The Voices in Our Heads

by Michael Aronovitz

  He wound up hitting the sack at 6:30 p.m., claiming he wasn’t feeling well and that he was trying to beat this bug before Monday. Max ignored this, besides showing a bit of disappointment in not being able to watch a little U.F.C. as they always did together at the end of the weekend, and Kim didn’t notice really, glasses on the end of her nose, knitting, caught up in a difficult section of a brown sweater that hadn’t been going right, asking if he could pick up tempura shrimp from Trader Joe’s on his way home tomorrow.

  Up in the room it was too bright to sleep and too frightening to stay awake. Ben had visions of the police coming to the door, detectives going through all his shit, techies sifting through his computer, looking for one single suspicious download to nail him on. He pictured going in front of Johnson’s board of directors, trying to defend the fact that he had interfered with the private life of a minor, that he’d aided and abetted something horrific.

  When Monday morning finally dawned he was drained, resigned to it, ready to plod into what surely was to be a black sort of nightmare.

  He got to school, put up his pre-class, stuck a Shakespeare on every desk. Kids filtered in, and though they all came from different parts of the city, he thought that if anything strange had happened with Stephen over the weekend, they would have heard.

  He couldn’t detect anything out of the ordinary. They talked about hip-hop, work, basketball, sex, the usual.

  Stephen came in at 8:43. He was smiling.

  And he was wearing his gloves.

  “Yo, Wags is a freak, yo!”

  “Dag Wagsie, you a blade!”

  “Stone cold gay yo!”

  Greg Fisher pounded on the desk in front of him, haw-hawing as if he was going to bust, and everyone was bucking in their chairs, cracking up. Stephen played it to the hilt, swishing across the front of the room, the runway model with a hand on the hip, a pout on the lips. He had on his uniform, no blazer of course, and black gloves with rhinestones on the seams. He was also wearing a black scarf with sparkles littered through the fabric. It was perfect, actually. Ben had forgotten to speak for Stephen to Johnson as he’d promised, and the kid had gotten a one-day free pass while the paperwork went through. And he was dressed like the ultra-fag purposely to flaunt the fact that he was still here, rub Tanner’s nose in it. The get-up was also excellent cover for the gloves, at least for a day, and maybe he’d just keep on wearing them, like a permanent badge of defiance. In the back of Ben’s mind a bit of a warning flare went up. Mrs. Johnson didn’t go for this glam crap, mostly because it made the other students laugh and pound on tables and make sexual slurs, but Stephen was a senior, and they got away with shit like this all the time, and there were other things to marvel at here that took precedence to tell the truth.

  Stephen looked smarter. It was obvious if you were clued in to it, something in the eyes, a sharpness where before there had just been dull silverware. He finally took his seat, stuck his feet up on the desk, and winked.

  Ben felt his chest swell with pride. Relief, anticipation, the whole package. He’d been right to do this. Never a doubt, captain.

  He did his Shakespeare lesson, selling it with even more verve than usual, walking between the rows emphasizing Lady Macbeth’s dark emptiness, the chalice waiting to be filled with the Devil’s darkness, and he had the class in the palm of his hand, all taking notes, all except Stephen of course, why blow his cover, and yes, the kid was focusing on every word as if language itself was forging new rivers and throughways straight to the center of his mind. Marcus was so taken with the lesson, in fact, that he finished twelve minutes early.

  “Get out your notebooks and write at the top ‘Pop Quiz / Journaling.’ I am going to collect these and look at your timed writing. I know, I know, it’s the end of the period, when you graduate I’ll give you all a dollar, all right?”

  That got a laugh or two, and they got out notebooks, ripped out pages. And even though it had nothing to do with Shakespeare, Ben just couldn’t help looking for the “thank you,” the little pat on the back. He was entitled, right? He’d just turned a kid’s life around, given him some hope.

  “Here’s the prompt,” he said. “Write about someone who has influenced you. Keep it real. You may begin.”

  They all bent their heads and got started, and Ben was disappointed that Stephen didn’t join them. Of course he knew that the kid was smart enough to know that showing off a spike in the radar like this might cause his friends to mistake him for the Blair Witch, but Ben couldn’t help it, he wanted to be thrown a bone here. Selfish, yes. But he’d been worried sick all weekend. Seemed a catharsis was in order.

  He caught Stephen’s eye. The kid returned the glance, and gave a slight nod. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. A nod was a nod, after all.

  The bell sounded, and the class dispersed, Stephen waiting for last. On his way out, he brushed past, pulled his hand out of his pocket, and stuffed a wad of folded papers into Ben’s palm. When Marcus opened it, like a loose, shabby book, he saw Stephen’s handwriting, neat yet simplistic, squared corners, controlled curves, all of which lacked the stylistic flair that years of experience would have painted across the wrinkled pages. Yes, it looked like the report had gone through a trash chute, crinkled, mashed, a red juice stain in the bottom corner of the front page, a coffee mark shadowed through the bottom five or so at the left edge. He probably didn’t have a desk to work on, and he’d penned this thing upon his knee outside on the stoop, in the bathroom, on the kitchen counter. At the top it said “Jacques Derrida and the Fallacy of the Center.”

  And the report was brilliant.

  Ben read it three times on his prep, and each run amazed him more than the last. So this was what five times the intelligence of the functionally retarded looked like. Of course, it wasn’t at the level Ben had reached during his two-day stint, but it was admirable, certainly legible, and clearly not stolen from the Internet (for little “Stephenisms” were peppered through the prose), similar to a paper one might get from a freshman at a good state school whose expertise sat more on the side of the brain that celebrated the math gene. And of course there was the urban vernacular. Smart was smart, but you only knew what you’d grown up hearing.

  But some of this stuff was just priceless: his making reference to Derrida’s explanation of secrecy, quoting “The question of the self: who am I not in the sense of who I am but rather who is this that can say who?” and then responding in classic Stephen-tone: “Yeah, like we wear masks and think we got some secret self inside, but there’s always a secret behind the secret. Like we think it’s a good guy that’ll save some old lady getting mauled by a pit bull, but then for no reason we want to go on the zoo balloon. Yeah, maybe the secret self has a smaller secret self and that self has one and on and on. And maybe they get younger and younger deep inside until we see our soul is nothing more than a baby feeding on a tube.”

  And on and on. There were twenty-three pages of this, each more philosophical than the last. It was scary, really. Ben had always disliked Derrida, found him aloof and purposefully vague. Stephen, in his heightened state, thought just like the guy. In the margins.

  The question was how much residue had been left in the silo.

  He looked up, startled. Stephen was standing in front of him.

  “Did I do good, Mr. Marcus?”

  Ben smiled. Even now, a trace of the urban accent had been polished off. It was good magic, all good.

  “It’s miraculous,” Ben said. “Real good, I mean.”

  “I know what miraculous means.”

  “Sorry. My fault.”

  Stephen reached into his pocket.

  “I wrote the journal, Mr. M. I wrote it just now in the bathroom. Will y’all read it? It ain’t as good as the Derrida paper, but there’s still some fumes left over like you said there’d be.”

  He handed Ben the paper. It read,

  “Write about someone who has influenced you. Keep it real.”

  Mr. M. />
  That funny motherfucker

  That is all-ways doing some thing or

  Saying some thing off the wall

  But the transformation of his virgin

  eye’s of seen thing that I have seen

  supported me in time when no one did

  But the loyalty, and kindness suddenly

  Take over me

  Because I am grateful for having

  Him in my life

  He help me see things in writing that

  I have not thought I can see

  The combination of him and my life

  Is creating a meaning for living

  The consumption of my error and

  Mistakes make me try harder

  If I was not reading or writing for

  Him I’ll be in the hood

  He make me try harder when I give

  Up

  Mr. M. to me is like my older-brother

  That never fucked me over

  Being in his class give me the

  Satisfaction of happiness in my dark

  Heart, and give me the motivation to go on in life.

  A lump formed in Ben’s throat and his eyes welled up. Those last five lines, God, they were killer. He fought it a bit. You weren’t supposed to cry in front of your students, he’d read that somewhere. He looked up, about to mumble a sheepish “thanks,” and he noticed something was different. Stephen had moved closer, right to the edge of the other side of the desk, and there was more. In a flash Ben was reminded of that old card trick where the guy dealt them down in a vertical line, like dominoes on top of one another, and while you were distracted, turning up the front one for a look-see, he was palming a card. It felt exactly like that, in fact, but the distraction had been the poem.

  And Stephen wasn’t palming any card. He had taken off his gloves.

  He reached across the table, grabbed both sides of Ben’s head, and rubbed off the tears at the outer corners of both eyes with his thumbs. Then he jumped back a few steps and reached into his pocket.

  He pulled out the half-pill with Ben’s tooth grooves running down its center.

  It took a full second for it to compute.

  “So you’ve always been literate,” Ben gasped. He was trying not to hyperventilate, and not quite succeeding.

  “Of course,” Stephen said. “But in my neighborhood, you get beat up for having a brain. And with Daddy gone and Mommy locked up, I got no one to protect me.”

  He raised the pill to his lips.

  “No!” Ben said. “Please, God, no!”

  “You didn’t even come close to beating these first thirty seconds, Marcus. Still sitting behind that desk, thinking the world is going to somehow take care of you. Snooze, you lose.”

  He put the pill in his mouth, and swallowed it whole. A convulsion shook him. Another, and then there was a nearly imperceptible crackling sound, like butter in a hot skillet. It was Stephen’s eyes, filling with blood beneath their surfaces. They went ruby red, and he looked off to the side a bit, fingers splayed out. His voice was velvety, and there was an echo behind it.

  “Oh, yes. This will be easier than I had imagined.”

  “Stephen!”

  He slowly turned and observed Ben Marcus as if he were a spec of dust.

  “Yes, Marcus. You have your new thirty seconds. Also your last. What do you want to know before you become a part of the new history?”

  Ben was crying again, heavier, all wet breath and dread.

  “Why me?”

  “Because you are the only one who knows.”

  “So why didn’t you kill me Friday afternoon?”

  Stephen smiled softly.

  “No witnesses. Everyone was gone.”

  “I don’t get it. You want to take the blame for my murder? You’ll go to jail.”

  “Exactly. Where else do you think I can so quickly amass an army?”

  Ben slammed the table with his fists, and spittle flew out of his mouth when he spoke.

  “An army? I gave you life, a chance, what do you need an army for, goddammit?”

  Stephen threw back his head and laughed. Then he raised his arms, palms up, fingers aimed at the east and west walls. To Ben’s horror, Stephen wasn’t just making his voice echo and double like a god, he was also levitating about an inch off the floor. His arms were still raised and he lowered his deep red gaze down to Ben.

  “I need an army, Mr. Marcus, to take on this.” He slowly looked side to side. “This broken, damaged lie, this prison in poor disguise, the Tanners of the world, the Marcuses.”

  Ben pounded the table again, this time so hard the bottom of his body reacted with it, bringing his knees crashing against the bottom of the metal drawer.

  “You lump me in with the Tanners? What the fuck, Stephen, how dare you!”

  Stephen stopped levitating, and his voice lost its double, making his words that much more venomous.

  “How dare I? You once gave a lesson to us on slavery, trying to get us riled up with the transparent purpose of rallying us behind you for a cheap liberal’s moment with your claim that it was amazing the white masters could allow their own children to be breast-fed by black mammies only then to beat those same women that very evening. But then you have the brazen audacity to simultaneously say to our faces without batting an eye, to our faces, that you moved to a suburb so Max could get a better education. You teach in the ’hood, Mr. Marcus, taking black money to reinforce an uneven distribution of knowledge only the wealthy can benefit from. Charter school to suburb, breast milk to whip. Or is the analogy too difficult for you to fathom?”

  Ben spoke through his teeth.

  “So you’re calling me a racist?”

  “No, Marcus, I’m calling you ‘dead’ in about ten more seconds.”

  “But why this way? Why not tear open my chest to get to my body fluids? Rip out my fucking heart?”

  Stephen laughed again.

  “How pedestrian of you. The Human Candle is much more effective in this paradigm, and you should know that. It looks a lot more religious.”

  Ben reached out both his hands.

  “But you’ll die, Stephen.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “In one year. Really, it’s almost too long a time period for what must be accomplished, but an extra month or so of human sacrifice won’t damage the vision.” He grinned an accordion of teeth under those slanted red eyes. “Oh, Marcus. I don’t think you could even begin to imagine how many I’m willing to kill. The tally will be staggering, my death the final stanza. It’s the only effective way to be remembered. Goodbye, Mr. Marcus.”

  The new Stephen Wagner put his palm up next to his cheek like a stop sign and brought the fingers down in a little one-two, bye-bye.

  A stink rose into the air, burning hair and torched skin, bad rubber mixed with candied pork, and the pain was immeasurable. Ben pressed both hands to the top of his scalp, and liquefied skin squelched and bubbled up around his fingers, dripping down over his wrists in steaming rivulets. Both ears curled down, scrolling to the jaw in little ringlet spirals as if some invisible jackknife was stripping off tree bark, and Stephen started jumping up and down, in his ghetto voice, yelling at the top of his lungs, “I kilt ’im, I gots ’im, mutherfucker, mutherfucker, ha, ha!” and students poured in from the hallway and the law academy next door, and they made a loose ring at the edges of the room, hands up at their mouths in disbelief, and they watched Stephen Wagner jumping up and down flicking on and off the lighter he’d brought out of his pocket.

  Ben’s elbows had steam-jelled, then hardened to solidified pools of human wax, locking him in place, nodules and drip runners spread and dried in rough circles on the desk surrounding the contact points, and his terrified gaze sagged inward. When the lower rims gave, his left eyeball erupted in a burst of meaty stringy fluid that sprayed onto the desk, beading and hardening, the right orb fusing and dissolving to a bloody tar, oozing sidesaddle along the deteriorating cheek sagging down in a gradation of ma
rbled ridges.

  And when the run-off had worked its way down to the mouth area, Ben’s jowls folding, lips drawn down in a clownish pout, nose disintegrating and swimming off to both sides, Stephen brought his dance closer to his victim, not for the sake of intimidation, but rather, to fit better in the “shot.” He danced and whooped and hooted and howled, flicking the lighter on and off as proof of the first miracle of the new age: the teacher who melted right before your eyes, the candle that burned with no visible flames.

  None of the students jumped in. None of them thought to grab a hoodie off a hook and throw it over Ben’s head, get water, call an administrator.

  But five of them got it on their cell phones.

  Acknowledgments

  “The Falcon,” first published in Kaleidotrope, Winter Issue 2012 (www.kaleidotrope.net/archives/winter-2012/the-falcon-by-michael-aronovitz/).

  “The Echo,” first published in Nameless (Spring 2013).

  “The Green-Eyed Breath Vampire with the Cheap Striped Tuxedo and Monocle Tattoo,” first published in Polluto Magazine, Witchfinders vs. the Evil Red Issue (Dog Horn Publishing, 2012).

  “The Puddles,” first published in Weird Fiction Review #1 (Fall 2010) as “Puddles”.

  “The Rain Barrel,” previously unpublished.

  “Prequel,” previously unpublished.

  “The Sculptor,” first published in Weird Fiction Review #2 (Fall 2011).

  “The Gravekeeper,” first published in Schlock Webzine, 30 January 2013 (as “Grave Talk”) (www.schlock.co.uk/pb/wp_5f6591f1/wp_5f6591f1.html).