Boy versus Self: (A Psychological Thriller)

by Harmon Cooper

  He starts pumping, grabbing at her waist. He reaches forward and pulls her hair into his right hand. Using her hair as leverage, he pulls her head back as if it was tied by a noose. With his other hand, he wraps his palm around her neck, just below her chin. She hiccups and he feels the hiccup travelling up her throat.

  ‘You like that?’

  She hiccups.

  ‘This is so crazy.’

  She hiccups, sucks his finger.

  The mixture of hot and cold, fire and ice, is too much for his body to handle. He feels a daze set in, and finds himself yawning. He pulls out for a second to regain his strength. He starts doing jumping jacks, his condom-shielded cock beating against the bottom of his zipper.

  Boy jogs in place for a few seconds, strokes himself, and once he feels warm again, he tosses her onto her back and folds her knees to her chest. He begins thrusting in and out of her with all his might, all the stamina he can muster, practically fucking for all he’s worth. Boy looks into her black slit-eyes and sees that her eyes have rolled down from the back of her head.

  She’s looking directly at him.

  Her eyes are frozen lakes rimmed in crimson. Dilated pupils, acid blue. Boy pulls out of her. He stands back, frightened at the sight of her eyes. His heartbeat metronomes against the insides of his eardrums. What kind of freaky shit am I getting myself into?

  Lucy rolls forward until she too is standing. Boy takes a step away from her and she moves towards him. His back presses against the wall. She reaches out for his prick, bends over, grabs hold of it and slowly draws him towards her. She starts moving up and down, buckling her knees slightly.

  Back inside her now, Boy pushes Lucy onto the bed, so that her body hinges at a sixty degree angle. He keeps going like this, until sweat is dripping from his forehead into his lips. A gush of pure ecstasy travels from his legs to his forehead. He sees a sudden glimpse of Glass Wings across his mind’s eye – the most horrible ghost he’s ever encountered – but he quickly suppresses it as he comes.

  ₪₪₪

  Waves in the form of weighty encumbrances wash over festering strawberry hills in a junkie valley. They splash and Boy lands. The sun is Gerhard Richter’s stained glass, asparagus green with blue tips. Needles break from the surrounding hills, sprouting sharp metallic branches.

  Boy’s at a funeral.

  An Ataa Oko coffin is suspended on claw-like tree trunks, mangled and bulbous. A light wind lobs sharp magazine cut-outs through a field of empty chairs. The earth yawns, burps, vomits, sharts. Checkered triangles sweep the forgotten magazine cut-outs away.

  Boy sits down onto the lap of a violated Warhol blow-up doll. The face is halfway deflated, sexed to shreds. Air surges to the doll’s face. The doll’s head falls forward onto Boy’s shoulder, and blood drips down his torso.

  He touches the lipstick-colored blood, examines his fingers. Dream the rest. Slit-eyes and fortune cookies appear in the blood on his fingertips. Alex Grey veins multiply and spill down his arms. Frightened, Boy wipes the blood onto his pants, blood which resembles a Rorschach blot before it melts away.

  A towering man shuffles towards him from a nearby hill. His shadow is fifty times that of his body, as if the sun is a tiny Klieg light being cast from a position directly behind the man’s body.

  The man’s purple shadow shrinks with each step he takes.

  Boy feels himself sinking further and further into the Warhol blow-up doll. The semen-tinged plastic marshmallows around him. The suffocation doesn’t cause panic, the suffocation causes contentment. Boy has never been so happy to pass.

  A little girl with a sinister grin stands in front of him waving goodbye. She’s wearing a name tag that reads Penelope.

  ₪₪₪

  Boy awakens in a place he’s never been before. Darkness doesn’t describe it. Emptiness describes it, but doesn’t do it justice. It seems like dreams are almost tangible here, seems like things can change just by stretching his fingers. Subfusc starless eternity. The world is web-like and it needs to be stretched.

  Boy walks.

  Doesn’t walk anywhere per se, just continues forward. He looks down and sees his hands aren’t his own. The void around him is so empty that he feels satiated. Feels like he can just suck it all in and fill his stomach whenever he’s hungry. He doesn’t know what he is walking on and doesn’t look down to see. No sense in it. No sense in shattering the beauty of nothingness.

  He continues forward as only one can in a dream or a novel. Sees himself ahead of himself. Sees himself standing with his hands behind his back ahead of himself. Hunched over a little. Older. Maybe older. Maybe that’s what he’ll look like. Who really knows? Sees himself as himself and forgets himself.

  His ribcage splinters.

  The sensation starts from his feet and balloons up his body until he is a four-armed, two-legged incoherent mess. Then a loud snap like someone slapping their hand against a cement wall.

  Boy’s now himself, or at least inside the shell of himself. No lights in the space around him. When he looks down, his body appears to be illuminated.

  He feels toxic. Voices begin gravitating towards him. They grow louder, audible in a way that only the truly mad can comprehend. They hum past him, hitting his shoulders, forcing him to duck. He jumps from the voices but they’re still there. Mom’s voice. Girl’s voice. The people he can’t erase.

  Mom’s voice is an auditory dagger trembling with rage and remorse. Girl’s voice haggard and forgotten yet filled with a sense of fury that resonates deep within his skull. The voices continue to stream past him. Misfired familial missiles, unknown trajectory. He wants them gone but has no way of banishing them. He turns and they’re in front of him. He flips around and they’re in front of him again. The cycle is infuriating.

  The voices suddenly stop.

  The cold void hardens around Boy until he’s breathing hoarfrost and shivering. All the moments that have accumulated until now: those fights with Mom, the ghosts he’s seen, discovering the words Girl cut into her arms, escaping the sharks, finding happiness only to watch it crumble, accepting mediocrity, Glass Wings, ignoring the past, his first date, ignoring the past, his first kiss, ignoring the past, his first night of intoxication, ignoring the past, his STD, ignoring the past, the battle against himself, Glass Wings, Glass Wings, Glass Wings – the creature of his nightmares.

  Glass Wings.

  It’s a moment that he’ll soon forget. Boy watches these things and feels a sense of wonder. He’s been through so much yet he’s barely scratched the surface of existence. The voices appear again, and he listens this time instead of tuning them out. Mom’s calling out for answers, her future ghost in constant turmoil. Girl is using her body as an answer, cutting those words and those thoughts in until they burn deep.

  Boy wants to hold both of them, wants to pull them to his chest and protect them. He shoots his arms out, ready to embrace, to accept. The voices smack against his arm, blade against the surface of his flesh like a million razors shot out of a helicopter. They push him back; they keep him from moving forward. And he lets them. The voices grow with intensity and he gets swept up in their lethal wake.

  A new sound.

  He’s stirred by a thumping noise. His eyes open to discover that he’s lying next to Lucy, his body pressed against hers. A filled condom hangs loosely from his shrunken penis. He pushes her away and stands. His knees are wobbly and he falls. He hears the banging again.

  He flicks the condom off onto the floor and zips up his pants. ‘Lucy, put your clothes on,’ he says. His cell phone – two missed calls from Mom and ten missed calls from Friend. The party.

  Lucy hiccups and steps back into her dress. Boy is rummaging through his dresser, trying to find a clean shirt. He runs into the living room past Ghost.

  ‘…Helped her change her shoes and fix the buckle…needed go to the grocer but the storm was coming and…’

  ‘I got a friend coming over,’ Boy says to Ghost, ‘so shut the fuc
k up.’

  She hisses at him.

  More banging at the door.

  ‘Coming!’

  Boy unlocks the door to find Friend standing there eating a donut. ‘What took you so long, buddy? You whacking off or something?’

  Chapter 3: Santiago Escapes the Sharks

  Boy’s Age: 4

  It was the lesson Boy would never forget and the lesson he hardly remembered.

  Mom left Boy’s father, Rock, for a Mexican man five years her junior who worked as a janitor at the courthouse. Mom took Boy with her. The divorce stung but Mom ignored the pain because Rock deserved it (he cheated too), and Boy was too young to understand.

  Mom and Santiago got along well enough, especially when the bedroom door was shut. Boy would watch the Discovery Channel with the volume on full blast and cower at the sharks. Mom would emerge from the bedroom breathless with a towel wrapped around her sticky body. Santiago would follow in a pair of black undies. He would laugh and say things to Boy in Spanish. Boy would laugh because Santiago’s skin was purplish brown and his nipples looked like hairy prunes.

  Soon, Mom and Boy moved in with Santiago. One Sunday morning, Santiago ran into the house announcing he had a surprise in the front yard. Mom and Boy followed him out to find a small rusty boat attached to the trailer of his beat-up truck, sky blue and covered in rust.

  Mom was surprised, Boy was happy, Santiago was broke but happy. Broke and happy, Santiago celebrated with Mom that night while Boy watched Beauty and the Beast for the seventeenth time.

  Over the course of the summer, Santiago taught Mom how to drive the boat at the lake an hour away from their shabby duplex. At first, Mom was bad at it. Later, she became good, and would steer the boat while Santiago and Boy rested at the bow wearing matching sunglasses with blue rims. One time, Santiago forgot to use sunscreen. His skin peeled off in yellow clumps that looked like custards. Mom made him go to the doctor.

  Towards the end of summer, a drought lowered the water of the lake and a small island appeared in its center. The three spent an afternoon on the island, swimming and picnicking. They shared sandwiches and bananas, chips and salsa. Mom and Santiago drank beer. Boy drank lukewarm orange juice.

  After preparing to leave, Santiago told Mom to take the boat to the shore alone. Santiago and Boy would swim back together. Mom protested. She had never driven the boat without Santiago nearby and was scared. A distant look spread across his face. He assured her it would be okay, assured her that Boy would make it.

  After packing up, Mom steered the boat away from the island.

  Santiago pointed towards the shore and Boy asked if there were any sharks in the water. They started swimming, Santiago ahead of Boy. The sun was hot and the water was cool. Santiago occasionally slowed down to encourage Boy to swim faster. Boy had never swum a quarter mile, had never swum half a mile, and he certainly had never swum a full miles.

  Boy started to cry and his tears disappeared into the silvery lake each time his head plunged into the water. Eventually, he stopped swimming. Moments later, water began to fill his ears. He kicked and beat his hands in a panic.

  Santiago laughed. He grabbed hold of Boy, wrapping his big purplish brown arm around his skinny torso. Santiago whispered in Boy’s ear that there were sharks in the water and that he had better swim faster. Santiago told Boy that the only way to survive in this world was to fight the currents, escape the sharks, and push ahead no matter what’s chasing you.

  He let go of Boy.

  Santiago started swimming again. He told Boy not to look back because the sharks were closing in. Escape the sharks. Boy felt something nip at his toes and screamed, his mouth filling with water. Santiago never looked back and soon, Boy caught up to him. They reached the shore where Mom was waiting with a worried look on her face. It was a beautiful thing to see Mom on the shore. It was a beautiful thing to escape the sharks.

  A month later, Mom’s stomach started to grow. Mom and Santiago argued about getting married in the bedroom while Boy watched the Discovery Channel. One day, that same distant look spread across Santiago’s face. It was impossible to hide. Boy knew what it meant without understanding what it meant.

  Mom cried for weeks, months, and finally Girl was born. Girl had pretty black hair and Santiago’s eyes, but Santiago would never know this.

  He had escaped the sharks long ago.

  Chapter 4: Black Olive Eyes

  Boy’s Age: 9

  In the Fall, they moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, and Mom took a job as a cashier at Jimmy’s Sausage and Pork Outlet. Boy was young, nine years old, Girl was younger, and both their fathers had disappeared. This was years before Glass Wings came, years before Boy moved to Austin and met Friend, years before he encountered Lucy and Ghost, years before he had his STD.

  It was in Charlotte that Mom invented Charlotte’s Web, a piece of thinly sliced pork from the discount meat bin with mustard squirted on top in the outline of a spider web. Charlotte’s Web was garnished with a single piece of broccoli or buttered cauliflower, with a trail of mustard connected to it that represented the dangling spider.

  ‘Who’s hungry?’ she’d always ask, just before setting the food on the table. Girl could talk by then, but she couldn’t quite pronounce Charlotte. Instead, she’d yell Char-load! And slap her fists against the table.

  Mom, who had grown thin since their move from Florida, would watch wearily as Boy and Girl ate the same dinner six nights a week. Sunday was Different Day, her only full day off. She’d routinely get creative on Different Day, after they arrived home from church, of course.

  Oscar the Grouch was the name of a mound of lettuce with two black olive eyes and a frowny face made of ranch dressing. Michelangelo was the name of a circular pile of lettuce sectioned off by a strip of carrots topped with black olives for eyes. Kermit the Frog was the same basic design as Oscar the Grouch, except that Kermit had a ranch dressing smile. Rush Limbaugh – Mom’s favorite radio personality – was the name of a pile of angel hair noodles fried in pork fat and decorated with ketchup.

  Making just ten cents above minimum wage, Mom worked tirelessly six days a week at Jimmy’s Sausage and Pork Outlet just to keep up with the bills. A few of the women she worked with confessed to her that they’d recently started receiving food stamps. They talked about how their family’s diets had improved, how they weren’t paid enough at Jimmy’s. They tried to convince Mom to join the program on more than one occasion. ‘You deserve it, darling,’ they’d say. ‘Ain’t any shame in applying,’ they’d say.

  Eventually, one of the ladies printed out an application for Mom and gave it to her in an envelope. Mom brought the envelope home that night, her head pounding from a recurring migraine. She asked Boy to prepare some cereal for his sister while she rested.

  ‘Char-Load!’ Girl said, growing angry when Boy handed her a bowl of generic Fruit Loops.

  ‘Not tonight,’ Boy said.

  ‘I want Char-load!’

  ‘Eat it.’

  Mom could hear them from the other room but was too tired to tell them to quit their bickering. She was thinking of Santiago, Girl’s father, and how much things had changed in the three and a half years since he’d left. She was thinking about day care costs, bills, the clicking sound her car had been making, the clothes that needed washing. She was a woman with two children, from two different fathers, with a whole slew of problems.

  The next morning, Mom made each of her children a Madonna – a plate of scrambled eggs arranged like the pop singer’s hair around two black olive eyes and sliced apples for lips.

  ‘What’s this?’ Boy asked, holding up the envelope with Mom’s name written across it in cursive letters.

  ‘Oh, I meant to throw that away,’ she said.

  ‘Madonna is yummy!’ Girl smiled with her mouth full of eggs.

  ‘Don’t talk with your mouth full,’ Mom said.

  Boy opened the envelope and looked over the small stack of papers.

 
‘Application for Food and Nutrition Services…’

  ‘Look, I want you to remember this, okay?’ Mom snatched the application from him.

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Just because we’re poor, doesn’t mean we should ask our government for anything.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘This here’s an application for free food, but it ain’t free. Somebody’s got to pay for it, and that somebody is the American taxpayer. Some of those black women at work think I qualify. But I ain’t signing up. Our government is already in our business enough. To hell with all of them.’

  ‘It’s a free food application?’ Boy asked.

  ‘Nothing’s free, you remember that,’ Mom said. ‘There are too many people asking for a handout in this country. You’ll learn this one day. No such thing as a free lunch. Got it?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  Mom tore the application in half and tossed it in the trash can.

  Later that afternoon, Boy picked up Girl from daycare and they walked the three blocks to their duplex. While Girl watched TV, Boy retrieved the free food application from the trashcan and smoothed it out on the table. He went into the bedroom that he shared with Girl and pressed the two crumbled halves under their bed, alongside a few shark drawings he’d been working on.

  Mom came home that night with a paper sack brimming with groceries. She prepared Pinky and the Brain: two pizzas, one round and one long and thin, topped with mozzarella and tomato slices for eyes. For dessert she made blue Jell-O with cottage cheese eyes, which she called The Tick.

  ‘See,’ she said as Boy and Girl ate dessert, ‘we don’t need any damn handouts from nobody.’

  ‘Bad word,’ Girl said.

  ‘That’s right, Honey, and I don’t want you saying it.’