Editor’s Note: Freeline Media welcomes original works by authors around the globe. Here, we present the macabre short story “An Old Friend” by author Joseph Aisenberg.
AN OLD FRIEND
What a surprise, what a shock, what a creamy delight.
Stephen had not seen Alex in ages. Now, at Glenda’s party, through the dimness of a crowded, lamp-lit living-room, Alex’s face had just seemed to appear. Fat and pale, his smooth round cheeks were precisely flushed. The little black holes which were his eyes stared beneath two blank spots where eyebrows ought to have been. They had been singed off during a flame-eating experiment recently, as he was soon to explain. His curly, syrup-colored hair had the thick heavy discreteness of a wig; and he’d clothed his tubby bulk in a green shirt and khaki slacks. Taken all together, Alex looked remarkably lifelike.
Glenda’s party opened around them, like peacock feathers. Clutching beers, Stephen and Alex lumbered forward past a man laughing in a doorway. He did not seem to notice the large white dog violently gnawing his hand. Blood dripped to the varnished floor beside him. It got smudged and snatched up by passing feet, including Alex’s and Stephen’s.
A segment of hallway stretched like accordion’s bellows and dumped them into a room illuminated with brooding black lights. Along the walls hung two alternating sets of radiant posters — one featured an angry herd of muscular charging horses, the other an ominously facaded house set against a nighttime landscape. Between these images, through purplish gloom, the luminescent teeth of party-goers floated past. Eyes appeared glassy. White flecks glowed from shirt-fronts.
Next moment Alex opened a short red door. A kind of closet, the cramped area inside was lit by a single bulb hanging from a cord, which trembled atmospherically every time feet clomped up and down the crimped piney pattern above. It was obviously the underside of a narrow staircase. They squatted on two red, plastic chairs sized for school children, and talked and drank and tapped cigarettes into a mayonnaise jar on the floor. Every so often either Stephen or Alex would have to struggle from their chair, to open the door and aerate things.
Easier for Stephen, because he was much thinner than Alex, though Stephen’s legs — submerged in a pair of baggy green slacks — were long and lanky. His knees butted his chest every time he drew them up to cross or re-cross his legs. Also, his right elbow kept knocking the bare drywall every time he took a drag from his cigarette. Alex permitted himself a snicker at this despite the fact his own massivity nearly engulfed the chair straining to support it, and which occasionally let out an annoyed creak.
Not as I remember you
“Still the same old Stephen,” Alex said for the fourth or fifth time.
“Am I?” Stephen asked. “I don’t feel the same. Frankly I don’t feel much of anything. Whenever I try to think how I am all I ever come up with is … whatever.” He shrugged. “You’re not how I remember you at all, more intense somehow. Are those freckles drawn on your face?”
He squinted at Alex through the hanging bulb’s narrow shock of light.
“Part of the act,” Alex replied and discussed his recent activities. “The old dog’s been learning a few new tricks, as they say. Figured I’d start myself a second career as a stage freak, you know, kind of a magician specializing in the truly disgusting. The Amazing Al Guts, I call myself. Unfortunately I had a bad accident. Burnt myself. Be touching up my face a while thank you very much.” Cheerfully he showed off his waxy countenance, explaining how odd it was to smell one’s own skin burn.
“Anyway,” he continued, “I’m glad we found this little nook to talk. Did you ever marry?”
“Christ no. You?”
Alex chortled from one side of his mouth while simultaneously taking a debonair puff on his cigarette with the other. Streams of yellow smoke shot from his nostrils. “Oh a whole bunch,” he said clamping the cigarette between his lips and holding both hands before him, as if in measurement. “Three, four times, I’d say. You forget exact numbers after awhile. It was was all sooo long ago. I guess that’s the kind of kooky crazy thing you’d expect of me though. Sort of my style. Anyway, I was richer’n crap, but by the time all those greedy bitches got done carving up my corpse the only thing left was what you have seated before you — little … poverty … stricken … me.”
He sucked sagely on his cigarette. “These days my life is fairly simple. I got no job, eat plenty of junk food; live in a dirty one room closet of an apartment. You know, seeing and talking to you now, I wonder why in hell we ever stopped speaking all those years ago — just one of those things I s’pose, which is what my first wife used to say before I went and married the hell out of her. What about you though? Got a hot shot job? Swank bachelor pad?”
“Nope,” Stephen said and said nothing more.
Turning Repulsive
In the past Alex’s bright, rambling manner had seemed funny to Stephen, but now it repulsed him, like a slimy slug. It was the reason Stephen had begun avoiding him back in the day, though he did not say this. Instead he continued, “I never had special ambitions one way or the other really. Life’s passions, you know, are just so many passing fancies, as Marcus Aurelius said. Or was that Old King Cole?”
Stephen felt how false and glib his weariness sounded under the hanging bulb, but didn’t care.
“Eventually everything rots away to unrecognizable junk, don’t you think?” He really did sound fatuous. It was depressing. Good thing I’m drinking, he thought as he took another swig from the amber bottle in his free hand. Strange how alcohol had the magic ability to reveal the weather conditions of one’s soul. Were one deprived of this useful tool one might wander around years utterly oblivious of the internal tempests rendering the world asunder. How terrible, he thought.
I don’t even know what “asunder” actually means.
“Aint it the truth,” Alex said, slurping from a bottle he’d discovered on the floor next to his leg. No sooner had he done so than he spat it back out. “Christ!” He gagged. “Somebody ashed in it!”
Attempting to rub the taste off tongue and lips, he laughed. “Actually, I think I ashed in it. Or my other self did.”
“I know what you mean,” Stephen said with a surprised smile. “It’s like you’re about to open a door somewhere and catch yourself doing something behind your own back. And not just you either. Anything, everything: bed, dining room chairs. Lately I have the feeling somebody’s been rearranging the medicine cabinet only nothing ever seems different. It’s like the whole world was picked up and set down a little off-kilter, which I guess makes me another of civilization’s discontents — forgive the Freud. Must have the blues or something. How do you know Glenda?”
“Friend of a friend. You’re probably suffering Clinical Depression. You were always sensitive and existential. Ought to take a pill for it. The depression, I mean. Not much to be done about existence.”
“I hear suicide’s painless,” Stephen said raising his beer to Alex and finishing it off. Afterward, with a burpy grunt he doubled himself over his knees and placed the empty on the ground beside his black booted foot.
“That’s hilarious!” Alex brayed laughter as Stephen sat back up.
“I’m so glad we ran into each other. By the way, I fully intend on collecting the two dollars I loaned you for a pack of smokes that rainy night. Or am I the one who owes you? Incidentally how’s your mother? Last I recall you two were living unhappily ever after. You’re not still with her are you?” The way he asked, the way he licked his red lips when he asked, Stephen saw how much the idea amused him.
“Well … yeah, but it’s not … I mean she needs me right now.”
Alex slapped his thigh. “Of course, of course she does! A boy’s best friend is his mother. Who said that? I guess I said that.”
A Blonde Intrudes
The red door opened; a thin blonde entered. Her large shocked eyes were thickly lined. She wore a huge formless dress printed with yellow-orange flowers, the kind of thing an old lady might wear.
“I, uh, don’t mean to interrupt but like, I was sort of wondering had either of you seen my purse. You’re Jerry,” she declared to Alex. “Sean told me if I saw you, to tell you he was leaving and, like, he couldn’t give you a ride. And you’re not allowed to stay at his place anymore ‘cause according to him ever since you came out of the woodwork he hasn’t had a moment’s peace.”
“My name is Alex.”
“Are you sure?” She gasped, sounding almost outraged. She was clearly drunk. “How bizarre … I mean this is just so embarrassing. I mean, can you imagine?” She laughed at Stephen. “My name’s Anna. So you haven’t seen my purse? Hey, have either you got a smoke? You know this party is sooooo lame, worse than Tina’s last week; my feet are killing me after being on them the last hour.”
Neither Alex nor Stephen offered her a cigarette, or their seats. After a couple moments she continued: “Wee-ell, about my purse …” She glanced around. “You know …”
Her fuzzy gaze settled on Alex again, “You don’t look much like the Alex I remember. He —” She stopped speaking and crossed her eyes. She began vigorously swatting at an invisible insect before her nose. Briskly, Alex stood and shoved the girl back out the door with surprising deftness. He slammed it. He shouted her purse had probably been stolen, and giggled. He then turned on Stephen with slit eyes. “So really, what have you been doing with yourself lately?”
“Not much,” Stephen said. He suppressed an urge to shrug again. “Working the usual crap job. Why? What have you been up to besides freak show stuff?”
“I’m in a slump, I admit,” Alex said leaning against the door. “But at least I’ve accomplished a couple things to lose, even a few kids. True, I don’t bother about them, but just knowing they’re out there running around full of potential warms holy hell out of my heart. You know, looking at you sitting there reminds me how years ago everyone used to say to me you’d never amount to much. I’d always defend you, though, believe me. Now I’m wondering when you think you might actually make an honest man of me. Also, would it be cool if I crashed at your house tonight? I’m a few days late with the rent at my place. Rather not have another ugly run-in with the landlady who is, trust me, lacking in understanding. That way we can continue our little chat!”
He burst out as if the prospect would be especially pleasing to Stephen. “Yes, a good long friendly talk into the wee hours of the morning would do you a world of good. Cozy and most productive.”
He tilted his head and smiled, widening his black eyes for emphasis. The expression was odd since he lacked eyebrows to conduct cheery enthusiasm between features.
A horde of feet thumped down the stairs overhead then. This caused the hanging bulb to shudder on its cord, right near Alex’s pink cheek. It added to his general unpleasantness a quivery spectral quality.
Annoyance now turned to anger in Stephen’s gut. As if in sympathy, the light bulb flickered. When it stabilized Stephen extricated himself from his chair. He shoved Alex aside (only half-heartedly guarding the door in any case), and noted with disgust how his fatness generated its own heat as well as an unpleasant honeyish odor. Nearly gagging, Stephen pushed at the door, trying to open it.
The door pushed back. “Hey!” an irked male roared outside. “I’m not finished yet! Wait your turn.”
“That’s a hall, you fuck!” Stephen shouted back “Not a toilet.”
Can I stay with your mother?
“What’s wrong?” Alex said blinking with coquettish rapidity. “You know you’re not actually mad at me, right? All I did was verbalize how you feel in your heart. I’m very intuitive when it comes to that stuff. Anyway, can I stay at your place? I mean your mom’s place. It’s not like you own the thing, right?”
“No dumbass! I don’t even like you.”
“That’s hilarious!” Alex gave Stephen a chummy chuck on the shoulder. “Now how about a hug friend?” He spread meaty arms as wide as possible in this closet, ready to enfold Stephen. Reflexively, Stephen fell back against the door. It burst open, tumbling him into the hallway where he nearly collided with a nun rushing past, sobbing into her large white hands.
“Where are you going?” Alex called, wriggling through the little door after Stephen. “For God’s sake, don’t go upstairs. I hate climbing those things!”
Stephen took two at a time. When he reached the top he found himself in the dead end of a garret. Flimsy, blue x-rays and pictures of mutilated corpses hung from the slanted wall on the left. Soft music played. People milled about. Others, the larger share, stood completely frozen, morosely still. Stephen did not wish to go back the way he had come so he looked for a place to sit. Almost immediately he was accosted by Alex.
“I s’pose it ain’t so bad up here,” he huffed. “A little hot, but … Oh, look!” He squealed, “X-rays for decorations! That’s arty don’t you think Steve-o? Just the ticket for your bedroom! Wouldn’t be the first quirk you borrowed to spice up your life, though I doubt mom would appreciate anything as morbid as this stuff hanging around. You know,” Alex said, turning to a huge pockmarked man in a leather jacket. The man was smoking beside a lamp with a flared green shade. “His mom’s always saying ‘Stephen, why do you have to live in such a depressing mess all the time?’ ”
“He lives with his mother?” The man in the leather jacket asked in genuine shock. “How fucking old is he?”
“Pretty old … You’re what?” Alex asked. “Funny, my closest friend and I don’t even remember his age.”
“Leave me alone!” Stephen elbowed the soft, green-shirted stomach overhanging Alex’s khaki slacks. “You and I are not friends. You’re just some fat loser trying to make me feel bad. And,” Stephen said turning to a tall slim woman wearing a long blue canvas coat, her face turned away, “the prick even has the nerve to ask for favors while doing it.”
“Oh my god!” Alex laughed. “Tell me you are not talking to a mannequin! Jesus, you really are the same old Stephen.”
Alex moved forward and tapped the woman’s hollow, thonky head. Angry, embarrassed, Stephen darted across the garret. He struck up another conversation. This, too, turned out to be with a dummy in disguise — perhaps a third of the people comprised these artificial partiers. Alex followed after him, making sure to comment each time Stephen drew another phony from the crowd.
“How could you have fallen for that one?” he would ask. “The posture’s a dead giveaway.” And: “This one definitely likes you.” Alex placed his temple against the slanted wall beside an impassive, androgynous form. Its aerodynamic hairdo somehow perfectly set off a pair of sleek angular hands posed vertically before a narrow chest.
“Oh yes,” Alex said seductively, blinking his eyes, “this one is it.” Then he straightened up and took a confidential tone. “By the way, and this is completely off subject, but I was wondering if you still had that little bladder problem of yore, that leakage? If so I think sharing a bed is out of the question.”
“Get away from me, you fuck!” Stephen shouted.
Alex’s plump body flinched. A terrible shrill sob erupted from him. “How could you!” He blubbered.
All the living in the garret gazed at Alex and Stephen, silently sympathizing with Alex. This put Stephen into a fury. He flung the mannequin at Alex and rushed away. He jogged down stairs. He wove through a couple of halls where a stray vacuum cleaner and ironing board nearly took him out. At last he exited what he took to be a side door in this madhouse, fleeing a party that had been ruined by his old friend.
Part 2: Party Residue
Anyway, Stephen thought closing the back door, entering a kitchen which reeked of ammonia and burnt food — that was their whole friendship in a nutshell. Funny how such things slipped one’s mind over time only to flare up with sudden brilliance when one met a former friend. First, of course, there had been the initial warmth and fondness but soon the familiar fault lines reappeared intact.
The entire plot — the rise and fall of he and Alex’s relations — had come back with stark clarity during Stephen’s walk home through nighttime streets. Ancient arguments mute in Stephen’s mind for years fizzed up from the bottom of his brain, which he proceeded to describe aloud to an audience of traffic signals and sidewalks, street lights and parking meters; that mournful crowd of floor lamps huddling behind the glistening display window of a closed shop. Turning into residential neighborhoods near his home dogs, roused by his crazed talk, got into the act as well, adding vehement throaty barks block by block until finally, soaked with the sadness of fully recalled failure, he arrived at his own street. A curvaceous black car with sharp tail-fins, parked before the house on the corner as long as he could recall, brought this storm of rumbling ruminiscences to an end, leaving him feeling relatively calm as he let himself in the back door of his home.
An unpleasant residue of the party remained in his brain, however. He tried washing it away with a few swallows of soda from a bottle in the refrigerator, but the funk clung to him as he stepped into the dining room. This dead zone, navigable only by the light of a television raging from the living room, was used by Stephen and his mother principally for storage, piles of clutter obtained over the years: clothing and knick knacks (in his mother’s case); an assemblage of books, newspapers, and other printed matter (in Stephen’s own). He stumped through the mess, underneath which the dining room’s true purpose barely shown, and dropped his keys in an empty fruit bowl on the table. The action always made him feel he was truly home.
The living room wafted forward, its walls shimmering with aqueous television light. He saw his mother had fallen asleep on the couch before the television, again — life’s quiet melancholy wastefulness. Stephen plucked the remote from the coffee table, near a plate littered with charred bits of bread, and switched the channel. The romantic, black and white close-up of a man and woman’s well-orchestrated embrace dissolved in a series of soft flickers only to re-stabilize on the luridly colored scene of a woman’s bare torso. It writhed desperately along a splintered tabletop while a hulking, masked figure slowly put a power drill through it.
Stephen often did this. It gave him a shiver of pleasure thinking his mother might wake and discover such porno-violence flopping around before her.
Momentarily his mother did stir. She smacked her lips audibly in the couch’s shadowy maw, muttering nonsense. “He’s got to stay with us or the oven will win. Take the clock out of the pickle jar, all right?”
The landline phone buzzed from the kitchen. Stephen rushed to answer. Loud voices marinating in louder music spat out of the receiver.
“Why did you leave me here, friend? You didn’t even say goodbye to Glenda! She’s furious. Talk to her for Christ’s sake.”
“Hello!” a female voice screamed at him.
“Glenda? Is that you?” Stephen asked, consciously trying to keep his voice low.
“Hey, Sean! No, it’s Anna. Glenda’s in the bathroom, puking of course. Didn’t what’s his name tell you? I’ll get her for you.”
With a sigh, Stephen hung up. He nabbed a chair from the dining room table, causing a pair of dusty women’s sunglasses to slide from its seat. In the bathroom he removed his shoes, socks, pants. He turned the shower on and seated himself before the tub. Thrusting bare feet under the warm rain, he wiggled his toes and thought how good this felt after long walks. All too soon, though, the water began to cool, becoming an icy barrage. He turned it off. Not ready to do anything else but sit though, he picked up the book he’d left on top of the toilet tank. It was a paperback called The Fury and the Terror of Dr. Mars’s Dolls. After studying its cover with a smile — the title, as well as the author’s name, James Andrew Ainsburrough, was crowded round with cracked grinning dolls’ heads — he opened to a dog-eared page. It was the beginning of chapter sixteen, the beginning of the end.
“‘Surely Lillian,’” he read, “‘you didn’t think you could get away from us as easily as that?’ Lilian heard a voice laugh horribly. A rustle of clothing sounded from the back of the closet. Suddenly the thing in the darkness lunged, and Lillian began to scream and scream and scream …”
Already Stephen was bored. He replaced the book on the toilet and leaned back heavily in his chair. However boozed he might have been at the party the magic had worn off entirely by now, along with the sweet, keen sadness it cloaked him in. Despair always had a specially enhanced quality for Stephen when drunk, a smooth poetic gleam and purity providing a warm aura in which to steep his soul. Sobriety made things blunt, obvious, pathetic.
He swabbed his feet with a blue towel that had been left drooling from the lip of the chipped oval sink. Yes, he thought, everything had assumed the flat, dreadful aspect so familiar to him. He sent his eyes roving around the bathroom. They snagged on something horrible, far more horrible than the book, a grotesque decoration his mother had purchased years before. It hung on the wall near the sink mirror: a square ceramic tile depicting, in relief, a humanized female poodle. This glamorous little bitch bathed its fluffy body in a bubble-filled, claw-foot tub, raising a pink scrub brush toward her neck. Above the end of the tub hovered a real thermometer, as if poised for a dip.
The cheap adorableness of this item always made Stephen cringe. It underscored a curious persistence beyond the dull film coating his soul, of a rich capacity for life having nothing whatsoever in common with the objective nuts and bolts of his tacky existence. His instinctive rejection of it suggested a relentless rotten drip of color leaking through an unlikely crack in his hardened consciousness; perhaps the damn poodle represented some telltale blemish on the face of reality, indicating that the mindless stagnancy of each month, replete with all its replicate days, might be only a convention foisted on him, like clothing or language. And maybe life might lose its oppressive grip on his brain if only he could excise that poodle, destroy it and squeeze out the pus oozing underneath. But of course there were no actual sores, rips or ripples on the surface of things. There were no metaphorical signals through space. He was simply and undeniably here, anchored to concrete matter.
Each day was destined to copy the one before more or less exactly; past and future, Stephen understood were mere clanky variations on the world’s ever constant march toward decline. The only mystery to be found came from dreams, books, movies — most as flimsy and nonsensical as the thing on the toilet. Perhaps I’m still a little drunk after all, he thought, and heaved himself to his feet.
Stephen returned the chair to its rightful spot at the dining room table and trudged off to his bedroom. Standing in the hallway outside, he reached his hand through the open door and groped for the light switch, as was his habit. A click and everything came alive, down to that pile of clothing on the gold-carpeted floor in front of his mirrored bureau. But the bulb immediately went out with an audible snap and darkness reclaimed its own.
A kitchen cabinet where bulbs were usually kept disclosed nothing but a couple flattish, empty boxes which ought to have been thrown away. Nothing on the linen shelf cornered in the bathroom either. He crept out to the living room. Across the television’s screen a girl smeared with stylized blood, clad in a few carefully torn rags, ran with ill-feigned hysteria through extremely well-lit woods. She was being pursued by a giant masked man. This killer was different from the one bearing a power drill earlier: he wielded a gleaming machete. Must be another flick, Stephen thought. Movies without end, he mused as he unscrewed a bulb from one of the two table lamps.
Mom is awake; a strange noise
His mother sat up with a jerk. “Is that you Myron?” she asked, rubbing a huge pile of disheveled hair at the back of her head.
“It’s Stephen mom. Who the hell’s Myron?”
“Stephen, yes — did you say your prayers? The rose rug’s gone out with that devil’s car. And it’s so hungry …”
She lay back down again with a yawn, resettling into restless sleep. “So so hungry,” she repeated.
Returning to his room, Stephen peeled a corner of bed away from the wall. He stepped up on the mattress and nearly lost his elastic balance twice before locating the dead bulb in the shadowy ceiling. He removed and shook it beside his ear. Satisfied by the faint rattle emitted, Stephen dropped the bulb to the sheets twisting around his sunken feet. The new one he tried to line up with the threads of the live socket, but it was difficult since the only light to guide him was a slim wedge spilling through the open door from the hall, beside the end of his bed.
As he worked to angle the bulb into the stubborn little hole, Stephen became aware of a faint sound, scratching. He stopped and listened. Though the noise seemed to cease on cue Stephen thought it must have originated from outside the window across the room, whose smooth surface was devoid of life. Stephen watched, waited. Nothing happened, so he resumed labor with the bulb.
An even louder scratch raked across his spine a moment later.
What was that? He looked toward the window again. A large figure hurled itself against the glass. Blobby, blurred in movement, it clawed frantically at the pane, thudding and squeaking like a giant insect. Startled, Stephen lost his footing and tumbled onto the mattress.
The creature outside cackled. “It’s me dummy!” It cried through the glass — Alex, of course. Mashing his white face against the window his lips smeared into a couple of fat slugs which squirmed and parted, baring oddly feral teeth. “See? I just …” Whatever he mumbled vanished in a steamy spot of incoherence.
Rolling from the bed, Stephen stomped to the window. “What are you doing here?” he whispered.
“I was trying not to wake your mom by ringing the bell, duhh! May I come in? I vant to come in your home,” he said using a hokey Transylvanian accent. “But all seriousness aside folks, I’ve been looking the house over for you. After you ran off from Glenda’s party I figured you just must have forgot to bring me along. Are you going to let me in or what?”
“Jesus!” Stephen groaned, opening the window with a grimace.
Alex’s fat shiny head poked inside. Shiny, Stephen realized, because completely bald. “What happened to your hair?”
“My hair?” Alex patted his glossy round pate. “Goddamnit!” He spat. “I thought it was a little drafty up there. Never fear, my boy, I shall return — me and my hair.” He evaporated from the window.
Stephen shook his own head with disgust. An inky shape nearby did the same: Stephen’s silhouette reflected in the bureau’s gloomy mirror. Annoyed, he returned to the bed and fumbled for the bulb amongst humpy covers. Finding it in a cool fold of sheet, he re-mounted the mattress and at once, with almost magical ease, nosed its knobby tip right into the socket. Executing several smooth twists, a bomb of light went off, taking the room from muddy shadow to blinkless brilliance. The transition of visual values was so sudden Stephen felt as if his eyes were being stabbed by the room’s stark ugliness. Was this what he had been working so hard to see again?
Stepping from the bed to stiff gold shag Stephen considered calling the police, to report a prowler. Before he could act on this impulse though, Alex’s fat arm thrust through the window followed by its evil twin. These fleshy siblings, working more or less in unison, laboriously lugged Alex’s jiggly, seemingly boneless mass across the sill into the room, where it collapsed on the carpet with a nearly soundless thump.
Lying there, struggling, Alex looked like some sort of albino creature culled from the sea. The mere sight of him, as well as the horrible sweet smell he radiated, was sickening.
A low form of pity overcame Stephen’s revulsion, however. He forced himself to help Alex, though getting the plump creature back up was difficult. Stephen was nearly pulled down a couple times himself.
Several awkward, contorted motions had to be carefully executed — a wrist grabbed backwards, a leg braced — before the two finally stood side by side, breathing hard from the struggle.
Stephen told Alex he couldn’t stay. “I don’t even know why the hell I let you in.”
“Would have been boring not to,” Alex responded. “It’s doing things you know you shouldn’t makes life fun. By the way, your filthy carpet smells like cigarettes and mold.” Still gasping for air, Alex tried to reassert his dignity by smoothing his stained green shirt and dusting off the front of his khaki slacks. He turned sideways, looked himself over in the bureau mirror. He frowned, an expression oddly silly beneath that wig which had slipped down his head over a browless eye during the action.
“Besides,” Alex added, “my staying here was a done deal between us. Period.” Putting a wrinkly, worm-colored finger to the right corner of his mouth, he gazed at his reflection with rapt fascination. “My god,” he said in an awe-filled whisper. “I’m really pretty.”
“No,” Stephen said, “there was no deal. Even you’re not that dumb.”
“But don’t you remember? I asked if I could stay over, quite politely, and you agreed just like that.” Alex attempted a sharp snap of the fingers but got no sound. “Everyone heard you. Why don’t you call Glenda’s party and see if they didn’t.”
How ridiculous, Stephen thought. Yet part of him knew that if he actually were to call Glenda’s house and ask, whomever he spoke to would probably corroborate Alex’s claims.
Alex moved closer to the mirror. He shoved books and wads of clothing off the bureau so he could examine himself unobstructed. “Well, well,” he said. “My hair looks like an insane woman’s. Frankly you ought to have mentioned it after inviting me in. You’re a very rude person.” He straightened the brown mess on his head first one way, then another, as if seeking some ideal position. Finally he seemed to arrive at an acceptable solution, though to Stephen it looked as if he’d merely put the wig on backwards. Alex then wrapped a familiar arm around Stephen’s shoulders and gave him a squeeze. “Puny little thing, ain’t ya?”
For a moment both stayed like this, staring at the picture they made in the mirror. Stephen thought that he really did look thinner than usual — probably just hungry. And hadn’t Alex been slightly taller before? Trick of the mirror, he thought. Then he remembered how irked he was, tore free of Alex and grabbed one of his shoulders, which felt soft enough to slip Stephen’s grasp.
“I want you to leave now.”
“How can you though?” Alex asked indignantly. “You just let me in. Besides, I’m the guy you once loved more than anybody on earth. I am at least owed the courtesy of a little rest before you force me back out into the cruel world. Not to mention the farce with the window has utterly wiped me out. Have a heart bro, let me sit quietly in that chair awhile.”
He pointed to an old, gray, metal fold up near a set of cluttered shelves cattycorner to the window he’d come through. “Once I catch my breath I shall leave you in war and peace, as I leave everyone, whatever that means.”
Stephen hated the idea, but it seemed easiest at this point. Making a fuss might awaken his mother along with her wrath. Like so many species of dragon, his mother disliked having her sacred slumber interrupted. Issuing a satisfied, lip smacking “ahh,” Alex sat in the fold up chair. He tried to cross his legs but was too plump, so he settled for slinging an ankle over a knee.
Meanwhile Stephen pushed his bed back against the wall and threw himself down on it, crunching the dead bulb in the sheets. Goddamnit! He thought as he lay back, lulled by the same strange lethargy which kept him from getting rid of Alex. I’ll clean it when he’s gone.
For awhile Alex watched Stephen lying there, watching him. Then he glanced at the door to the right of Stephen’s temple, and the dusty cobwebbed moldings running along the floor, up over the closet. He eyed the shelves on his left suspiciously, and frowned at the dirty gold shag.
Annoyed, Stephen finally asked, “What?”
“Nothing,” Alex replied in a voice implying everything. “I’m just looking.” After a few moments he cleared his throat, asked Stephen if he wished to know the conclusions he’d drawn.
“Not so much. Are you ready to go?”
“Not so much. I was thinking rooms have souls,” he said as if uttering an unusual idea. “They really say a lot about a person. A television detective could put together quite a profile from this place.”
“Oh?”
“For instance, exhibit number one: this pretty picture.” He plucked a square photo of a girl from the shelf next to him. She had long chestnut hair and was seated on a porch, smoking a cigarette raised warningly at the person behind the camera.
“Put that down.”
“Girlfriend?”
“Not exactly.”
“It’s none of my business, I guess, but I can’t think why you should want to be all mysterious with me about it.”
“Mainly ‘cause I can’t stand you,” Stephen said with a chuckle.
“She married a few years back and moved away. I guess we really don’t talk anymore. Nothing mysterious, just…time. Your wig now, that’s another story.”
“Subtitled: His Masquerade,” said Alex. “But I think I understand it. You had feelings for the girl only you were too much of a coward to tell her.”
“No.”
“Course you were. You thought she’d reject you.” He glanced around Stephen’s room as if he knew she would have.
“Okay, it’s time for you to go,” Stephen said.
“Fine, but I need to use the bathroom.” He tried to stand, failed. After several concentrated attempts he started shaking his bottom, as if that might somehow un-stick him from the seat. The chair’s metal joints complained. The sound worsened as Alex struggled, until its front leg collapsed tossing Alex to the floor. Surprisingly, he managed a springy roll back to his feet. Face flushed, clutching wig to head, he insisted over and over he was all right, though Stephen had not asked.
“Your fat ass broke my chair,” Stephen said. “Just go to the bathroom already and get the hell out.”
“I hate to ask, but … where do you keep the facilities? I forgot the way after all these years of you not inviting me over.”
Stephen had no intention of letting Alex stroll around unescorted. In any case, so he took the lead. A few steps down the hall outside his room though, and Alex of course disappeared. Stephen started a search, opening doors at random. He half expected to discover Alex rooting through his mother’s drawers. Eventually Stephen located him in the cluttered dining room, writhing around within a set of heavy gray drapes. He claimed to have lost his way, saying he thought he recalled a door’s having been here.
Once Stephen had disentangled Alex, he prodded him from the dining room into the living room, guided by the television’s blue-wavering light. Despite insistent jabs, Alex halted part way in, behind the couch.
“Look,” he indicated the television screen. Thankfully Stephen’s mother slept peacefully while a naked, large breasted woman enjoyed having her taut tawny buttocks lesbianically massaged.
Definitely a new movie, Stephen thought with mild interest, but it didn’t matter. He shushed Alex harshly and resumed shoving him toward a hallway on the right. There he crammed Alex into the bathroom.
Underneath its closed door, a luminous strip came on. Stephen stood grim vigil, watching that light and listening for the toilet’s pleasant gush, signal of his release from this ludicrous situation. All he heard was silence followed by more silence. Minutes passed. Stephen rapped the door. Alex responded he needed perfect quiet to finish. Stephen rapped again, harder.
“Okay okay,” Alex said opening the door. “You can throw me out now, even though it’s the middle of the night. Anyway, I’m sorry about being such an ass before, but there are extenuating circumstances, believe me.”
“Don’t care,” Stephen said poking Alex in the approximate area of his ribs, to get him moving.
“I understand,” Alex insisted. “I’m just saying I can fully explain if not justify why I’ve behaved like this to an old friend.”
“Quiet for God’s sake, you’ll wake my mom.”
“But I must tell you.”
An Old Friend’s history
Alex said he hadn’t been the same since his wife’s death in a car accident the previous year. “You see I had a drinking problem, a bad one,” he said. “Still do, I guess. You wouldn’t understand, because you don’t know what business pressures can do to a guy (I’m getting to the point Stephen, quit poking me, sheesh). Anyway, my fourth and final wife was quite a gal. Married me for love, which was new. And she was at me to lay off the sauce from the start — you know the spiel: can’t you see what you’re doing to yourself? Can’t you see what you’re doing to us? But I couldn’t, wouldn’t listen. Then one stupid liquor-ridden night, after dinner at a friend’s, she suggested she drive us home and I had a fit insisting I was fine; caused quite a scene too. Well I’m sure you’ve guessed where this is going, so try to whip up some sympathy, will ya’?
Looking back on it now,” he said in storytelling mode, “the drive was a blur, stop lights, street lamps, convenience stores, road signs, all whooshing past. Suddenly there appeared a kid on a bicycle. Swerving, I hit the brakes, but it was too late. The kid thudded against the side of the car, ‘smack!’ Went up and over it denting the roof all to hell I might add.”
At this Alex got a faraway look, matched by the faraway sound of his voice. “I still hear that thud in my dreams. I still see that kid’s body bouncing across the windshield like a doll. The weird part is,” he said trying to scrunch what should have been his eyebrows, “my attempt to avoid him made me veer off the rain-slick street — did I mention rain before? — and slam straight into an elm, which I heard screaming while I tried to collect myself. ‘A screaming tree,’ you ask? Yes, screaming in agony while beside me Hester’s head smashed through the windshield and busted like a pumpkin. Her bleeding body was strewn over the dash like a bag of garbage. Well I was woozy as hell, practically hallucinating, and things got mixed up. All I remember after that is a strange, dark figure emerging from the shadows of nighttime suburbia and … well I can hardly believe it. Nobody, nobody could believe it Stephen …
“That man … he stole two of Hester’s fingers. He came up and snipped them right off with a pair of wire cutters as I watched helplessly.” Alex stopped, wiped a tear from his cheek, and allowed for a solemn moment to pass. “Anyway,” he concluded conclusively, “she’s gone and it’s all my fault. I just wanted you to know that, buddy.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, buddy.” “I’m glad you told me,” said Stephen. “I am. Now you mention it I remember the incident well.”
“Was all over the news, buddy.”
“The part about the stolen fingers — no forgetting that, huh?”
“The tabloids had a field day with it.”
“And it’s what happened to the wife of the main character in that book I left on the toilet, The Fury and the Terror of Dr. Mars’s Dolls. It’s pretty good. Dr. Mars is some sort of Frankenstein freak who uses fingers and other body parts from his victims in a voodoo ritual, to bring a bunch of creepy dolls to life, so he can wreak blood vengeance on the townspeople. I think that’s where it’s going, anyway.”
“Amazing!” Alex gasped in wonderment. “How ‘bout that! [Stephen harshly shushed him yet again] I mean, what are the odds? Crazy how the world’s full of these little synchronicities. You think the writer was inspired by what happened to me? Was all over the news.”
“Get out,” Stephen said dully and dragged Alex’s baggy body to the front door, no longer concerned what noise he maid.
“Sheesh,” he muttered, “I’m leaving I’m leaving.” He was still muttering when Stephen foisted him onto the porch along with several moths, whizzing around the light above the mailbox. Stephen closed the door, locked it. He underscored his decise by switching off the porch light as well.
His sense of satisfaction was short lived though. Remembering the window in his room was still open, Stephen rushed to close it. He burst through the door and nearly tripped over the wad of clothes before his bureau. This caused him to lurch toward the window’s gape. With almost dreamlike smoothness he righted himself, reached the window, banged the pane shut and pulled down its shade. After which he stood very still, holding his breath. He thought he’d heard a rustle of grass outside; the same scratching noise as before.
But there was nothing.
Relieved, Stephen threw himself onto his bed. A shard of shattered bulb forgotten in its sheets nicked his calf. He jumped to his feet again and promptly stubbed a toe on the bureau. Supporting himself by the edge of a partially open drawer, he hurled several obscenities at Alex; tried literally to shake the excruciating pain from his throbbing toe. He felt something warm and wet begin to slither down the back of his leg.
Awkwardly twisting around for a look, he saw a thin stream of bright blood oozing floorward over his long calf, elegantly traversing the curve of his heel as it dropped onto the gold shag.
Hobbling to the bathroom, Stephen cleaned the stinging wound. He put a flesh-colored bandage over it, but residual moisture caused the thing to fall off. A second did the same. When he bent to pick these up from the pale-tiled floor he noticed several bits of white material. Looked like peeled-off blisters. He discovered more of the stuff in the trash can by the toilet, plus several empty paper rolls and his mother’s awful ceramic female poodle, which Alex must have chucked there. Bigger pieces of skin-like material were to be found curling in the bottom of the tub.
Oddly, the idea Alex might be molting did not surprise Stephen, merely confirmed his ready feelings of disgust. He wanted to vomit.
With a violent yank, Stephen pulled the shower curtain closed.
That was when he noticed the open window next to the tub: Alex must have done this, to give himself another way back in. A big-bellied purse made of hemp, painted yellow and turquoise, had been heaped on the sill. Among its mostly useless contents Stephen found a package of cigarettes. He confiscated them and a big silver lighter with a raised grinning skull. An inscription on its bottom read: “from Sean to Anna.”
No money. The only other item of interest was a handmade ceramic chess piece, a Rook. It was burnt orange. For some reason Stephen stuck this in the medicine cabinet next to his mother’s pills. He then closed and locked the window, and applied a third bandage to his calf, which more or less clung to its leg-hair. Afterward Stephen carefully re-hung his mother’s poodle thermometer and stuffed the unwanted purse in the trash.
A few minutes later he was spreading a fresh white sheet on his mattress (having disposed of the old one on the back porch, in a laundry basket). He stuffed two dingy pillows into a pair of clean cases, flung them on the bed and was about to lie down when another miniscule shard of bulb, somehow escaped into the gold shag, lightly lodged itself under the nail of his left big toe. There was no blood, thankfully, but Stephen was enraged. He got a vacuum from a cluttered closet in the hall and roared it across the carpet, whose thick noodly fibers formed stark arbitrary swooping patterns every time the machine made a vehement pass — satiny waves one direction; dull matte the other — mirroring the surge of anger tightening and loosening in his chest. Satisfied he had got everything up the mechanical monster went back in the hall closet.
Bat-like thoughts of Alex kept flapping across Stephen’s mind, so he fetched The Fury and the Terror of Dr. Mar’s Dolls from the bathroom. He wished to check the book against Alex’s tale. As he was about to lie down for good something else stopped him: his image in the mirror.
I am definitely thinner, he thought. And my right arm seems longer than the other. Must be tired.
With an effeminate sigh, seemingly his thirteen thousandth of the night, he tumbled into bed and opened the book to the part where the protagonist’s wife dies in a car accident. The scene’s buildup and execution, so to speak, had been constructed by the author with bludgeoning rhetorical flourishes. These included breathless, italicized sentence fragments representing the killer’s point of view. They had been filled with kinky, obsessive observations so disturbing “even the most jaded connoisseur of horror,” according to the back cover, couldn’t help being shocked and terrified by the results.
But Stephen merely noted numerous hints that the evil-doer was probably just the repressed persona of the protagonist himself. A shattered mirror on the driver’s door, Stephen thought, was the giveaway; not to mention the character’s convenient, awkwardly placed blackout right after the mysterious figure’s shadowy appearance. Add to that the protagonist’s fear of his own hands shortly before the crash, and the mystery was essentially solved.
In any case, it was clear Alex had lifted his absurd car-crash story from the book’s panting pages in its entirety (including metaphorical imagery comparing the protagonist’s wife’s battered head to a busted pumpkin).
“Why do I read this crap?” he asked himself. “And why do I talk about it out loud?”
Heeeee’s Back
The door beside Stephen’s bed opened. Alex walked right in and sat down on the mattress next to Stephen’s feet.
“What the hell are you doing?” Stephen nearly shouted. “Get the fuck out!”
“Thing is,” Alex said, “I’ve been thinking and concluded it simply is not fair you won’t let me stay. After all, you told me I could and I don’t think a friend ought to wuss out on another, especially for no reason.”
“One: I never said you could stay anywhere. Two: we’re not friends. Three: don’t bring up the ‘bro code’ to me. Now leave.”
“That’s not gonna fly. Lots of people heard you. The witnesses from Glenda’s party are knee deep, pal.” Meaninglessly, he held his hand palm down under his fat chin to demonstrate.
“How did you even get in?”
“Back door was unlocked.”
Stephen slapped his forehead. “Course! Always forgetting it despite mom’s warning me about crazed rapists always entering unlocked doors — a Freudian slip?” he asked himself more than Alex.
“That reminds me,” Alex said. “Why did you change your sheets?”
Stephen dragged himself back out of bed once more, turning an admittedly gawky profile to the mirror. “I’m much too tired and frankly too depressed for more of these asinine verbal exchanges. What I’m saying is: if you don’t leave I’ll call the police.”
“Police?!” Alex shouted in feigned horror. “What the hell! You act as if you were scared of me for gosh sakes. It’s like I don’t even know you anymore.” The effect of Alex’s playacting, as with so many of his pseudo demonstrations of emotion, was that the attempted shock tripped and fell over his nose without eyebrows to support such involved steps.
“Well I was going more for disgust,” Stephen said, “but either way you can take it as your cue to, uh … go!”
Alex expressed a great sound from the depths of his pillowy stomach. “But I’m tired,” he whined, “and we haven’t seen each other in sooo many years. What if I promised that you wouldn’t even know I was here? I’d cross my heart and kiss my elbow.”
“Calling the police now,” Stephen said and started toward the door.
“Fine!” Alex gasped. He stood from the bed with a grunt, stunning Stephen by how short he now looked, shorter even than after coming through the window earlier. His wig? No, Stephen thought, the awful thing was on his head, right where it shouldn’t to be.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Stephen asked.
“I’m not the screwed up one.”
“No, I mean, why are you significantly shorter than you were an hour ago?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Alex said. “Why, does it make me look fat?”
He turned and tried to assess his rear in the mirror. Palpated his round, pink-daubed face. Removed his wig and inspected his bluish scalp. “You know, taking into account all my emotional suffering—though you don’t seem very sympathetic — I’d say I looked awfully good; remarkable even. But I did mention that earlier.”
“Alex?”
“Yeah.”
“Remember what we were talking about?”
“My leaving, you mean.”
“Please get out before you shed anymore skin or stink up my room with your nasty cologne. For real dude, you reek.”
“I’m not wearing cologne,” he said with offended dignity. “It’s a hormonal deficiency that acts up whenever I’m under stress, and nobody’s ever been insensitive enough to mention it until now.”
“Goodbye Alex.”
“Well I wouldn’t stay in your mother’s crappy old house now even if you got down on your knees to beg. Or if you used that high pitched voice you think sounds authoritative.”
“Works out well for both of us then.”
“So,” Alex said genuinely taken aback, “you’re really not going to get down on your knees and beg?”
Stephen closed the front door behind him for the second time that night, though with far less satisfaction than the first. On his way through the living room to shore up the back entrance he glanced at the television. An attractive girl with the requisite large bust was ascending a slim dusty staircase, holding aloft a candle whose ripply flame forced aside huge wedge-like shadows. “Guys?” She called out tentatively. “Is that you? Guys? … Quit foolin’!”
Part 3: The Excavation
They had been driving all night; Stephen had no idea where they were going. Alex had aimed his large black, fin-tailed car south out of the city and it fell off in darkness almost immediately. For hours now they had been sailing through shadows with little to look at but a series of softly glowing lights, scattered along the folds of the always-receding horizon like stars fallen to earth.
Meanwhile the road began to narrow. Lamp posts, rhythmically alternating one side of the street with the other, were flinging cool bars of illumination across the windshield with less and less frequency. The purplish mass of trees and brush previously kept at bay across fields on the far side of a smooth-surfaced lake started to encroach on the winding road. Alex took a sharp turn. A tiny dirt strip with huge crater-like holes caused the automobile to bounce and fret, stall and lurch. As they progressed, the woods closed in behind them. Ahead, the car’s hot headlights melted through the gaps of leafless, witch-fingered trees. It felt like the forest was determined to hem them in. As the car was on the verge of swiping the bleached trunks of its trees though, they suddenly parted like stage curtains.
Stephen and Alex found themselves parked before a filthy rotted shack. A crumpled looking vent stuck out the top. Several bits of mismatched tin, welded together, made up its roof. From the car’s trunk Alex removed a number of writhing black plastic garbage bags, filled with live dolls. These mindless creatures he set free in the shack and began leisurely to destroy, crunching their heads and torsos under foot as they crawled around the floor. A cracked, blue glass eye rolled into a corner.
Several mobile bodies he hung on wires around the room.
“What are we doing?” Stephen asked disgusted by the oily stink of the shack’s interior, which he understood to be Alex’s birth home.
Alex, who wore a long black leather coat, turned him a face fatter than ever, eyebrows penciled in place. “What we always do,” he said smiling, “dance.”
Alex raised the open flaps of his coat, like bat wings, and slowly waltzed toward Stephen through a clutter of mildewed furnishings, stamping across the backs of numerous dolls straggling in his wake. Offering another blinkless smile he took Stephen’s wrist and bit into it, drawing blood which he began to lap with a big boiled tongue.
Having had his fill, he licked well-reddened lips; tugged Stephen toward a small bed with a sheetless mattress, torn and stained. Stephen lay down on it without fuss, allowing Alex to tie him hand and foot with thick ropes, to the iron bed frame.
Brandishing a pair of rust-speckled sheers from a sagging set of utility shelves along the back wall, Alex raised them and plunged their beak into Stephen’s chest. With great crunching gusto, he threw himself into the hard work of separating Stephen’s rib cage, violently tugging the sheers back and forth so as to crack his sternum.
And though Stephen’s pain was hot and excruciating, it was a mere annoyance by comparison with the nausea he felt at the nearness of Alex’s hovering face, that laminate skin, those fake freckles, his broad smile; the bad sweet breath blowing Stephen’s nose. He experienced it with the same blunted horror he would poring over photos depicting children with grotesque physical deformities.
After prying Stephen’s chest open Alex peered into his bleeding, bulging innards. “There’s too much stuff inside,” he said. “I’ll have to throw it overboard.”
“Leave me something, though. For the ride home.”
“Unnecessary,” Alex said pulling things out at random: Stephen’s heart, stomach; the goopy fire hose of his entrails; rubbery liver, bloated bowels and bladder. These he hurled around the room as if in anger, though the expression on his face remained sanguine. Soon everything in the shack had been spattered with gore, from the little wriggling dolls crawling around beneath Stephen’s field of vision — he could hear them scratching about the floor like roaches — to the overhead bulb dangling from a cord, where a big red splotch cooked brown and began to flake.
“Now we begin,” Alex said. He started by cramming things from the room into Stephen’s gutted torso: a rusty bird cage, a metal fan with creaky blades, two Reader’s Digest condensed books, a variety of doll parts; and a small rectangular mirror, like something from the front flap of an old wardrobe. He turned it flush in a silvery flash before lowering it into Stephen with coffin-like slowness. The physical bloat Stephen felt, caused by this junk, blended with his feelings of shame.
Alex cocked his head to the side. “You lack only one thing now,” he said. “You lack the spark of life, the thing that makes us real. Ready?”
Smearing on a big gory smile, rubbing his drenched hands together with mock enthusiasm, Alex stuck two crimsoned fingers down his throat and began to retch. His whole frame heaved. From his open mouth something slimy and white started to protrude. Whipping back and forth it emerged one greasy segment at a time, each larger than the last, until Alex’s jaw was forced to unhinge itself like a snake’s, emitting several hideous cracks. Slowly, a huge larva wriggled out. When Alex had coughed up more than a foot’s length it dropped onto Stephen’s leg, fat glistening sections undulating with a horrible heft. It began moving up his thigh, coil-crawling over crotch to gaping chest.
“There,” Alex said, his plump jowly jaw snapping back in place. “Now we’re really and truly brothers.”
Under Alex’s smiling eye the huge gleaming maggot slurped and slithered its way into Stephen’s flayed chest, among the other junk, where its investigations somehow induced a series of terrible physical shocks. Stephen’s limbs jerked. The dolls hanging from wires swayed.
Threading the Needle
“Stay still,” Alex hissed as he poked black thread into the eye of a large needle. He began to sew up Stephen’s ragged flesh. The needle’s crude manipulations — perforating skin, cinching it together — unleashed a torrent of new pain. Upon reaching a molten peak (his ribcage being forced back together, stitch by stitch) the agony began to cool off, as if the operation’s very stress and strain necessitated a negative response from his slashed nerves. Stephen went numb; breathing became difficult; suddenly he understood that the straps binding his limbs to the bed were a shroud from which he, the immaterial he, would soon be removed and scattered among the chill black folds of the infinite horizon he had been driving through earlier that evening.
Something twisted, bent out of shape; a door opened somewhere; a gust of pure reason blew these images over as easily as cardboard cutouts, the shack, dolls, Alex. Stephen found himself squirming in a hot pudding-like substance as he pushed his way through the surface of flimsy rationality, located beneath his mother’s enduring poodle, and at last emerged from infected depths. He threw off his sheet with a gasp, opened his eyes.
Fresh air cooled his limbs. Everything was fine. The sun’s muted light shown on the pale wall before his nose — a gauzy effect of having been filtered through the window shade. All was infused with the timeless sound of birdsong. Everything was okay, everything all right.
Such tranquility lulled Stephen, who was still quite tired, into closing his eyes again.
Immediately he was back in hell. Phantom Alex re-inflated like a plump balloon and resumed surgery. “We must see what’s inside,” he said cutting Stephen open yet again. “We must see you see what’s inside.” This oblique bit of dialogue, possibly patched over from a different part of the dream, caused certain oneiric cogs and wheels to jam up; to skip; to jump back. Key phrases were repeated. “What’s inside what’s inside,” either he or Alex said. “That is if your insides are all in there. You see I see, but you don’t see the difference…” The voice or voices droned and dreamed on, an endless stream of words forming a cloud-dense mood so threatening Stephen understood that if he did not consciously force himself to wake up, he might be lost forever.
With a mighty effort he pried open his eyes. He yawned, scratched his scalp. What had all that been about? Stephen wondered. But he forgot the whole thing when he realized his left arm, which had been trapped so long beneath his side while he slept, was completely numb.
Stephen heaved over, preparing to endure the pain and discomfort of blood re-saturating his thirsty tissues, pins and needles etc., but was confronted by something much worse — Alex. Alex stood before the bookshelf in the corner, slump-shouldered, holding the picture of Stephen’s ex-girlfriend under his nose. Even from this angle, perhaps enhanced by this angle, Stephen noted the carnivorous expression on Alex’s smooth pink face.
“Oh for fuck’s sake!” Stephen shouted. This caused him to cough violently, loosening his daily supply of phlegm as the muscles in his arm started cramping from the blood rushing into it. “What the hell are you doing here?” Stephen asked — in the high pitched whine Alex had referred to last night?
Alex dropped the photo. He tilted his head thoughtfully as it fell to the floor with a sharp swish. How much shorter and fatter Alex seemed in the daylight, Stephen thought. And why was that cocked-head gesture so familiar?
“I’m not doing anything here, Steve-o,” Alex said. “What would I be doing? Dancing?” He stood on the tips of his toes and whirled around like a ballerina. Deploying a flourish of arms, he minced over to the door beside the bureau, took a bow, entered. He emerged a moment later.
“Closet,” he said with a blush. “It’s a holy mess in there too. This whole dump, frankly.”
“You’re like a bad cold you know that?” Stephen said falling back on his pillow and shaking his still numb hand. “Just when I think I’m over you, you’re back.”
“That’s hilarious!” Alex said laughing hard. Then he turned solemn. “The thing is I don’t have anywhere to go. After you kicked me out I sat on the porch ‘til your mom found me. She asked if I wanted breakfast. You know, she’s very nice. The way you always talked about her I expected a real See-You-Next-Tuesday if you know what I mean.”
“I don’t want you hanging around for breakfast.”
“Oh, breakfast was hours ago,” Alex said waving the subject away. “I’m here now because your mom wanted me to get you out of bed. She’s terribly worried you’re sleeping your life away. We’ve been talking about it all morning long. Everyone’s really concerned about you. I wish I’d known you were in such a bad way.” With that he executed a balletic pirouette, walked into the closet and didn’t come back out.
Wide awake now, and angry, Stephen jumped from bed as if to storm the closet. He was hindered by an awkward limp — his right leg seemed to have grown longer during sleep. It set him wildly off balance. A glance in the mirror showed Stephen had developed a slight stoop as well, which made his left arm appear to dangle a couple inches farther down than the other one.
Disgusted, embarrassed, he dragged himself over to the closet and called Alex out of it. No answer. Stephen flung the door open. Beyond, a dim deep hole dashed off into the distance. The stuff in his closet — clothes, sports’ equipment, old toys — had vanished, devoured by the gaping maw of hallway which only now had begun to coalesce. But hadn’t this been a closet before? No, no, the closet was always behind the other door, at the end of his bed.
Stephen tugged his long leg over the threshold and started down the hall. Turning right, another amazing corridor met him, at the end of which he was forced to take yet another turn. What an endless trip this was becoming! To cut things short he opened the first door he came across and stepped into a huge bluish bedroom. Along the high ceiling a fan with pearl-colored blades twirled listlessly. Long flowing drapes covered two windows. A pair of tear-shaped night tables amorously squeezed the plush mattress of his mother’s large bed between them.
Shunted in the corner was a small blond wardrobe minus mirror on its front flap. It stood open. Among piles of blankets and sheets, peeked a small armillary sphere. Exiting by a door cattycorner the one Stephen had entered he found himself in what could only be described as bits and pieces of several more hallways. These took him past the bathroom — exuding moist soapy warmth — into a final fragment, a kind of foyer which let him off in the living room. A news anchor-woman noiselessly worked her pink glossy lips on the muted television, pointing him toward the dining room on his left. Passing through that dim crowded area, he at last blundered into the kitchen.
His mother was seated at the table. Alex perched on her lap like a toddler, avidly spooning cereal from a white bowl. Stephen noticed the way his mother rested a fond hand on Alex’s bald pate (must have ditched that wig of his on the way to the kitchen somewhere), occasionally giving it a light pat. Tossed willy-nilly around the table were three other neighbor women, bored creatures who occasionally assembled for the purpose of making idle complaints, which they mistook for actual friendship. Already their saggy faces oozed an air of sad boredom bred by dull morning routines, with the rest of the day’s drudgery still to go. One after another they sent coffee cups to their sour mouths. Meanwhile a dark sullen child crouched in the corner near the dishwasher, moving two toy cars around on the floor.
“Sure is hungry, aint he?” the woman directly across from Stephen’s mother noted of Alex.
The lady sitting in the chair to the right of Stephen’s mother snorted. “Certainly not like my kid,” she said casting a weary look at the child on the floor, who pretended not to hear her. “Seems like I spend half my life these days trying to get brat over there to eat anything at all he’s so damned picky. Doesn’t seem healthy, you know? What do you think, Ida?” she asked the woman on her right. “I mean aren’t growing boys supposed to have big appetites?”
This third woman, Ida, opened her mouth a moment before speaking, as if carefully weighing her words. “All I know is when I was a kid my mother always made me sit at the table ‘til I finished every bite of my food. If I complained she’d smack me, saying children ought to be seen, not heard.” Her emphasis made it clear how uniquely rare she found such wisdom.
“And I bet you was quiet as a church mouse,” said the mother of the boy on the floor. “Not like my kid.” She jerked her tousled head spasmodically in the child’s direction. “I wish had one like yours here, Alex.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Stephen said from the doorway. The conversation at the table stopped, everyone looked toward him blankly. “Mother, I want you to know I asked the person in your lap to leave last night. Why then did I find his fat ugly face looking at me when I woke up?”
His mother shrugged. “He was hungry. You want I should watch him starve just because you’re rude? It’s not like he’s a stranger. And I wouldn’t even let a stranger starve. So what if you asked him to leave? You lie around in bed half the day before seeing fit to drag yourself in here and grunt demands like a hairy old caveman. Least when I do for him, he’s grateful. Aren’t you?”
She gave Alex a little shake in her lap, like a baby; he seemed not much larger than a toddler now. Swallowing a mouthful of cereal Alex put down his spoon, looked at Stephen as if he had not been following the adults’ talk, and licked a ring of milk from his fat mouth. He scratched his bald head. He burped. The women at the table laughed at how cute he was.
“You know he broke in the house last night,” Stephen said.
“Oh ‘broke into the house’,” his mother waved the words away the same as Alex had waved away the idea of breakfast. “Don’t be so melodramatic. Stephen gets that from his father,” she explained to her women friends, “who also would lie around half the day when he didn’t have a job, which was most of the time. That reminds me Stephen, I have to cook and clean over at Mrs. Bergman’s before I go to the store. I’ll be gone ‘til late afternoon. So if you could do the dishes and make Alex’s dinner I’d appreciate it.”
“I happen to have a job myself,” Stephen point out. “Besides, I wouldn’t make that little leech’s lunch if you paid me.”
“In case you’ve forgotten the bible does say a little something about being your brother’s keeper.”
“He is not my brother,” Stephen spat, not wishing to experience that word’s bitter taste any longer than necessary.
The mother of the boy with the toy cars released an artificial sigh, stood and involuntarily and arranged the bangs of her flattish brown hair. “Anyhoo,” she said, “thanks for the advice, but it’ll just cost more money. See ya’. You too Alex,” she added. “Well come on,” she said to her son with gray annoyance. This gave the other women at the table permission to leave as well. With jerky shrugs, perfunctory farewells, they headed for the back door.
The boy by the dishwashing machine timidly came over to Stephen; aiming a sour look at Alex, he handed Stephen one of his toy cars. “Here,” he said, “I don’t like my brother either.”
“If you don’t come on I’m gonna’ drive off and you’ll be locked out of the house all day,” the boy’s mother warned.
Once the women had gone Stephen, his mother and Alex stood around in the leftover silence. It was made curiously melancholic by the refrigerator’s constant drone.
“Well,” his mother finally said, “thank you for scaring my friends away, again. Five minutes must be a new record, kudos.”
“I don’t care about them, but I want that out,” he indicated Alex.
“Why?”
“Because it’s disgusting.”
“Sweetie, there’s no need to be jealous. I love both my babies equally.”
“That thing is not your baby mom, and he’s about as lovable as a cock roach.”
Alex threw his arms around Stephen’s mother’s neck and sobbed into the curled collar of her pale blue blouse.
“How could you!” The woman said giving Stephen a grave look of disapproval. The expression made her fragile face even saggier than usual. “My poor little Alex is so sensitive, aren’t you?” She cooed and embraced him with special maternal warmth. To Stephen she said, “Don’t you understand? I need this. He’s not like you and me. He’s special, important, entrusted to us for mysterious reasons. We have to take care of him I think.” She seemed on the verge of enraptured tears.
“Even the house feels more alive with him here. Can’t you sense it? Things haven’t been right for a long time. Not since before your dad—”
She stopped, shrugged, and gazed directly into her son’s eyes. “And now you want to take him away from me. You should be ashamed.”
“If he doesn’t leave I’ll throw him out,” Stephen said with feeling a curious sense of guilt, as if he were being somehow disloyal to his mother.
“It’s my home,” she said. “I might add you only live here because I allow it. So if I say Alex stays then he can stay just as long as he wants. And if you don’t like it maybe you’re the one should go. Might actually be for the best — have you taken a good look at yourself lately? Wasting away in that room. It’s not good for you Stephen. Me either.”
“You’re one to lecture,” Stephen said with a smirk. He came deep into the kitchen and glared at her. “You’re so lonely you’d actually stoop to cuddle this worm. Well I don’t care what you say: I want it out, now!”
He started to place his hand decisively on his hip, but the weird new length of his arm made him self-conscious, causing him to rub his bulging knuckles against the side of his lower calf instead.
Alex dropped the babyish demeanor and hopped from Stephen’s mother’s lap to the floor. He wiped oily tears from his round pale face with tiny white fists — no more than four feet tall now — and started toward the dining room. He was unable to get far due to his khaki slacks being too big for him. They snarled his feet; his green shirt draped about him like a dress.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Stephen asked.
“To lie down in our room, if it’s all right with you.”
“For goodness sakes,” said Stephen’s mother, “leave your poor brother alone.”
“He’s not my brother.”
“Anyway,” she said ignoring Stephen’s outburst. “I told Alex he could have a bed in with you eventually.”
“I told you, he’s not staying here.”
Into the wild blue yonder
Alex frowned wistfully at Stephen’s mother, winked and blew her a kiss. She was so moved by the gesture she pretended to catch the kiss from the air and clutch it lovingly to her throat. After which Alex re-fastened his hard browless gaze on Stephen. Trying out a sarcastic smile he shed his shirt with fascinating rapidity. An unnaturally smooth round body was revealed, punctuated by a tiny pinkish nub — a mere stand-in for genitals — smashed between the plump sausages of his rubbery thighs, above which hung a roll of greasy looking flab. “Let’s see if the bastard has the balls to throw me out now.”
“Why would taking off your clothes stop me?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea, Steve-o, but I am sure of one thing: the only person you’ll be hurting if you try is yourself, as my second wife was kind enough to point out on numerous occasions. I mean my fourth wife. By the way, doesn’t the condemned man usually get a last smoke or something?”
Stephen pitched the toy car at Alex and lunged for him. Alex instinctively shrank back, bumping a bare hip softly against one of the cabinets under the sink. Stephen grabbed a slippery shoulder even more squishy and pliant than it was earlier. “Don’t!” Alex cried wriggling out of Stephen’s grasp. Fumbling a cabinet open behind him, he more or less drained down into it. “I won’t!” He yelled from the depths. “You can’t make me go!”
“Stop all this fuss,” Stephen’s mother said. “There’s no excuse for such ugliness in the family,”
Stephen kneeled and stuck a long arm into the cabinet. Beyond boxes of cleanser and cobwebbed plastic piping he got his hand around a slimy pink ankle, reminiscent of a rodent’s paw. Clamping it tightly he yanked Alex out back-slapping to the floor, where it gasped, blinking dark sticky eyes. Though repulsed, Stephen forced himself to scoop the nude creature from the floor. Pinkish grease, like petroleum jelly, started to ooze from Alex’s pores, lubricating Stephen’s fingers so that he could not get a secure grip; he nearly lost the squirming monster several times.
Stephen stood, hugged Alex to his chest and made for the back door. It presented new difficulties. He had first to pin Alex’s cushiony body between himself and the doorjamb, heavily shouldering Alex in place while he freed a hand for the latch. From this contorted position he could only barely reach the latch with the tips of his slimed fingers; they slipped again and again. Just about the time he thought he was going to have to drop Alex to get it, Stephen finally managed hooking the latch with a sore forefinger, and tugged. The door sprung outward. Un-sticking Alex from the doorjamb, squeezing him to his chest once more, like a half-inflated beach ball, Stephen plunged into the ghastly blaze of a cloudless morning.
He heard his mother start to sob behind him. “Please don’t throw Alex out, he’s just a defenseless little thing.”
The defenseless little thing really started struggling now, as if scalded by the sunlight. “Take me back inside!” it squealed. “Take me back!”
Stephen’s hands lost hold of Alex. He fell to the ground where his body plumped back to boy-like shape, and he began to drag himself through the grass toward the house. Seeing this, Stephen’s mother started out the door to save it; did not get more than a few feet before Stephen snatched Alex up again and rushed to the backyard gate, far easier to open than the door, thank goodness. Beyond, he moved between the house and the next door neighbor’s, passing two trash barrels.
The moist, mushy bundle in his hands screeched, trying to claw Stephen with bendable digits; pressed its sucking mouth to his ear. Thankfully Alex could not manage a bite — even his teeth had gone soft.
Stephen found it most difficult keeping a tight grip on the greasy, mobile thing, practically exhausting his arms. He caught sight of their reflection sliding across the smoky surface of his mother’s car, rushing from trunk to roof, liquidly pouring down the windshield, the hood and bumper. It was bizarre but he put it out of mind as he carried Alex across the street and dumped him in the ditch of the lawn opposite.
Brown remnants of cut grass, along with green stragglers from the backyard, liberally breaded Alex’s small bloated body. “When you know,” Stephen heard Alex say with a new, whiny, buzzing voice, “I must be there… I was over there, over there, don’t you see it?” He reached a glistening hamster-paw hand toward Stephen. “It’s saying me don’t see it, but I know you’re lying! Why do they always lie about the pain? Why won’t they ever tell us the truth?”
Watching Alex struggle like this in the ditch, babbling, his black lidless eyes staring up fish-like at Stephen he felt a bit of sick pity. Alex was as trapped and doomed as anything else, he realized, because something fundamental was wrong with the world. But what? The Alex thing groped and groaned before him. Certainly all this was unpleasant, but it was hardly unusual in the grand scheme of things. Alex was simply part of another day among many as dull and pointless in the end as everything else.
Maybe I should put him out of his misery, Stephen thought: crush its wet head beneath my bare foot, like a melon. Satisfying to feel Alex’s warm innards squish between my toes. Stephen raised his foot over the greasy gasping face and was about to stomp the little beastie when a car turned into the street. For reasons Stephen could not explain he was afraid the people in the car would somehow connect him with this thing and hold him responsible for it.
Frantically, Stephen struggled back across the street, through his front lawn, up the porch steps and into his house, where he was accosted by his mother. She had her hands clapped over her ears. “Stephen!” she shouted. “Can’t you make that sound stop? The house is crying! It’s deafening!”
“Shut up!” Stephen shouted back, elbowing her aside as he dragged his right leg with him into the dining room. He pulled the heavy gray drapes behind the dining room open with Alex-sticky hands. The car had stopped next to the ditch. He’d known it would. An old couple got out of the car and tenderly lifted the little monster out of it. The man removed his black jacket and draped it around what ought to have been the creature’s shoulders. The couple chatted back and forth. They asked Alex something. It looked toward Stephen’s house, raised its grass-furred arm and pointed.
That was when Stephen started to hear the house’s screaming pain, as mentioned by his mother: a kind of keening that came from everywhere, windows, lamps, even from the couch cushions. The sound grew as the old couple outside began to walk Alex back across the street.
The thing’s reptillian form shambled onto the front lawn, waist-high between them. As Stephen stared and stared he finally saw how vulnerable and beautiful he/it was; knew that were Alex/it to come back in the house he/Alex would never be got out again. Trying to think through the noise, Stephen barely understood the problem or why it had ever mattered.
Joseph Aisenberg is an Oklahoma-based writer, film critic and historian. His noted works include the critical film analysis Brian De Palma’s Carrie: Studies in The Horror Film, which was nominated for The Bram Stoker Award, horror’s premier literary award. Aisenberg is also a regular contributor to film magazine Bright Lights Film Journal, has provided commentary tracks for Shout Factory’s 4K/BluRay steelbook special edition of Carrie, and is also the author of numerous other stories and novels. Freeline Media happily welcomes his contributions here.
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