“We’re good! Let’s go!” The Garys slapped shoulders, and then each rubbed his hands, one mirroring the other. “Let’s roll! We’ve been waiting for this drink all day.”
“We’re coming. Don’t leave without us.” Mick stood up and dusted off his blazer while Mark and Amy reached the Garys at the same moment from opposite ends of the room.
They were halfway out the door, and Cole almost relaxed, when he heard: “Hey, should somebody invite Wilkie?” There was grumbling among them.
“Come on, Cole. Come to the pub,” Gary said, buttoning his jacket while indiscreetly elbowing his namesake. “We’re sorry about before.”
“No, really. We are,” said the other Gary.
“Yeah. Your girlfriend’s coming.”
Amy swept her golden hair from beneath her collar. Cole couldn’t take his eyes from it.
“Hey, Amy! You’ll sit with Wilkie, right?”
Cole blushed and looked away. Amy said nothing.
“I . . . I can’t,” Cole said, burying his words in his collar. “I have things I need to do.”
“What’s wrong? Can’t hold your drink? Maybe Amy can help,” Mick said, while the Garys laughed.
“I think he’s already a little drunk.”
“Maybe he wants her to hold something else?”
“Guys,” Mark said. “Can we just go?”
“Really, I can’t— ”
“Ah, screw him,” said the loudest Gary, silencing the others. “If he doesn’t want to come, don’t let him come.”
Cole started to say something, but words clogged his throat. The five left merrily.
Cole remained in his cubicle for another fifteen minutes to ensure they were gone before he turned out the light.
The long subway commute was spent in the haze of a packed train. Cole could not shrink enough to avoid the sweating bodies — bumping and shoving, thrusting over-stuffed knapsacks into his face, elbowing his sides until he bruised — but he managed to keep his hands hidden beneath his arms, sparing that one piece of himself from the world.
It was not until he turned the bolt and locked the world out of his mother’s house, his childhood home, that he finally relaxed. Time had taken a toll on the exterior — white paint cracked, porch railings rusted — but Cole could not bring himself to alter any part of his memories, even if time was already hard at work obliterating them. His mother had been gone for over two years and he could not move a thing, afraid to disrupt the home he remembered. He still slept in the same bedroom he had used all his life, the room in which he had been born by his sweating mother thirty-six years previous. The house, that room, was his sanctuary — undisturbed by the burdens of time — and he crawled onto the creaking bed, maneuvering between exposed springs, to try and forget the world outside.
Forgetting didn’t happen, not at first. He twisted and turned, his mind racing, reliving his humiliation in front of Amy. Cole wanted to suppress it, to bury it deep within him, so that he might find a way to go on, but it bubbled-up unwanted, his depths already too full. When sleep came it only lasted a few hours — long enough for every stray mattress-spring to poke into his side and leave a small painful kink and a dark red welt just above his waist.
• • •
He held in his hand, hidden from the other passengers on the train, a wrinkled and creased photograph drawn from his wallet. All the faces from his department were barely visible except Amy’s; hers was unmistakable. The two Garys flanked her while Mark watched and Mick looked off at something unseen. The picture had been taken at a company outing and then published in the monthly newsletter. Cole, too, was in it. He stood in profile and was cut in half by the lens — a bodiless head floating on the periphery. He kept the picture close as it was the only he had of Amy and himself together; the rest had long lost their faces, victims to his thumbnail.
His stomach churned as the train approached the office, each piece of track bringing Cole closer to inevitability. He would see the Garys, Mick and Mark, and endure their jabs while he pretended his soul was not being destroyed. He hoped he could slip past Amy at least, slink to his cubicle and pretend nothing had changed, but when he arrived the sound of her voice calling him over filled him with dread.
She spoke but he could not look at her.
“Cole, I suppose I should talk to you,” she said, her eyes hanging overlong on her monitor.
His hands moved against each other like two small animals.
“Things are complicated, okay? I can’t . . . it’s not that you aren’t an okay guy . . .”
He looked over at his cubicle and saw four pairs of eyes watching from behind corners.
“I know the Garys like stirring things up. I wish Mark . . . anyway, let’s be friends, okay?”
Cole nodded, unable to look at her.
“Good . . . um, next time everyone goes out, you should come too,” she said and turned back to her work.
Cole continued to stand by her desk, scratching his waist with his thumb, until he realized they both felt awkward. “I should get to work,” he said, and tried to ignore the little sigh he heard as he left.
No one spoke as he walked past but he could feel their stares. He forced his anxiety down just to keep his knees from buckling.
Cole could see her from his cubicle — he could see all of them — but no one could see him through the dark plastic window. He could also hear them though he suspected they didn’t know it. Cole was certain they were discussing him though he never once heard his name mentioned. He knew he did not fit well with the other men despite the four years they had worked together; he sensed their dislike of him quite immediately and quite frankly.
Amy, though, was different. She never said anything about Cole’s odd nose or eye-twitch. Never mentioned his weight. She smiled at him in the mornings when he arrived even if she was busy on the telephone. They did not say much to each other, but he had always thought they didn’t need to. There was something deeper inside of them that was waiting to be born.
By mid-afternoon the kink in his side had become worse. The itch had gone and was replaced with a dull chilling sensation that spread back toward his spine. He touched his side and beneath his clothes he felt a sharp invasive pain, and a dark cloud began to cover his eyes. He stood up and the room began to jitter as though about to spin. Cold sweat dripped down his neck, and he stumbled toward the washroom where he could escape the prying stares.
He closed the door tightly behind him and quickly checked the stalls for people before being sick in the sink. He caught his face in the mirror — his skin was too pale, his hair too greasy and thin — and he was reminded why Amy wasn’t to blame for her feelings.
He touched his side and pain drilled through the thick of his torso. He breathed through his teeth and took hold of his shirt, then slowly pulled it up so he could get a better look at his sore in the mirror.
Cole gasped. The blemish had changed. While it had spread up his right side, the flesh had turned purplish brown like a bruise and had sunken, looking wrinkled and moist. Surrounding that, the skin was yellow and slightly puckered, and, though numb, touching it induced a sick writhing in the pit of his stomach. His mind clouded the longer he stared at it.
The noise of the door banging open startled him. He yanked his shirt down quickly before Mick stormed in.
“Mark is getting on my nerves,” he said, and moved straight to the urinals as Cole remained frozen. “Ever since he and . . . What are you doing?”
Cole sputtered.
“Did I catch you doing something? You look guilty.”
“N-no,” he said. Mick looked around suspiciously.
“Well,” he said, clucking as he washed his hands, “I’ll find out, eventually. I find everything out. Ask Mark.”
He laughed and then dried his hands on the strip of cloth that hung down beside Cole.
“I’ll see you,” he said, then clapped Cole on the shoulder. Pain shot through Cole’s body like electricity, instantly shorting his bra
in. Before he could scream, Cole had passed out and fallen to the floor in a heap.
• • •
He woke to find the four men — the two Garys, Mick and Mark — standing over him. He could hear a voice speaking to him but it was unclear whose it was.
“Are you okay?”
“Give him room.”
“I told you he couldn’t handle his liquor,” Mick said. There was a pleased expression on his face.
“What happened, Wilkie?” Gary looked awkward, kneeling on his thick leg. The other Gary stood behind him, hiding his smirk. “Taking a nap?”
“I — I don’t . . . I must have . . .”
“Don’t worry, your girlfriend called you an ambulance,” said the standing Gary.
“Amy? She didn’t see . . .” Cole tried to get up but arms blocked him.
“Don’t worry about Amy,” said Mark, curtly.
“Yeah, stay still,” said Gary.
“I feel fine.”
“You’re going to stay there if I have to sit on you. Do you understand? Stay still.”
Cole remained on the washroom floor for almost an hour before the paramedics arrived. They checked his pulse and blood pressure, but at no point did they suggest looking beneath his shirt. Instead, they held the stethoscope against the small triangle of chest exposed by his undone tie and then lifted him onto their stretcher. Beyond a few questions, the entire procedure was performed wordlessly, and they wheeled him past the fascinated faces of the four men and into the empty elevator.
The wound had quieted, shrinking to a gentle throb, and he felt confident it would be gone by the next morning. The paramedics gave him a funny look in the ambulance as he pleaded for release, and refused to do anything more than unstrap him from the gurney. They left him resigned, waiting in the hospital lobby, and went off to handle their next emergency.
The hospital’s plastic seats were uncomfortable but Cole tried to remain patient and waited for a doctor or nurse to direct him. The pain in his side had returned stronger; it felt like something was pressed against his ribs and scraping them from within. At one point the pain was so intense he could no longer feel his hands and feet. The throb filled his head and made it difficult to fill out the forms he’d been given.
He waited, one hand pressed tight against his side to keep his insides from falling out, and grit his teeth. He held the company snapshot in his other hand and stared at Amy’s blurred laughing face. He had been standing so close to her then. If he could remove the bodies of the four men, he and Amy would be together. He tried to fold the edges of the photograph over but found it impossible to do with one hand, and it slipped from his grasp and fell, landing impossibly out of reach beside a pair of sneakers held together with duct tape.
Their owner stared at him — an old man with a worn, un-shaven face and clothes that were a mishmash of different garments. He smelled as though he had not bathed in weeks and the sickly stench was overpowering. The photograph lay face-up by his feet, daring to be retrieved, but Cole’s stomach reacted violently to the vagrant’s odor — he had to breathe though his mouth to keep from vomiting. Even then, the sour aftertaste left a greasy coating. The man was oblivious to Cole’s discomfort and sat far too close, his bare arm brushing the shared armrest. Cole tried to squeeze himself away, but the vagrant’s body seemed to transform, expanding to fill what little space existed between them. He opened his mouth and revealed more darkened gums than teeth, and offered — with drunken breath and pointed finger — “You’re bleeding over there.”
Cole removed the hand he had clenched to his side and saw the dark stain of blood seeping through his shirt. The old man grinned, pleased with himself, as Cole felt overcome with nausea. He struggled to stand, desperate to escape, but his entire torso filled with an excruciating pain and he fell back into his seat. The air was being sucked from the room and Cole started to gasp, trying to gulp it down before it was gone. His head spun, speckles forming before his eyes, blinding him, then he felt a sizable shift inside his chest and everything changed.
His vision cleared and he saw the vagrant whose blurry eyes had grown wide and were focused unwaveringly on the side of Cole’s body, his gaping mouth screaming though no words emerged. Cole looked down. From beneath his bloodied shirt emerged a long ropey protrusion of flesh, at least four feet long. It was thick and wide, like a tongue with a rough pinkish surface, yet also covered in hundreds of tiny suckers that flickered as they opened and closed. The thing moved independent of Cole, curling upon itself, tensing, wrapping about the legs of the chairs, and the homeless man retreated while starting to blubber.
The long coil struck. It leapt at the old man and wrapped itself around his head, then lifted him from the ground. He struggled against the flesh, clawing at it with crippled hands, while paroxysms of muscles moved down its length and into his throat. An eternity of muffled screams filled Cole’s head before he felt a shiver within him, and there was the dull crack of something breaking. The vagrant’s body fell limply to the ground, and after a moment the long growth untangled itself and withdrew slowly back beneath Cole’s shirt.
He regained control of his limbs and scrambled woozily over to the man lying prone on the hospital floor — red marks the size of coins running over his head, his face a mass of crushed features, empty and pale. Cole silently stood, licked his lips, and lifted his shirt, craning to see what was beneath.
There was nothing there; just a long bruised slit, a trickle of watery blood trailing from it.
Voices travelled from the corridors, reminding Cole he would not be alone for long, and he panicked. He scrambled to pick up the photograph from the floor, his fingers sticky with blood, and rushed out of the Emergency Room, carried on his numbing feet.
He wandered the streets for hours, trying to wear away his pain, trying to make sense of what had happened. When he reached the limits of his energy he stopped and spilled the bloodied contents of his stomach onto an alley wall and then collapsed against it. He wiped his chin and pressed his head against the cold brick. Maybe if he rested a moment, things would make sense. He trembled and closed his eyes as his vision began to dim.
When he opened them, he had no idea where he was.
Somehow, he had been moved from the street and into a strange bed. His shirt was missing, and the wound on his side was covered with a long bandage, the adhesive tugging the skin of his midriff. There was no one else in the tiny room, yet it felt claustrophobic; books and porcelain religious figurines leered from the shelves that lined every wall. Cole kicked himself free of the sheets, desperate to find his clothes and escape, but his jarring movements caused whatever lay within him to squirm. He almost screamed from the pain.
Cole scanned the room for some sort of escape. He had to find a way to extract the . . . thing that was living inside of him. Returning to the hospital was not an option, not after what had happened. Just the thought of it brought a cold sweat to Cole’s back, and he tried unsuccessfully to scrub it from his thoughts.
He tried again to stand. He placed each foot squarely on the floor in preparation, but the simple motion felt like razors dragging against each other. Whatever the thing inside him was, it was going to kill him.
Cole heard a scratching at the door as though someone was trying to get in and he shrank back into the corner of the bedroom.
The door opened and revealed a middle-aged man, his body a thick trunk, who held in his hands a basket of books; Cole’s clothes were folded neatly atop them. He put them down by the door, and Cole noticed his hands were far more wrinkled than his face — as though they had long since died.
“Good morning! How are you feeling today?”
“Where am I?”
“It’s okay, you’re in my apartment,” the man said. “Your clothes are washed. I couldn’t get the blood completely out, though. My name is Leslie. What’s yours?”
Cole coughed, his throat feeling dry and prickly. Leslie offered to get him water, but Cole shook his head.
“Please,” Cole said, holding the sheet close, discomforted by the man’s proximity. “Give me my clothes. I need to leave.”
“I didn’t rescue you from the street just to let you give up that easily,” Leslie said, stepping from the room and into another Cole couldn’t see from the bed. He returned after a moment with a decanter of water and a glass. “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”
Cole felt a stirring within him. He grit his teeth and held out his hand. “Give me my clothes.”
Leslie shook his head.
“I’ve seen so many like you: angry at the world. It’s no wonder you ended up on the streets. Your kind is out there every night. It breaks my heart to know I can’t save you all.”
“Where am I?”
“You’re safe. I only want to help you get better.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” he said, and he knew neither of them believed it. Leslie smiled warmly nevertheless.
“You have to see the life you’re leading isn’t a good one. Nothing can come of it but more heartache and pain. You have a chance out, a chance to break free of whatever chains are holding you down. I want to help you with that.”
“Please, I’m fine.”
“Look at yourself! Living on the street, no doubt hand-to-mouth. When I found you I thought you were dead. Your skin was yellow and sickly — it’s a wonder you’re still moving at all.”
Leslie wandered over to the shelves across from where Cole lay. “There’s so much I can do to help you, if you’ll only give me the chance.”
“But . . . but I’m not homeless . . .”
“Aren’t you?” Cole took a breath and a pain stabbed him in the side. He said nothing. “Even if you have a place to stay, the fact that you were lying out there bleeding from that nasty cut tells me that you don’t really belong anywhere.”
“I don’t know who you are, but I . . . I need to leave here. It’s not safe to be around me.”
“Nobody’s safe. Nobody is safe anywhere. You’ve got to learn that. I look in your eyes and see a man trapped, caged. I want to set you free.”
Beneath The Surface Page 14
