“My friends…” Moses began.
“Yes, your friends, the ones you brought to Logan, got him mixed up in all these things. I would not let my son grow up like I did,” Mr. Chatterton said. “I mean, can you imagine eating only brown, grey, and white for eighteen years — to never know what a red piece of meat looks like, to only find its flavor on your tongue in a darkened restaurant on a date with your future wife from the prairies, the fucking prairies. A woman who had never been to a real restaurant with napkins that weren’t made of paper. A woman who will then leave you after your son becomes a violent little shaved monster. Too many experiments. Too many failures, Moses.”
Moses took another sip of his water. The kitchen door was locked; Moses could see the key dangling from the knob. The hallway back to the front door was too short, its garish lipstick red illuminating a path to another locked exit. And Logan was still in the basement.
“My mistake was thinking that with no real controls, my son might make the right choices, that he might experience the joys I was denied. My wish was that he wouldn’t feel the same dreadful spike of joy when I heard that bastard was finally dead, chewing on the same sandwich he’d been eating since 1965, chewing on the same bullshit he’d always fed my mother and I until she ended up like a catatonic — like the unchanging face of a goddamn fucking mountain. A face that never changes. You ever see someone like that?
“And instead, I have a son like this. All hate and bile. I had a wife, too, but that’s gone. She left. She blames me. Me, me, me! Yes, me, Moses.” Mr. Chatterton spat onto the floor. “Back to Saskatoon, of all fucking places for a woman to go — because she doesn’t recognize her son. She’s part native and so is he, and when he found that out—”
“I don’t really know what you want me to say.”
Mr. Chatterton settled his glasses back onto his face before stabbing the scalpel deep into the table between them. Moses stood up from the table, considering which drawer held the knives. In another’s kitchen, Moses realized, you were always at their mercy.
“My wife can no longer look her only son in the face. She can’t look at me. I am the one who made her this way, just like my father made me into what I am now. He never changed, Moses. He stayed static,” Mr. Chatterton said. “The same clothing for forty years. The same job, the same meals. He never could abide what happened on this street. Never could sell the land as those cheap little fire hazards sprang up to kill all the trees on the street with their shadows…such long shadows, don’t you think, Moses?”
Moses tried to pretend he was talking to Bill Murray, tried to replace the sneer on Mr. Chatterton’s face with a smirk and a wink. This was all just a big joke. A scene that had gone off the rails a little. It happens on the set after a long day. That was all it was. Maybe they’d use the footage for a trailer or during the closing credits. It was a blooper reel.
“Yes, Mr. Chatterton. I think maybe I’ll go check on Logan. He didn’t seem exactly—”
“Exactly what? Exactly perfect? No. And that’s what his mother wanted him to be. That’s what we were striving to make here. Not perfect, maybe, but pure. And then you and your hate and your bile and all your — why?” Mr. Chatterton asked. “Why did you have to pick him? And she — she was my best chance at reversing years of research! Control over our own destiny! And now it’s all fucked up by your little dirty hands. Look at yourself, you little cunt!”
Moses was flying now, his feet gliding down the stairs, his hands tearing belts from Logan’s trembling, sweaty body, the overwhelming green of the bedroom bursting cells apart in Moses’s pupils.
The basement door popped open behind him. Mr. Chatterton was still muttering aloud about his father — that bastard, that bastard — because he could never say the man’s real name anymore, not after nights of holding that rabbit antenna until his shoulders collapsed under the strain, not after all the mornings where oatmeal was crammed down his gullet, not after years of living under the torture of that deadening sameness, an unending loop of the mundane that had caused his mother’s mind to rot. After all that, there was no name — there was only that bastard, that fucking bastard and his goddamn ham sandwiches.
Mr. Chatterton drew closer, his teeth shining and freshly cleaned by the dentist. He’d come home from an appointment to find a note about the hatred living in his basement and the wife who could no longer sustain herself as the focal point of his countless little cuts. His son had reacted so violently to revelations of his heritage that he’d split his skull against the bathroom mirror. The note was written in her gorgeous looping hand, but there was no love signed to the bottom. Only her maiden name without a forwarding address.
“You had to make him into one of you,” Mr. Chatterton said. “And you know, we really thought it was a phase. We thought he might have just been confused, you know? But it wasn’t. No, it wasn’t a phase. And she tried to teach him, but he wouldn’t listen. What did you think you were teaching him, Moses?”
“Nothin’,” Moses said. “I wasn’t even there. I told them it was stupid.”
The gag sprang out of Logan’s mouth and he was sliding out of the bed. He couldn’t stop coughing. Mr. Chatterton stood in the doorway, his skinny shoulders casting the room in jagged shadows. The light bounced off his oily scalp. He held the homemade scalpel in his hand, and he drew a line down the side of his arm with it. His hand didn’t waver as it moved.
“I tried to raise him in a way that my father would have disapproved, but he has the same hate, just now directed outward instead of…instead of in,” Mr. Chatterton said. “It can only push out for so long. For so long that hate can only push out until it reaches the edges of the universe, and it has no other place to go. Expanding till the center can’t hold together.”
Mr. Chatterton drew the blade down his other arm. Down and not across. No, he drew it down, straight down and deep inside his arm, flicking the blade out once he reached the base of his palm. Mr. Chatterton never did things in small strokes. The paint in each room was always a performance.
“It’s like a star, boys. That’s how it works. It pushes and pushes those on the outside, swallowing them whole into its burning, burning — but it can’t hold all of it for long, and just like a star, eventually it implodes. Collapses in on itself. Have you ever seen that?”
Mr. Chatterton dropped his homemade scalpel to the floor and it scurried under the bed.
“It falls inward, and all that spite, that fucking bile, it gets redrawn, redirected — some would say misdirected — but that is where the hate was meant to go in the first place.”
The blood was no longer seeping slowly from Mr. Chatterton. There was nothing slow about it. He staggered against the wall as the two teenage boys climbed up on the bed, scrambling to back away from his collapsing body. His hands were trembling, the knuckles growing pale like his face. He was no longer smiling, but his eyes were still pink, still raw.
“It all turns inward.”
Moses Moon knew this would never have happened with Bill Murray.
“It turns…”
It was Logan who climbed off of the bed and kicked his father’s head. Mr. Chatterton just shuddered once. There was no hollow noise, only a wet thunk like someone collapsing on a water bed. Neither of the boys ran for the phone. They crouched over the body and Moses tried to close Mr. Chatterton’s eyelids with his fingers. Logan slapped his shaking hand away.
“Don’t touch that bastard. Don’t even touch that fucking bastard.”
9