26
I wake as the sun slithers through the curtained doorway to flick at my eyelids with its cold light. I rub my upper arms then reach beside the bed and pick up one of the cigarettes I hand-rolled last night. It’s stuffed with the weed we also make tea from and sometimes chew on because it has the power to make you feel a little better. I need that more and more these days. I light the cigarette, suck in and feel the smoke tickle my lungs, spreading warmth to my muscles while easing my brain into the reality of yet another day. Looking over my shoulder, Joyce slumbers deeply in bed beside me, same as always these days. That woman could sleep through God’s Breath, and thinking about that time nine years ago, I wonder if she wasn’t the one asleep though she accused me of being the dreamer. There was a time, shortly after the event, that I had convinced Sam that God’s Breath had indeed happened. And that drove Joyce batty—both me and Sam telling her the whole Kingdom nearly blew away and she somehow didn’t notice.
I feel bad about that now.
It’s been nine years and Joyce has aged gracefully, though the newfound sunshine proved too hard to resist and so her skin has wrinkled and withered some, which goes to show what happens when you give yourself over to the light. What happens when you love something too much to leave it. She’s now one of them Sun Worshippers that the world used to be full of. And we all know loving the sun brings one closer to Hades. Joyce is a cult of one, though sometimes I join her just to feel the marrow in my bones go warm and gooey as we sit atop the highest peak in rickety lawn chairs, eyes closed to the never-ending nothingness stretching beyond my walls. Anything to get closer to God.
So, I went from having a family of three, to a family of two, to no family at all only to find myself with a family of four that rightly turned into a family of three. The Holy Trinity. Just how it should be. Or that’s what I used to think, anyhow. Now I don’t know.
Quietly, I exit our shack and walk, smoking, over to Sam’s. I peek in but he’s already gone. Such a good boy. He’s out there now, walking the inner perimeter of these here walls, keeping us safe, keeping himself occupied, and wearing a furrow into the grey earth, which isn’t quite as grey as it used to be. Here and there are patches of brown and red-brown. Weeds grow more plentiful, adding pale green clumps to the landscape. The land’s trying hard to come back to life because hope springs eternal, no matter how long it’s been since hope has parted a single pair of lips.
Hope springs eternal for Sam, too, who’s out there patrolling despite that body of his betraying him. He’s not quite as young as I had always thought. But he’s not that old, either. Yet, the force that gravity has put upon that great mass during all these years has begun to crack his bones, slowly. He hobbles around like an old man and groans escape him without him even noticing them anymore. Joyce tries to convince him to just rest, keep his feet up, and relax. But I won’t hear of it. Sam likes feeling useful and if he were to give in to the aches and pains, give in to his bones’ complaints, he’d surely waste away even quicker.
After stamping out my cigarette and guzzling some water down my sandy throat from my canteen near the fire, I return to our shanty and sit down on the bed next to the Holy Ghost, Joyce. I place my hand on her curved belly and feel something move in there. An image of a tail whipping against the walls of her belly flashes through my mind. A clawed thing with my face scrapes away blindly in there, looking for an exit in its Kingdom Wall.
I gently grab her shoulder and nudge her. “Come on, Momma, time to get up,” I say. “It’s a brand new day.”
The Memory Palace is gone. Joyce didn’t like how I looked at her when I’d come back from a chat with Momma. Once we were sharing the same shanty, the same bed, she told me she wanted me to do away with it. She put her foot down. She had a pretty good idea what Momma and I talked about during my visits—that being the expulsion and/or execution of “those goddamned dirty Out-of-Towners.” I used to tell her the things Momma would say to me because I thought it would keep her and Sam in line. Now I find myself telling her what Momma says to me for different reasons. But I did as Joyce said and removed the grave markers, threw the furniture into the closest trash mountain, and hid the photo album in the trunk of a car at The Used Car Lot. The same trunk I’d hidden my toy chest and that folded, blood-browned dress in. I also kept the Twinkies there for a time. I never did share another with my new family. I ate the last one as I lay out atop the rusted hood of one of my old hotrods and relished it beneath a black sky sown with a billion blinking lights. Though that seems like a billion years ago now. Of course, The Used Car Lot is practically useless now, too. I’m twenty-five years old. What would I do with a bunch of beat-up, stripped automobiles? Sam sometimes tries to get me to play the way we used to, and sometimes I humor him, but that’s few and far between these days. I’m a man. A man of twenty-five with a wife and family. Joyce is my wife. I married us four years ago by the power bestowed upon me by myself and by God, who has rested these last several years, finally realizing that I cannot be defeated. We’ve had no God’s Breath since that day Terrance was attacked by a rusty old refrigerator and lost the battle.
Since we continue to live in Monster Island, the ashes and bones of Dante’s Inferno have also blown away during that final release of God’s Breath and all those gentle midday gusts over the years. There’s little point to The Washing and Drinking Fountain, as well, since the well has yet to run dry here in Monster Island. Only The Library still has some use. I read Joyce poems by John Ashbery because she likes to swim in painterly sentences that don’t mean much to me, though they do put pictures in my head, I guess. And I get Joyce to read me books about crime and punishment and end-of-the-world prophecies. Together we’ll read other ancient stuff, like The Giving Tree, to Sam even though it always makes him cry. My Kingdom is so large I’ve even managed to fill out a few more shelves with worthy books mined from the glistening ranges of plastic, metal, and paper that give shape to the earth around us.
I would have thought once that I was Papa, and Joyce was Momma, that my Kingdom would have grown and the land become richer. I would have thought Momma and I would be naming things, making places come alive. But Momma likes to sleep most days, though I try to wake her and get her to take walks with me, drink some tea, and eat more Protein Beans. If only for the boy that grows within her.
Over these past nine years with my new family and this blue sky, I thought my world would have shown me something new. But all it has shown me is the junkyard I’ve called my Kingdom. The dump I’ve called Home.
27
“So… you… are un… happy?”
“I don’t know,” I say, sitting on that downed telephone pole between two massive garbage heaps known as AT&T Mountain. I’m tearing trash apart only to toss it back to a world of torn-up trash. Flies, which are more plentiful now, buzz around in my breath. These mountains are close enough together that just a hint of God’s Breath would collapse them into one. Then, no more King Clyde. And one less mountain.
But I like it here in the shadow of garbage because the sun can be so harsh now that it’s always watching over us until it slips into God’s Open Mouth to let the night in. Besides, in between these mountains, no one can see us.
“You… know… what you should… do,” he says, sitting awkwardly into the slope of the trash mountain across from me.
“I know what you think I know I should do,” I say, scoffing.
“You… know… there is more than… one option.”
I try to look into his black eyes but I just can’t. Instead, I look up into the blue sky and whistle between my teeth and point upward. “Boy, that is a thing of beauty,” I say, squinting up into the light.
“You… have… to go… someday. Everyone… does,” Dylan says, reaching out and placing his orange hand upon my knee. On that hand, sores fester and leak yellow discharge. Instinctively, I recoil and Dylan pulls his hand back, slowly. He always moves slowly around me, as if he knows how uneasy I am.
Dylan, my long lost brother, only wants to spend some stolen minutes with me.
“Why… don’t you… go?” he asks.
“There’s nowhere to go,” I say, brushing away the ghost of his touch from my knee.
“Beyond,” Dylan says. “There’s… beyond. There’s no… walls. Freedom.”
“That’s not freedom! That’s slavery. Slavery to whoever is leading you through that. In here…” I say, gesturing only to realize there’s no panorama to be taken in between these colossal crap heaps. “In here, I’m King. I’m… I’m the only King,” I tell him, though it’s not something I really believe anymore.
“Hmm…” Dylan says, breathing loudly through his jagged mouth. A fly alights beneath one of his glossy black eyes. “They… the woman and the… large man-child… have to go.”
My brother. He’s the only monster I’ve seen other than that one I saw feasting on an Out-of-Towner when I was eleven, fourteen years ago. The one that gave me reason to christen Monster Island with that name.
I’m certain if that monster were here now, sitting next to my brother Dylan, I’d have a hard time telling them apart. Like that one, Dylan has orange skin covered in scabs and sores. He also has the V-shaped spine, making him hunched. His mouth is full of yellow fangs. His eyes are black. And sparse wisps of white hair escape his scalp like bits of spider web. Of course, he’s also completely dickless.
He showed up shortly after I was certain I was becoming Papa, and Joyce, Momma. I had told Joyce I was out hunting, but I was just looking for pennies to add to my collection I still keep in my toy chest in The Used Car Lot. I spotted something coppery in the mélange of yellow detergent bottles, split milk containers, and stuff obliterated into namelessness. He put one of those hands covered with sores like mouths over my own mouth and sucked the breath from me. I felt all the power drain from my limbs. Dylan dragged me away to a cavern dug into the side of a trash mountain near The Drinking and Washing Fountain, pushed me inside and placed a long finger with a grotesquely long nail over his lipless mouth, urging me to remain silent. His cavern was dug deep into the mountain, so deep that it got very dark toward the back. Dylan lit a candle on a candlestick holder, blocking my only exit, and held the flame below his gruesome face. His black eyes glistened, his fangs dripped drool, and he smelled of rot, but I could see he meant me no harm. And I recognized him as a familiar. Somehow I knew that I knew him, and I knew it wasn’t because he looked just like me—that is, if I had grown up to be a complete monster.
I also knew him because he was the thing I threw away. The red glistening thing I tossed into the garbage heap so long ago on that fateful day I found Momma dead and gone. My brother who I’ve missed so. My brother whose mouth I knew was fighting for breath when I discarded him.
And here he is today, bearing no grudge, wanting only company, family—not revenge.
Now we meet every Sunday in the morning. We call it Church. Dylan knows the power in naming things, too, even things such as common rendezvous.
I have someone to name things with me, even as most things are dropping their names like people used to drop pennies.
“Where’ve you been lately?” Momma asks just as I’m about to drift off into dreamless sleep. “You’re always off somewhere else. You’re never here.”
I’m on my side, turned away from her. I let the crackle of the fire outside our shack fill the silence, then say, “Out.” I feel a weight press on my chest the second I say it.
“Out?”
“Yeah, out. Just… out…” I say. I look over my shoulder, but she’s turning away. Soon I hear the measured notes of her sleep-breaths and know she may just sleep all of tomorrow away.
28
“Good,” I say as Sam uses a crowbar to pry some old rail spikes from the wall of Monster Island. I had him close it up some years ago. Now he’s wrenching those spikes from the piece of sheet metal that patched that hole up, and he’s letting out tiny pained grunts as he strains against the crowbar, fighting against the might he had only a few years ago to drive those spikes so deep into the wall.
“What are you doing?” Joyce’s wavering, airy voice asks as it tumbles like a feather to the earth at my feet and stops.
She’s woken. Finally. The sun’s high over our head and she’s just now left the warmth of our mangled mattress.
“We’re reopening the breech,” I tell her, dryly.
“But you can’t open that!” she complains, pulling a blanket around her, her tanned shoulders exposed. Sam blushes, looks away, confused about how he should proceed.
I give her my attention but I look back to Sam to let him know he should continue his work of opening that hole.
“For years,” Joyce says, more frantic than usual, “you’ve said we need this place closed up because there’s monsters out there, Clyde!” she snaps, her sarcasm and frustration swirling.
I step to her, place one hand on her shoulder, the other on her belly, lean forward, and whisper, “There might be.”
Joyce steps back from me, pulls the blanket tighter around her. “What?” she asks.
Just then the large piece of sheet metal clunks to the greyish dirt. Sam steers a look of pride my way and I wink at him and nod my head eastward, giving him permission to go play. He obliges immediately and lopes off to The Used Car Lot.
“Don’t forget to put in some patrol time,” I call after him and as he waddles away he waves a hand in the air without turning back to us.
I turn back to Momma, smiling.
“Clyde, what are you talking about?” Joyce asks in a serious tone.
I gently guide Momma over to the well. “Remember when you all threw me down there?” I ask.
“Clyde,” Joyce insists.
“We need that hole open.”
“But won’t the monsters get in?” she asks. She’s chiding me but I can sense the unease in her voice. She doesn’t want that hole reopened.
“Exactly. But how will the monsters get out?” I ask.
“What? Are you talking to me in riddles, Clyde? Because I really am in no mood.”
“What if there are monsters already here?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re insane. Sometimes you’re just insane.”
“We need that hole open.”
“This isn’t like you,” she says, biting her bottom lip. I reach out, place a hand on her belly, and nod.
“You need a place for when it’s time to run,” I tell her, then light a weed-cigarette and walk past Joyce where I’ll stroll my Kingdom’s littered walkways until the sun sinks and emerges once again.
I’m woken in the middle of the night by a hand around my throat. It’s Momma’s. Momma tells me there’s no monsters. Momma tells me I dreamed them. I turn to Momma, hold her face in my hands. “Then why did you have the dogs?” I ask. Momma looks dazed. “Then why did you have the dogs!” Her eyes are still leaking dreams. I shake her. “Then why did you have the dogs? Why’d you have the dogs? Why did you make me kill the dogs?” I ask, yelling now. Momma twists her face from my grasp and gets out of bed, her belly a full moon rising within our little shack. She steps out through the curtained doorway and I fall back to sleep, tasting grey dust on my lips, wondering about the dogs. Dreaming about the dogs. Dreaming about my buried fear of dogs. Dreaming about the head of a dog in my childlike arms.
29
“Why… did you… tell them that more… monsters are coming?” Dylan asks.
We’re in the darkness of Dylan’s Den, his shelter that’s dug into a trash mountain near The Drinking and Washing Fountain.
“I don’t know. I guess—well, now that you’re here, I just figured…” I say, lighting a second candle, giving this hollow a dim glow. I put a weed-cigarette between my lips and use the candle to light it.
“I… am your… brother. That’s why I am… here,” he says.
“I know that.”
“We know… the… same things…”
“We are blood,” I
say.
“I… know… that.”
“We are the same,” I tell him, though the words escaped me before I knew I was going to say them. I take a drag on the cigarette. We share a few silent moments of eye-contact in the near dark while I breathe blue smoke and flick ashes.
“We… are… the same,” Dylan says.
“Are more coming?”
“More?”
“Monsters.”
“No. No… more.”
“This is it?”
“You know… what you… have to… do.”
“Where’ve you been this whole time, Dylan? Momma’s been so worried about you.”
“You have to… let them… go… or…”
“You must have been very lonely all this time. Or did you have a family of monsters?”
“You have to… let them go… or… you will…”
“Did your family of monsters keep you warm at night? Did they tell you stories about family vacations to exotic locales like Jackson Hole, Wyoming? Did you ever go to Jackson Hole, Wyoming? It’s this place in America with a giant old hole in the middle of it and inside that hole are big old mean worms with big old bad teeth and Americans used to go there with all of the Out-of-Towners they caught and they’d throw them in there and watch the worms rip them apart and all the Americans would laugh and feel safe and good about themselves before going back home where they would steal from their neighbors and rape their own children. Did you go there? What was it like in your monster family? Did they Play House, too?”
“We… are… the same.”
“Did your father ignore you and beat you whenever you said something wrong or touched your Momma some way he didn’t like?”
“We… are… the same.”
“When your Papa died—your monster Papa—did he keep ignoring you? Did your Momma make you a man after that? Once he was gone and there was no one else but you two? There never was anyone else but you and your Momma, though, was there?”
The Sun My Destiny Page 15
