In Nightmares We're Alone Page 10

  “You warming up to your classmates yet? Making some friends?”

  “No, they’re all little kids.”

  “They’re a year younger. Maybe a few of them two.”

  He exhales dismissively, shakes his head, and puts it between his hands. That thing I said about the unwelcomeness of optimism in our culture, nowhere is it more true than in the ears of a ten-year-old boy. The screams of sluts and jocks and the roar of a chainsaw, sure, but optimism is gross and uncomfortable.

  “You know what’s going to be awesome for you?” I tell him. “A few years from now when all of you start getting interested in dating, you’re gonna be the oldest guy in your class and that’s gonna be hot. They say girls mature faster too, so you’ll probably be interested at the same time they are. And you’ll be the smartest, the tallest, the strongest… They’re gonna be all over you.”

  He doesn’t say anything.

  “You noticing the girls yet? I can’t really remember how young it happens. Any cute ones in your class? You can tell me.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “All right, we don’t have to talk about it. You remember what I told you though, right? Talk about them, ask lots of questions, one compliment’s plenty, don’t be afraid of silence, and if you need something to say, just make it up.”

  “God, I know.”

  “You okay?”

  “Why are girls the only thing you ever ask about?”

  “Well all that’s true for boys too. Friends, girlfriends, whatever. You want people to like you, you have to talk to them right. It’s a skill.”

  “I remember how to do it. They’re just all boring. Why do you want me to have a girlfriend so much?”

  I pause. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just know when it happens it feels really important and it’s hard to ask for advice. Most young guys panic. I’m trying to give you some pointers so you won’t feel that anxiety. It’s fine not to be interested yet. I don’t care if it’s ten more years.”

  It occurs to me how true this is as I say it, and suddenly I wish I hadn’t even brought it up. Six years older than him I had a pregnant fiancée. The kid makes my mistakes and I’m a grandpa at thirty-four. And he has to raise his own kid, like me, still confused by the whole world.

  “Does your mom help you with this stuff at all? Not girls, I mean. Just friends. How to talk to people, what to say, all that? Is that stuff she can help you with?”

  He shakes his head and looks down at the table. I don’t know if he’s answering no or if he’s just uncomfortable talking to me about his relationships with other kids.

  “Martin…” I collect the words before I say them. I’ve been wanting to ask him for a while but I haven’t been sure how to do it. “Martin, would you rather go to a different school? And live with me? If you want to, we can talk about it with your mom. If you just tell me it’s what you want, you could come to stay at my house and we could… You liked the schools in my part of town, right? You’d have different classmates now, but… I don’t know. Is that something you’d want?”

  He crooks his head back and sighs loudly.

  “Does that mean no?”

  “All I said was the kids in my class are babies, dude. It doesn’t mean I want to go live with you.”

  I’ve gotten used to him calling me “dude” instead of “Dad”, as much as I wish he’d go back. But you never get used to the incomparable harshness you get from a young child when you open yourself up to be vulnerable. No rejection in life hurts as bad as one from your son, a son who gets disgusted at a tearful kissing scene at the end of a romance movie and who laughs when a man’s arm goes through a lawn-mower.

  I have to pause for a while, then I do what that cynical culture of ours always taught us boys to do when when our emotions get bruised. I switch subjects so he can’t see he hurt me.

  “Hey, how about that part when he stabbed the girl with the screwdriver?” I say with a forced laugh. He half-closes one eye as he studies me so I double down. “Oh come on. That was awesome.”

  He nods begrudgingly. “Yeah…” He laughs. “Yeah, that was pretty awesome.”

  I wonder if this is unusual. I don’t think it is, but I wonder why it’s like this, so much easier to relate to one another over a woman being stabbed to death than to talk about crushes, loneliness, and the holes in our hearts we’re fumbling to fill.

  * * * * *

  The tale of the lion with the thorn in his paw, you always hear it from the perspective of Androcles. But how long did the lion have to wait? How much did he suffer? What darkness went through that lion’s head before his savior entered the picture?

  As Rory and I step out of the shower, I wrap a towel around myself and she starts dressing in front of the mirror. I put my hands on her waist and pull her hair back, kissing the side of her neck and down to her shoulder as she laughs and says, “You’re so affectionate tonight.”

  Once upon a time there was a lonely lion with no pride and no lioness. He hunted only to feed himself, and when he slept in his cave he slept alone.

  This house. The silence of it. The sycamore just beyond the mirror in front of us. I can’t see it, but I can feel it. A faint, masochistic lust that will build as soon as the front door shuts behind her. A lust that’s been building for months now, that fills this house when it’s empty like the place were the sycamore’s shrine.

  I don’t want to feel it anymore.

  I run my hand up Rory’s side, under her top as she pulls it on.

  “I can’t go again,” she says. “Not after we just showered. I’m sorry.”

  One day as he hunted a gazelle, the hungry lion placed his foot in a patch of thorns. He howled in pain and lost his balance, and when he stood up, the gazelle was nowhere to be found. The lion limped back to his cave with a wounded ego and an empty stomach.

  “Come on,” I say. “One more time.”

  She pulls my hand away from her body and turns to face me. “Sorry. We’re clean now, and it’s late, and I have church with my parents in the morning.”

  “Clean on the surface only,” I say, kissing her. “I know in your mind you’re just as dirty as I am.”

  “Right down to my soul,” she says, kissing back with a laugh, and then she pushes me back. “That’s all for tonight, Casey. Sorry.”

  As she turns for the bathroom door I can almost see the sycamore through the mirror.

  As the days went on, the pain in the lion’s paw did not subside, and he soon found that he could not hunt. In fact, he could barely walk. It was all he could do to make his way to the river and drink each day, and by night he rarely slept. He only lay on his back and cursed his paw. He wished he could find a way to make the pain stop.

  “Stay,” I call after her from the living room as she puts on her shoes at the door.

  “What?”

  “Stay the night. Why not? I have to get up early too. We can wake up together. We can wake up even earlier. We’ll go get breakfast.”

  She laughs for a second and then an awkward silence passes. “But my parents…”

  “You’re an adult now. Come on. We never do anything together but have sex. Let’s… sleep together. I mean… really sleep.”

  She studies me for a minute. “I think… I feel like getting to know each other would be… I just don’t feel like that’s what this was supposed to be about,” she says.

  “Please stay,” I say, and my voice shakes a little.

  She gives me a look that’s almost terror and says, “I can’t. I… I’m sorry. This is getting… I think maybe we shouldn’t have started doing this.”

  She’s practically running as she goes out the door.

  Day and night the lion screamed for help from his fellow animals, but the sounds of his roars only frightened them off. Before long the lion lost the energy even to scream. He was starved and helpless.

  By day he limped through the jungle, searching for another animal brave enough to get close to him and help. By night he
lay awake, crying, in a dark corner of his lonely home. Each night he stared at the entrance to the cave, waiting, praying that a savior would come to his rescue.

  Waiting.

  Waiting.

  Androcles doesn’t come tonight. Nobody pulls the thorn from my paw. As I bolt the front door and turn to face the sycamore, it’s illness I feel more than lust. It’s a sick self-loathing that gets worse a minute later when Rory texts me that she’s sorry, that she thought we were on the same page, that she didn’t want anything serious and if she led me on she didn’t mean to.

  I tell her it’s fine and I wonder why it makes me feel even emptier, why it makes me lust for the sycamore even more.

  A hundred years standing, maybe more. Maybe a hundred still to stand. And a century from now when everyone alive today is dead, if the tree had a memory and eyes and a voice, it could tell a story. It could tell how a guy named Casey bent a girl named Rory over a couch in this room, a girl who told her parents she was out with a study group. It could tell how he called her things no man should call a woman and she loved it, how he left the blinds drawn and the back window open so the tree could see. It could tell how he stared not at her, but at the tree, how he couldn’t even get an erection until his eyes locked on the branches and the knots and the trunk.

  If a tree could judge. If a sycamore could tell its story.

  If only I knew, maybe I’d be properly concerned with finding Androcles.

  * * * * *

  That’s the night, after Rory leaves and I pass out naked on the covers with the air conditioner turned off, when I wake up screaming.

  It’s not dreams so much, at least I don’t think it is. It’s physical pain. Some throbbing, searing wrongness in the whole of my right foot. I rip off the covers and sit up and grab it. My instinct is to apply pressure but it’s the wrong instinct. Like putting pressure on a snakebite with the snake still attached.

  I scream and pull back, squeeze the ball of my foot, try to run my fingers along my toe from the base to the tip as softly as possible to feel for something wrong, a bone sticking out or a bend where there oughtn’t be one. The way this feels, even a bloody stub where there ought to be more toe wouldn’t be a hell of a surprise.

  It’s in the tip, dead center, above the skin but under the nail. That’s where I find the culprit—a long, hard column sticking out a few millimeters from the surface, like a toy soldier took his knife and jammed it in right up to the hilt.

  I can’t see in my room. Too dark. I get out of bed and limp on the side of my foot with my toe hooked upward until I get to the light switch. The light on, I fall back across the bed and lift my foot up on my knee to examine the damage.

  It’s…

  What the fuck is it?

  A small, brown column, thicker than a sewing needle and thinner than a nail. It protrudes just a little and I can’t tell how deep it goes. As gently as I can, I run my thumb over it.

  Wood?

  For a second I wonder if I had a nightmare, if I slammed my foot hard into the frame of my bed and caught the splinter to end all splinters right there under my toenail, a big slab of rotting wood that broke off the bedframe and came to rest right where the source of pain has been.

  But I know that’s not the truth.

  Days now of pain. Days of limping and telling myself it’s getting better when I know it’s getting worse. Days of saying I stubbed it or a car ran it over whenever people ask about how I’m walking. Days of Googling foot diseases and infections and STDs that start in the toe. And now this.

  Not a splinter. This is phase two.

  I shake my head and swallow. Whatever it is, it has to come out. I’m no doctor, but I’ve never heard of a human body growing freak appendages that benefit its wellbeing. All evolutionary and Darwinian theories about positive mutations aside, a stick growing out of my foot is going to fuck up all my socks.

  I spend fifteen minutes drinking from a bottle of Canadian whiskey before the act. Self-surgery has never been a hobby. Between ripping foreign objects out of my body and backgammon I’ll take backgammon ten times out of ten, and fuck backgammon.

  When I hit that do or die time, I do it with pliers. It feels smarter. If I pull hard with fingers and nothing happens, I get excruciating pain with no closure and it’ll take a lot more liquid courage to try it with the pliers. But with the pliers the first time, this bitch is coming out no matter how bad it hurts. One hard jerk.

  I count down from thirty because I don’t have the stones to go on three. When I get to seventeen I pull hard, try to surprise myself. Halfway through a bottle of whiskey, it even sort of works. My foot gives a fair amount of resistance but the hard tug I give is enough to rip the object free with force to spare. As it comes out, a few drops of blood squirt across the sheet and more stain the carpet.

  The pain—imagine latching onto a perfectly healthy toenail with Vise-Grips and pulling it backward hard enough to rip the whole thing off. I’ve never tried, but I’d venture it’s pretty close.

  The pliers fly across the room and into the TV stand. My hand goes to my toe and I squeeze down and fall back on the comforter, mashing my face into it and screaming a muffled scream into the cloth. It feels wrong, like something you’re not supposed to do. You don’t rip out teeth or nails or pull off eyelids. If your body grows it, maybe you groom it, but you don’t grab it and rip it out.

  I have to strain myself not to vomit across my bed. It takes five or ten seconds before the pain and nausea subside. That’s when I finally take my bloody hand off my toe and assess the damage.

  It’s not so bad, all things considered. It’s swollen and black and bleeding and ugly, but it’s not the abortion I’m imagining. I limp to the bathroom and sit on the edge of the tub and hose off the blood with hot water.

  It’s only after all that is over and the blood has been washed and my foot dried that I get down on the floor by the TV stand and look for whatever it was that put me on the floor. I find it in the indent where the carpet meets the wall.

  It’s less than half an inch long and almost so thin you can see it better with one eye closed, but there’s no mistaking it. It’s a stick. A little piece of wood. Broken and bent by the pliers, there seem to be tiny branches that were reaching out before I ruined them.

  And on the end that came out of my toe… Christ…

  Roots.

  Still damp with blood and clutching to little fragments of flesh. A little tree or weed that grew from my skin. And how big would it have gotten if I hadn’t done away with it? What monstrous thing might I have had growing from me?

  I laugh.

  A man with a plant growing from his toe. It’s so absurd. So ridiculous. And yet… the sycamore…

  I place the little tree on my bedside table, shut off the light, and lie back down in bed. I’ll look it up in the morning.

  Sunday, September 26th

  In 2009, a particularly unlucky bastard was experiencing severe chest pains and coughing up blood. After x-rays and other tests, doctors said they were certain he had cancer. They opened him up to remove the tumors they expected to find, and they found something else. Turns out the guy had inhaled a seed. The moisture in his lung made for an inhabitable climate and a two-inch fir tree formed inside his lung.

  This is a true story, or at least it’s on the Internet. You can look it up if you don’t believe me.

  When it’s a one-in-a-million shot, that thing you’d never even dream of expecting because it would be too perfect, but the world conspires to give you a celestial blowjob and all of a sudden it’s yours, you call it a miracle. But that other one-in-a-million shot, the bad one, the one that you never should have had to worry about but somehow it happened anyway, that celestial vagina dentata, we don’t have a word for that. Whatever the opposite of a miracle is, we so hate to think about it that we never even picked a word.

  But miracles happen every day. And so do anti-miracles.

  I have to dig a little further before I find
the guy I’m looking for. This poor bastard got an anti-miracle and a half.

  As a teenager, he cuts himself, not even a bad cut. After that, for years, these warty growths start appearing on his body. First just a few, then tons. Eventually every inch of his skin is covered in these things and they branch out. Something the article calls “cutaneous horns” start sprouting from some of them.

  His life falls apart, he goes broke, he joins a freak show.

  Eventually, this guy has arms and legs that look like tree branches, big plant-like flippers for hands and feet. Even his face has hard, ugly sections that look like tree bark. He can barely move his limbs they’re so big and heavy.

  They call him the Tree Man.

  I swear to God this is a true story. There’s pictures and everything.

  I guess it’s all about some condition that makes warts grow on his body and another condition where his body can’t fight them properly. Two rare conditions that add up to a freak occurrence. And everything I’m reading says yeah, maybe they’ll cure him. Maybe they can fix this shit. Maybe rainbows will shoot out of my asshole and solve world hunger.

  Hell of a world we live in where this kind of thing can happen to you.

  Still, it’s a bit of comfort to know I’m not the first person to see a plant sprout from his skin.

  And whether it’s solidarity or schaudenfreude, suddenly my toe feels a little better. I think it’s healing. Maybe two freak occurrences happened at once that added up to celestial vagina dentata, but now it’s over and I’ll probably never understand. And for the rest of my life when guys in bars compare scars or brag about which bones they broke or what was the worst accident they walked out of, I can say a tree grew out of my foot and I got drunk on whiskey and pulled it out with pliers. And that makes me smile.