He sits up. Unlaces the hiker boots his mother bought. Clodhoppers. He starts tugging the thick laces through the eyeholes. I want him to disagree with me, shout at me, but he’s concentrating on his boots. Stripping them apart, too.
“We’ll find a new school. It’ll be okay. I promise, Dill. Swear to God.”
After awhile the silence turns mammoth, oppressive, so I take a shower. The yellow water reeks of sulphur the way all water does this far north. Lewd goings-on come through the pressboard walls. The rhythmic knock of a headboard. A man shrieking: “Sweet darlin’ Sunshine!”
I return to an empty room. The door’s wide open. I step outside with a towel wrapped round my waist. The tall gangly guy sits outside the adjacent door.
“Did you see a kid come out?”
“Ain’t seen nothing,” he tells me wretchedly.
I step back inside. Dylan’s hikers sit at the foot of the bed. Laces tugged out, tongues lolling over the toes. The utility closet door is ajar. I open it.
Next to my argyle sweater hangs my son on a noose of knotted bootlaces. Dylan’s face is as blue as a sun-bleached parking ticket…
My son has a birthmark on his shoulder. It looks like a pinto bean. During his Steam-Powered Android phase this birthmark became his “on” button:
“Power up Android Dylan,” I’d say, and press it. Dylan’s head would rise, arms cocked stiffly by his sides. “Android… Dill…” he’d go, in robot-voice, “… needs… pudding… for… power… cells.”
At recess another boy told him if you had a birthmark it meant your parents hadn’t wanted you born. Dill agonized over it all day.
“Dylan, that boy’s a creep,” I told him. “How could your mother and I not want you born? You’re the best and most precious thing in our lives. Believe me?”
“Okay. I believe.”
… Rip the hangar rod off the wall, plaster dust and the jingle-jangle of hangars. Dylan’s knees crumple as he falls face-first tangled up in my sweater. I try to pry the noose off but the laces are dug so fucking deep into his throat. A sobbing tension in my chest, agonizing compression pulsing ever-outwards. My vocal cords splinter as I let it loose. Blood’s blurring into the whites of his eyes. I claw my fingers under the laces and my shoulders pop loosening them. My son’s not moving but oh so warm. Prop one hand under his neck and open his airway as I’d been taught at Red Cross training. Settle my lips over his and blow. My breath disappears into the dense loaves of his lungs, circles around and back into my mouth with the taste of stale mucous and something else, slick and vile like gun oil. This cold throttling terror is sharp and blistering as blowtorched masonry nails clawing the surface of my brain.
Specks. Specks. Thousands upon thousands. I cannot see for their accretion.
BLACK SPOT
PIPES
Pipes. Is how I see you. All human beings. Pipes. As you have running through your home. Transporting fuel, water, wastes. All you often see of a pipe is their mouth, in the form of a drain or toilet bowl. People are pipes through which different substances emit. As a boy I understood out of Mama emitted food, a bed, blankets, smacks, a home, limits, broken glass. Out of Cappy Lonnigan: tobacco, cuss words, larcenous advice. Out of Teddy: moans, burn holes, crying jags, blackened ants.
I saw the colour, texture of their emissions. Out of Mama’s pipe flowed burnt orange fluid. Out of Cappy’s: bright blue liquid that when he laughed transformed into moths. Out of Teddy’s: muddy goo stubbled with dead crickets or rusty nails.
Twist a water tap, water pours out. Not so people. Some days I could do such a thing as comment on Mama’s new haircut — which often made her orange fluid flow brighter — but instead her liquid turned blackblack, full of twitchy, screamy things. Next she committed acts meant to hurt me in ways that I am incapable of being hurt.
Cappy was a journeyman pipefitter. “I’ve been a journeyman everything,” he would say, “including husband.” He said pipes connect odd ways. People connect odd ways, too. Their colours change when they merge, the way mixing different coloured paints do. I study emissions. Colin Hill’s fluid flowed sun-hot yellow. Abigail Burger’s flowed pale violet until her father yelled at her, at which it blazed hemoglobin-red. When she came to our house after her squirrel was shot, Patience Nanavatti flowed with burping lava. But Mama ran so dark that day, all the lava bled right out of Patience.
Out of my own pipe emits grey substances the consistency of gruel.
My pet’s name: Gadzooks! An Eastern grey squirrel suckled on scalded milk. When the neighbourhood kids gathered all our squirrels to play, he was hounded by his siblings. But Gadzooks! was terribly fierce. He once tore the head off a greensnake in an eavestrough. Devoured a family of silky pocket mice nesting in Mama’s walls.
Last night Gadzooks! dashed out my apartment window, down the drainpipe onto the road. A car ran over him — over him, you understand, not ran him over. The tires did not flatten him. Still, he was dead. By the time I rushed to the street, his legs were stiffening. Trapped under that car, the roaring engine, pinned in that wash of exhaust. Any man overtaken by such unreasoning forces so, too, would die of FRIGHT.
Now: Gadzooks! is in a shoebox. On a bluff overlooking Ball’s Falls. On top of the box is a silenced Glock 10mm handgun. I am in my vendor’s blues. I am digging a hole.
Wipe my brow. Pulse check. Fifty-eight bpm. Heft the gun. Adjust for windage. Empty the magazine into an elm. Collect the shell casings. Gadzooks!: into the hole.
Voices arise. I kneel at the bluff’s edge. Three men with a blue barrel. Colin Hill, the stuntman. Wesley Hill, his father. A third young man I do not recognize.
Colin Hill strips at water’s edge. Afterwards, he crawls onshore after plummeting. He ignores his father’s outstretched hand.
My name is Jeffrey. My mother smoked crack cocaine.
An addict of loose moral virtue, says Mama, who died giving birth. “A defiance of nature,” Mama said. “A ripe apple pushed out of a rotted one.” My mother died with chalky lips, Mama says.
Three pounds, nine ounces. They called it a miracle when I failed to die. Six months with casts on my elbows so I would not pull my joints apart with my frantic infant exertions. Mama keeps the casts — so small you cannot even fit a finger into them — to remind me I was once so pitiful.
There is a stain on my brain the size of a cocker spaniel’s paw print. Occipital with spread to parietal, temporal lobes. Only dead black meat.
“Your mother was a crackhead,” Mama says, “and your poppa was a sunbeam.”
The black spot is no physical bother. My fine motor, balance, speech skills: all tip-top. My pulse rate, excellent. Yet I fail to experience pain as others do. As a six-year-old I stuck my finger into a stationary bicycle ridden by Mama’s sometime boyfriend William “Cappy” Lonnigan. “What a nutty thing to do, kid!” My finger hung by a shred. The paramedics said I was “the stoniest little trouper” they ever saw.
Sundays Mama took us to church for ablution. The congregation swayed.
“Feel it, darling?” We were all Mama’s darlings. “The LOVE?”
I do not feel LOVE. RAGE. SYMPATHY. They live in the black spot. I have woken howling odd places in twisted bodily positions, never knowing why. I see guests on daytime talk shows. Emotion-torn faces crumbling apart under studio lights. Comprehension eludes me.
Mama took me to a movie. In it, a boy with massive facial deformities taught a blind girl to “see.” He put a hot potato in her hands: RED. Cotton batten: CLOUDS.