Inflictions

by John McIlveen

  Justice, black as night, stepped to the floor and regarded him coldly. Felix pulled his arm from her grip, or more accurately, she released it.

  She turned back to the painting to watch Nathan Rutledge’s black form come forward, followed closely by the young Korean woman whose name Felix never knew. Her skin was shining onyx, as her hair had been in life.

  Breaking his paralysis, Felix fled. Keening in terror, he ran past the incessant telephone, down the short hallway, past the guest bedroom, and into the bathroom. He slammed the door, and as he twisted the lock, he could hear the shuffle of approaching feet … then silence.

  Felix’s heart slammed so hard it made breathing difficult; it felt as if something inside was trying to escape. His eyes stayed riveted to the door, expecting it to explode inward.

  Five … ten … twenty minutes … the silence continued.

  But then, something started slowly working its way in … a thrumming. A staccato, rhythmic fump-fump-fump.

  His legs vibrating with fear, Felix slowly approached the door and leaned his head against it to listen. A frenzy of shadows shifted in the light beneath the door, as if his nearness excited them. Felix backed to the bathtub, when the banging started.

  “Leave me alone,” he practically whispered.

  A huge impact jarred the door as if a fullback had run headlong into it, and from its pearly white center, a pinpoint of blackness appeared and started oozing in a rivulet. Expanding from pinpoint to bullet hole and broadening until it was the size of a large fist, the rivulet became a waterfall. It pooled onto the floor and spread to cover all reaches of the bathroom. A liquid army, it advanced on Felix, lapping at his feet like the small waves of low tide. Cornered, Felix retreated in the only direction left and stepped backward into the tub.

  Jammed tightly against the back wall of the tub, Felix watched the oily pool shift on the bathroom floor as if agitated.

  It can’t climb the porcelain, he thought, it’s too smooth. But then a black tongue appeared over the lip of the tub as if mocking Felix. It expanded to the full length of the white basin and cascaded over, slowly at first, then faster and faster. The liquid boiled over Felix’s feet, and he felt an intense pressure, like a large belt wrapped around his ankles. As the bathtub slowly filled and the force increased, bolts of pain shot up his legs, forcing him to his knees.

  Felix fought to stand, but all his strength deserted him when arms, shining like black marble, rose from the surging pool. Six steely arms, smooth and so strong, seized him by his arms, his legs, around his shoulders, and drew him downward, finally pulling him under.

  As luxurious as the house was, Rachel didn’t like it; she never had. Too many angles and glass made the house seem cold to her, not homey like the house she was brought up in, or the one she presently lived in.

  She removed the code-card from her purse and entered the digits on the keypad. The Vaughn family filed into the house, through the foyer and into the den, where they dropped their luggage on the floor. The baggage-laden taxi driver, whose English improved drastically when cursing other drivers, followed the Vaughn family into the house, stealing furtive impious glances at nine-year-old Stephanie.

  “Dear god,” Ben breathed.

  He was the first to see the painting. He approached it, appraising it from different angles. Painstaking work was involved. Countless brush strokes swayed and curved over the canvas, forming definitive shapes so thick the paint looked an inch deep and even deeper in some areas.

  “What was she thinking?” he asked.

  “Why’d Grandma paint her wall black?” Daniel asked.

  “It’s kind of spooky,” said Stephanie.

  What Rachel saw spelled out in black and silver-toned 3-D was a tale of a terrible man with hideous secrets. The intricately painted images were presented across the great canvas in a clockwise spiral, starting in the top left corner with a youthful Felix Henneman in sailor’s garb brutalizing an Asian girl. Rachel followed the trail of years and horrors as her father, the man she never really knew, committed atrocities, crimes, and insult upon insult. Around the spiral she followed, until she reached the final two images. One presented Felix Henneman staring in rapt terror at this same painting, and the final showed Felix lying face down, half submerged in a bathtub. Rachel saw her mother, an Asian girl she didn’t know, and a man she thought looked familiar, standing over Felix’s prone body. Rachel backed away from the canvas as though she could back away from the truth about her father.

  Beside her, the cab driver stood with his gaze locked on the painting, an expression of profound horror transforming his features.

  “Are you all right?” Rachel asked him. His gaze shifted from Rachel to Ben to the painting as he staggered outside.

  Ben and the children looked confused and alarmed by the cab driver’s reaction, but Rachel understood. There was power within the painting. For her, it was the truth. For her father, it was condemnation, and for the corrupt, it was revelation, and maybe—if they were lucky—a chance for redemption.

  Rachel had little room for compassion or grief regarding her father. She knew she should, and it was that knowledge that grieved her, but not the death of Felix Henneman. He was found lying in an empty bathtub, with no explanation as to why. Massive heart attack was all anyone was sure of.

  “He died of heartbreak,” the stuffed shirts at Henneman Systems said. But Rachel knew the truth. A heart attack requires a heart; heartbreak requires a soul.

  “See if you can find a screwdriver,” she said to Ben. “This has to go.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Justice Henneman’s grand finale was unsecured and ready to be moved into the garage.

  Ben looked at the painting one last time, and a shiver wracked his body. “What the hell did she call this one,” he asked Rachel, “‘Despair’?” He moved behind it to see the title.

  Rachel already knew without looking. Mother would have named the painting for what it was.

  “Mother finally signed her name on a painting,” she told him.

  Ben looked up from the boldly lettered word Justice, his surprised expression almost comical.

  On a different day, Rachel would have laughed.

  Infliction

  How do you judge a scar?

  They are all different. Scars are not prejudiced. A ten-pound infant or a ten-ton boulder can scar, or be scarred. In my forty-nine years, I have scarred and been scarred. The knowledge is now more a part of me than my own callous heart.

  My oldest one had nearly healed. I had cast off my demon; exorcised from a thirty-year addiction to the bottle. Any bottle, as long as it held the spirit of numbness within.

  I walked proudly, with my chin high and my nose in the air, swaggering with the arrogance of a winner, but I wanted to be victor in more than the conquest of alcohol, that was merely a battle in the war for my soul.

  It has been more than seven months since I last surrendered to the drink … not so well with the guilt.

  I have destroyed my family.

  It has been four years since Suzi, my only child, ran away. Two years since my wife Tippi stepped off the Hampton Beach jetty, freely surrendering herself to the icy midnight waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

  Tippi …

  She was a study of smoothness, a classic Japanese beauty. As exquisite as a Monet brushstroke, the way she moved, the way she spoke, the way she loved … and the way she died. In one liquid moment, pouring from my life like mercury into the Atlantic.

  They found her drowned body the following morning, lying on the beach like a gift from the early morning tide. I was at home, unaware; drowning in my own intoxicated death. Too drunk to realize—or care—about her absence from our bed. Unknowing that my only bond to normality was laying not even a mile from where I lay. All her pain and regrets—all her scars—were given up, transposed by water with her last living breath.

  I attended Tippi’s funeral the same way I attended my life, from behind an inebriated gauze curtain. I r
emember little of the ceremony, but the people with accusation in their eyes will remain with me. Through common respect, while compassionately patting me on the back and emitting a stream of kind words, they tried to hide the blame, but it was like covering an alligator with a bath towel. Regardless of how well they covered it, parts would always show, fully emerging to lash out if I came too near.

  Your fault, the alligator would say. You failed her.

  Tippi, of course, would have seen it as her failure, not mine. That was her way. That was her gift and her curse. I see now that when we met I became her personal venture, her mission of mercy. I know she loved me … her passion was pathos.

  Suzi’s running away was the end for Tippi. She saw it as her final failure; the big push that ultimately and literally drove her over the edge. We knew where Suzi was, though the truth was almost laughable. The idea of a fifteen-year-old girl joining a traveling circus seemed ludicrous, like a plot straight from a child’s book or movie. Tippi searched for two years, while I submerged myself deeper into drunkenness. Then Tippi escaped.

  I found myself in an empty house. Tippi and Suzi were gone and I was suddenly alone to fend for myself. I was an abandoned infant; everything was new and estranged. I hadn’t cooked a meal in over twenty years.

  The only child of parents who passed away over a decade earlier, I was left with only two companions: alcohol and guilt. Both ate away at my insides, a violent river eroding the walls of my health and sanity.

  Bob Lynch was a large but gracious man whose generous heart was his own tormentor. He owned the garage where I had worked since my teens, though a lesser man would have fired me years earlier. He found me, nearly a year and a half after Tippi’s funeral, lying on my bedroom floor, holding a bottle like a lost lover. He saw a broken man swimming in a sea of empty bottles and his own waste, drowning, yet clinging to the shards of a shattered life. I had not shown up for work in three days.

  Bob signed me into Hawthorne House, a local rehabilitation center, and told them he would pay the bill as long as they did not release me until I was cured. Bob was another love neglected by my weakness. He bestowed the unconditional love of a brother, owing nothing, asking nothing, and getting nothing in return, except a barely adequate mechanic with a life full of troubles.

  I signed myself out the next morning with every intention of returning to my comfortable oblivion, nestled between the familiar sheets of guilt and drunkenness. I wanted to drink myself back to the muted memories of a woman who gave me everything. I wanted to return to my gullible drunken form where I could convince myself of happiness and of times that had never existed.

  All of that changed with three words. What Tippi could not do with twenty-five years of love and begging, one young woman achieved with three words. Sobriety is a wonderful hearing aid.

  I was drawn by the sobs of a teenager who sat in the rehab lobby. She was aged by her addiction, but I figured her between fifteen and eighteen. Her blonde hair was stringy and dirty, and her eyes, sunken and ringed with the mascara of a drug addict. She stared at the floor, tolerating the overplayed sympathy from an attendant.

  “I don’t matter,” she said through her tears. Her desperation was a throat-clutching smoke that filled the room, seeping through the cracks of soberness in a broken man’s armor. The aid tried to convince her otherwise, looking uncomfortable while her eyes scanned the lobby for help. She wore her inexperience like a flamboyant hat.

  The girl looked at me, and I saw eyes that I had thought of too seldom in the last four years—in the last nineteen years. In their carved-out depths I read things seldom found in the eyes of someone six times her senior. There was pain, rebellion, fear, blame, loneliness, rejection, and beneath it all, unfathomable to me, love. It was illogical. It didn’t belong there! It stood singular, a rose in a field of weeds, begging for attention. How could this child still find room for love? For possibly the first time in my adult life, I wanted to cry.

  How could I have been so blind? How could I have been so heartless?

  Though this girl did not look anything like my Suzi, the connection was there. At that moment I vowed to find her so I could tell her that she now mattered. That I was sorry that fate burdened her with a father who was so narrow—so careless—that he would allow the two finest things in his life to slide through his numbed hands, without even the flattery of an attempted grasp.

  I would have given my life, right then, just to feel Suzi in my arms. To kiss her face and hear her say, I love you dad. I forgive you. To embrace my daughter, the only link to Tippi and the remnants of a life that could have been so good, if not for my ignorance. Perhaps there was still a chance for forgiveness through Suzi.

  I went home that evening and poured every trace of alcohol down the toilet. I dumped my after shave, rubbing alcohol, and cooking sherry, bidding farewell to my lifelong mistress, and turned my back before she could seduce me again. For two days, I cleaned my home with a vehemence I could not recall ever having. I scrubbed the floors and the walls, behind the refrigerator, stove, washer, and dryer. I washed the curtains, sheets, and lampshades, and scoured every surface. I wanted to remove any evidence of myself from the house, for fear that the ghosts and demons of my past would haunt the next residents and betray my secrets.

  The house sold easily after only three weeks on the market, understandably so for such a fine home. A proud manor for which I could claim no credit; I had inherited it. Any personality shown on or within its walls was the works of Tippi or my parents. I was ashamed to accept money for it.

  I sold it for $325,000, with furnishings, much to the displeasure of my confounded real estate agent. The house was appraised at $399,000.

  Bob Lynch cried when I told him I was leaving, though the revelation didn’t really surprise him. Like a parent who loses a rebellious child, there is still love and pity. It still hurts.

  I couldn’t answer his questions of where I was going, or why. They were answers I didn’t have. I simply told him that I had dropped my heart four years ago, and that I needed to find it. I said no when he offered me money.

  My search for Suzi was rooted in the shallow and dry dirt of optimism. The prospect of her being with the circus four years later was paper thin, but substantial enough for hope. Perhaps someone would remember the girl I forgot.

  Finding the name of the circus was similar to searching for bugs under rocks; you flip one, and then move to another, knowing that eventually it will turn up. I found an ad in the Portsmouth Herald archives from four years earlier, trumpeting the arrival of Dunn & Barlow’s Magnificent World Fair.

  A traveling circus moves like a butterfly. It flutters erratically on an inconclusive path, leaving little clue of where it’s been, and even less of where it’s going. Hampton Beach town records showed nothing except a statement for the land that Dunn & Barlow’s had leased. Like the butterfly, they arrived, left, and never returned. No information was available beyond that.

  Bud Martin has a good memory. He owns The Sand Dollar, a diner located across the boulevard from the Hampton Beach State Park, the land Dunn & Barlow’s had rented. Bud’s the talkative sort with plenty of nothing to say, and shares his wisdom with the flip of a burger. He serves an abundance of both for your dollar. He recalled the circus, but remembered no names. He said that it’s better that way. However, he remembered a conversation about a town in Vermont called Woodstock, and then spoke of a concert he attended many years ago with the same name.

  For more than three months I followed such leads, a man and his Corolla, tracking baseless clues across the country like a cat chasing a string. I zigzagged across America with my life possessions jammed in the trunk. My conviction and hopefulness died a little more with every dead-end, but in Sarasota, Florida, at 3:00 AM in a sleepy café, I met a nosy truck driver named Kennedy who overheard my inquiries. He shared a great story with me.

  He said that when you live on the road, lonely hour after hour, billboards play a weighty role. They break
the monotony of the blacktop, since they are one of very few things in a long-hauler’s life that change with any regularity.

  Dunn & Barlow’s was a name familiar to both the trucker and billboards. Like the truck driver, traveling circuses are nomads, night gypsies that move by the light of the moon. They occasionally cross paths on the dreary road. Kennedy recently saw the name in Pennsylvania, somewhere on route 80, he said.

  Twenty hours later, I stood at the edge of a large field in Moon Township, Pennsylvania, staring at the twin yellow peaks of Dunn & Barlow’s Magnificent World Fair’s main tent. My vision swam in the heat of a treacherous June afternoon, causing the sight to ripple lazily in the golden pasture. My heart yearned to run onto the fairway, calling for Suzi, needing the truth. My heart feared the truth.

  I walked tentatively, following the crushed grass of the tire-hammered path. Children dashed excitedly by reveling in the vow of the big top. I envied their enthusiasm and faith, and their naiveté.

  A profusion of smells, sweltering and concentrated, escorted me onto the concourse. Italian sausage, hay, freshly cut wood, animal waste, and new paint merged and hit me with long-forgotten memories of days when I too ran with reckless abandon and little more to worry about than length of wait at the main event.

  The bazaar was alive with noise, the screams of excited children, a pitchman’s banter, and the mechanical whir of the rides. Over the loudspeakers, the voice of W. C. Fields promised a night of wonders beyond belief and miracles every half-hour. I wandered the park hoping for providence, the hand of an angel to steer me along.

  Suzi smiled at me from the photo I held. Her face glowed, a paradox between teenage awkwardness and newfound sexuality. Her eyes sparkled with rebel enthusiasm, but they held a darkness that was barely at bay, a frog in a child’s hand struggling for freedom, burrowing for the first opening large enough to allow escape. She had found that hole.