by Ime Atakpa
Perhaps arrogance compelled me to believe I could obviate the future, and now I pay the price in blood and sweat needlessly shed. All for what? For new beginnings destined never to end. For days that pass me by like shadows, featureless and indistinguishable from each other. It’s little comfort to topple furniture or deliver a spectral shout if all my efforts amount to naught but Mother in a frenzy, Father in a rush to console her.
Not even a week ago, he suggested she seek external help for her dilemma. “Profound psychological issues,” he called them, amidst a rant so bloated with medical jargon that even those professionals would require the layman’s rendition.
Every day since then, she has occupied the couch listlessly, a woman devoid of the joys which bring meaning to life.
“Mother.” Tendrils reach through the barrier to deliver my message. She jumps at the sound, covers her ears.
“I’m not listening. Nope. No one’s there. Nothing to not listen to.” She folds her ears over themselves and presses them tight. “Can’t hear you. Ha—” She leaps up to pace around her room. “Nothing to hear.”
So long ago, I thought it possible that a man could transcend the laws of nature. I’d laugh if I could, but the sound refuses me. I hear it myself in my bubble of solitude, but the sound won’t reach them. Anguish silences that desire. Whatever otherworldly forces separate me so invariably from the ones I love, I should rage against. If anguish knew a form, knew a body, how would it assume itself except in my image?
“Mother,” I call again. She jumps once more but refuses to acknowledge me. Instead, she increases the pressure against her ears and bends her head inwards toward her chest. She rocks back and forth just like that, with her arms squeezing tightly against her chest; her breasts, in turn, fasten her chin between them.
Hours pass, as do days and weeks, but only months inform the passage of anything substantial. Temperatures shift noticeably, reminding me that a divine order continues to hold the world in place. The changing seasons are little miracles, proof that the coldness of this house shall not last forever. Outside these walls are marvels unseen, marvels of the natural world from which we are protected, levied against the stasis of emotion here. Melancholia—that damnable goddess—lives in the plaster, in the carpet, in the furniture; she breeds with herself, sending forth spores to further contaminate once-peaceful lives.
I cease my interventions, and Mother loosens her grip on herself. Even so, the remnants of my haunting persist in symptoms. She shudders often, not for cold but for anxiety. She sits on the couch as she often does, curled in her protective position.
I understand now that peace can never return to this place, not so long as I exist apart from it. Darkness has penetrated too deeply into the foundations of this home for its influence to be subverted or forced into submission. And the wild fevers that taint both my mother and father cannot be tamed.
Outside, time continues along its path, stimulates the cycle of day and night, ignoring entirely the stagnation here. It continues, quite foolishly, to suggest to me the inevitability of change. Or perhaps it’s mocking me. Or maybe neither. Truth or illusion, what does it matter? What did it ever matter?
Sunday afternoon. Mother sits on the floor in the foyer. She assumes her usual position, pulling her arms toward her center, pushing her breasts closer together, and drawing a heavy breath as she does so. Her feet slide against the hardwood floor, pointing inwards toward one another, and her chin falls between the crevasse formed by her chest. One arm curves across her torso, supporting the weight of her freely hanging breasts; the hand at its end grips at her right shoulder, thumb beneath her collar, pressing deeply against the flesh there. A deep breath. “Listen,” she says. An exhale. “Silence.”
-XIII-
Seventh Birthday
Mother lies back, letting the television drown out Father’s voice. It’s Friday night. I know this only because they spend it together on the couch. It’s gotten warmer, so they forego the usual snuggling beneath blankets. They instead sit placidly, unassuming. Only on Fridays do they make a conscious effort to come together and enjoy one another’s company. Slivers of moonlight line the floor and furniture through cracks in the blinds. Dressed in all black save a white undershirt, Father appears like a mime; and I imagine he sounds that way to Mother whose eyes stare at the television without any hint of registration.
“You never talk about it. I need to talk about it.” Father tells her again and again how she can’t make him forget what it was like to lose his only son. And I, by the dinner table so as to be reasonably removed from their angst, cannot agree with him, insofar as she hasn’t forgotten, not exactly. She chooses not to remember for her sanity. He demanded a cure for her. This is her solution.
Mother continues to stare vacantly at the television. It’s a sharpened knife plunged deep into my father’s pride.
“He was different.”
That word again. Again from Father. Different. I move carefully between them. Mother maintains her stonewall.
“He was a normal boy. He wasn’t talking like ‘whilst’ and ‘ere’ and ‘betwixt.’ He was normal for—for fuck’s sake—he was normal.” Father stands to begin pacing the room. “Something, it…something happened. You know it. It’s connected. There’s no way you can’t see that. Would you—come on, dammit, talk to me!”
Her hand twitches on the edge of the couch.
Father brings his pacing to a halt immediately between Mother and the television. “Talk to me. Please. We’ve lost enough. I need you, Lyn.”
“We have,” she offers.
“Well, what is it then? I’ve been quiet, I’ve taken it in stride. Brooklyn, I’ve loved you. And I’ve never asked anything about it because you obviously, well, it’s just obvious it hurts you to think about it. But this is my son too. I need to know.” Her eyes pierce his body, seeing nothing of it, moving through it to continue watching what it obstructs.
“It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.”
“It is.”
Father turns, wailing, and lashes out. His palm slams into the center of the old box, toppling over the image of a newscaster pointing animatedly at things that aren’t really there. He disposes himself over the remains of his destruction. Already splintered on several points on the chassis, the device buckles completely under the weight of his foot. We’re treated to a series of cracks, little bones snapping into smaller pieces, and the rest of the structure becoming appropriately weaker. Subsequent strikes reduce the television into a mess of parts.
Mother hasn’t moved, neither her body nor her gaze. Meanwhile, Father stands huffing over his destruction. “It’s not nothing,” he insists once more between furious breaths.
“What do you want me to say?”
His panting lightens.
“I didn’t. I didn’t know any of this. That’s…” Her head cranes toward the ground. “He’s our son we raised together. But I think I’m tired of believing there’s still something left to care about.”
Father steps away from the sharp pieces of plastic protruding from the television. “You were the one, Lyn. All this time, it was you.”
“It was the person you thought I was. It’s been too long since then.”
“Not long enough that I have to stop believing that person is still there, somewhere.”
“You never believed. You never cared.”
“I always cared about you.”
“About Hubert?”
He looks around the room incredulously, appalled to have his concern for me called into question. “Always. Always.”
Finally, she stirs. Only her eyes, but they move to catch Father’s. “We’ve been like this for too long, Dylan. We need to do something.”
“The police…”
“No, we need to do something. Us.”
“What’s to be done?”
“I don’t know.”
There’s a tear in Father’s light blue jeans. Blood coats the little b
it of tanned skin visible through the tear, and the area surrounding it darkens with his blood. He’s bled enough.
Mother sighs deeply and gestures for Father to come closer. He does as she instructs, taking a seat next to her on the couch. There’s a blanket resting on the arm of the couch that she takes and throws over the remnants of the television. His back arches in a pained sort of way just before he falls intimately on his side, head resting on Mother’s legs. “You can ask me,” she says.
“Why did he act so differently? You told me about the sleepwalking, I expected that. But it was like his personality changed too.” He scoffs. “How could I care? For twelve years, he never felt like my son. Not the one we taught to walk and talk.”
Mother says nothing. Her hand reaches for Father’s skull. It strokes through the messy hair, reinstating order in that wilderness. His breathing seems to lighten.
“And I remember after we got married, it was almost the same.”
“Dylan...”
“No, I know you don’t want to talk about it, but I’ve felt like such an outsider. Because you changed. Everything about you changed. And then Hubert changed and I couldn’t help but to think it had something to do with the way you did. You know? Maybe it was all connected, and I know there’s something you’re not telling me. For fuck’s sake—” His voice lowers. “Hell, Lyn, who else could give me an answer? But you never wanted to talk about it.”
“It made you so sad.”
“Of course it did.” There’s hostility in his voice now, and the rising of his chest becomes more pronounced. “We were so alike. And then we weren’t. I didn’t know who I married.”
“I always loved you.”
Father shifts on the couch, pressing his head into its back. “I know,” comes his muffled response.
“Don’t cry.” The movement of her hand through his hair slows. She ceases combing her fingers through his hair and begins massaging his scalp. A bead forms in the corner of her eye. She raises her free hand to wipe away the tear but halts halfway. Instead of brushing it away, she runs the hand through her own hair and blinks hard. The tears roll down her reddening cheeks, down to her chin, and drip onto the couch, right beside a smear of blood left where Father’s leg rubbed against it. “I don’t know what it is. I can’t explain. Something changes. I felt it on my seventh birthday. I guess I eventually just got used to it being there. By the time I met you, I don’t think I remembered who I was before. But this is me, Dylan. I promise.”
“What about Hubert?”
“Hubert,” she laughs, head leaned back, grinning wildly. “I see myself in him. The part of me before I turned twenty-five. I remember how much I loved being outside. I still love it, but not as much. But when I was still having my episodes, I loved it. I thought Hubert would love it too.”
“He’s not our Hubert, is he?” Father’s head emerges from the couch. Without much care for gentleness, he pulls away from Mother’s reach and sits fully up, wiping away residual tears with an ineffectual wrist. “Is he?”
“No, I don’t think that he is.” Mother laughs again, this time without much emotion at all, as though she’d just then realized something she’d known all along. For me, the sensations strike with much more authority.
To learn that what you are is false, the implanted remnants of a genetic disorder…how does one handle such news? Maybe you don’t. Perhaps you’re not meant to.
Father rises now and walks over to the shattered television. “So you’ve known all along that you haven’t been hearing his voice?” He begins a systematic separation of the large, blunt pieces from the smaller, sharper ones.
“I do hear his voice sometimes.”
Something shifts in the air around us. A modicum of understanding shifts between us all. It connects each of us to the center of this tragedy, and I feel such a force that I cannot ignore it. They’ve set the stage for one final trial.
“Mother,” I call out, directing the tendrils to translate my voice into a whisper. No sooner do I accomplish this than does she smile knowingly.
“Like now. I heard it now.”
A brief pause in the sorting of shattered plastic. “Just now?”
“Mhm. It’s the same voice. Half of it Hubert’s, half of it the other one.”
“You mean? What do you mean by that?”
“It has a voice. It’s a really sad voice, like an undertone. It used to be like mine except a pitch higher. Now it’s Hubert’s.”
“But a pitch lower.”
“Yeah.” Her smile fades. “I keep thinking, maybe he’s really back, trying to tell us something. What happened to him, where he is, what we’re supposed to do.”
“I can’t hear anything.”
“I know.”
“Why can’t I hear it?”
Mother only shrugs.
Father sighs. “There’s a lot we don’t know.” He rises. Mother and I quietly watch him fetch a dustpan from the garage. He returns bearing a neutral expression and sweeps up the plastic shards with an incredulous air of optimism about him, as though nothing of the prior exchange registered with him. Or perhaps he simply refused to accept the absurdity of it all.
Even as a non-corporeal person, I hardly believe the explanations Mother provides for our current state of affairs. Surely, she cannot truly believe that the same forces responsible for imparting this curse upon us also possess the power to augment our personalities. Any person with even a slight sense of self-awareness would feel if any such change occurred. And so I probe my mind for memories of myself as a seven-year-old. But I needn’t think long to reach the only reasonable conclusion. I hardly remember what I was like at thirteen, let alone seven.
“Dylan? Am I too stubborn?”
So who am I now?
“I don’t blame you for not wanting to call the police. It’s not like he has birth records.”
What am I?
“After the first few days, I should have done more. Then at least we’d have his body.”
What am I supposed to do?
“And then what? They wouldn’t even be able to identify him properly. You wanted him away from all that, and that’s what we did. I didn’t understand why you wanted it that way, but I’ve always supported you.”
Who exactly am I?
“It’s almost been a year. There’s nothing left to identify. But I—Dylan, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” He kisses her forehead. “Hey? Do you remember what I told you the day I proposed?”
“I do.”
“Exactly. So there’s nothing to apologize for. I’ll be here for you.”
Then they fall into a peace I’ve not seen in all the months since this affliction stole me from them. Somehow, they seem happy. I’m all that remains of wretchedness here, probing myself for more methods by which to escape from this.
“He’s not coming back,” Mother says.
Father kisses her once more. “It’s okay if you want to believe, if that makes it easier. People have come back after longer than this.”
“Oh?” A giggle slips from her stern lips. “Come back from what? Dea—” Her next giggle warps halfway through completion into a sob. “He’s gone, Dylan. We both…we…we…” Try as she might, she cannot bring herself to finish the sentence. Another sob thwarts every attempt at giving closure to the matter; I root for her sobs to overtake her, censor the harshness of those words. And for a long while they do, Father standing next to the television, watching her with that same hopeful vibe emanating from him. He lets her cry for as long as she needs and longer, and when she manages to stifle the sniffles and tears and wheezing, he takes her into his arms, pulls her head against his chest, and whispers the words that destroy me.
“I know.”
A clap of thunder roars outside. I know what I have become.
-XIV-
Ghost Wounds
Another awakening. Light. Color. Bedpost. The mirror that doesn’t reflect. Gray hairs of the carpet. Cosmological bedsheets.
Outside my window, leaves dance on a light breeze. The sun peeks out from behind bleached clouds. And somewhere in the world, children run and play alongside their parents. That’s all it takes to remind me.
I’ve waited through the cold months of winter and watched the spring leaves sprout from the stems of perennials. And now I’ve come full circle, nearly a year since this affliction first took hold. Gone is the cold and gone are the little buds, fresh leaves and flowers having replaced them. Summer again sneaks around the corner. The sprouts of last season bear their truest colors, their brightest. They enshrine me in their splendor, mocking me with every day they continue to stand upright.
These last months have forced an unimaginable change in me. I clung to the dim hope that I might master my curse and turn it against itself, but now I’ve accepted the futility of that endeavor just as my parents have come to accept the futility of their own hopes.
I watched them endure that storm wrought of hope as best they could, and when time rejected their dedication to happiness, they were stripped of their skin and shown to one another. And neither knew quite what it was that looked back at them. Only a name, only a memory of days long past, never to return.
There I was, the very key to their happiness, locked away in an impregnable prison.
But perhaps something good could be borne from the ash of tragedy. I watched them befriend naiveté. I watched them coddle and nurture it as though it was their child, and not I. But what a shame it was to discover that Mother could not even save vegetables from premature death; and Father could not keep his fingers busy enough to distract his mind. There were half-knit socks, fingers for gloves that, if completed, would have matched my winter camping gear, and a small beanie whose edges frayed beyond repair. All these artifacts ended up on a neat pile on my bed.
“Right here for you when you’re ready,” Mother says as she lays down a glove finger. Immediately, she pulls her hands to her mouth. “Oops.” Though the door had been closed upon her entry, she leaves it open just a sliver when she leaves. I always hated that. That I ever felt legitimate anger at such a trivial event baffles me. What did it matter that the door was left open? I had nothing to hide then; and now I have everything to reveal. Yet the door I seek remains ever-closed. The pathway unto it twists and turns, refusing to lead me from here.