One of me has his hands around my head, and he’s shoving his cock into my mouth and I’m choking. I’m gagging. He’s looking down at me with a wild, mischievous smile. My eyes are tearing up. I shut them. Another is behind me, slamming into my ass and causing so much pain. The others are all fondling me or each other or looking away distracted, embarrassed, or bored.
One is sticking his fingers into the raw flesh on my face where I ripped patches of my beard out.
Why are they doing this to me?
Why am I doing this to myself?
They’re expressing their love for you, I hear some voice, not my own, say inside my head. Or, maybe it’s coming from beneath the bed.
All the copies of me are silent in their thrusts and molestations—fucking mute and dumb—and I’m the only one making a sound, gagging, choking, crying, rustling the bedcovers, trying to scream out. Through squinted eyes, their motions, their actions, are odd. Like a videotape played in reverse while they clearly move forward through space and time.
Someone’s pinning my arms down and when they let up just a bit I slip my arms free and push the version of me sticking his dick in my mouth away from me so I can finally scream, “GET THE FUCK OFF ME GET THE FUCK OFF ME GET THE FUCK OFF ME!” and like cockroaches at the first sign of light, they all scatter away from me, hopping off the bed onto the floor and back into the mirrors. All running backwards back into their places.
When I stand from the bed, naked, tasting salt, sweat, and sickness, and feeling sharp pains, I look around and see all these different versions of me in the mirror. Right now, they’re all looking ashamed.
All of them. Mirrored images.
As they should be.
The shotgun’s still on the bed. Everyone in the mirrors is looking with bashful eyes at me, at the gun.
Trying not to keep myself (in the mirrors) out of my blurry sight, I find my pajamas and put them back on. I then take the shotgun, the ends of its barrels wet with saliva, and place it back under the bed and walk out of the room.
***
I spend the next countless hours under a bare light bulb drinking scotch in the solitaire room, where I find the game even less complete than before. There doesn’t seem to be a full deck here, and I keep getting frustrated, placing numbered cards out of order and with complete disregard for suit. Each time I do, however, someone on the other side of one of the doors says “Nuh-uh, no cheating, Jack!” and I pull the offending card away without protest and look at the table feeling there’s no way this game can be finished.
All the while I’m watched attentively by portraits of myself, my father, my mother, Karen, and Samuel.
They watch me play for hours.
That’s how bored they are.
***
When God said “Let there be light,” she clapped. She was the original inventor of The Clapper. God’s got a patent pending on everything. And then we came along. We stole from her and claimed inventions and laughed at her and stabbed out our eyes for fear of seeing her. I’ve seen her. She popped off the top of my skull like the lid of a jar and scooped out my brain when I was young. We sat down at a long table of light and dined on it.
Finished, she showed me the universe, and flattened it. She folded it, and showed me how all of it touches all of it all at once. God removed one ripple from it, pinching it between her long dark fingers, pulling it from the sheet of universe like a bit of wet tissue. She placed it in the empty space inside my skull, between my ears.
The stars that were my eyes immediately collapsed.
My mouth foamed like a sick sea.
I longed for the blood of God, so I drank.
***
Once, in the game room, after a game of ping pong where Karen and Samuel ganged up on me to beat me mercilessly with swift backhands and heavy overhands, I called Karen a bitch and she responded only by placing her paddle down and giving me a look of disappointment.
“Don’t worry about it,” Samuel said, patting me on the back and handing me an ice-cold bottle of Heineken he pulled from the mini-fridge in the corner. “She knows you’re trying.”
We took a seat on the little couch set before the big, bulky TV in the game room and drank beers. There was no Sox or Cubs game on that night, so Samuel slipped in a video cassette titled Top 100 Defensive Plays of the Chicago Cubs.
I laughed. “Do the Cubs even have that many defensive plays worth watching?”
The room was dim and cool. Samuel’s mother slept quietly down the hall. Or, maybe she was dead. Or hadn’t moved in yet. Or even existed.
“Ernie Banks? Billy Williams? Ron Santo? Randy Hundley? Ryne Sandberg, asshole?” Samuel said, half joking, half serious. “Are you kidding me? They’ve had some great fuckin’ teams, Jack.”
“I’m… I’m only kidding,” I told him. “Just trying to get under your skin.”
He said he knew. That I’m always getting under his skin, and patted my knee as baseball players on the old tape dove headlong to catch dropping flies or flipped the ball to each other in the infield to turn flawless double plays.
I placed my hand over his hand on my knee.
“No,” Samuel said.
***
I haven’t been able to find my way out of these three rooms. Each is large and square and windowless. Each leads back into one or the other, despite the fact that the exit of each room does not logically lead back in any circular fashion. Even if they did, the order of the rooms wouldn’t match up. I can leave the chair room and end up in the mirror room. I can leave the chair room and end up in the solitaire room. From the solitaire room, I could end up at either of the rooms, just the same.
Only thing is, the rooms change ever-so slightly each time. The portraits may be me, Karen, mom, dad, or Samuel, or any combination of us. And usually upon (re)entering one of these impossible rooms, the portraits would be painted at different angles, and sometimes didn’t even look a whole lot like us.
That is, if I took time to inspect them with eyes I refused to fully open.
It occurs to me that Samuel’s mother should have a portrait on these walls and it upsets me. She once lived in this fucking labyrinthine house, why doesn’t she have a portrait?
Mom and dad never lived here, I hear Karen say. Why do they get portraits? And, anyway, have you not noticed that the portraits of mom and dad are basically just doubles of our portraits?
I look, and I’m sure I see a difference even when I don’t. Mom and Dad. Karen and Jack. Jack and Mom. Dad and Karen. Etc. etc.
But, still, it bothers me that Samuel’s mother, the lovely woman, was left out of the gallery.
So, unable to complete the game of solitaire and unwilling to venture away for fear of winding up in the room of mirrors, I rip my mother’s portrait off the wall and hold it right up against the light bulb for hours until the paint on the canvas softens and melts.
I spend more hours with my hands moving those soft paints around, attempting to recreate the likeness of Samuel’s mother from memory. Using my hands and fingers, eventually I fashion a visage I could be quite proud of. Considering I had no brush and no fresh paints to work with, this portrait is quite convincing, if just a bit messy.
I hang it up on the wall, back in its place next to me or dad or whoever that is.
My hands crusty with old, dried paint, I step away from the piece of art I just hung and smile and smile and smile.
I smile, arms crossed against myself, proud. Proud until I realize it’s just the same goddamned portrait of my mother I had taken down and tried to erase and recreate.
My mother is a palimpsest.
She’s looking at me, smiling.
She’s asking me if I remember going to the beach.
SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!
***
“Jack…”
“Jack?”
“Jack…”
***
I have a theory. I think they’re trying to drive me crazy.
That’s my theory
.
I think they want to destroy a perfectly sane man.
They probably did something to my meds.
They probably put something in the drinking water.
They probably injected the food in the refrigerator with some kind of poison.
They probably laced the bear traps with hallucinogens.
They think I’m too adrift to notice.
They think I’m not as bright as I am.
They believe my head’s a jack-o-lantern, only filled with flame.
They believe I could never love myself enough.
I have a theory… they’re trying to drive me crazy.
***
It occurs to me that I’ve given up on getting out of these rooms too quickly. Perhaps the trick is to keep going—like, I’m inside a giant lock that requires the cylinders, springs, and pins to revolve and move a certain number of times before opening.
And my body is the key. Turning.
I feel a twinge of hope after passing through the three rooms dozens of times and finding the expressions on the portraits grow more worrisome and the faces I see in the mirror-room more despondent.
They know I’m on to them.
They know I’ll break away from them.
My will is strong. It always has been. I can will myself out of these rooms.
I will will myself out of these rooms.
***
I wake up under the card table, and the light is flickering.
Goddamned Karen didn’t pay the electric bill. But then I remember the lights went out a long time ago and these lights have nothing to do with the electric bill.
So why the flickering? The dimming?
I crawl, groggy, out from beneath the table and first inspect the game of solitaire and see, through a lattice of lashes, all my previous evening’s work has been undone and the game is even further from being completed.
The light bulb.
The light bulb is flickering… not because of the electricity… not because of the unpaid bills. The bulb is flickering because there’s a dark creature inside it thrashing, flapping its wings spastically, stuck inside the hot glass.
I feel empathy for the ugly insect and consider breaking the bulb and setting it free. My hands on the back of the chair, ready to swing away, in fact, before it occurs to me that breaking the bulb will throw the room into complete darkness.
Pushing the chair back into place, I step back against the wall between portraits of Samuel and Karen (or my mother) and watch the wild flailing and thrashing of the large bug as it beats against the thin, paper-like glass of the bulb. Hollow clacks and thuds. The light in the room goes in and out as it does. It’d make the room appear to be in slow motion, if anything in the room was moving.
But nothing’s moving.
I just watch the bug beat itself to death inside the glass, surrounded by my family, their eyes in the walls.
I think: That’s me in there. Just, a bug-sized version of me, dangling from a different universe’s string. His face and body, blackened from the burning bulb. He’s moving so fast, flickering and fluttering, because he’s wavering in space and time. Or, it’s astral projection.
For a long while, I just watch the bug bash its head against the glass until it stops moving and sags to the bottom of the bulb.
The light’s no longer disturbed.
I crawl back under the card table and suck on my thumb and try to rest my weary eyes, my lids overworked by my will keeping them from slipping completely back over my bloodshot eyeballs.
***
Pitter-patter. Clack-clack.
Rain.
It’s raining.
And the house is quaking, trembling, and vibrating.
It’s thundering.
Pitter-patter. Clack-clack.
And: BANG!
Darkness. So warm. Curled up and gone. So warm.
Pitter-patter. Clack-clack.
I do not want to wake up.
I do not ever want to wake up.
The tickle of a many-legged thing crawling across your skin.
My half-moon eyes find the light and there’s two or three or four black beetles crawling along my arm. A few of them have my face because they are my children. I swat them away and realize that I’m still under the table, which is shuddering.
But not with the thunder, because the table’s not just quaking, it’s sinking, and bulging, and dipping toward me like an overfilled Hefty bag.
POP!
FLUSH.
Flicker-flicker-flicker-buzz-buzz-buzz.
The table breaks and I’m baptized by a deluge of black beetles. They wash over me, burying me, slipping into all my crevices, crawling into my mouth and dying from the words there, dying from the stench there, dying from touching a tongue so black it turns them pale and dull as it leaches all the light from them.
Rolling out from under the crushed table and mountains of beetles, I find that I’m in the dining room on the first floor, and the beetles are spilling from the fancy crystal chandelier like a black fountain, continuous.
“Did you do that?” I hear a man’s voice ask, maybe from the stairs around the corner.
“I… uh… goddammit I need a drink, Harold,” the woman’s voice responds and their feet slam each step as they retreat upstairs from the plague of beetles.
“Ha ha ha,” I say out loud, rather than actually laughing. “Ha ha ha!” I repeat, triumphant in a swarm of flittering and flying beetles, in a pool of black and crunchy undergrowth.
Pitter-patter. Clack-clack.
The beetles keep spilling from the chandelier and soon I’m ankle deep in them. Sooner still, they’re wrapped around my shins and crawling up and over me, trying to drag me down. Eventually I’m waist-deep and paralyzed, and they’ve climbed up me, dissolving my skin, turning me leprous, burnt, and cancerous. I wait to infect the world, the very ground beneath me, and I close my eyes. No, I don’t close my eyes. The insects have covered them for me. The insects that control me. The insects that are god of me. For now.
I am stung and bitten and unable to move. Unwilling to move, my will having become weakened as of late. The summer light, which I hadn’t seen in such a long while, is now filtered through the black hard-shelled bodies covering my eyes.
Why don’t I swat them away so that I can see the summer light, see the garden and the garage back there awaiting Karen’s return?
I just don’t care, that’s why.
Paralyzed by the rising tide of twittering insects, I stick my arms out like Christ and let them crucify me. I open my mouth and they skitter right in, unafraid of this black nub of a tongue I used to use to tell the world I’m here, I exist.
The bugs soon fill my mouth and choke me. I gag and cough and vomit and black-winged things fly away and are replaced by others, a steady stream of them just slipping into my open mouth, mindlessly.
Crunch-crackle-crack.
“Oh, this is—this is just too much, Natasha,” I hear the man say.
I’m blinded and made mute by the bugs.
I’m paralyzed by their weight.
They’re spilling, still, from the chandelier.
There’s so many now that they’ve swelled to a mass reaching up to my armpits. I can’t see, but I imagine they’re filling the entirety of this first floor, like the end-scene with the popcorn in that movie Real Genius, that I starred in, wrote, and directed.
For the first time I think I’m being shown some mercy.
These beetles have lived within me since I scraped and clawed my way out of my mother’s womb. Now they’ve come out of me to drown me.
But in a show of betrayal, I’m gripped first by the ankle and then the wrist, and I’m wrangled and ripped from my spot and dragged through the sea of blackness, little legs tickling my eyelashes. Rays of summer sunshine sometimes stab my eyes through barely parted lids.
My vision remains distorted by bugs and light only until I’m being dragged up the stairs as if I’m already a dea
d body.
They have me, one foot cradled under an arm, each, and they’re pulling me up the stairs, muttering and arguing between themselves.
“He was going to let himself die down there,” I hear one say.
“Yeah, and?” I hear the other say.
“He’s not dying down there, stupid. Jesus. Why do I bother?”
I try to get a good look at them, but my head keeps slipping back along the steps and smacking good, keeping my vision a pained blur.
They appear well-dressed, as far as I can tell, between slamming my head against the stairs. She’s in a white, frilly dress of some sort and he’s in a tan linen summer suit. I can only see their backs, so I don’t know who the fuck they are.
On the last step before the second-floor landing, they give my legs a good yank and I crack my head and all goes mercifully blank.
PART THREE
In God’s thumbprint, we are only a millimeter of the swirling lines. We ask to be more, to be recognized, but we’re just part of God’s thumbprint. We swing through space every time she has to scratch her nose or wipe her ass. And we don’t notice the difference.
She never looks at her thumbprint. Who looks at their own thumbprint? Really looks at it? The only time anyone would inspect God’s thumbprint is if she committed a crime.
But no one polices God, and no one takes God’s fingerprints.
***
“But… I thought he was supposed to have killed himself already.”
“Don’t be stupid. You don’t know anything.”
“But, I thought…”
“Did you check the time?”
“Did I check the time?”
“Yes, did you check the time?”
“But, you have a watch on your wrist.”
“Did you check the time?”
“I don’t have a watch.”
My Eyes Are Black Holes Page 6
