Boy versus Self: (A Psychological Thriller)

by Harmon Cooper

  ‘Um, from what I’ve gathered so far, you are in a trailer with two topless Elvises and one of them is massaging you.’

  ‘Actually, they’re both massaging me, but there’s more to the story.’

  ‘I’m sure there is,’ Boy says.

  ‘So the other one returns with this bucket filled with some sort of liquid and she takes off my shoes and socks. Then I notice that there is some steam coming off the liquid in the bucket. She pushes the bucket over to my feet, and lowers my feet into it.’

  ‘Crazy.’

  ‘Yeah, and the other one is still massaging me and my feet are in this like soupy liquid, not quite oil, but thicker than water. Maybe like warmed up hand lotion or something. Fuck if I know. So now all my nerves are tingling and I’m just sitting there convulsing like a goddamn shaman and I don’t know who these girls are or why they are treating me like this.’

  ‘Okay, so what happens next?’

  ‘I’m getting to it! So one of them takes off her Elvis hair and sunglasses and you’ll never guess who it is.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘It’s Register Girl from Toy Joy! Remember her?’

  Boy says, ‘No.’

  ‘Sri Sri Sri. Remember, the Sri lady? From when we were tripping in the toy store…’

  ‘The one with the strange haircut and star tattoo?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  Boy remembers her, remembers Jill the clinic lady walking up behind him. He shakes his head to cast away the thought.

  ‘Did she recognize you?’

  ‘Well, I say to her, “hey do you remember me from Toy Joy? You know, I came in and my buddy was bugging out.” Something like this…’

  ‘I wasn’t bugging out,’ Boy says.

  ‘We’ll debate that later. So she says, “No, I don’t remember you,” and she keeps massaging my feet.’

  ‘Why were they massaging your feet in the first place?’

  ‘I’ll get to it later. So I say the three magic words—’

  ‘—Sri Sri Sri.’

  ‘Exactly. And she says “Sri Sri Sri,” and her friend looks up at me, still with her Elvis costume on and smiles.’

  ‘So then what?’

  ‘Then they move up and start massaging my calves and the back of my knees.’

  ‘What!?’

  ‘Yeah, and it hurts to have my calves massaged because I carry a lot of stress there.’

  ‘And how do you know this?’ Boy grins skeptically.

  ‘Well, Register Girl tells me.’

  ‘Does she have a name?’ he asks, tired of pseudonyms.

  ‘Citronella,’ Friend says, biting at something on his nail.

  ‘That can’t be her real name.’

  ‘No really, it’s her name. I looked on her driver’s license later. She had it changed to Citronella when she turned eighteen.’

  ‘And let me guess,’ Boy says, ‘Citronella’s friend’s name was Five.’

  ‘Actually, her friend’s name was Eight.’

  ‘Eight? you’re joking.’

  ‘Nope, she had it legally changed.’

  ‘That’s it, I give up on Austin,’ Boy says, laughing. ‘So Eight and Citronella are massaging your calves in Elvis costumes…’

  ‘Yeah, and Citronella looks up at me and says, “You’re tripping hard, aren’t you?” And I mumble. So she says, “I thought so,” and I ask, “Is that a problem? Why are you ladies massaging me anyway?” and Eight says, “Because you were the first person to meditate with us tonight.” “So you’re giving me a free massage?” I ask. “Yes,” she says, “we made an agreement that if someone – man or woman – actually sat down and meditated with us, we would offer them a free massage.” Crazy, huh?’

  ‘I don’t know how to feel about any of this,’ Boy says.

  ‘So I ask them, “Are ya’ll tripping or something?” and Citronella laughs and says, “I don’t do that stuff anymore.” Well now they’re each massaging one of my hands and I’m crying.’

  ‘Again?’

  ‘Don’t judge. I was out of my mind, man. It’s ok to cry when you’re out of your mind. You should know that.’ Friend gives Boy a heated glance.

  ‘Not judging.’

  ‘And so Citronella asks me, “Do you want to really meditate with us?” And I say, “Of course I want to really meditate with ya’ll. Why the hell not?” and Eight laughs and I ask: “Whose trailer is this?” And Eight says, “We don’t know exactly. It was the nearest private area we could find.” And then I finally come to the realization that I’m stuck in a trailer with two topless women who are both massaging me. So I start getting turned on.’

  ‘You just now realized this?’ Boy asks, shaking his head. He is all too familiar with topless women wearing Elvis costumes.

  ‘Well, at least my dick does. So I casually reach my hand down – now they are massaging my arms – and I point my finger out and poke Citronella’s nipple. Well, both girls stop massaging me and glance at one another. And like seconds later, Citronella reaches down to my crotch, squeezes my dick and twists it, man! And she’s glaring at me and saying, “Is this what you want?” And I’m like, “No! Sorry! No! God no! Please!” And now she’s rotating her hand and I’m just freaking out from the pain and Eight is laughing.’

  ‘Damn!’

  ‘So I’m trying to get away and I’m like trying to kick my legs but Citronella has got this Kung Fu grip on my dick, and I’m just completely immobile. Just paralyzed, you know? And I’m screaming, “Stop! Stop! Stop!” and Citronella is laughing and then she lets go and kisses me.’

  ‘Please don’t tell me…’

  ‘Of course I kiss her back.’

  ‘After she just nearly ripped your—’

  ‘—Yeah, and her kiss is like crazy and I’m just freaking out, tingling all over and shit. I mean, the inside of my head is like a snow globe or something now.’

  ‘So what happens next?’

  ‘Well, I sure as hell don’t touch her boobs again. I just kind of sit there and let her kiss me. And I realize, after all this torment and tripping and whatever – I realize that I never ever want to hallucinate again. So I tell her this. I tell her I never want to smoke weed again, that I want to meditate with her and change my life, and I’m crying now and she’s crying, hugging me. And Eight is sitting next to me, holding my hand and comforting me.’

  ‘Never again?’ Boy asks incredulously.

  ‘Never again,’ Friend says with a once-in-a-lifetime look of conviction in his eyes.

  ‘So it took you meditating in front of a pair of topless Elvises, those Elvises giving you a massage and then getting your dick almost ripped off, then a long kiss from a woman who works at a toy store – all this to give up drugs?’

  ‘When you say it like that, it doesn’t sound so profound.’

  ‘Selling them too?’

  ‘Selling them too… that is, after I get rid of the weed I got right now, of course. Speaking of which, you don’t know anybody who needs anything, do you?’

  ₪₪₪

  Boy turns off his phone for the night. Maeve and Salome can wait. It’s been a terribly long day, and all he can think about is smearing paint onto a canvas. He doesn’t want to paint anything in particular, or work on a new piece. He just wants to smear and smudge.

  Using an old canvas that he’s since re-primed, Boy begins swirling Cerulean Blue with Cobalt Green. As soon as the brush touches the canvas, he loses himself in the moment, concentrating solely on the colors, solely on the way they mesh together, the way the blue overtakes the green, the way the green eventually alters the clarity of the blue. Neither hungry nor thirsty, distracted nor focused, Boy blends the colors until they are a mess of brushstroke and memory.

  He hears something in his living room and looks over his shoulder. He still needs to clean, still needs to replace his paint splattered sheets. Responsibilities pile up like chips at the dealer’s table. He needs to do some job hunting, but figures he can do some later,
after he finishes painting.

  As he pulls some sharp lines from the blob of paint in the middle of the canvas he thinks of Friend and his recent epiphany. He wonders how long the spirituality kick will last. He’s seen it happen to Austinites before, seen many obsess over self-fulfillment in the name of soul searching. Everyone wants to be something they’re not, nothing profound in that.

  As he loses himself in the color and canvas, one of his action figures falls onto the floor in the living room. The coffee table shakes slightly. Paint Ghost is back. Boy caps his paints and spins around, listening as she approaches.

  There.

  Boy thrusts his paint brush in front of him just in time and pokes an invisible, solid object. Paint Ghost doesn’t run this time. Instead, she remains stationary as Boy pulls a single vertical line from the center of her chest to the bottom of her chin. The line curves like the end of an umbrella, distending slightly as her chest moves up and down.

  ‘Stay calm,’ he says softly to her.

  He dips his brush into more paint and spreads another line up to the bottom of the invisible girl’s chin. Very slowly, he points the brush at what he assumes is her nose. He presses his brush into her nose and outlines her nostrils. Boy reaches for a bigger brush, dips it in the red paint on his easel.

  He begins filling in the rest of her face with the red paint, stopping at the hairline and moving in calculated gestures. It feels just like painting real skin, like painting the peel of an orange. Paint Ghost has high cheek bones, like his sister, and thin eyebrows. She remains surprisingly still, her face red and her nostrils blue. With a different brush, boy shades her lips green.

  He reaches his hand out, and runs it down the contour of her naked shoulder until he arrives at her wrist. Her body is cold, but not as cold as Lucy’s. The coldness reaches the bones in his hand and spirals upwards.

  ‘Is it okay?’ he asks her. No response. He pulls her in closer. As soon as he drops her wrist, the whites of her eyes appear.

  Paint Girl is pupil-less; blue veins trickle out from the corners of her eyelids like onion roots. Boy reels back as soon as he sees her white eyes. He recovers quickly and springs forward with his paint brush. He streaks his brush across her bony shoulders, smoothing it over her collar bone. She trembles once the brush meets the side of her neck.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he says, running the brush beneath her ear. He sweeps her chin-length hair to the side and some of it bounces back. The once invisible tips are now accented in green with hints of chartreuse, like a small pond lit by a single paper lantern.

  Boy steps in front of her. She’s a flat-chested girl, closer to a boy than a woman. A gamine, a stringy thing who’s finally held still long enough for Boy to get a good look at her.

  He feels overwhelmed with emotion, the way a god must feel when casting a being into existence. Something swells inside him and dissipates into his appendages. His arms suddenly feel like jelly, his fingers cardboard.

  Boy stops his brush at her belly button. He places his hand in the air and wraps his trembling fingers around her thin wrist. Her eyes open wider, and the whiteness of her sclerae intensifies.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Boy says to her, ‘I’ve touched ghosts before.’

  ‘I’m not a ghost,’ she whispers.

  ₪₪₪

  Startled by her soft voice, Boy drops his paintbrush to the floor, his heart thrumming like a rattlesnake’s tail against his ribcage. Paint Ghost nods her painted face, which looks odd because Boy still hasn’t painted her hair yet.

  ‘Impossible,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘What’s y-y-your name?’

  ‘Penelope.’

  Boy’s phone buzzes and he quickly shoves his hand into his pocket to silence it.

  ‘Who is it?’ she asks.

  ‘I don’t care,’ he says, looking at her cautiously. ‘You’re the thing that painted the sign. What are you exactly?’

  ‘I’m Penelope.’

  The whites of Penelope’s eyes give her a frightening visage, but the way she holds her body – at least the part of her body that is painted – is casual and calm. Not sure what to make of it, Boy’s nerves fire left and right.

  ‘Why did you spread my paint everywhere?’ Boy asks, his voice still a little shaky.

  Her green lips curl into a smile.

  ‘Well, please don’t do that anymore. It’s expensive.’

  She giggles. ‘But you just wasted paint on me…’

  ‘Yes, but it was a test. I guess I don’t have to do it next time. You will come back, won’t you?’

  ‘As long as you need me to.’

  ‘And you’re not a ghost?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Are you a spirit?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Are you a girl?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Are you dead?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Are you a hallucination?’

  ‘Close. Why are you crying?’ Penelope asks.

  Boy touches his face; he quickly dries his wet cheeks with his sleeve. ‘I… I…’

  ‘Please don’t cry.’

  ‘I just don’t understand all this. What the fuck is wrong with me? Why am I seeing you? W-w-why am I talking to you?’

  He slams his fist against the table to add emphasis to his statement, but there is no strength backing his gesture, and the sound is barely audible.

  ‘You want me to leave?’

  ‘I just want to know why you’re here. I… I don’t get it.’

  ‘It’s okay. There are others like you, you know,’ she says.

  ‘Are you my guardian angel?’

  ‘That sounds so stupid.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Do I look like an angel?’

  ‘I don’t know. What does an angel look like?’ Boy’s tears have stopped now and he can feel his nerves calming.

  ‘Don’t they have wings?’

  ‘You would know better than I,’ she says.

  The way she says wings reminds him of Glass Wings. He shudders. ‘How long have you been here at my home?’

  ‘Not so long. I just arrived two days ago.’

  ‘Where were you before?’

  ‘Somewhere else.’

  ‘What were you doing there?’

  ‘Same thing I’m doing here. Would you like to continue painting me?’

  ‘No, it’s fine…’

  ‘Why don’t you paint my back?’ Penelope turns around and her hair lifts off her neck. Some of the paint from the tips of her hair and her neck attaches itself to her arms and hands. Now it looks as if there is half a torso standing in front of him.

  ‘Can you feel it when I paint you?’ Boy asks, flattening the tip of his brush onto her small back.

  ‘Yeah, it tickles.’

  ₪₪₪

  Tattooed hipsters, internet start-up temp employees, bloggers, shoe-gazing penniless artists, broke musicians, homeless people who’ve scrounged up a dollar or two for a cup of coffee, sweaty Town Lake joggers, frat dudes brave enough to journey east, plastic smile realtors, bearded bikers, writers checking their Twitter feed, activists planning protests, soccer moms looking out of place, grad students Facebook stalking their ex-girlfriends, a girl in the corner writing notes in a Moleskin journal, a hyper barista with thick rimmed glasses going table to table to talk to everyone, a red-headed guy with skin modifications studying Tibetan and sipping a cup of yerba mate tea, a thin man in a Namaste t-shirt and pajama pants reading a book called Buddhist Yogic Practices, a couple sitting on the patio with matching bulldogs – for the last month, Boy has been spending his afternoons people watching at a coffee shop on East 38th called Cherrytown. He’s also been juggling a relationship between two women and one invisible girl: Maeve, Salome and Penelope.

  Currently, he is working on a few preliminary sketches for a statue of Glass Wings he hopes to one day create. Without the materials, or a proper studio, Boy would never be able to adequately create the piece he envisions. He would also
have to brush up on metal welding. (He’d taken shop class in high school as a double elective his junior and senior year. While he hadn’t done big welding pieces, he had made small amateur pieces during his final semester at Huntington.)

  ‘My man,’ Friend says, fist bumping Boy. He sits down in front of him with an Odwalla. He’s grown out his beard, and a hint of color has returned to his face. Coming from a heated yoga class, Friend is shiny and ready to talk.

  ‘So what’s up?’

  ‘You won’t believe what I got into last night.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Boy asks, closing his sketch book.

  ‘So, Eight invited Citronella and me to this party off Slaughter Lane. You ever go that far south?’

  ‘Not often.’

  ‘It’s like a whole different side of Austin down there. Kind of a strange vibe. Anyway though, so this guy named Marcus has this two-story house that he’s turned into a meditation retreat, but it’s also kind of a hippy grotto thing.’

  Friend takes a swig off his Odwalla and sets it on the table. ‘Man, you should have seen this guy’s living room. ‘It was totally decked out with Om symbols and these two projectors projecting chakra symbols onto some of the walls. There were cushions everywhere, like some sort of pharaoh’s lair or something, and this dude with dreads was sitting on a white fur rug playing a harmonium and singing at the top of his lungs.’

  ‘What was he singing?’

  ‘Some strange chant. It sounded like whaaaaa heeeeyyyy guuuuuurrrruuu. And all these people – well, not all these people, maybe like fifteen people – were sitting in front of him and chanting too. So Citronella leads me into the kitchen, where they have this fresh batch of marijuana kombucha sitting in this giant punch bowl.’

  ‘Did you drink some?’

  ‘Of course I drank some; I’ve always wanted to try that!’

  ‘I thought you quit doing stuff like that,’ Boy says with a slight grin.

  ‘Well, I mean, I quit doing hallucinogens. Marijuana – she’s a little harder to give up. But like I told you, I’m not smoking everyday anymore. Occasionally, like twice a week, I’ll use a vaporizer, because it’s healthier you know. But, I mean, really? Marijuana kombucha? Even Citronella couldn’t pass this up. The closest I’ve even come to drinking marijuana was the time Aiden and I made dragon juice. You ever tried dragon juice?’