Naked, on the Edge (9 page)

It would be easier on us both, he had said.

Elliott had cried at that, and crapped his pants, and his father had never said anything like that again.

"Do it," said his father.

Elliott jumped up and down three times, slapping his hands together over his head as he did. When he stopped, his heart was hammering, and his breath was glass in his throat.

"I'm sick," he sputtered.

"Hell you are."

"I'm sick!" Elliott ran to his bedroom and cried and wet the bed. He didn't change the sheets until the next morning.

E
lliott got the mail from the mailbox. He stood on the stoop and sifted through the stack. There wasn't much today, just a folded Little Caesar's Pizza advertisement and a bill from the oil company. He looked through the untrimmed hedge bordering his yard at the Campbell's trailer. He wondered how beat up the Campbell children were when they finally got taken away.

He went in and ate some Frosted Flakes from the box.

He then fixed a bowl of red and green colored special edition Cap'n Crunch left over from Christmas, stirred up some instant milk to wet it, and took it to his mother. She was awake, and clawing at the arm of her wheelchair.

Elliott put the cereal on the nightstand. "Where you going, Mom?"

"Got a cramp, got to get up and get it out."

"Want help?"

"Course I do. I can't do without you."

Elliott watched for a moment. In his mind he saw his mother falling onto her face and breaking her nose. He saw the blood bleeding down into the cracks of the old linoleum where her food scraps and her cats' pee and her own existence seemed to be drawn.

"I know," he said. He helped his mother into the chair. "I got you breakfast."

"Mixed it up with that shitty milk I bet."

Elliott watched as his mother struck a match on the side of the wheelchair and touched it to the tip of the cigarette in her mouth. "Well, yeah."

"I don't like it."

"I'll give it to the cats."

Elliott's mother grunted and drove the heels of her hands against the wheels. The chair shuttered then rumbled out of the bedroom.

Elliott followed her. She went into the living room and, after tugging weakly at the curtains until Elliott pushed them back himself, settled before the window and looked out at the yard and the cracked walkway and the untrimmed brush and the county road.

In the kitchen, Elliott picked up the phone book.

Already, Mosby's picture was scuffed and bent. Elliott's father had used the phone book, treating the artwork like he treated everything else around him, as something made for a purpose, a single purpose, and nothing else. Daddy's purpose was to work and sweat and be the head of the household. Elliott's job was to go to school like all the other boys his age, like the boys who weren't sick and didn't have a ruined penis and boys whose mothers weren't dying. And Elliott's mother's job was to go on and die.

The grimy, strawberry-shaped clock over the stove read ten-thirty seven. Mrs. Anderson wouldn't be there for another three and a half hours.

Elliott went into his bedroom and sat on his cot. He pulled the paper bag out from under his pillow and looked at it. Even with the dull pencil lines, the horses were good. He was a good artist.

"Mom, you think I draw good?"

From the living room, "Huh?"

"You think I draw good?"

"Whatever."

Elliott put the horses back. He walked through the living room into the kitchen, where, through the open door, he looked at the bony back of his mother's neck as she looked out the window.

He turned on the stove. He filled a pan with water and set it down to boil. He wondered how bad scald burns would look. He wondered how they would feel. He felt around in the junk drawer and took out the little knife he'd used to sharpen his pencil. He wondered how hard someone would have to push if neck skin were to part?

He went out to the living room and stood beside his mother. From outside, he could hear one of the cats picking on the door.

"Cat wants in," said his mother.

Elliott opened the door. The cat trotted in. Cats, Elliott thought, were like his father. Cats believed people had a single purpose—to serve them. Elliott shut the door and the cat ran into the kitchen in search of food.

Elliott said, "You want me to turn on the T.V.?"

"My head hurts too much. You gonna give me a massage on my head, Ellie?"

Ellie rubbed her head with one hand. In his other, he held the little knife.

He stopped then, because he could hear the water boiling in the kitchen. He left his mother and went to the stove.

Before lifting the pan, he went to the window, unlocked it, and pushed it open an inch. May air bled into the stuffy room. The crusty orange curtains trembled as if afraid of the breeze.

Elliott looked over at the Campbell's yard. He thought about their children, taken away.

He turned Mosby's wrinkled painting upside down.

The knife was put back into the drawer for next time, if the water wasn't enough.

Then, sucking air through his clamped teeth, he poured the boiling water over his forearms and hands. The skin erupted, bright and red. Angry, insulted blisters rose.

He caught his breath.

"Goin' back to bed, honey," said his mother. She rolled away from the living room window and out of sight.

He caught his breath. Pale cat hairs, floating in the kitchen, landed on the burns and beneath the pain he almost felt a tickle.

He dropped to the kitchen chair and lost his breath; he thought of horses running running running on sand toward the beach. He caught his breath again.

Elliott faced the living room and the front door and he waited for his smiling teacher with the white, billowing sailboat coat.

T
hen Pilate went out to the people and saith unto them, Behold, I have found no fault with this man. The chief priests and officers cried out, Crucify him!

Pilate held forth his hand towards Jesus, who bore a crown of thorns and purple robe, and saith, I may release to thee a man on this day of feasting. Whom will ye that I release, the man Barabbas or this man Jesus?

And the crowd cried, Give us Barabbas! Jesus must die!

When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing to save the man Jesus and that Jesus was indeed to die to please the crowd, he offered the execution of noble captives, to have the man's wrists slashed with sword and thus causing him to bleed quickly unto death. But from the crowd called up the man Andrew, son of Phinneas the shepherd, who said, Jesus must suffer for his words! Do not give him the gentle death! Crucify Him! The crowd joined in the mocking call, He must suffer for his words!

Then Pilate went from the crowd and washed his hands, and turned Jesus to the officers and soldiers, who gave unto Him a cross and bearing such went all unto the place of the skull which is called Golgotha.

There they crucified Him, and two others on either side with Jesus in the midst.

Book of Trials, 7:23-8

D
anielle stood against the rough wall, her red eyes turned furiously towards the shrouded figure on the gurney. Marie and Clarice were gone, spun away with dour exasperation, vanished through the small ceiling-high window of the cellar. Their words still echoed in the room like late-season flies caught in a bottle.

Marie: "He is not Alexandre! He is nothing. He is less than nothing."

Clarice: "It's done! Come with us. Sister, take my hand. It stinks in here."

Marie: "Look if you must, gaze for a moment, but be done with it, and then come."

Danielle had pressed her gloved hands to her ears and shook her head. “No.”

Marie snapped her fingers sharply as if Danielle were a dog to obey her mistress, and Danielle had simply said, "Leave me be."

Marie and Clarice had done just that. They thought their companion mad, not a good thing for a creature of the night. Madness could only lead to foolishness and carelessness, and with carelessness, destruction. They had left their mad friend to her own fate.

Danielle stared at the soiled sheet, the sharp protrusions beneath the cloth where the nose and chin were, the feet. Softer mounds of the shoulders, the fisted hands, the groin. Light from lanterns, hung in this subterranean room by the men who had departed just minutes ago, sputtered from ceiling hooks. Water pipes dripped puddles onto the dirt floor. Spiders and their webs, left in corners by the hasty custodian the day before, held still as if pondering the strange and recent occurrence.

"Alexandre?" Danielle said softly, tasting the cold of her breath as it passed through her incisors and her protruding canines.

"Why can that not be you?" She took several steps forward, hesitated. So much she had witnessed in all these many years, so much terror and viciousness and death, yet this one was almost beyond her ken.

"Why can that not be you?" she repeated, then touched her own face. "Is this not me? Am I not still walking this squalid earth in the form of a young woman, though nearly 120 years of age?"

The sheet stirred slightly. Danielle gasped and put out her hand to find that it was just a current of air passing though the damp brick room, travelling from one ill-hung door to another in the opposite wall.

Was this world not filled with such as her, existing in conjunction with mortals who most often believed their own reality was the sum and total? And so what incredulous magic could not happen, and what damnable curse was impossible?

The room was hot and rancid, foul human scents coiling like smoke from the floor, the walls, the chairs, the gurney. The men who had been here just minutes ago had stunk at first of excitement, and then disgust. They claimed for themselves the crown of civility, yet winced and vomited at the result of their self-proclaimed goodness.

"Is this not me?" she repeated. "Look, Alexandre, and see that flesh which you once loved." She shook her head, warding off the stench, then ripped her gloves from her hands and threw them to the floor. She clutched at the frilly bodice of her dress, and ripped it from neck to waist. Her dagger-sharp nails raked the white skin of her breast as she did, leaving long, bloodless skin-lips gaping silently in the air.

Cursed costume of the modern, nineteenth-century woman! Such prudes, such whores, tied up and trussed and playing at seduction with their prim dress, not knowing what it is to be wholly female! Ah, but she had known! Alexandre had known her femaleness and she his maleness, and they had reveled in the wonder of it all.

She tossed the ripped cloth aside. Then she wrenched off the rest of her garb - the leg-of-mutton sleeves, the long muslin skirt, the petticoat, cotton stockings, garters, buttoned shoes. All were hurled away. The hat, the hairpins, the ear bobs. Her auburn hair fell free about her shoulders.

Danielle closed her eyes and caressed her cold skin. She traced the length of her arms and torso, feathering the soft hairs on her chilly stomach, strumming the already healing skin-lips on her breasts.

She had been naked when they had taken away Alexandre from her the first time. Lying in a stall of the weanling barn they'd been, Danielle leaning gaily into the wiry hair of Alexandre's chest and laughing at the prickling straw in her hair and in her back. She had picked up a yellow stem and had ticked his chin and his nose. He had kissed the straw and then her fingers. He had wrapped his arms around her waist and nestled his chin into her neck, his tongue playing easily along the tender flesh there.

"You were tender and true," she said, her brows knotted and lips trembling. "But only one wrong laid on your head, as any human would have who has lived past infancy. How, then, did this curse come to you?"

Beneath the sheet, Alexandre did not move. Danielle took several more steps and grasped the sheet that covered her beloved.

T
he handsome, tattered young man arrived at Bicetre on a frosty, late March morning in 1792, appearing like a spectre beneath the shadows of the pear orchard behind Paris's infamous hospital and prison. The sky had rained not an hour earlier, and the rain had been cold and severe, drilling chilly puddles into the ground and knocking branch tips from the naked trees. Shivering droplets hung triumphantly to the fur of the animals in the paddocks and to the emerald leaves of the boxwood shrubs that lined the narrow dirt pathways.

The brick institution of Bicetre was large, dark and filled with most unpleasant business - that of madness, of loneliness, of anger, desperation. Of screams. Of silence. Bright, curious doctors ministered to the sick. Hardened officers tended the miscreants.

In the shadow of the great place, flanking its west side, was a four-acre plot on which animals and vegetables were raised for the use of Bicetre's personnel, patients and inmates. It was called appropriately the Little Farm. Fenced paddocks monitored the cows and sheep and pigs; in a small hutch nested chickens and pigeons. Several gardens bordered with woven vine fences offered up turnips and beans in the warmer months. A tiny grove of pear trees held sentinel near the stone wall where, beyond, the citizens of Paris pounded back and forth in the rhythm of their individual and now collective lives.