Mouthquake

by Daniel Allen Cox

  Come on now, we’ve seen you with him several times. You know him. We’ve seen you.

  Am I in trouble?

  Well, no. Not if you tell us everything. And not if we believe you. So don’t even try lying, because we’ll know.

  But what if I tell the truth and you don’t believe me?

  That won’t happen. How did you meet this man?

  Outside. I met him on the street.

  Did he talk to you?

  No.

  Then how did you meet?

  I was coming home and I wanted to cross the street but I couldn’t because, um, I think, like, there were too many cars? Yeah. So he made the cars stop and let me cross. It was winter and there was a lot of snow. He had big boots that could go through it.

  Were you alone?

  Y-yes.

  Was this in January?

  Uh-huh.

  Was it still light out, or was it getting dark?

  Getting dark. I couldn’t see him well.

  You’re lying.

  No, I’m not!

  Yes, you are. The sun doesn’t set before three in the afternoon, even in January. So either you’re lying about the darkness, or this bullshit little story happened later than you said it did. So which is it?

  I don’t remember.

  Why were you alone?

  I don’t want to say. You’re going to get the neighbour in trouble.

  The neighbour won’t be in trouble if you tell me the truth.

  Are you a perp?

  No, I’m not a perp.

  I was going to get her a pack of Rothmans King Size. I always have to do that because she doesn’t like to leave the house. But I don’t tell my mom I do it.

  That’s okay.

  It’s okay?

  Sure, no problem. At least she smokes a good brand. Wanna root beer?

  Y-yy-y-yyyyyy sure!

  When did you start speaking like that?

  Like what?

  Maybe we’ll talk about that another time. Alright. Here’s your root beer. Now I want you to try and remember a little better. Can you do that? Good. Did this man talk to you?

  No. Is he in trouble? What did he do?

  We’re not sure, that’s what we’re trying to find out.

  Did he steal something?

  Yes, he steals all the time, but we already know that. We’re looking at something else. Let me ask the questions, okay? What do you do when you’re with him?

  We just sit. On the bench.

  Why?

  I don’t know. It’s hot. People give us food. Um, they’re really nice to him. Everyone, I guess, likes him. He gives the candy and cookies to me.

  I see. But don’t you find him gross? Doesn’t he smell?

  A bit. But you smell, too. All grownups do!

  Huh. Now I’m going to ask you a question, and I want you to think very carefully before answering, because I don’t want you to give me the wrong answer. Can you do that? Okay. Did this man ever touch you?

  No.

  You answered too quickly. Do you want some more time to think?

  No, I don’t need time to think, he didn’t touch me. I want another root beer.

  There is no more root beer.

  I don’t believe you.

  Maybe there is more, but first you have to keep talking. He is a very big man. Even when you were sitting on the bench beside him, his leg never touched yours? It’s a pretty small bench. There couldn’t have been enough room for both of you.

  Okay, maybe his leg, but it’s not his fault. He’s big because he’s strong.

  So you were lying when you said he didn’t touch you.

  I’m not a liar, I said!

  Don’t get upset, just tell me the truth. What else are you hiding? You won’t get in trouble if you tell. But if you don’t tell, there could be repercussions.

  What are repercussions?

  Bad things.

  Bad things that happen to me?

  Yes, possibly. That’s why you have to tell me everything.

  Will you tell my mom?

  No. We can’t tell your mom any of this.

  Okay, well, I think he was standing there with chains around his neck and I was, um, like really scared. Then he put his hand on my head, because I remember it was so big it felt like I was wearing a hat. Or like someone put a baby on my head. And he laughed. I wasn’t scared anymore because I could tell he was really nice.

  Wait—you’re saying that he touched you? With his hand?

  I guess so.

  Is that a yes?

  Do you have any more donuts?

  All kinds.

  Then, yes.

  That’s really interesting.

  Why is it interesting?

  No reason. That’s all we need for today. You did very, very well.

  So you’ll give me the root beer and donuts, and I can go?

  Not just yet. I need you to come in the back with me.

  Why?

  We have to take your picture for the files.

  But why can’t we take the picture here?

  The cop led me to a locker room in the back of the precinct. We were alone. Well, kind of. There was a life-sized poster of Hall & Oates in front of the lockers. They looked so real, leering at me with pretty smiles. I couldn’t stop staring. The officer sat me on the wooden bench and started taking pictures of me with a Polaroid camera. The flashes flashed. What I remember most is trying to pose like Daryl Hall, with a smile as pretty. Every time he clicked, the camera spit out another grey square. He put the photos away before they developed, before I could see them.

  I never saw the Grand Antonio again.

  Antonio didn’t do anything to me, but some people believed the cop, who just wanted an excuse to put him away. That’s what some people said. He wanted to get a dirty body off his beat. There was an investigation but no trial. Kept it hush-hush and out of the press. They called in a speech therapist to ask me questions and to give expert testimony on my stutter and the events that might have triggered it. It was all about my mouth. The conversations were way over my head:

  Isn’t it possible that

  Wouldn’t you say that

  Do you deny that

  Is there a reasonable chance that

  Can we object that

  Did you feel that

  Did you suspect that

  Did you worry that

  That that that that that that that

  Did he ever

  Touch kiss rub stare poke press grab show

  This wasn’t the language that German Shepherds used. I replied “yes” or “no” almost randomly to the questions, because I didn’t understand what they were saying to me. Then I was worried I had given them all the wrong answers, the ones they would twist to get Antonio in trouble.

  I would later learn that, even though their fabrications had nothing to do with the soundscape of my life, there was indeed something in my past to talk about.

  I would later learn how easily the kind people of the world were destroyed.

  LA GLACE

  Sometimes I tell friends about my dreams. Especially if they’re embarrassing. I like to create uncomfortable moments between us because I find it can reveal a lot of truth.

  I’ll lie in bed with an awkward hard-on, pick up the phone, and inform someone that we just had transcendent sex in the ocean until we got twisted in kelp and drowned to orgasm. I have no qualms telling them that they just voted the Conservative Party of Canada into power for another term of total environmental devastation, or that they were dropped from a plane onto the roof of le Stade, bounced once, then punched through to their deaths. Their response is often silence. I’m used to it.

  There’s a recurring dream I often tell people about. Ever since I was a kid, about once a year I’ll dream that my body levitates and starts to spin in slow orbit, just a few feet off the ground. I’m wrapped in a bed sheet and angled on an axis, rotating at an even speed. A perfect solstice. I watch myself from a distance, pos
sibly separated from my body. There are variations of the dream where I’m cycling without a bike and manage to take off into the sky. Tripping over laundry and power lines, I can feel the power of flying. Maybe I just want to meet my friends somewhere other than on the bloody grounds of our daily lives. This dream elicits a number of interpretations. I consider them all before discarding.

  But there is one dream I will never retell to the person involved. It’s too infinite to articulate properly, too imprecise to read into, and too heartbreaking. Even a complete recounting here is out of the question.

  It occurs somewhere on the meridian of sleep, the horizon of drifting away, a ledge I’m always about to fall off. Despite gravity, I manage to hang on to my perch. I get the twitches and breathe deeply, and then images erode my wakefulness and take over, a few blurry pixels at a time. I’m chained to a wall of ice. I seem to be in some kind of cavern as colourless as Lucite, cold but also fuzzy, the steam of condensation wrapped around me as I chill in the fridge, my prison. I don’t know where my feet are. I assume my wrists are handcuffed in iron shackles, but it’s hard to tell, because my hands and arms have gone numb. I know nothing about my situation, how I got here, how long I’ve been here, or how deep the cavern is. I just assume it goes on forever. Various moods visit me over time. They dervish around me like the smoke of dry ice and spirit away too quickly. Sometimes, when the condensation clears, I can make out long corridors; at other times, I’m convinced the cave is no more than a tiny box. Light illuminates my prison from different angles, sometimes piercing the floor, other times curling around a corner, but never directly from above. I’ve never liked overhead light, so I’m suspicious that I’m not subjected to it. Aren’t dreams designed to torture you?

  She starts to materialize. I don’t see her, but I can hear her breathing, her hair swishing on the ice, the rattle of chains. It’s the sound of rust falling and the rage of trying to break free. Sometimes I swear that I can hear tears rolling down her cheeks, freezing, then cracking and falling like tinkling ice chips. Uncertain music washes through the chamber. It drowns out the details about her movements that I struggle to make out. Is she in pain? Is she inching in my direction? Does she know I’m here? Am I where I think I am in relation to her body? Is she in her body when she shakes off the ice, or is she somewhere else, in another cold, distant shell? But I can’t grasp her shape because the music separates us. It’s a hard-core ambient wall of synth that makes me feel alone when I most need to feel connected. It lasts for hours.

  Then I can be in the ice for weeks until I hear her again.

  My days are filled with despair, with the understanding that there’s no rescue, that I’m a child doomed to die of emotions frozen in time, choked by inactivity, lost to the world and forgotten by the compassionate, desperately clinging to any glint of light as a sign of hope, any disruption in the carpet of fog that has obscured my feet since I got here, so that I have no ground. All I want to do, aside from getting out of here, is lower my arms to my side. I would agree to live here forever if allowed to crouch for a few minutes.

  I think I hear my name. I assume it’s an illusion, but there it is again. She’s calling me. She can’t be far. But the music swells loud, and it’s absolute pain. Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 4 is a curtain of broken glass shattering the air, muffling voices, subsuming everything into the movement. I am lost in a cadence. Strangled by the necks of two French horns. Muted by andante overtones and a pressing hush. A mimic trumpet is camouflaged in her timbre, unmistakeable to my ears, but I am wounded in my confusion and granted a reprieve by a drop in the levels. And then completely lost in the atonal, sonic mud. Just another plaintive instrument fighting to be heard, I am. It echoes and echoes, and my name becomes unrecognizable. It becomes the middle part of a trombone solo I particularly hate.

  The movement ends and the ice walls light up at once, as if my prison were on the inside of the sun and moving toward the inner surface, just under the brilliant mantle. At this speed, she could appear right in front of me; I’d recognize her anywhere. She’s stranger than any symphony, that’s obvious. We’re two tortured spirits writhing helplessly in front of the other, a mutual display of ugliness. I think we’re both naked. Elongated familial bones, sharing a marrow but on opposite sides of the chamber, our differences too slight to accept. How come we still can’t touch each other? The lack of logic makes me shiver.

  She’s working her way free. Her mane of hair is caught in the ice, rays of light blasting through rousse and russet. She’s a mosquito in the amber, escaping one strand at a time, twisting her head this way and that; her ice is melting, and her wet hair comes free—I can smell it—she smiles with every muscular yank of her neck, smiling high, she’s working toward me—I can feel it—she hasn’t looked at me yet, she’s too busy breaking through the ice. Breaching. Her energy is what I’ve been waiting for. I open my hands to be held, open my heart to be rescued.

  And I wait for her to look at me. But she doesn’t.

  Instead, she lurches out of the ice and forward. A wild woman, and all mine. She looks right through me, looks for the fastest way out.

  All I have to say is “I’m here,” but I can’t say it.

  All I have to do is open my mouth to let her see the shape of my teeth, leave a recognizable dental impression on her, but my mouth is sealed shut with ice.

  All I have to do is scream internally to let her feel my vibration, and she’ll press her warm body against my wall to melt it, enfold me into her, and make like old times. But my lungs are filled with crystals, so screaming just sounds like glass snapping one square centimetre at a time.

  And then she, the only person I have ever seen in this ice chamber, up and leaves me all alone.

  We were this close to escaping together, but I am stuck in this dream.

  Fuck Shostakovich. Fuck ice.

  IN ALL INNOCENCE

  When you read out loud, do you see the same word twice?

  Do the words jump around in your head?

  Do you think clearly?

  Do you think faster than your mouth is able to move?

  Are you nervous?

  Why don’t you just slow down?

  Why don’t you think before you speak?

  How come you don’t practice the techniques you learned in therapy?

  Were you dropped as a kid?

  Have you ever thought it’s because you’re left-handed?

  Are you doing it just to get attention?

  How come sometimes you stutter and other times you don’t?

  Are you faking it to get out of doing stuff?

  How could you forget your own name?

  Why are you blinking your eyes like that?

  Do you belong to a church that speaks in tongues?

  Is it contagious?

  Do you even stutter at all?

  How many more assumptions about speech can you take?

  What is your breaking point, and does it break on any word in particular?

  MARILYN DOES MONTREAL

  It was tough whenever we moved and I had to start a new school. There was a new class of thirty kids to become acquainted with, thirty new names to memorize. Of course, there were always two Stephens and two Michaels and up to three Christines and four Jessicas. So perhaps twenty-three new names to remember and match to the faces.

  The memorizing was easy but the speaking wasn’t. When addressing a classmate, I just used whatever name I could say at the moment. Because I had just moved to the neighbourhood and joined the school, I could use my newness as an excuse. I swapped Trevor with Nathan with Robert with Alicia with Rowena with Grace with Josh with Rodney with Sandra with impunity. I kept them straight in my head, but I kept them guessing in the aisles. Some of the kids started to wear name tags for my benefit, ones they glued to their shirts with spit. Or they would tell me their names every time we met. I think I got superficially high grades because the teachers pitied me for having what they thought was amnesia. That
was kind of my style back then. I was a player well before I even had pubes. I was completely excused of the responsibility to remember. A Sun could very well be a Christophe. Perhaps I didn’t even know what names I could say fluently. My feelings on the letter S were so hard to nail down on a sunny day in September when school started and I had to SSSSSSsssssssssss my way through everything. Who could pay attention under conditions like that, especially a slitherer like me?

  Nobody wanted to sit beside me, and I knew why—I had the stink of a kid with a past. I could see them whispering to each other, trading versions of the same story. I guess word got around. Although even if it had happened, it didn’t happen how they say it did.

  I would sometimes fantasize about having a friend who was a boy, maybe a little older than me. We would ignore everybody else and have our own fun. I drew pictures of him in my notebook and gave him a name: Derek. We would skip school to go skating on Beaver Lake, then eat lunch outside and huff on each other’s hands with peanut butter breath to keep them warm. We’d jump the fence at the railway tracks, even though there was a hole big enough to crawl through. Just to be different. When a train passed, Derek and I would shake our dicks at it and laugh and laugh, just two boys flopping a weird signal to the conductor in unison. Maybe that was something that boys could do together.

  Derek would pretend not to know that I stuttered. He would find a reason not to hear it.

  I drew him over and over.

  The homeroom teacher was just another strange man in my life who asked me the weirdest questions. Where was Chibougamau? Were the Iroquois hunters or gatherers? In what year was Nouvelle-France founded? I found it odd how he always wore the tightest possible pants, almost as if he were trying to teach us the shape of the Gaspé Peninsula, a quick geography lesson enhanced by well-placed fabric.

  What territory borders Quebec to the northeast and is directly above the Gaspé?

  Newfoundland.

  In some respects, yes. But more officially?

  Nitassinan.

  Excuse me?

  It’s land taken from the Innu, and they never said we could.

  You’re avoiding my question.

  I answered it.

  Why don’t you just say what it’s called in your damn textbook?