The Convulsion Factory (28 page)

I waited for Andre, long enough for things to start seeming more normal, not that they were, but you get used to whatever’s around. We were starting to lose the light overhead when he came back, carrying something in a vinyl bag, with another young boy at his side who showed no sign of recognizing the other two, and I thought,
What’s he doing, scooping them up one at a time?

“Oh, hey,” Andre said, and he shuffled in his olive canvas coat, with darting eyes. “Been here long?”

I said yes, and Andre gave the vinyl bag to Axl, who looked inside and started going on how it wasn’t fair, it was Cheyenne’s turn to clean one, or get this new geek, or me, so Andre tried to calm him, saying it could wait. Then he had to calm the new boy, who’d winced so hard at being called a geek by someone older that I thought he’d be sick.

“Where’d they come from, Andre?”

“The skulls? Just … around.”

“The kids. These kids…?”

He looked as if I’d asked the too-obvious. “They’re all over, Angus, they’re like puppies, you know. Everywhere you look.”

“Except they don’t have tags, I guess.”

Andre, turning on me, said, “You think I’m kidnapping them, do you? Because I’m not, there’s no need for that,” and he spun the newest arrival around, this thin wisp of a little boy with the cringing eyes under choppy bangs, then he yanked up a sleeve to show me the constellation of crusty pocks along that undersized arm, cigarette burns of varying recent vintage. “You think he does that to himself? You usually have to get a little older than six before you start doing that to yourself.”

I couldn’t react, waiting for something that wasn’t true.

“Believe me, I know,” he went on, then sent the new boy over by the remains of the fire, which Cheyenne was trying to rekindle now that he was finished with Nihil. “I’m just trying to make things better for them, is all, make things better for myself.”

“By bashing in the backs of their heads?”

“Only that one. You can’t save everybody.”

“Yeah, but Andre, they’re
kids
, you can’t make decisions like this for them. How much did you know when you were eight, nine?”

“Enough to know how much I hated when those assholes would beat on me just to hear me cry. That’s why I’m doing them a favor, either giving them power to survive, or putting the weak ones past all the hurt, forever. Either way it’s done out of concern.” Andre slumped and let his face sag as though he hadn’t slept for days. “You don’t understand, I’m just trying to get the dreams to stop.”

“Dreams?”

“Dreams,” then he pointed to the quieted Nihil, proud and terrible and mighty in that mangle of flesh and metal, and for the first time I realized they’d wired him into his own antenna. “I was the one who dreamed he was dead, wasn’t I, the one he called to first? So I’m only giving him what he wants.”

“And that includes the
damaru
?”

Andre looked surprised. “You know about that?”

I said only from Cheyenne, and asked what it was.

A
damaru
is a kind of magical drum, he explained, hourglass-shaped and Tibetan in origin. Right away I knew this was nothing Andre would know about, it sounded more like Jamey talking, Jamey and his lore about things that made noise. Jamey’s incorruptible brains picked by Nihil, the coagulated voice of rust and impulse.

Damarus
could be made of wood, but the truly powerful ones were made from two skulls, tops sawn off like bowls, then joined at the crowns, with membranes affixed over the ends. You didn’t beat it as such, but shook it, and two knotted cords whipped back and forth and did the rest.

“Skulls, they’re really resonant,” Andre said. “He told me in one of the dreams that powerful
damarus
can wake the dead.”

The idea was interesting enough to get me sidetracked, forget the moment and think of what was really going on here. The raising of a new army, maybe, or founding of a new religion of the null and void. Of course it was very Darwinian in nature, you couldn’t deny that, but it had gone this far, so who was I to judge.

Axl was compliant again, scouring the second skull, and I saw that it’d already been peeled and partially cleaned, and so easier to ignore that not all that long ago there had been a face on it, atop someone’s shoulders, someone who’d been laughing or shouting or crying.

I looked up, far above Nihil in that gabled tower, past the pulleys and chains, looked toward the day’s last light, thinking they’d better get the fire going again, or no one would be able to see and maybe they would freeze. Through the broken boards swirled fine snow, and now out of the wind it drifted straight down, and I moved over before Nihil and shared it with him, that first kiss of winter.

The snowflakes melted upon his skin, Nihil warmer than room temperature at least, while behind drooping eyelids the orbs were twittering back and forth again, dreamer’s eyes. I wondered if he was privy to things miles away, in Chicago’s coldest heart. If in his vast expanding mind he saw a canvas of brick and cinderblock, and on it a constantly unfolding mural of slaughter and kickbacks, and if it flowed, a story like in a movie, or if it was just what it was, random and senseless, like coming attractions.

Snowflakes on my face, I remembered being here that winter day with my father, hating how such a simple sensation can take you back so far, so fast, so thoroughly.

And I remembered Jamaal, being with him in this room the day after his sister was burned. Where was he now, anyway, and did he that day wonder where his life would lead, or did he try to shut out all thoughts of the future, suspecting that nothing good could come of it?

Snowflakes running down our faces, Nihil grunted and grinned.

The fire was going by now, smoke rising pale gray, and in the play of flame and shadow, among their four silhouettes, I saw the tallest lift his arm above the smallest, staggering off balance as he swung the sledge mallet. In the meat locker hush came a thud of case-hardened steel against curving bone, occipital I think, and at the instant of impact Nihil twitched and strained and panted and pulled at the wires that traversed his inner realm, as though he’d felt it across the room and all the way down to marrow.

The blow had been glancing, the puny boy screeching as he buckled to his knees, but Cheyenne and Axl caught his shoulders. I was flying across the room without having thought to, Andre braced for another swing, telling the keening boy how sorry he was that he’d messed up, he’d do better this time, and maybe it was true, that if slaughterhouses had glass walls we’d all be vegetarians.

Andre malleted the boy a second time before I could ram into him, and everybody tumbled, and I could hear the excitable squeak of the bedsprings, then I wrested the sledge away from Andre and knocked him on the knee, and when we disentangled he was crying, crying and hiccuping, sounding no different than when we were in third grade, except the spectators weren’t laughing.

He rolled onto all fours, favoring the one knee, and after I stood over him, sledge in hand, he lowered his head and stretched his neck out, body still except for the shudders from his sobbing. When I didn’t move he began begging me to do it, although whether he wanted to sacrifice himself to Nihil or simply end everything wasn’t clear to me. But nothing much ever was.

I dropped the mallet to the killing floor with a clink, and Andre offered no resistance when I stripped the long canvas coat off his back, peeling it away like a skin to drape it around the six-year-old. He was still alive, but silent now, no more wailing left in him as he bled from the back of his head and both ears. He weighed almost nothing in my arms, a scarecrow with pupils fixed and dilated. I wrapped the coat tighter, packing him to travel.

We’d gotten as far as the door when that sound came again, more solid this time, mallet into thicker bone, and when I looked toward the fire and what was going on there I couldn’t make out which was Cheyenne and which Axl, but it didn’t matter, they were taking turns, both silhouettes hopping from foot to foot in their glee, and naturally Nihil loved it, ate it up like ambrosia.

With the boy in my arms I rushed out of the slaughterhouse and through the woods, breath in plumes, the hiss of fresh snow whispering through the trees. In that stillness I was the bull, the violator, shoes mashing layers of dead leaves while I plotted a course to the nearest hospital, Central DuPage probably, I could hand him over at the emergency entrance and fade before anyone could get my license plate, I didn’t even know this boy, how could they connect us?

The lights of the houses grew brighter ahead, and the boy, so weightless before, became heavier with each step. I stopped to adjust and set him down a moment, braced against one bent knee, but in the twilight his face began to streak, blood from both nostrils, and his limbs trembled, weak as a rabbit’s heartbeat, and that was it, he had no more of anything. I watched it leave.

We lay in the leaves and sticks and frost, dusted with snow, then I looked back at the slaughterhouse, where smoke rose from the gabled tower, and I wondered if I shouldn’t see the rest of it through. I’d already amazed myself, taking an actual moral stand on something, so I left the boy on the path for now and went back, back to the killing floor.

Their sledge now still, Cheyenne and Axl were crouched before the fire, wiping their faces clean, while I stood before Nihil. I could cut him into pieces, burn him, stop it here before his dream spread any further. He was as revivified as I’d yet seen, Andre’s skull especially resonant maybe, and his eyes were open, looking, comprehending. They fixed on me with an unblinking struggle to contract his focus to one tiny mite before him.

“I,” he whispered, slow and laborious, “know … you…”

I shriveled. You cannot look upon such a thing, or hear its voice, and feel sure of anything, especially conquering it, except for one: Nothing is as you believed, and is probably worse.

His eyes never left me, two dark malignant stars.

“Ohhhh,” his withered lungs creaked, “negative…”

I’d heard all I wanted, drifting over to sit beside the fire, warming my hands because there was nothing else to do until rush hour traffic thinned. Cheyenne and Axl watched with expectation now that Andre had gone the way of the weak, seeming to expect me to bring them their hamburgers now. Later, when I left, I almost told them to go home until I remembered they were, and the last I saw of them they were tugging on the chains to hoist Nihil and the springs up, up, higher, into the gabled tower and gathering smoke, where he might better see and hear and smell all.

O
, he’d said,
negative
, in recognition, and now I knew what it meant, but could never recall having told Jamey my blood type.

On the path I retrieved the boy, because he deserved better, and carried him to my car, no suburban dweller stopping us because I looked like I knew what I was doing, every wet mile of the way, southeast, into a buffering industrial zone before Chicago peters out into farmland.

No one lived near, and it was too late for blue collars and too cold for gangbangers. We had the wastescape to ourselves, a jagged field of refuse like the worst of Belfast or Beirut, or an elephant graveyard, only for a city, iron bones and entrails everywhere you looked. On clearer days you could look north and see the skyscrapers of downtown.

I could never have left the boy at the slaughterhouse, had no reason to believe he had much of any family who would do right by him and his pock-burned arm, so I carried him into the scrapyard for the most fitting mausoleum I knew: the big boiler that Mae and Jamey and I had turned into a giant drum one Sunday last summer.

This time it was empty, although Mae had never known any different, and it was out of the wind and elements, just a cut-out heart that had long ago ceased thumping. In there I laid him, with his soggy head, wrapped in an olive coat big enough for a shroud, and I wished I’d had a flower or two to leave, but it was the wrong season, and always would be for him.

*

We’d chanced across the boiler while exploring, Jamey always on the lookout for new sound sources, and to him this place was a playground, if one where anyplace you fell you’d contract tetanus. I remember him running both hands over the boiler’s plated hull, asking, “Who could throw away something with this much potential?”

“The world is full of stupid people,” Mae said. “Why not just give up and try to blend?”

At Jamey’s instigation we took bars of scrap metal and began hammering away to see what the thing sounded like, a deep hollow gonging of incredible density. Soon we found our rhythm to work around, something of our individual selves given over to a group mind. It happened naturally, bypassing thought, the reverberations taking us over as we swung and sweated and felt our arms thrumming with each impact, down to the pits of our stomachs, until it felt as though the boiler were playing us instead. We served it, dancing to its massive peal, until we felt we might raise such shockwaves we could collapse the city into piles of rubble, if only we had the stamina to play that long.

And when our arms gave out and echoes rang, Jamey wiped sweat from his forehead and said, “I’ve
got
to bring my remote DAT down and record this sometime,” then he ran to a port where some intake pipe might’ve once connected, crawling halfway through to listen to the last dying echo.