Stories From the Plague Years

by Michael Marano

  I was transfixed by the blue-orange will-o’-wisp glow of his pipe. I didn’t want to answer his question, even as my body answered it, with memories of blossoming pain echoing beneath my skin.

  I’m seven years old. I’ve locked myself in a bathroom, and I’m punching myself. There’s joy to venting anger and frustration, joy in damaging myself, making real and feelable the rage that stabs me from within with ghost-blades too dishonest to draw blood, or to leave scars that offer the consolation of watching them heal. I can’t remember why I’m so enraged . . . some comment from my father has roiled me into this frenzy, or some accusation of my mother’s has bewitched me with a fury that must be released somehow, even against myself. All I can recall is the passionate need to hit and hurt and punish someone, anyone, anything. Saints have known this pain through hair-shirt self-martyrdoms that let them feel the love of the Divine Father and see the Light of Heaven, not through rage that stains shadows the color of dying scabs.

  In my ecstasy of loathing, amid the blows I smashed against my brow and the back of my head, I looked up and saw my red, wrath-twisted face in the mirror . . . my little boy’s mouth fixed in a grimace, veins bulging at my temples, and bruises spreading like wine spilled on satin.

  I stood there, my small fists stopped in mid-blow, panting like a wolf over a steaming kill, thinking perhaps I could reach through the mirror and kill the boy who inspired such pity and contempt in me, hoping to travel through the Looking Glass to the fantasy world where a weak little boy could die by my hand as he deserved to.

  Instead of reaching through the unyielding and cruelly solid glass, I reached instead into my child’s mind and pulled forth a screaming, pleading surrogate: a thing to punish besides my own face, yet that still bore my face.

  After several minutes of pantomimed blows against another, non-existent thing that cowered in the corner where two sheets of ugly vinyl wallpaper met, my rage subsided.

  In the mirror, it seemed as if my bruises—for which I was often rewarded with extra food at dinner for sparing my parents the bother of inflicting them—faded. I washed my throbbing face with cold water and left the room with a soothing emptiness in my chest, knowing that what I had done was a ritual that offered me salvation.

  I decided to tell him.

  —Most children have imaginary playmates. I had an imaginary victim.

  —I . . . don’t understa . . .

  —I didn’t play with my imaginary friend. I beat the shit out of it. It was smaller than me and weaker and I could pummel it and bully it. I made it pay for the unspoken crimes I committed. It was my little pal. My coping mechanism.

  —It?

  —Yes. It.

  —It wasn’t a child, then? Another boy or girl?

  I know where the little shit came from, now. I’ve witnessed his birth twice. When I was older, just going to college, I’d sprained my knee. For two weeks, I walked using an elastic brace. Late one night, while getting ice water, I was too tired to put on the brace. My knee buckled. My arms flailed as I grabbed hold of a chair.

  And I saw myself ghosted in the night-black glass of the window over the sink, a mass of palsied movements, jerking limbs, reflected as on a pool of oil. A ridiculous caricature of who I am. The distorting glass made me look squat and twisted, like pictures I’d seen of the hunchback in Poe’s “Hop Frog.”

  What happened next was more than memory. It was a snapping of my mind through time that drowned my senses. Years collapsed, cracking into the moment in which I now stood on a burst knee, my arms trembling to support my weight.

  I’m five years old. My body remembers its weakness, its smallness. Even my mouth recalls the old set of my jaws before the loss of my milk teeth. I’m running through melting snow in my parents’ back yard. It’s warm for a winter’s day, spring-like. Despite this, my mother has packed me into a snowsuit too large for me, filling the space my body does not with layers of sweaters and pajama bottoms. Because it’s still winter out, no matter how warm and sunny and bright it is, no matter that the snow melts and drops from the branches . . . and to go to the yard in winter is how little shitty ungrateful boys catch cold and die, and that is how they show they don’t love their mothers, because their mothers have to worry all the time and if little boys really loved their mothers . . .

  So I wear the snowsuit and the layers and I’m miserably hot, because I also wear a hat and scarf. The drawstring of the hood is knotted to press against the underside of my chin: punishment tied by my mother’s sharp-nailed and rose-scented fingers for my wanting to step out into the air. I feel stupid and silly and angry. My movements are weighted, as if the air were thick as stale honey. The outfit is a prison I’ve been forced to wear, a prison like the loveless home I live in. I’m enraged that my body is co-opted as part of my prison. That I’m forced to be as weak and useless as my parents wish me to be.

  I try to run, as any child would, through the snow that glistens brilliantly, the only way I can: by holding my arms out almost to their sides and throwing my legs in front of me one at a time. I look up and see myself reflected against the windows of the house. They warp me like fun-house mirrors. I look like a twisted fat little goblin in a storybook, a troll creeping from under a bridge. Something rips inside me, tearing away like a strip of skin. The pain offers a kind of relief from the oppressive heat.

  That had been the first moment of self-contempt I’d ever felt that I understood to be self-contempt. The first time I’d been consciously sickened by my own image, the first splitting of the first cancerous cell that would devour my psyche. I realized this as I leaned against the table, recalling how I’d leaned that day against the swing set from which my father had removed the swings, lest I fall. My knee ached as I tasted the gorge that the Truth had pushed into my throat, through its revelation that my little scapegoat who’d helped me cope with my childhood had been me at that specific moment. A visualization of everything I’d hated about myself before I’d shattered myself in front of the bathroom mirror and pulled forth my victim: weak, whining (oh, how it used to whine so for mercy while I imagined torturing it), and pathetic.

  Thirst forgotten, I limped to bed.

  But wondering if this small totem of self-hate had been with me since birth, I didn’t sleep that night.

  Nor the next.

  —No. It was an it. Not human. Like a gremlin.

  —Did you imagine it to be not human so it would be easier to hurt?

  I watched the bank of phantom pipe smoke float between me and Doctor Johansson. The sun, creaking to the west, came from behind a cloud, and shadows from the thick window bars bled onto the smoke like slashes. I wondered if the yellowed air filter in the corner could draw the smoke that was not there.

  —I don’t think I’d have been as fond of hurting it, if it had been easy to hurt.

  —Did it have a name?

  The shadow bars faded. I don’t know how long I must have been silent for the clouds to hide the sun again. How much of this day had I spent in fugue-like silence? I was afraid to answer, to speak the Name I had never spoken, and invoke whatever hidden power might be knotted within that Name.

  —I gave it a stupid sort of kid’s name: Piggy.

  Nothing changed with the invocation of the Name. I watched Doctor Johansson’s eyes, to make sure he didn’t think the name funny. Or trite. It would embarrass me if he did.

  —Why did he have that name?

  —I think I gave it to him because he was kind of baby-pink, like a pig, or a puppy’s belly. It seemed to fit. I’d never heard the name before I gave it to him. Maybe the name floated in the ether as the name of victim, and I picked it up. I’d never heard of any victim character named Piggy until high school.

  The phantom smoke dulled the glass-hard reality before my eyes. The effect was soothing, yet I still felt a dread between my shoulder blades, that the Name so long unspoken might still reveal a potential that had been dormant.

  —What
did you do when you ah . . . punished Piggy?

  —Most often, I’d shut myself away and throw punches at it. Before that there had to be the chase, where I’d look all over the room to see where it was hiding. Then I’d drag it from the hiding place by the roots of its hair. And then I’d start beating it.

  —And this was like imaginary play?

  — I’d swing and kick at where I imagined Piggy to be. I’d get something like a sugar high during the punishment. My vision would get grey and buzzing. I’d be spent afterward.

  —Did you talk to it?

  —Sometimes I’d speak to it, to re-enforce the punishment. Things I’d learned from my father. Things like, Come out and take your medicine, you little shit!

  —Did Piggy say anything?

  —Mostly it just begged not to be hit. Sometimes I’d imagine it screaming.

  —You never had conversations with it? Like most kids do with imaginary friends?

  —We weren’t on speaking terms.

  —Sort of like you and your parents.

  His insight struck me like a heavy boot. The tumours nestled in me felt as if they shifted, like waking things.

  —Yes. Like me and my parents.

  —In fact, you were its parent. At least as you understood parents to be.

  Realization is the crash of a thing you didn’t know. What turned my guts to clay was not realization, but the stripping away of a refusal to know that the proportions of the creature, as I’d first imagined it, were the same as I had been proportioned to my father.

  —I suppose I was.

  —How old were you when you gave up Piggy?

  —About eleven or twelve.

  That wasn’t entirely true. The last time I’d used Piggy was about a year ago, the day I was diagnosed, the day all the nagging fears bloomed to awful fruition, when the worries about the bloody stools, cramps and fatigue boulder-crashed upon me and shattered whatever hope for a life I’d ever had.

  The world had chewed me and spat me out. I drunk-stumbled home from the doctor’s, wanting to vomit, wanting to take a knife and cut out the cancer myself, to make bloody and visible the inner maulings I’d suffered. My jaw locked, my fists felt fused solid, immobile as blocks of wood. Blood trickled from where I’d bitten through my lip, and I was afraid of my own blood, of the toxins it held that I could be ingesting back into me. Blind rage is a half-truth. Rage doesn’t blind. It inflicts more clarity than you can bear to see.

  The pain of vision searing me, I upended the table, threw dishes against the walls, embedding fragments into cheap sheetrock. I pummelled a wooden door until it splintered. My gaze, vicious as desert sun, fell on a shelf of shiny new paperbacks. I was cheated of the time to read them, so I destroyed them, cracking their spines and ripping them as strong men rip phone books. I kicked apart the bookshelf; a jutting nail sank deep behind my Achilles’ tendon. My raging sight burned away the pain of it. I moved on my wounded foot like a wind, not walking to the things I destroyed, but surging, like a swarm of leaves.

  I grabbed the phone from the wall. It was high-impact plastic, and would take a good long violent while to break. I hammered the receiver against the wall, watching lovely clouds of dust rise from the craters I punched into the plaster, watching each mote turn with the grace of malignantly indifferent planets.

  I smashed my thumb against the wall, crushing it between receiver and plaster.

  I howled as clarity burned itself to onyx. Evil thoughts packed themselves tight into my head, like a million blind maggots, a million demons all lusting for blood crammed inside my skull.

  I could have murdered all that lived in that second.

  In that darkness, in that mass of pitch that boiled itself from spectra that had been so unbearably bright, I remembered my little surrogate, my little scapegoat. I reached into my mind and dug up the mind I’d had as a child. In there, cowering, I found Piggy.

  Forcing my mind to be that of a child, I ripped away my blindness and found the little shit standing in front of me.

  I bellowed and launched myself at it.

  It was sweet—like when I knew the immortality of youth—to have it suffer and beg and plead and to hear with my mind’s ear the splintering of its bones and its screams and suddenly . . . bedded within the music of its screams I heard words, not the pleading excuses I’d been used to, but one syllable, uttered over and over beneath my imaginary blows like sobs.

  “Why?”

  I stopped and saw the bloody little face, so much like mine, the lips and cheeks hanging in shreds.

  The little being faded from my mind’s eye, and I wondered, Why should I punish the thing that had helped me cope? The thing that helped me survive?

  It was time to punish the ones who had hurt me, who had taken my life.

  I crawled over the rubble of my apartment, trailing blood from my left ankle. I hobbled to bed and slept a death-like sleep for almost a full day.

  When I awoke, with the sheet snaked around my feet clotted with dead brown blood, my mind felt wonderfully focused, clearer than I ever remembered.

  I planned the rest of my severed life with a new sense of purpose.

  —Why did you give up Piggy at that age?

  —Maybe I outgrew it. Maybe I refocused my anger into other channels, like all adolescents do. Not sure.

  —Do you think at some point, you would have given up killing, if you hadn’t been caught?

  —I think I would have finished my killings, or gotten tired of the planning and execution of them. Or died.

  —Did you ever want to stop?

  —I’d thought about it.

  —Did you want to be caught?

  —Oh please, stop me before I kill again? That’s so melodramatic. No. I expected to be caught, but I didn’t want to be.

  —Whom would you have killed after Catherine?

  —I thought about killing Sarah, another ex-girlfriend. But I thought about what she was like, and realized she must have been screwed up in the head, only I didn’t realize it when we were together. Too young. There was a lot bad in our relationship, but it was . . . human. Not cruel. Not malignant. I got in touch with her, just to see what she was like, now.

  —And?

  —We had a nice talk. She’s been in therapy. She had a pretty rough life I didn’t know about. I couldn’t hold her responsible for the crap she’d given me. The poor kid was scrambled. We had a quiet dinner date, for old times’ sake. It was all very nice.

  —There was no way you could have reconciled with Catherine?

  —No. We could only have peace after she was dead.

  Catherine knew my voice when I called her. I could taste the Tom’s-of-Maine-scented huff she blew into the receiver, the same expulsion she made whenever I asked for a crumb of help, even when I asked for coins with which to make a phone call. Still, she asked (with the same high- pitched pain in her voice that I once heard in the yelp of a stray kitten I found as the vet drew its blood), “Who is this?”

  “It’s Dean.”

  “Dean?”

  “Dean Garrison, Catherine.” Jesus Christ! You could pretend to remember the people you’ve pumped fluids with, you toxic, skeletal bitch.

  “Oh . . . Dean.” She let out a different flustered sigh, like someone called about back taxes. She had a wide vocabulary of sighs, complex and subtle enough to compose Haiku with.

  “I need to see you, Catherine.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” She spoke as a teacher would to a bad third grader, voice thick with finality. Yet there was a reflexive quality to what she said, the same with which a shop-girl would mutter, “Have a nice day.”

  I know her too well for her games to stab me now. I’ve read the fictions and the lies that are her life, to write myself into it as its coda. I know she’s had many lovers, a mass of half-remembered names and limbs and cocks she has puppeted not with strings, but words. I’ve choked on her gnawing hunger for
control, and I know many of her lovers have come back to her, desperate for the opiate freedom of her manipulation, and for the woollen-soft comfort of her abuse. I’ve seen her pick up the phone when ex-lovers call and vivisect them with her scalpel-precise tongue, only to tell me afterward that she was meeting them for coffee.

  But none of them have played the card I held, the totemic charm I’d now utter.

  “I’m dying, Catherine.”

  “What?!” She gasped, perhaps taken off guard while on the phone with a man for the first time.

  “I’m dying.”

  “How?!”

  Through the phone lines, I felt the air around her tingle with her worry that her psychotic love life has risen, like a chain-draped ghost, to haunt her . . . that I gave her AIDS or she gave it to me. Since she was the greatest AIDS risk I’ve ever run, I let her sweat. I choked crocodile tears, took deep breaths.

  “I have cancer.”

  “Oh.” A new sigh, rich with poetry I’ve never heard before: a fucking sigh of relief.

  “I want to talk. I want to make sure everything is squared away between us. It would mean a lot to me.”

  At no point during our exchange did I tell a single lie.

  The walk to Catherine’s apartment was pleasant. The wonderful smells of crisp October night thickened to a delicious liquor; the stars were bright as angels’ eyes, not faded by the glowing rot of the city. I hungered to drop my anger toward Catherine: a burden I’d carried too long. It was a near sexual need, a quasi-tantric state that trembled beneath my muscles deep near the bone. The desire, its silent, healing passion, told me along my very nerves that there had to be something decent at the core of my relationship with Catherine, otherwise we’d have never gotten together. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have stayed together as long as we did, and let our relationship twist into the knotted web that it became, something that grew like a cancer and sundered what was healthy between us. Tonight I’d cut that cancer away.

  I stopped below Catherine’s building, palms damp, heart fluttering, as if I wore another body, like a coat, over the one full of tantric expectation: another body that I formed through the act of looking at and through her home. I leaned against a tree and unslung my book-bag, the final emblem of my youth, for I’d die at the age when I was expected to start carrying a briefcase. The bag clattered from the shiny metal instruments inside that I’d purloined from an undertakers’ supply house—the keen blades that would help Catherine and me fix our relationship better than any couples’ counsellor could.