The Family Unit and Other Fantasies

by The Family Unit

  “I haven’t missed one yet,” Joe replied; then to remove any relief, added, “Of course I’ve never cut it this close.”

  “You haven’t?” George’s voice was shrill.

  “No, but there’s a first time for everything.”

  Beyond the slowing of his speed, Joe was also swerving wildly around the roads. This was no ploy but a defensive reaction to seeing supernatural cars and caravans—some with wings, others with huge, twice-tractor-size wheels—coming at, then racing right through his car.

  “That was a close one,” Joe said, after a near miss.

  “What was?”

  “Nothing.” Why tip his hand? If Joe could see such oncoming “traffic,” he could see through George as well, and he wanted to ease slowly into this revelation.

  “Oops,” he said, starting to do just that. “Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  “That thump. Like a flat tire. Oops. There it goes again.”

  “I haven’t heard a thing.”

  “Really? Jeez, let me pull over for a second and see.”

  “What? But, no, we can’t—”

  Not signalling—there were rarely real cars on the near-black back road, the reason he had chosen it—Joe pulled over to where a shoulder should have been but was instead just grass bordering the woods beyond. Then he killed the lights, turned off the engine, and got out.

  George was too stunned to say anything besides a beseeching “The time—.” The words echoed in the empty area and seemed to refer meaningfully to their pasts, the changes they had made in themselves, and a world they could no longer recreate. Or was it the start of an explanation for his years-long masquerade—or sudden subterfuge—or however long it had taken him to alter himself, that Joe didn’t stay for him to complete?

  His breath visible, stumbling not on ice but from drug-caused clumsiness, Joe pulled on the gloves he had removed to drive. Then he knelt and made to “inspect” the back tires. After a long enough pause, he called, “Just what I thought!” knowing that George’s closed windows limited how much he could make out.

  “What’d you say?” George asked predictably, emerging to learn the answer—and then stopping, suddenly, when he saw that Joe had popped the trunk.

  “Hey, we don’t have time to—” he said, advancing. “Can’t we just drive on the tire until we get there? I never heard anything myself anyway.”

  George’s voice had returned to one rougher, less recent and more recognizable than the one made soft and feathery by the lofty thoughts it had to convey. George more resembled his old self, too, looked goofier, less the grand man of letters. Were these reversals caused by panic? Joe’s imagination? Or was George purposely shape-shifting to put Joe at ease and off the track? Joe had no time to choose an answer; he was too busy searching in the trunk for the implement he wanted.

  “This’ll only take a minute,” he said.

  He saw it immediately, but scrambled more for show. Then saying “Got it!” he turned and looked up. George was right beside him, his expression one of total confusion and complete understanding, if that made sense, which it did to Joe, the way many strange things did now. Then George said, as if realizing something crucial in his life had ended and would never again begin, “I’ve missed the train.”

  “Have you?”

  “Yes.” Now it was resignation—though not exactly acceptance, which meant there was also the quiet start of rage.

  To forestall it growing—for who knew what monster this emotion would turn George into, and how many heads and grabbing hands he would have—Joe revealed what he had found in the trunk. It wasn’t what he assumed George assumed it to be, a jack. It was instead a shovel Joe had bought as a gift for Michelle, for her to start digging that garden she always said (past the point of tedium) she wanted. He had hoped that her creating one would occupy her for hours on end each day, without ever needing his company. But he had (out of pure indolence) forgotten to give it to her, and the tool still had a price tag like a cardboard noose tied around its neck. He stared, deciding whether to peel it off, for appearances sake.

  “What’s going on? Are you drunk?” George asked, his anger growing, though luckily waiting until it had all the information it needed to explode.

  Then Joe thought he had no time to lose, there was a world to save. So he lifted the shovel and smacked George square in the face with it.

  George staggered back, slightly, his hands out to signal stop, his nose and lower brow caving in. Before he could escape, Joe hit him again, this time on the side of his head, harder than he’d ever hit anything in his life. He dented George’s skull right above his left ear. After George went down, standing over him Joe finished him off with a final smash—like a last hammer blow to nail—that flattened the rest of his face. Then he stood there, panting, before deciding he better drag his body into the woods.

  He dragged George by the foot, the leather half-shoe coming off in his hand and making him cry out as if he held the foot itself. The journey was arduous in ways he hadn’t imagined, and he felt new aches in his lower back and wrists as he finally got the one hundred and sixty-pound corpse (if only he did as many push-ups every day as George obviously had!) to a forested area suitably remote from the road—plus he had the shovel to contend with, which he pulled along with one pinky hooked into the hole of its handle, the price tag still stupidly shaking against his skin.

  The woods where he was were obviously part of a hiking trail, for the moon revealed paint marks on trees, which tipped travellers on which way to turn. For a second, Joe was sure he saw a troop of boy scouts wearing uniforms from Depression-era Norman Rockwell paintings parade past, but they disappeared as quickly as he had made them come.

  Then he was left with just the digging and burying and the worrying about his health—and finally the cutting of corners by covering with leaves the parts of the body he could not submerge. At last, he approved of the job he’d done, a public service for the human race that would forever go unknown.

  Dragging the shovel behind him, Joe found his way back to the car, necessity giving him a better sense of direction than he’d ever had. (His lack of it was a sore point with Michelle on quarrelsome family car trips full of cranky U-turns, reluctant asking of directions, and silent miles with front seats full of angry Mommy and Daddy, while in the backseat, with his thumbs, Tad destroyed more helpless people on a portable, lap-sized death machine.)

  Joe waited a second before re-entering the car—but how many cooling-off minutes would discourage a coronary? (It had always been an hour between swimming and eating, but that was cramps and who had an hour?) Then, deciding if he died he died and the car must be kind of cold anyway, he began to get in.

  The second his key was inserted, the car started screaming, as if telling everyone what was happening on the dark, abandoned road. To his horror, Joe realized he had pressed with his palm the red security thing on the key chain (something which he had once done to devastating effect in front of the town’s Farmers’ Market, setting off what sounded like a siren and briefly ruining his local reputation). Now, knowing only that closing and re-opening the door would stop the Subaru’s shrieking, he frantically, hands shaking, tried to make this happen. Only after a too-loud second slamming of the door did the alarm, with a final infuriated croak, actually end.

  Sweating uncomfortably, Joe stood near the silent road, waiting for the authorities or anyone else who had something against him to appear, but no one did. So he entered the car, immediately locking the door, fearing retaliation from George’s interplanetary partners once they’d learned of their (if this was what he was) leader’s demise.

  Before he turned on the motor, he looked down and saw grim proof of his suspicions: blood that had obviously spurted from George as he was dying now stained the front of Joe’s big down jacket. Yet it wasn’t red or frankly any colour he recognized, but a kind of sick-making amalgam of a
ll colours, with white the dominant shade in its weird little rainbow: confirmation that George had come from (and now perhaps returned to) another universe. Joe would have to hide the jacket—or maybe secretly keep it, in case he had to appear in an intergalactic court. Then he drove home fairly competently and facing no traffic.

  He assumed no one would be the wiser or none the wiser or whatever the expression was; he was home free, in other words. He pulled into his driveway, wondering who’d knocked over his trash can—probably that nasty kid from next door, hyperactive Billy. Then he got out, went in, and walked right into Michelle, who was wearing her nightgown, had been worried that he’d been gone so long, and immediately said to him, “My God, why is there so much blood on your coat?”

  In the harsh light of the hall, Joe saw that his jacket had indeed been colour-corrected, the liquid now truly red—or the dark brown blood becomes when it starts to dry. Discombobulated, yet with an even faithful married man’s mastery of lying (about everything from how he doesn’t watch internet porn to how he didn’t gamble away his paycheque to why he was just paying attention), Joe immediately began improvising a story, one about a dark highway, a deer, and its accidental death by their car. It was so convoluted that Michelle interrupted, as he planned, with, “Okay, okay, as long you and George are all right. Let’s just get that jacket off.”

  After she had stuffed the coat into the hamper, Joe chug-a-lugged a nearly full Brita pitcher of water, said, “I really need a shower,” which was true, and then ran up the stairs to the second bathroom. There he found, to his shock, that the sedative bottle was in fact empty and the others had only a few last pills rattling around in them like forgotten patients roaming an asylum shut down by the state. He swallowed the ones that remained.

  Joe sat on the toilet and nearly fell in; he cursed and laughed, closed the lid, and sat down again. He thought about his coat and considered what had happened: he might have made a big mistake about George. Possible? Yes. Probable? Not really. Still, if it was true, Michelle now knew that something had occurred and would know more once George’s body was found by hikers, or those Depression-era boy scouts, or when it was half-eaten by coyotes which now prowled the area because they’d been displaced from their habitat by developers—he’d read an article about it and even thought he’d once seen a white one running frightened across the highway at sunset; it had been too big to be a dog.

  Joe looked down at the carving knife he’d just swiped from the kitchen while drinking the water, which he had hidden inside his plaid shirt and which had scraped his stomach a little when the handle was hit by his arm, which had been knocked by his rising knee as he came up the stairs. As he gripped the knife, last used to slice meat from a Christmas ham for late-night snacks, new images trickled down before his eyes as if they had burst the banks of his brain and overflowed, like rainwater spilling from the gutters of his roof. He saw his wife and son slaughtered from behind, their throats slit with no time to scream, his secret safe. Then, dropping the blade, he sat forward, his eyes closing, his hands patting them as if to dry up the pictures and keep them from ever coming back.

  Perhaps one pill, like a single, fertilizing sperm, had completed its mission and for a second brought him clarity, dying and dissolving as it did. It was he, not George, he, not George (“surprise!”) who didn’t care, who was completely cold to his wife and son, who loved nothing—unlike his old friend—who was actually already in a crucial way dead. But before he could completely ingest this information, other medications muscled in to adjust his understanding of it.

  Now he saw something strange upon the tiles at his feet: drops of blood were falling from the slight gash in his skin caused by the knife, skiing from his stomach over his belt and jumping between his pleated knees to the floor. To his terrible relief, they merged with the grey-white that was down there, were almost as clear as tears, were not, in other words, in any way human—he was not human, for the blood had come from him, and so he did not have to face his future or look back upon his past.

  He, not George, had arrived on Earth—and by accident, not with the diabolical designs he had accused his friend of having. It had all been a mistake, and so now he needed to get out and go back to where he belonged.

  Patching his cut gut with a little circle bandage, which was not big enough but the last one left in the box, Joe stood up. He hadn’t showered but felt oddly cool, perhaps from a special inner air conditioning system he now secretly had, or maybe just because his realization had relaxed him. For whatever reason, his “body” was climate-controlled, and so he didn’t feel he needed the jacket Michelle had put into the wash when he tip-toed down the stairs and ran out the front door. His wife’s quizzical cry of “Joe!” followed him out, as faint as he knew now his connection to that name, this home, and her had always been.

  “Joe” got back into the car and saw the shovel stupidly not hidden, just sitting there on the passenger seat, reminding him for a second of what he’d done and not very well, and shouldn’t have in the first place. He threw it onto the backseat to remove it from his sight, and its knife-sharp edge barely missed slicing open his mouth.

  Then he drove. He drove for hours, past the part of the world he recognized, crossing over into places he’d never been before. At last, at dawn (at the start of what day?), his gas tank empty, he left the car in the middle of a road in a place in America he couldn’t name. Then he ran down the highway, laughing and screaming, because he was so happy that he would soon see the large and welcoming lights of his mother ship.

  LONG STORY SHORT

  Rick thought if she told him the story again, he would kill her. It was an irrational decision, since she was near death and if he merely practiced patience, the event would occur without his committing a crime. But the anecdote—which she had repeated heedlessly for the third time today? Fourth?—was as inciting an offence to him as infidelity might be to a married man.

  “It was at a restaurant in Paris forty years ago,” his mother said, as if sharing a delicious secret. “Jean Calot was suddenly seated at the table beside your father and myself. I’d always loved him in the movies—‘belle laide,’ ugly beautiful, I called him,” as if she had made up the movie star’s generally accepted nickname and needed to—once again—translate the common foreign phrase. “He had a little dog with him, which appalled your father—it seemed so unclean and against the restaurant’s rules, unusual for France. But I took that dog—a Pekingese, I think it was—hid it on my lap for the entire meal, and fed it scraps. Jean Calot whispered thanks to me at the end. ‘Merci, Mademoiselle,’ he said. Mademoiselle! And I was over forty!”

  And clearly married—and borderline humiliating her husband, Rick’s father, by flirting with the film star. But that wasn’t really what infuriated Rick about the story—it was his mother’s obvious delight in all its shallow details: the fancy restaurant, the trip to France, the purebred pedigreed dog. They reflected what she relished in the world, what she respected, even worse.

  Rick knew that his mother’s considerable wealth would come to him once she died: he was her only relation and now her kind-of companion (though he only came over once a day to spell an exasperated paid housekeeper before another could arrive). In recent years, he had refused loans or gifts of money from her, but he was no longer so completely self-righteous, because he was no longer so successfully self-employed. He also knew that the old woman suffered from dementia, a kind in a mild early stage that was losing the race to ruin her to the cancer more quickly killing her. He knew all this—he wasn’t proud of his emotions. (Nor was he proud of his life: he was an unmarried freelance business “consultant” in his forties, wasting time others would have used to achieve much and love others.)

  Still, the fact that his mother clung to this particular story like a shipwreck survivor does a last piece of wood in the water—that this was what was keeping her afloat, that its (what was the word politicians always used?) values
were still accessible in her brain long after most others had been washed away—repelled him. If this was what she prized—and if she lived more in movie fantasies than in life—what did it say about him? His fists primed to pummel her only relaxed when the last words of the tale rolled out of his mother’s mouth, and they were always the same—she was as practiced and perfect in her part as a Broadway star in a long-running play: “Mademoiselle! And I was over forty!”

  Rick exhaled and rose, hearing the knock that was obviously the night nurse.

  An option beside matricide, of course, had always been available to him, but it had seemed too creepy and even cruel. Now, with his mother lingering longer in life than he had anticipated, it was imperative that he stop the story. And if the best he could do was simply change it to another, so be it.

  He’d always heard rumours and hearsay about the service, but now trolled the Internet for actual information, which he found. He was tipped off to a storefront on 23rd and Third that had once played host to a hockshop, in the days when people still sold only things and not ideas. It had no official website or phone number; it wasn’t actually illegal but unsavoury enough to have to be discreet about itself. Some court would rule on it eventually. Until then, it was hidden in the back of the small shoe repair store, one so inexpensive and old-fashioned that it—ironically enough—attracted beat cops as clientele. They either suspected nothing or used the clandestine business themselves, the way they did whorehouses, providing “protection.”

  When he arrived, Rick had a peculiar sense of having been there before, but he dismissed it as déjà vu or a wistful regret he hadn’t shown up sooner. The paunchy and sixty-something shoe repairman put out a “Closed” sign and took him into the back when he said what his need was. The man closed the door of a cluttered storage space. Half hidden by boxes of shoes was a cabinet that looked not unlike an old card catalogue used before libraries went completely to computers. (Maybe he’d even bought one at auction, Rick thought.) A crude scrawl on an index card taped to the front said simply “Anecdotes.”