Some Hell

by Patrick Nathan

  “You’re sick.”

  “Hey, I’m a man and I have needs. I always forget you’re gay, sorry.”

  “I’m not gay.”

  “There’s probably a cloud where all the dudes have sex. Except—oh man, I forgot. They don’t allow you guys into heaven.” He sucked in a deep breath. “Yeah. Nice knowing you.”

  Colin bit his lip to keep from laughing. “I’ll send your gay ass to hell right now.” He shoved his pillow onto Andy’s face. He wasn’t sure if he was angry or just pretending, or if it mattered.

  Andy pushed the pillow aside. “Hey!” He sat up. “Let’s see what dying is like right now. You hold the pillow over my face until I tap out. Then I tell you what it was like to almost die. Then we can switch.”

  “Okay. How will that work?”

  “Just shut up and do it.” Andy lay flat. “I’m ready.”

  Colin looked at him. The light had gone from his eyes, and Colin assumed they were closed. Andy lay there in his pajama shorts and tank top, and it occurred to Colin that he might play a prank or do something cruel when he was helpless like this. He thought about punching Andy in the balls or farting on his head. Instead he placed the pillow over his face as he’d been told and held it down in the center. He was squinting to read the clock when he heard something mumbled through the cotton, like a voice in the next room. He moved the pillow. “What?”

  “I said I can still breathe. You gotta do it hard.”

  “Whatever.” Colin returned the pillow and pressed down on each side until his knuckles met the carpet. He watched Andy’s chest swell up and down until he started squirming. With a jerk of his hand he tapped on the carpet three times. Colin let go and Andy gasped.

  “What was it like?”

  “I almost died. There was this tunnel of light and my grandpa was asking me to step into it.”

  “Liar.”

  “It’s true.” Andy grinned. “He said, ‘Make sure that homo friend of yours doesn’t come this way or I’ll beat his ass.’”

  “Shithead.” Colin hit him across the face with the pillow. He held up his arm as Andy swung with his own. They laughed as Colin moved in and tried to suffocate him again, as though giving him a hint. It didn’t seem fair that Andy wouldn’t suffocate him, that he didn’t get his turn.

  When the lamp flicked on they turned to face the doorway, both frozen and squinting in the light like night animals caught digging through the garbage. At first Alan said nothing. He stared with his eyes half open, leaning against the wall. The lamp flickered when the furnace clicked back on, and it made him look like an actor in a movie where a frame had been spliced out.

  “Go to bed,” Alan said. “It’s almost four.” He flicked off the light and shuffled down the hallway, his slippers crackling with static. Colin waited for the creak, and when he recognized the bedroom door he gave Andy a nod. Again they lay there, again quiet, again alone even together as they listened to the furnace and the clock. Colin didn’t want to, but he thought of heaven, all those people who weren’t allowed in, of their only everlasting alternative. He saw the way the shadows in hell’s caverns would flicker as though they too were flames.

  It wasn’t long before he heard Andy’s snores beside him and felt terribly alone. I’m the only one awake, he thought. There’s no one left to talk to about hell. He tried to not think, ultimately focusing on the ticking. Sometimes he’d count to sixty, telling himself how that was a whole minute, that if he counted to sixty fifty-nine more times it’d be an hour, and that if he repeated that cycle twenty-four times, a day would have passed. It was nothing you could stop.

  It was the bedroom door’s creak that woke him, the basement’s that wouldn’t let him go back to sleep. The light was too grey to tell if it was just after dawn or late in the morning. Outside, the last leaves holding on to their trees were shaking in the wind, plucked off one at a time like part of a child’s game. He still hadn’t raked the yard, as he was supposed to, and he tried to imagine all the ways out of it. It was Sunday and he knew his father wasn’t going downstairs to check on a fuse or a pipe or even to start the dryer where there was always a heap of wrinkled clothes. Colin knew he wouldn’t be at breakfast. He knew he wouldn’t move from that room—what he called his office—until dinner was on the table and they called down to him. Only then would he sit down and smile and tell them, This looks delicious. After that he would talk. He’d make jokes, and even though they were stupid jokes Colin wanted to hear them. On the following morning he’d go to work, come home, eat another dinner, and live through that week as though there was no reason to hide in a wood-paneled room with no windows. Maybe he’ll forget about the yard, Colin thought.

  His father had been writing for over a year but nobody knew what he was writing. It wasn’t as if they never asked. At least once each Sunday Colin crept downstairs to peer through the slats in the door. Hey, he’d say, running his finger along the slats so they rattled. You writing a manifesto? Colin knew it was something serious, as though his father was about to make a discovery or invent a new way of travel. But Alan paid no attention and only went on writing.

  Now, in the light of morning, time didn’t seem so concrete. Colin tried counting the ticks but couldn’t pay attention long enough to make it through a full minute. The house was still quiet. If the sun was outside it didn’t move. He thought this might be what forever was like, after you died and had to go on existing. Why wasn’t heaven whatever you wanted? Couldn’t he choose to turn it off?

  He stopped listening to the clock when Andy’s breath quickened. Colin looked over and saw him as he whimpered into his pillow, as he mumbled words that weren’t words, his whole body shaking in his sleeping bag. He watched until Andy cried out a single and final No! before he shuddered and fell still. Colin thought he should squeeze his hand, maybe even wake him up, but he didn’t want him to get the wrong idea.

  It was a while before Andy woke. He looked at Colin and blinked away the light. “Dude. Were you watching me sleep?”

  Colin forced a yawn. “I just woke up.”

  “Man, I gotta piss like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Me too.”

  Andy unzipped his sleeping bag. “Well, me first.” Colin watched as he took delicate steps down the hallway, almost like the floor was on fire. The furnace went silent again and Colin could hear the torrent that fell from his friend. Andy too had a penis, resting right now in his fingers. For some reason he’d never considered it before, or if he had it never seemed so significant, even crucial. Colin knew that Andy would be able to hear him as well, and when it was his turn in the bathroom he aimed at the porcelain instead of the water, and didn’t make a sound until he flushed.

  As he passed his parents’ room he heard the bed creak. He paused in the doorway and his mother rolled to face him. “Morning,” she said as pushed herself up with her elbows. She opened her mouth to yawn but tried to smile at the same time, her teeth bared like a dog’s.

  “Morning.” Colin noticed the other side of the bed, its covers pulled up to the headboard, its pillow centered with too much care. “Can we have pancakes for breakfast?”

  Diane squinted as though she hadn’t heard. “Pancakes? I haven’t made pancakes in forever. But I think we have everything. Except buttermilk, but regular milk is fine.” She brushed her hair back with another yawn. Her bathrobe was draped over the footboard and she pulled it over her shoulders. “Come here a second.”

  Her legs were crossed and still buried under the sheets, her knees sticking up on both sides like two cats sleeping under the covers. She pulled him into a hug, her breath warm through his shirt as her hand traced a circle beneath his shoulder blade. He could tell she was looking at the right side of the bed. “Did you see your father yet this morning?”

  “I heard the basement door.”

  Her arm squeezed tighter. He wished he hadn’t told her. This was one of those times when lying might have been the right thing.

  Diane put her head
against his chest. “That’s what I thought.” She patted his back. “Give me ten minutes and I’ll have the batter in the bowl.” Then her hands were on his shoulders and she was looking up at him, her eyes too wide. “Why don’t you go downstairs,” she said with a smile that was all wrong. “Tell him we’re making pancakes. Say they’re his favorite. Maybe that’ll change his mind.”

  Without warning, Colin kissed her on the forehead. Only after, with horror, did he realize this. As he left the room he didn’t look back. He didn’t want to see what she felt.

  Sometimes Colin thought of what was happening to his father and felt a kind of pride, like they were evolving or mutating, one by one. First, Heather could see the future; now their father had become secretive, no longer the pun-making man he’d grown up with. It was something in their genes, Colin decided, and thinking of all the ways it might show up in his own body or consciousness charmed the pale hairs on his arms until they stood up straight. He had come to imagine that this is what his father was writing—all the truths he discovered and all the things that would happen. Whatever book came out of it would not be some random piece of the future but a history of everything that hadn’t happened yet, their entire lives.

  He was thinking about his father’s future as he trod down the stairs—quietly, both out of habit and because he liked to sneak up on people. No one else was allowed in the basement office. They could only glance through the door and see, shelved on the far wall, Alan’s leather-bound notebooks, no labels on their spines. To Colin it looked like the secret archive in some old spy movie. It was easy to pretend he was rescuing stolen plans or launch codes, and he slunk along the wall to avoid unseen trip wires. You couldn’t sneak up on the evil archivist by strolling out in the open. He shook his head and came away from the wall. Lately he’d had to remind himself not to be such a stupid kid. He pushed his hair out of his eye and approached the door, stepping into the bands of light from inside.

  His father wasn’t writing. There were two open notebooks, one written in and the other blank. The brass pen he used was erect in its holder, next to his brass lamp. His arm was resting on the desk, and Colin immediately saw the gun in his hand. He stopped breathing and leaned closer, careful not to press his nose against the door.

  He didn’t look tense, his father. His posture suggested boredom, more than anything. He was leaning to the left, resting the non-gun-holding arm on the arm of the chair. The barrel faced the blank bulletin board hung on the wall between his desk and the overhead cabinets. The way he aimed it made Colin think of jokes from movies, like I got six little friends and they can all run faster than you. Then the gun came up off the desk as his father leaned back in the chair. When he bent his elbow and put the barrel under his chin Colin lost a little drop of urine. As if they’d rehearsed it, both closed their eyes and took a simultaneous, silent breath.

  Colin had never heard a gunshot before, and when he heard nothing but a click he thought the sound was so loud he’d been deafened. It’s like a bomb going off, his uncle had once said, making fun of an old western on TV. Guns don’t sound anything like little toys popping, like kids’ fireworks. They sound like goddamn bombs. When Colin opened his eyes, there wasn’t any blood. His father was still in his chair, skull intact, barrel resting in that soft, ticklish spot neither chin nor throat. The furnace next to the office still humming. The fluorescent light buzzing at the top of the stairs. Footsteps on the floor above like nothing had happened or ever would. Alan sighed and straightened his arm, the gun leveled once more at the bulletin board. Either because he’d decided to live or because the gun was broken he pushed the chair away from the desk, slipped the gun into its bottom drawer, and took up his pen. Colin watched as he wet his lips and reached for the mostly blank notebook.

  He thought about silently running up the stairs and making noise on the way back down. He could even whistle something, as if he hadn’t just seen this terrible thing. But when he pictured his father at the breakfast table trying to make conversation his heart felt pushed through an opening that was too small. There was nothing Colin could say to him. There was nothing he wanted to hear. If his father sat down with them Colin would leap across the table and gouge out his eyes, smash plates over his head, slash him up with a butter knife. He left before he burst into tears and punched the fake door into fake splinters. When he came back upstairs, Andy was staring up at the ceiling. Colin thought of how afraid he’d been in his sleep, how you could see through him when normally he blocked out your light. “How’d you sleep?” he asked.

  “What do you care?”

  He shrugged. What did he care? “I had a couple weird dreams.”

  “Oh yeah? Who’s the lucky guy?”

  Colin rolled his eyes to make himself look annoyed. He knew Andy expected him to say something back, or maybe to come over and try to suffocate him one more time, but the concept of suffocation seemed more serious now, more permanent. If you did see that light, it was already too late. He began to shake, and if it wasn’t for his mother, calling from the kitchen, he might have suffocated anyway, with no one’s help.

  Diane was pouring circles of batter onto the griddle when they heard Alan’s coughs from below. It sounded recorded and played back through blown speakers. Colin looked down at the linoleum as though he could see straight through, down to the basement. Andy went back to reading the movie listings on Diane’s laptop. Paul had already turned back to the table and taken a swipe at the stick of butter.

  “He better not be getting sick again,” Diane said as she cracked an egg into a frying pan. “He doesn’t have any time left.”

  Colin was holding his brother’s hand flat on the table when Heather walked into the kitchen, straight for the refrigerator. “Sounds like someone’s got the black lung,” she said.

  “That’s your father,” Diane said. “Can you see if he’s okay?”

  Heather swallowed three gulps of orange juice and put the jug back on the shelf. “Why don’t you see?”

  “Can you please just check?”

  “Whatever.” Heather slammed the refrigerator shut, rattling the empty cookie jars on top. The house sounded it as if it were collapsing as she ran down the stairs. For a moment all Colin could hear was the popping noise as air tried to get out from under the eggs. Then her feet were on the stairs again, the basement door shut so hard and fast there was no time for it to creak. “He’s smoking,” Heather said when she returned. She looked to their mother for an explanation.

  Colin hadn’t told anyone about the gun and it was getting to be too late. Why didn’t you say something sooner? his mother would scream.

  Diane set the spatula on the counter next to the stove. “Can you watch this for a second?”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  Diane tightened her bathrobe as she crossed the room. Her footsteps on the stairs were different, Colin noticed—heavy like his sister’s, but slower. He understood what that meant, and he put his bare feet on the floor so he could feel their argument. When he heard his mother’s weight return to the stairs and the door slam once more he crossed his legs and covered his toes with his hands. She frowned at him as she walked by. “You know that smoking is bad for you.”

  “I think I burned this one,” Heather said as she poked at a blackened lump of batter.

  “Let me do it.” Diane took the spatula and scraped the failed pancake off the griddle. “It’s times like this I wish we still had Dozer.” She slid it into the trash can hidden under the sink.

  Andy leaned in over the computer. “Your dad smokes?”

  “I guess so.”

  “What are you two ladies whispering about?” Heather pulled a chair away and sat down, her feet on the chair across from her. “Declaring your eternal love?”

  “I was telling Colin that the fortune-teller just walked in.”

  Colin tried to kick him under the table.

  Heather rolled her eyes. “What are you talking about, faggot?”

  �
�Heather,” Diane said without looking up.

  “So how does Colin die? It’s getting run over by a bus full of nuns, isn’t it?”

  “How the fuck should I know?”

  “Heather!”

  “But you said he’d be dead in three years.”

  She put her chin in her hand and batted her eyelashes. “And when did I say that?”

  “I don’t know.” Andy frowned. “I just know you said it.”

  “You two need to find something better to do than invent conversations with me, ’cause that’s pretty lame.”

  “But you said—”

  “Mom,” Colin said. He pulled his brother’s hand away from the butter dish. “We’re gonna go to a movie. Is that okay?”

  “I don’t care.” She tossed another pancake onto the pile next to the stove. “First batch is ready.” She brought the plate over to the table. “Everybody gets one for now. More on the way.” She stood next to Colin’s chair. “Ask your father for money. Hopefully he didn’t spend it all on cigarettes or a new convertible or something stupid.” The way she looked at him made him feel like they were all alone in the room. She was trying to be angry, he could tell, but her eyes drooped in the corners and she bit her lip. “I don’t know,” she said.

  Colin thought he could make it through the rest of the day without seeing his father. He’d prepared himself for the next morning, when he would find once more the father he knew—the one who’d make jokes you couldn’t even call jokes as he poured cereal into four bowls, who’d never pointed a gun at his own face. But when Alan knocked on his sons’ door before bed, Colin froze as though the police or the Mafia had found him. He stayed bent over his homework and pretended he hadn’t heard. Paul went on sitting on the bed like a statue or a sad ghost. Their father let himself in. “Hey.” He shut the door behind him. “Just wanted to ask how the movie was.”