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

by Andrew Schrader

  On the next block, a six-year-old girl they both knew from school, Anna, sprinted out of her home and joined them. Overalls flapping, pigtails bouncing, her arms pumping back and forth, propelling invisible air that cascaded behind her little body, protecting her and her new friends from Anna’s parents, who were in pursuit.

  They sprang to the right down Elderwood Lane, losing their parents, soon joined by three more kids. Then five more. A dozen. Soon, other children, handfuls at a time, feeling the indefinable feelings of joy, of possibility, of electricity, ran beside them in shimmering bursts of glee.

  They formed packs. A hundred per pack. A thousand. Running atop cars, scattering over gardens and lawns. The stampede of animal children took over the town.

  Adults sought shelter, praying the thunderous beasts wouldn’t destroy their electronic caves. The children became wild buffalo on prairie lanes, trampling the earth, readying the soil for the bugs and larvae and ground squirrels. They shed their human minds and bodies and became animals, dirty and snarling—and loving.

  They made wild hissing sounds, then broke apart in laughter. They passed through a ladybug swirl and invited the bugs to join the pack. They did.

  More children, young prodigies of the earth, soon carried creatures with them—on their backs, in their hands, wrapped in their hair. Heads became swarms and hives. Shoes became sanctuaries for bugs and bees and other small creatures.

  All were invited. Plants and animals around the neighborhood came to the cyclone of loving children, and all gathered as one, running and growing and running and growing in a never-ending tornado.

  All the city’s children, and of all the wildlife that goes unnoticed in civilized life, gathered their troops for the great rewilding. Town after town, county after county, state after state. No resting. No stopping. No need.

  Soon all the nations’ and the world’s children and animals were whisked up in the frenzied tornado. And everyone rose up together and left their parents and this planet for that strange, magical place where the night of running children lasts forever.

  Every Day

  Out near the pastures, past the grazing cows and beyond the edge of the giant rocks that spatter Dinosaur Point, Richard and Jamie were wed. Over seven years, they’d loved, split, loved again, and were now taking their most sacred of vows. They held their palms pressed together, parallel to their lips. Far away, the sunlight split a cloud, lit up the sides of their faces, and disappeared into the shadows of the hills as the two lovers came apart.

  They stayed just that way: lips locked, smiling, separating, smiling, and kissing again. It was a lovely pattern enjoyed by few couples. Time spent together had no better use. Sleep proved difficult, as their bodies were too eager to find each other. Time outside of work was celebratory. It was a joyous life.

  Yet, as time worked its contradictory magic, their habits became both frayed and grooved over the years. Love was overcome by tedium: grocery shopping on weekday nights, whiny children, five-day workweeks, quick breakfasts, too much television, and not enough time for anything except the tasks of daily living. Vacations were brief and infrequent.

  While zest and life rarely mixed over the years, their love remained. Sometimes it was buried, and sometimes their bodies did not press together at night. Sometimes anger came fast over small difficulties, and sometimes flaring tempers tried their patience.

  On a Wednesday morning (the worst day of the week for some), Richard rose for work for the ten thousandth time. He would soon look forward to Thursday so that he could look forward to Friday, which would be unbearable, except for the last two hours of the day when he could taste the weekend.

  They went to work. After making plans to have Jamie’s sister pick up their two noisy children, Richard and Jamie decided to celebrate their wedding anniversary by meeting at their favorite restaurant in the city.

  Richard arrived first. He ordered a drink and waited, trying to hide the bouquet of roses he’d picked up around the corner (men get embarrassed at having to hold flowers in public, for reasons unknown).

  The minutes passed, but still no company. Richard checked his watch. It was much too late now—twenty-five minutes past their meeting time. As he stepped out of the booth to leave, he glanced toward the door and saw a magnificent-looking female, all dolled up in an extraordinarily tight, red dress that stopped inches above her knees.

  This woman was dressed unlike any woman he’d ever seen before.

  It was his wife.

  In she came, looking around the restaurant like she was searching for someone she didn’t know.

  Richard waved and caught her glance, and the woman cocked her head at him, slightly puzzled. Keeping her head to one side as if she didn’t recognize her husband, she walked straight up to him and asked:

  “Are you Michael?”

  Richard blinked.

  He decided that he had better play along with his wife, this woman who’d come all the way here, dressed like a model, and called him strange names. Yes, he was going to play along.

  She extended a hand. “Macy.”

  “Macy?” He smiled.

  “You don’t like it?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Are those for me?” Macy pointed to the roses he was still hiding beneath the table.

  He quickly apologized and gave them to her.

  Macy settled back in her chair. “I hate red roses. Are there drinks?”

  His wife, Jamie, had always loved red roses.

  Then, he remembered this was a play—his wife was pretending.

  “Waiter!” He flagged down a young man with a mustache, and he and his wife were soon tipsy.

  After a few drinks, Richard stopped asking himself whether he should break the charade. Instead, they learned about each other’s new personalities—his name was Michael, and he’d been schooled at Notre Dame. After a brief career in classical music, he’d become a programmer at a Fortune 100 company, inventing a technology commonly used in something that only tech people cared about.

  Macy had just gotten out of a marriage to a boring old geezer who’d never loved her anyway, and she worked as a high-profile advertising executive at a large television station in the city. She had no children, and never planned on having them. She enjoyed her freedom.

  The surreal nature of the night overshadowed their normal, everyday lives, and Richard was lost in the fantasy. He forgot about his work, their kids, their house that needed a new roof, the dog with the bad hind leg, the car that needed a new transmission, the in-laws who always had a problem with the way they’d done something.

  Habitual life faded into the horizon of memory, and for those few hours, this man and woman became lovebirds anew. They spun fantastic stories about lavish trips they’d never taken, fairy tales about robbers and daring getaways from the police, mind-readers from Calcutta, and Michael told Macy how he suspected his neighbors were some kind of werewolves raised from the Dead Sea. Later, they crept up to that neighbor’s living room window, where they remained, peeking in, waiting for werewolves until the sun came up.

  In the morning, Richard sat up and rubbed his eyes, rolling out of bed—left foot first, as always—before heading to the bathroom and brushing his teeth. He stepped out of the bathroom and watched his beautiful wife wake up.

  “Good morning,” she said, stretching.

  Richard responded, all in good fun, “Good morning, Macy.”

  She blinked. “My name’s Annabelle.”

  Richard rolled his eyes and went back to the bathroom to finish getting ready. But when he returned, he couldn’t get Macy—or Jamie—to act like his wife. After several minutes of joking, then arguing, then joking again, Richard decided to leave it alone and go to work.

  Later that night, Jamie still wasn’t acting like Jamie. Or Macy. Instead, she was still pretending to be Annabelle, the orthodontist with a practice two towns over.

  Richard was perplexed. Still, what could he do? That night, he took on the pe
rsona of Oliver, a hip bartender from the East Side.

  They had another magical night.

  Days passed. Then weeks and months. Annies and Shanes and Dannys and Janes, Cindys and Sams and Alishas and Scotts all came to know and love one another. For the next twenty-seven years, two consecutive mornings never saw the same two people.

  Good times and bad times and everything in between came and went. Deliriously happy days that found the woman bubbly and inspirational were followed by days of her waking up sick, miserable, and refusing to work. One day she was a high-profile civil rights attorney and the next, a writer from Belgium. They went to bed excited for what the next day might bring. There was no more dread for work or groaning at life’s little problems.

  Things were new again.

  Even when life presented those terrible times that come to us all, the man and woman stayed sane and delighted. There were no more bad days—even when they were bad. Each day was precious and significant. Previously boring trips to the grocery store at rush hour, when tired bodies plodded down the aisles for frozen chicken and vegetables, became exciting as the man and woman learned about who they were that day.

  But then, a horrible day came—a day we all know will come and avoid discussing. For months, the woman had been growing sicker, and she was about to pass at the old age of 85. She called out Richard’s name and motioned him over to her hospital bed.

  “Hey,” he said, “you called me Richard! It’s you, Jamie. How long have you been back?”

  She smiled. “I’ve always been here.”

  “So, you were only pretending!”

  “Yes and no. I was pretending, but one day, the day before I created Macy, I realized something. You and I, and everybody else, are always somebody else, each day. Each night we go to bed, and the next morning we are reborn. We only think we’re the same people every day because our minds tell us it’s so. I thought we were getting tired of each other, that life was just about running errands and taking care of kids and being with the same person. But it wasn’t true.”

  Richard smiled. “Yes, I guess you’re right. I only think I’ve seen the inside of our home before, our car, your beautiful face, but the truth is I’ve never been here because today is a new day. And neither have you seen our house, our car, my face. And if you and I have never been here before, then each moment is new, forever . . . Now that I think about it, every time I’d get mad or annoyed at you these past years, I’d also get instantly sad. I think it’s because I knew it would be the last time I’d see you. And how could I really be angry at someone I knew would be gone in just a few hours?”

  Richard paused, smiled. “We really lived every day, didn’t we?”

  Jamie looked up at him, eyes wet. “Most people want to fall in love once, just once. But we’ve fallen in love ten thousand times.”

  Then they hugged and cried, and Richard knew this would be the last day he’d ever spend with his beautiful bride—with whom he’d just been reunited after all these years. He crawled into the hospital bed with her and held her frail body, wrapping her hand in his.

  “Darling?” he asked.

  “Yes, dear?”

  “Tell me about who you are today.”

  And she did.

  The Parasite

  I see these kids sometimes driving their parents crazy: screaming, kicking, crying in the airport or the grocery store while the red-faced, infuriated mother struggles not to smack their grimy face. “I swear, my son doesn’t kick the walls like this at our house. He just needs more space.” This is one version of the usual explanation, but the parent is fucking boiling inside.

  Those kids are bad, but bad in the normal kid way. The kind of bad I’m talking about is bad bad. I’m talking about evil. A deep badness that no parent can scream, cry, cajole, or beat out of them.

  I have one of those kids. Actually, it’s my wife’s kid. After she died, I was entrusted with his care. I’m not sure how to say this without sounding awful, but sometimes you just know something about someone: a feeling, a deep-seated unease that’s hard to explain.

  They revolt you.

  That’s how it was with Cory. Twelve-year-old Cory. Waves of disgust rolled through me as his care worker wheeled him in when we picked him up to bring him home with us. My wife, Sally, waited for him with open arms. Cory had lived in a facility most of his life, and his biological father—long since divorced from my new bride—had been his primary caretaker.

  Cory had a rare form of palsy. No one knew how to treat it. The doctors could only label the symptoms, not the disease itself, which made him a medical anomaly. His mind and body were born atrophied and stayed that way.

  I could only pity the kid. I’d met him once before, seven years before, when his mother and I drove down to Ventura from our home in San Jose. I remember the open room with huge windows that diffused the flowers and piano and patients in a soft, white glow like an old movie. Cory’s back faced us, and I shivered when the nurse turned him around. Beady eyes, one larger and higher on his face than the other. His tiny smile bored right through me.

  I hated him immediately.

  Two years ago, Cory’s father died in his sleep. It was mysterious. His heart had stopped. When they opened him up, rumor said that the coroner gasped. Later, she admitted that she had no explanation for the extreme calcification of the man’s heart. Men twice his age didn’t have the blackened muscle of this fifty-year-old man. In some rare cases in people exposed to extreme radiation—like those in Chernobyl—their hearts would calcify and age prematurely. But that was nothing compared to this.

  Through complications with the will, there was little money left for Cory’s care. The facility in Ventura cost thousands of dollars each month, but with no more incoming cash, the hospital released him into Sally’s care.

  We set up the spare bedroom, once my man-cave: part poker room, part movie corner, and total sanctuary. I got rid of everything, stuffing it all deep into the garage. We retrofitted the room and adjusted the internal wiring for Cory’s equipment.

  We added a small fridge for his medications and amino acids, and we purchased a van specially designed for his wheelchair. Then, of course, we moved Cory in. It took two hours to get him inside. I eventually got it down to thirty minutes. Normal ins-and-outs required knocking down the kitchen wall and widening the door frames. Three months and $28,000 later, Cory was settled in.

  I didn’t like the way Cory changed our personal lives. I stayed later at work, went out with my coworkers, and did whatever I could to stay away from Cory and the house. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the shitty feeling I got when I saw him.

  About two months later, Sally came home complaining of a sharp stiffness in the back of her neck that ran down to her ass. Her entire spine and the surrounding muscles had tightened, causing headaches and forcing her to walk hunched over. Lying down brought some relief, but the pulsing pains gnawed at her and forced her to lose several weeks of work. With the remodel and the time we’d had to take off work, we were almost out of money and our savings was gone. We’d mortgaged the house—again.

  I took more time off from my sales manager position at a large server manufacturing company, and Sally and I began making the rounds at doctors’ offices to try to treat her. The first doctor, the one through my insurance, called her condition TMJ. His hypothesis was that Sally’s years at a desk job had caused severe muscular issues. But this didn’t satisfy Sally. Muscles in her back would seize for minutes or hours at a time. TMJ couldn’t explain that.

  The second doctor proclaimed it was multiple sclerosis, which his tests couldn’t confirm. We went to a third doctor, who labelled it fibromyalgia, or phantom pain. It was never the same diagnosis.

  Two months later, we came home from the fifth doctor. I helped Sally inside, one arm slung around her back and one propping her up under the armpit. Staggering around the corner, we stopped mid-stride.

  Cory was lying facedown on the hardwood floor near the kitchen. His
wheelchair was several yards away, which meant that he fell out and then crawled.

  Impossible.

  I rushed over. Cory was awake. He dribbled a bit, his eyes fluttering once and locking on mine. I picked him up to put him back in his chair.

  “What happened?” came a squeaky voice. It was just loud enough to hear over the buzzing refrigerator.

  I nearly dropped him. Speaking? Impossible! His vocal cords never developed. How could he talk? I looked at Sally, but we were both shocked.

  “What happened?” the voice repeated.

  “I think you crawled, little guy.” What else could I say? With that, I placed him in bed and inspected him for bruises.

  “Thank you, Dad,” he said, almost as an afterthought.

  “You’re welcome.” I waited patiently for the soft sounds of sleep and then left, exhausted.

  I helped Sally upstairs. Her feet curled under at the arches. Hunched, she hung with one arm around my neck, the other gripping some unseen pain on her back, just above the hip.

  We walked on slowly.

  The stairs took ten minutes.

  Sweat soon came in rivers, making her makeup run down her face. By the time I got her in bed, her complexion had turned sallow, and her face was mottled by pain and cosmetics.

  “What’s happening to me?” she lamented before submitting to sleep. We didn’t talk about Cory.

  Over the weeks, her symptoms progressed. The muscles around her skull and the back of her neck became taut like rope. Every night, I’d spend an hour patting her down with heating pads and then massaging out whatever knots I could.

  After a week, I started using the rolling pin from the kitchen on her skull and back. It would help for an hour or two, but then her muscles would snap back and make everything worse. Sometimes the pressure made her vomit for hours at a time, and sometimes she could only mutter hoarsely the next day.

  A week later, her legs locked at the knees and then at the ankles. Her shoulders, high and compacted against her neck, stuck out like a hunchback in an old movie. Her fingers were gnarled like oak.