The Orchid Eater

by Marc Laidlaw

  “But I can’t leave the station now, it’s—”

  “Alec, you just had a death in the company. For Craig you can shut down.”

  “Oh. Yeah.” Alec looked numb; but Hawk looked as if he had been switched on, as if he had always carried inside him all kinds of strange, dark, quiescent machines waiting to be thrown into life . . . and now they were finally running. “For Craig,” Alec said.

  “I’ll meet you there.”

  Cars slowed, stopped for a light, leaving the crosswalk clear. Alec rushed into it, heading for the gas station. There was another kid over there, in the blue shirt and cap. Mike could hear Alec yelling at him: “We’re closing up!”

  Hawk made as if to follow. Then, as if he were totally aware of everything Mike had seen and heard and thought, he glanced down at him and said, “Go home, kid. Remember what I said last night? You don’t want any part of this.”

  Mike kept his mouth shut, but he was thinking: Yes I do! Wanting it with a hot, desperate energy, as if he’d been charged up somehow, as if there was something in him the equal of anything in Hawk. His veins felt flooded with fear and electricity—in short, with life.

  Hawk crossed the street an instant before the light turned red. By the time the cop finally reached the sidewalk, everything on his belt clanking heavily, the cars were pouring past. He looked red and swollen and sweaty in his dark, heavy uniform. He gave Mike a look of utter disgust and irritation, as if he were the cause of all the cop’s woes.

  “What are you looking at?” he snapped.

  Mike took off running.

  10

  After leaving the storm drain, early, Lupe walked south along the shore. There was such a warm glow in his belly that he hardly felt the chill of the ocean air. Except for footprints of daybreak joggers and beachcombers, the sands were bare of humanity. Although he was confident he had left the pipe without being seen, it wasn’t till he had strolled around several juts of the shore cliffs, hands thrust deep in his army jacket, that he felt he could relax.

  In a tortured snarl of sea rocks, where the waves rushed gurgling through pockets in the slick brown stone, he crouched down out of sight of the apartment buildings that covered the cliffsides and washed his hands in a tide pool. He peeled away the film of drying blood. He cleaned beneath his nails. Wishing for a mirror, he splashed his face with seawater in case any blood had spattered there. An oceanic taste filled his mouth, both salty and sweet. The power of the sea, of all nature, was spreading through him; he relished the surge of new strength. He opened the switchblade and started to wash that as well, until he remembered that salt water might rust the spring. Contenting himself with scraping off the flecks of tissue before they scabbed over, he watched sea anemones groping at the sifting rain of small fleshy particles that drizzled into their pools, seizing the tidbits and plunging them into their soft gullets; tiny crabs darted out from under rocks, fighting over the fragments.

  The initiation of the Pump Jockey had gone very well, he thought. The boy was right for his collection.

  The Pump Jockey had been easily lured with the promise of a climax to yesterday’s confrontation. Lupe had discreetly let himself be seen from across the Coast Highway, and then retreated as if in terror. When the boy followed him into the pipe, he had run as far as the branching tunnels before stopping in pretended confusion, though he had explored the sewer in darkness and knew that both routes joined again not far ahead. There, beneath the manhole cover, he had let the boy catch up with him.

  The Pump Jockey’s laughter, his low threats of “faggot,” had long since faded from the world, but in Lupe’s ears they were nearly as loud as the waves. Nearly as loud as the shrieks that had come while cars rushed overhead, while church bells rang in the distance and gulls screamed on the beach.

  Now, hearing a scrabbling sound like something digging up from the rocks, Lupe shoved the knife into his pocket. A big Irish setter came running over the rocks, bounding toward him. He hurried away before the dog’s owner followed.

  As the air warmed, he stripped out of his jacket and stuffed it into his pack. His eyes constantly roved the cliffside for shelter, dark places. Although the shadow of the cliff was still long and cool, nearly touching the tideline, he knew the heat was on its way. Where not completely covered by buildings, the cliffs were so overgrown with iceplant that they looked like freeway embankments and offered as little shelter. He needed a hole, and there were no overpasses or bridges here to hide him.

  Far down the beach he saw a yellow lifeguard jeep approaching. A flight of stairs ran up between two houses that seemed to float above the sand on enormous cement columns. Lupe started up the stairs, heading for the highway. Halfway up, he spied a dark recess beneath one of the houses, less substantial than a crawl space, but large enough for a boy or a small man. He scuttled into it, grateful for the cool and dark, suddenly conscious of his exhaustion. He had been up all night, wandering the streets, making his way back to the beach and the tunnel, sometimes fingering the knife he planned to use that morning, sometimes tracing the edges of the key, whose time would come later.

  He had taken out and studied the key many times since the night before, wondering what it meant, where it fit in. Silver, gleaming like a fallen piece of the moon, it was an unmistakable invitation—a promise for some future date. For now it lay buried deep in a pocket, safe and sleeping.

  The crawl space was cramped, littered with rusted plumbing, clogged with spiderwebs. He turned around several times like a dog settling down to clear itself a bed. From here, daylight was only a narrow band of glare. He turned his back on it, curling up in the deepest corner of the cave, head pillowed on his pack. Dreams were not long in coming. Neither were the boys.

  ***

  Long after nightfall, the boy found himself on a road he didn’t know, beneath shattered streetlamps, above a huddle of dark apartment buildings. The smog-shrouded valleys of Los Angeles lay below; above him rose a dark crest, hunched like the back of a sleeping dog. A huge loom of black metal stood atop the hill, soaring into clouds whose bellies held a smutty reflected light. The night felt charged with energy and stank like a leaking battery. Snapping sparks fell from the power lines that swept up to the tower from the horizon. The hairs along his arms and spine stood on end. He thought he heard laughter in the wires, but when he turned to go back the way he’d come, he discovered that the laughter was behind him. It was real.

  The boys came up from the houses, or flocked out of nowhere, silent as shadows, surrounding him. But shadows could not have grabbed him so forcefully; shadows could not have pushed him up the hill and into the cave.

  That was the First Cave. All he’d seen or could remember of it—fragments.

  Sandstone walls appeared in leaping bursts of bluish light that came with a roar and then faded, like the flame of revelation in a nightmare which shows a monster’s grin for only an instant, then shuts off and strands you in darkness.

  This was a darkness full of laughter, full of fingers digging into his flesh, pinning him to the ground.

  When the light flared again, he saw a blue tongue of flame licking from the nozzle of a blowtorch. Hissing and spitting, it kissed his cheeks, singed his eyebrows, then went away somewhere out of sight.

  Someone said, “Get his pants.”

  He couldn’t believe where the flame went next, roaring over his crotch, kissing him with fire. It was more pain than a soul could bear—though a body might. He fled from that place the only way he knew, escaping into darkness with nothing but his mind and imagination to carry him. His spirit was a thing of pure agony, neither awake nor asleep, alive nor dead, but suspended somewhere in between—somewhere he had never dreamed of finding.

  Skin shriveled, sizzled. Blood-rich tissue swelled, popped, burst. Thanks to the torch, his wounds were instantly cauterized.

  He dreamed that he was floating in the sky, a god inhaling burnt offerings, his own flesh the sacrifice.

  That dream never ended.
r />   ***

  The boy spent months in white rooms, surrounded by white people. His soul was likewise bare and antiseptic—cauterized. Sometimes he felt blindingly white, as if the fire that purged him still burned somewhere inside. Sometimes he only burned, without reason, and he fled the light, fled the world again. The sun was a blowtorch burning holes in the walls where he hid, trying to get at him. The doctors were agents of the fire, boring into him in their own way. They brought him food on trays, chunks of meat, the smell of which sent him reeling back into memories and left him vomiting. They stopped feeding him anything that had ever been able to bleed.

  But the doctors, determined that he should return to the world at any cost, remained ignorant of what they were sending forth. Something had hatched in the First Cave, a remote, detached divinity that inhabited his altered body, taking up residence in all the empty places the original Lupe had left behind.

  His chief therapist was a long-haired, bearded young man who considered himself streetwise. Dr. Brownhouse was flush of face and shiny white, his eyes gleaming with all the new wisdom he had to dispense, things he claimed could heal the boy through and through. This eager young fellow, with psychedelic posters on the walls of his clinic, had been through countless seminars of the new school, and he had learned a bold language of holism.

  Whatever happened to you, Lupe, you’re young enough to get past it. You have to tell yourself that you will get over it. You have allies within. I want you to claim them, seek their help. I want you to see them clearly, call them to you. Visualize them—draw their power into you. Bring yourself together. You’re an artist, I’ve seen your sketches, I know you can make these pictures in your mind. So use that power. Make them as strong as you can.

  Some of Lupe’s sketches were tacked to Dr. Brownhouse’s walls, but they were old work, childish fantasies from all the time Lupe had spent confined and dreaming in his Aunt Theresa’s house, in the small room where she locked him so he’d be “safe.” Her worst threats of what might happen to him if he left the house had not come close to matching the reality. As if stunned by how thoroughly life had shamed his imagination, Lupe had not touched so much as a crayon since the incident.

  He kept busy, though, putting the doctor’s words to work:

  Face what you fear.

  It was sound advice, and once he was able, he followed it.

  He was afraid of the dark as he had never been before, afraid of caves and holes, so that was the first fear he forced himself to face. He shut himself into dark rooms, closed himself into closets, found windowless basements and huddled in the blindest corners until terror seeped away and the dark became an ally.

  Eventually he found his way back to the First Cave. He watched it till nightfall, staring into the empty socket as if an eye might emerge to stare back at him. When nothing came, he knew that he had conquered his fear completely, though he was not ready to reenter that particular place. Not yet.

  Miguel was his first initiate. He took him in an ivy-choked, abandoned tunnel not far from the First Cave, luring him with a tale of a suitcase he’d found filled with hundred-dollar bills, maybe the stash from a bank heist.

  In darkness he claimed that first life. It was a bloody initiation, no less for himself than for Miguel. He consumed the boy’s power, literally absorbed his vitality, and afterward stood in the dark imagining Miguel as he had been in life, in full flower. Opening his eyes, he saw the soul-shadow standing before him.

  And Miguel remained. Because he was the first, and the source of so much inspiration, Lupe allowed him to keep his name. Small, thin-boned, a fierce but silent companion, Miguel had followed Lupe east out of L.A., as if eager to join in the search for companions.

  They crossed the country, hitching rides in empty trucks and crowded cars, through parched farmlands and plains wracked by thunderstorms. Often, when the company of people seemed unbearable, they went on foot.

  Lupe found initiates wherever he went.

  They were drawn to him from all over the lands through which he traveled. He won their trust easily, because he was—or looked—so young, so innocent, simply another boy like themselves, traveling alone. The Hopi had sullen eyes but a quick smile; he could not believe Lupe had come all the way from Los Angeles to the colored deserts of the Southwest. He showed Lupe a wind-carved notch high in a sandstone bluff where they sat drinking whiskey and smoking weed while the sun went down behind a distant butte. At the moment the first star appeared, Lupe introduced the Hopi to Miguel, and the second boy’s strength warmed him all through a cold desert night. Falling snow melted when it touched him. He was a flame among the stones. He found a road and followed it till daybreak, when the two boys (friends now, closer than they’d ever be to Lupe) disappeared.

  Gradually the desert sun had come to seem too bright. Facing his fear of the fire had always been harder than facing the dark. He knew this was a weakness, but was helpless. Fire could not be endured in the same way as darkness. The stars shone like white flames; even the moon threatened to scorch him. Seeking shelter, he traveled east over broad lands whose flatness frightened him, since no secrets could be kept there. He traveled as quickly as possible, sometimes wishing he had remained in the desert, with its canyons and eroded walls and ancient sculpted stone. But soon he found himself in rich countryside like none he’d ever seen, among other kinds of shadows: shadows of woods, shadows of mountains, shadows of caves. This land was fertile with darkness.

  Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, the Carolinas. Limestone caverns had gnawed and wormholed away the underside of every surface. There were big caves like subterranean Disneylands, full of lurid lights and guided tours, offering ridiculous souvenirs. He knew he could never be comfortable in these places, though he always looked with longing at the unlit side tunnels, the regions no one had mapped. Once he slipped away from a tour and lost himself for days in the dark, living on icy water and imagining himself a slippery blind thing that had dwelt there forever.

  He met the Cherokee in the Appalachians. The land was full of runaways. Together they hitchhiked and camped for several nights in the national parks, until Lupe convinced the other to take him to a sacred cave, a place of his ancestors, where they planned to eat mescaline. Lupe always pretended to carry a rich supply of psychedelics, a lure to most of his companions on the road.

  Sometimes sex was the bait. Certain fellow travelers warmed to Lupe’s hints of things that could best be done in deep darkness. He would always remember how the Virginian had grinned and said, “We could do those things in any old motel.”

  Lupe said, “Not these things.”

  The Virginian had picked him up in a battered truck, heading north through the Shenandoah Valley. Lupe steered the talk to caves, which was easy enough with signs advertising them every few miles. “Forget about them ones on the map. I know a better one. No ticket price, either.” As they turned onto a rough narrow road among pines, Lupe glanced at the bed of the truck and saw Miguel, the Hopi and the Cherokee crouched down in back.

  That night, when he retraced his route along the same road, four shadows rode in the bed.

  Over a year later, hitching south on the same stretch of highway, he accepted a ride from a young Marine on his way home to Charlotte on leave. Lupe described the Virginian’s cave as the hideout of old distillers, and said there was supposed to be a cache still hidden there. It was late by the time they found the place. The Marine was tall, strong, and recently trained in fighting; but all his advantages went for nothing in the dark.

  The cave states were the most fruitful by far. Somehow he wasted more than a year in New York City, which he feared at times he would never escape. He’d thought that with its subways and cavernous buildings he would make many friends; but he never found comfort there. The city, which should have been a collector’s dream, made him doubt himself; consequently, few trusted him. He sponged off older men who held no attraction for him, since few had the sort of vitality he sought in his initiates. They
were only useful alive. He did learn things in this period, however; he learned to read; he learned how to mold himself according to the desires of others, how to talk like them and act like them, to blend into each little world in which he found himself. He had started some of this with Dr. Brownhouse, spending time in a place and among people so different from those he’d always known. But New York allowed him to hone his skills, as he ranged between ruined tenements and penthouse suites.

  He added but one boy to his gang in all that time, a wasted, scrawny addict whose initiation was less an act of desire than of self-defense. It had been so long—he needed someone. Absorbing his power, Lupe felt such a violent jolt of sickness that he instantly regretted his decision; but it was too late. The Junkie was his forever, polluting the purity of his collection.

  Once back in the country, he initiated the Marine almost immediately. Then came the young black Musician, who never played a single note for Lupe either before or after his initiation, though the long drawn-out wail of a freight train’s whistle was music enough in the dark, onrushing boxcar where he met the other boys.

  After that, Lupe’s thoughts began to turn toward home.

  Toward Sal.

  It was because of Sal he had ended up in the First Cave, powerless and vulnerable. Sal had stunted him—shattered his life. So it was Sal he thought of, now that he had made himself whole. Now that he had allies.

  When he returned to Los Angeles after years of wandering, after dozens of other lesser caves, he felt ready at last to master the First Cave. It took him days to gather the courage, and when he finally visited the place he found the hump-backed hill covered with new buildings, the rock itself leveled or gouged away. The cave was buried or destroyed—there was no way of telling which. He shrugged off his disappointment that there would be no showdown, knowing it had been a childish wish. The true First Cave was inside him now, where it would remain unchanging, bottomless, a pit that could never be filled in or covered over. None of the outer caves could have been any darker or deeper than the one within; and in facing that one, he knew he had mastered them all. He was ready now. He was whole.