Phantom Effect

by Michael Aronovitz

  The diving board was a breeze, my hands running over the surfaces and my fingers working the internal mechanisms like they knew their way blind. By the time I was finished the illusion was perfect, and now I was running full tilt through the fairytale dream room, with its old fashioned ceiling Halogens coming up in slow motion, its lazy morning shadows, its beach chairs in pretty little rows like church, and I was speeding toward the long rounded edge between the shallow and deep ends where I was gonna blast off for the cannonball of the century.

  Four feet to go and I had to sneak over one last look at the booby trap I’d rigged up last night, in fact, I wanted to watch it while I was flying high through the air. I was a jet with screaming engines, a fighter pilot making his last sweep across the war zone that his massive nuke was about to absolutely flatten, a hard-ass general…

  I slipped.

  I fucking slipped right there at the last second where there was a puddle I hadn’t noticed, and I didn’t fly high but I sure as hell soared long, feet kicking up in front of me, rear end coming down fast and hard, crash landing straight into the protruding concrete border-fringe.

  It was my tailbone.

  Smashed.

  I heard it, thought of eggshells.

  There was that velvety, royal feeling all through my bottom side that you had when you were gritting down your teeth real hard or pressing your fingernails into Styrofoam packing material, and then my jaws clapped together making copper and everything was hands over feet over hands, all rumple and tumble, like dump-trash.

  And I’m walking, asshole, slow and cautious as the adult this time, making my way down this dark corridor where the Motel 6 pool water around the bend is making wavery lines along the damp tile walls. Somewhere something is dripping and my breath is wet on the thickening air. I’ve been removed from the little re-run I just had to live through again as a teenager, and I’m left with the nothing but the scattered memories of what happened after my accident.

  And I ain’t stupid.

  I pretty much know that there’s something waiting around the corner here, something bad, something truthful. Like I said, I don’t remember too much after breaking my ass bone, and I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that this dark twin of the Jewish Y has answers, reflections in the deep end, pictures in the ripples to fill in the blanks.

  What I do remember after crushing my tailbone was being plunged into the chlorine and then soaked in sweat. There were sirens going off, but they sounded distant and mournful. Some time later I could see a tube coming from my arm and trailing up to a bag with clear liquid in it, but everything around me was all splinter and slash, dark and shadowed, grainy and disconnected. I had an incredible throbbing pain in my loin section, all up my back and down through my legs, and that gave way to throbbing and pulsing and sluggish waves that coursed through my stomach and up through my scalp. There was numbness, and someone kept putting sharp lights in my eyes, real close and piercing, and there must have been a kennel near the hospital because I always heard dogs baying and moaning, but when I think about it now I must have been dreaming.

  When I got home I was bedridden for months. I missed a lot of school. I watched a lot of TV, read a lot of comic books.

  Mama was all official about things, walking me around with an arm across my back, exercising my legs by pulling and pushing them like riding a bicycle, feeding me soup and beans and raw veggies out of Tupperware. She said that I had fractured my coccydynia or something like that, and that even though the surgeon had replaced the smashed bony structure, I might not be the same ever again. But she was gonna help me the best she could to live a normal, healthy life.

  I walked with crutches for nine months, a cane for the next three. I missed half a year of school and there was a petition, this proposal thing Mama worked on in the kitchen for like three solid weeks. Then all the phone calls from the Department of Human Services stopped, and I was home-schooled by this old black guy named Mr. Goodwin who used to be a shop teacher at some inner city high school, and I hated him because he talked real low and proper and slow making me listen, and he had these big dark hanging body tag moles all around the edges of his eyes, but I liked him a little too because he didn’t water stuff down with bullshit, especially English, where he just gave a lot of hand-outs and old state tests that we drilled as if he thought it was pretty much a throw-away too.

  And no hospitals. Mama said they fucked me up real good in there once and we weren’t gonna make the same mistake twice. She bought a shit-load of books on herbs and Holistic healing, real medicine man shit, hey, when an Injun-woman goes all spiritual, Shaman, and medicine cords its best to get out of her way unless you want a peace pipe shoved up your nose or something. First it was a bunch of talk about the mind, body, and spirit, and then came the non-fat diets and the incense and the New Age music. Sounds like a bunch of hocus-pocus, I know, but to this day I still sign off on my health insurance taking the payout. Doctors are thieves, fumbling in the dark, looking stuff up on Google, taking guesses, I mean, look how they botched her cancer diagnosis, fucking the chemo, running in circles. And in playing nursemaid to her boy, at least for awhile, my Mama was nice to me.

  Well, not really. It wasn’t nice, not quite, let’s be real.

  She used all of this to make me into some kind of crash test dummy, never really talking to me anymore, just talking at me with phrases. At first it was creepy in a way, but after awhile it was like shaking hands or saying “How ya doing?” when you didn’t really care one way or the other.

  I got my certificate in the middle of eleventh grade and left home at seventeen. It wasn’t your typical send-off, but it wasn’t all that new either. I didn’t get a full ride to state college, growing up to be Dr. Biff Malibu, but I didn’t drop out of high school and end up living on the streets either. I was lost in the landscape, a part of the blur.

  But now, rounding the bend in this dark tile hallway with the little wavelets fluttering on the walls, I realize that something changed after the accident, something important, something I buried and never talked about even to myself in “real voice” or those little fucking mind numbing self-help catch phrases. It had to do with lust and ache and exotic dark pussy. It had to do with then and later, before and after, and the difference that I buried below the grains.

  “You made yourself forget what it felt like, didn’t you Johnny?”

  I round the corner and the Motel 6 pool area is a bare womb, the walls stripped down, the doors to the locker rooms removed. There is light, but it is dim and I can’t see what source is generating it. There are wavelets reflecting off the walls to the high ceiling, but the pool is bone dry, threads of sediment following the grout lines and forking down to the drain.

  At the far edge of the deck by the kiddie steps at the shallow end there is a naked woman sitting on a bar stool, facing away and slowly brushing her long mane of black hair that goes almost all the way down to the tiny flower-petal creases above the narrow groove of her ass. She starts to come around then, her tan hour glass shape twisting at the waist, one arm positioned protectively across her chest, and I wanna look away, but I can’t, and it’s an old story, but that’s the point, ain’t it?

  “Mama?”

  It’s a dead echo in here. She looks back at me with those stony black eyes, those tomahawk cheekbones, and I suddenly want her to swing her legs around to face me, knees together catching gleam going up the thigh, hair brush in her lap barely covering the pubic area, arm brought down to allow for the hanging turquoise, onyx, and spiny oyster pieces to hide one nipple and barely expose the other. That would make this the lowest low, right? A perfect piece of Englishy bullshit-congruity proving that in the end my signature in this blur of a world was never any more than a stain.

  She turns away again and there are more brushstrokes, slowly, lovingly, shoulders set back high and regal.

  “I’m a problem solver, Johnny,” her voice says. “Thought I solved you.”

  “Solved me?


  “Tamed is a better word. Funny how that backfired, huh?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Love beads, Johnny. It’s all about the love beads.”

  She vanishes. And there by my left fingers on the bright white surface of the diving board there is a necklace. It seems to have been dipped in blood, all droplets and runners, its moist tokens the polar opposite of crafted pendants or mementos. They are marble sized globes, slightly oblong, each fastened to the choker by fragile corkscrewed threads. They look like sperm, and the ghostly whisper of my dead mother’s thoughts hiss about the space like escaping steam:

  “Close Johnny, but not quite. They ain’t marbles. Technically, they are a packing material UPS was considering way back when, but wound up passing on in favor of the cheaper Styrofoam popcorn product. These were too expensive. They’re filled with silicone. Took me forever to find.”

  “To pack boxes?”

  “I only needed two, Johnny.”

  “Two necklaces?”

  “Two of those small globes. Or should I say…implants…”

  I gasp, and her voice whispers behind it.

  “Why do you think I dated a veterinarian, Johnny? What procedure do you think I was learning to do all by myself all that time?”

  I run.

  Back down the hall, feet pounding into the darkness, and as the sweat starts to poke up on the back of my neck there is an eerie light coming up along the long tile hallway, the laundry room with its steel chutes, curved rails, and canvas tubs, the restaurant area with its checkerboard of thick wooden tables, and while I am thundering back the way I just came as fast as I am able I can feel the deep internal slipcover gliding off of my past, my real past and not the reinvented one. The thing that fucked me all this time is that I was always well aware of the way things really went down, but I stuffed all that shit back in with the old moldy invoices in the old dusty boxes in the back of the warehouse so to speak. The lies, on the other hand, were repeated in my mind like some favorite tune, built up with form and substance and sensory details like my life depended on it.

  All my own Englishy bullshit.

  I went to a party at Jimmy Whalen’s house in sixth grade. I cut down his tire swing in the back yard with my Swiss army knife and his dad put me in a time out back behind the woodpile while everyone else got to eat pizza. And Mr. Whalen wasn’t no maintenance man for the Jewish Y, but rather, a guard at the Graterford prison who organized the groups brought out for highway trash detail. After sitting by myself for five minutes, smoking a Marlboro Light from a rumpled soft pack and looking out into the public woods leading to the train yard, I snuck into the shed, found one of Mr. Whalen’s litter pickers, and flattened all four tires of his Ford F150.

  In seventh grade I got in real bad trouble in science class when I put a water-filled condom in Mrs. Levitz’s desk drawer. Rudy St. Clair had stolen it from his older sister’s backpack when she came home from college to do laundry and borrow money again, and even though he put me up to it, he broke the code of silence when I got caught planting it red handed, fucking me royal by coming forward with Jimmy Whalen and telling Principal Lally that I had been wrecking the class all year, coming in late, asking to go to the bathroom, wandering the halls, pretending to need to see the counselor, the librarian, and the nurse, and then calling out in class with dumb stuff, asking for a tissue, or hand sanitizer, or what page we were on when Mrs. Levitz had just announced it three times.

  On the last day of school I got caught in the basement closet jerking off to the sight of my own Mama’s privates.

  The next week she started dating Dr. Goldstien, a veterinarian who took her under his wing, letting her assist him so she could learn all the procedures. He was nice. I saw him twice, once when he beeped for Mama outside in his gray Volvo, and the other when he looked after me one morning as a favor, taking me into the Jewish Y as a guest. In the locker room, after bitching a little in this smooth quiet voice about how I should have brought a bathing suit with me and there was some major problem with wearing your cut-off jeans and undies into the pool, he let me go play by myself outside on the vacant baseball field by the access road leading out to Haverford Avenue. One of the equipment sheds back there was open and in a pickle barrel with a carpenter’s belt draped over it, I found a cordless mini circular saw. It was then that I connected the border woodlands with body parts, and it was a day or so later that I went under the knife.

  For a crushed tailbone.

  That never got crushed in the first place.

  In a hospital.

  That never had me registered as a patient.

  I start to slow down, hand pressed to my side, breath heaving. Somehow I have made it upstairs, and even though the rug has been taken up leaving a hard cementous base, there are still old fashioned light fixtures left on the walls, spilling weak little glow spots along wallpaper striped down in green and maroon Applebee’s colors. To my left is the elevator foyer, two open shafts, gritty cinderblock walls. To the right is a stripped area where they must have had an ice machine, squared casing lines on the floor, steel gooseneck cables pitch-forking out of a keyhole recess. Down the hall I hear a noise, like a whisper, like a mimic of my own hard breath.

  I make my way down the green and maroon corridor, and this must be the floor with the honeymoon suites because it seems the rooms are miles apart from each other, and the farther in I go, the longer the hallway becomes.

  The breathing mimic is louder now, and it’s coming every seven intakes or so, a sound of hard air pushed through a CPAP ventilator machine, forced in because the fragile, damaged organs aren’t strong enough to do it themselves. And it may be my eyes or the lighting, but it looks like the walls are bowing out a little with each of those forced breaths, then sagging back for a moment like limp tissue before they regain their original form. And it smells too, like death fingering down the corridor, from Mama’s lungs straight into mine.

  I am standing in front of room 457.

  There is an electro key insert, but the door is cracked open a sliver, resting against the jamb. All I have to do is push it. I stand there, arms dangling.

  After the operation and the recovery I only saw Dr. Goldstien once more, at his house, where he was sunning out by his back yard pool, there in his suburban lagoon setting with tea tables, lawn chairs, beach umbrellas, and a straw hut looking like a cheap tiki bar. Mama had broken off with him almost a year ago, and I found the address in the trash on a Post-it note stuck to the cover of a canine hygiene textbook she threw out with the Spring cleaning. He lived in Springfield. I rode my bike. Snuck up between yards. His fence was cheap looking compared to everything else, with those razor thin green and white slats going in criss-cross through the cyclone diamond wire, and there I was again, staring through the slivers, only this time it wasn’t one appendage pressing deep inside another to the pelvis-to-pelvis stopping points. It was this old Jewish guy, with skinny bow legs, a pot belly, and curly gray chest hair.

  How could she fuck him? How could she do it?

  I hated thinking about that kind of thing about my own Mama, but I hated thinking about sex in general lately. Things were different somehow. I still loved looking at girls, at their pretty eyes, the backs of their knees, the curve of their backs, the swell of their breasts.

  But I didn’t feel it anymore…down there. The haunt of it still lingered, like a phantom effect, but there was some kind of weird disconnect. I still wanted to touch girls, hold them, feel their legs, kiss their throats, make them submit. But something was missing, something important.

  I looked through the slats at Dr. Goldstien’s diving board. It jutted out flat and hard and I wanted to dismantle it, rig it to fail, watch him go whoopsie in his own fucking pool, but I didn’t know how to do it and I knew I wouldn’t get away with it anyway. I was impotent.

  I am standing in front of room 457 in the gutted Motel 6, and behind that door is my Mama’s ghost, bedridden and cancer stricken lik
e she was in her last moments of life, connected to a breathing machine that pumps air into her poisoned lungs every fifteen seconds or so, the three-inch mouth tube strapped to her face, one reddened eye looking out, one skeletal finger ready to spell out the word “HOSPICE” or some other horrific, undeniable truth.

  On the last day of seventh grade I watched my Mama fuck someone and participated in the process by masturbating. She dated a veterinarian and learned how to perform a neutering procedure so she could drug her own son and neuter him, using silicone packing globes as replacements for his man-balls. Her son was a threat to her in a way that shook her to her core, and she was a problem solver.

  I never lost my mental lust for women and I made damned sure I could continue as a participator. I never lost my hunger for the game, my need for the hunt, for the chase, the dominance, and that last gasp of breath, holding her close. Our big “O.” I reinvented my past, blackened what was real with denial, and continued to fuck in the only way that was available to me. No hard diving boards for Johnny, no cigarette afterwards, no cuddling, kissing, and soft spoken whispers, just a Sawzall for the heavy work and a cordless mini circular saw for the finish. And a flood of public woods as a dumping ground.

  Killing isn’t sexy, asshole.

  Killing is sex.

  “Johnny…”

  It is my Mama on other side of the door. She has crawled there, I can see the movement of her lips through the crack at knee level. She has clearly ditched the ventilator mask or at least pushed the funnel aside, and she is on her knees gasping.

  “Johnny…one thing…”

  No.

  No more ghosts or buried secrets. I pull the door closed and I run, back down the endless hall that seems to hyperventilate all around me now, the walls like fragile elastic being drawn to the snapping point and then left to sag, and there on the approach to the foyer area with the elevator shaft I think about it for a second, about jumping the edge and doing a massive cannonball that will end it right here. But if the dead can just mosey on into a gutted Motel 6 smack in the middle of a real life timeline, it ain’t too smart to trespass on their own home turf, not just yet, not without a roadmap. Besides. My survival instinct would probably make me grab at the cable on the way down, tearing back skin, slowing the descent just enough so the impact wouldn’t kill me. Just break my tailpipe.