The Convulsion Factory (5 page)

“Are you feeling all right?” she asks, and she hardly slurs her words at all anymore, because now she’s a professional at this. “You look kind of pale.”

“I’m okay,” he says, and hauls the bag out of the can. He knows what’s coming next, and then it’s there, Mom’s clammy hand squelched across his forehead to see if he’s running a fever or coming down with chills. She shrugs. She can’t feel much, he’s figured that out by now.

“You’re always too pale,” she says, and nods to herself as if the act of nodding transforms it into gospel truth. “Maybe you should go to the doctor after school tomorrow.”

He tells her maybe he will, so she’s happy, and he totes the bag through the garage and drops it by the cans already awaiting pickup. Dusk has fallen, and Alex decides to hang outside in the yard for a while. He fishes into his sock for a joint and smokes it behind a tree in suburban peace and quiet. He watches a BMW that looks like Dad’s cruise past, and when it gets to the end of the block he pretends to press a button and vaporizes car and driver.
Foom
.

No doctors, he knows he told a lie. The only way he’ll go to a doctor these days is if he’s carried there unconscious and has no say in the matter. Doctors ask boring questions and make you take off your shirt and he doesn’t want that, and he’s not sick anyway.

Mom’s always finding some reason to suggest a trip to the doctor, and he always says he’ll go but never does, and she never questions why no office visits in Alex’s name show up on the bills. He doesn’t think she remembers most of the time. Sometimes he tells her he went and needs money to get a prescription at some pharmacy where they don’t have a charge account and she shells out the cash and he spends it on more important things. It’s a good arrangement.

He finishes the J and waits for most of the smoke smell to clear from his clothes and heads back inside. He watches MTV some more and vacates when they announce they’re going to play a pair of Michael Jackson videos, so he hunts for and finds the Very Important Paper he needs. He takes it upstairs to the rec room.

He was right, this is where Dad went. In his corner in the back, hunched over his flat worktop while working with plastic pieces and Testor’s glue and tiny bottles of paint. The fruits of Dad’s labors hang suspended by fine wires from the ceiling, models of Fokker tri-planes and Sopwith Camels from the time of the Red Baron, and B-17 Flying Fortresses and Stukas from World War II, all the way up to modern F-16 Falcon and Harrier jets. The ceiling back here is nearly full, and the models just keep coming. Now Dad is working on a kit proudly acquired last week, a scaled down version of a Stealth Bomber.

Dad is employed as a comptroller for some big corporation with a lot of interlocking squares in the logo, but Alex knows his secret. Dad really wants to be Tom Cruise. They have a DVD player hooked up to the TV but still only one disc, a copy of
Top Gun
. Dad has watched it at least twice a month for years, and Alex knows that whenever Dad watches he pretends he’s Tom Cruise shooting down MiGs and nailing Kelly McGillis.

“Dad?” he says, and waits and watches his old man pour himself into the model and close off all else. The model looks silly, like a chunkier version of Batman’s boomerang. “Dad?”

“Mmmmm?” comes an eventual reply.

“Got a minute to sign a paper for me?”

“Mmmmm.” Alex doesn’t know what this means, so he waits, and finally Dad joins two pieces together and says, “What is it?”

“It’s a permission release for my driver’s training class this final quarter.”

Dad still hasn’t looked up. Alex could be on fire and roast all the way down to charcoal before Dad would notice, and he finds this funny, the thought of a charred lump standing there between his father and the pool table begging for an autograph.

“Just put it on the edge of the table, I’ll sign it a little later.”

“But I need it tomorrow, and it’ll only take a second.”

“I never sign anything without reading it twice,” says Dad, words to live by, he’s using that particular tone of voice. “You’ll have it by tomorrow. Now … please?”

Alex bows out. He’s had his eyes crossed the whole time to see if the old man would notice, and it’s a bet he would’ve won. Tom Cruise would have noticed. Have to be alert to be a fighter pilot.

He checks on Mom and finds her zonked in the living room and so he lifts the half-smoked cigarette from her fingers so she won’t set the couch on fire. As she sleeps, gravity plays mischief with her face, but that’s for somebody else to lift.

When he returns to MTV, Michael Jackson is history, so he watches some more and calls a couple friends to see what’s new in their lives since school was out, and pretty soon he’s tired and it’s time to go to bed.

He digs into his sock drawer in the very back and pulls out a small plastic box full of shiny metal. He takes off his shirt and leans back on his bed. A moment later he selects a safety pin from the box and opens it and skewers it through a pinched fold of skin over a left-side rib. He licks the trickles of blood from his fingers and latches the pin closed again and watches MTV to wait until it quits bleeding. Just like after the ninety-odd pins he’s already put there.

Sometimes they get infected and he’ll wash the area down with alcohol or hydrogen peroxide. It burns, but he doesn’t mind, likes it sometimes even, because it means he can still feel something, and it scares him to think of what it might mean if the pain were to stop.

Just like the blood. His scar tissue has gotten gnarly thick in places, and sometimes he’ll sink in a new pin and it won’t bleed, and this never fails to freak him out. No blood, like he’s dead inside. Somehow this signifies failure. Or maybe he’s like an atrocity-hardened veteran who can’t cry, because no matter what he sees it’s just not awful enough anymore. The body won’t turn loose of the liquids.

He admires the craftsmanship, though, and likes the way they look down his body in their orderly regimented rows, no haphazard placement. Some have been there so long it looks like the skin is growing around them, trying to swallow them and make them its own. He supposes this is what he wants. The only problem is, he has to watch where he rips his T-shirts, so Mom and Dad don’t see, because it’s his secret.

He should have thought of this a long time ago.

He knows that every single pin has its own special meaning.

One per night … for every day since midwinter that they have never told him anything remotely like they love him.

*

Mom eats lunch professionally, he decided this when he was ten. Long elaborate luncheons with other ladies like herself, where they plan benevolent crusades and their slogan is probably something like
We Will Stamp Out Social Inequity In Your Lunchtime
. He has no idea what they actually accomplish, and wonders if maybe what they do is plan to raise money to give their husbands rides in fighter jets to keep them happy in hopes they don’t stray off looking for the Kelly McGillises of the world as a consolation.

But whatever inequities they fight, he hopes they don’t eradicate them any time soon, because then what will they do? He can easily imagine some new group springing up to attend luncheons on their behalf and decide what’s to become of these poor displaced crusaders.

Mom has beat him home from school by all of five minutes, and doesn’t question if he went to the doctor or not. She’s happy and fired up, and he suspects that the main reason she attends the luncheons is so she can examine her own life on a comparative basis and feel reassured that it is superior to most everyone else’s who is there.

“Another divorce in the works in that group,” she tells him with no small amount of glee, then tells him who. It’s no one he can recall her mentioning before.

“Oh, that’s terrible,” Alex says but doesn’t mean it, because it sounds like par for the course.

“Pretty soon I’m going to be the only one there who’s never needed a divorce lawyer.” She beams and goes for the Seagram’s. “Aren’t you proud of your mother for that?”

“Proud,” he murmurs.

She pours over ice. “An eighteen-year marriage, still as intact now as the day of the ceremony. These days that’s quite an accomplishment. Have you seen my Valium?”

He spits out a likely location, mostly out of reflex, and when she checks, it’s there and she downs a couple. Mom has three separate prescriptions from three different doctors that she fills at three different pharmacies and she still can’t keep track of them. Once he told her she should tie the bottles with strings to her wrists, like careless children with their mittens, and she actually thought he was serious. Worse, for a moment he thought she considered trying it.

“Someone said the high school prom is in three weeks,” Mom calls out. “You’re going, aren’t you?”

“I haven’t thought much about it.” The idea of putting on a tuxedo makes him queasy. He doesn’t bother telling her that the prom is a junior-senior activity and he’s only a sophomore, which is just as well, because what’s he supposed to do, whisk the girl there and back on his skateboard? Maybe next year he’ll feel better about tuxedos. At least he’ll have a car.

“Why don’t you ask Tawny Bradley?” Mom doesn’t let up. She can’t be thinking about grandchildren, though, because the notion of her becoming a grandmother would probably send her off seeking a fourth prescription. “Her mother was there today, and it didn’t sound like she was going with anybody yet. You’ve always liked her, haven’t you?”

Alex swallows a sick lump in his throat. “Maybe I will.” It’s the quickest way out of this, combination safety valve and backup parachute all in one.
Maybe I will
. It gets her off his back.

Mom knows good and well he’s always liked Tawny, or at least used to. Alex and Tawny went to the same gradeschool, where he developed a giant industrial strength crush on her in fifth grade, and she pretended not to notice that he was alive.

He made the mistake of confiding this unrequited love to Mom and Dad, as he was naïve in those days, and the memory still claws at him as viciously as a tiger. There was a night when they bought him a tape recorder because they said it might do him good to record some of his class lectures, and he looked at it thinking
But I’m only in fifth grade
, and they were all three sprawled out on the family room floor so they could show him how it worked. For some reason Tawny’s name came up and he remembers that he blushed and before he knew it the tape was rolling and Mom was singing her name over and over and he was absolutely mortified. Then Dad joined in like he was a bass singer for some dinosaur 1950s group and he was crooning, “Tawny, I neeeeed you,” and they kept it up because they found it so amusing, and all the while his thin, piping voice rose to a frantic screech begging them to stop while on the tape he fancied he could hear the sizzle of tears as they vaporized down his burning cheeks.

It’s probably the one thing he can never forgive them for, because even today whenever he talks to a girl he remembers the shame he felt that night that love was somehow wrong and something to hide and they made him cry for wanting the girl two rows over to notice him. So if they never have any fucking grandchildren it’s their own fault, theirs and the Sony Corporation’s.

He’s about to go downstairs to his room when he looks back and sees Mom standing in front of a hallway mirror looking over her shoulder at her behind and she shifts to catch the view from various angles, and the Seagram’s sloshes in her glass. “Do you think I need a butt tuck?” she asks.

He doesn’t know what to say because he’s not used to looking at Mom’s ass that way and it makes his cheeks burn all over again. He wonders how his friends see her, because sometimes he’ll notice that some of their moms look pretty decent and he’ll entertain thoughts of them that involve anything but maternal activities and wonder if he’s suffering from an Oedipal Complex, once removed. Mom stretches the fabric of her dress taut over her rump and seems satisfied with the way it looks and he fleetingly wonders if she’s trying to seduce him, and fears that if she is and something happens, she’ll find out about the safety pins.

“No, I don’t think I do, maybe I just need to get serious about my tennis again.” She nods at her reflection and cinches the dress about her waist and hips. “Good thing I stopped at one kid.”

He leaves her standing there and hurries downstairs and finds last year’s high school yearbook and carries it into his bathroom and locks the door. He finds the picture of Tawny Bradley and drops to his knees while staring at the picture and frantically whacks off into the toilet and then flushes the evidence of his crime. As the remnants of his seed swirl downward, he wonders if any illegally aborted fetuses are down below, and if they feel anything, and if they do, if the sewer is anything like the womb.

*

He’s a sidewalk surfer, and Friday after school he rides his skateboard to the mall. As sometimes happens, he has trouble with the electric eye door openers at the main entrance. He thinks it’s kind of ha-ha funny and kind of weird funny, but lately they don’t want to open for him. He wonders if maybe they operate on the principle of scanning for personality instead of for bodies, and if he has problems because they don’t see his because it’s not really there. But he’s learned how to beat the system by holding up the wide flat top of his skateboard and that fools the sensors. In he goes.

He feeds a few quarters to the arcade and when he passes by Frederick’s he peeks out of the corner of his eye at the mannequins and what they’re wearing, and pretty soon he’s thirsty and gets a giant cherry Coke and takes it into the record store. He’s not supposed to have food or drink in here, but most of them know him so it’s cool. He’s in luck, Allison is working, and she waves to him from the checkout counter and he hears her tell her co-worker that it’s time for her break.