The Convulsion Factory (24 page)

While my father was deciding how best to apportion our beef into steaks and roasts and ground, I strayed off out of curiosity and boredom, finding myself behind the slaughterhouse, undetected while I watched some squat, grizzled man gnaw at a wet cigar stub and grumble curses as he shoveled up a spill of what I took to be fat ropes. They slipped and slithered and glistened as he chased them, favoring one leg, and left pink smears in the snow while he slung them into an enormous wheeled pail that must’ve overturned. He noticed me finally, and now I sort of knew what the gray ropes really were, and with one fatty loop draped over the rim of the pail, he leaned on it and grinned around his cigar. His teeth were stained, and one eye covered by a gray film.

“Hey little mister,” he said to me. “What’s
your
name?”

Angus,
I nearly told him, but stopped myself in time, because mistaken identity was sure to get me killed, cut up and shoveled into buckets, so I turned and ran as fast as I could and when my father caught up with me he said we’d better wait a few minutes before going back home, until I quit shivering. From the cold, he thought.

It was the last Christmas our nuclear family would know, and while it probably wasn’t the same evening, in my mind the trip to the slaughterhouse will be forever linked to the shouts between my parents, and later discovering my father behind the house, when I wasn’t supposed to, in his private place inside the tool shed. I watched as he cried and hung his head, and every several moments chopped at wood with a hatchet. There was something so terrible about seeing him in this fallen state that I, while I knew I should’ve, could no more have gone to him than I could’ve run into the arms of that unshaven troll who’d been shoveling guts.

When our beef was ready I went with my father to pick it up, but we took the car this time and it wasn’t the same as on foot, against the elements, and it’s almost the last thing I recall us doing together. He was gone by spring, my stepfather and his own son in place by summer, and by the week I entered second grade I’d already seen my father for the last time, wondering where he’d gone and when he would send for me and clinging to that final Yule as evidence that we’d had one adventure, at least.

It was more than a decade before I did the math, and realized that over that Christmas my mother had been pregnant with Rachel, and must’ve known even then that it wasn’t Dad’s.

Which explains a lot about his mood, as I look back.

*

“‘Music of the world’ is what that means, literally,” Nathan explained. “Symbolically it means ‘music of the spheres.’ Not like harps and organs and trumpets … more the harmony in creation, say, from the planets orbiting. It was part of the medieval world view. To them music theory was like astrophysics.”

We looked at the words again:
Musica mundana.

“I told him about it once — say a year ago? — one night when we were stoned, but … are you
positive
he’s been dead eight days?”

“We’re just taking his word on it,” I said.

“Because not decaying I can see, with it so chilly in here. But it’s the blood not pooling I can’t figure. You know … if I didn’t know better … I’d almost be tempted to say what we have on our hands might be an incorruptible.”

“Isn’t that more in the line of Catholic saints?” Andre had to ask, and Nathan said usually, and we looked at that spike still in Jamey’s arm and burst out laughing at the absurdity of it, even Andre, everybody laughing but Mae.

Of the five of us standing over him, Mae was youngest and had known Jamey the least amount of time, but perhaps felt she owed him her life. She’d been panhandling and dumpster-diving when he spotted her along North Clark, and for runaways that’s often the last step before prostitution. Probably Jamey wouldn’t’ve noticed had Mae Pak not been staring at the violin she’d brought all the way from South Korea, by way of Los Angeles, and ceremoniously snipping its strings with wire cutters.

He’d helped her find a job in a music store, and a roommate, but later told me that he’d misunderstood everything that day he first talked to her, thought the business with the violin wasn’t so much despair as low-rent performance art.

So maybe to Mae, Jamey really had been a benefactor, since two years later she’d reached her nineteenth birthday without ever slipping on the fishnets each dusk and heading out to gobble an assortment of occidental penii.

But maybe Mae didn’t yet understand the way, in any group of friends who have some history, you develop a sound idea who will be the first to do certain things, like marry or sprout a tumor, and naturally first to die. I had a reasonable expectation that Jamey would be head of that particular class the day an old needle grew too dull to pop into his arm, and I watched him sharpen it on the scratch-strip of a book of matches, then have to forcibly yank it from the vein because his subprecision work had left a tiny spur of steel that caught his skin like a fishhook.

So the five of us stood clustered inside the slaughterhouse, admitting the obvious about Jamey and maybe contemplating personal mortality, the escape clause in our fleshly contracts.

We couldn’t decide what to do with him.

While it seemed clear enough on the surface, once extenuating circumstances were considered the issue became murkier, the most persuasive argument for inaction coming from Jamey himself, as he
had
left a note, if no guarantee we’d be the ones to find it, and he’d gone to the trouble of coming here in the first place. After all, Rachel said, if he’d simply meant to die and be done with it, he could’ve managed as much in his own crusty bathtub, with far less fuss. Clearly, something about this place had called to him as his mausoleum, guiding his hand as he sprayed
Musica mundana
for an epitaph, and it wasn’t irony: He’d never even considered a vegetarian lifestyle.

Then there was his refusal to cooperate with putrefaction.

It was Andre who said that if we were planning to leave him, we should at least make it appear that his presence was intended, rather than him just happening to have died where he did.

Mae knelt to slide the needle from his vein and Rachel untied the tourniquet, and when we took him up from the floor we found that he was still flexible without being mushy. Because it seemed a shame to leave him in total darkness we bore him out of the room he’d died in and through a wide iron door that slid back on shrieking rusty rollers, and then another, to relocate him in the grandest room in the slaughterhouse. I felt reasonably sure that this had been the actual killing floor, where mallets met heads, because the ceiling was much higher, and in one area it opened into a short gabled tower, where windows would’ve let in natural lighting for a nice expansive open-air ambience while the brutes swung their mauls. Although the windows had been boarded over, all the boards had weathered apart so that slatted light filtered in.

His clothing didn’t seem right for him now that Jamey was in his place of final repose, so we stripped him, grateful that upon death he’d been considerate enough not to have soiled himself, or had simply neglected to eat that last day or two, what with bigger things on his mind. His pale body was very thin and slat-ribbed, with concave stomach and long toes with dirty unclipped nails, and a cluster of needle tracks.

Since leaving him on the floor seemed no better here than in the other room, Nathan and I hunted down a bedspring that had been around for fifteen years or more, junked by suburban white trash, and laid him out on that. But this seemed not a very pleasing use of space, given the soaring, vaulted quality beneath that steeple-like tower, so since there were still chains hanging from pulleys up there, we ratcheted them down and hooked them to one end of the springs, and wove Jamey’s limbs in and out of the rusty coils so he’d stay in place. We hoisted him aloft so that the springs stood on end, and Jamey hung serene in the metal, facing the doorway we’d carried him through, so that on walking in you couldn’t help noticing him, arms welcoming, something almost benevolent about him, although his head did tend to droop forward. Rachel took care of that, looping the tourniquet around his brow and tying it back to raise his chin off his chest. Mae wedged the syringe into a spring coil near his head, angling it away from his scalp like an exclamation point, or the first ray of light from a fledgling nimbus, and finished, we all stepped back to admire the effect.

“I wouldn’t’ve anticipated this ten minutes ago, but that’s just about the most holy thing I’ve ever seen,” Nathan said, and coming from him that was high praise.

It occurred to us that since Andre and I had played here as boys, there was no reason to think the place any less irresistible to kids today, so we did need to insure Jamey’s privacy. We were well into morning by now, so Rachel and Mae and I left Nathan and Andre on guard while we drove to a hardware store. I used Visa to buy a screwdriver and the heaviest hasps and padlocks they carried, securing the slaughterhouse doors again after so many years, making sure we’d all jotted the combinations for whenever we got the urge.

We paid our respects one more time, and Mae kissed Jamey’s unspoiled cheek. After she began to cry a little I held her, and her so tiny against me, sniffling with her black black hair in her face, and on the way to our cars Rachel motioned me to fall back a few steps.

“If you want to go spend the rest of the day with her, that’s fine by me,” Rachel said, and I was about to say all right, maybe I should, but Nathan couldn’t give her a ride home because he had a job to hurry to, and Andre lived nowhere near her, so we decided to take her home with us since Mae didn’t want to be alone.

As we were about to leave the Lutheran car lot, Nathan turned his pleasant potato face to gaze in the direction we’d come from.

“You
kno-ow
,” he said, voice dropping and breaking the
know
into two syllables, in that analytical Nathan voice of his, “once you start safeguarding something that’s essentially worthless, and making it a group secret and spotting the odd miracle or two, what you’ve got is the basis of a new religion.” He shook his head. “I really should know better than this.”

*

When Jamey brought Mae Pak into the fold, it had only been in the past few years that I’d gained any real experience with anyone of different ethnicity than my own, which is to say extremely white, white nearly to the point of appearing blue from the veins beneath my Protestant-sired skin. Such daily homogeneity wouldn’t have been the case had I grown up in the city, but out in the ‘burbs there are enclaves where the majority clings to its status with tenacity so fierce you’d think the real estate consists of cotton plantations.

Still, I remember Jamaal.

We went to the same junior high and walked the same direction home each afternoon, and weeks went by before I’d first heard the sound of his voice. I remember now his smooth caramel skin and the shiny black curls of his hair, and how mysterious his brown eyes looked, not like anyone else’s. The word wouldn’t have occurred to me then, but now I would have to regard them as stoic.

Jamaal had the sort of build that American mothers describe to their friends as husky, and couldn’t run very fast, in every way a stark contrast to his brother Jameel. Jameel was older by a year, and taller, wiry as an Olympic sprinter. He never smiled and never spoke, suffering each day with a scowl terrifying in its maturity, and whenever he walked through crowded school hallways his passage was as clean as a razor’s. It was this image that dominated when my mother told me to watch myself around them, all of them, both boys and their older sister and their parents, and while my mother and her chatty friends weren’t sure which Middle Eastern country the parents had come from, it was an awful place.

“They hate us, every last one of them,” my mother would warn me. “For no better reason than because we’re American. They aren’t Christian there. They wish us dead.”

So I steered clear, the terrible Khashab brothers going their way, and I mine, until the afternoon I rounded a corner on the way home from school and saw Jamaal’s broad back, thirty feet ahead of me. I dropped my pace so I wouldn’t overtake him, giving him cause to cut my throat, and I was so careful that I stumbled and dropped the big armload of books I was carrying. They scattered across the sidewalk with an unnerving racket and papers burst free, strewn like fall leaves, and he turned around.

Jamaal turned around.

He said nothing, silent as his viciously mum brother, and as I stooped to retrieve everything he backtracked, so I kept my gaze low, the way you do with animals who might take eye contact as a challenge. His shoes came into view and they stopped, planted firm as pedestals, and I saw a knee, then the other knee, and then the rest of him as he knelt to help me pick up the mess.

When it was done, books dusted and papers salvaged, he looked at me with long-lashed brown eyes so shy, and some worse flavor, as though he’d guessed what I’d been thinking, and he said:

“You really should have a backpack.”

So we became friends, and as we were in seventh grade we were too old to play together, so instead we just hung, but never at my house and never at his, because I suppose each of us had things at home we wanted to shield the other from.

It was inevitable that I would show him the slaughterhouse, initiate him into its secrets and decline, and we would prowl its corridors as if searching their shadows for hints of our futures and how to reach them. Or we’d look for valuables left behind and sometimes even find them: the odd dirty magazine, select pages already brittle; warm beer, cached by older kids for later.