Bedfellow

by Jeremy C. Shipp

  Alone, Tomas pulls a few of his main heroes from his jacket pocket. There’s the bodybuilding mouse and the headless bobblehead and the army man who only fears balloons. The team easily defeats an invisible croc-topus, but when he wants to play the boy and the wolf spirit, he can’t remember the story. He grasps only bits and pieces. The mime’s motto is “ . . .” When the boy and the wolf come together, his eyes glow like light bulbs. But what else happened?

  Ordinarily, Tomas can close his eyes and think back on a happy moment and see everything like he’s watching a video game. Right now, he focuses on the campfire. He sees the dancing red-orange flames, the peanut butter cup s’mores, the spark that drifts onto his arm but doesn’t burn. At first, Tomas doesn’t see Marvin at all, but then the man’s head appears, floating next to his mom. His cheeks inflate a little. He doesn’t speak, but his mouth opens wider and wider. Too wide.

  Tomas collects his heroes as quickly as he can and rushes through the tunnel, stepping on the edge of the pitfall. Thankfully, he doesn’t fall. Once he returns to the world outside, he finds his sister on the lawn again, trying to balance on a bocce ball with one foot. With one look, she hurries over to him.

  “What’s wrong?” she says.

  Only now does Tomas feel the tears on his cheeks. He’s not sure why he’s crying. He played wolf boy in the courtyard and he came back.

  “Nothing,” the boy says, wiping his face with a sleeve.

  While trying his hand (or foot) at the bocce ball balancing act, he notices some movement in his peripheral vision. When he looks up, Marvin waves at him from the second-story window. Tomas hesitates for a moment and then waves back.

  Hendrick

  Hendrick knows full well that his friend is sick as all hell, but that doesn’t stop him from sitting on the edge of Marvin’s bed and breathing in the virulent air. Even the pyramid of used tissues on the blanket doesn’t bother him any. To be honest, Hendrick prides himself on his hearty constitution, his hardy genes. Marvin’s flu is just another opportunity to stare suffering in the face and come away unscathed.

  “You look like shit,” Hendrick says.

  “That’s fitting, right?” Marvin says, and flicks his nail absentmindedly against an empty bottle of Gatorade. “I mean, I am the new face of diarrhea, nationwide. Did you see the commercial?”

  “Yeah, man. It’s good. Funny.”

  The actor shrugs almost imperceptibly. “Good or not, at least I’m living the big life now. I have diarrhea money. I can finally afford Cheesecake Factory.”

  Hendrick laughs, but as far as he’s concerned, this diarrhea commercial is no joke. You have to respect a guy like Marvin who’s willing to drop everything in his damn life to make a go at Hollywood. That takes balls, especially for some office peon with wide-set eyes and a nose like Gargamel. Marvin will never be a Channing Tatum or even a Nicolas Cage. Maybe one day, though, he’ll be one of those character actors who look more like the caricatures of famous people.

  “How’s everything at work?” Marvin says, flicking his fucking Gatorade again. This time with two fingers. “Same shitshow? Same cast of mediocre characters?”

  “Same everything.”

  Back when the two of them slogged through the drudgery together, Marvin used to say their workplace was The Office if it were produced in hell. That’s still as true as ever. Edgar’s an incompetent ass who gets half-drunk every lunch and won’t stop fiddling with his belt whenever he’s chatting with a woman. Brett won’t stop lecturing people about factory farms and the dangers of high-fructose corn syrup. Marcella can’t take a fucking joke.

  “Hey, can you get me one of those?” Marvin points a pinky at the line of bottles on the windowsill. “If I move, I might explode.”

  Hendrick definitely gets enough do-this-do-that at work, but the poor guy’s face looks like a sweaty, bruised peach. How can he say no to a face like that? When Hendrick crosses the room, he notices for the first time all the empty bottles strewn about on the floor. A fiery flash of animosity heats up his forehead, but the feeling dies out as quickly as it came. The moment he grabs a red bottle from off the windowsill, Marvin says, “Could I have the Glacier Freeze? I like to save the Fruit Punch for the end. They’re my favorite.”

  Out of a vague tingling of resentment for having to exchange the red bottle for a blue, Hendrick tosses the Gatorade across the room instead of handing it over. Hendrick doesn’t want to hit Marvin in the face, or anything that extreme. But if Marvin isn’t able to catch the bottle, Hendrick will be able to chuckle a little and say, “Nice one.” In the end, Marvin catches the bottle without even looking in Hendrick’s direction.

  Gradually, the actor slides his body from a sitting position to where he’s flat on his back. He holds the bottle high up above his bed, with his right arm outstretched. Then he tips the Gatorade slightly so that the Glacier Freeze waterfalls into his open mouth.

  “What the fuck, man?” Hendrick says. “You’re going to choke yourself.”

  “Oh.” Marvin sets the bottle carefully on his stomach. “Right.” Then, in a way that makes Hendrick clench his jaw, his friend inches his way back up to a sitting position, shifting his body in small, awkward jerks. Marvin’s a great guy and all, but he’s certainly as annoying as all hell sometimes. Hendrick enjoys the company of irritating guys, for the most part, but only when they’re trying to be.

  While Marvin grunts softly in bed, Hendrick takes this opportunity to collect the trash beside the bed. There’s little he despises more than picking up after another person, or even himself if truth be told. He moves the small wastepaper basket to a spot on the nightstand so that maybe Marvin won’t make another mess.

  Once he’s sitting up again, the actor says, “Hey, so I did end up watching Howard the Duck and there is a duck with boobs in it. I don’t know why a duck would have boobs when they’re not mammals, but I guess that’s what they mean by poetic license, right?”

  A dim feeling of déjà vu lights up his mind for a moment. In truth, they probably had dozens of conversations exactly like this, back in the office.

  Marvin gulps down some more of that damned Gatorade. “Oh, yeah. I was going to ask. When I was watching Howard, I remembered this old animated short. From the Betty Boop era, maybe. So, there’s this duck who gets shot in the face by a hunter or a policeman, and his bill shatters to dust. The duck tries on different objects to see if any of them could replace the bill. He tries pinecones and cattails and this pair of knives that he finds in this abandoned car. I think there was blood on the windshield. So, the duck approaches this badger who’s his best friend, and the knives slide right into his chest. When the duck tries to talk, the knives move up and down, and the badger’s organs spill right out of there. Some of the guts go into the duck’s mouth. The problem is, I can’t quite remember if this is an actual short I saw, or if it’s something else. Does it seem familiar to you at all?”

  “No, not really.” By now, Hendrick’s feeling a small knot of pain in the back of his skull. He can’t be sick, though. He never gets sick. “I don’t think anyone would make a short like that back in the thirties.”

  “Yeah. You’re probably right.”

  Right when Hendrick’s about to say something like, “Yell if you need anything,” his old coworker tosses the now-empty bottle over the side of the bed. The halfhearted little clunk of plastic hitting two-year-old hardwood saturates Hendrick’s senses.

  “You know, I think the duck was wearing a little top hat, now that I think about it.”

  Outside the guest room, Hendrick wonders what he ever saw in Marvin in the first place. But that’s the way with friends, isn’t it? Their presence in your life can feel a bit like an anomaly, and you have to wonder what exactly is bonding the two of you together. Heading down the stairs, Hendrick decides that he’s in the mood for some Peanut Butter Apocalypse ice cream. Of course, what he really wants is to get out of the house for a while, alone. He wants to hear Morgaine’s voice again. He wa
nts her to sever those small cords that connect him to this world. All of this will only be possible if he can manage to get out of the house alone. That’s easier said than done, usually.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Hendrick stands with his hand in his pocket, fondling his keys. He’s only thirty-nine years old, but he experiences another one of those damned brain farts. What exactly is he doing right now? The answer doesn’t come, so he settles down in his recliner and plays one of those fireplace videos that Brett introduced him to. Or was it Marvin? The flames in this video burn a dark gray-blue, which is supposed to be especially calming or some such bullshit. Honestly, Hendrick does feel especially calm after a while. He reads the same shitty paragraph in the same shitty book a few times until he rests the book, pages down, on his lap. He knows he should really go upstairs and check on Marvin, but Hendrick’s eyes are already closed. The firewood crackles and snaps, and in his sleep, the sounds become voices. “Tsh ks kssss,” they say, swarming around his head like invisible bees. They sound urgent, but Hendrick tells them to shut the fuck up. He tells them if they don’t speak English, they don’t belong here. Finally, the voices buzz off, and Hendrick searches the shadows for a familiar face.

  What he does is plunge his hand into a patch of darkness and then swirl his hand around until he feels a strand of hair or the tip of a nose. Once he grabs hold, he has to pull fairly hard in order to get the head out. He’s hoping for Morgaine, or someone who looks a little like her at least. Every time he pulls, the faces come out wrong. They’re jumbled and knotted and translucent. He almost wishes the swarm of voices would come back, but he is without friends when the veiny faces press deep into his chest and begin to speak.

  Kennedy

  Once in a blue moon (or a Smurf moon, as her mom calls it), Kennedy likes to visit one of those websites where you’re paired with a random person from around the world in a private chatroom. Most people are either extraordinary perverts or as boring as Kennedy’s geometry teacher, Mr. Sizemore. Kennedy will sometimes chat with her teachers before class a little, and Mr. Sizemore’s probably the worst teacher to talk to in the universe. “Do you like teaching?” “It’s a job. I’m lucky to have one.” “Do you have any hobbies?” “Not really.” “What’s your favorite shape?” “Please go to your seat, Ms. Lund. I need to finish this.” On her travels across the internet, Kennedy has encountered countless Mr. Sizemores who don’t even ask questions back, and who might as well be trumpet-talking like the adults in Charlie Brown.

  The good thing about the random chat website is that every once in a while, you’ll jabber with a guy who insists he’s a time traveler from the year 4587 or a girl from a country you’ve never heard of before who doesn’t mind sharing what she ate for breakfast.

  On the website, you’re allowed to set a default for all the strangers, so this time around, she sets the name as Sparkle Fantastico. One of the best Sparkle Fantasticos of the afternoon tells her that Donald Trump is a horseman of the apocalypse. He says Trump’s organs are weapons from every time period in human history. A subcompact semiauto .380 ACP for a spleen. A pair of hira shuriken for kidneys. An obsidian blade, crafted by Beelzebub himself, for a heart. Sparkle also says that Rosie O’Donnell is an archangel who can fling Koosh balls made of pure light energy. Kennedy doesn’t understand half of what this guy’s saying, but she appreciates the overall concept.

  After tossing aside a few more extraordinary perverts, Kennedy comes across another worthwhile Sparkle who only eats dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets. About five years ago, this Sparkle’s pet ferret died, and ever since then, every food in the world makes her nauseous except for dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets. Kennedy can’t tell if the woman is telling the truth or not, but she doesn’t really mind either way. According to Ms. Fantastico, her ferret Matilda was her sister in a past life, back when the two of them worked in a millinery shop in Paris.

  “Sometimes at night, when everyone else is asleep, I can see Matilda’s face in the ceiling. I can see her as she was when she was a person. The weird thing is, the two Matildas, the ferret and the human, have similar features. The same dark, round eyes. Their resting faces were both a little frowny-looking, but not an angry frown.”

  Kennedy pictures two ferrets in straw bonnets decorated with pale pink peonies. Dressed in lavender afternoon dresses, the two sisters smile down at an urchin in suspenders who’s trying to sell ferret-faced cupids from a woven basket. Kennedy saw a painting like this somewhere before, only there the people had human faces.

  When Ms. Fantastico asks for her favorite memory, Kennedy bristles internally. She’s not about to hand over her most precious moments to a second-rate Sparkle Fantastico. Instead, she decides to give Sparkle her third-or fourth-best memory and pretend that it is her most precious.

  “So, this was a few years ago, when I was like ten. Me and my family were on our way to some campsite in the desert. Our RV broke down and we had to wait outside by this burned tree. It was about five hundred degrees outside, and we kept waiting for my dad to fix the engine, but he’s pretty bad at fixing cars.

  “Eventually, my brother sort of wandered off around the tree, and when we found him, he was playing with this dead coyote. My mom washed his hands like a million times, and my brother cried because she wouldn’t let him play with the coyote anymore.

  “My mom kept telling my dad to call Triple-A, and he finally did after about eighteen hours of yelling at the engine. Me and my brother got pretty bored, so Uncle Marvin took us across this field to these little shops that looked kind of like the Old West. When we were walking across the field, Tomas kept looking everywhere for more dead coyotes. He didn’t say that’s what he was looking for, but I could tell.

  “When we got to those shops, Uncle Marvin bought us some crocodile and kangaroo jerky. I only ate the crocodile jerky because I was pretty into Winnie the Pooh at the time, and I didn’t want to eat Roo. In one of the shops, there was this part where you could pay a couple dollars and see all the greatest mysteries of the world. The doorway looked like a big mouth, so Tomas was pretty freaked out to go back there, but Uncle Marvin said he would carry him the whole time.

  “The mouth breathed hot air on us when we walked through the doorway. The room was dark and there was a fog machine pumping fog everywhere. It smelled really sweet and chemical-ish. In the room, we saw jars full of dead baby aliens and a mummified cat and a big walnut that grew a human mouth. I don’t actually remember all this stuff, but I asked Tomas about it recently and he could describe everything on every shelf.

  “I do remember the next room pretty well. We had to walk through this beaded curtain thing, where all the beads were little neon skulls. They made the room look like a kelp forest, with fake kelp hanging from the ceiling. There was even more fog here than the other room, and there was a strong cabbage smell wherever we went. The kelp created a sort of maze that we had to navigate. Sometimes, we had to duck under glowing jellyfish or dried-up piranhas. Tomas still wouldn’t walk, even though he liked the fish and everything.

  “Finally, we made it all the way through the maze to an open area with piles of bones on the floor. Fish bones and human bones and some of those big shark jaws with the teeth still attached. Near all the bones, there was a mermaid hovering above the floor. There were probably wires or something holding her up, but I didn’t see any. She wasn’t an Ariel sort of mermaid. Her tail was sharp and spiny, and her face was like one of those deep-sea fish with white eyes and a giant mouth full of needles. An antennae thing dangled from her forehead with a light at the end of it. As soon as we walked in the room, she reached out at us with these webbed claws, her arms all draped with seaweed.

  “Uncle Marvin read this plaque on the wall that said you’re supposed to put your hand in her mouth and make a wish. If she doesn’t bite down and eat your hand, your wish will come true. Tomas cried a little bit, so Uncle Marvin had to carry him back into the kelp area. I knew the mermaid wouldn’t eat my hand, but I was still
sort of scared. When I walked up onto this raised platform thing, her eyes moved so that she was looking right at me. I knew the mermaid was fake, but I kept thinking, Don’t bite don’t bite don’t bite. I made a wish inside my head and the mermaid did start to bite down a little but not all the way. My hand brushed against her teeth when I was pulling it out but the teeth weren’t actually sharp at all. They were foam or something. Tomas said he could hear me scream from where he was. I don’t remember screaming at all.

  “Tomas kept asking me what I wished for, but I wouldn’t tell because that would destroy the wish. In the next store over, Uncle Marvin offered to buy us some ice cream. Neither of us asked for ice cream and we didn’t even know there was ice cream in there before Uncle Marvin said that. The weird thing is that’s what I asked the mermaid for. Ice cream.”

  Ms. Fantastico thanks her for the story and before she can ask any follow-up questions, Kennedy says that she needs to go. The teenager types Fart and exits the chatroom. She always ends all her online conversations with Fart.

  When Kennedy told Alejandra the story a few weeks ago, Aly said that the mermaid was probably made of papier-mâché and was probably held up by thin black wires. Kennedy knows this already. The whole reason she likes telling the story is that even a fake mermaid, devoid of magic, can manage to grant a wish every once in a while. No one ever seems to understand that.

  Kennedy closes her laptop with a curled pinky and then tilts back in her office chair. Placing her bare feet on her desk, she leans back even farther and searches the ceiling for the face of her own past-life sister. Maybe her sister is a penguin now, or a Parisian street urchin selling miniature mermaid statues.

  Unable to find anyone but a daddy longlegs in the ceiling, she lets herself fall backward onto the mound of pillows and blankets behind her. The mountain of softness protects her for the most part, though her neck feels somewhat achy after the plunge. From here, she rolls over onto all fours and crawls over to the plaid backpack that always brings to mind a lumberjack’s shirt. This is Saturday, and while she feels an almost moral obligation not to do any homework tonight, she removes The Witch of Blackbird Pond from her bag. So far, Hannah Tupper hasn’t made anyone’s face melt off, but Kennedy is still hopeful. In her backpack, she also spots the single unused cigarette that she discovered in her desk in Ms. Vasquez’s class. She almost raised her hand to tell Ms. Vasquez about what she found, but she changed her mind.