Some Hell

by Patrick Nathan

  Image of life, Colin thought as he closed the notebook. A glass of ice water you can’t drink. A knuckle that won’t crack. Anything could set him off: a commercial for boys’ clothing, lifestyle magazines in the bathroom rack. And now Victor, who could teach him everything. He saw his future, little more than a pet Victor kept under his desk. “This is your life now,” Victor would tell him, pointing at the handcuffs that kept him from getting away. He imagined Andy, curious about some assignment or upcoming test, peering behind the desk to find his former friend, servile and silent. Andy’s old grin. The flash in his eyes that showed his talent for knowing what to take advantage of. Colin couldn’t stand this, alone every day. From then on, as the phone rang upstairs, he did his time in the basement.

  With the sound of the furnace, he could pretend the office was a control room deep inside a starship. The slight tremble in the floor, the door rattling in its place—he could be a captain on his way to the next system. Maybe his father was the captain, and all those notebooks made up the ship’s log. Hell was a planet circling the galaxy’s oldest star, one that wouldn’t shrink or supernova, one that’d never die. They kept going back because there was so much to learn. It was a dangerous place, even if some of its demons were kind, as the captain had said. That’s why he kept a gun. Even in hell, you sometimes had to fight your way out.

  He felt stupid to think like a kid, to tell himself an ugly room in an ugly basement was part of a spaceship. But it felt worse to think it was only a house where three people of the original five had left. We’ve lost 60 percent, he calculated. It sounded like something he could add to the notebooks, if he ever had the balls or the malice to change them. We’ve lost 60 percent of the crew, he corrected, and it felt adventurous, it felt right. Nobody was watching. He could step outside the office and hold the gun as if he were exploring the ship, as if it’d been taken over when they docked. That’s where Heather was, maybe, and Paul—taken prisoner by hell’s marauders. The captain himself had been taken. There was still time to save him. Even without his lieutenant to watch his back—Who betrayed me, Colin suddenly decided, who defected to the other side—he could still put up a good fight. For a second he lost the fantasy, distilled to the image of Andy holding a gun to his forehead. Image of life, he called the eternity of seconds it took to unzip those jeans. He looked at the floor, where his father had lain, all blood and limbs. Not a captain. Not a hero. Just a man too weak to live. Image of life. That is life, he told himself. Whatever game he thought up, he knew now he’d never play it. He opened the drawer anyway, and there it was again: image of life, an empty drawer where bullets had once been, where a gun was supposed to be locked away.

  That evening, his mother walked into the house like a movie star. Colin could tell she wanted him to ask why, but he didn’t. “It’s just one of those days,” she said anyway, setting her purse on the counter with a deliberate, heavy plop. He was unloading the dishwasher. She put her fingers in his hair, letting her nails run apart from each other as they slid down his scalp. His shoulders contracted. He stood there on pause as his skin came alive. “I thought we’d order a pizza,” she said. “I called on the way home. I hope you didn’t start dinner.”

  “Mmm,” he said, in their way that meant no. He pushed back into her hand.

  “I was thinking”—she let go and crossed the room—“I was thinking you could call your girlfriend, if you wanted.”

  Colin went back to the dishes. He sighed as he smacked the plastic cutting boards together. “She’s not my girlfriend anymore. I told you, she’s just a friend.” He hated this conversation, especially when he realized someone like Chelsea was convenient. Fags don’t have girlfriends, was the middle school reasoning. He leaned over and began gathering up the silverware.

  His mother sat down in front of the ashtray, its cigarette butts bent up and crushed like overcooked macaroni. Most wore the ruled, pink smudges of lipstick. Were a person’s lips like her fingerprints? he wondered, every set unique? “Get real, Colin,” she said. “You two are on the phone day and night. She’s over here every couple days, or you’re over there. It’s love.”

  “Nobody says ‘get real’ anymore.”

  She frowned and pulled a cigarette from her pack. Right away he searched his pockets for the lighter, and she smiled as he neared the table. This wasn’t forever, he knew. You couldn’t sustain it or preserve it. You couldn’t enclose this whole kitchen in glass, seal all the seams, and flash-freeze them both. He wanted to cry. The dishwasher was empty but he still gave it his attention, as if there were something he’d missed. “Did you have a good day at school?” she said.

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  “You learn anything new?”

  He shrugged and began rinsing the leftover dishes. “I guess. Isn’t that what it’s for?”

  Why hadn’t he understood, until now, that when she waltzed around the house, reached for things like a ballet dancer, sang half of what she said, and closed her eyes with each deep breath, his mother was at her most depressed? He glanced over at her purse as though he could see right through the purple sequined fabric. She’d never stash it elsewhere in the house. He knew, because he knew her, that the gun was with her everywhere she went.

  How was he supposed to lose everyone he loved?

  “Colin, I feel like we haven’t talked for a while,” she said. “I mean talked. Like…” The phone rang before she could find the word. He didn’t want to answer it. He didn’t want to hear him. But it was worse, wasn’t it, to think of her talking to him, to hear his breath on the other end like some midnight’s obscene call?

  “I’ll bet that’s her now,” his mother said. She scooped up the ashtray. “I’ll give you lovebirds some privacy. It’s not too late to invite her for pizza.” She winked and left the room.

  He held his hand on the receiver. The same number. Couldn’t he let it ring? Would Victor only call back? He picked it up and listened, hoping he’d detect something—noises from some machine, maybe, that Victor was building in his basement, or the faint cries of someone he’d locked away. Some sign this was the biggest mistake of his life.

  Only silence. “Hello?”

  “Colin. I’ve been trying to reach you all week.”

  “I’ve, uh. I’ve been downstairs a lot. It’s hard to hear the phone down there.” He heard a creak—Victor leaning back in a chair, he guessed—and pictured him at a computer, all of Colin’s information, his life, his past, everything onscreen as though he was a criminal.

  “Are you sure you’re not avoiding me?”

  “No. I just—it’s hard to hear the phone.” The receiver felt hot and he passed it to his other hand, where it felt cool. He touched the hot hand to his face and wondered if he was getting sick, if he could stay home tomorrow. “I’m sorry,” he told Victor. It seemed like the only thing to say.

  “I want you to trust me, Colin. I really do.”

  “I don’t. I mean I do trust you,” he said. “I’ll try?”

  “Will you take the phone downstairs with you, when you go?”

  There’s no cordless, he could have said. There’s no reception. The furnace is too loud. Instead he nodded, as though Victor could see him. “Sure?”

  “I’m glad,” Victor said. “You know, I was thinking of you—”

  The doorbell, mounted right above the kitchen desk, rang out like a siren. Everything hit right then—how weak his legs had become, how his hands were coated in sweat. “Pizza,” he said into the phone. “I have to go, Mr. Miller.” He hung up before Victor could protest. The pizza man looked afraid of him, like he might get sick just from talking to him. Colin tried to smile but his mouth felt wrong.

  She was already on the couch, clicking through the channels. She’d changed into pajamas and tied her hair into a ponytail. With her feet folded beneath her she looked ready for a slumber party. “Why, thank you,” she said as he laid the pizza on the coffee table. It was the same voice she used when he lit her cigarettes. He gra
bbed a slice and sat across the room. She found an old, unfunny comedy and they ate until the pizza was gone.

  It wasn’t long before the sunlight retreated from the room and across the backyard. As it sank into the tree line the whole thing looked like a fresh scratch, pink with blood. His mother, alone on the couch, looked wreathed in slashed-up, watery rainbows. She smiled and patted the cushion next to her. “Sit with me.”

  “Why?”

  “Just get your ass over here and sit with me.”

  With a sigh he crossed the room. He recoiled as she put her arm around him, but when she began massaging his neck it was hard to fight it.

  “Relax. You’re very tense.”

  “Whatever. I’m totally relaxed.” He tried not to close his eyes and sink into that smell of cigarettes and faint perfume. But she was still his mother. When the credits rolled and the late news started, Colin’s head was on her shoulder. His skin was tingling as though he was wearing some electric shield, as though nothing could hurt him. His eyes snapped open when the phone began to ring but she pulled him tight and rubbed his shoulder.

  “Whoever it is, it’s not important.”

  It went on ringing. It wasn’t important, was it? He could hear her heart. His own slowed to match it. The television went quiet. There was a wisp of breath in his ear, the words all soft and squished together. What she said, he couldn’t hear. The words themselves, though—he could tell they weren’t what mattered.

  She could protect him.

  She couldn’t protect him.

  It was something Diane had learned over time—not her fault or his but just what happened to mothers and their children. Some nights, she felt everyone was right to hate her. Here’s your model of stability, she thought, squinting to read one of Alan’s notebooks in a shard of moonlight, the only one awake. Here’s a year of therapy bills.

  To have been a bee or an ant, a drone whose only inner voice is that of its colony—Seek, Return, Attack, Defend, Gather, Harvest, Die. At least that you can trust, Alan had written.

  But it hadn’t been a year, she realized one morning. She’d first seen Tim last May, after seven months of trying to mourn alone. She couldn’t go back to that. Since leaving his office in December, she’d thought about her mistake every day. Washing the dishes or creeping along in rush hour traffic, the image of Tim resting his head against his palm came to her, his look of surprise like he’d encountered a new subspecies of humanity. “You don’t have to divulge specifics,” she repeated in her best Tim voice as she drove to work. All through January, she promised herself she could undo it. She could get him used to her again, old harmless Diane. On the morning of her appointment she glanced at herself in the bathroom mirror and felt, for the first time in weeks, no longer repulsive.

  Just before lunch, she got the call from Kathy. “Tim can’t see you today. His son is sick.”

  Diane dropped the phone in her lap and picked it up again. “Sorry. Hello?”

  “Tim can’t see you. He’s taking care of his son.”

  A forklift in the warehouse beeped as it backed up. Whenever she heard it she thought of movies Colin watched, as if she were on a space station and something was failing.

  “The earliest we have is the last week of February.”

  She sank into her chair. In her head, February was an entirely different color from January, stuck that way from all the calendars she’d hung in her office over the years. February was grass coming through the snow, streams and lakes thawing at the edges—photos taken in places far from Minnesota, where grass and flowing water were weeks into the future. February felt like a separate part of the year. She was chewing her lip when she heard the shout from the production floor below, the crash. The forklift wasn’t beeping anymore. She stood up and looked out the window and saw a pallet overturned, a slow dark circle creeping out from under it. “Fuck,” she said into the phone.

  “Do you want to schedule an appointment?”

  She reached for a list of emergency phone numbers. “Yes. Yes, put me down.”

  Kathy sighed whenever she put an appointment into the computer, a sweep of breath against the clatter of her nails on the keyboard. “You’re all set. See you in a month.”

  Diane hung up and went to the window. There were six of her people standing around the spill and shouting at one another. They’d want somebody fired over this, and she was already grouping them into those she’d try to save and those she’d let slip by.

  Two weeks later she slept with Daniel. The accounting department invited her to a happy hour on a Thursday, too cold to do much else, and as she wrapped her coat over her shoulders she made a list of excuses. I had a flat tire, she could tell her son. I had to work late. Two hours later, she realized she’d have to think of a better lie. In the bar they had to squint to read the menu, and when Daniel touched her arm as he asked her to split a two-for-one, she felt somewhere inside her that murmur, that voice bubbling up like tar and just as ancient.

  As they made their way through his under furnished apartment she felt as if the entire floor could hear her heart. Her favorite part, when she thought about it later, was the moment he removed his shirt. The way men, in their youth, looked broken into shapes—it was an odd thing to love but she loved it. Daniel was put together with ovals and rounded rectangles, the arcs around each bicep like sleeping parentheses. She began to squirm on the bed as he fumbled with his belt, and if that’s all they’d done—if he had stood there unbuckling his belt for another five minutes—everything would have worked out.

  “You sure can go a long time,” she said, half an hour later, hoping it would be one of those things men can’t hear without ejaculating. Instead it sounded like criticism.

  He paused to look at her, propped up on his elbows. “Is everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine.” She traced a curve across his shoulder and down his chest. Up close, it was only skin. “This is fantastic.”

  He bent down to kiss her and she pushed his head into her neck. She forced a moan and he continued, slow at first but gathering momentum. Her eyes roamed the ceiling and she tried not to laugh or cringe as he kissed the spot under her ear. Each movement was so deliberate his entire body was shaking. There was a brown spot near the wall. Water damage, she thought, almost missing his soft convulsion, his absence of breath.

  He sat on the edge of the bed, facing the window. “Well,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  He scratched his lower back and turned to look at her. “Maybe next time will be better?”

  She nodded and got out of bed, gathering her clothes from the floor. “This should definitely make things interesting,” she said. Her fingers felt frozen as she fastened her bra. When she checked the mirror, straightening her hair, his reflection stepped behind hers. It annoyed her that he was still naked, but she smiled at him anyway.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I just wasn’t expecting this.”

  He came over and touched her shoulder, and when she turned around she moved away from him, as though it was natural. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, and she kissed him on the cheek.

  She didn’t see him the next day. They both called in sick.

  For a while it distracted her: sex as a novelty, or a vacation. The human male like wearing skirts again in the spring, how you forget they exist and how much you love them after you remember. Later, she came to realize it wasn’t even what she wanted. It was the wrong thing to want, and this made it easier to look Daniel in the eye, as if they’d only bumped into each other in the laxative aisle at Target. She’d been through ten months of therapy and she was well trained. What is it that you really want, then? she heard Tim say in her head. What did she think a man would do to her? What was Daniel, whose skill lay solely in his confidence—without which women were free to burst out laughing at his touch, to smirk at his eyes full of heat—what was he supposed to have done for her? He could fill himself with blood and fuck all night, but it was a stup
id trick, just like men who can talk forever and—without once revisiting a subject—say only one thing: Don’t move. Don’t escape. What, instead, had she hoped for?

  As February went on she began to worry. Last year, she spent Valentine’s Day crying, unable to leave the couch. That was foreign now. Even as she stood smoking on the dock at work, her cigarettes felt like the present—not cheap tokens of the past. She told herself it was healing. She faced away from the wind and let the ash ride away, off toward the swamp and the freeway just past it. The pond out there was a white sheet of ice, and in the morning’s light there were two suns, stacked one on top of the other, if suns you could call them. More like white stains on a grey T-shirt, lost in the clouds. She thought healing would feel better, or at least different.

  She thought she’d be happier.

  During their Valentine’s dinner, she at least pretended to be. “I’m so lucky,” she told Colin after the waitress had left. “So privileged to be out with the most handsome man I know.”

  He leaned close and cupped his hand around his ear. “What?”

  “I said I’m privileged. You taking me out. Here.” She waved her hand across the room. Shannon had sworn up and down about the Blue Pig, one of those restaurants loved briefly and defended violently like a bad boyfriend. Diane knew it would be closed in a few months.

  “This is gonna be a good year,” she said, and waited for Colin to lean closer so he could hear. “January doesn’t count. Nothing until now counts.” She raised her water glass. He rolled his eyes and raised his own, already empty. They clunked together and she understood they were cheap. Not plastic but that thick, clumsy glass you can find in the clearance aisle at the end of summer.

  “To a superawesome year.” Colin twirled his glass and slouched down in the booth. He glanced out the window, half reflection and half the sidewalk’s dirt-encrusted bluffs of snow.