The Humanity of Monsters

by Nathan Ballingrud

  no

  in the indigo hour before dawn, in that fleeting sliver of light when i can catch my reflection in glass / silver / stone, i stare at the wide black gash of my mouth, now forever shut. cruel Prince, to give ur loved ones only half the knowledge, all the pain. beneath the thick iron stitches, swollen skin, bright gold stargodfire rests beneath my tongue, warm and alive. everything u ever were, everything u will ever be. everything i ever—

  and the pain comes not blood or flesh or bone it rolls over me and the knowledge o sweet Prince the knowledge the burden of Time, the horrible skip of my heart. i have u have all of u possess u tight and neat and IT IS NOTHING. NOTHING. nothing. and ur hand, so small, at the small of my back. what i would give. what i would give. and i cannot swallow cannot breathe. it is all that is left.

  and in the indigo hour before dawn, after the quakes have subsided, i slipped between the rough sheets, curled by ur side. my hand so large against ur belly. ur hip warmed my cock, and my breath dampened ur breasts. and when i left, when morning chased me away, they found u bruised and beaten, ribs cracked, acid teardrops festering in the hollows of ur neck, skin dissolving like sand in the hissing waves.

  o my human star. one second. one moment. one word. i have all of you and nothing, except one moment one word. i would give anything. i would give everything, to bring it back.

  everything.

  so.

  Date Unknown

  the last lost day—(ocean shores, washington, 1975)

  and ur little body lay crumpled in pools of water, cold ocean-old pools of salt and sand and rust. the groan and crack of decaying metal all around, hiss of the waves rolling in with winds and night, and above u, the jagged hole still weeping with ur blood. beyond: endless darkening skies, and nothing at all. pain at one shoulder and fear at the other, clarion-calling each other like long-lost lovers, and the waters rising ever so higher, hitching up ur broken bones, ur flowered dress, ur slender shivering thighs. screams pure and high as starlight shot through the air, never breaching the hold, falling back down all around the cavernous waste.

  u closed ur eyes. and the waves rushed and thumped against the wreck like the beating of some great unseen heart, and the waters lapped and caressed ur waist, slid across ur small breasts, lifting u up and down. and the cold grew in power and nimble fingers of water pushed the hair from ur forehead and eyes and black winged summer night closed in, around, down, furnace-warm but not enough to keep away the cold. and hard uncaring, unloving ocean covered ur lips, slid forked rivulets of brine into ur mouth, down ur throat and u breathed it in, and the world and the waves and the wind grew to pinpoint, ur body a million years away, and all that was left of the universe was nothing—/

  /—was a kiss: a bright gold fuse of stargodfire unfurling from a single unstitched whispered word coiling into ur heart, an explosion of wings unfurling and lifting up, hot breath against ur face, warmth thunderclapping through ur blood and bones, and the roar of the waves thrusting against the beach, the hand at the small of ur back, a lover’s touch at ur face as u opened ur eyes, standing alive and whole on the beach before the Catala, rusting high and dry above the grassy dunes.

  and u stood shivering hound-like, dripping wet hand at heart, under the white gulls’ cries, under the scudding clouds and the lowering sun, stood before the Catala, the ship with the hidden treasure, the ship u had never set foot on—/—fallen on bled on died. Stood until the nerves bit and prickled in ur legs, and the shadows lengthened and reached u, brushing against ur toes / the small of ur back / the tender hollow of ur neck / the translucent flesh of ur ear, all set afire by unseen whispers warning u away, and: u flew, a girl-shaped human star shooting up the long flat dunes through the grass and over the naked driftwood piles, racing away the miles of stone cold coast until u seemed as small and unreachable as the far-off circling gulls, never stopping, never looking back through all the joyful goldenfused years of ur life at the broken wreck back on the beach, the broken black-hulled monster rusting away, un-stitching un-working un-working, repairing all the broken moments until Time endless Time spiraling Time swept it all away, scrubbed it down to clean pure sand upon which my love, my memory, had no reach or purchase, until all that remained of the moment was U, and the Glorious Word.

  do u remember now?

  you do not.

  i do.

  you go where it takes you

  nathan ballingrud

  He did not look like a man who would change her life. He was big, roped with muscles from working on offshore oil rigs, and tending to fat. His face was broad and inoffensively ugly, as though he had spent a lifetime taking blows and delivering them. He wore a brown raincoat against the light morning drizzle and against the threat of something more powerful held in abeyance. He breathed heavily, moved slowly, found a booth by the window overlooking the water, and collapsed into it. He picked up a syrup-smeared menu and studied it with his whole attention, like a student deciphering Middle English. He was like every man who ever walked into that diner. He did not look like a beginning or an end.

  That day, the Gulf of Mexico and all the earth was blue and still. The little town of Port Fourchon clung like a barnacle to Louisiana’s southern coast, and behind it the water stretched into the distance for as many miles as the eye could hold. Hidden by distance were the oil rigs and the workers who supplied the town with its economy. At night she could see their lights, ringing the horizon like candles in a vestibule. Toni’s morning shift was nearing its end; the dining area was nearly empty. She liked to spend those slow hours out on the diner’s balcony, overlooking the water.

  Her thoughts were troubled by the phone call she had received that morning. Gwen, her three-year-old daughter, was offering increasing resistance to the male staffers at the Daylight Daycare, resorting lately to biting them or kicking them in the ribs when they knelt to calm her. Only days before, Toni had been waylaid there by a lurking social worker who talked to her in a gentle saccharine voice, who touched her hand maddeningly and said, “No one is judging you; we just want to help.” The social worker had mentioned the word “psychologist” and asked about their home life. Toni had been embarrassed and enraged, and was only able to conclude the interview with a mumbled promise to schedule another one soon. That her daughter was already displaying such grievous signs of social ineptitude stunned Toni, left her feeling hopeless and betrayed.

  It also made her think about Donny again, who had abandoned her years ago to move to New Orleans, leaving her a single mother at twenty-three. She wished death on him that morning, staring over the railing at the unrelenting progression of waves. She willed it along the miles and into his heart.

  “You know what you want?” she asked.

  “Um . . . just coffee.” He looked at her breasts and then at her eyes.

  “Cream and sugar?”

  “No thanks. Just coffee.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  The only other customer in the diner was Crazy Claude by the door, speaking conversationally to a cooling plate of scrambled eggs and listening to his radio through his earphones. A tinny roar leaked out around his ears. Pedro, the short order cook, lounged behind the counter, his big round body encased in layers of soiled white clothing, enthralled by a guitar magazine which he had spread out by the cash register. The kitchen slumbered behind him, exuding a thick fug of onions and burnt frying oil. It would stay mostly dormant until the middle of the week, when the shifts would change on the rigs, and tides of men would ebb and flow through the small town.

  So when she brought the coffee back to the man, she thought nothing of it when he asked her to join him. She fetched herself a cup of coffee as well and then sat across from him in the booth, grateful to transfer the weight from her feet.

  “You ain’t got no nametag,” he said.

  “Oh . . . I guess I lost it somewhere. My name’s Toni.”

  “That’s rea
l pretty.”

  She gave a quick derisive laugh. “The hell it is. It’s short for Antoinette.”

  He held out his hand and said, “I’m Alex.”

  She took it and they shook. “You work offshore, Alex?”

  “Some. I ain’t been out there for a while, though.” He smiled and gazed into the murk of his coffee. “I’ve been doing a lot of driving around.”

  Toni shook loose a cigarette from her pack and lit it. She lied and said, “Sounds exciting.”

  “I don’t guess it is, though. But I bet this place could be, sometimes. I bet you see all kinds of people come through here.”

  “Well . . . I guess so.”

  “How long you been here?”

  “About three years.”

  “You like it?”

  A flare of anger. “Yeah, Alex, I fucking love it. Who wouldn’t?”

  “Oh, hey, all right.” He held up his hands. “I’m sorry.”

  She shook her head. “No. I’m sorry. I just got a lot on my mind today I guess. This place is fine.”

  He cocked a half smile. “So why don’t you come out with me after work? Maybe I can help distract you.” His thick hands were on the table between them. They looked like they could break rocks.

  Toni smiled at him. “You known me for what. Five minutes?”

  “What can I say. I’m an impulsive guy. Caution to the wind!” He drained his cup in two swallows, as though to illustrate his recklessness.

  “Well, let me go get you some more coffee, Danger Man.” She patted his hand as she rose.

  It was reckless impulse that brought Donny back to her, briefly, just over a year ago. After a series of phone calls that progressed from petulant to playful to newly curious, he drove back down to Port Fourchon in his disintegrating blue Pinto one Friday afternoon to spend a weekend with them. It was nice at first, though there was no talk of what might happen after Sunday.

  Gwen had just started going to daycare. Stunned by the vertiginous growth of the world, she was beset by huge emotions; varieties of rage passed through her little body like weather systems, and no amount of coddling from Toni would settle her.

  Although he wouldn’t admit it, Toni knew Donny was curious about the baby, that his vanity was satisfied by the knowledge that she would grow to reflect many of his own features and behaviors.

  But Gwen refused to participate in generating any kind of mystique that might keep him landed here, revealing herself instead as what Toni knew her to be: a pink, pudgy little assemblage of flesh and ferocity that giggled or raved seemingly without discrimination, that walked without grace and appeared to lack any qualities of beauty or intelligence whatsoever.

  But the sex with Donny was as good as it had ever been, and he didn’t seem to mind the baby too much. When he talked about calling in sick to work on Monday, she began to hope for something lasting.

  Early Sunday afternoon, they decided to put Gwen to bed early and free up the evening for themselves. First she had to have a bath, and Donny assumed that responsibility with the air of a man handling nitroglycerin. He filled the tub with eight inches of water and plunked her in, then sat back and stared as, with furrowed brow, she went about the serious business of dropping the shampoo bottles into the water with her. Toni sat on the toilet seat behind him, and it occurred to her that this was her family. She felt buoyant, sated.

  Then Gwen rose abruptly from the water and clapped her hands joyously. “Two! Two poops! One, two!”

  Aghast, Toni saw two little turds sitting on the bottom of the tub, rolling slightly in the currents generated by Gwen’s capering feet. Donny’s hand shot out and cuffed his daughter on the side of her head. She fell against the wall and bounced into the water with a terrific splash. And then she screamed: the most godawful sound Toni had ever heard in her life.

  Toni stared at him, agape. She could not summon the will to move. The baby, sitting on her butt in the soiled water, filled the tiny bathroom with a sound like a bomb siren, and she just wanted her to shut up, shut up, just shut the fuck up.

  “Shut up, goddamnit! Shut up!”

  Donny looked at her, his face an unreadable mess of confused emotion; he got to his feet and pushed roughly past her. Soon she heard the sound of a door closing. His car started up, and he was gone. She stared at her stricken daughter and tried to quiet the sudden stampeding fury.

  She refilled Alex’s coffee and sat down with him, leaving the pot on the table. She retrieved her cigarette from the ashtray only to discover that it has expired in her absence. “Well, shit,” she said.

  Alex nodded agreeably. “I’m on the run,” he said.

  “What?”

  “It’s true. I’m on the run. I stole a car.”

  Alarmed, Toni looked out the window, but the parking lot was on the other side of the diner. All she could see from here was the Gulf.

  “Why are you telling me this? I don’t want to know this.”

  “It’s a station wagon. I can’t believe it even runs anymore. I was in Morgan City, and I had to get out fast. The car was right there. I took it.”

  He had a manic look in his eye, and although he was smiling, his movements seemed agitated; his fingers tapped the table, the cords in his hands standing out like pipe. She felt a growing disquiet coupled with a mounting excitement. He was dangerous, this man. He was a falling hammer.

  “I don’t think that guy over there likes me,” he said.

  “What?” She turned and saw Crazy Claude in stasis, staring at Alex. His jaw was cantilevered in mid-chew. “That’s just Claude,” she said. “He’s all right.”

  Alex was still smiling, but it had taken on a different character, one she couldn’t place and which set loose a strange, giddy feeling inside her. “No, I think it’s me. He keeps looking over here.”

  “Really, Claude’s okay. He’s harmless as a kitten.”

  “I want to show you something.” Alex reached inside his raincoat, and for a moment Toni thought he was going to pull out a gun and start shooting. She felt no inclination to move, though; she waited for what would come. Instead, he withdrew a crumpled Panama hat. It had been considerably crushed to fit into his pocket, and once freed it began to unfold itself, like something blooming.

  She looked at it. “It’s a hat,” she said.

  He stared at it like he expected it to lurch across the table with some hideous agenda. “That’s an object of terrible power,” he said.

  “Alex—it’s a hat. It’s a thing you put on your head.”

  “It belongs to the man I stole the car from. Here,” he said, pushing it across to her. “Put it on.”

  She did. She was growing tired of the serious turn he seemed to have taken and decided to be a little playful. She turned her chin to her shoulder and pouted her lips, looking at him out of the corner of her eye, like she thought a model might.

  He smiled. “Who are you?”

  “I’m a supermodel.”

  “What’s your name? Where are you from?”

  She affected a light, breathy voice. “My name is Violet, I’m from L.A., and I’m strutting down a catwalk wearing this hat and nothing else. Everybody loves me and is taking my picture.”

  They laughed, and he was leaning over the table at her. She could see the tip of his tongue between his teeth. He just watched her for a second. “See? It’s powerful. You can be anybody.”

  She gave the hat back.

  “You know,” Alex said, “the guy I stole the car from was something of a thief himself, it turns out. You should see what he left in there.”

  “Why don’t you show me?”

  He smiled again, and glanced at the nearly empty diner. “Now?”

  “No. In half an hour. When I get off work.”

  “But it’s all packed up. I don’t let that stuff just fly around loose.”


  “Then you can show me at my place.”

  And so it was decided. She got up and went about preparing for the next shift, which consisted of restocking a few ketchup packets and starting a fresh pot of coffee. She refilled Crazy Claude’s cup and gave him another ten packets of sugar, all of which he methodically opened and dumped into his drink. When her relief arrived, Toni hung her apron by the waitress station and collected Alex on her way to the door.

  “We have to stop by the daycare and pick up my kid,” she said.

  If this news fazed him, he didn’t show it.

  As they passed Claude’s table they heard a distant, raucous sound coming from his earphones.

  Alex curled his lip. “Idiot. How does he hear himself think?”

  “He doesn’t. That’s the point. He hears voices in his head. He plays the radio loud so he can drown them out.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Nope.”

  Alex stopped and turned around, regarding the back of Claude’s head with renewed interest. “How many people does he have in there?”

  “I never asked.”

  “Well, holy shit.”

  Outside, the sun was setting, the day beginning to cool down. The rain had stopped at some point, and the world glowed with a bright, wet sheen. They decided that he would follow her in his car. It was a rusty old battle wagon from the Seventies; several boxes were piled in the back. She paid them no attention.

  She knew, when they stepped into her little apartment, that they would wind up making love, and she found herself wondering what it would be like. She watched him move, noted the graceful articulation of his body, the careful restraint he displayed in her living room, which was filled with fragile things. She saw the skin beneath his clothing, watched it stretch and move.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, touching the place between his shoulder blades. “You won’t break nothing.”

  About Gwen there was more doubt. Unleashed like a darting fish into the apartment, she was gone with a bright squeal, away from the strange new man around whom she had been so quiet and doleful, into the dark grottoes of her home.