Boy versus Self: (A Psychological Thriller)

by Harmon Cooper

  And mean it for once.

  Don’t skirt around the elephant in the room: ride that son of a bitch into the ground and pull its ribs out with your trembling fists. Bludgeon the elephant with its own tusks. Bathe in its blood. Sell those precious pieces of ivory to a Chinese witch doctor. Make a profit. Start a country. Beat your war drums and invade your neighbor. Repeat.

  Boy never felt suicidal until this point, never felt the urge to extinguish his own existence until he saw pregnant Lucy moving inside her picture frame. That’s when things became too catastrophic, too real.

  Get away. Breathe. It’s not real. Breathe. Breathe.

  He locks the bathroom door and stands in front of the mirror. Boy refuses to look at himself – even a glance could do him in. Life is volatile and the stick holding the carrot is broken.

  Breathe.

  He runs cold water and splashes it onto his face. He scrubs at his eyes, rubs his temples, cups his hands over his ears, steadies himself. Just breathe.

  Something or someone jiggles the door handle.

  No. No. No. Boy collapses onto the floor. Not here, please not here.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  He looks up to see Megumi sitting on the bathroom sink with her legs crossed. She’s naked, her pupils white as ever. Her mouth is puffed, as if she’s blowing air out in a gesture of boredom.

  No. Please. No.

  Boy closes his eyes and tears squeeze out.

  It is real. It is real.

  The feeling of nausea overwhelms him. He bends forward and retches. Nothing comes out. He’s dry heaving now, trying to pull it together enough to stand. Stand up dammit! He sees Megumi’s long legs standing in front of him. From his crouching position, he springs forward like a crazed linebacker and crushes Megumi’s back into the protruding portion of the bathroom sink. A coldness radiates off her skin.

  The Japanese woman is crying now, lying in a heap on the floor.

  Boy, with one arm pressed against the wall for support, watches her wearily, aware that he must keep an eye on her. Because the woman in the bathroom isn’t Megumi, it’s Penelope. And as Boy finally verbalizes this, Megumi’s figure constricts and seconds later, a small, naked girl clutches her knees to her chest with her back against the bathroom stall.

  Wicked. Little. B—

  And even though he’s trying not to make complete eye contact with her, he can see a grin spread across her face. Those white eyes of hers beam like halogens and they’re watching Boy, waiting for him to make his next move. The transformation will come soon. Glass Wings will be here. Glass Wings is already here. Glass Wings is Penelope.

  ‘Y-You can’t… anymore… please… no please fuck that… YOU CAN’T ANYMORE!’

  ‘You don’t want to see me?’ she asks innocently.

  I never wanted to see you.

  Whether she’s real or not real is no longer important. He runs forward and pulls his leg back. The top of his foot hooks under Penelope’s chin and her head glides back like the pate of a ballerina. And as if time could come to a standstill, and physics no longer held sway over the realm of the living, Penelope keeps her head in this bent backwards position as slit-eyes form across her white pupils.

  Her eyes darken – carcass red – and they turn slowly until they have steadied themselves on Boy.

  ₪₪₪

  And he’s up and turning towards the door before he can even process what’s happening. Boy hears the wings tearing out of the flesh from her back, hears the prickly glass teeth ripping from her gums, smells that carrion stink of Glass Wings’s putrid, parchment flesh as he fumbles with the deadbolt.

  The door swings open. It smashes into the chest of a short Japanese man waiting to use the bathroom. Boy vaults over the man and twists around the corner.

  ‘Calm down, calm down,’ he says, steading his pace but still powerwalking. His heart is seconds away from exploding, his limbs weak and hollow.

  Absolute silence surrounds him in the corridor leading back into the main hall of the museum. Attached to the ceiling, an exit sign shows a little green man running in the direction of a sharp arrow. Exit. He’s shaking uncontrollably now, and then he hears it, hears that sickening sound like ripping leather.

  Do not run.

  It’s the voice, the same voice from the hotel room last night that told him to stand his ground, that certain voice, that voice they may be crazier than Boy is because what it is suggesting, what that intrepid voice is suggesting is damn near suicidal: do not fucking run.

  And Boy laughs at this, laughs at this foolish voice that is valiant and reckless. He’s fighting to catch his breath, stopping dead in his tracks and turning around. What is there to lose? Absolutely nothing.

  Boy turns to face his monster.

  ₪₪₪

  Glass Wings’s tongue is the first thing to come at Boy. It lashes into the wall and curls around, swooping for his legs like a spiked lasso. He jumps over the tongue as it reels back towards the wretched monster’s mouth. He’s laughing now. ‘Kill me you fuck!’ he screams, running towards Glass Wings with one fist in the air.

  Instead of trying to tackle the creature as he had the previous night, Boy slides as soon as he nears the seething monster, semi-successfully sliding under the arch between the creature’s right wing and the floor. As he slides, the tips of Glass Wings’s wing slash up Boy’s back.

  He cries out in pain, touches his back and pulls his hand around to see streaks of blood across his palm. The cuts aren’t too deep, but that doesn’t mean his fresh wounds don’t sting. Boy limps to his feet, flinching as he stands, feeling his shirt lightly feather against the slash marks.

  That voice again. The voice of instinct, of reprisal, that voice many have heard but few have answered. Forget the pain. Boy turns back to Glass Wings, who’s laboring to turn around in the cramped hallway.

  Weapon.

  He needs something to level the playing field, something that will take out the creature once and for all.

  ₪₪₪

  Boy starts running into random rooms affixed to the hallway. He first enters a staircase, but turns immediately out the door. He doesn’t want to be chased down a stairwell ever again. More importantly, he wants to be the chaser.

  He runs into another door marked only by a security camera high overhead. In the small office, museum workers sit quietly on their computers typing away. Boy surveys the room, looking for a weapon. The woman nearest to him stops typing and bows from her seated position. ‘Hello? May I help you?’ she asks in heavily accented English.

  Do I need help? Boy doesn’t answer the question. His ears perk up – the sound of Glass Wings advancing in the hallway is louder than a building collapsing. No weapons. He could throw a computer, but decides to find a different weapon.

  He bursts back into the hallway. An air piercing screech that nearly splits his eardrums bullets past him. Glass Wings’s tongue comes forward like the arm of a kraken and Boy narrowly avoids it. It slams onto the floor, pulling the tiling up as it reels back into the wretched monster’s sinewy glass-infested jaw.

  Glass Wings is the shark and he’ll triumph in the end if Boy doesn’t do something soon.

  A door up ahead glows under a single light shielded by mesh wiring. The light forms a halo-like circle in front of the door’s entrance. Boy looks back over his shoulder and sees Glass Wings lumbering towards him. The fucked monstrosity will catch him soon.

  Boy twists the door handle and finds—

  ₪₪₪

  —A supply closet.

  Brooms, mop buckets, toilet paper rolls, tools. He grabs a screwdriver, stuffs it in his back pocket. He reaches for a hefty wooden mop. Positioning himself in front of the door, Boy watches as Glass Wings charges him. He notices the scar on the creature’s chest from Megumi’s knife. He also notices that the creature has shrunken somewhat.

  Glass Wings bellows as his tongue flies out of his mouth. Black blood sprays into the air and Boy begins his wild charge. He
dodges left, twisting around with a firm grip on the mop handle. He brings the end of the handle across Glass Wings’s face, as he had so many years ago in West Virginia. The smack is sickening. It echoes down the hall, ripples across Tokyo Bay.

  Feeling a sense of power he’s never felt before, Boy pulls the handle back and cracks it once again across Glass Wings’s jaw. Glass teeth burst forth and blood pools into the creature’s eyes. His black tongue comes back and wrenches the broom from Boy’s hands.

  The momentum forces him forward. Boy barely pulls the screwdriver from his back pocket before he tumbles into Glass Wings’s body. With a consummate fury, Boy drives the screwdriver into the monster’s trapezius. Black blood geysers as he pulls the screwdriver out and the creature shrieks.

  His hand held over his head, Boy drives the screwdriver down into the monster’s left eye. His squishy eye gives way under the flat-head screwdriver, and the eye pops, filling the air with a mist of yellow pus. The creature’s accompanying scream carries with it the smell of rotting flesh.

  Glass Wings falls backwards with Boy on his chest. On the floor now, Boy lifts his arm to once again plunge the screwdriver into Glass Wings’s face. It happens more quickly than he could have anticipated. In one moment, he’s holding his arms over the monster, ready to deliver the coup de grâce. Seconds later, he feels something sticky tightening around his neck.

  Boy struggles to free himself from the monster’s tongue. His hand is still held over his head, but soon it will give in the same fashion that his neck will snap. He can feel his larynx compressing, the sharp sting of tiny shards of glass digging into his flesh. His head grows light, and his vision starts to blur.

  Then the voice returns. No. That’s all it says, but it grows louder and louder. No. NO! NO!

  And at the point where he’s starting to lose consciousness, Boy drives the screwdriver into the center of Glass Wings’s forehead.

  ₪₪₪

  He awakes seconds later lying on the floor next to Glass Wings. The creature’s face is blackened with syrupy blood and impaled with a screwdriver.

  ‘Megumi…’ Glass Wings says in Penelope’s voice.

  Boy pulls himself up.

  ‘Megumi...’ the monster wheezes, coughing up a ladle’s worth of black blood.

  ₪₪₪

  Running into the street outside the museum (past the bewildered museum staff who have surely contacted Oggie by now), Boy flags down a taxi. He hops inside and begins fumbling in his wallet for the hotel card that he took a few nights ago. He hands the card to the driver and tells him in English, ‘Hurry! Fast! Fast! Go!’

  The driver gets the gist and speeds off. Boy can feel the fresh wounds on his back, and hopes that he isn’t getting blood on the backseat of the taxi.

  ₪₪₪

  Keio Plaza Hotel. Boy takes the elevator to the thirty-ninth floor. His nerves are like little toothpicks berating him from all angles. They burrow into his skin, seer into his bones, pool in the hallow cavity of his chest. Hard to breathe. Hard to survive. Hard to accept all this. Hard not to.

  The man in the elevator, the same man who’s always in the elevator, smiles grimly as Boy slides through the opening door. The man’s eyes hint that he knows something is askew; his lips pressed together say it’s not is place to verbalize it.

  Boy erupts onto his floor as soon as the elevator doors slide open. He stops at his door, taking the deepest breath he’s taken in years.

  ₪₪₪

  He doesn’t have a weapon this time, didn’t think to keep the screwdriver during his mad dash to get to the hotel. All he has are his two hands, two shaky hands that are prepared for the worst.

  Hotel room orange-dark. All the lights are off.

  ‘Megumi?’ Boy whispers. He comes forward and nearly trips over his carry-on bag. He kicks the bag and its contents spill across the floor. The hotel room seems to swell now, to elongate and Boy suddenly feels miles away from the bedroom.

  The living room is empty. Megumi’s purse is on the couch and her blood-stained clothes are folded neatly next to her purse. There isn’t a breath deep enough to prepare Boy for what he may find in the bedroom. He’s still tiptoeing, as if Glass Wings wasn’t already there, as if the monster could be placated with niceties. At least this gives him a chance to find a weapon.

  Megumi’s knife.

  Boy turns back to the couch. He swims his hand through the contents of her purse: Lipstick, a perfume bottle, her wallet, a coin purse, a small pad of notebook paper shaped like an anime character, a blush compact, a tube of mascara, two tampons wrapped in plastic. No knife. He combs through the bag again.

  He saw her put the knife in her purse last night, remembers her shoving it back into a sheathe she told him she had made specifically for the knife. He had even held the knife, examined its blade for Glass Wings’s blood (of course there was none).

  ‘Damn,’ he whispers, glancing around the room for other weapons. He starts laughing quietly to himself.

  If this wasn’t happening to him it would be funny. If he could watch this happening to some ill-fated character on a movie, he would laugh along. Searching for a weapon in a hotel room to kill an invisible monster only to come up empty-handed because, hotel rooms don’t usually have weapons just lying around.

  His chuckle turns to somber reserve as he nears the shōji door separating the bedroom from the living room area. There is only one place the monster could be.

  ₪₪₪

  The door slides open and Boy notices the blackened outline of a form lying on the bed. The room is noticeably colder and darker than the living room area, and his skin pricks as soon as he nears the bed. He sees the pale bottoms of her feet sticking out from the whip cream ruffle of the comforter.

  ‘Megumi?’ he whispers.

  The bedroom squeezes into a thin line. Boy reaches his hand in front of his body and his fingers stretch into long spidery legs. He’s trying to grip the covers, trying to check and see if Megumi is indeed okay, but the further he reaches his hand, the longer his arm becomes.

  He takes a step closer to the bed. ‘Megumi?’ he whispers again, feeling a pair of plump tears bubble in his eyes. Something is terribly wrong.

  He bridges the harrowing gap of space between the bed and the sliding door. It takes seconds, it takes eons. He can’t really tell any longer. Time is like a broken clock suspended on a telephone wire dripping numbers into a mighty vat of boiling oil. Boy is like a dripping icicle hanging from a noose over a burning field of blood-stained napkins. The inevitable is inevitable, damn if it isn’t true.

  A halo of lifelessness lingers around Megumi’s pale frame. Her body is shrunken, absent of its essence.

  She’s not breathing.

  The realization strikes and the room snaps back to its normal size. Boy hasn’t even known her for a week, yet he feels a tremendous loss. He falls to his knees next to the bed. It can’t be. Boy wants to touch her, but he’s afraid to accept the truth. He sees Megumi’s knife on the nightstand.

  He will find the monster.

  ₪₪₪

  His sobs are heavy and sad. His sobs are tired. Boy’s tired. Life has exhausted him. Ghosts and hallucinations have extinguished his spirit. Megumi’s knife is unsheathed. He doesn’t know if he did it, can’t remember retrieving the knife from the nightstand.

  Must find the monster.

  The monster is inside him. The monster is inside him and he will dig it out. Monsters are everywhere, but this one is unique. This one exists somewhere completely encased by Boy’s flesh. This one is so real that no one else except a dead Japanese woman can see him. She’s dead. Boy knows it by the color of her skin.

  How did Glass Wings do it?

  It doesn’t matter now. The monster is inside him. The monster could be inside others, but many will never have the chance or the balls to carve it out.

  Carve it out.

  His sister carved her monsters out. She carved her monsters into words and those words multipli
ed. In the reflection of the knife’s blade – which is subtle but clear enough in the darkened room – Boy sees his own eyes, eyes which have gone white and filled with neon blue veins. Success and stress, stress and success. This is what you wanted. You wanted to be here. You created this. You created something into your reality. Just like David-Mayo said back at the restaurant.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  It’s not Penelope’s voice, but Boy knows who’s controlling it – she is. He doesn’t respond. He sits with his back against the frame of the bed, gazing at his reflection in the knife’s blade.

  Watch yourself do it. Carve the monster out. That voice is Penelope’s. Carve the monster out.

  ‘Hey!’

  The bed trembles behind him.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  He sees a darkened form move out the corner of his eye. It’s come to this. A hand drops onto his shoulder. The hand is alive; his hallucinations are flourishing and as vibrant as ever. Boy readies himself for what may happen next.

  ₪₪₪

  ‘It’s me,’ Megumi says.

  What comes next is a surprise. Boy instinctively drops the knife, and gasps as his body fills with a warmth he hasn’t felt in ages. Relief, utter and pure and genuine. He wipes tears of joy away; he doesn’t want Megumi to see him crying.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asks.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Boy pulls himself to his feet to find Megumi sitting with her legs crossed under the blanket. ‘I-I-I thought you were…’

  He takes in her messy hair that is barely contained by a lime green hair clip. Her cheeks are puffy with sleep, red, and there’s a small wrinkle across her face caused by the pillow.