Methods of Madness

by Ray Garton

  “I thuh-thought we were f-friends!”

  “We are friends. But… it’s a two way street… you know?”

  She laughed coldly, humorlessly. “I thought you cared about me.’’

  “You thought? You mean you don’t know? I told you I love you, for crying out loud!”

  “See? I knew you held that against me!” she sobbed, pushing me away and standing. “I have to go. I’m a m-mess. I’m sorry I’ve wasted so much of your time, Buh-Benji. I’m sorry I’ve treated you so horribly.” She reached for her purse and in an instant—

  —I was that fat kid again, that fat ugly kid who was lucky enough to be pals with the prettiest girl on campus and I was blowing my one good thing—or, at least what I saw to be my one good thing—and the smartass voice in my head hissed, Yeah, that’s it, go ahead and run her off, like you’re ever gonna have another woman like this hangin’ around in you tubby life, making me want to scream out “Will you make up your fucking mind!”; suddenly, it was as if all the fat was back, straining at my belt and buttons and filling my pant- legs like tree trunks and I grasped Mardee’s wrist, stood and said, more than a little pleadingly, “I’m sorry, Mardee. Really. I didn’t mean for us to fight like this. I’m just… I’m a little edgy and… well, full of holes.” I tried a laugh to break the tension, but with minimal effect. “Please, don’t go. Sit down and I’ll get you a towel. Okay?”

  She thought about it, dropped her purse on the sofa and wiped a few tears, sniffling, “Well… okay. But you… hurt my feelings, Benji.”

  You’ve been hurting mine for years, I thought, but pushed it aside and said, “I’m sorry. Really. I’ll get a towel.” I headed for the kitchen to get the small handtowel hanging from the refrigerator door handle.

  Okay, so I wimped out again. I felt good about what I’d said, but I hate confrontation and don’t handle tension terribly well; I tend to head straight for the ‘fridge and bury my anxiety with a sandwich made of anything I can get my hands on. As I went down the hall, I had to admit to myself that I was disappointed in Tommy. While I understood what he’d done, I couldn’t condone it. Anyone who has ever been mistreated should know better than to turn around and mistreat others, even if its done in revenge. Tommy, like myself, had been rejected, picked on and laughed at. How could he do virtually the same thing to all those girls? I was familiar with the desire to do it, but that desire was always quelled by the thought of the pain I would be causing by fighting fire with fire. I’d felt that pain too many times—and too deeply—to allow myself to administer it to anyone else. I sometimes hated myself for that, sometimes saw it as a weakness. But my familiarity with that pain had always won out. Apparently, Tommy had found some way to numb it.

  In the kitchen, I stepped over the towel-covered goo on the floor and stumbling to a halt when I heard—

  —nothing. Absolutely nothing.

  I listened. Nothing. I pressed my ear to the sewing room door. Nothing. Trembling, I opened the door a crack and peered in at the laundry room door. It was still intact, but still I heard nothing.

  My heart, which had already put forth more than its share of effort that day, began to pound anew against my ribs and my testicles crawled into my abdomen. Even my bowels, which I realized, quite suddenly, were full, threatened to move at any moment.

  Why had it stopped its insistent pounding? What was it doing in there? Most importantly, and worst of all: was it still in there?

  I pushed the door open all the way, walked with leaden feet to the laundry room door and pressed my ear to the cold wood. Deadly, empty silence. I tried to open the door, realized it was nailed shut and dropped to one knee, reaching for the hammer.

  “Benji? What’re you doing?”

  I dropped the hammer. “Nuh-nothing. Um, just, I’m, uh… “ I sucked in a breath and decided to take care of her first. I got up, grabbed the towel and hurried back into the living room, dropped it in her lap and said, somewhat breathlessly, “Could you excuse me just a second?”

  She looked up curiously. “Yeah. Sure.”

  I rushed back to the laundry room, closing the sewing room door behind me and proceeded to pry the nailed baseboard off with the hammer’s claw. The nails squawled as they pulled out and the board clunked to the floor. I stared at the bottom of the door, holding my breath, knowing that blob of fat could, at any moment, rush through the pencil thin opening and latch itself onto me…

  Nothing happened.

  I felt like I weighed a ton as I rose to my feet and my hand felt numb on the doorknob. The door gave a thin squeak as it opened.

  The room was empty.

  The fat was gone.

  A glistening trail of slime ran across the floor and up the front of the washer-dryer, above which the small window I’d crawled through earlier was shattered.

  It had escaped.

  “Oh, God,” I groaned, clutching the doorjambs. “Oh, my God.”

  I had to get her out. I had to get Mardee away from the house before I could deal with it and I had to do it now. I rushed into the living room, out of breath, and gasped, “You’ve gotta go.”

  “What?” She looked shocked.

  “You’ve gotta go.”

  “So you are upset about—”

  “No, no, Mardee, really, this has nothing to do with that.” I grabbed her arm and lifted her from the sofa, swept her purse up and handed it to her and led her to the door. “Really, this is just a personal problem, nothing I wanna bother you with, really. Just go. Okay? Please?”

  “Can’t I just change my jeans? I’ve got clean ones in the—”

  “Just go, Mardee.” I got her to the porch screen, opened it and hurried her down the steps.

  “W-well, okay, if you’re sure you’re not ups—”

  “No, I’m not upset. Really. I swear, I promise. Just go. Call me when you get home. Okay? We’ll talk. I promise.” I got her on the sidewalk, where she turned to look at me with confused concern. “Go!” I shouted. “Hurry!”

  She frowned, then turned and hurried through the gate to her car, getting in and slamming the door.

  I closed and locked the screen door, looking down the porch to the tear in the screen. There was nothing I could do about that, but I could keep it from getting into the house. I rushed inside, closed the door, locked it, then ran for the laundry room where I grabbed the stack of baseboards. Tucking them under my arm, I hurried through the sewing room, grabbing up the hammer and bucket of nails, and staggered to the front door. Falling to my knees with a painful cry, I nailed one of the boards to the bottom of the door, wincing with each fall of the hammer, then stood to rush to the back door in the kitchen to do the same, but I tripped and fell when—

  —I heard Mardee’s car door slam shut again. Nails spilled over the living room floor and I froze to listen.

  The front gate squealed open… clanked shut… footsteps came up the walk…

  I felt nailed to the floor. I had to move, but couldn’t. It was out there somewhere. With Mardee. Before I could budge, my inner voice spoke: So what? Let them take care of each other. Get them both outta your hair, huh?

  I’m ashamed to admit it, but for just a moment, I actually considered it.

  Yeah, just forget about ‘em for a few minutes. Go clean the kitchen floor. It’s a mess in there, y’know. Later, maybe you can look Tommy Fischer up. Write a letter or give him a call. Tell him all about it. He’d probably love it, don’t you think?

  I felt a chill as I listened to Mardee’s footsteps outside and I almost did it, almost went into the kitchen to clean up that mess.

  Instead, I heaved myself off the floor, muttering, “No. I can’t,” clambored to the front door, pulled aside the curtain and looked out the window in the top half. Mardee was coming to the door, a pair of freshly washed jeans tucked under her arm. My eyes darted to the right and—

  —I saw it. It oozed across the lawn toward her, slow but determined.

  Mardee saw me, smiled halfheartedly and waved,
calling, “I just wanna change my jeans, okay?”

  I screamed, and I swear to God I sounded like my mother. I clutched the doorknob with both hands, turned it and pulled as hard as I could. The nails pulled out with a groan, the door opened and I threw myself onto the porch, crying, “Go back! Please, God! Mardee! Go back! To your car! Go—”

  It happened quickly, but in my eyes, it was dream-like… slow motion… underwater…

  The yellowish, bruised glob of fat rushed her, wrapping itself around her ankles. Her face was a mask of puzzlement as she fell forward, arms splayed, her folded jeans tumbling through the air before her. It was on her in an instant, covering her like a soggy, grease-soaked blanket and, for the longest time, she lay on the sidewalk, writhing inside her glutinous prison, her scream muffled wetly. Her legs kicked and her arms waved, all four webbed together by the fat that jiggled over her face and back. But then something happened.

  It shrunk.

  It disappeared.

  Quickly.

  In an instant, it was gone in a chorus of screams and rips.

  Mardee lay on the walk, her legs still kicking, but weakly now, wearily; for a moment, her screams were gurgles, then her voice became whole again, calling my name over and over and over…

  I stood on the porch for a long moment, staring open mouthed and breathless, feeling as if my heart had stopped beating.

  Her clothes, soggy and discolored, lay around her in tatters. Mardee, mostly naked and jiggling, was a mountain in my front yard. In a matter of seconds, she had tripled—perhaps quadrupled —in size. Her bared flesh folded together in wet, sparkling rolls that shifted and rippled with her sluggish movements.

  It took me a moment to realize what had happened, then a moment longer to realize I wasn’t having a nightmare.

  “Noooo!” I screamed, rushing through the screen door and down the walk to her side. “No, God, please… no… “

  She was enormous. Gargantuan. Bigger than I had ever been in my entire life. Her hands and feet slapped against the cement like the fins of a grounded fish. I knelt beside her, my vision blurred by tears, and helped her roll over.

  Her face was pale as milk, eyes wide, mouth yawning and uttering unintelligible sounds as she clutched the lapels of my robe.

  “I’m sorry,” I sobbed, helping her into a sitting position. “I’m so suh-sorry, Mardee, my God, I’m so sorry.”

  Her bared breasts were pendulous, her nipples spread over them like small pancakes; her abdomen seemed made of pale gelatin that jiggled and swayed from side to side as she sat up.

  “Jesus Christ forgive me,” I groaned. “I’m so sorry.”

  I held her for a moment, squeezed her tightly, running my arms through the residue of fat that clung to her like honey.

  “I’m… so… sorry,” I breathed into her ear.

  “Buh-Buh-B-Benji? What’s… wrong? What’s… happened… to me?”

  My sobs were uncontrollable. I thought of all those years in school, all that time wasted dodging the poison arrows of my peers… all those years as an adult, when the arrows became invisible but no less deadly. I thought of Mardee as she was back then in those days of painful words and missed dances… as she’d been just moments before…

  The guilt I felt then weighed far more than I’d ever weighed in my life.

  “Benji?” she whimpered. “What’s… happened? To me?”

  Crying, I helped her to her feet, my arm around her shoulders—as far as it could go, anyway—holding her close to me as I led her toward the house.

  She stopped, looked down at herself and screamed. Her voice echoed up and down the street and cut through my chest like a scalpel. “Benjiii!”

  “It’s okay, Mardee,” I whispered, leading her through the screen door. “You’re gonna be all right.” I led her into the house, patting the mound of her shoulder as I whispered, “I can help you. This is a problem I know something about… “

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  Standing in the doorway of the small apartment, the big detective, puts his hands on his hips and looks around. “Jesus Horatio Christ,” he says quietly. “There’s enough blood in here to drown cattle.”

  He hurried down the wet sidewalk, not wanting to look suspicious, but wanting to be far away from the park as soon as possible. His hands were deep in the baggy pockets of his long green coat, pulled together over the front of his pants. He was crying; his twisted face glistened with tears, his thin chest hitched with sobs.

  He had done it again. They had done it again. He hadn’t wanted to, he really hadn’t. But he never realized that until it was too late, until afterward. He never thought about it before, when he could stop it, keep it from happening. How could he think with that voice hissing at him, stabbing upward through the center of his body like a steel barbed spike, up and up, straight to his brain. He could only think afterward, when it was quiet, satisfied, resting. Growing…

  He knew it was growing. He hadn’t thought so at first, but it soon became obvious, impossible to ignore. He wanted, needed to tell someone, but he knew he couldn’t. After all, even he hadn’t believed it at first. And if he told someone about the growing, he would have to tell about the voice, too. They’d put him back in that place, give him back to the twitchy-lipped doctors, the stiff-necked nurses. He could almost hear the door locking behind him again. Smell the sterility. The stinging, artificial cleanliness of the halls, the bathrooms. No glass or metal objects. Guarded showers. Jigsaw puzzles and pottery classes. Questions answered with questions. He wouldn’t let that happen again. He knew what to do.

  He’d known the moment he rolled off that girl in the park. She was tiny. Young. He’d had to beat her to get it inside.

  He knew what he had to do, and he was going straight home to do it.

  He was surrounded by the city, in the very center of it now. All around him great god-like erections rose toward the dirty night sky. Cars drove by, their tires making moist panting sounds on the wet pavement. A few yards ahead of him a bus, long and fat, grunted to a halt at the curb and he hurried to catch it, his hands still in his coat pockets, his tennis shoes splashing through puddles. Beside the bus, he looked up and through one of the windows. He saw a pretty face, blond, big tired eyes. Looking up and down the length of the bus, he saw that she was alone inside.

  The doors opened.

  What if it awoke? Told him to follow her, made him follow her, forced him with its ugly, insistent pounding?

  “Hey, buddy,” the driver called. “You coming, or what?”

  He backed away, turned, jogged down the walk, away from her.

  Never again, he thought, not after tonight. Tonight it ends.

  The woman in the robe and curlers walks in behind the detective, arms folded over fat, soft breasts. “I knew he’d be trouble,” she says.

  “You the one that called, ma’am?” the detective asks.

  “That’s right. I’m the landlady.”

  He watches her standing there, soaking it all in, ogling the mess. He knows she can’t wait to tell her friends. “You received a complaint?”

  “I heard the screamin’ myself!” she says, pressing a liver-spotted hand to her chest. “Hell, I’m alia way down stairs and I heard it myself!” She looks at it some more, all the blood, the knife, and shakes her head. “Yeah, I knew he’d be trouble.”

  He was cold even though he was sweating and gasping from his rush to get home before it stirred, before it spoke.

  It began years ago. At the boarding academy. His father had sent him there after his mother had shot herself. “Get you some good Christian teaching,” the tatooed man had said. But he knew it was really to get him out of the way of his father’s woman friends. There had been a lot of those.

  The dean had caught him one night. He hadn’t even heard the keys rattle in the hall. The little man had just walked into the dorm room and found him sitting on the bed with the magazine, masturbating.

  “It’s evil,” the princi
pal had said the next morning. The man had glared at him over the big oak desk, leaning forward, his pockmarked face hard, angry. “It hangs there to remind us of sin and the only good that comes of it are urine and children. It’s dirty. Filthy. Why do you think little boys are taught to wash their hands after they touch it?” Tiny gems of perspiration had sparkled beneath his razor-like nose. “It must be fought, trained, or it will make you do things you have no business doing.”

  He’d heard it that night for the first time, when he thought he was asleep. Just whispers. Unintelligible. Dream-like.

  But over the years it got louder, clearer.

  Then they’d put him away, punished him for the things it had made him do. Horrible things. Nasty, wet things that had brought him no pleasure—not really, not afterward— and had even made him throw up and lose consciousness at times. But they were things that had satisfied it, that had quenched its thirst and sated its hunger and, most importantly, silenced its incessant hissing…

  I’m crazy, he’d thought with giddy relief. Just crazy, that’s all. Now I’ll get better and it’ll go away.

  And it did. For a while. Long enough for him to feel, to seem cured.

  Now it did not hiss. It screamed. It scorched the inside of his skull with its hot breath and made his eyes water with a voice that sounded like a nuclear holocaust. It was enraged, perhaps, by the sores that had appeared on it, swollen and running with milky fluids.

  And dear sweet merciful Jesus it was growing!

  His hands, still in his coat pockets, covered it now, pressing over the denim crotch that had grown tight, that would not hold it much longer. The sores, probably draining again, stung. Beneath the pants, he was still wet from its vomiting.

  I’m not crazy, he thought frantically as he hurried across a street, around a corner. I never was! I’m not, no, I AM NOT CRAZY!

  He thought of that poor girl, limp beneath him, whimpering, and cried some more.