This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2016
A Kindle Scout selection
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For Jim: This book, the child we never raised together
Contents
Chapter I
BREAD CRUMBS
Chapter II
BENEATH THEIR SHOULDERS
Chapter III
CONVERSION THERAPY
Chapter IV
THE MANIKIN’S REVENGE
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Chapter I
What are your parents like?
Such a difficult question to answer. Family relationships are complicated. It’s almost impossible to get another person to understand.
And how long does it take before you can trust others? How long before you trust them enough to reveal the whole truth?
BREAD CRUMBS
An Odd Adventure with Your Other Father
“Celia, when you were a young girl and woke from a nightmare, calling for father, it never bothered me that you meant Jack. He was more generous with his emotions. He could comfort you with a hug and a few hushed words; a quick joke and he’d have you smiling, the nightmare forgotten.
“I’m sad that we lost him when you were only four years old. You never really got a chance to know him.
“Which is why I want to tell you stories about your other father. To bring him back to you, in some small way.
“You asked me to start at the beginning, tell about how we met and fell in love at college. I’m actually going to rush through that part, if you don’t mind.
“The better beginning is to tell when I first learned about Jack’s special gift . . . and how it first became useful during our travels together:”
#
May of 1985, our graduation ceremony was hours behind us, and we rode Jack’s punch-red VW Beetle across the wide span of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. Jack was driving, stubborn since it was his car, but he should have surrendered the wheel to me. He hated bridges in general, but the Bay Bridge was its own kind of beast: three lanes wide on the westbound span and 4.3 miles from end to end.
Jack was tall, so he had to lean close so his head didn’t hit the roof of the small car. His hands gripped the wheel like he was ready to pull it from the dashboard. He was like somebody’s nervous grandmother, sitting atop two phonebooks—which was funny, since he zipped that Bug like a racecar through the small-town streets of Kent County, Maryland. The problem was the water that stretched around us for miles on either side, a calm light blue with sun glimmers on tiny peaks. Jack had never learned how to swim.
Two miles in, and I worried maybe he was going to pass out. I touched the top of his knee with a supportive squeeze, and his leg jolted against the accelerator in nervous response.
Okay. Maybe touching him wasn’t such a good idea.
And all the while I’m thinking What’s the worst that could happen? It’s not like Jack’s tiny car could crash like a battering ram through the side wall, sending us on a deadly plummet toward the Bay.
June air rushed through the car’s open windows, like a blast from a hand dryer. Our lane had a metal lattice section down the middle, making the tires hum whenever Jack drifted off center.
“It’s pretty solid construction. Concrete and steel cable.”
“Thanks,” Jack said through clenched teeth. Guess I forgot that logic couldn’t usually compete with somebody’s phobia.
Then one of the steel suspension cables snapped. A dozen or so car lengths ahead, the bridge cracked down the middle as if a giant zipper-tab dragged open the section of metal lattice in our lane.
Gusts of air through the car window, tires on asphalt, the toy-car putter of the VW engine, and my scream.
More cables snapped. Ahead, cars in our lane dipped into the opening—a widening split-span of asphalt and steel and concrete, the flicker of water shining beneath, sun flecks now sharp as broken glass. The sides of the bridge buckled, and cars in the outside lanes began to tumble and slide toward the gaping crevice.
What do you say to someone when you’re both about to die? I shouted Jack’s name, said “love,” then spread one arm across his chest while the other hand gripped the shoulder strap of my seatbelt.
I might have uttered the word “brake” also, in the vain hope that slowing the car would give us a chance.
Jack kept driving at his steady pace. The car’s hood flew up, blocking the view through the windshield. I closed my eyes, fighting the sick-stomach sensation of falling, falling.
Falling.
“Jesus, Shawn. I’m having enough trouble on this damn bridge without you spazzing out.”
Jack’s hands granny-gripped the steering wheel. The hood was fine. The road ahead was smooth. I turned in my seat: through the rear windshield, the intact bridge stretched back as far as I could see, cars calm in their respective lanes.
I must have fallen asleep, had a nightmare . . .
“Pretty solid construction. All concrete and steel.” Jack’s imitation of my voice wasn’t very good, but the sarcasm was pretty effective.
I was trembling. My heartbeat raced, and my breaths started to wheeze.
And since my asthma never seemed serious enough to merit an inhaler, there was nothing to do but wait it out.
Jack attempted humor, to distract me from my tight, desperate gasps. “What was in the punch at the graduation picnic? Glad I didn’t drink any.” The comment actually made things worse. I was drugged, having a bad trip. That meant more awful images were on their way.
Don’t think of anything bad, I told myself.
Bright colors. Flowers. Kittens and rainbows.
Don’t think of a rock smashing through the windshield. Don’t think of a bolt of lightning flashing toward us. Don’t think about a nest of spiders in the seat well, an egg sack bursting open as newborns pour out, the tickle of a thousand tiny legs that crawl beneath the cuff of my pants.
Yeah, none of that happened. No more hallucinations.
My wheezing stopped the same time we approached the toll plaza. After Jack gave his buck twenty-five to the attendant, I made him pull the car over and turn off the engine.
We got out of the car and stretched our legs. I traced my foot in the dirt beside the road, happy to find solid ground beneath me. I leaned against Jack’s VW—the tiny car so frail my weight could almost tip it over, the same car I had imagined dropping through the middle of the cracked bridge into suffocating water.
“What happened back there?”
“I couldn’t explain while you were still driving.” Then I told him about my strange and vivid hallucination—a kind of waking dream, since I knew I hadn’t fallen asleep. I described the images in detail. “Once it was over, I didn’t want to say anything. You already have that phobia, and I didn’t want to make it worse.”
“Wouldn’t have made it any worse,” Jack said. “That’s what I already imagine. That’s the kind of thing that always goes through my
head when I drive over a bridge.”
He turned to the front of the car, lay a palm against the curved hood. “Did the hood flip up and block the windshield? The way this ol’ car rattles on the road, sometimes I’m afraid that’s gonna happen.”
“Yeah. At the last part of that mirage or whatever. Yeah.”
(Okay, Celia, here’s where you get a quick summary of the year Jack and I met. We went to Chesapeake University, a small liberal arts college on the eastern shore of Maryland. Only about eight hundred students total, so you pretty much knew everybody. Even though we had different majors—Jack in Journalism, me in English with a minor in Film Studies—we still ended up in a few of the same classes. Senior year, first trimester, we took Dr. Reid’s seminar, “Classics of the Silent Era.” Jack took it as a Pass/Fail elective, but I swear he knew some of the films better than Reid—Lon Chaney films, especially, and Lang’s Metropolis. We talked about movies outside of class and became good friends. More than friends.
I wasn’t expecting that last part. I mean, I knew I was gay, but I was scared of it. The world wasn’t as accepting then as it is today—and it’s still not perfect, of course. College can be a confusing time—you’re still finding yourself, choosing your major, imagining a job, wondering what kind of life you’ll fall into after graduation. By senior year, you have a solid small group of friends, and they know you really well. They have expectations about the way you’ll behave, and I’d slipped into the role of the regular guy. Stable and smart, hard-working when I needed to be—which was usually the night before a paper or project was due. Like I’d done my whole life, I let everybody assume I was straight. Guess you could say Jack was as straight as I was. He was the journalism guy, editor of the school newspaper, and he wrote half of each edition, as well. Easy-going. The kind of guy you’d have a drink with and let your guard down—which was a great strategy for getting good quotes from an interview subject.
I’m not sure which of us made the first move. It’s like we gave each other permission, and things just happened from there.
Well, young people fall in love all the time, don’t they? I wouldn’t say that part of our story is terribly unique.
We had different groups of friends, for the most part, but that senior year, we withdrew into our own world. Except, we didn’t tell anybody about our relationship—so we couldn’t be together all the time. It was a year of secrecy. I’d sit next to my friends Bill and Denise in the dining hall, nod at Jack as he walked past with an empty tray, and suddenly I’d need to ditch them to “study at the library,” or to “meet Professor Keyes about my Senior Project.”
Jack and I lived on different floors of the same dormitory. Most nights, I’d sneak into the stairwell and down two flights to be with him in his room. Spent every minute with him that I could during the school days, and on weekends we drove over the Bay Bridge, Jack at the wheel pretending not to be nervous, then we headed toward Washington, DC, and the city’s wealth of shops and eateries and museums and movie theaters. We also visited some Dupont Circle bars where, for a brief interlude, we didn’t feel any need to hide who we were. Never ran into anybody from school in those bars. Not sure how I’d have reacted if we had.
In retrospect, I think our secret should have been pretty obvious. But when we told a few of our closest friends during the week before graduation, they all acted surprised. Bill and Denise took the news really well, and I was sorry I hadn’t told them sooner.
Here’s the thing. I don’t know how we fell into that secrecy. I guess, as closeted gays, we were accustomed to hiding; then, as our relationship continued and deepened, it seemed liked we’d passed the “good time” to tell people—whenever that was. Secrecy was a bad idea. It treated our relationship like it was some kind of criminal plot, something to be ashamed of. It put a layer of dishonesty between us and our other friends.
But it had some benefits. Sure, it was a nuisance having to sneak around all the time, but it was fun, too. Intense. I was more shy and introverted than Jack, and I think he would have broken the story sooner if he hadn’t liked all the drama. Our time together was stolen. Senior year was pretty exciting.
It had been about seven months, but by graduation it was as if we’d known each other seven years. We had private jokes about teachers and fellow students, long conversations about movies and books. Big philosophical questions: nature vs. nurture; benign God vs. a cruel, random universe; Coke vs. Pepsi.
There’s some couples where one person can practically finish the other’s sentences. That would get boring, don’t you think? But your other father and I had something like that. You could say that in addition to academics, my senior year I majored in Jack. I knew the way his mind worked.
Which is a bit of a roundabout way to explain why, as he asked me about the hood of the Beetle flipping up, I got suspicious.
He looked guilty.
When we crossed the Bay Bridge, I’d seen what scared him.
“You did this to me, didn’t you?”)
#
My accusation must have sounded angrier than I intended. Jack stammered and protested, which made him look even more guilty.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think so. I mean, of course not.”
His eyes fluttered away from my face, then back. He repeated the pattern—like each time he glanced away, he expected my anger to be gone when he looked again.
“Tell me,” I said.
“There’s nothing to tell. Except . . . ”
My anger relaxed slightly, and he continued: “You got on my nerves a bit, okay, saying how the bridge was safe. Like I didn’t have a right to be nervous driving across, you know, miles and miles of water. I thought: He wouldn’t act so superior if he saw things the way I see them.”
That was it? A wish? Enough to explain Jack’s guilty demeanor, but the actual phenomenon was still unclear.
Among our other philosophical debates, Jack and I had an ongoing conversation about whether or not ghosts actually existed. On this matter, we actually came to a kind of consensus: in our working hypothesis, ghosts depended on the unconscious power of a frightened observer. So, no “real” ghosts, but allowing the possibility for things like telekinesis or mind-reading—in unusual, heightened circumstances. It was a trade-off. The world wasn’t supernatural, but the human mind could be.
“When you described the bridge opening up like that,” Jack said, “it wasn’t just similar to what I saw in my head. It was exactly what I saw. A zipper, like you said. The Bay waters shining beneath a crumbling gap in the road. It’s like I sent you those exact images.”
Visual. I realized that my hallucination was entirely visual, with no accompanying sound other than my shouts and the wind and the car across the road. I didn’t hear the whip of snapped cables, the twist of metal or rumble of shattered concrete.
I’d experienced a sensation of falling, but that could have been psychosomatic.
“I’m so sorry, Shawn. I really hadn’t tried to scare you or anything. It was just a thought I had.”
I accepted his apology. At the same time, I sought a more rational explanation. He’d previously mentioned his phobia to me, and maybe some of those visual details had come out in those conversations. I’d half-forgotten the earlier descriptions, but as we rode across the bridge, the memories flashed up with fresh brilliance, like a movie projected onto a screen.
“Wait a sec.” Jack closed his eyes to concentrate, opened them again. “How many fingers am I holding up?”
At the end of his wrist, his hand was scaled like a fish, thick green webbing between his fingers.
Six fingers and a thumb.
#
My expression told Jack what he wanted to know. His smile spread into a wide grin. I asked if he could see it, too.
“Hell no. I’m not crazy. How many fingers, Shawn? You have to tell me how many, or it’s not a valid experiment.” He wiggled the fingers, red claws at the tips. The webbing rippled.
“Six,” I
said.
“And what movie?”
As if to make the solution more obvious, two of the transformed fingers disappeared. The green scales faded to the shaded gray of a black-and-white film.
My father’s favorite monster movie. “Creature from the Black Lagoon, okay? Now put that thing away. Turn it off or whatever.”
“One more test.” He extended his arm, requesting a handshake. The hand was gray and shiny and wet. It reached out of the movie’s lagoon, anxious to grab a swimmer’s ankle.
“I’m not touching that.”
“Come on. You gotta.” He held out his hand, impatient.
Maybe I could prod it with one finger. I reached forward, hesitant.
And the Creature’s hand shot forward. Awful scaled fingers closed around my wrist.
Even as my eyes continued to trick me, as water squeezed from those webbed fingers and dripped along my forearm, I recognized Jack’s touch.
Claws scraped across the inside of my wrist. I felt the soft caress of Jack’s fingertips.
#
He did a few more tricks, testing the muscles of his new-found gift. He made an old man’s face appear in a roadside boulder. Do you see it, Shawn? Tell me what you see! He studied the car, then popped an illusory flat tire into the Beetle’s front passenger wheel.
That’s when I made my First Rule: Don’t mess with the car. I was still shaky from that Bay Bridge experience. “I need to feel safe while we’re driving, Jack, so no more jokes with the tires. And especially no tricks while the car’s moving. I need to believe in what I see through the windshield.”
Jack nodded in agreement, but he was still giddy about his new abilities, so I wasn’t sure he listened to me. His wavy hair stretched into bangs, a fresh beard overtaking his chin then spreading over his entire face. “Describe what you see now, Shawn.” As he spoke, his lips snarled beneath a wolf’s snout; fangs rose from his jutted lower jaw.
I rolled my eyes. “Give it a rest, would you?” Secretly, I had to admit it was a better werewolf transformation than I’d seen on film.
Odd Adventures with your Other Father Page 1
