Plow the Bones (13 page)

Aaron Dhames:

No, I’ll never do that. She doesn’t want to know what she thinks she wants to know. It’s not nice stuff, man, it does bad shit to you. Look, they said goodbye! They made their mark and they took off, what does she want to bring him back for? So he can do it all over again? So he can make a deeper cut on the world, and be even more miserable than he was before? So he can make her miserable? Again?

Marissa Taliofano:

Aaron… he owes this to me. One of these papers is Zero. And I
know
that Aaron has his hands. I know it. I need him. I never got to tell him I was sorry. If I could just tell him I was sorry, everything would be okay. I could teach him how to be happy. He was so close. He could have reached out and grabbed it.

Aaron Dhames:

Don’t you think that if I could help her I would? Don’t you think I would love to do that? I can’t. I’m not a monster, okay? I’m not a bad person. Marissa wants this story to end with her and Zero cuddling up on the couch, happy again, and yes, fine, that would be lovely. But it can’t happen. This story ends with me, an aging fucking douchebag scenester in charge of keeping secrets. I know what I did to her. I know what I did to them. I don’t know how, but I know that if you follow all the roads backward, they all lead to me. And I can’t do anything to fix it. I don’t have that kind of power.

Jan Landau’s Golem Band — “Whisper It To Me”:

You’ve got me under your fingernails and I’m never coming out. It’s warm in here, and I don’t ever have to be afraid.

THEY SAY THINGS ABOUT THE closet in the common room of Holton House. Weirdest thing. All four walls are mirrors. Even the back of the door. Floor to ceiling on all sides, endless mirror hallways leading on and on until the reflection blurs, like if you could step through the barrier and run through those hallways, you would fade and be spit out into total blank obscurity at the other end. There’s no light switch. If you want to stand in that closet and use those mirrors (and nobody does, that’s for goddamn sure), you have to leave the door open and see by the trickling light of the common room. So what the boys of St. Cecelia’s Private Academy talk about on those long secret nights — their dorms abandoned, their voices low, all of them huddled around a single candle — is that closet.

Marco tells the story that most of them already know. Marco is a senior. He never made prefect, never played politics. And he looks eighteen, so he buys cigarettes for the younger kids sometimes. People look up to Marco. People are afraid of Marco. He has earned the right to this story, to claim partial ownership of it. So he crawls up on the back of the couch, reaches up, twists off the smoke detector. He takes out the big square battery. Then he climbs down, picks up the candle and uses it to light his Camel. It’s an important part of this story.

He says, “Okay. Shut up. Listen.” He takes a drag, wanders around the room. Blue smoke follows him, curls and coils from his mouth. It’s part of the show. He leans on the ping pong table and he says, “A long time ago, something happened in Holton House.” He tells them that whatever happened, it was so bad that nobody wants to talk about it. And he’s right. Go ahead. Try to ask somebody about the closet. Try to find out what happened in there, when it happened, who it happened to. Nobody’s talking. Marco says, “Here’s what you do,” and he holds up the Camel so everyone can see. He tells them how to summon up Ember Eyes. He passes on the same secret ritual that he learned his freshman year. It’s all bullshit, of course. He tried it once. Nothing happens. You just about shit yourself imagining that it might, but then some dickhead bangs on the closet door with both fists and you shriek like a baby and you walk out of the closet and everyone’s losing their shit laughing at you. But that’s not the point. That moment just before the banging, just before the rage and humiliation, the moment just after you inhale and just before you scream, when you’re sure it’s all real,
that
is the point.

It’s that Brett kid who speaks up when it’s all over. It’s always somebody. That Brett kid’s a transfer student. Sophomore? Junior? Whatever, older than most of the new kids. Kind of has that pretty–boy thing going for him. Baseball build. Sort of swoopy haircut. Right now though, that Brett kid is just another newcomer who thinks he knows what’s coming. He says, “Well that’s pretty fucking stupid.”

Everyone laughs. It is well timed. This kid is good at shit like that, natural comedian.

Marco says, “Try it,” and throws his pack and his Zippo at Brett.

Brett says, “I don’t smoke,” but it’s too late now. Should have thought about that before. Because now everyone in the common room is giving him that upward lilting catcall, that “oooo–OOOH!” noise, subtitled,
You have just been issued a challenge. Failure to answer this challenge will reveal you to be a spineless fag. We know you will not step down now.

He shrugs. Says, “Fine.” Gets up. Has to step over everybody to get to the closet door, careful footfalls between and around and over the tangle of crossed legs, searching out the patches of carpet like a swamp–walker. Christ, it seems like the entire house is in here. Then he opens the door and goes in.

The ritual begins like this. Brett shakes a smoke out of his pack and mutters, sing–song, “Fuck you guys. Seriously,” then he sticks the cigarette in his mouth and lights it. The lighter swallows up oxygen and spits out flame and now there is light in the closet, and Brett can see for miles and miles down the hallways behind his four reflections. He chokes (this is good; this is not part of the ritual strictly speaking, but it doesn’t hurt), and in the windless claustrophobic space (the one that goes on forever and ever down those phantom hallways), the smoke hangs, weaves, makes shapes for him, a shadow show. Now Brett holds the cigarette like a pencil between his thumb and forefinger, leans close to the wall opposite the door, presses the ember against the surface of the mirror. Twists. It rains orange embers. They flutter like dying lightning bugs toward the carpet, and now the cigarette is out and there is an ashy black smudge on the mirror. Brett says, “Okay, cigarette burn number one. Looks like a cat’s asshole.” Out in the common room, the other boys laugh. It’s that timing again. Guy’s a riot.

He lights the cigarette again. The Zippo’s getting hot, but that’s part of the ritual too. Again, he presses the ember against the mirror. Another half–assed fireworks show. Another ash–stain, this one maybe two inches from the first.

He lights the cigarette one more time. And he flicks the lighter closed.

The only light is the orange cherry, replicated four–fold, cloned a thousand fold, onward down the endless hallways.

And now…

Everything that happens now is too slow to see. Think of time–lapse photography, think of capturing motion where no motion seems to be, because that’s what this is like. The ash–stains start to glow again, like the cherry of his cigarette, like the embers that cascaded to the carpet and burnt little black marks there (next to older identical burns; building on the history is part of the ritual). The stagnant smoke stops twisting in the space between Brett’s face and the mirror. It finds form, seems to eat away at space and make room for matter. And Brett hears the sound of paper lungs trying to breath.

Ember Eyes. Ember Eyes in the mirror, smiling sadly. In a white shirt and a red St. Cecelia’s tie. Naked below the waist, his legs somehow both shriveled and dry and black, and also wet and lithe, snakeskin slick. And that face, like a child’s drawing of a face, a hole for the mouth and those fiery cigarette stains for eyes. Ember Eyes says, “It’s been… so long since I’ve had one of those. Could I bum?”

What Brett is supposed to do now is say, “No.” He’s supposed to say, “Ember Eyes, you want something from me. I have what you want. What price will you pay?” That’s how Marco explained it: vague symbolic language, the decorative frills of ceremony. But this was never supposed to happen. The opportunity was never supposed to present itself. Right now, there is someone on the other side of the closet pounding a double–kick–drum tattoo on the door. Boo. Gotcha. But there is no high–pitched girlie shriek from inside, Brett’s not bursting out of the closet and telling Marco to go fuck himself, and everybody’s laughter is stillborn in their throats. Outside, nobody says anything, and inside nobody screams.

But, oh goddamn it, Brett does want to scream. He wants to run. He wants to burst out of the closet and let everyone know what a baby he is, fine, whatever, he doesn’t care, he just wants out of here, away from Ember Eyes, who is pawing at the other side of the mirror, begging in his shredded emphysemic old–man voice, “Come on, man… I haven’t had a cigarette in
such
a
long time.
”

And Brett says, “Okay,” and offers the pack to Ember Eyes. It knocks against the glass. And Ember Eyes’s fingers, black and bulbous at the tips like tree–frog toes, squeak on the other side of the glass, slide down the surface (somebody will try to Windex the mirrors some time later, and they’ll wonder why they can’t seem to scrub off the smudges, and they’ll get the fuck out of that closet, not really understanding why it spooks them so bad). Ember Eyes says, “Is this a joke?”

Brett shakes his head. The tears are coming.

Outside, one kid says, “Okay, ha ha, Brett, you turned it around on us. Come on out.” He’s good, that Brett kid. He’s doing the voice, doing it better than Marco, and they can all hear it. They are disappointed. No spook show. No humiliation. This is not what they wanted.

Inside, Ember Eyes says, “Is this some kind of a fucking joke?” The corners of his mouth work, the muscles tense and release beneath his sunken mold–colored cheeks. He grimaces. His teeth are yellow, nicotine stained. His glowing cigarette–cherry eyes spark like firewood.

Brett starts bawling. He sinks against the door, feels Ember Eyes’s heat against his back, jolts upright, swings around. He is surrounded. With those endless hallways at his back, to his sides, and Ember Eyes framed in each one, angry, hurt, betrayed, gesturing helplessly at the cigarettes with his awful snakeskin hands.

Ember Eyes says, “I don’t think this is funny.”

Outside, Marco grabs the handle. It burns him. He swears, shakes his hand up and down. The boys gasp. Some of them start to cry, trying not to, still posturing, still make–believing that this is make–believe, even when some part of them deep inside knows otherwise. All they hear on the other side is Brett, sobbing, scrabbling, scratching. Marco says, “Brett, come out. We’re done. It’s okay.”

Inside, Ember Eyes says, “All I wanted was a smoke. I asked nicely. Why are you being such a jerk?” His voice deteriorates. He’s got a campfire in his throat, eating up his vocal chords, putting runs and holes in them like old nylon stockings.

Brett says, “I’m sorry,” and cries some more.

“Give me,” says Ember Eyes, and sucks breath into his rotten lungs, “a cigarette.”

Brett wants to tell him he can’t, that there are mirrors between them, thick walls where reality separates from myth, sorry, Ember Eyes is stuck in storyland and Brett is standing in the third dimension. But he doesn’t say anything. He shakes his head. Closes his eyes.

So he doesn’t see what happens next. He doesn’t see Ember Eyes’s frog–fingers sinking through the mirror, manifesting in front of him. His black rawhide hands slip through, the glass clings to them like Vaseline, slips back into place like rubber. Wrists, arms, shoulders, each joint slipping through the mirror,
pop
, and Brett hears it all, hears each nasty noise and whimpers in response, but his eyes stay closed tight, wrinkling the skin into spider webs.

Marco is pounding on the door now. Yelling. Someone will come. A prefect, a house head, someone will come and make this all stop, save him from culpability.

Ember Eyes, slick and slimy and dry and brittle and sad and angry and unreal, steps out of the mirror. And Ember Eyes makes a noise in his deteriorating throat that sounds like nothing Brett has ever heard, and he wraps his fingers around Brett’s skull, twines them in Brett’s swoopy hair. His fingers are longer now. They touch at the back of Brett’s head, his thumbs meet below his chin. Oh Christ! They grow, Brett can feel them! They grow!

The kids in the common room sit with their hands bound up behind their necks, their arms pressed against their ears, their eyes down.

Marco throws himself shoulder–first at the door over and over, feels the burning heat behind it radiate through his T–shirt and into his skin, burn him in a way that will never leave him, that will redefine heat for him.

Ember Eyes presses his mouth to Brett’s, crams his thick purple tongue past his lips, opens his jaw wider and wider and whatever is left of that Brett kid thinks that maybe Ember Eyes is trying to climb inside him. Ember Eyes has a mouth like a manhole, wider, wider, wider, and the edges of Brett’s mouth split, bleed. But Brett is far away. And Ember Eyes begins to suck. His paper–lungs expand and he draws the air out of Brett’s chest and Brett thinks,
He’s trying to suck the smoke out of me.
But Brett is far away from himself, and none of this really surprises him. He has lost his grip on himself, and now the best parts of him are torn into fours, floating away down the mirror hallways.

And then…

Well…

Whatever happens next is not part of the ritual. And no one will remember it anyway.

Fifteen years from now, a man who looks much older than he is will wheel a shopping cart past a strip of college bars. He will have a beard that mostly covers the scarring at the edges of his mouth and a comb in his jeans pocket that he will pull out and drag through that beard every five minutes. His beard will be long and straight and shiny, and sometimes he will sit on the curb next to his cart and braid it with slow, precise, delicate care, and the next day his beard will be crimped and kinky and he will have to spend some extra time combing it. He will smell terrible. His shopping cart will be full of empty beer bottles and soda cans which he will bring to the grocery store and exchange for a few bucks, which he will spend on Swedish Fish, the empty bags of which he will crumple and shove into the pockets of his filthy beige Dickie’s coveralls. He will ask people for cigarettes, and then when he gets them, he will smile and say, “I don’t smoke,” and add them to his collection of never–smoked Camels or Marlboros or Basics in a peeling cigar box in the children’s seat of the cart. People will laugh when he says that. He has perfect timing. Natural comedian. Guy’s a riot. The regulars at the bars will call him Smokey, and some of them might even wonder how he got where he is. Most of them won’t. Some winter — when it is particularly frigid and he won’t go to the St. Vincent Hotel because of that long, long hallway leading past the front desk, that terrible hallway, Christ, he never wants to see that hallway again,
any
hallway again, never ever
—
he will fall asleep on a bus–stop bench and he will freeze to death.