What Goes On In The Walls At Night: Thirteen tales of disgust and delight

by Andrew Schrader

  Approaching panic, Everett tried to speed this up. “Arms up, palms up,” he said, when—

  “Oh, sir? I think you’re forgetting something. I’d like to make this inspection a little more intimate.” Then he said something which drove spikes of fear through Everett’s heart. “I’d like a private room.”

  “I th-th-think right here is fine, sir.”

  The man grinned even wider. “Ah, yes, well, this man here”—he pointed to himself with both thumbs—“knows that by law, each and every person who comes through here is allowed to request a private screening”—his eyes flashed—“so as not to cause the subject any undue embarrassment.”

  What could Everett do? He knew he was right. If he refused, it could cost him his job. And even though, at this moment, this man here made him hate his job, made him regret that he’d ever left the slaughterhouse in the first place, Everett knew he could safely reason that this would be the last time he’d ever have to see this man. He couldn’t let one person drag him down, make him question his life, his own existence. It was, after all, just a man.

  Everett led him to the private room, to the back-right of the checkpoint. It was secluded, isolated, though there was a camera mounted in the top-left corner of the room that captured any and all events.

  The man put one foot down in the small feet marks on the floor, which were painted in white and yellow. He pounded his other foot on the floor like a soldier reporting for duty then stared straight ahead.

  Everett started. “All right, sir,” he said, full of contempt. “Once again, this is an invasive search. I’m going to be touching sensitive areas, including . . . your private areas.”

  The man gave his enthusiastic approval.

  Everett began, this time, by running his fingers around the collar of the man’s bright yellow polo shirt, then, flattening his palms against the man’s back and chest, pulled downward on the material as hard as he could. By the end, the man’s shirt was hanging loosely at the collar and two inches longer in the front and back than when he came in. The man didn’t care, didn’t notice; he was much too happy, giggling and oohing and aahing and cooing at every touch. Every palm and finger that touched the man through the shirt sent fresh spasms of ecstasy through his body.

  “I’m going to touch the inside of your thighs . . . and your buttocks,” warned Everett, now close to tears. Still, he had to proceed. It was his job. And like most people who work solely for their job, Everett was able to stop the tears and stuff them way deep down inside—to explode at some inopportune time in the coming weeks, months, or years. (You may have read about these people: the term is “going postal,” and it occurs when people spend most of their waking hours upset and unhappy at a job and a life they never wanted.)

  As Everett stuffed his unfortunate feelings he ruffled the cuffs of the pants down by the man’s loafers, then flattened his palms against the man’s bony legs and worked his way up, feeling the veins and bones in intimate ways normally reserved for lovers. In fact, Everett felt like a lover of sorts. And when he’d reached the top of the man’s jeans, to the upside-down V that signifies where the legs meet the groin, he realized he was face to face with the most intimate of intimate places. Everett was on his knees, looking up at the bulge in the man’s pants, and beyond the pants there was the man, and the man was smiling, gazing down at Everett, nodding and grinning, nodding and grinning.

  Everett looked up over his shoulder at the camera in the top-left corner of the room. The red light on its top was blinking every couple of seconds, and Everett shamefully realized that this would all be on camera, saved for all eternity. There would always be evidence of the man with the erection.

  Suddenly, Everett felt a pull on his fingers. Not like someone was tugging them, just a pull towards the man’s belly button. At first Everett thought he’d stumbled, and tried to draw back, but the pressurized jerks were overwhelming. Everett quickly found himself wrist deep in the man’s belly button. He gasped, looked up, saw the man’s face—who’d thrown his head forward, grinning, of course, to watch the show. The arm went in, up to the elbow, then there was a popping sound, and Everett disappeared altogether.

  Everett is fine, don’t you worry about him. He’s lying down now, resting, somewhere in the dip of my stomach, near the pyloric sphincter, where he won’t be jostled by the ocean waves of my belly. At first he tried to fight his way back up to the esophagus, but I soon taught him his lesson with a cup of hot coffee. So now he sits and waits, though he gets hungry at times. It was difficult, at first, for him to adjust to my vegetarian lifestyle (his old diet being 70 percent meat). But now he lies, waiting for the next batch of food, and though I’m sure it sickens him his survival instinct is strong, so he continues to eat. He must be careful, though, not to get sucked into the intestines, for there is no coming back up once he goes down.

  Everett and I are very happy, thank you very much. We get along; sometimes we bicker when I exercise and shake him around—but for the most part we are good together.

  What I love most is when he climbs, hoping, somewhere, somehow, he’ll find a way out of my cavernous tummy. The climbing and touching provokes wonderful waves of ecstasy and pure giddiness—the feeling I grew to love back at the airport.

  And you know how much I love to be touched.

  Wings

  My part in the Martin Nicholls affair started almost twelve months ago, when he called to ask if I would drive the 140 miles or so from Madison, Wisconsin, to Wausau that same evening. I had just thrown my bags down on my living room floor, hung my captain’s cap on the hat rack, set my pilot wings on the kitchen table, and was settling in for two weeks off, deciding what to do with my free time, when the phone rang.

  No, it wasn’t an emergency emergency, he said, but he needed an old friend, someone he could trust. Yes, tonight. It had to be tonight. It had been years since college; he would be so happy to see me in person and catch up. Could I leave right now? Please don’t tell anyone, he asked, he couldn’t handle any press sniffing around his business again.

  You might remember Martin Nicholls, if you’re a sports fan. Day after the Packers’ last-second 21-20 victory over San Francisco four or five years back, Martin held a rushed, end-of-day press conference where he announced his departure from the NFL to his estate in upper Wisconsin.

  Big news, for a first-round draft pick to leave mid-season. Made front page headlines for a few days. Soon, however, his story was bowled over by some sports scandal involving price-fixing or something, and Martin Nicholls happily disappeared from the limelight. After that he split from his beautiful model wife, and then he was alone.

  I looked at the clock and reviewed my options. It was 7:30 p.m. For him to call me after twelve years, out of the blue, alarmed me. He could have been suicidal. Perhaps I could talk him into a program. I agreed to come that night.

  “Adios,” he said, and hung up.

  Three hours later a 767 screeched overhead. I was near the airport, standing in front of a supermarket in an urban part of town outside Wausau. Martin had given me instructions to wait in the parking lot of the Ranchero Market on North 17th Avenue and wait for his call to the pay phone.

  Another plane roared. Made me homesick. Not for my home, for the plane. I can’t stand not being in the air for too long. Honestly, I found the idea of two weeks off utterly depressing. With no wife, no kids, and nothing holding me back except four walls, a roof, and the payments on them both, the time ahead loomed before me like a lonely highway in the desert.

  For me, nothing beats the air. I have the displeasure of having been born in the wrong body, as the wrong animal. When I was four I leapt from the play structure at my preschool—I’d just known that I could fly. And I did, for about two seconds.

  Weeks later, after the cast was taken off my arm, I tried it again. I thought it would be different this time. It was. I broke a leg. After that I stopped trying to fly.

  But the love of flight had taken hold. Posters of Wo
rld War II aviators, models of P-51 Mustangs and Boeing 314 Dixie Clippers, and other paraphernalia for my imagination consumed all available wall and dresser space. Once the comic books started, my mother sat me down for a chat.

  Without real wings, I settled on being a pilot. I received my first in-flight training at sixteen—a surprise birthday present from my father—and flew my own grasshopper illegally the year after that. From there I earned my private pilot certificate, my commercial license, and my flight instructor certificates and found work for Belle Airlines. That was thirty-five years ago, which makes me a veteran.

  I think about it sometimes. It. The end. I can’t fly forever, and in a pilot’s life I’m passed my prime. Morbid considerations, maybe, but considerations nonetheless. I’ve always thought I’d like to die in flight. I used to think I’d crash a small pond jumper into an empty barn, or fly high enough for the air pressure to dissipate and the engines fail. There I would eject with no parachute and—

  The phone rang.

  “Here’s what I need.” Martin’s words came out in an avalanche. “Can you write this down—don’t forget it, I need it, and you have to get exactly what I need, what I need right now—”

  I pulled out a pen and paper. He sounded much different, agitated, like a man losing control of himself. I’d seen it before. In the air you see a lot of things, one of them being people panicking. Panic attacks are common up there. It starts slow: at first a person can’t breathe. Then they look around, all wide-eyed and crazy, and sometimes they just spit their speech like a child spits their food: messy and mushy.

  “Here it is.” Martin took a deep breath, which sounded labored and wheezy. “Twelve whole chickens, two pork loins, three tri-tips, a New York steak, six slabs of bacon, fourteen packages of processed bologna, ten packages of hot dogs like you get at the baseball park—chicken, beef, whatever they got, the more meat in them the better—forty or fifty cans of Vienna sausages—on second thought, just buy whatever they have in stock, the hot dogs I mean—a rump roast or two or seven, eight packs of pork ribs, ten or fifteen packs of hot links, however many whole frozen turkeys they have today, and clean out their selection of ham hocks.”

  I finished writing. “Is that all?”

  Martin cleared his throat, coughed, spoke. “Can you get me some oats? I need the fiber.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Some roast beef, prime rib . . .” He then listed off another dozen or so items that on second thought were absolutely vital.

  “Martin, this will cost at least—”

  “I have a tab. Just give them my name. They know me.”

  “You have a tab?”

  “Jesus Christ, I was MVP, remember? They know who I am.” He talked like I was stupid or something. But no MVP I knew, or anyone, ever, had a tab for meat at the grocery. Unless—

  “You gonna tell me what this is for? I just drove three hours to get here. Are you having a party or something?”

  He snickered. “Party? Yeah, sure. You and me, bud. There’ll be drinks, dancing, steaks!” He laughed and laughed, then choked, coughed, sputtered. “Just get here. Please. Here’s the address . . .”

  I wrote it down, hung up the phone, and went inside.

  He was telling the truth, too. The man had a running tab for meat.

  After three attendants packed my trunk, back seat, and floors full of frozen meat, I sped off, the meat piled so high I couldn’t see out the back window. Soon the city lights faded far behind me. I drove out of the city, fifteen or twenty miles, into the wilderness, and there was no longer any need to see out the back window, for I was all alone.

  I wound through a forest of birch and cedar trees so thick the moonlight never touched the floor. I ascended a mountain towards my old, isolated friend’s even more isolated estate, and soon found myself at a gated mansion set far back at the top. The twelve-foot high gate was already open. Vines snaked around the bars. Dead leaves flew up as my car passed. The gate shut behind on its own, and I drove the last two hundred feet up to the face of Martin Nicholls’s manor.

  I stepped out of the car, heard the birds first. They were all around me. If you remember the news story of Martin’s seclusion upstate, you may also remember that he’d retired on an old bird sanctuary.

  I turned as a hooded oriole perched itself on my car’s antenna. To my left I identified a black-headed gull, several sparrows, a warbler, even a mountain bluebird. Birds aren’t usually out at night. These ones were.

  Overgrown shrubs and bushes and trees lined the property. Flowers had been planted, had grown, matured, and died; now their skeletons wound around the house. All the foliage (the entire estate, in fact) had been neglected for some time.

  The mansion itself was symmetrically perfect, with two massive domed structures that jutted up on either side of the house like turrets. I guessed from left to right the place stretched two hundred feet, one hundred on either side of me, since I stood in the exact middle. Behind my car, near the circular driveway, was one of those tasteless statues of a mermaid standing straight up, spitting water ten feet into the air. There were, in fact, three of those girls, all with their heads back, breasts jutting out of their seashell bikinis, covered in birdshit, ready to do Martin’s bidding.

  The car, too (I assumed it to be Martin’s) sat caked in dust and dirt. From the looks of it, it hadn’t moved in many months, possibly a year.

  In any case, the meat shouldn’t sit there in my back seat, and I would need help to bring it all in. I honked the horn twice to signal Martin.

  He didn’t come out.

  I honked again, waited.

  Then, a voice, amplified by a megaphone, exploded from inside the house.

  “YES, THANK YOU, COME IN RIGHT AWAY! AND DON’T FORGET THE GROCERIES!”

  The front door opened with a tiny push, and I stepped into a beautiful, marble-floored reception area. Ahead stretched a wide staircase that started as one then split off into two and wrapped around the second story. The hallways extended along either side of the upstairs hallway, and led to various rooms, so the whole upper floor was one big open circle that overlooked the entryway.

  The house, though, was under invasion of dust. It had a smell to it, too: a sour, rotten odor. Full of sweat and fog and funk and age.

  And meat. Of course, the meat.

  Red meat. Cold meat. Raw meat. Cooked meat.

  Days of cooking. Lifetimes of cooking.

  The stench of boiled, baked, sautéed meat had buried itself in the walls, in the bannisters, the furniture. It had claimed the house, held it hostage, and I doubted any amount of washing or de-stinkefying could expel it.

  “QUICKLY, QUICKLY, IN THE KITCHEN!”

  I rounded the corner to the kitchen, a turkey under each arm.

  I stopped abruptly when I saw him.

  “Glover, my friend,” said the 800-pound bloated bag of mush in the corner. He let go of the megaphone and it rolled onto the floor. “You came!”

  I turned away, almost at once. Martin, my friend, was leaned up in the shadowy corner. Some yellow from the porch lights outside the kitchen streamed in between the cracks of the blinds, casting slivers of light that cut across his bulbous, mushroomlike head. Both his head and body were coated in a greasy sheen.

  “I know, I know, this looks bad,” he said, raising his rolling red arms that could block out the sun. “But you know what, I’m happy, and that’s all that matters. That’s what’s important, right? Hey, Glover—Gloooo-verrrr! Look at me, come on, don’t treat me like a leper.”

  I must have looked like a kid avoiding his parent’s gaze; I still hadn’t seen Martin straight on. Slowly I turned my head, cautiously, saw a little, turned away, turned back, keeping my head now in one place, so I only saw him at an angle.

  “Your face!” I said.

  “Oh, that.” He rolled his eyes, his hand going up to his forehead, as if he’d just realized it was there. “Yeah, yeah, oh well. What can you do?”

  “B
ut—it’s completely red! And—?” There were bands across his face. White bands of muscle.

  I turned slowly and faced him straight on, as curious now as disgusted. He was still mostly bathed in darkness, and I stepped forward to get a better look.

  Martin’s face had lost its roundness. It was now almost completely flat, like a slab of steak. His nose had faded into the planar surface of the skin beneath his eyes. His hairline fled toward the back side of his skull. His eyes were sunk far back into the flatness of his Mack truck face, so far back that his skin covered them over, giving him vision troubles. Ears he still had, only they were tinier and pulled back tight against the side of his head.

  Then there were the bands of color that ran diagonally, haphazardly, across his face every which way, like scars, or meaty muscles.

  His head looked like a rectangular piece of meat.

  “Martin,” I said, steadying myself on his kitchen counter to sit down on a stool, “I know it’s not my place, but I think you have a problem.”

  His breathing came in short wheezes, his red and white striped shirt stretching across his waist, his stomach bulging sideways, three feet across. Down near his groin, at the bottom of his stomach, his fat, wormlike loins were impossibly stacked on each other. A little bit of his hairless fish-white stomach peeked out under his shirt. His arms rested on the sides of his body like propped-up sausages.

  A giant balloon man, made of pork.

  “Yeah, you could be right.” He mouth-breathed, unable to get air. “I do need help. You’re such a good friend, that’s why I called you.”

  His breath snagged in his fatty windpipe, and he coughed and gasped and burped and farted, all at the same time.

  When he stopped rumbling, all the fat around his midsection hung so low his legs appeared to connect with his stomach. The skin around his calves was pulled tight, stretched and red with broken blood vessels.