The Humanity of Monsters

by Nathan Ballingrud

  “It’s real pretty,” Alex said.

  “A bunch a knickknacks mostly. Nothing special.”

  He shook his head like he did not believe it. Her apartment was decorated mostly with the inherited flotsam of her grandmother’s life: bland wall hangings, beaten old furniture which had hosted too many bodies spreading gracelessly into old age, and a vast and silly collection of glass figurines: leaping dolphins and sleeping dragons and such. It was all meant to be homey and reassuring, but it just reminded her of how far away she was from the life she really wanted. It seemed like a desperate construct, and she hated it very much.

  For now, Alex made no mention of the objects in his car or the hat in his pocket. He appeared to be more interested in Gwen, who was peering around the corner of the living room and regarding him with a suspicious and hungry eye, who seemed to intuit that from this large alien figure on her mama’s couch would come mighty upheavals.

  He was a man—that much Gwen knew immediately—and therefore a dangerous

  creature. He would make her mama behave unnaturally; maybe even cry. He was too big, like the giant in her storybook. She wondered if he ate children. Or mamas.

  Mama was sitting next to him.

  “Come here, Mama.” She slapped her thigh like Mama did when she wanted Gwen to pay attention to her. Maybe she could lure Mama away from the giant, and they could wait in the closet until he got bored and went away. “Come here, Mama, come here.”

  “Go on and play now, Gwen.”

  “No! Come here!”

  “She don’t do too well around men,” said Mama.

  “That’s okay,” said the giant. “These days I don’t either.” He patted the cushion next to him. “Come over here, baby. Let me say hi.”

  Gwen, alarmed at this turn of events, retreated a step behind a corner. They were in the living room, which had her bed in it, and her toys. Behind her, Mama’s darkened room yawned like a throat. She sat between the two places, wrapped her arms around her knees, and waited.

  “She’s so afraid,” Alex said after she retreated from view. “You know why?”

  “Um, because you’re big and scary?”

  “Because she already knows about possibilities. Long as you know there are options in life, you get scared of choosing the wrong one.”

  Toni leaned away from him and gave him a mistrustful smile. “Okay, Einstein. Easy with the philosophy.”

  “No, really. She’s like a thousand different people right now, all waiting to be, and every time she makes a choice, one of those peoples goes away forever. Until finally you run out of choices and you are whoever you are. She’s afraid of what she’ll lose by coming out to see me. Of who she’ll never get to be.”

  Toni thought of her daughter and saw nothing but a series of shut doors. “Are you

  drunk?”

  “What? You know I ain’t drunk.”

  “Stop talking like you are, then. I’ve had enough of that shit to last me my whole life.”

  “Jesus, I’m sorry.”

  “Forget it.” Toni got up and rounded the corner to scoop up her daughter. “I got to bathe her and put her to bed. If you want to wait, it’s up to you.”

  She carried Gwen into the bathroom and began the nightly ministrations. She felt Donny’s presence too strongly tonight, and Alex’s sophomoric philosophizing sounded just like him when he’d had too many beers. She found herself hoping that the prosaic obligations of motherhood would bore Alex, and that he would leave. She listened for the sound of the front door.

  Instead, she heard footsteps behind her and felt his heavy hand on her shoulder. It squeezed her gently, and his big body settled down beside her. He said something kind to Gwen and brushed a strand of wet hair from her eyes. Toni felt something move slowly in her chest, subtly yet with powerful effect, like Atlas rolling a shoulder.

  Gwen suddenly shrieked and collapsed into the water, sending a surge of water over them both. Alex reached in to stop her from knocking her head against the porcelain and received a kick in the mouth for his troubles. Toni shouldered him aside and jerked her out of the tub. She hugged her daughter tightly to her chest and whispered motherly incantations into her ear. After a brief struggle, Gwen finally settled into her mother’s embrace and whimpered quietly, turning her whole focus onto the warm, familiar hand rubbing her back, up and down, up and down, until, finally, her energy flagged, and she drifted into a tentative sleep.

  When Gwen was dressed and in her bed, Toni turned her attention to Alex. “Here, let’s clean you up.”

  She steered him back into the bathroom. She opened the shower curtain and pointed to the soap and the shampoo and said, “It smells kind of flowery, but it gets the job done,” and the whole time he was looking at her, and she thought: So this is it; this is how it happens.

  “Help me,” he said, lifting his arms over his head. She smiled wanly and began to undress him. She watched his body as she unwrapped it, and when he was naked she pressed herself against him and ran her fingers down his back.

  Later, when they were in bed together, she said, “I’m sorry about tonight.”

  “She’s just a kid.”

  “No, I mean about snapping at you. I don’t know why I did.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I just don’t like to think about what could have been. There’s no point to it. Sometimes I think a person doesn’t have much to say about what happens to them anyway.”

  “I really don’t know.”

  She stared out the little window across from the bed and watched slate gray clouds skim across the sky. Behind them were the stars.

  “Ain’t you gonna tell me why you stole a car?”

  “I had to.”

  “But why?”

  He was silent for a little while. “It don’t matter,” he said.

  “If you don’t tell me, it makes me think you mighta killed somebody.”

  “Maybe I did.”

  She thought about that for a minute. It was too dark to see anything in the bedroom, but she scanned her eyes across it anyway, knowing the location of every piece of furniture, every worn tube of lipstick and leaning stack of lifestyle magazines. She could see through the walls and feel the sagging weight of the figurines on the shelves. She tried to envision each one in turn, as though searching for one that would act as a talisman against this subject and the weird celebration it raised in her.

  “Did you hate him?”

  “I don’t hate anybody,” he said. “I wish I did. I wish I had it in me.”

  “Come on, Alex. You’re in my house. You got to tell me something.”

  After a long moment, he said, “The guy I stole the car from. I call him Mr. Gray. I never saw him, except in dreams. I don’t know anything about him, really. But I don’t think he’s human. And I know he’s after me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have to show you.” Without another word, he got to his feet and pulled on his jeans. She could sense a mounting excitement in his demeanor, and it inspired a similar feeling in herself. She followed him out of her bedroom, pulling a long t-shirt over her head as she went. Gwen slept deeply in the living room; they stepped over her mattress on the way out.

  The grass was wet under their bare feet, the air heavy with the salty smell of the sea. Alex’s car was parked at the curb, hugging the ground like a great beetle. He opened the rear hatch and pulled the closest box toward them.

  “Look,” he said, and opened the box.

  At first, Toni could not comprehend what she was seeing. She thought it was a cat lying on a stack of tan leather jackets, but that wasn’t right, and only when Alex grabbed a handful of the cat and pulled it out did she realize that it was human hair. Alex lifted the whole object out of the box, and she found herself staring at the tanned and cured hide of a human being, dark empty holes in it
s face like some rubber Halloween mask.

  “I call this one Willie, ’cause he’s so well hung,” said Alex, and offered an absurd laugh.

  Toni fell back a step.

  “But there’s women in here too, all kinds of people. I counted ninety-six. All carefully folded.” He offered the skin to Toni, but when she made no move to touch it he started to fold it up again. “I guess there ain’t no reason to see them all. You get the idea.”

  “Alex, I want to go back inside.”

  “Okay, just hang on a second.”

  She waited while he closed the lid of the box and slid it back into place. With the hide tucked under one arm, he shut the hatch, locked it, and turned to face her. He was grinning, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Okeydokey,” he said, and they headed back indoors.

  They returned quietly to the bedroom, stepping softly to avoid waking Gwen.

  “Did you kill all those people?” Toni asked when the door was closed.

  “What? Didn’t you hear me? I stole a car. That’s what was in it.”

  “Mr. Gray’s car.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Who is he? What are they for?” she asked; but she already knew what they were for.

  “They’re alternatives,” he said. “They’re so you can be somebody else.”

  She thought about that. “Have you worn any of them?”

  “One. I haven’t got up the balls to do it again yet.” He reached into the front pocket of his jeans and withdrew a leather sheath. From it he pulled a small, ugly little knife that looked like an eagle’s talon. “You got to take off the one you’re wearing, first. It hurts.”

  Toni swallowed. The sound was thunderous in her ears. “Where’s your first skin? The one you was born with?”

  Alex shrugged. “I threw that one out. I ain’t like Mr. Gray, I don’t know how to preserve them. Besides, what do I want to keep it for? I must not have liked to too much in the first place, right?”

  She felt a tear accumulate in the corner of her eye and willed it not to fall. She was afraid and exhilarated. “Are you going to take mine?”

  Alex looked startled, then seemed to remember he was holding the knife. He put it back in its sheath. “I told you, baby, I’m not the one who killed those people. I don’t need any more than what’s already there.” She nodded, and the tear streaked down her face. He touched it away with the back of his fingers. “Hey now,” he said.

  She grabbed his hand. “Where’s mine?” She gestured at the skin folded beside him. “I want one, too. I want to come with you.”

  “Oh, Jesus, no, Toni. You can’t.”

  “But why not? Why can’t I go?”

  “Come on now, you got a family here.”

  “It’s just me and her. That ain’t no family.”

  “You have a little girl, Toni. What’s wrong with you? That’s your life now.” He stepped out of his pants and, naked, pulled the knife from its sheath. “I can’t argue about this. I’m going now. I’m gonna change first, though, so you might not want to watch.” She made no move to leave. He paused, considering something. “I got to ask you something,” he said. “I been wondering about this lately. Do you think it’s possible for something beautiful to come out of an awful thing? Do you think a good life can redeem a horrible act?”

  “Of course I do,” she said quickly, sensing some second chance here, if only she said the right words. “Yes.”

  Alex touched the blade to his scalp just above his right ear and drew it in an arc over the crown of his head until it reached his left ear. Bright red blood crept down from his hairline in a slow tide, sending rivulets and tributaries along his jaw and his throat, hanging from his eyelashes like raindrops from flower petals. “God, I really hope so,” he said. He worked his fingers into the incision and began to tug violently.

  Watching the skin fall away from him, she was reminded of nothing so much as a butterfly struggling into daylight.

  She is driving west on I-10. The morning sun, which has just breached the horizon, flares in her rearview mirror. Port Fourchon is far behind her, and the Texas border looms. Beside her, Gwen is sitting on the floor of the passenger seat, playing with the Panama hat Alex left behind when he drove North. Toni has never seen the need for a car seat. Gwen is happier moving about on her own, and in times like this, when Toni feels a slow, crawling anger in her blood, the last thing she needs is a temper tantrum from her daughter.

  After he left, she was faced with a few options. She could put on her stupid pink uniform, take Gwen to daycare, and go back to work. She could drive up to New Orleans and find Donny. Or she could say fuck it all and just get in the car and drive, aimlessly and free of expectation, which is what she is doing.

  She cries for the first dozen miles or so, and it is such a luxury that she just lets it come, feeling no guilt.

  Gwen, still feeling the dregs of sleep and as yet undecided whether to be cranky for being awakened early or excited by the trip, pats her on the leg. “You okay, Mama, you okay?”

  “Yes, baby. Mama’s okay.”

  Toni sees the sign she has been looking for coming up on the side of the road. Rest Stop, 2 miles.

  When they get there, she pulls in, coming to a stop in an empty lot. Gwen climbs up in the seat and peers out the window. She sees the warm red glow of a Coke machine and decides that she will be happy today, that waking up early means excitement and the possibility of treats.

  “Have the Coke, Mama? Have it, have the Coke?”

  “Okay, sweetie.”

  They get out and walk up to the Coke machine. Gwen laughs happily and slaps it several times, listening to the distant dull echo inside. Toni puts in some coins and grabs the tumbling can. She cracks it open and gives it to her daughter, who takes it delightedly.

  “Coke!”

  “That’s right.” Toni kneels beside her as Gwen takes several ambitious swigs. “Gwen? Honey? Mama’s got to go potty, okay? You stay right here, okay? Mama will be right back.”

  Gwen lowers the can, a little overwhelmed by the cold blast of carbonation, and nods her head. “Right back!”

  “That’s right, baby.”

  Toni starts away. Gwen watches her mama as she heads back to the car and climbs in. She shuts the door and starts the engine. Gwen takes another drink of Coke. The car pulls away from the curb, and she feels a bright stab of fear. But Mama said she was coming right back, so she will wait right here.

  Toni turns the wheel and speeds back out onto the highway. There is no traffic in sight. The sign welcoming her to Texas flashes by and is gone. She presses the accelerator. Her heart is beating.

  dream of the fisherman’s wife

  a.c. wise

  The fisherman’s wife breathes out, and tendrils of smoke curl around her. She listens to the tide inside and out—salt sea and salt blood, eroding shores of sand and making a hollow space within her skin and bones. She listens, and the ebb and flow tells her what she does not want to hear.

  She needs no doctor to know: When the moon swells to full, she will bleed again.

  A sigh laced with more smoke. This time, for just an instant, the tendrils thicken, become solid. One brushes her cheek, chasing salt slipped from within to without, aching to join to sea. The fisherman’s wife starts, but doesn’t move, holding her body quivering-taut.

  The touch does not withdraw. Cautious, she pulls on the pipe again, adding more smoke, more weight. The first tendril, more a tentacle now, is joined by a second and a third. One slips past parted lips; one traces the edge of her parted robe and curls around the swell of a breast that isn’t as full as she wishes.

  Dive. She feels the word against her flesh, then the smoke is gone. She shudders, hairs rising, skin puckering tight.

  It was a dream. Was it?

  She draws her robe close, tucks her legs up, and waits for
her husband to come home.

  Below the pier where their hut crouches—all one room and no place to hide—waves surge, bringing the scent of green weeds wrapped around wooden piles. The fisherman’s wife raises her head from the drawn-up pillow of her knees. Through sleep-puffed eyes, she squints at the edge of the lowered shades. Still daylight. She didn’t mean to doze. Outside, seabirds call, squabbling over fish guts baked dry by the sun.

  She rises as her husband steps through the door. The fish-stink on him is laced with sweat. It is his scent, her scent, the scent of their life together, and for a moment it breaks her. Her eyes sting, but no more salt falls.

  The boards creak, the light changes as her husband shifts, uncertain, as though afraid of and for her until she folds into him. Her hands go to the nape of his neck, the small of his back. His fingers meet and lace together between her shoulder blades, pulling her close. There is black blood under her nails and his fingers are callused from tying knots, casting nets, hauling lines. They are the hands of a fisherman and a fisherman’s wife. They fit together, two halves of a whole.

  “No.” She murmurs the word against his throat, breathing in the salt-sweat of him, answering his unspoken question. It is the same answer she gave last month, and the month before. He softens a moment, before tightening his grip, fingers stroking her spine to soothe.

  She shivers, reminded of . . . what? Should she tell him of the dream that wasn’t a dream, the word spoken into her jaw by a smoke-tentacle, caressing her tongue?

  The fisherman draws back, concern in his eyes. “Wife? What is wrong?”

  She shakes her head. “Only a chill wind from the sea.”

  The fisherman’s wife rises. Is she sleeping still? If she glances back to the pool of moonlight holding her husband in their tangled sheets will she see herself lying beside him, chest moving steady with the in-out tide of breath? She steps outside, barefoot; from the pier to the sand, to the edge of the shore where the water traces a silver line against her toes.