The Least of My Scars

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Dumb shit.

  What’s that make me, though, yeah.

  I didn’t even know he had it. That phones could even do that.

  Close. Too fucking close.

  I blow air out my mouth long and slow, look far away, to a dozen other things I could be doing right this moment.

  None of them are right.

  And anyway, like my old man said once going into the office he’d just been fired from, a tire iron held low along his leg, me and my sister buckled into the backseat for the rest of the day: Better men than me have failed at lesser endeavors.

  What he was talking about there was glory. How to get it, how to reach down into the world and rip it right the fuck out.

  A voice mail, yeah.

  Real scary.

  I lean down, thumb one of the ear buds from the player into the phone’s jack, then rotate my head, plug the other one in as well.

  Like I already knew, it’s Dashboard Mary. And she’s in a car. I can tell, can hear it all around her, the space. Outside.

  Someday I’m going to go to the roof, I know. Just to look around. To hold my hands out and turn in movie circles like I’m dancing with the air, with the whole world.

  Right after I’m sure that I haven’t been pulled up there on somebody else’s strings, I mean. Right after I know there’s not a police copter hovering just below the height of the building. The traffic copter from the news on the other side, some reporter in the field betting her career on commandeering this particular whirlybird, stacking cars up for miles in every direction.

  I’ll go outside right after I decide to be twelve years old again, I mean. And a girl.

  Probably tomorrow, yeah.

  Ha.

  This is the first new message, from the first time the phone rang.

  Dashboard Mary’s whispering, covering the phone with her other hand, if I’m hearing right. But too, she’s not even talking to Kid Hoodie: “I don’t know why he’s not responding, ma’am. This isn’t like him at all. He’s usually more—at least . . . ”

  And then it’s over. Just that.

  I don’t smile. Don’t know what to do.

  The way she said ma’am, though.

  I can feel the long muscles around my femur writhing. About to get into a tremble if I don’t hold them down.

  She was talking to somebody older, was the thing. And there was apology in her voice. But a kind of apology she’s practiced at too. A kind she’s tired of already. That’s become routine.

  I push all the buttons I can, pull the phone away, drag the wires down. Stand up, walk all around the room, careful never to step over the wet-dry vac’s cord.

  It leaves me walking every part of a circle around the couch but the most important part.

  Ma’am.

  I’m not crying either. Guys like me don’t, not from something like this.

  Ma’am. Mam. Mom.

  She was talking to a mom is what she was doing.

  Without even having to think about it, I run to the trap door, kick it open like it’s counterbalanced for but then have to go back to the living room, lay flat-ass on the floor to go under the cord, complete the circle. No clue why I didn’t think of that first.

  I nod that that’s done then, don’t let myself look to the kitchen, to Kid Hoodie, because I know what it’s going to look like over there: not a medical school skull with clay on it, a cut-off sweatshirt draped over, but Kid Hoodie himself, standing up from behind the counter but standing very still, like I won’t see him.

  And I’m not breathing as hard as it sounds like, all raspy and deep.

  And I’m not running to her.

  Except that I am.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, and instead of opening the trapdoor the rest of the way, to crash through, make my escape or die trying, I let it down just enough that the counterweight touches her head against the ceiling below me. And then I’m up again, in the bathroom, pulling the medicine cabinet door off its rusted hinges so I can hold it down through the crack in the floor, see her upside down, glass bottles hanging from all her fingers like she’s forever falling through space: Mom.

  I lower my face to the bunched-up carpet.

  The fibers stick to my cheeks and to the snot from my nose.

  “You’re still here,” I whisper, because she is.

  She’s not the ma’am Dashboard Mary was talking to. Not the mom. She couldn’t be. I don’t know what I was thinking.

  Stupid stupid stupid.

  But still.

  As punishment, so I’ll learn, I make myself listen to the next voice message before I’m ready.

  It’s still her, Dashboard Mary.

  She’s humming to herself. The kind of humming you do while you’re working, I think. Doing a thing you’ve done day-after-day for the last twenty weeks, as far as you can remember back. Anybody who’s ever pushed a mop knows.

  It’s not even a song, either, really. Or—no, it is.

  Come and knock on my door. Just the tune.

  God.

  That’s why Kid Hoodie made it her ringtone.

  Or maybe she did it one night while he was in the other room. As a surprise.

  “Now just,” Mary says then, nearly two weeks ago, the just almost strained, like she’s . . . lifting something? “All better,” she says when it’s over. “Now just—” and then time’s up, the message is over.

  I swallow hard, almost lose it.

  For a long time it’s just my face in my hands.

  Nothing creaks. Not caster wheels, not the clay to either side of Kid Hoodie’s mouth. There’s just the empty hum from the phone. It fills my head, cuts my tether for a bit so that I’m floating all around.

  That’s why I was thinking Mom. It’s the way Dashboard Mary was talking. That tone. All better. It’s what they say to their kid, leaning over him in bed, and then they pat it down so it’ll stick, their kisses, and the number of times they tap, it’s the magic number. The number that keeps the kid’s soul from getting taken in the night, or whatever the rhyme was.

  But. Too.

  That’s also how nurses talk to their patients, isn’t it?

  The sheet-changing nurses, keeping their ward of grown-men babies happy and alive, their souls folded into their chests like sleeping birds.

  I bite both my cheeks at once, shake my head no, no.

  There’s no blood, though. And I’m biting hard enough to bite through, right? Shit shit shit.

  I open my mouth, suck both cheeks in, and slam the heel of my hand up against my chin so that the black in my eyelids fizzes, burns like the coldest star.

  Then the blood comes.

  I make myself swallow it all, and feel on the outside of my face, for teeth pushing through. There’s just heat. No white.

  No nurse white.

  I laugh at how stupid I’m being. This is starting to be like the old days, some motel manager knocking on the door like he’s down a tunnel a thousand miles long. A whole host of interesting things in the bottom of the ice machine down the hall, that they won’t find for weeks.

  Nurse Mary.

  Yeah.

  What would a nurse be doing with a nothing like Kid Hoodie? A punk like Jason Pease? She’d have at least gotten him off cigarettes. Kept him out of Trouble.

  It’s bullshit, whatever I was hearing. Has to be.

  To prove it, I play it again and again and again. Smooth the carpet back over the trapdoor, the palms of my hands inches away from the soles of her feet. The mannequin’s.

  This is what it was, what I heard: Dashboard Mary was down in the car—no, that second call was a day later. She was back, was trolling around the Chessire Arms, and finally parked all illegal somewhere. Because that’s the only kind around here. So she had to be on constant lookout. Any girlfriend of Kid Hoodie would know that the law’s bad news.

  And of course she brought food. This was a stakeout.

  And of course she called him once, but made herself hang up before it started rin
ging. Before she thought it started ringing. But the call went long enough for Kid Hoodie’s voice mail to pick up, to record what she was doing: smoothing out a sandwich wrapper on the seat. While trying to balance her drink between her legs. Smoothing out her wrapper and balancing the drink and talking to herself because she was alone. Everybody does it: There, there, all better.

  If you’re alone too much, you can hear anything in anything. Because there’s no one to tell you otherwise, just yourself. And nobody’s their own monitor.

  It’s why going to your room for a day or two when you’re a kid, to think about what you’ve done, it’s the worst.

  But I’ll be damned if Singer’s going to do that to me.

  The phone’s charged now. I could call her if I wanted. Ask her to bring me a sandwich too, then very carefully, very intentionally, so that she’ll have to hear, flatten the paper out on the couch beside me until each crinkle’s gone. So that she can’t help but knowing that I’ve heard her when she thought she was alone. That I’ve been there beside her.

  And maybe it’s better this way. The cat and mouse.

  So long as we each remember who’s who.

  I hiss a laugh out, and it hardly even sounds that fake.

  Because I can, to show that I can, I play the voice mail another time, and another, then rip the ear buds down to plug them into Kid Hoodie, let him hear what he can’t have anymore, but then stuff them back into my ears to try to catch what she’s whispering to him.

  She knows it’s me again, is already saying the same thing over.

  I’m not stupid, though.

  I plug one into Kid Hoodie, one into me, but then get the clay in my ear like warm spit and just sling the whole fucking contraption across the room, scream after it to keep it away.

  It bolos around the oak coat rack with the brass hooks, finally winds down, too tangled for anything.

  But I can still hear something. Kid Hoodie’s stupid drum music, thumping in my head like it’s infected me. I shake my head no, step across the room to grind the thing under my foot, but—

  That’s not what I’m hearing, music.

  What I’m hearing’s just after the thump, the bump, the beat. Like an echo, just without sound. Like the shape the sound was, half a moment ago.

  And then I stand fast, know what that shape was: a hand, balled into a fist. The door. Somebody knocking.

  I push across the room not touching anything, fling the door open.

  Nothing, no one.

  I nod about this like it’s right, it’s expected, then latch onto the jamb, lean out, look down to the right.

  Framed against the metal of the elevator door there just for a moment is a stoop-shouldered shape in some bullshit light green jumpsuit, I guess. Turning right into the stairway. Leaned over like he’s running away, except he’s walking even slower than usual. Singer’s sending me the senior citizens now, walkers and all.

  I hiss, almost step out, almost give chase, just do him in the stairwell, drive the side of his head into the corner of the wooden banister until the thin bone there eggshells opens, strings the bloody yolk between my fingers.

  But I don’t.

  Leave those kinds of theatrics for the short-timers.

  And I’m already laughing some anyway.

  I close the door, hold it shut, and know that if I turn around at the wrong moment, what I’m going to see’s Kid Hoodie’s head, balanced on top of the wet-dry vac.

  I never should have turned my back. Probably exactly what she wanted.

  At the same time it scares me a little, that I’m not worried about Green Leisure Suit getting away. Or, no, that’s not right: Green Paper Suit. Green Paper Suit Man.

  Because that’s what it was. One match and he’s gone.

  Except it wasn’t a suit either.

  I pull my ground-meat inner cheeks between my teeth again.

  Scrubs.

  He was wearing scrubs.

  Leaning forward because he was pushing a stainless steel cart of some kind. And not even looking back at me.

  And maybe I do cry a little then, but I finally luck onto a place above my knee I can bite down onto, hold myself in place.

  It’s not great, not even close to perfect, but it’s enough. My other hand holding the corner of the wallpaper down.

  There are days like these, too.

  Some amount of time later, I don’t know, I’m in the kitchen. Because I have to, because it’s come to this, I’m wearing the cut-in-half wet-dry vac tube on my arms like sleeves, a shoestring running behind my neck to keep them on. It turns me into a robot, and robots aren’t pussies, don’t have to think what they don’t want to think.

  I could never go through the trapdoor like this. I can’t even walk over it because she’ll know. They all will down there, are probably already making eyes at each other, worried. But I can make up for it. By not answering the phone when it rings.

  I don’t go to the window, don’t answer the phone.

  What I do instead is eat so much overcooked eggplant with mustard that I throw some of it back up, and stare at it there on my plate, just chewed, hardly digested, cheek blood threaded in and out like a tapeworm.

  Because I’m nice, I collect it in five spoons, balance them all the way next door, and feed Riley.

  She moans, shudders, finally opens her mouth for more, like a baby bird.

  I don’t watch any television for the next twenty-four hours.

  The phone rings two more times but cuts off on the third ring. Halfway through it, each time.

  Kid Hoodie looks over from his corner under the table, wants so bad to answer.

  All the more reason not to.

  I know what I want to tell her, though. I want to sit on the floor by the coat rack with that tangled-up phone pressed to the side of my head and tell her that I figured it out. That I didn’t even have to leave my apartment either, do what I was thinking over and over: go door-to-door all up and down the hall, seeing if the Green Paper Clothes Man, the real nurse, if he had a reason to be on this floor or not.

  Not that I would have minded.

  All it would take is some polite knocking. I’m the guy who lives a few doors down, yeah, that one, hey. What? Oh, just wondering any of a hundred things, whatever gets me in the door, lets me see if there’s any bedbound renters here. Anybody in need of a house call.

  If not, great.

  Then just move from room to room, push something (my thumbs, with the metal thimbles sharp on the end) into the eyes of everybody who had the bad luck to see me. And everybody else besides, just stack them up like wood in the lefthand apartment, everybody including the geezer with the bedsores and the catheter, who would probably lift his face to help me get the angle right. Because he’s ready, has been ready for years.

  Nevermind that I love him, or would, if I’d had to actually go down there.

  But he’s there all the same.

  It’s the only explanation.

  Otherwise, Mary Dear, I have to believe that you staged those calls, planted that guy in the hall, and that Girl Scout in her green uniform before him, just to get my eyes used to the color. That you know about me. That you razored some pages out of that manual, that that little phone has some function where you can call without ringing and then just listen in.

  And I should have answered the door sooner yesterday, I know that too.

  Then Green Paper Clothes Man, he could have just told me all this. All about you.

  But I know anyway.

  So send that cute little Girl Scout back if you want, sure.

  I never did earn my dissection patch.

  I’m not supposed to, and don’t have any money for it, and it’s just going to draw attention, and it’ll leave Chessire Arms there in the call log, but still. If Singer’s not going to feed me, I’m going to have to feed myself.

  I lower myself to the tangled-up phone, raise it to the side of my head—latex glove on now, of course—and dial in the number from the magn
et on the refrigerator.

  Pizza, yeah.

  The kid who answers has to say the name of the place three times (I add twice more in my head) before I manage to get anything out: “Cheese.”

  I’m the troll under the bridge, mumbling up at the people walking in the bright sunshine.

  He doesn’t hear me, is already reading some spiel off. Wings, buy a medium get a large, I don’t know.

  “No meat,” I cut in, louder now, and just let it hang there.

  I’m not wearing the wet-dry vac sleeves anymore either. They’re duct-taped back into a single tube, are back where they’re supposed to be.

  And it’s not like I’ve never done this before. Ordered a pizza boy.

  Before, though—two times, in different states, different outfits, different types of pizza in different sizes—I always had the hundred dollar bill there on the table for when the doorbell rang.

  Trick is, when the pizza boy has to start thinking about taking that hundred, about what not having change is going to do for his next three deliveries, you can use it. Take the hundred back and ask if a twenty’d be better?

  It always is. Especially for a twelve-dollar pizza. That usually means the pig ordering it’ll just take the five back, wave the three away, thanks, kid.

  But that twenty, man, it’s always buried in some pants in the laundry way back in the motel’s bathroom, you think.

  And everybody knows the doors on those rooms lock.

  Like that, he’s in, nevermind his training, all the horror stories.

  I’m just a guy on the road. A three-dollar tipper, maybe.

  Who’m I going to tell anyway, right?

  Yes, manager sir, your delivery boy did actually step into the room to keep the door from closing, to keep himself from having to knock again like a fool, maybe losing that third dollar.

  I was so shocked, so insulted, so terrified. What would Mrs. Pig back in Wisconsin think? That I do this on every trip, invite young boys into my room late at night?

  Yeah.

  So maybe I do.

  But not for what you think.

  These days, though, I’ve been burning all the paper money in the oven, flushing it.