Forever, in Pieces
Page 11
This year, though, he hadn’t received either card or gift. His Valentine’s bag—replete with crude calligraphy, shiny tin-foil moons, and meticulously sketched stars—was utterly barren. Not one classmate had bothered to give him a valentine.
No surprise there.
Ben was becoming accustomed to his classmates’ alienation as lonely days stacked one upon another, building a monument to childhood solitude. But, while his bruised ego may have been hardened to Joe DeLucca’s repeated wedgies and Andrea Weatherly’s name-calling, the sting of his mystery admirer’s absence—even if only in the lack of a few obscurely meaningful words and a fleshy trinket—was fresh pain. He didn’t need or want love letters—or even “like” letters—from his peers; rather, he yearned after those tidbits of bizarre divinity signed “Forever.” This year, there simply wasn’t one.
A spitball squished against the nape of Ben’s neck. Some boys chuckled.
Ben ignored it all and forced his mind outside, onto a ice-encrusted breeze.
When the principal finally announced the early dismissal and everyone else streamed toward the buses waiting in front of the school, Ben sneaked away, toward the playground. If he was to be lonely, then he wanted to be alone. He could always call his parents and ask them to pick him up later.
Once outside, he clomped around in the snow and stared up into the senseless whorl of tiny crystalline flecks, each an individual soul in this storm, this chaotic, raging blindness that was life. He crumpled to the ground, knees sinking into snowdrifts already a foot deep. Tears flowed across the wind-scoured tundras of his cheeks. Somewhere nearby a vacant swing creaked on rusty chains, singing the serrated melody of isolation.
Ben wiped his eyes with a mittened hand and gazed out over the barren playground.
“Why?” he screamed between barely controlled sobs.
“Why didn’t you send me anything? What’s wrong with me? What did I do? What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with me?”
Bus engines growled in the distance.
Then silence.
Ben sat in the snow for what, to his nine-year-old mind, was hours. The storm continued to strike his face without answer. Eventually, his legs began to go numb.
He rubbed his running nose with the back of his sleeve and stood. There was no reason to stay out in the cold; it couldn’t provide any more solace than the warmth inside.
Plodding back to the school, head hung low, Ben didn’t expect to see a perfect circle—a cylinder, really—melted into one of the piling snowdrifts by the doors. Yet there it was, a strange little hole, at least a foot in diameter.
Ben stopped, confused, and walked toward it. No footprints led up to its lip or ran away from it. No animal tracks littered the drift.
Approaching cautiously for reasons he couldn’t have explained, Ben leaned over the cylindrical hollow, peered to its bottom, and gasped. There, resting on a thin sheen of ice within the hole, was a small black box and, underneath the box, a gleaming silver envelope. Despite the near blizzard-like conditions, snow refused to enter the tiny chasm; here was a place out of time and out of space. Ben reached in and picked up the box and envelope.
He removed his mittens and tore open the envelope. Sure enough, a sable card waited inside. Ghostly words on its face declared “You and I, Ben. You and I. I. You. Us. Us, Ben. Abandoned never. Forever.” Ben traced the writing with a finger. He read the card once more, then carefully slid it into the only zippered pocket of his jacket.
Next, the box.
Its design was similar to that of a ring box, with tiny hinges on one of the four sides. Ben flipped up its lid and let out a sound that echoed between the pillars of horror and awe. He didn’t drop the box, but came dangerously close.
There, nestled in a perfectly crafted divot within the innocuous cube, Forever stared at Ben; a single eyeball, glistening in translucent liquids and neatly severed from the optic nerve, met his gaze. Its iris was of an uncertain color—perhaps it could best be called gray, though gray was a term far too prosaic to capture the eye’s true hue. Flecks of something shining, something vaguely silvery and mirrored, resided in its depths. Ben couldn’t tear his vision away from this most recent of gifts. He didn’t want to reach out and stroke its moist surface; he just wanted to look at it and know that it was looking back at him.
Minutes evaporated. The wind howled in Ben’s ears. In the space between the eyes of the lover and the beloved, all was wondrous serenity.
Uncovered hand aching from subzero breeze, Ben decided to go back inside, find a teacher, and call home. Tonight, snug under the blankets of his bed, he would stare for as long as the moment held him. He snapped the lid shut and skipped into the school, focus never drifting far from the little black cube he held in his hand.
However, what Ben couldn’t see was that, once back inside the darkened space of the box, the eye’s abysmal pupil had expanded far beyond its bounds and swallowed every last fragment of starry, magical iris.
February 14th, 1994
No one had asked Ben to the Valentine’s Day dance. He’d hoped that his lab partner in geology, a slightly nerdy brunette named Emily Watts, might want to go with him. But someone else—a goateed guy in the grade above them, some sort of guitar player in an amateur grunge band—had taken her instead.
Even though she probably only talked to Ben in class out of necessity and in the hallways between classes out of pity, he liked Emily. He liked the way she made fun of the football team and laughed at the popular kids; he liked the way her hair fell over her right eye when she didn’t have it pulled back in a ponytail; he liked the way she smelled of fabric softener and sugar cookies; and he liked that she wore black bras and that, whenever she bent over to examine rock specimens, he could see the mystical place where they ended and her breasts began. He liked so much about her and more. But it was all pointless. She’d wanted to go with that older, cooler, band guy. Ben wasn’t even an afterthought.
Yet, filled with a dangerous mixture of unrealistic fantasy and fragile optimism, he came to the dance anyway. He dreamed that maybe Emily would see him there, realize her mistake in coming with the guitar dude, and rush into his arms. So far, it hadn’t happened.
From the instant Ben had stepped into the dimly lit gym, he’d squirmed and sweated, trying to find a place to stand that was both unobtrusive but open to invitations from potential dance partners—namely, Emily. Such a place didn’t exist, though, and Ben was forced to hover behind the refreshment table. From this vantage point, he watched couples dance; he watched as covert kisses were exchanged when chaperones’ faces were turned in adult conversation; he watched hands sliding over curves and into darkened spaces.
The fever of youth sweltered in the gymnasium while he remained frozen, watching.
About an hour after he’d taken up position behind the punch bowl and cookies, Emily and the goateed band guy strolled toward Ben.
Emily waved.
Ben waved back.
They came closer. Too close.
“Hey you,” she said.
“Hey,” Ben mumbled.
“I didn’t expect to see you here. I didn’t think this was really your thing.”
“Yeah,” Ben said, trying to force the quiver from his voice and the redness from his cheeks, “I just thought I should go to one of these for once.”
“Yeah. They can be pretty lame. But Anthony wanted to do something with me and I wanted to do something, too. So here we are. You’ve met Anthony, right?”
She giggled and wrapped an arm around the band guy’s—or, more accurately, “Anthony’s”—waist.
“Yeah,” Ben whispered.
“It’s not so bad, really,” Emily said, pointing back at the dance floor.
“Yeah, I guess. For some people.”
Emily nodded slowly.
Ben swallowed hard.
Uncomfortable silence slid between them.
A breathy love song from the 80s began playing.
Anthon
y pulled Emily closer.
“You wanna get outta here? Go somewhere else?” he asked, never so much as glancing at Ben.
Emily nodded, beaming.
“See ya later, Benny,” she said, turning on her heel and practically skipping across the dance floor, toward the exit.
The two melted into the swirl of shifting bodies.
And that was the end. There was nothing more to do, nothing to say. Emily had made her choice. Tonight she’d make out with the guitar dude, squeeze her hand into his pants and awkwardly tug at what she found inside. By next week, there would probably be more details, more steps. Ben didn’t want to imagine any of it—the laughter, the slicked skin, the not-quite words, the lapping motions—but he was forced to.
He opened his eyes wide, as wide as he possibly could, and let visions of the dance rush in. Flowing dresses, shiny ties, shuffling feet, and the spiraling nebulae of disco ball reflections—these were at the blurry center of Ben’s concentration. If he could fill his mind with enough random imagery, enough non-sequitur thoughts, then perhaps the hellish vacancy that drew tortures inside his head would be crowded out.
He needed to leave. He needed to go home and watch TV or play Super Mario World. Mindless distraction was a whore who would always take him into her outstretched arms.
Ben shrugged himself to action. He walked out of the gym, turned down a hallway, and found one of the school’s two payphones. He called his parents and asked them to pick him up. They didn’t ask why. He hung up and stood in the empty hall, hand on the receiver. Muffled, dying beats pulsed in the air. Whether they originated in the chambers of his heart or the cavern of the gymnasium, he couldn’t be sure.
All day, Ben had been focused on only one thing: Emily. He dreamed about their night together, their first dance, and the way she’d feel pressed against his chest. He’d barely even given thought to the fact that, when he’d left his house earlier in the evening, his yearly Valentine hadn’t arrived yet. Now, he regretted his decision to stray from the lonely companionship Forever’s promise offered.
Ben wandered away from the phone, shuffling through the shadows of an unlit passage that led to the library. It would take his parents at least fifteen or twenty minutes to drive to the school; in the meantime, he could simply merge with darkness.
As he made his way along the hall he rapped his knuckles against the row of lockers that stood to one side of the narrow corridor. He held some vague apprehension that someone might knock back from the other side.
No one did.
He continued on.
With his gaze fastened to the floor, Ben turned a few corners and found himself standing before the entrance to the library. Oddly, one of the doors was ajar and a light—apparently near the end of its glaring, fluorescent life—was spastically flickering somewhere deeper inside.
Ben was drawn toward its incomprehensible pattern.
He crept into the library foyer, straining for silence in his footfalls. The harsh light blinked out its schizophrenic S.O.S. from a private study room to his left. Though his hands began to sweat and his knees felt wobbly, he kept inching closer to the light, pulled forward as if on ethereal strings. Before he consciously realized that he had reached his destination, Ben found himself standing in front of the study room’s door, pressing his face to its tiny rectangular window. Inside, he saw the package and the envelope, neatly arranged on a table.
He opened the door as one might open the door to an execution chamber or a cathedral—reverently, carefully, making sure not to be too eager for fear something with the power to crush bodies and souls might be offended or, worse yet, might flee into the sky and be eternally unknown. Stepping into the small study room, Ben smelled an aroma he couldn’t place—a potent mixture of citrus and sulfur, perhaps. As it dissipated into the learned hollows of the library, his interest in the odor’s unusual composition waned and he focused on his tangible gifts.
First, the letter.
He grabbed it from off the table, carefully slid his finger under the flap, and tore an opening across the top. Pulling the card from within, he saw more dream-scribbled words than ever before. The card read: “Ben. You hurt. You will always hurt and be hurt. By them. By them all. But I am with you. I need you. Without reserve. Without hesitation. Hold me. Caress me. You are mine. I am yours. We. We. We. Forever.”
Ben’s hand shook. His stomach churned, not unpleasantly. He wanted to climb between the lines on the card and snuggle there, never to return to the world of dances and Emilys and abrupt, awkward goodbyes. He’d made a terrible mistake in taking for granted that Forever would still be waiting for him, regardless of whether a relationship with Emily worked out or not.
After a series of deep breaths, he scooped up the package—a small, rectangular box that in a more conventional universe might have held a necklace or bracelet—and removed its lid. Hidden away inside, lying on a bed of black velvet, was a pair of plump, rosy lips.
Ben brought them close to his face. They were perfect. Each one turned up at its edges ever so slightly, drawing what may have once been an arc of pleasure or sin. A delicious sheen of gloss covered their surface and reflected the flickering light. Ben knew what was about to happen; waves crashed and ebbed within his abdomen. His hands, as if not his own, pushed the box toward his waiting mouth.
Lips touched lips. Somewhere far beyond the reaches of satellites and telescopes, a segment of space and time cracked and fell away. This was Ben’s first kiss, his only kiss. A kiss from Forever.
For a moment, only a moment, Ben wondered if Emily’s lips tasted as deliciously tart, as full of possibility and passion as those in the box. He wondered if any girl could be as amazing as the girl he was already with, the girl he wasn’t with at all.
For a moment, he considered the strangeness of his love, then he kissed the warm, welcoming lips again.
February 14th, 1998
By the time he was a senior in high school, Ben was beginning to suspect that the grotesque Valentines were a practical joke perpetrated by someone he’d known for years. He was sure that the various body parts, while convincingly well-made, were latex or some other synthetic material. After all, in twelve years none of them had shriveled or rotted away. Though he was by no means an expert on the subject of death and decay, he understood enough about biological processes to realize that, unless these human remains had been expertly embalmed, there was no logical way that they could have remained in the same soft, smooth state for so long. Their longevity supported his malignant suspicions. The fact that they were perpetually warm was more problematic.
Ben had reasoned that the parts must have been composed of some sort of exothermic material, a strange polymer used for space vehicles or something. He had no solid idea on that front, only inexact theories that seemed to fill the holes in reality.
The envelopes and the packages had continued to arrive like clockwork, every year another piece, every year another remarkable fabrication. Ben had no clue as to who would be willing to put so much time, money, and effort into screwing with him, though. He couldn’t fathom anyone caring enough about him to invest their energies in the Valentines—a potential strike against his theory.
Of course, regardless of whether the parts were real or not, he still wasn’t willing to throw them in the trash; there was, in some intangible yet crucial way, a disingenuous sparkle in the rationalization of their origins, as if a brilliant light had burst into existence only to reveal the vastness of a much richer darkness.
Today, Ben was skipping school because he wanted to capture the truth that he believed existed. He wanted to witness the moment of Valentine delivery—the conception of what, for so many years, he had felt was a miracle. He was sure that if he simply sequestered himself inside his room and set up a video cameras at the front and back doors of the house, he could capture evidence of the trickery or, at very least, learn the hidden identity of the gift giver. Today would be the day he uncloaked mystery.
Lying on his bed, waiting for he knew not what, Ben cranked up the volume on one of his Nine Inch Nails CDs and stared at the ceiling. A spiked weight seemed to press up from behind his back, arching along his spine. It was the gifts. They needed contact.
He hadn’t kissed the lips in months, and he hadn’t touched any of the other parts in even longer; they remained imprisoned in a dusty fire-safe under a loose board beneath his bed. His hands ached to free them, to knead them, to either possess them or be possessed by them. Beads of sweat began to form on his forehead. He wouldn’t reach down and pry up the board. He wouldn’t. He had fought these urges before and he’d fight them this time as well. His heart raced; all motion ceased. The whole of the universe was here, in his room, in the struggle to deny desire. He had to hold out for one more day.
Only one more day.
By tomorrow, he’d know whether he should lay his offerings on reason’s alter or kneel to the throb and pulse rebounding along every fibrous pathway in his body.
Ben swung himself out of bed and wandered away from his room. His parents were at work. Even though he had the house to himself, he felt as if a thousand eyes were trained on his every twitch.
“I’m going to find you today!” he shouted.
“I’m going to make you show me your face! I need to see your face!”
He didn’t expect a reply and he didn’t receive one.
Outside, a car alarm was chirping like the spawn of hellbound sparrows and mechanical bees.
Ben walked to the living room, turned on the television, and hit the mute button. So far, everything was normal.
Two hours later, he was still seated in front of the TV, half asleep. A rerun of Seinfeld babbled silently in the background. He hadn’t heard a single creak of a board from the patio out back or any shuffle of feet on the brick pathway to the front door. Two hours for nothing. His parents wouldn’t be home until well after eight o’clock, though, so there was still plenty of time left to keep vigil.