by J P Barnaby
Everything in his brain focused on that single, all-encompassing feeling of bliss. Harsh, ragged breaths escaped his lungs in bursts, and without thought, he kissed the boy’s neck and shoulders and tried to show him what their interlude had meant to him. Such a pretty guy, sweet and smiling, he wished he could take him out for dinner or even coffee and just talk. Unfortunately, he knew that people generally looked at the deaf in one of two ways: as a novelty, or retarded. When he spoke, and his voice didn’t hold that same generic cadence that everyone on earth seemed to achieve as easily as breathing, people assumed he was slow or mentally handicapped. They talked louder, slower, which of course didn’t help him a bit unless he could read their lips. So they didn’t bother talking to him at all. They talked around him. They treated him like some kind of animal, incapable of rational conversation.
So he didn’t give them the chance.
“Oh my God, that was fucking amazing,” Nick said as he came out of his sexual stupor and kissed Spencer lightly. With their foreheads pressed together, he could feel Nick’s breath on his face, so he closed his eyes for just a moment to savor the feeling before he was alone again.
With a sigh against his cheek, Nick’s chest rumbled with speech that Spencer didn’t catch. He pulled back to look at Nick, but the boy had fallen silent. Spencer started to feel a little self-conscious, naked above a total stranger who just lay there staring up at him. After another long minute of silence, Nick pushed on his shoulders and tried to roll out from under him.
“What the hell, man? I said I had to go back to work. My boss is going to be pissed,” he said before turning his back to Spencer and grabbing his uniform from where it lay crumpled on the floor. As Nick faced away, Spencer couldn’t tell if he talked while he dressed, but his face seemed to be moving in a manner consistent with speech. Instead of trying to understand, Spencer simply sat on the side of the bed and waited.
“So, would you?” he asked as he turned around and looked expectantly at Spencer. God, would you fucking leave already? Spencer tilted his head to the side as he tried to figure out what the kid had asked him. He must have taken too long, because Nick said something about him being stupid before he grabbed his shoes off the floor and started for the door. Spencer leaned over and snagged his pants from the floor. With vicious jerks, he pulled them on and then pushed on Nick’s shoulder to make him look up.
“I. Am. Not. Stupid.. I. Am. Deaf., Asshole.,” Spencer told him in slow, measured speech as he had been taught from early childhood. Just for good measure, he pointed to his ear and shook his head. A look of dawning comprehension passed over Nick’s face, which was replaced quickly by regret and shame. Good.
“I’m sorry,” Nick started and put his hands on his chest to illustrate his sincerity. Wow, really? “I’m going to go.” His exaggerated speech made it difficult to read his lips, but worse, he used two fingers to mime walking and then pointed to the door like Spencer was too slow to understand that he was leaving. For fuck’s sake.
Spencer opened the door to the small bedroom and held out a hand to indicate that Nick should go first. The guy couldn’t pick up his little signature machine and get out of the house fast enough. He didn’t even say good-bye to Spencer in his haste to get away from the freak.
Spencer leaned against the door and wondered what it would be like to have a guy look past the deafness and actually see him.
Two
AARON SAT quietly, picking at his grilled cheese sandwich, when his mother came into the kitchen with an envelope. He saw that it was addressed to him, but when he shrugged at her, she opened it instead. Taking another bit of soup so that she could see, he waited, remarkably uninterested, for the results of his final homeschool exams. Part of him hoped he had failed every subject so he could bow out of any further discussions of college, but the smile that spread across his mother’s face told him otherwise. Looking into his mother’s overbright, misty eyes, he understood what she was feeling. By all rights, he should have died that night in the garage with Juliette, so the fact that he even had results to mail was a miracle.
“I am so incredibly proud of you, Aaron. When we chose to homeschool you those last two years, I didn’t know if you’d ever be… if you’d… but you did,” she stammered and then handed him the sheet of paper. Underneath the pretentious state logo was a list of his achievements. He had managed to pass every subject. In a few, like English, he was sure that his results were born more of pity than the actual quality of his work.
He didn’t care.
“Let’s… I mean…. Can we take you out to dinner to celebrate?” The hopeful longing in her face made the polite refusal he was about to give die in his throat. Shame burned on the back of his neck like the summer sun. She had done so much for him, and asked for so little in return. Couldn’t he just give her this one thing? From her expression, it looked like her whole life depended on his answer to the question.
Slowly, he nodded.
His mother did manage to restrain herself from hugging him, but just barely, and unfortunately he had reached the upper limit of his accommodations for the day. He was grateful that she didn’t hug him, because one of his meltdowns in the kitchen would have just punctuated the afternoon nicely. Things were starting to get bad for him again, he could feel it. Some days were better, but lately, his depression was taking him on another downward spiral. He tried so hard to keep things from spinning out of control, but trying to hide the depth of his depression from his mother had become exhausting. Aaron tried so hard to keep the worst of his symptoms from her, because she had so many other things to worry about. Sometimes, when the demons came calling inside his head, he saw just how much caring for him was taking a toll on her. In those moments, he wished that he’d just have the balls to end her pain, and his, but he didn’t. It was just one more thing in his life he wasn’t man enough to do.
“Okay, well, Allen has his first date tonight, so maybe tomorrow night,” she said, her beaming smile bringing him back from those dark thoughts. It was a bit of a comfort to him that Allen had a date. His brothers had to deal with so much, and finally they were able to start living somewhat normal lives, despite their psychotic brother. Aaron left more than half of his sandwich on the plate, but finished his soup, tipping up the bowl and drinking it. He hoped that would appease her almost constant need to feed him.
“Mom, I’m going to go lie down for a while,” Aaron told her as she took his dishes to the counter near the sink. The combination of all the pills and omnipresent suffocating depression made Aaron feel tired, lethargic. Some days, this tiredness allowed him to finally escape for a few hours in the dreamless sleep of a midafternoon nap. On other days he would just stare restlessly at the ceiling or the TV, even the very idea of sleep eluding him.
It started off as most of his dreams did, with that last debate practice. Juliette was the captain, but Aaron was the best on the team. They were trying to get other students involved, since it was the beginning of the term, trying to get them engaged to see which ones would make the team that year. Aaron always helped out with recruiting because the debate team was important to Juliette, and Juliette was important to Aaron. That night, the topic that they pulled from the list was euthanasia. Juliette was on pro and Aaron was left with con. It didn’t matter how they personally felt about the topic, they still needed to put together a concise, effective strategy for debating the issue. Juliette explained to the assembled students that voluntary, active euthanasia was about people deciding how they wanted to live and die. The government should not be able to legislate a person’s free will if they weren’t injuring another party. Denying a person the choice of ending his own pain and suffering was unfair and cruel. These were valid points, and Aaron knew that arguing them would not win him any favor. His explanation of the cons of euthanasia was on a different level. By actively taking the life of a person, especially one who is in inexorable pain, one could not know if the consent given was voluntary. A person with substantial w
ealth could be murdered with no legal recourse. Even assuming the absence of foul play, a mistaken diagnosis could end someone’s life needlessly.
By the end of the debate, Aaron and Juliette had been furiously hurling facts and arguments at each other with such voracity that other students discussed the possibility of intervening. That’s just how Aaron and Juliette were, passionate and competitive. Friends since grade school, they knew exactly how to push each other’s buttons and what their next line of defense would be; they made a hell of a debate pair.
The dream skipped around—the walk, the van, the screaming, the pain, the blood.
Aaron shot bolt upright in bed, the scream caught in his throat. His bedroom was dark, which confused him further, and then he heard the doorbell ring. The men were there. They’d never been caught, and they were there. The men that had hurt him, had killed Juliette, they were there to finish the job. The men would kill his family like they had killed Juliette. Without thinking, without stopping to consider that his attackers would hardly ring the bell, he vaulted out of bed and practically fell down the stairs. The sight at the front door stopped him in his tracks. Intellectually, on some level, he realized that it was just Allen and his date, but Allen wore his letterman’s jacket, just like Aaron had been wearing that night. His date wore a sweater and jeans, her auburn hair falling straight down around her delicate face, reminding him of Juliette.
The flashback hit without any warning.
Juliette screaming.
Juliette begging for her mother.
Juliette begging Aaron to make them stop.
Juliette covered in blood.
The man’s breath on the back of his neck.
The knife slicing his face.
The blade cutting across his throat.
“Mom!” Anthony screamed as Aaron fell to his knees on the living room carpet. Their mother, terrified and completely bewildered, knelt next to her eldest son.
“Mom, don’t let me go! Please, they’ll hurt me, Mom! Please….” Aaron pleaded, trying to force the images, the memories from his mind.
Allen’s date, who had no idea what was happening, began to get scared, backing slowly toward the door. Allen looked over at her, and then at his brother on the floor. If Aaron had been seeing his brother at all as he knelt on the floor trying to keep from sobbing, he would have seen that Allen’s face, now ruddy and flushed, was livid. Their lives had been so fucked up for so long, and Aaron was ruining the first real sense of normalcy, the first real date Allen had ever had. Aaron knew that both Allen and Anthony must catch shit at school for their freak brother, and Allen had finally found a girl to look past that.
“Shut up, Aaron!” Allen roared, obviously humiliated by his brother’s psychotic meltdown in the middle of the living room.
His hands were gripped into tight fists at his sides, and despite all the love and respect he surely felt for Aaron, Allen had seemed to finally reach his breaking point. Two years of their parents’ misery, two years of night terrors, and two years of wanting more than anything to have his brother back had finally taken its toll on Allen. Shaking, he turned to his date and held out his hand wordlessly.
“Maybe we should do this another time,” the girl said, with one hand on the doorknob. She looked like a frightened fawn ready to bolt.
“No, Carrie, just give me a minute, please….” he pleaded with her, and she nodded as she continued to wait with her hand on the door. Allen turned on his brother, his eyes ablaze, fueled by his date’s fear.
“I am not you! I am not stupid enough to be lured into a goddamned van, tearing my whole family apart!” Allen yelled, and all the blood left Aaron’s face as the flashback began to recede and he realized what he had done. Everything Allen had to deal with just living in the same house with him, and he had just terrified the poor girl before they could even get out the door. He felt like Quasimodo in the bell tower, the freak that should be hidden away for everyone’s peace of mind, maybe even for his own good.
“My brother is a lunatic,” Allen told his date, almost drowning out his mother’s shocked gasp. Before anyone could call him back, he grabbed the girl’s hand and pulled her out the front door, leaving his trembling brother kneeling helplessly on the living room carpet. It was the first time anyone had said it aloud, but Aaron felt with perfect clarity that it was true. He would never be normal. He would never be anything but a burden, a source of shame and discomfort for his parents and his brothers. Not for the first time, Aaron wished he had died with Juliette and not been left to linger in this damaged shell.
Hours later, after Aaron had been properly medicated and put to bed, Allen came in to check on him. Aaron was propped up on pillows, staring blankly at the wall near the foot of his bed. It was always like this when he was drugged, like he was in some kind of suspended animation. Unable to move because his limbs were just too heavy, unable to think because his mind was full of fog, he simply existed. If they stood him in the corner, he could have been a potted plant, except he no longer had any aesthetic value. Aaron had heard Allen enter the room, but it took him a moment in his medicated state to respond. The guilt that consumed his brother was plain on Allen’s pale face.
“Aaron,” he said tentatively, like a boy drowning in waves of his own self-hatred. He still smelled faintly of the aftershave he’d worn to impress his date. Before the attack, when he was still able to smile, Aaron might have teased him about it. It all seemed so frivolous. Allen pulled Aaron’s desk chair up next to the bed and sat down. With almost painful slowness, Aaron’s blank stare moved from the bare wall to his younger brother. Tears welled in Allen’s eyes as he looked at his big brother, nearly incapacitated by the drugs the doctors prescribed. Allen waited until Aaron’s eyes finally focused on him before he spoke.
“I am so sorry, Aaron,” Allen said, the tears beginning to fall. “What I said to you was unforgivable. I didn’t mean it, I was just….”
“Embarrassed,” his brother finished for him, his eyes glazed over.
“Yes,” Allen replied shamefully, looking down at the navy blue comforter that covered his brother’s bed.
“Now, let me tell you something,” Aaron said, as he fought the hold of the drugs and depression. Allen looked up to meet his brother’s level, glassy stare. “I never climbed into that fucking van. I was dragged into it, screaming and fighting.” The anger in his face, in his voice, was unmistakable, and Allen just nodded, wide-eyed and pale.
“I didn’t…. They never really told us what…,” Allen stammered.
Aaron could see that Allen’s own behavior, his words, sickened him, and he didn’t need to do anything else to drive the point home. None of this was Allen’s fault; it was Aaron’s. He had brought this horror down on his family, merely by surviving.
“As for the lunatic part, well, you’re probably right about that. Between the drugs and the flashbacks, I feel like a madman most of the time.”
Allen took several short, very shallow breaths and looked like he was suffocating, crushed by the weight of his older brother’s disapproval. Before the attack, Aaron knew that Allen had idolized him. He was everything that Allen wanted to be—smart, funny, good-looking. “Aaron, I….”
“If you came in here looking for forgiveness, you needn’t have bothered,” Aaron said, his gaze still unfocused. “You had it before you ever left the house.”
Allen dropped his head, the tears falling in earnest, mumbling something about Aaron being a much better man than he was.
“It scares me,” Aaron went on, not commenting on his brother’s emotional outpouring, a dreamy quality to his voice, maybe because he rarely used it anymore. “What could happen to you, or to Anthony. I’m scared all the time, even with the drugs. When I saw you standing there, you and that girl who looked so much like Juliette, I thought that maybe if I stopped you from going that I could have stopped it all from happening. It triggered a flashback, and all I could see was Juliette and me. I had to stop you from going, to stop
Juliette from dying. I had just woken from a really bad nightmare, and it was all… jumbled in my head. I’m sorry that I embarrassed you.” This was the first time in two years Allen had ever sat and talked alone with Aaron. His parents had told him the basics about what had happened to his brother, but maybe he never really appreciated the extent of the damage until today, when he heard it straight from Aaron.
They both looked up at the sound of yelling—not screaming, as Aaron had become accustomed to in his dreams, but more like an argument. He couldn’t make out the words through the walls and closed door, so he couldn’t understand what was happening. His parents never fought, nor did they raise their voices to him or his brothers. Especially since Aaron’s attack, his family forced themselves to be exceedingly polite to each other.
Making his decision, Aaron glanced at Allen, threw back the blankets, and crept to his bedroom door. He placed a hand on the wood and used it to steady himself as he turned the knob. The small click sounded loud in the confines of his room, but not so loud that it would have been heard over the shouting. Once he swung the door slowly open, the voices became discernible.
“We are not having this discussion, John. I won’t do it.” A soft thump, like the slamming of a drawer, punctuated his mother’s disagreement. Slipping quietly from his room, Aaron crept down the hall with Allen right behind, each step bringing them closer to their parents’ bedroom. Their door was pulled to, but not completely closed. He leaned heavily against the wall. The tranquilizer caused him to feel slow and stupid as he pressed his palm against his forehead to stop the hallway from spinning.
“You saw what happened tonight. It was Allen’s first real shot at something normal. We can’t keep sacrificing them to try to save him. It’s been two years, Michelle, and he’s not getting any better.” His father’s voice sounded heavy with tears that Aaron knew he would never shed, not over him, anyway.
