"Wanna see what Santa brought you?"
Peter brightened a little. Good old Sam. He plainly refused to let anything die. For the past six years Christmas had meant little more to Peter than June first or the twenty-ninth of February. It was just another day spent as a prisoner in this nerveless bag of a body. But Sam always made it that tiny bit brighter.
"Not another toothbrush," Peter said in that cruel breed of humor Sam had still not gotten used to, and probably never would.
"Nope," Sam said. He patted the larger of three foil-wrapped boxes. "You'll never guess."
"So show me," Peter said, deciding to play along. If he knew Sam, the kid had gone to considerable expense to brighten his Christmas. The least he could do was pretend to be happy. "Could it be. . . a lifetime supply of Swedish Erotica tapes for the VCR? Olga Gobbles the Home Guard?"
Sam grinned. He loved his brother mightily. "Nope. Not even close."
"Okay," Peter said, rolling his eyes in a parody of concentration. "Could it be. . . a new pair of shoes? No, wait. . . a spanking new flight helmet! Yeah, that's it."
"Wrong and wrong again." Sam glanced at his watch. "Too bad you'll have to wait another. . . eighteen minutes to find out."
"Cruel," Peter protested. "Nurse! Call a cop!"
"Well. . .” Sam said grandly. "Okay. Let's have a look-see."
Ignoring the parcels at the foot of the bed, Sam reached into a plastic IGA bag on the floor by his feet. He came up holding a foil-wrapped package about the size of a cigar box. He made a show of examining the name card.
"Oh! Here's one for me! 'To Sam from Pecker Pete.' Hey, man, thanks a bunch! Can I open it now?"
Grinning, Peter nodded. Every year Sam pulled the same crazy stunt. Since Peter had almost no way of shopping for Sam, short of browsing through the tedious fare in the gift shop downstairs, the kid always bought a present for himself and scribbled Peter's name on the card. Usually it was some sort of gag. Last year it had been a peaked cap—peaked caps were big in the north—but this one had a huge coil of fake dogshit glued to the bill, real enough looking that you sort of breathed through your mouth for a couple of beats until you were sure it was only plastic. The year before that it had been a huge rubber dildo in the shape of a rocket.
Sam tore off the paper with a flourish. He lifted the lid, peeked inside, and beamed like a delighted child. "Check—it—out!" Daintily, with forefinger and thumb, he produced a flesh-colored harmonica in the shape of a penis, complete with grotesque ropy veins. "A bone-a-phone!" He blew a couple of discordant notes.
"Play dat funky music, white boy!" Peter cried, caught up in the fun in spite of himself. The kid always got through to him. "Man! Lookit the helmet on that. Blow those skin-harp blues!"
"Hairy sax," Sam said with a grin, waggling the thing in the air.
"Flesh flute," Peter shot back.
"Cock clarinet."
"Pistol whistle."
"Okay," Sam said, showing his palms in surrender. "I give."
"C'mon," Peter said, genuinely curious now. "What's in dem boxes?"
"All right," Sam said. "We'll start with the big one."
The caroling went on for a good half hour, the raised voices of the congregation almost drowning out the high-pitched trill of the choir, all of it underpinned by the reverberating chords of the organ. By the time the singing was done, Leona could barely contain her tears. Both Peter and Sammy had done stints as altar boys, and when the procession filed out of the vestry—the priest resplendent in the red and white silks of the season, the sober-faced altar boys balancing tall golden candlesticks—she lost it completely, sobbing like a child, honking every few minutes into a crumpled hankie. The woman beside her elbowed her bespectacled husband, who'd been drowsing, and dragged him off to another pew. Leona didn't mind. The stuffy bitch's perfume had been cloying.
The opening prayers gave way to the first of the Old Testament liturgies, which the plump monsignor recited in a booming basso profundo. At first Leona did her best to follow. But her throat was parched, and an all-too-familiar drumming had begun against the delicate skins of her temples.
She needed a drink.
"You crazy son of a bitch," Peter said in unaffected surprise. This was miles more extravagant than anything he'd expected. "This must have cost you a fortune!"
"Nah," Sam said, blushing furiously. "I stole the sucker." It was an Apple computer, complete with keyboard, color monitor, and all the handy-dandy attachments one needed to run the sweetheart with no hands. Peter could tell it was used, but it was in mint condition.
"You crazy son of a bitch."
Not wanting to cry—as he wound up doing every year—Sam set busily about gathering up the wrapping paper and stuffing it into the wastebasket, jabbering the whole time about all the neat things Peter could do with his new toy.
"They've got more games than Carter's got pills. I picked out a few of 'em for you. Pac-Man—I knew you liked that one—and a Chuck Yeager flight simulator that'll flip your wig. The guy gave me a demo, and within two minutes I was reaching for the airsick bags. It comes with a dozen of them—barf bags I mean."
"You crazy son of a bitch," Peter said a third time, still marveling. "What about word processing?"
"No sweat," Sam said, sitting again. He'd arranged the computer components on the table at the foot of the bed. "I know a guy who can bootleg the software for us. The lad's an ace." Sam paused a beat. "You want to write?"
"Yeah," Peter said. "I've been thinking I'd like to record some of my experiences. You know, when I leave this piece-of-shit body."
Sam flushed again. "Sounds great." He still hadn't gotten used to the idea of his brother as a kind of living ghost. The story Kelly had told him that day outside the Sandwich King had made his skin crawl, and the look in his mother's eyes the night of her bogus séance had made him want to shake her until she finally snapped out of it. Her eyes had shone that night with the lunatic light of revelation, and Sam guessed that she'd have been no more affected had God Himself materialized before her on a cloud of spun silver. It was creepy, and as much as Sam understood Peter's need for something meaningful in his sessile existence, he wished that none of this had ever happened. Against his mother's instructions, he'd come home that night to find the apartment a shambles and Leona planted soddenly on the piano bench, stroking Peter's enshrined grad photo, enough Jack Daniel's in her system to put a shipload of sailors out of commission for a week. When he tried to talk to Peter about it the next day, Peter had cut him off in a brutal stroke the likes of which Sam had never had leveled at him before. It had stung him deeply.
But what had stung him even more deeply was the shine of cruel satisfaction he'd seen in his brother's eyes. Peter had tormented their mother and he'd enjoyed it. He'd enjoyed it immensely.
"Well," Sam said, getting to his feet. "It's a quarter past twelve and I've got to shag ass out of here." His eyes were fogging with inevitable tears. "Believe it or not, I've gotta work tomorrow, Christmas or no Christmas."
"C'mere," Peter said, his own eyes moistening.
Sam bent over the bed, cupped his brother's face in his hands, and kissed him on the mouth. A tear fell, and mingled with one of Peter's on his cheek.
"Fag," Peter said as his brother drew away.
"Fuck you," Sam said as he left the room.
"And your grandmother, too."
"See you tomorrow," Sam said from the corridor.
"Yeah," Peter said to the empty room. "You too, kid."
Gazing at the computer components through rainbows of grief, Peter lay alone in the Christmas morning silence and thought about who he had been. With the vividness of one preparing to die, he reviewed the highlights of his sentient life with pain and a terrible yearning. The images came in no discernible pattern. He remembered the ambulance attendants lugging his mother down the long flight of stairs in their duplex on Colby Street, her belly swollen to the size of a beachball and her face grizzled with pain; and his first gli
mpse hours later of his newborn baby brother, gray eyes scrinched shut, dark hair matted with a blood-tinged goo that had frightened him badly. He could still hear his father's voice, assuring him that it was nothing to worry about, his brother was okay, just a leftover smear of the juices he'd stewed in for nine long months. With the same startling clarity he remembered his first glimpse of Kelly Wheeler, long-legged teenage goddess seeming so unattainable, swinging her locker shut in the last mellow light of an autumn afternoon, her ample breasts all but hidden in one of those baggy sweaters she insisted on wearing. "They're gross," he could hear her saying of her breasts in that singsong voice. Ah, they were anything but gross, and the first time he'd seen them—the first time he'd touched them—he thought he had died and gone to heaven.
Other images marched through his mind in a solemn procession. Inviting Kelly home and sitting beside her on the piano bench, dissolving the fib he'd told her about his beginner skill level in the most moving private concert he'd ever given; the love they had made later that day, that first incredible love, its overmastering intensity; the four of them—Peter, Sam, their mother, and Kelly—going together to midnight mass back in '82. . .
For a moment he remembered what it was like to be whole, remembered it so lucidly that he came close to trying to sit up in bed. With this memory came a breath of the inner calm he'd once savored, the quiet confidence, the easy belief in a shining future. . .
Then, like entrails scraped from a butcher's block, the whole thing slid into a lime-filled pit. With deliberate strokes Peter filled the pit in, putting paid to a past that was truly past, as irretrievable as an infant's first breath. The accident had changed him. In one brutal stroke it had reduced him to a heap of breathing rubble. A page had been turned, a savage twist effected in the horror novel of his life. But now a new page was turning; he sensed it with a certainty not even the healthiest of nerve endings could so keenly relay.
It made him want to pray.
The trance came readily tonight, quelling the storm in his heart, engulfing him in a warm narcotic sea. He left his body without a backward glance and slipped through the frosted window. Outside, snow fell in lazy, looping flakes, and an updraft carried him away. Behind him, slung about the hospital's concrete waist, a festive sash of Christmas lights flashed in random patterns. Across the lake, the Science Center twinkled like an idling spacecraft. Few vehicles were afoot on this early Christmas morning, just a lone city bus sluicing back to the garage, and a cab without a fare. Ranged out below him, the strip-mined face of the land seemed to Peter like an old and tarted-up whore trying vainly to disguise its pockmarked features behind a mask of Yuletide cheer.
He veered toward the twin Gothic spires of Saint Joseph's Cathedral, thinking how much they reminded him of teeth. Rotted stubs of teeth.
"For a child is born unto us, a son, and dominion is laid on his shoulders."
A son, Leona thought wistfully, idly tuning in on the sermon. Even through her grief and the whiskey haze she could remember how it felt to have him growing inside her, nudging the walls of her womb with an innocent elbow or knee. Her labor had been so easy; Peter had come into the world kicking with a hale vitality. . . but the instant he'd slipped through her birth canal, a vast depression had consumed her. It had persisted for weeks, becoming at one point so black that Leona had contemplated ending her life. The sense of loss, of amputation, had been total. It was as if her heart had been wrenched out along with her child. The feeling had passed, to be replaced by the wonders of the life she had given. But it had returned with Peter's death. Now all that filled it was the booze. The fit was imperfect, more illusion than substance, but it got her by.
If only she could carry again. . .
A bitter cackle rose in Leona at the unbidden thought of conceiving again, of carrying a child the way she had carried her Peter. Sam had been a horror, unplanned, unwanted, born after thirty hours of excruciating labor by cesarean section.
No. Nothing could replace her boy.
Her tongue made a spitless pass across her lips. Far below, the priest knelt before the altar in a gesture of supplication, the flowing folds of his vestments pooling around him like a garish noonday shadow. The congregation had joined the choir in an upbeat rendition of "Today a Savior Is Born," and Leona took advantage of the interlude to scrounge in her handbag.
And even before she got the cap off the flask, she could feel the emptiness withdrawing a little, filling, like cement slopped into a hole in the dirt.
He slipped into the church through the big mullioned window, its round shape reminding him of a docking port in some cosmic Spielbergian saga. Inside, the altar, the kneeling congregation, the resounding chords of the organ—all of it swamped him in a backswell of nostalgia, and he hung there in the smoky nave, remembering. As a boy, he had wanted so badly to try out that organ, with its uncountable buttons, pedals, and keys, that he had actually looked forward to coming to church. And they always had to sit in the balcony, as close to the organist as possible. In those days the organist had been a scratchy, blue-haired old dolly who had frightened Peter with her cold black eyes, eyes that had measured him harshly the one time he'd mustered the courage to approach her during mass. She had favored him with a witch's scowl that had sent him cowering back to his seat, his round eyes swimming with tears.
Could that wicked old fossil still be alive? he wondered now. Still lording it over her organ?
He rose on the perfumed air, gliding over the lip of the balcony the way a breeze kisses over a ridge. The organist had her back to him, but he could see from here that she was a much younger woman; her straight posture and hennaed hair told him that. She—
A bright dart of silver pierced Peter's eye.
A reflection. . .
He glanced down—and there she was, not ten feet below, the last person he'd expected to find here, tipping a flask to her lips under the reproachful eyes of all those around her. There she was, a wraithlike parody of the woman who'd once been his mother, who'd borne and suckled and loved him. There she was, the whore who in the hour of his greatest need had left him for dead.
Rage plowed into Peter like a steaming locomotive. His mouth yawned open in an unheard, killing scream, and he flew at his mother like a missile.
Leona's body jerked and then stiffened, the small joints in her back popping like corn. The flask flew from her hand and ricocheted off the pew in front of her, scarring the wood and blessing a small circle of worshipers in a mist of Jack Daniel's. A terrible inarticulate groan escaped her as she rose rigidly to her feet and her handbag thumped to the floor. Spittle roped down from her mouth, which had stretched itself back in a G-force rictus.
You bitch! Peter roared in a silence that was somehow infernal, maddeningly impotent. He had meant to pass through her like a cold December wind, but a few feet from her his deliberate forward momentum had been converted to a passive, magnetic drawing, a resistless pull with twice the force of his initial attack. He had pierced her in a way that had left him feeling unexpectedly warm. . . and paradoxically aroused.
He was inside his mother.
He struggled away from the baking heat of her, the spider-silk cling of her, trying to escape. He wanted out. But she would not let him go.
"Peter?" Her voice was husky, erotic. She stumbled into the aisle, the people around her shrinking back. "Peter?"
A forbidden excitement seized Peter then, an oedipal rapture that extinguished his rage as effortlessly as a wave crashing over a match flame. His mother's flesh enveloped him, awakening dark dreams and sinful passions, doubling, trebling, quadrupling the richest ecstasies he'd shared with Kelly Wheeler.
Staggering down the stairs, Leona flung her arms around her own heaving torso, as if to embrace the life that had suddenly infused her. The heel of one shoe snagged on a bald patch of carpet and sent her tumbling into the lap of an immensely fat woman, whose bloated cheeks reddened with anger and affront. This crazy bitch was stone drunk in the house of God, t
he fat woman thought, and she heaved Leona to her feet with a thrust of her flabby arms. Leona regarded her with glazed eyes before staggering away, her own cheeks as red as a cockscomb.
"Oh, Peter," she babbled, "I love you. God knows I love you so much."
No! Peter shrieked. Let go of me! Let go!
Passion, anger and shame roiled within him in a witch's brew of emotion. He could see through his mother's jaundiced eyes the commotion her convulsions were causing. Even downstairs, twenty feet below, inquisitive heads were turning, curious faces angling up.
But she would not let him go. He was trapped. . . and worse. She was drawing him downward, away from the twisted warren of her mind to the barren heat of her womb.
And a part of him wanted to go. A part that was growing by the second.
No! he protested, bitterly vehement. You left me for dead!
"But you were dead," Leona crooned in that same husky voice. She took the last three steps to the railing in a lurch that almost toppled her over the edge. Hands reached out to stop her, and she batted them away. "Dead and buried in that shell of a body." Her hands clasped the guardrail and she smiled. "But now you're back. To be born again."
Far below, the priest interrupted the mass to look up.
A tattered hush blanketed the church.
No!
"Yes," Leona whispered. "Oh, yes."
The opposing forces of disgust and desire were tearing Peter apart. With the entire force of his will, he resisted that dizzying downward pull through his mother's sick body. He had already passed the jackhammer thud of her heart, the coarse bulk of her diseased liver, and now the slippery coils of her guts enfolded him in a hissing serpentine tangle. Vivid memories of the womb seduced him still farther downward, the floating peacefulness, the constant nourishing warmth. . .
But it would not nourish him now. It was peeling and dry, and he would perish there.
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