by Jan Carson
‘But my mom is almost as pig-headed as me. She’s always hated the west coast. God only knows why, but she was pretty happy in Chicago. She was doing well at the university and dating this guy, Mike Pacchione, from the architect’s firm on the corner. He was fake Italian and his eyes crinkled like stewed prunes when he smiled. Secretly, I liked him better than dad, but I’d never give her the pleasure of admitting that. My mom refused to move west. She thought if we stayed in Chicago, Mike Pacchione would marry her and we could be a kind of normal family again. No matter how many times I threw up on the living room carpet she refused to even consider California.
‘I was starting to look really ill by this stage. People in the grocery store thought I was a heroin addict and wouldn’t stand beside me in line. I could see my teeth through my cheeks when I breathed in. I dropped two dress sizes in less than six weeks and I wasn’t fat to start with. My mom got so worried she called my dad in Portland. I knew things were getting really serious then. It was years since mom had asked for my dad’s input on anything aside from the divorce. But my dad is a doctor and she figured this was a medical matter. I guess she wanted to get me fixed before I faded away to nothing. Two days later, I was standing at the departure lounge with my mom sniveling all over my jean jacket as she packed me off to Portland, Oregon for the summer.
‘Last time I saw my dad he was a big time surgeon down in LA. He did operations for rich people; mostly famous actors and politicians. No one in LA trusted him but they kept paying him money to fix them up anyway. LA’s kind of weird like that. Later I found out that he used to go to the papers with all the gossip on his patients. Even when I was really young I knew my dad was not a good guy. People glared at him across the room in restaurants. “Your dad’s a great doctor, Sorry, but a lousy excuse for a human being,” my grandma once told me. That pretty much sums him up. My parents were stinking rich and really miserable. I was too young to really understand why.
‘So, when I got to Portland airport last month, there he was, waiting by the baggage claim, not one day older than 1989 and wearing the same big-shot business suit and shiny shoes. For the first ten minutes he made a massive deal of pretending to be glad I was here, hugged me and everything. In seven years of living in the same house, my dad had never once touched me. The airport was pretty damn awkward. I’m not a big hugger. Being touched makes me angry, so I threw up on his shiny shoes. I could tell my dad was really mad – his eyes went crazy and kind of joined up in the middle – but he didn’t want to cause a scene in the baggage claim so he wiped the worst of it off with a napkin and yelled at me in the car later.
‘“Things are going to be different around here, Soren,” he said, and punched the steering wheel while he was driving. “Your mother’s spoiled you. I can tell you’ve been a real brat for her but you won’t get away with it here. You’ll eat properly. You’ll speak when you’re spoken to. You’ll do exactly as I tell you. And if you don’t, you’ll find I’m quite capable of making your life a living hell.”
‘I said nothing. It was part of my shtick to say nothing but even if I’d been in a talking phase, I wouldn’t have known what to say to my dad. Twenty minutes later we arrived in this shithole and I realized that this was going to be the worst summer since the one before the divorce. I worked out real quick that my dad’s not the big-shot doctor he was when I left California. Now he’s stuck here managing this crumbly old folks home in the dampest city known to man. I’ve been here for weeks now, “getting better” and doing my damndest to bug the life out of my dear old dad. I figure, eventually he’ll crack up and send me home. Even Chicago would be an improvement on this dump.’
Soren James Blue paused and folded her hands dramatically across her middle. Malcolm Orange lay back on his second X-Men pillow and began prioritizing the barrage of questions which had been buzzing round the inside of his brain. ‘Hold on,’ he said, somewhat confused, ‘if you’ve been here all summer, and I’ve been here all summer, how come I’ve never seen you before? I’ve never even heard of you until this morning. I can’t believe you managed to avoid everyone on the cul-de-sac, all summer.’
‘I wasn’t living on the cul-de-sac,’ Soren James Blue stated bluntly. ‘I was in the Center.’
‘No way!’ said Malcolm. It was a dumb kid thing to say and Malcolm rarely permitted himself the luxury of platitudes but the enormity of Soren’s confession had struck him like a dive-bar roundhouse.
‘Yeah,’ Sorry replied, ‘I’ve been in the Center for nearly two months. Dullest summer of my life, for sure. But, look,’ she raised her shirt further to pinch a generous inch of white belly flesh, ‘I got better. I’m sort of fat now.’
Malcolm Orange was dumbfounded. He looked at Soren James Blue’s naked middle. She was very much alive, and reasonably angry. Perhaps the Center wasn’t the death curse he’d always imagined. He had approximately two hundred thousand questions to ask Sorry, beginning at the Center’s front door and progressing logically to her ultimate escape, several days previous. His fingers itched for a notepad in which to record this, the most important research project of his life.
‘I have a lot of questions,’ he said, almost choking on his own teeth with enthusiasm.
Soren James Blue yawned deeply, exposing an entire mouthful of polished metal. ‘I’m bored talking about me,’ she replied.
‘But I need to know about the Center for my research project. I need to know what goes on in there and how you managed to escape. Are you like a fugitive now? Do you need a place to hide out? You can trust me and I’ll talk to my mom, she’ll understand. You can sleep under the kitchen table so no one sees you through the window.’
Sorry laughed, the very same sprinkler laugh that made him feel suddenly young and thin and incapable of being taken seriously.
‘Hold on kid,’ she giggled, tugging the X-Men pillow free from his grasp, ‘let’s get our priorities right. I heard you were disappearing. I don’t want you to vanish before I’ve had a chance to get to know you properly.’
Without further comment she slid off the bed and rescued Mr Fluff from the cavernous pit under Malcolm’s bed. Mr Fluff, it appeared, was well used to being hauled around town and immediately settled into position across Sorry’s neck, forelegs flopping over one shoulder and hind legs over the other, like a lost lamb straddling the Good Shepherd. Wearing her cat like a mink stole, Sorry scooped Ross, still sleeping, into her arms and strode out of the bedroom, heading for the kitchen.
‘I’m thirsty,’ she shouted over her disappearing shoulder, ‘too much talking. My tongue’s gone dry. I need a drink. Do you have any beer, Malcolm?’
Close inspection of the fridge revealed nothing runnier than a bottle of ketchup, two months out of date, and so Malcolm, ever the initiative-taker, screwed the top off Ross’s milk bottles and he and Sorry drank 2% straight from the bottle. They drank without speaking, polishing off an entire packet of Chips Ahoy whilst they stared at each other over the kitchen table. Ross, still sleeping, as only Ross could, had been abandoned in the laundry basket by the washing machine with an unwrapped Snickers bar by his head in case he woke hungry.
Soren James Blue had never encountered a baby as small or unresponsive as Ross Orange and, uneducated in all matters infantile, displayed an inappropriateness unrivalled even by Malcolm himself. It had been her original suggestion to strip Ross naked and leave him submerged for the afternoon in a bathtub of lukewarm water. ‘Babies poop a lot,’ she reminded Malcolm. ‘And I’m sure as hell not wiping it up. If we leave him in the bath he’ll kind of clean himself off and we can just drain the water before your mom gets home.’
Thankfully the bathtub’s only plug had been long since removed; a cautionary move, instigated after Denise DeWitt’s untimely death. Malcolm was thus saved the annoyance of explaining to Sorry why a three-month-old baby, unwanted as he was, could not be left free-floating for the afternoon in a bath of lukewarm water. Instead he simply mumbled something about a missing bath plug and
left the matter unresolved.
In his own kitchen with a belly full of Chips Ahoy, Malcolm Orange felt his confidence returning. Granted, he was still disappearing and burdened with Ross for the foreseeable future, but he was almost certain he’d found in Soren James Blue an unlikely ally, a friend even, capable perhaps of making some sense of his perforated existence. Thus reassured he licked the crumbs from his fingers, individually, with precocious attention to detail, and stood to address his new friend.
‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I’d like you to look at my back and tell me how bad it is. My head won’t turn far enough to check for myself. I have a flashlight if you need one.’
Soren James Blue had lived through enough serious situations – divorces, hospital wards and psychiatrists – to recognize the need for gravity. She popped the tail end of a final cookie into her mouth, shuffled the crumbs from her lap and turned to face Malcolm.
‘Right,’ she said, invoking the spirit of some other, dreadfully grave little girl, ‘if we’re going to do this, we should do it right. I’m a big believer in scientific research Malcolm, so we should probably record the information somewhere.’
‘Hold on,’ cried Malcolm and dashed from the kitchen, returning momentarily with a brand-new notepad, un-noted. ‘I was saving this for a big project but I don’t think they come much bigger than this. Take as many notes as you like.’
Soren James Blue opened the notebook at the first blank page and, with scientific precision, in royal blue ink, printed the words ‘MALCOLM ORANGE DISAPPEARS’ in block capitals. Dampening her pointer finger with spit, she turned the pages by their corners until, having arrived at the third blank page, she prepared to begin her investigation proper.
‘Malcolm,’ she said, taking notes in a furious hybrid form of shorthand which most closely resembled Morse code indentations, ‘when did you first notice yourself disappearing?’
‘Yesterday,’ he replied, ‘in the evening, just before dinner.’
‘How do you know you’re disappearing?’
‘I’m covered in little holes and some of them are pretty big.’
‘I see! Are you bleeding from any of these holes? Do you leak when you drink water?’
‘Not yet. I mean, you just saw me drink a whole bottle of milk and none of it came out. But I am worried about leaking, or letting water in in the shower. I’ve put Band-Aids on the biggest holes, but I’m not sure that’s going to make much difference in the shower.’
Soren James Blue continued to scribble furiously in the notepad. Malcolm was not sure what she was writing as he’d long since quit speaking. Perhaps she was dyslexic. Dyslexic people took almost three times as long to write down even the simplest sentence and, even then, they usually got their spellings wrong. His father had claimed to be dyslexic, though Malcolm’s mother remained militant that this was not real dyslexia, but rather another example of her husband’s chronic laziness and bullet dodging. Finally, Sorry looked up from her notes and continued with the interview.
‘Is there a history of disappearing in your family?’
‘Well, my father disappeared to Mexico with the car and all my grandparents are dead, but it’s not really the same kind of disappearing, is it? Mine’s more holey.’
‘What about drugs? Do you take any drugs, even the medicine kind?’
‘Nope.’
‘Not even for the diarrhea?’
‘Quit bringing up the diarrhea, Sorry. I wish I’d never told you about it. It hardly ever comes out any more. Mostly I just think I’m going to have diarrhea but it doesn’t actually happen.’
‘Allergies?’
‘Well, I don’t like bathroom hand driers, or red stoplights, or Kentucky and I once got stuck by the shoelace on a department store elevator, so I’m not that fond of those either, but I wouldn’t exactly say I’m allergic.’
‘No, you’re just chicken shit nervous as far as I can see.’
A further scientific silence ensued.
‘It might be dreams,’ Malcolm shared, hoping to pique Sorry’s interest further. ‘I’ve done a lot of research into dreams. You can really easily dream things true if you’re not careful.’
‘Balls,’ she replied. ‘No real scientist would seriously consider dreams. There’s a perfectly good explanation for why you’re disappearing, Malcolm and I’m going to help you find it.’
‘And then will you help me stop it?’
‘Maybe. It all depends on how serious the problem is. Look, kid, it’s all speculation until I actually have a look at you. Take your clothes off and stand on the table.’
‘No way! I’m not getting naked in front of you. You’re a girl and you’re not even my mom.’
‘I’ve seen it all before,’ Sorry replied, chewing the tip of her pen disconcertingly. But Malcolm Orange dug his toes into the kitchen table and stalwartly refused to get naked for her. Stalemate raged for twenty full minutes as science waged war on modesty, locking horns angrily somewhere over the condiments. Eventually a compromise was reached; all clothes would be removed, with the exception of a modesty-concealing pair of underwear. (Horrified by the prospect of an intimate examination by a girl, even if tempered by the security of underwear, Malcolm slipped into his bedroom, removed last night’s slightly stained boxers and replaced them with not one, but two pairs of tight white Y-fronts, straight out of the pack. Malcolm Orange was taking no chances when it came to medical research.)
The examination itself was relatively painless. Soren James Blue made a quick outline sketch of a young boy in her notebook and, when complete, bade Malcolm mount the table and disrobe.
‘I’m ready,’ she said. ‘Get up there and take your clothes off. I’m going to mark the disappearing parts in my notepad so we can analyze the data afterwards.’
‘Good idea,’ replied Malcolm. ‘And you should also mark the holes on me with a Magic Marker. That way we can monitor how much bigger they are tomorrow. I saw it on a medical drama. It’s how real doctors keep track of infections. If you look in the drawer under the microwave you should find a pack of Magic Markers you can use.’
Soren James Blue went rifling through the drawer and returned with a luminous orange marker, and a pair of his late grandma’s reading glasses. ‘Score,’ she yelled, holding one lens up to her right eye. ‘These bad boys are stronger than a friggin’ microscope. I’m not going to miss any of your disappearing bits now.’
Malcolm Orange scrambled onto the kitchen table and removed his shirt and shorts, flinging them across the kitchen where they came to rest half in, half out of the sink. His feet straddled the salt and pepper cellars. His head came within inches of the ceiling fan. The thrash of it, rotating mere fingers from his crown, caused his hair to rise and fall in a well-fluffed parody of flight. He looked at the dripping faucet and tried to conceal his embarrassment.
Soren James Blue began at his ankles and, swapping the flashlight and spectacles from hand to hand, moved ever upwards, taking occasional notes in her notebook. She worked silently, placing a firm, directorial hand on Malcolm’s ankle when she wished him to pivot left or right. At first she was bent double, folded like a paperback novel, as she approached his crotch she straightened up and by the beginning of his shoulders was forced to employ a kitchen stool for a proper view. For a girl, inclined to excessive outbursts of anger and vomit, she made a meticulous researcher. Arriving finally at Malcolm’s face she explored, with an upturned teaspoon, the inside of his mouth, ruffled through his hair and eyebrows and even made a cautious exploration of his eardrums. Somewhere about the kneecaps, Malcolm Orange began to relax and by the time Sorry was approaching his midriff, had settled right into the idea of being investigated by a girl, if only for scientific research.
Approximately fifteen minutes later, Soren James Blue recapped her Magic Marker and jumped down from the kitchen stool. The investigation was over. Malcolm looked down at his naked torso, expecting to be peppered in dots and circles. Sorry’s fingers, frantically poking and proddin
g across the landscape of his naked flesh, had left him convinced that the perforations were worse than even he had anticipated. However, only a single orange circle, navigating the edge of his bellybutton, blared beacon-like from his middle. Malcolm was confused. He ran a finger round the circumference of his bellybutton, following the outline of the Magic Marker, and looked to Sorry for guidance.
‘That’s the only hole I could find,’ she said. ‘And it looks perfectly normal to me. It’s just an ordinary bellybutton. Congratulations, Malcolm. It turns out you’re not disappearing after all.’
This was a mystery to Malcolm. Even now, with an audience, he could clearly make out the holes all over his naked arms and torso. His knees were almost entirely missing. Even the microwave door supported his worst suspicions. The backs of his shins were pickled with reflected perforations. His heels were holes, grasping at the base of his ankles. Malcolm Orange was disappearing, this much was obvious, and Soren James Blue simply wasn’t willing to admit it.
‘Dammit, Sorry,’ he said, raising his voice to outdo the ceiling fan, ‘I AM disappearing. Why won’t you admit it?’
But before Sorry could rise to her own defense the back door flew open (having been long in need of a good oiling, the doors of Chalet 13 willfully resisted all ordinary openings and closings and could only be forced into acquiescence with the kind of brute force which rendered all movements sudden and somewhat dramatic).
The clip of the door slamming into the kitchen wall caused Mr Fluff to rise from her sleeping spot atop the microwave oven and land, vitriolic and spitting, upon Sorry’s shoulders. Thereafter Sorry, suddenly unbalanced, fell forwards on to the kitchen table, dislodging Malcolm, who tumbled naked and sprawling across the kitchen floor, forming a squirming roadblock for the kitchen’s latest occupant.
The door swung back on its hinges and before Sorry and Malcolm could untangle themselves, opened again, admitting a somewhat frail and tweedy man fumbling forwards with two garden canes. The inevitable proceeded in slow motion. The old man, with a hearty cry of, ‘Malcolm, I’ve come to get you for the People’s Committee,’ took two tentative steps forward and made untimely contact with Malcolm’s naked heel. One garden cane ventured due south, whilst the other headed north, and the elderly man, like a tin can pyramid, toppled forwards, sandwiching Malcolm Orange between his own skinny belly and Soren James Blue, who was now pinioned chin first to the kitchen floor. After the impact and the inevitable round of mutters and arthritic groans, Sorry raised herself up on one elbow, allowing Mr Fluff free passage to extricate her tail and left paw, which had become trapped at the base of the pile. ‘Holy Crap,’ she thought, fully aware of her father’s fury and the compromising nature of her current position, pinned to the floor by a semi-naked stranger, ‘this looks bad. Really, really bad.’
