How the Days of Love and Diphtheria (2 page)

Are you lonely out here? Do your parents know you're gone?

How the exterminator clothes stunk of the son's last moment. How they fell from the boy's figure like a sack, as if the dead-son had been twice his height. How the boy's teeth trembled as he thought,
They will know
. How the boy crept into the house dressed in the black clothes of the dead boy, and how the soot trailed in his wake. How the parents slept somewhere in the house, their snores while he waited for them in the living room, and how they found him asleep in the morning, or what seemed morning under black skies. How they prodded him with fingers until he woke and how when they spoke he did not know the words. The father carried him to the bathroom and the mother stripped the clothes from him like an enormous skin. How they held him under the shower, no matter his thrashing, and how the water became pools of oil. How they called him the name of their son and dressed him in the dead child's too large clothes.

How he stood before the fogged mirror, pink and alive.

How the father said, “Did you always have brown eyes?”

How they poured him milk as if his throat were not clogged with soot.

How they watched television and, when he snorted at the stupidity, how they said “but you like this show” and how in his mind the boy thought of you and your horses and your knives and your canisters of gasoline rampaging into the television house. The blonde family, blood smudged and torn apart while once bald eagles swirled overhead. The pristine house, wrapped in smoke and flame, and your black masks on the television.

The son dead before him. His bulging purple face. His coal-stuffed eyes.

How slow the son's dead meat slid free of his clothes. The pale white against the landscape. How the boy kicked the dirt over and over until the son was a mound in the shadows along the hillside.

“Looks like we need to do some school shopping,” the mother said when the son's clothes did not fit him.

How the mother kneeled before the boy's bed. How they prayed although he did not know the prayer. How she must have known.

What did he dream in these last moments? Did he consider his father and the soot angels they made? The arms of his mother, their warmth?

How the boy and the father stood at the window watching the burning house, how it shimmered in the waves of heat. How the father said—

I believe in what comes before innocence. I believe in the wide yawning mouth
.

Now the boy in the dead-son's bedroom. How he laid on the son's spaceship sheets, the faint green of the stars decaled along the ceiling. The shapes they spelled in their secret language. How kittens seemed to mew within the walls and how the boy slept, contented by the sound. How the boy read
The Art of Lovemaking
from the dead-son's shelf although the words seemed squiggles of worms, how the pictures were black and white photos of bodies, naked men with shaved heads, their ribs and shoulders, the bones jutting, naked men tossed and wrapped into each other, naked men piled and mixed with the dirt while smoke stacks loomed in the dim background. The coils of black smoke. He blushed when the mother asked him what he was reading and he said later it reminded him of her and Father, together. “How so?” But he would not say.

How the father said, “Do you remember when we played catch outside—”

And the boy said, “Until we lost the ball—”

“In the mounds somewhere,” the father said. “And how angry your mother was, how she wouldn't look at us. We were filthy, I'm sure. But a boy has to play, I said—”

How he kissed the first girl he brought to his room, the taste of her wires, her blue rubber bands. Her smile and her neck against his kisses, the strawberry of her red hair. How she trembled beneath his weight, under his wetness, his hands. How she was firm and large and seemed as the mother once seemed through the lighted window. “Please, I want to see,” he told this girl. How she caught her hair, her braces, in her sweater. How her teeth chattered and her eyes darted. How the boy, with his lips and his hands, did not care even after her neck gave against his caresses and she seemed to fade in and out of consciousness. This girl, pale and fraught with freckles. And how her undershirt pulled free and how her gray brassiere and his fingers along the edges, the softness. Now pulling and unraveling and unsnapping until these, pink and erect and what he so long anticipated. How she whispered against his embraces that she should leave. How she heard the mewing within the walls, ghosts of kittens long dead, voices of kittens born anew. “There's nothing there,” the boy murmured against her neck, his hands—. How she pulled free anyhow. How she scurried while he lay, exposed and ready for her. How her soot tracks disappeared against the gusts and fresh cinders. How the boy never saw her again.

How the son sometimes stood on the hillside. His blue naked flesh. How in the evenings the son watched them from the yard. How they all seemed through the lighted windows. How the son made no gesture but to stand beneath the glow of the always burning house. How the boy locked the windows and propped chairs against the doors.

How the father told the boy, “Their son died from diphtheria. His mother found him, blue and wheezing. He was still alive when she arranged him in the casket but the boy was dead when the father arrived home, the white lace, his calm blue face. When she said the word he dragged the mother from the house. She'd gone mad, yelling in a language nobody understood. How the long trail of gasoline caught and spread. How it has burned ever since.”

The man gestured to the razed pines, the scorched stumps. I believe in how easily a forest burns, he said
.

These boys, boys whose names the boy could not recall, these dozens of boys and how they crowded into the boy's room, these boys with long tangled hair, boys with yellow teeth verging on green, boys smelling of fuel oil, of perspiration, of some rank earth, boys with switchblades unsnapped and glinting, boys with black eyes, with blood-shot eyes, these boys with fluids and how they dripped, yellow and red and translucent, these boys and how they piled over each other, how they giggled and sneered, how the boys crowded into the boy's room tingling all throughout with the longing to grope, to pull and suck and stab the boy atop or alongside or nearby. How the heat of the boys made the other boys dizzy, how they smoked cigarettes and snuck whisky and how the room filled with blue smoke and how they laughed at the mewing of kittens inside the wall, how these boys thumped at the wall with their knuckles, their knives, how these boys wanted to hunt and murder what lived within, how these boys glowed and grew rigid and purple in the light of the burning house.

How the son watched from the hillside. His bruised throat. How he stood in the center of the cinder yard with calm dead eyes. How one morning the boy woke, and there, the son, dangling from the ledge outside his window. His blue murderous fingers.

How the mother lost her slender figure, how she resembled a pear, save her sags and folds, which seemed more the melting and collapsing of a large candle, how the dirt did not wash free from underneath, the smell of black and decay, and the walls always lost under dripping tar. Now how the father was too drunk on malt liquor and fuel oil to command the woman to scrub and how the woman was too fat to climb the stepladder, too immense and putrid to stretch her arms over her shoulders, too weak under the layers to scrub. Trapped along the walls, a thousand, thousand flies writhing and buzzing in the tar. How the woman slept now for the fumes of the tar of the always burning house. How her figure bulged on the sofa. How her wheezing trembled the house. How the father slept for his drink or stumbled up the stairs and how he sometimes lost himself along the banister and there he lay howling and moaning through the night. How the boys in their wild masses stampeded over him, how they stole his cigarettes, the last of his cashed disability check, how the boys bought firecrackers and lighters, how they exploded these on the lawn, the glow within the glow. How the father loomed at the boy's room and the stillness of a hundred boys within. How he slumped against the malevolence of children. How his lips, sodden for the boys within the room, the musk of the boys, the stale heat of the boys. How the father missed the trembling of youthful flesh within his arms, none since this wretched family he built, these black walls, this wife who bulged and wheezed, this house he grew from the timber and soot, this house under the light of the house burning, trapped always under this illumination.

The man gestured to the skies, Under the shadow of our aircraft, he said, a schoolyard of children became a river of tar
.

How the father leaned in the boy's bedroom doorway and in his arms, a folded pair of exterminator clothes, dusty and crisp with mold. How the boy's room was empty save for the boy, the scents and stains, the mounds of translucent fibers. The father's mouth scarcely moved when he spoke and how his words seemed the words of something less than human, some yawning piece of earth, some dying sludge. “You want to play catch?” the father said. “You old idiot,” the boy said. How the father lurched into the room and how the boy shoved him off, how the father pitched over, flailing. How the father struck his face on the boy's desk. How the father watched the boy from the floor, his face a sheet of blackish blood. “Too big to play with your old Dad huh,” the father said. “You're not as big as you think you are.” How the two swaddled their hands in white socks for lack of gloves and now in the basement how the walls sweltered and dripped, how the sound of hands wrapped in socks thumping against warm meat, how white socks clotted black with blood, how the father swung wild for the boy's face and how the boy mashed in the father's throat, his stomach, his kidneys. How the father wheezed and vomited. How the father buckled. How the boy was too quick and the father too drunk. How when the pain was gone the boy took the socks off and so too did the father. How the coal dust and soot filled the father's throat and how he fell to his knees, wheezing and dripping blood, saliva, mucus. How his face smeared violet. How the old man moaned and wept and how the boy left his father there, blind with blood.

How his face glowed with a long off yellow. How the father said, “I would burn this house and all of you in it, if I had to.”

How the boy woke, clasping his throat and gasping. How he believed he could not breathe although he was breathing. How he watched his skin in the bathroom mirror for hints of blue. How the boy slept with the medical encyclopedia under his pillow and how he reread the sections on sanitation and vaccination by the dead-son's night light. How he wandered the house while his parents slept, gauging the strength of his own breathing and listening to the mother's wheezing on the sofa. The father's low faint breaths in the basement. How this infection seemed an infection no fire could eradicate.

In those days, the man said, the city was reduced to rubble and the horses lost their skin for the fires. The horses in those days wandered pink and exposed. In those days men with skin like blackened alligators rode bicycles along ancient obliterated streets. In those days we watched them on the television news, and from our tallest buildings fell confetti and streamers. Our women kissed our men openly on the roads, in celebration
.

When the boy left, the father was asleep in the basement, his face crusted with black blood and flies. When the boy left the mother was asleep on the sofa. Her face and arms lost in immense putrid folds. When the boy left he took only a soft apple and the medical encyclopedia, until the mewing of the kitten inside of his walls became too great. How the boy opened the plaster along the cracks as if pulling open a canvas tent or the skin of a large animal, and there the white pink thing, trembling and mewing in his hands. How he stroked her soft white fur and how she mewed in his hands.

The man gestured to the narrow highways, the long stretches of dirt and dead grass. He indicated the bleached white skulls of horses and dogs. He told us of what you had seen and what you had done. The barns you razed to soil and the crops you brought the torches to, the cornfields you popped and, from the midst of the exploding white, how red and gray pheasants ascended, screaming and smoking, their feathers alight. How blood is a sort of copper. The farm mothers you held down and shoved full of red glistening pricks and knives. How they screamed through the rawhide buckles you clenched in their mouths. How a mound of children is inevitable and their smell is the musk of loam. How you marauded the suburbs and left the intestines of fathers and mothers and children coiled on front lawns. How we cannot always breathe. You spelled the names of a thousand ancient writers with the flames and blood of your conquests. You targeted not priests and kings but the blue fumes of mothers and fathers. You sought out the children and how they would grow into something other and you taught them to be no more. How we grew confused and lost by your light. The man gestured to the footprints along the road, those of a boy and those of a cat. The boy who followed your fires along the hillsides and ravines and the kitten who trotted, faithful and obedient, to the rhythms lost within his wake
.

How the rain pelted the roof and the long off flashing of lights and the kitten asleep on his belly. When the boy woke he woke to the wood smoke you built along the horizon, the hay and dung from barn animals long dead, their fumes mere remembrances trapped within the wood, the lice and rats within the hay the boy and the kitten bedded on. She, sleepy and fat on the mice he cornered and stomped for her. So long now since the boy knew the breathing or words of a creature other than the kitten, other than eagles gliding. How the boy knew by the eagles, the blackness of their skulls, the smoldering of their feathers, if you had passed by. How the kitten mewed when the eagles dove and returned to the gray skies with marmots and mice within their beaks. When the boy woke he stroked the kitten under the chin and the animal purred and stretched. How the boy slept by the rumbling within the kitten's throat, the crackling and splintering of your long off fires.