by Martin Rose
I turned over the possibilities.
Or someone was hoping I would fall into this trap; believe in what I wanted. Count on heartache to do the work of persuasion. Exploit the remains of my heart.
I tucked the pictures into my pocket and left the car.
*
I came to the Rogers’ house unannounced. They had never given me their address, and Rogers populated the phone book in greater numbers than I had phone minutes to waste—the school proved useful in providing me what I needed from a list of dead-end addresses, and I stood before what appeared to be a burned-out shell of a building. Concrete foundation sketched a square embedded in derelict land.
No one lived here, if anyone ever had.
I entered the yard anyway. A sad, overgrown, neglected garden grew up through burnt timber and beams, vines snaking along the remains of a wooden frame. The ground blackened where the house fire had burned hot and long. If there had been furniture, items of personal nature, they were gone. Faded caution tape spiraled out into the wind and, beside me, the doors and windows of neighboring houses stayed closed. No one asked me my business and this was not unusual.
I poked through the thorny interior. The coastal wind shifted and spat a random paper at me that pressed against my leg until I snatched it up. A missing child flier for a boy called Marco Spitz who had been eight when fate snatched him away into the abyss of the world, never to be seen again. The flier was two years old. I crumpled it up and tossed it away. I inspected the walls, what was left of them, peering into their sandwiched insides. Rats and deer mice scattered from their nests, trailing insulation and black mold. Gossamer webs infested every wretched corner of broken joists and surviving studs.
In the backyard, the grass became a churning frontier land of thigh-high weeds. You would think that when your house burns down, you’d mention it, but I guess when you’re busy summoning fake tears for the benefit of a fake stolen son, it’s the last thing you think of.
While I pulled my shoe out of a sucking puddle of black mud, I followed the line of a chain link fence along the back that pointed like a rusting arrow to a dog house nestled in the corner of the property.
Somehow, they didn’t strike me as the dog-loving type. I took them for cat people.
I advanced through the weeds. I wasn’t a dog fan myself nowadays, as they tend to find me on the tasty side, like an overripe pork roll. I expected wildlife to dart out from the darkness as I bent down to peer in the hole. Gnats swarmed thick and heavy in a cloud, and I swatted at them until I gave up and breathed them in and out as though they were inconvenient elements of the air itself, like humidity.
I thrust my hand into spiderwebs, into moist, spongy wooden walls. My skeletal fingertips tapped against warped wooden boards as I searched the interior. No loose plywood, nothing questionable—
I passed over an object. Nails rattled and a board clattered loose and fell to the earthen floor in an expulsion of mold. Beneath this, pill bugs and carpenter ants sprinkled down through my seeking fingers until I encountered a ridge, gripped it, and pulled it out.
A journal.
A journal hidden in a dog house. Someone was keeping secrets, and I didn’t think it was Rover.
*
I didn’t dare open it on the property. I needed a place that was quiet, where I wouldn’t be bothered, so I drove back the way I had come, to the darkened house of bad memories I called home.
How I wished I could still drink like I had when I was alive.
Beep-beep.
I reached for the orange prescription bottle, shaking out a fresh dose. With a metal click, my mouth closed over the pills and I savored the medicinal flavor. After each dose, I registered a subtle change as the medication hit my stomach lining, breaking apart and passing through the membrane in minutes. Chemicals lit up my neurons and receptors like fireworks, bringing my fading intellect back to life again, making logical human thought possible.
Without it, my memories otherwise were broken fragments, shuffled cards. I did not like to think of it. I understood the feral nature of my condition and was at home with it; what I did not suffer gladly was the loss of self-awareness and identity.
I did not read the journal right away. At my desk and with my hand over the warped cover, I lingered and thought of Clay, the boy as I remembered him. But I had as many memories as there were human remains of my boy: nothing.
Nothing at all.
I turned the first page.
*
There was a boy, and this boy had no earthly father.
This boy had guardians and watchers, men and women who wore the same outfits like uniforms, like khakis and sweater vests and ties and suits and long skirts. The guardians and watchers were made up of a thousand eyes, and they watched the boy every minute of every day.
The guardians and watchers kept the boy and sheltered him in house after house. This boy never had a home, just a thousand and one couches he was shuffled from, and sometimes when there were no couches in these dilapidated homes, there were only basement floors or attic rooms.
For the boy was a secret; a secret the guardians and watchers did not want others to know. And the boy was schooled in social manipulation, how never to give oneself away, and he understood without being asked he should bury his heart and his feelings and never be close; not to the fake parents who pretended to love him, or even to the schoolchildren who really did want to love him.
When the boy asked where his real parents were, he was told he had none. He was born into this world through Righteous Passage, conceived as Jesus was to Mary; and the boy was their holy son.
A thousand eyes watched the boy; but even eyes grow tired.
Guardians and watchers are people, and people sleep. So the boy learns to save himself, gather his energy for the night, when the guardians pretend they are an ordinary, average family. They go to separate bedrooms like in old 1950s sitcoms where no one ever has sex, even in a marital bed. And there, the guardians sleep.
The boy uses this time to stir, to come awake. He creeps across the floor and becomes expert in assessing a house the moment he enters it. He intuits the places where the floorboards are most likely to creak and give him away, knows where the shadows will be at their thickest in the midnight hour, so when the stray guardian awakens in the middle of the night to take a leak, he shrinks into the darkest corner and waits there, unnoticed, until they fall asleep once more.
He does not escape these clever prisons made of many people’s homes, that do not look like prisons at all. Here, the bars are white picket fences, and garden gnomes in bright flowers stand guard with an air of menace. They have made it clear over time, with sinister suggestions, with strange weapons they keep in gun cabinets and stranger weapons like whips beneath their beds, that bad things will happen to him if he questions the life they have built for him.
He wants to escape. He dreams of empty fields and crowded streets where he fades from their thousand eyes, but he fears the consequences of failure. This is not why he sneaks like a weasel by moonlight. No, he lurks and haunts the nighttime hours so he can find books. They stack paperbacks and coffee table offerings in an effort to appear literary and intelligent, but the books are just a part of their masks. The boy teaches himself how to read complicated words, and from time to time he finds newspapers on the dinner table from the day before.
He studies everything he touches, so when he is done reading it, he puts it back in the exact position he moved it from. He does not want the guardians and watchers to know how intelligent he has become. If they knew, they might make a more complicated prison. Bad enough he knows that because he is young, no one will ever believe him, no adult or figure of authority will ever give his story credence.
The boy plays dumb at school. If he excels at a subject, he’ll flunk the next test to bring the grade down. If he is too well-behaved, he’ll pick a fight with the bully in the school yard. He helps with activities, not because he loves or enjoys them, because tha
t is what is expected of him.
They speak too, in the evenings, of responsibility and they review the day’s events. And one day—the boy cannot remember when—they speak of a Great Father.
Who? Asks the boy and they say, your father, the one who will come one day to claim you at last.
And at this, the boy experiences his first understanding of optimism and hope. That there might be a bright point in his life of reconciliation with a saturnine figure that has been missing from his youth. He conjures thoughts of wizened Merlins, of Odins, of Santa Clauses and Sitting Bulls, of old men with gray in their hair and long beards who will be both close and familiar and impart the discipline and sagacity he did not know he longed for until that moment. That he will meet this shadow figure they refer to in hushed and excited whispers and know at last, who he is, and what he was born for.
This Great Father has another name: Lord of the Flesh Eaters.
The boy has heard the guardians and watchers talk about the Lord of the Flesh Eaters. In hushed voices, they exchange words with guarded looks, as though they fear the Lord is nearby, listening.
The boy has known this presence, this overwhelming sense of Other, a darkness that follows him from house to house, from family to family, and finds him even when he awakens in the night to creep out of bed and read the dusty pulp novels of his latest guardian.
They are all afraid of the Lord.
In the meantime, the boy has become clever. He carries a knife in his pocket he bought from another boy in school. He’s not violent—he has no need for a knife. His guardians provide him with everything he needs. But he knows the guardians and the watchers keep a cage in the basement. The cage is always empty, it is the sort of cage you might store a dog in, a dog roughly the boy’s size. So he keeps the knife close. Just in case.
None of the guardians or watchers have ever hit him or touched him wrongly. The cage sits in a corner against the concrete slab floor, mute testament to what could happen if he begins to question, if he should demonstrate his defiance. He longs to leave these strange families that keep watch over him, isolating him from the rest of the world and shutting him away from any hope of help.
No one has ever said he is a prisoner, but he knows without having to be told that he is already in a cage.
*
They tell the boy that December 21 is his birthday—the longest night of the year, and that it marks his fourteenth year. He has never celebrated his birthday, without any real, earthly parents. He is awkward in his adolescence, listening to his guardians and watchers speak.
He does not believe it is his birthday; he thinks he might be younger than fourteen. But whatever the case, this must be a special occasion, because all of his guardians and watchers have taken the trouble to leave their homes and come to him where he is living now, and they are all wearing their long, dark robes, red as bricks.
They stand in the living room while he waits for what they will tell him.
He wonders if his mother will come; but she is the one who sent him to live with these strangers. It has been ten years since he saw her, knew her warmth and maternal embrace. The world begins and ends with her, and likewise do his memories. There was a place he used to live before, and he played in a green frontyard where he picked tulips out of the garden. That was when he met his new mother. She walked past the white fencing in a dark, long dress, the fabric gathered around her ankles like a stage curtain. He wanted to touch it, and she let him while he played at her feet. She asked if he wanted to walk, that she knew a place where they kept such pretty things, if he would walk with her. And his new life with his new mother begins thus, with a clasped hand, a furtive look back into the yard he is snatched from, their quick steps down the broken pavement.
Until the day his mother loses her face. After that day, she would not speak to him or suffer his presence, sending him to live with the watchers and guardians.
His heart broke without her, a fragile instrument of blood and flesh—destroyed and shuffled from one guardian to the next.
He knew they always went to “church” on Sunday. They never spoke of it, but they disappeared without him during the day, and with a few carefully placed questions he was able to discover that his watchers never go to church, not a real one, at least. He had friends whose parents attended the Lutheran church, the Protestant, the Catholic church, and none of them had ever seen any of his guardians or watchers there. So the boy knows something is going on; and he is a part of it, though he has never been there, and cannot say what it is they do when no one is about.
They tell the boy that he is special, unlike any other; in his blood runs a magic spark, a power. His red blood pumping through his veins is a blood designed to save the world; his body a host for a greater power.
The boy says: What?
Yes, they say. Yes, unbelievable, isn’t it? But our king, our Lord of the Flesh Eaters, has been dead for centuries now. We have kept the faith in our God, and he has told us he has chosen you. He wants you to be the vessel for his holy spirit, and he is almost ready to ascend to this world.
The boy still does not understand. But they are crowding all around, and he can smell the sweat underneath their clothes, the excitement they can barely conceal in their shuffling feet, their nervous stares as they watch him with vacant eyes.
The boy gets up, clenching his hands into fists. He touches the knife he keeps in his pocket through the denim to reassure himself, but he is unprepared for this. They are too many, and he is too young, still trying to be a man in a boy’s body.
Tension rises. He looks for an escape exit, anything, but the room is filled with red robes and his guardians.
The first one reaches out to touch him, gripping his shoulder with a hand. The boy does not wait—waiting is over. He snatches the knife out, slashing the man’s hand. The guardian gives a startled cry, as though he has never seen blood before, and reels backward into the crowd which consumes him, swallows him up with a sigh.
The Lord speaks through the boy! a woman shrieks, with a moan like sex; the display gets her off in a religious ecstasy.
Get back, the boy hisses. The Lord says get back.
But they do not get back.
Hands and fists and claws all come for him, digging at him. He slashes, he brandishes his weapon, and blood flies from hands, from arms, from faces. Swatches of blood and red fabric litter the floor by the time it is all over, but he is no closer to the door when the fight is finished. They are clutching their damaged limbs, and the strong who overcome the boy carry him down the basement steps two by two in a thunder of rushing feet.
In the cool, damp air, they open the cage door and thrust him in.
Cramped and bent over, the boy waits until they are gone, and then he cries in the dark with the night divided between cold bars, hard concrete.
Happy Birthday, Owen.
*
I could have called my brother, Jamie.
Ah, Jamie. Golden son, favorite one.
Jamie always had contingency plans, what survivalists and military types like to call “redundancies.” Backup plans for your back-up plans. He would have known what to do with this, how to fix this problem.
This is the sort of thing Jamie and I picked up in the military, but along the way, I picked up Virus X, Jamie’s pet engineering project on behalf of Uncle Sam. Ever get a booster shot when you were a kid? That was the idea—a virus that would protect us, lengthen our lifespan.
Jamie encouraged me to be a test subject. Four others guys and myself had the honor. Twenty-four hours of observation, and we were still healthy as a stable of robust horses, young men making dirty jokes and wondering where our next beer was coming from. I traded stories with a soldier called Hearst, and we talked about how much we missed our wives, our sons.
When we were dismissed from our experiments, we went home and did all the things we said we would do when we got home. I told my son I would buy him a sheriff’s badge. Shining gold to pin to his chest.
An accessory to dreams. We kissed our children and played with them, we took our wives out to dinner and made love to them in the hot darkness.
And while we lay there, basking in the afterglow of skin like warm peaches, worms were eating their way into our centers. Virus X carved pathways to our hearts, where infection and rot would spread from our pulsing blood.
Into the witching hour, we soldiers awoke, miles apart in the darkness, suffering from a common affliction. We were dying.
You’ve known disease, infection, fever; sick-room days, lying on your back, shallow breaths as you try to wrestle your ghost into your body. You’re not ready to die, you think. It can’t be happening.
But it is happening, when you wake up with a 110-degree fever. Brains boil inside your skull and you stare into the ceiling, confused, dazed. What do you do? Do you get up, take some aspirin for this pounding hurt inside your brain? But the heat collapsed your reason in upon itself—so you continue to lie there, just like a dog panting and sweating through your clothes.
The wife wakes up. Jessica asks, What is it, honey, and then screams when she feels the heat baking off you. She’s the mother of your child, your wife who waited for you through the war. She waited through Kosovo, through missions on foreign soils—she knows what you need.
Relief overwhelms. Of course Jessica knows what to do. I am saved.
She is so small—a tiny, five-foot, four-inch woman, she stops short of my larger, six-foot frame and lifts me from the bed. How she lifts two hundred pounds of dead weight, I don’t know. And she carries me to the bathroom, where the bathtub overflows with cold water, with cubes of ice floating at the top.