Phantom Effect

by Michael Aronovitz

  Which I would have.

  And chances were that Nurve the Purve was not going to be quick as a whip, that I’d be stranded down there, stone cold busted one way or the other. In fact, it was almost a certainty.

  I snatched down the key and walked numbly toward the basement door. I stuck in the little steel tab. Turned the lock. I was a middle-school loser with the chance to see an older girl naked. The lack of an exit strategy didn’t matter. I had to find a hiding place, and that was something I was pretty sure I’d be able to manage. The rest I’d leave up to chance.

  I pushed the door open, and from above there was a light sprinkle of concrete dust that feathered across my shoulder, a tiny stone dancing along the top step and cascading down into the darkness. Dim light from our living room filtered in from between my feet, and the paint-flecked Lincoln green stairs were triangular, spiraling down into the dark. Above between the rafters there was a pull chain that actually had a metal coat hanger attached to the bottom, and I gave it a yank. Harsh bulb light flooded the area. To my left was a series of shelves crammed with dog-eared magazines and old cookbooks, soup cans, spices, a broken night light, a tarnished wok, blue wiper fluid, a tire pump, a red beer cup filled with plastic forks and knives—toss-away “forget me” shit. And to the right down over the curve of the banister was the flash-view of Nurve the Purve’s little slumlord apartment, water boiler and heater mostly hidden behind one of those zigzag dividers, horizontal pipes partially masked off by this white vinyl material that looked more like connected shower curtains than something gauzy or flowing, two black wicker chairs, an entertainment center, a couple of low bureaus, double-level coffee table, iron floor-stand ashtray with an amber glass bowl, and a king-sized mattress on the area rug in the middle of it all.

  Black satin comforter with a white throw-blanket folded at the bottom, fluffy pillows, scene of the crime. The question was whether I would get a better view from behind the zigzag divider or the pipe curtains at the outer edge of the “love den,” but I didn’t get the chance to make a good choice.

  There was the sound of tires stopping short in the back alley driveway, now or never, and a smarter seventh grader going on eighth would have pulled the light off, backed up a step, yanked the door closed, and started planning his summer vacation.

  I pulled the light off all right. I pushed shut the door too, but it was from behind me and I clapped down the spiral staircase as quick as I was able. When I reached the bottom I could hear the lock tumbling over, and as I took a step toward where I remembered the shower curtains were at the far side of the living space the back door came open with a scrape, light pouring in from the archway, figures standing in it.

  There was no time for Z-shaped dividers or pipe shrouds. Mr. Nurve was in the foreground taking that moment to look at himself pulling out the key with the dark form waiting just past his shoulder, and I knew full well that my little grace period at the edge of the shadows here was about to end. Badly. I turned and opened a wooden door, temporary closet, large reach-in size that had been hidden from my view originally because it sat at the base of the stairs. I backed in, bumping up against the clothes hanging in there. And while I was lucky there was a handle on the inside so I could pull the door flush, I was unlucky in the sense that the double doors were set so close together you couldn’t see through the crack.

  The clothes were heavy behind me, maybe winter coats with that coarse kind of fur on the outside because it felt all prickly up my back and everything in here was dense and close and it smelled like cigars and the type of cologne that brought up pictures in my head of the old geezers who worked the newspaper stands down on 69th Street or the shoeshine booths in the subway concourse, the kind of stuff all us white trash kids were familiar with, living in the “burbs” a few blocks west of the city. The low ceiling had me cramped into a hunchback position, and I was leaning forward on the balls of my feet because of the pressure of the coats, feeling as if I was barely holding myself from tipping face-first into the door I was clinging to.

  Outside, I couldn’t really hear much. There was shuffling, Mr. Nurve’s disconnected and muted voice, and a whisper here and there that I couldn’t make words out of. My breath felt harsh up in my ears, and I tried to keep it steady and quiet as things progressed out there. I wanted to watch, but had the sense to know that they needed to be “occupied” before any kind of sneak-peek was gonna go down. The last thing I needed was to crack the door just to see Nurve the Purve looking right back at me because his eyes just happened to be resting on the closet while he was pulling his trousers down. I needed an indicator. But things sounded muffled and distant, a bump here, a murmur there, and I was too scared to chance it. The backs of my legs started to hurt and, to make matters worse, my right foot started to fall asleep. I swallowed dryly. Maybe if I could have walked around a bit or at least shook it out I could have halted it at the baby stage of those rolling waves that felt kind of cool if you were in the mood. But I couldn’t do a thing about it as the feeling moved slowly but surely to the nest of hornets that hurt like hell and promised to overstay its welcome.

  I was dying for sure, droplets of sweat starting to cut down my face.

  I heard something clink. That was Nurve’s watch. He’d just tossed it into the amber glass ashtray. They were undressing.

  My eyes were starting to water and I had the awful feeling I was about to sneeze. I was also starting to get hard, as embarrassing as that was, and at the same time I was terrified about cracking the door, now thinking that I wasn’t entirely sure whether or not there had been one of those latch mechanisms that set it in a groove when I’d pulled it shut, making it so there would be a soft “pop” sound when you pushed it back open.

  I heard groaning, or I thought I did, and I undid my zipper. Took my thing out even though it was insane, couldn’t help it, the whole thing had gone too far. This was it. I pulled my lips into a big ole skeleton’s grin, held my breath, took the inner handle of the closet door I was holding, and pushed as gently as I was able.

  There was a small sound when it came open actually, but from what I saw through the sliver, the two of them weren’t in any sort of listening mode.

  I had the perfect angle to see just enough, at least the region that mattered, a vertical slash-shot that started just below Julianna Conigliaro’s belly button and ended mid-thigh or so. Nurve had her on her back lying across the bed, his face buried between her legs, I could see his palms pressed against the sides of her ass and the top of his head bobbing a bit from behind a long thigh, working it hard, salt ’n’ pepper ponytail drawn together with a leather hair-band that had a jewel in it. I wanted to get a more complete view, but stood terrified that there would be a squeak or a squawk that they would notice, so I stuck with my thread and started touching myself, awkward brushstrokes because I was a righty, the dominant hand occupied with holding the closet door in its place.

  Someone’s breath exploded out there, and I could only assume it was Julianna, and I’d never heard a girl come before, and it was almost unbearable. Then it got even better. Nurve pulled his face away and there through the slot I saw Julianna Conigliaro’s pussy.

  It was sexy and alien, delicate and strange. She had manicured the hair down there into a thin brunette stripe and beneath it there were folds that layered and forked down to a sensitive opening, dull red and moist. Below that was the pucker of her dark anus, and I let my eyes dance between the two, the stroke of my left hand gaining its own kind of clumsy momentum.

  Nurve the Purve hauled up, and a second later he was guiding his thing toward her with his left fist. It looked strained and corded up, the head of it bigger and the shaft thicker than I would have thought, and then he pushed it into her, slow at first, the rim of her opening widening with it.

  I was really pulling on myself at that point, hot friction about to explode, and I was hoping I could be quiet about it, praying there would be some way to clean it up later, but I was so far gone, everything s
o bright and so hot that none of that mattered.

  Nurve pushed his hips forward and settled in her, the muscles on the sides of his butt dimpling, and he drew back and then rocked his hips back in once again. And again. Then another a bit faster and the next a bit harder followed by another that determined a rhythm, hitting that stop-point against her with purpose, making her jerk back a bit each time on the black satin comforter cover with each thrust, and it started getting more rapid making a smacking sound, then so urgent and furious that she brought her legs around him in a cradle, and I saw she had a blue tribal ankle-band tattoo and a thin white scar running up her left shin all the way to the knee.

  For a second it didn’t compute.

  Then it did.

  That was Mama lying there underneath Nurve the Purve, not Julianna Conigliaro, and I had a choice to make.

  Finish or bail.

  I kept going. I had to. It felt too good to stop and when I exploded in jolts and spasms I realized there was nothing left for me in this world that anyone would ever forgive or begin to understand.

  I also realized that I must have backed too hard against the coats, because something broke and gave behind me, and there was the sudden rat-tat-tat of them like marbles falling out of a bag, jumping all along the hard Traxtile floor section of the closet. There was a yelp and a shout out there, scrapes and scuffles, and it sounded like something knocked over.

  The door in front of me was ripped open. I was still holding the inner handle, but I just let it pass through my fingers. I lowered my head and could feel the both of them in front of me, staring and broiling.

  I kept my eyes down. All around my feet were tokens and stones, turquoise and onyx, spiny oyster pieces and coral and sterling silver drums, all of them loose and scattered, discarded and lost, all because I’d put my eyes where they didn’t belong and then gone and broken so much more than the string of Mama’s favorite necklace.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  Deseronto stood there in the stifling darkness, an upended Motel 6 laundry tub somewhere to his left, a rumple of shredded canvas at his feet. His palms were pressed to his face, his fingers clawed against the lids of his eyes. He wanted to rip at them for what they had seen, leaving jagged black craters and thick stains of crimson below them. The words “Out vile jelly” came up in his mind, but he had no idea where they came from. He had a vision of a guy in a toga wandering the land in blindness as a result of this sort of self-mutilation, but hadn’t a clue where he’d heard the tale or the context through which it had been delivered. Probably school where he hadn’t really been paying attention because he was looking across the aisle studying girls, a lifelong issue, a cruel full circle.

  He had not remembered the closet incident the way he’d just been forced to relive it either. No way. In his mind, it had always been Julianna Conigliaro lying on that black comforter, naked as a jaybird for all but those long suede leggy boots. The necklace stowed in the closet was not strung with Indian love beads, but rather this gaudy set of colossal white pearls, Julianna’s big fat mother’s pearls that she thought she’d misplaced when they moved here from Jersey ten years ago. Julianna had actually found them at the bottom of one of those hidden zipper sleeves in a Samsonite in the attic. She took them for herself and never told her mother about the discovery, hanging them there in Nurve the Purve’s closet because she was hoping someday to be more than his basement fling, to be taken out to dinner, or the theater, or maybe even to a fancy hall where they’d show off what they’d learned in their ballroom dancing class, because even though she’d been a wild child in high school she wanted the good things in life too, a touch of class, a bit of respect. And Deseronto’s own Mama hadn’t been the one on the other side of that basement closet door, all sexed up and sweaty with the white throw-blanket pulled across her shoulders and asking him what the fuck he thought he was doing, but rather, answering their front door on Sunshine Road, mouth dropping open when Nurve the Purve told her what her little Jonathan had been up to. He thought he distinctly remembered that the Purve was holding him in place there on the stoop by the back of his hair in a sweaty tangle and his mother was asking him what the fuck he thought he’d been doing.

  Distinctly.

  But if the necklace was made up of pearls, then why were the spiny oysters and coral and turquoise and onyx so God damned familiar just now? And how could he possibly have known anything about Julianna Conigliaro’s dreams and aspirations to begin with, let alone the theft of the pearls or the circumstance that had made them available? He’d never actually spoken to her.

  Deseronto stumbled in the dark, hands splayed out in front of him.

  What was the name of that guy who came up with the idea that you didn’t remember the bad shit that happened to you way back when? He thought it was Freud, but always got him mixed up with the dim recollection of a blown-up black and white poster/photograph by the board in 7thth grade literature class, portraying this ancient guy who looked like a skinny version of Santa Claus. George Bernard Shaw was his name, but who the hell knew what he wrote, and if he wasn’t Freud, then who the hell was? This little roundabout to a roadblock usually halted his grainy memories of middle school pedagogy and historical figures in general, and he bumped into what felt like the hallway wall leading back the way he had come, struggling to remember this classroom shit he thought he’d never in a million years have a use for. He thought the words Id, Ego, and Super Ego had something to do with it, but he couldn’t recall why. He was familiar with the concept of repression, but never really believed it when a defendant claimed it, at least not in principle.

  Until now.

  Maybe it wasn’t just a bunch of slick criminals trying to get over. Maybe he had actually reinvented his own history because the truth was so fucking hideous it had acted as some sort of blinding element, forcing him to art up the blank slate with bits of charcoal, sidewalk chalk, crayons, and spray paint, anything he could get his hands on.

  Blinding element. Right. Pull out the eyes. Ha. If only he could remember the story that came from!

  A harsh flare of light came up and Deseronto brought his hands before his face, squinting into it as it slowly dialed back to a dim sort of wavering illumination. He blinked. He’d gone the wrong way again as layed out before him was what appeared to be an offshoot to the hallway he’d originally stumbled through, the aqua and bone-white wall tiles making a long curve around a bend with skeletal grid work patterned above him where the drop ceiling panels had been removed. He pressed forward and his feet made squelches and splashes, the “wavering sensation” caused by reflections dancing and flickering along the walls.

  And it was thick and humid and smelled like chlorine.

  And he was running, heart pounding with excitement, bare feet pounding along the damp tile floor and sending echoes up and along the corridor leading to the vacated pool area. Rudy St. Claire and Skinny Jimmy Whalen were still getting changed back in the locker room where all the old farts were hanging up their brown derby hats and bright colored pants, waddling around with their white hairy chests, skinny legs, and sagging dough marbled ass cheeks. Early hours on the hot days were open season for the elderly here at the Y, and they clogged up the shallow end of the pool just like they blocked your way in the mall, sucking down the free air conditioning and shuffling along in their walking groups.

  Fucking bone heads.

  About to meet up with pure genius. It was Rudy who started all this, with Jimmy for the access and Deseronto playing technical engineer, and it all really kicked off when Rudy said that they had to make the most they could out of these last days of summer vacation since there was someone awful waiting for them just around the corner in eighth grade, and it was this retarded old science teacher named Mrs. Levitz who still tried to discipline all old school and shit, keeping everyone in rows with their hands folded, chanting the ecosystems and biomes vocabulary words for pre-class every day, and then making everybody copy shit out of the textbo
ok instead of being put into groups where you could goof like always and make the nerd or the ugly girl do all the writing. He’d heard she wouldn’t let you sharpen a pencil because the grinding was distracting and she tracked how many times you took the pass for the bathroom, sometimes saying no even if you were gonna squirt yourself. When the three of them were over Jimmy’s place earlier this morning chilling down the far edge of his back yard behind the wood pile, they decided to make a he-man teacher haters club the old crab wouldn’t be able to touch. The Einstein shit came a bit later.

  Like usual Rudy had a rumpled soft-pack of Marlboro Lights, and they sat in the damp crab grass not caring if it made the back of their pants wet ’cause they were “dudes yo,” smoking and looking out into the thicket of trees and overgrowth doing that slow tumble and clutter down the short ravine that widened to a gully and eventually spread to the train yard SEPTA used for its hub between the Norristown line and the Market-Frankford El leading into downtown Philadelphia. Jimmy, with his long skinny face and patchwork sideburns, was cracking his knuckles and hawking and spitting back over his head, back over the mossy cord of wood his dad cut and gathered from the tangle of public forest last year then totally forgot about, and at first it was a good trick making them laugh, and then it got old and he stopped.

  “First of all, we gotta come to class late,” he said.

  “Yeah, late,” Rudy echoed, scratching his scalp through the black wool knit slouch beanie he hadn’t taken off since last January. He had a wide dome and a beanpole neck making some people call him “Bobble-Head,” but no one was about to give him that kind of shit here behind the woodpile. “How late though,” he said, “and what’s our excuse?”

  “Something lame,” Deseronto said. “Won’t matter. She’ll be into the lesson by then. When she says where were you, just mumble, or point to the other guy, or say you were stopped by security or an aide or a lunch lady or the vice principal in the hall and they didn’t give you a note.”