In Nightmares We're Alone (13 page)

When I hit that do or die time, I do it with pliers. It feels smarter. If I pull hard with fingers and nothing happens, I get excruciating pain with no closure and it’ll take a lot more liquid courage to try it with the pliers. But with the pliers the first time, this bitch is coming out no matter how bad it hurts. One hard jerk.

I count down from thirty because I don’t have the stones to go on three. When I get to seventeen I pull hard, try to surprise myself. Halfway through a bottle of whiskey, it even sort of works. My foot gives a fair amount of resistance but the hard tug I give is enough to rip the object free with force to spare. As it comes out, a few drops of blood squirt across the sheet and more stain the carpet.

The pain—imagine latching onto a perfectly healthy toenail with Vise-Grips and pulling it backward hard enough to rip the whole thing off. I’ve never tried, but I’d venture it’s pretty close.

The pliers fly across the room and into the TV stand. My hand goes to my toe and I squeeze down and fall back on the comforter, mashing my face into it and screaming a muffled scream into the cloth. It feels wrong, like something you’re not supposed to do. You don’t rip out teeth or nails or pull off eyelids. If your body grows it, maybe you groom it, but you don’t grab it and rip it out.

I have to strain myself not to vomit across my bed. It takes five or ten seconds before the pain and nausea subside. That’s when I finally take my bloody hand off my toe and assess the damage.

It’s not so bad, all things considered. It’s swollen and black and bleeding and ugly, but it’s not the abortion I’m imagining. I limp to the bathroom and sit on the edge of the tub and hose off the blood with hot water.

It’s only after all that is over and the blood has been washed and my foot dried that I get down on the floor by the TV stand and look for whatever it was that put me on the floor. I find it in the indent where the carpet meets the wall.

It’s less than half an inch long and almost so thin you can see it better with one eye closed, but there’s no mistaking it. It’s a stick. A little piece of wood. Broken and bent by the pliers, there seem to be tiny branches that were reaching out before I ruined them.

And on the end that came out of my toe… Christ…

Roots.

Still damp with blood and clutching to little fragments of flesh. A little tree or weed that grew from my skin. And how big would it have gotten if I hadn’t done away with it? What monstrous thing might I have had growing from me?

I laugh.

A man with a plant growing from his toe. It’s so absurd. So ridiculous. And yet… the sycamore…

I place the little tree on my bedside table, shut off the light, and lie back down in bed. I’ll look it up in the morning.

In 2009, a particularly unlucky bastard was experiencing severe chest pains and coughing up blood. After x-rays and other tests, doctors said they were certain he had cancer. They opened him up to remove the tumors they expected to find, and they found something else. Turns out the guy had inhaled a seed. The moisture in his lung made for an inhabitable climate and a two-inch fir tree formed inside his lung.

This is a true story, or at least it’s on the Internet. You can look it up if you don’t believe me.

When it’s a one-in-a-million shot, that thing you’d never even dream of expecting because it would be too perfect, but the world conspires to give you a celestial blowjob and all of a sudden it’s yours, you call it a miracle. But that other one-in-a-million shot, the bad one, the one that you never should have had to worry about but somehow it happened anyway, that celestial vagina dentata, we don’t have a word for that. Whatever the opposite of a miracle is, we so hate to think about it that we never even picked a word.

But miracles happen every day. And so do anti-miracles.

I have to dig a little further before I find the guy I’m looking for. This poor bastard got an anti-miracle and a half.

As a teenager, he cuts himself, not even a bad cut. After that, for years, these warty growths start appearing on his body. First just a few, then tons. Eventually every inch of his skin is covered in these things and they branch out. Something the article calls “cutaneous horns” start sprouting from some of them.

His life falls apart, he goes broke, he joins a freak show.

Eventually, this guy has arms and legs that look like tree branches, big plant-like flippers for hands and feet. Even his face has hard, ugly sections that look like tree bark. He can barely move his limbs they’re so big and heavy.

They call him the Tree Man.

I swear to God this is a true story. There’s pictures and everything.

I guess it’s all about some condition that makes warts grow on his body and another condition where his body can’t fight them properly. Two rare conditions that add up to a freak occurrence. And everything I’m reading says yeah, maybe they’ll cure him. Maybe they can fix this shit. Maybe rainbows will shoot out of my asshole and solve world hunger.

Hell of a world we live in where this kind of thing can happen to you.

Still, it’s a bit of comfort to know I’m not the first person to see a plant sprout from his skin.

And whether it’s solidarity or schaudenfreude, suddenly my toe feels a little better. I think it’s healing. Maybe two freak occurrences happened at once that added up to celestial vagina dentata, but now it’s over and I’ll probably never understand. And for the rest of my life when guys in bars compare scars or brag about which bones they broke or what was the worst accident they walked out of, I can say a tree grew out of my foot and I got drunk on whiskey and pulled it out with pliers. And that makes me smile.

Best of all, no STD. I’m as sexually healthy as a twelve-year-old church boy.

I shut my laptop. Only had one reading today and I canceled it this morning when I woke up paranoid I was turning into a mutant. Now that everything’s okay, I want to go out in the world and be alive.

I pick up my phone and scroll through my contacts for a lady to call, and for some reason my eye lands on Elaine. The banging forty-year-old with the doll we decided is possessed. Elaine who exudes more love and optimism for a dead fetus than most people do for their living children.

I’m about to hit TALK and I hit END instead.

It doesn’t seem right. Too many regulars coming by my house already. I don’t need to jump into anything new.

I tap my hand on the table a few more times and go through my mental Rolodex. Daphne. Trish. Michelle.

It’s not what I want. I’m not sure what I want but it’s none of them.

A quick glance over at the tree and my heart seems to beat harder. I must have someone, someone to make me stop thinking about the tree. The tree in my backyard. The tree in my body.

I look at the clock. 2:30 on a Sunday. Martin’s probably bored at home. If I promise an adventure, pick him up a gift, I can make up for the awkward lunch yesterday.

I pick up my cell.

* * * * *

“Help! Help!” screams Martin, thrashing around in the pond, splashing water everywhere. “I’m drowning! I can’t swim!”

There’s a man passing through the park on a jogging trail. A man in a business suit, carrying a briefcase. He’s the only person nearby. The only one other than me, anyway. And I’m a few hundred feet back in the woods.

“Help!” screams Martin. “I’m gonna die!”

The man in the suit looks in each direction. That moment people have before doing something heroic but inconvenient. That moment when they think,
Somebody has to do something, but does it really have to be me? Can’t I just stand and watch somebody else be a hero and pat him on the back afterward and say, ‘My God, why can’t there be more people like you?’

But nobody else is here. It’s Armani guy’s time to shine.

“Hold on!” He shouts to Martin. He runs for the water, throwing down his briefcase and pulling a wallet out of one pocket and a phone out of the other. He tosses them on the shore and slips off his loafers and leaves them in the dirt. He pulls off his jacket and seems for a second to debate removing the expensive pants before deciding against it.

“I’m coming!” he shouts.

Martin keeps thrashing and splashing and calling for help as the guy jumps in the water and swims to him. It doesn’t take long for Mr. Hero to get out there and wrap his arm around my son and tread back to the shore with him, but it takes long enough.

Two hundred forty-three dollars cash in the wallet. That’s a find. And his new, top-of-the-line smartphone will fetch a few bucks. The shoes are loafers, probably bought from Men’s Warehouse or some shit. They won’t fetch much money but I always take the shoes anyway. Otherwise they could end up spotting me or putting two and two together and going after Martin. It’s just easier if they’ve got nothing but wet socks to run in.

The briefcase I leave. Most of the time they’re full of business papers. Maybe if you took enough of them you’d find the odd laptop, but you’d waste a lot of energy first. Plus, I’m paranoid about finding drugs or money. Guys like that, you knock them over and leave them with their stash, they count their blessings. You take the case, somebody finds you at the bottom of Sunset Pond with a butterfly knife in your throat.

So it’s a smartphone, a couple hundred bucks, and two credit cards—one Visa, one MasterCard. He hasn’t even signed his name on the back, the dumb bastard. Of course, credit cards are always canceled an hour and a half later, but it buys me a nice dinner with my boy.

I grab the cash, the cards, the shoes, and the cell phone. I leave his driver’s license and everything because why be a dick?

* * * * *

“Check this out,” I say to Martin at dinner. I hand him the little tree I pried out of my foot in the night.

He rolls it over between his thumb and forefinger, unimpressed. “What is it, a stick?”

“It’s a sapling. A baby tree. It grew out of my foot last night and I pulled it out with pliers.”

“Dude, gross.” Martin flicks the stick across the table at me.

We’re at Nathan’s Steakhouse, which is upscale without being ritzy. The bill will probably come in at ninety bucks for the two of us, so hopefully Mr. Hero won’t have time to cancel his card before they bring the check. It’d be a shame to have to throw down that big a chunk of the cash we pulled in, but if we have to we have to.

“Remember I was walking with a limp yesterday?” I ask. “Turns out I had a plant growing in my foot. Weird situation. I did some reading and it seems like not many people have had anything like that happen.”

“You gonna die?” he asks casually. He’s joking, acting cavalier either to hurt my feelings or because it’s decidedly cool for boys not to have emotions.

When I was fourteen years old two schoolmates were pushing me around in the hall before class. They grabbed by backpack and said they were going to throw it in the toilet so I ran after them. As the three of us went sprinting through the hall. The principle screamed at us for running, gave us detention, called our parents, all that authoritative bullshit.

I didn’t think it was fair. I started crying.

Those other two kids told the story and for months I caught hell for it. I was that kid who cries when grown-ups yell at him. I didn’t live it down until a year later when I sent another kid to the hospital on the football field. Just like that I was cool again.

That’s what I think about when Martin asks that morbid, callous question. There is something beneath the surface of society that shames sentimentality—especially in young boys. There is something that encourages emotional walls. When Martin gets older, he’ll probably be popular with his classmates, but I wonder at what cost.

If my classmates had hugged me that day I started crying, if hospitalizing that kid hadn’t led directly to the loss of my virginity a week later, I wonder if I’d still be paying for our food today with money I stole. I wonder if I’d still be divorced.

“Yeah,” I say to Martin, automatically burying my emotions in a joke. “Trees are going to grow out of my body until they kill me and you and your mom will bury a plant. Should make for either a really pretty open casket or the freakiest one ever.”

He gives a wry laugh and shakes his head. “It’s like the beginning of a superhero movie. Soon you turn into Plant Man or something.”

“Talk to forests and will them to do my bidding?” I ask. “Like a superhero for environmentalists?”

“Captain Planet for the new generation,” says Martin.

We make twisted jokes for a while about relationships with plants and trees growing out of my body, because it’s easier than talking. If I knew what was going on in my body at this moment, I’d probably never laugh again.

“I got you something,” I say. “A little gift. You’ve got to promise you won’t tell Mom.”

“What is it?”

“Promise?”

“I promise. What is it?”

I place a little box on the table that I grabbed on the way to pick him up. He opens it and for an instant I get to witness the fading of that world-worn jadedness life is teaching him to project. His eyes light up with excitement.

“For real?” he says, pulling the knife out of the box.

“It’s not a toy,” I tell him. “You could really hurt yourself with that, or somebody else. So keep it somewhere safe and only use it when you need to cut something. I know it’s cool, but it’s dangerous.”

“I know. I know.”

The rest of the meal he spends looking for stuff on the table to cut. Napkins and straws. Even his chicken he cuts with the new knife. That sinking feeling I had a minute ago seems to melt away and I feel proud of myself in a way I haven’t in a long time.

Before long it’s five o’clock and I pay the bill. Mr. Hero’s card works fine. I toss it in the trash on my way out. It won’t work much longer and there’s no sense leaving a trail.

When we get back to his mom’s house, I tell Martin, “I’ll wash your wet clothes and give them back to you next time.”

“Okay.”

“And if Mom asks…”

“We went bowling and had pizza. I beat you by two in the third game.”

I laugh. “She’ll never believe you if you tell her that last part.”