Some Hell

by Patrick Nathan

  Colin stared at him. He couldn’t remember the last time his father had even mentioned a movie, much less cared about one. “It was okay?”

  Alan stood next to the bed. The room’s only light came from a penguin-shaped lamp on Colin’s desk. In that shadow his father looked unshaven, old, tired. He glanced down at the piece of paper trapped under Colin’s hands. “Homework,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “What subject?”

  “English.”

  Alan ran a hand through his hair. “I never did that well in English. Is it a book report?”

  “Kind of. I gotta answer some questions on the book we’re reading.”

  “What book?”

  Colin bent over and opened his backpack and pushed aside folded papers and snacks. He came up with a small white book and handed it over.

  “The Catcher in the Rye.” Alan laughed. “They’re still making you read this stuff?”

  Colin nodded.

  “I read this when I was your age.” He thumbed the pages. “I remember the scene where he invites the hooker up to his room but doesn’t—but doesn’t, you know. I never got that.”

  “I don’t think we’ve read that part yet.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” He set the book on the desk.

  “Whatever.”

  Alan sighed and sat down on Colin’s bed. Colin watched him as he looked around the room reading posters and studying models of lunar outposts and spacecraft, almost as though he’d never been in there before. He tried to remember what he was going to write. Alan touched the wing of a fighter on Colin’s headboard and watched as it bobbled, hit during battle. “So school’s going okay?”

  Colin turned back to his desk. He stared at the book and listened to his father shift on the bed. “I guess so,” he said. “It’s just school.”

  “I hated school when I was your age. Well, all through childhood really. I didn’t really like it until college, when we could do whatever we wanted.”

  Colin thought about a school like that, where kids just got up and left when class got too boring, or where the boys who smoked didn’t have to sneak into the trees by the highway. That was almost worse than school, having to choose.

  “I miss it, though. All of it.”

  Colin shrugged and tapped his pencil on the paper in front of him.

  “But I’m glad it doesn’t bother you. Having one kid who can’t stand school is hard enough.”

  Leafing through the book, Colin caught the word fuck toward the end. He read that paragraph.

  “I mean Heather. I pointed at her wall but you’re not looking.”

  “Totally,” Colin said into the book.

  “And you’re not listening, either.” There was a slap as Alan pushed off his thighs and got to his feet. Colin turned and saw his father standing next to Paul, pushing a willful lock of hair behind his ear. Paul’s eyes were half-closed. Colin knew they were saying things to each other that nobody else could understand. He wanted to break the pencil in half and throw it at them.

  “Did you rake the yard?” Alan asked.

  Colin turned back to his homework, putting the pencil to the paper as though he finally knew what to write. “No. There wasn’t time.”

  “Goddamn it, C.”

  “What? I’ll do it after school tomorrow.”

  “That’s not the point.” The floorboards groaned as he moved for the door. “I asked you to do one thing this weekend and you can’t even do that.”

  “Uh…sorry? I didn’t know it was the end of the world or anything.”

  His father was standing by the door, his hand on the knob. It was hard, now, to picture him with the gun. Colin had let himself forget it, rolling his eyes at his father as if to say, Work? You want me to work? For a second it seemed like the whole thing could have been dreamed up, like he hadn’t crawled out of his sleeping bag that morning until he heard the clang of a whisk in a metal bowl as his mother mixed pancake batter.

  “Goodnight,” his father said.

  Colin nodded at the notebook paper. He wrote, very slowly, the title of the book, adding a loop on top of the C like he did when he signed his name, as though he would write The Colin in the Rye. His father lingered a few more seconds before he left, and Colin plugged his ears so he couldn’t tell what room he went into next.

  For the first few months after his father began to write, Colin tried, every time Andy came over, to pick the lock on the basement office. It wasn’t something you could do alone. Someone had to watch the stairway or listen for footsteps. Before long, the boys tired of bending paper clips into shapes they didn’t understand, arguing at the foot of the stairs. Besides, it was only a room full of notebooks, Andy pointed out. Not worth their time. They gave up and went back to watching television and smashing batteries with rocks on the back patio.

  Now, as he stood outside that office and looked through the slats, Colin had never before wanted so badly to know what his father was putting on those pages. A notebook had been left on the desk. The lamp made parts of the room look like an unfinished drawing. Unable to sleep, Colin had heard what sounded like the basement door’s creak, and he invented an entire conversation with his father. He would creep down the stairs with his silent bare feet and surprise him, right outside the door. I’ll rake the yard tomorrow. Sorry I wasn’t listening.

  But he’d heard the wrong creak. It was instead the bedroom door, with its wooden groan at the end as the door frame pulled back against the extra weight. He’d gone to bed, his father, leaving the lamp and the notebook here to wait for him when he came back, maybe early in the morning, before breakfast, or maybe not until next Sunday. Colin leaned closer to the door and squinted at the notebook.

  For the first time in months he thought about picking the lock. He was thinking of how he’d have to jiggle the paper clip until something clicked, and out of instinct he reached for the knob to test its strength. When it turned, he looked down as if there were something he’d missed, all this time. He opened the door and went inside. The cigarette smoke had already attached itself to the foam ceiling tiles, but it didn’t smell as bad as he expected.

  The notebook was open to a page marked “Curious Parasitoids” where his father had written, in a list: Emerald Cockroach Wasp; The Eponymous Alien; Sacculina; Lancet Liver Fluke. Colin had to read it several times to make sure it was English. Aliens? His heart picked up as he put together the scenario, his father working for the CIA, sorting through government secrets. He flipped the page back and found another list merely called “Notes.” The first point said something about fixing the crack in the foundation under the kitchen window, and the second point advised him to “put bullets in separate place.” Colin flipped the page back to “Curious Parasitoids” and tried to center the notebook where he’d found it. He felt judged for reading it, like the time he and Andy had found a copy of Penthouse when they were ten and burned it when they couldn’t handle the secret any longer.

  He opened the bottom drawer of the desk. His father hadn’t followed through on his task. There the bullets were, right next to the gun. His eyes widened at its weight. “Jeez,” he said as he shifted it into his grip. He aimed out into the basement’s dark, finger on the trigger. For a second he thought about putting it under his chin, but his stomach panicked at the idea and he brought it into his lap. It was a revolver. He knew that if you pushed the cylinder to the side you could load it. It made a crisp little noise as he did so, light peeking through the chambers. When he and Andy were younger they pretended to be marines, marooned on an alien planet, and a marine’s utmost skill lay in how fast he could reload his gun. Colin looked down at the bullets. In the heat of battle you never had much time. Every second lost meant one more second you could catch a bullet or fail to toss a grenade out of your foxhole under the ping-pong table. He took six bullets from the box, surprisingly small in their plastic cartridge. Loading them wasn’t as graceful as you’d expect, and he dropped one or two on the floor. He returned his finger
to the trigger. His heart had never felt so big, pressed up against its cage of bones as though it’d finally outgrown it. Then he began to sweat. He quickly put the gun and the box of bullets back in the drawer. When he realized the gun was still loaded he heard a door’s creak—definitely the basement’s—and he jumped up from the chair and darted out of the office, hiding behind a stack of boxes in the far corner. As he watched his father step into the light, he bit down on his tongue until it hurt. Alan didn’t even look at the door. He didn’t even ponder it, wide open like that when he’d left it shut. He didn’t look around the basement when he reached out for the door and pulled it closed behind him. When his shape, sliced into pieces by the door’s glowing slats, sat down at his desk, he didn’t even pause as he reached for his pen and went back to writing. Colin, swift and silent without shoes or socks, ran upstairs before his breath gave him away. He lay awake all night waiting for the sound like a bomb going off.

  Colin had always thought the word was parasite, but when he searched online he learned that parasitoids were a unique subset of parasites that, over time, “ultimately sterilize or kill, and often consume, the host.” He wished he could see the list again—the long word his father had written before “alien,” the sac thing, something about a liver. After a few days had gone by, the words emerald cockroach wasp hatched in his head, and he said them over and over until he knew where they came from, whispering to himself while Paul rocked back and forth on the other side of the room.

  As part of its reproductive process, the emerald cockroach wasp delivers a paralyzing sting to its prey—the cockroaches of Africa, South Asia, and the Pacific Islands. With the roach briefly incapacitated, the wasp delivers another sting to the ganglia, targeting a precise fold of the brain. At this point, the roach is technically able to escape—no longer paralyzed—but will instead begin to groom itself as though the wasp has moved on. The wasp’s venom blocks its victim’s octopamine receptors, neutralizing aggressive or defensive behavior, including any desire to flee. The wasp then chews off half of each of the roach’s antennae and proceeds to lead it, as though by a leash, to the wasp’s burrow, where it deposits an egg on the roach’s abdomen and leaves to find another roach. Meanwhile, the larva emerges from its egg, burrows into the roach, and begins its gestation process. To prolong the life of its host, the larva feeds on the least life-threatening organs first. Once the roach is hollowed out, it uses its body as a cocoon, emerging several days later as an adult wasp. Colin even watched a short video of the whole ritual—the wasp leading the roach away, Here, come with me, there’s nothing to be afraid of, and the roach as happy as you could imagine a roach being, and so calm.

  At the funeral the following Saturday, Colin’s grandfather mentioned his black eye. “I used to get in fights when I was your age,” he said as the two stood in front of a bulletin board full of photographs. He wasn’t looking at Colin. He didn’t introduce himself in case Colin had, over the last ten years, forgotten he existed. Instead he sipped his coffee as they looked at all those pictures of Alan—most with his children. Colin leaned closer and looked at some Christmas morning, six or seven years ago. His father was holding a boxed set of Legos. Only now did Colin remember how his father had read the back while he waited, describing the city workers and their vehicles. The bulletin board began to tremble and Colin looked down at the carpet to get himself under control. He still hadn’t decided if he’d killed his father.

  “I got it from my brother. The black eye.” He licked a tear from his lip and turned back to the photographs, as though someone had dared him to look into the sun.

  “Do you and your brother fight often?”

  Colin shook his head. “Paul is retarded. I mean”—he looked at the floor—“he’s autistic.”

  Quentin frowned at the pictures, as if he no longer understood them. “I forgot about that.”

  The word retarded—Colin knew better, and he knew his grandfather was ashamed, filing Colin away with the rest of the world’s middle school boys. But he was different from them, and he wished he could prove he was different.

  “I’m sorry about your father.”

  Colin hid the twitch he’d developed whenever he heard the word itself, father. When he looked up again Quentin was gone, across the parlor’s entry hall. How long could Colin hide, a murderer in plain sight?

  His mother was sitting on a bench by the door, surrounded by her friends and Alan’s two sisters. If you didn’t know them, his mother and his grandfather, you wouldn’t have noticed the way he turned his head when he walked by her, how he didn’t nod or smile, and it wouldn’t have seemed strange. You’d have thought he was only a distant relation come to pay his respects—an old coworker, maybe, or a college professor, rather than her father. Colin watched as he continued into the main room. Piano music came through the overhead speakers, rattling on the high notes. He watched his grandfather take the row farthest from the pulpit, just inside the door. The way he laid his suit coat over the chair next to him and smoothed it with his hands made Colin’s skin tingle. It made him think he was saving the seat, even though he said he’d be alone. There was family out there Colin didn’t even know he had.

  The night before the funeral had been long. As she read aloud from a letter that’d come in that day’s mail, Colin’s mother stubbed out cigarette after cigarette in a beach glass ashtray as the remains of their family sat around the dining room table. Diane had taken up smoking only two days after it happened. Colin had been heating soup in the microwave when she began coughing in the next room. It’d made him shiver, like a déjà vu you heard instead of saw—an already-heard—but it was the smell, more than anything, that made him want to fly apart in every direction, to throw dishes through the windows and overturn the table and its shingles of unopened sympathy cards. She was on the couch, cigarette in hand. Standing in the doorway, Colin thought he was the only one to scold her, to tell her she was a bad influence. Instead he put his head in her lap and cried until he fell asleep.

  He watched her now as she took long, deep drags and held on to the smoke before exhaling. The smell was already familiar as the dining room gathered it up against all its clefts and furrowed places. He held his breath and wondered how it felt, but he knew he’d never try it. It was too hard to not picture it as his father’s ghost, grey and shape-shifting, pulled into you and drawn out again like it was looking for something. Why did the gun go off? it wanted to know. Why did I die? It wouldn’t stop searching until it found the answer, billowing out between his mother’s lips. Someday that ghost would find its killer and wrap its tendrils around his neck.

  “I just don’t think he should come,” Diane was saying, glancing over the letter again. “I haven’t talked to him in…oh God, four years? It’s too much at once.”

  “Where does he live?” Colin asked.

  “In town. Over in Minneapolis.”

  “So he’s not coming a long way?”

  “No. Not at all. Why’s that important?”

  Colin took the letter and looked for clues that might reveal their relationship, his father and his grandfather, but there was only sympathy—no memories, no stories, no affectionate names. Colin traced the signature—an elaborate Q followed by a jagged line. It made him think of a seismic reading or a heart monitor.

  He could feel his mother watching him. “I don’t know what to do,” she said.

  “I don’t get what the big deal is,” Heather said. She put her phone in her pocket and collapsed onto the table, her head resting on her arm. She spoke into the wood and Colin felt it in his elbows. “Are we supposed to hate him? I know it’s been like ten years but I don’t remember him being, like, deformed or anything.”

  “Don’t start,” Diane said.

  “Don’t start what? I’m just saying he’s not this horrible monster. He obviously wants to pay his respects or whatever.”

  “Please, Heather. I don’t need to hear this.”

  Heather pushed herself away from th
e table. “Fine. Do what you want. I’m going to my room.” She reached over and thumped Colin’s head with her knuckles. “And don’t bother me.”

  “I wasn’t going to!” He swung at her, too late, and called her every name he could think of as she slipped through the doorway.

  Diane waved her hand in the air as though she’d made Heather disappear. “Just leave her alone.” She lit another cigarette and spoke out of the side of her mouth. “If she wants to be a little—a little brat, that’s her business.”

  She was already good at smoking, Colin decided. It’d become something he could watch without crying or even thinking of what his father had called his new habit. Right now, it helped him not think of how she and Heather had turned against each other. Nobody had laid blame but it was something you felt coming. They were waiting for the right time to say it, and it made him feel worse to know they’d blame each other for what happened, passing over the real culprit.

  “Can you blow rings?” he asked her.

  “What?”

  “With your smoke. Can you make smoke rings?” Colin dug his hands under his thighs and sat on them. He kept wanting to point at the cigarette, like some kid.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” She flipped the cigarette in her hand, glancing at the glowing end. “Let’s give it a shot. You’re the judge—tell me how I do.” With a tap of her finger she ashed into the tray between them and took a long drag, concentrating on a picture of a sheep on the far wall. She tilted her head back and blew a single, shapeless cloud, or what a cloud might look like if you vacuumed out the inside. Colin watched as she took another breath, but when she formed her lips into an O she broke out in a laugh and lost the rest of her smoke in a coughing fit. “Guess not,” she said.

  “Five point six,” Colin said. “Promising, but needs work.”

  She smiled and set the cigarette in the ashtray where it sent its gnarled signal into the air. This probably wasn’t true, but it felt like the first time she’d smiled all day—all week, even. It felt like something he’d given, and he let himself believe it. He needed to believe it when he’d taken so much.