Lies & Ugliness

by Brian Hodge

  “There,” he says. “Next time your parents start grilling you again about my religious convictions, you won’t have to lie.”

  Funny he should think of this with their departure for France imminent, because it was one of her citizens who wrote it down.

  Hell, said Sartre, is other people.

  Rik fully understands why Claire has never wanted him around her family for any length of time — maybe the duration of a restaurant dinner once a year but that’s all. Suspecting that perhaps she thinks they have enough years between them finally, so that she can expose him to her people with impunity to herself, that they won’t reflect as wholly on her now as they might’ve five years ago.

  Just maybe she should reconsider.

  It isn’t that there’s anything overtly wrong with them. Nice people, by all indications. Never raise an unkind voice to one another, and that’s the problem. Honestly, he’d prefer some shouting now and then to an atmosphere so sterile and so brittle it could be snapped over old Edgar’s knee. Something vital has gone missing in each of them, some inner license to act a little pissy once in a while, or without performing an immediate act of contrition on the rare occasion the strain gets to be too much. Their lives are paved with eggshells. They’re not real human beings, they just play them in front of each other.

  And Claire is the worst. Salvageable, but still the worst, because of all the pretending that seems to come so naturally, so compulsively. He used to think he knew who she was, but now he can’t even be sure of that much, because it’s hard to discern which is the real Claire, and which is the fabricated Claire designed to keep someone happy. Why hasn’t he really taken notice of it until now, running from Chicago to southern Minnesota, an umbilical cord as thick as a tugboat cable.

  “Go upstairs and straighten up your room, Claire, it’s a sty as usual,” her mother orders her, and she does it. Does it like her life depends on it.

  “Did you tell your Grandpa Edgar that it’s no wonder he’s depressed, left for dead in a place like that by his own family?” her father demands of her after her mother returns upset from scrubbing for the old man while he plays divide-and-conquer, and Claire says of course not, she’d never say such a thing to him, she tried to be upbeat. Cheerful. Positive.

  But she’d said it, all right, only because he had wanted to hear it. Rik sat on Edgar’s sofa and watched her do it. Just as he’s watching her desperately lie her way out of it now.

  “Our Claire, in the arts,” they say to the neighbors, and to the friends who stop by to gawk at what someone bound for France looks like, and her parents say it with pride that’s mostly genuine, even if they are suspicious of the morality of those creative types, but they have no idea that until last week their daughter worked in a Hallmark store because she could never bring herself to tell them the truth. Tell them that her photographic career has so far, despite her talents, been such a dismal failure that she’s never earned more than $700 a year at it. The opportunity to spend a year in indentured servitude to an aging Parisian rumored to crave the energies of eager young acolytes is the biggest thing that’s ever happened to her. And for whatever small achievements that she’s enjoyed so far, she’s used the silly pseudonym “Claire Voyeur,” not because she really likes it, but because, even in Chicago, she’s terrified that her more licentious work might be spotted by someone who knows her family. And would tell them.

  They seethe behind masks of politeness and clenched-teeth smiles, and it’s starting to rub off on him too. Rik can feel it happen, can hear the blood pound in his ears. The slow, steady scrape of a spoon in Mrs. Cody’s cereal bowl is as loud as the whine of a circular saw. The teaming of her somnambulant father with the TV’s remote control pits Rik’s molars against each other like grinding stones.

  He knows where their real selves have gone, should have noticed it before now. It’s been right there in front of him all along, hanging on a dining room wall otherwise full of family photos. Their credo, gold-foil calligraphy on a square of varnished walnut:

  “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.” Matthew 16:24

  They’re suicides, the Cody family, only still walking around believing they’re alive, with nothing more than flickering embers left of who they once were before snuffing themselves out like cigarettes. And if they ever remember any more than that, they cower at its shadow. Right now the worst thing he can think of doing is leaving for Paris and its cathedrals without knowing for certain who she is at the core — his Claire, or theirs … they who were sacrificed a lifetime ago to a doe-eyed masochist they believe came to save them, never knowing his true face, a face rendered in stone outside of town by some time-obscured iconoclast who saw through the mutations.

  Rik can’t help but wonder who that sculptor was, if he or she was utterly alone in the knowledge and driven mad by it, or if early in the history of this devout little town and county there was an entire group of them, scorned by neighbors, then willfully and bitterly forgotten.

  And scant hours before he and Claire plan on leaving for Chicago again, a piece of the puzzle comes to him in the middle of the night, the same way the final steps of complex theorems will interrupt the sleep of mathematicians, jolting them upright in their beds.

  Rik slips out from beneath the guestroom quilts, rubbing the crust from his eyes, the house wolf-hour still and silent around him. He moves to the faux-Early American roll-top desk along one wall where he’s been keeping his wallet, his comb, his loose odds and ends. He unfolds the scratch paper he was using to piece together the name of the abandoned church, one row of incomplete letters and a column beneath each one for possibilities of what they might be. Grabs a pen and starts circling letters, the first one an L, just like he’s always known it has to be.

  L … O … N …

  And it fits. The proper letters have been there all along, he’s just needed to distinguish them from the rest.

  … G … I …

  Eight letters total, and when he finishes he looks at the name spelled across the paper in staggered letters, realizing that he has to see it for himself out there all over again. Now that he knows, even the lateness of the hour and the chill of a northern autumn don’t matter. Revelations come when the rest of the world is quiet; the lure is more compelling than anything he’s felt in years. Something he would have scoffed at a week ago because he, of all people, knows how dead the past really is. Good for study, sure, but not for living.

  He dresses, then creeps up the stairs into Claire’s room, using the dim bleedthrough from the bathroom night-light to find the keys to her car. He pauses for a moment to look at her, measure the depth of her breathing, but under those blankets, in these shadows, she could be anyone, and maybe she is, it just depends on who else is around.

  Then he’s out the door, on the road, six miles from town and retracing their path from Sunday afternoon, scarcely encountering another car the entire way. To someone from the city, unaccustomed to the totality of darkness that comes with the absence of streetlights and neon, even the quaintest daytime countryside can by night turn into an alien landscape, full of possibilities but none of them welcome.

  Past the twin brick pillars and along the undulating drive, even the moon disappears from view but the polished fronts of the newer headstones flash with reflected headlights, until he rolls past them into the earlier era demarcated by those older, rougher stones that seem to not so much blend into the darkness as exude it.

  He ignores the spot where they parked the other day, instead veering off the drive and onto the grounds themselves, steering between twin rows of headstones where days before they’d walked. Low-hanging branches scrape at the roof and the windshield, and when he’s finally got the car close enough, he stops with the high beams shining on the Patron Saint of Cranial Deformity. Shuts off the engine but leaves the headlights burning.

  And when he steps from the car into the chill of this rural night Rik’s not sure what
he expects to see. The grotesque statue is still there, with arms outstretched, hasn’t moved a single stony muscle, even more hideous by night than by day, with shadows exaggerating every deliberate flaw.

  But as he stares at it, and it stares back at him, it’s plain they understand one another now. He knows its birth, and it knows he knows, this mockery made in defiance of an eater of souls.

  He grins in the woodland night, breath misting from his mouth. And it’s so clear to him now. Salvation and deliverance … they come not from surrender, but from defiance. This is the only respect he will win from it, from what it represents.

  Forward. The headlights blast his shadow across the ground, vast enough to eclipse the Saint and plunge him into darkness once again. Rik follows where his shadow leads, fallen leaves slickwet and glistening beneath his feet, decaying twigs snapping like tiny bones.

  Only when he’s close enough to touch the Saint in its marbled atrophy does he see what lies on the ground alongside it, half-concealed by leaves and unmown grass. It makes perfect sense, of course, and that it wasn’t here the other day when Claire shot pictures is beyond doubt. He must accept that it’s here for him to find; in this moment for him and him alone, and no one else in the world.

  Of course. Because he’s got to finish this.

  The only question in his mind is if this spear is really as ancient as it looks.

  He stoops, wraps his fingers around the stout wooden shaft and brings it up with him, inspecting the killing end as it rises, long and narrow. The Romans were masters of their craft.

  It startles him when he first hears the groan, and spear in hand he whirls in the direction it’s coming from. Ahead a bit, and to the right, same direction as the forsaken renegade church consecrated to honor not one of those who followed the man on the cross before or after he died, but the one who wielded the spear to make sure the job was done.

  Rik sees legs first, bare and dangling and traced with blood. The nearer he comes the more he can make out of this figure squirming in the tree, arms pinioned somehow to an overhanging oak branch; nails or ligatures, it makes no difference. Its muscles are ropy with stress and strain. Its flesh is a rawmeat topography of suffering, denied the modesty of a loincloth. Two vibrant eyes gleam in the center of the mass of beard and hair and thorns, and the stench of sweat and blood hits him when he’s still several feet away.

  When it looks at him and licks its lips, he knows what it wants.

  And he wonders how Longinus felt in this moment, the Centurion said to have finished the job. If the occasion was a momentous one, or drudgery, just another task. It was said later that even Longinus was soon overtaken by this life he’d helped extinguish — the reason they’d eventually made him a Saint, after all — but Rik doesn’t believe it. Better than most Rik understands that history doesn’t necessarily equal the past. The past is what really happened, and history only what someone wrote down to improve upon it.

  All these years, why has he even bothered with it at all?

  His life has been nothing until this moment.

  He clenches his teeth and thrusts the spear upward, at an angle, and for an instant the tip meets the same resistance as a knife at the skin of an orange, then shears through between two right-side ribs. The figure gives an explosive grunt and spasms, suspended body whipping about like a gaffed fish, and the shaft twangs in Rik’s hands with violent tremors. They’re both sweating now, on either end of the spear. It’s the most powerfully erotic moment of his life.

  After a time the struggles diminish to a languid writhing and then cease altogether; the dangling legs are stilled. Rik yanks the spear free and it brings a fresh stream of blood down the side and the right leg. He upends the spear and drives it into the ground, leaves it freestanding while he regards this body hanging beside him. He reaches out to touch a limp foot; runs his hand higher, along the smooth shin, and the skin is warm, tacky with the blood of earlier wounds. Higher, and higher still. He’s standing on tiptoe, nearly at the limit of his reach, when his fingers brush the open wound in its side, and only now, when he feels a faint pulsating there, does he realize that it’s still alive.

  The radiant heat, the wetness…

  He traces the shape of the wound with fingers now tender, recalling the other night’s conversation with Claire.

  This body … it’s more like a woman’s than he ever realized.

  Rik peels away his clothes, and with a trembling that has nothing to do with the chill, throws his arms tight around the dangling legs, and lunges upward, and begins to climb, because this isn’t quite finished after all.

  She awakens to the smell of coffee and its never-fail allure. It pulls her from the bedroom, once, long ago, a refuge, but now preserved as a tiny museum where nothing ever changes and everything on the walls reflects a decade gone by. Claire at nineteen. A dead girl, for all intents and purposes; at least she should be.

  Jeans and a sweatshirt to start the day and her hair’s a streaky blonde nest. Out the door and down the stairway … it’s not like her to get up so early. At the windows it doesn’t even yet look like dawn has broken but she’s wide awake now so there’s no sense in pretending otherwise.

  He’s waiting for her in the kitchen, and he smells clean and looks freshly showered and shaved, just the right amount of muss to his hair where it hasn’t dried smooth, and she stares for a moment, trying to freeze everything about it, and if she can just wake up with this same guy every day for the next year, maybe that returning westbound plane won’t be better off crashing in the Atlantic after all.

  Rik pours her a mug of coffee and when she drinks it’s another surprise.

  “Hey, this is the real thing,” she says.

  He nods. “Went out and found some Sumatran in a bulk bin at the all-night supermarket. I couldn’t take that canned stuff your parents buy one more morning.”

  And it all seems normal enough until she looks at the kitchen clock and realizes, no, this can’t be right, shouldn’t the sun be up by now? She checks the clock in the microwave oven but it says the same, and so does her father’s watch, left every night for the past thirty years on the back of the upstairs toilet where he can find it first thing each morning.

  One window, to the next, to the next, and outside there’s still nothing but dark sky, but it’s more than just a cloudy morning. In confusion she looks at Rik but he merely shrugs it off, smiling over the rim of his mug.

  “Let’s just enjoy it,” he says, and takes her hand and pulls her gently along to the front door. Outside, they sit on the edge of the porch, feet resting on the steps as they breathe in the clean damp chill of pre-dawn. She lowers her face over her mug to let the rising steam warm her cheeks, her nose, and even after Rik confesses to her what he did last night she doesn’t really understand, but something’s different this morning … neighbors should be stirring and leaving for work and the eastern sky should be glowing the color of coral, and for that matter her parents should be up by now because they agree that it’s a sin to sleep too late unless you’re sick.

  She leaves her coffee on the porch and runs inside, up the stairs and into their bedroom to shake them by their shoulders, and while they’re still breathing they simply refuse to wake up.

  “Just going by what I’ve seen since we got here,” Rik says when she rejoins him on the porch, “my guess is it’s like this all over town. How far beyond that, I don’t know. But the sun’s not rising here.”

  By now she’s had just enough time to get used to the idea, and once they’ve emptied their mugs there’s a hint of drab gray in the sky, as though, in this town at least, the world has tilted on its axis and made of them a harsher, more northerly land of extremes, of midnight suns and noonday moons.

  “Three days,” she whispers, remembering old lessons. “Three days.”

  Rik nods. “You want to see if we can move our flight up?”

  “Yeah. Let’s,” she says, thinking what neither of them has to say aloud. That they can g
o very, very far in three days, even around to the other side of the world, and for the first time in her life, maybe that will be head-start enough.

  An hour later, after they’ve packed and loaded her car, she stands at the curb and looks at the house, its windows dull as eyes blinded by cataracts, just one more house of secrets and lies in a townful of others exactly like it, and before they drive away to see how far this promising darkness extends, she plucks from the gutter a rock the size of her fist, and laughing, crying, she hurls it at the front door of the house that’s made her most things she is and isn’t. It strikes with a sharp thud and bounces off, coming to rest upon the welcome mat before the door to this tomb. And no matter what else three days hence may bring, she hopes she’s thrown that stone so hard that nobody will ever be able to roll the goddamn thing away.

  Endnotes: From the Gutters of Civilization to Your Discerning Eye

  When readers ask where a story came from — even when they have a specific story in mind, and aren’t just voicing the dreaded “Where do you get your ideas?” — they often don’t appreciation how cruel the question can be. They mean no harm by it, and, to be sure, that they wonder at all is gratifying. But trying to take the threads of thought and feeling and expression from their final form, then backtrace them to their genesis … sometimes it can really make the veins in your head throb.

  The question implies there’s been some sort of willful linearity, like driving a Ferrari from Point A to Point B, when in fact writers are actually more like those poor aromatic unfortunates who clatter along city sidewalks pushing shopping carts filled with a puzzling array of seemingly unrelated rubbish. And every now and again we stop and stoop with a satisfied grunt — sometimes an unnerving squeal of delight — and toss something else in the cart. Eventually we peer into the cart and notice how a few of these salvaged treasures can start fitting together.