Thought Forms

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Monday Pete asked him if he had scored on Heidi. No, Ray said, she had simply dropped him off at his car that day. He didn’t think Pete bought it. Russ didn’t bring it up. It seemed to Ray that everyone watched him at the factory, and it wasn’t as pleasant as he had dreamed. He expected the world to disapprove. Work was lonely, dark without her. He got through it somehow.

  Her vacation to Maine looked like it was going to be a vacation in hell for him.

  Tuesday and Wednesday Ray called in sick at work.

  ««—»»

  Ray sat at his kitchen table with a coffee in front of him, a fluorescent desk lamp the only illumination in the house. The refrigerator hummed, and there was a trickling leak from the bathroom sink. When he looked up from the bright pages before him at the dark door beyond the kitchen, vague ectoplasmic forms seemed to stir in there. He had just finished watching a videotape of Halloween and now it was one-o-five at night.

  The book was the Gould and Pyle tome on medical anomalies. Ray hovered at it like some sorcerer over a mystic volume with blood-penned spells to summon forth demons.

  Halloween, now this, and no lights but one. He wondered if he were masochistic.

  A photo of a disrobed man with elephantiasis of the scrotum—the tumor, which was successfully removed, weighing one-hundred-twenty pounds. One man afflicted with the same anomaly had a scrotal tumor with a circumference of six-and-a-half feet, and six-feet-ten vertically.

  Ray sipped his coffee. Well hung, he joked to himself, but feeling an empathic twinge in his own lower parts.

  Photo of a Chinese woman, a mere four-feet-eight in height, crushed in bed under the weight of an ovarian cyst weighing in at one-hundred-eighty-two pounds (twenty-two gallons of fluid). Fluid. An easy word, but what fluid, from where? Ray wondered. How could a four-foot-eight body manufacture a tumor nearly six feet around?

  Another photo showed her with cyst removed like a one-hundred-eighty pound stillborn baby. The stretch marks on her belly looked like accordion folds. More of her bulk had been removed and destroyed than was left to exist.

  Photos of a boy of five with a tumor hiding half his face. Didn’t even look like it was growing from his face—more like a glistening organ, a liver or giant heart, placed on his face, or a giant amoeba-blob parasite affixed to it. The boy was staring with mouth agape, his expression hard to describe. Ray was greatly disturbed by the picture. Five years old. He was disappointed that the authors didn’t tell him the boy’s fate. What had this boy done to deserve this evil karma?

  The book was from eighteen-ninety-six—the boy long dead, gone from pain.

  Illustration of a woman with a fat pendulous growth growing from her face, hanging to her knees, three feet long. Her ear was dragged down into the growth, on level with her breasts.

  Lipoma of the parietal region. Nice words, but what did they mean?

  How did it happen; why?

  Could it happen to anyone—like me? wondered Ray.

  Everyone was a freak. Obese people, anorexics (Ray was surprised to find them in the book—he had thought anorexia to be a recent fad-like ailment). People still got the “Elephant Man’s” disease. Medical science could only weed out so much, correct so much. Ray’s cousin Paul had twenty cats, and one had a weird crooked stump of a tail, a cross between its tailed mother and Manx father. Ray’s left eye was rather crooked, off to the left a bit (most people didn’t notice) and its vision was weak. Ray’s uncle had been born without an anal opening. And Ray’s cousin, Paul’s sister, had given birth to a boy with a cleft palate and harelip, the mouth orifice connecting to one nostril. Multiple plastic surgeries had repaired him tremendously and he was more adorable than most babies, but a man Ray had met as a young teenager came to mind. This man hadn’t been born with a cleft palate so much as a cleft head. He was a rather famous sideshow attraction, and while the man gurgle-rasped his story he autographed pictures of himself like a movie star, and Ray had his somewhere to this day. The man had seemed immensely tall to him, and was dark-suited, and Ray had looked up at him with repulsed, timid fascination and morbid curiosity…almost like an awe-inspired respect, or reverence, as if the man had received his wounds in some cosmic battle.

  The man had three eyes, two noses (or one split nose) and a cleft mouth. Dick Smith, Rick Baker or Tom Savini would be hard-pressed to duplicate this look—it wouldn’t quite catch the mood. And Ray felt something like guilt even today, as he had then, when he recalled the man looking down at him with his three eyes from that great height and handing him his autographed photo. Ray had imagined that the man looked at him a little bitterly, a little disgustedly, for the way he gawked up at him. Maybe Ray had only imagined this due to the man’s unpleasant visage—he’d never know.

  Ray would never forget the armless-legless man, the three-legged rooster, the pickled baby horrors he’d seen as a boy in tents with straw-littered floors. He could see these images to this day, whereas he couldn’t easily summon up the faces of school chums from those same years, or even remember exactly what his aunt and uncle had looked like then.

  Mutants, freaks, deformed souls made up much of his artwork, as if he were trying to exorcize these visions out of him, but to no avail.

  Ray focused his attention back on the book, peripherally hearing the plop-trickle from the bathroom and a single car swish by in the night. The story, called “well-known,” of Edward Mordake was related. An heir to a noble family, handsome and intelligent, and on the back of his head there was a second, smaller face. A “beautiful” girl. It would make expressions, follow you with its eyes as you observed it, and “gibbered” endlessly—though only Edward Mordake could hear its demonic whisperings, fiendishly tormenting him until his fateful suicide at twenty-three.

  Ray didn’t know how much of the story had been further abstracted by its tellers and by Mordake himself, but the book showed other cases of

  “supernumerary” heads with individual brains growing from people’s heads, and legs dangling out of bellies, and an entire withered upper half of a body hanging out of a man’s belly, and Ray had seen an Asian man in a tabloid once with a smaller Asian face on his skull, which was successfully removed in a kind of warped abortion. Ray wondered what intellect, or at least sentience, however low, hummed in these beings.

  What horrors could be created by our traitorous bodies, at the prompting of Nature, or God, karma, whatever.

  Ray closed the book at last, coffee gone, sink still gurgling, and couldn’t help but wonder about the integrity of his own fragile corpore-ality. He also wondered what inner need compelled him to this kind of reading, and thinking.

  ««—»»

  Thursday Ray sat at Joe’s battered wooden desk in the leather room during work hours, taking a little break for himself, and contemplated looking up Heidi’s home phone number.

  Ray’s eyes lifted mindlessly, following a peripheral movement.

  In the high-ceilinged stock room, its shelves filled with every color and texture of leather, a half of a cow skin was nailed to the wall near the ceiling. A full skin was too difficult for a cutter to handle so they were bisected down the spine, and the tacked up half skin looked amazingly like a map of the United States (the neck Maine, front leg Florida, hind leg Texas). It was tacked in such a place of honor because it was a hideous skin, branded and scarred, badly colored, like the skin off some cow mutation. Below it a hand-scrawled sign read, “Another Quality Product From Spruce Leathers.” Part of the skin had fallen loose (Maine) and hung down, showing the lighter colored wall behind it. Also, the skin’s light outline could be seen as it stirred in the breeze from a powerful fan across the room. It billowed out from the wall like a lazy sail, pulsing, the ugly squiggled brand rippling.

  Ray watched it numbly as though mesmerized.

  At home that evening he called directory assistance, asked for Heidi’s town and Heidi’s father’s number. He hesitated, almost changed his mind—then he was suddenly dialing out the code. Cracking the
safe, no turning back.

  It was Heidi’s mother. Ray identified himself as a friend from work.

  Heidi was still on vacation with her sister, her mother told him pleasantly.

  Ray stammered that he was an artist and had wanted to show Heidi some of his work. The mother said that sounded exciting and he could come down and drop it off if he cared to. Ray said no thanks and hung up. Two seconds later he dialed again and apologized that he hadn’t left his own number should Heidi wish to call him back. The mother, sounding a wee bit surprised or wary at this calling back (or was it his paranoia?), took his number. She told him Heidi was coming back on Friday evening.

  Again Ray thanked her and hung up.

  Friday? Then why had she said she wouldn’t see him until Monday?

  She’s engaged, remember? a cold part of him answered back tauntingly.Still, he was a bit relieved to find she truly was in Maine on vacation, as if he hadn’t believed her.

  He waited that night for her to call her mother, receive his message, and call him. He was agitated, played video games, paced with a beer in hand rather than coffee, listened to David Bowie sing about Modern Love.

  Would her call answer his unformed, frightened questions? Would she tell him—in the voice of God, His ventriloquist’s puppet—his fate?

  Dicky called to check on his progress. The ring wrung his heart.

  Ray didn’t think he was in love, but maybe he wouldn’t recognize it, never having felt romantic love for someone who truly returned it. Would she want to return it? He didn’t want her to release him to soar alone. She had helped him, but not as much as he had believed almost a week ago today. He hungered for more, he hungered to stay alive, not be teased with one day of life. In or out of her embrace, he felt so hopelessly unreal. Why this dazed numbness, everlasting? Was he lacking in emotion, or too filled with it?

  Brief encounter, her voice came back. Or was it his own voice, that cold alter-ego’s voice, taunting again?

  What was in her mind? What was her motivation? The fear maddened and exhilarated him. What had she spawned in his mind?

  She didn’t call him that night, of course, and that night he had a vivid and resonant nightmare…

  89

  Chapter

  4

  Itwas six-fifteen PM. Five-and-three-quarter hours till clock-out.

  The latest reincarnation of Tar-Fiend was hung up by a piece of masking tape on the door which led out onto the loading dock. A word balloon had him saying, “Where do you think you’re going, puny mortals?”Conversation had broken down into smaller groups. Maureen and Jean quietly exchanged while they worked, Abigail exchanged with Paul about her husband Tim and their car problems. Donna had slunk off, mostly unobserved, to the ladies’ room to smoke a cigarette.

  The ladies’ room was cleaner than the men’s room, as is common with factories. Donna lit a cigarette and glanced obligatorily into the mirror at her doppelganger, as some ancient peoples believed the mirrored self to be. Again she vaguely considered dying her hair blond, as she had been doing lately. She had had it blond before. Her boyfriend would shit—he’d kill her. She liked the idea of unsettling him like that.

  She knew she looked damn good blond. In the summer, with a tan, in a skimpy bikini cutting into her soft beer belly, with her tattooed heart and arrow on her upper arm…blond. Her boyfriend had better keep in line, because she could turn more heads than turned at Wimbledon if she put herself to it.

  Donna reached into the trash basket, felt around. Her hand closed on something heavy in a paper bag. She drew it out, ducked into a stall and closed the door. Donna sat on the toilet and had some swallows of peppermint Schnapps.

  Through the floor she heard chains rattling. She realized it was the

  “degreaser”—fresh unpainted parts loaded in a cage, and then lowered into a steaming vat of chemical fumes which would boil away grease that would otherwise eat into the plastic and hinder painting. She thought this was funny, as the molders had been sent home. Then she considered that maybe the post-ops guys were the ones who degreased parts, and she dismissed it. Anyway, the chains had stopped. The parts now rested on a grill over a volatile solution one-hundred-and-eighty degrees Fahrenheit.

  Someone had told her once that you forgot where you were, working at the degreaser—the fumes made your eyes red, made you high, and you had a hard time getting out of bed the next day, as if you’d been mildly poisoned. She’d also heard that if you tossed some aluminum in the vat it would react with the chemical and there’d be a giant fireball explosion.

  The kid explaining this to her had then flicked his cigarette’s ash into the vat to tease her and to prove how cool he was.

  Donna heard a man shouting down there, yelling something across the room to someone else. He sounded mad: “— fucking asshole, fucking (something)…”

  She tilted her head back and her throat moved as she gulped a bit more Schnapps.

  Feet clumped down the stairs which ran alongside the diagonal freight elevator leading to the third floor. The door squealed open and Steve stepped out. He was six-four and looked as heavy as Paul, who was almost a foot shorter and pretty light himself. He was a shy kid. Paul liked him.“Hey, Paul.”

  “Hey, Steve.”

  “You have an extra four shelf rack down here?” Steve glanced around the room and didn’t spot any.

  “What rack?”

  “The kind with four shelves. I got racks but they’ve got too many shelves—I’m painting Infoforms and they’re big.”

  “No racks down here. I couldn’t find any for these front housings.”

  “None behind the cafeteria?”

  “Mm-nope. Why don’t you unload small parts off the four shelf racks and put ‘em on the racks you can’t use? There are a lot of painted parts up there; I’m sure there’s four shelf racks.”

  Steve smiled shyly and slapped his head. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “Sure, just transfer those parts and use the racks.”

  “Good thinkin’, Paul.”

  “First shift should be smart enough to put small parts on racks with lots of shelves and save the four shelf racks for big parts.”

  “They’re too lazy,” Steve said, scratching the back of his neck. His blue jeans and work shirt were grayish with paint mist that had settled on him. He sprayed without using a mask or goggles, like the first shift painters. When they blew their noses there was paint in their snot.

  “Hi Steve,” Maureen called, cat-grinning.

  “Hello.” Steve wiggled his fingers. He shuffled, watched Paul work.

  “I see you got your witchcraft necklace.”

  “Yep, my pentagram. I’m surprised you mentioned it—all the people in here and hardly anyone ever mentions it. Truck drivers come in and don’t mention it. Whatta ya gotta do in this world to get noticed, wear a bone through your nose with pinwheels on the ends?”

  Steve laughed softly. “No, you have to have the, um, pentagram tattooed on your forehead.”

  “That wouldn’t work too good, necessarily—my cousin Ray has a yin and yang tattooed on both his hands right here—” Paul tapped the web of his left hand between thumb and forefinger “— and he says people hardly ever ask him what it means.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It’s a Chinese symbol for life and death, man and woman, flesh and spirit—it’s a symbol for wholeness, ya know? The circle and spiral are used a lot in witchcraft as signs of infinity and wholeness of the spirit.

  You’ve seen it.” Paul proceeded to draw a duplicate of Ray’s tattoo on his left hand, using his black ballpoint pen. “It looks like a 69.”

  “Oh—oh yeah. Yeah. It’s a kung fu symbol too, right?”

  “Yeah, Ray’s into martial arts. He learned a lot from a friend who’s really incredible at it. There. Only the white side is red on his tattoo; red’s the oriental color of life. Like the Japanese red sun flag. On his left hand the tattoo is opposite of the right—the black
side is on the left, red on the right. It’s really like a 96…wait, no it isn’t. Well, on his left hand the thing’s reversed, the way his right hand’s yin/yang would look in the mirror.”

  “I get it.”

  “That enhances the effect. Makes it neater.”

  “He got any other tattoos?”

  “Nope.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yup—I got Brooke Shields’ face on my bum.”

  “Oh God,” Jean moaned.

  “Yeah,” Maureen said, “he’s got a ying-yang on his ying-yang.”

  Donna resisted temptation and bagged the remainder of Schnapps; a bit left for later if she felt so inclined. Good thing about Schnapps, she didn’t need to chew gum or suck a mint after. Her rather dreamy eyelids were rather dreamier, though she held her outer reserve well; none of the others had seemed to notice the other few times she’d indulged herself at work. Ha—they should see her when she was really oiled…fuckin’ wild woman. She’d punched her boyfriend once on the chin and almost knocked him on his as, and he was big. He’d had all he could do to pin her. She snorted a smile to herself, imagining what it’d be like to get shit-faced at work and start beating on her fellows, and all of them trying to tackle her down. Crazy thought.

  She heard activity downstairs again, through the grimy linoleum floor under her sneakers.