Boy versus Self: (A Psychological Thriller)

by Harmon Cooper

  ‘What do you mean?’ Boy asks. Capitalism sleeks in like a guilty cat.

  ‘I mean, God, I hate to say it like this, but this is a selling point. If you are honest about what’s been happening to you, it’ll give people a greater sense of the suffering that these pieces hold. It will breathe life into them. When you first showed me all the pieces – while I found them interesting – I didn’t quite understand where they were coming from. Now, I get it.’

  ‘And the Glass Wings piece?’ Boy asks. ‘Is it still the one you want?’

  ‘Even more so now. It needs to be saved, it needs to be documented.’ Oggie’s eyes fill with excitement. ‘You have a unique talent. Your work needs to be seen and preserved.’

  It was the best compliment Boy had ever received, but it felt like a curved Persian dagger being pulled across his stomach. Look around you! He wanted to scream at himself and at Oggie. The glass. The blood. The terror. Document this?

  D0 the pieces in my new collection really need life breathed into them? The Glass Wings sculpture was staggering in size and breaming with animosity. The portraits of Ghost and Lucy were bizarre and powerful. He was most proud of the sculpture he crafted of Penelope.

  To create the Penelope statue, Boy had purchased a child-sized manikin off eBay and created a metal frame of the contours of its body using coat hangers as wiring. Once the temporary frame was complete, he welded thin pieces of steel together over the coat hanger frame. With a frame intact, he crafted a thick tree-trunk-like bracket and anchored it to a pedestal fashioned from a large hunk of metal.

  To keep the sculpture from looking robotic, Boy coated the metal with plaster, which he then smoothed to form the contours of Penelope’s face and the pieces of her body which were visible. He wanted three-fourths of the piece to be visible and for her to be reaching forward, almost as if she were emerging from a sticky invisible swamp.

  He placed a wig on the sculpture, matted it down with glue. He trailed the sticky hair down what would later be her chest and let it dry there. While one of her legs was completely covered in plaster, Boy wanted her other leg to only be half visible. To do this, he detached the manikin’s leg and used it for a reference point for his sculpture. He wanted Penelope’s statue to appear as if it was coming forward, yet her right leg needed to remain partially invisible.

  He pulled the leg forward, and rearranged her body to provide the slight twist necessary for a person walking towards something. With the frame intact, Boy started experimenting with dried paint. Boy tested various types of paint until he could get one that would harden in a dribbled pattern, almost as if it were oozing out of the manikin’s arm and from the tip of her chin.

  Boy also had to be careful with the paint once he applied it. He didn’t want the colors to mix together and form a muddy brown, as they had when he first saw Penelope. He wanted them to streak individually in thin lines, almost like a pinstriped pattern but more organic, with overlapping colors and splotches from where paint had dripped from her arms to her torso.

  He ran into trouble when he first erected the statue. The weight pulled the statue forward, and Boy had caught it just in time. To stabilize the base, he added a thin bar of steel to the piece’s back after cutting grooves in it at Bertetta’s studio. After applying plaster to the back and smoothing the grooves to make it more spine-like, he tested the weight again.

  Starting with Daffodil Yellow as a base, Boy poured an entire bucket of paint down Penelope’s half-formed body. The yellow pooled on the floor between her legs, which gave him another idea. Once he installed the piece, he would paint footprints across the gallery floor leading up to the piece. The final installation would also see Penelope standing in a giant puddle of all the colors he’d used.

  Continuing to form his base color, he poured Bittersweet Orange through a two-gallon plastic bottle with five holes drilled in it. He did this over her head, and the orange colors washed down over the yellow, merging at points into a color that resembled sunburnt skin. Using a funnel, he poured individual streaks of other colors down her body over the course of an afternoon. It was beautiful, watching the colors swirl, watching them mesh together, watching the hues sizzle as they met more powerful counterparts.

  ₪₪₪

  The nurse leaves as the early morning sun begins to add a subtle blue to the room. What time is it? He didn’t realize that it was so late. Megumi comes from the bathroom wearing the hotel robe pulled tightly across her torso.

  ‘We’ll talk about it more later,’ Oggie says to Boy. Oggie looks up at Megumi inquisitively as he stands to leave. He hadn’t said much to her aside from a few things in their shared tongue. ‘I’ll be back in the morning. Wait, it is the morning. Well, it’s almost the morning. We are supposed to go to the gallery at ten. I’ll change the time to twelve so you can get some rest. Also, I’ve arrange for you to switch to the room across the hall, so pack up. There’s too much blood in here.’

  ₪₪₪

  ‘Where are your clothes?’ Boy asks Megumi, after Oggie has left.

  ‘They’re in the bathroom. I tried to wash the blood out of them.’ Gauze has been wrapped around her arm and a small cut is visible over her cheekbone.

  Boy thinks for a moment about Oggie’s last statement. Could he see Glass Wings’s blood too? No, Oggie would say something about a bunch of black blood everywhere. He glances at the shattered window. He, himself, can’t see any black blood either. Just red. His blood. Megumi’s blood.

  What has happened in this room isn’t real. Glass Wings is a hallucination. Boy knows it, but if that’s the case, what did he attack? What attacked him? And if Glass Wings isn’t real, how did Megumi see his hallucination, how did she attack the fucked monstrosity? Maybe they weren’t hallucinating after all.

  Something bigger was at play here. Something he would have to deal with for the rest of his life. Oggie and Girl’s shared solution comes to him: medicine, treatment. Maybe he really should get diagnosed and be prescribed something. But what can medicine do against something real enough for two people to attack it? How can medicine quell a monster?

  ‘We aren’t hallucinating…’ he says, stuffing his bag with his toiletries.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Megumi asks.

  ‘They are ghosts. The things we see. “Ghosts” isn’t the right word, but it’s the only word I can think of to describe them. But, that’s what they are. Hallucinations aren’t real; these things are real. Your lady who attacked you… Glass Wings. Have you been attacked by others?’

  Megumi doesn’t speak. She looks down at the cuts on her arms that she bandaged with the nurse’s supplies after taking a shower.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I don’t want them to be real,’ she says, skirting around the question. ‘No, they aren’t real. We can’t think things like that.’

  ‘They can kill us. Glass Wings could’ve easily yanked one of us out the window.’

  ‘I don’t want…’

  ‘This isn’t about what we want! It’s about what’s real to us and not real to us. Look at this cut. Look!’ Boy points at his bandaged arm. ‘That monster’s wing did this to me. I didn’t do this. And you, you stabbed it. I saw the knife. I saw the blade, the black blood. This isn’t a fucking hallucination. It’s real. There must be others like us, others who’ve been attacked by these things but are too afraid to do anything about it.’

  ‘They should be afraid. How do you know we didn’t attack each other? How do you know that cut on your arm isn’t from my knife or the glass?’

  ‘What about seeing Penelope? We both saw her turn into Glass Wings. You saw that, right? How can we both see the same thing if it isn’t real? You saw her change.’

  ‘I know,’ she says.

  ‘Exactly. Something bigger is at play here, something we can’t fix. Something medication can’t fix.’

  The point he wanted to make falls on deaf ears. Megumi hasn’t once suggested taking medication. She looks at Boy despondently.
>
  ‘There are others like us,’ he says as he zips up his luggage. I’m not hallucinating. These things are real, real because they can attack, and real because another person can see them.

  ₪₪₪

  Boy’s thoughts wriggle their way across the ceiling like acid tracers. Images from his life swish through a murky stream. The diminishing darkness on the ceiling blooms and Boy thinks he sees the silhouette of Glass Wings. The creature. He will see the creature in a number of hours at the museum in the form of a sculpture he’s spent weeks of his life crafting.

  Oggie still wants the statue. Boy has to chuckle at this. After seeing what a monster like that could do, he still wants to own it. To Oggie it’s just art, a work of his ‘investment’ that should be preserved. To Boy, it’s a quantifiable nightmare that must be annihilated.

  Maybe Oggie could keep it as long as Boy never has to see it again. He doesn’t want it, wants to take a bat to the piece, should have taken a bat to the piece as soon as he finished it rather than pay homage to the monster.

  As he lies in bed next to Megumi, and the room fills with an unsettling light, Boy can think of only one phrase, one thing, one final action: destroy or be destroyed.

  ₪₪₪

  Outside Tokyo bright bubbling activity. Prussian Blue and Naphthol Carbamide. The biddable order and cleanliness of Japan is a far cry from the chaos of Boy’s inner life. He’s hardly experienced the city so lost he is in his own mind.

  ‘Have you given any more thought to what I talked to you about?’ Oggie asks. They’re in a small taxi. The driver carefully steers the wheel through a pair of white gloves.

  ‘Which part?’ Boy asks. His grogginess is giving him a saturated feeling. His legs are soggy bread, his breathing quick gulps of oxygen through a thin straw from the depths of a deep lake. He misses Megumi. She’s still asleep at the hotel. What he wouldn’t give to be there with her. Instead, he’s on his way to see documented examples of his demons.

  ‘What I was telling you last night about the explanation of these pieces. Your disorder, if you will.’

  ‘It’s not a disorder,’ Boy says. ‘I was attacked, seriously attacked. By Glass Wings, the same piece you are… interested in.’

  Oggie pauses uncomfortably as he thinks of how he should respond to this. His next question comes as a surprise. ‘Have you ever filmed yourself during one of these… episodes?’

  ‘No,’ Boy says. While he knows what’s happening to him is real, he’s also reluctant to do something such as documenting the incidents just in case they are indeed fake.

  ‘What do you think you would see if you filmed yourself?’ Oggie asks.

  ‘I would see…’ Boy’s never pondered the question, never tested himself this way before. He’s quiet for a minute as he tries to come up with an adequate answer.

  ‘This is what I want you to think about today.’ Oggie wince-smiles without looking over at Boy, as if he too plans to contemplate the question. ‘What would you see if you filmed yourself?’

  ₪₪₪

  The monster is locked inside a giant crate. His wings are detached, swathed in bubble wrap, and taped between Styrofoam sandwiches. Two museum workers in latex gloves and surgeon masks continue to unpack Glass Wings’s metal body. In the rafters above the substantial gallery space, cameras hang like red-eyed bats, occasionally shifting their position.

  The gallery is long and rectangular. It curves towards the entrance (where an old security guard sits reading a newspaper with a magnifying glass) into a high ceiling corridor. Boy plans to start Penelope’s footprints here. He takes a brief walk through the gallery, noting which pieces have already been hung as per his instructions.

  The lights beam down on Boy’s portrait of Philly Ghost’s teeth in a prescription bottle. The actual painting of Philly Ghost, a black on black 3 x 7 piece, is still saran-wrapped and leaning against the wall. On the opposing wall, Ghost sits in a series of 3 x 3 oil paintings. He can hear her voice as soon as he looks at her portraits:

  ‘...It wasn’t difficult…just past the ridge over near…buy some candy…so she usually ate carrots…I didn’t really think about it…’

  The three portraits of Ghost were made out of a six-layer stencil, spray painted in various colors onto the canvas and augmented with a thick layer of oil paints. Wanting the Ghost pieces to be Pop Art-esque, Boy layered the spray paint on the two outer pieces in neon colors, giving them a photonegative feel. Surrounded by the two colorful pieces, a sense of lucidity emerged from the middle piece, which was kept as close to natural as possible.

  His giant portrait of Lucy hangs on the opposing wall. In the portrait, Lucy’s pulling down her cheeks to reveal a pair of bleached eyes that have rolled into the back of her head. They’re black olives; the skin surrounding them is vermilion and sickly. Her dress is tattered and her legs, which stop at the frame, curve inward to indicate she’s slightly pigeon-toed. Not as frightening as it sounds, but more frightening than it sounds.

  On the adjacent wall is a single portrait containing two images. On the left, Lucy is painted in her old, withered form. On the right, Lucy – after she zapped Boy of his life force (or whatever she did) – is painted in a newer, polaroid-styled picture accented with mustardy hues.

  Surrounding the area where Glass Wings will later be installed are two 3 x 7 frameless portraits of the broken glass from the dresser back in Virginia. In each oil painting, the pillars of shattered glass rest in front of the dresser mirror, reflecting back what could be described as a city after a horrible bombing. Glass Wings will stand, in all his horrifying glory in front of the two pieces.

  The Penelope statue is still in its box at the opposite end of the gallery, it will stay there until Boy gets a sense of where he wants the statue to be placed. Using a stencil he’s cut himself, he will paint small foot prints leading to the piece. He’ll also splatter various shades of paint on the base of the statue.

  As Boy watches the two gallery workers pull a glass wing out of the shipping container, a jerking in his chest tugs him forward. He’s envisioned all the pieces together before, had to once he got the floor plan from the gallery, and even though everything hasn’t been hung or assembled yet, he now gets a sense of just how truly frightening all this is. He wants to hang his head, wants to disappear somewhere instead of being surrounded by the things that have haunted him all his life.

  He sits down on a bench facing his portrait of Lucy stretching her face. Boy wants to stand and begin his work, but a tension in his arms and shoulders keep weighing him down. It feels as if he’s been filled with steel, rusty notched steel that’s both heavy and capable of mincing his insides if he dares move.

  ‘Hard to see it all together?’ Oggie asks softly. He’s next to Boy now with his hands in his pockets. ‘It is remarkable, you know. There’s something frighteningly beautiful about it all. I especially like the Ghost portraits. I don’t know how you captured those colors.’

  ‘Stencils mostly. I just put it all together in layers.’

  ‘It’s more than that, but fine, if you say it’s easy, I believe you.’ Oggie looks down and notices Boy is clenching his fists to the point where his knuckles are white. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

  ‘I-I’m fine,’ he says, sucking in air.

  ‘If you write down what needs to be done, I can have the gallery workers do it. It looks like you could use some rest. Last night was surely a lot to take in—’

  ‘—It’s not about last night.’

  ‘What is it then?’

  A form moves in Boy’s peripheral vision. Ignore it. Against his better judgment – and what will soon become a gesture he’ll surely regret – he gradually looks up to see Lucy shifting inside her portrait. Trembling, he twists his body away. He wants to pull at his hair now, claw his eyes out, curse himself for bringing this shit alive.

  ‘These things…’ Boy wants to tell Oggie the truth. I’ve basically spent a year of my life creating a monument to the thing
s which haunt me the most.

  ‘These things? These pieces you mean?’

  Boy hears a hiccup.

  ‘Y-y-yes, I just should have thought this through.’

  Oggie sits down next to him. ‘I can only imagine how difficult this is.’

  Another hiccup.

  He’s suddenly jumpy, trying his hardest to not look out of the corner of his left eye, trying to look only at Oggie, who’s seated next to him, and is somehow unaware of how dire the situation has become for Boy.

  ‘...Didn’t see that pretty girl there with…all the time I thought about it…he picked up that hat of his…likely not the first time it had…made me say it just because I was planning on…’

  ‘Can you hear anything?’ Boy asks. His flesh is crawling now, silverfish wriggling up a wall during an earthquake.

  ‘Hear anything? What do you mean?’ Oggie pauses for a moment to listen. ‘I can hear the air conditioner up there. It’s a little loud.’

  ‘…Likely there will be a chance to go…first thing we will need to do is fix the light…old pumpkins in the cellar are starting to smell…’

  A hiccup and a hiss.

  Boy foolishly looks at the painting of Lucy once again. The things we create can invariably destroy us. She’s no longer pulling at her eyes – she’s now holding her swollen stomach. Placenta drips from the opening of her dress. The coral liquid spills out of the painting and onto the museum floor.

  Panicked, Boy stands with his back to the painting of Lucy. ‘B-b-bathroom! Where’s the bathroom again?’

  ₪₪₪

  Get away. Get away. GET AWAY!

  Yes, getting away would be nice, getting away would be wonderful. To hurl yourself out the window of a tall building, to fly for that split second before you collide with the lukewarm concrete below, to take the plunge and drown yourself in the deepest well, to step out into rushing traffic with your arms spread wide tears as you scream, I AM READY! I AM READY YOU FUCK!