Displacement (13 page)

—The court recommended you stay here

. . . I knew and understood.

. . . under our care . . .

I knew and understood.

. . . unfit to stand trial . . .

I knew and understood.

. . . incompetent . . .

I was going to stay here.

. . . medication . . .

And I was going to go mad.

. . . intensive therapy . . . No way out.

The tiny mouth detached from my neck and the spot where it had been felt cold and wet. Little feet scraped against my back and I heard faint laughter and felt the warmth of breath against my ear, felt the noose of flesh that had never lived tighten around my neck as little arms hugged my throat.

I screamed.

Doctor Johansson flew back from his desk.

—YOU LITTLE SHIT!!! YOU BROUGHT ME HERE!!! YOU PLANNED THIS!!

My throat ripped within as I yelled and jerked in the rattling chair, trying to detach the little fuck from my back. I felt it drop off, then heard it run to the door. Like the hands of a diabetic going into shock, my mind grasped and clenched and groped as what I had wrought shivved itself into the core of my awareness.

The little being ran towards me again and its hand grabbed my hair. The thing
hung
off my scalp, dangling, jerking my neck to the sides, and Oh, God, why couldn’t I see it, like before? Why was it hiding behind the air, now? Why was it laughing like a happy child?

The door opened, I heard it over the hollow and hoarse sounds my torn throat made in lieu of screams, and suddenly Richard stood over me with three attendants.

—Get it off me, Richard. Please.

But my voice was too mutilated to be heard. Richard had a hypo in his hand.

Oh God, no.

I started crying.

A prick on my shoulder and a grey cloudy void.

* * *

I’m going mad.

I know this, for I have written this poem, and have only now discovered its last stanza.

It’s as if I’m going senile, parts of my mind strobe out, leaving holes in my consciousness. I’m aware of the hollow spaces left behind, like the soft sockets that mark where a tooth has been pulled.

The bars hum deafeningly with the madness of this place, and the barn-stench of psychotherapeutic drugs taints my own sweat now. The chemicals paint my mouth with a taste like burnt tin foil. I rewrote myself as myth, and all myths are defined by their endings. Warrior kings become great because of the final battles that await them. Killing avatars such as I, Grendels of this day, who invade the white-carpeted halls of those we kill, are defined by the normality that is restored by our capture and our deaths. By the catharsis those who drink of our fictions feel as they close the book or watch end credits roll. By our being invaded by the dybbuks that are our downfalls, as we are tormented by our suppressed selves. By our Others. The fiction demands it. I made myself a Trickster, and in so doing, I’ve been tricked. I am not Loki. In becoming an archetype, I am ruined by my own Trickster son whom I exiled . . . just as I, an exiled son, have ruined my father.

Why has my little victim done this to me? I try hard not to use its name, anymore. Because there’s a power, a magic, to Names that can make things real . . . imaginary things. Spectres can accost you in the broad light of day if you give them the right Name, even if you’ve made yourself an accosting spectre.

That’s the real question.
How
could he have done this to me? He’s a goblin.
The Velveteen Rabbit
told how things can attain the gift of life through nursery magic. The Velveteen Rabbit was given life for helping a little boy cope with sickness. My little twin, my Other, was brought to life through nursery magic, the same magic that turned me into a god over the smaller things I tormented. Maybe my little victim was given life for helping me endure my torturedchildhood.

Torture.

That’s the issue, isn’t it?

I tortured him, and this is his payback. His trick, as the dispossessed child of a dispossessed child. But he’s unfair. I’d let him go. I’d freed him long ago, and he won’t let me out of this place, won’t give me the peace of death.

When I’d come out from under Richard’s needle, I tried to cut my way out of here, a way cut out through myself. The one legacy from my father: the easy way out.

It was dark, and I was chained with my arms crossed when I came to. But it was simple enough to slide the links down to expose my wrists. I should inflict upon myself a Gothic end, poetic. What else should be expected of me, who, invoking the poetry of fiction, inflicted Gothic ends on others? I thought of Filippo Argenti, Dante’s enemy who, in Hell, went mad with anger and turned his teeth against himself.

I followed his example, and felt hot blood bubble into my mouth.

I spat out the skin of my wrists and sat on the bed and bled onto my blankets, so the sound of blood streaming on the floor wouldn’t bring the attendants.

Minutes later I heard a crash against the bars of Tuttle’s cell. (Could the little monster get through the bars of my cell?) Tuttle woke and started screaming again, blanket thrown over his face. Could Tuttle see it because he was a Fool? A Child? A Monster? Did all three masks he wore give him such Sight?

I was too weak to move when the attendants came into the hallway to check on Tuttle. Despite their coming, I knew I had a good chance of dying. But before they could return with the med kit, I felt pressure on my forearms, a small hand on each choking off the blood-flow to my chewed wrists.

The attendants saved my life. God damn them.

My aching wrists were then separated from the reach of my mouth by the thick canvass of a straitjacket. Undaunted, upon my return from the infirmary, I took another lesson from my poetic mentor, whose myths defined the killers’ myths I have used to define me. Dante wrote of Perdella Vigne, who, after a running start, smashed in his own head against the walls of his prison.

When I tried, a soft body placed itself between the wall and my head, clinging, perhaps, like a spider.

I’m sure my little victim didn’t mind the impact. He’s suffered worse under my rage.

I fell backward to the floor, as if pushed by a schoolyard bully.

My second attempt made quite a racket. The attendants came and bound me to the cot with restraints that look like seat belts. They took no chances, and left me in the canvass jacket.

And so tonight, I swallowed my tongue.

My victim opened my mouth and pulled my tongue from my throat. I tried biting the fingers, but my teeth passed through them as if they were clay.

My only hope is the cancer. But that’s a vain hope.

Because I think my little victim is my cancer, displaced in some ethereal way outside my body.

My miserable life when I was young gave birth to Piggy. Later, my miserable life gave birth to my cancer. They’re the same thing, products of my mind under like circumstances. And when I faced death born of my own pent-up rage, I created a third set of circumstances. He prompted me to seek the catharsis that would free him with a single whispered word:
Why?

As I have been taking my life back by taking lives, Piggy has been taking back the lives I have stolen from him. Maybe that’s how he got a life of his own.

And a will of his own.

Oh, my. I’ve been using his Name, haven’t I? I couldn’t not use it forever, could I?

So this is Piggy’s revenge, as all Tricksters have their revenge. Or his Justice, perhaps. His hunger for the Justice of seeing me imprisoned and broken, as I had kept him imprisoned and broken in my mind.

At least I hope he’s done this out of Justice, or revenge, or rage.

I hear him now, my exiled twin, the click of his feet on the hallway floor. He passes through the bars like a whisper. He runs a few steps and jumps atop my chest, where my raw and aching wrists press over each other in their canvas sleeves.

I can see him, this twisted little creature taken from my mirror image. His ugly goblin’s face is like my own when I was a child, and like a child, I cry when I see him.

Because I
am
a child again. I have no freedom, I waste here in neglect. The strait-jacket is so much like the restricting snow-suit from so long ago, an embodiment of my prison I wear as a garment.

Just like old times.

I am a child again, and Piggy is smiling warmly at me, like an old friend. And grinding my stitched wrists as he does so, he rocks back and forth, as a toddler would, expecting to hear again a much-loved story.

I hope he has done this to me out of rage or revenge.

Because I couldn’t bear to think he has done this to me out of Love.

Michael Marano is a former punk rock DJ, bouncer, and the author of the modern dark fantasy classic
Dawn Song
, which won both the International Horror Guild and Bram Stoker Awards, and which will be reprinted by ChiZine Publications in 2013, to be followed by two sequels. For more than 20 years, his film reviews and pop culture commentary have been a highlight of the nationally syndicated Public Radio Satellite System show
Movie Magazine International
. His non-fiction has appeared in alternative newspapers such as
The Independent Weekly
,
The Boston Phoenix
and
The Weekly Dig
, as well as in magazines such as
Paste
and
Fantastique
. His column “MediaDrome” has been a wildly popular feature in
Cemetery Dance
since 2001. He currently divides his time between a neighbourhood in Boston that had been the site of a gang war that was the partial basis of
The Departed
and a sub-division in Charleston, SC a few steps away from a former Confederate Army encampment. He can be reached at
www.michaelmarano.com
.