He pushes ahead and I follow him and when we come to a house of gingerbread and licorice, I know that the house is not safe. It’s not safe but I have no control over my limbs and I stroll directly up to the door and hammer on it while Sam helps himself to a tasty chunk of cinnamon rain gutter. The woman who comes to the door is no crusty hag, however. She is maybe thirty, with hair black as tar. She wears raw leather pants stained with what looks like blood and a vest made of fine silver chain. The woman smiles when she sees us and her teeth glitter white as needles. I don’t trust her but Sam shouts hooray when she asks if we like sugar cookies. He trots inside and I follow him, helpless. The woman strokes my face and her fingers are cold and bony, with long black nails. She purrs that it’s a shame but I am too old for her table, that my skin will be tough and gamey. But my brother is still soft and plump and if killed properly and marinated in butter and blackberry wine he will make a delicious stew. The woman asks me to gather wood for her fire and I comply.
I am not stupid, however.
I am only vaguely aware that this is a dream and I can’t seem to wake myself up but I know this woman. I would know her anywhere. I shiver myself awake and Sam is sitting on his haunches like a little stone frog beside me, staring at my face with profound curiosity.
My head hurts, he says.
I know, I say. Mine does, too.
You were talking, he says.
What was I saying?
You said you weren’t hungry. Then you said the boy is my brother.
Jesus.
Am I the boy?
Yes.
You were having a dream, he says. A bad dream, huh.
Very bad, I say.
What was it about?
His face is pale and fine, his lips still rosy with fever. He is so close to me that I can smell his breath when he exhales. The air coming from him is sour. The smell of sick.
How do you feel? I say.
He thinks for a minute. Okay, he says. But not my arm. My arms hurts.
What’s wrong with your arm?
I don’t know, he says.
Show me where it hurts.
He pulls his sleeve up over the elbow and I see it right away. On the pale underside of his biceps, there is small white mark surrounded by red flesh. It could be a puncture. It could be an insect bite. I take a deep breath and remind myself that kids get nervous when adults freak out.
That doesn’t look bad, I say. Do you remember feeling sick today?
Yeah, he says.
When did you feel sick?
Today, he says. A little while ago.
He bobs his head up and down and sideways and shrugs one shoulder and I remember that he’s five and therefore has no real sense of time.
Uh-huh. What were you doing?
I was sitting on the floor, he says. I was playing with the guys you got me. Wolverine and the guy with fire on his head. They were fighting.
Ghost Rider, I say.
Huh?
The guy with fire on his head is Ghost Rider.
Oh, yeah.
Who was winning?
Wolverine, mostly.
That makes sense. What else were you doing?
Nothing, he says. I was only watching TV…. I was watching Sailor Moon and I was having some chocolate milk. That’s all.
Chocolate milk, huh.
He nods, vigorously. I like chocolate milk. I love it.
The trees are dense and twisted, with thin black branches that hang just above our heads and tangle together like terrible hair, blotting out the sky. Unseen wolves howling in the dark, their voices ghostly.
The boy is brave.
I don’t even have to think about it. The chocolate milk is bad, poisoned. I haul it out of the fridge and look at it carefully. The boy is watching me and it occurs to me that children, like animals, generally have a keen nose for madness. I don’t want to scare him, so I whistle softly as I examine the chocolate milk.
Paranoid people don’t whistle, surely.
What I’m looking at is an ordinary plastic milk jug with a white, screw-on top. Brown and white paper label with a bar code and the words chocolate milk two percent and Sunny Fields Dairy in bright, cheerful script followed by your average nutritional bullshit in small print. The jug is half empty. Or half full, if you’re a positive thinker like me. I unscrew the top and sniff it, then the contents of the jug. It smells like chocolate milk. But that’s too easy.
Do you want some? says the boy. He’s looking at me.
No, I say. I’m not thirsty.
Oh, he says.
He doesn’t say anything else but I can see the little-kid wheels turning in his head. Why are you sniffing it, then?
I think this chocolate milk is bad, I say.
It’s good, he says. I think it’s good.
Yeah. But sometimes milk just goes bad, when you least expect it.
Can I smell it? he says.
Of course.
He hops up and comes over to me. I crouch down so he can reach it and he inhales deeply, frowning as he does so.
Trust me, I say.
The boy nods, gravely. As if he knows the world to be a mysterious, often nonsensical place and is therefore willing to accept the notion that chocolate milk, while it may smell good and taste good, may in fact be bad.
What have you had to eat today?
He tells me that the lady brought him some chicken nuggets earlier.
Which lady?
I don’t know, he says. The lady who wears a mask and doesn’t talk to me.
The lady who wears a mask and doesn’t talk to me. That sounds familiar, doesn’t it. I head upstairs, taking the chocolate milk with me. I cruise through the kitchen, the living room and dining room. I peek into the Lizard Room and no one is about. The house is endless and silent. They could be anywhere, and I begin to go from room to room.
I find them in Molly’s room. I open the door and everybody is packed in there under white, hot lights. The air feels thick, almost humid.
Molly sits in a wooden chair, crying. She wears white underpants and bra. Jude is behind her with scissors in hand, bright steel blades that look very sharp. She is apparently cutting Molly’s hair. There are yellow tufts of it like a ring of feathers at their feet. There is a nasty bruise on Jude’s face, puckered and bloody. It looks like a bite mark. Her shirt is torn at the throat. Miller lies naked on the bed behind them, staring at the ceiling. Huck stands in one corner with a camera, Daphne in the other. They don’t look too comfortable. Jeremy sits in the green chair, out of the shot. By the expression on his face, I would say he has an erection.
Why are you crying? I say.
I’m okay, says Molly. I’m okay.
Jude, your face. What happened to your face?
She doesn’t answer. She snips at Molly’s hair and Molly winces at the sound.
Miller looks at me. What do you want, Poe?
Where should I start? I want to know why you’re naked. I want to know why Molly’s crying and I want to know what happened to Jude’s face. I want to know what’s in this fucking chocolate milk.
Jeremy giggles.
You. You’re in my chair, I say.
Jeremy stands up, shifting his gear to hide that inconvenient wood. He looks around but there’s nowhere else to sit. I brandish the jug of chocolate milk like it’s a weapon. I approach him, menacing but feeling ultimately goofy.
Have a drink, I say.
No, thanks. He scratches his head, confused.
Jesus. Just sit down, I say.
Meanwhile, tufts of yellow hair fall slowly to the floor. I find myself staring at them. The hair falls so slowly. It floats.
Dreamy, isn’t it? says Miller.
I look at him on the bed and he is lying on his side, playing idly with his flaccid penis.
What? I say.
Haven’t you ever noticed that our eyes, our very brains have been programmed to register certain images in slow motion?
I shrug. I have
noticed that, yeah.
Television and film have been around for what, a hundred years? he says.
That sounds about right.
In less than a hundred years, our brains have mutated. We don’t process visual information the way our great-grandparents did.
What’s your point, Miller?
You walk into a room and you see the following things. Two attractive women in their underwear. One is crying. The other has a bruised face. You see a naked man on a bed. You see two minor characters in the shadows, holding cameras. You see a young, handsome boy who will soon be dead, sitting in a green chair.
What is your fucking point? I shout.
What do you see?
In the green chair, Jeremy croaks like a frog. I’ll be dead soon?
Jude, I say. What happened to your face?
Molly bit me.
Okay. That makes sense.
She stares at me like she has a thousand times before. Her eyes open in such a way that I know she actually sees me. The scissors gleam in her hand and her face is temporarily ruined. Her hair is braided into pigtails so that her face is fully exposed, as if she had planned for this.
What’s in the milk, Jude?
Chocolate, she says. It’s chocolate milk.
Where did it come from?
Who knows. A brown cow, I suppose.
Are you poisoning that boy?
What? she says.
There’s a mark on his arm, like the mark of a needle.
Miller scoffs. It’s probably a spider bite.
Taste it, says Jude. Taste the fucking milk.
Molly wipes her face and stands up. Everyone, she says. Everyone get the fuck out of my room. Everyone, please.
Her voice is silent and roaring at once. Her voice is mildly terrifying, like driving into an ice storm. The silence ripples and after a brief pause, everyone begins to come alive. I stand in the doorway, wondering if she wants me to go. Or just the others. Jude puts down the scissors and walks toward me. I step aside to let her pass, which she does without quite looking at me. Miller flops off of the bed and comes toward me, naked and hairless. He scratches his chest, grinning. He doesn’t say a word. Jeremy, Huck, and Daphne troop past me, their heads lowered. Molly stands in the center of the room, arms folded across her chest. I tell her it’s okay, we’re off camera. She stares down at the yellow hair at her feet and mutters a response I don’t understand and, with two fingers, gently pushes the wooden chair over backward so that it falls with a dull crash. She turns to the bed and violently strips the sheets from the bed, throwing them to the floor.
What did you say?
Molly turns her doll’s head around slowly to look at me, her blue eyes unblinking.
What did you say just now?
Dead flowers, she says. My hair looks like dead flowers on the floor.
Molly crawls onto the bare mattress and crawls slowly across it and for a moment it’s like she’s crawling across an endless table, blue and white. There’s a bowl of porridge at the far end and she just wants to taste it. She huddles in the corner against the wall, arms wrapped around her legs. She looks like a kid on a boat and she’s afraid the waves will take her away. Her hair is short and wispy but it doesn’t look bad. Jude could have butchered her, if she had wanted to. She could have cut her ear off or something. I expected her to, really. Molly looks cold and I crawl across the mattress to give her a sweater. I sit next to her, not touching her. The air in the room has a silver, post-apocalyptic glimmer, a strange fairy dust quality that I associate with dinner parties and domestic violence.
You’re still here.
Yeah.
She lowers her head to rest on my lap, and I stroke her new hair.
What do you think? she says.
You look like a boy. But not bad.
Molly sighs.
What happened? I say.
The scene, she says. We were shooting the scene. Jude and I were lying on the bed, talking about you and John. We were sharing a cigarette. We were talking about sex and drinking vodka and Jude was touching my arm, just lightly touching it, you know. It felt nice and I kissed her, I kissed her cheek and then she kissed me on the mouth and we started sort of making out and it was weird because everyone was in the room but I think it was a nice scene. The lights were soft and there were good shadows and it felt natural, it felt pretty. Jude was touching me, touching me and I was spinning or falling like I was going to come. And then suddenly John was on the bed, he was naked and he stank and he started kissing Jude, grunting and groping at her and she pushed him away and I started to sort of panic. I wanted John to go away. I wanted everyone to go away but John was trying to get Jude’s clothes off and she was telling him to stop, just stop but he jerked her pants down and he was trying to get inside her and she was crying and the three of us were tangled together and suddenly it was hot, I couldn’t breathe and it was like I had these extra arms and legs and too much skin and Jude was kissing me, her mouth was all over me, her mouth on me and John’s eyes were so black and the light started to turn green around the edges and I was slipping, disappearing. I had a seizure and I was gone for a minute and when I came out of it Jude was holding her face and there was blood in my mouth.
Jesus.
By now she has climbed on top of me. Molly is as small as she can make herself, crouching like a bug on my chest. I wrap my arms around her, carefully. I don’t want her to feel trapped but maybe it’s what she wants. Molly is no longer shaking but her arms and legs are so cold. Her skin feels like she’s been outside in winter. I have an erection but I ignore it.
And then what?
Then John told Jude to cut my hair, to punish me. He told her to make me ugly.
What did Jude say?
Molly shivers. She didn’t want to do it but I think she’s afraid of John.
I think so, too. It worries the hell out of me but I don’t say so and then I forget about it because Molly is aware of my erection. Her hand drifts down into my crotch to give me a squeeze. It seems like the wrong time for this but I groan and she unbuckles my belt and slips her hand into my pants. Molly kisses my ears and throat and chest but she avoids my face and mouth, as if she is reluctant to let me see her. She unbuttons my shirt without looking at me.
A ring of yellow hair on the floor.
Lost feathers, dead flowers.
I make love to Molly on her bare mattress and the sex between us is grim, tender, wordless.
thirty-one.
MOLLY SLEEPS BESIDE ME, snoring softly. I’m wide awake and staring at nothing in muddy underwater light. The gloaming, baby. Panic attack, delirium tremens. Headache and shrinking vision. Blackbirds on the wing. I can’t tell the difference between panic and sickness but my body is begging for a drink. My arms and legs are numb, naked and tangled with Molly’s. The separation between us is vague. I slip out from under her and she mumbles nonsense at me but does not wake. I gather my clothes and creep into the hall to get dressed. The clock chimes four times and for a moment I have no idea whether it’s afternoon or morning.
Jude is in the kitchen, drinking coffee. She holds the cup with both hands and sits with her back very straight. She stares through me and says nothing. The mark on her face is purple and swollen. I take a bottle of vodka from the freezer, then fetch a glass and pour myself a generous shot over ice.
Happy hour? she says.
I grunt and light a cigarette.
Your hands are shaking, she says.
It’s a new feature. I don’t want to talk about it.
Jude sighs. You are dying before my eyes.
How’s your face?
It hurts. But it’s no one’s fault.
What about Miller?
What about him?
Molly said he forced himself on you.
Jude flinches, slightly. That’s not true.
What is the truth?
He wanted to make love to me, she says. I wasn’t interested.
I don’t understand.
What, she says. What don’t you understand?
I don’t understand why you don’t cut his wee willie off and feed it to him.
Jude takes a cigarette from my pack, fumbles with the matches.
Are you afraid of him?
Jude strikes a match and lets it burn down to her fingers without lighting her cigarette. She strikes another and watches it burn. I push the glass of vodka across the table but she shakes her head. I reach for her hand but she pulls it away and now Miller crashes into the room. He wears black jeans and a black military-style sweater with patches on the shoulders. He tosses my jacket at me.
On your horse, Poe. We’re out of here.
Where are we going?
Baseball game, he says. The Giants are playing the Reds.
Oh, yeah. Who’s going?
Miller winks at Jude. The boys, he says. Just the boys.
I finish my drink but make no move to get up.
Don’t tell me you’re not interested, says Miller. These are dream seats, behind third base.
I look at Jude, who nods and lights another match.
Yeah. I’m interested.
Excellent choice, he says. I’ll meet you out by the truck.
Outside and the sun is fierce in a white sky. Jeremy and Huck wait beside the Range Rover and I have a sudden, surreal vision of the four of us at the ballpark. The crowd like an ocean around us, roaring. The smell of peanuts and big plastic cups of warm beer. Miller waving a big puffy hand. Huck grimly shoving fistfuls of cotton candy into his mouth. Jeremy flirting with a red-haired girl behind us. I can see it like it already happened but there’s a tracking problem and the back of my neck has gone cold. Huck sits on the hood of the truck, smoking one of Miller’s cigars. His hands are filthy and he looks tired. Jeremy crouches in the driveway, tossing pebbles at an empty wine bottle. His eyes are narrow and red and he regards me warily as I approach.
I crouch next to him and pick up a rock. I whip it at the bottle but miss.
What’s up, I say. You look like shit.
Jeremy shrugs. Nervous. I’m nervous.
Why?
You heard what the man said. I’m gonna be dead soon.
He’s fucking with you.
Oh, yeah? Why don’t you ask brother Huck what he’s been doing this afternoon.