“I’ve just had a tough winter.” She didn’t say anything, waiting for me to fill it in. “The first snowfall, I spun out and crashed into a guardrail—” I kept talking through her gasp. Thank God I hadn’t said through the guardrail. “It’s okay, I was fine, just scraped up my arms when the airbag went off. The car was pretty banged up, though. And after that, I had some trouble.”
“Have the noises come back?” she said.
I opened my mouth, shut it. So much for the plan. When I was a teenager I had a swimming accident, and after that I started hearing the noises. That’s what I called them, anyway, what everyone in my family called them. But they weren’t exactly sounds. I didn’t hear voices, or humming, or music, or screams. It was more physical than that. I felt movement, vibration, like the scrape of a chair 1 2
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across the floor, a fist pounding against a table. It felt like someone rattling a cage in my mind. But that was too hard to explain, even to myself.
“Oh, honey.” She dried her hand on a towel and pressed her hand to my neck. “When do you hear them? At night, when you’re tired . . . ?”
“It comes and goes.”
“Right now?”
“Right now, not so much.” Another lie. Every few minutes, I felt a lurch and a flurry of clawed scrabbling, like a raccoon in a cardboard box.
She studied my face, as if by concentrating she could hear what was happening in my head. Her left eye, the glass one, was fixed on a point just beside my right ear. “You should talk to Dr. Aaron,” she said.
“She helped you so much last time. You could do some therapy with her.”
“Mom, it’s not like getting a lube job, you can’t just drop in for some quick therapy.”
“You know what I mean. Talk to her. If you’re worried about the cost—”
“It’s not the money.”
“I can lend you the money.”
“She’s not going to charge me, Mom.” I rubbed the side of my head. “Listen, I already called her. I’m going to see her tomorrow.”
“Then why are you arguing with me?”
“I’m not arguing! I’m just saying that I’m not ‘doing therapy.’ I’m just going to stop in and say hello.”
“Maybe she could recommend somebody in Colorado. There must be good psychiatrists that—”
“I’m not going to see anybody else.”
She blinked, waited for me to calm down.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to . . .” I opened my hands, closed them.
“What happened back there?” she asked quietly. Amra and Lew were coming back soon. I didn’t want to be in the
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middle of it when they walked in. I weighed what I could tell her. Enough to be plausible. But too much and I’d have to manage her reaction.
“It’s complicated.”
She waited. I sat down at the table, and she sat next to me.
“The noises weren’t bad at first,” I said. “They came mostly at night, but I was handling it okay. Then they started to get worse, more persistent. I missed some days of work.” I kept my tone matter-of-fact.
“So anyway, my car’s totaled, the people at work want to fire me, I wasn’t sleeping well . . . I knew I was stressed out. The doctor who took care of me after the accident referred me to a shrink, a psychiatrist. I told him my history, you know, the stuff from when I was five, and the stuff from high school. But if it’s related to possession it’s something he’s never heard of before, so we had to spend a lot of time talking about what I think is going on. And in the meantime he’s teaching me meditation techniques, ordering scans of my head, having me try out medications. And of course none of it worked. The MRIs and fMRIs and CAT scans didn’t show anything, no tumors or blockages. The meditation exercises were all things Dr. Aaron taught me years ago, straight out of some post-possession handbook they all must read—and I’d been trying those.
“The drugs, though. He opened up the whole medicine cabinet: antianxiety, antipsychotics, anti-everything. Nothing was too horrible, but the worst combination made me sleep sixteen hours a day and then wake up with a dry mouth and a queasy stomach. But the noises didn’t go away.
“After one particularly rough night I went in to see him and he says, why don’t we try some environment that’s less stressful, where people could watch out for you? Like on Wild Kingdom, why don’t we tag you and bring you to a safer environment? And the next thing I know I’m in the psychiatric ward of the hospital, hanging out with schizophrenics. There was a guy there, Bertram—nice guy, maybe fifty, totally whacked. One minute we’re having a perfectly normal conversation, talking about Pakistan or the weather or something, and the next second his head would jerk up and he’d stare at the lights and 1 4
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say, ‘Did you feel that?’ ‘Feel what, Bertram?’ ‘They just scanned us.’
See, he believed there were these super-telepaths named slans . . .”
I was rambling.
Mom sat silently, her mouth pulled tight. She’d sat through the recitation, absorbing the facts like blows. Her face had hardened, and her gaze had shifted from my face. I didn’t know what I’d expected—
not tears, my mother was not a crier—but not this. Not anger.
“What is it?” I said.
Headlights slid across the front window. Lew and Amra’s Audi coasted into the driveway, bass pumping. The stereo cut off. Mom stood up quickly, walked past without looking at me. “I’m going to make coffee,” she said. “It has to be decaf, I can’t drink caffeinated at night.”
Amra followed me down the dimly lit stairs, one hand on my shoulder. Sometime during the run to Jewel, she and Lew had decided to stay the night instead of driving back to their house in Gurnee, about an hour away. Dinner had become a slumber party, and slumber parties required board games. Amra was trying very hard to treat me the same as she did before she knew I’d escaped the loony bin. At the last step, I reached out and found the lightbulb chain. “The vault,” I announced.
The basement was a maze of shelves, and the shelves were stacked with the treasure of our childhood—Lew’s childhood and mine. Mom saved everything, not only every GI Joe and Matchbox car, but every Hot Wheels track, Tinkertoy, and puzzle piece. Anything that didn’t stack neatly was sealed in clear plastic tubs. Farther into the dark were our baby clothes and old toys, Dad’s army uniforms and paraphernalia, Mom’s wedding dress, boxes of letters and books and tax returns, and odds and ends with irregular silhouettes: elementary school art projects, bicycle parts, an arbor of golf clubs and fishing poles. I was itching to explore farther, but not with Amra.
“The games are over here,” I said.
I led her past the comic collection—eight long white cardboard boxes and one small brown box labeled in Magic Marker block letters:
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“DeLew Comics.” The small box was more than big enough to hold the complete output of our short-lived company. The winter I was in sixth grade and Lew was in eighth, we’d tried to sell our self-made comics for a quarter apiece to our friends. Our biggest seller, RADAR
Man, made us maybe a dollar fifty.
“I never come down here,” she said. “I can’t believe your mother still has all this stuff.”
“The Cyclops sees all, saves all.”
She frowned at me—she hated that Lew and I called her that—
and then spied a box on the game shelf. “Mousetrap! I used to have this!”
We pulled games from the shelf, comparing personal histories. I couldn’t believe she’d never done battle with Rock’em Sock’em Robots, and we set it aside to bring upstairs. The games, I knew, were complete, down to every card and counter, even the gazillion red and white Battleship pegs.
“Here’s the masterpiece,” I said, and unfolded a massive, asymmetrical playing board taped together at
odd angles. The tape was yellow and cracking. “Life and Death.”
“What did you do?” she said.
“It’s a game we made up, Lew and me. We cut up boards from Monopoly, Risk, and Life and—”
“Your mother must have killed you!”
I grinned. “Yeah.” I sat down and pulled out Ziploc bags full of plastic pieces and dice. On the bottom was a sheaf of handwritten pages illustrated by pencil sketches of my preteen obsessions: soldiers, trains, and superheroes. The Official Rules.
Amra was oohing and ahing over her finds. “Ker-Plunk, Stay Alive, Don’t Break the Ice—unbelievable.” I flipped through the faded pages, trying to remember how to play.
“Bang.”
I looked up, and Amra was aiming the slingshot at me, the rubber tube pulled back. There was nothing in the pocket, but she looked at my face and lowered the weapon. “What?” she said quietly. I stood up, too quickly, and my pulse thumped in my temple. “Just 1 6
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put it back.” My throat was constricted, and my voice came out strange. “That shouldn’t—I didn’t know that was down here.”
I took it from her. The homemade weapon was small in my hands, just a Y of tree limb, a strip of black rubber, a patch of leather for the pocket.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, yeah.” I tossed the slingshot back into the open box she’d found. I took her hands, dry and smooth and cold. “You just have to promise me one thing.”
“What?”
“You’ve got to let me win in Rock’em Sock’em Robots. I’ve got a frail ego.”
I lay on top of the covers in my sweats and T-shirt, staring at the nighttime shapes surrounding my bed, waiting for the house to quiet. Mom had made my room into a sewing room, and the walls were lined with Rubbermaid boxes and stacks of fabric. Bolts of cloth leaned in the corners. When I was a kid, the walls were covered by my drawings, my homegrown superheroes and supervillains. In bed I’d stare up at RADAR Man and Dr. Awkward and Mister Twister, imagining them in motion, even when—especially when—the lines were too faint to make out. The pictures were better in the dark. In the hospital my walls had been perfectly plain, though some of the long-term people had taped up posters (but no framed pictures: glass, nails, and framing wire were all big no-nos). I’d had no trouble falling asleep, though. At 9:30 every night they gave me two big yellow pills, and by ten I was unconscious. The nurses locked me in anyway: my shrink had told them about my sleepwalking problem, or as I liked to call it, wolfing out.
Every night since leaving the hospital I’d held a strategy session with myself. Did I need one pill tonight, or two? When should I take them? The last six capsules of Nembutal were in my duffel bag at the foot of the bed, and I didn’t have a prescription for a refill. I was on war rations.
I hadn’t taken anything tonight. I didn’t want to fall asleep yet, and
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if I waited I might get lucky. The noises, usually most persistent after dark, were quiet for the first night in weeks. Maybe coming home had given me some control.
Around midnight, Lew finally clicked off the living room TV and clumped to bed. Mom and Amra had gone to bed hours ago. I waited a half hour more, breathing. The thing in my head kept still. I sat up slowly, afraid to wake it.
I opened the door and stood for a long moment peering into the dark, listening. Then I walked down the hallway with short steps, trailing fingers along the wall until I’d passed the bathroom and found the corner at the end of the hall. I turned in to the living room. Moved past the couch and around the end tables and footstools, navigating by the moonlight silvering the edges of the furniture. In the kitchen, the vent light above the stove had been left on like a nightlight. I unhooked the basement door, stepped down, and shut the door behind me. The stairs creaked as I went down.
I walked through the vault, the cold cement stinging my bare feet. I went past the comics and the board games, past the box where Amra had found the slingshot, and turned farther into the maze, down a narrow path between the wood veneer cabinet stereo and the orange crates full of phonograph albums.
Two green dry-cleaning bags hung from a black pipe: my father’s uniforms. The workbench was just behind them, against the far wall, near the water heater and sump pump. Tools hung from a peg board that had been screwed into the cinderblock. Only a few silhouettes were empty. The bench held the heavy red toolbox and stacks of Cool Whip containers full of screws and nails and orphaned hardware. A red Craftsman hammer lay on the bench like he’d left it minutes ago. The safe was on the floor, under the workbench. It was a small steel box, about twelve inches to a side, painted black. I squatted down, and pulled on the door’s little silver handle. It was locked, as I expected.
I leaned down on one forearm, and looked up at the underside of the workbench. It was too dark to see. I ran my fingers along the lip of the bench until they found the cuts in the wood. I smiled. I couldn’t 1 8
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read the numbers etched there, but I didn’t need to—Lew and I had memorized the combination long ago. Not that my father had made it difficult: 2-15-45 was my mother’s birthday.
I leaned sideways to let the light hit the dial. The safe didn’t open, and for a moment I wondered if Mom had changed the combination. I tried again, and this time it opened.
The inside of the safe seemed much smaller than the outside. A shelf divided the space into two small compartments. On top was a dark leather holster, flap closed, and a small box of ammunition. On the floor of the safe was the pistol swaddled in an oiled rag. I moved my hand under it, lifted it out like a baby, and unfolded the cloth with my free hand. A gleaming black .45 automatic, my dad’s service sidearm in Korea. I fit my hand around the stubbly grip and aimed at the white cylinder of the water heater, feeling the weight of the Colt tug at the end of my arm. Before Lew and I had cracked the safe we’d held only plastic toy guns. The heaviness of the metal had come as a shock.
On the other side of the basement, the door to upstairs creaked open. I quickly folded the rag back over the gun and set it in the safe.
“Del?” It was my mother.
“Down here,” I called. I was afraid to close the safe, sure that the metallic click would be immediately recognizable. I pushed the door to within an inch of closing. “Don’t worry, I’ll turn off the lights when I’m done.”
The stairs complained as she stepped down. I did the only thing I could think of: I coughed and pressed the door shut. When she turned the corner I was walking toward her, a short stack of vinyl LPs in my hands. “I hope I didn’t wake you up,” I said. “You know, you could sell these on the Internet.”
She was dressed in a housecoat and thick blue woolly socks. She glanced at the albums, then at my face. “You haven’t slept at all yet.”
I shrugged. “My circadian rhythms are all messed up. I don’t sleep much anyway.”
“I used to hear you walking around the house at all hours,” she
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said. She took the top album from me, a painted photo of Bing Crosby in a Christmas stocking cap, and turned it over in her hands.
“You could have told me,” she said.
“I know.”
“I would have come.”
“I know.” She would have. She’d pulled me back from the brink twice before, and she could have done it again. She would have flown down, cleaned my apartment, counted out my pills, rubbed my head through the night.
But I couldn’t tell her. I’d talked to her on the phone almost every week, and I’d never once said, Hey, I’ve lost my car and my job and my mind. And by the way, I’m calling you from the crazy house.
“It’s not . . .”
I almost said it aloud: It’s not just noises. I felt . . . vertiginous. Like my heels were rocking on the edge of a balcony rail. All I had to do was lean forward a few inches and let myself fall
. The thing’s inside my head, Mom, and it’s trying to get out.
“It’s not that I didn’t want to tell you,” I said. She picked up the hammer and hung it in its silhouette on the pegboard. “Well, you’re home now.” She touched my arm as she passed. “Don’t forget to put everything back when you’re done.”
2
When I was fourteen I became famous in my high school for leaving so much blood in the pool that they had to drain it. It was a fabulous head wound for such a stupid accident. I was at the side of the pool, trying to pull a canoe paddle out of another kid’s hands, when I stepped back and put my foot down on a foam kickboard. The deck was wet, the kickboard shot out from under me, and I went down. I smacked my head against the cement lip of the pool and fell into the water. I didn’t lose consciousness. I don’t remember being afraid. I floated facedown for what seemed like a long time, unable to push my head out of the water. The bottom of the pool turned black, but maybe that was blood loss or oxygen deprivation. Then a brilliant light as my classmates hauled me out. The gym teacher, I can’t remember his name, laid me out on the deck and pressed towels to my head until the paramedics came. The blow swelled the side of my head to the size of a softball and blurred my vision. But I wasn’t paralyzed, or even badly injured. They kept me in the hospital overnight just to make sure, but they said I’d be home in the morning.
It was that night in the hospital that the “noises” began. The first thing I felt was a thump, like someone in the other room had knocked
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the wall behind my head. I turned, and it happened again, and this time there was nothing behind my head but my own room. I called for the nurse, asked her if someone was in the room with me. She thought I was dreaming.
Then the intermittent thumps grew louder, more frequent, and changed in character so that now it was like a baseball bat slamming repeatedly into a tree trunk—with the sting and burn of each impact running straight into my head.
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