In Nightmares We're Alone (12 page)

A guy in a mask slices into a woman’s head with a bandsaw and Martin and I cringe and laugh. A guy gets pulled up into the fender of a bus and we cringe and laugh. A woman trips over a carpet and gets a pair of scissors lodged in her throat. A guy takes a hatchet to the face. A teenage girl gets hit by a subway and her blood splashes on twenty people rushing to help her. We cringe and laugh and cringe and laugh.

These days, this is the main way I relate to my son. The dark of the movie theater. The sounds of screams. Images of brutality and death.

A man unbuttons a woman’s blouse and I cover Martin’s eyes, and a part of me wonders if I’ve got the whole thing backward.

Me, the man who held a baby boy in his arms at seventeen but to this day has never been in a fight, I can’t remember anymore whether my dad covered my eyes for the nipples or the guts. Do you desire what’s paraded in front of you in all its graphic detail, or do you want what you’re told not to look at?

After the movie’s over we walk across the street to that cafe where we spend most of our time trying to pretend we still have a relationship.

“What happened to your foot?” he asks as I limp up the steps to the entrance. I didn’t see a doctor today like I promised myself I would.

“Nothing. Just hurt my toe.”

He doesn’t seem to hear me. “That was pretty badass when the elevator smooshed that guy, huh?”

“Yeah, Martin. That was pretty badass.”

I force myself to walk on the side of my foot until we get to the table and it’s a huge relief to finally sit down. It wasn’t this bad yesterday. I need to figure out what’s happening to me. Can’t be an STD, right? It has to be an infection. The natural kind that you get from wearing the same socks a couple days in a row and walking too much, not clipping your nails as often as you should. Even if none of that sounds like me, it’s what a bad toe has to be.

I can’t have it amputated. No matter what it costs to fix it, I have to. Even if it’s just a toe, they’ll all notice. I can’t leave my socks on with girls, not every time. Who does that? At some point they’ll see it and I’ll lose everything. No such thing as an attractive man with nine toes. Name a movie star. I dare you.

“You warming up to your classmates yet? Making some friends?”

“No, they’re all little kids.”

“They’re a year younger. Maybe a few of them two.”

He exhales dismissively, shakes his head, and puts it between his hands. That thing I said about the unwelcomeness of optimism in our culture, nowhere is it more true than in the ears of a ten-year-old boy. The screams of sluts and jocks and the roar of a chainsaw, sure, but optimism is gross and uncomfortable.

“You know what’s going to be awesome for you?” I tell him. “A few years from now when all of you start getting interested in dating, you’re gonna be the oldest guy in your class and that’s gonna be hot. They say girls mature faster too, so you’ll probably be interested at the same time they are. And you’ll be the smartest, the tallest, the strongest… They’re gonna be all over you.”

He doesn’t say anything.

“You noticing the girls yet? I can’t really remember how young it happens. Any cute ones in your class? You can tell me.”

“I don’t know.”

“All right, we don’t have to talk about it. You remember what I told you though, right? Talk about them, ask lots of questions, one compliment’s plenty, don’t be afraid of silence, and if you need something to say, just make it up.”

“God, I know.”

“You okay?”

“Why are girls the only thing you ever ask about?”

“Well all that’s true for boys too. Friends, girlfriends, whatever. You want people to like you, you have to talk to them right. It’s a skill.”

“I remember how to do it. They’re just all boring. Why do you want me to have a girlfriend so much?”

I pause. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just know when it happens it feels really important and it’s hard to ask for advice. Most young guys panic. I’m trying to give you some pointers so you won’t feel that anxiety. It’s fine not to be interested yet. I don’t care if it’s ten more years.”

It occurs to me how true this is as I say it, and suddenly I wish I hadn’t even brought it up. Six years older than him I had a pregnant fiancée. The kid makes my mistakes and I’m a grandpa at thirty-four. And he has to raise his own kid, like me, still confused by the whole world.

“Does your mom help you with this stuff at all? Not girls, I mean. Just friends. How to talk to people, what to say, all that? Is that stuff she can help you with?”

He shakes his head and looks down at the table. I don’t know if he’s answering no or if he’s just uncomfortable talking to me about his relationships with other kids.

“Martin…” I collect the words before I say them. I’ve been wanting to ask him for a while but I haven’t been sure how to do it. “Martin, would you rather go to a different school? And live with me? If you want to, we can talk about it with your mom. If you just tell me it’s what you want, you could come to stay at my house and we could… You liked the schools in my part of town, right? You’d have different classmates now, but… I don’t know. Is that something you’d want?”

He crooks his head back and sighs loudly.

“Does that mean no?”

“All I said was the kids in my class are babies, dude. It doesn’t mean I want to go live with you.”

I’ve gotten used to him calling me “dude” instead of “Dad”, as much as I wish he’d go back. But you never get used to the incomparable harshness you get from a young child when you open yourself up to be vulnerable. No rejection in life hurts as bad as one from your son, a son who gets disgusted at a tearful kissing scene at the end of a romance movie and who laughs when a man’s arm goes through a lawn-mower.

I have to pause for a while, then I do what that cynical culture of ours always taught us boys to do when when our emotions get bruised. I switch subjects so he can’t see he hurt me.

“Hey, how about that part when he stabbed the girl with the screwdriver?” I say with a forced laugh. He half-closes one eye as he studies me so I double down. “Oh come on. That was awesome.”

He nods begrudgingly. “Yeah…” He laughs. “Yeah, that was pretty awesome.”

I wonder if this is unusual. I don’t think it is, but I wonder why it’s like this, so much easier to relate to one another over a woman being stabbed to death than to talk about crushes, loneliness, and the holes in our hearts we’re fumbling to fill.

* * * * *

The tale of the lion with the thorn in his paw, you always hear it from the perspective of Androcles. But how long did the lion have to wait? How much did he suffer? What darkness went through that lion’s head before his savior entered the picture?

As Rory and I step out of the shower, I wrap a towel around myself and she starts dressing in front of the mirror. I put my hands on her waist and pull her hair back, kissing the side of her neck and down to her shoulder as she laughs and says, “You’re so affectionate tonight.”

Once upon a time there was a lonely lion with no pride and no lioness. He hunted only to feed himself, and when he slept in his cave he slept alone.

This house. The silence of it. The sycamore just beyond the mirror in front of us. I can’t see it, but I can feel it. A faint, masochistic lust that will build as soon as the front door shuts behind her. A lust that’s been building for months now, that fills this house when it’s empty like the place were the sycamore’s shrine.

I don’t want to feel it anymore.

I run my hand up Rory’s side, under her top as she pulls it on.

“I can’t go again,” she says. “Not after we just showered. I’m sorry.”

One day as he hunted a gazelle, the hungry lion placed his foot in a patch of thorns. He howled in pain and lost his balance, and when he stood up, the gazelle was nowhere to be found. The lion limped back to his cave with a wounded ego and an empty stomach.

“Come on,” I say. “One more time.”

She pulls my hand away from her body and turns to face me. “Sorry. We’re clean now, and it’s late, and I have church with my parents in the morning.”

“Clean on the surface only,” I say, kissing her. “I know in your mind you’re just as dirty as I am.”

“Right down to my soul,” she says, kissing back with a laugh, and then she pushes me back. “That’s all for tonight, Casey. Sorry.”

As she turns for the bathroom door I can almost see the sycamore through the mirror.

As the days went on, the pain in the lion’s paw did not subside, and he soon found that he could not hunt. In fact, he could barely walk. It was all he could do to make his way to the river and drink each day, and by night he rarely slept. He only lay on his back and cursed his paw. He wished he could find a way to make the pain stop.

“Stay,” I call after her from the living room as she puts on her shoes at the door.

“What?”

“Stay the night. Why not? I have to get up early too. We can wake up together. We can wake up even earlier. We’ll go get breakfast.”

She laughs for a second and then an awkward silence passes. “But my parents…”

“You’re an adult now. Come on. We never do anything together but have sex. Let’s… sleep together. I mean… really sleep.”

She studies me for a minute. “I think… I feel like getting to know each other would be… I just don’t feel like that’s what this was supposed to be about,” she says.

“Please stay,” I say, and my voice shakes a little.

She gives me a look that’s almost terror and says, “I can’t. I… I’m sorry. This is getting… I think maybe we shouldn’t have started doing this.”

She’s practically running as she goes out the door.

Day and night the lion screamed for help from his fellow animals, but the sounds of his roars only frightened them off. Before long the lion lost the energy even to scream. He was starved and helpless.

By day he limped through the jungle, searching for another animal brave enough to get close to him and help. By night he lay awake, crying, in a dark corner of his lonely home. Each night he stared at the entrance to the cave, waiting, praying that a savior would come to his rescue.

Waiting.

Waiting.

Androcles doesn’t come tonight. Nobody pulls the thorn from my paw. As I bolt the front door and turn to face the sycamore, it’s illness I feel more than lust. It’s a sick self-loathing that gets worse a minute later when Rory texts me that she’s sorry, that she thought we were on the same page, that she didn’t want anything serious and if she led me on she didn’t mean to.

I tell her it’s fine and I wonder why it makes me feel even emptier, why it makes me lust for the sycamore even more.

A hundred years standing, maybe more. Maybe a hundred still to stand. And a century from now when everyone alive today is dead, if the tree had a memory and eyes and a voice, it could tell a story. It could tell how a guy named Casey bent a girl named Rory over a couch in this room, a girl who told her parents she was out with a study group. It could tell how he called her things no man should call a woman and she loved it, how he left the blinds drawn and the back window open so the tree could see. It could tell how he stared not at her, but at the tree, how he couldn’t even get an erection until his eyes locked on the branches and the knots and the trunk.

If a tree could judge. If a sycamore could tell its story.

If only I knew, maybe I’d be properly concerned with finding Androcles.

* * * * *

That’s the night, after Rory leaves and I pass out naked on the covers with the air conditioner turned off, when I wake up screaming.

It’s not dreams so much, at least I don’t think it is. It’s physical pain. Some throbbing, searing wrongness in the whole of my right foot. I rip off the covers and sit up and grab it. My instinct is to apply pressure but it’s the wrong instinct. Like putting pressure on a snakebite with the snake still attached.

I scream and pull back, squeeze the ball of my foot, try to run my fingers along my toe from the base to the tip as softly as possible to feel for something wrong, a bone sticking out or a bend where there oughtn’t be one. The way this feels, even a bloody stub where there ought to be more toe wouldn’t be a hell of a surprise.

It’s in the tip, dead center, above the skin but under the nail. That’s where I find the culprit—a long, hard column sticking out a few millimeters from the surface, like a toy soldier took his knife and jammed it in right up to the hilt.

I can’t see in my room. Too dark. I get out of bed and limp on the side of my foot with my toe hooked upward until I get to the light switch. The light on, I fall back across the bed and lift my foot up on my knee to examine the damage.

It’s…

What the fuck is it?

A small, brown column, thicker than a sewing needle and thinner than a nail. It protrudes just a little and I can’t tell how deep it goes. As gently as I can, I run my thumb over it.

Wood?

For a second I wonder if I had a nightmare, if I slammed my foot hard into the frame of my bed and caught the splinter to end all splinters right there under my toenail, a big slab of rotting wood that broke off the bedframe and came to rest right where the source of pain has been.

But I know that’s not the truth.

Days now of pain. Days of limping and telling myself it’s getting better when I know it’s getting worse. Days of saying I stubbed it or a car ran it over whenever people ask about how I’m walking. Days of Googling foot diseases and infections and STDs that start in the toe. And now this.

Not a splinter. This is phase two.

I shake my head and swallow. Whatever it is, it has to come out. I’m no doctor, but I’ve never heard of a human body growing freak appendages that benefit its wellbeing. All evolutionary and Darwinian theories about positive mutations aside, a stick growing out of my foot is going to fuck up all my socks.

I spend fifteen minutes drinking from a bottle of Canadian whiskey before the act. Self-surgery has never been a hobby. Between ripping foreign objects out of my body and backgammon I’ll take backgammon ten times out of ten, and fuck backgammon.