.

  I didn’t get further than the parking area.

  Originally, the structure had seemed a familiar, charming little piece of commercial Americana, offset from the highway by a grand sort of rotary, restaurant at the far edge, sprawling golf course in the background. Across the way was an antique furniture store and a glass crafter, both a short walking distance from the shopping center with the Wegman’s and the Giant. But when I stepped out and shut my door, I realized I had been mistaken about the surroundings. Everything was gray, and to the left across the highway was an abandoned warehouse, windows darkened, weeds at the perimeter growing out of the cracked cement tire bumpers. Past the motel dumpsters on the far right side, a swarm of cattails and yellow grass led to an area of marsh and tangled woodland. To the right of the place was a rusted cyclone fence with old trash blown in at the bottom, and beyond that, a drainage ditch and an abandoned quarry, dozers parked up on the mounds, and I remembered that the parking lot seemed full when I entered, yet now stood empty for all but a maroon minivan with a soccer magnet in one corner of the back window and a Garfield toy with foot suckers in the other.

  I walked up to the vehicle and noticed that my forearms had run over with goose bumps. It was starting to rain, slanted darting drops, and the clouds moving across the sky were running thin shadows along the asphalt.

  In the sideview mirror I could see the woman in the driver’s seat, designer sunglasses propped above her forehead, auburn hair in a ponytail, severe eyebrows, delicate face—beautiful like glass, a look of general superiority and boredom.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Could you tell me where I am, please?”

  I honestly believe she was about to turn toward my voice and acknowledge me, but a piercing scream erupted from the back seat. I didn’t have a good angle to get a look inside past the lady’s shoulder, but when I backed off a half-step I could see through the glass it was a toddler in a car seat, struggling, scratching at his harness, staring at me with wide, rolling eyes.

  With Mom occupado, I bent to look in her sideview and saw the strangest, most frightening thing looking back at me on an angle.

  I was a playing card, a Jack I think, and I couldn’t tell if I was a heart or a diamond, but I knew for sure I was one of the red ones. My face was elongated, skull-like, shaped like the “Scream” mask, but the eyes were brilliant and savage, close-set and piercing, the drawn lines around the mouth sitting deep and carved like judgments. I was holding a flaming scepter, and my hair was a nest of wriggling snakes.

  I stumbled away from the vehicle, out of the kid’s sightline, and I was driving again, back in the burst of landscape unfolding into the bosom of flawless blue sky, warm and mindless, a vacant baseball field on the right, a red barn, a silo, grazing cows.

  The boy’s name was Jason MacGonigle, and his mother had been trying to teach him to play “Go Fish” while the tile man was laying a mosaic pattern on the floor in the sun room. It was the Jack of Hearts, and while the African prints in the living room were a comfort, animal shadows like the ones in his story books, this robed nightmare with the skinny face and the big fire-stick had hideous black eyes that followed him even when he pushed it across the table and told Mommie he didn’t want to play anymore.

  I knew that he dreamed about the Jack of Hearts that night, and that the dream character was far worse than the playing card itself, elongated, fluid, and reptilian, a Disney cartoon gone horribly wrong, and the thing slithered through the cracks outlining the closet door and wore the shadows like a cloak,
waiting for Jason to close his eyes so he could rise tall above the bed and claw his dagger-like fingernails straight into the boy’s once rosy cheeks, squeezing and squelching up fistfuls of bloody ribbons that lay in hot spatter across his straining bone knuckles.

  So you see now that I am everyone’s nightmare. I wonder what I did to earn this title, but my past life is a blur. I do know that I am on a real highway with real people who don’t have a clue as to my presence, not really. But how often do we really notice who sits next to us at a red light, or cruises in the neighboring lane at seventy-plus? Looking would be rather impolite, like staring at someone in an elevator when we all know the rising or falling floor numbers are a mandatory study.

  Plainly, this is my hell I suppose. I am to stay on this road for eternity, and if I veer off of it, or cause some sort of accident that disrupts my journey, innocent people, real people will pay. This is all a private outdoor prison that is secured by my morals, go ahead, go figure, chew on the irony.

  I tried driving off the road and aiming for a tree once. It was one of those humongous oaks that had an L-shape cut out of the branches to let a power line through, and I got close enough to see two knots in the bark and I put my hands in front of my face, just to get beeped at for my trouble. You see, just before impact I was “sent back” to the two-lane thoroughfare I had been driving on all along, and suddenly realized that I had merely drifted a bit over the double yellow. Instinct came into play, and I jerked the wheel to hard right just in time to avoid oncoming traffic, another irony, since I had just tried to kill my already dead self.

  I’ve tried driving off bridges, causing head-on collisions, making dangerous 360 turns in heavy traffic, all failures. Nowadays I pull one of those just to wake myself up, for the fun of it, to remind myself that I was once a living being who wasn’t stuck daydreaming for hours, years, centuries at a time, driving off to nowhere straight into the blue.

  I’ve also caused a multitude of those minor, harmless accidents that get me “real contact,” and I’ve scared the living shit out of more people than I can count. I do it because I have to, because being time-deprived is a torture. I do it to remind myself that even though I am stuck in this endless cycle, I’m still real.

  Do my victims remember me, or am I the shadow of a dream? Am I merely a bad feeling to recover from . . . finally, the explanation for unwarranted depression?

  In what seems like years ago I cut off three high school girls on their way to put in orders for prom dresses. The redhead with the turned-up nose and the three-quarter moon Alice headband saw me as a cop and feared an invasive frisk outside of the car, a hard rape across the front hood, my dick a transformed Billy club going down my leg, pushing a huge, blunt shape against my trousers. The ash blonde with the nose ring and practiced sour-apple pout in the passenger seat saw me as her own father, drunk again, shortsleeved dress shirt drenched with back sweat, shock of gray hair falling across his eye, punching her like a dude again and pulling her out into the brush so she could really get what was coming to her for acting like her mother all these years, and the little cookie in the back, rosebud lips, tiny tits, big teeth, black hair tucked behind her ears, envisioned a hillbilly with a wandering eye, one strap of his overalls unhooked and dangling, taking her by the scruff of the neck and the back of her pants and throwing her into an old van sanded down on its sides to the brown primer splotches, then belching exhaust on the way to his farmhouse basement, then a cage, and some sort of ritual that involved oily puddles, steel clamps, heavy gauge cables, and car batteries.

  Of course, I retreated, but I wonder if they swapped stories, argued about my given appearance, called each other “stupid” for being so paranoid. Did they remember being cut off at all? Was my “presence” known or just “felt”? Or, here you go . . . did I ever stop them in the first place?

  I’ve got to live, and if I am already dead, I need to exist within this realm I have inherited. I can’t ride into the blue anymore, conscious in the unconscious endlessness of a never-ending blur going pleasantly and rapidly nowhere.

  The question is, what do monsters do when they finally come out of the linen closet, or the attic, or from around the corner of the woodshed? When I was a boy, I was terrified that a nameless, hooded man with yellow eyes and a steel grip was to reach up and grab my ankle if I let it off the edge of the mattress. So what if he grabbed the ankle? What if I screamed? What if he leaned in close and breathed death into my face? What would be next? Would he ask me my favorite color? Would we talk about God? Would he tear out my throat with his teeth and put me on a road leading straight to the bosom of blue?

  Time to find out. I’m going to kiss a bumper, cut off a Kia, give someone the finger. Except this time, I’m not going to walk away at the first sight of transformation in the sideview mirror. I’m going to get in the car and tell my victim to drive. Home. Into a life where the streets are named, where engines rest, and where demons, torturers, and rippers are finally granted a timeline, a purpose, a meaning, and an end.

  The Green-Eyed Breath-Vampire with the Cheap Striped Tuxedo and Monocle Tattoo

  June

  They shut him away up there because he’d become a bit of an embarrassment, to tell the truth, and while Jordan didn’t really want to come to terms with all this, he knew deep down she was right. Nowadays, if they didn’t keep an eye on him he got into all kinds of mischief, putting napkins in the toaster, suitcases in the oven, clothes in the bathtub. Last week he’d opened up every conceivable threshold in the place, starting with the entrance door, the mud room storm door, and the screen door on the porch. Then he’d flipped up the lid on the basement meat freezer and opened the fridge doors in addition to all the cupboards and closets and every drawer in the place, that’s right, the ones in the bedroom bureaus, the laundry room utility containers, the garage storage lockers, and the bathroom cabinets. Jenna thought it looked “ultra cool,” as if the house had sneezed, but Ann Marie wasn’t having any of it. She’d been forcefully suggesting getting family support to put him in a rest home even before the whacked-out shit he’d pulled last night, but Jordan hadn’t caved even now. His father had been his idol too long for that noise, and he still saw him as the hunk of granite he’d grown up adoring, the king of the job site, betting man, and barroom philosopher. He saw it in his smile, in the flash that came into his eyes once in a blue moon. What he refused to acknowledge was the disoriented bonebag living in the guest room at the far end of the upstairs hallway, gray hair thinned into that U-shape and greased behind the ears, forehead speckled with liver spots that spread to larger brown ovals along the top of his crown. Seems Jenna was the only one who understood his gibberish lately, and more and more Ann Marie was voicing her displeasure with the fact that an eighty-three-year-old man was so fascinated with an eight-year-old’s dolls and jump ropes and Leggos and water colors.

  Jenna called her grandpa “The Mountain Man,” and sometimes her “Gorton’s Fisherman.” She liked to stroke his frizzy white beard, which had food in it more often than not, and Ann Marie was certainly no fan of that ritual. She’d had so many talks with the kid about “good touch and bad touch” lately, in fact, that Jordan was having trouble just laughing it off. Dad was no child molester. He was a hero, the guy who’d worked construction year round in the elements laying brick and tile, coring holes in concrete when he had to, taking on massive commercial restoration jobs where he’d balance himself out on rickety scaffolding hundreds of feet up in the air grinding out mortar joints, then bouncing on the weekends over at the Red Eye just to put his kids through school. He was the one who taught Jordan how to bury a linebacker on a straight run up the middle, how to avoid getting rinsed at the dealer by throwing the hood up yourself, how to shoulder failure, how to hit back.

  What he wasn’t, at least to Jordan Colella, was this wrinkled, withered old child-thing, always dressing in his red flannel and paint-splattered overalls no matter how many times he or Ann Marie pointed out to him that th
ere was a fresh pile of shirts and trousers there on his bedroom foot locker. He was not that shuffling sack of old meal, rolling and clacking his false teeth in his mouth like bad chewing tobacco, often staring with confused, tea-water eyes when you called to him, eyes that had once been hard flint.

  Sometimes he almost made it back, fooled you. Jordan would be sitting at the table with him, eating breakfast, bitching about how the Phillies couldn’t buy a base hit, or how the new warehouse rat they hired at the tool place kept pulling the wrong caliber shots for the Ramset pins, or how much of a pain in the ass it was to keep up with the virtual orders coming in by the boatload when contractors used to just use a goddamned telephone if they ran out of a box of sleeve anchors, or carbide saw blades, or three-inch coarse threaded drywall screws, or how Frankie (his oldest, freshman at Widener) would only call for money or to complain about all the reading they didn’t prepare him for in his high school classes. And old Aldo would listen to it all, legs crossed, hands folded. He’d say “Uh-huh” once in a while, nod his head in the right places. Then out of the blue he’d ask Jordan in a spidery whine if the Russians were coming, or if the aliens from Planet Krypton had landed and taken over Route 476. And he’d started to refer to Ann Marie as the “scary nurse,” seemingly unaware that she was right there in the pantry looking for a bottle of Clorox, or coming down the hall stairs, or bringing in two bags of groceries, close enough to hear the spitty little stage whispers.

  The real trouble, however, started earlier in the week, when Dr. Shilingher suggested a combination of Aricept and Namenda, claiming it wouldn’t “cure” Aldo, but rather “keep him steady, as if he were in a parking lot for awhile.” This, of course, irritated Ann Marie to no end. Steady? Are you kidding me? But Jordan was hopeful. Maybe it would make a couple of subtle differences, take off the edge. It was just plaque in the brain after all. They could put a man on the moon, right?