Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  “You think from what I’ve done that I’m a monster, Miss Boone. You think I thrive on cruelty, but it’s not that way. Even Greer, in his last moments, thanked me for what I did. Even the children, their life force wavering, and the stains along their scalps spreading darker juices over their eyes, whispered praise with their final breaths that I had led them to that place.”

  He held a light up to the papers stuck to the wall. His shadow seemed enormous and twisted as he moved the light in circles; he didn’t look back at her, but moved from petition to petition. “Blessings and praises and prayers, all from the locals, the believers in Y-Cha. And I, Miss Boone, I am her sworn consort, and her keeper, too, for it was Nathan Meritt and no other, the Man Who Skinned A Thousand Faces, who is her most beloved, and to whom she has submitted herself, my prisoner. Come, I will take you to the throne of Y-Cha.”

  A pool of water, a perfect circle, filled with koi and turtles, was at the center of the chamber. Jane had followed Nathan down winding corridors, whose walls seemed to be covered with dried animal skins and smelled of animal dung. The chamber itself was poorly lit; but there was a fire, in a hearth at its far end; she thought she heard the sound of rushing water just beyond the walls.

  “The river,” Nathan said. “We’re beneath it. She needs the moisture, always. She has not been well for hundreds of years.”

  He went ahead, toward a small cot.

  Jane followed, stepping around the thin bones that lay scattered across the stones.

  There, on the bed, head resting on straw, was Lucy. Fruit had been stuffed into her mouth, and flowers in the empty sockets of her eyes. She was naked, and her skin had been brutally tattooed until the blood had caked around the lines: drawings of monkeys.

  Jane opened her mouth to scream, and knew that she had, but could not even hear it.

  When she stopped, she managed, “You bastard, you said you hadn’t hurt her. You said she was still alive.”

  He touched her arm, almost lovingly. “That’s not what I told you. She did this to herself. Even the flowers. She’s not even dead, not yet. She’s no longer Lucy.” He squatted beside the cot, and combed his fingers through her hair. “She’s the prison of Y-Cha, at least as long as she breathes. Monkey God is a weak god, in the flesh, and she needs it, she needs skin, because she’s not much different than you or me, Jane, she wants to experience life, feel blood, feel skin and bones and travel and love and kill, all the things animals take for granted, but the gods know, Jane. Oh, my baby,” he pressed his face against the flowers, “the beauty, the sanctity of life, Jane, it’s not in joy or happiness, it’s in suffering in flesh.”

  He kissed the berry-stained lips, slipping his tongue into Lucy’s mouth. With his left hand, he reached back and grasped Jane’s hand before she could step away. His grip was tight, and he pulled her toward the cot, to her knees. He kissed from Lucy to her, and back, and she tasted the berries and sweet pear. She could not resist—it was as if her flesh required her to do this, and she began to know what the others had known, the woman with the scraped face, the children, Greer, even Rex, all the worshipers of Y-Cha. Nathan’s penis was erect and dripping, and she touched it with her hand, instinctively. The petals on the flower quivered; Nathan pressed his lips to Lucy’s left nipple, and licked it like he was a pup suckling and playing; he turned to Jane, his face smeared with Lucy’s blood, and kissed her, slipping a soaked tongue, copper taste, into the back of her throat; she felt the light pressure of his fingers exploring between her legs, then watched as he brought her juices up to his mouth; he spread Lucy’s legs apart, and applied a light pressure to the back of Jane’s head.

  For an instant, she tried to resist.

  But the tattoos of monkeys played there, along the thatch of hair, like some unexplored patch of jungle, and she found herself wanting to lap at the small withered lips that Nathan parted with his fingers.

  Beneath her mouth, the body began to move.

  Slowly at first, then more swiftly, bucking against her lips, against her teeth, the monkey drawings chattered and spun.

  She felt Nathan’s teeth come down on her shoulder as she licked the woman.

  He began shredding her skin, and the pain would’ve been unbearable, except she felt herself opening up below, for him, for the trembling woman beneath her, and the pain slowed as she heard her flesh rip beneath Nathan’s teeth, she was part of it, too, eating the dying woman who shook with orgasm, and the blood like a river.

  A glimpse of her, not Lucy.

  Not Lucy.

  But Monkey God.

  Y-Cha.

  You suffer greatly. You suffer and do not die. Y-Cha may leave her prison.

  She could not tell where Nathan left off and where she began, and seemed beyond the threshold of any pain she had ever imagined in the whole of creation.

  She ripped flesh, devouring, blood coursing across her chin, down her breasts, Nathan inside her now, more than inside her, rocking within her, complete love through the flesh, through the blood, through the wilderness of frenzy, through the small hole between her legs, into the cavern of her body, and Y-Cha, united with her lover through the suffering of a woman whose identity as Jane Boone was quickly dissolving.

  Her consciousness: taste, hurt, feel, spit, bite, love.

  5

  In the morning, the saint slept.

  His attendant, Sunil, came through the entrance to the chamber with a plate of steamed vegetables. He set them down on the table and went to get a broom to sweep up the broken pitcher. When he returned, the saint awoke. The servant stared at his master’s face as if he were seeing the most horrifying image ever in existence.

  The saint took his hand to calm him, and placed his palm against the fresh wounds and newly formed scars.

  Sunil gasped, because he was trying to fight how good it felt, as all men did when they encountered Y-Cha.

  His mouth opened in a small o of pleasure.

  Already, his body moved, he thrust, gently, at first, he wanted to be consort to Y-Cha.

  He would beg for what he feared most, he would cry out for pain beyond his imagining, just to spill his more personal pain, the pain of life in the flesh.

  It was the greatest gift of humans, their flesh, their blood, their memories. Their suffering. It was all they had, in the end, to give, for all else was mere vanity.

  Words scrawled in human suffering on a yellow wall:

  Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood

  I delight in your offering

  Make of your heart a lotus of burning

  Make of your loins a pleasure dome

  I will consecrate the bread of your bones

  And make of you a living temple to Monkey God.

  The servant opened himself to the god, and the god enjoyed the flesh as she hadn’t for many days, the flesh and the blood and the beauty—for it was known among the gods that a man was most beautiful as he lay dying.

  The gift of suffering was offered slowly, with equal parts delight and torment, and as she watched his pain, she could not contain her jealousy for what the man possessed.

  The Stain

  Jason hunted for the T-shirt just outside the walls of the hotel compound.

  He haggled over the price of a particular shirt — the kind Kyle would love. It was boiling hot out; the sea breeze did nothing to cool down the market stall. After an extended back-and-forth with the seller, Jason got a sweet deal: the shirt, flip-flops, plus a few knickknacks for his son’s collection.

  The guy selling souvenirs under the plastic awning lived — no doubt — among the squalor of hut and shack that ran the length of road between hotel and airport. The man’s teeth were a mess. Bright-eyed but malnourished, he sweated in the sauna of noon.

  Jason felt a twinge of guilt, having bargained so aggressively just to shave off a buck or two. He recalled his wife’s phrase, spoken on their honeymoon a decade earlier, at a coastal resort in that kind of country: “The misfortune of being born in the wrong
place.”

  Still, Jason closed the deal with American dollars.

  The seller chattered in the universal language of pissedness to the short woman who wrapped the items and slipped them into a brown paper bag.

  Jason gave the shirt to Kyle the minute he got home from the airport that night.

  “Look what it says,” Jason told his son.

  Kyle, who was nine, read it out loud.

  “Wow,” his son said, after. “Wow.”

  “Wow is right,” Jason said. “When you’re a little older, I’ll take you there. It’s got cool cliffs and these islands out in the ocean that you can actually swim to. Your dad parasailed. It’s like flying.”

  Over dinner at the sushi place in town, his wife Amy said, “Don’t I get a T-shirt?”

  “Maybe next time. I brought in three new clients, one trip.”

  “And that means…”

  “Well, we can probably put an offer on the beach condo.”

  She took a sip of her soda, picked up a chopstick and jabbed it at the air. “Do we really want to do that? We may take a hit for it.”

  “It’s for Kyle, too.”

  “I think we should just save the money. Invest some more,” she said, and reached over to harpoon a piece of dragon roll off his plate. He crossed chopsticks with hers and knocked it back in his court.

  “Yeah but a condo, just think,” Jason said. “Income property, plus vacations. It’ll pay forward. Add a little to our investment portfolio.”

  “But can we make a business of it?”

  “It’s a start,” he said. “You never know where it might lead.”

  When they got home, Jason drove the nanny back to her little apartment, paying her double for the extra time.

  After Amy fell asleep, Jason went to look in on Kyle.

  In bed, Kyle’s head was nearly covered by the blanket. Jason drew the cover down a little, kissing his son on the back of the scalp.

  Kyle wore the T-shirt. A slight discoloration ran along the collar where the manufacturer tag had turned upward.

  Jason turned on the flashlight of his cell phone to look.

  A brown-red stain.

  He checked the back of Kyle’s neck, but there was no cut.

  He wondered if the stain had been there when he’d bought the shirt.

  A few weeks later, Jason — at home, contacting potential clients — was interrupted by a call from Kyle’s school.

  Jason met with the headmistress that afternoon. Her office looked out over the vast grounds with its soccer field and swimming pool. She mentioned Kyle’s moods, his disruptive behavior among the other boys, his outbursts.

  “But that’s why he’s here. You’re handling it,” Jason said.

  Then, she mentioned the T-shirt.

  “I still don’t understand,” Jason said.

  The headmistress, her eyes a bit too kind, said, “He wears it under his school shirt every day.”

  “That against the rules?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “Our nurse suspected he was using it to hide something. We’ve seen this before.”

  Earlier that day during recess, one of the teachers noticed some bruises at Kyle’s neck. Boys got bruised all the time, but these seemed odd. Sent him to the school nurse. The nurse noticed that the bruise disappeared down behind the collar of his T-shirt. Kyle told her about having problems sleeping. Waking up in the middle of the night. A scratchy feeling on his back. She asked him to take the T-shirt off. He wouldn’t. She had to physically draw it off. He became uncontrollable.

  “That’s when she saw it,” the headmistress said.

  “Saw what?”

  “The blood. The markings.”

  Before four, Jason wrangled an appointment with Kyle’s pediatrician, who examined the bruises and sores on his back.

  “It’s nothing — look.” The doctor wiped the trace of blood away, and smoothed out the faint scars with his fingers. “I don’t think this is anything serious. Just a skin thing.”

  “How could it happen?” Jason looked from the doctor to his son.

  His son looked down at his feet.

  “Kyle?” Jason asked.

  His son looked up at him. “I told you. I don’t know. Maybe I fell. I don’t remember.”

  “Yep, that’s probably it,” the doctor said. “Probably scraped himself a little. It’s not as bad as it looks. See? Might have brushed against something, scratching it. That would account for any blood.”

  “You sure it’s not something worse?” Jason asked.

  The doctor would run some tests. He took a little blood, gave an overdue booster shot, suggested a specialist of some kind if it kept up.

  “I’m okay,” Kyle said. He looked at his father.

  “Did anyone hurt you?” Jason asked.

  Kyle shook his head. “I already told you a million times.”

  That weekend, Jason and Amy set up camcorders all over the house. They hid them among shelving, behind hanging plants.

  Every night, they watched video of the nanny and Kyle from the previous day.

  The nanny —from Ecuador — proved efficient for the most part but did push Kyle away when he went to grab a second cookie after he got home from school.

  Jason didn’t quite like Maria that much after this, but it was hardly cause for firing her.

  When asked — frequently — Kyle denied any knowledge of the origin of the bruising and sores.

  The bruises faded in a few days.

  “My brothers were always bruising themselves,” Amy said in bed one night. “Boys play rough. You must’ve been in a few fights as a kid. That alcoholic school nurse just over-reacted.”

  The next afternoon, while doing laundry, Jason drew the T-shirt from the hamper.

  The stain was still there, right near his son’s side. Jason saw a new stain at the collar and another down along the lower part of the shirt, and yet another by the sleeve edge.

  He scraped at the stains with his fingernail.

  Little dried flecks came up.

  He remembered how — as a boy — he once or twice scraped up his side falling off his bike. He’d bruised himself all over after accepting a dare to jump from a boulder. Suspended over a bridge, he’d burned and blistered his hands. No one had ever thought — in those days — to mention it.

  Jason bleached the shirt three times, but the stains wouldn’t quite come out. He kept seeing them, faint as they’d become.

  He threw the shirt out in the trash.

  When Kyle discovered it was missing, he slammed his door and told his father he didn’t love him.

  Jason and Amy both laughed at this over a drink before bed. “I’m pretty sure I said that to my mother half a dozen times before I was fourteen. Maybe after that, too,” she told him. “Don’t worry, he still loves you. He’s being silly. Maybe we spoil him too much. Your mother thinks so.”

  Jason didn’t respond. He did spoil Kyle, but when he thought of his own childhood, he didn’t want Kyle to ever feel the way he felt as a boy — going without when it came to things every boy wanted.

  In bed, finishing up the last of several spreadsheets on her laptop, Amy clicked over to a travel site to book their flight to Costa Rica. “There. We’re set.”

  “When?” Jason asked.

  “Two weeks from now. Sun, sand, sea — and vacation home hunt.”

  In the days leading up to the trip, Jason felt coldness from Kyle — still angry at the loss of his favorite shirt.

  Just before hugging his son goodbye, Jason promised he’d bring back a bunch of “T-shirts, sunglasses, sandals. Cool stuff.”

  When the airport limo drove off, Jason looked back, waving from the open window.

  Kyle stood in the driveway with Maria.

  Kyle turned away a little too quickly, grabbing Maria’s hand.

  In Costa Rica, Jason and his wife spent mornings checking out dozens of condos and houses on the coast. Their afternoons and evenings became bouts of windsurfi
ng, sailing — and drinking a bit too much.

  “I don’t think I ever want sex again,” he laughed after their second go-round in one afternoon.

  Every night at seven, they had video chats with Kyle on the laptop. Jason spent a half hour asking him about his day, what he’d done and what friends he’d seen. They’d play a brief game of Turtle Races on the computer before shutting it down. He always let Kyle win.

  “You miss him already?” Amy asked.

  “Yep. Next time, we’ll bring him. It’ll be fun. I want to teach him how to wind surf.”

  “I’d worry he’d drown. You know me. He’s too young.”

  “Plenty old enough to go out on the water — with me there to catch him. Maybe kayaking, too. That’d be fun.”

  Amy leaned into him. “Remember when it was always like this? Just the two of us?”

  He put his arm around her. “Okay, one more time before shut-eye. Just one more and then this old man’s got to sleep.”

  They settled on one of the condos in a colorful complex called Cabeza del Mar.

  The property management company was first-rate. A handful of laborers worked on the floors as Amy stepped around them, inspecting their work, suggesting the kitchen appliances.

  The agent told them that if they signed the contract soon, they could decide all the upgrades, including the en suite bathroom.

  “We’ll take a few weeks down here a year, rent it out the rest of the time,” Jason told Amy over margaritas at their new favorite watering hole. “By the time we’re fifty and taking early retirements, it’ll be paid off and maybe we’ll spend winters here,”

  “Or sell it when the market revives,” Amy said. “I bet it’ll be worth a million then. Maybe more.”

  “Given what we’re going to be paying, it better be more.”

  They had a goal of reaching eight million dollars in savings and investments — minimum — by the time they were fifty. They looked for new business opportunities whenever they could; that’s where Amy’s market research skills came into play.