Happy October! In the spirit of the season, I’d like to offer a ever-so-slightly revised version of a story that first appeared as “Radiation” in my collection, I Held My Breath as Long as I Could. I hope you enjoy it!

Through the window beside my desk, the setting sun bathed 72^nd Street red. On the other side of the wall, my roommate Randall banged around the kitchen and cursed about missing frozen lasagna. It was impossible to focus. These were my last days in apartment 13D, and, though I’d found a new place to live, I hadn’t yet found a new place to work. The latest draft of my resume would have to wait until after dark, or even the following morning, when I could think without Randall’s violence chopping the knees out from beneath my every thought. 

I’d used the last clean plastic cup as an ashtray, so I drank Seagram’s 7 straight from the bottle instead of going to the kitchen for a new glass and risking contact with Randall. I dropped onto my bed, put my feet on the sill, and opened a horror novel to pass some time. 

Two more weeks, and it would all be over. 

A few meager sentences deeper into the book, Randall barged into my room without bothering to knock. 

“Have some lasagna today, Hair?” he said. Randall never met a person he couldn’t saddle with a nickname. I was Hair, or Hairball if a girl were present, because of my first name, Harrison, and my long hair. He knew I hated the names, but it didn’t stop him. 

“No,” I said, wishing I had the nerve to say something mouthy, like, Go fuck yourself, Randall.

“Well, it was there this morning, and I know for a fact I didn’t eat it.” 

He waited for me to say something, but I pretended the conversation was over and returned to my book. 

“Fucking asshole,” he said. He slammed the door on his way out. 

I have trouble reading when I’m angry, and getting drunk only makes it worse. By quarter to eleven, I was blitzed and had given up on the book. I was working my way through a boxed set of The Prisoner and had just exhaled the first drag of a second joint when I heard a small plop. It gave me pause, and I looked back at the window, thinking maybe a bug had flown into it. Didn’t see a thing, so figured it was nothing. Then my toe exploded with sudden sharp pain. 

I brought my foot up, slapped it hard with the palm of my hand, and crushed something creamy against my skin. I looked at the mess in my hand as blood pattered from my toe to the floor. The remains between my thumb and forefinger looked like a piece of rigatoni in some kind of alfredo sauce. There were sharp, bristly bits on the underside of the noodle, and its guts were thick and sticky. 

I looked back down at my toe and examined the cut. It was deep. The sucker had bit me good.

I ran to the bathroom, pulled the shower curtain back, turned on the cold tap, stuck my toe under the faucet, and tried not to pass out. I’ve always been bad with real blood, especially my own. That night was no exception. As I washed the bite mark on my toe, my mind slipped away like a man exiting a subway car and disappearing in a crowd, and I fell headfirst into the tub.

#

“Open your eyes, Toolbox.”

Dreams about macaroni salad and sailboats with Egyptian hieroglyphics slipped off, scurrying back into the corners of my mind. Above me, Randall was laughing, his Ken-doll blonde head looking oh-so-perfectly affable.

He’d turned the tap off (it had been left on when I passed out), but the water had yet to drain. We’d never had it out over what exactly I was upset about, nor did I intend to get into it before I moved. Gina was in the past. Let her stay there.

“I heard you fall, then you didn’t answer. Thought you’d died or cracked your head open or something.”

“Wouldn’t you have loved that.” 

He laughed. “C’mon, I hate you, but I don’t want you to die. What happened?” 

“My toe,” I said, sitting up a bit and pointing to where my foot dangled out over the tub. 

“Cut it pretty good, looks like.” He patted me on the chest. “You’ll live. I’m gonna go feed my birds.”

He left me to bandage myself up. We’d met through an Internet posting when my last good friend in the city moved to Texas with his new wife, and it had been all right with Randall for a while. For a while, it seemed like we were going to be friends–another Craiglist win. 

Until Gina.

I poured hydrogen peroxide over my left toe, watched the foam fizzle, and only then thought about the weird moment that had brought me to my present state. 

What the hell had bitten me? 

After wrapping a plastic bandage around my toe, I went back across the hall and pushed my door open wide.

At first, I didn’t see anything. Everything looked normal. And then I saw one of them. 

The radiator in my room was one of those white rectangular jobs that ran along the wall beneath my window. Most of it was obscured by my twin bed, but a small portion of it remained exposed between the foot of the bed and the right-hand wall. Nearly hidden by the bed’s shadow, emerging slowly from the lip formed by the top and front panels, inched a small, white slug, barely bigger than the first joint of my thumb. 

What the fuck?

I thought about telling Randall, calling him over to show him, but I’d seen too much of him already that evening. I went into my room and closed the door.

#

Because my stepfather was an exterminator and could handle bugs just fine, I decided that it didn’t take much to handle bugs. One day I woke up and decided all bugs were my friends. Instead of squashing them, I’d throw them out a window or put them in the garden or whatever was most convenient. I didn’t hate any of them. Spiders, roaches, silverfish–whatever, it didn’t matter. They were all cool. 

When I saw the bug on the radiator, I didn’t immediately fear it. It was simply some new kind of bug I didn’t know about. So what if one of them had bitten me? My stepfather would’ve killed them on sight, but not me. I would understand them. 

I went down on my stomach and put my face close to the edge of the bed-frame. I shined a penlight into the shadows and gasped at how many I saw dripping from the metal, spreading in a growing arc across the floor. A few opened their mouths, peeling open where a harder seam ran around their soft, gooey centers. I counted at least two rows of small, sharp teeth. They didn’t have eyes, or anything else in the way of sensory organs. 

Little white mouths–that’s all they were. 

A wet, rippling, slurping sound drew my attention to my left. Directly beside the bed, a second group of them writhed on the side of my desk. Some had climbed the wall onto the corner of my bed, worming along my pillowcase like leeches. It was like a creeping tide of boiling white cheese. 

I lost my cool and pushed back across the floor to the opposite wall and shrieked with a spasm of revulsion. So much for kumbaya. 

Few people, I’m hoping, know exactly how it feels to communicate telepathically with carnivorous macaroni and cheese. Imagine a bully twisting your arm behind your back until you feel like it’s going to break. Now imagine that arm is your brain and every word spoken at you is a lightning flash of migraine-like pain. That’s what it felt like when they spoke to me. Every word was a bolt of misery.

If you continue forward with this plan of relocation, we will kill you and your roommate Randall. If you want to save your life and his, you must make him move out. If you have not made any progress by this time tomorrow, we will draw additional blood. 

We believe we have communicated our message. We will depart. 

Be aware: what you see of us is nothing against our sum total. What we say comes from throughout the walls. 

My eyes welled with tears from the pain. I was seeing three or four of every one of the creatures. Every new breath brought a flare of awful sensation to my head. I remained, curled in a fetal ball, drooling on my floor, waiting for the misery to end as the creatures moved back to the darkness under the radiator.

#

I grew up with Gina outside Dover, New Hampshire, where we lived across the road from each other. Her father wasn’t a drunk like my stepfather, but he could be just as cruel. One day after her seventh birthday, he took Gina to a farm and let her pick a rabbit to keep as a pet. A month later, as punishment for Gina refusing to eat her eggplant dinner (Gina wanted real meat), Gina’s father went outside and butchered fluffy little Lavender. He made her watch while he hit her pet with a maul and ripped its skin off. Later that night, she ran away to my house. For a handful of amazing minutes, I held her while she wept. When her father came over, my parents made her go back with him. I followed, yelling at him while my mother struggled to hold me back, until he turned and charged me, sending me running for my mother’s arms. He spat at the ground, called me a faggot, and told me to stay away from his daughter. My mother cursed back at him and told him to leave before she called the police. I still remember the shine of Gina’s tear-filled blue eyes as she looked back before her father yanked her inside slammed the door between us. 

After that, I dreamed we’d grow up, marry each other, and live in a house somewhere far away in another state. We’d raise rabbits and never, ever kill them. 

If you’ve read your Steinbeck, you’ll know it’s no good dreaming about rabbits. The years passed, and she dated tougher, more imposing guys.

Gina Wallingford–the one I never had; the one I could never let go. 

She was a librarian working in Queens when I moved to New York City. I brought a freshly-minted degree from the Harvard School of Design and a head full of hopes of wooing her as an accomplished big city architect. I got in touch, we hung out a bit, but she didn’t suddenly become into me because I was accomplished and had money. For me, it was enough to see her again. 

Then Randall moved in. Randall was someone who attracted women easily, almost thoughtlessly. It just happened with him, in a way I always envied. I blamed it on him being a good-looking veterinarian, which is a powerful combination for a woman who loved animals. When Gina started routinely asking whether Randall would be coming along to the things I invited her to, would Randall be coming later, what was Randall up to, was Randall seeing anyone?–well, it didn’t take an architect to read the writing on the wall. 

One night, they were out somewhere. I don’t know what happened, but I received a call from Gina. She was sobbing. All I could make out was that Randall was some kind of asshole, our apartment was toxic, she couldn’t see me anymore, and goodbye. 

When Randall came home, he was all smiles and had another girl giggling on his arm. 

“Easy come, easy go, huh?” I said. 

“Fuck’s wrong with you, Hairball?” 

“Who’s this creep?” his new girl said. Randall waved it off, and then they were gone, laughing, stumbling to the other side of the apartment. 

A month later, I lost my job. I decided it was time to move out of my toxic apartment. Maybe then Gina would start returning my calls.

#

When I woke up the next day, I found the nearly empty bottle of Seagram’s 7 beside me in bed, where some portion of its content had soaked my mattress and my t-shirt. My head still ached, but it wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling for me. My mouth was the kind of dry that extended to the back of my throat. The first glass of water didn’t take well and brought my gorge up. 

Good morning, me, I thought, flushing vomit down the toilet. I rinsed my mouth with tap water and spotted some dried blood on the floor near the bathtub. 

And there I stopped, contemplating the insanity that floated in my head. Little made sense. 

There was still a bandage on my toe. I unwrapped it and looked at the wound. 

Bite marks. Still there. 

Randall, I thought, panicked. I exited the bathroom and checked the living room. No sign of him. His bedroom door was closed, and I went over and knocked. 

“Yo,” he said from the other side. 

I could hear his damn birds, chirping and fluttering their wings. Randall liked birds a lot, and he had five separate cages in his room to house them. I wasn’t going to miss waking up to their infernal racket. 

“You okay?” I asked. 

“Why wouldn’t I be?” On the other side of the door, I heard him cooing to his pets. 

“Just checking.” 

“You’re just checking if I’m okay?” 

“Yep. Later.” 

“You’re a real psycho, Hair. You know that?” And back he went to his cooing. It must’ve been feeding time. 

I was about to walk away from his still-closed door when I thought to warn him, to tell him, what, exactly? 

Hey, I met some monsters last night. They want you to move out instead of me. 

Yeah, and how was that going to sound? 

Also, why me, anyway? I was a mess. I was unemployed. Why had they decided I was the guy they wanted to keep around? No creature, human or otherwise, really wanted a disaster like me for a roommate. Was I fracturing in my own head? Was I imagining it all? 

But the bite, I thought, sitting down on my bed. The bite proves it happened. 

But did it? I took the bandage off and brought my toe to my mouth. I was skinny and fairly flexible, but my toe made it to my mouth in only one way. 

My teeth couldn’t have lined up better with the bite marks if I had I made them myself.

#

So either I was crazy and wanted to kill my roommate, or my radiator was full of well-spoken telepathic monsters that wanted my roommate to move out. Why such high-functioning grubs would give two shits about who lived in our apartment was completely beyond me. 

Sane or not, it seemed reasonable to think I would have to be there to either kill Randall or do the creatures’ bidding. Both problems were solved if I just didn’t go home. 

So I went to the movies. Three of them. I don’t remember what I saw. I sat in the dark and tried not to think while I chewed the hell out of my fingers. When the movie theater closed, I went to a diner. I didn’t have a job (I’d been laid off from my architecture firm), so what did I need with sleep? I took my book and stayed out, drinking cup after cup of coffee, until the sun came up and turned the streets blue. 

Looking at that light through the glass of the diner’s window, the dread I’d felt two sunsets ago returned. 

… we will draw additional blood. 

Everything around me–the coffee cup, the spoon, the sugar packets, the stainless steel creamer, and the tabletop–seemed real enough. I seemed real enough.

What if they were real? 

What if my absence didn’t matter a bit to their agenda?

I had to get home. I signaled for the check.

And isn’t that exactly what they want? 

Come what may, Randall deserved to be warned, whatever it meant he would think about me. 

What did Gina matter anymore, anyway?

#

“Randall?” I called, cautiously entering the apartment after my trip to the diner, fearing what I was going to find. 

It was dark, no lights on anywhere. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed. Randall’s door was open. His bed was neatly made. His birds’ cages were covered in their dark cloths. From the look of things, he’d been gone all night. 

I let loose a heavy sigh of relief and sat down on the living room couch, relieved more than I would have thought possible. 

Nothing bad could happen so long as he stayed away. It was getting brighter in the apartment, and for some stupid reason, it made me feel safe, as if the horrors wouldn’t dare come out in broad daylight. 

The couch seemed safer than my room, so I watched a Twin Peaks rerun (Donna, at the Roadhouse, mouthed the words to James: I want you, rockin’ back inside my heart … ). 

I don’t remember falling asleep. When I woke up, all the lights were on, and my head was pounding with such force, I thought the entire apartment was shaking. 

You think we are not serious. You are mistaken.

They were everywhere, crisscrossing the walls in thick, pulsing webs, coating the floor, and piling up like slush against the side of the couch or the legs of the coffee table and TV stand. In my shock, I fell off the couch. Before I could get up, they’d swarmed over me, and in the time it took me to push myself to my feet, I’d lost the index finger of my right hand. At first, I didn’t even feel it; I stood up, shaking my limbs free of the creatures, and as I brushed them off, I rolled my own finger under my palm off my chest. The bent joints hit the floor, where the sad little hook of flesh was quickly devoured. 

Blood spurted from the wound. I screamed and fell backward, my head swimming. Without thinking much about it, I squeezed my finger tight while I grabbed a lighter from the coffee table and held the flame to the wound, until the pain and the smell of my own sizzling flesh overwhelmed me. 

[Note to self: standard lighters aren’t actually hot enough to cauterize a wound. I think I did more damage than good with that Bic. Next time, try the stove.]

I might’ve passed out, but they started talking again. 

It is our sincerest hope that now you will be motivated to do what must be done. Randall cannot stay. 

I was in too much agony to talk, but they seemed to read my mind regardless of the incoherence. 

We don’t like his birds, Harrison, or his mind. We have lived here for a long time. We will never leave. We are molded from many. We are not alone. What we say is thought throughout the walls. 

I tried to tell them to go talk to Randall themselves, but the words didn’t come out. The pain in my head pulsed with ebbing frequency as the white tide receded, leaving me gasping on the floor between the couch and the coffee table. The skin on my face was cold, but sweat still rolled down my temples and along my jaw. I regurgitated what little I’d eaten, but I lacked the strength to move anywhere or do anything about the mess. 

Eventually, the pain eased, and I fell asleep blowing bubbles in my own puke.

#

When I woke, there was still no sign of Randall. I cleaned the floor and wrapped a large Band-Aid and gauze around my little stump. Caught between miserable alternatives, the last thing I wanted to do was to try and explain my injury to some knit brow in the nearest emergency room, but I knew I should go. Except I really didn’t want to, and instead I went back to my room and downed the last swallow of the 7. 

“Fuck it,” I said. 

I spent the day stoned and watched more episodes of The Prisoner. When I’d watched them all, I watched them again in a different order. Two more days passed in a similar fashion, with no sign of either Randall or the vile macaroni. When I ran out of liquor, cold pizza, toilet paper, gauze, and hydrogen peroxide, I called out for more of whatever I’d run out of. You can get pretty much anything delivered in Manhattan. 

I tried to think of a way to convince Randall of the change of plans. If I showed him my finger, he might well assume I’d bitten it off myself. Same went for my toe. 

I realized I looked like shit, so I showered and shaved. No use looking like a homeless person when you’re delivering the news from Crazytown. 

With no clear idea in my head, I ate some leftover fried rice and fell asleep.

#

In the end, I wrote Randall a note. 

Hey Randall, 

There’s some kind of weird bugs in the wall. They come out in swarms. They seem to mean us harm. I think it would be wise to clear out. I’m going to stay to sort this out with the building, coordinate exterminators and the like, but I think it would be best if you moved out, found somewhere safer to live. These things are EXTREMELY DANGEROUS! 

I’ve lost a finger. Seriously. 

I’m really not kidding. 

You need to go. Don’t forget your birds. I think they’re on the menu, too. 

Cheers, 

H. 

I put it in an envelope, marked it with his name, and put it on his desk. Then I retreated to my room, locked the door, closed the drapes, and I waited. 

At least now they couldn’t say I hadn’t tried.

#

He came back a few hours later, and it didn’t take long for him to come pounding on my door. 

“Hey, the fuck is this shit? Are you kidding me with this, Hairball? Christ!”

Ah, I thought, he’s got a woman with him. He’d used the one sobriquet reserved for such occasions. 

I stood directly on the other side of my door. “No. I’m telling you the truth. You gotta go. It’s not safe here for you.” 

The handle shook. The door popped and cracked as he fought to yank it open. “Damn it, you better open this door!” 

“There’s millions of them, man. You gotta go. I didn’t make the rules.” 

“You didn’t make the rules? I’m losing my fucking patience with you! Open this fucking door!” 

“No. I won’t. Just go. Please. Tonight. Before it’s too late.”

“You’re a fucking psycho! You hear me? I’m not going anywhere. You piece of shit. You cowardly little worm! I’m staying! So you can go fuck yourself!” 

He pounded on the door once, hard enough to knock a nearby picture off the wall. The glass of the frame shattered on the floor. 

“Oh, brilliant,” I said. “Really sweet. I’m trying to warn you, do you a favor, you idiot.” 

I lifted the picture up. Shards of glass tinkled to the floor. I could hear Randall and his date giggling and wandering away. I closed my eyes and tried to calm the embers of rage in my chest.

Well, that went about as well as I expected it to, I thought. I considered leaving the apartment that night. Staying put us both at risk. If I left, maybe the monsters would kill him and maybe they wouldn’t, but at least I’d be out of harm’s way. 

I made up my mind to leave the next day. I’d rent a hotel room until I found somewhere else to go. Financially speaking at least, I could easily survive the few weeks it would take to get settled somewhere else. 

I’d already lost a finger for Randall (I had the stumpy finger to prove it); I’d be damned if I was going to lose anything else. 

And if the monsters came that night? Well, they would have to give me some points for trying. 

I rolled a nice, fat joint. Whatever happened, though, I don’t think it was because of the pot, even if the pot made it so much harder to deal with.

#

I was still pretty high when I woke to someone screaming. I first thought Randall was doing something to the girl he’d brought over. I bolted from my room and opened Randall’s bedroom door without knocking. 

They were both naked, but Randall had fallen to the floor. His blood swirled in the churning stew. The flesh of his arms was chewed to the bone. They were in his ears, in his mouth, and had torn through his left cheek. One of his eyes was gone, and the monsters worked fiendishly into the socket. 

I’d been right about the birds; the monsters dropped from the ceiling onto the cages, chewing through the cloth, and were now busy consuming parakeet, parrot, and blue macaw.

But worse than either of these two scenes was the girl on the bed. When I saw her–when I realized it was Gina–my legs buckled and I had to hold the doorframe to steady myself. Sadness choked me, and it was all I could do to look. It was so unfair. 

They’d worked their way up her body, consuming her legs and the soft flesh of her stomach. There they pooled inward while she tried to worm her way off the bed with arms were nearly gone.

I couldn’t let it continue. I went to the kitchen and found the largest knife. Returning, I crushed a few of the creatures, feeling them ooze and squelch between my toes as I reached for Randall’s head. The ragged stump of an arm reached for me, searching, pleading, and then I pulled his hair back, exposed his throat, and drew the blade across the unbroken flesh. 

I took his subsequent gurgling for gratitude. 

Then I went to the bed. 

“Hair,” Gina said. “Hair, please. Stop it.”

I can believe the monsters. I can believe the insanity. I can believe a lot of things, but I can’t believe she would call me that. 

I put my hand over her eyes, and I pushed her head back. Then I pushed the blade deep and drew it across Gina’s throat, thinking about the skinned rabbit behind her father’s shed and how I’d consoled her all those lifetimes ago.

#

I woke up in the bathtub. I crawled out like a vampire emerging from its coffin. The toilet was unflushed and full of vomit, which I’d splattered all over the sides of the bowl, so I spent some time cleaning that up to avoid going back to Randall’s room. 

I’d lost all sense of what day of the week or month it was. The light coming in the window of Randall’s room was the same early-evening shade of red it had been the night I first met the monsters. 

There was no sign of the previous night’s terrors. No blood. No bodies. Not a single morsel of flesh. 

The creatures had eaten everything. 

The bed was unmade, and the door was open. The covers to the birdcages were shredded, but all the birds were gone. 

They’d left my knife on the floor. I picked it up, and bent it toward me in the light of another day’s retreating sun. 

I studied my reflection in the blade. Questions I didn’t want to ask about myself stood paralyzed in my mind.

#

Okay. I’ll come clean.

There’s something I lied about, and it’s important I tell the truth. I owe it to Gina. 

The truth is, it wasn’t ever because of Randall that Gina stopped coming around; it was because of me. We–Gina and I–got into it pretty good the day she went and did something with Randall that neither one of them invited me to. I was pissed. I was drunk. I was stoned. Then I called her up and yelled at her, because I’d lost the will to pretend I wasn’t mad at her for dating Randall instead of me.

I’m sure in her mind, my anger came out of nowhere.

“I just think you’re a bad fucking person,” I told her. “You’re not good for me.”

“Why would you say that? You’re my best friend!”

“I’m your best friend? Are you fucking kidding? I mean … that’s pathetic. We haven’t talked to each other for years, and now we’ve only been hanging out a couple months. But hey, yeah, we’re best fucking friends! That’s fucking sad, Gina.”

“You’re such an asshole. I can’t believe you. You’re just drunk, you know that, right? You’re going to regret this all tomorrow. You’re going to regret this when we’re not friends anymore.”

“I am drunk, but me being drunk doesn’t have a goddamn thing to do with you being one of Randall’s whores, and I’m still going to think you’re one of Randall’s whores tomorrow because I thought it as soon as I woke up this morning. That’s right! I woke up, made some coffee, thought to myself, ‘Holy fucking shit is Gina ever a goddamn whore!’ Tell me: how did you become such a terrible goddamn person, anyway?” 

“Jesus, Harrison, can you even hear yourself sometimes?” She was actually crying. 

“I can hear myself just fine,” I said, “and I think I sound awesome.” 

“Well,” she said, and there was this wounded finality in her voice that satisfied me at the time and haunts me now, “I think you just became just another toxic relationship in my stupid fucking life. Have it your way. Goodbye, Harrison. Have a nice life.”

And that was it. She hung up; I hung up. 

It was one of those things that felt really good at the time and only felt worse the longer I went without being able to speak to her. Because she was right; I did end up regretting it. And after she died in my apartment? Let me just say that, whenever anyone says anything about not believing in regret, I expect to get pretty argumentative, and it’s Gina I’ll be thinking about. 

She was the love of my life, and the last thing I ever was to her was mean. 

Kneeling on the floor of Randall’s room the day after the monsters killed Gina and Randall, I found myself repeating my own stupidity: 

I can hear myself just fine, and I think I sound awesome. 

I can hear myself just fine, and I think I sound awesome. 

I can hear myself just fine, and I think I sound awesome.

#

You would think the beasts would have been satisfied, but they came back a night later. It was a long twenty-four hours; I wondered if police would be coming by to investigate the deaths and if I’d seen the last of those little white mouths. It was just long enough of a lull to make me think it was all going to be fine from that point on. 

At the same time, the conspicuous absence of the creatures worried me. For one, I felt some kind of resolution was needed. I didn’t know what I expected them to say (“Job well done!” seemed a bit cold), but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t seeking some sort of attaboy from them. 

Something that, at any rate, would let me know that we were square. 

But more than their compliments, I wanted to see them again to assure myself that they did, in fact, actually exist in the first place. 

They waited until around two a.m. the following morning, and then they woke me up one last time. Congratulations and accolades, however, were not what they had in mind. 

They came back pissed. 

When they woke me, they were covering the wall beside my bed, blocking the window, and spreading over the ceiling. Some fell onto my arms and face, and I brushed them off, retreating to the door before they screamed at me and brought me shuddering to my knees.

You poisoned us! We will KILL you!

Something hit the wall, and I saw an impact smear of bloody, milky gristle. There was more buzzing behind me, and another half dozen flew in uncontrolled arcs across the room. 

The creatures were growing wings. Even as they spread out, an increasing number of the boiling mass were popping out of the crowd, flying like wayward popcorn kernels from an open kettle.

We cannot control it! You have murdered us! The wings weaken us!

They splattered over every surface in the room, leaving behind the contents of their gooey bodies, and I soon realized the gore coating my walls was the undigested remains of Gina and Randall. The portion of the white tide that was not currently sprouting wings was regurgitating my former friends onto my bed, my desk, and the floor. 

It was the birds! The birds have done something to us! We are poisoned! You must HELP US!

With all that was left of my strength, I thought back, pushed back against them, and their mental power must also have been weakened, because it was the only time I’d ever been able to do such a thing. 

“No more!” I yelled, and when the force of my refusal hit them, the remaining creatures exploded, coating every inch of my room and my body with blood and flesh.

#

Spent a few weeks in a hotel after that. Found a new place through an online ad, cleaned myself up, and made a good show of it in the interview. I don’t know if the police are looking for me, but I figure they probably are. I might leave town altogether soon, but I haven’t quite managed to pull the plug.

My new roommates seem really nice. 

But you never can tell about people, can you?

We had to go in Uncle Joe’s beat-to-shit wagon be­cause the alternator went in my dad’s Chevy. I didn’t like it. It meant we’d be riding with Uncle Joe the whole way, listening to him bullshit about his life. Knew I’d get stuck in the back with his damned husky. The mangy thing smelled and was too eager to be loved. I’d shove it away, but it would always come back, the same dumb grin on its face every time.

We were going to Connecticut because my grandfather died. We got off to a late start, which put Uncle Joe in a bad mood. He yelled at other drivers, yelled at his car, yelled at my dad. My dad tried to smile and brush it off, looked for some way to make it pleasant—but all he got from Uncle Joe for that were these suspi­cious stares.

Then there was the light from the sun, all faint and nostalgic, with golden rays of late evening lighting up every damned leaf in the woods. People in school always get im­pressed when I know words like “nos­talgic.” They say, “Oh, he’s so smart. Wouldn’t think it, would you?” These little brats from their big houses com­ing up to me all the time, wearing their fucking clothes they just bought yesterday. I’m wearing dirty jeans and a secondhand tee-shirt passed down from whatever scumbag in my fam­ily got tired of Aerosmith. The rich shits tell me I could be all smart like them, and it’s supposed to feel good.

Truth was, that day, I was feeling good—really good—and what I hated most about that trip with my father and uncle, right from the start, was that all I wanted to do was call Helen Plum, who told me I was sweet the afternoon before we left. Sweet and smart, she said. I only nod­ded, but an hour later, I was in love with her. Hell yeah. Helen Plum. I looked up her number while my dad was in the kitchen putting half-emp­ty bottles of booze into a backpack. I was going through the Plums in the book, trying to figure out the one for Helen’s family. Mom was on the couch, smoking cigarettes and watching me. She didn’t usually take much notice of things. Just sat there all day on the couch. She was sick. Sick of perpetual shame is what I think, but I’d never say that to her.

She said, “Whatcha doing, Jasper?”

I said, “Nothing, Mom. Just looking up someone’s number.”

“Whose number?”

“Helen Plum’s.”

“Who’s that?”

“You remember her. She came by last week­end. Short hair, dyed purple.” The girl I was talking about was named Ariel something. She’d just moved to our nasty little part of Nashua. My mother nodded. I knew she wouldn’t know the name. Also knew she’d like the thought of a purple-haired girl whose last name was Plum.

She took another drag. There were only three Plums listed, and only one was local. I wrote the number on a piece of foil torn from a pack of GPCs. My heart got light because the phone on the coffee table was right there in front of me. The challenger’s stare.

“You ready, Jasper?”

Obviously not.

But it was just my father, ready to go, not the phone taunting me, and I knew that. But I thought it was funny, all the same–the timing, you know? Through the living room window, I could see Uncle Joe’s car idling in the driveway. Uncle Joe smoked a ciga­rette and slapped his dog in the face. The dog looked like it was grinning, en­joying getting smacked like that.

Finally I said, “Yeah.” Flipped the phone book closed. I tucked the number in the breast pocket of my flannel, and that was that.

*     *     *

Stifled in the dark car, cigarette smoke curling under my nose, I felt dry. My dad and uncle were filling me with their own nastiness. Uncle Joe talked about my Aunt Nora. He’d renamed the dog Nora after my aunt divorced him a year ago. Even though she’d been living in Tennessee for a good six months, he still had stories to tell about how she was an awful bitch who was ruining his life. Thank God he’d broken free. Uncle Joe pounded the top of his car with his fist in triumph, and my father laughed. Smiled. Told Uncle Joe how he hated the sight of my mother’s na­ked body.

“Man, I can’t help but laugh. She puts on these cheap little numbers and tries to dance around like she was some kind of sexy bitch working at Guenevere’s. Then she gets all upset when I tell her to get her fucking clothes back on, but whatever, man. She ain’t no fucking Julia Rob­erts. She ain’t nothing but a tired, old fat-body with bad teeth that I have to keep feeding.”

The dog was beside me, and it pissed me off. It was lapping my face and whin­ing. Then it looked at me with that sad face dogs get, as though I could do some­thing for it. I tried to get it to lie down, but it wouldn’t. It paced about, climbed around—never comfortable.

“Having fun back there, Jasper?” my uncle said. He smiled at me in the mirror. “Dog’s a bitch, ain’t she? I love it. C’mere, Nora.”

The dog jumped up be­tween the front seats. It tried to climb over Uncle Joe’s shoulder. It nudged his arm, and the car swerved. Uncle Joe shoved Nora into the back again. The dog fell into the narrow space between my knees and the back of my father’s seat. It managed to climb out with a little work. Then it stared at me again. It shifted its weight back and forth between its two front legs and resumed its whimpering.

*     *     *

We made it to the motel in Connecticut by seven o’clock. The funeral was set for two o’clock the next day. A plan formed. They’d drink in the room until eleven and then head out to the bars. They’d get me in, of course. I was sixteen, but in my fam­ily, that was just a number—a part of someone else’s law.

We threw our bags in a small closet in the motel, and Uncle Joe sent me and my father out for liquor. He said he wanted to make a telephone call. One guess as to who it was he wanted to call and why he wanted us gone.

Out in the hallway, I asked my dad, “You think I could maybe make a call later?”

“Who to?”

“Someone from school.”

“We’ll see.”

He didn’t need to say more. No money of my own. I’d done the forms for a few job places, but no one had called me back yet. Dad blamed that on me, too. It was typical. So I was still dependent on handouts, and I’d heard all my dad’s long-distance speeches enough times to know I wouldn’t be making the call to Helen Plum from the motel room.

But wait until we were back in Nashua? Hell with that. There was this silly sense in me that I had to do it as soon as possible—some­thing my dad and Uncle Joe would’ve called lust. Sure, whatever. I really didn’t care what it was. Just wanted to call Helen, and wanting something like that made me feel bet­ter, like there was a shield protecting me from all their shit making me less there somehow.

My dad made me carry the booze so he could smoke. I was pretty well pissed off by the time we got back to the For­tunate Rest Motel. The ‘U’ in ‘For­tunate’ was blinking on and off, and that helped me out a bit. It seemed funny—though not enough for me to explain it all to Dad when he asked what I was grinning about.

Uncle Joe looked out at the road as he smoked a cigarette and paced back and forth in front of the window in Room 63.

“You get us something good, Freddy? Hope you didn’t listen to your son and get those wine coolers.” He grinned at that.

“That’s right, Uncle Joe,” I said. “But I’m still waiting for you to re­turn the ones I shoved up your ass two months ago. Still getting off on them, or what?”

Uncle Joe made a face of mocked shock. “What a naughty boy you got there, Freddy. He’s getting better with the comebacks.”

“Yeah, he’s a wiseass,” my dad said. “Want a beer there, Joe?”

Uncle Joe left his eyes on me for another second and a half.

*     *     *

Sometimes, that first beer still seems like a choice. By the time we left Room 63, I’d had three. Generosity abounds when they’re trying to turn you into an alcoholic. Phone calls, forget it. Want beer? Hell, sure—and then they’ll even take you out to a bar.

We left Nora and set off. When the bouncer at the first bar refused my entrance, we went to another place, which wouldn’t let Uncle Joe in because he was wearing sneakers. My dad had to hold Uncle Joe back from the bouncer.

“That faggot would’ve loved Dad,” Uncle Joe said, itching to go back to the no-sneakers bar. “Fucking asshole never wore nothing but those damned shit-kickers.”

By which he meant Grandpa Bel­don’s cowboy boots. You see, “dead” never implied “respectable” to my family. Some people had to die, and more than a few were better off that way. I never really knew my grandfather. Just knew that he screwed up Dad and Uncle Joe to the point where they never talked. Well, they never talked to him. They always talked about him. I knew the whole story. How my grandfather used to have a constant supply of younger women. How he’d spend all his time and money on the other women and their kids instead of his own. In one of my father’s wiser drunken moments, he said my grandfather had never managed to fully become a man. My father’s reason was that Grandpa Beldon would see a young girl on the street and think of her as a sex object rather than a daughter-type figure.

“The man was all fuck and no nur­ture,” my dad had said. “A cowboy, maybe, but not a father.”

Uncle Joe spat on the sidewalk and moaned. “I can’t believe the asshole’s finally dead. You know how long it’s been since he offered to send me any mon­ey? Fourteen goddamned years!”

The fourth bar let us all in. It’s im­pressive to see the swift change from a drunk, father-hating man into a drunk, chauvinist pig. Uncle Joe walked through the doorway, and a glow washed over his angry face, the doorframe siphoning off his former venom.

“Look at all the sexy babies in here, Freddy,” Uncle Joe said, taking his place at the bar. “Jasper, get up here beside me. I need your opinion on something. Barman, three pints of Bud, por fa­vor.”

I did as I was told. We sat around the side of the bar, as near as possible to the end. A pay phone beckoned from the wall on Uncle Joe’s right. I sat on his left. He lit a cigarette. Nodded his head to the Black Sabbath song playing from the jukebox across the room.

“Fucking good music. I don’t un­derstand the shit they come out with now. This is where it’s at,” he said.

“Bunch of whiny brats singing today,” Dad said. “Staring at their shoes.”

“Amen,” said Uncle Joe. “You like this music, Jasper?”

“Sure.”

He slapped me on the back. “You’re an all right kid. I’m glad you’re here. So listen, I have to ask you: You think a woman on the face of the earth ever made a guy happy?”

I thought of Helen and didn’t say anything. Raised my eyebrows and drew my coat tighter around me. Beers came. I caught the look the bar­tender gave me, but I kept focused on Uncle Joe.

“No,” Uncle Joe said. “And I’ll tell you why. It’s because they don’t want to make any of us happy. They just want to run us into the ground. I don’t expect you to understand this yet, but the secret is to beat them to the punch. Sooner or later, it comes down to who goes for the jugular first. Know what I mean?”

I nodded but didn’t agree. Kept trying to hang on to the image of Helen in the bleachers in the school gym. Just the two of us, talking be­cause she’d wanted to. Such a sur­prise. I imagined her now reading a book in a well-made bed, surrounded by stuffed animals, listening to quiet music on a small radio beside her. Uncle Joe punched me in the shoulder.

“Take my ex-wife for exam­ple,” Uncle Joe said, like it was some great shock he’d bring her up. “She had me convinced, yeah? I was all in love, doing all the right shit. Wasn’t I, Freddy?”

“You were,” my dad said.

“And what happened? She fucking divorces me! Breaks it off, steals my money, heads off to Tennessee with some goddamned lawyer.”

He was leaning in really close to my face. My natural reflex was to back away, but I knew that Uncle Joe just would’ve come closer. He was trying to read me. Trying to make sure I was listening and buying his shit. A part of me didn’t want to make him feel stupid, so I made my face stay where it was. Even if I knew he was about as dense as they come, there was still no point in piss­ing him off.

“I don’t know,” he continued, backing away slightly to take a drag on his cigarette. “Point is, you have to be cruel to be kind, because the only one you can look after and take care of is you. You reading me here? Because I’m only gonna say this once.”

I was full of hope that I’d only hear this sermon preached once. Knew I’d probably get at least one encore.

“So we’ve got a mission tonight, Jasper. Know what that mission is?”

I shook my head. Braced myself.

“Tell him, Freddy.”

My father leaned in across the bar. “The three of us are all going to get a nice, round, juicy piece of ass. All of us.”

Uncle Joe smiled and blew smoke out at the bar. He punched me again in the shoulder, this time a little hard­er. “How’s that sound? Pretty god­damned good, yeah? You been laid, Jasper?”

“Yeah,” I said, surprising myself with the defensive tone of my voice.

“How many times?”

I faltered in my lie. Just for a sec­ond. “Three times.”

“Three times, huh? Not bad. Fred­dy, you know your kid was screw­ing?”

“Should. Goddamned whores make so much damned noise it’s hard to sleep nights.” My dad winked at me then. Uncle Joe noticed and gave me a nudge.

“Well, then, you’re going to get laid again tonight. Sound good?”

I nodded. “Sure.”

“Jesus fuck, Freddy,” Uncle Joe said. “He don’t look all that excited, does he?”

“Think he’s a skeptic, Joe. Doesn’t believe you.”

“Guess I’d better get to work con­vincing him.”

“Guess you’d better.”

Uncle Joe slipped from the bar­stool. “Allow me,” he said and went toward the other end of the room.

I looked at the exposed pay phone. I turned to my dad. He smiled at me.

“Going to be a good night, kid­do.”

“Could I make a phone call, do you think?”

“Why?”

It was such a desperate move. I wasn’t even thinking about how Helen’s family would’ve reacted to a phone call from a lovesick, boozed-up sixteen-year-old kid at midnight, who just couldn’t wait until normal business hours to proclaim his slurred passion.

“Just want to call a girl,” I said.

“Ah, so that’s it. Well, I don’t think you need to waste any money on that. We’ll have all the ass you could want in just a little while. Relax, have a beer. You don’t look drunk enough yet.”

He put his arm around my shoul­ders.

“You’re my son, Jasper,” he said. “I love you like a brother. Whatever you want, just say the word. Your Uncle Joe and I got you covered. Want a smoke?”

I hesitated for a second, but then I thought better and took one. He lit it. I coughed. My dad grinned. I waited. Stared at the burning tip.

*     *     *

Eventually, Uncle Joe flagged us over to where he stood be­tween three women. Pale faces and gray eyes, the mascara making them look even more disfigured and uninteresting. They looked shrunken, despite a general heftiness—like par­tially deflated balloons.

“Jasper, Freddy, I want you to meet Vicky, Gina, and Diane,” Uncle Joe said. “They’re out for the night be­cause their old men don’t know what they got. Isn’t that right, girls?”

“That’s right,” Vicky said. The oth­er two smiled at me and my dad.

“So this must be Jasper, huh?” Gina said. At about thirty, she seemed the youngest. I stared at her navel. It rode a wave of flesh that curled around the waistband of her cutoffs. A smiley-face patch, smeared with mustard, had been stitched above the right-hand pocket. “Your Uncle Joe here’s been telling us all about you. Good student, he says.”

“That’s right,” my dad said. “Smart­er than all of us combined. Just ap­plied to Harvard.”

“No shit,” Vicky said. She shook her head. “That’s fantastic. Glad to know someone’s doing something good with their life.”

It goes without saying that I’d ap­plied nowhere fancier than the local pizza place. But I smirked. It was somewhat fun to play the part of the genius that I wasn’t.

After that, a motion was made and passed to head back to the mo­tel where the liquor was cheaper. During the long walk, Gina, tummy rolling, stuck beside me. Uncle Joe waltzed up the sidewalk, his hand on Vicky’s ass. My father had his arm around draped around Diane.

When we got back to the motel, my dad told me to take Nora for a walk. Would’ve been okay if Gina hadn’t followed me out. She smoked a cigarette against the wall of the motel while Nora took her sweet old time.

“Pretty dog,” she said. “Could use a bath, though, huh?”

True. But then, Nora had needed a bath ever since Uncle Joe brought her home. I couldn’t remember Nora clean. Always dirty. Always reeking of Uncle Joe’s apartment.

“Pretty cool to get in a bar at your age, huh?” Gina said. “How old are you? Eighteen? I remember being eighteen. Christ, we all went every­where.”

“Sixteen.”

“Sixteen, Jesus!” Gina whistled. “Your dad and uncle are pretty cool guys, huh?”

“Guess so.”

“Your dad’s a sexy man. Looks like you boys were cut from good stock, huh?” She took a step toward me, smiling in sync with the patch on her shorts. I held Nora’s leash and tried to focus all my attention on the dog. Then Gina took another step, and I saw her hand move toward me.

“Just shut up, would you?” I said. She was worse than the fucking dog. Nora took a piss and I pulled her back up the stairs to the room. Gina followed, graciously not saying another igno­rant word and keeping her distance.

Back inside, Uncle Joe cuddled with Vicky, and my father stretched out beside Diane. Any chance of a halfway decent night’s sleep dissolved.

“Gina, come sit,” Uncle Joe said. He moved over. She sat on his right, Vicky on his left. The TV was on. They were watching late-night HBO. I didn’t know the movie. Two people were having sex—that much was clear. I took a seat on the floor in front of my father’s bed. He tapped my head with his dirty toes.

“Get up here, Jasper. Stop being so grumpy.”

They made space for me beside Diane. We were all on top of the cov­ers to begin with. It didn’t last. Diane said she was cold, and my dad worked his blankets out to allow her to crawl beneath.

“Jasper, go get us some ice,” my father said.

I got off the bed, crossed the room, and headed for the door. Trying not to look. On my way out, I caught a glimpse of my uncle between the two other women. Vicky already had her shirt off, and Uncle Joe’s hands were working on unhook­ing her bra. I left the room, out of breath by the time the door closed again.

I realized I hadn’t grabbed the ice bucket. Fuck it, though. They hadn’t wanted ice, and even if they had, I certainly wasn’t going to be their errand boy. I walked down the carpeted stairwell, through the lobby, and out the front door. On my way to Cal­ifornia, I guess. I craved so much distance between myself and what was behind me. Couldn’t even think about it. Just had to go.

I came up on another pay phone. I took a seat on the grass beside it and looked across the road. There was a train station up a ways. I tried to think about other places. I’d never been to another place long enough to get a sense of it, so I thought about Nashua, once ranked one of the best towns in the United States, one of my teachers had said. I wonder if whatever magazine had said that had met us.

My arms were shaking. My legs stiffened as the cold air seeped through the fabric of my jeans and my thin shirt. I wanted to be in bed back home.

I stood up and leaned against the pay phone. I rested my head against the cold metal. Looked at the silver numbers, the black receiver. Looked at the little blurb that had that big 35-cents-for-a-local-call thing. Too bad I wanted long distance. I couldn’t even call a cab. I stared at the eye-level text and felt like I was drowning.

But I couldn’t let myself think like that, so I said fuck it and walked back to the motel. When I crept through the door, I closed my eyes but couldn’t close my ears. Heard my father moan­ing “Aw, Gina, yeah. Uh-huh, just like that,” sounding like the asshole from the movie they’d been watching earlier. I went in the bathroom, closed the door, and crept into the corner beside the toilet. I heard a whimper. Finally noticed Nora in the dark corner beside the tub. She raised her head for a mo­ment and then went to sleep. I tucked my jacket behind my head and tried to do the same.

I waited for morning—awake, aware, and bored of my racing heart.

*     *     *

The light brightened in the window above my head. I really hate the sun. It never makes me feel good. And that fuck­ing bathroom! Out of all the hotels and motels I’ve ever stayed in, that was the only one that ever had a win­dow in the bathroom. What ridicu­lous bad luck. It was a gray morning, and those are the worst for me. I feel the price tag of everything. I look at my clothes, my skin, and I think of what it all cost and how the dream my mother had had a long time ago must have been so different. In that motel, it was all gray, cold light—light that would come from a corpse’s hide. I didn’t even have a watch to check the time and chart my progress toward the end of it all.

It was this curiosity that finally got the better of me. I opened the door to the bathroom and went out into the room. Didn’t see a clock, so I went around the bed to see if my dad had taken off his watch and left it on the nightstand.

Gina was gone. One down. Thank God it was her. I didn’t want to see her face with our recent history crusted on her eyes. Uncle Joe slept with Vicky, who drooled on the pil­low. Uncle Joe had his mouth hang­ing open like he was singing a song.

My dad’s watch was where I thought it would be. I checked the time. It was 10:09. My dad was snor­ing on Diane’s naked breasts.

His wallet was beside his watch. When I set the Timex down, I picked up the worn billfold. He had a ten, a five, and three ones. I took the five, put the wallet back, and walked out into the hall.

There were phones in the lobby, but I didn’t have any coins. The kid behind the desk looked at me funny when I asked for change, so I told him to forget it. I walked until I found a convenience store. The world moved around me. Other people seemed translucent and unreal, distortions of an unrested head.

I bought a thing of orange juice and asked for all quarters back, no bills please and thank you. The big man behind the counter didn’t want to do it. I could tell. He made the change, though. I like to think of him as a saint for that.

The pay phone was on the side of the building. I took out Helen’s number. Opened the orange juice and drank some. It tasted good, like sunshine from a better place. I sat down. Took the change out of my pocket and looked it over. Old and new coins, all silver. I finished the or­ange juice and set the bottle on the ground beside me, then stood up and faced the phone. I took the receiver from the cradle and dialed the num­ber.

“This call requires a minimum de­posit of two dollars and seventy-five cents.”

I deposited all the coins and closed my eyes, turned away from the phone, and fell against the concrete wall of the store. The phone on the other end rang. She would be getting out of bed, I thought, the light in her bedroom clear and bright—not from the fickle sun, but from the inner exuberance of every object around her. The top of my head lifted off its hinges.

“Hell–”

I hung up. Replaced the receiver in the cradle, the black plastic slipping against my moist palm.

It’s not what you think. You think I was a coward—that that was why I couldn’t do it. But it’s not like that. I hung up because I couldn’t bear the thought of talking to Helen Plum. I couldn’t handle liking her anymore. Didn’t want her eyes on me. Didn’t want her ears to be polluted by the wretched whine of my voice. Hated the thought of hearing myself talk to her.

I left the rest of the coins and the orange juice bottle on top of the phone and went back to the motel.

*     *     *

Nora was waiting behind the door when I got back. I took her outside again, and when she finished, we went back up­stairs to the room. She was hungry. I could tell. The way she looked at me. Nuzzled me. Just like always. But I had no food. I cursed myself for leav­ing the money. I could have bought her something if I’d been thinking of anything except myself, but now I was too tired to steal more money and walk back to the conve­nience store.

I went into the bathroom. The dog followed me. I turned on the light to get rid of all the gray. I saw the un­used motel soap and shampoo, and I remembered what Gina had said the night before about the dog. I remem­bered how cold I’d been to Gina. She’d smiled at me. She’d thought there’d been something possible. But what? I was sixteen. It dawned on me then that perhaps she’d wanted to be the instructive older woman in my life. A saucy little adventure on my way to manhood. But I’d denied her. For a moment, I felt really awful about my earlier angst. But whatever. She’d had her fun, hadn’t she? I put it behind me.

I poured Nora a bath, not knowing if dogs preferred hot or cold. I made it hot. That’s what I’d been taught to do, and if it was good enough for me, it was good enough for Nora.

I picked her up and put her in the tub. She resisted for a while, but I told her to calm down. “Everything will be fine,” I said. “Everything is great.” A noisy eighteen-wheeler rolled by out­side, and it freaked her out. I spoke as soothingly as I knew how.

She settled down, and I did the best I could with what was there. I rubbed the soap into her fur, getting a thin lather. Then the shampoo. Then the soap again. Then the rest of the shampoo.

I used every towel on the rack to dry her. I wanted her to shine. She seemed happy while I dried her off. She kept licking my face. I put up with it.

After throwing the last hand towel into the pile of dirty, wet towels, I bent close to Nora’s neck and smelled her.

Under the layer of new soapy-smell, all the old filth was still there. She seemed happy enough, but I could still smell it. All of it. Close to the skin, ground into the pores.

I stood up and looked into the tub. The soap seemed to have never exist­ed. The water was a gray murk with bits of dirt floating on the surface. Transfixed for a moment, I tracked the path of a tiny, busted twig.

Other stories have better endings, but not mine. Some people probably end up standing up to their fathers. Not me. I wasn’t built for confrontation, and that morning wasn’t the day that things magically changed. That was the morning I didn’t call Helen Plum.

Instead, I looked down at my Aerosmith shirt, which had originally been my cousin Ray’s, and I took it off. I kicked my nine-dollar sneakers into the cor­ner. I took off my dirty, torn jeans, my socks with the holes in the heels, and my cheap boxer shorts with the crotch falling out from too much wear and tear. I shed it all.

Then I stepped into the bathtub still filled with the filth of the dog, sat down, laid back, plugged my nose and closed my eyes, and I went under. I held my breath as long as I could.