Ben and I didn't speak. Our feet led us away from the direct path. Somewhere out there was the old man's house, that looming ruinous thing. All the lights would be out, and he would be inside somewhere, haunting its darkness. We couldn't bring ourselves to go directly there, and so we wandered awhile.
Our directionless path lead us to a murky little pond, a drainage run-off where we used to swim. We hadn't been there for years, and it seemed smaller now. Pale reeds stuck up blue from the glassy surface. It was almost a perfect circle. At that moment, in the fading light, it looked to me just like an enormous camera lens.
Ben kicked off his shoes. “Let's go in.”
“You serious?”
“Come on,” he said, “it'll be fun. Anyway, I feel kinda, you know... Let's just go.”
I shrugged. “Yeah, okay.”
We stripped naked, not looking at each other. Something had changed between us. It was like everyone else on the planet had died, and we had no one but each other.
I watched him walk into the black water, shivering and milk-white in the moonshine. It seemed to erase him as he went in – to the ankles, to the knees, to the thigh, to the waist, the breast, the shoulders and then everything. He dipped under and was gone.
I followed.
We swam in circles around each other, our pale legs kicking just beneath the surface.
I floated on my back and stared up at the endless sky. All the stars were coming out. I remembered playing here when I was younger. Ben and I would come out and swim together. It was like an adventure, journeying together into some wild unknown. We did everything together then, because we had nobody else.
I felt him come up behind me. He was shivering, but his breath was warm on the back of my neck. I felt his arms wrap around me, his hand covering my heart. I felt very peaceful, very still. Everything was about to come apart, but I felt whole. I felt his hand slide down my chest and disappear below the surface of the water.
For some time after we floated together, just drifting in the iris.
We walked naked together awhile after leaving the pond. We didn't have anything to dry ourselves off with and we didn't want to get back into our clothes, so we just padded on barefoot through the gathering dark, like native boys treading a hidden path. Ben had the paper bag gripped tight in one fist.
“How much is he giving us?” I asked.
“A thousand dollars,” Ben said.
I whistled.
“Yeah,” he said.
We could have stopped then. We could have turned around, destroyed the tape or lost it in the woods. We could have gone home and lived our quiet sad lives. We could have done a lot of things, but back then there had seemed to be only one option. It seemed as though we were on a road which could not be abandoned. All there was to do was keep putting one foot in front of the other.
And then, all of a sudden, we were out of the woods. It was just as I'd known it would be: the long shadows of the house reaching across the dead grass, all those dark windows devoid of any light, the mailbox gaping like a toothless mouth.
We dressed, pulling on our clothes over wet skin, and we started across the field. My shoes squelched with every step. The mailbox groaned when Ben opened it. He held out the paper bag.
“Put it in,” I told him.
“Yeah,” he said, but he didn't do it.
“Ben, come on. I wanna get out of here.”
The porch light came on. It was a sickly sparking yellow, the color of a bug-catcher. I jumped; my first instinct was to drop down and hide in the grass or run for the woods. Ben didn't react, he just turned to look at it. He pulled the paper bag close against his chest.
“Jesus, Ben, let's go!”
He looked at me, and his face was lit with the eerie glow of the Old Man's light.
“Ben, come on!”
Ben shook his head. “I'm going to take it to him,” he said, “I'm going to get our money right now.”
“Are you crazy? Let's just go!” I stared at the house. I don't know if it was just my imagination, but I thought I could see a dark shape moving just inside the front windows, a lurking figure peering through the blinds and trembling.
“Come with me,” he said.
I shook my head.
His eyes and mine were locked together. We stared at each other.
“I'm going, Connie,” he said, and he turned away.
I stood by the mailbox and I watched him walk towards the house. I thought of all the times I'd seen him walking to school with a bag lunch in his hand. I thought of the videotape. Somewhere beyond the clouds the moon was shimmering pale and whole, waiting to break through. The long grass seemed to clutch and tug at his bare legs as he crossed the field.
I don't know why, but I thought of the RV. We were eight years old when we'd first found it in the woods. It seemed to me like that had been a very long time ago, thousands of years, lifetimes. We'd been so excited, we'd had so many plans. I remember going inside for the first time, the whole thing full of dead leaves and overgrown with vines and scrub. The sun shone green through the mossy windows, this weird magical light. Ben and I had felt like we were going into another world. We used to sit in there together and he'd tell me about all the things we were going to do, how we were going to fix up the RV and take it across the country. We were going to be free, with all the world stretching out before us. We were going to live however we wanted, wherever. All over the damn country, no home or family, just each other.
Ben stepped up onto the first stair of the Old Man's porch. He looked back at me. He grinned, but I remember feeling like it was only for my benefit, just to reassure me that it was going to be okay.
The door was pushed open from the inside, and there was this horrible black nothing in there, thick and deep as a starless sky. I couldn't see the old man. Ben and I kept looking at each other. He went up another step, but no further, just standing there on the brink of something awful and irresistible.
It's strange to think about it now, about everything that happened to us that summer. I remember Ben now and it seems so distant and somehow so beautiful.
I remember the way I ran through the forest that night, it felt like I ran forever, away from the house, away from the old man, away from everything I'd ever known. I was lost, but I didn't feel lost. I felt like I knew exactly where I was going, and I was sure that it would be alright, no matter what happened, because I knew that Ben would be there waiting for me with a cocky grin and a stupid joke. He was indestructible, bad things just slid off him, nothing stuck.
But of course that wasn't true. It's one of those things you learn, growing up, one of the things that makes you wish you could stay a child forever. Bad stuff can happen to anybody, and does.
* * *
Fragment
Yeah, I remember Garrett's magazine. God, we were so desperate back then! Fucking underwear catalog, and we went crazy over it. For a while Garrett would only let us look at it, we couldn't touch it or anything. I begged him! Come on, just a little while, loan it to me for a few days, man! He couldn't be budged. It's weird, how open we were about it back then. We all knew that we wanted the catalog to jack off with, but nobody seemed to care. There was no judgment, no weirdness. And it wasn't like we were nasty about the pictures either. About the women in the pictures, I mean. I practically worshiped them, each and every one of them.
Eventually Garrett let us borrow the catalog. Every week after church we would go out into the field and it would be passed from one boy to the next. There were only four of us at first, but I guess by the end there were about a dozen kids out there, all boys of course. I remember when it was my turn. My cousin Sam was in town. I wasn't sure at first, you know, if I should show it to him. I did, though. He was in a sleeping bag on my floor and I was under my covers with a flashlight, staring at this woman modeling this silky purple bra. He asked me what I was reading, and I said that he could come under the covers with me if he wanted to see. I didn't mean anything by it,
I just... I wanted him to know. I had my pajama bottoms pulled down around my knees. I don't remember if he looked or not. He held one side of the catalog and I held the other. The flashlight was balanced between our heads. It got real hot against my cheek, and the blanket was pretty heavy. We were both sweating, breathing hard, hands down between our legs, side by side on my bed. The catalog shook. We didn't look at each other, but I remember catching a glimpse of Sam, you know, out of the corner of my eye. He bit his lip and he took a big breath and held it in, then he stopped moving. He went all stiff, and then he just sort of melted away. He slipped back down off the bed and got into his sleeping back. I hid the catalog and we never talked about it. We weren't... I don't know... traumatized, or anything. We just knew not to say anything.
Duncan Bauer was the last person to have the catalog. His mom caught him using it in the bathroom. I think she burned it, who knows. Huh. Garrett's fucking catalog. Real Rosetta Stone moment, that.
* * *
The Young Christ
She found god in the earth and drew it from the sun-warmed soil, clutched in dirty hands and lifted to the naked sky. Virgin alabaster fingers cupping soft black dirt. Too real to be real. She swayed, gazing in awful wonder at the earth in her palms. She was lonely, and ready to believe. The willingness of childhood had not yet left her, and she ached to see the world around her put into proper order.
He came to her uninvited, stepping from the mouth of the woods without a sound. There were wisps of hair on his chin and upper lip, and angry red spots where he'd worried at his acne. He approached her with the guilty stride of a voyeur, too-rehearsed, too-stiff.
What they would become was buried deep, then little more than the glimmer of metal in water.
She sat back on her haunches, feeling the warm dirt press up against her bare thighs. She watched him. She was not afraid. An envelope of poppy seeds was open before her. She'd stolen them from the store. It was the first time she had ever stolen anything. She could not say what had drawn her eye to the little packet with its brightly colored picture. Some instinct, maternal perhaps, had compelled her to reach out for the seeds. She would create, she would summon from the earth her red-faced children with their bright petal eyes and they would turn to bask in her presence and they would owe everything to her who had allowed them to be.
He stood over her, his hands shoved awkwardly into the pockets of overlarge thrift store jeans. “Hey,” he said to her, “what's up?”
She looked up at him and squinted into the hanging sun. “Nothing.” The light was unbearably bright, but she did not look away. “I'm Juliette.”
“I'm Brian,” he said.
* * *
A sungod born in this garden on the edge of the town, on the edge of the day as the home star tumbles earthward. In the morning it will be reborn, and we will follow it.
* * *
Juliette's parents worried about her. She'd overheard them talking: “She's such a quiet girl. She doesn't seem to have any friends. That girl doesn't know what she's doing. She'll come to a bad end.”
Juliette had learned to keep her words strictly to herself. Her parents and her teachers, those adults in authority over her, they all assumed that she was slow. That was the word they used, slow. They made excuses on account of her sex. Her father said that it was only natural. After all, girls were simpler than men and she wasn't an ugly girl, so what need was there for her to be smart? After all, she would always have her looks. After all, she could find a man to do her thinking for her, couldn't she? Her mother did not argue this, and nodded her head. Of course he was right.
When Juliette heard them she bit her lip so hard that it bled and the blood ran red down her chin like a curtain of wet silk pulled slowly from her mouth. And she kept her thoughts closer and quieter.
Juliette's father was the pastor of the little church on the edge of the town. It had a steeple and a bell and a single stained-glass window. We were entranced by that window when we were children, continually amazed to see the colored light scattered on the floor of the holy place. When we grew older we began to hate the window and the light which shone through it, and we took every opportunity to tread maliciously upon the malformed sunshine – as empty a protest as ever there has been. We came also to despise the teachings of Juliette's father. We took special care to learn words like hypocrisy and ignorance and blasphemy. Large words which felt too big for our mouths. When we formed our tongues around them it was always with an awkward delight. Words were our only weapons against adults, whispered together in quiet conference as we tromped the swaying yellow fields behind the churchyard in the after-service hours.
We hated Juliette then. She refused to talk with any of us, and we feared to speak in her presence lest she carry our words back to her father. We had to be careful then, we apostates, and we turned our caution to rejection. Whenever Juliette came quietly near we would glare at her and depart. She had black hair and blue eyes and pale skin and whenever we turned away from her she would go to sit alone in the corner and cry hot tears into her hands. We never felt guilty; we felt like we were striking back at her father for his ignorance, his hypocrisy, his blasphemy.
Our feelings mattered little to the adults, who all seemed to adore Juliette as much as we feared and rejected her.
I always thought it was kinda sad, how they would ignore her when she cried. They only ever seemed to see her when she was forcing a smile on her face. She was so pretty when she smiled, it was like she was a little angel. That's what they all called her, you remember? The little angel. Sitting there in that spotless white dress, always the same dress. She told me later that her father forced her to wear it. It was a symbol of purity, I guess. She said that she hated it. I couldn't stand seeing the way they fawned over her. “What a doll,” they would cry, pawing at her sleeves and her hair, “What a toy!” It made me jealous back then. I guess I never really saw how hard it was for her.
Her father made her wear the dress so that he could always see the stains. She knew that she would be punished if there was dirt on her dress, yet the dirt called to her, hungered for her. She ached to tear the dress from herself and run naked through the grass, to feel the dirt between her toes, to roll in it and be one with it, to be clasped in the arms of her true mother. The dress was like a leash, a tight collar around her throat holding her back from the beckoning world.
Juliette's mother did nothing, she was nothing but a wife. God spoke through Juliette's father, God spoke with her father's voice and acted through her father's hands. God told Juliette's mother that she was nothing without Juliette's father, that she was nothing but a womb and a mouth, nothing but flesh. Joy in service. Joy in submission. Joy in subordination. Joy in the foot grinding her down to a beautiful shape. She took what joy she could. Who was she to speak against God?
Juliette's mother had sad brown eyes. She submitted without argument. It was only right. God's hand closed around her wrist, tight as a shackle. Her face became a mask in servitude to the whims and mood of God. Take care of your man. Please your man. Don't give your man reason to stray. Don't ever let go of your man. Tell your man that he's strong and let him prove it against your weakness. What are you without your man?
Juliette's mother had a name, though it was rarely spoken. Her father was called Reverend Theodore.
For three days Juliette had kept the poppy seeds hidden deep in her sock drawer, where their presence drove uneasy spikes of fear through the days. Surely they would be found! Her sin would be uncovered. You could not hide a sin from God. And did God not speak to her father? Surely he would know, he would be told, he would find her sins out and she would be punished.
What would they do to her, she wondered, what punishment? In her childhood she feared pain above all things.
She could not be left home alone, could not leave the house on her own, could not exist it seemed without the presence of her parents. Other fathers spent their days at work, but her father the pastor remained almost
almost always at home, reading in his study, demanding silence. Other mothers spent their days at parent-teacher conferences and book groups and social clubs, but her mother could not be spared from father's side. There was a second umbilical cord, invisible to the eye, which had not yet been cut. She could not get rid of the seeds and she could not plant them. She waited.
She waited three days, and on the third day Juliette's father left the house to attend a prayer meeting with several of the church elders. Her mother sat there dozing in her chair and when sleep took her Juliette watched the peaceful mask slip away and the dreams behind her mother's face begin to twist and writhe in her features.
Juliette sat quietly for several minutes, fear building inside. Finally she rose and quit the house with seeds in hand, her white dress catching the sunlight as she stepped down off the porch steps and onto the immaculately maintained grass of the yard.
She was free. She looked up towards the sunny blue sky and basked in the heat of the day. For the first time she could remember, Juliette smiled without having to tell herself to do so. She felt alive.
Her house was right over the hill, just down the road from the church. You could see it from the ridge. None of us knew that she lived there, though. It was just a house to us. You know, anonymous. I used to walk out into those fields after church. It was like breaking the surface sometimes, like getting the first breath of air. It's funny, you can see the whole town if you look back that direction but, if you look the other way, Juliette's house is the only thing there. And I mean the only thing. She must have been lonely.
Juliette left her yard and walked out into the field. She worried that her mother might wake or her father return early, but the sunlight and the caress of the endless oceans of neck-high grass swept the fear from her. She didn't mind being lost, and wandered deep into the field until her house was far behind her and the grass gave way to shrubs and scrub brush and little trees just tall enough to shield the earth below from all but a few fingers of golden sunlight.