Above the gas can was what had once served as a bench. Where it once was fixed to the wall it now hung limply downward, held by two rusted nails at each end. Above this was a shelf that had held better over time. Along the shelf were three Mason jars. There was a space for one more on the end. He held his jar up and examined the rusted top again. He very delicately placed it beside the others and then stood back.
He hadn’t planned to do this, but the opportunity was there, had presented itself as if sent from somewhere divine by someone divine. The jar was where some almighty wanted it to be. At that moment, the moment when Paul was admiring his own unique thoughtfulness, there came the distinct breaking of dry leaves and branches being cracked and broken behind him. All at once the doorway of the shed filled with a large, silhouetted figure. It was all he had time to determine and then something connected with the side of his head and there was only the dirt floor and the fog and then nothing.
In the abyss of his unconscious it was his father again, floating in the black holding cold slabs of chalk and broken bottles.
The first thing Paul realized was the unbelievable pain in his head. The second thing he noticed was that he couldn't reach his hand to examine where the pain was coming from. His arms were pinned to his sides. Stretched out on a bed, his arms and legs had been tied to the mattress. The straps seemed to be leather and apparently ran under the bed, latched together somewhere beneath him. There was a window at his feet. Outside, two birds sat idly along the window sill. They pecked at the cuticle-soft wood and flew away. Just like that.
Larry Fenner sat in a chair across the room. He was slumped in the chair, his body limp and relaxed. His head was tilted down so that his chin lay on his chest. Paul couldn’t tell if he was crying or grinning. He lifted his head and stared at Paul with electric eyes that jittered in their sockets. Paul heard a scratching sound and saw that Larry was pulling his fingernails across the arms of the chair. They twitched with the same quickness as did his eyes. A delicate rope of spit hung from his peeled back lips, dropped and hung there briefly before snapping in half. Larry licked his bottom lip.
"Paul Shannon," he said. His voice was low, full of baritone again and hatred.
Paul tossed his head back onto the pillow. He could still see Larry from the corner of his eye and tried to conceal his panic when Larry stood up.
"Paul Shaaaaaaaaaannon," Larry said again.
There was no reason not to face him. Whatever insanity this was, it was going to keep moving forward, so Paul stopped looking at the ceiling, turned his head, and watched Larry cross the room.
The dress Larry wore was a pale yellow, flower print. The thin fabric hung from his shoulders, lost in folds of thick muscle. He was barefoot and the dress stopped at his kneecaps. Paul could see the tangled and scarred mess that covered Larry's shins and ankles as he moved across the room. He dragged behind him with a single finger a large cane. The cane scraped across the hardwood. Once he was across the room, Larry swept his hand across the top of a mahogany dresser and came away with a pistol.
"Jesus, Larry. Jesus Christ, Larry.”
Paul broke over. The panic he had been able to keep under control didn’t waver. It didn’t become shaky. That panic broke perfectly in two like a tree bent in a thunderstorm, bent until it snaps fully through. He writhed against the straps and buried his head far down into the pillow. He arched his back and pushed his legs out but then went still on the bed. If anything, the straps had tightened around his chest and legs.
Larry stalked back to the chair and plopped down, laying the pistol across his thigh, the cane now clutched in his left hand. He rapped it against the floor five times, muttered something Paul couldn't make out, and then stood up. The gun clattered to the floor. Larry had the cane in both hands now and in seconds was standing over Paul.
"What’re you doing? Larry?"
Larry raised the cane above his head and then brought it down hard across Paul's legs. Paul heard a snapping sound with the first hit and then nothing above his own screams on the second and third hit. Then Larry stopped and let the cane fall from his grasp. It lopped against the bed and then rolled off to the floor. Without a sound he ignored Paul’s open sobbing and staggered back to the chair. He bent and plucked the pistol from the floor and returned it to his thigh. His head dropped again, his chin pointed down, his eyes were fixed on Paul but hectic.
Paul could only look back. He was crying hard now. His head and legs throbbed in painful rhythm with his heartbeat, clubbing against his ribs.
"Have a look here, Paul Shannon.” Larry's voice was different, a higher pitch, a straining squeak. He leered at Paul and gently tugged at the dress. It rose slowly across the tops of his terrible knees until he was exposed naked beneath. Clumsily, and with absent regard, he took himself and began masturbating half-heartedly, tossing himself back and forth. "We can have a good time, Paul Shannon. It's okay."
"Oh God, oh God," Paul held his breath and squeezed his eyes shut. The world had ended. This was how his time in this world ended. And there, at the end of the world, Larry stopped pulling at himself and took the gun from his leg. He staggered to his feet in such a way that the dress fell back into place, stopping with a swish against his hairless white legs. He had the gun at his side for one, two seconds before pointing it at Paul’s head. When Paul didn’t look, he pushed the end of the barrel against one eyelid. The eyeball sunk painfully far back into the socket.
Paul stopped moving against the straps. He lay still in the bed and watched images behind his eyelids. Images mostly of his father, but some were of his mother. His poor mother. His mommy. These images were smoke and dotted here and there with a set of kind brown eyes. The eyes seemed to look down on him from somewhere above him and he could tell by the way the creases around the eyes bunched at the skin that she was smiling. His mommy. It was everything he could do not to call out for her now, about to die here inside the boogeyman's cave.
Focusing on his mom had almost worked, but Paul could still hear Larry breathing hard. He felt the cold circle of the gun barrel leave his eyelid, the weight from it leaving a ghost of an indention and pressure there. And he opened his eyes. When he did, he saw Larry bring the gun slowly up the side of his own head. The image was so unexpected that Paul’s senses all but shut down. There were words still left within the spinning of his consciousness, words like birds chattering.
There's gonna be a day.
Sounds like glass shattering.
And it'll feel like tomorrow.
His eyes wide open now, he watched. Larry lowered the pistol as if he might have come to his senses, forgotten the years of abuse and watching abuse, lying about it, making up stories to explain abuse. Larry stretched out a smile, a fake smile more unholy and unnatural than any mask, any demon or fiery archangel. In one clean motion he changed the position of the pistol again to press the end of the barrel into his own neck. It seemed he rushed to do it before his next thought made its way through the calamity of all his days before this one. With a hard jerk Larry pulled the trigger, and only then did his unnatural smile disappear in the tumbling folds of his lips.
26
There was nothing after Larry shot himself. Not really. Only blood and hours of twisting on the bed until he worked his leg loose enough to free the rest of himself. And then after that, more twisting, this time with various narratives for law enforcement followed by his refusing a trip in the ambulance. Larry had pounded his legs with his cane, but nothing that seemed to have broken any bones. The police were mostly half-hearted in with their questions: How did he end up here? What was his connection to Larry Fenner? Series after series of the same questions asked in different ways. None of it at all interesting to Paul. His total and absolute attention was now focused on the letter in his back pocket. The letter his dad stuffed inside a Mason jar during some lonely moment amid an ocean of lonely moments.
Paul sat down on his father's old bed to read another line of the letter which had accompan
ied the two-hundred and some odd dollars inside the jar. He heard loose springs rattle against one another with metal friction when he relaxed down into a six-foot long groove pressed, over the years, along the right side of the bed. When he settled on the bed, pill bottles rolled against his back. Paul grabbed some of the empty bottles that were darkened by age — Marplan and Nardil — and reached behind him until he found bottles with pills still in them — Effexor, Zoloft, Serzone, Topamax. He gathered the bottles and placed each one carefully along the night stand beside the bed and then held the letter up to a small shaft of light coming from the room's single window.
The writing was scrawled and barely legible, probably would have been to the untrained eye. But Paul had been reading his father's letters for many years and knew the great swooping h and the jagged r as clearly as typed and formatted business correspondence, and then the rest, each jagged letter and nervous word. His father's nervous handwriting was replaced with gashing red green and black crayon marks, and then, below that, a stick-man with black hair holding a stick boy's three-fingered hand. Beneath the drawing Paul made while in grade school were his father's words, but he couldn't make them out. The letter was written over the drawing. Paul could see where the pen cut tiny paths through the crayon marks.
When he finished, Paul let the letter fall into his lap and lifted his legs slowly onto the bed. He stretched back and let his arms fall over his head. His eyes avoided the ceiling, and rested peacefully on his feet. Along the edges of his body, just like an embrace, the deep cast left in the bed from the years and decades his father spent in the exact same spot held him in place. In this spot, Paul allowed himself to imagine in full detail a life from this perspective, the hours that might pass with nothing more on his mind than a terrible series of days from his childhood so scarring he would never talk about it with anyone. David Shannon lived with that experience on the surface of his skin at all times.
But those thoughts, trying to put himself in that place, was eased when Paul remembered he was in a small bedroom in the back of his grandparents’ house, protected and loved no matter what might come next. A newly formed womb away from the world. In this way, some of it made a strange sense. Solitude in this bedroom was a comfortable existence in its way, and final. Imagining himself safe and realizing this was the general state of mind his father likely was in during the last quarter century of his life, Paul’s thoughts, for the first time in a long time, did not center on his father, but returned to his mom.
An evening at Ruby’s, the restaurant where she worked nights. An old jukebox with songs like Chuck Berry’s “My Ding-a-Ling” and John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Jack & Diane” played in rotation — the first for laughs and the second, he was sure, to help remind her that love could be waiting somewhere just as magical; standing with him in the IGA while he played with a toy she could never afford to buy, giving him those few minutes of fun while she pretended to choose between dry dog food or canned; changing wet bed sheets to get him in the dry one. More time in a bedroom like a miniature shipping crate with a single bed and a lamp standing crooked in the floor; hours and hours and hours filled with only him and her sharing their quiet and mutual sadness.
In every memory for all of his years his father had been a shade somewhere on the perimeter of these memories, a shadow as flighty as a dust mote in the corner of the eye and then gone. But now, lying in place of his father, consuming him in that way, it was only himself and his mom. Playing pepper passing baseballs in Lulie Bates trailer park, making Pillsbury cinnamon rolls on food stamps day, staying with aunts and uncles between apartments or homes rented in hollers all across Mays County. Her making that seem like part of an exciting, extended vacation.
Moving in seconds through these memories again, Paul was sure this nostalgia, the memories he secretly held to for survival his entire life, was not the kind of reality he had just endured at the hands of Larry Fenner, Larry who had once lived his own terrible life and was now flat on his back in the cold ground. Nostalgia could do nothing tangible to help him. His mom was no more real to him than his father had been, only opposites, the yin and yang of his inner mind. Life wasn’t made up of good or bad experiences, only moments, one after the other after another in a steady march toward the unforgettably painful.
Paul settled more deeply into the cast left by his father’s weight. The light in the room was almost yellow, serene. The lock on the door still worked fine. Very naturally, it occurred to him he could easily rest for a while in his father’s old bed. William and Eve might tell a guest to move along after a couple days, but for blood they would, and did, offer an indefinite lifeline. He could stay here, take that lifeline, and look away from the world. So much would fall from concern, and, like his father, he would be alone but protected, sad but never in danger of becoming more sad, self-forsaken but set free from choice and consequence. He rolled onto his side, adjusted the pillow. A clock hand ticked from somewhere in the room and then blended into white noise. So many moments stopped in place, and all this time to spare.
Tomorrow he’d talk to his grandparents.
Tomorrow he’d stop planning what to do next.
Dysphoria Page 14