Boy versus Self: (A Psychological Thriller)

by Harmon Cooper

  ‘What the hell is wrong with me?’ Boy presses his palms into his eyes, feels a sob coming on, chokes it back.

  He turns on his computer, sees the date and time on the menu. Either twenty-four hours have passed or the date is wrong. Plus it’s raining outside. He checks the internet. The date definitely isn’t wrong. Somehow, he’s lost a day. Somehow, he’s finally gotten some decent sleep.

  Shower and shampoo. Boy can’t remember when he bathed last. He weeps in the shower, lets the tears wash down the drain. Pull it together. Pull it together. The water goes cold. He curses the shower, nearly slips on the bathroom floor as he scrambles to find the towel.

  Downstairs now, Boy finishes a carton of orange juice and eats a pair of cold tamales. In the pantry he finds a box of taco shells. He eats the shells and uses a mixture of ketchup and mustard as dip. He remembers he bought chocolate not long ago, finds it stashed in an otherwise empty utensil drawer.

  After putting something in his stomach, Boy works tirelessly to catch up to a finish line that seems to stretch further and further into the horizon. He is work and work is he; carrot on a stick and stick with a carrot tethered to it. If only he could paint his horrors away.

  Chapter 11: The Lost Years are like Sandwich Cookies

  The lost years twist apart and crumble into pieces and flakes. The lost years grow stale with age and are easily forgotten when trampled upon. The lost years came in a package that has since been abandoned in a trashcan in somebody’s neighborhood. The lost years hold so much in-between them that they are like sandwich cookies.

  The lost years made more sense then than they do now. The lost years dance through the doors of memory with sharp cleats and muddy shoelaces. The lost years are shrill and bittersweet. The lost years trail up Girl’s arms in a series of words and phrases. The lost years swirl down her legs in an act of self-betrayal and self-gratification. The lost years are infinitely lost.

  The lost years are blemished marbles in a felt Crown Royal sack clinking against one another. The lost years are blemished marbles in a felt Crown Royal sack with a slit in it. The lost years escape like convicts through a hole in the wall fighting over one another. The lost years are pinpricks and polished surfaces, cracked edges and refined discouragement. The lost years are lost because they were born into existence with a sense of detachment. The lost years are like sandwich cookies because they come apart once they’re dipped in milk.

  The lost years are how Boy describes a good portion of his life. The lost years stack like chipped dominoes on the edge of a precipice, teetering towards collapse. The lost years are peppered with small instances of success and slivers of memories that blade Boy’s psyche like a sushi chef. The lost years are cereal boxes stacked like food pyramids. The lost years are pills and medicines and prescriptions and illnesses all in a single emergency room. The lost years are the cure for the disease and the disease for the cure. The lost years come apart easily if you twist them.

  The lost years are sweet no matter how stale they become. The lost years are stale no matter how sweet they become. The lost years can be divided up between Boy and Girl and shared. The lost years are heavy in Mom’s purse and sandbags under her eyes, balls and chains. The lost years are like two mountains next to one another that never meet but always see the same sunrise.

  The lost years are the crumbs eaten by rats and cockroaches, carried away by ants to their granulated lairs. The lost years leave a stain on the table rimmed with deceit. The lost years are teetering towards collapse. The lost years are swept under the rug or shoved into a closet.

  The lost years are sweeter than they seem, more dangerous than they appear.

  Chapter 12: Japan

  Boy’s Age: 25

  Boy is lying naked on a massage table.

  His head is sticking out of a padded hole covered with a towel which has been carved into the top of the table. He’s gazing down onto the floor. He doesn’t know what to expect, didn’t know what to expect upon arriving in Japan. Strange to be naked in a room separated from the lobby of the massage parlor by a single black curtain, but Boy’s life has never been normal.

  Someone enters and removes the towel covering his lower half. The towel is quickly replaced by a longer towel that is steaming hot. More towels are lumped over his body until he feels hampered down by their heat. Sweat drips from his forehead onto the floor below. The warmth swells around him, encompassing his body.

  The pressure on the mattress changes. The table’s legs cut into the squares of carpet separating them from the wooden floor. He feels something on his back, a strange heavy weight, too strong to be someone’s hands. He wants to turn his neck, but can’t.

  The weight on his back rocks left and right. He realizes the pressure can only come from feet, can only come from someone standing directly on top of him.

  The person’s heels separate, cracking his spine like a pair of old knuckles. Boy flinches, a good pain really, and holds his breath as the feet saunter down his vertebra. Now the feet are standing on his ass, kneading his lower back with their toes. They scamper up his back again and press into his shoulder. Another crack. Boy takes a deep breath, adjusts to the wonderful pain.

  The tiny feet are now pressing into the soles of his feet. He feels a gush of energy swell up his calves and to his stomach. The feet scamper up his spine, until they are again rocking back and forth along his back. They land on the floor and he can finally see them through his padded viewing hole. Painted toe nails, Cadium Red. A small woman.

  The hot towels are removed and his lower body is covered again by a dry towel.

  ‘First massage, then hotel. It’s my routine every time I visit,’ Oggie said hours earlier, as they exited Narita Airport.

  ₪₪₪

  Boy and Oggie flew business class from LaGuardia to Tokyo. Never having ridden business class before, Boy found himself unaccustomed to the services and perks. Strange to be separated from economy class, or the animals back there, as an Australian passenger jokingly said to the flight attendant.

  I used to be one of those animals.

  For dinner Boy had the minced chicken rolled up with shrimp, sliced veal Zurich-style with Fuji poached apple sauce, buttered carrots, steamed Japanese rice and trio mousse with vanilla sauce.

  He drank two screwdrivers as he talked to Oggie. Oggie had become a friend, someone he trusted completely, not enough to tell him of his hallucinations, but Boy had only recently revealed those things to his sister, and he had given her a heavily watered down version.

  Oggie had already selected his two pieces for the year, Cosmetic Before and Cosmetic After from Boy’s Human Comedy collection. His opening for the pieces was pushed back due to Hurricane Sandy, but the three week extension gave him more time to focus on the finished product. They were currently on display with the rest of the now independently owned collection in Philadelphia.

  Boy grew tired as they spoke, as the world whipped by outside the plane in clumps of stringy clouds and bundles of iridescent stars. The 180 degree decline of his seat made it easy for him to fall asleep. He was woken up seven hours later by a thin Japanese flight attendant brandishing a menu backed by a finely pressed piece of leather.

  After breakfast, he went to the restroom and stared at himself in the mirror. Boy wanted to laugh at what his life had become, at what he’d become. He wanted to smash the tiny bathroom mirror, drain the blood from his hand into his empty wine glass, and toast himself. Life really is a comedy.

  The plane shook slightly from a bout of turbulence. The captain came on the loudspeaker telling everyone to get back to their seats and buckle up. Boy slid the bathroom door open, and a flight attendant pushed past.

  Success.

  Boy’s success was a joke really, and he owed it all to Oggie. Boy’s sister had told him not to start second-guessing his work. Is my art really that good? Or, could I have done this on my own? These types of questions would only lead to inner turmoil. Better to just accept what’s hap
pened. Better to never forget how it happened, but also to never question what should come next. Better to just work until the version of himself that he has created in his mind topples the version of himself he has actually become. Better not to have the veil lifted – religious types pay heed.

  Boy has had two big shows since the Fall of 2012, as well as a couple of smaller shows at local New York galleries. Human Comedy was set to travel to Denver, San Francisco, Portland and Dallas this year.

  He’d been described by one magazine as a neo-outsider artist, the stupidest phrase he’d heard in a while. Not quite Art Brut because no one knew of his craziness, at least not yet, but still, Oggie’s connections had taken him very far very quickly. To Boy, success was as ridiculous as the people who believed they should have it, yet did nothing to obtain it. He was selling art now, was making his own money, and was still shocked every morning he woke up from a bad sleep and found himself in his Brooklyn studio, surrounded by his art and his ideas for future pieces.

  The strangest part of supposed success (however limited it was in the scheme of things) was how little he’d changed through it. He still maintained the lackluster diet of orange juice and random bits of food he could find. He still was the eccentric, slightly introverted guy that people knew of, but never really knew.

  His hallucinations had died down a little, but he still spoke with Penelope and would see Glass Wings in random places from time to time. No matter how much time passed between his last encounter with the horrible creature – the night Boy fed him the beer bottles – the sense of true confrontation was always present.

  It was in this mindset that Boy decided to make Glass Wings into an actual piece. In Early 2013, he met with Oggie’s sculpting friend, Josh Bertetta, and quickly fell back into welding, something he’d dabbled in in his final semesters at Huntington.

  His only problem: glass didn’t exactly weld to metal. To accomplish the desired effect – a rusty creature with pick legs and glass wings – Boy used glass bonding adhesive to glue slats of stained glass to the brackets along the bottom of the Humerus, Ulnare and the Basal phalanx. Knowing that this would hardly support the weight of the glass he planned to add to the wings, Boy also applied glue to the inside of the brackets he’d installed along the Tertials, Secondaries and Primaries (the pieces of steel themselves were tightly bolted into their various bases). Before working with the glass, he added a Radius and Metacarpus to each wing for additional support.

  Unlike a bird, Boy wouldn’t be able to fashion the wings in long, straight remiges. Instead, he would use the framework of the wings as a bracket support for pieces of shattered glass, basically creating a ruffled effect. To keep the wings light, Boy used the thinnest pieces of glass he could find. He also used different types of glass, which gave the wings a sinister peacock-like effect. While the wings were crafted first, they eventually would be installed last, each piece bolted into eight industrial-sized sockets on Glass Wings’s back.

  Boy realized it would be difficult to support this weight on Glass Wings’s pick legs. Bertetta, Oggie’s welding friend, had suggested that Boy stray away from his original idea of pick legs, and instead helped Boy craft ostrich-like feet to evenly distribute the weight. The outcome was both frightening and absolutely strange – mechanical and deranged, struthionine.

  Making the Glass Wings sculpture was both a cathartic cleansing and a re-opening of past wounds. The piece had already been shipped to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roppongi. Oggie, pulling his behind the scene strings as usual, was able to get Boy into the first floor exhibition gallery, no small feat as the museum rarely showcased foreign artists, especially ones as new as him.

  ₪₪₪

  In two days, Boy would oversee the installation as well as the arrangement of his newest collection, Portraits of the Ghosts that Haunt Me, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roppongi. Amazing ridiculous amazing true. Amazing.

  ₪₪₪

  The curtain opens.

  The massage therapist hops back onto the table. Hot oil that smells like green tea is poured onto his back. He can feel the woman’s feet next to his rested arms. The woman lowers herself onto his back in a squatting position. Using her knees, she begins pressing into his back in an outward motion, massaging him with the inside of her thighs.

  The woman stops with her knees tucked underneath her body. Her weight is balanced on ridge of Boy’s spine. She bends forward and presses her fingers into his shoulders. She squeezes, and uses her hands to lift her body into a forward bend. She presses her palms and thumbs into the spot where his neck attaches to his shoulders, where she works her fingers until Boy lets out an audible sound of pain.

  ‘Soft-uu?’ she says.

  ‘Soft,’ he says.

  The intensity of her grip lessens as she moves down his spine. She pecks her fingers into his back as if she is typing a lighthearted e-mail. The pressure increases until it feels like heavy rain drops washing away his skin. Her legs slide down his torso. She trails her fingers down the small of his back, over the lumps of his ass and onto the backs of his thighs.

  Using a scooping motion, she pulls at the skin of his inner thighs – the same skin that his testicles rub against every day – in an outward motion. The woman massages the skin up and out, clapping her hands together as they come back down for another tug. Arriving at the back of his knees, she presses her pointer fingers in a straight line down to his heels. More oil is added. She’s now standing at the other end of the massage table, working on his heels and the soles of his feet.

  Glass Wings. The dead creature that assaulted his sister over a decade ago and attacked him in New York is now a statue. Glass Wings exists in a form which others can now see. Boy pushes the thought away, tries to relax and enjoy the increasingly arousing massage.

  Don’t swallow your demons; spit them out.

  Another voice: Focus on the massage. Focus on the massage.

  ₪₪₪

  The Japanese woman presses into the center of Boy’s palm and swishes her thumbs outward. She pinches at the excess skin on his fingers, digs her nail deeper into the center of each of his nails.

  Finishing with his other hand, she says something to him in Japanese.

  ‘What?’

  She starts pushing at his body in the way one would roll a log.

  ‘Turn over?’ he asks.

  ‘Hai!’

  Boy turns over, trying to hide his exposed groin area with the towel. He can see the woman now. A firm body and closely cropped bangs – she’s shorter than he imagined. Her nose is a small button and her skin is pale. She smiles at him without making eye contact as she whips the towel off, leaving Boy fully exposed.

  The room suddenly becomes colder. The woman gets back on top of him and squats over his stomach. He can hear her breathing now, soft and shallow.

  Two humans who don’t know each other and couldn’t communicate if they did find themselves in a small room. One is naked, the other is clothed. It’s an SAT question gone horribly wrong, a scenario that doubles as a metaphor for human existence. Kill me when life starts making sense.

  The woman squirts more oil onto his chest and massages her hands in the same way she would roll a large hunk of dough. Boy looks at her, tries to make eye contact with the woman straddling him. She’s looking off somewhere over his shoulder, somewhere through him, past him. The only thing on her face is that plaster grin of hers.

  She glides her hands up to Boy’s temples and presses in with her thumbs. He closes his eyes at the pain. Like a roll of film spilling out into an ocean of frantic worms, images of his bizarre life barrel past. They dispel as soon as she decreases the pressure.

  ‘Okay?’ she asks.

  ‘I think. Just some thoughts.’

  ‘I can’t English.’

  ‘It’s okay. Again. More. Press harder. More. More. More! Yes, good.’

  ‘Hai!’

  She jams her thumbs into his temples again. His legs spasm and Glass Wing
s enters into the room of his cluttered mind. Glass teeth eyes hollow. Mom holding the belt over her head in the bathroom in North Carolina. Glass Wings watching. Penelope painted, white eyes. Girl’s cuts covering her body like sadist graffiti. Fresh and sticky dripping. Glass Wings’s tongue trickling out of his mouth and wrapping around Girl’s neck. NO END. Blood on his palms. Boy trembles and the woman stops massaging his temples.

  ‘Okay?’ she asks.

  ‘Again.’ He takes a deep breath, tries to get it all out. ‘Again.’

  She glides her fingers down his chin and circles his Adam’s apple. Lifting herself to her heels, she scoots down his body, squatting just above his knees to massage his belly.

  Boy tries not to think about her proximity to his prick. Instead, he imagines her fingers as paintbrushes glossing over his torso with a variety of colors. He imagines the colors swirling together, like the few times he’s painted Penelope. Red and yellow makes orange; white and red makes pink; blue and yellow makes green; red and blue makes purple. He imagines his body as a canvas of scars and memories abraded by time.

  The woman comes to the skin just below his belly button. She begins pulling her fingers in a backward motion, leaving his body just as she reaches the base of his penis. Boy feels no arousal at this. It should be sensual, yet he feels nothing. Misguided libido. She seems to sense this and squirts the bottle of hot oil directly onto his penis.

  Boy recoils. A feeling of restlessness pours so strongly over him that his immediate response is to try and squirm out from underneath her. He doesn’t want what could happen next. He’s mad at himself for not wanting what could and very well should happen next. Her fingers wrap around his prick. They compress and begin moving up and down. Who turns down a hand job?