And then there’s the paranoia.
My crib, I’m sure, was too small and unsafe. A normal-sized child could easily have stuffed his head between the railings. Only my giant, oversized head saved me. I remember the countless hours I spent lying on my back, unable to roll over onto my stomach, staring at the asbestos-laden ceiling, watching the particles sifting down through my “Songbirds of the Central Midwest” mobile and down, down, down my throat and into my lungs. My parents, I’m sure, picked the crib out of somebody’s trash. The mobile was probably a gift from some thoughtless distant relative who didn’t realize that I was terrified of the Midwest, and of the particular songbirds that dwell there. They looked like German aircraft circling above me. The only thing that gave me comfort in the room was the night light plugged into the outlet. It was a banana, or a moon, with a smile on its face and light shooting out its nose.
My parents, Paul and Bonnie, are so proud of their early poverty. They like to think that they raised themselves up by their bootstraps. But it’s not like we’re swimming in it now. The house we live in, I’m sure, could collapse at any minute (termites), and we’d be buried alive. Our only hope would be our German shepherd, Rex. But he’d probably run over to the park and swim in the fountain while we bled to death in our urine-soaked nightclothes. Bugs (centipedes) would sit on our eyeballs while Rex bit at the waterspouts. How tragic it would be for Rex when he came back and found our bodies eaten away (rats) and then had to live with my sister in her immaculate apartment and listen to her humping her stupid boyfriend.
My father, Paul, could get us out of this rathole.
“It’s no rathole!” he is always telling me.
“Then why do I have to sleep in the basement?”
“Because you’re twenty-eight years old!”
This is his answer to everything. He thinks my condition is optional. “You’re not sick,” Paul tells me. “You’re a bum.” Sometimes I think about leaving home and living on the streets just to teach him a lesson. The streets, however, are no place for a guy like me (rats and bugs). Paul is not a large man. He wears black plastic glasses and is clumsy with tasks that other people perform with ease. I see him lose his balance sometimes when he is walking up the stairs. And whenever he carries a plate of food across the room, the food is at risk of sliding off. Meals with gravy are especially harrowing to watch. Sometimes, when Paul is shuffling around, I am convinced I could tip him over just by nudging him. It would be satisfying, but, boy, then he’d have my ass in a sling.
I think Paul is waiting for me to leave this house (by casket) before he buys another one. He must have money socked away after all these years as parts manager at that place where he works. Bonnie used to work, too, as a nurse in a hospital. But she was bringing home more than a paycheck (Ebola), and I asked her very nicely to quit, which she did, though now I am her only patient and am forced to live with the constant threat of sponge baths and spoon-feedings of puréed vegetables. When we hear the blender, Rex and I make ourselves scarce.
I hate the blender. The garbage disposal, too. I sure could do without that thing! The day the men came and put it in was the worst day of my life. All I can think about is getting my hand stuck in there. Why would my hand be in there? Maybe I’d be retrieving a dropped biscuit. Maybe I’d be passing by and my hand would slip down there just as the disposal was turned on. The truth is I sort of want to put my hand down there. I must have been hypnotized when I was little.
“You’re going to learn the hard way,” Paul warned me one time when he caught me looking down the drain with a flashlight.
“I can’t see anything!” I said, frustrated.
“They’re miniature beavers,” he said, looking over my shoulder. “They’re afraid of the light.”
“Really?”
Nothing would please Paul more than for me to learn such a painful lesson (amputation). Bonnie would hate me for making such a bloody mess, and I’d have to get a hook, and then I’d never find work in my field.
One time I made the mistake of moving out of the house. I’d thrown a bowl of beef stroganoff out the window (parsley), and Paul had given me a lesson on diplomacy. So when he told me I should get my own apartment, instead of crying, “No way!” I decided to be diplomatic. I said that I’d agree to move, but only under the condition that my new apartment have a spiral staircase, a bathroom with two sinks, a fireplace that you could light by turning on a switch, and a Southwestern motif.
Paul came home three nights later and told me to pack my bags.
I never made it to my apartment, though. Paul drove me out of town, beaming and humming oldies. At a stop sign, I exited the vehicle and darted into a wooded lot.
How long was I in the woods? It’s impossible to say. A week? Ten days? Several hours? My progress was slow (quicksand), and I was followed, I’m sure, by Paul’s minions from the parts department. When I got back home, Bonnie had converted my bedroom into a sewing room. She’d never sewn a thing in her life! I began to throw her sewing supplies out the window, but before I got very far I found a pincushion that looked strikingly like a chubby man-child — it had many, many pins in it — so I left the rest as it was and set up housekeeping in the basement, where they’d put my things. Paul did not appear happy when he came home later that night: no beaming, no oldies. Rex and I, however, had a hell of a reunion.
Their mistake was not throwing my stuff in the trash. They know that now, and I know that they know, so I never ride anywhere with Paul, even though he’s always asking, always hopeful. Rex, I am sorry to say, does go with him. He’s stupid that way. Our first dog, Cody, made that mistake one too many times, and my sister and I never saw him again.
My medication, I believe, is optional. They say you are supposed to take it regularly, but of course they say that: it means more dough for them. Why don’t I take my medicine? Because I don’t want to walk through life like a zombie. I love Rex, but I don’t want to act like him, wandering from room to room without knowing why. Paul and Bonnie would love for me to take my medicine. I’m easier to control when I take it, they say, and I’m more fun. But I’m afraid I’ll wake up one day to discover I have a potted plant resting on my head and several years have passed. So I am careful about what I take and when. For instance, I will never take medicine if I know my sister is coming by. Bonnie tries to slip it in my food, but I am onto her. The applesauce gives her away. Suddenly, it’s applesauce all the time, applesauce with everything, even with spaghetti and pizza. Applesauce has become my enemy. I slip Rex my applesauce while Paul and Bonnie are distracted by Wheel of Fortune. He has never been so well-behaved.
One evening, a couple of hours after dinner, I came up from my “bedroom” and found Paul in the kitchen standing over Rex. He was crying and vulnerable to being tipped over. “He’s dead!” he bellowed.
I took a good swing with my foot and kicked Rex, hard, and he staggered noiselessly, but not unhappily, to his feet and moved into the next room.
As a nurse, Bonnie once knew how to trick people into taking their meds. The sudden appearance of the applesauce is a sign of decline on her part. She is inept as a nurse and has a pear-shaped body. She scuttles around the house like a bottom-heavy child’s toy and appears nearly impossible to tip over. I look nothing like her. I look nothing like either of my parents, yet they refuse to admit that I’m adopted, even when taped to a chair. The truth is, I’m not very interested in my real parents, except that they may have a bigger house and, I’m sure, a prettier daughter.
Just because I am a bit “psychotic” doesn’t mean that I don’t have urges. Yet my sister still refuses to put out. She says she is tired of my asking every time I see her. I tell her that if she came around more often, I wouldn’t have to ask so much.
“For instance,” I say to her, “if you came by every week —” she comes by once a month — “I’d only ask you every other time I see you.”
“Then you’d be asking me twice as much,” she says.
“No,” I point out, correctly, “I’d only be asking you half as much.”
She works in a bank and is not very smart. While Bonnie is harassing her about some “boy” named Jimmy, I switch dinner plates with my sister. She has said before that she doesn’t remember much of her weekends at home. She should be grateful to me for that and should thank me by letting me put a long object (bowling trophy) in her cookie. If I could find my pills, I’d slip them into her applesauce, and then maybe I’d get to have sex with her. So far, the closest I’ve ever come to having sex is sticking a peanut-butter cracker on my poker and letting Rex lick it off. Rex is a fine-looking animal. He has a thick coat and can fetch the daily paper, but not the Sunday.
Bonnie is plotting to kill me (dismemberment). I keep hiding the trash bags. “Where are the trash bags?” she is incessantly asking.
“How should I know?” I say.
“For Christ’s sake, I can’t keep throwing your father’s money away on trash bags.”
“Well, without trash bags,” I point out, “you really can’t throw it away.”
That’s when she’ll make a threatening comment, pivot like a ball in a socket, and wobble out of the room.
I don’t like trash bags. Back when I used to ride in the car with Paul, I’d see them on the side of the highway. I knew what was in them.
“A body wouldn’t fit in a garbage bag,” he’d say.
“A torso would,” I’d say. And it would. Even a hefty man-boy torso.
“You make me crazy,” Bonnie says to me one day, still not having found the trash bags.
“You shouldn’t make light of my people’s condition,” I tell her. “Didn’t you see Cuckoo’s Nest?” — the greatest movie of all time.
“Why don’t you just tell me where they are?”
“Why don’t you just use paper bags?”
“Because the grease [blood] soaks right through.”
In an attempt to kill two birds with one stone, I’ve jammed the trash bags down the garbage disposal.
Bonnie leans against the doorjamb. For now, she’s given up. “You’ve really been brushing Rex a lot lately,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“He looks great.”
I give old Rex the once-over. “He sure does,” I say.
“He’ll look nice for our guests,” she says, and retreats into the kitchen.
“Guests?” I say to the empty room.
Paul has confessed to thinking that my condition, though diagnosed and documented by some of the finest professionals our medical community has to offer, is just an excuse for being lazy. “You’re as sane as a songbird,” he says.
“I keep seeing things,” I tell Paul. “Horrible things.”
“It’s all in your head,” he says.
Exactly.
“You give up on everything,” he says. “You always have.”
I haven’t given up on the sexual pursuit of my sister, I think to myself. But there are other things I have given up on. Like ice-skating, for instance (frostbite and amputation). Ice-skating is basically signing up for death. You could fall through a crack in the ice, or a skate blade could slice right across your jugular.
“You just have to be different,” Paul said to me the first time I refused to go skating with the family. I was maybe fourteen.
“I don’t want to get my fingers chopped off,” I said.
Paul promised that my fingers would be safe.
“But can you say the same for my jugular?” I asked.
They left me at home. On the way out the door, my sister, then ten, punched me with her ring pop.
Now my doctor asks me, “Is ice-skating more exciting because you can’t do it?”
“I get chills watching it on TV,” I tell him. “I can’t tear my eyes away. It’s like watching a train wreck.” (Don’t get me started.)
“Perhaps,” my doctor suggests, “you create a fear of skating just to make the world a more interesting place.”
“But, Doc, the jugular,” I say, holding my throat.
“Maybe you create a dangerous world because the real one bores you.” He raises his big Indian eyebrows, the way he does when he thinks he’s made a good point.
If I thought about it, this could go a long way toward explaining my fascination with my sister.
I throw open the door to our first guests, two people I’ve never laid eyes on before in my life. “Bill!” I shout. “And Marcy!”
Paul, standing right behind me, says, “This is Jerry and Anne.”
He likes to make me look like an idiot. And I guess I knew these people are not Bill and Marcy. They just seem like they could be Bill and Marcy. “How’s Scotland?” I ask them.
“They’re from Albany,” Paul says. He just doesn’t get it.
I drape their coats over my arm and place my free hand on Paul’s shoulder. “How about getting Bill and Marcy a drink?”
“Jerry and Anne,” he says as I walk away.
When I was little and we lived in my parents’ first house, the deathtrap, my mother would make me take the leftover peas down to the basement. Those peas were not at all like the peas they make these days. They were dark and swollen, and they floated around in the plastic container like eyeballs. I or my sister had to take them down to the basement john and flush them. I don’t know why we had a toilet down there. The basement in that dump wasn’t fixed up or anything, and the toilet looked like something that had been ripped out of a bus station. Today, if even a single pea finds its way onto my plate, I won’t sleep for weeks.
Was I afraid down there? You bet. There was a strange man down there. His teeth were yellow and loose and fell to the floor when he talked. My doctor has told me that this man was not real. And I know he must be right. How could a man live down there with no food? What kind of life is that, anyway? What purpose would he have for living? I know he was not real.
So why, when Paul sends me down to the basement tonight for more ice from the freezer, do I catch a glimpse of the man out of the corner of my eye, sitting on the edge of my bed?
“I’m just getting more ice,” I say, my back to him — or rather, to the empty room. And then I get the ice and leave, careful not to look his way again. I know if I do look, he won’t be there.
My doctor, the impudent, bushy-browed Indian, suggested that I never saw the man in my childhood, that I have since made him up.
“Are you mad?” I said. “Why would I do such a thing?”
“Perhaps,” he said, “your own childhood bored you.”
Indians cannot be trusted.
There are many women at this party I would like to have sex with — or perhaps stick something (banana) in their cookie. They wear these little knee-length dresses, and they may even have fruit stuck in their cookies already. My sister is not at this party. She doesn’t like my parents’ friends, or bananas. My sister is not a good conversationalist. When she eats, she holds her fork across her index finger like a teeter-totter. That is not to say that this unnerving habit alone makes her bad to have around at parties, but it is a sign of the compulsive behavior that makes her sometimes unbearable. At the dinner table, she props her chin on the V of her thumb and forefinger and doesn’t say a word. It’s as if the rest of us are all just so boring to her; our conversations are so boring. It’s as if, to her, we’re just discussing trash bags and the sprinkler system, and not my father’s plot to kill his son (adopted) and bury him (alive) out back.
When she holds her face like that, her fat cheeks fold up like the skin of a Shar-Pei or the undulating hills of Ireland in the springtime. Once, she lifted her chin off the V, and I saw her entire face fall off. It was pretty bloody beneath, and there were bugs crawling around. I think she’d look better if she let her hair grow.
Paul is the bowler of the household. He has his own ball, which is really heavy. He is not a very good bowler because he lacks balance. I have been told, by a certain Indian friend of mine, that I lack balance. I am supposed to imagine that I’m on a teeter-totter (my sister’s fork), and I have to remain in the middle.
Paul carries his bowling ball in a black bag that looks like the cases doctors carry on old TV shows. When he walks out the door with it, he says, “House call!” This is very funny. The shoes, which look like the shoes worn by a type of person whose name I am too chilled even to speak (clown), he keeps in the car. I may be in the living room with Rex, and Paul will march past, satchel in hand, head down. “House call!” he’ll say. I’ll applaud, and from some remote part of the house, Bonnie will laugh, and Paul will barrel through the door and go bowl a 110.
Paul took me to the bowling alley one time, several years ago, but the place proved to be a little too much for me. It was waxy and exploding and merry. Someday, somebody in a long black coat (mad gunman) is going to throw open the glass doors, step into the red-carpeted lobby, and shoot the place to shit. And I thought it was going to be that day. That’s why I spent most of the evening under a bench. In a moment of spastic terror (everybody wearing clown shoes), I heaved my bottle of orange soda down a lane. For that, Paul had some explaining to do.
I think Paul should throw his ball harder down the lane. My sister tells me, incorrectly, that throwing the ball harder would only increase the odds that the ball would end up in the gutter. I point out that the ball would actually be on the lane for less time, and so would have less of a chance of going into the gutter. I have also told Paul that he should put his thumb in the hole, but he’s going to stick to his own style. Paul’s bowling ball looks how the earth would look from space if it were made of cantaloupe. The colorful ball and the technique of not using his thumb are his trademarks. Bonnie does not bowl but is shaped like a bowling pin, which may explain why Paul continues to bowl.
When they have sex, Paul shouts out, “House call!”
On my second trip to the basement, I am followed by a woman. “Helen, lovely Helen,” I say. I don’t know what to do. I’ve never had a woman in my room before, except for my sister, and she didn’t stay long. This woman has on a green dress with sequins, and a tiara.
“My name is Barbara, jackass.”
She has a husky voice and is drunk and busty. She looks for a place to set her drink, and we share a perplexing moment over the complete absence of flat surfaces. She drops her plastic glass to the cement floor. The ice spills out wonderfully.
“Barbara, lovely Barbara.”
Her mouth is warm and it’s on my mouth. Her hand is cold and it’s in my pants. My goodness. “House call! House call! House call!”
The light goes on at the top of the stairs. “What’s going on down there?” Bonnie yells.
There is a long, silent pause while I think of something to say. Helen, lovely Helen, licks her fingers. “Nothing!” I yell back.
Then I get the ice and follow Helen up the stairs. The floor is covered with bananas. I carefully avoid them. I can do this, because I have balance.
I return to my job, which is to pick up empty drinks and deliver full ones and not talk to anyone. I keep an eye out for my friend, but she has disappeared. Paul, who in his inebriated condition is especially vulnerable to being tipped over, finds me fishing cashews from the nut bowl. He looks suspicious, as if he knows something (hidden cameras) that he couldn’t otherwise know.
“I was in the basement,” I say. I am sweating even more than usual.
“What were you doing down there?” he asks.
Several moments pass before I blurt out, “Bowling!”
Thankfully, Paul has heard such drivel from me before, and he walks away, leaving me to my nuts. If he had the same nose for bullshit as my Indian doctor, I’d be toast.
Time passes. I am occupied by tasks and distractions. I find myself having a discussion with Bonnie in the kitchen. The topic is me, and she, I’m sure, is performing some sort of psychological assessment. This routine is one I have been through many times, going back to when I was a mediocre student at Ugo Cerletti Elementary and Bonnie was about the best field-trip mother ever. She went with us to the train museum, the Shaker village, and the Indian graveyard. She carried caramels in her big skirt pockets and would throw them to kids even when they got the answers wrong. She was very good at keeping us in a group. Sometimes, when two kids got out of hand, she’d pick them up and carry one under each arm; Bonnie is a strong woman — a strong, pear-shaped woman. Sometimes kids would horse around just so they would get picked up. Then she dropped Peter Hasse on his head at the apple orchard, and that was her last field trip.
“How has your evening been?” she asks.
It is clear that her radar has gone off. I force myself to turn away and start calling, “Rex! Rex!”
She grabs me by the shoulder, turns me around, and asks if I’ve been bothering the guests.
I tell her that I have not.
She asks me if I have been drinking.
I tell her that I absolutely have not.
She asks me if I’m having fun.
I tell her I got a hand job in the basement.
And that’s the end of my evening. She asks me to identify the “pervert.” I am unable to disguise my disappointment when I tell her that the fantastic woman has left the party. I am marched down the stairs and put to bed by a very upset pear-shaped woman.
“Get some sleep,” she says. “Tomorrow will be a hard day.”
I am too excited to fall asleep. I just lie there in my too-small bed and stare at the glowing stars and planets that Paul has stuck to my ceiling. For a long time I thought they’d fall off and cause severe damage (blindness), but they never have. It’s truly amazing. There are fewer footfalls upstairs, and I am always afraid that they will stop altogether and I will go up there and everything will be gone, including the furniture and the drapes and even Rex. Sunlight will pour through the bare windowpanes, illuminating the empty rooms, igniting the floating dust (mites). Nobody will come to get me, and when I go outside, the world will be empty, too: just me walking down the barren streets, no sign of life except for the distant caw of a blackbird and the heavenly voice-over of my Indian doctor saying, “There is nothing to be afraid of.”
This story previously appeared in the Threepenny Review.
