Stories From the Plague Years (11 page)

That had been the first moment of self-contempt I’d ever felt that I understood to be self-contempt. The first time I’d been consciously sickened by my own image, the first splitting of the first cancerous cell that would devour my psyche. I realized this as I leaned against the table, recalling how I’d leaned that day against the swing set from which my father had removed the swings, lest I fall. My knee ached as I tasted the gorge that the Truth had pushed into my throat, through its revelation that my little scapegoat who’d helped me cope with my childhood had been
me
at that specific moment. A visualization of everything I’d hated about myself
before
I’d shattered myself in front of the bathroom mirror and pulled forth my victim: weak, whining (oh, how it used to whine so for mercy while I imagined torturing it), and pathetic.

Thirst forgotten, I limped to bed.

But wondering if this small totem of self-hate had been with me since birth, I didn’t sleep that night.

Nor the next.

—No. It was an
it
. Not human. Like a gremlin.

—Did you imagine it to be not human so it would be easier to hurt?

I watched the bank of phantom pipe smoke float between me and Doctor Johansson. The sun, creaking to the west, came from behind a cloud, and shadows from the thick window bars bled onto the smoke like slashes. I wondered if the yellowed air filter in the corner could draw the smoke that was not there.

—I don’t think I’d have been as fond of hurting it, if it had been easy to hurt.

—Did it have a name?

The shadow bars faded. I don’t know how long I must have been silent for the clouds to hide the sun again. How much of this day had I spent in fugue-like silence? I was afraid to answer, to speak the Name I had never spoken, and invoke whatever hidden power might be knotted within that Name.

—I gave it a stupid sort of kid’s name: Piggy.

Nothing changed with the invocation of the Name. I watched Doctor Johansson’s eyes, to make sure he didn’t think the name funny. Or trite. It would embarrass me if he did.

—Why did he have that name?

—I think I gave it to him because he was kind of baby-pink, like a pig, or a puppy’s belly. It seemed to fit. I’d never heard the name before I gave it to him. Maybe the name floated in the ether as the name of victim, and I picked it up. I’d never heard of any victim character named Piggy until high school.

The phantom smoke dulled the glass-hard reality before my eyes. The effect was soothing, yet I still felt a dread between my shoulder blades, that the Name so long unspoken might still reveal a potential that had been dormant.

—What did you do when you ah . . . punished Piggy?

—Most often, I’d shut myself away and throw punches at it. Before that there had to be the chase, where I’d look all over the room to see where it was hiding. Then I’d drag it from the hiding place by the roots of its hair. And then I’d start beating it.

—And this was like imaginary play?

— I’d swing and kick at where I imagined Piggy to be. I’d get something like a sugar high during the punishment. My vision would get grey and buzzing. I’d be spent afterward.

—Did you talk to it?

—Sometimes I’d speak to it, to re-enforce the punishment. Things I’d learned from my father. Things like,
Come out and take your medicine, you little shit!

—Did Piggy say anything?

—Mostly it just begged not to be hit. Sometimes I’d imagine it screaming.

—You never had conversations with it? Like most kids do with imaginary friends?

—We weren’t on speaking terms.

—Sort of like you and your parents.

His insight struck me like a heavy boot. The tumours nestled in me felt as if they shifted, like waking things.

—Yes. Like me and my parents.

—In fact, you were its parent. At least as you understood parents to be.

Realization
is the crash of a thing you didn’t know. What turned my guts to clay was not realization, but the stripping away of a
refusal
to know that the proportions of the creature, as I’d first imagined it, were the same as I had been proportioned to my father.

—I suppose I was.

—How old were you when you gave up Piggy?

—About eleven or twelve.

That wasn’t entirely true. The last time I’d used Piggy was about a year ago, the day I was diagnosed, the day all the nagging fears bloomed to awful fruition, when the worries about the bloody stools, cramps and fatigue boulder-crashed upon me and shattered whatever hope for a life I’d ever had.

The world had chewed me and spat me out. I drunk-stumbled home from the doctor’s, wanting to vomit, wanting to take a knife and cut out the cancer myself, to make bloody and visible the inner maulings I’d suffered. My jaw locked, my fists felt fused solid, immobile as blocks of wood. Blood trickled from where I’d bitten through my lip, and I was afraid of my own blood, of the toxins it held that I could be ingesting back into me.
Blind rage
is a half-truth. Rage doesn’t blind. It inflicts more clarity than you can bear to see.

The pain of vision searing me, I upended the table, threw dishes against the walls, embedding fragments into cheap sheetrock. I pummelled a wooden door until it splintered. My gaze, vicious as desert sun, fell on a shelf of shiny new paperbacks. I was cheated of the time to read them, so I destroyed them, cracking their spines and ripping them as strong men rip phone books. I kicked apart the bookshelf; a jutting nail sank deep behind my Achilles’ tendon. My raging sight burned away the pain of it. I moved on my wounded foot like a wind, not walking to the things I destroyed, but surging, like a swarm of leaves.

I grabbed the phone from the wall. It was high-impact plastic, and would take a good long violent while to break. I hammered the receiver against the wall, watching lovely clouds of dust rise from the craters I punched into the plaster, watching each mote turn with the grace of malignantly indifferent planets.

I smashed my thumb against the wall, crushing it between receiver and plaster.

I howled as clarity burned itself to onyx. Evil thoughts packed themselves tight into my head, like a million blind maggots, a million demons all lusting for blood crammed inside my skull.

I could have murdered all that lived in that second.

In that darkness, in that mass of pitch that boiled itself from spectra that had been so unbearably bright, I remembered my little surrogate, my little scapegoat. I reached into my mind and dug up the mind I’d had as a child. In there, cowering, I found Piggy.

Forcing my mind to be that of a child, I ripped away my blindness and found the little shit standing in front of me.

I bellowed and launched myself at it.

It was sweet—like when I knew the immortality of youth—to have it suffer and beg and plead and to hear with my mind’s ear the splintering of its bones and its screams and suddenly . . . bedded within the music of its screams I heard words, not the pleading excuses I’d been used to, but one syllable, uttered over and over beneath my imaginary blows like sobs.

“Why?”

I stopped and saw the bloody little face, so much like mine, the lips and cheeks hanging in shreds.

The little being faded from my mind’s eye, and I wondered, Why should I punish the thing that had helped me cope? The thing that helped me survive?

It was time to punish the ones who had hurt me, who had taken my life.

I crawled over the rubble of my apartment, trailing blood from my left ankle. I hobbled to bed and slept a death-like sleep for almost a full day.

When I awoke, with the sheet snaked around my feet clotted with dead brown blood, my mind felt wonderfully focused, clearer than I ever remembered.

I planned the rest of my severed life with a new sense of purpose.

—Why did you give up Piggy at that age?

—Maybe I outgrew it. Maybe I refocused my anger into other channels, like all adolescents do. Not sure.

—Do you think at some point, you would have given up killing, if you hadn’t been caught?

—I think I would have
finished
my killings, or gotten tired of the planning and execution of them. Or died.

—Did you ever want to stop?

—I’d thought about it.

—Did you want to be caught?

—
Oh please, stop me before I kill again
? That’s so melodramatic. No. I expected to be caught, but I didn’t want to be.

—Whom would you have killed after Catherine?

—I thought about killing Sarah, another ex-girlfriend. But I thought about what she was like, and realized she must have been screwed up in the head, only I didn’t realize it when we were together. Too young. There was a lot bad in our relationship, but it was . . .
human
. Not cruel. Not malignant. I got in touch with her, just to see what she was like, now.

—And?

—We had a nice talk. She’s been in therapy. She had a pretty rough life I didn’t know about. I couldn’t hold her responsible for the crap she’d given me. The poor kid was scrambled. We had a quiet dinner date, for old times’ sake. It was all very nice.

—There was no way you could have reconciled with Catherine?

—No. We could only have peace after she was dead.

Catherine knew my voice when I called her. I could taste the Tom’s-of-Maine-scented huff she blew into the receiver, the same expulsion she made whenever I asked for a crumb of help, even when I asked for coins with which to make a phone call. Still, she asked (with the same high- pitched pain in her voice that I once heard in the yelp of a stray kitten I found as the vet drew its blood), “Who
is
this?”

“It’s Dean.”

“Dean?”

“Dean Garrison, Catherine.”
Jesus Christ! You could pretend to remember the people you’ve pumped fluids with, you toxic, skeletal bitch.

“Oh . . . Dean.” She let out a different flustered sigh, like someone called about back taxes. She had a wide vocabulary of sighs, complex and subtle enough to compose Haiku with.

“I need to see you, Catherine.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” She spoke as a teacher would to a bad third grader, voice thick with finality. Yet there was a reflexive quality to what she said, the same with which a shop-girl would mutter, “Have a nice day.”

I know her too well for her games to stab me now. I’ve read the fictions and the lies that are her life, to write myself into it as its coda. I know she’s had many lovers, a mass of half-remembered names and limbs and cocks she has puppeted not with strings, but words. I’ve choked on her gnawing hunger for control, and I know many of her lovers have come back to her, desperate for the opiate freedom of her manipulation, and for the woollen-soft comfort of her abuse. I’ve seen her pick up the phone when ex-lovers call and vivisect them with her scalpel-precise tongue, only to tell me afterward that she was meeting them for coffee.

But none of them have played the card I held, the totemic charm I’d now utter.

“I’m dying, Catherine.”

“What?!” She gasped, perhaps taken off guard while on the phone with a man for the first time.

“I’m dying.”

“
How
?!”

Through the phone lines, I felt the air around her tingle with her worry that her psychotic love life has risen, like a chain-draped ghost, to haunt her . . . that I gave her AIDS or she gave it to me. Since she was the greatest AIDS risk I’ve ever run, I let her sweat. I choked crocodile tears, took deep breaths.

“I have cancer.”

“Oh.” A new sigh, rich with poetry I’ve never heard before: a fucking
sigh of relief
.

“I want to talk. I want to make sure everything is squared away between us. It would mean a lot to me.”

At no point during our exchange did I tell a single lie.

The walk to Catherine’s apartment was pleasant. The wonderful smells of crisp October night thickened to a delicious liquor; the stars were bright as angels’ eyes, not faded by the glowing rot of the city. I hungered to drop my anger toward Catherine: a burden I’d carried too long. It was a near sexual need, a quasi-tantric state that trembled beneath my muscles deep near the bone. The desire, its silent, healing passion, told me along my very nerves that there had to be something decent at the core of my relationship with Catherine, otherwise we’d have never gotten together. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have stayed together as long as we did, and let our relationship twist into the knotted web that it became, something that grew like a cancer and sundered what was healthy between us. Tonight I’d cut that cancer away.

I stopped below Catherine’s building, palms damp, heart fluttering, as if I wore another body, like a coat, over the one full of tantric expectation: another body that I formed through the act of looking
at
and
through
her home. I leaned against a tree and unslung my book-bag, the final emblem of my youth, for I’d die at the age when I was expected to start carrying a briefcase. The bag clattered from the shiny metal instruments inside that I’d purloined from an undertakers’ supply house—the keen blades that would help Catherine and me fix our relationship better than any couples’ counsellor could.