The Voices in Our Heads (7 page)

Really? Jordan turned the camera around as if there was a button he’d missed. He sighed. They’d forgotten to monitor it last month after the dancing and had left it recording all night. He hit “Rewind” and watched the little white icons spin. After what seemed a logical amount of time, he hit “Play” and saw an image, slightly tilted, of the open bay closet he was currently standing in front of, the top shelf crammed with book bags, cases of Dr. Pepper, paper towels, and the beach coolers, the main area below occupied by the fall and winter coats, for all but about a foot and a half of empty space to the left.

He hit “Rewind” without hitting off “Play,” so he could see the closet go backward in time and catch the last moment of dancing.

Something moved. On the tape. A blur right in front of the camera, and then something in the closet. Jordan stopped the tape and hit “Play.” His spine went cold and beads of sweat burst out on his forehead.

The coats were now hanging to the left, with the one and a half feet of space to the right. There was no movement, no dancing shadows, just the dull illumination off-camera from the staircase light they always left on so Jenna could easily find her way to the bathroom upstairs. It was still the middle of the night.

Jordan gasped. There on the tape, the coats moved, all by themselves, from left to right, making the foot and a half of empty space switch places.

He hit “Rewind,” then “Stop,” and then played it again. No. There was no one in the closet hiding behind the coats playing a trick; the camera had a full view to the floor, and it would have shown his or her feet. He watched the coats start moving again and hit “Stop” abruptly. Backed it up. Hit “Play,” then tried to hit “Pause” at just the right moment. It took him three tries, but he got it. In regular time it appeared that something slipped to the edge of the leather aviator jacket all the way to the left of the bunch. It was a hand, connected to nothing, palming the coats and sliding them to the side like a shower curtain. A hand in a white glove with the finger bones painted in.

Jordan swallowed hard and let the footage play, back from the initial movement in the closet. There was the sneaky disconnected hand, the slide of the jackets across the coat bar, then nothing.

Suddenly, there was a burst into the middle of the camera, a face, close up and then gone, as if this “thing” had jumped through the air.

In live time it was but a blur, a flash, nothing identifiable. Jordan fucked with the “Play” and “Pause” button seven times before he nailed it, there, dead center, a bit grainy, but mostly distinct, like the freeze frame on a bang-bang play at first base, where you see the given figure clearly, just accompanied by streaks and back trails.

This was not Aldo’s face, though Jordan wasn’t really expecting it to be at this point. This guy was younger, leaner, skull-like cheek to jaw, black tattoo circling the left eye, then drawn down like the dangling chain on the glassware pirates used, or that Colonel Klink character on the old
Hogan’s Heroes
show. The eyes were bright green, piercing and inhuman.

And he was smiling, all teeth, all crooked, browned-up and rotten.

Jordan went shopping. He went to Sears and bought refrigerator magnets, blank photo sheets, construction paper, and a sheaf of loose leaf. He went to the photo department and purchased two digital recorders with tripod set-ups. Then he went to Home Depot and bought a new caulking gun along with three tubes of brick adhesive. At CVS, he purchased twenty containers of aspirin, five bottles of Omega Fatty Acid capsules, and ten boxes of Prilosec.

He convinced Ann Marie that it was OK he didn’t go to Dong Night over the at Johnsons’. He made arrangements for Jenna to sleep there and told Ann Marie to stay at her mother’s. She didn’t argue. You couldn’t talk to Jordan nowadays, and she was clearly sick to death of fighting with him.

When mother and daughter finally left for their night away, Jordan set to work, first in the shed, then in the hearth, next in the kitchen trash, and last in the bathroom. The most difficult operation was in the fireplace, of course, not because Jordan had any trouble whatsoever duplicating the patterning his father had originally formed on the walls—after all, he
was
a Colella and laying brick was in his blood—but more on account of the twisting and positioning of his body in this particular application. How the hell did Aldo do it? I mean, the guy was eighty-three, and before the last tri-wall was fully “papered,” Jordan’s back was screaming.

It was 11:30
p.m.
by the time Jordan had washed up and positioned all the cameras. The first one was placed outside the bathroom, floor speckled with carefully arranged pills, mostly around the toilet, all exploding outward, the flatter ones stacked on top of one another four or five high, and the oval-shaped capsules in uniform diagonals toward the window. The second camera was down in the living room pointing at the fireplace, magnets and photo papers caulked to the inner brick facing, wet garbage arranged on the floor cement, trash can on its side, pokers leaning across and aiming in. The last camera was aimed as the original had been, at the open bay closet, but now the space was crammed at the bottom with propane tanks, trash can lids, gingerbread men, and coils of garden hose, the recycling drum there on its side, this time crawling with stink bugs.

Jordan went up to his room, turned on the air conditioner, and waited. All night.

The next morning he trudged downstairs, cleaned the house, did the rugs with the steam cleaner and wet vac he’d borrowed from the shop, burned seven cans of Raid industrial-duty bug killer, forced himself to be patient. Ann Marie called twice and he didn’t pick up. He showered. Dressed. Gathered the cameras, and then watched the tapes.

The Breath Vampire first tried to enter through the closet, sliding the coats, yet unable to jump the blockade of outdoor shed paraphernalia. He was too tall, couldn’t get his foot up and over, and he was slippery, only showing up in flashes and blips, covering more space in his patches of invisibility than you accounted for, but when he did sporadically “wink up” the frustration on his thin, mask-like face was more than evident.

The hearth was horrifying. The monster tried to pull a Santa Claus, but the caulked magnets and papers made him lose his palm pressure and slip down the flue; it seemed even representations of family togetherness defied him. The wet trash at the bottom made him go “whoopsie” on his butt as if coming down off a playground slide, and the pokers propped on the trash can acted like Braveheart spears, impaling the son of a bitch through his inner thighs and privates, worms squirting out of the opened wounds. Then it exercised its own type of “Rewind” ability, and Jordan watched the thing make four fruitless and painful attempts before giving up and trying a bathroom entry.

That one was the strangest of all. Jordan had an excellent memory, honed from being in the construction trades so long and having to repeatedly retain the details of stocking and delivery orders on the fly, so his arrangement of the floor-pills was dead-balls accurate.

Aldo was a genius. The arrangement and its effect reminded Jordan of the
Mission Impossible
movies, where laser rays were set all over a room, guaranteeing failure of mobility. The capsules and tablets were set in some kind of diabolical mathematical perfection, and when the beast snaked out of the toilet, feet first, body curved and shooting, like liquid being pushed through a curved see-through science tube, his thin-toed boots couldn’t find purchase as he took fuller form. He made six attempts, each time doing his little flamenco, trying different angles, always slipping, hitching, and pitching, then retreating through the pipes backward, upside down, and head first.

Ann Marie came home an hour and a half later without announcement. I mean, enough was enough already, and Jordan was still in the living room, watching the recordings, pausing, rewinding, over and again. He looked at his wife in the doorway, his eyes red and dull.

“What?” she said.

He cleared his throat.

“Jenna, go play a video game.”

“OK, Daddy,” she said, prancing over to the “entertainment corner.” He took Ann Marie’s hand.

“Upstairs,” he said.

He closed the bedroom door and showed her the tapes. Her hand remained up at her mouth, and after the viewing she wordlessly followed her husband out to the garage where he piggybacked the small black tape canisters to a small yet weighty decorator brick he had in a pile left over from when they had the walkway done. He wrapped the bunch with duct tape, drove out to the reservoir, and dropped it off the pedestrian walking bridge into what fishermen and occasional swimmers called “The Deep Run.”

They stayed at Joey’s for awhile, and Jordan put the house up for sale at tens of thousands below the neighborhood asking price. Soon, they moved back to South Philly, 10th and Morris, two streets down from where Jordan grew up, and they got Jenna placed in a magnet school. She had started waking up with a smile the minute they left Wynnewood.

Jordan Colella kept on at the tool house, often driving home in mute frustration, as when they closed the service end of the shop on account of the economy and stuck him with farming out repairs, or that time the ladders didn’t get over to Liberty II on time, or when shipping sent out old cartridges with hardened epoxy crammed in the ports and Jordan had to hear about it from everyone and their mother because he was the “inside man” in charge of the funhouse. Ann Marie continued answering phones at the hospital, and last year when they didn’t give her a raise they gave her a title. Frankie failed English 102, dropped out without telling anyone, and took a job at the Navy Yard. Life went on.

They discussed the possibility of putting Jenna in therapy, but Jordan insisted she’d get over it. And besides, what was there to uncover? A monster in the pipes? A fiend up the flue? Who would believe it? Any idiot could foresee the blame ending up right back on Aldo somehow. Ann Marie hinted that maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, like erasing the unexplained and putting it in a place Jenna could process or some such shit, and they fought about it.

In the end, there was no therapy. Jenna did get over it, but Ann Marie developed her own backward strategy of streamlining the unexplained by giving signals here and there that Aldo was indeed wrapped up in the dark time her family went through, somehow, some way. She’d seen things change the minute he crossed their doorstep, there was no denying it. Jordan argued a bit at first, then deflected it, and allowed the frequency to die out over time. He moved on.

But deep inside, he never let his father’s true legacy dwindle to fumes that could simply blow off on the wind. He always remembered that Aldo had pleaded with them at the last moment with his “Ape . . . ape . . . ape,” which was really, “Tape . . . tape . . . tape,” mispronounced because his teeth were out, and the cold hard fact that his father, his hero, utterly gave himself up in that freaked-out “Dong” get-up, standing guard over his granddaughter, ready to go painted face to painted face and toe to toe with the monster, the one only
he
could see in glorious Technicolor continuity somehow, because of a little plaque on the brain.

In Ann Marie’s eyes, Aldo Colella would forever be known as the family monster no matter what she had seen on those tapes in the bedroom.

Jordan still goes to the gravesite once a week to apologize for this, and to whisper to his dear father a more deserving and proper goodbye.

July

Doris Watawitz didn’t like touching trash, and she didn’t appreciate the idea that the Reading boys let rainwater sit in two uncovered Rubbermaids across the back alley for a week last month after carelessly tossing in their Heftys crammed to the gills with fat-marbled meat scraps, jumbo snow crab shells, black beans, and corn cobs. When the township garbage men left the stinking bags right there in their bins, ripped open by chipmunks no less, the older one had come out in shorts, an Iron Maiden retro T-shirt, and black flip-flops to dump the filthy moisture all over the uneven asphalt. He sprayed it off with a garden hose, but it did nothing but spread the brown, stinking water farther down the alley connecting the back yard fences and small garages of everyone who lived on Ellswood and Federal Streets. There were chicken bones, rotted cherry tomatoes, and rank pieces of spotted lettuce littered into the crevice made by Jenny Walshberg’s back garden bordering stones, and hair-clotted cue-tips and cotton balls floating in a trench that ran behind Hugh McMenomay’s grill area framed off by railroad ties with those pretty little planters on the top edge.

The Reading boy had tossed the tattered bags back into the plastic trash cans and hauled them up the alley one at a time. He probably dumped them in the blue container they had at the park up the street, right next to the water fountain and the jungle gym. The alley smelled like disease for days, and though the stench had finally blown off, Doris still considered the asphalt of the back alley to be contaminated. As a result, her own trash and recycling ritual had become rather involved, and every few days she’d added a feature even though she knew it was all rather obsessive. First were the plastic disposable gloves that brought up images of embarrassing physical exams, serial killers, and New York City perverts no matter what generation you hailed from. Next was the sacrifice of her pink Laverne and Shirley sneakers, banished outside now under the short overhang so she wouldn’t track Reading germs into the house, and then just for good measure she’d started rolling her jeans to the knee so the cuffs wouldn’t drag out there.