Authors: Nic Brown
Though she vacations for weeks at a time only blocks away, Maria has not seen Christopherson's father in years. When he opens the door, she is stunned by how handsome he is. His hair is gray and his face has thinned with the years, but it is definitely an improvement. It is new for her to see someone's parent as a person and not just a position, let alone someone who is handsome, and she wonders if it is the bearing of a child that has given her a newfound appreciation for a generation who has already done so.
“Hey there!” he says, elated to see his son. “Alright. Skeleton man.”
“Hey, Dad,” Christopherson says.
“You guys been looking at all the weirdos in the graveyard?”
“Yeah. Dad, you remember Maria.”
“Hey, Mr. Jessee,” Maria says. She extends a hand from within the sheet and waves.
“Maria!” he says. “You look pale.”
Maria laughs courteously but does not reveal her face. She is afraid she is blushing and opts to keep herself well hidden.
After they return to the street, Maria surrenders the last of her hope. She will not find her daughter tonight. It is probably for the best, she thinks, as they make their way west. The children have begun to pack up and go home, their bedtimes quickly approaching. The volume of screaming has slowly decreased. Christopherson circles back toward his mother's house.
“You see your dad much?” she says.
“Yeah,” Christopherson says. “He takes me out on the boat.”
Maria wonders what it is like to have a father. In her own life she has never truly felt the absence. Maybe she simply doesn't know what she's missing. Perhaps, she thinks, it is not that she has missed anything, but rather that a second parent is just insurance against the other. For Maria, to whom her mother has been everything, the approaching loss of that person spells absolute family destruction. She ponders the arithmetic of parental population while unwrapping a mystery-flavored Dum Dum, its wrapper printed with purple question marks, and that is when she sees it: the very house for which she has been hunting. A chill runs through her, despite the late October heat. It is enough like the photos for her to recognize it, but film could never capture its true splendor. The grounds are filled with nappy grass across a wide lawn dotted with azaleas and rosebushes. The house is both more grand and more run-down than she expected. Maria has envisioned her child on this very lawn, the one Christopherson is now crossing. She rushes behind him, hidden and shushing within her white sheet. The mailbox reads
PRICE
. Their last name. Maria never missed it, but now that she knows it, the family seems material. She realizes that, before now, she has not known her daughter's full name. Bonacieux Price. It sounds right, she thinks, relieved.
At the stoop, before Christopherson can even knock, the door opens and Nina appears dressed as a tube of Aim. Even in the guise of toothpaste, she is more beautiful than in film, avian and fragile and fine.
“Aren't you like twenty by now?” Nina says.
“Trick-or-
treat
!” Christopherson says.
Maria approaches slowly and in dread. She is pleased that Christopherson knows the Prices but hopes it does not lead to conversation. What could she say that would not betray her? Again she is thankful for her costume, redolent of softener and dust.
Rolling her eyes, Nina extends a bowl of saltwater taffy. Behind her, at the end of a small hallway, a blue baby seat sits on a worn hardwood floor. It is empty, and for a moment Maria is both disappointed and relieved. Then, across the doorway, Philip passes. He wears a pair of glasses from which bloodshot eyes dangle on springs, bouncing slowly above a tightly wrapped bundle held close to his chest. He approaches the door and reveals what is so tightly wrapped. It is Bonacieux.
What the days have so quickly wrought. The child's left eye is bruised black and a Band-Aid spans the bridge of her nose. Maria's mouth opens in pure primal terror and she is glad to be wearing a sheet to hide her betrayal of bald emotion.
“Our little welterweight,” Philip says, and Christopherson begins to laugh.
Maria is left out on some joke here, overwhelmed by the fact that her child has been damaged. Nina pulls more of the blanket away, revealing small boxing gloves taped onto each of Bonacieux's hands. And then Maria gets it: this is a costume. Her daughter is dressed as a boxer. The child, eyes still closed, raises one gloved hand to her face.
Maria is startled by the paths her mind so readily took. Philip takes Bonacieux's hand and with it lightly punches Christopherson on the nose. He feigns a knockout, swinging both skeleton arms for balance.
As Maria stares at her daughter's soft face, her breasts begin to swell. She backs up a few steps, scared of the biological magic at work here. She is not even sure at first of what it is, but it soon begins to make sense: her milk is starting to flow again. She feels betrayed by this production of her own body, triggered by nothing more than an image.
Philip and Nina have ignored Maria until this point, but now they turn to her, and Philip says, “TKO!”
Maria says nothing. They don't seem to expect her to. She is just another trick-or-treater. They've already had hundreds.
“Y'all be safe,” Nina says. “And tell your mother we said hi.”
“Alright,” Christopherson says.
Maria raises one hand within her sheet, where it cannot be seen, and waves, secretly, to her daughter. She backs slowly down the sidewalk, passing a tall azalea as a crowd of other teenagers flow down the walkway, keeping her eyes on her daughter until she loses sight in the mob of trick-or-treaters. Maria feels a confused energy she does not know how to expend. She has a desire for a cigarette, a drink. A drug.
“You OK?” Christopherson says.
“I need to go,” Maria says.
“Home?”
“Not home. Just not trick-or-treating. I think I want to do something crazy.”
“Al
right
,” Christopherson says, grinning. “Let's.”
A block removed from Philip and Nina's house, Maria can now recognize the excellence of the boxing costume. It's a relief is what it
is. She feels like she has proven her achievement. Her daughter lives in town that Maria loves in a beautiful old house with a woman who dresses up in a homemade toothpaste costume and a man whom she has admired from afar. Her child is with the right family, her ex-boyfriend is in a different town, and she is at the edge of the continent carrying a pillowcase filled with candy.
CHRISTOPHERSON STOPS BEFORE
a huge, dilapidated house that looks like it has been constructed explicitly for the set of a horror film. It is clearly uninhabited. Pieces of siding hang at odd angles from the facade. Plywood covers each window. Dark gables serrate the roofline. The largest magnolia Maria has ever seen takes up most of the front yard and has sprouted branches directly into the second-story balcony.
Maria is surprised this place isn't crawling with delinquents. She guesses they are all still practicing phantom sit-ups in the graveyard and is glad of it. Christopherson takes Maria's elbow and leads her across the yard, dead magnolia leaves crunching beneath their feet. He pushes the front door open and crosses the room behind the flickering flame of a black Bic lighter. On the mantle is a half-burnt votive candle that he carefully lights.
The room was once grand. Now Maria can see at least one hole in the floor; who knows how many others are hidden in the darkness. An ornate mantel stretches over a fireplace from which logs, recently burnt, have tumbled onto the floor. The walls are mildewed and, once probably white, are now a filthy ochre. A cut-glass chandelier glimmers at the end of a kinky chain. And over the mantel, flickering in the candlelight, is a red octopus, spray-painted onto the wall, its arms stretched across the room, onto the ceiling and adjoining walls, binding
the space together in a web of limbs as if they are all that maintain the room's integrity.
“Whose house is this?” Maria says.
“No one,” Christopherson says.
“You paint this?”
Christopherson nods.
Maria is impressed. The image is excellent in a careless way she could never execute.
“Here,” Christopherson says, and lifts from his pillowcase a canister of gold spray paint. “Knock yourself out.”
The can is cold and surprisingly heavy. Maria has not drawn or painted a single image since well before she gave birth. She has never used spray paint. Before a region of wall free of octopus legs, she points the can and presses the nozzle. A weak spittle of paint sputters onto her knuckles.
“You have to shake it,” Christopherson says.
Maria shakes it. She makes one gold dot on the wall. Then another and another. At first this was only a test. Here is the paint, this is how it comes out. But she keeps making dots, and pretty soon they add up. They are becoming something, a sort of upside-down broken eggshell. She connects them until they form the outline of a cartoon ghost. Where this came from, she does not know exactly. Jack liked to play an old tabletop Pac-Man in the back of a bar in Carrboro, and she guesses this painting is some psychic regurgitation of those graphics, a video-game hieroglyph of a man she is trying to forget. She cannot claim to understand the odd firings of her brain. She paints a thought bubble above the ghost and, in slow cursive therein, writes
WHAT AM I DOING
?
“What
are
you doing?” Christopherson says.
“I don't know,” Maria says, stepping back, paint fumes searing her throat. Gold paint creeps down the wall and collects into a thickening bead along the baseboard. She coughs. “This stuff gonna make me pass out?”
“Not unless you spray it in a bag and put it over your face. Which can be fun. Ever make yourself faint?”
“That sounds like a terrible idea.”
“Not with the bag. I mean, just with breathing. It's not even drugs or anything,” Christopherson says. “Here. Watch.”
Christopherson squats against a wall under two octopus tentacles. They reach toward him as if trying to pull him up. “Count my breaths for me,” he says. “To thirty.”
As Maria counts, Christopherson inhales and exhales in a rapid and violent sequence, then rises wide-eyed and expectant. He points at his chest and says, “Press!”
Maria tries to remember his simple command: press? Why she should, she is not sure, but she places her hands on Christopherson's bony sternum and pushes. He exhales in a rush and then drops to the floor. Unconscious, he lays crumpled against the warped baseboard. Maria is terrified.
“Christopherson!” she says.
He is out for one, maybe two heartbeats, before he opens his eyes beatific.
“Hot dog,” he says.
“What the hell!” Maria says. “You OK?”
“I just had the best dream.”
“Just now?”
He nods silently and softly, as if to say of course, and sits up.
“You dream?” she says. She does not understand the course of this miniature mental journey.
“They're like even more than dreams,” he says. “They're visions.” He rises from the floor. “Here,” he whispers. He gently pushes Maria against the wall, pieces of it crumbling around her feet. “Try it. Squat.”
Maria is not sure she wants to reenact Christopherson's sudden psychic departure, but what else has she come here for? She is terrified but curious about anything that might transcend the plane on which her days have been skidding along. She starts to inhale and exhale rapidly, mimicking what Christopherson has just done. He counts each breath aloud, excited for her, and as he does, Maria begins to grow less scared. The night has become overstuffed. The set pieces of some drama have been gathered around her here, but she does not know what scene to act out. She longs to flee to the wings. Here is an escape, however brief it may be. Christopherson continues his count, and when he reaches thirty, Maria stands, already so lightheaded and dizzy she can feel herself losing control. Christopherson presses his forearms across her chest.
“Now exhale,” he says, and pushes.
Maria finds herself naked in a room with Jack, Christopherson, and Philip. Even as it happens she knows it is only a dream. One of them takes her in his arms, but she cannot tell who. She can't believe she's dreaming about group sex. It seems both silly and inevitable. She wants them all at once, feels a businesslike requirement for it. “I'm going to need you,” she calls out to no one in particular. “Get over yourselves. Do it.” She feels lurid and wild, yet still obvious and predictable.
When she opens her eyes, Christopherson is standing above her. Her head feels soft and numb, her tongue swollen.
“My God,” she says.
“See?”
“How long was I out?”
“Two seconds?”
Maria reaches out to Christopherson and pulls him down, onto his knees. She is still rushing on her dream. He pushes his tongue far into her mouth. One hand rises to her breast, still swollen with milk, and Maria lowers his arm. She wonders if he's ever done this with anyone before. “This can't happen,” she says, but it is still happening. It is more dangerous than anything she has seen in her dreams. She feels only young.