As I Die Lying (8 page)

The thing-with-the-knife raised its arm.

I could only watch in
horrible fascination. I was used to Mister Milktoast taking over,
but he was nowhere around. Was this
my
arm lifting, throwing a sharp
shadow on the wall? Was it
my
bones and muscles that had flexed themselves into
revenge? Was it
my
eyes Mother was looking into, her own eyes as wide as Jesus
plates? Was it
me
plunging the knife into the meat of Father's back with a
chicken-soupy sound?

Father was so intent on his artistic
toe-tapping that he didn't register the metal intruder that had
found a home between his shoulder blades. He froze, his right leg
raised in a victory jig, his boot poised for a dramatic climax to
his love ballet. It became his swan song, the culmination of years
of dedicated practice.

He spun, all grace forgotten, his sewer eyes
spinning wildly in his head like slot machine reels trying to line
up Lucky Sevens. As he fell, his mouth formed questions that had no
answers. Just before he landed, driving the knife completely
through his chest to plow through his splintered rib cage, his eyes
stopped spinning long enough to lock onto mine, and in his last
slippery moments he recognized his executioner.

Or so he thought.

He lay on his back, a crimson gurgle rising
from the black depths of his throat as his esophagus sucked madly
for air. Mother screeched but had no energy to rise. The
thing-with-the-knife that was me watched Father's final discoveries
march across his features in a platoon of twitching facial
expressions. Father found cold sobriety, he found betrayal, he
found agony returning like a karmic boomerang bouncing back
threefold. And if he searched for God and salvation and redemption,
he must have come up empty.

If indeed the thing-with-the-knife was me,
then what happened next was entirely the thing's own actions. As
Mother watched, slipping into the feverish cold of shock, the
thing-with-the-knife rolled Father over and yanked the slick knife
handle out of his ruined flesh. Then the thing hacked at Father's
bootlaces, scarring the leather, screaming and frothing in search
of socks. Then the boots were off, flopping over, impotent.

And that's where I found myself when the
thing gave me back my skin and bones. The thing shambled off to the
Bone House where Mister Milktoast lived and where I had been
briefly imprisoned.

"Richard," Mother moaned. "Lord,
no...no...no..."

Her voice trailed on with her mantra of
denial as I looked down at the bloody boot I held in one hand and
the butchering steel shaft that I held in the other. The rich
crimson sauce coagulated, turning a crusted red brown as it cooled
and dried. I blinked in the soft glow of electric light bulbs as if
I had just come back from a journey to the blackest corners of
night.

And I was standing over my father's
corpse.

And Mother was trying to stand and my own
legs were gelatin and Father's legs were bloody noodles.

Mother took the knife from my hand and looked
into my eyes and held my chin as if she were scolding me for
sneaking into the cookie jar. Her eyes shone like stones in a creek
bed.

"Listen, Richard. Here's how it
happened."

How? I had seen, hadn't I? I was there.

"It was
me
," she said. Her voice was cold and
metallic, like the knife. "I killed him. I...got tired of him
beating me...I was scared he was going to kill me..."

No, Father had wanted to kill her slowly, not
all at once. Her sudden death would have robbed him of a reason to
get up in the morning. Their dance had been scripted from the
beginning.

"Listen now, baby," she went on, and sobs
crept into her words. "When the police come...you don't know
anything, okay? You were in your room and you heard a fight and
came out and saw him dead...you got blood on you when you took the
knife from me turned him over.”

And the tears broke free, running down her
scared face. And fear fed her mind, threw fuel on the flames of
panic. I nodded, numbly. I wanted to be gelatin again, to sag back
into the dark hollow in my head. Even then, I didn’t want any
responsibility for my actions. I was a disciple of the Blame Game
and I had learned at the feet of masters.

"And the police will
know...self-defense or something... people will understand if
it's
me
. It's the
only way."

She made me call the police. A long night of
questions followed, and I didn't have to pretend that I was hazy on
the sequence of events. Mother sat at the kitchen table talking to
the officers as red and blue lights pulsed through the window from
the driveway. Her hands, the ones she had rubbed in her husband's
blood, were shaking, but her voice was firm. Much later, the police
led her out into the cold night through the crowd of neighbors and
she sat in the back seat of one of the police cars. I watched from
the porch as she was driven away, and she waved at me with one
bloody hand.

"Was that you, Mister Milktoast?" I asked
later, in the silence of my dark bedroom.

"That wasn't us. That couldn't have been
us."

"Who, then?"

"Richard. I think...we've got company."

Of course, what else could he say? After all,
we’d learned the Blame Game together.

Never had I been so proud of Mother as when
she stood calmly before the court and spun a hundred tales of abuse
that were too vivid to be mere imagination. Never had I loved her
so as she bravely detailed her imaginary crime. Never had I hated
her so as she took the blame that was rightfully mine.

After the testimony of a handful of
neighbors, not a jury in the country would have convicted her.
Following a finding of not guilty by just cause, she walked down
the high-roofed halls of the courthouse as a headline, beset by an
army of photographers and news crews and tight-jawed reporters. As
she walked down the granite steps, holding her red wool coat closed
against the early spring wind, she dropped to page two. Driving
away, her story was shunted to the back burner. In a week, she was
last week's news.

Except at home.

"Do you want to talk about it?" she
asked.

"No."

"What's done is done."

"It'll never be done."

"I still love you."

"I don't
need
love." I could lie like that.
"What's it ever brought me?"

"We still have each other."

"That's even worse."

"I don't care what people say. I just care
about us."

"Do you miss him?" I was afraid to ask,
afraid not to ask.

"I just get lonely sometimes. And tired."

"Don't cry. He's not worth it."

"I'm not crying for him."

Crying for us. Always for us. "Shh. It's
okay."

"It's not okay."

"Let's not talk anymore. It's time for
bed."

THIS CHAPTER HAS NO NUMBER

"You think?" I asked Mister Milktoast.

We were waiting in the hall to see Mrs. Bell,
the high school guidance counselor. I had been sent to her because
I made it into the ninth grade without ever fitting in. Plus people
thought my mother had killed my father. If I didn’t have Mister
Milktoast, I probably would have doubted my sanity. But if two
people share the same delusion, it’s not really a delusion, is
it?

"Sounds a little crazy to me,” he answered.
“And you know what I think about you and crazy."

"Yeah. But it sort of makes sense."

"Come on, Richard. Multiple personality
disorder? Who are you trying to kid? Nobody falls for that
anymore."

"How else can I explain your existence?
You're not the result of schizophrenia. 'Split from reality.' That
doesn't quite fit the bill. And I don't think you'll let me write
you off as the invisible childhood friend any longer."

"No,” Mister Milktoast said. “And there's the
new one to think about. The one who killed Father."

"See? That takes care of the 'multiple'
part."

"But how can you call it a 'disorder'? From
where I'm sitting, it looks like I'm the one who keeps things in
here from falling apart."

"I've got to hand it to you there."

"And don't you ever forget it. United we
stand, divided we autumn."

"We'll stick together until the end. You've
kind of grown on me, you know?"

Laughter trickled from a classroom down the
empty hall. Normal people, normal noise. I sat there having a
conversation with myself. Or maybe I’m just making this up, more
revisionist history because the truth is too unbearable.

"And there's the fact that most documented
cases of MPD occur in women who were sexually abused as children.
There are hundreds of psychiatrists who still don't believe it
exists. Besides, now they call it ‘dissociative disorder.’ Fancier
name."

“
Are you going to go
Freudian on me?” I said. “Use my traumatic childhood as an excuse
for all the terrible things you’ll do later?”

“
Your brains are Freud or
scrambled, but you’ll always be Jung at heart.”

The door opened beside us. Mrs. Bell poked
her head out and said, "Richard Coldiron?"

"Yes, ma'am." I stood and walked into her
office.

"Let me handle this," I whispered to Mister
Milktoast.

"What's that?" Mrs. Bell said, sitting behind
her big wooden desk. Her hair was white, like stuffing that had
spilled out of a hole in a pillow.

"Nothing." I slouched into the chair that
Mrs. Bell waved me toward.

"Look on the wall," Mister Milktoast said
inside my head. "A shrinking certificate. Be careful."

Pipe
down
, I commanded.

Mrs. Bell shuffled some papers on her desk.
"So, what seems to be the trouble, Richard?" she finally said,
smiling as she looked into my eyes. Hers was a Grinch smile, one
that looked like children's torn flesh was hidden behind the tight
lips.

I studied my shoelaces. "No trouble,
ma'am."

"That's not what I hear." She rattled her
papers.

"Well..."

"We can talk about it. Everything you say
stays with me. Our little secret."

Oh, great. Secrets. "There's nothing to talk
about."

The Grinch smile slid downward. Her chair
squeaked as she leaned back. "When there's family turmoil such as
this..." She paused and looked at the pale-green cinder block wall
as if she had a window. "...then it's bound to have some kind of
negative impact on the innocent."

I shrugged. She obviously didn’t understand
the concept of “guilty bystanders.”

"When you lose a loved one, sometimes the
grief gets buried,” she said. “It's okay to let it out."

"I'm fine, really. I just like to keep things
to myself."

"Hmmm. Just remember that it wasn't your
fault."

Mister Milktoast echoed her
in my thoughts.
Hear that, Richard? It
wasn't your fault. How original.

I got a sudden headache. The bad voice came
out like acid vomit.

"Oh, yes the fuck, it
was
," the voice roared
inside my head. My veins split, my eyes watered. For a second, I
thought I had said it out loud, but Mister Milktoast assured me I
hadn’t. Of course, he might have been lying. While you can always
trust me, and I’ve found him more or less reliable, everyone has an
ulterior motive, and don’t ever forget it. All bets are off in
revisionist history.

Mrs. Bell saw me wince. Then I was gone,
inside, and all I could do was watch and wait. The Bone House was
safe, but like a bomb shelter, it both protected and
imprisoned.

"It's okay to feel sad," she said, and her
smile was back. Grinch with an appetite for all the sweet little
Cindy Lou Whos of the world.

"It
was
my fault,” the voice told her,
using my mouth and lips and vocal chords and lungs. "But I'm not a
damn bit sorry."

Mrs. Bell nodded slowly and seriously. "Now
we're getting somewhere. Let these feelings out."

She scribbled on a notepad while talking to
herself. "'Problems with authority? Possible Oedipus complex?
Post-traumatic stress disorder?'"

She had a long conversation with the thing
that had taken over my mouth.

And they thought
I
didn't associate well
with others. They hadn’t met Little Hitler yet.

CHAPTER NINE

Ottaqua, Iowa. 1989.

I was in my senior year of high school,
filling dreary days as if they were journal entries, the secret
dairy of an uninspired life. A miserable memoir written in
invisible ink. I wish I had typed it then instead of having to do
it now, when memory fails me and I have better things to do. Then I
could fake the ending and we could all go on with our lives. But
this is a book and you expect me to tell everything just as it
really happened, despite all that bullshit about voices in my
head.

Think about it a moment.

In writing, you’re supposed to avoid clichés
like the plague or else make them obvious like you knew it all
along. Wink wink.

But the first time I go and kill somebody, I
reach for that convenient excuse of being squirrel-shit nutty. And,
even today, I’m not sure whether I really killed my father or if I
just freaked out because Mother did it. Maybe it doesn’t make any
difference now. It’s not like Mister Milktoast wrote this book, or
Little Hitler. Fuck them. My name’s on the cover and that’s that. I
am the author.

And if I’m not, they better put my name on
the royalty checks anyway.