"The police searched my apartment. Not only did they go through his stuff, but they went through mine, too, which made me look guilty. A bunch of different people asked me about him, but I couldn't answer anything--he and I barely knew each other. He was just a guy from work who I thought would be a good roommate."
"I can't believe you lived with a killer without knowing he was a killer," Joel remarked. The dome of steel wool that engulfed his head bristled with doubt. He stared at me, trying to read my thoughts with his "essential-to-the-outfit" glasses.
Fran, Joel, Candice, and Abraham. My cosmically-ordained foes surrounded me, sitting on ragtag furniture in a dalliance with modesty. Ruth had bought a new record player, and these weirdos had to, as a matter of compulsion, bring their vinyl specimens to share. Slap their refined sensibility all over someone else to demonstrate just how skilled they were at consuming the shit other people make. We occupied three mismatching sofas that formed a flat-bottomed "U" in Ruth's basement. Everyone except for me and Abraham wore a band t-shirt.
"I don't have any," I explained. "Plus, music kind of bothers me."
"Mine are all keepsakes from life-altering, gestaltic cathedrals of experience. I would hate to damage them," Abraham said, adjusting his ponytail. He had also donned a cardigan sweater and bowtie for that day's "audio sesh."
According to Ruth, seeing those four people again would be a test. Partly of my maturity, but mainly of my dedication to her. Avoiding her friends was not an option, so tolerating them, interacting with them, became necessary by default.
"Okay," I said, planning a quadruple homicide if the meeting went awry, "you are worth it."
"I know," she said, smiling.
When Joel or Abraham talked over each song to educate me about the artists, recording methods, or music itself, I strategically nodded, said "okay" or "oh wow" to appease Ruth. For an hour, maybe six hours, my brain ignored the songs and the oral exegeses thereof without issue. Until.
"Can we play something else? Please?" I asked.
"It's not your turn," Fran said. "And, really, you didn't bring anything to share."
I pondered silently. After declining fifty or so versions of human guts plastering the walls, I concluded that, because my hands could reduce a mountain to gravel, the era of asking had passed. "Change the fuckin' song."
"Hey, guy, let's be gentlemen, okay?" Joel suggested, fully convinced he had say-so about the next breath he took.
Instead of countering with an invitation for one-on-one combat against me, I thought about a dandelion haggling fate with the lawn mower. Dainty pleas crushed by engine noise. Composure rattled by the rumbling earth, the spinning-blade currents of air.
Candice, narrow of shoulder, the probably self-described wallflower who still managed to butt-in all the time, had something to say. "Is it misophonia? Or an autism thing?"
"No. It's...Roger music."
#
"You don't! Hit! Your mom!"
The edict comprised three stanzas, each marked by slamming a child into the wall. With each impact, I saw flash cubes cooking magnesium an inch from my eyeballs. Then I woke up from a knock out.
As a kid, the strength of a man felt unnatural, hydraulic, just utterly like fighting a mindless force. Dad can always hear you. Dad can always reach you. Dad can always pin you. A tower materializes on the horizon, breaching the foreground at a speed much quicker than you can process. You smash into that tower, headfirst. That's dad.
I tried hitting my mom. A random inspection revealed wadded--as opposed to folded--clothing items in my dresser drawers.
"Greg! Come! Here!"
Locating the voice, I ran to my bedroom, stopping at my mom's magenta sweatshirt and blue jeans. My mom, tan from ethnicity, black hair permed into tight curls, was up a few weight classes due to frozen pizza, relevant when she yanked me to the floor by my shirt, pounded her knuckles on my ribs then down my leg. Her heftier base and arms produced a deep, tissue-indenting thud, which was increasingly tough to shame with a deadpan. She bared her teeth in a caricature, a dumb animal expression of hate.
"Dragon face. Look at the dragon," I said, pretending her blows had no effect.
My mom went for a kick but missed, bashing her foot on the wall.
"What the hell is going on in here?"
My dad entered the room. Shirtless and bright as a peeled Russett-Burbank. The no-ass, pot belly factory worker had come to help his wife. Help his wife beat up a child while wearing unhemmed jean shorts.
I sprang up, threw a spontaneous abortion of a punch that squished on my mom's collarbone. That unwise move not only rippled through time to rationalize all past and future violence against me, but also motivated my dad to show-off for his wife. Look at how protective I can be against a seven-year-old. As my involuntary nap transitioned to wakefulness, Roger Music welcomed me, vibrating the air with a reminder of what house, what life, I was stuck in.
Roger Music was Blues and Southern Rock. He blared it from tall floorstanding speakers, twin bouncers denying relaxation or peace, to accompany his daily beer drinking. It was the soundtrack of a man who hated his children. Of sabotage and betrayal from siblings. Of parents beating their kids for using ice cubes, being awake in bed, or whatever violation arose from an abuser's caprice.
"I want that one," I said, pointing at a breadstick that happened to be larger than the rest. My mom carried a pan of them to the kitchen table.
The back of an adult's hand clobbered my cheek, knocking me to the floor.
"Think you gotta be the king?" Roger asked.
I didn't know how to answer.
His music played during home haircuts. A haircut at home entailed my mom's cigarette breath heaving rotten air into my face while I sat cross-legged on the carpet, while she took an hour to methodically do a bad job. Ten snips on one side, two on the other. Ten snips on one side, three on the other. If I moved, if I complained about muscle cramps or having an itch on my neck, she would bash my bottom lip with a backfist.
His music played while my sister pulled down my shorts and underwear as a prank (a prank whose punchline has always eluded me). Disrobing a little boy made her laugh until her lungs extruded asthmatic, shreds-of-breath wheezing.
I pulled everything back on. We stood alone in the basement. Golden shag carpet, a brown couch, and a credenza with a lamp on it composed our surroundings.
"Why was your thing sticking up? Do you have a boner?"
With no machinations identified, instinct--screaming and waving its arms--begged me to escape. I managed one step before my sister tackled me.
Sat on my chest. Increased her density until she weighed a suffocating 500 pounds.
"I heard stuff comes out," she said. Her hand slid beneath two layers of elastic waistband. Each centimeter of infringement stoked the fire behind my cheeks. The iron in my capillaries must have been glowing at 900 degrees Celsius.
I bucked. I kicked my legs. I pounded her spine with my fists. Or maybe thanatosis deterred nothing as weakness offered a belly once again to size and cruelty. Being small in a way that invited suffering made me cry, made me hate the natural order that had gifted P. terribilis but not me. In the shallow din of hyperventilation I found a scream, clutched it, raised it up.
"Help! Mom. Dad. Help--"
My mom called out from upstairs, over the music. "Greg! Be! Quiet!"
It hurt. Like my skin was getting torn or split or burned by the friction. By the flippant roughness. Nothing came out.
Her butt raised off my chest. Her voice stuck a knifetip into my memory, etching deeply that giggle, that sing-song derision.
"Look at Greg! On the floor! Crying, crying, crying. Little penis. Little penis. All he does is cry."
I stayed on my back, sprawled on the carpet, for what could have been hours. Whoever I was before that had been chopped into mush. Tossed in a stream. Expelled from my tear ducts.
Spasms borrowed from a thunder-cowed dog wracked my torso. Salt rivers oozed with eternal supply from my nostrils.
I wanted to die.
I wanted to kill.
I wanted to be nothing.
I wanted to be more.
Emptied from sweating and sobbing, perhaps leavened by purpose, I bounded upstairs to the living room. Parents had the couch. Kids sat on the floor. They were watching the console TV, so I positioned myself to block the screen, ready with feet firm and shoulders back and chest out for the predictable ire.
"Move," my dad said.
"Yeah, move," my sister said. Her tone tipped a dump truck's worth of gloating onto my head, right in front of everybody. But only I could hear it.
I pointed. "She--"
I told them what happened. I told them what happened. Anything beyond my vocabulary got mimed. Although tattling would extract a cost, a gauntlet of usury scheduled by a vindictive mind, I had to try. The grownups had to know.
I looked at my dad. Judging by the smile on his face, the story amused him.
"Aww. Did she whack your weenie? Did you like it?" he asked.
"You're disgusting," my mom said. To me. The glare she hit me with could have shattered glass, blighted a path through winter wheat.
"He's lying," my sister said.
My dad continued. "Look at his face. He liked it."
My mom still glared. Streaming tears down her cheeks, she had a question. "How did we fuck up? Fuck up so bad with you?"
The salvo ended, inexplicably, with my brother punching me in the stomach. I folded over then knelt, drooling through clenched teeth.
"Greg! Go to bed!" my mom said.
#
"Holy crap," Joel remarked. "Do you need a hug?"
"That. Wow," Fran said, to no one in particular.
Abraham, similar to when he attended funerals or did anything with an audience, was unaffected. "Hey, I get a re-do on my song," he said. "If certain people are too fragile for it, they can fucking leave for three fucking minutes."
Ruth stood by the turntable, had dialed the volume to "0" during my story.
"Greg," she said.
"I know. I never told you that stuff--"
"Did you confront them? As an adult? What happened?"
Candice leaned forward, rapt by the recounting of child abuse.
"Greg, hey," Ruth repeated, "maybe you can go upstairs for this one song?"
I stared at the traitor, at the confidante I should have never created. "Are you seriously forming a tag team with mister 'cathedrals of experience?' His song can go get raped to death by feral fucking hogs."
"Let's vote," Fran said.
Let's vote, Maria said.
Abraham talked again. "Alright. I vote for Greg to go upstairs. And for him keeping any further incest fantasies to himself."
I pulled off his jaw. In front of everybody. Pulled it off then tossed it on the floor. The transition from "normal face" to hanging shreds of baby octopus, the tongue exhibition, the mouth whose opening now mingled with all the empty space in the universe...nicely coordinated with his bowtie. His gurgling scream was my contribution to the musical get-together. When he, the incomplete organism, stood up to try pushing past me with a frantic, single-minded flailing that made me laugh, I held him at arm's length by grabbing his throat then crushed his windpipe (with all the reverence of wadding a paper cup for the trash). After I let go, his body flopped onto the couch next to Candice, who, same as Fran and Joel, was mired in a freeze response.
"Are we done voting?" I asked.
"He got powers for saving a faerie's life," Ruth said. "He can lift two hundred thousand tons, fly eight thousand miles per hour, and survive a six thousand megaton blast. What else. He has to eat and sleep, but his body can process anything as food. Rocks, dirt, metal, plastic. Oh. Also. His hair and fingernails are actually destructible, he produces no waste, and he killed a six year old boy."
After reciting her list, Ruth looked at me directly in the eyes while turning up the volume on Abraham's record. Cranked up the power on her doomsday device.
I unplugged the record player. Instead of allowing our respective glares to clash in a no-contact shoving match in the air between us, Ruth grabbed a blanket off the armrest of a couch then draped it over Abraham's corpse.
"Come on," she said to Candice, offering her hand then tilting her head at Fran and Joel. All four band shirts ended up on the middle couch, joining forces to oppose me.
"We can't escape. We have to pray that he spares us. That whatever inch worm of grace toiling around inside him can climb through the heaping shambles of his dumb, dilapidated feelings," Ruth explained.
It was an assessment from a stranger. No soulmate, no actual enemy, would ever figure me so poorly. Or it was sarcasm, and not the good kind like whenever I did it.
"Reminder. I disowned my whole family. What chance do you have?"
No one talked as the full force of my query tinted the walls, the air--the light--with gloom. Ruth's bottom lip trembled. A grimace crumpled her face, forcing tears out of her head. My revelation had sliced open the neck of her self-possession--all the sangfroid drained out.
"I confronted my parents. And my brother. And my sister. About everything."
#
Family vacation, once a year on my mom's birthday, meant a three-hour drive to a cabin where summer sausage and hamburger buns made the entire menu, and strolling a river bank provided the only diversion. The cabin boasted electricity, had refrigeration, so a boombox cassette player and ninety cans of beer proved that Hell wasn't a place, it was a reproducible set of conditions. When I became 18 years old, I moved out of my parents' home unannounced, so that annual trip (along with my family's existence) continued without me for seven years. Until."Turn that down. Someone's knocking," I heard my brother say.
The flat of a knife blade pressed his neck when he opened the door. Looking at him for two seconds, it was obvious that since our last meeting an invasive bramble, his gigantic beard, had out-competed every other facet of his appearance and personality, which included a shirt-deforming belly protuberance.
I pushed my way inside the cabin then maneuvered myself behind him, setting the knife edge on his throat.
"Hey! Music off, now. You're going to answer some questions," I announced.
"Oh, this again," my brother said.
"Mom, who's that?" a little kid, a boy, asked. He was sitting on the floor in the main room, the sparsely furnished walk-in casket, drawing on printer paper with a ballpoint pen.
"That's Uncle Nobody, and he's going to leave," my sister said, walking over to a man I didn't recognize to whisper in his ear. The man, likely her husband and the father of the little boy, sat on the far right side of a stone hearth, drinking brown liquid from a rocks glass. He was--had to be--a humanoid mass of obedience and misery dressed in a flannel shirt and ballcap. The day he got married, his totemic ceiling became "barnacle," and a wife's disrespect, her lack of appreciation, defined his manhood via showing how much he could endure, probably. My sister joined him on the left side.
Brown hair. Buck teeth. And whiteheads peaking with so much pressure that a stern look from six feet away would risk a sebum shot in the eye. That was her, in the big sweatshirt that failed to hide her double chin.
"Lou, go lay down on the big bed. You can finish your drawing tomorrow," the husband said.
"Ludwig. Bed time. Now," my sister commanded, almost yelling. The boy got up, halted a groan at its crescendo, then ran to the only bedroom. I heard him slam, kick the door.
My own mom and dad stood by the wall, drinking beers and smoking cigarettes. They monopolized the same open window, two guards barring the welcome of fresh air and unclouded sunlight, holding outside their burning tubes of death between drags. They blew the smoke wherever their heads happened to point.
"Oh, questions," my dad said, melodramatically pretending to cry. "My childhood."
"Where's the phone?" my mom asked.
"I'll open him, and he'll die, unless you answer me."
"Try without the knife, you fuckin' coward," my brother said.
"Just ignore him," my dad advised, tipping his head back, gulping from a can of beer as though the payment-seeker from his past was a chump he could take his eyes off of, an intermission he could drink through.
I obliged my brother, ditching the knife by throwing it into my dad's thigh. Precious beer, the contents of a ruined drink, sprayed from his mouth, and his howl of pain shattered everyone’s trance--they had to stop dismissing me. Especially after I slammed an open hand between my brother’s legs then, hefting him by the crotch, smashed his head against a ceiling beam before dropping him, the brunt again concentrated on his head. The crack of the first impact, the crack of the second, sounded unsurvivable for a human brain. The twitches faded from his body as Ankou, kneeling over him, gently stroked his back to flatten the final tremors of life.
I shut the door behind me. "Everybody, sit on the floor. No yelling. No phone. Just...we’re going to talk."
"Is he going to talk?" my sister asked, referencing my brother.
"Actually, he spoke first. Did you not hear him?"
"I can’t sit down. Look what that son of a bitch did," my dad complained, presenting the knife in his leg for all to see.
"Yep, we ruined our kids' lives," my mom said, stumping out her cigarette then drinking from her can of beer.
I pointed at the husband. "Answer my questions, or he dies."
My sister scoffed. "Ha! Be real. Nobody's listening to you--"
A night's worth of bourbon had slicked the skid from "guy in the background" to "red-faced, charging maniac." Stepping toward the husband as he rushed at me, I bowed my forehead onto the bridge of his nose, halting in one second the charmless flirtation with violence. The man stumbled backward, fell on his butt, blood pouring from his nostrils. I yanked him up by his flannel, restraining him with a non-drowsy sleeper hold. His struggle to break free was a conniption from the ether. Empty space throwing a tantrum.
"I kill him if you keep ignoring me. Mom. Dad. Why did you beat your kids? Humiliate them? Make them feel like shit?"
"You’re going to kill somebody? With what?" my mom asked.
"I just killed your firstborn son with my bare hands."
"Yeah. Accidentally," my dad said. "It happened when he fell. He shifted in the air, we all saw it."
"That--never mind. Am I stuck in a dream? Why aren’t you grieving a dead son? A dead brother? What the fuck is wrong?"
"I don’t see you grieving," my sister said.
I half-shrieked. There was no message, only the shrill venting of emotion.
"You don’t control us," my mom stated as though she had the final word on reality.
"Answer my question."
"Which one?" the husband, my captive, asked. The nearness of the voice startled me--I had forgotten that the flesh-and-bone bargaining chip could speak. "Your communication isn't exactly a tight grouping."
"Why. Did they beat. Their kids. Et cetera."
"That. You know that never happened," my dad said.
"You’re stuck in the past," my sister accused.
I split the husband’s upper half, vertically from his middle, as though stretching my arms through the arc of a yawn. Blood showered me as I closed my eyes in an accidental homage to the parking lot rainmaster. Two torn sections, plus his head and guts and legs, fell about me, the rejected mouthful of a discerning dragon. Cloaked in blood, death at my feet, I inhabited retribution. Then I slowly walked forward.
"Music. Off."
They saw me shut down my brother’s brain in a casual, flap-of-the-arm fratricide. Saw me rip a man to pieces with the ease of pulling apart monkey bread. Their cooperation was mine.
"Do it yourself," my sister screamed, which somehow segued into, "you won't get away with killing him."
The boombox was on the floor in the corner. When I unplugged it, it felt like unplugging an enemy's mechanical ventilator.
"I did already. I mean, I killed him, and none of you stopped me. You ranked defying me and making sure no one gave me what I wanted as more important than his life. Kudos. You win. You're so principled."
"The police will catch you," she said, beginning to sob.
"Hey. If you three admit to your wrongdoing, I'll call the police myself. You can watch me surrender to them."
The sobbing (allegedly) wracked my sister's diaphragm with seizures, littering her speech with a trembling and breathiness, a mangled baritone vibrato that issued this decree. "I will never. Admit. To your lies."
I lifted the boombox overhead, vertically between the squeeze of my hands, then threw it end-over-end at my dad's face. Parts and pieces of the device bounced off the wall then onto the floor, joining the parts and pieces, the splattered mush of his head. His decapitated body fell next to my mom. Busted electronic components sat in a pool of blood where my dad's head would have been. In death, he had improved, had become a low budget movie cyborg executed with a shotgun.
Eat it!
Roger screamed, nosetip ramming the child's cheek.
Eat it!
I don't feel good, the boy had said. On his plate, mixed vegetables--terrible of taste and texture--sat cold and unmoveable. In his stomach, more vegetables, along with meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and tap water, treated mucosa like a trampoline.
The boy gagged. Fingers of air jammed themselves into his throat. A glob of puke went "splat" on his plate.
The mantra did not concern itself with trifling details. Eat it! Roger screamed.
"Mom."
"What."
She stood by the window, staring at the mess that had previously walked around and breathed and married her. Cigar store Indians showed more emotion.
"You're not sad."
"I'm not giving you anything."
"He forced me to eat my own vomit off a plate."
"Oh. Not someone else's? Okay."
I floated, rising above her then looking down to illustrate my in-every-way superiority. "You caused me. I don't mean 'gave birth to.' I mean, I'm a result, and you're...too dumb."
She never looked at me. "Did you starve? Were you homeless?"
"You provided the same as a prison? That's your checklist for acceptable--fuck. Why the fuck am I answering you? Fuck you."
I flew at her, brought my elbow across her cheekbone with a downward, diagonal slash. Upon impact, a bunch of bones shattered and buckled and moved contrarily to supporting life. The blow crashed her body into the wall, onto the floor, in a blink. Her chestful of tar labored for oxygen no longer.
"Ludwig, come here! Mommy needs you."
Mommy's little human shield ran out of the bedroom. My sister got off the hearth, kneeling to catch the boy in a hug. She repositioned herself to sit on the floor, clutching him the whole time, his face to her chest. She wailed performatively, unstructured vowels grating the air like a goat's lamentation against silence.
"Your accountability can save you. Admit to five things you've done wrong. Fuck it. Three things. That's goddamn charity."
She didn't acknowledge me. Deep breaths and changes in pitch upped in frequency as her crying continued. Inside the boy's ear closest to her mouth was likely a wasteland of smoothness.
I snatched him from her flabby, useless-when-it-matters grip. Realized.
"Why? Why? Are all of you? Why?"
He was limp. Motionless. A marionette whose strings had been cut by Atropos. My sister had suffocated him.
"He deserved better than to die by your evil hand," she said, her voice stuffed with gallons of canned ham and self-awareness.
"There are no cameras in this room. You are not on stage. You--"
I stopped cradling the boy then grabbed his ankle, swinging his body three full revolutions above me to bash his head into her face.
"And then she died? She died, yeah?" Chapter Eighteen