by Vivian Barz
Eric snatched up the phone with one goal in mind: he was going to call Maggie back if only to experience the satisfaction of hanging up on her . If there was one thing he hated—the one act that could truly drive him to murder, he reckoned—it was when a person hung up on him. The ultimate disrespect, as far as he was concerned.
As Eric was about to go through with the call, however, he stopped to consider what he was going to say once she picked up. You’re a bad person. Thanks for ruining my life. How could you? Because when it came to Ye Olde Fucked-Up Situation of Eric and Maggie, all that could have been said—and all that probably should not have been said—had pretty much already been stated.
With that thought, Eric pocketed his phone and exited the Jeep.
On the way into the house, he stumbled over the bottle of wood cleaner he’d carelessly left in the middle of the walkway. He dropped his satchel and seized the bottle, and like the phone, he nearly lobbed it . . .
Before he knew it, he was rolling up his sleeves and pouring a splash of cleaner onto a rag. His belly hitched when he neared the trunk. Eric patted a burp out of his chest; his fast-food dinner, combined with the lingering stink inside the trunk, had given him a slight case of the queasies.
(Or it was the conversation with Maggie.)
Okay, fine, it was probably the conversation with Maggie, though he wasn’t going to dwell on it now. Nope. Eric took a seat and wedged the daisy kneeling mat under his rear, his brain focused on finding a topic unrelated to his ex-wife. He settled on the upcoming show at Luna’s.
The nausea soon passed, and Eric went about scrubbing the trunk’s inside. He removed remnants of lining that remained in the seams, balling shreds of faded blue silk on the ground by his thigh. When it was all gone, he stepped back to behold it. The trunk was cleaning up quite nicely, and for the first time since purchasing it, Eric could discern its hidden beauty: rich wood grain, solid brass hardware, an overall robustness. It had come from an era when things were built to last, and he could imagine it living on for a few more centuries. It was a shame he didn’t have kids,
(Jim and Maggie might)
since it would be a fantastic heirloom to start passing down through the generations. Even with the hole in the bottom, and even with that stench (which was finally starting to dissipate, thank Christ for small miracles), he’d still gotten an amazing deal for twenty dollars. Once it was fully restored, it just might be the nicest thing he owned.
(Though that’s not too great an achievement, considering you don’t own much now, anyhow.)
Eric flapped the rag down at his side. “What is your point?”
Right away he thought: If anyone walking by outside earlier didn’t think I was nuts when I was shouting at my wife
(ex-wife)
over her having my brother’s baby, then they certainly do now after hearing me snap at my invisible companions.
He surprised himself by snickering. Really, what else could he do at that stage but laugh?
Eric fell silent as his phone vibrated against his hip. He knew who it was before he even checked the caller ID to confirm. Maggie, adding insult to injury, now calling from home—his former home.
This should be good , he thought and then spoke with sharp meanness he felt high up in his scrotum. “Yes? What now ?”
“Hi, Eric . . . I know you don’t want to talk to me, but . . .” A nervous clearing of the throat.
Eric’s grip loosened, and the rag sank to the floor in a woozy, chemical swirl. Then so did he, knees groaning as he fumbled back on his haunches, joints alarm-slackened, dropping, dropping, until the bones of his butt felt the coldness of concrete pressing up through the seat of his pants.
“Eric? Just listen, all right? Please.”
Eric rooted for anger, finding it effortlessly in the pit of his belly. He seized it hard. “The fuck I will—”
“I’m an asshole, all right? I don’t deserve you as a brother. And I don’t deserve any sort of forgiveness—”
“Not in this lifetime.”
“I crossed the line. What I did . . . it was unconscionable. Deplorable—”
Jim’s groveling , Eric thought. He only uses big words when he grovels . “Fuck you, Jim! Fuck! You! ”
A pause. “Okay, well . . . I can’t say I didn’t expect this.”
He sounds amused—uncomfortable but amused. The cheeky bastard is relishing this. “If you have something to say, I suggest you get on with it. Because after this conversation, I don’t ever want to talk to you again. You or Maggie.”
“We’ve been through tougher things than this. Mom and Dad—”
“Don’t you dare .”
“I miss you, little brother. I’m so, so sorry,” Jim said with what sounded like genuine remorse. “If I could go back in time . . .”
Throat tensing, Eric felt his grudge-holding resolve began to slip away. Maybe it was purely the sound of his brother’s voice, which he realized how much he’d been missing now that he was hearing it. He was still light-years away from forgiving Maggie, but maybe he could try burying the hatchet with Jim . . .
His eyes fell to the nearly faded band of white flesh that marred the bare ring finger on his left hand, and he bristled all over again. He shook the idea from his head. He was not ready to forgive and forget. Not even close .
Jim responded to Eric’s silence with a long sigh. “Fine,” he said, as if that settled it. “I was calling about Maggie, anyway.”
“What about her?”
“Look, I know I’m in no position to ask for any favors—”
“You’ve got that right.”
“Can I please finish?”
Eric’s curiosity got the better of him. “What is it?”
“Maggie has been having a hard time lately—you’ve heard about the miscarriage.” Jim paused, probably anticipating some type of response.
Eric wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of one.
“You might think that she doesn’t feel guilty about . . . about what happened, but the truth is that she does. She’s really hurting over the whole thing. You know what she’s like; she can’t stand having anyone upset with her.” Jim paused. “She hasn’t been eating or sleeping. She’s been depressed. I’ve been worried about her . . .”
“So?” As much as Eric had been loath to accept it, and as much as he wanted to imagine that Jim was still out cruising the field like the player he’d been all through his twenties and thirties and even much of his early forties, he was now starting to wholly comprehend that his brother’s interest in Maggie ran deeper than a cheap fling.
My God, he actually loves her , he thought with more than a little astonishment. Jim is in love with my ex-wife. My Maggie.
“So maybe you could go a little easier on her?” Jim asked. “We—I . . . I’m in no position to ask for sympathy, but this is serious. She lost a baby, and I’m worried that it was because—”
“I’m going to stop you there,” Eric said. He was utterly drained, no longer sad or angry. He was done. Just done . “I can’t do this right now, Jim. I just can’t. I will go easy on Maggie, but that’s only because I won’t be taking any more of her calls. Yours either. I don’t forgive either of you, and I doubt I ever will. You’re going to have to live with that, just like how I’ve learned to live with what you’ve done to me.”
“Come on; at least let’s—”
“I’ve said what I have to say. If you and Maggie are as sorry as you claim, then you’ll both respect my wishes. If the time ever does come when I feel like reaching out to you, I know where to find you. You are, quite obviously, now living in my house.”
Eric could hear Jim speaking fast as he disengaged the call.
“Prick,” he muttered as he pocketed the phone once more. He shook his head. “Jesus Christ, what a day.”
(She was right earlier, you know. Maggie. You can’t avoid this Jim situation forever.)
“But I can avoid him for the time being,” Eric said, scoo
ping up the ball of tattered blue silk. He deposited it into the garbage bin and slammed down the lid. “And you can’t call olly when you’re the one hiding . . .”
Eric stopped dead in his tracks. Now, what the hell was that supposed to mean? And who the hell was Ollie?
Hands on his hips, Eric asserted to the quiet, empty room: “Okay, enough is enough. You need to get a grip.”
He was done dealing with Maggie and Jim. Done debating with invisible companions. Done feeling like shit. Though his life was still not perfect (though when was it ever?), he’d finally managed to get it (slightly) back on track and to a point where envisioning some semblance of a future without his ex-wife was not entirely incomprehensible.
With a childish stamp of a foot, he added: “Humph. That’s right. Tonight, right here, right now , you’re going to get a grip.”
Eric believed himself too. But as he approached the trunk to get back to business, his guts bubbled up in his throat. He stumbled over the bottle of cleaner once again as he sprinted inside to throw up.
CHAPTER 17
When Eric was a young boy, he had a cocker spaniel named Lucy.
Lucy was intended to be Jim’s, too, but shortly after their father had brought her home as a puppy, it became clear which son the dog favored. Despite Jim’s repeated attempts at bribery—squeaky toys, bones, beef jerky—it was Lucy and Eric who became thick as thieves, the two inseparable on days Eric wasn’t in school.
Lucy used to pad into Eric’s room every night while he was sleeping and jump up on the bed, where she’d curl herself into a furry little ball and nestle down into the quilt Eric kept for her near his feet. Lucy never awakened Eric when she did this, but some part of him always knew she was there, her breathing and her warmth never failing to bring him comfort.
This pleasant childhood memory was brought to Eric’s mind as he now felt a weight resting at the foot of the bed. However, unlike Lucy, it brought him no comfort whatsoever. The mass emitted an unhealthy charge, the itchy radiation of a heated laptop cooking skin. Whoever—whatever —it was also breathed differently than the gentle manner of his beloved pup. It wheezed, drawn-out gasps suggesting that each pained breath might be its last.
It was all wrong, unpleasantly off .
Eric thought of Maggie. At the core, she was a free-spirited artist, so the way she’d insisted on making their bed with suffocating hospital corners had always struck him as ironic. Maggie’s feet were tiny for a woman of her height, and so the pull of the sheet hadn’t bothered her. It had irritated Eric immensely. It had not only pinched his size twelves, sore from walking campus all day, but also made him feel mummified. The hospital-corner battle was constant during their marriage, and it was one Maggie typically won, since Eric had run late most mornings and thus hadn’t concerned himself with minor troubles like making the bed. Now Eric got up early each day to tidy the bedroom, smoothing blankets over mattress with spitefully sloppy edges.
Eric kicked a foot up and over to loosen the sheet, an instinctive maneuver he’d executed nightly during his marriage. The movement didn’t alleviate the tension, and now Eric was rising up, up, up through waking layers of fitful slumber. He’d gone to bed early, his uneasy stomach continuing to bother him to such a degree that he’d begun to worry that he’d caught the flu from one of his students—and wouldn’t that just be the icing on the shit cake of his new job? He rolled onto his back lazily and peeled open his eyes, giving the ceiling a resigned sigh. A tickle caught in his throat, and he coughed dryly, parched from vomiting earlier.
He needed water.
Eventually thirst won out over laziness. It was as Eric turned to ease himself out of bed to go and get that cold drink that he finally noticed his two intruders.
The creature was what he spotted first, floating in front of the bedroom’s long windows. Hidden within the gauzy white curtains at an impossible height, its pointy, deformed silhouette started about four feet up, as if it lacked a head and legs but possessed a narrow, protruding chest. A grotesque alien form gurgling and snorting in a manner no human is capable of.
The second visitor was somebody with whom Eric had already formed an acquaintance. The little boy from the classroom. He wasn’t rotting or partaking in any ear-flicking antics; now he played a game of jacks at the foot of the bed, bright-red ball bouncing high before his freckled face, moving sluggishly, as if floating through gel. When the ball came back down, the boy’s grubby hand vanished right into the mattress along with it, materializing again with a scoop of silver and red.
For the first time since awakening, Eric became aware of the boy’s wheezing, which his tired brain had previously dismissed as wind beating against the house and which now seemed as if it were blasting right against his ears. The excitement of the game had agitated the boy, and he sounded on the brink of a fatal asthma attack.
He played on, taking no notice of Eric.
Eric had frozen midmotion: head tilted back; bicep, hip, and foot pressing against the mattress on one side; bent elbow aimed toward the ceiling and leg hovering on the other; midsection twisted. It would be a painful pose for anyone to hold for even a few seconds, worse with the boy’s weight pressing down against the blankets. Eric, muscles cramping and starting to quake, wasn’t fazed. He was too focused on the creature, which had begun to sway within the curtains.
The creature, with its strange, frightening, inhuman sounds.
A small voice at the back of Eric’s mind implored him to squeeze his eyes shut so that he wouldn’t have to gaze upon whatever monstrous abomination was emerging. Like with the plane-crash exchanges with his ex-wife, he couldn’t bring himself to look away, not even when terror caused his bladder to let go and he wet the bed, a humiliating act he hadn’t carried out since he was seven.
It was a horse’s head. Backlit by moonlight, it jutted from the window, neck up. It was decomposing. Badly. Its death stink could be smelled from clear across the room, yet underneath the rot there was a whisper of a richer scent: fresh dirt. Eric’s mouth dropped open in a startled, silent scream as the horse clomped forward, its putrid rust-colored body materializing from thin air with each new step. When it was fully formed, it occupied the entire space in front of the bed, nearly from one end of the wall to the other. Snorting, it turned its neck slowly and blinked at Eric with milky eyes, only it looked like it was winking because its left eyelid had decayed. Its mane was scant and tangled, patches of maggoty scabs clustered at the roots. Beyond its bony rib cage, Eric could see his coat and umbrella dangling from a peg on the wall, and it was then he realized that the horse was flickering in and out of existence with a strobe light effect, solidifying and dissolving and then solidifying again.
His eyes shifted to the foot of his bed, and he saw that the boy was flickering also.
Eric’s stomach somersaulted. Makeitstopmakeitstopmakeitstop.
The boy whinnied as he met Eric’s unblinking eyes.
Behind him, the horse stamped its foot on the hardwood floor, whispering, “Tweeeenty-twoooooo, tweeeeenty-threeeeeee.” Its speech was childlike, yet molasses slow and full of static—a tired phonograph dying a slow, painful death.
Crazily, Eric thought of a late-nineteenth-century doll he’d read about in a random toy collectors’ magazine he’d flipped through at the dentist’s. Edison’s Talking Doll, invented by Thomas Edison, had been produced with a tiny phonograph of sorts, chanting rhymes like “Hickory Dickory Dock” with such realism that it had frightened Victorian children half to death. Intrigued, Eric had later found clips of the doll’s voice on YouTube, and it was ghastly, indeed.
The horse’s chanting was a million times worse—times infinity.
I don’t know how much more of this I can take—
The horse’s counting intensified in speed and volume. “Twenty-two, twenty-three . . . twenty-two, twenty-three . . .”
Eric’s throat tightened, and his mouth watered. He belched. Just make it go away. I can’t do this. I can’t. I can’t�
��
“Twenty-two, twenty-three! Twenty-two, twenty-three!” High pitched and chipmunk fast.
I’m going to be si—
“TWENTY-TWO TWENTY-THREE TWENTY-TWO TWENTY-THREE!”
Eric launched up from bed and sprinted toward the bathroom. He made it to the toilet just in time. He cracked his elbow on its edge as he kneeled over and heaved what acid he had left inside his stomach into the bowl. The horse stopped shouting, thank Christ, but the kid started neighing again in its place, mocking him, Eric was certain. Eric bent over the bowl and spewed again. By the time he finished gagging, the house had fallen silent.
Eric wasted no time running through the house and turning on all the lights. Except the bedroom; that one he ignored as he held his breath and squeezed his eyes shut, groping the door closed from behind the safety of the wall. Now he stood in the living room under the spotlight of the ceiling fan, panting, his face glistening with postvomitus sheen, foul vinegary breath tasting of sick, hands trembling against his thighs, heart hammering in his throat, balls constricted as two grapes, crotch embarrassingly soggy.
He had no idea who to call or where to go or what to do. None. Zip. Zero.
It dawned on Eric that the person he wished to seek comfort from most was Maggie, maybe simply out of habit but maybe out of something else entirely. Jim, too, since he’d know what to say and do better than anyone, having been around when Eric’s disease had first manifested.
But fuck that .
He’d rather stand there under the fan all night, half-naked and shivering, scared out of his gourd, than ask those two for help. It was this revelation that delivered Eric the small amount of irritation he needed to get moving . . . three steps to the sofa, where he now sat calming himself, pondering what had just happened and what he was planning to do about it.
As far as schizophrenic episodes were concerned, he’d had some doozies. He’d been so deep Inside the Curve for a few in his early twenties that he’d thought he’d never make it back around the bend again without suffering some form of permanent trauma. But this . . . to compare this episode to his others would be like equating a microwave-dinner meltdown with nuclear devastation at Chernobyl.
