The Scream

by John Skipp; Craig Spector

  Ted had frozen fast in the corridor, watching the pro-cession, which was almost upon him. He was surprised to find himself locking eyeballs with the happy captive: a gaze momentarily broken for a wicked little wink.

  “I must be the luckiest boy in the world,” the kid said in a passable Pee Wee Herman imitation. “First day of my tenth-grade year, and already I got two dates for the senior prom!”

  Ted laughed. Joe Fridays One and Two cast a quartet of baleful eyes toward him. “Cutest girls in the school, too,” the prisoner incanted, and then they were past him, receding down the hall. But there was no mistaking the instant camaraderie that their introductory gaze had signaled.

  Later that day Ted discovered the nature of the heinous crime that had sent Chris Konopliski perforce to the principal’s office. When Chris’s homeroom teacher, a wretched old bat named Miss Renquist, had inquired as to the scholastic appropriateness of his black leather jacket, he had said, “Why, I’m just modeling the new Miss Renquist line of lingerie.”

  It was nice to have found a friend.

  Ted studied the painting on the back panel of his jacket. It was a staggeringly good reproduction of the Scream album cover. The superimposed images of the band in the foreground, semitransparent and shimmering. The tortured sky. The burning lake.

  Best of all was the mouth, subtle but unmistakable, that spanned the length of the sky.

  Its subtle, unmistakable smile.

  God, he’s talented, Ted told himself. No way he was gonna say it out loud again, but lordy, weren’t it the troof. In New York or California . . . in any halfway civilized place . . . Chris would be rakin’ in the bucks with a talent like that.

  But here, way out in West Buttfuck, nobody gave a shit. It was like the whole town had already decided that Chris was no good, that he’d never amount to anything, that he and his whole deadbeat Polack family were completely beneath their contempt.

  If Chris is ever gonna get anywhere, Ted concluded, he’s gonna have to get the hell out of this town first. Go somewhere where people’s taste isn’t lodged in their ass.

  Somewhere where nobody knows his name.

  Then he looked at the jacket again. From where he stood, it looked damn near perfect. It made him want to look at the cover and compare. Unfortunately, Chris had opened it up and was using it to clean the pot. He leaned over Chris’s shoulder to check the readiness, and wound up looking at the inside painting instead.

  It was an uppergrandstand view of an enormous indoor coliseum. The oval floor was ringed with a wall of brilliant flames. Within it was a pool of what appeared to be molten lava, in the shape of a five-pointed star. There were contorted tidbits of human anatomy at every point within the pool: clawing arms, straining torsos, screaming faces. They sizzled and smoked in what seemed phenomenal anguish.

  In the heart of the pool, something huge and terrible was beginning to emerge from beneath that steaming gumbo of body parts and souls. A misshapen claw.

  The crest of the head.

  And surrounding the pentagram on all sides was the crowd: filling the seats, the aisles, every bit of available space. They were all young. They were all hip. They were all dead.

  And though their bodies were extended in wild gestures of supplication, they all appeared to be screaming. . . .

  “You know,” Chris said, as he folded the E-Z Wider and began to load it with clean green, “I wonder about these guys sometimes.”

  “Well, you can wonder out loud to your little heart’s content at the concert on Monday.”

  “I mean it,” Chris reasserted, lighting up and taking a deep lungful off the joint for emphasis. “These guys are extreme.”

  “So what are you saying?” Ted took the doob for him.

  “I’m . . . just . . . saying. . . ,” Chris began, then his lungs exploded in a racking cough. Ted laughed. Chris was roughly twelve times more stoned by the time he finished. “I’m just saying I wonder about them, sometimes.”

  “I’m sure they wonder about you, too. You’re such a dork.”

  “No, but really. Think about it. All this ‘Critical Mass’ shit: it’s like they really want the world to blow up, you know it?”

  “Well, hell”—Ted laughed—“who doesn’t?”

  In the living room, nearly three minutes of blessed near-silence had passed. Those minutes were over. The heavy-metal thunder from above had resumed.

  “Bang, crash, boom,” Rachel Adams said, rolling her eyes in time with the music. A lock of her long red hair fell over said eyes; she brushed it away without losing a beat. She was scarcely an inch over five feet tall; her faded denim dress clung to the voluptuous padding that pregnancy had draped over her frame over a year ago and that still clung tenaciously on. Among those who knew and loved her, it was unanimous that she was one of the ten cutest people ever born.

  Rachel didn’t feel especially cute right now. She was on her knees on the hardwood floor, chunks of a mangled turkey frank in one hand and a sopping sheet of phone bill in the other. All around her was debris of the most terrifying sort. Directly in front of her was the cause.

  “D-dah-dah-dah,” little Natalie informed her. “Dah-dah-dah PFTHHH!”

  “That’s charming,” Rachel assured her. “That’s what I think of Daddy, too.”

  “PFTHHHH!” Tiny pink tongue abubble, slipping past pursed lips and toothless gums to waggle in the breeze. “PFTHHH! PFTHHH!” The state of the art in nine-month-old communication.

  “C’mon,” Rachel provoked, sliding closer. “Can you say ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’? Of course you can.” The hand with the savaged shreds of wienie gestured encouragingly.

  “Dah-dah-dah,” Natalie insisted, and then began to chew on the remote control unit for the VCR. Natalie was like that: the mouth was the doorway of perception. She must have learned that from Jake and me, Rachel thought, and then beamed at her baby daughter.

  At nine months, Natalie Guinevere Adams-Hamer was fourteen pounds and twenty-three inches of miniature human beauty, even in baggy disposable diapers. Her eyes were huge and grayish-blue, like her mother’s; her fingers were long and delicate, like her father’s; her body, not quite grown into proportion with her head, was petite and cuddle-demanding. She was one of those babies for whom laughter comes as easily as tears: she had a great sense of humor, also inherited from both her parents, that made the joy of being around her transcend the obvious pain-in-the-butt qualities.

  “Oh, boobie-boobie-boobie,” Rachel cooed, dropping the damp phone bill and sliding closer. “Gimme that. And come here.” She pulled the remote control out of Natalie’s hands and mouth—not the world’s easiest task, as the kid had a powerful grip—and hoisted the midget to her no-longer-lactating breasts for a deep and abiding hug.

  It had not been an easy birth; comparatively, Ted had been a piece of cake. Thirty-four and a half hours of labor do not a picnic make, especially when you throw in three rejections from the hospital (you’re not dilated enough, the rooms are full, don’t come back until you’re ready), coupled with a one-boy history of Caesarian delivery and the fact that she was thirty-seven years old.

  Lots of fear.

  Twelve times as much pain.

  But the worst was the waiting, the seeming eternity of it. Nine months and four days had evidently not been long enough. God and Mother Nature were clearly taking some cues from Hitchcock, masterfully dragging out the suspense without ever once letting it get close to boring. All the questions she and Jake had been nursing since conception—boy or girl, dark or pale, bright or retarded, and so on—flared brighter than ever in the moments between contractions, when what passed for rational thought was, if barely, even possible.

  And then, on the thirty-first hour, when the seconds between the screaming pain had all but evaporated, Beth Israel Hospital had finally opened up one of their puke-green rooms to her. They had stripped her, enrobed her, slapped her on the comfortless bed, drugged her, greased her up, and strapped on the monitors: one for
the baby and one for her. They had turned on the machines, transformed the heartbeats of mother and child into shimmering waveforms that looked as if they belonged on Jesse’s keyboard oscilloscope.

  Then the three more hours of waiting for the doctor to arrive, with Jake nearly collapsing from lack of sleep, and the nurses saying Don’t push, Don’t push in direct contradiction to everything her own body was telling her. . .

  . . . and then the doctor arriving, looking freshly golfed (though she knew it wasn’t true, it just felt nicely cruel to think so in those fleeting seconds of sanity now allowed between contractions), checking out the elastic sprawl of her distending vaginal lips and going Mmm-hmmm, we’ve got ten centimeters as Jake and a nurse spread her numb legs wide . . .

  . . . and then the long gurney-roll down the corridor, the crash through the double doors into what Monty Python had so aptly named the “fetus-frightening room,” the hefting up onto the bed . . .

  . . . and then there had been no more room for thought at all, just the Push and the Push and the pain and the Push and the prick of the needle and the slash of the scalpel and the Push and the Push and the Push . . .

  “And there you were,” Rachel hissed, back-datedly triumphant. “And even though you were covered with slime, you were perfect, baby. Perfect.”

  Natalie grabbed a handful of her mother’s red tresses and yanked. Mommy went “YOW!” and wrenched the tiny hand free, pulling the baby to arm’s length. Through the thin skin on the baby’s face, every trace of emotion from surprise to terror flickered with staggering clarity in the instant and a half before I Natalie began to cry.

  “Oh, boobie! I’m sorry I scared you!”

  “WAH!”

  “I just don’t like having my hair pulled, that’s all!”

  “WAH!!!”

  “Oh, no. You’re getting sleepy, aren’t you, sweetheart?”

  “WAHHHH!”

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  “WAHHHH!!!”

  It was pretty clear where this conversation was going, so Rachel gave up her end of it, resigning herself to coddling Screamo for a minute and surveying the wreckage. It was considerable. The rest of the poor mutilated turkey frank, a half dozen remnants of crackers past, a toy chainsaw, and an Ugly Ball shaped like a leering skull (Ted’s warped sense of humor), seven brightly colored concentric rings and the stick-stand to ring them on, a Busy Box full of ringing bells and dials to twiddle, a mangled TV Guide, the rest of the phone bill, one well-soiled diaper, and a couple of wipes were among the visible casualties. This was not to mention the well-known cacophony and ferment to be found inside the playpen. God only knew what lurked behind the sofa, lay furtive in the unseen corners of the room.

  This was the curse of life: eternal vigilance. The minute you finished one thing, twelve other things caved in. This was especially true of motherhood. There was never any end to the detritis that needed to be picked up, cleaned, put away, and then slid through the cycle again.

  But it’s my house, she thought, and the truth of those words made all the difference in the world. Jake and I own the thing: lock, stock, barrel, and twenty-year, variable-rate mortgage.

  The house was old-style big; Pete’s grandparents had been fairly well-to-do for their time, and their living quarters had reflected it. Most of the original furnishings remained, though she’d solicited brother Cody’s help in stripping and refinishing them, and she’d reupholstered them herself. Lots of solid oak and mahogany to go with Jake’s beloved burnished brass. Above all, tons and tons of space, the likes of which she couldn’t have achieved in New York City for less than the gross national product itself.

  It was hard to believe sometimes; even now, with almost a year in the house behind her. It was hard to believe how lucky she was, how close to ideal her life had actually become. She had a man she loved: more important, a man she trusted with her life, who would be with her till the end and maybe even after. She had the baby she’d been dreaming of and the economic freedom to stay home with that baby. She had gotten Ted out of the city, whether he liked it or not. She had gotten out herself.

  But most of all, she was centered, at long last and hopefully forever; and, God, what an amazing feeling that was! What a weight off the shoulders and the soul! There was an incredible sense of completion, of all the threads running through her life finally having come together into something coherent and beautiful. Something she could show for all the years of struggle, the years of mistakes and shortcomings and failure, the years of making do and making peace with imperfection.

  This was what life was supposed to be like.

  This was her dream, come true.

  And that was the scary thing about it, the tiny terror that struck her occasionally, unexpectedly, like walking face-first through a spiderweb in the dark: the idea of just how fragile it was, how delicately balanced the pieces of her joy. What if anything were to happen to Natalie? To Ted? To Jake? What would happen to them if anything happened to her. . . ?

  “WAHHH!!!” Natalie remarked. Her face was a Kabuki mask of misery.

  “I think it’s nappytime for you, kiddo. Give Mom a little bit of time for herself and her art, whaddaya say?”

  “WAHHH!!! PFTHHH!!!”

  “Well, that’s a start, anyway.”

  They turned, Natalie helplessly, toward the staircase. It was an elegant old affair, wide enough for three fat people abreast, winding slowly to the right and upwards at the fifth to fifteenth steps. Like so much of the rest of her life these days, it was a gorgeous thing.

  Even with the crazed music pouring down from its summit, courtesy of good ol’ Deadbeat Konopliski and her own ever-lovin’ son. In a minute she would be telling them to turn it down so that Natalie could manage a nap. They would be grumpy about it, and no doubt stoned again. God, life was tough.

  But even Ted’s music was pretty good these days. It was nice to see him graduate from the angry young no-talents to more sophisticated fare, even if they were still singing about demons and gang bangs and all that charming smarm.

  Take this group, for instance. The Scream. There was real depth there, real sonic texture. Even Jesse had to agree. Whatever else you might say about it, the music was powerful; you could almost believe, engulfed in that sound, that hell wasn’t such a bad place after all. . . .

  “PFTHHHH!” Natalie said.

  “Yes,” Rachel agreed. “Then again, there’s always that.”

  * * *

  FOUR

  Jesse was waiting for the phone to ring.

  She sat watching the silently replicating waveforms on the monitor before her. The amber screen flickered and glowed. On it, pirated dulcet tones of the entire New York Philharmonic string section silently reinterpreted themselves as a series of sharply etched peaks and valleys, cascading forward like the topography of an alien planet.

  The light pen sat limply in one hand, its fiber-optic tip staring blankly back like a tiny, glowing eye. Watching, impassively. Waiting patiently, like everything else in the great hall, for her to make a move.

  Waiting, for the phone to ring.

  And the bottom to drop out.

  She looked up, past the high-tech sprawl of cables, keyboards and consoles that covered well over three quarters of the room. She was alone at present, the amps and mike stands that I marked the positions of the other band members pointing only toward empty space.

  Normally she’d be thrilled. Solitude was an all-too fleeting phenomenon in the hyperpace of the last five months, with its concert preps and news clips and round-the-clock rehearsal/recording/production/promotion sessions. Normally she’d be seizing on the chance to diddle, undisturbed, with the vast array of digital samples that were her specialty and the textural trade-mark of the Jacob Hamer Band’s muscular sound. Normally, the animated patterns on the screen would mean something.

  Not today. Nothing today would be normal.

  Not until the telephone rang.

  And maybe not even then . .
.

  On the screen, the patterns had ceased cycling. One—it looked like a pizzicato violin sample, but she wasn’t really I paying attention—had frozen in mid-strike. It was an eerie metaphor for the immediate future, like a cheap videotape stuck indefinitely on pause, static bands of white noise blotting out any hope of concentration.

  Jesse reached over and laid the light pen to rest. Her breasts ached, full and heavy. Bad sign. Even the slightest brush of fabric against her nipples was becoming almost unbearable.

  And you know what that means, don’t you?

  Down the hill, the voices came together in ragged, home-grown harmony:

  “Holy, ho-lee,

  Holy, ho-lee,

  Holy, ho-lee,

  Lord God Almigh-tee”

  Shut up.

  Jesse winced. If she heard their spirited off-key rendition once more, she would explode. The likelihood was high: that was the twelfth tuneless time today, and they showed no sign of stopping. Once an hour, every hour. A dawn-to-dusk, daily vigil of prayer, song, and righteous wrongheadedness.

  Ordinarily she’d find it amusing to sharpen her wit, and her claws, on the pious blockheads who power-jockeyed for God and country and five-figure love-gifts on cable affiliates nationwide. Lately, though, they had been hitting a little too close to home.

  Today particularly, she simply wasn’t in the mood.

  Down the hill, the voices swelled, majestically akilter. Probably a fresh news team had arrived. The protesters started in on the rousing third verse:

  “Father, fa-ther,

  Father, fa-ther,

  Father, fa-ther,

  Lord God Almigh-tee”

  “Shit.”

  Jesse brought a nimble, articulate hand up to rake through her cropped auburn hair. Then she stood and stretched. It was a purely symbolic act, relieving absolutely nothing. The cramps were gone, but what did that prove?

  Her first time, she had thought she had the flu. The second, there were no symptoms whatsoever beyond a little swelling and tenderness.