Lies & Ugliness

by Brian Hodge

  “Of course you didn’t. I saw her this morning when she was still asleep. For you she was awake and ready. She had everything tucked away inside her shirt so you wouldn’t see it. Besides … you know how I know it wasn’t just some old thing she found down there?”

  “How?”

  “It was moving. All on its own.”

  Sometimes it seems no less than a miracle, what people can get used to in their lives, what has become of their lives. You no longer know how many months it’s been since you’ve thought in terms of escape, or of anything that resembles freedom. Looking back, even your job was a kind of prison, sentenced to forty years with time off every night for good behavior. All you’ve done is exchange that for the ultimate in security, with no doubts about the roof over your head, and always knowing exactly where your next meal is coming from.

  Sometimes, when you still feel motivated to think at all, your thoughts will drift to the Man in the Iron Mask. Some mysterious historical figure you’ve heard about, seen a movie about, thought to have been a problematic heir to the throne of France, and imprisoned and made anonymous.

  You’ll wonder how he’d been able to stand the mask, forced to carry this secondary prison around with him wherever he went. Probably he felt revulsion and hatred for it at first, although you wonder if eventually he came to feel a strange love for the cell forged over his skull. If he depended on it for a sense of protection. If he would’ve felt naked without it. If he found it hard to imagine a time he’d been any other way.

  Whenever your hands or gaze stray down to your belly, you think you must be a little closer to those answers.

  The basement seems to let more sound in than it lets out. The rumble of passing trucks and airplanes, the forlorn whistle of a distant train, the fanfares blaring from their TV … used to, you’d listen to these with subtle contempt, because of their proof that the world has been so willing to go on without you. Not once has the world ground to a halt on its axis. Not once has a helicopter circled overhead with some urgent voice calling your name on a loudspeaker.

  Because you did have a name once, remember. But so did everyone else lying beneath gravestones rendered illegible by time and rain and vandals.

  Planes, trains, and TV theme songs … now they only break up the monotony of the day, even if that too is a thing of the past. Down here there’s no such thing as day or night. Down here there’s only the light switch. Sixty watts for a sun and a moon to keep you company as you try to categorize the people you used to know, wondering which ones still hold onto hope you’ll turn up alive, which ones have given you up for dead, and which have given you up for merely rude — yes, I’m off to start my new life, and no, you can’t know anything about it. There really are people who think that way, grudgingly acknowledging that, okay, people like Galen and Nelson Ross exist, but backing off from the possibility that their spheres of existence could overlap.

  He comes back down to see you, Galen does, just as you’ve known he will have to, even if it’s taken him longer than you thought it would to get around to it. A day and a night, or a night and a day, maybe more than one of each. Down here, time has ceased to have any relationship with clocks and dawns.

  As always, he’s preceded by a weapon that you yourself put in his hands. They’ve never trusted you, never ever, just as they’ve never trusted themselves to be able to handle you without hardware to keep you at bay in case you decide to fight. Electricity — they like that. It was how they brought you down in the first place, with a taser, which they followed with an injection. Not on their front porch, though. By then they’d known where you lived, canny enough to avoid your disappearance looking as though it had anything to do with their occasional place on your route.

  “Well?” Galen says.

  You still give him nothing when you look at him. “Well what?”

  “Do you, um, have…” He’s looking as though he wishes you’d make this easy on him. He should be so lucky. He points at your body. “…something to show me?”

  You pretend you don’t have a clue. “Haven’t you seen it all by now?”

  “Not lately I haven’t.”

  Just listen to the two of you. Bickering like some old married couple.

  “I really don’t know what you’re getting at,” you tell him in that monotone that’s become your voice. “But I’m not doing a strip show for you, if that’s what the hints are about. So if you think there’s something you want to see, I guess you’ll just have to come over here and knock me out to get at it.”

  It’s always a risk, but you put it to him this way because you’re pretty sure it’s something he’s no longer able to force himself to do. It’s not like the early days, when he was driven by his own warped version of passion. That’s gone. Whatever he thinks love is, you’re quite sure he doesn’t feel it for you anymore: love giving way to shame giving way to a slow, general apathy. For a long time you’ve been wondering if he maintains this arrangement simply because he doesn’t know what else to do.

  Sometimes you miss the energizing purity of how you used to hate him, him and his wormy little brother. Your exhausted reserves remind you of when you were nineteen and spent a week attending the trial of a young man who murdered one of your best friends, strangling her on a date gone wrong. You’d hated him too, except by the time he came to trial months later and you could face him across the courtroom, you found yourself unable to hate him anymore, feeling instead a crippling sorrow for everything lost and squandered, and it occurred to you that human beings simply weren’t made to hate forever.

  If they were, though, these two deserve it in so many ways, Galen most of all. The first time he raped you, his cock felt as cold as a jailer’s key. A few days later, when he came back for more, still tossing around the word “love” like a cheap poet, something in you snapped and almost forced your throat across the curved blade he wielded, but instead your deepest intuition told you to rape him right back. The muscles in your legs and hips were still at their peak then, and talking dirty wasn’t totally unknown to you, so you forced yourself to become the most grotesque parody of lust that you could, and battered away at his invading loins until they shrank before you, out of you, even as he told you to stop, stop, stop that.

  The third time he never even made it as far as your mattress, Galen seeming appalled to look down and find himself unable to rise to the challenge. You wanted to jeer, but wanted to live, too, and feared that mockery might make him explode with a killing rage. Instead, it was enough to know that if this was all that had come of the third time, there would never be a fourth. And there hasn’t been. You have yourself to thank for that.

  You’re still here, though, now like some vestal virgin that they keep down where normal people store lawn furniture and broken garden statues.

  The two of you stand facing each other, frozen by your own refusal to bare yourself and by Galen’s hesitance to force it. The two of you have long since given up trying to talk sense to each other. You’ll never love him. He’ll never set you free.

  When he shuffles for the stairway in defeat, you watch as he goes and, as you often have, wonder what turned him into this. Not once has he ever indicated that he feels what he’s doing could be wrong — only an uneasy fear that he might’ve gotten in over his head. That he’s not a bad-looking man, for whom this must be the last resort, is the least of it. You’ve gotten the impression that he’s never dated much, or at least very successfully, but so what. You’ve got your own charm bracelet of broken hearts, received as well as inflicted, and not once has the experience come close to making Galen’s course of action seem reasonable.

  He’s halfway up the stairs when he pauses. Uh oh, you think, right on the verge of relief, just before he turns and rushes back down again. Galen moves the swiftest when he’s the least sure about himself and what he’s doing — you’ve got that much pegged about him, his way of bluffing. But what does that matter when he’s the one with the aerosol canister of pepper spray,
and you’re still the one who flinches.

  “Just show me. Underneath your shirt.” He brandishes the spray at your face. There’s no doubt that he’ll use it because he already has twice before. “Just so I can go upstairs and tell my ignorant brother how wrong he is. Is that too much to ask for?”

  One button, two buttons, three buttons, four. And you’ve given him what he wants. Just to see the look on his face? Maybe. Who’s the ignorant brother now?

  At first he only stares. You’ve expected that. You did a lot of staring too when it first began to extrude and grow from your belly. You stared the way you would when you were a child and crossed paths with someone who wasn’t just different, but wrong somehow, with burn-puckered skin or parts that numbered too many or too few. The difference this time is that you got over the disgust much sooner than Galen will be capable of. This is from you, after all. It’s of you.

  It is you.

  “What … is that?” he asks.

  “You don’t like it?” you say. “You should. You gave it to me.”

  “No,” he whispers, and shakes his head. “No way.” But he can’t tear his eyes from the sight. Considering what it is, at least what you think it is, there’s a strange beauty to it. “That’s impossible.”

  “Yeah, I would’ve thought so too,” you tell him, and turn your back on him for a moment, returning to your mattress on the pallet on the floor, where you sink to your knees with your shirt open loose to either side, exposing the inner half of each breast and the ribs below and this thing so like a regrown umbilical cord.

  By now there’s enough to hold coiled in both hands. It’s stilled, doesn’t move, won’t move. It doesn’t seem to want to as long as you’re awake. It seems to wait for whenever you’re asleep, but you’ve caught it roving free when you’re only halfway between, in neither one state nor the other. Good enough for it, you suppose. Of course it doesn’t have a mind of its own. Like a sleepwalker, it merely takes orders from some other side that the waking half is scarcely aware of.

  Ever since you’ve known, you’ve tried to be careful to keep it secret. Months ago you heard them drilling peep-holes in the floor, to fit with some sort of mail-order lenses to widen their view. You thought you’d blinded them all with food, but must have missed one, or missed them installing another.

  And now that he’s learned of your condition, Galen doesn’t know what to do. Nothing in his pathetic lifetime has prepared him for this. He can’t even run properly now, much less march upstairs like a man and admit to his brother that he was wrong.

  “Gave it to you, you said,” he reminds you. Like you could’ve forgotten. “I don’t see how. It’s not a baby. It’s not anything I’ve ever had. A thing like that, you can’t blame it on me.”

  “Did I have it when you first put me down here? Did I have it a month later? Or a month after that? Jump in anytime, Galen — just when is it that my life before you grabbed me doesn’t matter anymore and you start taking responsibility for what happens to me under your roof?”

  It’s the strongest you’ve spoken to him in ages. A part of you, quite conscious, isn’t so sure that’s a good idea. Because it means you’re interested in what he has to say. You’ve got an actual stake in the conversation for a change. You’ve found it in you to despise him all over again, an honest emotion — yet what if this kills the thing coiled in your hands or, at the very least, stunts its growth?

  “But I don’t even know what it is,” he whines. A whiner who could easily kill you, just to shut you up. Well, that would be a form of deliverance too.

  “Do you want to know what I think it is?”

  He’s not even sure of that much. Any move, any answer, damns him to something, doesn’t it? Knowing too much, or not enough.

  “It’s cancer. I think.”

  Galen looks stricken all of a sudden. Maybe you’ve hit a raw nerve. Maybe it’s what their mother died of — you don’t know. But you sure can hope, can’t you? Can wish it on the old bitch who bore these two, and no harm done, because she’s already dead.

  “It doesn’t look like cancer,” he says.

  “Don’t think so? What’s the last kind of cancer you looked at?”

  It’s never that hard to stump him. Just the same, he’s probably right. Masses — that’s the way you’ve usually heard cancer described. Formless, really, just mad growth in random directions. This, though … it’s almost pretty, like a sturdy vine, with its suggestion of leaves, its more delicate tendrils. They didn’t even allow you so much as a plant down here but, why, look — you provided anyway. Something not dependent on the sun you never see.

  “Say it is,” Galen tells you. “Or say it isn’t. Whatever it is, how am I supposed to have given it to you? Are you saying it’s like the clap or something?”

  How can you put this into terms that he’ll accept, or even understand? It’s nothing you can prove, either, just something you know intuitively, the same way you would if you were pregnant, needing a doctor’s confirmation only to make it official.

  “Do you know anything about the life I used to have? Except for bringing you packages? Of course you don’t. You never asked. I don’t think I ever would’ve felt like telling you, but still. You never asked.” Already it’s some other woman you’re talking about. A dead woman, here’s her eulogy: Remember how she used to like to…? “The night you two grabbed me, I was just getting home from a sculpting class. That weekend, I would’ve been in a five-K run, for charity. I wasn’t up to handling ten-K yet, but I was working on it. I was about eighty pages away from finishing a book about tigers that I was reading, because the month before I’d lost a cat to feline leukemia and I wanted to read about tigers before I got another one. At last count, I had twenty-six plants in my apartment, and I’m sure they’ve all been dead a long time now, because there was nobody there to water them until it was too late. I’d met a new guy, the first guy I’d met in over a year that I really felt like I clicked with. We were supposed to go to a movie that same night after the five-K run. It was quiet, I know. But it was my life, and I liked it.

  “And then you and Nelson came along. You’d decided you were going to take me away from all that — big plans, huh? So you stuck me down here, without the tiniest little piece of that life left anymore. And sure, I was scared the first few weeks, and that must’ve kept me occupied in a way, but after a while I just got used to it. And then there was nothing. You’d put me down here with nothing to do. I mean, not a thing. Except be bored. And sad, still, because of everything you’d taken away. But mostly just bored.”

  He stands mute, watching you fondle the two handfuls of tissue-colored vine emerging from the center of your sunken belly.

  “You still don’t get it, do you?”

  Of course he doesn’t. He’s a man whose mother took care of him for too many years and now his brother burns his eggs and they indulge terrible suspicions about a world that probably doesn’t even know they’re alive, as long as they pay their taxes on time.

  “A person’s body does whatever it has to to get what it craves,” you tell him, then glance down. With a grin. “Interesting … isn’t it?”

  Galen looks at you, so queasy that you can’t resist lifting your hands a little, as if offering.

  “Do you want to touch her?” you say. “She is half yours.”

  Galen wants nothing of the kind, just backs toward the stairway while you recognize the familiar expression overtaking him, the way he’s regarding you. It’s more than honest disgust; you would expect that. You felt it yourself at first. What really gets you laughing is the disappointment — you’re not the woman he thought you were, and even though he’s known that for a long time, he’s only this moment discovered how much. It’s written all over his face and you’ve seen it all before. For different reasons, less extreme, but it’s nothing you haven’t seen in a man’s face already, when he’s finally forced to give up his little-boy illusions.

  The door slams shut again at the top
of the stairs and you hear the sound of the locks engaging back into place. It’s entirely possible that they won’t open again for a long time. Maybe ever. Will Galen and Nelson let you starve? Or will they retain just enough humanity to at least keep the food coming but otherwise forget you exist, letting you diminish to the same status as a stray cat for whom someone might leave out kibble on a porch.

  Hours later you’re weary again, ready to sleep, but this time you drag the pallet and the mattress across the cool cement of the basement floor, drag them right up against the nearest wall. From now on, this is where you’ll sleep. This is your place. This is its place. It’s been straining to get here and you just haven’t recognized that until now.

  Lullaby, and good night…

  As you welcome the hope of yet another dream of vines and ivy-covered walls, and of the way old stone will flake and crumble before the delicate pressure of their probing tendrils. And just before you slip beneath, into a place where the full moon still shines silver, you sense that first tentative but purposeful stirring deep in the very center of you, from that sun they’ve never been able to extinguish.

  The Last Testament

  I

  From out of the darkest days of Eastern Europe’s Balkans War, there came sporadic reports of a lone man in priestly black robes who walked the charnel fields and the streets of ruined villages, showing no fear of bullets, bombs, or butchers. Death surrounded him, witnesses would claim, yet he seemed impervious to it. Serbs and Croats, Christians and Muslims … all soon came to hold him in awe, in particular those who had not long before tried to kill him for ministering to their enemies, only to find that their rifles would not shoot true.

  I promise you this: There is no killer so godless that he fails to recognize a kind of miracle in another’s immunity to the tools of war.

  The Father, as he simply became known, was at the center of an ever-expanding reputation for healing the wounded, and with those whose shattered bodies were too far gone even for his powers over flesh and blood, for easing their suffering as they departed life — often with a kiss. More than once he was seen in two places at the same time, and at least once to levitate. Of the fact that none had ever seen him eat so much as a single bite of food, little was made, except as another possible sign of divinity.