It was worse than his touch. Although he’d never beaten them. A bite, yes. A pinch, yes. Dragging from the darkness by their hair or ears? Yes, yes, and yes. But it wasn’t like…It could have been much worse, he thought.
It’s not like I fucked them. At least, not often. I like their mouths. They prefer mine. And my fingers. Rough from cold nights collecting. Zero…two, four, six, eight, ten…twenty. Pumps. They count with me. One, two, three, sometimes four digits. Sometimes a fist. Every so often I have to give them more. I hear them count strokes like blows, but I never hit them. I don’t want them to stop. When they say the numbers, I feel like more than nothing.
He’d pinched them and left bruises, but just so he could count the marks while giving them their weekly shower. He’d bitten them accidentally on purpose once or twice, but that had only been his excitement gone awry. But he’d never ever backhanded, punched, or kicked even one of them. He had never handcuffed or tied them down. The worst he’d done had been to tease their imaginations with suggestions of things he might do if. Things he’d shown them in scary movies, and then allowed their imaginations to keep them in check. He’d poked around their minds like a finger in a wound, searching for the sorest spot. He preferred to think that he’d cajoled more than he’d commanded, waited more than he’d coaxed, watched more than he’d touched. When one of them had gotten pregnant, he’d waited nearly a year before touching any of them. And, after that, he’d waited patiently for the lullabies that would come after the crack, crunch, purr of his sweet box.
He needed the singing to deafen him to the words he’d been hearing since the period of time that he could not remember. I am nothing. Between life with La Belle and his first time seeing his disembodied and empty hands and then seeing those same hands holding a gun. Since then, he’d been quick to cry behind the backs of women. He’d used his peepholes to hide his tears from his subjects. He’d closed his mouth so they wouldn’t hear the crying that came from nowhere and the accompanying haunting syllables, I am nothing.
He’d cried when Sol was giving birth. The delivery hadn’t been like his first experiment. He’d even risked the tears and words flooding then breaching the spot in his throat. He’d been unable to stomach the thought of so much coming out of a door that would never heal itself shut the same way again. He hadn’t wanted to witness and rejoice. He’d wanted to stalk, plot, lay his trap, walk into her mind, and wreck shop. He had not desired another child. He’d wanted a baby something, a little thing he could rear or rid himself of at will. But when My arrived, he’d wanted to give his son himself the way he saw himself. He’d wanted to draw his version of himself live for My and thereby give him what he believed was everything.
He’d admitted to himself that his first breakdown had not started with a stroke, neither the first nor the second. It had started with My. It had been the inability to control all life under his purview, to control the first scratch at the thing beneath his upper rib cage. He had never called it a heart, just the feeling. He still hated it. Except for having to go to the hospital, part of him was grateful to be numb all over. Feeling had been his least favorite part of invading the insides of the women’s minds even if he could only imitate genuine emotions and reflect them back like a fun-house mirror. He’d hated to experience their thoughts comingled with a sensation that eluded him like an ice cube through warm fingers. Anytime he’d heard them start to cry, he would take his finger off the incoming button on the box. He’d enjoyed only when their minds writhed, when they screamed the most creative curses they could produce, their tongues twisting off and spitting words into the air that he controlled. He’d relished his time inside them. Their minds were his domain. Their bodies, his garden maze. But their feelings were the dungeon where they tried to trap him. In the end, it was My who’d dragged him into the prison he could not break out of. He was forced to hear and to cry.
My crying comes from nowhere. I am nothing inside. No hurt. But I cry before and after. And for him, even during. They don’t know. They don’t see. I am nothing to see. I am only their reflections and now I am his. He makes me. Cry. I want to hold him, but I can’t let go. The gun is in my hand. It reminds me that I have a hand, an arm, a shoulder, a body. I hold on to anything to make me more than the nothing that I am. But now my My threatens to make me something. I’d rather cry from nowhere because somewhere inside me is a prison.
* * *
—
LUCIEN WOKE up hours after his arrival at the hospital, shivering wildly. He couldn’t feel the warmth of the room that mirrored the rise in the temperature outside. He turned his head to look at the rooftops, where rain was melting the snow. A feeling approximating heartbreak came over him as he thought of the demolition crew members donning slickers the same color as their hard hats to start leveling his house. He lay hoping that they’d wait for him to get out of the hospital and say a final farewell on his front steps. Maybe they’d be delayed, waiting for days for an all clear to start lopping off the aboveground levels of the house. He wondered how far they’d gotten. Had more of the upstairs floors collapsed? Had the weakened and overburdened main floor buckled? Was he worrying for nothing? Although he kept replaying the men grumbling about not letting anyone die in the hazardous house while he tried to retrieve his belongings, he chose to hope that he’d get there in time to halt the damage for a few hours.
He knew that they could never understand his hoarding. They would see it as more reason to tear his house apart. He told himself that even if the house was collapsing downward onto itself, it was also being pushed upward by the compressed mostly metal junk in the basement. Unless they dismantled the house chunk by chunk, they might never get their machinery into the ground to excavate or exhume. He laughed himself into a coughing fit thinking of his secret. Not the women, but the bomb shelter that neither his neighbors nor the demolition team knew existed. Whatever plans the fire marshal may have gotten from the records bureau were not the originals. The plans for the house that they would have in hand were doctored reproductions that had been made by civil servants on the take who’d erased the Mob safe rooms from the blueprints. Lucien satisfied himself that he would have time to at least save My and maybe one or two of the others in the safe room. Although the plan he had made in the days prior had collapsed, he chose to believe that he still had a chance.
He couldn’t believe how things had fallen apart, how he had not followed his original plan after the second stroke. He had tried to coach himself to stay healthy enough for My, for his girls. He never again wanted to be reliant on Leona’s mercy. After his second stroke, he had sworn not to become her prisoner for a third time.
Do not get sick again, not around her. Do not allow her to become your jailer. Do not give her cause to take you to the hospital. She is one of them. Flex-shift healers of the worst kind, always watching, listening, sniffing. Anticipating every twinge, cough, and ache. Waiting for a reason to poke, fondle, confine. Don’t breathe. Stop every sneeze before it happens. Do not take in their salt water or their purified air. Hide your arms. Do not let them stick you. Do not let them take your blood, search your mucus, take pictures of your bones, look inside your chest. Do not let them name your sickness. Get out before they make you worse. Do not fall asleep. Do not let her tiptoe through your mind. Keep your head clear of clutter. Remember where they hid your clothes. Recall the turns out of rooms and hallways. Count the stairs. Count the floors to the ground. Count the blocks to the dollar van, the streets to your street, the cars on the next. Get into your van. Rest. Rest. Drive by to make sure. Stop when you see your house. Go inside. Get My.
Lucien regained full consciousness in the middle of the afternoon, screaming inaudibly in a hoarse voice for Marie-Ange and his girls. He shook his head vigorously, like a Saint Bernard shaking off fleas. He wanted Leona to get the hell out of his ear canal, to get her to stop trying to crawl into places she desperately wanted to see. Do not let her i
n! He knew that she would try to stop him.
Go inside and let them out. Get them out. One by one. But not One first. Zero should go first. Then One. I should kill her, skip her, same thing. Then Two and Three. Then My. My first. No, he needs care. Count backward. Always make My last. Three then Two. Leave One behind. Kill her. Leave Zero. Kill her too. Then My will remain with two mothers like me.
He didn’t know that he was coming undone. He couldn’t see his madness from the outside and so he thought that he was as he’d always been. He took his hallucination for lucidity, mixing past and present, feeling what he didn’t know to be longing and missing loved ones. He’d understood emptiness more than hurt and had experienced a bit of sadness when Marie-Ange passed. Anxiety was new to him. It had come about only after the fire and hadn’t left him since, even when he was daydreaming, unconscious, or asleep. His eyes were open, he thought. But he could hear himself calling for Marie-Ange as if she might respond.
Marie-Ange had been the best but not his first mother. He had never considered his birth mother in that category at all. His aunt La Belle had always held that place as his first and only mother until his wife. He’d told himself that Marie-Ange’s only fault, besides the cutting threat, had been her illness that had forced him to watch her confined under the control of other men who’d called her ailment by name.
“Cancer.” The faceless doctor with a foreign accent had refused to sugarcoat. “Surgery is the best option. We think it has spread.”
Lucien had looked for the others in the group of “we.”
“We can do it on an emergency basis. It’s spreading as we speak. We can discuss the options afterward. Chemo, yes. Radiation, absolutely. Both mandatory. Yes, figure out the options later, then determine where and from whom you will receive your care after the hospital. Yes, a long stay. It has, well, spread.” He produced an anatomical blueprint of her insides.
Lucien had hung his head and walked out before the finger tracing and detailed explanations had begun. He’d felt more comfortable watching and eavesdropping through cracks, slits in curtains, from hallways and stairwells. He’d peeked and listened.
“Here is where we found the biggest mass, which has these tubes, fallopian, connected. The ovaries. Your small intestine likely. No, not your vagina per se. Really, upward.” The doctor looked up from the paper and searched for Lucien. “Can you get your husband back in here? We need to discuss the length of your stay and postoperative care.”
Lucien had quickly returned to the room before the doctor could finish his last sentence. He followed the doctor’s explanation as if being led on a leash.
The length of the stay turned out to be six weeks. Wife batterers, child abusers, kiddie-porn collectors, even downright molesters who’d pled no lo contestere had been given less time. Lucien had had to be on lockdown with her for years of near-death scares until she’d finally died. Worse than jail, although he was still more afraid of that than the hospital.
Lucien looked up at the ceiling, not knowing if he was awake or asleep. He was high on oxygen. He didn’t budge because the small pinprick of the IV hurt too much to snatch out himself. He also had yet to figure out how to execute his plan. He had to ready the garage before the demolition was complete and then transfer the women, at least two of them, and My. He knew that Leona was just taking a break from his bedside. He needed to send her away, to make sure she would be gone for several hours before he acted. He would send her to the court to halt the tearing down of his house. She would do it. He believed that she loved him more now that he was trapped in the hospital, now that his girls—all of them, including his delusions of Marie-Ange—were gone. She might just pretend to try to save his house but let it get torn down so he’d be left with nothing except her. He understood well the desire to hold a cherished one for safekeeping. But Lucien did not, could not, believe that Leona had loved him, because he didn’t know what love was.
With three thin blankets yanked up to his chin, he felt hateful. He hated Leona for believing that her love was true. He felt as much disdain for her as he did for the inadequate blankets that were given to him in the hospital and those who had given him the covers, knowing that one paper-thin layer could not warm a grown frostbitten man. He hated the doctors for keeping him jailed because of a little cough called by a strange name, “pneumonia,” in an attempt to scare him. He hated the first nurse who’d missed a vein and had to prick him twice to get the IV in. He’d wanted to throw her across the room like the tray of lukewarm, unsalted, misnamed gray-brown heap they called food, even steak (of the Salisbury variety), with gravy that was gelatinous and powdery at the same time, mashed potatoes (he still had teeth), and Jell-O (what the fuck was Jell-O?). He hated the circumstances that had brought him to the hospital as much as the person who’d loved him enough to bring him there, sit with him, wipe his feverish forehead. The same person who had wiped his ass after his second stroke and who still gave him sponge baths. He hated sponge baths. They reminded him of his childhood in Haiti when La Belle would try to conserve water that was still being hauled in steel drums for the use of affluent families. At least La Belle could see through him. He hated that Leona believed every lie he’d ever told her. He hated her for her forgiveness because there were times that she seemed to know that he was being deceptive. Rather than confront him, she’d let him have his lie like a pauper with counterfeit money. He hated her for not being Marie-Ange. He hated Marie-Ange too, for more than just dying on him or threatening his treasure. He’d hated being controlled by the responsibilities he had created and assumed.
He couldn’t even think about his daughters. He couldn’t begin to admit to himself how much he’d wanted to annihilate them from the time they were born. They’d been unruly children, precocious up to the day they’d told on him. Brilliant mimics for mastering how to stalk him. He despised them for having talents that he did not, talents they’d wasted because he never derived financial or sexual benefits from them, except that one time. They’d never sung for him in private, only at church, where he hadn’t been able to publicly reveal his hedonism, close his eyes around the luxurious sounds, lick his lips to indulgently savor a cappella riffs, recline into the notes and bask in the private concert, slip his hand downward decadently to satisfy himself. They hadn’t even given him that. He hated Marie-Ange for not sharing. They belonged to him as much as her. If she could dress them up and parade them around, then he could have them or, if necessary, buy them, which he’d already done by paying the mortgage, their tuition, and for whatever lessons to refine their talents. He was decent for suppressing his hatred and being a tolerant husband, a mostly restrained father, a generous family and community caregiver.
He’d hated the women at KAM. He’d given the men a pass because they’d all been suffering like he had. But the women who’d passed through on their way to the promised better life, they’d owed him much more for his services. He hadn’t been greedy. He hadn’t even asked for money most of the time. He had had a pay-it-forward attitude, a “good will come to me” mind-set. He’d given and given an ear. He’d loaned them tongues when they couldn’t speak the white man’s language. He’d advised, wiped tears, translated, found jobs, loaned money, helped feed, arranged marriages—all without requiring a big cash fee. How much would they have had to pay for their papers? Tens of thousands had been asked for the life-altering documents that would have allowed them to earn a better living and to go home to see and, most often, bury loved ones, with the legal right and full ability to return home. Which one was home? Haiti? America? PAP or SOP? KAM? Or the hovels into which they’d ducked while inappropriately dressed in two-piece church suits with high collars, itchy pantyhose, and frilly hats in ninety-degree weather? Home? They’d always come back to KAM. He had been so overly kind that they’d owed him exceptional payment for the things he’d done for them. The documents he’d filled out to get their kids to America. How much would a mother give
for her kids? He’d never asked for much money and sometimes none at all.
He hated them for pretending not to know his fee. They’d known how to repay him. They’d glossed over his crass jokes about body parts that he could have only seen by peeking. He’d known the cuteness of facial features by heart after months or years of close observation. He’d always indicated his desire pou yon ti bagay, “for a little something,” a little touching with lowered lids, a stroke of lips on lips, just hand holding downward indecently, just a piece of ass, not the whole thing. They would still be whole after giving it up. There would be enough left over for hungry husbands. They didn’t even have to lie down. Slide the panties to the side and give him a slice standing up. Forget the panties altogether. He’d settle for a taste however they wanted to give it to him or take it—on their knees at the side of the house, in the garden, or in the rear of the garage when it was warm. In the boiler room, the shadowy corner of the foyer, the coat closet where he kept the small collection of things he was planning to send to Haiti. He could help them fill a barrel or a shipping container for the hungry ones back home. He could help with his hands on their hips or a palm guiding their stroke. Baby wipes and paper towels handy for the cleanup.
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