Two Faces

The mangled structure lay open like a body, jutting walls and spraying pipes like busted ribs and leaking viscera. Just like my brain, I guess. I couldn’t see the similarities right then, but I see them now—my head busted open and spilling memories like sewer water across a wasteland of hoarded garbage and mud.

White hot branding-iron pain shot up my arm, my leg thrummed with agony radiating up from my busted foot, copper-smelly crimson soaked the collar of my shirt, streaming from my torn open face. The pain was intense, but my mind was gone. Spewing, as I said. It was somewhere all the way back in 1983, rewound twenty four years deep on the VHS. Back when I first stepped foot into this place, a ten year old kid on the lookout for his next dumb little adventure. It was different then, the top of this hill. Still heavy with mystery and foreboding, but there was magic here, too. Real make-your-eyes-twinkle magic. But magic is fragile. There’s only a breath of fresh oxygen between a dying fire and an explosive inferno, right? Backdraft. That’s what happened here in 1983. The magic went wrong.

Standing there before the destruction, an open nerve of pain and knife-to-the-chest nostalgia, I recalled the very first time I ever saw him—sitting on the shell of a rusted, vintage tractor-plow, he appeared like magic. My friend Billy.

I think of all it took—a psycho-killer’s face on the news, that call from my mother, the figure appearing to me in the dark—to kick-start the remembering. To begin the excavation of that lost time, buried somewhere unreachable to me for so long. The first stab of the spade into the hard, frozen earth of my brain. I mean, how often does somebody go back and try to recall an imaginary friend? Or a childhood monster? Or, I think, rather, how often does somebody forget them altogether?

It’s weird, isn’t it? Memories really are kind of like snow. Moments come and go, sometimes like quiet flakes, sometimes like blizzards, but soon there’s a blanket of it behind you, untouched, because, you see, you’re walking forward into the wind head on. One foot in front of the other. Right, left. Step, step.

Then you try to recall. Somewhere up that hill back there is something you want to pull up and at first it’s just a snowball that comes rolling back to you but then it’s a clump the size of your head and then the size of you and then a car and then a house and soon the whole mountain is coming down, crashing and crushing and it hits you with such force that you lose your breath and you might just go dizzy before you can come back into your right mind, into the present again. The details came back to me in blows to my gut and for a long time I would find myself fighting simply to breathe.

But that came a little later.

The remembering really began some days before in my shitty apartment on a cold night heavy with fog and rippling with rolling waves of thunder. Dark and stormy, you might describe it. Something snapped that night—the very shelf I’d built my life on so carefully, piece by tiny piece, fracturing and bending under the weight of sudden and oncoming memory.

Two faces came slithering out of that black space in my head where the lost time had fallen years ago. Those two faces I thought I would never have to see again in my life came to me on the same day. The first face I saw on the television—my father’s murderer, escaped. Possibly armed, incredibly dangerous, disappeared into the free, unsuspecting world. The second face materialized out of thin air in a darkened corner of my bedroom like a phantom…

May, 2007

The City Just Far Enough Away from Serenridge

I didn’t hear about it until later that day. May… something. The middle, like the fifteenth I think it was. You ever notice how so many weirdly significant things happen in May? Babe Ruth hit his first homie, the Beatles released their very last, Rob Kennedy got a lead injection, the Hindenburg zeppelin exploded… I’d spent the day telling myself I had been looking for jobs when what I was really doing was writing off Google page after Google page of perfectly fine but not totally perfect jobs and then switched gears and started writing my stories instead. Shorts. Sometimes novellas. The kind that went into a collection of other short or short-ish stories. So, the kind of thing that would never sell (so I’ve read). I could never summon the discipline to finish a whole novel. Fuck that. Yeah, so, I gave up the job search pretty quick to work on that. And to sulk, I guess.

After writing something that could maybe be something pretty okay I packed up and drove home to my small apartment that was (thank Christ) rent controlled. That would come in handy right about now, after that stupid job I didn’t even like gave me the steel-toed boot for no good reason other than they thought I was a payroll expense they could spare. At least that’s what they said. Had to cut some corners, reevaluate the books. Make some departmental sacrifices. Made it sound like it was a really painful decision they thought long and hard about. Which is odd, because I was a department of one. Staff Writer for a non-profit. It’s boring work, I won’t get into it.

And I would’ve left soon enough, but they snatched away the satisfaction of quitting. That’s really what pissed me off the most, I think. I’d ask Deb about it tomorrow.

Anyway, I got home and saw my machine had a message to listen to, the little red light saying hey… hey… hey… hey… It was my mother.

“Andrew, it’s me, your mom. I, uh… Have you heard the news? I’m sure you have.” I had not. The ride back to the pad had been silent and brooding. Fuck Mark and his stupid This isn’t easy for us either voice and his We’re so sorry about this face. The voicemail continued with, “I’m not sure what to do, I’m… Just call me back when you get this. I love you.”

Will do, ma.

I went to the fridge and opened a beer. Drank it down pretty quickly standing there. I guess I was thirsty. It was gone quick so I grabbed another, cracked it open, drank a third of it before I closed the fridge.

I turned on the TV, came around to the front of the couch and was about to lay my ass down. That’s when I saw him, when I heard his name. Wedged between a story of some little girl hosting a bake sale to help raise money for her dying mother’s HIV treatment and news of the coming storm—“Worse we’ve seen in years, folks!”

If this tiny apartment was Hogwarts, then he was The Dark Lord whose moniker you kept shut up in your trap if you knew what was good for you. If this little room was the setting for a middle-school slumber party, his was the name you were afraid to repeat three times in front of a darkened bathroom mirror for fear he might appear behind you and slit your neck open with a sharpened fingernail. If this one-bedroom was Haddonfield, Illinois, he was the Shape, the boogeyman that Tommy and his babysitter Laurie feared so immensely. This was my very real boogeyman.

And here they were saying that name over and over again, turning my blood into slush as it pumped in my veins, making me icy cold and frozen to the spot.

But seeing his face there in bright, technicolor terror was the worst part.

“…happened just this morning and officials are asking the public to keep an eye out and call the number at the bottom of your screen if you see or hear anything that might help lead to his capture.” said the first guy.

“Re-capture, Terry.” corrected the woman beside him.

They laughed a little about the live gaff. I dropped my beer, not caring much that it was burping up foamy gold pilsner all over my hardwood and wetting my socks. I actually hadn’t noticed quite yet that I hadn’t taken a breath in several moments, didn’t notice until I gasped for air a few seconds later when they played the security camera footage of his escape.

It was a short clip. A few seconds. Some high up angle, jerky, stop-motion movement to the images. It was a shot of some prison hallway—near the laundry room according to the reports I read a little later on the plane I almost died on, but that’ll come soon enough. In the video there’s a couple big push-cart laundry baskets in the hall, a door across from them with some number painted on it. The whole place is lit a sickly green from fluorescence, the grainy image only capturing the idea of his features, enough for me to see that he had taken a couple of time leaps while in the cage.

He shows up two seconds in up near the top. That’s when I gasp for air again. I’m positive my soul leaves me for a second or two, like Joaquin Phoenix when he sees that footage of a Brazilian party crasher in Signs. There was a time for me before the news of the escape, before seeing that footage. Then there was everything after. This whole thing, all of it. These words and this remembering. This big excavation. All of this is the aftermath.

They play the clip again, then again, and again and again and then one more time to make sure I didn’t sleep that night. His grizzled figure walking casually across, then disappears off down the hall off-camera. It felt like watching footage of Bigfoot or Loch Ness (or that Brazilian party crasher) except this time they’d captured footage of the devil. My devil.

The Boogeyman…

He was out. He was loose.

I went around the place and checked my locks. Double-checked them. Triple checked. Pulled down the blinds on the windows, tied them off on the little plastic hooks Command-Stipped to the wall, made sure they weren’t going anywhere up anytime soon. I was turning off any lamp by any window when I heard the first few smattering droplets of rain, and it sounded like fingernails trattering against the glass. Like, Open up, open up, it’s only me…

Who is it, Dandy?

I slipped on the now sticky smear of beer behind the couch and thought I should clean that up but didn’t. Grabbed another beer and a dishrag instead. Third drink of the night. Cheers to the past that comes back to haunt us! Cracked it open and took a few big swigs, then went over to the front door to check the deadbolt again again. Threw the dish rag on the beer spill. Tossed my socks on top of it for good measure.

The storm was really raging now. Had come like a starved jungle cat into a hospital nursery. In other words it was starting to tear it up just outside. Common enough up here in this corner of the country, but even so…

Where is she, Dandy?

I stopped in my tracks. Wondered where the hell that thought had just come from. Thought maybe it was just weird atmospheric pressure from the storm or three beers sloshing around in my gut or both. Who is she? I’m far too worried about a certain he who must not be fucking talked about, thank you very much.

It’s a girl’s and a boy’s name, thank you very much!

The walls thrummed beneath a wave of thunder.

The power went out.

“Shit,” I hissed. The darkness seemed thick, bleeding in from the outside world which was now so much deeper and darker now that he was out there somewhere. The fuse box was on the back wall of my bedroom closet. So I went there. Into the room, past the foot of my bed… but I didn’t make it any farther.

He was standing in my way.