But, she stopped drinking altogether the first time I got her pregnant. During that time she got more moody, distant, cold. I started spending more time with Samuel and my sister. This only pissed her off more, even though she didn’t seem to want me around, either.
She said she didn’t like me hanging around Samuel.
I told her a guy needs guy friends.
She spat and gave me a death stare and told me I fucking well know that’s not what she’s talking about.
I asked her to explain. Every time she’d just storm out of the room.
I came home one night from watching a White Sox game and drinking beers with Samuel, and she was gone. She left a note that said if I wanted to spend all my time with Samuel, and not her, my pregnant wife, then I should have just married him, instead.
That made me laugh.
It made me laugh until the note said she had an abortion that day and was off to stay with her mother in Vancouver.
She knew I wanted a family. She knew I wanted children of our own.
Vindictive. Spiteful. Hateful.
The only reason my wife entered my life was to fulfill her own vocation as a destroyer of dreams. She did that and strolled out of my life, fulfilled.
That night, unable to get her on the phone, I burned the fucking house down. I stalked from room to room doing my best Jackson Pollock impression, but with lighter fluid instead of paints. I wrote my name on the walls, my masterpieces.
It felt good, the match sparking a small flame into existence, and that small flame igniting an all engrossing one. Like the Big Bang.
I walked out of that house, my skull a jack-o-lantern, my back warmed by the flames, and moved in with Samuel and Karen. When the cops asked about the fire, I said I was nowhere near that house. I was out of town, in fact. I was in Vancouver, trying to reverse my wife’s abortion.
They looked at me strangely. It’s a look I’ve grown to expect.
***
Is he awake?
Shhhh…
That bright portal to annihilation fills my bedroom window. My familiar bedroom window. Lying in bed, I roll over and squint at the ceiling for a while and it all remains—this room, my half-sight, even my cleansed body. It doesn’t all pixelate and dissipate and scatter to nothingness in the wake of my breath.
I’m thirsty.
I’m fucking parched, as if I drank a gallon of saltwater or spent all of last night supine on some distant dessert dune—somewhere on Mars—instead of this plush bed.
I roll over and reach for the Johnnie Walker on the nightstand but my hand only comes away with air. The bottle’s gone. Not empty, just not there. The pill bottles are knocked over atop the nightstand with a few pills spilled from them. My glass is still there, but it’s not full of melted ice or scotch—it’s half-full of tomato juice, half the glass caked in a dried red film.
Sitting up, I put the glass to my lips, and, so thirsty, I don’t care that the juice is warm.
Not until the thick, salty fluid slides back against my tonsils do I recognize the juice is not juice but blood, and I spit it out and cough and wipe away the spit and blood drooling from my chin and inspect the glass and see that a couple teeth are floating in it. I drop the glass and it clunks and splatters red across the floor, and, sticking fingers in my mouth, I check for missing teeth and discover I am missing a couple, but that happened when I was a teenager.
I hear something.
On the other side of the guestroom door, someone is snickering behind a cupped mouth.
Anger. Indignation.
I wipe my hands on the bedspread and stand and nearly fall back to the bed, a rush of blood to my head making me dizzy and queasy. Steadied, I stroll to the door and fling it open, hoping to surprise these people who have broken into my home and insist on taunting me.
“Ah-ha!” I yell, like a father catching his meddlesome children snooping around his closet and finding his wigs and panties and bras, all hidden behind the tapes and video camera used to record the baby sitter taking a pee.
My outburst is followed by a howling scream.
It’s mine. It’s me screaming.
Directly outside the bedroom door, where I’ve stepped, was a bear trap, and I’ve stepped right into it, its mammoth metal teeth digging into my calf muscle and cracking my shin bone with unrelenting pressure.
The shock is almost enough to overcome my willed eyelids, half-shut.
In disbelief, all I can do is squint at the rusty metal jaws destroying my leg, and scream. The pants leg of my pajamas is soon drenched with blood and turns a dark red. I’m reaching down, gripping the big metal motherfucker, trying to pull it open. It only seems to tighten even more at my efforts, and I’m screaming and crying now and wondering why.
Trapped in this house, my leg will soon gangrene and the infection will spread and I’ll finally be able to sleep forever. As I’ve always wished.
Oh, quit your blubbering, I hear Karen say, mocking me. You only stubbed your toe after all.
With gritted teeth, bleary vision, and panting breath, I scan my surroundings, just now noticing I’m not in the third floor hallway. I’m in a room that my bedroom definitely doesn’t lead to.
And my leg is not in a bear trap. I have just stubbed my toe.
It kind of hurts.
This room, like yesterday, or whenever that was (time is not relative, subjective, or objective), is the same as the bare room I found first upon passing through that mystery door. There’s a chair in the middle of the room, and a door on the other side of the room, opposite me. Again there’s a portrait of my father, or me, on the wall. Only, it’s on the other side of the room.
There’s a light bulb hanging from the middle of the room and it’s on (somehow), casting everything in a dim dirty yellow.
“Karen?” I call out, uselessly. I can sense myself about to break into a crying jag, ready to collapse and die here on this floor of this fucking impossible room.
“Karen? Why—why are you doing this to me?” I plead, beg. I do begin to cry but catch myself, my father’s voice in my head saying: Crying’s for pussies!
Or maybe the voice comes from the portrait.
I tell myself: Fuck this, I’m not going through this shit again.
I’m not playing this game, I tell myself.
I turn back the way I came from and grab the door handle and turn it, but it doesn’t budge. At first. I jammer and jiggle it and it finally pulls toward me and I thrust myself back into the confines of my familiar bedroom.
But it’s not my bedroom. It’s the same goddamned room as yesterday! The second room, but this time the game of solitaire on the table appears incomplete. And instead of portraits of my mother and father on the walls, the portraits are of Karen and Samuel.
Last time, I had to go through this room to get back to my bedroom—or, rather, to sort of appear, instantaneously, standing before my bathroom, clean and comfortable.
I should never have opened my eyes.
I should never have left my room.
So, crossing my fingers, I walk past the unfinished game of solitaire and the portraits of my sister and her husband, their eyes following me as I do.
Bile backs up in the back of my throat. I feel sick and shaky as I place my hand on the doorknob. I just want back in my room. I promise I’ll never leave it again.
“Oh, do you, Jacky? Do you really promise? Cross your heart and hope to die?” I hear that woman’s voice ask from the other side of the door.
“Karen—please, Karen, just stop fucking with me,” I beg, hand on doorknob, head now resting against the door.
Behind me, the mouth on Samuel’s portrait turns black and blue. Then it bleeds.
I won’t turn to look at it.
“You’re doing a wonderful job, sweetheart,” I hear the man whisper.
“WHAAAAAAAAAAA!” I fucking shriek, wild, storming into the room where I hear them chortling and mocking me.
Click-clack of the latch slipp
ing into the strike plate as the door closes behind me.
And I’m surrounded.
I can’t hold it back anymore. I’m surrounded, and they all look so sick, so sad, so defeated, and so fucking useless. They disgust me, and I collapse and start bawling, sobbing, ripping my eyes and hair out.
My beard, I actually rip it out, in patches. Tufts of hair in the palms of my hand still attached to bits of my facial skin.
I’m in a room now with a very comfortable, inviting, wondrous bed in the center of it. It’s well-lit and warm but not too warm. But, the room is a virtual hall of mirrors, and I’m everywhere. Every-fucking-where. Most of my reflections are following orders, doing as I do. Some, however, got bored quickly and are just staring or looking away, embarrassed. Some are reading goddamned books or sipping snifters of fucking brandy.
My face slick with blood and tears, I vomit a slick green film before me and look up to see how many of me in the mirror did the same. About a third of them. The rest seem disgusted, or they aren’t even looking at me anymore.
They all have their eyes wide open and this angers me.
“Shut your eyes!” I yell. “Shut your goddamned eyes!” I scream while pounding the floor beneath me, careful to avoid splattering the green vomit.
One of me is banging, banging, BANGING on the mirror, from the other side, and staring at me. He’s pleading, begging. He wants to get my attention. But all his banging and yelling is silent. He isn’t making a sound. He can’t make a sound, I don’t think, from his part of the parallel universe.
The whole room is devoid of sound, in fact. The quietude is almost peaceful. Welcoming.
I just want to crawl into that bed and sleep
But you just got up, lazy bones, I hear Karen tell me.
“But… I’m just exhausted, little sister. I’m so, so tired…” and I shuffle over to the one section of mirror where I’m pounding against the glass.
As I do, all the other versions of me in the glass stop what they’re doing and watch.
The one banging on the mirror is crying and I reach up to the glass and put my hand on his bearded cheek and tell him to calm down.
“Calm down,” I say, nearly crying. “Calm down, I’m here. What is it? What do you need? What do you want?”
Like a child who’s just been beat, he’s having a hard time getting control of himself, expressing himself. I tell him one more time, and more sternly, to tell me what he wants, and the me in the mirror points back toward the bed. He mouths the words, “Under the bed,” and gestures that I need to look there.
“No,” I tell him. “No.”
He nods and wipes more tears and snot from his face. He breaks my heart.
Not wanting to upset him further, I walk back to the center of the large room full of mirrors, a couple dozen versions of myself watching or walking away from me as I do. Some distract themselves with books or their own fingernails. Some seem to be inspecting their teeth and picking bits of meat from them.
At the bed, I stop, not wanting to look under it.
Absolute silence.
The one in the mirror is banging against it again and though it makes no sound I sense it and look back and he points, telling me to look.
I reach under the bed and feel something metal, something cold, something long and heavy.
It’s the shape of death and it weights my lungs with sadness and, as I pull the shotgun from beneath the bed into reality, I cry. I cry and my doppelganger in the mirror simply looks relieved.
I hold the shotgun. I stroke the shotgun. I remember the shotgun.
I put the shotgun in my mouth and go to sleep.
***
When I was fourteen my father walked into the room I shared with my sister, a shotgun leaning against his shoulder, the stock cupped in his right hand, and a twelve-pack of Old Style dangling from the other hand.
“Get up. Come on, let’s go,” he ordered, his face filthy and bearded, his dingy White Sox cap pulled low on his brow.
My father was not a hunter, and before this moment, I’d never seen that shotgun—didn’t know he owned one. I was on the floor, the room to myself for once, a turntable between my legs spinning Strange Days. I was also smoking a cigarette, a habit I’d picked up when I turned twelve, or maybe eleven, but have since kicked. I was scared what kind of power black cancer inside me would give me over the world.
Dad didn’t bother with the cigarette that day, though. He just looked at how I tried to hide it, cupping it in my hand, the ember burning against my palm, and smirked, told me to put it out.
Since I didn’t get up fast enough, he set the case of beer down and yanked me to my feet, nearly pulling my shoulder out of its socket. I kicked the turntable in the commotion and it skipped, kept repeating the lyric, I think that you know what to do, yeah.
Mom was away at work at this time. It seemed she was more often away at work and my dad was more often around the tiny house, drinking Old Style, watching Donahue. He liked to sit on the couch for hours, surrounded by crushed beer cans, his chin in his chest, his eyes straight up and out, staring into nothing, and just mumble to himself. Mumble and drool.
With shotgun pressed against his shoulder, and me carrying the twelve-pack, we wandered into the woods behind the house. It was dusk and the light was grainy, dusty.
“You don’t hunt,” I told him and he told me to crack open a beer. I did and held it out for him. He pushed it back toward me and told me to drink. I did.
We posted up on a big old tree stump, and waited, not talking, barely breathing. Just making enough motion to swallow beer.
“We’re gonna wait for those damned bears been gettin’ into our trash,” dad said, already starting to slur.
Eventually a squirrel skittered up a tree about twenty feet away and my father lifted the gun and aimed.
“No, dad…” I said.
“Don’t be a goddamned pussy,” he told me, and fired, the kickback knocking him off the tree stump and onto his back. A red blotch marked where the squirrel had been, its chewed up body twitched at the foot of the large ash tree.
He chuckled and regained his place, not embarrassed at all, and told me to snatch him another beer. We sat there and drank and every once in a while he’d fire off shots at rabbits or sparrows or raccoons, more often missing than hitting anything. There were no bears, however. I’m pretty sure there hadn’t been bears in Illinois since the late 1800s, actually.
After a time, he got bored of firing off that shotgun and told me to take some shots of my own. When I had a squirrel in my sights, he yelled and screamed and smacked the back of my head until I finally fired, missing on purpose, but trying to make it seem like I’d tried. But he wasn’t happy. He made me keep at it until finally I hit something. It was a pigeon and I’d only winged it. It lay in the dirt, flapping the wing that wasn’t broken, making circles in the dust with the one that was. My father grabbed me by the shoulder and dragged me over and told me to finish it off. I didn’t want to do it, but the ugly bird was clearly in a lot of pain. He told me to finish it off. He repeated it.
I think that you know what to do, yeah.
I turned and pointed the gun at him, shaking. He laughed and it only took a second for him to pull the gun away from me, slap me hard with the back of his hand, and then turn to the pigeon, which he obliterated with the butt of the shotgun, leaving only an unrecognizable mess of feather and blood and bone.
I cried and he told me not to take it so hard—that a father’s gotta throw a punch every once in a while and a son’s gotta learn to take a punch. That’s not why I was crying, though. I was ashamed. I should have put that decrepit old thing out of its misery. That was my responsibility.
I shook the tears off and we drank until it was well dark and the night sky sparked into a million giant fires millions upon millions of miles away.
“Now, I want you to know, Jack, I wouldn’t never bring your goddamned sister out with me like this. You know? OK?” he told me, swa
ying on the tree stump.
“OK,” I told him.
“Us men, we gotta stick together. You’re gonna be a real man, son. You just gotta learn to stop being such a goddamned whiny little pussy all the time. OK?” he asked, finishing off the last of his beer.
“OK,” I told him, feeling dizzy and warm and grateful. My cheek still pulsating.
“Here, here… look at this,” he said, pulling the shotgun onto his lap. From his pocket, he withdrew a small knife and carved his initials into the stock before handing me the knife and encouraging me to carve mine in there, too. I did.
Normally, I’d be tempted to turn that knife back on him, to slit open his throat and shove my hands into the gaping wound and play his bloody vocal chords like a harp.
That night, I didn’t.
“This is our time,” he told me. “You, me, the outdoors, and our shotgun. Nobody else. OK?” he said, seeming happier than I’d seen him in a long time.
“OK,” I answered.
We guzzled down the last of the beers (eight for him, four for me, total) and fired off rounds into the sky, trying to knock down a few of those stars. When a falling star would streak across the heavens, above the tree canopies, my dad would hoot and say, “Goddamn! Now look at that! We got one!”
Later, my father tackled me to the ground and when I cried out he said, “Ah, shit! Come on now, I’m just playin’. Just wrestling, like men are supposed to do,” and we wrestled in the nettles and dirt and bear shit.
I broke three ribs that night, which I had to let heal on their own over the next few months.
***
I wake sightless in the dark now, and for a moment I feel rested, but my jaw hurts. That damned shotgun is still in my mouth. It’s still in my mouth and now someone’s pushing the shotgun further into my mouth, scraping my teeth and putting pressure on my tongue. I’m choking. I try to back away but then feel an unpleasant sensation against my back and realize I’m trapped. I’m being held. The gun in my mouth, shoved down my throat.
Click.
The lights are on and I’m surrounded. I’m surrounded by a dozen different versions of myself. But they’re not in the mirrors. And the shotgun’s not in my mouth.
My Eyes Are Black Holes Page 5
