“How did you find me?” the houseguest asks, voice deep but ringing with fear.
“BIG TUM,” Lover says. “Your new friend has a very memorable license plate. I wish I had thanked him, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is, your daddy owes me. I gave him so many chances to pay. Does he even care about you?”
“He will pay! I know he will!” the houseguest begs.
“No, he won’t, and now I have to do this!”
Braden tightens every muscle in his body to avoid twitching at the sound of bullets finding homes in his houseguest’s head, and then in the floorboards. The wailing stops after the very first. That doesn’t prevent lead from raining down for another minute, hour, day, year, forever and ever. Braden will never get that downpour out of his head.
When the thugs finish, they step over Braden and leave without a word.
He crawls over to the body, fully expecting to see Greta, as she was last night, except dead. But even in death his houseguest refuses to revert. Not that Braden can tell based on anything above the neck. The man didn’t have much head to start with. Now he has none. Braden stares at the pile of shattered bone and brain. The little shards of that one eye and bits of teeth are scattered across the floor like the pieces from a board game. He doesn’t actually see any of it. The shadows save him. They creep from beneath the furniture and say, “This is not for your eyes.”
What they do reveal, however, is the man’s distended stomach, protruding from under the tight polo. Whatever is inside is pushing, ready to come out. Braden puts his hands on cooling skin. “How can I get you out of there?”
Still not sure he believes his eyes, he considers the obvious answer. He slides his hand into the front of the torn jeans, looking for an exit. He recoils at the greasy, flaccid tube his fingers stumble upon. There was something else there last night. He is certain. Now there is not, but this child, or whatever it is, still needs to come out.
What is it? Braden’s not sure he wants to know. Maybe it would be better to leave it. Surely it would be an atrocity, like its father. Not Braden. Its other father. Would it have anything of Braden in it? Did that make it worth saving? He spends a long time thinking about it dying in there, in that lump of hairy man flesh, fighting for air and pounding on the walls with tiny, undeveloped fingers.
Then he goes to the kitchen and picks out a knife.
Before he starts cutting, Braden tears down the blinds. He shoves the furniture to the sides of the room, enlisting all available light. The sun massages his shoulders as he presses the blade into the belly button. He makes a series of slices, none more than a millimeter deep. He will spend hours getting through this flesh if it means not digging in so far that he damages the child any further than it’s already destined to be.
Sweat forms around the few lingering strands of hair atop his head as he sits cross-legged on the hardwood floor, constantly changing his grip on the knife. Soon he hears cries. They sound like a normal baby, but that provides no relief. It worries him more. Gurgling, spitting, hissing noises. That’s what he wants to hear. That would better prepare him for the abomination he is going to see. He does not want to get his hopes up. But he does anyway.
When he finally cuts into the womb, the blood flow gives way to paste-like liquid that oozes out over the stomach. All his accumulated hope disintegrates. This curdled goop is not what should be coming out. Still, he dives into the slit and tries not to think about what he’s touching. He suppresses the vision of pulling out a bark-skinned beast with stumps for arms, barfing out the word “Daddy” in toxic blue bubbles. He ignores the urge to reach for Face Ripper.
His hands seem to effortlessly lock onto the body, and he instinctively manipulates them to protect the neck as he withdraws the child with a sound like globs of expired milk spilling into the sink.
The baby’s arms slap the air, eager to be free. Braden almost drops it upon first sight.
“This can’t be!”
But it is. Braden wipes the white mucus away and inspects the skin color. He counts the fingers. He counts the toes. He counts the eyes. Twice. No matter how much time he spends gazing over every inch of the newborn’s body, letting the sunlight from the windows anoint the new flesh, nothing can change the fact that he now holds a perfect baby boy.
The child’s fists clench as he reaches out for Braden, his father.
GLORIA
KIRSTEN ALENE
No birds sing in this part of the forest. There is no sound of rollicking wildlife, no shivering undergrowth. No wind moves the dark leaves of the canopy. No fresh air at all seems to have penetrated this part of the forest and what air has managed to squeeze itself through the heavy branches and graying pine needles is gelatinous and difficult to breathe, stale as it is and reeking of decay.
Laboring with the stagnant atmosphere, his feet disturbing little plumes of tree dust and brittle four-autumns-past leaves, is a man with the pinched expression of a starving jackal and the neck of a sickly, colorless giraffe. The man puzzles over a tree, moves on to a bush, then across a small clearing to another tree. No great light is coming down through the trees, though it is a cloudless day, and his jackal features are only as obvious as the vague, shallow lines of split bark on the beech trees he grazes with anxious fingers.
Years ago, each tree and bush seemed distinctive and unique. The character of the plant life radiated out of each separate needle, forming a pathway from the road where he has parked his decrepit CRV, to the familiar grounds of his youthful wanderings. He is aggravated by the absolute sameness of this once distinct foliage. But he is also relieved. His fierce canine expression slackens and his face returns to its customary calm. Head wavering on his prodigious, pale neck, he puffs out his cheeks and blows a raspberry in the silence.
If any of those cohorts from his youth—the ones who knew, as he once knew, the tight and claustrophobic inches of the forest like the backs of their hands—could seen him now, he would have been a stranger. They would, however, despite the unkind effect of the years that separated them from him currently, have most definitely recognized his previous jackal-like expression. A look like that is unforgettable.
Fortunately for him, all of those people who might once have been able to identify him, all of those people who knew the forest once, who knew him once, are gone. No one has a chance of navigating the deepness of this forest. No one except Steven.
Tree shadows have followed him as he speeds down the wet highway, cutting a line from the Mackley Park turn-off through a haze of thin rain and a half-hearted fog straight to the bedside of his father-in-law.
“Dennis, she looks up at me every day. She looks up through that moss when I call her. You don’t know how cold her eyes are now.”
Dennis’s father-in-law, Steven, has been cloistered in the Lakewood Valley Assisted Living Facility since the age of twenty-seven. Steven suffers from an intense and debilitating paranoia that surfaced in his youth. His madness culminated in a string of arsons, for which he was arrested. When he admitted to his legal counsel that a sinister man who had been following him forced him to burn the houses, he was deemed incapable of governing himself, and implanted in the home.
Despite this seemingly insurmountable handicap, Steven has dedicated himself to the study of science and natural philosophy. Years ago, Dennis’s visits to the private apartment in Lakewood were like free tutelage. Steven’s wise and lonely ramblings, interrupted only occasionally by fits of oblique terror and rage, were Dennis’s only stimulation in a world now devoid of the rages and terrors he had himself known as a youth.
When true and honest madness began to manifest in Steven it took weeks for Dennis to notice. Now it is difficult to discern any remainder of the former man in a steaming pool of insanity. Only once every few visits does some clairvoyant and beneficent pronouncement make its way past his father-in-law’s cracked, trembling lips revealing that a man is sequestered within, as the mad man which houses him is sequestered in the Facility.
/> Dennis no longer bothers to knock on the apartment door, the stoop of which is overgrown with tangles of morning glory vine and slick with the pulpy remains of twenty or thirty newspapers. Slipping in the newspaper puddle and cursing the neglectful staff, Dennis shoulders the door open and steps inside. The whole apartment smells of medical supplies and dampness. There is probably mold growing in the walls. Mold abounds here, in this complex, and in the town. Every man-made structure is its sporing ground, every dark place its little chapel. Covering his nose and mouth with the sleeve of his jacket as he passes the filthy, cramped restroom, Dennis walks straight across the bedroom to the window. “Steve, it’s so muggy in here, you tell them to open the window when they come.” He shoves open the high window which shudders as it moves in its uneven aluminum frame.
His father-in-law lays prostrate on the bed, strapped down beneath soft, beige sheets, breathing heavily into his pillow. Dennis takes a seat near the bed, in a rickety folding chair that has almost grown into the worn carpet. Steven moves his head left and right. The creases in his neck and face stretch into faint lines, then fold back into papery, elephant skin. Outside the window, children scream and laugh. A gunshot rings out far off in the distance, somewhere in the forest near where Dennis recently wandered.
“I didn’t want to tell you, Dennis, but I’m in love.” Dennis reaches out to hold the withered fingers in their cotton-lined cuff. “I’m in love with her, I have been for years. She comes in here to see me. I never leave, you see. I can’t.” The hand jerks away at Dennis’s touch. The whole bed jumps as the strap pulls at the bed frame. “I’m in love, don’t you get it? Can’t you comprehend you ignorant, fascist swine. You limaceous endomorph, you zeophyte, you placenta.” Steven yells angrily for a moment and is calm. Dennis’s eyes unfocus, the whole room is a beige, antiseptic blur. The bed is a raft, the children peering in through the window, holding themselves up by their elbows, are trying to get a good look through boiling waves of brownness. With his eyes squinted up and strained they look like dogs, their jaws slavering, eyes wide and pupil-less. Other gunshots ring out, some closer, some farther up the mountainside. Old men out hunting the coyotes with their sons. Dragging huge, rotten carcasses through the undergrowth to leave the scent of death behind them.
“I went there just yesterday, Dennis,” Steven says, suddenly cogent and bright-eyed. He snatches Dennis’s hand and grips it tightly. “The nurse who comes here, she’s a witch. She leaves my bonds loose so I can slip right out. I think she pities me. She’s a whore, too, I’ve seen her. I followed her to the spot. You know the spot I’m talking about. Right? You know. They all know.” The children cackle from the window. Dennis wants to shoo them away, to rise and show them that he is not a corpse, but Steven continues, “I went there to see her. I owed her that much for never speaking. She was so beautiful. She was so thin. She was so damn cold. I know now why you told me . . . something like that can weigh on a man, I know. I know now. Aren’t you glad?”
Dennis nods. He is not glad. He does not like those children hearing this revelation, however insane and disjointed it may sound. He rises from the chair but before he can make a movement for the window, they have yelped and retreated. A moment passes and they resume their game out of sight. Another gunshot.
People seem more concerned when a body blossoms in roadside foliage, than when it sinks and fails to resurface. In one version of events, the failure of the body to resurface was proof of her immediate ascension.
In the kitchen, surrounded by his wife’s collection of ceramic roosters and a wide expanse of busy rooster-themed wallpaper, Dennis jabs his fork into a potato. He imagines the potato screaming, writhing beneath his powerful incisions.
“Daddy?” Dennis jabs again, prying apart the papery brown skin to reveal the flaky, pulsing flesh beneath. A cloud of steam breaks over his face. “Daddy? Are you okay?”
“Dennis, stop violating that potato and eat your dinner before I take it away.” Nothing aggravates Dennis more than when his wife addresses him like a child. She has no business talking like that to him, or to anyone. Gloria is far past needing to be threatened and chastised. Not that she ever needed discipline.
His daughter smiles at him and puts her soft hand on top of his. Dennis’s wife clicks her tongue disapprovingly. “What’s up?” Gloria says. She is the most beautiful child he has ever seen. At the age of five, they had thought she could never be prettier but she has only grown more stunning in the decade since, her face blossoming around the twin anther of her radiant brown eyes like a real bayou lily. Her beauty is complimented by a single dimple in her left cheek, a square but not masculine chin, a lineless and peach-smooth forehead, and an untamable head of perfect golden curls which are now pinned up in a light cascade by a little silver headband. Now, as is happening with increasing frequency, she looks more like her namesake than her mother or her father. More like her namesake than any other living being. Dennis’s skin twitches involuntarily and his wife snaps, “I mean it, Dennis.”
What was the story about the woman intellectual, the succubus who poisoned her husband’s second wife with two drops of her corpse cold blood? Did that blood penetrate the fertile womb of the innocent, ignorant female? Was the resultant child angelic or demonic?
Dennis, ignoring his wife’s persistent disapproving babble, grips his daughter’s hand and pats it lovingly. “Nothing’s wrong, sweetheart. I was just thinking about your grandpa.” Dennis observes his wife stiffen slightly. She has not seen her father in four years. The last visit was so painful and humiliating that she has refused to continue seeing him. I’d rather, she says, remember him as a real person than a skeleton spewing nonsense and insults to an empty room. She hates that Dennis sees him, hates when Dennis mentions him, most of all she hates when Dennis talks about him in front of Gloria. Her grey eyes grow steely and dark. Gloria smiles sadly and nods, as if she understands. As if her huge, reflective eyes house a vat of sadness.
When Gloria has been installed in her bed and kissed by both her father and mother, Dennis’s wife pours a tremendous glass of whiskey and hands it to her husband. “Thanks, Kat.”
They sit in the living room in silence, trees outside the large bay window barely illuminated by a sliver of a moon, thick branches unsuccessfully muffling the continued sound of gunshots on the mountainside. “Still hunting?” Kat says in response.
“I guess it’s the only way to be sure,” Dennis says, heaving himself to his feet to peer out the window into what he knows is just complete darkness. “I was out there today, but I didn’t hear anything,” he mutters mostly to himself but Kat, nose in her own glass, hears him and snorts.
“You were what?”
“I was out, you know, where we used to go.”
“I hope by ‘we’ you don’t think you are referring to myself, Dennis.” Hidden by an overwhelming amount of disdain is a hint of fear.
“No, dearest, I was not referring to you.”
Among the glassy reflection of roosters, he can just make out the small flashes of light from rifles firing in the dark, separated from their cracking reports by full seconds, two seconds sometimes three.
They almost lived there, out in the woods. Which is foolish. There is more mold there, more rank decay and stagnant water than anywhere else in the town. It is infested. It is filthy.
But to them it felt open and clean.
Boys in masks and costumes flee through the brush, their capes and shoelaces tangling in nettles and blackberry bushes, spores suck down into their lungs as they struggle with the undergrowth while he watches.
In one version of events she is alone in her room at the top of the stairs, looking out into the garden when a moon god with heaving chest and naked limbs slithers out of the hedge and in one swift movement, mounts the rose trellis and knocks on the glass of her window. When she wakes, she leaves with him and never creeps back down the stairs again.
When Dennis wakes next to his wife, his immediate reaction is to
recoil. Two huge, intently staring black eyes have replaced her small, watery grey ones which, in the morning, are usually squinted with sleepiness and slightly grumpy. The momentum of his initial recoil sends him out of the bed and onto the floor where he lands, legs tangled into an immovable knot of sheets. His breath comes in short gasps as he fights with his feet, waiting for the alien face to peer over the side of the bed but no face appears, which terrifies him more. After a minute of silent struggle, Kat’s familiar groggy face slides into view. She laughs. “Were you awake?” Dennis asks, his heart pounding.
“I am now, geez, what did you do?”
Dennis watches his daughter back the car down the driveway. When she reaches the end he goes to meet her, pulls open the heavy driver’s side door and pats her head. “You’re getting better.”
She looks at him very seriously. “You don’t have to worry. Everything will be all right, you’ll see.”
More gunshots echo faintly through the valley.
Dennis pulls into the parking lot of the town’s only bar and sits in his car for a while. Eating breakfast here alone is better than enduring his wife’s moans and wails about the various chores and tasks he has neglected over soggy bacon, dry eggs, and stale toast at home.
“They’re really going after the Keye-Oats, huh?” a filthy, plaid-shirted man says at the next booth. His friend stirs a small dish of mayonnaise slowly with a French fry, “’Spose,” he responds.
“But then what can they do? It’s the only real way to be sure.”
In Heaven, Everything Is Fine: Fiction Inspired by David Lynch Page 24
